SNES Game of the Week 118 - Clock Tower

[spanky]

Tough luck excelsior !

Street Fighter II Turbo is a very important game to me - it's where I learned to love fighting games. Sure, I had played and enjoyed a few fighting games before, but they always seemed so random to me. Combos and even special moves that didn't involve rapidly mashing buttons felt so arcane to me. I played this when it came out and I loved the ability to play as the bosses, as well as being able to play Champion Edition. It's a very good port overall, but it didn't really resonate with me outside of that.

Fast forward to the following summer, my family and I had gone camping for the week. One day while we were in town, I saw a marked down copy of Gamepro's guide for this. My mother let me get it and I spent the rest of the week poring over the guide and made it a point to rent the game as soon as we got home. It's a great guide by the way, walking you through the basics, then in-depth strategies for each character, followed by tips for individual matchups and a guide for each opponent on the highest difficulty. There's even an art section, pretty in-depth preview of Super, the first tier list I had ever seen and an interview with the top ranked Street Fighter player in the US (Tomo Ohira, in case you were wondering). All of a sudden,  the special moves, combos and strategies made sense to me. The world of fighting games suddenly opened up.. I spent years picking apart this version to the game and at one point I could beat it on the hardest difficulty with every character. Out of my friends, there was nobody who could beat me, and I would eagerly hop on any SF machine in the wild and take on all comers. My interest in fighting games has waned a bit recently - I don't have the time to memorize the insanely long combos you see in today's games, nor do I have the stomach for losing 10+ matches in a row online. But I'll play Hyper Fighting any day.

I also prefer it to Super. While Super has more characters and "extras," I prefer how Turbo plays. Not only is it faster, but you can do crazy stuff like cancel Ryu's jumping fierce into an air hurricane kick, or buffer Zangief's SPD out of his turbo clothesline. This is an S, without any question for me.

[Snake]

excelsior I feel your pain!  It hurts to import a game and come across so many complications!

I remember when my friend got SF II Turbo, I'd go over every weekend, and we'd be up till 2:00 AM playing the game with a group of friends, over pizza and rotisserie chicken.
Turbo is reasonable upgrade over the original SF2 and Champion Edition... and an interesting switch up for Chun Li getting a half-baked fireball special.  The addition of all the boss characters and endings really add to replayability.  It was around the release of this game, I started scaling back my visits to the arcades.  Why burn quarters when there is an unlimited home edition?!

Street Fighter II Turbo
Rank - B+

[ommadawnyawn2]

For playing the best out of the SNES SF offerings overall, being the best fighting game on the system and the most important tracks sounding better than in super, it's an easy S.

[excelsior]

• Publisher - Taito
• Developer - Taito
• Genre - Puzzle
• Initial Release - 13 January 1995

Which will burst first: your concentration or the level you're working on?



It takes more than just swinging the bubble-turret and taking aim on the falling ceiling; tactical planning and mental dexterity are the only way to string together three or more bubbles and 100 wins to make it through all the bubble and ego-bursting rounds of Bust-A-Move!

  

  

[excelsior]

A few days early for next weeks entry since I'l away from tomorrow. Don't think we've covered a Taito game yet, so here we go. Like many puzzlers the first edition in the series is a tad redundant due to later entries enhancing the gameplay. I think with Bust-A-Move/Puzzle Bobble there's enough here to still remain enjoyable. The multiplayer is nice fun and there's aa lengthy single player campaign also. Like many old Taito games the soundtrack is pretty one repeating song, but a real earworm.

Ranking - B

[vnisanian2001]

Spent hours with this one as a rental. A.

[spanky]

Very fun twist on the puzzle genre. There's a bunch of sequels but did any of them evolve the formula at all? It's an A.

[dsparil]

This wasn't the specific version I played a lot, but there is so much similarity between all the Puzzle Bobble games; I really don't like the name Bust-A-Move. I had 4, but I spent so much time on whichever NeoGeo version my local laundromat had. At some point it got replace with SNK's clone Puzzle de Pon (maybe it was the sequel R) and that stuck for longer. I ended up preferring Puzzle de Pon in the long run, but Puzzle Bobble is still a solid A.

[Snake]

Bust-A-Move

I definitely prefer the original title of Puzzle Bobble, considering it features Taito's incredibly cute Bubble Bobble characters.  Creatively fun, matching and popping bubbles filled with the original game's enemies.  I played this plenty in the arcade Neo Geo cabinets, and the SNES version does a pretty damn good job of recreating the experience, short of Neo Geo's original sound quality.  As puzzle games go, this series is a go-to for me.

Grade - A

[🧀Son of Suzy Creamcheese🧀]

Street Fighter II Turbo - First of all, nice anecdote, excelsior. I've had some frustrations with playing foreign games, but I can imagine if you tried it when you were young back in the 90's it seems like such a revelation - and then it doesn't work as well as you think. As for the game, it's the SNES SFII I have the most experience with, I think. I'm not the biggest fighting game fan, but I enjoy SFII, so I'm going to give it a B.

Bust-a-Move - Not a version/installment I've played that much, but if memory serves, it's a perfectly fine version. This is one of my favorite puzzle series, I used to play the PSX port of 2 a lot as a kid. I had not heard of Puzzle de Pon, dsparil, but apparentely it's licensed by Taito, so it's a bit of a weird case. I can't think of any other case where gameplay was essentially licensed. Anyway, I'm giving this one an A.

[excelsior]

• Publisher - Malibu
• Developer - Black Pearl
• Genre - Shoot-em-up
• Initial Release - November 1993

Captain Carnage is in charge of your force... all right he is your force. That's right - one man against an entire army! If you need better odds, this isn't your game!



Here's your mission: with your one-man ground force, you must stop a mad dictator bent on destroying the world! Rescue civilians, eliminate key targets, and destroy General Akhboob's bio-nuclear generators, which he's using to create his endless mutant army!



On your side: an awesome arsenal of the 21st century's most destructive weaponry.



On their side: battle zones full of the nastiest mutated enemies and the baddest bosses you'll ever want to see!

  

  

[excelsior]

So, what exactly happened here? We have a follow up to Super Smash TV, yet it rids itself of much of the charm of that game, whilst also moving its gameplay into scrolling arenas, which is poorly executed. The port is handled by different companies entirely. Did even Acclaim pass on this game? I wouldn't blame them. Total Carnage. I don't love it.

Ranking - F

[spanky]

I wouldn't go quite so harsh as an F but yeah this is an underwhelming port of the inferior sequel to Smash TV. The game is even wackier than Smash and for some reason the humor doesn't land for me this time going full on military jingoism in an over the top fantasy retelling of the first Gulf War. The port has some real first gen, western developed jank to it. It is very ugly looking and sounds even worse - fortunately there doesn't seem to be that much slowdown.

The SNES content standards don't help either. The original game has copious amounts of blood and red stuff that have all been turned a slime green. You might think you're playing a game version of Nickelodeon's Super Genocidal Double Dare. In the arcade version, the final boss turns into Hitler briefly and you actually execute him in an electric chair with a spectacular explosion in the end cut scene. In the home port...he doesn't turn into anyone and just goes to jail. Yeehaw.

It's not great but I think the core game is still fun enough to play. It would have made an OK rental back in the day. D.

[dsparil]

I have never in my life even heard of this, but that certainly sounds very strange.

[ommadawnyawn2]

Never played this one based on how fugly it is (might've fired it up quickly in emulation at some point), not feeling too hyped after that F but I guess I'll try it at least.