Batman: the Video Game

Developer: Ocean Software (later Infogrames)
Year: 1989

Pfffft. This is stupid. You wanna know about this game? It's a side-scroller. There are bosses. And stuff you have to jump over, and unresponsive controls. And you play as Batman, from the movie, the shitty one with Michael Keaton. There are some shitty cutscenes, and you have a life bar rather than a one-hit death. Also you have a boomerang and a gun, just like the real Batman. It's not awful, but it's not good.

There. Happy?

Rating: 4/10 Yawn.
Advice: Decide when you have to jump if you want to jump a moment too early, then jump a half-second before that.
Best Moment: The part where you stop running from left to right -- and START RUNNING FROM RIGHT TO LEFT!!!!

Ryne Sandberg Plays Bases Loaded 3

Developer: Tose
Year: 1991

So, Ryne Sandberg. By this point in time, he'd probably locked up his Hall of Fame credentials, but it's worth nothing that 1992, the year after the release of RSPBL3, was his best year ever, with a WARP3 of 13.0, one of the 30 best ever for a second baseman. Something to think about is all I'm saying.

This game plays like BL2, with a couple of really shitty improvements:

• The entire game is now from behind the batter, including fielding and baserunning. This is the opposite of every other baseball game ever made.
• The season mode has been replaced with a 'perfect game' mode where what you're trying to do is play a game that hits 100 points on some ridiculously complicated scale that includes runs and hits, but also things like spectacular catches. Lame.
• Ryne Sandberg's name is on the cart, but he's not actually in the game. Really.

There's not a lot to recommend this over BL2, then. Gameplay is almost identical, except when it's upside-down, and though it's easier to catch a pop fly, it's almost too easy when the ball is hit back at the pitcher -- pretty much an automatic out, and this happened about a half-dozen times in Laura's and my game.

Now, if there's a saving grace, it's that on the L team, which laura played with, your closer is a guy with a 1.04 era named coseti and he's a fucking submariner. We were both pretty sick of BL3, but then laura puts this guy in and it's like, Holy Shit! Submariner! I won't take the time here to digress re: my love for the submariner, but let's just say it was a really nice surprise.

In the end, though, I lost, which sucks, because laura decided to start throwing wack submarine curveballs and i couldn't put a bat on them. And BL3 lost because it's backwards and otherwise not a lot better than BL2.

Rating: 6/10 Not the best, not the worst, and has nothing to do with Ryne Sandberg. Presence of Submariner: 10/10
Trivia: Ryne Sandberg was named for Ryne Duren, a reliever from the 20s who was also not in Ryne Sandberg Plays Bases Loaded 3.
Advice: If you stand on your head after you hit the ball, it's sort of almost as good as every other baseball game ever made.
Best Moment: Submariner. Obviously.

Bases Loaded 2: Second Season

Developer: Tose
Year: 1990

Now, we're talking.

Before I start, I don't own Bases Loaded 1. The reason for this, for those of you who don't collect, is that it's a really easy to find game. This sounds counter-intuitive, but you don't go get the easy games, because games tend to be sold in lots. So someday, I'm going to have to accept Bases Loaded 1 in order to get a game that's actually hard to find, so it doesn't make any sense to buy it on purpose. That's how it works, and it's why I have 30 super marios and no kid icarus. Yet.

In any event, BL2 is the baseball game we've been looking for. Things to recommend it:

• really tight, responsive gameplay
• great balance
• the ability to play a 130 game season with stats
• players have tracked 'abilities' that allow you to monitor their performance over the short and long term
• pretty good animations and better graphics than prior baseball games

Generally speaking, this has felt the most like actual baseball to both Laura and I of the games we've played so far. The game ended 7-4, which is a major upgrade to the 18-19 and 23-25 losses I took in the 9th innings of the last two games we played, both in terms of not losing and increased realism.

By way of quirks, Bases Loaded shows pitches from behind the pitcher, rather than the batter. This is different, and neither better nor worse than the other way around.

The game has 2 negatives: the song is SHIT, and they play it over and over and over. And the baserunning scheme is off sometimes -- you press the direction of the base you're ON rather than the base you want to GO TO when running forward, but it switches when tagging up. This is confusing, and there's no real reason for it, since as I mentioned below, the standard baseball console game controls had clearly already been hammered out by this point.

In the end, though, this was our favorite baseball game so far. It still doesn't look good, and pitching is a little weird here -- selection and placement are sort of smeared together -- but it was fun to play, and the rest is hair-splitting.

Rating: 7/10 I'd play this again. Also, I won.
Advice: Play it with the sound off, or stuff ears with cotton.
Best Moment: Realizing that in this one, you can actually catch a fly ball. Wow.

Baseball Stars

Publisher: SNK
Year: 1989

Day 2 of the baseball extravaganza, and we arrive at Baseball Stars, which is pretty much identical to Baseball Simulator, but without the option of playing in a stadium in space. Sooooo, i guess, there's no real reason to play it.

The music is slightly better, and the gameplay feels slightly tighter, but really, there's not much to recommend Baseball Stars over BS.

I don't have a lot to say about this game. Not bad, but not really good, either.

Rating: 5/10 It should say 'meh' right on the box.
Advice: Play Baseball Simulator instead.
Best Moment: 2 baseball games down, 5 to go.

Baseball Simulator 1.000

Publisher: Culture Brain
Year: 1989

This is the first of what's going to be a bunch of baseball games, and it's a pretty high point on which to start. It's a pretty arcadey game, and the play is a little sluggish, but it's a generally pretty good game.

What's interesting to find is how quickly all of the baseball controls come back to you when you pick this up -- the controller chooses a base, and A and B either throw or run there. I'm not sure when these were picked to be the standard console baseball controls, but they're firmly in place on BS1, and they work pretty well. Outfielders run too slowly, and all the batters seem more or less the same, but you do have some roster control, and the sound is good.

BS1 sets itself apart by giving batters and pitchers special moves that you can do a limited number of times during a game. You can throw a ball that goes back and forth a lot, and as a batter you can turn into a burning tornado. It's basically NBA Live, except with baseball, and it adds some character to a genre that's pretty heavily populated on the NES.

Rating: 7/10 Pretty good, for a baseball game.
Advice: Play in space stadium. Every time. It's space stadium.
Best Moment: First time lightning strikes the batter.

The Bard's Tale

Developer: Interplay
Year: 1988

This is a tough one to review, for two reasons. First of all, it's an RPG -- what are we honestly going to get out of playing it for half an hour? And second, I've probably put 100 hours into the Bard's Tale over the course of the last 20 years, so there's not a lot for me to learn about it. So here's an attempt to review the game, and the NES version.

First of all, Bard's Tale is an amazing game. There's depth, there's really good dungeons, interesting characters and classes, there's challenge and some puzzle solving -- it really has everything that subsequently became standard for computer RPGS. It also has the bad stuff -- random battles, grinding, some clunky interface stuff. But mostly, it's a really, really good dungeon crawl, one that i've come back to several times since I first played it at the Bucktown Public Library.

The NES version suffers notably in terms of interface and control -- again, establishing a pattern for RPGs that's still around on consoles today. The graphics are also notably crappier, which was a surprise for me given that they really weren't that good on the Apple. The town of Skara Brae was clearly pre-fab and everything looks like everything else, up to and including dungeons.

Still and all, Bard's Tale is a great, great game. It's fun, challenging, has a diversity of monsters and the NES version preserves the spirit of the game even if it misses out on a little in terms of execution. If you haven't played Bard's Tale, this isn't the version to start with -- but it's definitely a game worth playing.

Rating: 8/10 Great game, one of the greatest, but clunky on the NES.
Advice: Get thee unto an Apple emulator.
Best Moment: Probably the first time you go back into the dungeon under the inn and realize how much ass you kick now. There's a reason people tolerate leveling.

Balloon Fight

Developer: Nintendo
Year: 1984

If you have any question as to why there aren't any Wii's for your kids a full year and change after launch, you really don't need to look much farther than Balloon Fight. Nintendo has been doing things like this for 25 years now, and all the video ram and double data rate memory and pixel shading in the world doesn't change the fact that the whole point is that these games are supposed to be fun.

Balloon fight is actually just Joust, of course, but it's with balloons instead of ostriches. It's got great music and features great 2-player, which Laura pointed out was cool in that Mario Brothers way where you switched from cooperative to competitive anytime you wanted to. You mash the crap out of A to float, you have 2 balloons, and when they both get popped, you fall into the ocean. In the meantime, try and pop other people's balloons. That's it. That's all. And it's really good.

There's not much to say here. I mean, your thumb gets tired, the person you're playing with accidentally pisses you off by popping a balloon, and the whole flavor of the game changes. It's easy at first, then it gets difficult without your noticing, and then you die, and then you want to play again. You play Balloon Fight, and you realize that anyone who was counting the big N out had sort of forgotten how good they are at what they do.

A great game, and an important reminder.

Rating: 9/10 It's simple, but for what it is, it's not far from perfect.
Advice: Don't be ashamed -- the 'turbo' button is there for a reason.
Best Moment: The first time you mash your way back up out of the ocean just in time to escape drowning.

Bad Street Brawler

Developer: Beam Software
Year: 1987

I knew nothing about BSB going into this, and I was expecting a sort of corny side-scrolling beat-em-up. What I got was a side-scrolling beat-em-up with a lot of personality that had Laura and I hitting the reset button well past the time that we'd committed to play the game. We brawled on Bad Street till the breakadawn, or 10:20, which was still way past my bedtime.

On its face, BSB is a pretty straightforward puncher on rails -- not even any vertical movement, so really, you're moving and punching and kicking. There are about a half-dozen enemies in the first 2 levels, but one of them is a monkey who whips bananas at you, so there's that.

What keeps BSB fresh as you move from level to level is the fact that the A and B buttons that you're mashing actually do new things on every level. There's a sweep kick in one level, and a stooge smash in another. At one point, A grabs someone and trips them, and then later, it's a flying kick. At the beginning of each level, it tells you what your moves are, and lets you practice them against a punching bag. It's a really cool feature, and figuring the new moves out, along with the desire to see what you get next, is a real motivator.

So in the end, it's a puncher. And I like the fact that in videogames, 'beat-em-up' is the accepted name for an entire genre of play. Bad Street Brawler doesn't have a story, and you can't jump, but it's a fun side-scroller with the twist of a variety of available moves, and you could do worse.

Rating: 7/10 Pretty good, with some originality and a sense of humor.
Advice: Stooge smash sounds fun, but the windup takes so long that the midget's just going to hit you with a bomb if you try it.
Best Moment: Holy Crap!! TWO gorillas!