SNES Game of the Week 118 - Clock Tower

[excelsior]

• Publisher - Ubi Soft
• Developer - Vivid Image
• Genre - Racing
• Initial Release - November 1994

It's fast, it's frantic, it's furious, it's the first racing and fighting game for four players... It's STREET RACER! Race and fight with 24 different tracks, 5 game modes with tons of options, and 8 street racers to choose from!

  

  

[excelsior]

Street Racer was a mid-tier title back in the day, releasing across a number of platforms so being fairly well known, but seems to have fallen into obscurity somewhat. It's pretty clearly inspired by Super Mario Kart, and better racers of that ilk would follow in the next few years, so it's not so surprising. That said, I did have a good deal of fun with it back when it came out. Offering 4 players was an advantage to it getting some play. Instead of Mario Kart's collectable powerups, Street Racer gave each character their own specific ability, which unfortunately lead to it feeling unbalanced with some abilities being vastly better than others. Street Racer has multiplayer battle attractions as with Mario Kart, but here we get to play car football, long before Rocket League. Outside of balancing issues the gameplay is solid enough, but unremarkable.

Ranking - C

[spanky]

Despite Super Mario Kart's popularity, there weren't a ton of clones of it found on 16-bit. Those would all come in the next gen. So I remember being sort of excited to play this back in the day. It's a very Euro game - technically impressive (4-player mode, they found a way to make it without utilizing the DSP chip), great music and sort of unappealing character designs.

The marketing really leaned into this being into a fighting/driving game hybrid - though it doesn't really come off that way in practice. You have a health bar but I don't think racers can get knocked permanently out of the race or anything like that. Giving characters distinct weapons makes the game a little less random and hectic than Mario Kart, but the randomness is also part of the fun of this genre.

It's not a bad game but it's inspiration sets a very high bar. B.

[dsparil]

Mid-tier is a good way to describe Street Racer. It's not awful, but it also doesn't do anything that great. Looking at old reviews of it, I'm a little surprised as how highly praised it was. I vaguely remember playing it back then, but it must not have had much staying power compared to Super Mario Kart. I guess I'd go with a C overall.

[windfisch]

Street Racer

Visually this one certainly does impress: The detailed tracks zoom and rotate smoothly, the panoramic backdrops scroll by parallax-style and the fluidly animated contestants are visible from a multitude of angles, lending them them a three-dimensional presence. The characters are more or less amusing stereotypes, somewhere between the Wacky Races cartoon and Street Fighter: We get a sumo, a voodoo priest and the sole sexy lady, you know the deal. The hooligan, however, struck me as a rather unusual and, uhm, bald choice. And the Red Baron-like made me wonder whether we’ll someday get to see German WWIII drone pilots immortalized in a similar fashion, those Yellow Online Edgelords... But until everything goes up in mushroom clouds, we’ve still got light-hearted escapism like this to keep us from questioning our politicians' sanity and integrity. The upbeat tunes certainly help in that regard. And the game plays rather well. But like Super Mario Kart it suffers from a low viewing angle and flat, hard to make out obstacles. I ultimately prefer Super Mario Kart, but not by much.

Rank: C

[excelsior]

• Publisher - Nintendo
• Developer - Nintendo/Intelligent Systems
• Genre - Art Tool
• Initial Release - 14 July 1992

Mario Paint lets you draw, paint, animate and compose music! Creation! Imagination is your only limit with an amazing variety of drawing tools. Animation! Add exciting dimension by creating moving animation with up to 9 frame sequences. Orchestration! Compose your own songs by selecting from over 15 different musical sounds and the entire scale of notes. Coordination! Increase your Super NES Mouse dexterity by playing Gnat Attack, the clever fly swatter game included inside.

  

  

[excelsior]

Mario Paint is a difficult one to speak about in context of how it compares to the rest of the SNES library since it's less a game and more a creative studio. From the creative standpoint, there's quite a few tools that allow creation of pictures, sprites, animations and music. Everything is presented in that Nintendolike way where simplicity of the tools enable just about anybody to play and get creative, without necessarily being a great artist. From that perspective, I feel like Mario Paint is a success. My biggest issue with it as a kid was the space limitations for saving your art on the cart were extremely limited to the point of being discouraging should you not want to lose older work, which I consider quite a big flaw. That said, I spent a lot of hours just messing around with it and the fly swatting game was quite a nice distraction also.

Ranking - B

[windfisch]

Mario Paint

While I didn't get the chance to play it when it was fresh, this very much reminds me of my first times using drawing programs. We had something for the Atari ST (b&w only, iIrc). And I vividly remember being at a friends home, experimenting with a basic PC graphics program, modifying a Monkey Island 2 screenshot. Good times! The makers of Mario Paint were aware ofthat kind of appeal and tried to add all kinds of fun bells and whistles, like rudimentary animation and music composition tools and even a mini game. The design mentality and presentation make this feel like a predecessor to the Wario Ware games, featuring a similarly playful and whacky tone.

This is all well and good, but unfortunately Mario Paint suffers a bit in the one area that matters most: the controls. I'm playing this via emulation, using an optical mouse, which Mario Paint was not desinged for. So it might be less of an issue on original hardware. Keeping that in mind, the mere act of drawing doesn't feel entirely satisfying. There are times when the system struggles to keep up, resulting in delays. And while I understand the need to keep it simple, there are a couple of essential tools missing, like a zoom function. Others are extremely limited: you get only one undo step and the pencil doesn't allow for pixel-precision. Furthermore, if you draw too quickly, the latter won't always draw continuous lines. Granted, the stamp tool actually allows for fine drawing in a zoomed in fashion. But the stamp size is fairly limited, so drawing larger objects that way requires stiching together multiple stamps. On the plus side, all this gives users a better understanding of the basics of pixel art. The limited colour palette and resolution are pretty close to the EGA mode in DOS, practically putting you in the shoes of graphic artist from that era. Thus, you're forced to work within those limitations, utilizing techniques like dithering to achieve better results. The first Monkey Island is a good example for the latter:

Subconsciously this particular background probably inspired me with my own effort (link). Using a limited toolset can be rewarding and there are some truly amazing pieces of Mario Paint art online. But it takes a lot of patience and practice. As excelsior already pointed out, with little saving space and no way to print, most of that art would have been lost at the time.

I almost feel bad, because this is a very admirable effort with lots of lovely ideas put in. And maybe it is the best they could do with the hardware. Emulating on recent hardware, allowing for quick saves and screenshots, I would still grant it a low C. But based on its own merits, I can't rank it higher than D.

[spanky]

I'm afraid this is the first game in this thread that I'm not going to be able to give a proper rating. I never played it as a kid and from what I gather, the emulation isn't perfect for it as well. Moreover, I'm not a particularly artistic or creative person so the appeal of the game is lost on me. I do appreciate the "Nintendo-ness" of it all. I will say it does look it accomplishes what it sets out to do very well - in 1992. In 2023, the limitations seem very apparent. Though I think I could give this to my kid and he'd spend hours on it.

[dsparil]

Can't say anything about Mario Paint either. My preferred emulator has issues with the SNES mouse (doesn't work right and you're forced to use it) so I can't give it a spin to refresh my memory. I do wish that Art Academy had stayed around as a spiritual successor though instead of dying off after the Wii U. That was a legitimately good drawing program.

[Snake]

Mario Paint, Rank: B

Ah, another memento I still have of my friend who recently passed away over a year ago.  I still have the trackball mouse, but not the little "cleaner tool" that was used to scrape out dust and lint build up on the inner rollers of the mouse.  The soundtrack has that "je ne sais quois," that catchy melodic mood that just says Nintendo, in a kind of vein that makes me think of Pilotwings or all the Nintendo Wii menus, Wii shops, Make Mii, and all that jazz.

It's a pity that Nintendo hasn't made a modern update yet, more memory, more saved projects! But for its time, it was a lot of creative fun.  There was just something really cool about making your own pixel sprite stamps, and making an animated feature with a soundtrack out of it.  This is about as close as I've ever gotten to composing my own music... how fun it is to try to recreate the Dragon Ball or Sailor Moon theme using cat meows and dog barks for musical notes!

The fly swatting game single handedly honed my mouse moving skills.  It makes for a cool mini-game distraction, for an otherwise, creative studio.  I really enjoyed seeing what other players made in magazine issues of Nintendo Power.  Good times.

[🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀]

I have messed around with this, but only briefly, and never on original hardware. So I'll refrain from rating it, but at least I've heard of it, unlike Street Racer (are we sure that's a real game?). It's probably one of the first games where the more idiosyncratic side of Nintendo really shows, and it ultimately (in?)directly lead to WarioWare, so I respect it.

[ommadawnyawn2]

As a tool I think the limitations give it a certain charm, and it benefits from there not being much competition on consoles at the time but it was kind of limited even at the time. I'd give it a weak C.

As a game it's more of a D-, I don't think I've spent more than 10 mins on that mini-game.

[windfisch]

Okay, I admit it: I'm having kinda fun:

The Secret of Yoshi Island

Dammit, excelsior, why did you pick this?! I need to get way more important stuff done.

[excelsior]

windfisch - To destroy your productivity of course. Keep up the good work.