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Tag: 1987

  • The Three Stooges (Cinemaware, 1987)

    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.

    1. Neither does Shemp, again. Poor Shemp. ↩︎
    2. You’ll notice I haven’t discussed how this game plays–well, that’s because my joystick always stopped responding in it, so I just had to avoid it. I wasn’t heartbroken over this. ↩︎
  • Double Dragon (Technōs Japan, 1987)

    Double Dragon (Technōs Japan, 1987)

    Developed/Published by: Technōs Japan (Published by Taito in North America.)
    Released: 22/04/1987
    Completed: 12/03/2026
    Completion: Finished it (no need for saving until that ridiculous final level.)

    This essay on Double Dragon follows last week’s on Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun as a tribute to the recently departed Yoshihisa Kishimoto, even though, to be honest, I’m pretty hard on it.

    Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, and if I’ve got an Egret Mini II and I’ve paid to own Double Dragon again, then I might as well play it. 

    In my write up of the NES version, I mentioned that I’d played and completed the arcade original in the form of a now long-delisted Xbox 360 release (written up for Eurogamer.) I absolutely put the boot in, but re-reading that now, I notice how it’s definitely a review of the Xbox 360 release rather than an examination of the arcade original. But there’s something I mention in the review I had completely forgotten about: Double Dragon’s astonishingly poor performance.

    I initially thought the Egret II Mini was at fault–I’d remembered someone saying that if the power supply is too low there are issues–but I’d plugged it in with a decent charger. It’s simply that the game’s original hardware wasn’t up to the game design, and the Egret II Mini stays authentic to that (it seems that people can, and do, overclock the game when emulating it through other means; it might have been nice if Taito had offered something like this, but I understand why they didn’t.)

    Ultimately, the game suffers so much slowdown it is agonising to play. The game slows down as soon as there are as few as two enemies on screen, but speeds up if (for example) you’ve knocked one of them down. The speed of the game undulates in a way that’s completely discombobulating. It makes playing the game unpleasant in a way that’s unusually unique; like trying to build a card tower in front of a rotating fan. And you’ve got jam all over your hands.

    Now… just because I feel that way doesn’t mean that the arcade audience of the late 80s felt that way, with Double Dragon “America’s highest-grossing dedicated arcade game in 1988 and 1989.” I find that baffling, because it’s nigh unplayable! 

    (The only assumption I can make–and it very much is an assumption–is that because the game was using older 8-bit chips, maybe the board was cheaper and so a lot of machines were sold, so it won by sheer numbers. But I certainly don’t have any sales numbers.)

    The thing that makes this all a bit of a shame is that, well, even if it’s stupidly hard, I sort of like Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun, and Double Dragon, as the next game from Yoshihisa Kishimoto–and the one that truly defined the side-scrolling beat-em-up by featuring proper levels that you have to progress through to complete–should be better than it is.  Kishimoto is really trying to make another leap here, and you can feel the game straining within the limitations of the obvious technical problems.

    For example: the game is clearly intended to improve on Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun’s enemy AI, one of that game’s most interesting aspects. And while the enemies here do try and position themselves to take you on, the thing you’re most going to notice is that they’ll just refuse to get close to you if you’re holding a weapon (making holding weapons a complete waste of time) and then otherwise they’re really as dumb as rocks, happily walking into dynamite they’ve just thrown or off cliffs.

    And the player’s abilities are supposed to be deeper, more interesting, more situational, with new moves like a headbutt and a spinning jump kick. But it’s ruined by the fact that–I’m sure inspired by Kunio-Kun’s powerful back kick–heroes Billy and Jimmy Lee have a “elbow smash” that attacks enemies behind them. Possibly aware that the back kick was frustrating–because you couldn’t use it unless you had an enemy behind you–you can now do the elbow smash whenever you like, and because it guarantees an immediate knockdown… the entire game becomes about turning your back on enemies, performing the elbow smash, and then performing it again as soon as they get up.

    I want to be clear: I don’t think you can play this game “properly.” It’s simply too frustrating, with no sense that anything that happens is related to your own abilities because of the slowdown. So instead, the actual and I suspect only way to get through this game is to elbow smash every enemy you face–the ones you can’t make drop off edges, anyway. 

    The only reason this game isn’t an easy single credit win is because the final level is, frankly, nonsense. The first section features some blocks that spring out from the background and some spears that statues attack you with that knock off half of your health. They don’t have any tell (the blocks in particular are infuriating) and it means that you will almost certainly lose a life (and the default settings only start you with two.)

    (There’s also a jump across a bridge in the previous level that will probably take a few lives from you, but at least you can see that.)

    Once you get past all that nonsense, the main problem is just that every enemy has a ludicrous amount of health and (yet again calling back to Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-Kun) the final boss can kill you in one hit by shooting you. He goes down easily to the elbow smash like everyone else, however.

    I really, really wish I liked Double Dragon. It’s a hugely important game, but when you play it, you almost can’t understand why. The design is coming from the right place. I can see that Kishimoto is trying to move the genre forward. But it’s still a bit half-baked, and the performance is too poor for you to appreciate it anyway.1 I wasn’t that hot on the NES version–with its awkward platforming, and still including those annoying stupid blocks–but it’s a much better way to spend your time than this.

    Will I ever play it again? Right, that’s twice. That’s absolutely enough times.

    Final Thought: You know what? There’s one thing they nailed straight off with Double Dragon. The theme music. Absolutely gets the blood pumping.

    1. I’d love to read Florent Gorges’ Enter The Double Dragon to see if it has anything on Kishimoto’s experience making this, but it’s 1) in French and 2) not easily accessible. ↩︎
  • Smash Ping Pong (Konami, 1987)

    Smash Ping Pong (Konami, 1987)

    Developed/Published by: Konami / Nintendo
    Released: 30/05/1987
    Completed: 09/04/2025
    Completion: Beat a computer opponent!

    Smash Ping Pong is a bit of a mystery in the Famicom Disk System line-up, and Nintendo’s history in general. Created, and originally released, by Konami in arcades (and on other home systems such as MSX) as Konami’s Ping Pong, for some reason Nintendo put it out on the FDS themselves. This is especially odd when Konami were one of the few third-party developers to go all-in on the FDS–like Nintendo: their new releases were on disk, not cartridge.

    There’s a few possibilities as to how Nintendo ended up publishing this, but it does seem to stem from its very likely background as a port that Konami had kicking around in the back of a cupboard unreleased. In fact, The Cutting Room Floor says as much: that there is “ample evidence” that it’s a salvaged cartridge release, most damning that the game code includes a serial number that aligns with “missing” serial numbers from Konami’s early Famicom lineup.

    The question really is: why put a game that’s already a couple of years old by this point out on the FDS? Well, Nintendo will have almost certainly been looking for more games to help quickly fill out the add-on’s catalogue, and sports games are a perennial filler.

    Or, perhaps Konami considered it more profitable to fob Smash Ping Pong off on Nintendo to handle all the publishing duties for, considering the Famicom Disk System’s licensing terms anyway, which requested partial copyright ownership and royalties compared to the complete wild west of Famicom cartridges.

    But having said all that, it might just be that someone at Nintendo really liked Konami Ping Pong! Because… it’s really good?

    I’ll admit to not having much experience with ping pong games before this–I’ve never played the much loved Rockstar Table Tennis, for example–so I don’t know if what Smash Ping Pong does is unusual or influential, but I am extremely impressed with a design that cleverly side-steps any questions like “well, why not just play a tennis video game, aren’t they the same?”

    You see, in Smash Ping Pong, you don’t control the movement of your paddle. Your disembodied hand and paddle already track the position of the ball. The game is instead entirely about which strikes you use, and the timing of your strikes.

    While this takes a bit of getting used to–and the speed of the game doesn’t help, but then it is ping pong–savvily the game only features three kinds of strikes: drive (a fast strike) cut (a slower strike) and smash (self explanatory?), chosen with a tap of the d-pad, plus the ability to change if you’re holding the paddle fore or backhand by holding A, which can change the direction of the strike.

    It is shockingly elegant, and I think is one of the best examples of a game trying to replicate the experience of playing a sport at least at this early stage I’ve seen. You don’t have to think about positioning–in ping pong, it’s about hitting the ball, not about getting into position to hit the ball, right? And so it’s all about watching the ball and getting into a rally, trying to force your opponent into a mistake. You don’t need to think too much, but you do need to practice and learn how to guide the ball in an advantageous way, when to change strikes, when to change to fore or back hand.

    Screenshots really don’t bring across how exciting this game is to play.

    There is some “give” to the design though. When a strike goes awry, either from your or your opponent, a tone is played to make it clear this is a slow, easy ball that you can smash–usually an easy point unless you’re at the far end of the table and don’t change hand position. 

    It just… works, and while it does suffer from the classic “one player is at the back of the screen” issue of this kind of game (though it switches positions to keep it fair) Famicom owners who played it probably found this one of the most balanced and engaging sports games for two players on the system. Not as flashy as Pro Wrestling, but a good companion.

    It does fall down a bit on single player though. You can select difficulties and play either first to 11 or first to 21 matches, but there’s no tournament or campaign mode; you just play a single match and you’re done, at best a practice mode to get you up to speed to play another human. They do try for some character–the Famicom Disk System mascot Diskun shows up, and Donkey Kong is in the crowd (he probably didn’t want to go see the tennis, what with Mario being there) but it’s not quite enough to keep the attention.

    I guess you could imagine upping difficulty as a tournament, but it’s hardly satisfying.

    I’ve talked previously about the kind of “curated” collection you would want to end up with if you were a Famicom collector–a selection of games you might actually play on occasion rather than just have on shelves–and this would 100% be in mine along with Pro Wrestling. Didn’t expect that at all.

    Will I ever play it again? I would love to. It’s funny, while playing this I was struck by the question of how often “retro” gamers actually play these old games with other people, or if they do just sit in collections. Because this is ripe to be rediscovered–it doesn’t feel like a design where you’re better off playing a newer ping pong game instead, because it’s so focused and complete as it is.

    Final Thought: I liked this so much I wanted to see if it was fondly remembered by Japanese players so looked it up Nintendo’s handy Famicom 40th Anniversary site, only to learn, tragically, that it didn’t even get a sniff at the “What do you think of when you hear ‘sports game’?” poll, which had rank rubbish like Volleyball in ninth.