Rapid-Fire Reviews #01 | MAD TV, MEGA MAN 4 & DESERT STRIKE

Hello readers,

welcome to a new segment on TGBProject that we call "Rapid-Fire Reviews". 

This challenge has been going on for quite a while now, and from time to time, I find myself in an awkward spot where I play certain types of games that don't quite fit the review style that I do. The main reason for that usually is that these games are a lot more complex in their content and mechanics, that I'd either have to play them for a long time to get a useful review out, or that I'd die out of boredom before I get the necessary understanding. Boredom is a more extreme example, but the point is that I can't justify spending the dozens, if not 100+ hours on the games and I couldn't bring out a proper review out either.

So instead, I figured there will be Rapid-Fire Reviews for these games, with three per episode, meaning once I play three games that fit the description, they will be put together for a post like this one. There will also be a separate spreadsheet for these games that I have played or similar games I might want to play in the future.

These will not be reviews in the style of my main reviews, but instead a collection of my random thoughts that I will note down here.

For today's first rendition, the games are MAD TV, Mega Man 4 and Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf.

MAD TV

• Initial Release Date: 1991 
• Platforms: Amiga, MS-DOS
• Genre: Business simulation
• Developer / Publisher: Rainbow Arts Software 
• Series: Rainbow Arts Software
• MOBY RATING: 7.6 (#5,683 of 158K)

Did you ever want to run your own TV station? You can do that with Mad TV, one of the most popular games of its kind. You play a protagonist who, one day on his couch watching TV, sees the beautiful reporter Betty Botterblom and instantly falls in love. He rushes to the Mad TV tower to confess his loves for her, and as he rides the elevator to the top, where Betty is situated, a man is thrown out of the building. An angry man, who turns out to be the owner of Mad TV, paces through the corridors until he stumbles upon the protagonist stepping out of the elevator. He offers him the job to run the channel, and that's where the game starts.

The intro has no voice acting, so this is how I imagine the set-up for the game to be like. The goal of the game is to run the channel Mad TV and compete against two other TV channels for the best ratings. The end goal is to fill up the heart meter for Betty Botterblom, because once it is fully filled up, the protagonist gets to marry her, which ends the game.

The interface looks like the following. Your character is shown in a towering building with multiple floors and rooms. You can ride the elevator up and down, and your two enemy TV station guys are running around as well, rushing from room to room. These rooms offer you cassettes for shows that you can run, for movies, documentaries and for commercials. You yourself run from room to room to get these things and then go to your office to choose which shows and commercials to run.

Each day starts at 17, TV time starts 18 and goes until 1am. When the day starts, you need to prioritize certain rooms. This means your enemies might go to the advertising agency room first and potentially choose the better paying commercials if you're unlucky. You yourself may choose to head to the movie agency, where you can decide which movie to purchase based on a few criteria, such as cost, critics opinion, box office gross, Betty's opinion and an x-rating, which means the movie can't be run prior to 21. Based on this info, you try to combine the best software of all types for the most successful day in terms of ratings and revenue. 

Next to the daily hussle, there are your owner goals to meet as well. Minimum ratings for example, or doing your best to help your station win a 'Sammy', which is an award given out from time to time to the station with the best news or cultural program.

And that should be the gist of it. I found it to be pretty fun, and much deeper than you would think at a glance in terms of its systems. I enjoy management sims in general, but my interests rather lie in the sports management sims rather than this category, so I didn't find myself very interested to go deeper into this one to give it a proper review that it would deserve and that would likely end up being pretty positive. But if a TV sim sounds interesting to you and you like what you've read, check it out.

RATING: Recommended!

MEGA MAN 4

• Initial Release Date: December 6, 1991 
• Platforms: NES, PlayStation
• Genre: Action, Platformer
• Developer / Publisher: Capcom / Capcom (EU: Nintendo)
• Series: Mega Man
• MOBY RATING: 7.6 (#5382)

This is now the 3rd Mega Man game I have played for this challenge, and unfortunately, the games just do not click with me. This one is the 4th of 6 that would release for the NES in the main series (+9 if you want to count it for its NES-style presentation) and just looking at this ranking of Mega Man games, you can't necessarily tell that all fans feel this way, but you can see that it doesn't get any better from here for the NES games, at least on a fundamental level.

And I don't mean 'better' as in the game is objectively bad, it goes without saying that it definitely isn't. What I rather mean is that it won't improve in any way that would make me more receptive to what the series is, at least on the NES. It doesn't have to, but that's the reason why I'm going to skip the series as part of the challenge until Mega Man 7 (at least), when the Mega Man series jumps to the SNES.

If you are unfamiliar with the Mega Man series or haven't played any of the games, you may read my complete review of Mega Man 3 to get a sense of what to expect from Mega Man 4, which is fundamentally exactly the same.

I am going to rapid-fire the echoed thoughts here though, as per what the point of this mini-review series is.

You are Mega Man and you need to defeat 8 different bosses in this horizontally scrolling Action-platformer game. Defeating each boss grants you their weapon and you can pick which order you want to go through them. Each boss has their own patterns and at the end, you are faced with a boss rush where you need to fight them all before you fight the main antagonist, Dr. Wily.

This is a unique approach to level design and instantly recognizable as belonging to the Mega Man series. Do I like it? No.

I have pretty much the same issues as I had with Mega Man 3. First, there is very noticeable slowdown for the NES version on a regular basis. You don't even need many projectiles on the screen for slowdown to start occuring, and it does get annoying. Second, you can only shoot frontward the way you're facing, but many enemies have this annoying habit of spawning on top of you and coming diagonally down and making it difficult to kill them without getting hit yourself due to how finnicky the controls are. Third, enemies respawn if you move away from their spawnpoint by a frame too much. This also happens when you kill a medium-difficulty enemy, enter a secret room from his screen and then when you return to their screen to take the correct way, the enemy has respawned and you need to fight him again.

Fourth, and that is my biggest Mega-Man specific gripe: The boss order system offers me no value. There is a clear boss that is by far the easiest to fight with your starting weapon. Most bosses are unbeatable with it unless you are ridiculously persistent for many hours to try and get the patterns perfectly down, which, thanks to the slowdown and the non-stop attacks from the bosses, is a horrible experience. And once you do defeat the easiest boss and get their weapon, many subsequent bosses start becoming much more trivial because you can simply spam the boss weapons, which, by the way, you constantly need to stop the menu for and switch. The menu is not responsive enough and getting charge items in the levels for your weapon only affect the weapon you're currently using, so it becomes a constant switch fest sometimes. Not fun. Anyway, the bosses. So you have a situation where the majority of bosses are no-go's for the majority of players as their first boss to defeat, and where the boss weapons often make the next bosses much easier. Plus, some of the bosses repeat patterns from earlier Mega Man games, so there is that as well.

So all I got to hang on to are the soundtrack and the level design at this point. I though the soundtrack was fine, not good like Mega Man 3's soundtrack, and as explained with how enemies act, their respawning and some really annoying obstacles (rocks falling from above, having to jump over platforms that disappear while enemies surround you, long-distant jumping on platforms with unfairly precise timing required), I find the level design to be more frustrating than anything else.

Again, this is not an objective look at Mega Man, though some specific points (slowdown) are. It's mainly my subjective perception of everything and how I don't find enough here to make these games, for me, what is most important: fun. 

Though, to be fair, many platforms for the NES I seem to have issues with, while SNES games so far have been mostly fantastic, so it's likely also a sign that the SNES has aged much better technically than the NES, at least for people who didn't grow up with the NES. Having said that, I believe that also has more to do with the fact that from a technological standpoint, developers weren't able to cram as much play-time into their NES games as their SNES games, so unfair difficulty was added to compensate for it. I find the charm in that in other games, but unfortunately I don't in the Mega Man series.

RATING: Not for me

DESERT STRIKE: RETURN TO THE GULF

• Initial Release Date: March, 1992 
• Platforms: Sega Genesis, Amiga, MS-DOS, SNES, Game Boy
• Genre: Shoot 'em up
• Developer / Publisher: EA / EA
• Series: Strike
• MOBY RATING: 7.9 (#2953)

Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf is a shoot 'em up created by EA that has the Gulf War as its setting. The Gulf War ended a year before this game came out, so you can imagine that there has been plenty of criticism levied onto this game at the time. Nothing like you would see today though, which is why this game still managed to top best-selling charts for months after its release.

The game is pretty unique for the time. You control a helicopter from an isometric perspective and shoot at small vehicle sprites and buildings. Each stage comes with its set of missions, which pretty much always are to destroy certain buildings and enemies, and to rescue your own troops or abduct enemy personnel. You are given 5 missions during the first stage for example and are meant to do those in a certain order. If task #1 is destroying comm relays for example, you can't start by destroying a power plant first, which would be the second task.

To add strategic elements, you have to worry about armor, ammo and fuel during your mission. You pick up fuel tanks and ammo crates to fill up the respective resources. From my understanding, armor is filled back up by rescuing troops and bringing them to a landing zone. There is a map in this game that shows you locations for everything, so you're not left clueless or anything, and the different elements at play here are the main reason for why this game doesn't get boring within the first hour.

If you're a fan of shoot 'em ups and flight sims, I'd wager you'll have fun with this for much, much longer than an hour (or the other 4 games in the series). There is a gameplay loop here that seems pretty fun, if simple.

For me, flight sims have never been my thing, and the repetitive nature of the game doesn't really do it for me. I can't say I played it enough to fairly rate it though, which is why the review landed here. In terms of genuine complaints, the main one I would mention is how easy it is to have your ship destroyed. There are certain turrets or something like that that seem to lock on to you and shoot missiles that damage your helicopter heavily. Three shots and the chopper explodes. The first shot is fired right as the turret comes into frame, so I had a hard time dodging it. Even the second shot I couldn't really ever dodge reliably, because you need the time to turn your helicopter, which I found to be just as fast, if not slightly slower than what the turrets need, meaning I couldn't really ever figure out how to outmaneuver them. The camera system in this game is pretty unique and lauded for good reason, but I found this to be quite finnicky from today's perspective.

That's really my only complaint though. The game is what it is, which is a shoot 'em up with unique ideas and plenty of stuff it does right, but it just does so on a simple level. If you're the type of gamer for this sort of game, I'm sure you'll have some fun with it.

Rating: Recommended to flight sim and shoot 'em up fans