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?

Comments

USA related plots

[Hermione Kestrel]

I like those CRAZY plots where the USA is DEFENDING justice and equality. I laugh my pants off at those ones.

Re:USA related plots

[Yorrike]

Like Raid Over Moscow?, where the most difficult part of the game was getting your ship out of the hanger. Great game though, I spent many an hour waiting for my Commodore 64 tape drive to load that bad boy.

Speaking of the C64, have you come across the game called Cubby Gristle? It's just plain weird. You play a fat guy who's goal is to eat as much food as possible with the end coming when you reach a metric ton in weight. All whilst avoiding angry grandmas, annoying kids and shopping trolleys. So far as I could tell from my play time when I was 10 years old, and more recently with an additional 14 years of gaming under my belt, the game is impossible to complete.

Zero Wing!

[hookedup]

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. :)

Re:Zero Wing!

[PhotoBoy]

Yeah I was amazed that Zero Wing wasn't in that list. Then again maybe the story made perfect sense before it was translated.

I find the absense of "Ninja Golf" for the Atari 2600 quite surprising too, since it's about a Ninja who must pass the final test to become a true ninja: complete a round of golf on a golf course filled with sharks, snakes and other ninjas out to kill you...

And of course there's the grand-daddy of them all: Pacman, the obesity simulator that rewards you for eating lots. Plus it glamorises drug taking by encouraging you to eat ghosts while high. ;)

Bubsy

[B00yah]

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...

Re:Bubsy

[Pxtl]

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?

Re:Bubsy

[Lars T.]

Or how in most FPS you could fall dozens of feet and land without any damage, but can't climb a ledge that barely reaches to your breast.

2 games come to mind.

[wickedj]

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.

They can have him.

[RubiX^3]

"The president has been kidnapped by Ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to save him?"

-Bad Dudes

My Vote:

[Ieshan]

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?

Re:My Vote:

[Anonymous Coward]

Fireballs don't fire from Mario's stomach. There is a distinct fireball-throwing frame. Don't you remember it? It's the frame where Mario looks like the posing English swordfighting dandy from Rob Roy.

Also, Mario and Luigi wear different colored shirts and hats, not pants.

Finally, Mario could run in both directions. He just couldn't backtrack beyond the current screen.

PacMan

[shaka999]

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?

Re:PacMan

[Yorrike]

"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if pac-man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." - Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, inc. 1989

Re:PacMan

[EnVisiCrypt]

Actually, that quote is from Marcus Brigstocke, a British comedian. Any other attributions are apocryphal.

It was a joke about ravers, it wasn't incidental prescience on the part of Nintendo in 1989.

Not retro, but fun

[oojah]

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

Super Monkey Ball 2

[rufo]

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.

Frogger

[TwistedGreen]

I could just never figure it out... Why on earth would a frog want to cross the road?

Re:Frogger

[Lars T.]

One word: Buckyballs.

A Boy and his Blob

[Nutcase]

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.

Re:A Boy and his Blob

[Takeel]

I can explain some of this. These answers are all from the game's manual. If you're reading this and haven't tried this NES game, I highly recommend it. It was designed by David Crane (of Pitfall fame), and it really is a lot of fun once you get the hang of it.

You just happen to have a blob

"Like many boys in the twenty-first century, the boy has a buddy from outer space. This one's from Blobolonia - a place where an evil emperor makes every-one eat only marshmallows and chocolate. In fact, for the emperor, healthy things like vitamins are poisonous."

, known only as "blob"

"Blob (his full name is Blobert) came to Earth looking for someone to help him defeat the evil emperor. That's how he met the boy."

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.

"You see, the boy miraculously discovered that not only does Blob love jelly-beans - but that different jellybeans turn Blob into different shapes. And that those shapes can be used to get through many otherwise impossible situations!"

There is no plot beyond the treasure hunt, and the fact that you have a blob.

"To defeat the evil emperor they boy and Blob will need a goodly supply of vitamins. And to get the vitamins, they'll need money. To get money, they'll search the underground caverns for hidden treasures and diamond stones."

Strangest retro game plot...

[WWWWolf]

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...

PS2: Cookie & Cream

[RevRagnarok]

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

StrangestVideogame Plot

[QEDog]

Metal Gear Solid 2 anyone? La-li-lu-le-lo?

Moonwalker

[Craig Maloney]

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.