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Category: Every Game I’ve Finished
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Vampire Survivors (poncle, 2022)
Developed/Published by: poncle
Released: 20/10/2022
Completed: 05/05/2026
Completion: Beat the final boss, saw the credits.Vampire Survivors completely passed me by originally. But the genre it spawned–now apparently named “Bullet Heaven” by Valve, although I’m not sure if people have decided to accept it–is everywhere and it feels like I should probably know about it.
Off the back of Vampire Survivors, my feeling is that it’s… something I know about now.
In fact, it’s something that I was quite prepared to be done with very quickly once I understood it. If you’re unfamiliar with Vampire Survivors–and it’s not impossible, I really didn’t know anything about it until I played it–it’s a game in which your chosen hero is placed in the middle of an essentially infinite map and enemies spawn off screen in increasing amounts and make a beeline for them. The chosen hero attacks automatically, and really, there are only a few ways you affect their survival. First, by moving them around: not just to avoid enemies, but to collect the experience gems they drop. Secondly, by selecting the upgrades they receive by levelling up: new weapons, passive items, or simply upgrading the weapons and items you already have.
The pleasure of Vampire Survivors is the ramping up of your abilities versus the ramping up of enemies. The very first time you play, you think “how on earth am I going to survive this” as you walk around slowly with a whip that fires, occasionally, horizontally the direction you’re facing. It’s awkward, and not even really fun. You’ll probably pick weapons and abilities at random and die a few times, but then you’ll grasp you want to pick weapons or abilities that synergise [“well, obviously”–Ed.] and before long you’re playing a game where your hero basically stands still while a whirling tornado of attacks spin around them, energy gems are absorbed into them from a distance, and literally thousands of enemies die by the second in huge, incomprehensible mosh-pit.
What’s odd about Vampire Survivors is how quickly that occurs. At least, it did for me. Once you learn or luck into the realisation that if you pick the correct synergies of weapons and passives weapons evolve into ridiculously powerful new forms, the game reveals itself to be about… doing that. Each level-up, pick the thing that matches the thing you have. Simple.
In my recent(-ish) piece on Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, I wrote about the “machine zone” described by Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Designers in the gambling industry are engaged in an ever increasing arms race to create perfect, friction-free sensation and the absolute absorption of players in their games until, ideally, they never stop playing. Not that they couldn’t, that they’d never want to. A perfect skinner box.
Have you noticed how gambling is everywhere now? You can’t seem to escape it. If you watch any form of TV (remember when streaming didn’t have ads?) every ad break seems to be for an online casino or sports betting. Prediction markets are being shoehorned into awards shows and god knows what else.
It feels like as everything gets slightly worse in people’s lives, as all the money, all the resources get held by an ever smaller amount of people, as our high streets and third spaces get hollowed out, the offer being made is “well, gamble. Maybe you’ll hit it big, and join us.” Or at least, that’s the offer initially being made. The real offer being made is “Gamble, and lose yourself. Lose the outside world. The longest you’ll ever have to live is the moment between spins, and the best thing is the spins never have to stop.”
It is a persuasive, efficient, powerful form of design. I doubt the people on the ground, the ones engaged in user experience, recognising when an animation is too long or a particular button press unnecessary, are evil as such. I think we’re all able of abstracting far more horrific things away if our own comfort demands it. And you know, they’re designers in the gambling industry. It’s hard to be disappointed.
So is it unfair that I’m disappointed in the waves of game designers that delve into the dark patterns? It’s getting disturbingly transparent to see the slot machines and scratch cards; like a promise, “come join us in the machine zone. This one doesn’t even need you to spend all your money. Your time is good enough for us, here.”
I play a game like Vampire Survivors, and I think… where is the “play”? where is the joy, the creativity, hell, the “series of interesting decisions”? The time between level ups is just the time the reels spend spinning. After the first few, every level up is as automatic as pushing “spin again.” And after a certain point, you don’t even have to. Like an addict in the machine zone, you watch the machine play itself. If there is a vampire here, it is one that drains us of our time, our life, our joy.
I’m sure you probably think I’m being sort of histrionic here. I’ve complained about this before, honestly; when I wrote about Blue Prince. The idea that these games–which I admit unlike slot machines you can “win”–ask you to spend time on failing runs, waste your time, but feed you the incremental success (directly analogous to slot machine’s carefully spaced payouts, I feel) to keep you playing.
But it’s… shit. It’s games as commerce, not art. And I can hear the complaints, but I guess I’m at the point where they don’t wash. The spate of gambling themed games makes it clear that any distinction over the fact that games’ dark patterns were a parallel evolution is utterly meaningless. And sure, the games are fun, in many cases do require more thought–so then remove the dark patterns!
You’re creating games that you want people to play, right? Not setting traps for people to fall into?
As I said above: I don’t even think gambling designers are evil. I don’t think most game designers are thinking deeply about the value of design, actually; so much is genre convention already that I don’t think it’s interrogated.
The problem for me is when playing Vampire Survivors, there’s just so little to interrogate. I was done with it after my first half hour win, but–and it speaks of the insidious nature of it, and my own completionist tendencies–I realised there were a few things I could do to “complete” it properly, surmised it wouldn’t take much time or attention to do so, and saw the credits.1 But I felt nothing. No joy. No pleasure. No excitement or interest or… anything. Really. I just lived in the moments between spins.
Will I ever play it again? There are a lot of DLC with IP people love for this game now, but look… it’s like getting excited that they made a slot machine with the Golden Girls on it or something.
Final Thought: So I suppose the big question is: do I play Vampire Crawlers? Well, the problem is I fucking love dungeon crawlers and deckbuilders.
After all that… what am I like!
- I probably wouldn’t have done this if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s really hard to look at the screen during about… what, twenty, thirty percent of an episode of The Pitt? ↩︎
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Goal! (Tose, 1988)
Developed/Published by: Tose / Jaleco
Released: 23/12/1988
Completed: 22/06/2026
SCompletion: Won the “Championship” (it’s obviously the World Cup, there’s a picture of the World Cup at the end) withItalyScotland (look, they play in blue, ok?)After the terrible experience of Match Day’s bare-bones port and antique play, I was definitely looking for something better to play to get my arcadey footy fix–but of course, the siren call of more retro beckoned. Steam, surprisingly, has a sort of burgeoning collection of retro games, I think because there are a lot of companies throwing games up in the hope they’ll make a buck or two. I learned my lesson well enough with Match Day to not bother with Microprose Soccer, even though I’d genuinely like to play that predecessor to Sensible Soccer–the version on Steam apparently doesn’t include the proper C64 game and doesn’t work on Steam Deck anyway.
However, I spotted Jaleco Sports: Goal! and it looked like it had a little more oomph to it, including two versions of Goal!, CRT filters, saving and rewind, and manuals. What I’d consider the bare minimum–but after Match Day, a welcome sight.
I usually don’t love tube-style CRT frames but it helps here to cover up a lot of the flickering/garbage at the edge of the screen… It’s not even exactly the bare minimum. I appreciate that Sickhead Games/Rock It Games made sure to include all the different regional versions of Goal!–so you can, if you wish, play the original Moero! Pro Soccer version, or the PAL version (for some reason)1. And that even includes all the different manuals. Pretty good!
I suppose it’s hard to ask for more from a re-release of an late-80s footy game, because what are you really going to dredge up that’s that illuminating? So at best, you’ve got to hope that by 1988 we’ve reached “football as a video game” rather than “we tried to represent football as best we could ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
After Match Day, or I suppose more contextually, Soccer, Goal! for NES feels like a huge step up in that it’s much more accurately representing the sport–full differentiated teams, tournaments, and all the rules including offside (although I never saw this play out… actually come to think of it I never even saw a foul given, but the manual does say they’re there!)
You can also feel it trying to be a video game. It’s trying to do what you want a video game version of a sport to do: create something that gives you the same feeling of the experience without being a slavish recreation. In Goal! You can feel the flow of a football game and those big moments: When you scored the goal needed to win the game with a header off a keeper deflection. When you had to desperately defend against an opponent that just keeps knocking on your door in the dying minutes of the game. All of those sorts of things.
It’s a shame that Goal!.. is not very good. Credited to Tose, I genuinely think they set out to make a good football game–and I think they did nearly succeed. But there are a lot of baffling decisions.
First up: that viewing angle. It’s not… what is that angle? It’s not isometric projection. I think it’s an attempt at military projection? But there’s something so off about it. It feels like you’re a giant with a crick in his neck, and it doesn’t even look like the players are drawn correctly for the angle anyway. Why did they do this? It’s not a viewpoint football is ever seen by (perhaps in the modern era by a failing drone, I don’t know.) Old footy matches were often shown at a bit more of an angle, but this is just ridiculous.
It’s what probably causes one of the most major issues with Goal!. It’s bloody impossible to line up your shots correctly. Blessedly the game has a pass and a shoot button (though the I feel layout is backwards) but by putting everything at an angle, and the cross of a d-pad famously not at an angle, it’s a nightmare. It doesn’t even feel like you can really line up your shot with the angle of the pitch!
But there are plenty of other glaring errors. The AI is atrocious. As much as you can still weave a story in your matches, the story sometimes features beats like “when the midfielder that wasn’t under your control suddenly stopped chasing the ball to run in the opposite direction.” I said jumpers for goalposts when talking about Match Day, but a lot of the time Goal! looks like children playing: literally everyone on the pitch just chasing the one person with the ball. And despite already having a low framerate with jerky players, when things like that happen the game’s speed craters. It’s Double Dragon level, though arguably worse because Goal! (thanks to the stupid angle) requires such precision.
The bad framerate is especially damaging because it makes Goal! so unresponsive. The game features a sliding tackle, but it literally took me several games to successfully pull off, even though the command is just “push a direction and press the tackle button.” It just doesn’t let you do it nine times out of ten. And if you’re trying to switch players to get closer to the opponent with the ball? Good luck. The game seems to have absolutely no system in place for selecting the closest player–you’ll often find it selecting someone miles away. Just for fun, I guess.
It’s not all bad, though. Goal! Does have one of the best things in a football game: aftertouch. After shooting, you can hold B and push a direction to bend your shot, and it’s one of the things you’ll need to do to beat the keepers, who are weirdly close to perfect if you get them on screen head on but useless if you try and bend it in around them before you even see them (another side effect of the weird angle is how close you have to get to even see the goals.)
Maybe it’s just that the game chugs along, is unresponsive, and awkward–you really do have to have a death grip on your controller to try and hit those angles–but scoring goals does feel really satisfying, so that’s nice. There’s a real dopamine hit that keeps you playing longer than you probably should.
And, honestly, I bet at the time it did keep a lot of footy-loving NES owners playing. Goal! Got some terrible reviews–39% in TOTAL!–and while it’s not exactly that I’d say they’re wrong (it’s not good) with so few footy games on the NES I understand why you’d make do when playing this–somehow I did just keep playing it until I won the World Cup. It was probably better in multiplayer, too, with both players struggling with the controls and tackling–I don’t know if the championship mode gets more difficult as you go, but it can be pretty frustrating playing against the better teams who are able to tackle at will.
In an attempt to offer value for money, there’s a weird extra mode in Goal! too. The “shoot competition.” This is a mode where you’re trying to quickly score a goal from a set piece against a couple of defenders, but… it’s got completely different graphics and plays differently.
Why would Tose do this? It’s not even very good. It’s easy, over quickly (score five times, you’re done) and doesn’t reward you with anything. I wonder if this was what the game was originally supposed to be, and when it turned out the graphics wouldn’t fit into memory with two full teams, they just jammed it in as a wee extra.
The weirdest thing about it is that you can play as one of three “stars”: Hansen, Roko or Juarez.
Hansen?
As in… Alan Hansen???
He was a defender!
And Scotland isn’t even properly in this game. Which, by the way, immediately halves the scores I don’t give out. Meaning I’d be rating this more harshly than TOTAL did. So they’re lucky I don’t.
Will I ever play it again? No, but as I said above: I would understand why people would. This is so nearly there, just let down by weird decisions and technical limitations/ineptitude.
Final Thought: Another odd decision: in adapting Moero! Pro Soccer as Goal!, I guess Jaleco felt they had to try and attract the US market, and so Goal! even in its European release has a Championship mode (World Cup, international teams) and a “Tournament” mode, but the tournament mode features American teams2, like literally anyone would care. It’s a shame as well because only the tournament mode features the “proper” knockouts of the World Cup, with the Championship mode instead featuring a strange double group stage. Really not sure what they were thinking with that. Anyway. Alan Hansen!!!
- Sorry, I’ve let the side down here and didn’t actually boot this version up to see if it’s any different. The main way it should be different is it should be slower, at 50hz, and I imagine they didn’t go that far. Also, why would you want to play that! ↩︎
- Something I like about this: Tose obviously didn’t have the memory to fit in stats for more teams (or couldn’t be arsed to make them up) and so they just made the American teams rebadged versions of international teams, and the manual happily admits this. ↩︎
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NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)
Developed/Published by: Sumo Digital, Sumo Digital Academy / Secret Mode
Released: 26/03/2026
Completed: 06/07/2026
Completion: Won the Egg Cup with Carlisle!The World Cup grinding on finally gave me a reason to give my time to this, Sumo Digital’s “Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager” because I was, at least in the group stages, going to have a lot of games on that I didn’t exactly feel I needed to give my full attention (but I still wanted to see the goals and that.)
Now, I’m not someone who really bothers with football manager games, but I like deckbuilders and I really loved the theming of this, chock-full of the kind of maximalist skeuomorphism that hasn’t really been seen in games since the likes of Yes, Prime Minister (and which does really feel like a very “British games” kind of thing.) It was definitely enough to make me get over the main issue I have: that I love football, but I just don’t care about club football at all.
Love a game that gives you a desk: Yes, Prime Minister (Oxford Digital, 1987) vs. Nutmeg!
I suspect that’s an unbelievably unusual opinion, but if you’re going to feel that way, growing up in Scotland is probably what’s going to do it. Which I suppose makes it somewhat ironic that probably the most major issue I have with Nutmeg! is that it’s limited to the English leagues, which I care about even less. I get it: they’re recreating 20 years of football history right down to the real transfers happening at the right time, and that’s a lot of data entry (I suspect Sumo Digital Academy had to take on quite a bit of grunt work) and it’s probably the most famous and popular league in the world, but I hope that they’ll be able to add the Scottish leagues in future, so players can try and desperately make the top flight of Scottish football in the era even slightly interesting (sorry.)
But still, don’t say I don’t persevere. I simply picked the most northern teams I could get–first York, which I got to the second division–and then Carlisle, the most northern English football team you can get.1
In general, however, one of the nice things about Nutmeg! is that I don’t think you have to be a locked-in football fan to enjoy it. Thanks to setting itself to an era and going for a more abstracted take on the sport, Nutmeg! does manage to split the difference between being a “themed video game” and a “football manager” and that makes it worth playing even if you just think it looks interesting but you only know the barest about football.
Despite that, I do think the tutorial doesn’t explain the game as well as it should, which is why I’ve written an entire guide for it. However, in short, the thing that needs to be understood about Nutmeg! is that it’s not a deckbuilder about building a “perfect engine” that you use across the game, but instead a game about percentages. Nutmeg! is more like a streamlined, card-based XCOM than it is a football-themed Slay The Spire.
The majority of your time is spent actually being a football manager: you’re trying to build the best team of players you can, and to do that you’ll need to make money–selling merch and improving your stadium to sell more tickets–and hire the best staff to train and support them. The loop, really, boils down to acquiring the best players you can to win matches which allows you to make more money to buy even better players. Unless you chose to play in marathon mode, you aren’t going to play every game–meaning that you mostly go into games with a straight percentage chance of winning or drawing, and only a little leeway to affect that by choosing your team’s tactics and formation.
So quickly you learn: you can’t win every game, unless you want to engage in brutal, repetitive save scumming.2 You have to pick your battles–and the trick here is that’s where the deckbuilding game kicks in, with card-based matches.
I really love the matches. The system isn’t entirely elegant, but it does a great job of representing the highs and lows of a football match. Football matches are 90+ minutes and they tell stories that boil down easily into highlights, and this is how Nutmeg! works. Again, you can’t expect to simply build a perfect deck and win. First of all, any cards you use in a match get burned off, so your deck is constantly changing. Secondly, every action is that XCOM-like battle of percentages that you try to bend in your favour with your hand of cards. Want to score a goal? Well, if the goalie is incredible and your striker… not, you’ll have to spend the best attacking card you have and still not guarantee the goal.
Everything in Nutmeg! is a gamble, and that simply feels right for what they’re trying to do. Strong teams are better than weak teams, but absolutely unlikely things can happen… about as often as unlikely things happen. You won’t get a division 5 team beating a first division team, but underdogs can still win the day with the right cards, and there’s a real thrill in having saved a powerful card until you absolutely need it, like in a cup knockout game, knowing that if you lose it, you’re probably out till next year.
But there’s always next year.
Nutmeg! is a really nice “casual” take on football and management sims. How good players are is very clear–you really don’t have to pour over the stats–and the matches you play matter. But it’s not perfect. There are no issues that ruin it, exactly, but there’s definitely a culmination of niggles that could turn you off.
First, that UI. It’s charming, and I love that it evolves across the years, but it’s also really busy, overcomplicated, and slow to navigate. It feel like they’ve created a lot of redundancy to try and make it simpler to do more things, but it’s confusing, and made worse by the fact that the way they highlight what you’re selecting is far too subtle. And then when you actually switch screens there are animations, zooms… I’m aware that if they cut this down the game would feel very static, but especially as the game settles into a loop where you’re doing the same things flicking between screens over and over, you’re going to get very tired of it (and a bit dizzy, frankly.)
Then there are the weak points of the game’s loop. Ensuring players keep their skills trained up is just tedious busywork; I get the idea (you can’t keep all your players at their full potential) but couldn’t the game just… switch players at max out for me? They already ensure players change which skill they’re training when they max them out, so it’s not totally out of pocket to ask.
There are some subtler issues, too. Early in the game as you’re building up your team, the cards you’ll be getting usually work with the recipes you have. But with a well trained team, you might be getting only the top-tier “basic” cards, meaning that the recipes you want, which often use lower-ranked basics, you can’t make! I want the 50% goal card, not the 60% goal card that might fail, but if I never see a 20% attack card I can’t make it. It’s a strange–and probably not easily solved–design issue. Maybe give players the ability to split cards?
And ultimately, there’s a limit to how long you’re going to want to play Nutmeg! as there’s only the four divisions and the Egg Cup. The game offers twenty years of seasons and having played it for not quite half that, there’s a feeling of diminishing returns as the game starts to feel like it boils down to just waiting to make enough money to snipe the best players from other teams even if they cost millions and millions of pounds. There aren’t quite enough events or stories to be told once you’re topping the league unless you just want to start over with a different club. You know, adding the Scottish leagues would give players new things to aim for…
All that said, I had a blast in my time with this, as it somehow scratches the football itch, the deckbuilder itch, and even the XCOM itch. It’s not perfect, but it does exactly what it sets out to do and you really can’t say fairer than that.
Will I ever play it again? Although I led my team to a win in the Egg Cup, they haven’t lifted the first division trophy. I could be convinced to attempt such a feat if there are any future updates to the game. Like if they added Scottish leagues. Just worth mentioning. Again.
Final Thought: Of course, Nutmeg! Isn’t the only football manager to explore the XCOM concept, there’s also Football, Tactics & Glory, which also recently put out a World Cup update. I’m eager to compare and contrast at some point in the future, but I am a bit footballed out now–I played this for like 30 hours!
- I could, if I was absolutely dedicated, have attempted to stuff my teams with Scottish players, but they don’t include nationality in the stats and the ones I recognised instantly were all knocking on a bit, even if it would have been pretty funny to field Frank “Wherza Burds?” McAvennie (sorry, I know this post is getting extremely regional.) ↩︎
- You can choose to play the game seeded so you can make it impossible to save scum. I recommend this–but you’ll regret it every time you lose a match or fail to attract a new player, so be warned. ↩︎
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The Three Stooges (Cinemaware, 1987)
Developed/Published by: Incredible Technologies, Cinemaware / Cinemaware
Released: 1987
Completed: 30/01/2026
Completion: Raised enough money to repair Ma’s orphanage… but not enough to get married to her three beautiful daughters. This is the “real” best ending; who’d inflict The Three Stooges on some women?As celebration of the release of The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2, I’m proud to share this final excerpt from my article in said journal, “A History Of The Three Stooges In Video Games”. The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2 is available only physically, and only from Amazon: .com, .ca, .co.uk (or your regional variation) so run out and get a copy today! Well, you don’t need to run anywhere, but you know what I mean.
If there’s something that stands out about Cinemaware’s take on The Three Stooges–certainly before we have to get into the thorny issue of the game’s quality–it’s that it is the kind of work that absolutely deserves the cliched phrase “a love letter to…” because it is, from the moment you open the manual, clearly a love letter to the Stooges.
Cinemaware’s manuals are famously more supplements providing historical context–the manual for Defender Of The Crown has pages on The Norman Conquest and the veracity of Robin Hood–but nothing matches The Three Stooges, which includes a massive thirteen page essay from “A Dedicated Stooge Fan” recounting the entire history of the Stooges from Moe running away from home in 1914 until his untimely death (and yes, that means it references Joe Besser and Curly Joe DeRita, though they obviously don’t feature in the game1). Someone at Cinemaware clearly loved the Stooges enough that they wanted to license what was–in 1987–hardly a gold-standard license, and treat it with more respect than it had likely ever been treated before.
The opening page of the manual’s essay, which splendidly opens with both a dictionary definition and a quote from Leonard Maltin. It’s a slightly strange outlier in Cinemaware’s output. The company’s games were heavily influenced, of course, by the golden age of cinema–Defender Of The Crown Errol Flynn swashbucklers, It Came From The Desert ‘50s B-movies, and so on–but there was never any sense that they had to be licensed rather than just give off the affect. It’s possible that slapstick was chosen as a genre to tackle and they found it just doesn’t work without iconic characters to back it up; I find it much more likely that Cinemaware’s founder, Bob Jacobs, was just a stoogehead. After all, The Three Stooges doesn’t really fit the more “grown up” air the company was attempting to cultivate; The Three Stooges may have been from the era of classic cinema, but it was certainly the fodder of children (indeed, you only have to click on a few Youtube videos of playthroughs of this game to see how many people picked this up excitedly as children.)
Interestingly, even if Jacobs was a stoogehead, designer John Cutter wasn’t (though he’d tell Youtuber Matt Barton that “by the end of the project I definitely was a fan.”) Designed by Cutter at Cinemaware and implemented by Incredible Technologies (who would go on to create the Golden Tee Golf games you probably remember from bars) The Three Stooges is similar to Defender Of The Crown in that it mashes together board game inspiration with minigames. Like in Defender Of The Crown, the issue with the design is that it isn’t very cinematic despite the company’s founding principles, and so it similarly relies on the idea that if you have big, flashy splash screens powered by the Amiga’s graphical capabilities things will seem cinematic. And The Three Stooges has, well, the Stooges to help: Cinemaware were able to use digitised images of the Stooges and frames from their shorts to push the illusion.
Speaking of Defender of the Crown, The Three Stooges references it in what I think is the best joke in the game: it opens with Defender Of The Crown’s title screen, before the Stooges walk on and realise they’re in the wrong game. It works particularly well because you could easily believe Cinemaware accidentally mastered the wrong game on the disks, and I assume it caught a lot of people out.
There’s a simple framing device–the Stooges discover an orphanage is going to be foreclosed by an evil banker if they can’t raise $5000 in a month to pay the rent; the Stooges decide they’ll take on the task. Unlike Mylstar Electronics’ The Three Stooges, aka “Brides is Brides”, there’s no fiction that this represents a specific new Three Stooges short, but if it did, it would be one of the later ones where they use a lot of old footage, because Cinemaware’s Three Stooges pulls heavily from Punch Drunks (1934), Men In Black (1934) and Dutiful But Dumb (1941) with the other minigame generally inspired by the Stooges pie-throwing antics (the manual specifically references Hoi Polloi (1935).)
The selection of these shorts is at least vaguely interesting to me. Frames are digitised directly from Punch Drunks and Dutiful but Dumb if not Men In Black; the shorts had been released on VHS by this point, but they hadn’t come on the same tape or anything. Punch Drunks and Men In Black are (basically) the first Stooges shorts (Woman Haters doesn’t count, with all that weird rhyming) but… why Dutiful but Dumb?
(I’m getting ahead of myself here, but it particularly stands out because it’s a reinterpretation of the sequence where an oyster in Curly’s soup keeps eating his crackers as a cracker eating contest, which–look, I know I’m splitting hairs here–makes no sense because even in game Curly is dressed as a “Vulgarian” officer. I have to believe it’s because someone at Cinemaware just really loved that sequence.)
As with all of Cinemaware’s output, the attention to visual detail (well, on things other than “what Curly’s wearing”) means The Three Stooges looks great. But similarly it comes at the cost of a game that is… bad. Based largely on the Game Of Life, the idea is that 30 days equals thirty turns, and on each turn you “roll” (in this case, hit the fire button to stop a hand) for your preferred event. You want to hit on the movie-inspired mini-games or free money; you don’t want to hit on the banker (at best, you lose a turn) or the mousetraps, which just snap on the hand and cost you a day.
It’s actually here that the game’s only interesting tactical consideration lies. As the days progress, the hand gets faster and faster until it’s sheer luck what you hit. To mitigate this, you can select the “eye poke” space, which wastes a day so that you can get involved in some classic stooge hijinks where as Moe you beat the everliving fuck out of Larry and Curly as punishment for… wasting a day I guess. Doing this, for some reason, slows the hand–unless you miss repeatedly on your eye pokes and shin kicks, in which case you can end up in a worse situation than you started with. So the game, at least, involves a bit of risk/reward, in that you want to ride the game as far as you can without having to waste a day on slowing the hand–but if you wait too long, you’ll struggle to hit the required space, and probably screw yourself completely.
That said, it’s not like the game is that punishing if you just want to muddle through it. Money isn’t hard to come by–though if you’re truly aiming for a high score (and marrying the orphanage’s comely daughters) you have to play quite strategically (you make so much more from mini games than the free money spaces that a free money space is actually a hindrance.) Anyway, those mini-games.
Not great! If there’s something I can’t shake about The Three Stooges, it’s the idea that–like Defender Of The Crown–it was made with great intentions but also an arbitrary release date that means that it comes across as a bit unfinished. Nothing really makes this clearer than the comparison between the Punch Drunks mini-game and the others.
In the Punch Drunks mini game, you can see that some of the developers have inserted themselves into this classic Stooge short.
In the Punch Drunks-inspired mini game, not only do you get a proper digitisation of some of the beats of the short (Larry breaking his “Stradivarius”) the play screen features this entertaining split screen where you see the fight ongoing as you race to get a new violin. It also plays… fine, as you move up and down on the screen to avoid obstacles and can leap them too. It’s nothing special, but it feels like it’s what it’s intended to be.
The Men In Black-inspired mini game is almost like what you get if you tried to do the same thing with absolutely no cinematic flair whatsoever. Inspired by the racecar sequence, you get a overhead view where you really can’t tell you’re playing The Three Stooges as they race up the screen avoiding patients, and a nurse in front of you drops stuff that you can pick up (but because you’re a massive, three car collision box, you don’t really have to move to do it.) Indeed, because the nurse moves out of the way of collisions, you can just follow her movements at top speed and that’s… it.
Curly, clearly wearing the costume of a “Vulgarian” guard.
You could argue that the Dutiful But Dumb-inspired mini game at least uses digitised art, but it’s actually a hindrance. You’re trying to collect crackers with Curly’s spoon–which controls horribly–but the game constantly cuts back to the splash screen of Curly so we can see him react to the oysters. Basically the only way to avoid this is to be superhuman at the game and stop the oysters ever stealing a cracker, but it’s beyond me or probably anyone’s patience.
There’s a strange sort of dilemma with The Three Stooges: when you play a mini-game that doesn’t have sufficient Stooge content, it feels unrewarding. But when you do (like in the Punch Drunks mini game) you get sick of the repetitive intro and outro and all the horrifically slow loading that results. In fact, in a full playthrough on Amiga, it feels like you’re waiting for the floppies to load more time than you do anything else.
The repetition also doesn’t make sense in a game that expects you to do the same minigames over and over. Alright, Larry can break his violin and have to run and get another one day after day; but why does the hospital keep hiring the Three Stooges? Why do they keep getting hired as waiters if it always ends in a pie fight?2
You can say I’m putting too much effort into trying to make this Three Stooges game make sense; the shorts, after all, barely do. But it speaks to that Cinemaware’s concept of game design was upside down. I’ve got a great sympathy for games that try and be maximally replayable, but it’s obvious that rather than this awkward attempt at the Game Of Life, The Three Stooges should have been a kind of supercut of Stooge shorts that you just played linearly.
I suppose one bright spot for Stoogeaholics might be the trivia sequences, which feature absurdly trivia questions that veer from easy to bafflingly hard (do you know where Larry liked to drink?) and unarguably this is a more interesting, more authentic take on the Three Stooges than Mylstar Electronics’ attempt. But it outstays its welcome almost as quickly.
Will I ever play it again? Cinemaware loved releasing their games on every system they could, but the differences between Three Stooges versions are lower than in Defender Of The Crown, for example. I’ll be honest… there’s a chance I’ll stick the GBA version on my Trimui Brick.
Final Thought: If there’s one thing to be said for Cinemaware’s The Three Stooges, it’s that Moe’s daughter, Joan Howard Maurer expressed that seeing it would have been a “thrill” for her father to see it, very sweetly saying it allowed her to “join in during a pie fight and zap [her] father for the first time.”
For that alone, I’m glad they made it.
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Match Day (Ritman/Clarke, 1984)
Developed/Published by: Jon Ritman, Chris Clarke / Ocean
Released: 1984 (first reviews showed up in Jan 1985.)
Completed: 20/06/2026
Completion: Scored a goal, at least, in every version I played.It’s the World Cup, and as usual when any major football tournament comes around, I suddenly get a hankering to spend all my time engaging with football content, which means that I end up playing a football game or two.
Of course, this World Cup is a bit… extra, isn’t it? There are so many games a day that it’s hard to find space to do anything else, and I’m lamenting that I didn’t get myself a big wallchart or something just so I could remember the dazzling number of permutations of potential brackets. But on browsing Steam to see what was what in the ol’ football world, I was surprised to see that Match Day was available. Literally Jon Ritman and Chris Clarke’s original Match Day in its ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 editions, along with International Match Day for the Speccy (which is just Match Day but with some extra pieces of art and they just changed the team names to international teams.) Not Match Day II, the one people have a particular fondness for. Match Day. The one from 1984. On Steam. For money.
This seemed a bit… optimistic from publisher Pixel Games. The last time I mentioned Match Day was when I was discussing Nintendo’s shockingly rancid Soccer, where I made the (possibly controversial) statement that “Match Day was at least as good as this.” It’s a statement I more-or-less stand by–certainly if you were looking for value for money, you were getting more for less with Match Day. But in 2026, with Soccer (essentially) free on Switch with a Switch Online subscription… Pixel Games are absolutely asking for money for old rope, here. As with Soccer, only the most extremely nostalgic could squeeze some pleasure out of a game of this.
Match Day isn’t the first home computer football game; it’s not even the first on the Spectrum. The original text–at least, the one that spawned all the imitators–was International Soccer, released on the C64 in 1983, and a pre-Batman Jon Ritman, looking for his next project, found that every publisher he asked was looking for a version of International Soccer on Spectrum. Publisher Artic would beat him to it with World Cup Football1, but it wouldn’t matter–Match Day would blow it away, becoming a top seller (and becoming well liked enough to be mentioned in Crash’s fan poll, published as late as April 1986!)
I’ve mentioned it before, but the issue with early sports games is the effort required just to recreate the sport is such that there’s really no space to consider what would make it particularly fun as a video game, and Match Day is no different. You can recognise it as football. Sure, there aren’t the right number of players, but there are throw-ins, corners, keepers–it’s football. But on the humble Speccy, there are issues. Firstly, the colour palette is insane. The game defaults to everything being white or yellow on bright green, which (I imagine?) comes from the idea that the most important thing about football is that it’s played on green pitches with white lines and a white ball–though you can at least go into the settings and change that to black on green, which is more or less parseable.2 The main issue is that it’s slow (though not really any slower than Nintendo’s take on the sport…) and with only one button–and no ability to actually tackle, or control shot power(!)–Match Day is really sloppy and stop-start to play, as you and your opponent rely on trying to slowly block each other with your players’ weighty movements. Because players with the ball are slightly slower than opponents, this can lead to situations where it feels you get completely boxed out (or just end up passing it to your opponent and back again) especially because a cross or diagonal pass is more than likely going to end up in another throw in.
Match Day makes you watch a long intro to each match to show off that they’d licensed the Match Of The Day theme (but not the name.) To be charitable, the game is a lot of scrappy midfield play chasing loose balls, very “jumpers for goalposts.” They may as well be, because the keepers are hilariously incapable. When you get control of them, you can either have them leap left or right, and that’s it. If the ball is literally next to them, slowly creeping over the line? You’re out of luck, it’s going in.
The reason I suspect Match Day was successful is that–while it doesn’t exactly play a great, or let’s be honest, even an adequate game of football, it’s a game where you can name teams whatever you like and easily play against friends–even in tournaments of up to eight people! If you had a Speccy and at least one pal, this was definitely going to get played a lot.
But today, Match Day is a museum piece. Essentially impossible to play (and with five minute halves, interminable to do so–a problem Super Soccer suffered too.) You’d hope then that in a modern re-release there’d be something to make the package feel worth it. Maybe I’m not asking for a Digital Eclipse-level documentary or something, but… some box art? Any context whatsoever?
No, this is shockingly bare-bones. Like, bare-bones to the point you can tell they didn’t even bother to design a front end, it looks completely default. You get saves, rewind, and imagine resizing, but no scanlines or anything like that. There’s a real lack of care here. The first and most obvious thing they could offer is a “turbo” mode to speed the game up a bit, but they were hardly going to go that far when if you’re playing the Amstrad or C64 versions you actually have to watch the game get run from the operating system. And suspiciously the C64 version has the team names overwritten, so it’s not even a clean rom (look, I’m not saying they just downloaded it off the internet, but…)
Speaking of…
Conversion Therapy
The Amstrad version is not very fondly remembered–Retro Gamer seem to give it a kick every time they mention Match Day–and it wasn’t developed by Ritman and Clarke but by Sentient Software3. However, I do have to say… I like it better than the Spectrum version, sorry. Sure the ball’s yellow, it’s maybe a touch slower, and there’s some very weird colour corruption when players overlap, but exactly the same as far as I can tell–although Ritman says on his own site,
“The versions for the BBC, C64 & Amstrad CPC were programmed by others who didn’t even talk to me about it.”
I’m certain this version shares code (maybe Ocean passed it along) but happy to be corrected. Ritman does go on to say say he thought the conversions were dire, but the Amstrad version, at least, might be bearable at double speed. Still a shame about the terrible goalies though.
The C64 version, however, is unsalvagable drivel. It’s way smoother than the Speccy or CPC versions (oh to have hardware sprites…) but it gets pretty much everything else wrong. The AI is non-existent. Opposing players seem to just stand about in a stupor, occasionally waking up to run at you and the camera doesn’t move until you’re at the very edge of the screen, so you’ve got no idea what’s coming, but it doesn’t matter because you can basically walk it into the goal every time. Absolutely shocking.
The Pixel games release doesn’t include the BBC Micro version, but I feel like I should mention it anyway because it was, absurdly, ported by Chris Roberts, he of Wing Commander and Star Citizen fame. So there’s a game he actually finished, then.
Match Day was important in its time and place, and I feel like I should be glad it’s “in print”–so many games aren’t–but you just can’t release it like this.
Will I ever play it again? Aye, I’ll get the lads round for an eight-player cup one day. (I will not do this.)
Final Thought: Literally the day Ritman handed in Match Day he saw Rare’s Knight Lore and became “determined” to make an isometric game. He went on to make Batman, and we all know how that went.
- Which would, of course, infamously become World Cup Carnival. You can read all about that on Super Chart Island. ↩︎
- The way you know which player you’re in control of is that that player’s boots are a different colour. Not an ideal system, but it works. ↩︎
- There are a few Sentient Softwares on Mobygames, but the most likely one is the one that made How To Be A Complete Bastard. So that’s cool. ↩︎
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The Three Stooges (Mylstar Electronics, 1984)
Developed/Published by: Mylstar Electronics
Released: 05/1984
Completed: 29/01/2026
Completion: Rescued Curly’s bride, Cora. It’s just the same thing again for the other two brides!As celebration of the release of The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2, I’m proud to share this first excerpt from my article in said journal, “A History Of The Three Stooges In Video Games”. The Journal Of Stoogealogical Studies Vol. 2 is available only physically, and only from Amazon: .com, .ca, .co.uk (or your regional variation) so run out and get a copy today! Well, you don’t need to run anywhere, but you know what I mean.
I’ve never been a huge fan of The Three Stooges. I remember once watching what’s generally considered a peak Stooges short, A Plumbing We Will Go, absolutely stone-faced as Will Sloan, editor of the Journal of Stoogealogical Studies, and fellow Stooge fan Justin Decloux sat next to me, crying with laughter. But I never grew up with The Three Stooges–in fact, I can’t remember ever seeing them at all on TV in the UK, while I do have strong memories of Laurel and Hardy shorts playing on BBC2. When I finally encountered The Three Stooges I viewed them as, at best, poor imitators of the best of the slapstick form. Some cursory research shows that this reflects an Atlantic divide: bolstered, perhaps, by Stan Laurel being English, and that Laurel and Hardy toured British music halls post WWII, Laurel and Hardy remained popular in the UK, with their shorts staying in rotation, whereas in the US, The Three Stooges continued to grind away into the 70s, a hegemon led by cheap syndication and desperation.
But I have warmed to the Stooges. I’ve actually got Will and Justin to thank for that. I was invited to Justin’s bachelor party where we watched a 16mm of one of their later, recycled-footage filled shorts Husbands Beware, and the sight of these old men hurting each other… if you’ll forgive me for recycling my Letterboxd review: if the old adage goes “comedy is tragedy plus time” the sight of the Stooges,ravaged by time, stumbling through a cheap lazy remake was genuinely tragic. So very, very funny!
But it’s not purely an ironic appreciation; there’s a charm to their underdog tenacity; a tenacity that ensured their brand would endure into the video game age. It may seem surprising, but The Three Stooges license has been used several times for video games, starting with Mylstar Electronics’s arcade game The Three Stooges, and I don’t think only because it was cheap and accessible–I think because the people making them genuinely were fond of the Stooges.
Released in May 1984, The Three Stooges is a product–and victim of–the legendary video game crash of 1983. Mylstar Electronics’ route to developing a Three Stooges video game began in 1976, when Columbia Pictures–owner of the majority of The Three Stooges output–purchased Gottlieb, then purely a maker of pinball machines. (It’s interesting to note there is no record of an attempt to make a Three Stooges pinball machine after this purchase, though Gottlieb would make several pinball machines based on Columbia properties in the era, such as Charlie’s Angels and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.)
Gottlieb would have some success with arcade machines in the early 1980s with, most famously, Q*Bert, and in 1983–a year after the Coca-Cola company acquired Columbia–Gottlieb was renamed MylStar Electronics (somewhat controversially.) Mylstar Electronics would last mere months, releasing a handful of games before being shuttered in the continued aftermath of the crash. In fact, it’s believed that there were only a few hundred Three Stooges machines produced as a result, and due to poor reception, most of these machines were repurposed by arcade operators into other games, leaving–reputedly–as few as fifteen machines surviving today.
Mylstar’s The Three Stooges is poorly remembered as a result, with no retrospectives and even few contemporary sources. Electronic Games Hotline (July 29th, 1984) has the closest thing to an announcement, claiming that the game was released in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of The Three Stooges (signed, as they were, by Columbia in 1934.) The game’s most notable developers are Jeff Lee–who did the graphics for Q*Bert–and David Zabriskie, a long-time creator of audio for pinball machines, with programmer Sam Russo and designer Tom Malinowski with little else to their names.
The Three Stooges sets the tone for the Stooges in video games in some ways, most notably that it sticks to the original Columbia trio, Larry, Curly and Moe (sorry, Shemp fans.) But the most interesting thing it does is that it portrays itself as a new Stooges short: “The Three Stooges In Brides Is Brides.”
Although the game isn’t referred to as such anywhere except the title screen, it does imply that this machine did not just have the license slapped onto it–the developers had to have some interest in making the game offer a “true” Three Stooges experience, with a story (The Three Stooges must rescue their fiances from the evil Dr. “I.M.Acad M.D.”1) a genuine attempt to recreate the Stooges in pixel art from and lots of digitised speech.
Unfortunately, they made a very optimistic decision: the game is made for three simultaneous players, one playing each Stooge, and the game is absolutely terrible if you don’t play it that way.
Now, it’s entirely possible that it’s still terrible if you do play it that way–not that I expect to have much chance to find out–but the game is clearly fully designed around a group of three players working together. A single screen game, on each screen the players must attempt to destroy all the furniture to find three keys to open the door to the next screen, and they do this by picking up one of two hammers that spawn on screen. While this is going on, the police are attempting to capture The Three Stooges, while civilians get in the way–both of which can be halted by chucking pies at them, which sit around the screen on indestructible tables. But the civilians can also pick up and throw pies, complicating things further!
It’s obvious that The Three Stooges is meant to be a raucous, silly arcade game for three; the design intentionally only places two hammers on the stage so that one player is left out to either play defence (by throwing pies at enemies) or spoiler (by throwing pies at the other players so they can get the hammer.) Sadly, played solo, the game’s deficiencies are blaring. Enemies seem to move about completely randomly, and when the other two Stooges are computer controlled they become just as dangerous, making the game (I suspect) significantly harder as they cost you lives by walking into you with a hammer. The game also suffers rough, unforgiving collision detection where you’ll find yourself stuck on furniture or killed by things you thought you avoided.
The game also massively outstays its welcome. I only played up to the point where I was able to rescue the first fiancee, but it took forever, and every stage is exactly the same bar the one unique stage that has you throwing pies at singers, avoiding the notes they create (this is by far the most frustrating level, as the notes are almost impossible to avoid.) On each level you beeline to the hammer, destroy the furniture, grab the keys then leave. Without other players, there’s very little play (I do wonder, if the company had not been rapidly closed, a revision might have seen the hammer and furniture placement change more across levels.)
Fuck this level. And the thing that should be the most charming about it–real Stooge voices–becomes insanely annoying about 30 seconds in. Every time a Stooge collides with anything, they’ll say the same stock phrase; prepare to hear “Oh a wise guy, huh?” more times in a single playthrough than the Stooges ever said during their entire Columbia Pictures run (no, really.)
The Three Stooges is an interesting curio, and one that I do believe was made with the best of intentions by people who were on some level fans. It’s certainly possible that it’s worth playing if you ever have two other Stooge fanatics to hand–I guess I should have given Sloan and Decloux a call–but I suspect that even the most hardcore group of Stoogeaholics would never have the patience to get that far.
Will I ever play it again? Sure, if I see a real machine and Will Sloan and Justin Decloux happen to be standing next to me.
Final Thought: The game features a few comedic interstitials (almost certainly inspired by Pac-Man) but the funniest thing in the entire game is that once all fiances are rescued, before the game loops, it announces “now it’s on to reruns.” Probably the most accurate representation of The Three Stooges in the entire game.
- I don’t grasp the joke here at all… Oh wait, “I am a cad.” Damn, everyone reading this in print is going to think I’m an idiot. ↩︎
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Wild Gunman (Nintendo, 1974)
Developed/Published by: Nintendo
Released: 1974
Completed: 31/05/2026
Completion: Played Reel A and C.
Well now howdy, y’all, gather round as I tell the tale of how I played the only Wild Gunman in the West….
*cough*
Ach, I cannae be arsed keeping that up for an entire essay.
Yes, in what can be considered an insane stroke of luck, I just happened to be within driving distance of Ontario Pinfest, Ontario’s only pinball show (though I admit I hadn’t actually ever heard of before) and 74XX Arcade Repair, aka Callan Brown, just happened to be taking his recreation of the North American Wild Gunman cabinet there. So obviously I had to go.
Wild Gunman has been covered in some detail before, so I’m somewhat wary of just reiterating a lot of prior work. I recommend Kate Willaert’s lengthy article on A Critical Hit that goes into the history, and I similarly have to push you towards Callan Brown’s video, where he goes into great detail about his own research after discovering an auction for some of the original 16mm reels.
But to summarise Wild Gunman’s story: the game was released in a fascinating period of Nintendo’s history, as it continued its transition from playing card manufacturer into entertainment powerhouse. Already successful in electronic toys, the company was continuing to expand, and Hiroshi Yamauchi hit upon the idea of using the company’s existing toy gun systems to create a laser clay pigeon shooting system, and to then install it in abandoned bowling alleys, as bowling as a fad had come and gone in Japan. It looked sort of bonkers:
This was, by all accounts, extremely successful until the 1973 oil crisis hit, leading to a ton of orders for the system being cancelled. This pushed Nintendo into debt to the point of bankruptcy–they had created a smaller version of the Laser Clay Shooting System, Mini Laser Clay for arcades, but it wasn’t enough of a success. Satoru Okada, Gunpei Yokoi’s “right hand man” and an engineer at Nintendo R&1 told Retro Gamer in 2016:
“Nintendo was in such poor financial state. I remember that president Yamauchi came to see us and said: ‘We need money. But in order for banks to lend us some, we need to show them that we have new fun projects to launch. In short, find me some new fun projects quickly, even if we cannot really sell them!’ Since we still had a lot of material left from the Laser Clay, we came up with the Wild Gunman project in a hurry. In the end, the president liked it and he insisted we sell it.”
Wild Gunman’s big benefit is that it’s immediately a lot more thrilling than simple clay pigeon shooting–because clay pigeons don’t shoot back. As designed, players step up, put on a holster(!) and pistol, with the idea that they’ll be shown five different opponents. The opponent’s eyes will flash, which is the player’s cue to draw, cock the pistol, and fire–all before the opponent shoots them. The goal is to shoot all five to get a perfect score, shown by lighting up all the sheriff badges on the machine.
The original Wild Gunman is a clever bit of tech, in that it uses two 16mm projectors, and it would switch to the second if you shot your opponent to show them falling over (otherwise it would just keep the first projector running). There were four film reels that operators could purchase, allowing them (I guess) to switch them out or, if they were feeling flush, have more than one machine running. What’s really fun is that I think you could assume that the footage was re-used from something else, because by virtue of the rich 16mm film stock it just really feels like something from a legitimate spaghetti western, albeit an especially cheap one. But according to Okada, it’s not! He states that the footage was shot by Yokoi, and it featured actors/random whiteys local to Nintendo who they found and shot at Dreamland, the now sadly demolished Disneyland-inspired theme park in Nara.
However, I’m going to have to quibble with Okada on his recollection, because there are four film reels, and if you look at the flyer, you’ll notice something:
Film reels A and B have a background that’s very building heavy. If you look at an image or map of Nara Dreamland, that seems correct. Inspired by Disneyland, it has its own version of Main Street, U.S.A., and I’m sure if you collected enough images from the park you could pinpoint where these shots were taken.
However, film reels C and D are suspiciously… deserty, and several feature guys riding horses. It doesn’t match any area of Dreamland I’ve managed to see online, digging through different sites.1 I found this pretty suspicious. I got briefly excited when I saw that some of the footage in reels C and D match footage in adverts for Nintendo’s light gun toys while looking something else up in Florent Gorge’s The History Of Nintendo (1889-1980), but that’s almost certainly re-use as the toys in question (Custom Gunman and Custom Lion) didn’t come out until 1976.
However, I would still gamble that these second reel sets were not in the original Japanese release of Wild Gunman, and possibly created for the North American release, which also heavily changed the cabinet design. If I’m correct in my hunch, this creates a new mystery: who shot this footage? The different canisters and film stocks that Brown has aren’t really helpful there. It seems unlikely it was, say, Sega (who hilariously released the North American version of Wild Gunman) but I’m sure a proper historian will dig into this and solve it at some point in the future.
That all said: How does Wild Gunman feel to play?
Now, I can’t say definitively, in some respects, as it’s worth noting the original Japanese version–initially called Gunfight–has a slightly different design, and Brown’s recreation of the western version has some changes (indeed the gameplay is a re-creation in Unity.) To have the exact experience of the Western version, you could hope that the guy in California who apparently has a real cabinet has put it back together, or possibly you could make your way to Vierzon in France and hope that the original machine that was seen there at a music festival(?) in 2011 is still there. But that said… I can’t imagine it’s that much different, and I’m confident in saying: Wild Gunman was great fun.
One of my absolute favourite arcade machines is Quick & Crash, Namco’s novelty quick draw game, and while Wild Gunman doesn’t quite hit the highs of breaking a “real” ceramic cup and being timed down to the millisecond, what really stands out is how close it is anyway–and I’m sure in 1974 the live footage was more than enough novelty.
It’s all about the experience of drawing the gun. There’s so much tension in preparing to shoot, and as much as you prepare yourself–”don’t shoot before you see the whites of their eyes,” you recite to yourself–the urge to panic and draw early is high. It’s exciting, too, that the game expects you to cock the gun before firing, adding just a touch more complexity to the experience.
Wild Gunman even features two levels of difficulty. Players can optionally turn on the “Foul Check” mode which requires that they draw and cock the gun after the opponent’s eye-flash, making the timing even harder. I have to admit I didn’t check with Brown if this mode had been implemented when playing the re-creation, as I was generally overwhelmed by the experience (on my first play he just told me to cock the gun early, and on my second I forgot to put the holster on, which is probably why in the video I took I look so cool and skilful.)
If I’m going to be a little critical, it feels like such a missed opportunity that the game doesn’t tell a bit of a story, though. It doesn’t need to have an intro or outro or whatever, but you can’t help but feel that the fact the game is just five random standoffs and then it’s over feels… wrong, considering the potential of using video. To have more sense that you were in a shootout against a band of outlaws or something.
But I also sort of get it. You can “lose” every battle, so it’s not like it makes any sense anyway, and at least originally they were filming random white guys they found in Japan and they probably just had to make do with what they got.
I played Wild Gunman twice at Ontario Pinfest because I was a bit shy and I didn’t want to bogart the machine. But I could happily have played it until I “mastered” it, the same way I have to play Quick & Crash until I’m as good as I remember being at it (good. The best, even. Don’t ask me to show you though.) That’s really remarkable for a game from 1974.
Will I ever play it again? I’m sure I’ll be back at Ontario Pinfest, or maybe Brown will be showing the machine elsewhere–I’ll be happy to play through the other two reels.
Final Thought: As exciting as the discovery of the Wild Gunman reels were, there’s a Nintendo shooting game reel that I suspect will never be found but which should be an A Day The Clown Cried level grail: according to Gorges, Yokoi and Nintendo created a prototype called Fascination using the Wild Gunman hardware, where the aim was to watch a (specifically noted as) Swedish woman dance around, and each time she paused to shoot off a piece of clothing until she was dancing around in the buff. This was never released (unsurprisingly) but was apparently very popular with the staff of Nintendo. I bet it was, the dirty buggers.
- And trying to work out which are AI slop websites that stole other people’s images. It’s getting harder and harder to work out what’s legitimate and worth linking. ↩︎
