Bullfight (Arcade)

The first thing I should mention here is that the title of this game isn't any kind of metaphor, it's literally about bulfighting, and it's pretty grisly, so if you that might upset you, you should probably skip this post. It's a top-down single screen game, it's pretty fun, atmospheric enough, but also quite flawed.

You play as a torero in the bullring, and the controls comprise a joystick and two buttons. Obviously, the joystick moves you around, while the buttons are for cape moving and stabbing, respectively. You score points for leading the bull with your cape, stabbing the bull, leading it into a wall, opening a wound on its back and killing it. Upon killing the bull, you go onto the next stage, with progressively fiercer bulls, and eventually, a second bull gets added to the mix.

The bull can trample you, which temporarily immobilises you, he can knock your sword out of your hand and even sometimes break it (if this happens a guy at ringside will throw another one into the ring after a couple of seconds) and he can gore you with his horns, resulting in a lost life. Since your torero wears a different-coloured outfit for each life, does that mean that they're literally being killed in the ring and it's a different guy each time? Who knows?

As for the flaws, there are two main ones. The first is that cape movement is kind of awkward and stiff. I think the direction in which the cape rotates is determined by the relative positions and movements of you and the bull, but I'm not entirely sure about that. The second is that the bull's movement can sometimes feels erratic and random, even when you're leading it with your cape. I guess this adds a little realism, since a bull is a huge, angry wild animal and should be a little unpredictable, but it can also make the game feel unfair.

If you can stomach it, though, I do think bullfight is a fun game, despite its flaws and the fact that it's pretty shallow in the long run. Interesting that other than this, the only other videogames based on real-life bloodsports that I can think of are those Cabela rifle animal hunting arcade games. I guess that's because of the unpleasant subject matter and the inherent unfairness in favour of the human participants that most of these sports hold. I'd also like to point out before I finish that I am totally against bloodsports of all kinds in real life.

GG Series Collection Plus (DS), Part 4

It's time for the final part of this long series of reviews, and it's covering the sports section of the cartridge. Don't worry, though, as apparently Genterprise are as lacking in enthusiasm for the subject as me, and some of these games really stretch the definition of a sports game.

Drift Circuit
A terrible racing game. All the cars are the exact same sprite in different colours. They aren't even properly animated, they just slide around and rotate. It's also incredibly slow-paced and tedious. The gimmick is that you can increase your speed by double-tapping a direction to drift, but this just feels awkward, and the boost isn't much, either.

Tetsubou
This is a little odd. It's a futuristic gymnastics game starring what appears to be one of the cycloids from the Street Fighter EX series. You jump to grab on to bars, then swing round them and jump to other bars, collecting gems and trying to reach the exit. It's kind of frustrating when you miss, but otherwise this is a pretty fun game.

Throw Out
A weird soccer-like game starring teams of four fat little robots. It's not particularly interesting or noteworthy in any way.

Exciting River
A kayaking game with an interesting control scheme: the shoulder buttons are each assigned to one of the paddles. Tap them rhythmically and alternately to go straight ahead, and repeatedly tap one to turn in that direction. The player simply has to get to the end of the course before time runs out, and there's a bunch of courses to play through. It's fun to play even on the strength of the controls alone.

Run & Strike
A tennis/squash game featuring a girl hitting a ball at targets on a wall. It reminds me of the bonus games in SEGA's tennis games. Though it's not a bad game, it just didn't really grab me.

Air Pinball Hockey
Like you might guess from the title, this is a weird hybrid of pinball and air hockey. The way this turns out if pretty similar to an arkanoid clone, but with a smaller paddle that can move in all directions. The stages all have different goals, like scoring a certain amount of points or destroying a bunch of targets, and you get a fresh set of lives for each stage, too. This is easily the best game n the sports section, though that does feel a little like damning with light praise.

Uchuu Race
Dissapointing, this one. You drive a spaceship round various short tracks as fast as possible, and touching the sides adds seconds onto your time. There's no opponents at all, and though it looks nice, there's not really much substance to it.
               

Kaze no Notam (Playstation)

You might have already seen the boxart and title screen for this game posted on tumblr before. For some reason, though, no-one seems to have actually taken any in-game screenshots, and with the exception of a miserable, point-missing review on GameFAQs, no-one seems to have written on the game, either.

So what you probably aleady know is that it's a game about riding around in a hot air balloon. It's a product of Artdink, who seemed to be having something of an experimental period in the mid-90s, with this along with other non-traditional games like Aquanaut's Holiday and Tail of the Sun. So, what you might be wondering is how they made a game out of Hot Air Ballooning, and the answer is: they barely did. 

The biggest unique point of Kaze no Notam is its controls. The player can't just steer their balloon about as they like, and are instead subject to the whims of the winds. A column on the right side of the screen shows the direction of the wind at different altitudes, and the only direct control the player has over their balloon is to ascend and descend to try and keep themselves in their desired air current. 

There are a few different game modes: finding a target on the ground and shooting it, shooting at three widespread points to make a huge triangle, and shooting down other balloons. None of them are particularly engaging though, but that's okay, since they only seem to be included as a token concession towards traditional videogamery, and the aforementioned controls mean that trying to beat times or play efficiently is a fool's errand. 

The real point of Kaze no Notam is to just leisurely fly around the maps, sightseeing and relaxing. The maps are huge, and full of cool stuff to see: futuristic cities, mountain-topping mansions, ruins of lost civilisations, and so on. The game lets players pick any of the maps right from the start, and also gives a choice from a few different times of day and weather conditions. As if to really hammer home the point that the game is more about aesthetics and mood than it is about mechanics and challenge, neither the time nor weather options actually affect the gameplay at all.

I definitely recommend that you seek out and play Kaze no Notam, for two reasons. The first is that it's a perfect example of how a videogame can be more than just its mechanics, and the second that it's a great little time capsule of a time when the advent of textured polygons was widening the scope of the kinds of games that could exist, and before the risk-minimising homogeneity of large-budget game development had sanitised and narrowed the scope back down.

   This game is also known as "Notam of Wind"

Taekwon-Do (SNES)

Like the previously-covered Champion Kendou, Taekwon-Do is part of the mostly dead (apart from MMA and Boxing games, usually featuring real-world athletes) genre of combat sports videogames. Obviously, it focuses on the Korean martial art Taekwon-Do, and, unusally, even offers an option to play the game in Korean rather than Japanese (though, wasn't the import of Japanese videogames to Korea illegal when this game came out? I don't know).

Though there are other modes, such as a King of Fighters-esque team battle mode, and some kind of character edit/training mode that I couldn't really work out, as its pretty text-heavy, and I can't read Japanese or Korean, the main single player mode sees the player selecting a character and taking part in tournaments around the world. There are three possible ways to win a match: either knock your opponent out, knock them to the ground five times, or have scored the most points when the time runs out.

Successful attacks score one to three points each, while knockdowns and ringouts are worth five each. The score totals aren't visible until the end of each match, presumably to stop players building up a safe score and then blocking or avoiding attacks until the counter runs down. There's no visible health bar, but knockouts usually seem to be achieved by completely overwhelming your opponent with constant attacks. The game controls pretty simply: the face buttons combined with directions on the d-pad execute various attacks (mostly kicks, of course), and the shoulder buttons are held to take on different stances, and also to move up and down the mat. The sounds for attacks connecting and being blocked sound like wood blocks being knocked together, which is more effective than my description implies, and gives a very different feel to the more visceral sounds heard in regular fighting games.

Since this is an attempt at a fairly realistic martial arts sports game, the characters are all just guys in Taekwon-Do outfits, and, in fact are all head and palette swaps of the same sprite. Don't take this as a negative, though: the developers have used this fact to their advantage, as that one sprite has a ton of expressive animation. Not only are there special reaction animations to getting hit by ceratin attacks, or in certain situations (for example, a character taking a strong hit to the gut will hunch over and hold themselves for a few frames, while a character being hit mid-jump will stumble on their feet when they land), but the fighters also show various levels of fatigue, which seem to be effected by various factors, such as the character's own stamina stat, the severity of the beating they've taken and the amount of jumping and other energetic moves they've performed. By the end of a particularly fierce bout, both characters will be breathing heavily, shoulders slumped and knees starting to buckle. This depth of animation really adds a lot to the game, and I'm slightly worried I'm not doing a good enough job of getting that across.

Soyeah, Taekwon-Do is definitely a game worth looking into for those wanting something slightly different from a typical fighting game, as well as those interested in how a videogame can take its weaknesses and turn them into strengths.

Basketball Nightmare (Master System)

The night before the big game, the captain of a high school basketball team has a nightmare, where he has to play against teams of monsters. And though he's probably American, and the game was made for western audiences (the only ones still buying Master System games in 1989), a lot of the monsters are very Japanese: buddhist cyclopses, kappas, undead Japanese grandmothers, and so on. The enemy teams, being monsters, play on spooky courts, too, which happen to look pretty cool, with baskets made of bones and rocks and such.

Despite the unusual theme of Basketball Nightmare, it doesn't add any kind of fantastic elements to the way the game plays: no power-ups or special moves or anything of the sort. It's just a regular basketball game in which the AI teams all happen to be monsters. So normal is the manner in which the game plays, that in 2-player mode, and the pointless CPU vs CPU mode, the teams are all human. There's also talk online of a secret single player mode played against international human teams, though I haven't found any instructions on how to access this mode.

The game plays better than you'd expect from an 8-bit team sports game, and it's presented excellently: attempted slam dunks are shown via impressive full screen cutaway animations and the regular sprites are all cute and appealing. It does fall apart, however, when you discover the secret to winning every match: get the ball, run to the bottom right corner of the court and shoot. More often then not, you'll score a three pointer. Do this a few times, and your opponents will have no chance of catching up before the time runs out.

Basketball Nightmare is worth a look for the cute graphics, and some fun might be had from the 2-player mode (though I guess either both players or neither players would have to know about the secret for it to be at all competitive), but it's definitely not an essential game that needs to be sought out.

Aa Harimanada (Game Gear)

Aa Harimanada is a sumo game, based on Kei Sadayasu's comiic of the same name. You've probably seen the Mega Drive game based on the comic, which, as was the fashion at the time, was more like a sumo-themed fighting game, with large, detailed sprites and special moves and the like. (As an aside, the UK's Sega Power magazine printed a review of the Mega Drive game, but were apparently too lazy or too cheap to get someone to translate the title for them, so they just referred to it as "SUMO".)

The Game Gear version is, as far as I can tell with my very limited understanding of sumo, a lot more realistic. Though there are special moves in the game, the only reason I know this is because I once

performed one by accident (ashoryuken-looking maneuver that I was unfortunately never able to recreate). The CPU opponents never performed any specials, no matter how far into the game I got. There is one particularly unrealistic-seeming touch left in however: the ability to jump stright up in the air about three or four metres. You can't attack or anything from up there, though, so it's as pointless as it is inappropriate. Winning is possible via the regular sumo methods of knocking your opponent down, or throwing them out of the ring, though there is also a health bar, presumably to avoid stalemates, and attacking an opponent with a fully depleted health bar will automatically knock them down or send them rolling out of the ring.

As you can see from the screenshots, the game's graphics are fairly nice looking, though they're far from the best the Game Gear has to offer, and as you play the game, you'll notice they commit a far graver sin: repetition to an almost absurd degree. There's only one arena in the game as far as I can tell, having played well over twenty stages in, and even worse, there's only on character sprite. It's true, although the many opponents you face in the game all have different names and portraits displayed before each bout, every one of them, including the player character, is one sprite used over and over with the only variations being in skin and mawashi colour. Making this even worse is the fact that the varying skin colours rarely match the colour of the character seen in the pre-match portraits.

Despite this, the presentation in general is pretty good. The one sprite the game has is of a decent size and also fairly well animated, and there's quite a bit of sampled speech, considering it's an early 90s handheld game. Each match also ends with a big, full-screen animation of the winniing move, which looks pretty cool and is only slightly hampered by the fact that again, all the animations feature generic characters, irrelevant of which characters are involved.

Unforunately, though there are a few good points speaking in this game's favour, they are vastly outweighed by the negatives. The aformentioned health bar is the game's real killer, even in light of the recoloured sprites problem, as it removes the need for any kind of skill in the game. It's entirely possible to coast through the game by simply pummeling opponents with palm thrusts and headbutts until they're knocked out, and it seems they never develop any kind of skill to counter such tactics. I've only seen the game over screen because I lost a fight on purpose, and I've never seen the game's ending simply because the boredom of fighting identical, inept opponents always becomes totaly unbearable after about twenty-ish matches.

Net de Tennis! (Dreamcast)

In Europe, the Dreamcast was advertised with the slogan "up to six billion players", obviously referring to the console's in-built online capabilities. Obviously, SEGA Europe then went on to live up to this by releasing a massive amount of games with online play. And by massive number, I mean "about five or six". Yeah, they

messed it up, just like they did when they refused to play to the Saturn's strengths and arcade-loving userbase. Another Saturn analogue is that in Japan, Capcom in particular were releasing a whole bunch of games that could be played online, most famously their "For Matching Service" series of arcade ports. This is another one of Capcom's online Dreamcast releases.
What's obvious as soon the game starts is that it's a budget release and that it was definitely released with online play in ind, with single player being just an afterthought, only offering single exhibition matches with no kind of career or arcade-style progression mode available. There's also a couple of extra features included to enhance the online aspect. The first is a simple character edit mode, in which you can choose the hairstyle, skin and clothing colours of a player, as well as choosing whether their racket is star-shaped or a more traditional oval, plus you can give your player a little dog that follows her around the court (and you can

choose the colour of the dog too). The other is a mode allowing players to select a still avatar, and four short phrases, which, it seems would be displayed during play when the analogue stick was pushed (the game itself being controlled with the d-pad, obviously).
As for how the game actually plays, it's okay. Nothing special. No fancy moves or powers or anything, like in something like SEGA Superstars Tennis as far as I could tell, though the players do have stats labelled "Guts" and "Miracle" (plus one of the players is apparently from a country called "Love"), so it's possible I just haven't figured out how to activate these things (but the CPU players haven't used them, either). One weird little touch is that when you're serving, you can tap down on the d-pad to make your player bounce the ball on the ground. It doesn't

affect gameplay in anyway, but it's a nice little thing.
I'd probably compare the game to the early Game Boy game Tennis: just a simple, fun tennis videogame. This doesn't really work in its favour though, since there are a lot of simple fun tennis games on pretty much every system, and most of them are easier to get ahold of than this one, there's not really any reason to bother going to the effort of tracking this one down, unless you specifically like to seek out and play lesser known titles like this like some kind of weirdo nerd or something.

Simple 2000 Series Vol. 104: The Robot Tsukuruuze ~Gekitou! Robot Fight~

Before playing this game, all i knew about it was the title, an from that, I assumed it would be a game about giant robots, or maybe some kind of Angelic Layer/Plawres Sanshiro-esque affair with toy robots fighting. The second guess was the closer of the two, though unlike the fighting toy robots seen in those shows, the robots in this game are much more realistic. Rather than being tiny mechanical superheroes, these robots are

blocky machines, awkwardly stumbling about just like bipedal robots do in real life. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen robots pretty similar to the ones in this game in real life, but searches for "bipedal robot sumo/fighting/etc." proved fruitless.
Anyway, the fighting portion of the game has your robot facing another in a sumo-style arena, victory coming from either depriving your opponent of their balance points and knocking them over, or by pushing them out of the ring. The first robot to win three rounds wins the fight.
Of course, the robot in-game belongs to and is controlled by the teenage members of an after-school club, and between the matches, you can instruct the four members of the club to either perform one of four actions (making new robot parts, programming new special moves into the robot,

repairing the robot's parts or changing the robot's parts), or they can spend the week studying to increase their proficiency in one of the four actions.
The makers of the game really got into the high school anime presentation style of the game, even going so far as having the game's intro be in the style of an anime intro, complete with vocal theme song and a fake time stamp in the corner of the screen. The developers' (HuneX) back catalogue (at least as far as their Simple Series entries go) is largely made up of visual novels and romance games, which shows in this game in the form of the unbelievably lengthy dialogue scenes that occur almost constantly between fights, delivered in the format of static pictures with text boxes beneath them. I don't feel like I'm missing much

through my inability to read them, and to be honest, my enjoyment of the game shot up immensely after discovering that you can skip entire scenes of dialogue in one go by pressing select.
In summary, this is a fun game with a nice, friendly atmosphere, even if you skip all the dialogue scenes. It' also very well made, with great production values that really hide the fact that it's a Simple 2000 game. I definitely recommend it.

Champion Kendou (SG-1000)

I don't know much about kendo, though it seems to be a sport that's mysteriously under-represented in videogames. Other than this game, there's a Simple 1500 release on the Playstation, and oddly, a few games on 80s British computers and very little else. I guess other types of fighting are seen to make for more exciting videogames?
Anyway, the game has two main modes of play. The first, and most realistic is a tournament mode featuring teams of five fighting one by one. A pint is scored by getting a clean hit on your opponent, and the first to score twice wins. Their opponent is eliminated, and the first team to lose all five memebers loses the match. I don't know how many rounds are played in this mode all together, but I've been able to get to the fifth team of opponents so far. Though the box art depicts the competitors as men, the in-game sprites are simple and plain enough that you can, should you be so inclined, project any kind of personality onto them. Like if you're some kind of weirdo, you might decide that you're controlling a team of misfit teenage girls, led by a seemingly aloof sempai who seems stuck up but secretly she's really kind and protects younger kids from bullies. If you were some kind of weirdo, of course.
The other mode isn't so good. It's a one-on-one mode in which the two fighters each have health bars, which for some reason are reduced not only by taking attacks, but also by attacking. You can actuallly knock

yourself out by attacking too much.
For some reason, I instantly took a liking to this game. It's simple, but very satisfying to play, and the primitive graphics somehow manage to radiate a lot of atmosphere. One amusing minor detail is that the crowd of spectators seem to be very one-sided in their tastes: They'll cheer when the player's team wins a match, but only offer a stony silence for AI victories.
I definitely recommend this game! If you're one of those collector types, it might be helpful to know that it was released on Sega's My Card format, meaning it's compatible with the Sega Mark III, the first model of the Master System, a few other, more obscure 80s consoles and the Mega Drive Powerbase Convertor.

The Karate Tournament (Arcade)

In the period following the release of Street Fighter II, tons of fighting games were released into arcades. Most of them were terrible also-rans like Mortal Kombat, some were the start of timeless, beloved franchises like Fatal Fury and King of Fighters 98. What they mostly had in common is the basic formula codified by SFII that even to this day most fighting games adhere to, with health bars and combos and special move inputs and so on.
The Karate Tournament is one of the few that doesn't follow that trend. The most obvious difference between it and other fighting games is the lack of health bars. Instead, it takes a more realistic martial arts tournament approach, with each fighter having six points, losing one when they take a hit, and two when they're knocked down. Losing all six points means losing the fight.
Three is a pretty important number in this game: you can choose from three difficulties before you start playing, you get three lives, and each location has three opponents to fight. Obviously, when you lose a match, you lose a life, but you have to start the match from the beginning again. A nice little touch is how there's a kabuki referee guy like in the early Samurai Shodown games, announcing and waving flags when a fighter gains a point or wins a match.
The points system makes the fights a lot quicker than in regular fighting games, usually only going for a few seconds and sometimes ending in only 2 or 3 hits. The other big difference is in the controls. Since there isn't any health system, there aren't different strengths of attack. Instead, there's an attack button an a jump button. There's a ifferent attack for pressing the attack button at the same time as each direction, as well as mid-air attacks, and quick mini-combos activated by pressing both buttons plus a direction. As far as I can tell, the CPU opponents all have the same moveset as the player, differing only in their preferred tactics and their skill in using them.
Despite all the unique innovation and originality in the game, my favourite thing about it is the graphics. As you might expect from Mitchell, the makers of the psychedelic Strider-clone Osman, the colour pallettes in this game are all incredibly bright and vibrant, and the animation is also excellently fluid (probably as a positive side effect of there essentially being only one character).



The Karate Tournament doesn't have the lasting appeal of regular fighters, with their varied casts and masses of tactical options, but it's still a game I reccomend playing, as there really isn't much else like it and it does look amazing.

Sega Game Pack 4 in 1 (Game Gear)

It might seem strange to review a compilation, but this isn't a compilation of previously released games, the games on here were made specifically for a compilation. Not this compilation, though. Three of the games were originally part of two Japan-only releases called Kuni-chan no Game Tengoku Volume 1 & 2. The other game, Penalty Shootout was made especially for this cartridge, which appears to have been released only in Europe, mainly as a pack-in with the console, but apparently there's also a very rare boxed release of it too.
You might say that a console pack-in might not be obscure enough to fit this blog's remit, but it's not like you see people posting about this game everywhere, is it? It seems to have been mostly forgotten, which is good enough for me.
So, on to the games!
First up is Flash Columns, which, as you might guess from the title, is a cut-down version of columns, featuring only the "Flash mode" from the full version. If you don't know, flash mode gives you a stage partially filled with jewels, some of which are flashing. Get rid of the flashing jewels and go on to the next stage. There are a couple of differences between this version and the version you might be used to, though. Firstly, although the jewels still fall in vertical columns of three, to make them disappear, they have to be arranged so that at least four of the same colour are touching, non diagonally, as opposed to the normal columns rule of putting three in a row, in any direction. The other difference is the scoring system, or rather, the lack of one. In this game, you get one point for every jewel you make vanish. No extra points for chains or disappearing large amounts at once, and also no time limit to get the falshing jewels in. This is the flaw that ruins the game, with no rewards for speed or skill, it feels like a tedious trudge.
The second game is the one made especially for europe, Penalty Shootout! Essentially, it's a guessing game. You choose which direction to make the guy kick the ball, and how high. Then you hope the goalie doesn't jump in the same direction. After five shots, you switch places. There's no way of knowing what the computer player is going to do, making the whole thing a pointless waste of time. Don't bother with it.
The third game, which is referred to by most of the internet as just "Rally", though I'm sure I remember it being called something like "Pan-American Grand Prix" in the manual, though I no longer have the manual, and of course there are no scans of it online (as far as I can tell), so wo knows? Anyway, this is definitely the best game of the four. It's an Outrun-clone, but with no branching paths. So I guess you could also call it a Hang-On clone, but in a car, if you wanted to. Whatever you want to call it, it's fast and fun and has nice graphics. The only downside is that it's really really short and easy. But that's not a massive downside, is it?
The last game, which is also the second best game on the cart is Tennis. It plays exactly like Nintendo's Tennis game on the Game Boy. Obviously this version is infinitely better though, for three reasons: it's made by SEGA, it's in glorious colour, and instead of Mario being the referee, Sonic is the referee. Other than those differences, I assume it's only the game's relative obscurity that stopped there being any kind of lawsuit, as it really does play exactly like Nintendo's game.

The Simpsons: Bart Versus The Juggernauts (Game Boy)

Before I start, I should be clear: this isn't so much a review as it is a warning. I've played this game for more than anyone ever should, and you shouldn't make the same mistake.
This nightmare all started many years ago, when I got my Game Boy. It was preowned, and came with a few games: the 32-in-1 cartridge that I previously mentioned, Super Mario Land 2, WWF Superstars 2 and this one. The Simpsons: Bart vs The Juggernauts.
The game is about a Gladiators-esque gameshow, and Bart's appearance as a contestant on it. There are six events, but you only start with two: A basketball style thing and a skateboarding thing. Although I've managed to get past these two events at some point in the distant past, in recent plays, I haven't managed it, and I've spent hours trying.
In the first event, there's a large black and white grid with a basket at the other end. you have to take a ball to the basket and get back as many times as you can in the time limit. The squares aren't arranged in a checkerboard pattern, and the black ones electrecute you. Get electrecuted three times and the event ends early. Also, sometimes the squares change to their opposite colour. They flash before doing it, but they also sometimes bluff you and flash without changing. Two of the juggernauts are jumping around the grid, and will knock you onto another, random square if you land on the same square as them.
The second event has Bart skateboarding down a ramp to build up speed, then at the end, jumping off the ramp to dropkick a juggernaut off his pedestal. Obviously, there are obstacles on the ramp, like pizza slices and hand smashing through the floor to grab Bart. If the description could end there, this event wouldn't be so bad. To stand a chance of hitting the juggernaut at the end, you have to avoid every obstacle and be at full speed at the end of the ramp. Even that would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that pizza slice can sometimes appear right on the end of the ramp without warning. Then there's the fact that the juggernaut will be holding a shield either high or low, meaning you have to position yourself correctly on the ramp, or just bounce off it harmlessly. There's absolutely no way of knowing whether the sheild will be high or low until you hit it.
By the way, not only do you have to complete these events, you have to do it perfectly, as fast as possible and on your first try, because although you get three tries for each event, to get the amount of points you need to go on to the next set of events means playing perfectly.
Don't play this game! The only slightly redeeming feature about it is the fact that it features some old Simpsons characters that never get mentioned or seen any more, like Dr. Marvin Monroe and Captain Lance Murdoch. Hopefully having written this review of it, I can finally exorcise this demon that has haunted me for years and never play it again.