Mario Kart 64, Contra III, Comix Zone, Bonanza Bros.

Mario Kart 64 – 1000 Points
The Mario Kart series has had its up’s and down’s. The Super Nintendo original stands as a true classic. The GameCube saw the release of the underwhelming Mario Kart: Double Dash. Many disliked it for its extremely unbalanced item selection as well as its uninspired constricting and track design. Mario Kart DS went a long way toward repairing the damage, but its unnecessarily large amount of karts led to unbalanced gameplay, and its loose power slide system led to rampant “snaking”. While both of those are still great games, neither had the merits to dethrone the king of the series, and that is the game which was just released for the Virtual Console…Mario Kart 64. Mario Kart 64 was one of the earliest titles to hit the Nintendo 64 early on during its launch window, and it hit at the perfect time. While the N64 was going through a dry spell early in its lifespan, Mario Kart 64 provided more replay value than many games combined being the console’s first four-player title. There are many who still play it today. “Why?” you ask? This is the game that defined the Nintendo 64 as the “Party Machine” back in the day by ushering in a new generation of multi-player insanity that is best described as forever brilliant. Included are four player versus and battle modes for your gaming pleasure alongside a full grand-prix mode where you can race the CPU at 500cc, 100cc, or 150cc speeds. The single player experience is rather bland and stale in comparison to other games of the era like Diddy Kong Racing which offered full single player adventure modes. The Multi-player is where the real timeless appeal of the game shines. The battle mode contains the now legendary “Block Fort” arena which provides one of the most balanced and insane party game experiences available to this day. Included are twenty brilliantly designed race tracks, and four battle tracks. While the battle tracks are few in number, they more than make up for quantity in sheer quality. While the item system in successive sequels would become more exaggerated and diverse, the game balance would suffer as a result. Here, the selection is very balanced and works well in the 3D format, and the power slide system is adjusted so that it can be a powerful asset during races, giving you that little half second advantage at the finish line, but not allowing the system to be abused like Mario Kart DS. All split screen games naturally suffer from the inability for multiple people to have a good view of their corner on a small screen, but the N64 version of MK64 suffered some in 4-player split screen mode thanks to the limited resolution (320×240) of the N64 making the available screen size for each window rather blocky on a large TV. This limitation is gone on the Virtual Console with the game running at double the resolution (640×480) and now in Pro-Scan. That means the frame rate is much improved over the N64, which was infamous for its chunky frame rates, but there is a consequence. The karts and drivers are just 2D sprites laid in front of a 3D world, and the higher resolution makes this glaringly obvious. This port is not perfect. There is one glaring omission that severely hurts the replay value of the single player mode. In the original game, you could save “ghost data” of any Time Trial race onto a Nintendo 64 Controller Pack (memory card) and transfer that to other consoles or save it for yourself so you could race against your best times. Sadly that feature has not been emulated here. You can save time trial records and such to the game’s own memory, but ghost data saving is completely unavailable. Nintendo should have taken more time to perfect the emulation and adjust the game so that it could save time trial ghosts directly to Wii’s internal memory, because here’s the sad reality. Nintendo claims that it is infeasible to include support for Controller Pack save data, but there are fan developed emulators out there that have had support controller-pak save data for over three years. According to our recent news story, Nintendo has outwardly refused to address the issue, which means it is probably more likely due to a lack of desire to invest the resources to accomplish the task, thinking that fans won’t miss the relatively obscure option. Ghost data is an important feature and vital to the replay value of the single player mode, which was already lacking to begin with, but this all leads to a disturbing future scenario. The controller-pak was created to curb costs on cartridge memory, but most N64 games fortunately had internal save support anyway. Still, there were exceptions. If Nintendo refuses to offer any support for N64 controller-pak save data, early games such as Crusin’ USA, NBA Hang Time, and Hydro Thunder will be completely broken, and games such as Tetrisphere and The New Tetris will be partially gimped much like Mario Kart 64 is here. It is possible to patch this issue as fans themselves have already proved illicitly, but until Nintendo wakes up and realities this, it counts as a knock against the game. Other than the now gimped single player mode, you will still find a killer multiplayer experience with this game rivaled by few. It’s not called the king of Kart racers by many for nothing. Mario Kart 64’s gameplay strikes that perfect harmony between gameplay skill, and random fun. There are few superior multi-player experiences this side of Smash Bros. Melee, and the single player is fun, even if it won’t hold your interest for long. The textures are a little muddy, and the characters are actually pre-rendered sprites, but when a game is this fun, nobody really cares. Unless you own the original cartridge and four controllers, which is still the superior way to play thanks to Nintendo’s blatant cost cutting measures, grab 1000 Points, four controllers, and three friends, because Mario Kart 64 will not disappoint.

Contra III: The Alien Wars – 800 Points
There are shooters, and then there is Contra. As the sequel to the original Contra for the NES and Super C, Contra III is a landmark title in the “walk-and-shoot” genre of games popular in the late 80’s/early 90’s. It was released exclusively for the Super NES in 1992, published by Konami, and developed by the team that would break free of Konami to become the independent studio known today as Treasure. Taking place during the 27th century, Contra III details the third invasion of Red Falcon as you control Jimbo and Sully in their fight to save humanity. Contra III is regularly used as a point of comparison for almost every other game in the world of 2D even though it is fundamentally the same as the original game. Levels are extremely varied in style, and the bosses are about as epic as you can possibly hope for. As for the rest of the Contra games, III is extremely difficult, requiring perfect jumps and knowing when and where all enemy fire will come from. That can lead to some frustrating trial and error based gameplay. Fortunately there is a two-player mode, and the controls are spot-on. The traditional side scrolling gameplay is broken up by the occasional overhead stages which utilize full Mode 7 rotation. The effect is a tad dizzying at first, but you’ll adjust quickly. The controls in the overhead stages are a little awkward as well because you have to use the L & R buttons to rotate your character because he is always pointing forward. The bit of awkwardness in control doesn’t mean that the stages are a bother though. They are actually quite enjoyable. In fact, Contra III’s overhead stages served as the inspiration for the bonus rounds in the recently released Assault Heroes for Xbox Live Arcade. Contra III’s music is rather generic and simple which is odd for a Konami title of the era, but you’ll hardly hear it anyway over the sound of the game’s terrific explosions, and your own cursing at the screen after every cheap death. If the game has any real fault other than difficulty imbalance, it’s that the experience is over too soon. With only six stages (half scrolling, half overhead) the game seems to end just as its getting started, but for the time that it lasts, you’re in for an intense ride.

Bonanza Bros – 800 Points
Bonanza Bros is a now obscure arcade to home conversion published by Sega and developed by US Gold & Synergy in 1990. In this platform game, you take on the role of brothers Robo and Mobo as they wander around a house stealing various objects and dodging the police. Once you’ve acquired the loot, you sneak it up to the rooftop where a blimp is waiting to whisk it away. Your characters can walk, jump, and shoot the cops while dodging their shots by hiding behind furniture or support beams among other objects. You cannot kill the police officers, but merely stun them, and they are alerted to your presence when you come into hearing range or when you enter their direct field of vision. The sneaking around sounds like a very primitive version of the stealth scenarios from Metroid Fusion or Metroid Zero Mission where you have to avoid being seen, but in the actual game, the whole process is rather clunky and slow. Walk, hide, walk, shoot, hide, rinse, repeat. Though the game sounds particularly violent, the presentation is extremely cartoony so it doesn’t really show. The original plot-line for the Japanese original is that the brothers are actually thieves, but the North American version here originally advertised them as helping police in testing security facilities. This was probably done in the midst of the negative light the government and media were shining on gaming in the early 1990’s. Nonetheless, that is the version presented here. It makes little difference though because what you are doing is glaringly obvious, and actually a little humorous in how poorly the localization department tried to hide it. The game over screen depicts the Brothers in prison. Moving on, the gameplay does support two player split screen mode, but the problem is that the game is always stuck in this mode even in one-player, similar to Super Mario Kart, except that there is nothing helpful to the player on that unused half of the screen. The music is also completely forgettable, along with the poorly sampled voices and metallic sound effects. The Genesis could do better. Bonanza Bros. was included in the Japanese version of Sonic Gems Collection (but removed in the North American version along with the Streets of Rage series to preserve the “E” rating), as well as Sega Ages for the PS2, but this is its first appearance on a Nintendo platform in North America. Regardless, the game is mostly forgettable and extremely dated in most respects. As a two-player outing, it still holds some mild enjoyment, but you’re probably better off holding onto your points for something else.

Comix Zone – 800 Points
Here’s something completely original. Of all the games to come out for the Sega Genesis, Comix Zone is one of the most overlooked and totally original titles in the Sega catalog. Released in 1995, it hit when the Genesis’s lifecycle was coming to a definitive close, and was overlooked in favor of the slew of pre-rendered games attempting to mimic Donkey Kong Country like Sonic 3D Blast or Vectorman. At its core, Comix Zone is really just a 2D brawler in the vein of Final Fight or Sega’s own Streets of Rage with some slick animation, but the concept is so original, and the art style so diverse and lively, the game stands miles apart from those classics. Comix Zone tells the story of Sketch Turner, a cartoonist who was forced into his own creation by fictional villain Mortus, a creation of his own pencil. During a thunderstorm, Mortus comes to life and assumes the role of the cartoonist, and creates a living nightmare by casting Sketch into the comic book, and drawing all sorts of obstacles for Sketch to survive as he fights to free himself. The visual art style is so convincing because Sega literally hired comic book authors to come in and draw all the sprites on paper, then convert them to bitmap. The same can be said for all of the backdrops. You literally feel like you are walking and fighting your way through a living comic book. Each stage is made up of two “pages” of the comic book, with each section being contained in its own comic book panel. You can swing from panel to panel, or literally throw enemies through the white boarders and into the next scene. The story is narrated as you play the game with comic style text bubbles popping up as the characters proceed with beating each other up in-game which helps to create the sense of a living world of pencil and paper. You’ve got a canned combo system at your disposal like any good brawler, along with a series of “berserker” moves much akin to Final Fight that deplete your health if they make contact with an enemy or breakable object. If you die, Mortus will give you another chance to go on. You get one of these continues in each of the three acts (two stages apiece), and if you die again, that’s it. There are no 1-Ups of any sort. There is an inferior GBA port of this title available, but the limited viewing area ruins the effect of walking through a comic book because you can see the frames/scenes of the page you have yet to visit, or have left behind above and below you. The music was composed by Howard Drossin, best known for his work in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Knuckles Chaotix, and Sonic Spinball. To this day, there hasn’t been another game much like Comix Zone, which is disappointing because the concept is so original. Fortunately, everything about this game is memorable, and the concept is executed flawlessly. For a one shot title, this game has more style and originality than some franchises or the era combined. You might already own the game if you have Sonic Mega Collection Plus and a Sonic Heroes save file on your memory card, but otherwise, have 800 Points handy because this overlooked classic deserves your attention.