#7 SUPER THUNDER BLADE

Never judge a game by its clam shell. This is some deceptively cool looking box art. 

 The depressing black and white mess of a title screen is a much better depiction of what you are about to experince. 

If this continues much longer you’re going to start to wonder why I claimed I love the Genesis so much. I promise you though it gets better and we are almost out of the woods. This is, thank God, our last launch title. Wikipedia if you change the lineup one more time I swear to God I will kill you and your whole family, which I imagine includes about.com. It feels like I am earning the right to play games I actually enjoy, especially as many of my favorites and games I’ve always wanted to try come later in the Genesis life span. The further down the line we go the more games I like will pop up. But I have suffered plenty and the next few games we review are going to be good ones – or at least I am going to try my very best to pick them that way.

But right now we have no choice but to look at one of my most hated games of all time. You don’t even need to read further, I wouldn’t blame you. Super Thunder Blade is absolute dismal crap. This is the most annoying gnat that ever had the audacity to call itself a game I have ever played. I know what you’re thinking. It looks like Space Harrier. Space Harrier is best game of the century compared to this abomination.

Everything I said was wrong with space harrier is increased about two-hundred fold. The lack of animation frames that make bullets and obstacles impossible to dodge, the repetitive flying in a circle, it’s all here and then some. You now also get really bad controls likely meant to guise as realism, the worst level designs I’ve ever seen, and a broken version of a vertical shmup mixed in.

Helicopters are a big effing deal in the 90s. I’m not totally sure why this is but we definitely had a love affair with them. You’ve never seen to many helicopter games as you will see in the 16-bit era. I certainly haven’t seen any sense. When was the last time a helicopter themed game was even released on a console? This generation? I don’t think so. If it was it sure as hell was not popular. But we got tons of them on the Genesis and Super Nintendo and a lot of them were actually really good! I can think of four off the top of my head right now that were great fun. But this game is truly unplayable.

Just fly in circles, shoot, and pray. Thats it. Fifty bucks please. 

Like Space Harrier Super Thunder Blade is a rail shooter and the two games appear to be running on the same engine. Super Thunder Blade just has dismal controls, stupid features, and terrible level design. The controls feel delayed; every move you make is slow and clumsy. I think what they wanted to do is make it feel like what they imagined flying a real helicopter was like. This would be fine in other games but this isn’t a realistic game! You’re shooting down F-14’s and giant sci-fi battle tanks the size of sky scrapers! There isn’t anything realistic about it so this doesn’t add to the suspension of disbelief it’s just annoying.

Space Harrier had tight controls and even it got annoying when it came to obstacles because of the frame rate. Well, the frame rate is now just as bad if not worse only the controls are also terrible and the obstacles take up much larger portions of the screen.

There is no strategy to the shooting what so ever. When you fire, every few machine gun blasts also shoots off a homing missile. As long as you don’t get shot yourself things in front of you will always be shot down, there is no reason at all to line up your shots.

You'd better get used to seeing this image because you'll be looking at the broken fragments of your chopper a lot. 

The result of all this is a game where it feels like your spinal cord has been severed from your brain. You don’t actually feel like you are playing anything. Whatever happens on the screen, be it a victory or a defeat, does not seem to have any real solid connection to what you are doing with the controller.

And then there are the vertical levels. My God. Half way through each stage it turns into a vertical shooter. Only get this – you can only move from side to side. The chopper stays fixed to the bottom of the screen. It is also supposed to be hitting ground targets and they wanted it to look like the nose of the chopper is pointing diagonally towards the ground. What this actually translates to is a shooter where you cannot move up and down the scrolling screen and your shot only goes out about the length of your ship’s body. How could they have made so many bad decisions? There is no excuse for this! It’s not even technical limitations at play in these levels, the designers actually consciously choose these decisions and thought they were good ideas!

I sincerely want to know what made them think this was a fun addition. 

This super scaler stuff (the tech behind games like space harrier and thunder blade) does not seem to be fairing very well on this console so far. The whole time I was forcing my way through this mess I kept thinking of the poor Japanese, whose only launch titles were this and Space Harrier II. No Altered Beast. No Thunder Force. Can you imagine? Abysmal Crap and slightly less annoying crap. No wonder the Mega Drive would never do as well there as here; it had its poor legs broken right from the start.

Well it’s over. We’ve finally made it out of the launch titles which mean I now have a lot more choices about what to play next. It wasn’t the greatest launch and even the good games were a pale shadow compared to what was to come. Altered Beast remains my favorite of the bunch but it gets better. Much better. We now move into the rest of 1989. The weeks and months following launch day would see the Genesis start to establish a more solid and diverse library of games. It’s going to be an exciting time and the journey is only just beginning! The launch titles are merely the threshold out the door into the world of Sega Ages! 

#6 TOMMY LASORDA BASEBALL

I...Thats a nose. Also The baseball is as big as his head, which itself is as big as Godzilla. 

Big batter sprites are a cool feature, but check out the ghostly vistage of the catcher. Nothing in the rules says dead guys can't play baseball. 

Well kids it was bound to happen eventually. I knew that sooner or later I’d have no choice but to review a sports game.

It isn't that sports games are bad or pointless. But there are two things about them that make them a potential hurdle for this project. The first is, get this, ready to have your mind blown? Their target audience is people who like sports. Can you imagine? Now I don’t dislike sports. At best I’d say I’m mostly indifferent to sports. Particularly team sports, spectator sports. Watching other people exercise has rarely held interest for me. I do have some interest in hockey and boxing but even those I’ve never managed to follow for any length of time.

Be that as it may this project is all about personal growth through classic gaming. I am very much hoping to find many sports games I enjoy and maybe even discover a passion for some sports I didn’t know I had. It’s worth looking at it optimistically like this because god knows there are enough sports titles on every console ever made. I want to try actually mastering some of these sports games…..But I won’t be mastering Tommy Lasorda Baseball. And I would be willing to bet cold hard cash, neither will you.

My current theory is that Tommy Lasorda Baseball is a government artificial intelligence project gone haywire that has infiltrated the public through a Sega Genesis game cartridge. If I had to sum up basically all of my complaints about this title it boils down to an unstoppable CPU rendering the game damn near unplayable.

OR

I suck.

Honestly either one is likely. I really could suck that bad. But I think my story still holds some water because I have played Genesis era baseball games before where I didn't suck with quite this much suckatude. I don’t know all that much about baseball statistics but I’m pretty sure I had picked the best possible team. To start with I wanted to put the game on easy and set the computer up with the worst team for an exhibition match so I could learn how the game was played. 15-0. That was the final score. The CPU never swings on a ball. They never fail to hit. I got two strikes, non-consecutively, the entire game. The few hits I managed to get in never resulted in anything more than a base run and 90% of the time, not an exaggeration, the CPU always caught the ball for an instant out. It was a baseball Armageddon. I was slaughtered. I’d have picked up my ball and went home but after that game, I didn’t have any balls left.

The game isn’t “hard”. When I say a game is hard, even “too hard” I mean its got a steep level of challenge. Its like doing complex algebra without a calculator. This game isn’t hard its not playable.

I’d be curious perhaps to revisit this one to see if playing a multiplayer game is a better experience. I’d imagine so. The presentation is actually rather nice and arcade like. I especially enjoy how the ball increases in size on the overhead view, as it flies up towards the birds eye camera. It’s a bit odd how the pitching and batting work, with your player sliding all over the place to line up with the ball or position for a strike. I suppose though this was still a time for a lot of experimentation with this dynamic of the sport, the physical application of which is hard to translate into video game form.

But this is still an awesome effect. 

It is also worth noting that this is our first example of Sega’s famous marketing strategy of celebrity endorsements. This led me to research a bit about Lasorda who I knew nothing about – again not being a baseball guy. Even as a non-baseball aficionado it was an impressive career to read about. I kind of feel like this game doesn’t do him any justice. He was playing for the Dodgers while there were still Nazi’s in Europe for Pete’s sake!

The Dodger’s, the team for which most of his acclimates are accredited, does not actually make an appearance in this game. No MLB team does. This tended to happen a lot as those official licenses are often expensive to come by.

It’s hard to say if I gave Tommy Lasorda Baseball a fair chance or not. I met all my personal requirements for a game but it certainly had more to look into. It is the first example we have hit of a game running on a password system, a common feature to replace less than reliable battery backup, and had lots of stat based features that I didn’t really bother checking out. The reason for this is simple – if the single player campaign is unplayable than there really isn’t an additional mode in the world that can fix the title. It’s a bit disappointing because the game has decent presentation and may even be fun on a two player setting….But there are other baseball games that offer presentation, good multiplayer, and great single player. Most fans who aren’t collecting everything out right will likely be better off going with a later baseball title.