BUBBLEPUZZLE SUPER REVOLUTION DX is the name of this first song.  Bubble Bobble was my favourite of all arcade games ever, and there was something about it that could make you feel completely badass just from playing it.  It didn’t matter that you were playing a game about fat little dragons who blew brightly coloured bubbles in order to entrap happy little wind-up toys, in order to rescue your fat little girlfriends from a fat old alcoholic, all the while with the same song blaring over and over again in the background.

Ironically, I think that the song was my favourite part of the game.  I have never lost that song to the far corners of my memory, even when I’ve got stretches of years without hearing it.  That song, as cheery as it was, made you feel like the saviour of all mankind.  Or fat-little-dragonkind.   Y’know, whatever.  It’s all cool to me.

The feeling it instilled, from start to finish, was surprisingly similar to, on a smaller scale, performing on stage.  This was reinforced by everyone crowding around, more people coming to gawk the further you got.  Rounds of applause and frenzied whooping would be heard ’round the block when the game would show ‘And today’s record is..!’

In short, Bubble Bobble is METAL.  There is no other word for it.  And so, in tribute, I have written the preceding thrash-metal remix of the main theme song.

Later on, the Puzzle Bobble, or Bust-a-Move series was released: A puzzle game that was, lo and behold, about popping bubbles.  It still starred Bub and Bob, the lovable little lard lizards, but now they got less exercise, and would mostly just stand around, using a crossbow to shoot bubbles at other bubbles.  Now, this game didn’t make you feel anywhere near as badass.  Something in that area was lost in translation.  But the voice acting in Bust-a-Move 2DX was so perfectly abyssmal that I couldn’t resist inserting it into my already completed track in an equally abyssmal fashion.  If you’ve ever played that particular incarnation, you probably just got said voice acting out of your head within the past couple of weeks.

Now is the beginning of a fantastic story!  Let’s make a journey to the cave of monsters.  Good luck!

You’re welcome.

Today I went to my favorite arcade for the last time.   No, it wasn’t shutting down like most arcades, I just couldn’t bring myself to witness it’s slow demise. Like an ailing loved one, seeing the decay of what used to be is heart wrenching.  What was my home away from home is now a husk of it’s prior majesty.

Before the lights got dim and the pickings got slim, the arcade was thriving.  The day I turned sixteen was the day I had a free pass to game town (not the name of the arcade).  It’s because of my fondness for the place I write not to lament it’s passing, but to remember it’s living; to share what I experienced, in a place few more will share, in this Internet age.

I was not old enough to partake in the first arcade boom.  Instead I was there for the second, Street Fighter 2 inspired boom.  Having lived above a bar that housed a Dragon’s Lair machine, the large and well animated fighters immediately drew me in.   Thus began my love affair with arcade games. I got my fix whenever I could.  Comic book stores, convenience marts, bars; wherever I could con my family into taking me. What I really wanted, though, was to pilgrimage to that video game meccha that is Family Fun Center.

In its hayday the arcade was full of a noisey busyness of thousands of eyecatches vying for coinage. It’s that purposeful chaos that calls to a child. Sure, you could play mini golf there, or win some prize-tickets, but you couldn’t beat pile driving Dracula with Frankenstien while a would-be martial-arts Wolfman had a coin up for nexts.

That’s what I was big on, fighting games. Friday nights and the place was packed; machines lined with tokens, youth clutching movelists, the low murmurs of comparing tactics and talking smack occasionally gave way to a tide of rising voices, infused with the excitement of a comeback combo.  Familiar faces, but you only earned a name with skill.  In this dark room, lit only by active monitors, was community.

Like the rise and fall of mighty nations, that community was destined to break.  With the advent of better-than-arcade consoles, those great amusement houses went south. At the same time, the price for arcade cabinets started to skyrocket.  Arcade owners had a decision to make: go with the tried-and-true money makers of ticket machines and other light amusement, or pitch in the big dough and pick up the latest fighting game.  It was a no – brainer.  Why cater to the smaller audience?

The only respite for the core gamer was to huddle close to their Playstations and Saturns, playing rough ports of games they already beat.  Sporadic visits led to generic apathy, and flaccidly, the boom ended.  That wasn’t the final bell toll for arcades, though.  It would take a revolution to revitalize the arcade industry… a Dance Dance Revolution.

I struggled a bit with the new Bemani revolution.  After the dark and clandestine back rooms of the fighting game boom, the peppy j-pop sounds and bright flashing lights were bit of a culture shock.  The usual early twenties denizens that used to populate the machinoid jungle were replaced by youthful and trendy scenster types.   What once was dominated by one sex now beset by a mix.  As any old-timer I resisted these changes, snubbed the game and it’s fans; dismissing it as nothing more than a passing fad.

It was roughly this time when I managed to catch that fabled of creatures, the girlfriend who is into video games.   She, as a come-lately gamer, hadn’t ever been to an honest-to-goodness arcade, so, naturally, I wished to share this aspect of gaming with her.   That’s where my geezerish disdain was challenged. She wanted to play, I got talked into it, and that’s where my involvement in the third arcade boom started.

Humid, loud and confusing; sometimes a bit smelly, the Bemani section of the arcade was always full.  Chattering boys and girls clumsily flirt as their friends work up a lather, stumbling about a DDR pad.  Instead of eyecatches, conflicting songs, baselines from different machines making all hard to discern.   More than just Bemani, other games were discussed, familiar faces and if you were around enough you were known. No real rivalry, only mutual camaraderie, sometimes a little cheering on. In this hot and sticky room, people activating buttons to timed cues, was also a community.

That leads us to now, the dregs of that Bemani boom are slowly circling the drain.  My hallowed arcade recently obtained a Guitarfreaks V3 cab, but I can hardly make the effort to go and play.  Two DDR machines stand where six used to be, the keyboard mania is missing keys. I heard rumblings of another fighting game wave, but I won’t get my hopes up.  Perhaps the day will come when the arcade is fully phased out, it seems to be happening in many places.  I figure on that day, I will make my true last visit, and perhaps pick up a brick or arcade marquee as memento.

Okay, I discovered this by accident. It’s how to play the full Banjo game from the trial.

Step 1: Get into Spiral Mountain
Step 2: Go to the giant Ape and make him hit all 3 orange tiles. Make sure the one furtherest away from the tree stub with the monkey is hit LAST. DON’T GET THIS JIGGY YET.
Step 3: Get the orange from Ape’s tree, and give it to the monkey on the tree stub. GET THIS JIGGY.
Step 4: Go to the mole hill above the tree stump, learn how to egg attack, and beat the Ape. A Jiggy will fall.
Step 5: If done correctly, the 2 Jiggys will be right next to each other. Jump right in the middle of them. You should collect 2 Jiggys at the same time, extending the trial.

TRY IT OUT. The only thing you can’t do is save.

While there are certainly many people in a modern arcade at any given time, it seems like not only are there fewer females and non-whites, but the few who do visit these places hang around in little cliques.

We had a few characters back in the day.

• Name:  Big John
• Type:  Biker
• Favourite games:  Pac Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Big John was a gamer of a sort, but I think he mainly stuck around for the company.  He’d often just sit at the counter drinking a beer, looking gruff and scary.  I was the only one he softened that gruff exterior for.  He had a little daughter, but she died, so I think having me around was comforting for him.

• Name:  Jessie
• Type:  Punk
• Favourite games:  ‘Anything where I can kill somethin’.’

She was tall, spindly, green-haired, probably diseased, and smoked a pack or two a day.  She tended to hang out around the beat’em ups and wait for someone to start playing, then join in.  She hated playing games alone.

• Name:  Manny and Milly
• Type:  Awkward
• Favourite games:  Ice Climber, Simpsons arcade, anything co-op

Twin brother and sister, parents apparently thought the names were cute.  They were always together. every time I saw them.  Absolute epitome of the stereotypical ‘nerd.’  Big glasses, pocket protectors, the works.  Occasionally they’d get into fights, with one another, and when they did, there was blood.  Only people I’ve ever seen get further than level three in Mario Bros. ‘co-op’ without killing each other.

• Name:  Dave
• Type:  Fat dude
• Favourite games:  Gauntlet

Big, morbidly obese black man.  Never played anything but Gauntlet and pool, and it showed.  He actually completed Gauntlet on one credit for our Christmas Donation marathon one year.  Liked to poolshark new people, especially if they looked like they had money.

These are just a couple of the players at my old haunt.  We must have had nearly 100 regulars who’d be in and out at various times of the day and week.  When I walk into the Winchester arcade though, what do I see?  Ten wigger kids, four koreans, and a small group of kids running around making noise.  No group talks to another, and they all stay pretty much quiet.  Occasionally a mother will bring her kids in and look uncomfortable while the kids play shitty ticket games.

I tried to set up interviews with people I assumed were regulars, but I got turned down by every single one. What the hell, people, this is a social place, don’t get freaked out by a tall, muscly Italian girl with blue hair asking weird ques-  … Oh.  Maybe that’s the problem.

I don’t know what happened, though.  I can’t continue to write about ‘culture’ if there’s no culture left.  I guess I’m gonna be stuck reviewing old cabinets for awhile.

When I started playing Street Fighter II, I was about four or five years old.  Of course, I was awful at first, but the big dogs took me under their wing, probably because seeing a preschool-age girl kicking ass at a serious fighter was hilarious.  Or maybe that’s just why I’d have done it.  Regardless, kids learn quickly and I was no exception.  Within a couple of months, I was the Ebeneezer’s Street Fighter II champion, and with every win, I’d receive cheers from everyone except for the poor sap who thought they could beat me.  It wasn’t until much later that I realized that I had become a secret weapon.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.  Every arcade had someone like me:  The person you’d trick someone into playing with when you’re pissed off just to watch them cry.  Even nowadays, I’ve had the (mis?)fortune of seeing a 300lb. zit-covered behemoth annihilate a muscle-legged little Korean boy at DDR, so some traditions still live on.

Now, to put this in perspective, not everyone who came in would be given this treatment.  It wasn’t some sort of freakishly cruel hazing ritual, to get your ass handed to you by a toddler.  It was specifically reserved for the jerkoffs who would saunter up to the cabinet while someone else was playing, toss in a quarter, destroy their opponent, and then continue from where said opponent left off, all without so much as a ‘Hey, can I play you?’  Worse yet, would be when they either didn’t say a word, and acted like their opponent didn’t exist, which could be topped only with an utterance of ‘Too bad.’  At that point, I’d be carried over and placed on a barstool, handed a coin, and given a reassuring grin.

Those types of people tended not to come back.

Then, there’s the type who stuck around.  They’d come in, be nice, smile a lot.  Maybe they won, maybe they didn’t.  They were usually weirded out by the little one who got picked up by mom at the end of the day.  They sure as hell didn’t play Street Fighter with me.  The struck up conversations with the people they played with.  They made fast friends.  Eventually they even talked to me!

And the community grew.

Nowadays, arcades are clean almost to a fault.  The carpets are pristine and vacuumed, the screens are wiped down several times a day, and there’s a ‘no food or drink sign’ visible at every turn.  For some reason, this frustrates me to no end.

Obviously, food, drink and cigarettes can damage the cabinets; it only makes sense to be cautious.  On top of that, not everyone smokes, so keeping the air clean is only polite, but in banning these things, something seems to have been lost, and I can’t quite place my finger on it.

We still have noise, flashing lights, fat dudes with sweaty pits (even more so since the advent of DDR), but we don’t have snack counters to chill at, the lights don’t reflect off the smoke, and that particular stink I find so comforting is missing.

Another thing that seems to be missing is special events.  All the nearby (ish) arcades seem spiritually dead.  There’s no staff on hand except for one bored-looking girl behind the counter reading a magazine, and certainly no one cares enough to set up a tournament, or a demo; and no one knows one another because there are few, if any, regulars.  Back at Ebeneezer’s, we held weekly tournaments to help keep the place in business, yearly charity speedrun/pledges, and things of that sort.  Dana, the owner, wasn’t the only one setting things up, all the regulars would pitch in, setting up seating, putting out fliers, etc.  If it could be done with a cabinet and a fistful of quarters, it would be done to help keep the place running.

Come to that, I miss every game costing one quarter.  None of this ‘2 coins = 1 credit’ flashing at the bottom of the screen.  I understand the logic behind charging more: since the community doesn’t put all the hard work to keep their hangout in the black, they have to charge more per play; but at the same time, I’ve often looked at House of the Dead 3 and thought, ‘If I didn’t have to spend 75 cents per play, I’d probably put ten bucks into this thing.’

On a lesser note, whatever happened to table cabinets?  You know, the ones you could set your drink and an ashtray on and play a round of Galaga while sitting down and enjoying a drag between stages.  I guess that it all comes full circle here:  without food, drinks and cigarettes in the room, there’s no need for cabinets whose sole purpose is to allow you to enjoy your food, drinks and cigarettes while playing them.

Arcades aren’t dead yet, not by a long shot.  However, they have changed and evolved in ways that I, personally, don’t like.  Obviously, the people who still frequent these places appreciate the way they are now.  Arcades are no longer for me, or the bikers, stoners and middle-class college-types who’ve always got a foul-smelling Camel Light clenched between their teeth.

All-in-all, it’s still a business, and a business has to change with the times.  There’s a whole new generation of kids at these new sterile arcades, and that is the demographic being targeted.  I can accept that modern arcades are not for me, I can;  I just can’t bring myself to like it.

That’s right, Sunset Riders. This game was possibly the most mind-wasting and money-burning game I have ever played. I must have given that one machine over fifty dollars in the course of all the time I have played it. Nostalgia goggles aside, this game is a fast-paced shoot-’em-up set in the Wild West. Not much else to it besides playing one of the four main characters, all of them buddies looking for a bit of cash. Vigilantes. There isn’t much anything going on story-wise, and that’s part of the game’s charm. It cuts right to the action. Also, if you notice in the title screen, it properly shows each character. Nice touch.

Three blonde-haired cowboys and a hotshot Mexican. Possibly, if not the greatest line-up of characters ever. That’s like putting Big Bird, Elmo, Grover, and James Earl Cash into a game and then putting them in the Wild West and tell them to go shoot bad guys for profit, glory, and women.

I always roll with Cormano. There is no greater satisfaction in any game ever than going around gunning down people with fast-firing shotguns that shoot giant pink pellets at the speed of light while wearing a pink sombrero and serape. Anyways, the game is relatively simple, you go left-to-right, but there are none of those pesky border walls where you need to stop and kill every enemy before you move on. It’s non-stop shooting action and frankly, hard as nails. Their bullets may move slow, sure. However, they shoot several and they slowly begin to cloud your screen, making evasion hard and difficult for even the most skilled people. Keep firing and don’t stop, it’ll just mean your death warrant won’t be signed the second you start a stage.

You die in one-hit, and everyone else [with the exception of bosses] die in one hit too. During each stage, you can go into doors or kill certain enemies for power-ups, which boosts the amount of bullets you shoot and the speed. You automatically lose them each time you die, but they’re relatively easy to find. There are also gold bonuses throughout the stage which boosts your total money. $50,000 will automatically give you another life, although you’ll still be plugging in coins like a madman. No matter how good you are at dodging, you’ll always waste a life to each of those annoying little green bullets that come your way. In a sense, it depends on fast reflexes and a bit of luck, but thankfully, you can jump or slide around them with ease.

Every time you beat a certain stage, you automatically go to a bonus round. It’s pretty simply, you point in a certain direction and shoot Greenpeace, Blood, and Crip outlaws. The more targets you hit, the more money you get. They don’t fire back, but they do pick up speed when you try to hit them, making it difficult to get all of them towards the end. If you have a second buddy playing with you, he also helps you shoot, so it’s always easier to have extra firepower. The only problem is, the money gets split up automatically [same thing with the regular stages], so it nets you less profit. It’s always fun however, to purposely act as a decoy while your friend guns down enemies left and right. Now, onto something that is even more so difficult, the main part where coins get fried tenfold. Behold!

Bosses. Each boss has their own unique quirk, and for each one you kill, your reward increases. At the same time, they also become harder, hellish, and more brutal. Each boss area comes at the end of a stage, and are usually flanked by their cronies you’ve seen before. The game gives you some leeway though, and prevents more enemies from coming back after you maim a certain amount. Another nice addition is that each of these guys have one-liners when they begin the battle and when they die. It even uses voice, despite how pixelated it sounds. Just a warning though, most of the lines are extremely cheesy and/or terrible. The boss music balances that out in turn. Also, sliding is usually helpful for most of these bosses, except this guy.

Punningly enough, they fight with explosives and fire. I guess you could say that was a heated battle, to make light of it. I’m sorry, I’ll never do that again. Anyways, the bosses range from regular outlaws gone fat, to a guy riding an armored horse in black leather with bondage gear, a fat Mexican with a death wish, to the final boss. A fruity Frenchman. I’m not going to spoil anything else however.

To properly sum it all up, Sunset Riders is an amazing game that is one of the best damn shoot-’em-up games ever. What other game allows you to blast twins, Frenchmen, Indians, outlaws, and entire trains? This game is easily addictive and it allows you to procrastinate. The next time you think about trying a game out, think of this! It was also released on the SNES and Genesis if memory serves, so if you don’t have access to this, there’s other alternatives. The game is unique and virtually unheard of, which shocks me. However, I’m still not forgiving the game for giving me a broken arm after sliding on marinara sauce that was in front of the machine. It reminds me why I don’t like marinara sauce on breadsticks.

]]> http://giantenemyblog.com/sunset-riders-gem/feed/ 0 http://giantenemyblog.com/scaling-difficulty-in-a-changing-industry/ http://giantenemyblog.com/scaling-difficulty-in-a-changing-industry/#comments Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:00:09 +0000 Arcadia http://gamerblag.com/?p=1101 There’s something to be said for difficult video games.  Back in the eighties, during the height of arcade culture, games were not only a challenge, they were downright unforgiving.  Playing Wonderboy in Monster Land was enough to make a kid cry.  The generally-accepted reason for this is that the games were made to take your money:  You had to pop in another quarter every time you lost.  However, that difficulty transcended the arcades themselves, and home consoles tended to tear the player a new one as well.  Sometimes, this was to make up for the relatively short length of the games (This was usually the case for beat ‘em ups), though other times they were genuinely difficult.  Still others seemed hard as nails simply due to bad game design (Anyone remember Bayou Billy?).

Over time, games have become much easier:  This is hard to deny.  I can tear through most modern games and hardly lose a life, and I’d imagine most people reading this can too.  But when I turn on my NES, I relive a world of frustration that I couldn’t otherwise experience in any other medium.  For me, this is a good thing, as a general rule:  I love to be challenged, even when it’s enough to make me pull my hair out.  Others, however, play games purely to relax, and who can blame them?  Video games are meant to be fun, not work.

I’d like to take a look at the history and reactions of the changing of difficulty prevalent in the industry.

First of all, I grew up in the old arcade culture.  A dark room filled with men and women of all ages, races and social standings.  My arcade was home to bikers, punks, upper-middle class college-types, stoners, the works.  Yet for some reason, even if we’d hesitate to even look at one another outside of the arcade, that stale-smelling room full of flashing lights and loud noises seemed to bring us all together.  We’d sit and shoot the shit as though we were a big family, then laugh at the new guy losing to the four year old at Street Fighter.  We were the players who could laugh at a challenge, and if someone said a game was too hard, they’d get laughed at too.

I could go on a rant, “Back in my day,” and all that.  In fact I think I almost did.  But what I’m getting at is, when there was a new game that was too hard, we’d call over someone else to co-op it.  If a game was too hard, it just became a social experience.  There was no such thing as a single-polayer game.  They were always either competitive or cooperative.  This is what made difficult games fun.

For a long time, though, as home consoles became the preferred method of gaming, games seemed to become progressively easier.  I think, personally, this is due to games becoming a medium which people enjoyed on their own, rather than with a group of friends.  RPGs became prevalent and popular, which are ironic in and of themselves, since tabletop roleplaying necessitates multiple players.  People became more willing to admit a game was ‘too hard,’ and would not be judged for it.

With the advent of a user-friendly internet, where easy lines of communication with developers became readily available, old-timers began to pipe up, and as games became easier, their voices became louder, and more difficult games began to sneak back into the mainstream:  Ninja Gaiden on the X-Box would be a good example, which continues to frustrate players to this day.

Recently, as online multiplayer has become a viable option for consoles, and single-players games have become less popular, still more developers have had the courage to make their games more challenging.  Not everyone is happy about this, though.  It pains me every time I hear that Left 4 Dead is too hard on Expert:  There’s scalable difficulty for a reason, and if you don’t like the hardest of the hard, you can always drop it down a notch.  No one will hate you for it.

Even now, however, I don’t see any recent releases which even come close to Ghosts and Goblins or Contra or Bubble Bobble, all of which were extremely well-made games with a decent length for each for their respective genres.

I’m not saying that we should bring back the universal frustration of arcade games, as this hardly has mass-market appeal anymore.  But I think Valve has it right with L4D, and Bungie had it right with Halo 2.  Scaling difficulty is a good idea in general, especially if the easiest level is nice and relaxing, and the hardest is hair-pullingly difficult.  More developers need to follow this model, at least in my opinion.  We have an incredibly varied market of men and women, all with different wants and needs, and if catering to more of us is that simple, why not do it?

Ah, back in the 90s Capcom owned the licenses to a lot of awesome things, such as Disney and Marvel Comics and created some memorable and kickass games. They also owned the license to Jojo`s Bizarre Adventure and made one of the best overlooked 2D fighting games ever. This game is based off the popular in Japan manga series Jojo`s Bizarre Adventure, specificly Part 3, ”Stardust Crusaders”. The game is also known as Jojo`s Venture in some places.

Now, what is the most important thing in fighting games? Gameplay. The series`s unique form of superpowers called ”Stands” lend them self greatly to the gameplay of the game. The game uses 5 attack buttons instead of the Capcom standard 6, and the 6th button is used to activate the character`s Stand, a ghostly spirit that stands by the character and becomes the primary offense. This can be used in many different ways such as trapping your opponent between yourself and your stand or summoning your stand to attack as your character retreats. But some characters still use the stand button as a regular attack button due to their stands being perma-on. Stands also provide a slightly different, usually stronger moveset. If you take damage when your Stand is on, the Stand bar goes down, when it`s empty, your Stand shatters and you cannot guard for a few seconds. The Stand mechanic provides an interesting twist on fighting game character types like a trap setter or a charg character.

Aside from good gameplay, the game also provides other good things. The game combines Hirohiko Araki`s unique character designs with the standard Capcom anime-style sprites to create some interesting visuals. Sure it might not seem much if you look at the screen shots, but to a fan it brings joy. The game also has a interesting story mode which is somewhat deep for a fighting game. It tells you the tale of Jotaro Kujo and his friends as they venture to Egypt to defeat the vampire Dio, thus preventing Jotaro`s mother`s stand from slowly killing her. The story mode is composed largely of fights but also includes a lot of mini-games. The minigames in this game aren`t too bad, some of them being enjoyable, my favorite being the beat `em up segment where you fight zombies. The only problem some might have is that story mode forces to use a specific character in a specific plot point instead of letting you chose your own character, but this also lets you re-create scenes from the manga, which the story mode closely follows.

This game also has some internet fame due to Dio Brando`s super combo where he stops time, drops a road roller on his opponent, throws knives at his opponent, beats the road roller to an explosion and lets time resume.

This game has been released on the PS1 and a updated version on the Dreamcast. I reviewed the PS1 version.

I love this game. It provides hours of enjoyment.

8/10

Presumably ‘The Outfoxies’ refers to the act of out foxing one’s opponent, which I suppose makes some sense. The rest of this game…less so. A bit of a lost gem, The Outfoxies was created by Namco in 1994. Presumably fueled by sackloads of narcotics bought with the profits Ridge Racer brought in. Long before Super Smash Brothers heralded a new breed of super-competitive console gamer this was a title which, if anything, was an even more mad-capped take on the 2D fighter genre.

The gameplay is essentially a 2D predecessor to the likes of Power Stone and Super Smash Brothers. You enter a series of one-on-one fights to the death against various opponents including a top-hatted chimp named Dweeb, two Children Of The Corn-esque blonde children, a circus freak and her pet lizard and a wheelchair bound professor. The inappropriateness of some of the characters is what makes the game so odd. Maybe it’s just me, but shooting a pair of kids in the face with a machine gun just seems wrong. Ah yes, the weapons though. You start each round unarmed and with only your puny

Yes, that's a whale.

fists as protection. It won’t take you long to find something more destructive though, as the multi-tiered arenas are littered with a multitude of items with which to inflict pain. These vary from swords, grenades and rocket launchers to pies, barrels and lumps of coal (found on the steam train level).

The arenas themselves are also of note, with each one featuring destructible scenery. Ceilings collapse, walls break, pipes explode leaving new areas and weapons exposed. Knowing how to use the scenery to your advantage is as important as anything in this game. Conveyor belts, trapeze artists, even sharks feature in the various stages and can be used to your advantage or peril.

It’s difficult to fully encapsulate how bizarre this game is in words alone. It’s also quite well polished and a real blast with two players. Above all else, this game is just plain fun. It’s a real shame The Outfoxies never found its way onto a home console. It would certainly make a welcome addition to WiiWare/XBLA/PSN, with added online multiplayer. Sadly that’s about as likely as being attacked by a knife wielding primate. Do yourself a favour and hunt it down. If nothing else, it has a monkey in it.

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