Forget about Nancy Regan’s “Just Say No” campaign. This is how you fight the war on drugs. You, bad ass DEA enforcer/SWAT Power Ranger agent Max Force and your buddy, the equally bad ass DEA agent/SWAT Team Power Ranger Hit Man grab your machine guns and rocket launchers, and arrest every dope fiend, d-boy, thug, and even dog (yes, dogs can be arrested) you come across, and if they refuse to come quietly, then use your rocket launcher to blow the ever living shit out of them, and watch as they explode in a shower of blood and guts. You’ll visit seedy places such as the K.R.A.K. stop, which believe it or not, is a drug lab. Wow, these cats are so flagrant that they’ll put it right out there that they’re running a crack den. Along the way, you’ll either blow up, arrest, or arrest AND blow up heroin dealers, killer clowns, super strong retarded dope fiends who dumpsters stuff at you, and guys wearing mullets who throw hypodermic syringes at you, which are presumably full of their product. You even get to get behind the wheel of your car and run criminals over.

It’s obvious that American Gangster Frank Lucas doesn’t run this drug cartel, and your main enemy is a remarkably evil bastard named Mr Big, a huge head in a wheel chair. When you beat him, he turns into a demonic robo-skull-snake thingy which you also have to kill. This was ported to Nintendo thanks to Acclaim. In a hint of irony, the NES version was promoted as the first NES game with a strong anti-drug message…yet all references to drugs were removed. Even the K.R.A.K stop was changed to K.W.A.K stop. Oddly enough, the blood and gore was still retained. Of course this was one of the many games that were re-released on the Midway Arcade Treasures compilations. The main theme is even easy to hum along to as well.

Narc was the first game that bought a real solution to the drug problem facing our nation: dress up like a Power Ranger, grab your guns, get behind the wheel of your corvette, and kill everything that moves, including dogs, hippies, and morbidly obese heads stuck in wheel chairs that turn into giant demon robo-snake skull heads after taking enough damage. It’s just too bad that Midway’s 2005 attempt at a remake was nowhere near as interesting (or original) as this classic.

Fun Fact: Narc’s Max Force was featured in the Power Team animated series, which was Acclaim’s answer to Captain N. The series centered around a teenager named Johnny Arcade as he commands a team of semi-popular characters from Acclaim Video games such as Wizards and Warriors.

From the ‘so bad it’s good’ department comes Blood Warriors. Developed by Japanese company Kaneko, Blood Warriors was one of the many fighting games that sprung up during the 90s that attempted to cash in on the popularity of Mortal Kombat. Now granted, it’s still a pretty crappy game, but it’s like Super Street Fighter 4 compared to games such as Way of the Warrior and Survival Arts. It does the “digitized actors and bloody graphics” routine as expected, and of course the localization, to say the least, is lacking. Playing as one of 9 stereotypical Japanese warriors (the cast features such ground breaking character designs as a samurai, a ninja, a female ninja, and a Kabuki Warrior, who, like all other Kabuki Warriors in fighting games, attacks enemies with his hair), you beat the crap out of each other in 2 rounds. If you win the match, you can pull off a fatality by the press of one button! Hay, one-button fatalities! That’s one improvement Blood Warriors has over Mortal Kombat! Too bad there isn’t much else to rave about. Well, the character costumes are improved over all the other Mortal Kombat ripoffs at the time. That’s not saying that they are very good, but at least they are better than say, Blood Storm’s mongloid Running Man characters. It’s one of the rarest arcade games in the world, so however you can play it, you should play it. It’s almost like the fighting game equivalent of an Ed Wood movie.

Halloween is tomorrow, and who better to celebrate it with than two icons of horror, Freddy Kruger and Jason Vorhees? This weekend we’ll have a special Lost Classic and Maximum Letdown. Oh yeah, and we got the $20 Game of the Week too.
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In a world where Mass Effect and Dragon Age exist, there’s really no good reason to obfuscate the process of importing save data from a game sequel’s predecessor — and yet Lionhead Studios has managed to do this with Fable III.

So how do I make sure Fable III imports the Fable II character I want?

• Launch Fable II
• Select your desired hero
• Once in the game world, save and quit
• Launch Fable III and start a new game

This tidbit of wisdom was gleaned after an hour of trial and error, following 40 minutes of otherwise enjoyable gameplay that was riddled with the uncertainty that any import had in fact occurred.

What the hell, Peter Molyneux? If the intent was to keep the player immersed in the game world, then this oversight makes that goal an impossibility, and now my entire perception of Fable III is colored by it.
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Before Final Fantasy VII, the role playing game genre just wasn’t that popular. Playing a turd like this, I can see why, as this must have been what games like Dragon Warrior and Zelda must have looked like to most gamers. Believe it or not, this was actually a very popular RPG for Japanese computer systems. It was regarded as one of the first console RPGs. However, it wasn’t bought to America until a few years later, and it’s ‘innovations’ had already been done by other games, most notably the awesome Legend of Zelda. By it’s release, not only were the graphics sub-par, the story was virtually nonexistent and the gameplay was a serious and boring pain in the ass. With stupid looking enemies, a nonsensical battle system, and boring gameplay, this early NES game would turn anyone off to the genre. For years to come, this game’s pitfalls caused mainstream gamers to sleep on quality titles such as Lufia, 7th Saga, and Final Fantasy 2 – 6, or at least that’s what I think happened. After all, who’d want to play this crap when they could be playing Double Dragon or Castlevania?
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Remember back in the 90s after Mortal Kombat? Like any good gaming movement, developers and publishers sought to imitate MK. If it wasn’t the gruesome fatalities, it was the digitized graphics, and in many cases, it was both. Often times however, the characters would look ridiculous and the gameplay would suck. Who could forget ‘classics’ such as Way of the Warrior, Survival Arts, and Shadow: War of Succession? Well, Creative Edge Studio’s Bikini Karate Babes brings back those good old days. While the eye candy is only slightly more attractive than those great games of the past, the game control is the definition of clunky and unresponsive.
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The 90s were such an awesome time for comic books (not). Who didn’t love those holo-foil stamped gimmick covers, stories about clones, female versions of our favorite heroes and villains (She-venom anyone? She-thing? *shudder*), the Ultraverse, and the legions of extreme-badass muscle bound gun-toting characters who were the bastard children of Rob Liefiled and the Batman Dark Knight Returns? Remember when they tried to replace all the popular heroes with ‘cooler’ and more badass versions of themselves which lasted all of 1 year (or 3 in the case of Spider-Man)? Remember when most of the Avengers wore generic brown jackets? Speaking of the Avengers, remember that awesome Avengers beat-em-up that Data East did some years back? Of course you do. Well, a few years after that, Data East created this semi-follow up, a fighting game that’s based on the obscure Avengers crossover Galactic Storm. Basically a poor man’s Killer Instinct with Marvel characters, Galactic Storm brings us what we loved the most about the mid-90s. Obscure second string characters, confusing storylines, and lame gimmicks.
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Even though this is a crappy game and it is a maximum letdown, Jaleco’s Robowarrior holds a special place in my heart. It’s one of the first NES games i got. While it had an interesting premise (and the first level’s music was pretty catchy), all i remember about the game was that it was hard. Not in a Ninja Gaiden my-repeated-failures-want-to-make-me -try-harder-if-for-no-other-reason-than-to-see-what-comes-next kind of hard. Nor is it in a SWAT 4 I-have-to-think-very-very-carefully-about-how-to-approach-this-situation-least-the-whole-mission-ends-up-going-to-hell-in-an-instant kind of hard. Not in a Heavy Rain I-have-to-make-my-onscreen-character-do-things-that-should-be-second-nature-to-a-gamer-but-the-characters-and-story-have-made-me-catch-feelings-like-no-other-game-before-it-so-now-I-am-being-forced-to-make-my-characters-make-extremely-difficult-decisions kind of hard. Not even in a Super Columbine Massacre God-help-me-I-have-to-carry-out-what-was-one-of-the-most-horrific-acts-of-middle-class-suburban-violence-in-the-late-1990s kind of hard. No, it’s a there-are-so-many-idiotic-and-stupid-gameplay-mechanics-I’ll-be-lucky-if-I-can-make-it-past-the-first-level kind of hard.
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