Namco vs. Midway: 1990 & 1991

We’re back from my Sengoku Basara detour and our contest picks up in 1990 and 1991.  Since I can’t get any Namco games from 1990, this is a judgement for a 2-year time span, where most of Midway’s games are from 1990 and Namco’s games are in 1991.  Once again, Namco’s failure to release arcade games in English has them going in with a very low ammo count.  Technically one of their games for this year, Tank Force, didn’t even initially come out in English at all, but since they would otherwise only have one game for entry, I need to throw them a bone.  Maybe it will be the game that comes in clutch.

Badlands(MID): Another take on the formula set by Super Sprint with the upgrade system from Super Off-Road.  This time it’s back to the high speeds of racecars, but ones with mounted guns you can shoot at other players with.  True to the name, stages are Mad Max-style dilapidated and ruined areas of dirt and destroyed buildings.  Just like Super Sprint and Super Off-Road before it, it’s a fun racing game with tight controls.  It’s not necessarily better than the top-down racers before it, but it’s another variation if the other two didn’t quite do it for you or you’re an 80s guy who got on the Road Warrior hype train really late and is itching for some of that post-apocalypse car action.

Smash TV(MID): Smash TV is a good idea wrapped in bad game design and pacing.  It’s a twin stick shooter where, in a Running Man-style future reality show, you play as a contestant trudging through a gauntlet as you gun down enemies by the hundreds.  The shooting is done well enough, but the pacing is abysmal.  It can take several minutes just to get through one room and you have to get through a lot of them before you fight a boss, after which there are more rooms that each take several minutes to beat.  Not helping matters is that Smash TV doesn’t change up the enemies enough to keep things interesting.  There are weapons and power-ups, but none of them make the gameplay diversify from the same running and gunning across its bloated length.  It just goes on and on and on and on.  There’s so much action in Smash TV and yet it’s an exhausting bore.  It’s Gauntlet all over again.  SNK’s Ikari Warriors wasn’t a well-designed twin stick shooter, but at least it didn’t drag itself out.

The funny game show host is only amusing for so long.

Race Drivin’(MID): This is an updated version of Hard Drivin’.  There are two new tracks, a UI change and it runs smoother, but it’s the same graphics with the same unforgiving, slippery driving and the same instant replays that point and laugh at you as your car goes flying from your inevitable crash.  If this is how racecars actually control then I hope I’m never in a situation where I have to drive one.

Pit Fighter(MID): This game comes off as an experiment to make a competitive game out of a Final Fight-style beat-em-up.  You are given a limited number of moves to button mash at the other player and only a little strategy through the use of items that can be thrown into the ring.  It has no finesse and little depth.  The best part about the game is Midway once again bringing their A-game to the presentation.  The digitized actors for both the fighters and the crowd look great and the sound really sells the setting of a rough-and-tumble fight club filled with screaming onlookers and grunting brawlers.  It’s too bad Pit Fighter isn’t especially fun to play except for some fleeting shiggles with friends.  Maybe the Super Nintendo version fares better.

The secret is synthol.

Rampart(MID): I have passed by this game at local arcades more times than I can count because I thought it looked lame and I was right on the money.  The concept is fun on paper: one half is shooting and the other half is puzzle block placement.  It’s just that both of its aspects are done poorly.

The shooting isn’t fun because all you can do is fire slow cannonballs with unsatisfying impact on enemies and there’s no way to defend yourself beyond killing enemies before they can hurt you.  Then, after a few seconds of shooting in which you inevitably take damage, you place Tetris blocks around your castle because if you don’t make a full perimeter in time, you lose.
The puzzle aspect sucks because you have no control over what blocks you get, the blocks can’t overlay and you’re given a stringent time limit when time is something you don’t have because the game’s movement is done by a track ball when you have to carefully put each block on the exact right spot.  What was wrong with using a regular clicking joystick?  It controls poorly, the graphics are dull, gameplay switches before it can begin to get any fun and the voice clips are limited and get on my nerves.  Rampart blows.

Oof.  Midway’s 1990 showing was not so good.  1991 is Namco’s chance to steal the crown.

Rolling Thunder 2(NAM): I was hoping that so long after the first Rolling Thunder that the sequel would be great, but instead it’s the same exact game at heart and since the original wasn’t very fun, this one isn’t either.

Rolling Thunder 2 makes some welcome changes.  A second player can join to help, players can take more collision damage without dying and there are way more checkpoints, but that doesn’t do a lot to curb the frustration when bullets still kill in one hit and obstacles come out of nowhere with little time to react.  It’s still the same trial and error bullshit that makes a game that should take less than half an hour to beat take a full hour instead.  It doesn’t even look much better than the original.

Off the Wall(MID): It’s just another Breakout game.  That’s it.

Tank Force(NAM): Tank Force is another one of Namco’s arcade games that has a simple premise the game builds around.  That simple premise is that you are a tank and have to protect your base from being hit.  Everything in the environment can be destroyed with enough damage, leading to strategic pathfinding possibilities as you blow up enemy tanks and other armored vehicles.  If your base’s outer wall is damaged enough, it only takes one shot into an opening to lose.

The layout and visuals of environments are always changing, new enemy types are slowly introduced to keep it fresh, the destructive scenery can be used for and against the player, there are power-ups that change how the tank fires and the tank itself controls nice and snappy.  Surveying the stage for enemy positions and the paths available, and positioning the tank to fire without getting hit itself, is an engaging gameplay loop that keeps me interested for the entire run.  I didn't expect to like it so much after previous tank games like TNK 3 soured me on the premise, but Tank Force is a winner.  Why did this not come out in America?!

The Winner

With only 2 games, one of which was bad, the odds weren’t in Namco’s favor, but Midway did not impress this round at all.  Every single game from Midway was either a rehash of another game or badly designed.  The rehashes are fine, but only because the games they’re based on were fine.  Tank Force, on the other hand, was brand new (for Namco, at least) and was a great game on its own.  I had more fun playing Tank Force than the bad combat of Pit Fighter, the monotonous shooting of Smash TV or the everything of Rampart.  Hell I had more fun playing Rolling Thunder 2 than a few of those games, even if it’s also a bad game at the end of the day..  For that, Namco wins these two years.

Meanwhile…

It’s around this time that our previous contestants really picked up and had games way bigger and way better than anything Midway or Namco was making.  With Capcom’s CPS system and SNK’s new Neogeo, both were able to make some really nice-looking platformers like Magician Lord, Blue’s Journey and Mega Twins, Capcom made one of my favorite shooters in Carrier Air Wing and SNK began their dominance in arcade sports games with the humble little games Top Players Golf and League Bowling.  This is without going into the cavalcade of beat-em-ups that varied in how much fun they are to play, but all of them are fun even today.
 
Of course, the big show stealers were Capcom with Street Fighter 2 and SNK with Fatal Fury.  Mostly Capcom though.  Street Fighter 2 effectively invented the fighting game genre as we know it today and motivated game designers to make their own fighting games in a method of gameplay bursting with possibilities.  One of such game designers just happened to be Midway.  Not Namco though.  Not yet.  In fact, both companies are going to be going in light for the next round when I go over the games of 1992.

Before that though, I have one more little game to cover.  With this year finished I have gone over every single game in the Namco Museum Collection for the Switch and have mentioned some of the options to expect when you play the games on it.  For the sake of capping off my thoughts on the games it has I might as well touch on the last game in the collection that is not an arcade game, but a Gamecube game, which stands out from all the other games on the collection that are from 1991 at the latest.

I remember seeing Pac-Man Versus in Nintendo Power, but I never bothered to get it because it’s not a fully featured console game and the only bundle deal came with Pac-Man World 2, which I already had.  It’s a 3 vs 1 multiplayer game where one player uses the Game Boy Advance attached to a link cable to control Pac-Man in a classic pixel maze and the other players play as the ghosts on the TV screen on a 3D stage with limited, zoomed-in viewpoints.  Characters take turns playing as Pac-Man and try to be the first to get enough points to win by either eating dots or catching the Pac-Man player, all the while Mario is the announcer with his Italian Charles Martinet accent.

The catch with the original Pac-Man Versus was that you needed a GBA, a link cable and 4 players, which also meant 3 controllers.  You couldn’t play it with any less than 4 and it’s hard enough finding a second player.

Pac-Man Versus on the Switch collection fixes the requirements a bit by allowing the use of a second Switch to take the GBA’s place wirelessly and it allows for computer-controlled players if you don’t have the full 4.  It’s a great game at parties (if someone else there happens to have brought a Switch) and the gameplay is as simple as the original Pac-Man.  Even if you don’t have a second switch, there’s a single player option, but it’s not as fun.  Good on Namco for using the Switch’s features to bring back such a unique game and allowing more people to play it.  I’d go as far as to say that Pac-Man Versus alone is worth the 5 or so dollars you can get the collection for on sale, but Splatterhouse, Tank Force and Galaga 88 are good too.

Now that that’s out of the way, in the next year it’ll be time for