In Retrospect: The Battle of Olympus

Of the classic NES games that I never had but absolutely loved, The Battle of Olympus really stands out to me. When I was younger, one of my friends owned this hidden gem. We started it a few times, but he was one of those people who got frustrated at video games and would start screaming and throwing stuff around to the point where it was actually frightening, or would turn a game off as soon as he started to lose, so we never managed to get far. Later on in life though, he managed to mellow out a little bit and we finally got through the game together. After that, I borrowed it from him and played through it a few more times, absolutely loving everything about the game. I've always been awed by the structures and ruins of ancient Greece, the various (awesome) mythical beasts of Greek legend, and the heroes that arose to smash them into dust.

So for a person like myself, what isn't there to like about The Battle of Olympus? Judging a book by the cover (or a cartridge by its artwork) yielded nothing to dislike about this game whatsoever. There were Greek statues and columns surrounded by badass-looking serpents! If that's not an instant win, I don't know what is! Luckily, like the cover art, the guts of this game also happen to be fantastic.

Item Acquired: Lots of awesome stuff!

It's been a couple of weeks since I've posted anything substantial...and today, that won't change. However, here's a quick rundown on what I've gotten my hands on lately!

When interests collide

Today I found a neat link to an interview with the creators of the classic shoot 'em up series known as R-Type. R-Type has always been one of my favourite side scrolling shooter franchises...I find it's at just the right difficulty, controls and looks great, and also incorporates some really interesting game mechanics. The coolest mechanic within the R-Type series is the Force item. It's an addition to your ship that you can upgrade with different powers, directly launch at enemies, and also place on either the back or front of your ship, depending on where you feel you need more firepower or cover.

The main thing that drives me besides video gaming is entomology. I love insects and have worked with them and around them for almost 5 years, and started taking a strong interest in them around 8 years ago as I was working through my undergraduate degree in Zoology. In particular, I developed a fondness for beetles...they're just so damn cool and diverse! You may be asking yourself why I'm mentioning this in the same article as R-Type. Well, it turns out that the main inspiration for the Force item in the R-Type series was, in fact, a type of beetle! A dung beetle, to be precise. Here's the excerpt and photos from this portion of the translated interview:

----------------------------------------------------------------

A comparison of the Force and a dung beetle with its payload. 

 

ABIKO (Designer): It started out as a joke, but our idea for the Force came from the dung beetle. We were thinking of a system where you wouldn’t power up your own ship, but would instead power up the ball of dung. We wanted something where two players could play simultaneously within the same screen and fight together, basically. Our programmer AKIO is a hardcore Gradius player, so we were very conscious of the existence of Gradius. If we were going to make a horizontal STG, we knew it would get compared to Gradius, so we were thinking about what we could do differently.

By the time we were asked to start coding, there had been many revisions and changes to the original game design. For example, we originally wanted to make the Force capable of deployment in 4 positions on your ship: front, back, top, and bottom. But it turned out to be too difficult to program, so we left it only front and back. The powerups changed almost completely too. At first we had typical STG weapons like a 3-way shot, but we felt that this wouldn’t distinguish our game enough from Gradius, so we added the reflecting laser. That was a real pain to code. [Laughs]

----------------------------------------------------------------

If you're interested, you can read the rest of the interview here! There are some neat little tidbits about the R-Type series that I never had any idea about...such as what the hell the "R" in the title stands for!

August happenings!

Hey everyone,

There are two links that are currently keeping me intrigued and will continue to do so until the end of the month. Figured I'd relay them quickly!

I went through Hell Temple...

...and all I got was this...Provocative...Bathing Suit?

...what?

The Thrill of the Hunt

You may have recently heard about a massive collection of video games in Paris that contained complete, factory-sealed collections for the NES and Sega Genesis, among other systems. This giant trove of nostalgia wound up auctioning off for about...oh, over 1 million dollars and was purchased by a fellow Canadian. This is all pretty cool stuff...it would be amazing to have a full collection for even any one single system, let alone multiple, and I'd personally love to one day acquire a full NES game collection. Obviously this would involve a lot of cash, but I like to think that everyone's allowed to have one expensive hobby.

Oh, and one more thing...

Defend the Classics now has a page on Facebook! You can access it by clicking this hyperlinked text, or by checking out the updated Links to the Past section at the right side of the page.

SEND ME YOUR LIKES! SHOW YOUR FRIENDS!

World Ten: Unusual ways to finish off a boss

Hello all! I would like for you to bear with me on this post...apparently the Blog interface is changing around and, quite frankly, I don't like it. So I decided that in order to get used to this UTTER SILLINESS, I would throw up a World Ten entry. I haven't done one in a while, and I've come up with some (hopefully) interesting ideas for them lately.

Bosses are my favourite parts of video games, hands down. Good bosses can put your skill to the most brutal test, force you to learn a technique that vastly improves your methods, or function as a really cool plot device. As such, finishing off a boss is always rewarding, even if it's just a sigh of relief because you don't have to deal with the bastard anymore. That being said...there are some bosses out there in the video game world that are defeated in some pretty unconventional ways, some of which I figured I'd list off for your entertainment. These are in no particular order, but they're the first 10 that I thought of so I figured I'd give them the highlight. Let's dive in, shall we?

Item Acquired: 4 NES games!

Over the last couple of weeks, I've managed to get my hands on 4 new games for the NES collection! I managed to snag three of them from a vendor at a (relatively) local farmer's market when I was visiting some friends, while I snagged the final one just today. Let's take a look, shall we?

Item Acquired: Chrono Trigger

My previous blog post described a few games that I managed to snag, with a bit of a small cliffhanger at the end. I’m sure all ten of you are just teetering on the edge of your fuckin’ seats in anticipation to find out what the heck it was that I also found during my NES game hunt. Well, I’ll show you:

Not bad!

That’s right, Chrono Trigger. This bad boy cost me 35 bucks, which is ridiculously cheap for a physical copy of Chrono Trigger, even one that’s not in the best of shape! Let me put it this way: I was always under the impression that in order to get my greasy nerd hands on a SNES cartridge of Chrono Trigger again, I would have to pay $120 to someone on eBay.

“Wait a second,” I’m sure you’re thinking. “What did he mean by ‘again’?”

Or maybe you’re not thinking that at all, but read ahead anyway!