Spot

Name: Spot
Year: 1990
Publisher: Virgin Mastertronic International, Inc.
Devloper: Vargin Mastertronic Ltd.
Genre: Board Game
Hours Played: 3
Beaten: Yes, without cheats

People who grew up in the late eighties/early nineties will probably remember Cool Spot, the anthropomorphic sunglasses-wearing 7up logo. He had a couple of platformer games for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, but less remembered is his board game-style NES outing.

Okay, so this one surprised me.  I was always under the impression that Spot was a quickly thrown together 7up-themed Othello/Reversi game.  What I found instead was an original four-player board game with it's own unique personality.

Each turn, you can either add a piece to the board, or move a piece.  An added piece must be adjacent to an existing one, but a moved piece can hop across the board.  Enemy pieces are captured, not by cornering like in most games of this type, but simply by putting a piece adjacent to them.  That probably doesn't sound like anything special, but the resulting game is surprisingly brutal.  Being able to move a piece prevents you from getting trapped in a corner, but it also frees up that space for your opponent to move in, leaving a lot of strategy for when you should move and when you should add.

Graphics & Animation: 3 (Good)
The graphics in this game have a lot of personality.  All you're really doing is moving checker pieces around, but they get up and walk, dive towards their destination, moonwalk, and stop their feet when you're capturing pieces.  It's an impressive amount of attention to detail.

Music & Sounds: 1 (Bad)
There's only a couple of (forgettable) songs in the game, and they repeat over and over. And over.

Controls & Level Design: 2 (Average)
The good news is, the cursor glides nicely from grid space to grid space with the D-pad.  The bad news is, to play you have to click the piece you want to move, then click the space you're moving it to.  It's intuitive if you're expecting checkers, but since it looks like an Othello or Go style game, I actually thought the game wasn't working and had to look up instructions.  Fortunately, there's a demo that plays after the opening game that teaches you how to play; unfortunately, it doesn't explain the controls.

Story & Presentation: 2 (Average)
There's no story per say (it's a board game after all), but there are a couple of brief cutscenes for when you win or lose, showing a cheering or booing football stadium.

Length & Replayability: 3 (Good)
The average time of one round is pretty short, and there's no tournaments or modes to pick from.  What make the game impressive, though, is the large amount of boards you can play on.  Each board makes for a very different game, and you can easily modify them and create your own boards, adding to the replay value.  Between the multiplayer (up to four people!), the numerous board options, and ability to make your own board, there's a lot to do here before it gets old... but at the end of the day, there's only one difficulty level and only one game mode.

Total: 11 (Average)

Color a Dinosaur

Name: Color a Dinosaur
Year: 1993
Publisher: Virgin Games, Inc.
Developer: FarSight Studios
Genre: Art/Creativity
Hours Played: Half an hour
Beaten: N/A

Color a Dinosaur is one of those games that's become infamous among NES reviewers.  If you've never played it, it probably doesn't sound so bad.  Maybe you've even wondered if it's poor reputation is due mostly to anti-kiddie-game sentiments among gamers.  Well, let me assure you that even the most die-hard dinosaur coloring enthusiast would be hard pressed to enjoy this game.

The best thing I can say about Color a Dinosaur is that it lives up to it's name - you do get to color a dinosaur.  Your choice out of sixteen different dinosaurs, even. And that's all you get to do.  Don't make the mistake of assuming this is a low tech Mario Paint - there's no blank pages, no freestyle drawing tool.  All you can do is click and fill using a choice of 3 colors and 7 eye-bleeding patterns.

The reason I've picked this game to review first is because its my prediction for worst game on the NES. It fails in every category - you could argue the screen-sized dinosaurs were impressive for the time, if the designs weren't so ugly and the colors so eye scorching.  Even in 93, this didn't deserve to take up an entire cartridge.

Graphics: 0 (Awful) - I do have to give the game credit for truth in box art - the colors and art style really do look as bad as the box suggests.

Music: 0 (Awful) - I think maybe the title screen plays a little ditty?  The rest of the game is completely silent, except for a couple of buzzy sound effects when you click stuff.

Controls: 0 (Awful) - I know what you're thinking - how bad could the controls in a coloring game be? The problem is that you can't move the cursor freehand.  First, you select which part of the dinosaur you'd like to color - and since the dinosaurs are covered in spikes and spots, that means manually cycling through each detail until you've reached the body part you would like to "color".  Then, you hit the B button, and the game slowly - slowly! - fills in the selected area.  You'd have more fun if you fired the game up in an emulated, did a Print Screen, and colored it yourself in Microsoft Paint.

Story: 0 (Awful) - It's not like I was expecting a plot or anything in a game called Color a Dinosaur, but even Mario Paint on the Super Nintendo had style, theming, and cut scenes.  I don't think this game even has a credits screen.

Length: 0 (Awful) - I dare you to play this for more then fifteen minutes. I dare you.  Sixteen dinosaurs to color.  That's it.  No mini-games.  Even a blank page with a free-style drawing tool would have given this game some replayability.  As it is, it's not even as good as the free drawing program that came on black and white computers in the 80s.

Total: 0 (Lowest Possible Score)