Slashdot Mirror
Strangest Retro Videogame Plots Pondered
Thanks to TotalGames.net for its article discussing the oddest retro videogame plots of all-time. Among the highlighted titles are Sega's Genesis title, Greendog ("All you hafta do is find the six pieces of the Surfboard of the Ancients. They were hidden long ago by the Aztecs somewhere in the Caribbean"), along with Konami's N64 version of Mystical Ninja ("A giant UFO shaped like a peach has suddenly appeared in peaceful Oedo Town! The evil musical corps, The Peach Mountain Shoguns, have come to steal the Great Stage Plan.") What classic game made the least sense to you?
First up, Bad Dudes:
What's not to love about a game that asks "Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President?" They couldn't use, say, the FBI, CIA or the NSA. Nope, they just pick 2 "bad" dudes off the street and send them to rescue the president.
Second, Master Blaster:
One of the best games ever for NES. But also, one where you wonder, how much does one risk for the love of a frog. We witness a boy lose his pet frog. It lands on this radioactive box IN HIS BACKYARD!!! Then it jumps down a very, very deep hole and he follows. Luckily, he finds a kickass ride and perfect sized suit to go with it. Then he begins his journey to destroy vast amounts of robots and mutated creatures to rescue his pet frog only to find, his frog has mutated too and he must destroy. Can you feel his pain? Yeah, I didn't think so either.
Ok, first off, what the hell is PacMan anyway? This big yellow circle (no 3d back then) that gobbles up dots. What are those dots anyway?
Now our hero, PacMan, is chased around a maze trying to eat these "dots" by a bunch of ghosts who look oddly like the McDonalds Fry Guys. Why are they ghosts? Are they long dead PacMen out to seek revenge? Are they haunting the maze? Have millions of PacMen died in this maze trying to get the valuable dots? Sounds like someone needs to call a priest to me, not some yellow sphere?
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
I came across a fantastic game the other day "Stair Dismount". You have to push a guy down some stairs to see how much damage you can inflict upon him.
It looks like a rag doll physics test bed that the author decided would make a great game. It uses the Open Dynamics Engine.
The plot:
The legendary superhero Spector has found, to his shock, that he cannot write off all the damage he has caused to the city out of his taxes unless he proves that he has sustained significant damage in the process himself! Now it's up to you to 'help' him with this little detail..Download at http://jet.ro/dismount/ (Windows only, although it does mention that some people have had luck running it under Wine).
Ace fun.
Roger
Do you have any better hostages?
Some of the more surreal cutscenes I have found (along with a story line that makes almost no sense) are in Sega's Super Monkey Ball 2. Excellent gameplay, but the cutscenes in Story Mode involve a baby monkey (son of two of the other monkeys) sent back in time to help defeat Dr. Badboon, who is a mad scientist hell-bent on... marrying the one female monkey in the game. And apparently in order for anything to happen in the game the monkeys have to dance around singing magical Happy Fun songs (Magical Spell is Ei-Ei-Poo!). These have to be seen to be believed. (There may be some footage of the cut-scenes here if anybody's interested, although I haven't checked it out.)
If there are any other games with *more* bizarre cutscenes that run on the current generation of consoles, I'd like to hear it.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
(Courtesy of some guy.)
"In the year 199X, a secret command, Saber Tiger, is engaged in a savage war with the Demon's Batallion. The Saber Tiger's youngest leader, "Bang", played a very large role in the fight to the admiration of his fellow commanders. After the completion of one campaign, Bang and his girlfriend, Mary, are enjoying a longawaited vacation at the beach. Suddenly, they recieve an urgent communication from head quarters. It reads 'EMERGENCY CODE NO. 2568623. The inventor of the Doomsday Bomb, Professor Plum, is being held by the enemy, atop Demon's Head Mountain, and it appears the the world is doomed unless Earth surrenders. If the bomb explodes, the Earth will be a dead planet. A mass attack on Demon Head is impossible for the enemy vows to detonate the bomb on sight. Our colleague, Joe, has failed to return from a reconnaisance mission. Bang, only you can rescue Professor plum and save the planet. Now, you've got to get to Demon's Head Mountain at once!'
In the ruins of Demon Head, there dwells a fearsome demon that has terrified generations of people. Bang, and Bang alone, must set out on a daredevil mission to these unknown lands and seek to rescue Plum and deactivate the Doomsday Bomb.
As Bang sets off on his perilous journey to destroy the Demon's Batallion, Mary must remain behind deeply concerned for his life."
Despite what I just said, the point of the game must be to rescue your girlfriend, or else why would she be on the cover... with the flying guy on the motorcycle and the shard of electric glass? Wait... Isn't the point to rescue the professor? Collect the seven coins from the seven swirly bad guy thingies? Why do you need so much money? What happened to the bomb? It's so confusing!
I don't have a degree in Obscure Japanese Mythological Symbology systems! Why is the mushroom with black dancers protecting the talisman of the sun? What did I do to offend the teeth with blue hair? Who the heck are these guys anyway? What's that thing doing? NGYAAAAA!
The ______ Agenda
You are an anonymous boy. You just happen to have a blob, known only as "blob". It turns into things based on what flavor jellybean you feed it. Things like ladders and trampolines and such. No complex machines, per se. You use it in various forms to navigate the sewer in search of treasure, while it follows you around bouncing and begging for more jellybeans. There is no plot beyond the treasure hunt, and the fact that you have a blob.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Commodore 64 game "Army Moves", 1987 Imagine/Ocean. People probably remember this for the amazing music. It's just that back in late 1980s, it was not at all unusual to make a game where you control an army jeep that jumps. In big arcs. While shooting a lot of missiles. When I presented this game to the new gamer generation (that is, my sister), the laughter was nearly unstoppable. (The second level is boring. The helicopter you control just flies and doesn't, for example, turn into a kamikaze tomato in mid-flight and carpet-bomb the nameless enemy.)
Then some more. "Artura", 1988 Sentient Software/Gremlin. Crappy game. Mostly notable for its great music (surprise surprise!) and the fact that King Arthur marches around and flings about a million axes at the enemy with a single button press.
And that's just a random sample from the "A" section of C64 game selection =) The Nintendo Logic might have been odd at the time, but some C64 games were a few orders of magnitude weirder...
Not that retro...
I got it for Christmas after reading about it in the 'what can I play with my sweetie' thread. The moon got upset and left so it won't be present for the Moon Festival. So a chicken bestows upon two bunnies their marks of courage - a flower pot and an umbrella, that they wear on their heads. So you have to go and convince the moon to come back. That's just messed up.
- RR
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
...an egg with boxing gloves and wellies for limbs, a talent for somersaulting and a predilection for kleptomania who lived in a vast treehouse complex? Yeah, they were certainly smoking some interesting stuff when they made that up.
It must be time for a 3D sequel by now.
The funny thing is people keep listing silly little platformers. They're all bizarre - games like Sonic, and Earthworm Jim. All wierd.
Now, the funny ones are serious, 3d action games with such amusing plots. Like Red Alert II, or Battlezone.
BattleZone's always been a fave of mine. Big complicated conspiracy to hide a secret interplanetary war between the USA and the Soviets occuring during the cold war, fighting over alien technology crashed on the moon, venus, mars, and Europa. The moon landing was faked: we already had a fully functioning military base there.
Or Recoil, another tank game. Its the old "machines have taken over the earth" except that the plot is that a team of human hackers have hotwired an experimental enemy Machine supertank - but if they control it remotely, they'll be discovered, so instead they open a time-portal so that they can send the control of the system back in time to you - the player. So the idea is taht you are actually, really controlling a tank hundreds of years in the future, saving the human race. The hackers occasionally hotwire you screen and talk to you directly. Its all the most hilarious camp I've ever seen in a game. Too bad the play wasn't so good.
Hell, the very concept of UT or Q3 - a tournament where somehow each player dies 50 times in a single match. wtf?
Metal Gear Solid 2 anyone? La-li-lu-le-lo?
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
So was it the chainsaw that was missing, or the fuel? I don't quite remember. My friend claims both are available, but I believe he must've been hallucinating.