Old console/controller boxes! These things have been in the garage since before you were born. The spider inside the Genesis box was enormous and terrifying. If this was a 90s commercial, it would have yelled 'SEGA' at me.
This excellent poster details the hot new games you can get for your Game Boy. That Donkey Kong Land III looks pretty revolutionary, doesn't it? It kind of looks like James Bond is in Cerulean City.
A breakfast cereal collectible card from Babe 2: Pig in the City. I don't know in what sense it is collectible, but dear golly, my collection of one certainly included Thelonius.
One of these books supposedly contained 1001 cool jokes, but I'm not quite positive as to what qualified these jokes as being 'cool'. I certainly didn't feel cooler for owning it. The other book was my secret spy book. And clearly now, the secret is out.
This magical Sylvester head holds stunning secrets. You can keep candy in there! I mean, I'm sure there are other things you can put in there, too...
In every great legacy, there's a setback. Even the strongest among us falters here or there, and it's because of these missteps that we are able to grow and learn.
For Napoleon, it was Waterloo. For Nintendo, it was the Virtual Boy. For Kesha, it was pursuing a career in music. And for Tiburon, it was Madden NFL 06.
It was supposed to be a good idea. A gameplay mechanism that allowed more control and precision over your quarterback's throws. It sounded to the layman like a massive step forward from football game to football simulation.
After all, 2005's hit stick was an exciting way to finally deliver those bone-crunching tackles you'd always wanted to on puny guys like Az-Zahir Hakim. The rear cover boasted that this was the 'year of the quarterback'. It omitted the word 'shitty' between 'quarterback' and 'the', because we were handcuffed to the infamous cone of shame.
Known at the time as 'QB vision', it meant that every time you threw a pass, a ray of light shot out from your quarterback, indicating their range of visibility, or their fondness for Scott Summers. Throws made outside of this light area were horribly off-target, and suddenly this made a QB's awareness stat of utmost importance. If you were Peyton Manning, you could see almost everywhere. If you were Kyle Boller, you were Stevie Wonder.
To test it out for the first time in ages, I took on the woeful 2-14 49ers, and the results were not pretty. Steve McNair completed 15 of 33 passes for 222 yards, 2 TDs (one a miracle completion to Drew Bennett, the other an inexplicably successful 4-yard goalline grab by Troy Fleming, where the 230-pounder miraculously juked a defender) to 3 interceptions (iPhone wanted me to say interventions), and 2 sacks. On the other side, rookie Alex Smith fared even worse: 9 of 20, 136 yards, 1 interception and 7 sacks. Those are the kind of stats I'd expect if I were playing football.
In case you were wondering, yes Erron Kinney was fantastic. I'm beginning to think that he was actually the lead programmer with EA at the time, or had slept around a fair bit in order to put himself in such high regard. End game: a 13-31 win that I'm not proud of. Also, the only good game that Andre Woolfolk ever played. Historic.
As you can gather, the QB vision element was more of a hindrance than a benefit, simply too cumbersome for a game of it's pace. You could turn it off if you wanted, but then that defeated the purpose of even getting the game. If you were updating your Madden, you wanted more of a payoff than Pacman freakin' Jones.
On that note, this Madden is a bit sour grapes to me anyhow, because it came after a Titans 5-11 campaign, making them one of the worst teams in the game. So I'm playing the worst Madden game with one of the worst Titan teams... why, exactly?
Another gripe I have is that punt returning is simply impossible, because your AI won't block for you. Instead, they'll face your direction, watching with eager anticipation to see what happens next. And, inevitably, that results in your return man getting absolutely killed. In my case, that returner is aforementioned Pacman, which makes it okay.
AI issues aren't new to Madden, but because the overall package is usually so good, it's otherwise overlooked. In 06, however, it's hard to get into the game when your QB passes as well as Garo Yepremian.
As is appropriate for a wrestling video game, SmackDown! Just Bring It refuses to go out quietly.
So I thought, as a final farewell, I'd highlight the game's best feature, and one that, for whatever reason, was absent from later editions.
It's an 8-man battle royale! The top superstars of the era (The Rock, Steve Austin, the Undertaker, Triple H, Kane, Kurt Angle, Chris Jericho and Chris Benoit) square off for INAKA bragging rights.
Partly because my overview of top 20 favourite games has reminded me that certain games are poor and need not be in my collection, and partly because selling Madden scored me a cool four-dollar profit, I press on with another gaming sacrifice.
This time, it’s with one of my earliest PS2 games, my third ever if I recall correctly. Upon purchasing it, I thought it was all sorts of splendid and invested lots of time in it. Just one year later, when I picked up its sequel, I was finally able to see just how abysmal it truly was. It was like unmasking the Phantom of the Opera. What once seemed beautiful had now had its scars revealed. Just with less Andrew Lloyd Webber, and more Perry Saturn.
Ladies and gentlemen, now entering the ring… WWF SmackDown! Just Bring It.
Sometime in the late 90s, I became a fan of World Championship Wrestling. I recall with glee my weekly viewing of Monday Nitro, taking in the action of Hollywood Hulk Hogan, Sting, and my bishi Lance Storm. Grand times for all involved; thinking it all to be real, trying to understand the sanity behind a fifteen minute David Flair promo, and listening to a hip hop song by Konnan after each presentation. Battle followed by boogie.
Perhaps it was a series of poor creative choices, or perhaps it was because I just didn’t love it enough, but in 2001, after thirteen years of man-slammin’ mayhem, WCW ceased.
Immediately, my world became deprived of sweaty men hitting each other with foreign objects. It was a tragic event, but fortunately for me, the brand hadn’t folded outright, but rather, had been purchased by the rival World Wrestling Federation. I had been trying without much success to get into the WWF to get my fill of the rasslin, but when I spotted Storm strutting around the mat, I instantly was re-hooked into wrestling. Rear hook suplexed.
So my fandom of WWF was still fairly young when Just Bring It hit the shelves, the third in the SmackDown! series, and the first for the PlayStation 2. I had only owned one other wrestling game prior to this, No Mercy on the N64, so understandably the leap in technology from one generation to the next had me thinking I was looking at something fantastic.
Funnily enough, my dad had seen me playing Dead Or Alive 2 prior to this, and when he saw the blurry pixelated tattoo on the jagged model of the Big Show for the first time, he asked me plainly, ‘are you sure these graphics are okay?’
Indeed, a valid question, papa.
When you first pop JBI into your PS2, you soon realise that it is a ravenous beast that will eat your memory card alive. It commands a whopping 4,173 KB to hold a save file. To put this in perspective, SmackDown vs. RAW, the sixth title in the series, requires only 498 KB. Sometimes I wonder what exactly JBI needed all that extra space for. It’s probably not accurate to assume it must all be for Steve Blackman. It could be, though. He was a powerful man, you see.
The next thing you will learn is that the graphics are atrocious, especially if you’re like me and have your daddy nearby to point this out for you. The character models have low polygon counts and animate like stop motion figures. You’ll likely feel especially cheated if you gained high expectations after watching the opening sequence, which features graphical quality you will never see again, as long as you live.
Kurt Angle doesn’t look much like his real-life counterpart, Kane’s hair animates like a broom, and my created wrestler has a head shaped like a sausage.
The third and final thing you shall discover before turning the PS2 off and crying yourself to sleep is that this game has some of the worst commentary you have heard since Mattel introduced the Intellivoice in 1982.
Tazz and the ever-irritating Michael Cole bring you commentary that ranges from disjointed to downright bizarre. An example of the script will yield such gems…
Cole: Welcome to Raw is War!
Tazz: I’ll be announcing tonight’s event.
Cole: We can’t miss… Raw tonight!
Tazz: That’s dumb.
Cole: Michael Cole and Tazz at ringside.
Tazz: How can you miss that?
Cole: They’re colliding in the ring!
Tazz: Just look!
Those might seem okay on their own, but in actuality that is a segment taken from the opening twenty seconds of a match. Tazz sounds like a cranky toddler. But sitting next to Michael Cole would make me cranky, too. My primary regret throughout the SmackDown! games was never being given the chance to put him through a table.
JBI offers a multitude of match types and a bizarre story mode that involves running around the backstage area looking for friends to team up with and competing for titles you don’t want, followed by curiously worded arguments that border on playful. Actually, it sounds a bit like the premise to a My Little Pony cartoon when you think of it out of context.
As a standalone title, JBI might have been okay. After all, I was big on it at the time, but the fact of the matter is that just one iteration later, everything was improved astronomically. The increase in quality would only ever be in minor increments after that, so the big gaping hole that lies between JBI and #4, Shut Your Mouth, makes the former look like a big silly pink elephant in comparison.
The main thing you must learn is when to press the square button. Once you’ve seen the animations and read the AI enough, you will be able to counter any move at all with the mighty square button. Grapples, strikes, flying leg lariats, the whole gamut. That square button holds such raw power it might be president someday, so better get chummy with it now.
Successfully spamming the counter button is fun. What’s also fun is discovering how far you can progress in the menu after ejecting the disc.
Apparently, the game offered me an opportunity to meet a WWF superstar backstage at a live WWF event in the USA. I never took them up on this chance, though I’m tempted to give it a try now. Even though a live WWF event these days would limit me only to shows about panda preservation and discussions about your favourite type of shrub. …For this is what I assume occurs in the workings of the World Wildlife Fund. It’s no more ignorant an assumption than a KB-hungry Steve Blackman, really.
And if that didn’t confuse you, perhaps this will…
