Author: mpklamerus

Kid Klown in Night Mayor World

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Developer: Kemco
Publisher: Kemco
Year: 1993
Genre: Platformer
System: NES

Kid Klown in Night Mayor World is a pretty basic platformer for the NES where an evil magician has kidnapped your clown family and it’s up to you, Kid Klown, to rescue them. You run through level throwing balloons with the only real innovation being that you can also put balloons on the ground and jump on them to give you a big jump, or hold onto a balloon to descend slowly after jumping. It’s all very basic and the game can be completed in about an hour since it’s pretty easy. The only real challenge is on the final level where you have to go through a frustrating maze sequence that feels more like padding than a challenge, since the game gives you many opportunities for extra lives. It’s not an amazing game but I do have a soft spot for it since I completed it as a child without using any cheats, which felt like a pretty rare thing to happen for me due to the difficulty of so many NES games.

So none of that is really that interesting, what I did find interesting was the background of the game. It was originally a Mickey Mouse platformer in Japan and part of the Crazy Castle series, which played very differently and ALSO not a Mickey Mouse game here. In the US it used a Bugs Bunny license. For whatever reason they did not use that license and decided to launch their own IP, Kid Klown. It’s not a terribly interesting IP, you’re a kid who happens to be a clown. Everything about the original Mickey Mouse version sounds much more interesting since occasionally uses music from Disney properties for the game and known Disney characters for the villains instead of brand new enemies that aren’t particularly interesting.

Kemco continued to use the Kid Klown IP in a half assed way where most of the games in the series weren’t even released as Kid Klown games in the US, none of them were platformers like this, and the character was redesigned after this first game as well. There was a runner game for the SNES called Crazy Chase, a second Crazy Chase that only came out in Japan, a Game Boy Color puzzle game that was later released as an entry in the Crazy Castle series here, and a Playstation puzzle game that did come out here but didn’t have the Kid Clown name in the title.

Just overall a very weird history of an IP they owned and sorta tried to push but never did it consistently anywhere.

Kid Klown in Night Mayor World is available for the NES on your favorite rom site.

September is Library Card Sign-up Month!

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I already made a post like this on my birthday but it’s Library Card Sign-up Month! If you haven’t already, here’s another reminder to sign up for a library card if you don’t have one. They aren’t just for books! Mine offers movies, cds, comics, board games, video games, and more. Plus it’s a space where you can study and do work and have meetups.

Your local library may also have free digital services you can get through your card. Mine has Kanopy, Hoopla, and Libby (and probably others). Kanopy is a great streaming service for movie and tv that offers things to watch similar to what you would see on the Criterion Channel. Hoopla offers movies, ebooks, and audiobooks. Libby is focused purely on ebooks and audio books. Anyway, libraries are great. They’re a third place that would never be allowed to be created today.

Mystery House (1980) thoughts

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Developer: On-Line Systems
Publisher: On-Line Systems
Year: 1980
Genre: Adventure
System: Apple II

I finally played one of the first graphic adventures (the first I know of but I thought “this”very first” was under debate?) and the first game by Roberta Williams and Sierra and: It’s cute.

Mystery House is a text adventure with very basic line graphics where you are locked in a house with other folks and must find some hidden jewels. You start seeing dead bodies showing up and need to figure out who the murderer is and stop them before it’s too late. The actual design of the game is very basic, as you would expect for an adventure on home computers at this time, and you type in commands to walk around the house, find clues and items, and use them to progress elsewhere. It’s a pretty short game where you restart a few times since it relies on learning through failure a little bit but it’s not as cruel about it as a lot of later adventure games. The biggest thing I actually fought with was the parser. Even though it’s incredibly early in the genre’s lifespan, other text adventures already had better parsers at the time. I also found that the graphics also make the game harder since pure text tells you everything you can interact with, this game needs you to guess what the correct object name is to interact with it. Sometimes it’s also just hard to see what you should be trying to use. The game also features a pretty annoying maze. So maybe not a game I would really recommend to folks for the plot but I still had a fun enough time playing something of historical importance. Renga in Blue has a very good writeup of the game and I definitely liked it more than him, but I agree with all of the criticisms of it.

a person laying on the floor that has been strangled with pantyhose

One of the weirdest parts of the game to me is that there is an optional person you may never see, a grave digger named Joe. You can walk to a graveyard outside of the house (so I guess you aren’t actually locked in?) with six graves dug in the yard. If you walk into one of the graves, he buries you alive. But you don’t actually need to see him or go into the grave to complete the game so I have no idea why this screen exists. You can also stab him and kill him, which seems a bit excessive. But he does try to kill you if given the opportunity so I guess he deserves it? It’s all really weird.

It also got a release in Japan a little bit later with some slightly better graphics. I don’t know how the rest of the game or its parser is.

Anyway, glad I played it. It’s dated and simplistic but it’s also short enough that I think if you’re a little generous with the walkthrough to deal with the clunky parser, you might have some fun with the novelty of playing the first Sierra game.

Mystery House is public domain and available for free to download such as the ScummVM website.

I Am Never Doing This Again

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Well, that’s Blaugust all wrapped up and my take from this has been that while it was a lot of fun as a reader to get a lot more posts in my RSS feed. I’m not going to do the daily posts again. It’s just too much work, which is not what having this site should be for me. I know there’s a lot of effort put forth by the Blaugust organizers that you do not need to do this so I don’t blame them, but that’s the initial goal I saw and what I ended up sticking with. Anyway, glad I tried it but I’m not sure if I’ll officially participate next year.

Agony thoughts

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Developer: Art & Magic
Publisher: Psygnosis
Year: 1992
Genre: Arcade

I am still going through my retro gaming phase and thought I would finally check out a game that has been in my Amiga backlog for a long time, the shmup Agony. It’s a pretty straightforward arcade shooter. You’ve been transformed into an owl and must stop an evil wizard by flying through levels and shooting at stuff. You occasionally pick up powerups that you can use at any time to briefly help you through obstacles but there aren’t any innovations in this one. It’s not anything I’m upset about and I enjoyed the shooting quite a bit, but that’s not why people still talk about the game today.

an owl flying at sunset and shooting a giant wave

Where the game really shines is the art and music. The vibes are amazing. Everything is gorgeous and features incredible animation. I wonder if people lost their minds over Psygnosis finally publishing a game where you play as an owl. Between each level is a transition screen where you have some really nice art to look at as the game loads the next level.

art of a tree next to the water with rays of sun peeking through the branches

The game itself mostly isn’t too difficult to play except for the big difficulty spike at the end. I guess that’s expected because it’s an arcade game and people would beat the game in 15 minutes without that, but I actually found the first few levels to be cozy and relaxing. Like I said, it’s pretty simplistic and why there isn’t much to say about this one, but I had a good time with it and would recommend it if you’re looking for some games that are exclusive to the Amiga. I’m surprised that this one didn’t get ported anywhere else since it probably could have worked in some form on other platforms.

One of the developers wrote about the making of the game on his site and it also includes a download of the game. I don’t know if that means it’s officially freeware but clearly no one cares and no one is selling it today so have at it. I also just recommend looking around the site if you want to see more Amiga game dev history.

Agony is available on your favorite Amiga rom site.

RoboCop (Amstrad CPC)

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Developer: Ocean Software
Publisher: Ocean Software
Year: 1988
Genre: Arcade

I don’t know why this became RoboCop video game week for me. I completed that Unfinished Business game and then I guess RetroAchivements got me to start playing old British games. I believe this is a loose adaptation of the RoboCop arcade game by Data East. It’s a 2D scroller where you walk through stages shooting various gang members with the game switching things up at a couple points, like two levels where you have to shoot someone taking hostage

a 2D view of robocop riding an elevator

I think this is actually the first Amstrad game I’ve ever played and thought it was pretty neat. The use of color was really interesting to me and I’ll have to check out more games for the platform, especially if there are any exclusives. I’ve heard the ZX Spectrum version is better but wanted to give this computer a shot since I’ve played games similar to this one before like RoboCop 1 and 3 on the NES. While the game is clunky, movement is awkward and I thought the mini games don’t really work, I can see why it was a hit and has its fans. The NES already had better arcade games at this point and I think the Amiga was out there as well, I imagine that it was fun to have something like this on the home computer.

The inclusion of mini games feels like a thing that’s very specific to British computer games in the 80s? I suppose the thought is that it adds a lot of variety but I don’t know if I’ve ever enjoyed any of these in any game? In this game the hostage saving is frustrating because you have to shoot the hostage taker a lot of times like it’s a boss fight and I hated the Suspect Identification mini game because I felt like it’s incredibly fussy about getting everything right or else you lose.

I still had a better time with this than RoboCop 3, where I was constantly fighting with the controls and got frustrated with the instant deaths. Like that game, it’s only a handful of levels but once you’re done, it loops around back to the first level, giving it more of an arcade game-like feel. Little quirks like the game only having music and no sound did not bother me and it was fun dipping into an area of gaming I wasn’t familiar with.

RoboCop is probably available on your favorite rom site.

RoboCop 3 (NES)

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Developer: Probe
Publisher: Ocean Software
Year: 1992
Genre: Platformer

Well, after completing RoboCop: Rogue City ‒ Unfinished Business, I wanted to finally play this one since I’ve been a fan of the soundtrack of it for a long time. This post will be the farthest thing from a hot take because I’m here to confirm that like the movie it’s based on, RoboCop 3 is not an amazing game. Like the previous RoboCop NES games, it’s a platformer where you walk through levels and shoot bad guys. While those were developed by Ocean, this one is by Probe and only published by Ocean. None of the RoboCop NES games are that amazing but this is the worst one. The controls just feel off and the difficulty is cranked up to a very high degree to make up for the game only having five levels. One of these levels is just a repeat of the previous level but in reverse order.

Robocop flying from an exploding building while wearing a jetpack, and a woman and girl are holding onto him.

RoboCop 3 does a really “fun” thing where if your body takes enough damage, parts will malfunction. You can repair parts between missions by finding powerups that you use on the Repair screen between missions. It’s a really interesting idea in theory but is just not executed well. It’s too bad because I don’t really like criticizing games that are ambitious but it turns a game that was already hard to control into something even more frustrating. I watched Jeff Gerstmann play this and agree with his take that this is more frustrating than when RoboCop 1 is just frustrating to play because of clunky controls. Choices were made to make the game more difficult and it just makes the game worse.

So overall I wouldn’t recommend the game but I can recommend the soundtrack Jeroen Tel. It absolutely rules. Listen to this theme!

From listening to it, it sounds like something that was made for the Commodore 64. I do want to give that version a shot because from reading the YouTube comments and watching a few seconds of it, it does seem like a better version. It still seems to have some clunky movement but something about it being on a computer makes it more acceptable to me.

RoboCop 3 isn’t available legally anywhere but it’s easy to find on your favorite rom site.

RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business thoughts

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Developer: Teyon
Publishers: Nacon
Genre: FPS
Year: 2025

Just wrapped up RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business, a standalone DLC to 2023’s RoboCop: Rogue City. I had enjoyed that one quite a bit as a AA budget FPS/RPG even with its flaws, which I think were covered pretty well in outlets like Bullet Points. Since Unfinished Business is a standalone expansion, it’s essentially more of the same, so I also enjoyed this despite it not being as well designed as the original game. Unfinished Business is sorta similar to the film Dredd (or what I remember of it) in that you are now investigating a large apartment complex that has been built by the mega corporation OCP and is doing everything in their power to get people to leave their homes and move into it, so they can knock everything down in Detroit and build a new city on top of it. Mercenaries have taken over the building For Reasons and you learn what they are as you walk through the building shooting bad guys.

Robocop petting a cat
You can now pet cats

Just like with the original game, the shooting and movement still feels good to me and it’s fun seeing Peter Weller come back to do more RoboCop voice acting. One of the fun things in the original game was that you got to walk around Detroit doing some mysteries and exploration, and that part was cut down a lot in here. You still get little hub areas once in a while, but there’s a lot less exploration, which I thought was a shame. The parts that still exist are a lot of fun to walk around in so I wish we could have had more of that.

Something I really wish these Robocop games would do, but probably shouldn’t expect if we’re being honest, is leaning into the politics of the films more. OCP is clearly an evil corporation and throughout the game you’ll find little notes and emails of them doing evil stuff, like internal communications about how they can jack up the prices of insulin since it hasn’t hurt sales yet, but I wish there was more of this. I think it’s some of the more interesting bits but the games aren’t really that interested in being anti-cop or digging that much into the evils of OCP.

a message saying "The recent increase in insulin prices has not affected the number of medications sold. The price has therefore increased again. If the number of buyers remains consistent, another price increase will be considered"
Throughout the game you find notes and emails that build on the world

The game is also shockingly buggy. I have a pretty high tolerance of bugs in games as long as they are still playable, but it was still jarring how much weird glitches would pop up and how poorly optimized the game seemed to be.

This one mixes things up a little by having you switch to different perspectives during the game to move the story through flashbacks. You play as Alex Murphy, pre-RoboCop, as well as some other characters. They’re pretty brief, a little clunky, and 2/3 of the flashbacks are more walking sim-like bits, but I still liked them? I just think the variety was nice and the one that was hyped up the most, the Alex Murphy bit, was probably the least interesting one to me.

I am fascinated by how much this game references RoboCop 3, which is no one’s favorite in the series. It’s a bad movie but I think it has some interesting ideas in there (along with quite a few bad ones) that are in a film constantly being tripped up by studio mandates like how it must be PG-13 and appeal more to kids. It’s definitely not a Clone Wars/Prequel movies situation where it elevates the prequels, but it’s still interesting to me that it helps setup the events of the third movie a little by making people tired of OCP and introducing early versions of the robots in that movie and the jetpack and helps soften some (and just some) of the rougher parts of that movie like the kid being able to hack the ED-209 by saying that it’s always been an easily hackable pile of garbage. It’s too bad it’s such a poor movie because I think it’s really interesting that it’s a movie about homeless people vs cops and making the homeless people the good guys, but the movie is bad. I also don’t like Robocop 2 as much as other folks either, which means this is a franchise I know a lot about even though I really only like one movie in the series and one or two video games.

Anyway, this is a lot of complaining but I did enjoy my time with this expansion. It took me about 10 hours to complete and I think if you enjoyed the original game then you’ll like this. If you didn’t like that one, you’ll also not like this. Sometimes I just like my weird AA budget computer games that are a solid B that I won’t think about a ton after I finish them! I heard their Terminator game is like this too and should play that sometime.

RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is available on PS5, Xbox, Steam, and GOG.

Internet Mysteries: CompUSA Corporate and Borders Books and Music’s YouTube Channel

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Because I have no life, I am thinking about two internet mysteries I do not have the answer to.

Mystery 1: How is the CompUSA Corporate page still up? The company went under like 15 years ago and yeah, the name has been passed around a few times by companies trying to bring it back, but it never stuck. Someone has to be paying for this though. Who? I’m currently seeing very small gambling ads at the top but that’s a new addition. Does that mean it was kept alive by someone else and then sold to a gambling company, who is assuming that people are looking up the corporate site for a long dead company and will click on the ads?

Mystery 2: Who is uploading new videos to the Borders Books and Music YouTube account long after that company has closed down? Is there an employee that still has the login and uploads videos when they stumble across them on an old hard drive? The most recently upload is an interview with Jimmy Carter where the first comment is “I thought both of you died how did this get posted?”

Some Summer Reads I Enjoyed

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Recently I came across this article about how reading for fun has dropped a ton in the US over the last 20 years. I don’t actually know if this is accurate or the way they studied this, but it did prompt me to post about some books I enjoyed reading on Bluesky so I may as well post an expanded list here. The trick to reading a lot over the summer is simple. Just develop an extreme love with your library’s summer reading program. Anyway, here’s some things I’ve read with each title linking to the Bookshop.org page, but I read a lot of these through my local library. Many of them have audiobooks too.

Some recent Sci-Fi/Fantasy reads include:
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey
A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert
Sir Callie and the Champions of Helston by Esme Symes-Smith

Comics also count as reading and here’s some I read:
Dungeon Club: Roll Call by Molly Knox Ostertag/Xanthe Bouma
Girl Town by Casey Nowak
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Eerie Tales from the School of Screams by Graham Annable

The non-fiction I’ve read this year is sorta all over the place, but some of the things I liked were:
Collected Game Writing Articles by Steve Ince
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything by Colette Shade
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
Good Game, No Rematch: A Life Made of Video Games by Mike Drucker
How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones

I’ve also read a billion The Baby-sitters Club and Baby-sitters Little Sister books because that’s what my two girls love and know a lot of the lore AND can recommend the graphic novel adaptations