There is one thing that bothers me more than anything else. The worst thing in the world. I’m not bothered by VCR timers blinking at me for days after a powercut, microwaves with the door popped and “0:01″ on the display, anything like that. No, what bothers me is skipping ahead in series of video games.

I must play everything from the absolute beginning. EVERYTHING. And I must beat it, usually fair and square. This means I beat Final Fantasy I before anything else. This means that I PLAYED FINAL FANTASY II FOR THE NES TO COMPLETION. For those of you who have played that game, I want you to think about that. Go on, think good and hard. Did you enjoy that game? No? That’s because it sucks. Just look at that horrible levelling system. I don’t even want to talk about the game any more than that, it’s like having flashbacks to being in a warzone, or kidnapped in the basement of a rapist. God.

This compulsion is worsened when games have some kind of chronology – Castlevania, for example. I have played and beaten every single Castlevania game ever released, apart from Portrait of Ruin, which came out after I’d done my little “pilgrimage” through the series, and which I’m playing right now. Every. Single. Castlevania. Game. The shitty Gameboy ones. Simon’s Quest. The N64 ones. (Which I actually love, but I know everyone else hates them for some reason.) And I didn’t even do it in release order, I did it in CHRONOLOGICAL order, beginning with Lament of Innocence for the PS2 (set in the late 11th century) and ending with Dawn of Sorrow (set in the year 2036.)

One day a few weeks ago I decided to take a look at the Monster World series. For those who don’t know (and I’d understand that fully because the series name is so generic), Monster World is actually a kind of sub-series that runs alongside (and often INSIDE) the Wonder Boy series. Go check Wikipedia for the full story behind the naming and chronology if you care, it’s too confusing and retarded to bother taking up half this post with.

Anyway, I discovered that Monster World IV (which is also Wonder Boy VI or some bullshit) now has a translation patch putting it into English. And it stars a girl with a green ponytail. This compelled me to play it in ways I can’t possibly relate in text, caused by my intense fixation on girls of that ilk, which will probably be the subject of another (very creepy) post at some point down the line. However, due to my horrible compulsion to play shit in order, I resigned myself to slugging through the Sega Master System games that make up the early series in order to get there. I decided to let myself get away with starting on Wonder Boy in Monster Land, which is Wonder Boy II, because it’s first in the Monster World series. I could just say I was “working through Monster World”, see, and not “working through Wonder Boy.”

So far, the game has been a horrible, painful, terrible experience. I am about to show you why, in order to save you from having to play this godawful nugget of feces yourself.

Looks like solid retro fun, doesn’t it? A nice sidescroller with RPG elements, not too complicated, fun to play while you chat to friends or just when you’re over saturated with complex, modern games and need a bit of a break. Yeah, that’s what I thought too. Except, guess what? It’s a port of an arcade game. That’s not so bad, though, right? Loads of great games appeared on the arcade before being ported to home consoles – the first Castlevania, for example. But look at the status bar at the top. See that hourglass?

SURELY THEY DIDN’T, RIGHT? Well, yes they did. Yes they damn well did. They left the time limit intact from the arcade version. A feature designed to make sure you weren’t being a dick and screwing around in the same few screens and not letting anyone else play the arcade machine by penalizing you for dawdling was left in for the home console release. This timer runs down constantly, and whenever it runs out completely, you lose a heart off your health. But that’s not too bad, right? I mean, it just means you can’t fuck around too much and you have to get on with the game, right?

Oh, but look at that! There’s not one, but TWO shields for sale in the shield store. A weaker one that costs less, and a stronger one that costs more. That’s pretty standard stuff for RPG-like games, and the choice here is the same as the choice in most other games following the same vein: grind for the better stuff now, or deal with the increased challenge of playing with weaker equipment until later in the game when the items which seemed so pricy back then now cost chump change.

Except, hold on a moment here. I CAN’T grind for the more expensive equipment, because holy shit, I’m on a time limit! And it’s not just shields I have to think about too, there’s armour, boots, magic, a bunch of crap like that. Even if I just bought the weakest version of everything, I still couldn’t afford equipment for my entire bo–

Wait, what? In the time I was busy typing that crap to you, I got shoved outside the store, and now it’s closed PERMANENTLY and will never re-open? Yeah, that’s right. If you take too much time browsing in a store, where the timer doesn’t even run down and where any other game in the history of mankind would have the decency to STOP THE ACTION, you get booted out of the store and it counts as “having visited it”. Most of the equipment stores shut down forever after you’ve visited them once, whether you bought anything or not, so fucking around like this will only mean the store closes, you get tossed out on the street and you can’t buy anything.

Of course, this means that you CAN’T EVEN JUST GO INTO THE STORE TO CHECK THE PRICES, YOU BETTER BE GODDAMN PSYCHIC AND KNOW EXACTLY HOW MUCH MONEY YOU NEED BEFORE YOU EVEN STEP FOOT IN ONE, OR YOU’RE A DUMB BASTARD AND YOU DESERVE NOT TO HAVE ANY EQUIPMENT AT ALL. Since the Master System’s actual pause button doesn’t work in the shop screens, if you’re in a store and you need to take a piss, or the doorbell goes, or the phone rings or something, you’d better be prepared to come back to a nearly-dead character, because not only will you get thrown out of the store, but the timer will keep on ticking, sapping your precious hearts while you DARE to go and attend to your real-life business.

It gets worse, though. BELIEVE ME it gets worse.

So, you’re on a time limit and you want to grind a bit to get money for items. You’d think there’d be some method of refilling the timer without sacrificing one of your hearts, wouldn’t you? Well, lucky for you, there is!

Stores like this one will sell you ale or mead to refill your timer, give you some health back, and prompt the barman to give you some vital information for finishing the chapter, such as the answer to a question asked later on, or the boss’s location or weakness. So that’s alright, isn’t it? You can just go out, kill some enemies, collect their gold, and spend some of it on refilling your timer every minute or so, kind of like a much faster version of the “fight, gain money, and use a portion of it to rest up in order to fight some more” mechanic used in so many classic RPGs.

BUT GUESS WHAT?

THAT FUCKING STORE CLOSES TOO. You only get to go in there like twice, three times tops before it’s barricaded up forever and you can never get back in. So there goes your last hope of being able to gain money sustainably for better equipment.

As a side note, the FAQ I referred to mentioned something interesting. The game has certain spots, completely unmarked, where jumping will cause a bag of 10 or so gold to materialize out of thin air. So if you’re willing to read the FAQ for every single screen of the game and jump on all of them, you might have enough gold for the best shit, but otherwise you’re just screwed. The FAQ also recommended some tourneyfag technique for “waggling” back and forth over these spots to cause a glitch where the same spot gives out gold many times in a row, but screw doing that. If you even NEED to do that, that’s bad game design, isn’t it?

Anyway, those of you who know this game will know that I’ve been talking about the second level here. Well, the first REAL level, since level 1 is so short and easy. Of course, I got further in the game than this. Let’s talk about something that happens later on.

So here I am on level god-knows-what. I can’t seem to find this level in any FAQ, probably because I took some weird route that went over the clouds to some southern island. As you can see, I have more hearts, my equipment is better, blah blah. So I’m going through this level merrily…

… when I come to this. An enemy in an unhittable position that swoops down and hit me as I jump on small platforms over lava.

Sure enough, just like every old game designed to frustrate you, you also jump back a million miles whenever you get hit. Fortunately, I didn’t land on the lava. Even if I did, though, it wouldn’t be that much of a problem, because all the lava does is make you lose one heart and give you that just-hit period of invulnerability. In fact, I passed this section by deliberately getting hurt and using that period to just walk over the lava to the other side.

So, here I am at the boss door to this round. I’ve been knocking on it, but it just won’t let me in. This is fairly normal because in Wonder Boy in Monster Land, you need to collect the key from somewhere in the level in order to get through the boss door. That’s pretty standard stuff, and a lot of great games past and present have used the same mechanic. One of the previous levels in this game sent you past the locked door once in order to swim under the small island you were just on, collect the key in the water, and circle back to the door to unlock it.

Unfortunately, the right hand side of this screen is a dead end, and there are no pits in the floor or stairs to climb that could take me to other location. This level DID consist of a lot of areas, though, so I probably missed the key in one of those, yeah? I should go back and get it.

BUT WHAT’S THIS? I can’t go left back out of this cave and into the previous area. In fact, I can’t go ANYWHERE. There are no hidden doors or routes that I can find, and I’ve jumped in every spot to try and find some of those retarded hidden things. No, I’m just STUCK here with a steadily decreasing timer and a bunch of respawning enemies that take like 5 hits to kill, hovering directly over lava. And because this game doesn’t save data to an internal battery or use a password system or anything remotely logical, my only choice is to RESET THE ENTIRE GAME AND TRY AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING.

WHO THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA? This game is complete and utter tripe. I’ve suffered through some terrible shit for my play-every-series-in-order fixation, but this really does take the cake. Thankfully it’s mercifully short, so I don’t have to deal with it for like 30 hours of my life like I did with Final Fantasy II, but it’s like every little aspect of this game was made specifically to irritate the player. Some games do that well, like the classic Megaman games. Hell, there was an indie game created in recent years – I Wanna Be The Guy – which was designed as a homage to the intense difficulty and unfair bullshit that those games pulled, and it’s actually pretty fun to play.

But Wonder Boy in Monster Land is not fun in any of those ways. In fact, it’s just not fun at all. Its nostalgic retro charm is completely negated by its utter unplayability, piss-poor design and terrible execution. It’s not even “so terrible it’s fun to play” like Bible Adventures or Superman 64. It just sucks, I’m sorry I’ve wasted my time playing it, and I’m even MORE sorry that I’m going to force myself to finish this fucking thing in order to work up to Monster World’s better installments.