What I'll Miss About 30 Rock

Today, 30 Rock goes off the air. It's one of my favorite TV shows, and I'm going to miss it. Here is a list of things I'm going to miss about it.

• Liz Lemon. "I want to go to there."
• The movie Jefferson, made by Tracy Jordan with him playing all the parts. "It's not a comedy. It's a drama."
• Leap Day Williams, climbing up from the Mariana Trench.
• Jon Hamm in blackface with an indignant Tracy Morgan.
• Sabor de Soledad: Ahora con mas semen de toro!
• Dennis Duffy, the Beeper King. "Technology is cyclical."
• Everything Leo Spaceman said. "I'm a real doctor, with a degree from the Ho Chi Minh City School of Medicine."
• Dot-Com and Grizz. "Some day, I hope you'll ask us to fake being scientists."
• Cerie's cluelessness. "Cerie, I'm over 40." "I don't know what that means."
• Stacy Keach, growling two separate commercials for CouchTown and another for Bazooka Joe gum.
• Buzz Aldrin, yelling at the moon: "I walked on your face!"
• The great names they've used: Floyd DeBarber, Paul L'astname, Criss Chros, Carol Burnett.
• Margaret Cho as Kim Jong-Il.
• The failed Dealbreakers pilot. "Wave! Like a normal person!... Are you spinning a basketball?"
• The benefit concert to get Jack Donaghy's father a kidney, called "Kidney Now!"
• Buck Henry as Liz Lemon's father, Dick Lemon. "You can't have a Lemon party without old Dick!"
• The final heir to the Hapsburg dynasty, played by Paul Reubens with a ceramic hand. "I'm old enough to rent a car! HAAAA! It feels good to laugh."
• "Here comes the Funcooker!"
• "Let's not play the blame game." "Of course, I'm not wearing my outfit."
• "Tracy Jordan, the Black Crusaders are coming for you."
• "I don't like it here! I don't wanna be here! Who is this guy!"
• "I don't like 'Tubman.' That sounds sexist. Can we change that to 'Tubgirl'?"
• "No, Liz Lemon, I believe you dress me up as Oprah because you're concerned about maintaining our dignity."
• "Happy Valentine's Day, no one!"
• "So it's not the bandito blanco, a name for cocaine I just made up?"
• "A Mr. Brett Fav-ruh sent you this picture. I think it's a hot dog."
• "This is how I cry now after you had me get that offbrand eye surgery!"

Godspeed, 30 Rock. You shall be missed.

Read This: A Russian Family Lived Alone for 40 Years, Unaware of World War II

Wow. Amazing.

Review: 10000000

Developer: Eighty-Eight Games

If you make a list of games currently available on Steam, you can probably put 10000000 near the top of that list.

That's not primarily due to its quality, although it's a good game. It's mostly due to alphabetization.

/rimshot

Seriously, though, 10000000 is pretty good. Imagine if you combined a fast-paced game of Bejeweled with a free-running game like Temple Run, toss in resource-gathering and combat along with some RPG-lite elements. Whip it in a blender and serve chilled, and that's 10000000.

In 10000000, you're trapped in a castle, and you won't be able to leave until you score 10,000,000 points. In order to score points, you have to run through a dungeon, stopping periodically to open treasure chests, fight monsters and unlock doors. The longer you survive in the dungeons, the more points you gather. This is all handled with a gem-matching game in the vein of Bejeweled, and different jewels cause different things to happen. For example, sword jewels use physical attacks, wand jewels use magic attacks, and key jewels can open up treasure chests. If you're in front of a treasure chest, no amount of sword jewels will open that chest, just key jewels.

Meanwhile, you can upgrade rooms in your castle from the wood and stone you collect in the dungeon. Those rooms unlock upgrades which enable you to improve your attack strength, defenses, magic strength and other bonuses, which mean that you can run through the dungeons longer, rack up more points and resources, and on and on until you reach 10,000,000 points.

I like free-running games like Jetpack Joyride, Temple Run and Canabalt, but they never feel very deep to me. Since there's no definitive goal, you just keep playing until you get bored or unlock everything you wanted to unlock. I like puzzle games, but after a while, you're just trying to top your high score. Once again, there's no definitive goal, so you just keep playing until you get tired of it. Combining the two, then placing a definitive goal in front of the player is a stroke of genius.

10000000 has a few flaws, though. The sound and music don't quite work. The music is trying to affect a retro vibe, and it doesn't pull it off with the skill of, say, VVVVVV. The sounds can be a little confusing too. There's a noise that you hear when you match up wood and stone jewels that sounds like it should be for an attack instead. Even after several hours of playtime, I'm still not used to it.

I also wish there was a little more meat to the game, too. For example, you're upgrading rooms in the castle, but I wish there was more to do with it, like another strategy dimension. Imagine if the castle was under attack, and you could use your wood and stone to repair the castle and improve its defenses, expand the size of it, and other crazy stuff like that. That would be pretty awesome, but I guess you can't have everything.

10000000 is a great, great game, though. I was playing it one night and looked at the clock. It was about 10pm, so I decided to just do one more run through the dungeon. My "one more run" had turned into "50 more runs," and when I looked at the clock again it was 11:30pm. It's a lot of fun, and well worth its low cost.

Final Grade: A-

NES Replay: Al Unser Jr's Turbo Racing

Developer: Data East
Publisher: Data East
Released: 1990
Vroom?: Vroom.

In NES Replay, we go through each NES game from A-Z to see if they're any good. Today: Al Unser Jr's Turbo Racing.

The more I played Al Unser Jr.'s Turbo Racing, the more it came back to me: I played this game years ago.

I was a young kid and was over at someone's house. There were some kids who were much older than me, all about 16 years old, and they were really good at Turbo Racing. They didn't want to let me play because they were winning races and were afraid I would start losing. Finally their mom made them give up the controller. They left in a huff, so I played Turbo Racing and crashed my car over and over. Then I played Marble Madness and crashed over and over. I wasn't very good at video games.

Anyway, Al Unser Jr.'s Turbo Racing is really close to being a very good racing game. There's lots of customization, there's a season mode of sorts, the controls are decent and the music is good.

Vroom! Vroom! I'm a racecar!

Yet, there are three things holding it back from being great:

1. You don't see where you are on the track. In the HUD at the bottom of the screen, you have your speed, the gear you're in and a picture of your racer. What you don't have is the outline of the track and where you are on it. That would be really good information to have, because...
2. Turns come up really fast. Especially at faster speeds, you have almost no time to downshift and lower your speed coming into a turn. Signs will pop up that the turn is coming, and then you'll crash into said signs because the turn was right there. Haven't memorized the track yet? Too bad! Prepare to crash into a wall!
3. Bumping your fellow racers crashes your car, but not the other one. The track isn't very wide, and there are other racers that are, of course, trying to race with you. If you so much as brush them, your vehicle crashes, while the other guy continues unscathed. It's completely unfair.

How could these problems have been fixed? Widening the track, increasing the draw distance, putting more detail in the HUD, and improving the AI. Problem is, the NES wasn't that powerful, so there was no way they could have done everything wanted to do without destroying the game's framerate and rendering it completely unplayable

I really can't fault the makers of Al Unser Jr's Turbo Racing for this, though. You can tell that they really tried to make a Formula One sim, but fell short due to the limitations of the NES. This game isn't a total failure, just lackluster.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Aladdin

NES Replay: Airwolf

Developer: Acclaim
Publisher: Acclaim
Released: 1989
Eyepatches?: Eyepatches!

In NES Replay, we go through each NES game from A-Z to see if they're any good. Today: Airwolf.

I'm sorry for anyone who has fond memories of them, but I'm just going to come right out and say it: The 80's were stupid.

The 80's were a time where people wore neon legwarmers, women wore giant shoulder pads in their dresses that made them look like linebackers, and hair metal was actually possible. Everyone looks back on their pictures from the 80's and can't believe how silly they looked, or how awful their furniture was, or how enormous their glasses were. If they don't feel that way, they're probably still dressing as if the 80's were an ongoing concern.

This was never more apparent in TV and movies. Every movie had a diamond-smuggling subplot. Men could have enormous mustaches. TV shows could have characters wearing eyepatches unironically, at least until Jamey Sheridan broke the Un-ironic Eyepatch Barrier on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and he had a good excuse (he had Bell's Palsy, so don't make fun of him).

With the 90's, the age of irony began, and that was the end of the 80's cocaine-fueled sincerity. No longer could you play a TV show straight about a man and his talking car or a man who could turn into an animal (called Manimal!) You had to couch every goofy concept in 11 layers of irony or have it laughed off the air.

There is just too much excitement here.
I can't handle it.

That brings us to Airwolf, a TV show about a man who has a secret high-tech helicopter stolen from the government that he uses to accomplish secret missions. The main character's last name is Hawke. Ernest Borgnine was also on Airwolf, at least until they unceremoniously killed his character along with everyone else and tried making the show with an all-new cast and stock footage of the helicopter.

The 80's, ladies and gentlemen.

The game Airwolf isn't good, just like most of the rest of the 80's. Your mission is to fly around and kill enemy aircraft while searching for people that need to be rescued. The flying isn't very interesting, as it plays just like After Burner but with slightly spongier controls. Since the controls are a little rougher, it makes it hard to dodge enemy bullets, so you take damage more frequently.

There's also a problematic issue when it comes to the enemy planes. You need to steer away from bullets at times. In a game where you're heading straight ahead all the time like After Burner, sharp turns aren't a problem, since you're still always facing forward. However, in Airwolf, you're trying to fly towards objectives. Sharp turns can leave you completely disoriented, and since there are very few landmarks on the screen, you have to refer to your little minimap on the bottom of the screen that has a tiny, tiny arrow which shows the direction your helicopter is pointing. One time, I turned straight into the border of a level and was unable to get my helicopter unstuck. I crashed. Just like the TV show!

Hey! Look at that! I missed the obstacles! Now
all I have to do is land- CRASH

Rescuing people is a disaster, too. Whenever it's time to rescue someone, the game cuts away from the flight screen to a screen where you control your helicopter as it descends carefully to the ground so that the person can get in. As soon as this screen begins, your helicopter is already descending unless you quickly gain control. That means that many times your rescue is thwarted as soon as it begins as your helicopter crashes against a telephone pole almost immediately.

Every level is the same. You fly around, kill planes, look for your people to rescue, and escape.

"Ah ha!" you may say. "I have caught you in a trap! You loved Air Fortress, where every level is similar, but you don't like Airwolf, where every level is similar."

There's a difference, though. While it's true that every level in Air Fortress follows the same basic rules (Fly in, make your way through the fortress, destroy the core, and escape) there are several distinct phases, and each one plays slightly differently (not to mention extremely well). Every level is a little different, as there are new enemies and new obstacles every time. If you can't tell, I still really love Air Fortress.

In Airwolf, every level is the same. Not similar, but the same. There is no change in what you're doing or how you're doing it. There's no thought process involved while you're playing, just "fly around and try not to die."

So, to sum up, Airwolf is much like the 80's themselves: A lot of flash, but probably best forgotten.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Al Unser Jr's Turbo Racing

Read This: The Truth About Guns and Video Games

Robert Brockway has a fantastic article up on Cracked right now about the truth behind guns and video games. Go read it.

NES Replay: Air Fortress

Developer: HAL Laboratory
Publisher: HAL Laboratory
Released: 1989
Three Cheers For Lost Classics: Huzzah!

In NES Replay, we go through each NES game from A-Z to see if they're any good. Today: Air Fortress.

As I went to write this article, I realized that I had foolishly not saved any screenshots of Air Fortress while I was playing. Instead of being annoyed, I was actually pleased. This meant that I'd have an excuse to play another level of this game.

You know, I didn't expect to be surprised when writing this series. The NES library has been picked over so much that I thought it would be almost impossible to find some sort of "lost classic" unless I decided to be completely contrarian and praise an awful game, like heaping praise onto something like Chip N' Dale's Rescue Rangers 2 for being a neo-classicist masterpiece that dares to question the ennui of daily life.

After all, anyone who knows a little bit about the NES knows the names of the good games: The Mario games, the Zelda games, Mega Man, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, and on and on. There couldn't be any great games that we didn't know about, could there?

Well, there is at least one, and it's called Air Fortress. Here's the idea behind it: There are several Air Fortresses that are on their way to destroy your planet. You hop in your little spaceship and evade the fortresses' defenses in a side-scrolling shooter, collecting energy and missiles. Then, you exit the ship and navigate the corridors of the fortress itself, looking for the core. This is done in a platformer, where you're given a jetpack to navigate the fortress. Once you find the core, you destroy it and escape the fortress before it explodes.

There's shooting...

So what makes Air Fortress so good?

1. This is a game that understands the phrase "difficulty curve." The first level is almost too easy. The next one is a little harder. The next one is harder. The next one is harder than the last. And so on.
2. Your energy matters. So there are these little bubbles that have the letter 'E' on them. Collect them and your Energy goes up by 100. This ends up being both your life meter and the power you have for your jetpack. It will drop permanently when you take damage, but anything you've lost using the jetpack will recharge when you stand still.
3. The level design is good in the platforming sections. Each screen is almost like its own puzzle: How am I going to get through this while taking a minimum of damage? Where can I stop and recharge my jetpack safely?
4. You don't need to destroy every single thing in the level. Sometimes, getting through a level just comes down to evasion, not destruction. If you decide to destroy every enemy, you'll probably take more damage as you fight through the level. Plus, every time you shoot, your character recoils just a touch, so your weapon is more defensive than offensive.
5. When you destroy the core, the game starts to feel like Metroid. The lights dim. The music gets quiet and menacing. Wait too long and the fortress starts to rumble. You scramble for the exit, avoiding any enemies you've left behind. Hope you found the exit on your first pass through, because if you don't know where it is, you're gonna have a bad time.

...And there's platforming.

There are a few knocks on Air Fortress. Each level looks similar. You could show me a screenshot of the first level and the fourth and I couldn't tell them apart. I chalk this up to the game originally being made in 1987 with only a light pass to make it ready for the States in 1989. I'm willing to cut it a little slack on this part, but it still could use more variety.

The cores also don't fight back. There are defensive turrets and other things around them, but the cores themselves don't put up much of a fight. It would have been cool if they were each a little different or something, but they each have a different layout of turrets and defense mechanisms, so it's pretty much a wash.

So, as good as Air Fortress is, why had I never heard of it? Well, it was a very, very limited release here in the US, only about 300 copies through a direct mail promotion. It's amazing that there's even a ROM of it available.

If you have a chance, play Air Fortress. It's one of the NES' lost classics and it deserves its time in the sun.

Note: Upon further review, Air Fortress really isn't all that rare. It can be purchased for around a buck on eBay, so it can't be that difficult to get a hold of. The misinformation came from an unsourced claim on Wikipedia, which I'll get removed.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Air Wolf

Read This: Junior Seau Had Chronic Brain Damage

This is some news that the NFL didn't want to hear: Junior Seau had chronic brain damage when he committed suicide in May of 2012.

This sounds horribly morbid, but I totally called it. It explained his increasingly erratic behavior and the method of his suicide. It's just another sad reminder of what football does to the brains of the athletes, and it makes it increasingly more difficult to watch the game.

NES Replay: After Burner

Developer: Tengen
Publisher: Tengen
Released: 1989
Yes, I Know It Says "Sega" On The Title Screen:
But Tengen handled the port and all the
licensing so stop bothering me

In NES Replay, we go through each NES game from A-Z to see if they're any good. Today: After Burner.

We'll open the year by talking about Tengen.

Atari was the main company in gaming during the early 80's, and the Atari 2600 was the system to beat. With all the success that Atari had, they started to get a little arrogant.

One of their arrogant tactics was called “block booking." Block booking is when you tell a retailer, “You can have X amount of copies of this game everyone wants, but you also have to take X amount of copies of this crappy game that no one wants. Take it or leave it.” It’s a practice so shady that the movie industry was outlawed from doing it, and when the movie industry stops doing something shady, that’s a sign that it’s shady with a capital ‘S.’
Their arrogance culminated with Atari releasing a rushed version of ET, a horrible, horrible game that was made in two weeks and rushed to stores for the 1982 holiday season, then promptly buried in an Arizona landfill. Shortly thereafter, in 1983, the video game industry crashed. It wasn't all Atari's fault, but they were part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

There were a lot of factors that led to the industry crash in 1983. For example, too many video game systems were being manufactured and marketed, which confused the heck out of potential buyers and fragmented the market. However, there were two factors that led to the crash that the right company could have controlled if they had been willing. One, a lot of publishers flooded the market with cheap, crappy games that were popped out quickly just to make a buck. Two, unlicensed games were being made for systems, which meant there was little-to-no quality control.

This is definitely worth a lawsuit, isn't it?

Enter Nintendo. Originally, they tried getting Atari to help them with selling the NES, but Atari balked at working with another company. Nintendo sold the NES themselves and raked in tons of money. Now there was a new king of gaming, and Atari was pushed to the sidelines.

Nintendo succeeded because they noticed the two main things they could control and fixed them with a two-fold strategy. One, each third-party developer could only release five games per year. Two, each real NES cartridge had a lockout chip called the 10NES, which meant that only Nintendo-authorized cartridges could be used in the NES.

Atari had been the king of gaming for years. Nintendo popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, made a better system than Atari, solved the problems Atari had with their video game system, and then restricted Atari to making only five games per year, just like everyone else. Atari applied to Nintendo for special permission to make more than five games per year and were denied, so they were mad at this point.

Bear in mind, every company had to deal with the same issue. If you wanted to sell more games for the NES, there were ways around the restriction. For example, Konami went through the trouble of setting up a shell corporation named Ultra that served as a second publisher and allowed them to get around the five-game limit. Using Ultra, they released games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Adventures of Bayou Billy.

Atari made moves in that direction as well by setting up their own second company named Tengen, but still couldn't get around the restriction. Instead of continuing to work with Nintendo, though, they tried something different: They decided to crack Nintendo’s 10NES lockout chip and make their own unlicensed games, completely bypassing the lockout system.

You can tell it's different than the first level
because it's slightly pallet-swapped. We're down
the rabbit hole, people.

After several abortive attempts at cracking the encryption, they finally appealed to the US Patent Office under false pretenses and got the lockout chip specifications. Soon, Tengen began producing their own games that didn't look like the typical Nintendo Game Paks but worked on the NES all the same.

Nintendo hit the roof, and thus began a lengthy court battle that ended with Atari conceding defeat, dumping their unsold cartridges and paying Nintendo a hefty fee. Atari put out a few more poorly-received consoles before slumping off into obscurity before their name and logo were picked up off the scrap heap a few years ago by Infogrames. The modern company known as Atari is Atari in name only.

Why go through this lengthy story? Well, because it's important.

There's a sharp dividing line between "console gaming before the NES" and "console gaming after the NES," and that's mostly because of the quality of the games available. During the fragmented pre-NES years, publishers couldn't really focus their efforts on making one really, really good game. They had to instead focus on making smaller, halfway-decent ones if they wanted to hit as many consoles as possible.

The reason that gaming took off after the NES is because the choice was simple: Do you want an NES or a Sega Master System? If you want a Master System, what's wrong with you? Did you hit your head somehow? Are you dying?

That easy choice that gamers had meant that game makers had an easy target to shoot for: Make your game work on the NES and you'll be able to find a buyer. Because the target was easy enough to hit, a lot of publishers were able to make money selling games, in turn leading to more money being funneled into making better games, which sold better and led to better games.

If the courts would have ruled that Atari had every right to break the 10NES chip, the console market as we know it may look more like the PC market: Lots of competing platforms with manufacturers using the same basic specs to create games. Of course, the PC market was a mess for years, which led to it being the home of enthusiasts and die-hards to the exclusion of everyone else. (It's better now.)

So, imagine a world where Nintendo sells the original NES, while Coleco sells their own NES-compatible system with a slightly faster processor. Meanwhile, Atari sells their own system, but it's a bit shoddier, except the controller is different in a way people like. Now Panasonic sells their own NES-compatible system, and it has the nicer controller and faster processor, but it skimps on the RAM.

Sounds like a mess, right? That's what could have happened if Atari would have been able to break the 10NES chip. Thank goodness that it didn't. Because Nintendo was able to keep such tight control of their market, they thrived, the people who made games for the NES like Capcom and Konami thrived, consoles took off again, and everyone was happy.

Everyone except for Atari, of course.

So, let's get to the nitty-gritty: Is Tengen’s After Burner any good? Yeah, it is. It's an air-combat game in faux-3D where you fly a jet and shoot down planes that are coming at you while they try and shoot you down. It's a lot of fun, if a little repetitive. Each level is pretty much "face off against enemy planes, try not to die." One errant enemy missile can kill you, so you have to be very careful. However, the levels are short, so if you die you don’t get sent back very far. It has a really nice arcade feel to it that's still fun to play.

In short, After Burner is an OK game. Too bad the company that made it was so messed up.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Air Fortress