Posts tagged battletoads
Why the first level of Battletoads makes me want to punch someone
Do you have any favorite games — specifically retro titles — that you have played over and over and over again? Probably so. Is there anything in those games that irks you every single time you see it? Me too! Oh my god, we have so much in common! We should get coffee sometime…
Anyway, check out this screenshot from Battletoads for the NES.
Just. Fucking. Look at it.
This is taken from the very first stage of the game, during the fight with the level boss. He shoots you and yada yada yada, you beat him. Cool.
After dispatching the giant bot thingy, your toad runs and jumps into a hole to complete the level as pieces of the boss fall down around him. Cool.
Only it’s not. It’s not cool at all. You know why? I’ll tell you why. Because the while three of the pieces that fall are nicely-drawn representations of bent and broken bot bits, the art director (did they even have these back then?) decided to just fucking toss in the exact same gun sprite that is used during the fight itself.
What?! Ugh.
I don’t know why this annoys me so much, and I could go on to cite how the scale is way off since from the bot’s first-person perspective the gun would actually be much smaller when compared directly with your character, and how they just left it with the weird right angle cuts on the ends which makes it stand out like a sore thumb in a… normal… thumb contest? Nevermind. Forget I said that.
It just seems so lazy to me. Granted, I’m an extremely lazy person to begin with, but this is just an entirely new level of dont-give-a-fuck that I can’t even begin to understand.
Regardless, every single time I play Battletoads, I notice this unfortunate inclusion and wish I could point it out to everyone else.
Done.
The Battletoads liked Dubstep before it was cool
Game music has come a long way from the 8-bit days, there’s no doubt about it. Modern games regularly come with a suite of licensed tracks, which is something the consoles of yesteryear simply couldn’t accommodate.
Still, with all the WUB-WUB lighting up 2012’s action titles, I think we need to take a moment and appreciate some good old-fashioned pause music.
That’s right. Please enjoy a few minutes of the closest thing to Dubstep that an 8-bit console could produce, courtesy of Battletoads.
