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R4 isn't the first racing game to break the mould of generica, in the earlier generations of gaming creating a realistic recreation of real racing was impossible. Developers instead had to focus on how to translate the familiar in the sport while still making a fun game.
I remember the Super Off-Road cabinet well. The arcade called "Fun N Games" which was about 6 blocks from my house as a kid always had one. Sitting on the backside of one of the center columns of games, out of view from the big, popular "attraction" titles put front and center in the arcade. It had 3 steering wheels, a pedal(Who needs brakes?) and 2 buttons both used to boost during a race. Being 10 years old and knowing nothing technical about racing or driving except the vague notion that cars have a gas pedal and can go fast.. And a horrible nightmarish recurring dream I had back then where I dreamt that I was in a car alone at the wheel, speeding on the highway and had no way to slow down or stop the vehicle and I didn't know how to drive it either(No wonder I didn't get my license until I was nearly 20 years old). But knowing nothing about those things I still felt drawn to the Off-Road cabinet. It had a lot of colors, pixelated bikini models and "Ironman" Ivan Steward seemed pretty cool despite having never heard of him before. Between rounds of Ninja Gaiden, Street Fighter 2 and Magic Sword I found some time to pump some quarters into Super Off-Road. It conveyed a very immediate concept to the player, race around a track and hit boost constantly, ease off the gas only when necessary. Despite using a steering wheel to control a vehicle from a static isometric perspective it was very smooth, after a short time of playing you were already spinning the wheel and applying pressure with your hand to smoothly guide it around the corners at insane speeds. The first few races allowed you to build up your boosts and car parts before the difficulty really kicked in. Even as a kid I never really liked putting more than a few quarters into a single machine in a play session, I knew starting from the beginning always yielded a better value so I didn't get to see the later stages of Super Off-Road unless I watched someone older pump 20 bucks into the machine.
To this day I see Super Off-Road cabs in various pizza parlors and other locales that you might find an arcade cabinet or two in. More rarely i've seen Super Sprint, Outrun and Pole Position. All similarly "gamey" racers. The first Ridge Racer probably represents the height of popularity for the genre, I rented it with a Playstation when the system came out and I played all weekend to unlock most of the cars. I had no idea about the powersliding in the game but they didn't make it an incredibly hard experience for the gas/brakers out there, it was a fun and simple game. Ultimately though it was all about running time trials, doing something over and over to perfect. And it looked nice. A tech demo system launch if there ever was one. But from that point the arcade racer slowly became more faceless and niche in the mid 90's. Not many games conveyed a strong concept of racing anymore. To the point that my non-driving self had little interest in them through my teens. Racing games left me feeling blase, at the time I would rather have been reorganizing my Wolf/Dragon T-Shirts and coming up with new army combinations for Warhammer: 40k.
When I was about 16 or 17 I subscribed to Playstation Underground and never payed for the subscription, I still received about 6 "issues" before they realized this lil dude just wasn't gonna pay up. Looking back on those discs one of the things I liked most were the racing games, which in demo form are usually a perfect summation of the entire retail copy of the game. Giving you 1-2 tracks and a small selection of racing vessels you are free to time trial to your hearts content on the content they give you. I played extensively some ESPN Xtreme sports game, Cool Boarders 2, some Rally game by Codemasters.. But the racing game I played the most on those discs was Ridge Racer Type 4. I don't know what was particularly gripping about the experience, I'm confident it was just one car and one nighttime track. But I played it endlessly.
To this day I find myself fascinated by it's night driving aesthetic. Cool music, warm night air rushing past you. My mind is fixated on the notion, really. But it was a year or more later before I played the real copy of the game, it was quite a different experience. The industry at the time(At least in relation to racing games) was gripped with Gran Turismo fever, I believe the 2nd GT game was near release.. The initial focus of R4 is a mix of 4 "dynamic" storylines in campaign mode and running races against the series-recognized "challenge" cars(A super fast car and you have a 1 on 1 duel, if you beat the car it is unlocked for you to drive). I didn't play enough to really see everything in the game as I only rented it, but based on its pedigree(via my love for the R4 demo and the original Ridge Racer) and looks I had always recalled it fondly.
Over the last week I've been playing R4 again. When I started out I had to unlock some of the faster cars by playing the story mode, I was whelmed with the thought of getting back to the state of consciousness I had while playing the demo so many years ago. I just wanted to race on cool looking tracks, over and over. Maybe I would hit random for my musical accompaniment or repeatedly select my favorite song of all time "Move Me." I wasn't sure but I was ready to get to that point. Near the conclusion of my first play of the story mode I had taken a poor, losing team to the final race and won. Restoring my team coaches faith in life and causing him to quit the team and begin to fix the rift that had grown in his family, or something like that. The somber, quieting visuals that accompany the "talk" sections before a race are masterful, the stories simple and just a little bit real emotionally. The player is the person who gets the thanks in the end, through your beautiful racing you save lives of broken individuals.
I kept trying to get to the time trials, the endless racing. To connect with my desire to have one more win, one improved time. But as of yet I haven't gotten there. I spent some time unlocking the super cars but found myself drawn back to the story mode. Now as I have completed 3 of them and am near the end of the 4th I find myself not all that interested with just racing in the game. It's mechanics are simple, the races are almost beside the point. The real draw is what this racing game did completely different from everything else at the time(And maybe since, even in its own series), by providing a well implemented mode that doesn't even rely on racing for its entertainment.
It also looks better than any other PS1 racer. It's weird to me that the subsequent iterations of the franchise never went back to the story mode feature and also fail to match R4 in style or music content. Maybe the series development just got between trying to appeal to the people who went to it for racing, and the folks who just wanted a good time. Or maybe the producers got too caught up in trying to compete with the other racing franchises.
16 years ago for my 8th birthday I got Megaman 2. I played the hell out of it. But in my times playing it one thing sticks out, the first time I ever got to the final level it was pretty late and I was tired and I could not figure out how to damage Alien Wily, but passwords won't take you further than the first Wily level. So I left the NES on all night feeling like I had gone too far to start all over. I woke up in the morning and beat the game.
Last night as I was going to bed at 3:40am I had the desire to play Megaman 2. I had it sitting on my dresser along with a stack of 10 or so other games I've been wanting to play. I popped the game in and beat Metalman's stage only to have it freeze up on me. Already tired, I can't say why I was so compelled to play it more but I used a cotton swab to clean the game, waited a minute for it to be dry and popped it back in. On this second attempt to play I decided to start with Bubbleman's stage like I almost always do.. I went to Woodman's silicon forest after that, then Flashman, Metalman and so on. I never felt in Megaman 2 I had much reason to go in boss order as the buster does quite a bit of damage to almost every boss. The exception being Crashman.
As 5:00am drew near I was nearly done with the robot master stages. Sitting at the horrible "voosh" block section of Heatman's stage I felt like just folding and going to sleep. But I kept moving forward. Wily stages make use of some of the Dr. Light inventions as a means of platforming puzzles, I had forgotten this detail. Another loop thrown in my late night play session. The mech dragon at the end of Wily stage 1 died a lot quicker than I remembered. I also forgot that Wily stage 2 and 3 were incredibly short, a running theme in the game I suppose.
Wily stage 4 will always remind me of this one day during summer break in Seattle, I was at a friends house. He had just moved to an area no longer near the Maple Leaf district that I lived in. We had gone across the street to play with some neighbor kids. They were playing Megaman 2, I either didn't own the game yet or just hadn't finished it but they were on the Wily stages. One of the kids passed the controller to me and I made it to Wily stage 4, spending a while on the moving platform sections in the 2nd half of the level we eventually gave up and went outside. But the stage forever brings back the ambience of that setting to me. The large woodgrain television, the darkened TV room in the middle of a bright summer day, even the smell. It's like NES-esthesia I guess.
After a few deaths I managed to get to the end of the purple platforms, only to realize that the boss of the stage is a puzzle of sorts. Only crash bomber will hurt the turrets and walls/barriers set up, but you barely have enough to kill the turrets alone. I died and had to continue. I thought to myself that I could just leave the game on until I woke up like I did when I was 8, but I couldn't help but reject the idea. I knew there wasn't much game left. A second try at the level and I managed to finish it. After that I quickly made my way through the robot masters alley and Wily himself, on the final stage I discovered that you could run past all the acid drops without getting hit. I never understood the Alien boss really, perhaps just a twist to throw the older gamers who were following the loose narrative?
Megaman 2 might have objectively one of the better NES endings. To me it's the best though, there is none other that compares. It's dramatic, visually interesting and I think it's pretty open for interpretation. A point of interest in the game that I could probably read a long college paper on without any sense of irony. It's the type of ending that upon viewing at 5:30am, more than 15 years after first playing the game leaves you feeling introspective and deep. A lot of of time has gone by since I started playing this game, but it's appeal to me hasn't been lost.
1989 was probably the peak or height of the NES. Although 1990-1991 boasted many big releases I would say that it was really all downhill from '89.
One of the most memorable releases in 1989 for me was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Konami/Ultra. This iteration of the TMNT universe was a literal take on the animated television version of the franchise. Familiar to all the kids who followed the show, the turtles traverse much of the game by going through the sewers or driving around in their Turtle Van. Aside from only being able to see one turtle at a time the game is a brilliant adaptation of the animated series. Although the hardware had limitations you could maybe imagine the game as handling the parts of the show you didn't see: the turtles long and difficult adventures in between beginning and conclusion, as faithfully as possible.
I always felt that aside from the constantly respawning enemies and great music the game had a vacant feeling. The Turtle's days must have been filled with tedium, running from spot to spot. Hampered by the easy to dispatch foot clan at every turn. In between running through empty warehouses and sewers populated with weird eagles and frogs there is really no one to talk to. Splinter offers advice in the pause menu but aside from his text all encounters with the well known villains of the show take place in silence and there is only an average of about one villain sighting per level. Most kids probably never even got to the technodrome or shredder which lay far into the game, as far as I know and can remember Krang is missing from the game altogether.
But that brings me to the thing most memorable thing about TMNT. It was really difficult. For a franchise game Konami spent no time at all focus testing this shit with kids, if it was made now I would imagine that scrolls and ninja stars would drop with 25x the regularity and every turtle would be able to take 2-4 times more damage, as well as pizza being far more available in supply. In fact you would probably be able to pick up pizza and hold onto it until needed. Every difficult jump in the game would be gone or become non-lethal and the enemy respawn rate would be cut down by two-thirds. It would and should also have a save or password feature.
The consensus when I read other player's thoughts on the game is that level 2(The Dam) was incredibly hard, I never felt that way though. In fact for me, when the game came out I remember watching two of my friends play through level 2. This was before I had gotten a chance to try the game, but perhaps because of this early warning for the challenge or the chance for my 8 year old brain to memorize some of the routes through the level I can't ever remember dying on the Dam.
Because of this implied difficulty though I find a new challenge while I play TMNT: Pressure. Attempting to not let down my legacy with the game. I've actually never finished it and only have seen only seen past level 4 via a friend of mine who has beat the game before. But never have I had trouble getting to level 3, and even that level is largely all about memorization. The game works on your ability to memorize paths and tolerate repetition, like going through a maze but one where you sustain near automatic damage at regular intervals. If you know the ways through the levels to an exacting degree then you stand a much higher chance of finishing them than someone who simply doesn't know the path and wonders without aim. It's a clever design actually, something you would not see in a major developer game any more. But as I hooked up my NES and turned the game on at 3:00am last night I remembered the pressure from the last time I had played. As I quickly cut through the first level my anticipation for the dam and seeing if I could once again complete the challenge without problem grew. Defeating Rocksteady at the end of the stage I started to mentally prepare myself, entering the bottom of the dam and fighting my way through to the top exit, as I got closer to the exit to the top of the dam more and more garbled graphics were popping up. Finally as I walked out on the top of the dam the game froze. Saved by my old and inconsistently working NES I suppose. I tried this afternoon to get the game to play again for at least 15 minutes with no luck. I even own two copies and was trying both. Fate has given me a breather between trying to tackle stage 2 once more.
And I ended up just playing Section Z for a while instead.
I woke up yesterday morning thinking about how it has been a while since I've played my Nintendo Entertainment System. Craving playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mostly but I have also had a smouldering desire to play some other games. Despite this strong desire to play the games, I am almost more happy just meditating on the thought of them. In my minds eye I can recount much of the virtual space in TMNT, I can hum the theme song rendition in the game or the overworld music while I do it.
Yet it has taken me 48 hours just to get the games out and hook up the system, I have not even played them as of typing this. I feel the urge but the drive just isn't there. I think in the back of my mind that maybe its bcoming a little like walking down a familiar street just once more, but as I continue to have lapses inbetween going back and time slowly comes between me and the games I used to play I wonder if I won't feel the same way I felt upon visiting the street I grew up on in many years later. Aside from a few small changes in the way of some new street signs nothing had changed, but I had and the place no longer felt so comforting or close to me outside of memory.
