Athena - Athena's Wonderland

by: Aron Deppert

It is my pleasure to present to you this week's game: "Athena - Athena's Wonder Land". I am also pleased to inform you that neither the game, nor the promotional flier pictured to the left is a joke.

SNK, the makers of the classic "Metal Slug" series, released this as an arcade platformer in 1986. Sometime later in 1987 it was ported to the NES. I just can't figure out exactly why it was made in the first place, let alone released on home consoles.

You play as Athena, who was the Greek goddess of Wisdom and Defensive Warfare. She looks really wise in the red bikini, doesn't she? As was popular at the time, there is really no explanation for what you are doing. You just start out in some brick room, jump in the center, then POW!...you're in the first level: "The World of Forest".

You begin the game much like Athena does in the flier--scantily clad, except unarmed. The first bad guy you encounter is a man with a pig head, who we'll just call Piggies from now on. Once you kick and punch him into submission, you can steal his weapon, which I will refer to as THE LOLLIPOP OF DOOM!





Bashing Piggies with candy never felt so good...and so right!

I died about twelve times before I realized that you could break apart the blocks of dirt in the level to reveal things like armor, weapons, and sacks that for some reason or another awarded you points. I was overjoyed once I was in my full suit of armor! No longer did the Piggies, or the stronger Horsies I encountered later on, kill me in one or two shots. I now felt like a goddess and was just nearly invincible! Mind you, I said nearly. One main drawback I found to Athena was there was no checkpoint system, and no way to refill your health except for to slay this one enemy that looked kind of like an eel walking on land. I only saw one of them during my time in Athena's Wonder Land.

I can't help but feel SNK was a little too ambitious with the amount of sprites they thought the NES would be able to handle at one time. There was a point when I was nearly overwhelmed with Horsies and Piggies, and the system slowed to a grinding pace and everything became pixilated. I had a hard time understanding why this was happening, because no other game I played ever did this on my NES and they had more than four colors.

NES computing power at its finest.

I'm glad I hung on through my 12 game over screens, because once I found all of Athena's armor I kind of had a good time. Enemies were very predictable, and with the helmet, chest piece, boots, and shield, they had a hard time dispatching Athena from her Wonder Land. I even made it through the first boss, which was some really awesome looking octopus tree thingy that threw um....Pepto Bismol orbs at me?

Your indigestion medicine is no match for the goddess Athena! Rawr!

I couldn't help laugh when I learned that 14 years after her appearance in Wonderland, Athena appeared in SNK's King of Fighters 2000 game (they even kept her purple hair), and was a mini-boss in the SNK vs. Capcom game. I guess it was silly of me to think a crazy dye job and a red string bikini wouldn't carry a woman far in life!

Image credits: Screenshot, and en.wikipedia.org

Just in time for Valentine's Day - Chubby Cherub

by: Aron Deppert
Chubby Cherub was released in the United States in 1986 by Bandai on the NES. It had been released in Japan a year earlier under the name “Q-taro the Ghost: Bow Wow Panic”. The main character of the game was from a manga series in Japan and apparently the localization team didn’t think Americans could handle it, thus Chubby Cherub was born. Even though he looks like Cupid, this is a cherub of a different sort. Instead of making people love each other, his love can destroy small animals!

That's the true power of love -- killing puppies!

It seems that someone or something has taken the little cherub’s friends and stashed them in buildings, though I am only speculating this since the game makes no effort to relay the story line to you at all. The only things standing in our protagonist’s way are…DOGS! They bark at the cupid-looking fellow and send little icons with the letter B on them flying across the screen. If you touch even one of these bark icons, then BAM – you’ve got one dead cherub on your hands. Thankfully, the people at Bandai didn’t leave the cute guy defenseless; if you eat enough junk food, you can shoot little peachy colored hearts at the mean poochies. Lollipops give you ammo for your love ray, and the rest of the nutritionally devoid food powers your flight meter. The lollipops were so few and far between, so it was really essential to keep the flight meter full so I could fly around the dogs.

Ahhh...it's killer b's!

Though this game is very cute, the difficulty was extremely high. The dogs that barked at you often sent their icons out like a machine gun, and jumped erratically to seemingly random places which made them next to impossible to avoid. It only took one hit to send the heavenly hero to his grave (do cherubs die?) and when you came back, you were out of juice for your love beam. The flying meter is constantly depleting itself, which means that aside from dodging rapid fire barks, you need to constantly be eating food. Wonder why he’s such a chubby cherub? I was only able to make it to the end of the first stage once, and there are twelve total, so I think a good amount of cursing and frustration would be spent on this game if I decided to try to defeat it.

In a nutshell, I would suggest making your own love this Valentine’s day and not relying on the help of a flying naked baby with an eating disorder.

Image Credit: Screenshot, and en.wikipedia.org

Sega presents Michael Jackson's Moonwalker

by: Aron Deppert
Of all the movies to make a video game from, Moonwalker was the last one I thought I’d ever hear of. Believe it or not, Sega did it in the form of “Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker”. It is an Arcade-style that was released August 24th, 1990.

I know what you’re thinking: “This is some stupid joke, right? No one would be dumb enough to make a Michael Jackson video game.” It is my sad duty to inform you that not only does this game exist, but it’s also a little fun. Following a story loosely based on the Moonwalker movie, you progress through each stage collecting blonde-haired children (they replenish your health when you snatch them!) and battling thugs and henchmen by using your “dance magic”. The most basic attack involves a kick of the foot or flick of the hand which sends sparkles shooting out. Bad guys fly across the screen and vanish when they come in contact with MJ’s fairy dust. Michael’s other attack involves him spinning in a circle and throwing his fedora like a boomerang. His final, and most powerful, attack sends the King of Pop into a dance routine and all of the bad guys dance along. They must not be able to keep up with his slick moves, because at the end of the dance number they all die. Doesn’t it all sound too good to be true?

Not even the undead stand a chance against MJ's moves.

Well hang tight, because it gets better. Once the last child is captured saved, Michael’s pet chimp Bubbles flies into the game on a blue comet and sits on Michael’s shoulder to point the direction to the level’s boss. I use the term “boss” here loosely, because most of the time the battles consist of attacking the same enemies you have battled for the whole stage, they’re just wearing snazzier outfits and take a couple extra hits to eliminate. Once the boss is defeated you get to snatch one more kid before dashing away to the next area.

For the most part, the sound in the game is decent. Michael makes his entrance into the game in the first stage by flicking a coin across the room where it lands in a jukebox and sets “Smooth Criminal” to playing. All the music is wonderfully MIDI-fied and usually fits the level you’re on at the time. The only time the game’s soundtrack let me down was in the zombie and graveyard level, “Thriller” was not the song playing. Most of the tracks are off of the “Bad” album which was released shortly before the Moonwalker movie which came out in 1988. In-game sound effects are kind of underwhelming, but a great feature is Michael’s trademark vocalizations on the splash screens between stages (the game has five three-part stages). Sega even animated his mouth to kinda-sorta match the noise he was making.

Real voice acting in a game: cutting edge in 1990.

The game does have multiplayer support which just involves player 1 playing until they die, and then player 2 takes a turn at the same stage. The only real difference is player 2 gets a red outfit, which is disappointing because the white one is much more dashing. I was able to make it to stage 3-3 without losing a life, so if I had been playing with another person they obviously would’ve been bored. While both players playing cooperatively would’ve been fun, we all know there is only room enough for one Michael Jackson in the world at a time and two onscreen at the same time would probably have fried the Sega Genesis’s circuits to a crisp.

What all of these elements boil down to is a moderately fun beat ‘em up/platformer that will illicit a few giggles from any child of the 80’s or closet-case Michael Jackson fans. It’s sad to me that you don’t see games like this anymore. No game developer or publisher today would be brave enough to put their name on a game that features a grown man dancing around and sprinkling pixie powder on other men and then “saving” children, only to have them whisked away to who-knows-where on a blue comet. It just doesn’t get much kitschier than that.

Image credit: Me, and en.wikipedia.org