So, the famous blue blur is 20 years old. Makes me feel younger in a way, since Sonic is the first thing I really remember about being a child, it feels like it’s my 20th birthday too. Meh, who am I kidding? I’m turning into an old fart. Sonic, on the other hand, is looking better than ever, and this title is the final return to full form that has been building now for the past few years.

The turn-around for Sonic came in 2008′s Sonic Unleashed. Moving away from pointlessly complicated storylines, overbearing new characters and glitch-filled gameplay, Unleashed showed us that Sonic could be cool again. It introduced the new standard Sonic gameplay which has been carried through to Sonic Colours, and now Sonic Generations:  apart from that nasty ware-hog business, Unleashed was amazing.

Then came Colours, taking the Unleashed daytime formula and making it even better – with levels designed around an interplanetary theme park, we saw a return to the crazy, colourful level styles of the original Sonic games. Not to mention Wisps, those guys are so cute.

Now we have Sonic Generations – which is the good, the bad, and the rather ugly outings  of the past 20 years rolled into one. On paper this sounds worrying, so, does the game correct the past 10 years of Sonic mistakes?

The answer is, sort of.

The storyline for this game is almost entirely absent, there is a vague plot that runs through the game about the “Time Eater” and whatnot, but there are 12 cutscenes in the entire game, and most of them are short and inconsequential.  In a way I’m a bit disappointed by this, since Sonic Colours had a fairly okay plot, that progressed the story and had lots of humor in it. There is humor in this game too, but there’s so little done in the cutscenes and they’re so few that, really, they feel out of place even being there at all.

The levels themselves are largely great. You play through one level from every major Sonic game, both as “Classic” Sonic (the cute round one) and “Modern” Sonic (The tall retarded one) – Classic plays pretty much 1:1 as he did in Sonic 1 through Sonic & Knuckles, while Modern plays as he did largely in Unleashed, with a few minor tweaks. The actual level designs are largely faithful to the originals with one or two little new bits thrown in, but overall, nothing substantially new here.

There are two main reasons to play this game;

1: Playing classic Sonic levels in awesome 2.5D
2: Playing Dreamcast & Sonic 06 levels with gameplay that isn’t totally fucked.

The further you get into the game, the more recycled things seem to become, with obvious reasons. Playing the classic levels was a total joy and you feel like these levels  have the most effort put into them. The Dreamcast era levels feel like they’ve been upgraded but, since the original versions where 3D already, you can’t help but feel it’s the same stuff presented in a much nicer way. The modern era levels, apart from Crisis City (it was nice to play this one in a less broken way, shame though, just shows Sonic 06 could have been decent) – just feel like harder versions of levels I’ve already played.

A nice touch is the fact that you can unlock music tracks to use in different levels – including remastered and remixed tracks from classic Sonic games. This adds some nice little touches, for example, playing Speed Highway as Classic Sonic with Starlight Zone as the music does feel like you’re playing the latter instead. There’s a few other nice matches in there, i.e. playing Toxic Caves from Sonic Spinball over Chemical Plant or Marble Zone over Crisis City. There’s also a ton of artwork to unlock which is quite a cool thing to have, as it spans the entire 20 year history of Sonic.

Each level comprises of one main act and five side mission acts for each Sonic. There are also rival battles between Metal Sonic, Shadow and Silver. We also have the Red Ring hunt returning from Sonic Colours – but despite all this, I am afraid this game is far, far too short. This game takes, roughly, from putting the disc in to completing everything the game has to offer, one weekend. Compared to Sonic Colours, this game falls completely flat in this department.

Infact, if you removed the nostalgia element from this game, it would be a rather poor outing when compared to Colours, which had far more to see and do. Each level in Colours had it’s own set of red rings to collect, and each level had 6 full acts and a boss to complete. The side acts in Generations are normally quite short, mission based and take place in the same level as Act 1, unlike colours where each act was completely unique and mostly of a decent size. Colours also had the Sonic Simulator for even more fun.

The bosses in this game are also stupendously easy to defeat, even on “hard” mode. The final boss was hard, but only because I was expecting something harder and was trying to figure out what I had to do – imagine my surprise where the aim of the final boss is to just boost, and thats it. Infact it’s completely fucking appalling, and that isn’t a phrase I should be using for this game.

The Good;

• Great graphics and music
• Great levels to play
• Gameplay is spot on in main levels

Tbe Bad;

• Storyline isn’t very in-depth
• Cut scenes are rather badly rendered
• Game is very short, takes no time at all to 100% it

The Ugly;

• Shockingly easy boss battles
• No real love or attention to the menu system compared to colours
• Online play is rather basic and suffering from the usual leaderboard hacking rendering it worthless.

Yeah, it’d be unfair for me to say I’m totally disappointed in this game, it does bring joy to the 5 year old who played the Classics, and the 15 year old who had a Dreamcast, and it brings some closure to the disturbed 20 year old who was forced to suffer through Bestiality and Silver the Hedgehog a couple years back. I’d be lying, however, if I said I didn’t expect more. This game is over far too soon, it leaves you wanting for more. God, I hope there’s more. I hope there’s some cracking DLC levels coming out for this in the future.

Sadly, however, I doubt this will be the case. Shame.

Today we’re looking at The Oregon Trail, Third Edition for Windows 95 Pentium PC and Macintosh Power PC. I first played this game in 1997, on what was then my state of the art Windows 95 machine with 133mhz processor, 16mb of ram and a 4GB Hard Drive. The fact that my wristwatch beats these specifications today however should not detract from one important fact; at the time, the graphics on this game were the shit. And by that I mean, shit.

The box for this game makes many bold claims. “Top Selling”, “Used in Schools”, and, most interesting of all, “Internet Linked”. The internet was just starting to become a household thing, but online play and interactive applications were still in their infancy.

The Oregon Trail 3rd edition was no exception, however, since all it really did was create a shortcut in the Start Menu to a website, the contents of which have long since been washed away by the tides of Internet change and are to be anybody’s guess.

So, after installing from the 3 CD-roms (Yah. Why this game is 1.6GB in size is anybody’s guess. DVD’s didn’t exist at the time.), the game proper begins. We start out picking our team of five intrepid explorers to join us on this quest to Oregon City.

This basically just involved creating five people with rude names. There was no real skill to the selection, no special abilities or powerups, merely a choice of name. Cockface, Dickhead, Arsewipe, Buttplug and Jane however, are missing one thing. Supplies, of course!

Any game worth it’s salt needs a shop to buy upgrades, items and junk from, and this game is no exception. The EMH from Star Trek Voyager seems to run the ”general store” at the start of the game, which makes me wonder from the offset weather this is just a holographic simulation.

All manner of interesting items could be purchased from the Doc, including, but by no means limited to, the 5 month package, and the 6 month package. The contents of these packages remain a mystery, but supposedly they contain “basic supplies for the size of your party and the trip you’re travelling on.” I wish my local Co-Op was that comprehensive.

Oh, and for those who like a challenge, you can opt to “No Thanks” and attempt the trip without any supplies whatsoever. Clever.

So, now we have our band of intrepid explorers, miscellaneous supplies, Large Farmwagon, and four random Oxen that appeared from nowhere, we’re ready to set off on our trek across America. The game promises “human drama” which unfolds with events such as “dust storms”, “thirst”, “bartering” and “cholera”.

Say what you want about Modern Warfare 2, it just isn’t in the same league without a cholera feature.

One of the first obsticals to overcome is a river. There are several techniques to this, which including caulking the wagon and trying to float across, waiting for a ferry, attempting to traverse the shallow parts, or just praying that oxen make good life-rafts. This part of the game is generally quite annoying, since the ferry option is usually too expensive and your team die of starvation due to spoilage and dysentery before it arrives. Caulking the wagon is your best bet, and the only real option, however 90% of the time this fails and you’re greated with several messages telling you Cockface, Dickhead, Arsewipe, Buttplug, Jane, Danny, and Four Oxen have died.

Should you be lucky enough to get across the river, you’re ready to go hunting! That’s right, this game promotes to young children the need to mame and slaughter young animals for food with a shotgun. To be honest this is a bit more like Duck Hunt than a hunting simulator, as rather unconvincing sprites of lions, deer, birds and so forth move across the screen. As the difficulty increases, the animals move quicker and quicker until they’re so ungodly fast that it looks like the animal kingdom’s version of an acid party.

Still, what food you do gain is quickly lost to spoilage anyway, and things like broken axles, food poisoning, thives, drowning, broken legs etc. serve to make this game unrealistically difficult to complete for anyone, nevermind someone “Age 10+”.  Ultimately this leads to the untimely deaths of your crew to various forms of illness, the most popular of these being;

• Dysentery
• Typhoid
• Cholera
• Exhaustion
• Measals
• Snake Bite
• John Cena Championship Match

A funeral is then held for the poor dearly departed, until eventually there’s nobody left to bury you. Strangely, you always seem to be the last one to die. Misfortune clearly being on your side, dying lonely and from the shits in the middle of the American desert.

I’m not entirely sure what happens if you make it to Oregon. I’m not entire convinced you can make it to Oregon. I did manage to get to a random fort once, where I discovered, to my amazement, that the Holographic Doctor had somehow beaten me there.

This game is actually kinda fun though, and of course, it launched a thousand T-Shirts. Which is always cool.

DANNY’S RETRO RATING:

The first thing to note about the TV series of Geordie Racer, is that it’s almost impossible to understand what any of the characters are bloody saying. Trying to decypher the random dialect of Geordie people is nearly impossible, so to save the embarassment of trying, we’ll just assume for the rest of this review that the programme is filmed in a forigen language, and subtitles are required to fully appreciate the plot.

Oh, and what a plot it is. Setting the scene of Geordie Racer, the townspeople are currently 50/50 split obsessed with one of two things, either, the Great North Run, or the Great Pigeon Race. Now the reason for this, I can only assume, is that half of Newcastle is stupid enough to run through the North of England, and the other half are stupid enough to try and get a pigeon to do it for them.

The main protagonist is named Spuggy Hilton, a name that has all sorts of dodgy connotations throughout the series, the many references to “Spuggy in his bird, like” – which is Geordie for “Kevin is with his pigeon” – well, the sexual inuendos speak for themselves really. Anyway, Spuggy is the only person in his family who takes an interest in the Pigeon race. The rest of his family are nutters obsessed with long distance marathon running, and the thought of “The Great North Run” is making them “spuggy” in their pants.

As a keen Pigeon fancier, Spuggy (or the Spugmiester as I shall now call him), manages to aquire a pigeon all of his own, named “Blue Flash” – one of the best birds in Newcastle. Then some random bitch called Janie turns up, and along with the Spugmiester witness a spate of local art robberies, (I know, it’s hard to figure out what the fuck is going on at this point). Just how Bonnie and Clyde here managed to witness several acts of people stealing paintings, and what that has to do with racing people OR pigeons, ugh, I don’t know anymore.

The fact they had to witness these people stealing paintings on THREE seperate occasions to cotton on to the fact they were stealing them speaks volumes.

So rather than call the police, like most sane people, they decide to go and spy on the crooks themselves, using their pigeon and other stupendously dangerous methods. This is such a good message to give out to kids, isn’t it? I really gave up trying to decypher the plot at this point so you’re just going to have to make up how this thing ends in your own head.

BUT WAIT, there was more to Geordie Racer than a bad television show. That’s right, there was GEORDIE RACER, THE GAME, FOR THE BBC MICROCOMPUTER.

The game was released on a 5 1/2 inch floppy disk, you know, the kind that actually flopped and took ten minutes to load, the video game version of Geordie Racer actually was kinda cool, but purely because it beat the endless handwriting and Italian lessions that my primary school forced upon us.

The BBC Microcomputer had the graphics of the old style Teletext, and this is pretty much what this game offers. After a very badly rendered title screen with one-bit rendition of the theme tune, players are treated to the main game, which consists of…. “Part 1″ and “Part 2″.

Comprehensive.

After selecting one of these, you can choose to go to a “Metro station”, which is funny, because Newcastle-upon-Tyne has no form of underground or overground tram system. It barely has bus routes. It’s also funny how this tram system conveniently has stations named “Home”, “Shoe Shop”, “Chemist”, “Bank”, etc. – I sure wish that the GMPTE would build me a tram system that only went to the places I went too!

After you visit the bank to get “£20″, the chemist to get “Foot Cream” and the “Shoe Shop” to get shoes, you can start the race. This involves answering questions, each one you get right progresses you 1 mile, each one you get wrong earns you a blister. Too many blisters and you’re out!

The questions are basically asking about things that happened in the TV show, so without watching it, you’re pretty stuffed to actually complete this game, and as such, I have now eaten the floppy disk.

Well, that was painful. Time to tally up.

Danny’s Retro Rating:

First up, as per the title, David Bellamy’s Endagered Wildlife, for Windows 3.11, 95, and Macintosh Whatevercrapitwastheyhadthen.

For those not familliar with David Bellamy, he is a large bearded man who, for many years, fronted some namby-pamby shows on the TV about pandas. He later went on to do these very disturbing advertisements about Dettox disinfectant. Of course, with the Bellamy bandwagon at full roll, a video game release was inevitable.

Now the first thing to mention about this game is that, rather unpredictably, David Bellamy has absaloutely feck all to do with it. His voice, photograph, not even his name appears at any point except on the Compact Disc cover. This is, of course, something of a major dissapointment.

The plot opens up with a poor quality video of a pod crashing in what looks to be the surface of Mars. Then a video message is beamed into your brain, of two really cheesy actors in bad Star Trek costumes. They claim to have come from the future using some mumbo-jumbo technology, and have come back in time to warn us that the Pandas are all dead in the future.

Oh fucking n0es! – it’s now your job to meddle with the timeline and save all the forest-life from extinction. Now, to acomplish this task, you have to partake in one giant wordsearch puzzle for each endagered species that requires rescue. Now call me crazy, but, I’m not entirely sure what they hope to accomplish there. Now if we could sort Afghanistan out by doing a wordsearch and some really stupid mini-games, then the world would be a far better place.

Along the way you have to partake in various wordsearches, jigsaw puzzles, and watch various video clips of monkies randomly eating Bamboo. Once you’ve completed each puzzle, you move onto the next animal until eventually Bill and Ben pop back up on the viewscreen and say “cheers”. They then fuck off back too the future without so much as offering a cup of tea for your efforts.

Overall then, this game is severly lacking in any real substance. Duke Nukem it is not, with it’s cheesy MIDI soundtrack and total misrepresentation on the front cover, this game is bound to bring hours of sheer boredom too any household.

My grandparents love this game, by the way.

Danny’s Retro Rating: