Author: Nate

Doesn’t this look like as much fun as being forced to listen to Roseanne sing the national anthem?

Like the Waldo craze and the whole Disney Afternoon semi-craze, “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” was a huuuugee fad for a few years. Broderbund came up with this idea in the mid eighties (for a computer game), and of course it spun off into two TV shows in the nineties. Eventually, as the PBS show waned in interest, they decided to do a reformat of it and it became this really crappy third show (now history themed instead of geography themed) with probably the dumbest kids they could find. Luckily it only lasted one year.

I think the video game series could probably boast about being the only video game to come with a desk encyclopedia. That’s right; the game comes in a 4 inch thick case with some crappy “encyclopedia” for use in solving the “crimes”. Basically the way you play this game is you’re racing a clock that arbitrarily counts down the “hours” you have left to solve a theft of a historical artifact. You go to a location in time (time jumping is the biggest use of “hours”) and ask people (a text box) about the crime and they give you clues to what the criminal looked like and where he/she was going. Then you look up the clue in your “encyclopedia” and head off there, where you do the whole thing again. Eventually you either run out of time, and do another case, or you solve the crime and do another case; there’s no difference between winning or losing, save the fact that in your fictional world, someone with an incredibly clever name like “Ella Vator”, “Jim Shorts”, or “Stu Pidname” will have managed to get away with a Stradivarius violin from 1730, and that even though you were hot on the trail, the case will never be solved. Each game only takes about 15 minutes, and the only thing that happens when you capture the criminal is you get “promoted”. There really isn’t any point to playing after the first 15 minutes because it gets really boring looking for 8th century Chinese vases.

I understand that it was made in the early nineties and that the graphics aren’t better because of it. I understand that it’s supposed to be an educational game about history, but it seems to me that the only thing that this game actually teaches people is how to look up answers in an encyclopedia. It would be more educational if perhaps there was a recap test at the end of the game, where you had a certain amount of time to answer questions based on stuff that you “learned” earlier in the game. I would equate this scenario to the difference between an open notebook test vs. a regular test. An open notebook test only serves to determine how well you take notes, except in the case where there are way more questions than you could ever answer by looking up, or it’s an essay test in which you need to take points out of your notes and combine them to form a coherent essay. A regular test should make sure that you have an actual practical understanding of the knowledge, much like the final challenge on the TV game show. For those of you who weren’t even allowed to watch PBS when you were a kid, the final stage of the game involved locating 10 or so countries or states (depending on the continent that the map was of) on a large map on the floor, within a certain amount of time. The host would call out the place name and the person would have to put a marker on it, showing that the kid actually understood the geography of the continent and was not just reading it off of a map with labels and then going to place the marker.

Granted, a game that had a quiz at the end of it wouldn’t be any fun at all. I can’t imagine a kid wanting to play something like that. I mean I played “number munchers” on the computer like all present twenty-somethings once did, before games had more than 3 colors to show, but those computer lab exercises that we’d have to do back in elementary school were just outright boring. I’d much rather have a teacher teaching me…. or be jumping on Goombas, or shooting bad guys, or even, putting puzzle piece-shaped blocks that fall from the sky into lines so they disappear. Video games need to be fun, and repeating the same process five times per game is not fun, especially when each game is so short. If you’ve played one “case”, you’ve played them all, but maybe the object that’s stolen and the thief are different. I’m not a game designer, but it seems to me that the people behind this game wanted to push a game as being “educational” without trying hard enough to actually be educational or interesting to kids. I wouldn’t put it out of the reach of the NES’s capabilities to be able to have a map with different countries and have the player have to identify them, but I guess no matter where it goes, it’s hard to mask the whole “teaching kids things outside of school” thing that the creators were going for.

This game gets one and a half stars for putting forth an effort to create an educational game, and succeed at actually making it really popular. On the other hand, the game actually sucks, is incredibly repetitive, doesn’t teach anything that would stick longer than 5 minutes, is without a real goal to achieve, is incredibly repetitive, and is just plain boring. Also, the time usually runs out before you catch the crook (because of the amount of “time jumps” necessary to catch him/her) leaving you frustrated over something that you probably had no interest in playing in the first place, but thought would be cool because the box was so big.

Where’s Waldo? If you said, “In the upper right corner”, who knows? Maybe you’re right.

I was really into the whole “Where’s Waldo” fad when I was a kid. I think it had to do with the fact that I was reading a book without having to do any reading… I always liked to take the easy way out. I had all of the books: “Where’s Waldo?“, “Find Waldo Now“, and “The Great Waldo Search“. I even had the giant Waldo book, the small paperback with all the activities to do, and the fourth book, “Where’s Waldo in Hollywood?“, among various other puzzles and even a popcorn tin… yes a popcorn tin. So of course, it would go without saying that I had/have the Nintendo game. Strangely, though, the reason that I read the books was not necessarily to find Waldo. I know, I know, the title says “Find Waldo Now”, as if it were some sort of angry, authoritarian military leader, barking orders at me. Well, here’s the thing. Those pictures were filled with more than a guy in a tacky striped suit and hat. There were hundreds of sight gags per page, and always different ones throughout the book. The more you looked for Waldo, the more you found clever little drawings and scenarios. This was the real reason that I “read” these books; it kept me entertained for hours.

Anyway. This game, “Where’s Waldo”. The story is basically the same. You have to find Waldo in a bunch of different pictures. You have a certain amount of time at the start, and it counts down during each level. The time spent finding him is cumulative, so it’s best to find him as quickly as possible in the beginning levels, because the end levels will screw you over. In addition to that challenge, every time you guess that you found Waldo, and it’s actually not him, you get ten seconds taken off of your clock. And there are about 8 levels. Again, I say this as if these “levels” are some sort of obstacle course of bad guys or something. No. The levels consist of a still picture and a cursor. You move the cursor over to where you think Waldo is, and then push A. That’s it. That’s how you play the stupid game. I mean I guess I couldn’t ask for it to be closer to the source material; after all, that was my major gripe with Ducktales (that and the complicated attack method). Unfortunately, as the Waldo books weren’t all that exciting to begin with, this is a case where an upgrade was needed. There had just been a Where’s Waldo Cartoon show on CBS starring Brad Garrett from that Raymond show. Why couldn’t they have done something involving that?

Okay, so not only do they manage to take a boring idea for a video game, and actually create a boring video game, but they take all the fun out of the book. That may sound a little confusing and redundant, so let me explain. The idea of a video game where you search for an object on a still image is an incredibly boring idea for a video game, yet they made it, hoping it would sell on the brand name and the incredibly weird fans (of which it’s not inaccurate to say that I was a member… but I was 8, sue me), instead of developing something interesting to do with it. Next, in making this book into a video game, they took all of the interesting things out of it by giving us a time limit to find him, making us rush through the picture. I guess, however, that it’s not that big of a loss, as the pictures are about as terrible as you can get. Waldo pretty much consists of about 5 pixels, colored in red white and blue, mixed in somewhere among other similar blobs, many of them also colored red, white, and blue, just to throw you off. In fact, Waldo doesn’t even look like the same blob in each level. Sometimes it looks like he’s wearing brown pants; sometimes he’s small; sometimes he blocked by a car, and only half of him is showing. The easy level is anything but easy because of this, and as you go down to medium and difficult, there is a big jump in difficulty.

As the levels get harder, your cursor gets smaller, the counter starts with less time on it, , and the kicker: the screen grows in size. So now, in addition to searching for “Waldo” on one screen, you have to use your cursor to scroll over to an entirely different screen of blocky, pixelated stick figures that may or may not be him. So basically the motto of this is, don’t play on medium or hard. In fact, don’t play it at all.

I do think that the people who made the game realized how boring it probably was, because they actually threw in three levels that don’t fit the regular format. The first one is “THE CAVE”, in which you have to move your cursor around a black screen to find Waldo, whom you can’t see, but is walking around really fast. Your cursor acts like a flashlight, and if you see a bit of him and hit “A” in time, you turn the lights on and can move Waldo. You can then leave the room and go to the next pointless level, or take the biggest risk in the game and select the hourglass icon in the cave, which will either give you 100 seconds or take 100 seconds away. I think it’s about a 2/1 ratio in favor of subtracting the seconds. The second strange level is some weird 2-D maze thing called the subway, but it’s the last one that’s the killer. On the side panel of the rocket ship, you have to play a slot machine game, kinda like in mario 3, to get all of the windows to have a picture of Waldo on them, before time runs out. Then, and only then, can you ride in the spaceship and take a walk on the moon. That’s right. The only qualifications for Waldo to go to the moon are for him to walk through a myriad of places including, but not limited to, the circus, the city, a castle, and the woods, and have his face appear on the side of a rocket. No wonder the Russians have such a good space program.

When the most exciting part of the game is watching this idiot take 25 seconds to walk from one level to the next, you know the game isn’t going to get more than one star.

This game sucks. There’s nothing else to say. This is THE reason why Roger Ebert hates video games. The people involved took such an incredibly easy concept and made it very difficult for themselves and the players, and what’s more, no fun to play. And if it’s not fun to play, it’s not worth buying. I mean seriously, if they can make plumbers go down pipes, and ducks “Pogo Jump” on snakes, you’d think that they’d be capable of making a decent still image, but you’d be thinking wrong. Also, just to mention it, this game did make seanbaby.com’s list of the twenty worst NES games ever, which kinda makes me proud to own such an abomination.

Scrooge McDuck uses his patented “Pogo Jump” to defeat the Amazonian Snake. If only the girl at Pius X knew that.

So for some reason, I recently pulled out my old Nintendo and realized how dumb nearly all of the games I had are. Granted most of these games were made in 1989 or thereabouts, so I really shouldn’t judge them by today’s standards. I can however judge them by the standards of the other games that were out at the time. This is the first of a multipart series, reviewing the various NES games that I have in my collection, which is only about 10 or so.

First up: Ducktales. Ducktales was made in 1989 apparently, even though I always assumed that the cartoon wasn’t made until at least 1991 (I was way wrong). The game, like the TV show, focuses on the adventures of Scrooge McDuck, however that’s pretty much the only thing that the two have in common. Much like the widely-hated Super Mario Bros. 2, Ducktales takes a famous character and puts him in a totally ridiculous situation, more ridiculous than the original, and totally unrelated to it.

In the case of this story, you play as Scrooge, traveling all over the world (Transylvania, The African Mines, The Himalayas [Prototypes called it “Snow Mountain”], and The Amazon) as well as to the Moon (don’t question it!) in search of “lost” treasures stolen by various giant slugs wearing crowns, snowmonsters, tiki gods, or rats on the Moon. Of course the reason there’s a rat on the moon is because Scrooge is searching for a piece of green cheese (“Of Longevity”) which supposedly is worth millions of dollars. Never mind the fact that all the bad guys are wearing space suits; Scrooge is perfectly fine in spats and a top hat. Anyway, there aren’t any references to any of the locales from the show, and the only appearances by characters (Other than the Transylvania boss [Magica Dispell], and the main boss at the end of the game [after you beat the preliminary end boss, Dracula Duck]. Of course, it would make more sense to have Dracula Duck be the Transylvania level boss, and the tv-show villain be the preliminary boss, especially since the other level bosses have nothing to do with the show… but whatever) are a few brief cameos from Launchpad, who exists to take Scrooge back to the main menu halfway through each level, if you choose; the kids every once in a while; and Gizzmoduck, who shows up to blow a hole in the Moon so Scrooge can get into an underground lair that has no opening and is filled with Beagle Boys. How he got to the moon, we’ll never know.

The most ludicrous thing about game is the incredibly complicated and inane way that Scrooge fights off bad guys. They took the basic “jumping on them” idea from Mario, and found a way to complicate it. Scrooge uses his cane to “Pogo Jump” on top of them and then they fall off the screen. Unfortunately, this isn’t as simple as pushing the A button. You do need to push the A button, but while in midair, you must also push the B button as well as the down arrow on the directional keypad. Pretty much any combination of pushing those buttons at once will start you pogo jumping, but you need to continue to hold the A button for it to work, or you have to push them all over again. You can just hold the A button and continuously pogo jump, except in the Himalaya level, which is basically all snow and ice. When Scrooge tries to pogo in the snow, he gets stuck.

The levels are all very well mapped out, maze-like, with all kinds of secrets and challenging bad guys (of course, the only ones from the TV show are a few Beagle Boys, here and there). It’s hard enough to figure out where you’re supposed to go in these levels (in fact the Transylvania level actually has a wall that you have to walk through to get to the end of it), that making it past the bad guys seems easy. Once you have your bearings though, it’s fairly easy to beat, at least on the easy setting.

The animation is very good for when it was made, much better than the Darkwing Duck that the same company made a few years later, and the music is fairly catchy, but nowhere on the scale of Mario.

Despite the fact that the game has little to do with the show, and could very easily just have used original characters, the game is fun to play, and once beaten there’s much to explore. Making it not incredibly difficult, unless played on the difficult setting, and allowing the player to pick which level they want to play allows the player to learn the levels quicker than if they constantly had to start from the beginning every time they wanted to play level 8 or whatever. Ducktales gets four stars because of this, and the fact that it’s the only Nintendo game I could ever beat without using Game Genie.