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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?
I like those CRAZY plots where the USA is DEFENDING justice and equality. I laugh my pants off at those ones.
Cats: How are you gentlemen !!
:)
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Cats: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
Cats: You have no chance to survive make yourtime.
It doesnt get any more confusing than zero wing.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
You're a cat, the world is being attacked by aliens that can only hurt you if you touch them. Oh, and balls of yarn are your power source...
How Jaded Are 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.
"The president has been kidnapped by Ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to save him?"
-Bad Dudes
-=o
You play this plumber, who's a semi-twin. The reason he's not a complete twin is because his brother wears different color pants. Anyway, you're off to rescue your girlfriend, and to do this, you realize that you'll only run in one direction. Ever. But you'll sometimes jump.
Jumping is important, because there are evil mushrooms trying to kill you. You can jump on them. And don't forget the walking turtles.
The sewer system is filled with these big plants that eat you, but don't worry, because some other plants give you the ability to shoot fireballs from your stomach. Fireballs rule. And if you manage to run into the pretty mushrooms, you grow really big. And the flashing stars make you invincible.
Did I mention that the guy who stole your girlfriend is a lizard and has constructed some 100 levels of very repetitive runway for you to run?
Yeah, but it was a fun game, right?
What about Dizzy? You can't get much stranger than a wizard-fighting hard-boiled egg.
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-
Dash Dingo.
Your objective? To find and devour the seven crystal babies, or spend an eternity trapped in deep didgeridoo.
(BTW, anyone know the first pop culture reference to dingos eating babies? Seinfeld's Elaine once referenced it, but I want to know the source.)
Ohh yeah, and what is up with their names?! They were the Mario Brothers, Mario & Luigi - so their parents name one kid "Mario Mario"? WTF?! Who does that?!
And boy did they know how to dress. One in red, one in green - and we never got a christmas special out of em...
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?
The best proof that gameplay is more important than storyline.
Promote civility: mod down any post starting with 'ummm'.
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
A Cry in the Dark , starring Merryl Streep.
I could just never figure it out... Why on earth would a frog want to cross the road?
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.
You're a Chef, being pursued by hotdogs, eggs and pickles. You can spray pepper on them to stun them temporarily (pepper spray makes sense today, but back then it didnt, but kinda since the name of the Chef was Peter Pepper, which I always thought was a word play on "peter puffer").
His job is to walk on parts of hamburgers, buns, beef patties, lettuce leaves and sometimes tomato slices and cheese slices, in order to put them together, while trying his best to catch falling icecream cones, french fries and cups of coffee!
Sega Genesis, 16 Bit. Two kids are reading a "Global Gladiators" comic and say, "Wouldn't it be fun to be a global gladiator?" Ronald McDonald uses his evil clown powers to put the two kids into the comic book where they are faced with a hellish world filled with slimy creatures. Oh, and the must collect M (for McDonalds) symbols. Ronald shows up at the end of each level to wave you on to the next level.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Metal Gear Solid 2 anyone? La-li-lu-le-lo?
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
It took Mario 8 levels before he finds the right castle, hello?
He couldn't try other ones. Remember, Mario lives in a 2D world. He can't go around the castles, and he can't jump high enough to go over them, so he has to go through them.
Gauntlet had the craziest plot. There's this warrior, a valkerie, an elf, and some wizard who are all trapped in this dungeon. No one knows why, but they are, so they wonder around together, all rushing to eat the food and the potion and not shooting the food. These pixely monsters try to kill them, and every once in a while the exit will move. No one knows why. As time passes you slowly starve to death, and you are frequenly reminded by a ominious, omnipresent voice who provides commentary on the game. "Wizard needs food, badly" and "Red valkyrie shot the food: make up happy memories for me...
SAILING MISHAP
You are Michael Jackson. You must save the children from the clutches of Mr. Big. You can use your dancing abilities to destroy enemies, or grab your chimp "Bubbles" and turn into the ultimate fighting robot.
Meteors, mad scientists, girlfriend rescuing, meteor police, tentacles, dungeons...it had it all.
Man I loved that game.
This subject reminds me of the weird plot twist near the ending of Monkey Island 2. It is truly strange to say the least, where LeChuck who tormented you with a voodoo doll is really your brother in a theme park. I remember my first reaction was like 'wtf...' this is totally weird.