Stinger (Nes) / Moero Twinnbee (FDS) Review

 

Stinger (NES) / Moero Twinbee (FDS) Review

Date Released: 21 November 1986

Date Played: 24 April 2022

I have played Stinger several times in my life, but have never played the original Famicom Disk System version of the game, Moero Twinbee.  Needless to say, I was disappointed after pulling out my Twin Famicom, inserting the disk, replacing the disk belt, adjusting the spring, holding down the load trigger mechanism, and having to sit 3 feet away from the system itself to constantly manipulate the magnetic arm to make the game load, only to discover that the game is exactly the same as the NES version except for the fact that you can play with up to 3 people.  Of course, no one is going to play a 35 year old game with me and my daughter just rolls her eyes when I ask.  So, it was hours of time wasted trying to get the Famicom Disk System to work... which is par for the course if you've ever used one before.

I popped the American copy into the NES and decided to play it instead so I could use a turbo controller and save my thumb from the constant tapping of the fire button.  It was a wise decision and booted up on the first try.  Regardless of all of this prep-work, I was going into this entire event knowing that I wasn't going to have a good time.  See, Stinger is the 2nd game in the Twinbee franchise; and if you've read any of my other Twinbee reviews, you will be very familiar with how much I dislike these games.  Stinger is no different.  Even though it is an early and simple entry in the series, it shares many of the same frustrating mechanics that the other games have.

This time around you're trying to save Dr. Cinnamon from his kidnappers and you have to shoot your way through 6 stages. The gimmick in this one is that the game alternates between a horizontal shmup on odd numbered stages and a vertical shmup on the even numbered stages.  Your orientation doesn't do much to change up the game mechanics or the general feel of the game and whether you are flying toward the top of the screen or to the right of it, you'll notice that it feels pretty much the same.  There are still tons of zany enemies like coat hangers, shoes, fruit, TV sets, etc. to shoot before they shoot and/or crash into you.  You can really sense that the developer, Konami, is leaning in the the comedy side of the cute 'em up genre and are working pretty hard to cut out their own little niche.  Luckily, for the most part, they nail it.  The game is colorful and charming to look at.  As far as the aesthetic of the Twinbee games, I think they're all really great.  Who doesn't love a cute little space ship with boxing gloves? At the end of each stage, you'll face off against a whimsical boss that's just as random as the enemies in the stages.  You'll have to dodge seeds flying out of a giant slice of watermelon, or avoid the bubbles coming out of a maniacal faucet.  I really can't get enough of the clever ideas Konami comes up with for these games.  Even the music is fun and really works to elevate the light-heartedness of the game.

It's just too bad that the gameplay is so wretched.

I hate that I'm having to air my grievances over the mechanics of this game once again... but here we go.  The powerup system in this game works just like all the others.  You shoot clouds and golden bells pop out and quickly cascade towards the bottom of the screen.  If you collect them before they fall off the bottom of the screen, you get a point bonus.  Or, you can shoot them to juggle them in the air.  As you continue to shoot them, they change to different colors that all align with a different powerup.  Blue is for a speed increase, white is a double shot, pink is for a laser beam, etc..  It seems like a good idea in theory, but in practice, it's one of the most frustrating game mechanics I've ever seen.  

Sometimes you have to shoot the same bell DOZENS of times to get it to rotate to the powerup you need. It takes forever and is really tedious to manage this while also dealing with the insane amounts of enemies and bullets on the screen.  If you miss a shot, the bell falls of the screen and all your work is wasted.  If you accidentally shoot the bell while it's the color you need, it will cycle OFF of that color and all of your hard work is wasted.  Also, the bells block your shots.  That means if there are a ton of enemies on the screen, and you're currently juggling 3 or 4 bells, they will block a significant number of your shots at the enemies.  This often leads to one of them smacking you right in the face and taking one of your precious lives.  Even when you are really, and I mean REALLY trying to focus on getting a powerup you need, I bet 80% of the time, something goes wrong and you miss it.  A bullet gets in the way and you have to dodge which causes your to miss the bell.  Or, you'll tap the fire button one too many times shooting at the enemies and the stray shot will hit the bell and make it rotate off of the correct powerup. Usually, you'll be juggling multiple bells and you'll have one of them right where you want it and as it's coming down, it overlaps with the other bell you're trying to manage and you accidentally hit the first one and ruin it.  It's so extremely irritating, and I hate it so much.

On top of that.  You also have to deal with bombing ground units in both the horizontal and vertical stages.  On the horizontal stages, it's not so bad and the ground shot button is tied to your straight ahead shot button.  So, just tap away and dodge, and you'll be fine.   But, on the vertical stages, you have a reticule a set distance in front of your ship.  You have to position it directly over a ground unit and press the B button this time to hit the ground.  Trying to position yourself correctly, avoid the swathes of enemies and their bullets, and manage juggling all of the bells makes the game an incredible tense chore that I just don't enjoy at all. I don't like this mechanic either and even in games like Xevious (where it originated) and the much heralded Layer Section (Galactic) attack, I never really enjoy doing it.  If those games can't make me like it, Twinbee definitely isn't going to have a chance at converting me over to its side.  Not when it's making me want to pull out my hair over the bell juggling.

However, I will say this, if you DO manage to get fairly powered up and can start ignoring the bells, the game gets infinitely better and is actually pretty fun. On the occasions where I was able to do this on the first or second stage, I was able to plow through the game without much trouble.  But, getting up to that point is so difficult that it's not really worth it. Obviously, the game suffers from terrible Gradius syndrome and if you take a hit and die, you loose all of your powerups and become too weak to make any decent progress.  Meaning that you pretty much have to clear the game without getting hit or it's too difficult to recover and will blow through your remaining lives in no time unless you get super lucky.

I can't say I would recommend ANY of the Twinbee games to anyone.  I'm pretty active in the shmup community, and there is a general disdain for these games from a lot of people who are really into shooters. If you're really into shmups or even old school arcade games, the Twinbee games just don't play the way you would expect. They take away all the fun of shooting enemies and dodging bullets and instead make you focus on the task of juggling a bunch of bells and multitasking. It's more of a positioning game than anything.  I am fully aware that some people really like this mechanic, but it's just not for me.

I only have one game in the entire Twinbee series to play... and I can't wait for it to be over and done with.

Final Status: Played

Final Score: 4/10 (a little bad)

Xevious (NES) Review

 

Xevious (NES) Review

Release Date: September 1988

Date Played: 16 January 2022

Introduction:

Xevious is an early and highly influential vertical shmup developed and released by Namco to arcades in 1982. Although it is very primitive and simple by today's standards, it laid the ground work and invented many of the common elements we see in shmups to this day. It was then ported to every console and computer under the sun and was extremely prolific in the pop culture scene of the time. The NES version, released in 1988, is fairly true to the arcade version and is a decent port that I am choosing to review here today. 

Hardcore Gaming 101's publication, Guide to Shoot 'em Ups Vol. 3 Devotes nine entire pages to the original Xevious game while every other game in the guide has 2-3 pages on average. You can tell that they considered the game to be extremely important and worthy of so much reflection and even chose to begin then entire volume with this game despite it's title falling last alphabetically. It's a very important entry in the history of video games and I feel like the title is well known to pretty much every gamer out there even if they haven't played it. Although it has faded from popularity over the years and has a very basic gameplay structure, it is one of the most important shooters every made and is still very addictive and remains a bona fide classic.

Story and Legacy:

Much like many of the games that came in the early 80s, there is no in-game story to speak of. Instead, the story is usually pieced together from outside sources like the game's instruction manual.  In the case of Xevious, there was a pop culture boom centered around the game and it led to the creation of comics, artwork, novels, cartoons, and even a terrible and very rare animated movie.  I won't get too deep into the lore of the game and it's overly complex and oddly fleshed out story here because there just isn't enough room... and, honestly, it's a little embarrassing that so much effort was put into the background of such a simple and seemingly superficial game. But, I will give a brief synopsis to whet your whistle. 

Basically, from what I can piece together, there was an alien race who populated Earth long before the humans.  A catastrophic event was about to occur, so they fled the planet to find a new home.  Eons later, humanity had taken its place on Earth and was living its normal life when the ancient aliens decided to return.  Before their arrival, a bunch of their technology started sprouting up from the ground in anticipation of their return and wiped out mankind. You play as the pilot of the Solvalou ship and return to Earth to find it completely overrun by the aliens.  So, you do what any good pilot does and you start blasting them to kingdom come while trying to save the world. While even this small synopsis seems like huge overkill for the game, I encourage you to do your own quick internet search and dive into the hilariously complex background story of Xevious.  It's honestly quite shocking.

From all of the pop culture references, story, and insane amount of ports, it's easy to see that the world was enamored with this game. You may ask yourself why this is the case because it's just a simple game where you shoot stuff and there's a million just like it. After some research, you'll soon learn that Xevious introduced several huge developments that were milestones in the gaming world.  Firstly, Xevious was the first game with a vertically scrolling screen.  Up until this point, everything just took place on a static screen like Space Invaders and the backgrounds never moved.  It was also the first shooter to have a background that was anything more than a black screen or starfield.  The developers had to create terrain and different locations in the game to make the player feel like they were going somewhere as the screen was scrolling by.  It's a simple idea, but was revolutionary at the time.  If that weren't enough, the game also introduced the concept of gameplay secrets into the industry. There are hidden towers and other various secret scoring mechanics and 1UPs scattered around for you to discover by bombing certain locations on the map.  This added another element to the already addictive gameplay and caused many an arcade goer to pump extra coins into the machine to try to find all of the secrets that they could.  This, of course, led every other video game company out there to add secrets to their games to inject some much needed novelty to the whole experience.  

If this weren't enough in terms of ground breaking mechanics, Xevious was also one of the first games to introduce the concept of a Boss Fight.  Before this point, games just had more and more progressively harder enemies.  But, this game introduced 4 giant fortresses that you have to stop and battle before you're allowed to continue.  Of course, I don't need to tell you how influential this was to games in the future.  If you've ever played one, you know.

I think I've made my case for how important this game was... and still is.  It took the world by storm and in addition to all of those other "firsts" it still has one more...

Xevious was the first video game to ever have a TV commercial advertising it. No wonder it was a huge success.

Presentation:

In the modern age of 4k gaming and photorealistic graphics, Xevious isn't much to look at.  This was, after all, a game created in the early days and what you see in the screenshots are what you get.  You fly over grassy fields with brown roads.  There's the occasional river, tarmac, desert, and forest thrown in here and there.  But, the whole experience is very monotonous and seems to have only 5 or 6 colors used in the entire game. Other than the enemies and trees, nothing has any texture to it and appears to just be flat and basic shapes. It's par for the course at the time, but doesn't hold up very well anymore.  The game takes place in South America, which is a cool setting for a game, but you would never know it unless you're able to progress far into the game and start seeing the Nazcal Lines in the background.  It's a nice touch and is a memorable part of the game, I only wish that it was introduced earlier in the experience.  Some early variety in the setting would have been a nice touch.

To accompany the gameplay you're given a memorable but bizarre soundtrack.  The startup music is very catchy and fun even if it only lasts about 4 seconds.  However, the music during gameplay is a fever dream of dissonant and seemingly random patterns of 16th notes played in a loop.  It's one of the worst songs I've ever heard in a game to be so prominently featured.  It's grating to the ears and induces a sort of anxiety when you hear it similar to a kid just banging out random notes on a piano at full volume while you're trying to have a conversation with his parents in the same room.  I normally play all of my games with a surround sound setup, and I had to literally disconnect it to play this game because it was so painful to endure.  Not only that, the NES port pauses the music every single time an explosion occurs.  Meaning, that whenever you shoot an enemy, there is a hiccup in the music.  It's such an incredibly bad experience in the sound department that it almost ruins the whole experience. I would advise you to play with the sound turned off.

Gameplay:

While Xevious was basically one of the founding fathers of the genre and created a lot of the mechanics and tropes we still see in the genre, it's gameplay really just boils down to a basic vertical shmup.  You have your ship at the bottom of the screen and you have freedom of motion to move on both the x and y axes.  You have a basic shot and there are no powerups.  In addition to this, you have a reticule set a fixed distance in front of your ship and you can use it to target and bomb enemies on the ground.  I'm not sure if Xevious was the first game to ever use this idea in a vertical shmup (I know Scramble did it in a horizontal shmup), but I always refer to this mechanic as the Xevious Bombing Mechanic in all my other reviews as it's probably the best known example of this.  Other games like the Twin Bee series, Dragon Spirit, and Layer Section all borrow and use this mechanic as well and it's a somewhat common feature in a lot of storied game series. Unfortunately, I feel like it forces you to have to focus your gameplay onto two planes simultaneously and takes away from the fun inherent in the simple nature of a shmup.  You'll have to bomb installations, tanks, and turrets on the ground while also dealing with the onslaught of aerial enemies that come in several different varieties.  They are all very simple visually (some are just a black ball, or a disc, or a basic rocket ship) but have challenging and difficult attack patterns you'll have to memorize. Some can be very annoying like the previously mentioned black balls that seem to vanish right as you're about to shoot them or the tiny enemies that suicide bomb you at lightning fast speed. There is a primitive ranking system that will send different patterns of enemies at you based on how well you're doing or if you've died recently.  It can keep you on your toes and make it difficult to learn the game, but you'll start recognizing the enemy's behavior before too long and will get the swing of things.  In addition to the air and land enemies, there are the aforementioned boss fights which are all identical and involve surviving and huge barrage of bullets from the enemy base until you can bomb its core and advance. 

There are no individual stages in the game and is instead an unending and continual scrolling experience broken up into 16 sections.  These sections try to be varied somewhat with different background layouts and enemy patters, but still come across as repetitive due to the reuse of gaming assets. They are at least broken up by patches of forest that signify their starting and ending points. If you don't have the game memorized, you'll have to manually count these sections to figure out how far you've progressed into the 30min long 1st loop of the game.  If you die you're sent back to the beginning of the section you were currently on (sigh...).  Luckily, if you're cleared 70% of the section, the game takes pity on you and starts you at a checkpoint towards the end.  This is a nice mechanic that I enjoy, but would have preferred respawning right where you die.  Since there are no powerups, you don't really need a checkpoint system other than to frustrate the gamer (and I guess get more quarters in the arcade) and pad out the experience.  The game is pretty fair with its extends and you'll earn an extra life at 20k points and then every 40k after that. With the hidden 1UPs scattered around you can stockpile plenty of lives.

Despite this, the game is still very tough and can seem a bit unfair and unbalanced at times. Many times you'll play for 15 minutes and make it half way through the 16 sections without ever getting hit a single time only to hit a seemingly impossible section where you die over and over again before hitting a game over. Not only are there these huge difficulty spikes, there are also long and boring sections that require almost no effort and you'll just be sitting there not really doing anything other than dodging the occasional indestructible and oblivious enemy.  The game really needs some balancing tweaks and I think these were addressed in the many remakes and sequels to the original.

Once you clear the 16 sections, the game infinitely loops by taking you back to section 7 with an increased difficulty.  There's no real ending to the game and the final goal is to continue to play until the score reaches its max score of 9,999,990 which is much easier said than done.

Conclusion:

Xevious is still a lot of fun to plan and can be quite addictive despite its tedious nature both in terms of gameplay and presentation.  I don't personally like the ground bombing mechanic in shmups because it forces you to position yourself in precarious places in order to hit ground units and makes you have to split your attention between two playfields.  Quite often, as is the case in the Twinbee franchise, this can almost ruin a game for me.  However, in the case of Xevious, everything is so basic and uncluttered that the ground bombing mechanic, while not very likable to me, is still tolerable and does add some much needed variety to the game.  The backgrounds, while revolutionary for the time, are very boring and all seem to blend together and make the while experience even more repetitive.  Couple this with the insane and ear destroying music, and you have a recipe for a shmup that most modern gamers aren't going to want to put any effort into learning.  The extreme difficulty spikes interspersed between long and boring sections only serves to mix an element of frustration into the tedium that really hurts the game overall.  

The game pretty much created the vertical shmup genre as we know it.  It's highly beloved and influential but seems to be the case of an important game where other's stood on its shoulders to create something truly remarkable.  James Naismith might have invented the game of basketball, but you won't hear him mentioned in any lists of the greatest players of all time along side the likes of Michael Jordon, Kobe Bryant, or LeBron James.  I feel like this analogy is a good representation of where Xevious stands in the annuls of shmup history.  

Don't get me wrong, everyone should still play it.  But, I doubt very few modern gamers are going to fall in love with this game if they didn't already have nostalgia for it.

Final Status: Played (can't really be beaten... 5 hours invested)

Final Score: 6/10 (still a little fun)

Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum (NES) Review

Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum (NES) Review

Date Released: February 1990

Date Played: 10 November 2021

Dash Galaxy is notorious for being an absolutely terrible game.  Time and time again I've seen it on lists of the Top 10 worst NES games and is often mentioned with disdain.  Having a bit of a penchant for playing terrible games, I was actually a little excited to try it out.  The truth is that I've never actually met anyone who has played this game in real life and hoped that maybe all of the hubbub on the internet is more of a meme than reality.  

You play as Dash Galaxy, who is a throwback to the campy sci-fi movies of yesteryear.  Right from the onset the artwork and title screen give you really strong Flash Gordon vibes... and I think that's a good thing for a video game. A little flavor can carry a game a long way and help it overcome some of its faults.  After pressing start you're given a short cut scene of Dash entering a towering rocket ship which I guess is the alien asylum mentioned in the game's title. It looks pretty decent and sets up the game for something that never actually happens. It makes me think that the developers chose "Alien Asylum" for the title because it sounded a lot cooler than Dash Galaxy and the Too Talk Rocket.

Once the game starts, you're not greeted by a high action side scrolling stage.  Instead, you're in an overhead view that is nothing more than a block pushing puzzler. You have to slide these blocks out of the way in methodical fashion to avoid blocking yourself in order to gain access to the rooms scattered around the 25 floors of the asylum.  There are several rooms on each floor and in addition to moving blocks out of the way to reach them you'll also have to disable laser traps and unlock doors to gain access.  When you enter one of these rooms the game turns into a side scrolling collectathon that looks pretty terrible even for an NES game. Dash is oddly proportioned and the color pallet is very muted and everything feels dull and flat. There's very little texture to the sprites and they look more primitive than they should. Once inside, the door shuts behind you and you have to collect all of the blue switches in the area to reopen it.  In addition to that, you are searching for keys, bombs, oxygen tanks, and other items to help you along your way.  Finding these other items are essential to progressing in the game and missing one of them can spell disaster. You can easily find yourself in a position where you can't continue because you failed to find... or wasted one of the bombs. Dash's health is represented by his oxygen level that continually depletes as you play thus giving the game an timer that helps to ramp up the stress level to an uncomfortable level.  Scattered around these rooms are the enemies and obstacles that range from bats, robots, flamethrowers, slides, and other hazards to impede your progress. The enemies usually just slowly roam back and forth and the slides usually only cause you to lose a few seconds of progress and serve more as an annoyance than a real challenge to overcome.  Coming into contact with these objects will cause Dash's oxygen to deplete extremely rapidly and before long, you'll die.  Instead of killing the enemies, or dodging attacks, you'll usually just stand by and wait for them to slowly pass you at a snail's pace as you watch your oxygen deplete anyway.  Also scattered around the levels are trampolines that you have to repeatedly bounce on over and over to build increasing height to get the hard to reach items or to land on a tall platform.  These trampolines are a huge component of the game and you'll spend a large amount of time doing basically nothing while you character bounces up and down while slowly gaining height and as roaming bats slowly fly into you and use up all of you oxygen while you're unable to do anything about it. It's very annoying, and can suck your spirit to play the game after repeated occurrences.  All of this is frustrating, but isn't anything out of the ordinary for a game of this time. At this point, the game feels like many other mediocre platformer of the day; unpolished and clunky, but playable. Unfortunately, nothing is as it seems... and you'll realize from the very first step you take in one of these platforming sections that something is very, very off.

Dash Galaxy has some of the most awkward, floaty, and counterintuitive controls I have ever seen in a game.  When you press the D-pad to move, Dash slowly begins to walk in that direction and after a few steps he will all of a sudden start running at a breakneck pace (I guess that's where he got the name Dash).  It's extremely jarring and it feels like his speed increases by about 300% after a few steps.  Much of the platforming of the game involves timing this speed increase to awkwardly hop over gaps in the floor, from platform to platform, to reach a trampoline, or to avoid an enemy. You'll find yourself constantly careening towards the edge of a pit only to stop right at the edge almost as often as you find yourself accidentally crashing into an enemy, falling of a platform, or missing your target. It feels like you never really get the hang of it.  You'll find yourself constantly trying to tap the D-pad to inch up to what you think is the perfect place to make your leap of faith or backtracking to get more of a running start.  You're never really sure if you picked the right spot to start your run and you have to just pray that your instincts are right. To make matters worse, when you are dashing the height of your jump becomes basically nonexistent and you can only jump to platforms that are on the same level or lower than your current ones. Once again, it feels like you never get used to how this feels and you'll be terrified that you're going to fail every jump that you make this way.  When you're not dashing, holding the jump button causes you to soar almost straight up into the air.  As you slowly fall back down, you'll have to carefully maneuver your character to hit your mark.  There's some strange mechanic where you can't really jump as you're walking and will often have to come to a dead stop, jump, then press forward to clear the gap.  It, much like the dashing mechanic, is difficult to describe without feeling it yourself.  The best way I can word this is that the game feels clunky... and slippery at the same time and I don't recall ever being quite this uneasy having to control my character in a game before. Also, as you walk towards the edge of the screen, your character doesn't stay centered and you'll often find yourself positioned over to one side of the screen and unable to see what's coming up ahead of you.  This will often lead to you not knowing where you're supposed to jump, where items are, or if there's an enemy directly in your path. This is a common occurrence in a lot of subpar NES games so it's not really a surprise to find it here as well.  But having this flaw piled on top of the myriad of other issues only serves to put another nail in the coffin of this disaster of a game. Even after you begin to get a hang of how the game controls you'll encounter many enemies that stand right in your way and you have no choice but to take damage.  When you add the oxygen timer and the ultra repetitive and tense music, Dash Galaxy becomes a recipe for a rage quit.  Still, even with all of these issues, I was fine just plugging along at the game for a while and thought that it was pretty bad, but not as terrible as everyone would have you believe.

After clearing all of the platforming sections of the first floor, I jumped on the elevator and moved on to the second one.  Then, the 3rd, and so forth.  I slowly began to realize that most of these platforming rooms that were giving me fits didn't have any bombs, keys, or other useful items in them and were basically just a waste of time. At first, I thought it was strange that the game is making you clear all of these rooms for no reason before you could progress. Then, around the 5th floor I decided to only clear one room before getting on the elevator to ascend to the next floor.  And guess what?  It worked. I was shocked at this as I realized all of the time I had wasted doing these useless and frustrating rooms.  Realizing that you don't have to do every single room in the game, I decided to not clear any of the rooms on the 6th floor just hopped right back on the elevator... and it worked again. So, you don't have to clear ANY rooms?!?  What is going on with this game? Apparently, you can climb up the asylum without doing any of the rooms. So, I decided to start clearing a few rooms here and there and worked my way all the way up to floor 10.  It wasn't very fun, but it was doable.  Almost half way to the top of the asylum... maybe I can beat this game on my first go.

I tried to hop on the elevator on the 10th floor and it didn't work.  I cleared all of the rooms and still couldn't get on the elevator. Classic...  just like an NES game to put you in a position where you end up not knowing where to go or what to do. It's a tale as old as time and something I've experienced over and over again since I was 5 years old. Back when I was a kid, I would grab a Nintendo Power to help me out, but these days I decided look at an online walkthrough to figure out what I was doing wrong. After watching for a few minutes, I was appalled to learn that you're apparently supposed to find question mark items in certain rooms on specific floors to open warp points to let you skip several levels ahead in asylum.  This is totally fine for a secret or a speed run.  But it turns out that finding these warps is actually REQUIRED TO PROGRESS. If you don't find the warps, the game just soft locks you on certain floors and won't let you go any further.  It also doesn't even have the common courtesy to tell you outright that you've failed. There are no clues in the game or and indicators to know where the warps are without trial and error... and to make matters worse, you have to find EVERY SINGLE ONE of these warps in order to beat the game.  Since the game has no passwords and no save system learning where these warps are located would take a huge amount of time. I can't even imagine the amount of work it would take to slowly learn where these warp points are located. I'm not going to do it.. so I decided to watch someone who did.

As it turns out, once you know what rooms to enter, what items to collect, and where all of the warps are you can beat the game in 10 minutes! What a colossal waste of time. This essentially means this is a 10 minute long game that is padded out with dozens of hours of filler, dead ends, and distractions.  It's not like Super Mario Bros. where you can warp to the end and finish the game very quickly because the levels you skip over do have merit if you decide you want to play them.  In Dash Galaxy, none of the rooms have any merit and the developers not only want, but REQUIRE, you to skip over the content they've made.  They must have known they had a real stinker on their hands.

Where does that leave us, gamers?  It leaves us with a game that is nothing more than an exercise in trial and error.  If you're going to build a game around a mechanic like this, you better make the experience fun and addictive.  Obviously, the developers failed immensely in this task and created an amalgam of bad decisions.  This game doesn't even fall into the, "so bad it's good" category and deserves all of the ridicule it has received over the decades.  The only positives that I can say about this game is that it is an actual game and it does function.  

Final Status: Played (for a few miserable hours)

Final Score: 3/10 (Terrible)