While playing on Bog, a dark, wide map filled with small gaps of cover and two small buildings ripe for camping, I noticed an enemy player’s been using the infamous “noob tube” – an M203 grenade launcher – to get easy kills. I decide to switch over to my sniper rifle build, with an R700 equipped, ready to pick off the offending noob tuber.
I then started sweeping around the map looking for enemies. I spotted enemies on the other side of the map and starting aiming down the scope and taking shots, occasionally moving to avoid being easily killed. I then spotted an enemy with a rifle and his grenade launcher prepped, and I nailed him in one shot. However, he had just shot a grenade before he died. A grenade that landed right on me. I couldn’t resist to type “good trade” in the chat.
The aftermath.
It’s 2018, and there’s people still playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare online 11 years later. I had picked up the PC version of COD4 as well as World at War on Steam for $10 each. I had hoped they would hit the $4.99 sweet spot, but Activision doesn’t believe in the concept of making their games that cheap.
Surprisingly holds up even graphically.
Honestly, I didn’t need to buy these versions again. I already had both of those games on a console – hell, Call of Duty 4 was the first game I ever got for my PlayStation 3 in 2008 – but the PC version had a fair share of advantages that I wanted to check out. Plus I couldn’t resist replaying the campaigns to one of the best games in the entire series. (Black Ops would probably be a close second.)
First, I also wanted to look into the mod scene. There was a Star Wars-themed mod for COD4 calledGalactic Warfare that was making the rounds around 2009-2011, and it was kind of the reason I wanted to look into the PC version. Sadly, it seems the overall mod scene has died out, leaving me with just vanilla COD4 to play with. With Hardcore settings on, no less.
Hardcore makes it so there’s little HUD, and everybody’s a glass cannon. At least some of the weaker weapons prevail in this mode…
(Updated 4/15/2024 with updated links and clarification.)
Activision. I probably don’t need to say any more, but I’m going to. They’re a company that fully endorses the practice of “make something until it stops making money, then burn it alive and dump the ashes.” Franchises like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Guitar Hero, and James Bond came out practically yearly until the quality suffered. Many iconic studios like Neversoft, Bizarre Creations, and Radical Entertainment were among the casualties when their games didn’t sell well enough. Others, like Raven Software, were enslaved to make Call of Duty after two back-to-back commercial failures in Wolfenstein and Singularity. Even then, who knows when the COD bubble will finally burst?
But before Activision was the monstrous juggernaut they are now, they were still a company that was recovering from the ’80s. A bunch of bad business deals forced the company to be bought by a holding firm in the early ’90s, ran by Robert “Bobby” Kotick, who still runs the company to this day.
While Activision was trying to rebuild during the ’90s, they decided to do something unusual in terms of localization of two Super Famicom games to the west. Localizing games originally from Japan is fairly common, which usually meant changing stuff like minimizing Hitler and Nazi references in Bionic Commando on the NES, to straight up overhauls of existing games, such as Masked Ninja Hanamaru being transformed into Yo! Noid, a game involving Domino’s short-lived mascot for the NES.
In Activision’s case, their localization approach was somewhere in the middle: they decided to scrap the original Super Famicom soundtrack, get a contract deal with some fairly popular electronic bands, and have their songs be part of the new American soundtrack, complete with advertising this fact on the box and in the game itself.
So, all I can say now, is “Are you ready for this?”
(Before I go any further: Shout out to online buddy LanceBoyle for giving me the inspiration to write about these. Not the guy from MegaRace, though I’ll give him a shout out too, because why not?)
That’s one silly-looking ship.This is as far as I got, dying on level 1. I am bad at shmups.
The first game they attempted this with was BioMetal, a fairly innocuous shoot-em-up with powerups that was a decent little R-Type clone. Alas I am very bad at these kind of games, so I couldn’t get past the first stage. Though from what I’ve seen, it seems to be just one of many shoot-em-ups on a system that was already filled with them. It’s why stuff like Phalanx had that weird hillbilly on the cover, to make it stand out.
Yeah, this is early ’90s, alright.“Take that, you bootleg-Alien looking thing!”
Activision’s attempt to make it stand out didn’t involve a cover change, but rather something a bit more unusual: Composer Yoshio Nagashima’s soundtrack was replaced by songs from the band 2 Unlimited. 2 Unlimited was the band that made that fairly popular electronic song “Get Ready for This,” a song that plays practically at every sporting event you could imagine. It plays during the title screen and appears on Stage 2.
BioMetal also features other cuts from their debut album Get Ready!, such as “Twilight Zone” (Stage 1) and “Delight” (Stage 3). Though not all of the songs come from that album, Stage 4 uses “Tribal Dance” off their followup album No Limits!, whereas one other track, that one that plays on the Continue screen, Stage 5 and the Credits, is one I couldn’t immediately pinpoint. The closest equivalent might be “Maximum Overdrive” from No Limits!, but it could also be an original composition meant to emulate the 2 Unlimited sound by composers/arrangers Ali Lexa and John Rodriguez of Ubik Musik Productions. If you have any idea, feel free to let me know in the comments.
Over the years, I have bought a fair share of games more out of curiosity rather than actually wanting them. Often times these are portable games, which I don’t think get talked about all that much beyond the more notable titles. Today, I’m gonna tackle one of those portable games I got on a whim, and it’s based on a rather iconic extreme sports star. (Plus it’s been a while since I wrote something about a game.)
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. An awesome skateboarding game that was fun, even if you were bad on a real skateboard. A long-standing franchise with an impressive series of games that eventually got the common Activision treatment of “pump these games out until they stop making us money.” Nowadays, the franchise lies dormant, mostly remembered through nostalgic memories of the early games in the series with an occasional new installment that’s often hit or miss. The less we talk about Tony Hawk Ride, the better.
Of course, a series had to start somewhere, and looking back at the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, it was clear the game had some good ideas that just needed some refinement. Naturally, the game came out on every platform imaginable for the time period, like the Dreamcast, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation. But to go back to talking about portable games, I forgot this franchise appeared on a system that I wasn’t expecting.
The closest you will get to an 8-bit Tony Hawk.
Yes. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was on the Game Boy Color. Naturally Nintendo’s handheld was still modestly successful — albeit mostly buoyed by Pokemon — and while the Game Boy Color wasn’t nearly as big as the monochrome original by this point, it did bring us a lot of unexpected games on the system, including this one.
This is a long long way from Harvest Moon…
This game was made by Natsume, publisher of the Harvest Moon franchise. I can’t think of a weirder choice for a developer of a portable Tony Hawk game. Honestly, I didn’t even know they made games beside Harvest Moon until I had played this. They’ve probably been games for a long time, and I probably played a couple of them, so please refrain from sending me corrections.
I don’t even remember how I got this game, honestly. I think a neighbor had it years ago and just gave it to me since they didn’t have a GBC. The only other thing I remember about this game is that I wrote a scathing user review of this on GameSpot. You can probably find it if you check the game page for it, but I’d rather not link it, it’s like a lot of my past writing where it’s… a bit rough.
Remember True Crime: Streets of LA? It was a decent Grand Theft Auto clone developed by Luxoflux (RIP) and published by Activision in 2003. While it didn’t reinvent the wheel, it was a decent shooter, driving game and beat-em up. While I was doing my Game Fuel hunt a few weeks back, I had stumbled upon this mysterious gem in the DVD section at a Goodwill.
This is True Crime: Streets of LA Uncovered. A promo DVD for the game, presumably given to GameStop employees or people who pre-ordered the game. For $3, I couldn’t pass this up.
This promo DVD is chock full of interesting videos that highlight the game’s mechanics, a few behind the scenes features, even a video advertising the (now-defunct) truecrimela.com. There’s even a trailer for the original Xbox version of the game, which looked somewhat better than the other versions of True Crime.
