For as long as there have been video games, there have been ridiculous and stupid video game bosses. From the FBI Agent in Atari’s E.T. to Letz Shake in No More Heroes, who blew himself up before you ever got to fight him, ludicrous game bosses have a long and rich history. I’ve taken it upon myself to list my own personal bottom five video game bosses.

Number Five: Tarjan, the mad god, from Bards’ Tale 3

Back in 1990, Tarjan was the original blob of hit points. Final Fantasy later became known for this type of boss, but I’ve never played the original Final Fantasy, which was released the same year.

After a grueling dungeon, you managed to open the door at the center where the mad god had walled himself in. Three climactic battles later, you were ready to face Tarjan and his minions. Each round, he summoned ten new Black Slayers, nasty creatures that automatically kill you on any hit. Even with your adventuring party at full health, you had to have at least two characters cast the spell that resurrected the entire party every round, because you could be certain that by the time the spell was cast, a few of them would be killed. It wasn’t uncommon during this fight to have a character die once or twice per combat round. And Tarjan himself probably had upward of a million hit points. Even if you had multiple characters doing 9999 damage to him every round, the fight took quite a while. Although Tarjan is less ridiculous than the other bosses on this list, the over-the-top nature of this fight slides him into fifth place.

View video of Tarjan Boss Battle

Number Four: Gozer the Gozerian, from Ghostbusters

Although Gozer is like Tarjan in that they’re both gods, they’re on this list for opposite reasons. The Commodore 64 version of Ghostbusters wasn’t a bad game for its time – you’d drive around town blasting ghosts with unlicensed nuclear accelerators, earning money to upgrade your gear while keeping the city’s psychokinetic energy down to manageable levels. At the end, you had to dodge through the legs of the Staypuft marshmallow man to enter the building where Gozer’s gate opened. At the top, you faced Gozer the Gozerian. To beat Gozer, you had to… brace yourself… press the joystick either left or right. This caused the Ghostbusters to move towards each other and cross the streams. Then you’d win. Talk about anticlimactic. It was literally impossible to lose to Gozer. So congratulations, Gozer – you win the award for lamest boss I’ve ever seen in a game.

View video of Gozer Boss Battle

Number Three: Jen, from Prey

In a poorly-executed attempt at creating emotional conflict, the creators of Prey decided to kidnap your girlfriend and make her a boss. Halfway through the game, you’re ambushed by a four-legged alien with Gatling gun arms and your girlfriend’s head and torso. You’re only given a second to wonder whether you’re supposed to attack before your girlfriend starts unloading hot lead and lasers into you. It’s seriously freakish, but her cries for help as she’s attacking end up coming off more comical than sympathetic.

View video of Jen Boss Battle

Number Two: John Romero’s severed head on a stick, from Doom 2

This is the only game on the list that I haven’t played, but the very notion of having one of the game creator’s decapitated heads as a final boss is so out there that I couldn’t pass it up. As I understand it, the original intent was to place an object behind a wall, and have that object take damage through the area impact of a rocket launcher. When it was killed, the character would win. That object, of course, was John Romero’s head… on a stick. After Romero himself found out, he recorded himself saying “To win the game, you must kill me, John Romero” backwards, and the game was changed so that you had to turn clipping off and travel through the wall to fight him in order to beat the game. Freaking weird.

View video of John Romero’s Head Boss Battle

Number One: The Nihilanth, from Half-Life

After surviving a military attack from the guys you thought were on your side and trekking through an alien landscape in search of the alien leader, you eventually find… wha? A massive mutated infant with a flip-top head and tentacles for legs? Although the game was fantastic, the Nihilanth earns the top spot on my list for sheer absurdity.

View video of Nihilanth Boss Battle

Well, it’s been a few months, time for game developers to start complaining about used game sales hurting their bottom line.  Even the sales juggernaut that is Halo has to throw their helmet into the ring and say that the used game market has undoubtedly hurt their sales.

Here’s the quote that bugs me the most.  “Complaining about sales when you have a multi-million seller is somewhat difficult to justify, but it seems to me that the folks who create and publish a game shouldn’t stop receiving income from further sales.”

Well Marty, that’s true, they shouldn’t stop receiving income from future sales of the copies they actually own.  The copy of Halo, Halo 2 and Halo 3 that I bought?  Once purchased by me, they were mine.  Mine, mine, M-I-N-fucking E.  If I want to sell them, I can.  If I want to set them on fire, I can.  If I want to cover them in chocolate, drizzle them with caramal and eat them, I can.  Bungie, as a developer, did their part.  They made the game.  I, as a consumer, did my part.  I paid for the game.  Once the money changes hands, there is no reasonable expectation that Bungie has any continual ownership over the product.  You simply can not tell me what I can do with it as long as what I’m doing with it does not interfere with your copyrights.

Now, Bungie would say “Oh, we don’t mean you, dear gamer, we mean stores.  Stores like GameStop who buy the copy from you for 20 bucks and sell it for $55.”  Well, that’s all well and good and I appreciate you looking out for my best financial interests, an interest which, by the way, was strangely absent when you sold me $180 bucks of mediocre storytelling, piss-poor game play and the same fucking level repeated ad nauseum, but here’s the thing. You do mean me.  Oh sure, I don’t rake in billions of dollars in sales every year from selling used games, but in terms of what a consumer is able to do with a product once they have purchased it, there is no difference between GameStop and myself.  The difference to you is that GameStop sells your games right next to their cheaper, although marginally, used games.  By extension, the biggest difference to you is that GameStop is pounding you in the nether regions, and I am not, so, obviously, the best way to deal with that is to pound me in my nether regions by stating that you should be able to tell me what I can do with the item I bought from you.  That makes complete sense.

I can’t think of one situation where the seller of a product continues to realize sales from that product in the used market unless the seller of said used product is also the seller of the new product.  When I sold my house, I didn’t have to pay the builder any additional money.  When I traded in my car, I didn’t cut Nissan a check.  It’s bad enough that when we buy your games and we don’t like them, or they’re buggy we have no recourse to return them because everyone, including you, thinks were dirty pirates but now you have to tell us that we can’t sell that which we now own?  Give me a break.

Look, I understand your frustration, I do, but alienating your consumer is not the way to fix it.  If you don’t want people selling their games, you have to give them a reason to keep them.  Halo, for all that I don’t like about it, is phenomenally good at continual support, be it with new maps, or new game modes or a robust multiplayer community, so that people don’t want to sell their copy.  Rock Band 2 with it’s one time use code for 20 new songs, and the upcoming Gears of War 2 with the free maps are both excellent ways to encourage people to buy new copies.  Now, not all games can be multiplayer extravaganzas or have the ability to leverage new content, but the point is that instead of making efforts to deny the consumer the ability legally sell stuff that they own, why not give them a reason to not want to sell it in the first place?  Or you know what, make it so that they can’t sell it, by offering it to them digitally and just charge less for it.  When I buy a game on the Xbox Live Arcade, I don’t care that I can’t sell it.  I’m getting  game for, at most, 20 bucks.  To paraphrase Tycho here, 20 bucks is essentially free to me.  I know that 20 bucks is a stretch for a 60 buck game like Halo 3 but what about $50?  I get a new game for less, you realize the sale and it undercuts the used market.

The bottom line here is that by trying to tell the consumer what they can and can’t do with their stuff, you risk alienating them outright to the point where they’re not buying what you’re producing, and then, where are you?  I know that times are tough for game developers and publishers, but they’re tough all over and if you start pissing people off, they’ll take their disposable income and go spend it on the thousand other things they’re offered in any given day.  In the immortal words of John McClain, “If you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem. Quit being a part of the fucking problem…”

I’ve been avoiding listing browser games in the Free Game Friday feature, but I’m beginning to see that without using at least the odd browser game here and there, I have no chance of finding enough good titles.

Fantastic Contraption is a very cool physics-based puzzle game wherein you need to assemble wheels and spokes in such a way as to maneuver a pink ball into the target area. It starts easy, but the difficulty ramps up quickly. Give it a shot – it’s addictive.

Fantastic Contraption

Recently, I fired up the copy of Okami that’s been sitting on my shelf for months, gathering dust and cat hair. After the initial half hour of text-reading, when the game actually started, I was completely shocked at how good it looked. This is a Wii game, ported from the original Gamecube version – it’s not running on one of the consoles known to be graphics powerhouses. So why does this game look better than any photorealistic game I’ve ever seen? Because it’s not shooting for photorealism.

Okami looks like a cartoon. Not like a videogame. Somehow, the game manages to look like a really well done hand drawn anime. And whereas achieving true-to-life photorealism is still beyond the grasp of the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, or even high-end PCs, achieving cartoon-realism is doable. It just hasn’t been done in any game other than Okami.

“Cartoon-realism?”, I hear you say, “What the frell is that?” What I’m getting at is that normally you can tell when you’re looking at a video game and when you’re looking at a cartoon. You can tell which is which. But not with Okami. And the notion that a video game that looks like this is not only doable, but is doable on a last-generation console, is very exciting to me. Maybe we’ll see more.

Some of my very favorite games have been games that haven’t even attempted photorealism. Look at Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It’s a Nintendo game, of course, and Zelda’s art style has always been a bit cartoonish. But how about Psychonauts, another of my favorites? Not only is the art style in Psychonauts not photorealistic, I’d actually go so far as to call it anti-realistic. And I’m eagerly awaiting a sequel to Psychonauts at some point in the future.

The announcement of Beyond Good and Evil 2 thrilled me – it’s probably my favorite game of all time. But I feel very conflicted over the decision to make the game photorealistic. When I see Pey’j, I don’t want to see a freaky-looking realistic man-pig. I’d much rather see the friendly lovable cartoonish pig I grew to love, and cuteness somehow eludes a realistic pig-man.

When I played Uncharted, I enjoyed it. But the graphics annoyed me. Even in dark scenes, many characters and terrain elements had hints of shiny white highlighting, a side effect of the engine, I’m sure. And when I played Far Cry on the PC, back when it was considered a graphical masterpiece, the characters’ faces disturbed me. I remember commenting in my review of the game that the female lead had a bad case of TFP – Too Few Polygons – with the result that she looked mannish.

So although video games right now have chosen to take the road to photorealism, passing through uncanny valley and turning left at the corner of 3DEngine and OnlineCoOp, I’ll continue to appreciate those games that eschew photorealism for a style better suited to video gaming.

EDIT: Brandon pointed out to me that the original Okami was not a Gamecube game – it was a PS2 game. Oops!

I’ve been playing games for a long time. As a kid, I played Pong at my next door neighbor’s house on his pong machine, before he ever got ColecoVision. I played Crazy Kong on the old arcade machine at the Cumberland Farms on Rt 69 where I used to buy Chocodiles. And I played the heck out of Demons to Diamonds, Video Pinball, and Yars Revenge on my Atari 2600, which today is in a box out in my garage. I’ll certainly admit that over that time, the difficulty of video games, on average, has decreased. It’s easy for old-school gamers to tell today’s young Halo, GTA and WoW addicts that they don’t know what a truly hard game is really like until they’ve beaten all the Double Dragon games or gotten to the end of Karate Champ. But why has the status quo become easier games? And is it for the better or for the worse?

In those old days, playing Atari 2600 or Commodore 64 games, you’d play a new game, get killed, and start over. You’d get better through repetition, and because 14-year-olds tend to have far more free time than 35-year-olds, that huge time investment would pay off in skill. I could never have beaten games like Double Dragon, Kenseiden, or Forbidden Forest without a skill borne of repetition. Today, though, I’ve got less free time, and less patience for games that require repeated playthroughs to develop the necessary skill. Hence, I don’t play Geometry Wars, Ikaruga, or N+.

But the high difficulty in many of the older games I’ve mentioned may come more from the genre’s immaturity at the time than from anything else. The difficulty may have been the only way the game designers of that era were able to increase the number of hours you’d play a game. If you’d been able to play Super Mario Brothers to completion the first day you owned it, wouldn’t you have felt a bit cheated? It’s not really a long game – you can’t even save your progress. Only the game’s difficulty prevented a first-day completion.

Many of the highly difficult games of those days were certainly less than accessible. I can’t imagine my father playing through Realm of Impossibility, but he absolutely loves Wii Sports. Likewise, I’m not sure how I’d feel about replaying a game like Ultima III nowadays, given that when a character dies in that game, the game immediately deletes him permanently. Hardcore? Yes. Fun? Not so much.

Many of today’s more successful and popular games increase the amount of time players want to invest in that game not by making the game more difficult and thus forcing you to replay large sections of the game, but rather by adding story, (Metal Gear Solid series, Mass Effect) adding repetitive yet enjoyable gameplay, (Puzzle Quest, Team Fortress 2) or just by making the game world massive (Oblivion, World of Warcraft)

Read the rest of “Scattered Thoughts on Game Difficulty” »

Deaths is a brief but entertaining game. The catch is that you’re expected to die. A lot. The fifty last deaths of players all around the world is sent to your game via the web – and you’ll see the corpses on screen. You can play through the whole game in fifteen or twenty minutes, so it makes a good brief diversion.

Download Deaths

Here’s a little secret about me.  I wanted Rock Band primarily for the ability to sing.  Oh sure, I wanted to play guitar like I did in Guitar Hero and GH2, and I was curious about drumming, what with it being similar to real drumming, but what I really wanted to do was sing.  I have a decent singing voice.  It doesn’t make dogs howl or anything and I can carry a tune enough to know when I’m way off base, so it’s not like I was looking to be the next Robert Plant, I just really wanted to be the front man for a band.  Even a fake one.  Especially a fake one.

Once I got the game, I went through the guitar tour on Medium and then started vocals on Easy.  Then I did vocals on Medium, then on Hard with a small detour to do drums on Easy.  The vocal tour was, by far, the most fun I had in that game.  Now that Rock Band 2 is here, vocals is still the most fun thing to do, even more so now that you can do the band world tour mode all by your lonesome.

So why is singing the most fun?  A couple of reasons.  For one, singing allows you to be the most expressive of all of the instruments. You can grip the mic two handed, Eddie Vedder style.  You can take it off of the stand (you do have a mic stand, right?) and get down with your bad self.  You can kick, you can move, you can snap your fingers, you can shake your hips, you can even swing the mic around like Roger Daltrey, provided you have high enough ceilings.  When playing drums, you can just sit there.  When playing guitar, you can just stand there, in both cases because you have to keep your eyes on the charts to know what to do next.

Which brings me to my next point, namely that singing is the easiest thing to learn, which then allows you to be more expressive.  The only way to learn songs for guitar, bass or drums in Rock Band or any other instrument based rhythm game for that matter, is to play and play and play.  If you want to sing, you just need to get your hands on a copy of the song, be it from the cd, or downloading the song, or bringing the video up on YouTube and you can listen to it constantly outside of the game.  Once you know the words, it’s much easier to focus on getting the pitch right when you’re in the game, but you can also work on that outside of the game, when you’re your car, or in the shower, or any where you don’t mind having people hear you sing.

The other fun thing about vocals is that no one wants to do it.  Seriously. I bet that if you get a room full of people together to play Rock Band, the only way you’ll get any one to sing is to fill them with booze.  This means that if you sing, you always get to play.  Let everyone else fight over the guitars or the drums.  You focus on the mic, lest it become lonely.

Now, I find that vocals offers the easiest transition from Easy to Hard, but again, I can somewhat carry a tune, and it only takes like three tries before I learn a song, but that may have something to do with having done the vocal tour in the original Rock Band three times.  Outside of the game, I’m sure I sound like shit, but I can drop a 5 star in the game with no problem.  Well, a few problems any way.  Curse you Iron Maiden!  I think that once you learn a song, the tweaks needed to step your game up are so far removed from what you’d need to do to go from Medium to Hard on the other instruments, but again, that’s just my personal experience.   I can tell you that the elated feeling you get when you 5 star a song on Hard isn’t any different when singing then when axe slinging.

So that’s why vocals is the only way to rock.  You can tear shit up, look good doing it and never have to give up your spot.  Plus, everyone knows that the singer gets all of the hottest groupies.

We’re not in the habit of doing game reviews here at Lungfishopolis, so I’m phrasing this in terms of game remakes, and what makes them good. Yeah, I know it’s still more a review than anything else, but let’s pretend it’s not. M’kay?

I’m so glad that video game remakes haven’t gone the way of television and movie remakes. Whereas the new Bionic Woman might as well have been the new Monkees, and the Pink Panther remake was crap, Nintendo’s “Virus Buster” remake of the old NES Dr. Mario is brilliant, as was the “Pirates” remake titled “Sid Meier’s Pirates!”.

I bought the Final Fantasy IV remake for the Nintendo DS a while back, and having not played the original, I found the game to be enjoyable, and I could see how it had been improved over the old NES version. But Dragon Quest IV went even further.

The first thing you can’t help but notice is the beautiful new title screen and remastered music. Similar to Virus Buster, they’ve come up with a new version of that same old catchy music, and I love it. They’ve also added a quick save feature, which has become standard in many portable games. If you’re playing on a bus or subway and you hit your stop, you don’t always have time to run back to the inn and save the game before you look up to find you’re at the end of the line in White Plains. So hit the quick save to save your game anywhere, and it shuts your game down, but when you next turn on the DS, it loads and deletes that save. It’s kind of like a long-term pause.

They’ve also retranslated all the text in the game, which I noticed right off when I found that all the characters in Burland spoke with Scottish accents. It took me a while to realize that “bairns” were children. The monsters have been mostly renamed too. What’s a Chump Stump?

One of my biggest surprises came when I tapped a shoulder button just to see what would happen. The view, which until now looked like an improved version of the 2D original, rotated. Whoa! It’s 3D! A very nice feature for seeing around corners. And in towns and dungeons, the top screen serves to expand the viewable area, so you can better see what’s ahead. In the wilderness, the top screen is a world map.

Lastly, my favorite feature. When you enter a town, if you hit the Y button, up pops a list of all the shops in the town, their locations, what they sell, and how much everything costs. How convenient is that? A brilliant update for an old-school RPG, especially one on a platform geared towards those with too little time on their hands. I’ll be pulling out this game frequently for 5-minute grindfests.

I’ve also got a copy of the Resident Evil remake “Resident Evil: Deadly Silence” sitting in my DS case, but I tend to play that much less, largely due to its lack of the improvements Dragon Quest 4 has. I absolutely love Resident Evil, but if I could quick save my Resident Evil game rather than hunting for typewriter ribbon, I’d likely play it more often.

S.T.A.C.K.E.R. is a bit of an odd game: a Tetris knockoff masquerading as a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. knockoff. But it’s fairly entertaining. The blocks that drop can be enemies, weapons, armor, or other useful or harmful items. It can seem a bit complicated at first, but it’s really not a bad game once you realize what’s going on.

You can download a copy of S.T.A.C.K.E.R. from tigsource forums here.

In the first part of my Pixeljunk Monsters strategy guide, I covered gameplay strategies. In the second, I went into detail on the game’s towers and how best to use them. In this final segment, I’ll deal with the monsters and the inner workings of their lives.

It seems like every online guide calls most of the monsters by different names. The names I’ll use here are mostly in keeping in line with what you’ll see in other guides, but nobody seems to know what to call the simplest, weakest enemy in the game: the small white circle with arms and legs. I’ve heard them called ants, acorns, kuri, and puffs. I always thought they looked a bit like pandas. After taking a very close look at them, you can see that they’re actually acorns with arms and legs, wearing that big white mask that all the game’s monsters have. So I’m calling them acorns. The other name that’s hard to put a finger on is the weakest of the fliers: a small acorn-looking thing with pink maple seed pods for wings. Sometimes it looks almost helicopter-like. For lack of a better name, I’ll refer to these things as fliers.

Acorns
The big white round acorns are the most common of enemies. Early in the game, cannons are your best defense, along with an arrow tower or two near the village to pick off injured stragglers. Later, you’ll find that fire or tesla towers take these guys down like dynamite does tadpoles. Mortars are also very effective.

Spiders
Spiders are the fastest enemy in the game, and that’s what makes them so damn tough. Your cannons can sometimes do a bit of damage, but spiders are good at dodging cannon fire. Arrows are the most surefire method for killing spiders. Later on, fire and tesla towers also work very well.

Golems
The token slow-moving blobs of hit points, golems can take a lot of punishment. Cannons are by far your best bet early in the game, as arrows do practically nothing to golems. later in the game, buy fire, tesla, or mortar towers to take down the golems.

Flyers
The easiest of the flying monsters to deal with, these flying maple acorn things will generally succumb to a couple anti-air towers. Placing a few arrow towers close to your village will help to assure that none sneak through. Later in the game, you’ll find that lasers cut through them like a chainsaw through rotted gauze.

Bats
Bats are the fastest of the flying monsters. Anti-air towers work well, but if you can line up a laser just right, it’s even better.

Bees
The big, fat, slow-moving bees are nearly invulnerable to arrows and anti-air towers. The only way you really stand a chance of stopping them is by using lasers.

Stompy the Golden Idol
He’s the boss of easy levels, and he really likes to stomp things. So I’ve named him Stompy McStomperson. He’s big, he’s golden, and he’d like nothing better than to stomp his way over to your village and stomp everyone there into flat nasty villager goo. Gold is a soft metal, but arrows will still bounce off. Fire towers and cannons are your best bet. On the easy levels, you likely won’t often be buying tesla towers and mortars, but they work too.

Mumford Mossback the Mean-spirited Misanthrope
On the medium levels, you get Mumford Mossback. He moves faster than Stompy, largely due to the fact that he’s got actual movable legs. He’s also a bit tougher. Use lots and lots fire towers. Cannons and tesla towers also help, as do mortars when you need extra range.

Horace the Nightmare Snail
Ironically, it’s the snail boss in this game who moves most quickly. Horace is a big jerk. Don’t underestimate him – he’s the toughest creature in the game. Pelt him with all the fire towers, mortars, and cannons you can. No mercy, or he’ll do unspeakable things to your villagers.