[Retro ≠ Good] Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure

The other day we lost comedy legend, George Carlin, and I can see no better way to honor his memory than to dig up what is probably the lowest point in his entire career. I do not refer to his role as The Conductor in Thomas The Tank Engine, Fillmore the VW Van in Disney's Cars, and I'm not even talking about his role as Rufus in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. I'm talking about his role as Rufus in Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure.

Although ET for the Atari2600 is the most infamous example of lazy game developers tacking a big name license to a piss poor game hoping people will buy it anyway Bill And Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure is easily the NES equivalent.

The point of the game is to travel through time and rescue various historical figures from rebels who have kidnapped them and sent them to a time period that is not their own. The game begins with you flipping through a phone book and finding a number to dial so that you can launch right into a minigame in which you travel through the circuits of time. The minigame looks like it was pulled straight out of the old Atari days and is a crude game in which you must bounce the time traveling phone booth around until you reach the place you were trying to go to. I've seen more enjoyable cases of Gonorrhea.


After plodding through the minigame you can begin the real game. I wish I could tell you it gets better from here but, really, I probably had more fun with the abysmal minigame. The game begins by plopping you into a medieval world filled with a bunch of knights and other NPCs. For some reason, if they're standing still they'll give you items, if they're walking around and hit you then they'll demand that you give them your money or go to jail and if they're walking around like some dark ages lunatic zombie then they'll throw you in jail for no good reason. Since you have a very limited supply of items to get rid of your enemies and there is no XP system in place the real focus of the game is to avoid them. This, unfortunately, is much easier said than done since the game developers couldn't make up their mind as to whether or not they wanted you to be able to walk on grass or only in paths so they decided to split the difference and only make some grass able to be walked on and other grass not able to be walked on. There is no visual indication as to any difference between these two grasses and the grass that you cannot walk on seems to appear almost randomly, so avoiding some crazed jailers coming at you becomes much harder when your character all of a sudden forgets how to walk on grass without any prior notice. Some NPCs will give you some directions on how to find the historical figure you're tracking down, unfortunately there's not much way to follow this advice as the stage maps aren't particularly complicated and your movement is far from free so there usually isn't more than one way that you are able to go at any given time.



I won't bullshit you, I'm a bad game reviewer. I didn't even get past the first level of this game because, after an hour of watching Ted strut around with the gait of a Polio-sticken Muscular Sclerosis victim, stopping dead in his tracks on bad patches of grass, fruitlessly tossing pudding cups and textbooks around and being thrown in jail repeatedly only to plod through the level from the beginning again for the 678th time I decided that I no longer needed to torture myself and that even Zelda 1 wouldn't be good if it made you go through the hell that is BATEVGA's first level before getting to hyrule. The NES has an impressive collection of terrible games but this broken trash would easily manage to be in the top 10 worst.

[Retro ≠ Good] Taboo: The Sixth Sense

Home videogame consoles have been around for the better part of 40 years so far and haven't shown any signs of slowing with gems like Bioshock, Mass Effect and Portal being released within the last six months and plenty more promising titles upcoming. Still, sometimes you just have to dust off the old NES, grab that wooden sword and lay waste to all the Moblins, Tektites and Octorocks in Hyrule 2D style. It's fine to revisit an old favorite. It's another thing entirely to convince yourself that every single game made before 1998 is good simply because it's "retro". I've played a whole lot of them and, friend, let me tell you, some of those games are great and some are worse than chugging a 60oz. Big Gulp™ of pureed herpes. Which is a perfect segue for the first game we'll be exploring in the new Retro ≠ Good section.

Taboo: The Sixth Sense is a Tarot card reading game for the NES. No, it isn't an adventure game in which you collect Tarot cards. Nor is it a puzzle game in which you must match up similarly designed cards to get rid of them. The only thing this game does is read a fortune and, if you count this as a feature, picks your lucky lotto numbers as long as the lotto you're looking to play doesn't use numbers over 40 and, nowadays, most do.

To get an idea of how the game is at fortune telling let's consider something that seems entirely unrelated - somebody who works as a German-to-English translator. You hire the translator to accompany you in Germany and you're all set, everything translates properly, the translator provides a useful service and does a great job. If, however, you rely on machine translations from Babelfish you'll soon find out that it is translating the English for "Where can I find the nearest bathroom?" to the German for "Why is the walking of proximity toilets?"

Now consider the human Tarot Card reader - vague and worthless on their very best day. What happens when you entrust an already worthless service to a computer is the video game equivalent of dividing by zero - utter chaos and confusion at every turn. Since the technology driving the game isn't sophisticated enough to really understand the question you asked, or know anything about you personally, it can't give you an actual answer, but only some extremely vague suggestions on how you can make up your own answer. For example I asked it "Will anybody ever read this blog?" As we all know, the answer is "no" and as the picture shows, questions to the divine powers that control the Tarot don't support word wrap. After asking, the game informed me that my significator card is the Two of Coins which meant that "Your present position is avoids changing or difficult situations."

No, we can't just chalk that up to Engrish because the game is made by Rare, a British publisher. There's no excuse.

Let's assume that we should remove the word "is". Now it's saying that my problem doesn't change and avoids difficult situations. It's up to you to figure out what the hell that even means and then shoehorn your own fortune into it, which makes the game all the more unnecessary.

After plodding through several more vague assertions the game gives me my no-longer-relevant lotto numbers and sends me on my way, wondering what in the hell I was supposed to get from all of that. Total play time: about 2 minutes.

Taboo is possibly the very worst videogame I have ever played, offering no gameplay - no game - whatsoever, but is one of the only games that I would ever applaud for having a total play time of less than five minutes. I can't help but wonder who is the bigger nutcase - the guy that thought he could sell games based on this premise or the people that proved him right.

Triviabot: Koopaling Etymology

We've partied with him, we've gone golfing with him and we've gone toe-to-toe with him in the most forgettable installment of the Mario franchise, Super Mario Sunshine. But let's face it, Bowser Jr (left) is just so boring compared to his seven older siblings. Lemmy, Roy, Ludwig Von, Morton Jr, Wendy O, Iggy and Larry all turn 20 this year since their first appearance in Super Mario Bros. 3. Though they rarely appear in any modern Nintendo games they do have a cult appeal for some. This is likely due in no small part to the real life counterparts that their names and personalities were, to some extent, modeled after.



Iggy Pop is largely considered to be the inspiration for Iggy Koopa. He is also considered to be an instrumental in the development of modern Heavy Metal and Punk Rock as we know it today. Pop played with his band, The Stooges, in the early 1970s and became a notorious shock rocker, exposing himself to crowds and often leaving shows covered in blood, sweat and vomit. Those not familiar with him or The Stooges may know him best for doing that song in the Royal Caribbean commercials, "Lust for Life". He most recently got back into the studio with The Stooges to record their newest album "The Weirdness"(2007).



Much like Iggy Pop, Wendy O. Williams was a notorious shock rocker and among the most controversial women in 1970s Rock and Roll. She and her band, The Plasmatics, were as well known for their heavy metal/punk rock sound as they were known for their on-stage antics which included chainsawing guitars, sledgehammering television sets, exploding their equipment and performing wearing next to nothing (she was acquitted of obscenety charges in 1981 for performing wearing nothing but shaving cream). Williams died in 1998 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, she was 48.



Lemmy Kilmister is the founding member of the band, Motörhead and is considered to be one of Heavy Metal's living legends. His status of respect in the heavy metal community is best illustrated by a line delivered by Steve Buscemi in the movie, Airheads.
Question: "Who would win in a fight - Lemmy or God?"
Answer: "Trick question - Lemmy IS God."
Aside from Motörhead, Lemmy has also done a bit of acting and has starred in a few movies by independent film studio, Troma. Most notably, he was the narrator in Tromeo and Juliet. Motörhead recently won a grammy for their contribution to The Spongebob Squarepants Movie. No, I'm not kidding. In the way of videogames Motörhead's song, Ace of Spades, can be found in both the original Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. The umlaut is strictly for show.



Roy Orbison is considered to be the inspiration behind Roy Koopa. A Rock and Roll pioneer, Orbison is the singer/songwriter behind "Oh, Pretty Woman," "Only the Lonely," and "Crying," among others. His musical stylings have influenced many rock bands that came after him, including The Beatles, who site "Only the Lonely" as an inspiration for their song "Please Please Me."



One of the more obviously named Koopalings, Ludwig Von is named after Ludwig Von Beethoven. Aside from being a musical genius, writing some of the most recognizable pieces in the whole of human history, and inspiring fictional sociopaths, he was also an avid chess fan and was friends with a man who invented The Turk, a primitive precursor to Deep Blue, the modern day chess playing computer. Of course, Deep Blue is a complex marvel of computing. The Turk was a hoax and turned out to be just a high level chess player in a box. (source: www.mentalfloss.com)



Not a particularly good guy to name a Mario character after, Morton Downey Jr. is best known as the godfather of trash talk shows. His talk show antics became popular in the 1980's due largely to his yelling at, insulting and verbally abusing his guests or anybody who did not agree with him. His influence could later be seen, intended or not, in such shows as Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake and even Bill O'Reilly. He became a short-lived pop culture icon, primarily for being a loudmouth jerk. In what many believe was a hoax perpetrated in an attempt to reclaim his fading celebrity status in the late 80s he was found in the San Francisco International Airport with a Nazi swastika painted on his face, which he claims was the work of Neo-Nazis who had assaulted him. No evidence was ever found to support this claim. Downey died in 2001 of lung cancer.



Nobody is really certain who Larry Koopa is named after. Larry King is the most common choice. However, even though King is, like Morton Downey Jr, a talk show host (a more tasteful talk show host, but still the same career) nobody seems very convinced that this is Larry Koopa's namesake. If you have some guesses, make them in the comments. My money is on that delightful Cousin Larry from Perfect Strangers. That kooky Cousin Larry, if only he'd listen to Balki's simple Meposian morality and values then he wouldn't get into so much trouble.