The Randomizer - Fatal Rewind (Genesis)

 

 
The Randomizer is a D-Sub9 feature in which a randomly selected retro game is experienced for no more than twenty minutes. These are the stories.

Randomizer Selection #768 - Fatal Rewind (Genesis)

And now...

It's time...

FOR THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

At this point in the game's intro I expected some elephants and a lion tamer or two. But no, crushing disappointment and "too effing bad" is the soup du jour when it comes to Fatal Rewind by developer Raising Hell (now Bizarre Creations, the Geometry Wars guys).  I'm pretty sure it was published by Electronic Arts, although the port job was so spotty that Fatal Rewind was apparently presented by both EA and Psygnosis. At this point I needed to do some research because I was in way over my head on this one.

Fatal Rewind was previously titled The Killing Game Show and was released originally on the Amiga. It was ported with the more family friendly title to the Genesis, and was published by EA for that platform. For the life of me I can't figure out what the storyline is behind Fatal Killing Game Rewind Show, but from the various Amiga-version video caps out there, it looks like you're a bipedal dog-like robot that shoots things a great deal.

So far, so good.

Behold, the enemy scrotum.

The Killing Rewind Show Fatal Game Service Pack 2 plays a great deal like Contra. It's a shooting platformer complete with all the trinkets - lasers, spread guns, etc. However, instead of traveling the traditional left-to-right, you're expected to travel upwards to the exit of each level. To help speed you on your way, the lava/ooze/something nasty pit at the bottom of the level begins to rise after a ten-second head start. Touch the nasty liquid, and you die instantly. I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about this kind of gaming trope (see Joust, Castlevania: Bloodlines, etc) as they usually don't add much other than frustration, but that's not the problem with this title.

The problem with this title is that the game designers actively desire to kill you at every turn, and instead of directing that energy at being challenging and fair (see Super Meat Boy), they drove the point home to destroy your dogbot with the most bullshit design choices they can come up with. There's nothing "fair" about what they deliver to you. Your success weighs directly on luck and your ability to memorize entire levels without fail.

Take that, literature!

Your enemies are oddly generic snaking strings of objects - books, shields, squares, doodles, etc. Think of any number of side-scrolling shooter (Gradius, R-Type, etc.) and you'll get the idea. They're not drawn particularly well, and they're not overly inspired in pathing or AI design, but damn are they annoying. These strings can and will kill you in a single pass, as the string passes across the dogbot. Each object registers a hit and there's no "I just got hit darn it" invulnerability cool-down. Your dogbot's weapons are painfully slow, especially the default one. This means that the cornucopia of retrievable weapons falls directly into the Contra cliche: Just get the spread shot and forget everything else.

Death by Merlot. The worst kind of death.

The maps are a simple jagged mess of thin platforms. Aside from an arrow or two in scattered areas (some arrows point in both directions, which is really helpful thanks guys) there's little guidance to get you from A to B. With the destructive lava/goo rising quickly, I'm usually making frantic dashes in any direction until I find the one obscure proper path to make it to the temporary safety of higher ground. I had to pause for a moment and do a little more research about the original Amiga launch. It was then that I found a very important function that is lacking in the Genesis port: minimaps. While the Amiga version will lay out the entire level for you in an easy-to-reference keystroke, the Genesis version just lets you have at it without as much as a TomTom for support. This means you have to memorize the fastest path to the next ten feet of elevation all through each level.

Yep. Game over. Haven't cleared the first level yet.

It's interesting to note that beyond the tongue-in-cheek "we're announcing to you that this game is difficult" text additions to each display dialogue that the developers also added equally-taunting secondary items. Some secondary items have useful qualities - heal half your health, heal all your health, stop the ooze from rising for a time, etc. One, the "Oracle", has no redeeming value whatsoever. I've found two of them so far. One of them popped up a text line that told me how to use the Oracle - which I already did. The other put up a text line that said "Have a nice day!". So if my assumptions are correct, the Oracle is designed to entice players to send bags of dog feces to the developers' office receptionist.

The Oracle is certainly informative for things you've already done.

 Game over again. This time I made it as far as the second level - which looks nearly the same as the first. This time, it comes with a "match the shapes" key-card feature. What's fantastic about this feature is that the first key they give you is a square, but the first door is a circle. You have to get the keys in the proper order so you'll have the circle and the square at the circle door. Use the circle key, then you'll have the square key on-hand for the next door.

Confused? Try figuring that out while fighting that impossible rising-ooze time limit. Again, memorize the order and path without a minimap. Skip the first key, get the second key, bring it back to the first key, progress to the next door. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Game over again. God, this music is annoying.

Is that supposed to be polite or condescending?

Fatal Frame/The Killing Game Show presents itself as a game that was designed to be hard, then was ported to be impossible. The minimap alone in TKGS would have redeemed FF to a point. At least that way I can pause gameplay, refer to the map, and then make my crazy dashes from door to door. That would have placed Fatal Frame directly in the "Challenging yet exciting" category, a la Super Meat Boy. Instead what I got was something almost done, but not done enough to be irritating the whole way through.