The Videogame Solipsist: 16 bit Halloween Edition

(Note: again, I'm not going over every horror/monster game on the Genesis and SNES...just the ones I've played)Splatterhouse 3 (Genesis)

While Splatterhouse is a series that can look forward to a rebirth during this console generation, I'll always think of it as a 16 bit series. Something about the gameplay and 'feel' of the game just won't translate well to a modern console experience, but whatever. Splatterhouse 3 is interesting because, even though your character is pretty strong, the game is still creepy and scary. The cut scenes--featuring pretty realistic looking pictures--are scary, and I've always hated the fight against the possessed teddy bear after your son is kidnapped. Perhaps the most memorable thing about Splatterhouse 3 is how difficult it is. The game operates on a time limit, so you either end up rushing through levels and dying or you keep getting bad cut scenes and outright losing because you didn't get somewhere in time. At the same time, the controls are awful and clunky. Still, Splatterhouse 3 is notable for somehow combining the beat-em-up and survival horror genres.

Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts (SNES)

Speaking of difficult games...perhaps all most people know about this series is how damn hard the games are. Unlike Splatterhouse 3, though, the difficulty never comes from bad game design or poor controls. No, it's just a tough son-of-a-bitch of a game in which you can't make mistakes. Overcoming the obstacles and perfecting the timing required to progress is oddly rewarding, albeit useless, sorta like teaching yourself to write with your feet. Anyway, despite having demonic enemies and classic horror monsters (zombies, skeletons, etc.) Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts is more cartoony than the Castlevania series. But that's ok, because it's not supposed to be scary. It's just a legendarily hard game with great looking 2D graphics and a horror theme.

Super Metroid (SNES)

Though neither a horror game nor a monster game, Super Metroid still fits into the gray area of games that correspond to both horror and monsters. This is largely because of the fairly obvious influence of the Alien franchise on the Metroid games, giving them--Super Metroid, in particular--a creepy atmosphere. There's a pervasive sense of loneliness throughout the game, and while there are no 'scares' or terrifying things, per se, Super Metroid has always felt creepy to me. Exploring an alien planet, even empowered as you are with a power suit, is a bit unnerving at times, reminding one of the scene in the first Alien where they explore the derelict ship. All Halloween business aside, Super Metroid is somewhere in my top ten games ever, and if you haven't played it yet, you really owe it to yourself to do so. It's that good.

Alien 3 (Genesis)

Speaking of Alien...I didn't know until years later, but the Genesis and SNES versions of Alien 3 are different. Both have a similar sidescrolling shooter gameplay style, but the Genesis version is primarily concerned with you rescuing prisoners before the timer runs out and chestbursters rip out of them. This led to a bizarre situation in which, the first time you played a level, you would let everyone die so you could see where they were and thus plot a fast course to get to them all on time. Stranger still, the game is a convoluted mix of Aliens and Alien 3, such that you're still on the prison planet playing as a bald Ripley, as in Alien 3, but there are a ton of aliens and you have weapons from Aliens. I never got very far in this game and if I recall correctly the mechanics were a bit off. Ah well, it's still better than...

Alien Vs. Predator (SNES)

...Alien Vs. Predator for the SNES, which ostensibly was supposed to be a port of the awesome mid 90s arcade beat-em-up by Capcom but instead was a single player only piece of shit. It wasn't anything like the arcade game at all and was just a bad all around, making the Predator into a weak and awkward pile of garbage. On a side note, I've always wondered why sometimes the Alien and Predator crossovers are called 'Alien Vs. Predator' while others are called 'Aliens Vs. Predator.' There's never any consistency and it doesn't make sense because all of the ones with the singular 'Alien' have more than one Alien in them, not to mention most of them have more than one Predator. But, whatever. The SNES game is a pale, barely perceptible shadow of the Arcade version, which you may as well pirate because it'll never see another release due to licensing issues.

Castlevania: Bloodlines (Genesis)

I think there was a rule during the 16 bit era that companies would make what were NES/mostly-thought-of-as-Nintendo-franchise games for the Genesis, but they would be really freaking hard. Contra: Hard Corps. is virtually unplayable because it's so damn difficult, while Contra III on SNES is just 'typical Contra' hard. Meawhile, Castlevania: Bloodlines is ridiculously hard while Super Castlevania IV on SNES is just 'typical Castlevania' difficult. Maybe it's got something to do with roman numerals?? Well, in any case, Bloodlines is actually a really fun sidescroller which allows you to choose between two different characters (whip-y McBelmont or spear-y McWhat'shisname) and has, for its time and native platform, some incredible graphics and animation. I have to confess that I haven't played this one for years, so maybe I'm wrong about the difficulty, but I was way better at, and more patient with, 'hard' games as a kid, so if anything it's probably gotten worse. (Note: I never played Super Castlevania IV until about two years ago, so I won't be talking about it)

Haunting Starring Polterguy (Genesis)

Haunting is a game that I wish more people had played. It's actually a pretty novel concept: you play as the titular 'Polterguy', possessing objects in a house to try to scare a family out of it. Shades of Beetlejuice, no?? This game is actually really fun and creative, since most (if not all) of the objects do something unique to scare the family. You are limited by some kind of energy meter so the game is actually a puzzle game more than anything insofar as you have to figure out the fastest and most efficient way to get rid of the family. This 'possession' concept has been used in a few games since (off the top of my head, Geist for Gamecube uses it, although in different ways) but never as well.

King of the Monsters (Genesis)

I'd be hard pressed to come up with a game that appealed more to me, specifically the mid 90s version of me that was hugely into both Godzilla films and videogames. King of the Monsters may have been a bit of a counterfeit fulfillment of my dream for a decent Godzilla game, since the monsters within are generic versions of Godzilla and his foes, but I didn't care. You can't go wrong with a game that lets you play as giant monsters who trash cities and fight other giant monsters in the process. The game even rates you based on your destruction!! King of the Monsters is a fun-if-simplistic fighting game, and the kind of thing you play and never get very far in but don't care. Oddly, most of the modern day Godzilla games (specifically, Destroy All Monsters Melee) are essentially 3D versions of the King of the Monsters series.

The Videogame Solipsist: Dreamcast

September 9, 1999 was one of those weird numerical dates in history. It seemed ripe for people putting more significance into it than they should--9 is a powerful number, after all, and if I knew anything about Numerology I could probably list off a bunch of "facts" about it. Anyway, the main thing I remember about the date is that MTV was having some kind of awards show (they were whores for the "9/9/99" thing) and the Sega Dreamcast was launching in North America. I think that just speaks to everything that made the Dreamcast unique. Who launches consoles in September, let alone on a unique numerical date??

With a remove of less than a decade, it's easy to get nostalgic and lovey-dovey about the Dreamcast. However, we forget how sketchy the whole thing was when it first came out. Sega had given up on the Saturn in the U.S. by 1998, ironically a time when most of its best games were coming out here. By the end of 1998, it had been released in Japan, and we were teased for nearly a year with the amazing screenshots pouring out of that country. Still, we were very hesitant to buy in to the Dreamcast, after having been confused or burned by the 32X, Sega CD, and Saturn.

So, while I wanted to point out that we had no reason to expect the Dreamcast would be good, in the end I, and many others, were proved wrong. Looking at the games list, the Dreamcast had utter classics in almost every genre, as well as doing things ahead of its time: the VMU memory cards, online multiplayer on a console, first console to support mouse and keyboard, and the first console to use voice chat via a microphone.

I didn't get a Dreamcast until around the time the Playstation 2 was launching. I remember there being this weird time where, in the holiday of 2000, I was concurrently playing Grandia II on my Dreamcast and Final Fantasy IX on my Playstation, and I got way more into Grandia II than I did FFIX, and it didn't make any sense to me. It may have been excitement about having a new console, but Grandia II had voices, which was something I hadn't seen in a RPG before, at least on console. At the same time, there were already a ton of great Dreamcast games to pick up, too: Power Stone 2, Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, Virtua Tennis, Soul Calibur, Resident Evil: Code Veronica...I think if you look at the list of Dreamcast games that were released, you'll be shocked how many games you forgot and how many were released in 1999 or 2000.

This is to say nothing of 2001, which was simultaneously the peak and the beginning of the end for the Dreamcast. Let's start with the peak: Phantasy Star Online. It's the one game that immediately jumps to my mind as being what the Dreamcast was all about. I will never forget buying this game with some leftover holiday money, coming home, and getting lost in it for the rest of the day. Other than Diablo 1 and 2, I had never experienced anything like this. It was a dungeon crawler like that series, but with a Japanese RPG style and an amazing idea: free online play across regions. You could play with people across the world on it, and the game even had an innovative chat system that used symbols and a mechanic that allowed you to build sentences out of pieces that the game would translate across languages. For instance, you could make a macro that said "Help" or "Hello" or "Follow Me" and it would show up, properly, in whatever language the other people in your game were using. My fondest memory of this game was fighting a boss with three other people, one of whom was either French or French Canadian. Three of us died in the battle, and watched the last guy somehow manage to defeat the boss on his own while we cheered via the simple, translated phrases.

The writing was on the wall for the Dreamcast, however. The Playstation 2 simply commanded too much attention, and with its ability to cheaply play DVDs, it was hard to ignore for long. The games may not have been there, but by the end of 2001, they were. Things kept looking better and better for Sony while they got worse and worse for Sega. Microsoft had announced their entry into the videogames market with the Xbox, a system that largely felt like their take on the Dreamcast idea. Meanwhile, Nintendo announced the Gamecube, which promised to improve on many of the errors made during the N64 era. February 2002 saw the last official Dreamcast game in the U.S., NHL 2K2. Though the Dreamcast had a relatively healthy lifespan in Japan (like its predecessor, the Saturn) it barely lasted three years in the U.S. and effectively ruined Sega as a hardware brand. It would be their last system ever, though rumors pop up at least once a year that the company may step back in. However unlikely this is, with the increasing nostalgia and love for the Dreamcast, it may actually work the next time...

The Videogame Solipsist: Genesis

I forgot the thing originally had a headphone jack...

Today is my birthday. I'm 24 years old, and it's occurred to me that the 16 bit era was probably the happiest time of my life. The era began, roughly, when I entered first grade and ended sometime around when I was in middle school, so the SNES and--especially--the Sega Genesis are irrevocably tied up with the happiest of times. I also tend to be a 16 bit fundamentalist because I think the early to mid 90s were the golden era of videogames, both on PC and console.

Anyway, it's my birthday and I want to talk about the Sega Genesis. Which my sister and I actually got for Easter. I know, right?? It was strange. Sometime during the NES era we began to see and hear about the Sega Genesis. For whatever reason, we didn't want a SNES. Mostly, I think, the Genesis had a lot of games we wanted. A neighbor came over and hooked up his Genesis and we were completely blown away by the first Sonic game. Once we saw the other games for the system in Toys R' Us (for that was videogame mecca for children at the time), especially Streets of Rage 2 and Golden Axe 2, my sister and I begged our parents to get it for us. So, instead of any Easter candy, we got a Genesis. It must've been Easter of '92, because by then Sonic 1 was a pack-in with the system.

Looking back on it now, owning a Genesis was when I became a serious gamer. During the NES era, nobody really thought in those terms because everybody had the fucking thing. Sometimes you would go to clean your chimney and you'd find three NES's inside, black with soot. But during the Genesis era, I was a bit older and a bit nerdier, and I became what the kids today call "hardcore." I had a subscription to the Sega Visions magazine and would look forward to releases, sometimes even knowing their release date and going to find them on said day. All of my friends made the move to Genesis, and it's now I pause to emphasize the significance of the name. For the U.S., this was the beginning of Sega. I had a friend who owned a Master Sytem, but he was a bit off, and hid the thing under his bed in shame. Sadly, Sega would squander all momentum they had built up with the Genesis, so in the end I guess the name the rest of the world knows the system as (Mega Drive) was a bit more apropos.

My fondest memories of the Genesis are easily the Shining Force games and playing various games co-operatively with friends and my sister. I used to rent Sega games based on how cool they looked on the boxart and screenshots on the back, so Shining Force II fell unto my lap during 1994. My friend Dave and I latched unto this game like addicts, and between the two of us we probably paid for it in rental fees. It remains my favorite strategy RPG because I love the way Camelot designs interfaces, and I think they hit the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity in the gameplay/battle system department. One of my best memories is going to some mall in another part of Ohio for a flower show for my Mom and begging her to buy me the first Shining Force for $35. That seemed like so much money at the time, but I had never seen it for sale anywhere, so...

I digress.

Playing Genesis with friends seemed like a huge deal. It was a moment of pride to show off a new game to friends, either playing together or passing the controller around. General Chaos was probably our favorite because, at the time, we were all military fanatics. However, Genesis was also the last time my Sister ever devoted time to videogames. We routinely kicked ass in Streets of Rage 2 and Golden Axe 2 together, though she had to be the cliche and always play as the girl character.


Toward the end of the Genesis's lifespawn, you got the feeling that Sega had lost their fucking minds. The Sega CD seemed cool, but it was so damn expensive your parents would never spend that much on an add-on for a console that was perfectly fine on its own. I never knew anyone who had it, and the only game I've ever played for it was some shitty Dracula FMV adventure game that my friend Dave bought years later with the system, all under the intention of eventually getting Shining Force CD. As for the 32X, well, I actually played a few games for it, but that was always on the demo station at one of the videostores. It was just another expensive add-on my parents would never go for, and what made it worse was that by the time I might have convinced them to get it for me, a combination of wanting a SNES for Chrono Trigger and the announcement of the Saturn effectively killed any small interest I had in the 32X.

So it goes.