ceci n'est pas un journal

Which translates to United State Presidential Race


The translation is "mostly" complete so I’m going to attempt it. I don’t know why I’m saying mostly complete. There’s a truth about limited memory and text.
There are probably ways around it, like combining common letter combinations like ch and th into a single character and reducing the letters you need to a lean 52 or even 26 or even 24 if you can find a way to not use Q and X.

[clicky]


Alas, Kang… I mean Bob Dole… isn’t playable and you can't run on a platform of "abortions for some, miniatuare American flags for others" which is apparently the winning formula for an election.
Also democrats are red and republicans are blue. That’s because this whole red state blue state thing started with the 2000 election, which went on for five weeks and so red and blue was ingrained into our collective consciousness. Before, they were pretty arbitrary, with blue usually being the incumbent party.


George H.W. Bush was the winner of the actual 1988 election. His running mate was Dan Quayle. If you've played Fallout 2, you might remember Daniel Bird, who talked entirely in Dan Quayle quotes.


For whatever reason, Margaret Thatcher is eligible to run for president. She is opposed to Japan. I’m not sure if the actual Margaret Thatcher was but back in the 1980s, Japanese electronics and pop culture were spreading across the world.



I always mix up Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson. Pat Robertson is a Charismatic evangelical who believes in faith healing and deflecting hurricanes with the power of prayer (and we can blame him for Hurricane Gloria), thinks that killing someone in a video game is akin to killing someone in real life, believes that termites don’t build things, attacks homosexuality and feminism (which encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians) and abortion and college students, had a child out of wedlock, called Scotland a dark land overrun by gays, possibly had business dealings with Charles Taylor and Mobutu Sese Seko and possibly embezzled charity money. Pat Buchanan is a paleoconservative isolationist holocaust-denier who attempted to stop the deportation of Karl Linnas and John Demjanjuk, and along with Donald Trump called for the lynching of the Central Park Five, who were wrongfully accused of rape. Buchanan briefly worked as communications director for Ronald Reagan. Both Pat Buchanan and Pat Boone, who is a conservative Christian who is well known for watered-down versions of rock&roll songs, wrote for World Net Daily.


Michael Dukakis was the front-runner on the Democratic side of things. He was taken down by accusations of being soft on crime, even though he had a double digit lead in the polls.
I've met him.
No, really.


Jesse Jackson is a reverend and civil rights leader. He looks kind of like Lando here.


I don’t think Suzuki is a real person. In real life, the rest of the candidates were Al Gore, Paul Simon, Dick Gephardt, and Gary Hart. Also Joe Biden. And Pat Schroeder.
No, not that Paul Simon. He won Illinois.


Everyone’s blood type is listed because in Japanese culture, blood types are a big deal.


But, hey, people probably know their blood type and that can be useful in many situations.


I don’t know my blood type. I do know my zodiac sign, mostly because I wasn’t raised by wolves. But that won't help me if I ever need a blood transfusion.


Anyway, my point is that your advisor doesn't affect the game in any way.


This entire game is a misnomer. You’re not running in a general election, you’re running in a primary.


No wonder why I can't win this. It's because my chosen candidate is campaigning in the Michigan primary somewhere in the far-flung reaches of South Dakota. I’m not sure what these people want. So I’d assume that the thing that farmers would like is opposing cuts to farming subsidiary aids, supporting agricultural product price support, and dealing with pollutants, because, I dunno, I assume these farmers grow sorghum or corn or wheat, not moo cows. Diamond and Silk did an entire song and fucking dance routine about letting the cows say moo, letting the moo cows fart, and letting the cows spread disease. Hey! You! Leave them farting cows alone! Unless I’m getting the sliders wrong.


The translation is... uh... lacking.




A guide tells me this is inaccurate. What it was in Japanese is “for” and “against” not “democrat” and “republican.” And to further complicate things, it’s not a binary choice, it’s a spectrum.
I don’t know what my voters want to hear and I don’t really know what I’m offering. Or maybe it’s because it’s Michigan and my base in Michigan isn’t farmers, it’s Detroit and college towns. And probably auto workers but I don’t know because the auto industry collapsed, putting the nail in Detroit’s coffin. There were attempts to revive it but they mostly failed. But maybe it’s like Trump. If I attack Japan enough, maybe I can get their approval.


25 is a good number. If you make too many speeches, you'll get tired, if you make it that far, that is. If you make too few, your approval rating will drop like a stone, if it hasn't already.
Let it be said that being left of center, even on things like civil rights, will not endear you to voters. Maybe try running on a platform of “as Overlord, all will kneel trembling before me and obey my brutal commands!”
In fact, Clinton, who was firmly in the center, didn’t win a majority of votes. He won because Perot was siphoning off votes. And apparently Clinton ran against Lyndon LaRouche of all people in the primaries.


The Earth platforms are as follows:
Developing resources, whaever that means. Promote or hinder.
Nuclear power generation. Promote or hinder.
Air pollution control. Strengthen or relax.
Civil rights movement. Promote or hinder.
Immigrant worker regulation. Promote or hinder.
Gun possession regulation. Promote or hinder.
AIDS patient isolation. Promote or hinder. In those days, AIDS was seen as a disease of gays and Africans and IV users and so little effort was made to combat it.
Anti-smoking measures. Promote or hinder. Recently, I had a conversation about Mrs. Doubtfire and how the climactic scene revolved around the smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants. I remember being asked which section we were to sit in as a kid but not as a teenager so maybe they were already on their way out. The ban came in MA in 2004, MD in 2008, NJ in 2006, and NY in 2003. Those are the only states I remember eating in restaurants in.


Defense platforms:
Budget cuts: support or oppose
Military strength increase: support or oppose
Strategic arms reduction treaty: support or oppose
Ban on nuclear weapons tests: support or oppose
Star Wars project: support or oppose.
No, not that Star Wars. The missile defense system. The massively impractical missile defense system. Assuming they could knock out ICBMs and deal with decoys, it was useless against cruise missiles. George Lucas wanted nothing to do with it. But again, we’re not basing our stance on Star Wars based on how fucking stupid it was, we’re basing it on what people want and I assume people thought it was a good idea because they voted Bush to be Reagan’s third term.
Anti-government support in Nicaragua.
I couldn’t tell you anything about Nicaragua in 1988 but Wikipedia can. By then, Daniel Ortega was president and the previous dictator Anastasio Somoza was living in exile in Honduras.
I brought this up before. In those days, Central America was seen as the next big flashpoint after Indochina. But really, it all goes back to the 19th century, when Before the American civil war, William Walker and his band of filibusters (read: paramilitaries) Central America in order to establish Anglophone outposts that would be friendly to slavery, and briefly took over Nicaragua (The Confederate States of America had plans to annex Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean islands and even chunks of Colombia and Venezuela. I’ll take “things that will never happen” for 1000), and then throughout the 20th century, when Nicaragua was a US client state.
Anyways, I think of the Sandanistas as a bunch of socially conservative frauds, while Somoza was pretty open about his fascism. TVTropes’ useful notes page for Nicaragua says that there are former Contras who support Ortega and former Sandanistas amongst the opposition. I can see that, because it turned out that Daniel Ortega was every bit as conservative as Somoza, just with a bit of a social welfare bent. It’s one of five countries with a total ban on abortion. He’s the Smilin’ Cynthia McKinney of Central America. In 1990, a coalition of every other party in Nicaragua defeated Ortega.
Supporting Somoza will get you points amongst the neoconservative and anti-communist crowd. Supporting Ortega will get you nowhere, like a lot of things in this game.

Anyway.
Nuclear weapon production: cease or continue.
Mutual reduction of the Soviet Union Defense Force: Support or oppose.


Economy:
Taxes for finance reform: support or oppose. Bush won by saying "no new taxes"
Cuts to farming subsidiary aids: Support or oppose.
Space shuttle projects: promote or hinder. If you ask me, space research and exploration should be unmanned because robots don't eat or go mad from isolation like we do, and they can go a lot further and in even more inhospitable places. There are seas on Titan and oceans on Europa waiting for our exploration and if we send a probe to Alpha Centauri, we might get results back in less than a century.
Spending restraint: Strengthen or relax.
Complete welfare: Strengthen or relax
Consumer protection: Support or oppose.
Agricultural product price support: Support or oppose
Computer program protection: Strengthen or relax


Social:
Christian morality: Promote or hinder.
Mandatory worship in public schools: Support or oppose
Patriotic education: Promote or hinder
Abolish obligatory bus transportation to school: Support or oppose. So when I saw this, I thought it would be about the busing programs. Basically, the school system in this country is Jim Crow's greatest triumph. Busing meant that certain kids in black-majority districts, where schools were oft underfunded, would be selected to go to school in other districts instead. White parents were pissed.

I don't know if there was a push from conservative or really any circles to cut funding to school buses and tell kids who had parents who worked or otherwise couldn't get them to school that they were shit out of luck. But, honestly, with all I've seen, I wouldn't put it above them.

Recognition of brain dead. Support or oppose.
Pornography regulation. Strengthen or oppose. The thing that united the second wave feminists and the moral majority, and the thing that inspired The Handmaid's Tale
Prohibition of abortion: Support or oppose.
Improvement of childcare environment. Promote or hinder.


This being a Japanese game, there's an entire section on US-Japan relations.
Japanese car import regulations. Strengthen or relax.
Regulation on dumping of Japanese goods. Strengthen or relax.
Imported agricultural produce freedom demands. Strengthen or relax.
Plans to include new trade laws. Support or oppose.
Withdrawing tariffs, surcharge on imports. Support or oppose.
Prohibition of whaling. Support or oppose.
Advancing Japanese capitalism. Promote or hinder.
Improving the defensive strength of Japan. Promote or Hinder. Japan isn't allowed to have an army, mostly because the last time they had one, the world is still reeling from it.


Rest of foreign policy.
Automobile import regulations. Strengthen or relax.
Apartheid sanctions: Strengthen or relax. Apartheid lasted until 1994. Ronald Reagan was ok with it. He said that the sanctions would mostly hurt the black majority. But let's be honest here. Things couldn't really get worse for them. Highest imprisonment and execution rate and being disqualified from all but the hottest and noisiest jobs. Critics of the regime were disappeared. De Klerk realized that South Africa was becoming a pariah state.
Truth is, Republicans viewed the ANC as communist.
Sanctions on Iran: Strengthen or relax. By 1988, Iraq was launching its final offensives, ending Iran's offensive capabilities and forcing a ceasefire. A few years later, Iraq invaded Kuwait and an international coalation ended the Iraqi Army.
Really, it's because they overthrew the fascist-sympathetic Shah.
COCOM regulations: Strengthen or relax. It's an agreement on what can and can not be sold to communist countres, if you want to know.
Panama Canal restoration: Support or oppose. So I don't know if restoration means handing the canal over to Panama or keeping it in US hands.
Relations with China: Promote or hinder.
Tariffs on oil imports: Support or hinder.







Some things they didn't bother to translate at all.






Spoiler alert: He didn't. I feel like usually front-runners don't. Nixon being a notable exception. AROOOOOOOO!
I think I’ll accept that beating this game or even making it as far as Super Tuesday is a hurdle I’ll never jump. I am starting to suspect that this game wants me to pick one specific policy and not deviate at all from their expectations.

In those days, the democrats had appeal among the working class. All age groups as a whole went for Bush, although there wasn’t really a spread. I knew about Reagan Youth.
Dukakis only won amongst people with an income under $12,500.

Anyways, I hope we get the all-clear signal soon but I'll see you in July at the latest.

burning question: I can understand people who downplay the virus because feedback loops and walled garden syndrome. However, how in Etro’s holy fuck are there people who are registered nurses who are this fucking ignorant? I knew she was conservative but I was honestly hoping she at least thought Trump bungled the pandemic horribly and would rather put up with four years of Biden. I don’t agree with it but I can vaguely see where her disdain for poor people and people who don’t speak English comes from. In fact, it kind of reminds me of Drow’s position that not only should English be an official language, everyone should learn English and only English. I guess I was wronger than a quick turtle. Maybe it’s because she’s that relatively small number of conservatives because she’s a misanthrope instead of being conservative because she’s in an established relationship with someone who's conservative.
burning question: I just answered my own question, didn’t I?

74 days until the vernal equinox


This game wasn’t released in North America because Nintendo hates us. Well, up until the Wii’s virtual console, which released it only in Japan, and then the Wii U, a system that flopped, which gave us the PAL version, which increases the speed and pitch of sounds.

[clicky clicky]


So, the plot, revealed in the manual, is that once in times unknown to us, there existed a world called Ufouria, where four species inhabited its lands in peace and harmony. Get it? Four. One day, Bop-Louie, Freeon-Leon, Shades, and Gil happened upon a gigantic crater when out on an adventure. In the crater was a crystal. Bop’s friends went close to grab it and the ground gave way and tumbling they went into the darkness. Bop-Louie climbed down.


In the Japanese version, Bop-Louie is a penguin.


Bop-Louie can’t swim but he can float.


In the Japanese version, the crows pooped on you instead of dropping weights on you.




You get a Mega Man esque password.


I’m not actually sure but I think you have to take the hit. It’s annoying because so far I’ve found no way to heal myself.

I later learned that you can stomp enemies by holding down when jumping.



Unfortunately, his friends have lost their memory.


This is an easy fight. When he picks that blob up and throws him, he’s usually standing too far away to do any damage.


I like his expression.


In the Japanese version, he's a girl dressed as a cat.


Technically, all characters can walk through snow. Freeon-Leon is the only one who can walk on ice without slipping.








This is the world. Later items allow you to see things onn the world.


Shades is a ghost who wears sunglasses. Double the pun!


This fight is just as easy but in a different way. Instead of throwing the guy at you from the other side of the screen, he instead gets close to you, jumps, and tosses him. And you can walk under it.


In the Japanese version, he speaks in archaic Japanese.




That's where the clown was. Unfortunately, it's locked.


I bet you thought that you needed Shades to get past this.


This is for much later, although I believe you can do it now.


This guy just drops you.


Those eggs are enemies.


But if you bring this egg to that bird in the nest, she'll be happy and take you somewhere with absolutely fuck-all to offer.




It was around this time that I learned you can stomp enemies by holding down and jumping. You have to do this to make this Rick and Morty side character looking fellow cough up a blob and then you have to throw the blob at him.




You get Bop-Louie's secret power by doing this.


That guy in the cloud also helps you and he takes you to a palette swap boss.


After you defeat him in the same manner as his green buddy, he transforms into a head and you stomp on him a few times.


The most useful powerup in the game.




Gill is also easy unless you lose control of that blob, in which case, it’s difficult to get it back. Try throwing the blob against the wall instead.


I think this portrait is supposed to be Freeon-Leon but the NES can only handle so many colors at a time.


In other words, Gil can swim.


In Japan, Gill’s name is Jennifer. I’ve heard that Gill is male in Japan but I dunno because Japanese has genderless pronouns and there are species of anglerfish in which the female is the size of a football and the males attach themselves to her and degenerate into gonads. Also, in actual Cornish, it should be written as Gwynnever, you big dumb idiots.



The keys are gold, silver, and mercury. No, wait, wrong game.


I also didn't learn that chests with medicine in them respawn, so I kept saving it for boss fights.




This guy you have to fight as Freeon-Leon who is quite slow. The only thing that makes him challenging.






This guy is annoying because in his first phase his hitbox is weird and in his second phase, he’s invisible due to flicker. I’m not sure if that’s intentional or just PAL framerates being weird.






This is agonizingly slow. Gil can only remove these blocks with his secret power. It takes two seconds to activate and it blows up everything in a one block radius. Even worse, going into the menu causes the blocks to reappear. I’m not entirely sure that was intentional.


The hitbox combined with the arc makes this guy annoying. The smiley guy pukes out a blob but it’s on a delay so that can screw you a bit too.


Water of Life is a full heal. I don't know if it respawns but even if it does, you have to use Freeon-Leon's freezing power to get to it and it's annoying enough and the game is easy enough that you can really just save it for the final boss.




You have to fight him with the secret power and spears rain down from the ceiling so you're going to get hit a lot.
This guy you have to attack with the special power and that takes a few seconds to activate. I assume you can use Freeon-Leon’s power too because you needed it to get to this boss in the first place. Or, at least, that’s how the game intended for you to get here. You can bounce off the enemies with Shades, get hit, switch to Gil, and hopefully get out of the lava before you die.


But once he loses his armor, he's completely helpless.


Otherwise, the only things you need to beat the game are the suction cups, the bombs, and the keys. Technically, you can beat the game without getting Shades but that requires pixel perfect jumping.






His expression is one of utter bliss, apparently.














Sadly, this is the only game of its type. There are other Hebereke games but they're puzzle games or racing games. It's also spiritually linked to Mr. Gimmick, a game I did not play for the Twelve Days of Wonky Roms, because Nestopia, the emulator I use to take easy screenshots, had graphical glitches.


It's a bit on the easy side but it's still worth playing.


burning question: So they call this game Ufouria despite the fact that not one second of this game is spent in the land of Ufouria? That's like calling Super Mario Bros. "Brooklyn."

75 days until the vernal equinox


Here's an obscure Japan-only game for the Famicom.

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burning question: Don't you hate when shitty people like the same things that you do? I'm not talking about things like Radiohead or whatever, which are so well-known that there are bound to be some dickholes who are fans, but more obscure things. I'm going through the SF Lovers' Digest and Curtis fucking Yarvin of the fucking Dark Enlightenment and NeoReaction movement is on there. Stop liking the things I do, you shit-hog who is friends with Steve Bannon.

76 days until the vernal equinox

In other news, vaccine distribution is going slower than hoped but they say they're working as fast as they can so I don't know if that was just officials being overly optimistic.

I found an advertisement for a Hellraiser video game that supposedly had one million worlds and it was the largest game for Nintendo. As soon as I saw that, I wanted to play it for the Twelve Days of Wonky Roms.
The thing is this: it doesn't actually exist.
I read that it used the Wolfenstein 3D engine but Wolfenstein 3D didn't exist then and the NES didn't have anywhere near the processing power to render something like Wolfenstein 3D so they tried to put a processor on the cartridge (chances are they couldn't get it to function properly) and I can't expect anything good given Color Dreams' track record.


Which means "Ninja Jajamaru: Galactic Battle."
In Japanese and Chinese, the word for galaxy is a compound word formed from "silver" and "river," not "milk."
In various northern European and Asian cultures, it's called the path of the birds.

[Click for Great Justice]

This was supposed to be released in America as Squash, with the characters renamed Maru and Cori and with a lot of terrible vegetable puns. There are rumors that Nintendo was responsible for this because it’s too similar to Super Mario Bros. 3. I don’t believe it because Nintendo allowed M.C. Kids which is equally Super Mario esque. If Nintendo is responsible, it’s probably because their policy on exporting a lot of games is similar to that of the Japanese music industry: non-Japanese are filthy gaijin so we can’t have them listening to our music, while the Japanese people living there have turned their back on the motherland and can not be allowed to listen to our music.


Nintendo had this tendency of generating hype and then pulling the rug out from under us. You know, Moon Crystal. Final Fantasy V. It's not like they left Moon Crystal a secret to everybody and a decade later, we learn that "oh, hey, there's this game that's Japan-only but someone translated it and it's really good." No. They had advertisements in Gamepro and everything.


The intro must be done by the Coach's Hotline guys.


In said abandoned American version, this was, instaed of being a spaceship, an unidentified flying onion.


Lettuce check it out, he says. I am not making that up.


Somehow, the text moves both too quickly and too slowly at the same time.


He's called King Kale in the American version.


Destroyda becomes Vegetron.






They probably meant Sakura


And they've been transposed from feudal Japan to outer space.


It seems like each character plays the same exact way.


Putting on a space suit gives you an extra hit.


I think I'm ducking here.


Oh no! It's Mac Tonight!


You have to make a high jump to get into the portal. To do that, you hold the B button to start running in place but not so long that you end up doing a spin attack.


17 minutes later, although some of that time was spent screenshotting the intro movie.


You can spell things with J A and S but I have no idea how that mechanic works.


You can also turn into a giant mechanical frog.


The music is rather good.


The first boss spends most of his time moving around the arena. Just jump on him four times and he'll explode into a Mega Man death but with smiley faces. Bosses kill you in one hit even when you have a space suit and I don't know if that's intentional or some sort of programming mistake and I think that little green alien has something to do with those letters you've collected.


You rescue the king.


And he gives you a hint... about pipes. Unlike Mario 3, his hints are actually relevant for the next level. I'm still not over the fact that the king of the 6th world is the one to tell you about the Magic Whistle and it's ambiguous enough to sound like it's in Water Land and not in stage 1-3. Or the fact that they kept Goomba's Japanese name.







Those guys hop out of pits in order to knock you out of the air.


If you jump on that guy, you'll only get to a platform.


You have to do wall climbing. Jumping off the walls is incredibly fickle. You have to hold the direction towards the wall while climbing it and when you jump off, you have to change direction in midair.


27 minutes later. I may have taken a short break.


They all say "Thanks, earthling. You've done well." No idea why I screenshotted every one of them.


The fire planet is in fact a giant Bomb from Final Fantasy.


Good thing there's a stage select code. You know, in case I forgot to take a screenshot of the fire planet.


This, amazingly, is the one I kept. After this is a rather annoying elevator segment.


Instead of jumping on the boss, you have to jump on the buttons to make him take damage but you have to do it really quickly.


And we've rescued the nutcracker.


Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3720 to 1.


This level is an autoscroller and a pretty fast one at that, with small platforms that drift away from each other. It doesn’t help that the start key only pauses if you’re holding it down. And I don’t know if that’s a dick move by the creator or a game bug or an emulation bug.


And in here we run into Ghostface.
Note: this game in fact predates Scream.


And Cthulhu.


And, uh, I don't know what those are.


Oh, boy, a portal maze!


it’s a jumping puzzle. In a maze. I hate both of those things. I can not jumping puzzle. A maze with a time limit. A jumping puzzle with required precision.


12 minutes later…


Thankfully, the boss is easy as piss. A portal appears, moves around a lot, and spits out Cthulhu, who spits out some acid or whatever.


The pattern on his body and face looks like the pattern on the level introduction screen.


That's no moon, that's a Lego knockoff.


That guy looks like a Mega Man enemy.


Even the clouds are rectangles. Strong Mad was wrong when he said that Cubeland is not a real place.
The enemies detach their heads from their bodies.


You can throw boomerangs or star bombs at those traps.


He hits the ground with his hammer, some blocks fly out of the ground, and then you stunlock him into oblivion.


I ended up in front of the king of the robots.


I like the aesthetics of this place.


Not the ice physics, though.


The pirates take two hits. One smashes them into the ground and their heads waddle about, and the next one removes them from the game.


It's another autoscroller but it's not as hard as the first one.




Conveyor belts are annoying.


Oh no! It's time for the hardest boss in the game!


He's so hard, in fact, that I couldn't beat him legitimately.


To get past him, I had to use the stage select code.


Just kidding!


There was no boss fight.




This planet is so polluted that you can walk on the clouds.


They're still using propellor planes.


Looks like a walrus.


It looks like you have enough height to get over this platform, but you don't.
It really does look like I have enough height to make it. You can’t jump and turn in midair and make it and you can’t land on the cloud either. You can’t run up the ramp.


Nine minutes later.


There's a Gravity Man upside down gimmick here.


If you ignore a few rather annoying jumping puzzles, this is actually a pretty good game.


Destroyda is the hardest boss in the game but that's not saying much. You can't stand on the pipe things. You have to dash jump when he comes down, and that's a question of timing, but you probably won't get hurt if you're on the sides of the screen.


I can't tell if it's Fu Manchu or a Stormtrooper riding a giant smiling Octorok.


Four hits later, you get the ending. Yay!


















That isn't a typo, I just hit the screenshot button prematurely.


I don't know what a Data Man does or what his power that Mega Man gets from him is.


I assume this is the music composer.

77 days until the vernal equinox
Well, we begin 2021 with a game worth playing.

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burning question: Did they hire Liz and Ard from Wild Arms 2 to translate this?

78 days until the vernal equinox



There's not much. You can change the controls, but none of the schema they give you are optimal, you can do a sound and music test, and there aren't any difficulty settings. There's also a hidden level select option but I didn't make use of it.

[clickity clickity]

A lot of this game's humor is references to other, better things.


Don't be fooled. It’s relatively tame despite its Leisure Suit Larry-ish title and its being on the Genesis rather than SNES.








They're literal goddesses, by the way.


That's not very effective suntan lotion.


He tries drinking it and...


New Jersey during the late Cretaceous was no doubt underwater.


Moon-Unit is the name of one of Frank Zappa's daughters. I knew that but I didn't know Moon-Unit was a woman until I looked it up just now.




The first weapon you pick up is a hammer, but it's no ordinary hammer! It's a hammer that opens up to reveal a punch glove.
I just don't.


It’s a tie in with a comic strip, apparently. Making It by Keith Robinson has a Facebook page. The most recent comic is from July 13, 2020. For whatever reason, the Facebook page only goes up to 2016.


I don’t get it but it’s not quite as bad as Tempest in a Teardrop, at least.


You go flying when you jump on the pigs. Gradually, higher and higher. Unfortunately, even the slightest twitch of the d-pad messes that up and you just start from square one.
At least there isn't a time limit.


There was an egg hidden behind that woolly mammoth.




She's not going to let you by. You can try jumping, dash-jumping, attacking.


They're not even the same type of dinosaur.


The music in this level sounds vaguely like Also Sprach Zarathustra.






I didn’t take any screenshots of the boss but let it be said that he’s sad.
He just jumps back and forth.


And a mammoth lands on him.


Not giving back your health after beating a level is the ultimate dick move in video games. And your lives max out at 9 so you can't take a death after beating every area.


Instead of a boxing glove, you get a rubber chicken here. Because ha ha wacky.


You can get a pie here, thankfully.


I think that might be the stick guy from Robin Hood: Men in Tights


These guys are annoying.


I have no quarrel with you, sir Knight, but I must cross this bridge.
The symbol on his waistcoat is different.


Huh, I ran into a glitch here.


Normy moves like Sonic got in a fight with Slow Möbius and Flash Man. Ordinarily he moves slowly. When you dash, however, and you will accidentally press the dash button when trying to attack enemies because unfortunately one of the control schema they don't have is a=dash b=attack and c=jump, he goes flying.


Your biggest danger from dashing is falling into a pit.


She either summons a dagron or transforms into one, I can't tell.










Touching those doors damages you for some reason.


The park ranger gorillas keep walking and take a few hits to kill so they'll usually damage you.




This thing is just awkward.


Why, yes, this is a rat in a pimp suit.




Spitting cobras are Old World. And so are gorillas. But the bowl cuts are associated with various South American natives as well as Moe from the Three Stooges (I'm sorry, it turns out I didn't take a screenshot of one) and only New World monkeys have prehensile tails.


Uhhh.




For whatever reason, when you pause the game, it says “pawsed.” I don’t get it. I mean, I get that it’s a play on the word paw, but I don’t see a context for it. You don’t play as any sort of carnivoran. Maybe it’s surfer slang.



It was my luck to get a really awful screenshot of this guy, who jumps around the screen maniacally.


I thought Dick Dale was the God of Surf Music.


I think he's supposed to be Andy Warhol because there's no one else with that name. But.


Andy Warhol didn't have a beard. And he wasn't involved with video games either.


Those candelabras like to float around off screen and then clonk into you.


Despite being communist Romania, this level has mostly Castlevania aesthetics. I don’t know if things were different in the 70s but right now, Romania uses the type F plug outlet. Interestingly, the game’s graphics make it look like a type F outlet and I don’t know if that’s intentional or just a happy coincidence.


It might be a Virginia Opossum but I can’t be sure. I think it’s just a mouse.


Sunglasses make you invincible.




I was hoping for an armadillo but what are you going to do? Armadillos can’t survive in the Romanian climate anyway.




This game sure loves to hide its enemies behind foreground objects.


When you reach the boss, instead of him bouncing around the screen, you have a video game duel where if you die in the game, you die in real life. And by that, I mean you lose a life and you keep going.


Ugh, pong. Pong against a computer isn't that fun because they can always anticipate where the ball is going to be.






I needed to take a bunch of screenshots just so you can read this.


It takes three seconds for the squirrel to animate.


Someone compared it to Bubsy which is rather rude because at least you have hit points in this, even if you don’t get them back after beating the level.


On the other hand, you don’t really have much in the way of invincibility frames.




I just noticed him playing paddle ball during his idle animation.


I was expecting a shmup segment or something cool like that but no, you just rise up and then you’re in the next level.












They do their best to make it somewhat cheery.


When you pass those gates, the "alive" sign lights up.








Lawyers in heck! Hahaha.


You know, just in case you couldn’t tell who these guys are supposed to be. I’d have guessed “The Mafia” or something. There’s a button that summons an ambulance that runs them all over.


Snowmen in Heck is also familiar from somewhere.


It also wasn’t designed by Doug Tennapel, which gives it points over Earthworm Jim. This isn’t really a good game but I honestly can’t say that Earthworm Jim is a good game either.


There are also rampaging pickles in Heck for whatever reason. I don’t know. They probably ran out of people and things that they either hate or things that they think would be funny to be in a fiery setting.


The politicians also shoot the word "TAXES" at you.


You're probably wondering about Level 7. I know I was. I was thinking "by Pulse's beard, I can't believe I didn't screenshot anything on Level 7." So I look up a longplay of this game and I'm going to let you in on a little secret: There is no level 7. You go straight from 6 to 8. A reference to God is 7 or just laziness? You decide!








Satan is a sad boss as long as you didn’t pick up the squirrel weapon earlier in the level. I assume the squirrel does the same amount of damage as the snow cone. I don’t know, because, and this is a common theme, I don’t have the fucking manual.




The end! The verdict: No, not worth playing. The visuals are pretty nice, at least.


They all have dopey nicknames.


burning question: What are you going to do, bleed on me?

79 days until the vernal equinox

I promise you this won't be the Twelve Days of Licenced Game Hell.
This started out as a Jetsons game and then got its serial numbers filed off for the Japanese market, as Youkai Buster: Ruka no Daibouken, a game in which Yama, god of death, has his body stolen and demands that Ruka get his body back. It also got a massive graphical overhaul. And someone else made new music.


[Click]


Oh, cool, you can change the controls here. I’m not sure why action&jump is a thing but ok. I wonder if I get any bonuses for playing on hard mode. The answer is I do not know. Hard adds a few enemies and makes a few other enemies harder to kill.



I guess this game dismisses the fan theory that the Earth is a polluted wasteland.


Judy in the background has more frames in her dance than George does in his run.


Meanwhile, the rest of the family has no animation. Except for their robot maid, who has two.




I decided to make this into a gif despite the fact that despite the utter lack of animation, Captain Zoom still moves around and radiates stars and shit.


Said device that Captain Zoom gives you is a vacuum cleaner.


Which you can use to climb walls.


It's one of those Futurama tubes.




Hey, that robot is just trying to keep the place clean.


If he’s able to throw you, that’s an instant death. First boss, folks!


He's pretty easy, though.




Crushers are also instant death.


I don't think I want to know what that monkey is doing.


What's this? Ratchet scrolling in a SNES game?


The pow thing is just how much range and speed the vacuum has. There aren't any special powers, despite the HUD blinking and changing colors.


The alien Homer Simpson and Lenny throw projectiles back and forth and then at you. They're annoyingly difficult to dodge.


The music here reminds Zetaplays of The Carpenters while it reminds me of the Yaschas Massif.


Oh no, not a crusher segment. It's somewhat less Distorted Travesty bullshitty than you'd expect because there are switches that cause the wall to go back.




The repeating background looks really weird.




Dashing is weird. What you’d expect when you hit L or R is for George to run in place for a second before zooming off, the way you’d run in a cartoon. Instead, you can only dash while moving. it’s the equivalent of a run button but awkward because we have to use those L and R buttons for something.




Getting caught too close to the airlocks is instant death.


They were really proud of this thing because there are two more of them after this. You have to run.




Blocks show up on the platform and you launch them upward at him.


I don’t think the getting hit sound is George Jetson’s voice. In fact, I think I’ve heard it in ActRaiser.



I think this is Mars.




This is the best screenshot I could get of the armadillo. If you get any closer, he rolls up into a ball and tries to run you over.


After that we get a dark segment for no real reason.


Oh, a present!


I wonder what's inside!


The cat is by far the hardest and most frustrating boss in this game. You just have to aim the Suck-O-Matic at him as he flies across the screen in unpredictable ways.


This is a really short level. The miniboss is awkward and frustrating though. The buttons rotate the room and you need to grab the enemies and launch them into the electric barriers.


No, we're not at the final boss yet.


In the first phase, he spawns enemies out of his shoulders and you have to grab them and launch them into his head and in the second phase, his head detaches and you just have to grab it and launch it into the sides of the screen.




George can use the Suck-o-Matic to breathe underwater, but if you use it as a weapon or cling to the ceiling too long, you drown.


The robot whales eat you and you die.




The shit you are expected to figure out when you don’t have a manual. There’s a way to jump forward while clinging to the ceiling but I can not for the life of me figure out how to do it and there’s no info on Gamefaqs, no manual on the internet, no mention of it in a video, nothing. Zetaplays has done it but even he’s not entirely sure how it works. There’s a Nintendo Power feature on this but they only tell you that you can use the POP to cross overhead, not how to actually do it.


They also said there are five worlds. This is a lie.


I really like the background here.


I'd probably be less annoyed if it weren't for html's need to add quotation marks to image urls.




We get a brief vehicle segment.


And the boss takes entirely too long.


You'll get attacked by plates here.


Ah, this boss. He'll eventually split up and you have to grab one and toss him into another before they all disappear into the pots and reform.


It's another crusher segment.


Look, game creators. You can have clunky mechanics or you can have strict time limits in your levels. But you can not have both!


Goddamn no-good bullshit cat bastard!


And you fight these assholes right after without a health pickup.


Zora herself turns into a tornado a la the Dark Queen and uses her magical powers to create enemies.



There is more animation in the ending then my gif depicts but it’s just scrolling from still image to still image. There’s not even lip flapping.



burning question: why is there ratchet scrolling in an SNES game?

80 days until the vernal equinox
Uh, I found that song I was talking about. It's called Tailwhip and it's by Men I Trust. They're from Quebec City so I was on to something about them being not only from a French-speaking part of the world, but the Francophone equivalent of Kerry.


Goofy's Hysterical History Tour (Genesis, or Mega Drive if you're not in the US)

[clicky]


I played it on Not So Simple, AKA normal. On Simple, the enemies take less hits and you start with more health, but half of the levels early on are removed. On "Pretty Darn Hard!" the enemies take more hits and you start with less health, but some of the levels are removed.


I'm going to gif all of these and I can get away with it because most of the animation is just them flapping their jaws.


You can aptly describe this game as Bionic Commando without the good. You have the extend-o-arm and you use it to attack enemies and to grapple on to things. And there's a lot of grappling.


Hey, it's one of those mushrooms from Fantasia.


The prehistoric exhibit just seems to condense everything from the Cambrian to the Pleistocene into one exhibit.




You can summon birds to carry off your enemies.


NOT THE BEES!


You'll run into Caveman Pete throughout the level.


This is the edge of the level. You can't jump on to the rightmost leaf.


If you can't tell, he has a lightbulb for an abdomen.


The final battle with Caveman Pete is on one of those unicycles. He'll chuck eggs at you and you just dodge them and then jump on his head. Or just use the grabber and phase through his invincibility frames.


The manual seems to indicate that the stages go prehistoric -> medieval -> colonial -> wild west. Which would make sense, but the actual game really does go prehistoric -> wild west -> colonial -> medieval. This isn't a bug that sent me here.


Despite what the manual says, weasels are not rodents, they are carnivorans.


There's a lot of platforming.

Donald, who is riding Pete's stagecoach for some reason, gives you an extra life.



Gunslinger Pete jumps around and shoots corks at you. You can stop him from shooting if you jump on him or use your grabby arm on him.




The magnificent lakes and mountains of colonial Massachusetts. Must be in the same colonial America that Pocahontas is set in.


In real life, the largest body of water in Massachusetts is an artificial lake constructed in the 1930s. The largest natural lake is near New Bedford, which is not known for its mountains.


If you look carefully, and it’s more noticeable when the game is in action, you can see the lake background through the windows.


Check out the Pete weathervane.


That looks like Iago. I’d be lying if I said that macaws were indigenous to the United States, unless I’m including Puerto Rico, but that was part of Spain until the 20th century.


Oh, I get it, it’s a pirate ship. Which means this is also a coastal town. On the east coast. With mountains.
When you start this level, you have to go left instead. You can make a leap of faith to the right but you'll only end up dying or repeating the stage.


Collecting fifty balloons, and, why, yes, I only first pulled it off in the ship level, gives you an extra life. He sounds like he’s yowling in pain.






They got kind of lazy with the backgrounds here.


Wait a second, these are just frogs with new sprites! They even make the ribbit sound. Even though the only frogs that ribbit are in southern California.


It would be nice if we at least got more diversity of time periods. Obviously there are constraints on being able to go to the future but there could be ancient Egypt or ancient Rome themed levels. This game isn't Japanese but even then, it could have feudal Japan. After all, Where's Waldo went to feudal Japan.


Right before you get to Minnie, there’s a long segment in which you jump on the boulders.


The final boss is Sir Pete and like every other boss, he takes at least a hundred hits to kill.


My verdict: If you want grappling mechanics, play Bionic Commando or Ristar instead. If you want time travel, play Chrono Trigger. If you're still interested in this, watch a tool-assisted speedrun.



burning question: did this game really need to be so long? A lot of the game is just grappling on to tiny platforms.

81 days until the vernal equinox
I did not lose power from the Christmas Monsoon but I did not account for Imgur having technical difficulties.


Seeing T*HQ here does not fill me with any hope.


That music. I think it’s supposed to be the Ren and Stimpy theme music, but it could very well be the music from Maniac Mansion after opening up the game file and jumping up and down on the keyboard. Whatever it is, it barely sounds like music. We are not off to a good start here.

[Clickity]

I feel like one second is a decent compromise between “you can read the text” and “the gif doesn't look like shit, in fact, it looks fairly decent.”
We are also treated to a painful Gameboy rendition of The Blue Danube for his spacewalk. It’s not quite as cacophonous as the intro, at least.


Back to the intro music. Lovely.


Can you find the hazards? Spoiler: the buttons, the toaster oven, and the loudspeaker. The loudspeaker is offscreen from where you have to jump and it spits out a soundwave just as soon as it appears on screen. This causes you to get hit. The buttons only hurt you when they’re in the up position but they move much too fast to simply walk through. Jumping is sluggish and floaty but I'm going to attribute that to the low gravity setting and not to shitty programming.


Stimpy can hock up a hairball to attack enemies but since there are very few enemies and very many hazards, you’re not going to use it that much.


Standing in the bathtub water spray hurts you but you need to climb on the bathtub to jump over the barricade.


SEEEEEEEEEEEEE! SEEEEEEEEEE!
That's the sound eyeballs make.


Finding a TV with three cans of powdered toast in your posession allows you to play a game with Muddy Mudskipper. If you get all three right, you are invincible for a longer time. Don't just use it; abuse it.


Log has betrayed us!


This is one of the many many problems with this game. You have to climb up this enormous control system. As you can see, it's not exactly apparent what you can and can't jump on.


Quick! Can you find the platforms?


these pod things are platforms but only if you land on the very top of one.


In lieu of a boss fight, we get these brief timed segments. Be sure to jump over the spinning satellite dish! If you run out of time, you have to start from the beginning of the first stage.


I forgot to screenshot it and there's no fucking way I'm going to play through the first level again.


Very few enemies unless you’re playing as Ren, anyway. Which is too bad because Ren’s attack SUCKS. It's a slap, which I refuse to dignify with words like "feisty" or "pain" because it's not worthy of that, and it's inside your hitbox.


Oh, yeah, you also can’t slap while jumping.


One time, the saliva tree's droplets fell down in a pattern that I could not possibly avoid.


Eightballs fall from the sky! How remarkably funny.


If you slap this guy, you take damage. If you try to jump over him, he moves back and you take damage.


It’s long and you have to anticipate where the shooters are and then hope the hitboxes don’t screw you over. There are at least eight of them so you can’t just take the hits.
The problem is that Ren and Stimpy take up a large portion of the screen. I tend to gripe about platformers on the Super NES usually but that’s not to say that other systems aren’t guilty of this. Except for the NES; I don’t think it could handle such large sprites.


If you try to slap while on Log, you fall to your death. Good to know.


At least the time limit makes sense from a story standpoint.


I don't think Stimpy's ever heard of the expression "don't shit where you eat."


This place seems to be a parody of the Death Star, going by the light panels.


but it's all bathroom themed.




This place isn't very interesting. There's some heaps of buildings. Alas, you have to use Ren and his pimp slap.


You have to climb up.


Stimpy's litterbox?


Where you find Stimpy apparently eating the litter.


Ren looks like he was drawn in MS Paint.


They just shout "Ren!" and "You EEEEDIOT!" at each other for a while.


The end. I recommend this as much as I recommend Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon, that is to say, not at all. But it's still better than Million Dollar EXTREEEEEEEEEME!!!!!!!!!



burning question: When was the last time you heard anyone talk about Ren and Stimpy?

82 days until the Vernal Equinox


Inexplicably, it’s not called Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century.





I was going to put the three images together but then I realized that the layers scroll at different rates and it would ruin the effect.

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burning question: Why is Yamato Man called that if he’s clearly based on samurai, which didn't appear until well after the Yamato period? It's like calling Knight Man "Brigantes Man"