The Third Word War (Sega CD, 1994, Residual From The War Games Series, Cheat Post)

I assume the reason the words are curved at the bottom is that this is on a flatscreen CRT TV but the video input signal is either being output or processed like it’s for the convex-screen models. It happens on other games too, you may have noted it in my Doom post.

As I said 4 years ago…

As we watch the Democrats peddle their warmongering interventionist and laissez-faire let’s-wait-for-war attitudes, ie as they play their war games on their way to the fall brawl known as the midterm elections, where voters will probably vote Democrat to bring us nookular annihilation, I’ll take a look at some literal war games. Cold War video games, anyway.

That “let’s-wait-for-war attitude” remark is more reflective of the time I originally wrote it, at which point Democrats had briefly softened their warmongering from its 2017 levels (where Democrats wanted a nuclear war with Russia because they lost an election and blamed it on Russia… so protesting in the Capitol on January 6 because you thought an election was stolen is worse than trying to trigger a nuclear war because you thought an election was stolen- which Democrats STILL believe (despite scandal-free Obama and members of his team debunking it) while saying Republicans are terrorist Nazis who believe “the big lie” if they think 2020 was stolen).

Anyway, today we’ll look at a game I had wanted to do 4 years ago but didn’t get around to.

The Game

Imagine the game Civilization but you choose who to attack with a drop-down menu and the only time you get to move units on a map is when you start a battle and enter the Real-Time Strategy part of the game. Also you don’t even have to attack if you have enough money to buy out the foe.

I first tried to play as Russia, thinking I could mimic the moves that led to the Ukraine crisis. Instead, it turned out the world was totally bananas so that wasn’t going to work. Then the video output glitched (already here you can see it’s darker than usual) so I had to shutoff the console and try again.

It looks like something you’d play on a computer: you have a cursor and drop-down menus where you select what you want to do, and then the chance for some numerical inputs. You have a set amount of money in each turn, and can only take a couple of actions before you’re not allowed to act anymore (there’s a counter for it). You can invest the money in yourself or other countries. The benefit of foreign investment is you can either make them friendly or conquer their economies.

Now comes the “Third World War” part. You have military units you can send out, plus you can launch different types of attacks on a foreign country without invading. Surprisingly for a game named “Third World War”, your nuclear strikes are limited and don’t escalate to the world blowing itself apart. Maybe Putin played this before making his nuclear threats?

What’s interesting is some of the mechanics at play. You have unrealistic elements like increasing tax audits causing a rise in the morale of your population, or Canada developing chemical and nuclear weapons. But then there are some very realistic mechanics, like the fact that other countries can bomb cities and maim civilians without a care in the world but then America is condemned and loses allies if they do the same thing (same also goes for if you play as Israel where liberals really do want to “drive the Jews into the sea” I guess because they DON’T use human shields like Palestine does, yet strangely if you’re NOT playing as Israel they can invade at will with no condemnation), even if the country they’re doing it to just invaded somebody. Really, that applies to anyone you play as, and I’m sure idiots sucking propaganda worldwide can sympathize with how their special slice of Hell is always persecuted just like when you play as them in this game.

This is a very loooooong game to play, so have a few hours on hand. I went for an hour and the status quo was the same an hour in as it was at the start. Luckily there is a save feature. You can also play different scenarios, whether it’s erupting the Cold War into a nuclear conflict, starting a Third World War in the 1990s, or a free-for-all (though the Third World War scenario seems like that too). It definitely has a lot of replay value if this is your kind of thing.

Now for the combat- at times, you can get caught in a land war where you get to command military units. You’re shown the battlefield, but not all at the same time, and the camera starts over the enemy’s units. You hover the cursor over one of your units, and upon selecting it you can direct them to destinations and tell them who/what to attack. Once per battle you can also call in an air strike either from the air force or navy or both depending on who you have available. Just be careful with that- it takes them 20-30 seconds to get there, so enemy troops could easily have moved out of range of their attack. You can’t target specific units with them, rather you can only call for a strike at a general area and hope the enemy is still there when the attack comes. This is the Real-Time Strategy part I described earlier, for the casual reader not hip on game terms. Given the use of a cursor to point and click on things, this part too seems designed for a PC (I so dislike using controllers instead of a mouse for RTS games that I surrendered my copy of Command And Conquer on the Sega Saturn, which is not compatible with the mouse released for the Saturn… but I traded it for a Hogan’s Heroes boxset so while I was disappointed I had to trade it off it wasn’t a total loss).

Getting a ground battle started is not as easy as just picking a target. You also can control what each of those 16 armies have in them, a super level of micromanaging. Also- if you want to weaken the enemy with an air strike before starting combat (as opposed to during combat), you have to do the air strike in one turn and then combat the next turn because it will always start combat before doing an air strike if you try to do them in the same turn (air strikes outside of combat don’t effect your ability to do air strikes during combat).

Overall I have to say this high-level involved game isn’t really my style unless I plan to dedicate a day to it, but I’d probably get too bored after hour 2 of no progress. It’s a little… dry. You don’t exactly see how your economic moves affect your country and the world, and how they’re countered. There’s a lot of numbers and graphs too. Plus you’re not exactly seeing everything all at once, you have to scroll through pages of data every turn to make an informed decision. Also in between turns you get a news ticker at the bottom of the screen telling you what countries gained what weapons or what economic crisis or disaster affected which country, and you need to pay attention to that and take it into account in your turn. A lot of detail goes into this, it’s a very immersive and time-consuming experience, and it’s not fast-paced in the least bit. Even the ground combat portion takes a while- your units move slowly.

Then you remember it’s the Sega CD in 1994 and realize it’s a pretty good game given the circumstances, and usually can be found pretty cheap… or at least it used to be. In 2018 I got it complete in box for $5, but today that’d be $40 on eBay, or $15 for the game by itself. I’m planning a series on games that are inexplicably expensive and get the feeling I should’ve saved this one for that.

The Real World War III Is About To Begin!

Yes, this is also a cheat post.

Earlier this week I interviewed someone about Putin’s nuclear threats, how with his mentality he might not be bluffing, and how we’re not paying attention to the warning signs and just assume some sort of moral shield will protect us and we don’t have to understand how the enemy thinks, nor should we try to give the bad guy a little of what he wants in order to avoid a situation where precious liberal cities get nuked (the same liberals who say in all cases we should send unarmed, powerless, counselors to stop a crazy man with a gun who’s killing people because the nutcase just needs to be understood (as if social workers were infallible, as if victims had no rights and the killers should just be given a lecture and sent on their way… and rapists too, for you liberals who say there’s an epidemic and then vote to increase it) also say we should continually provoke and eventually fight a crazy man with nuclear weapons and that we shouldn’t even try to understand him, except to understand how we can attack first. They say you’re a traitor if you don’t shut up and obey Democrats’ calls to war without examining the bigger picture- just look at the Left’s McCarthy-era reaction to Tucker Carlson’s nuanced view on staying out of the war, in some cases the same Left that said we should not have tried to stop Russia-backed North Vietnam from invading South Vietnam).

Since the interview was conducted, America seems to have decided to up the ante and sabotage Europe’s principle source of energy. If it turns out America is the culprit, then we pretty much cut off our nose to spite our face by royally screwing over our European allies. Remember how you Lefties said Trump was evil because he wanted other NATO nations to do their fair share of the work (ironic that you communists were AGAINST someone pulling their weight instead of mooching off others like a billionaire)? Well, I’d say making sure their citizens freeze to death in the winter is a bit worse, this coming after (as mentioned in the last post) the Biden Administration begged them not to evacuate their people from Afghanistan and leave them to be used as hostages or killed by the Taliban. Again, Trump saying NATO countries should put in equal effort according to their abilities is way different than the Biden Administration outright trying to kill citizens of NATO countries, but I guess that major difference is lost on the “orange man bad” crowd.

Of course it didn’t have to be this way, this proxy war Democrats are pushing (it could’ve been over in April but the Biden Administration teamed up with England to sabotage a peace deal) in Ukraine that leads to billions of taxpayer dollars going to Ukraine and defense contractors only to end up in the pockets of corrupt politicians over there and over here with defense contractors spending our money to put warmongers in office so the money keeps coming (I thought Democrats opposed the military–industrial complex?). America is pretty much the reason the war hasn’t ended yet (this war is NOT about “protecting Democracy in Ukraine” as liberals chant, since Zelensky has shown himself to be one execution away from being as anti-Democratic as Putin), as you heard in the interview and saw in my last post. So anything that happens, such as Europe’s power being cut, is on the Leftist Biden Administration. Worse, it looks like that might be a permanent cut given the damage to the pipelines (granted, the whole reason Europe got hooked on Russian power is because of Leftists believing Russian propaganda… which is ironic since they tried to blame Russia for Trump getting elected yet they believed everything Russia said about the climate that led to dependence on Russian energy).

And it really looks like the Biden Administration is responsible for the pipeline sabotage. Consider this- as recorded in the last post they had no problem trying to say Russia would launch a false flag to start a war, yet when NATO all but accused Russia of launching a false flag with its pipelines suddenly the Biden Administration came to Russia’s defense while at the same time telling Americans to evacuate Russia (ostensibly because Russia might conscript them, which actually has been grounds for war in the past… a war that left the White House as a pile of ash just as one with Russia would). It’s like they knew they screwed up and are trying to limit the damage.

Anyway, this definite provocation will just make Putin more likely to lash out irrationally, with a nuclear reprisal still on the table. Anyone else remember how Leftists wanted to disarm our nuclear arsenal (and as recently as a month before the invasion wanted to reduce it)? Hey Lefties, quick question: how would we deter Putin from escalating already in this crisis if we didn’t have weapons of mass destruction on the table?

For that matter, remember that Democrats consistently are anti-military (check out that link to a Salon piece in that post I linked to- hey Lefties, if you don’t need the military to protect your freedoms how come you keep sending military weapons designed for our military to a foreign military and say it’s to protect your freedom from Putin?). They’ve been very open about wanting to dissolve the institution, and under their current regime we’ve seen recruitment numbers drop while the military releases perfectly fit soldiers by the thousands who love this country while keeping/promoting soldiers they train to hate this country and love terrorists, and hate the race that constitutes the majority of the American public (not that the ones left are trained to be competent, they might make the Russians look competent by comparison. And let’s not forget that the folks in charge of the military think America shouldn’t exist.). So why would these people who hate America fight Russia to protect it? These people, taught through CRT that America is irredeemably racist and the majority population is the cause of it, would sooner take Russia’s side if we were invaded- why WOULDN’T they? Russia just has to claim to be the woke liberator and that the Leftists in the military are being lied to by evil white fascists about who the real enemy is, and like all good civil rights warriors they want to be on the right side of history don’t they?

On the one hand Democrats want a nuclear war with Russia and are doing everything they can to recklessly plough forward into it, but on the other hand they spent decades trying to disarm us and are STILL working to do so. What conclusion can we draw about them (and any ex-military who join the party) from this?

Yes I know I railed on Democrats a lot while most Republicans are aiding and abetting this (when looking for that article on Rand Paul, I saw that Leftwing Rolling Stone magazine said he was working for Putin because he dared pause funding to Ukraine), but this is the sort of thing the MAGA movement in the Republican Party was against; it’s those the “extremist” “clear and present danger” faction of the Republican Party believes. If you Lefties hadn’t welcomed the ejected warmongers like Liz Cheney with open arms and embraced their violent worldview, hadn’t embraced those you said were liars who tricked us into invading Iraq, then they’d be even less relevant and the RINOs too cowardly to jump ship would be more inclined to work for peace or at least not work against it just to keep their checks coming.

What Do You Think?

You voted Democrat, so I guess you wanted World War III after all. Whether it was 62 million or 81 million who voted for Biden, this is what at least a third of the country seems to want. Vote Democrat again this fall to make sure we all die.

Well… not all of us. Wealthy executives at our defense companies, a few billionaires, and the leaders of the Democratic Party will survive a nuclear war because they’re for the people and for equity, and equity means the royalty and nobility in society survive in luxury while the serfs die in nuclear hellfire or struggle to live in post-apocalyptic hellscapes, but that’s what you vote for and defend so ardently on the internet, in social media, and in the real world with your protests/riots so I guess that’s how you feel. It’s convenient that I live near a prime target so I’ll be vaporized in an instant, but I regert that I won’t get to see radiation poisoning dole out karma to you while you continue to praise your Democrat leaders for their bravery in forcing this situation on you.

Doom (Sega 32X, 1994) – Part of the 32X In Revue Series

Doom was one of the launch titles for the Sega 32X. Since this is the first one of these posts on 32X games, I guess it’s appropriate I start with a launch title. It’s also appropriate that I introduce the 32X before I get into the game (it’s also also appropriate that I did this 2 years after covering a couple of Sega CD games, since in North America the 32X was released 2 years after the Sega CD). On the other hand given the background of the 32X, it is ironic that it took me several years to get around to making this.

In 1994, 32-bit video game systems were becoming all the rage. The Atari Jaguar and its 32-bit tech were concerning to Sega who wanted to get something out to market quick to compete. They had the Sega Saturn in development, but wanted something out sooner than that. So after first considering a new console that was basically a cheapass refit of the Sega Genesis, they settled on something you plug into the Genesis’ cartridge slot that made it more powerful. The idea was that it would extend the life of the Genesis- and extend customer loyalty- until the Sega Saturn came out.

This was a stupid idea and a waste of money that contributed to Sega going bankrupt a few years later. What ended up happening was Sega released the Sega Saturn in North America months in advance with the 32X only having been on the market for a couple of months by then, while in Japan the Saturn was released a week EARLIER than the 32X that was supposed to hold consumers over until its release and be a cheaper alternative until they could afford to upgrade. Third-party game developers knew what the 32X was intended for and decided not to waste their time with it, and consumers who might’ve bought a 32X went for the Saturn instead because Sega was basically competing with itself, so very quickly Sega abandoned the 32X and lost money. Then after only like three years they abandoned the Saturn to focus on the Dreamcast, which led customers (and developers) to think Sega wasn’t good at supporting its consoles since this was the second time they ditched one way earlier than the competition ditched theirs. In truth, Sega was just flat out of money and it was either ditch the Saturn for the Dreamcast or leave the Saturn as their last console. This is also why the Dreamcast was released without DVD-compatibility: Sega was out of money.

Arguably if the 32X hadn’t been released or if they’d just waited a year to release the Saturn like they originally planned (they moved the Saturn’s launch date up and lowered the price in order to compete with the PlayStation), Sega would’ve stayed competitive for longer and at the very least might’ve had money to make the Dreamcast a DVD player too, something which combined with it beating the other 128-bit consoles to market by a year and a half in Japan and a year in North America would’ve kept Sega going for a few more years.

In other words: their handling of the 32X DOOMed them.

The In-Game Story (Spoilers, Duh)

This is kinda needed to explain design issues with the Atari Jaguar port and others derived from it, which I’ll get to after this.

You’re a Space Marine on Mars handling security for a government contractor running teleportation experiments on Mars’ moons. This is set sometime in the future, not really defined (except in the SNES version which gives the date as March 24, 2022)… set in the future on Martian moonbases. Keep that in mind for later. Anyway, the teleporters actually are gateways to Hell and demons overrun the moonbases. You start on Mars’ moon Phobos which is just beginning to be invaded, then teleport to Deimos which has been fully invaded and is being transitioned into part of Hell, then head down to Hell itself.

Oh, and spoilers from Doom Eternal: the subsequent games turn out not to entirely be remakes afterall. Rather, they are just parallel universes, with Hell’s universe actually being the same place visited in all games. And the Marine you play as here and in Doom 2 and Doom 64 becomes a legendary demon slayer referenced in Doom 3 and who you play as again in Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal, after many years of busting demons (hot take- in order from favorite to least favorite I’d say the original, Doom 3 (Switch port), Doom 64, Doom 2016, Doom 2, Doom Eternal. This was derived after spending two months playing all of them back-to-back… and this does NOT take into account ports and variants because that would take way too long to list out and there’d be versions of the original Doom, Doom 2, Doom 3, and Final Doom all over the place in that list).

And apparently in at least 3 dimensions a company named UAC opens portals to Hell while in at least 2 dimensions there are 22nd century arcade machines for Super Turbo Turkey Puncher 3. So watch out for those things in our dimension, maybe stock up some ammo if they come into existence.

The Real-World Story

Same room, same angle, 32X on the Left, Switch on the right. The Switch version is a full port of the PC version, so I used that for these comparisons. Aside from the pictures of the GBA and Switch versions, all gameplay pictures were taken off the same TV, though the brightness of the camera may have varied a little.

In 1994 there was a rush to get Doom out on home consoles after it revolutionized first person shooters and its popular multiplayer capability crashed a few office intranet systems. The Atari Jaguar was the first console it was ported to with the Sega 32X, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Game Boy Advance, and Panasonic 3DO versions being derivatives of it. Despite being derived from the Jaguar version (they started trying to make a unique port, but I guess the fact they had only two months before its release date to work on it compelled them to use the Jaguar port that was already in progress. This was the theme around the 32X and Sega Saturn to follow- rushed out to market.), the Sega 32X was the first console that got a port to market. And it shows!

Firstly, what I mean by “derivatives” is that to get the game onto the Atari Jaguar content was cut, all levels had changes made, many graphics were cut to the point where some levels that originally looked like the futuristic moonbases they are supposed to be now look like medieval castles (and because of the many graphics cut they ALL look very bland until pools of lava and blood add some color, otherwise it’s all on the spectrum of gray, black, brown, and olive drab with textures repeated much more- the wider and more colorful variety of textures in the original PC version was not ported to the Jaguar derivatives), some levels were axed altogether while others had big sections cut out, and a number of enemies were cut (with these enemies re-inserted into the PlayStation and Saturn versions, whereas the graphics and most cut levels were not). One of the traps where the ceiling comes down to crush you is not in the Jaguar-derived ports (except in the stages from the second Doom game that are in the PlayStation/Saturn ports) but is in the SNES version. The version for the Jaguar was what the 32X, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Panasonic 3DO ports of the game were based on. Instead of porting the PC version, they ported the Jaguar version to other consoles.

Same room, same angle. Clockwise from top left it’s the 32X, Jaguar, Switch, and PlayStation versions. The PlayStation version had a lighting effect in the alcove with the demon carving that made it yellow.

Same room, same angle. Clockwise from top left is the GBA version, SNES version, 3DO version in the window size that worked best for me, and the 3DO version in the largest window size you could select without cheating.

Secondly, the SNES version deserves special mention (and gets any mention at all only because I draw comparisons to it later). Its framerate was just a little bit worse than the Jaguar port, its controls were a little more sluggish, and the enemies only ever faced in your direction and were almost unrecognizable and invisible at a distance because of the low resolution, but the architecture of the levels was actually faithful to that of the PC, they had a wider variety of textures (at the expense of floors and ceilings only displaying one color sort of indicative of the original graphic that covered them… yet still this one-color approach seemed to be more colorful than the other console ports), and they even had enemies that the more powerful consoles couldn’t handle. I think the music in that one is the best, though that is the one I grew up with so I am biased.

One thing that’s undeniable though is the SNES version maintains the story. The PC version was set in 3 segments of 9 levels each, with intermission text between them explaining the story and where you were and distinct styles between the segments. The SNES version keeps that (though it’s in 3 segments of 8, 6, and 8 levels) while the other ports discussed here remove the separation, intermission text, and most of the stylistic differences. Because of the many missing textures and lack of separation and story, aside from the level names you can hardly tell where you’re supposed to be in the other console ports. There’s just a gradual transition from bland industrial to bland castle, which is kind of why I didn’t like Doom 2 all that much- too bland with hardly a transition between bland areas. Saying it’s a console limitation doesn’t hold water either- the SNES was the weakest of the systems this was ported to with the lowest memory in its cartridges yet it managed to maintain the same diversity of environments as the PC port.

A minor example of what I mean by more colorful despite the floors just showing a single color. Top left is GBA, top right is SNES, and the bottom is the Switch.

As to reconciling this with the plot of being in the futuristic moonbases that are pretty bland and technologically challenged compared to the PC and SNES ports (the idea that demonic corruption turned the later stages into castles is sort of part of the plot on the original game, but it’s not to the degree you see here and the distinction between tech, corrupted tech, and Hell was strong), the 3DO version sort of makes it make sense by not giving too much of a story to the game, but the 32X version (and the Jaguar and the Saturn and probably the PlayStation and Game Boy Advance too) gives the PC plot, which is everything I said earlier about Mars/Deimos/Phobos (but no mention of actually being in Hell). As far as you can tell from the Jaguar release, the entire adventure is all on the moonbases (the level names at least indicate a change in location, and in the case of the 32X version all 17 levels actually are supposed to be on the moonbases), and for some reason wood and stone was favored as a construction material for the Deimos moonbase, with nary a computer in sight. I guess the UAC ran out of money. The PlayStation and Sega Saturn versions do have some intermission text on occasion, but it looks like a little different story than the PC release to the point where you might never actually have been in Hell. However, those two ports also feature most of the levels from Doom 2 and can be played almost as a continuous campaign with the levels from the first game so it makes sense the story might be adjusted a bit.

Same room, same angle. 32X top left, PlayStation top right, Switch bottom.

But how does the 32X version stack up in other areas?

Let’s start with the awful.

The music. Even though the 32X is supposed to allow better music, and even though the Genesis is perfectly capable of producing good music, this did not happen. The difference between even the PC MIDI music and the 32X port is so much of a downgrade it’s almost as bad as the difference between the music on the SNES and PC versions of Mega Man X (just plugging a previous post). There are also only 9 music tracks, compared to 19 in the PC version (but at least it plays over the level, unlike the Jaguar version it was derived from where there exist only a couple remixed tunes that play in between levels only because the Jaguar port couldn’t play music during gameplay).

While most of the sounds are there, they did mess one up. The teleporter uses the sound of the shotgun pumping. Speaking of teleporters, one of them doesn’t work, but at least it’s not an important one.

Now let’s do the glitchyness. Oh boy does it like to glitch! Every so often during a playthrough your game might freeze with an error code displayed in the top left. This has been going on the entire 14 year period I’ve owned this game. However, during one of my most recent playthroughs I think I should have seen this coming because the floor would occasionally- for a half second- turn into a bunch of garbled pixels. I had forgotten about its tendency to do this, and how some playthroughs were interrupted like this. The easiest glitch to access since you only have to play one level to see it is that when you beat level 15 (there is a secret level you access from level 3 that’s called level 17, but level 16 is the true final level) after having used the level select feature to skip any of the levels in the game, you are greeted with a command line prompt. Why? Because the game was supposed to restart, but they didn’t do that right so it just prints a command line prompt that kinda makes it look like they ported Dosbox to the 32X.

Speaking of levels, the Jaguar version this is based off of featured 24. As mentioned parenthetically earlier, the 32X version has only 17.

One issue it inherited from the Jaguar release that no other release had- not even the other releases based on the Jaguar version- is that when you collect the chainsaw, you no longer can use your fists. There is a powerup that makes your punches super strong for the rest of a level, but in this and the Jaguar versions if you switch away from your fists then you can’t use them anymore unless there happens to be another such powerup laying around. Not that you’d want this powerup- it blinds you for a few seconds when you pick it up. This powerup does not blind you in the PC or SNES version, but does in most of the Jaguar-derivatives to varying degrees. The 32X though was one of the worst.

The most powerful weapon of the game is missing from the 32X version unless you use a cheat code. It is not available to be picked up anywhere in this game. Compared to the SNES or PC versions this is not strange as this weapon is only available in the last third of the game, but on all the other Jaguar-derived ports this weapon is available in one of the levels that the 32X version features. This makes it kind of weird that it would be missing since it comes from the same stock. But the 32X version might’ve been based on an earlier stage in the Jaguar porting process before they put the weapon in- afterall, in the stage before this weapon should be available there is a wall texture missing that is present in every other port. It wasn’t replaced by anything, it’s flat out gone, causing a big graphical glitch. There are also other textures that are misaligned (most notably an exit switch that’s almost entirely under the floor).

The misaligned switch. Same room, same angle. Top left 32X, top right Jaguar, bottom Switch (and yes you pervert I know what a bottom switch is! You know that’s not what I meant!).

Oh, and remember how I mentioned the PC port’s multiplayer was popular? This is one of the few ports that has no such capability.

Same room, same angle, 32X on left and Jaguar on right. You can see that the graphical glitch caused by the missing wall graphic extends to more than just the wall that’s missing the graphic. You can also see how the colors on the Jaguar version appear a little darker than the 32X version (and darker than other ports).

Now for the neutral.

The controls fall in this category. The buttons seem more responsive and your movement can have more nuance than in the Atari Jaguar port or the Panasonic 3DO port. Sometimes they feel jerky, but that coincides with when the game itself slows down, whereas on the aforementioned consoles they were always jerky. And I think on the Jaguar version I needed to push the buttons harder. The SNES port had worse controls too, but as slow and unyielding as they were it actually worked given the game’s framerate. What makes this neutral though is the button configuration, though taken in tandem with other limitations it’s sort of acceptable.

One such limitation is that the monsters can only face you. Normally that’s a bad thing, but somehow it seemed to cancel out the two issues with the controls. When you strafe, you have to hold a button down and then press left or right. You can’t strafe in an arc with this configuration. You can only strafe immediately left or immediately right. The running button is separate from the strafing button, so if you were to strafe/run/fire you need to be pressing 4 buttons on a controller designed with only using your thumbs in mind which means that 3 of those buttons need to be pressed by one thumb. Somehow though because the monsters can only face you, and the two strongest monsters from the PC port are missing, this strafing issue not present in some other ports doesn’t really seem to be as bad.

Speaking of one-sided sprites, the rockets only have one sprite- the front. So when you fire it, the front of the rocket faces you. This would make since if the monster that shot rockets was in this game, at that point it’d be a coin toss on if the developers wanted your rockets coming at you or the enemy’s flying at it. But that monster is not present. Contrast this to the SNES version which did the same thing, but made the logical choice the 32X developers should have made and used the rocket’s rear sprite.

Some monsters move faster than in other ports. One of the floating monsters moves almost as fast as in the Game Boy Advance port. This is faster than the PC version. There is also a non-flying monster that attacks by running at you who seems to run a little faster in this than other ports and the original.

The monsters are deaf, meaning they have to see you to become active. Because of this, firing your gun in one area won’t send in a horde of monsters from another area. I think the PlayStation and Saturn versions were the only ones that didn’t do this. It’s bad that it had to be done but also good because it helps keep too many monsters from appearing on the screen and slowing the framerate down. While we’re talking about framerate, I’ll also mention that to help keep it high the game plays inside of a window on your TV screen, the part displaying the environment and monsters covers a smaller part of the screen than other ports. That’s a neutral because while it is a limitation, it also keeps the framerate at an acceptable level, and the window isn’t too much smaller than what you’d get playing other versions.

Just some unique things, but the music track that this one and the SNES port use for the first stage set on the Deimos moon base are the same- the music for the first bonus level. No other port, nor the original, do that. Also, some items and monsters seem slightly misplaced compared to other versions, like they’re a little to the left or right of where they are supposed to be, even compared to other Jaguar-derived ports.

And the good?

The framerate- it goes pretty decently, seemingly better than the Jaguar version on average and only slightly worse than the Jaguar’s average when there were a lot of enemies on the screen or if the section of the level you are in is too big (a problem that also plagued the 3DO port). Actually, the game speed in general is pretty good and everything looks smooth compared to most of the other ports, even ones that had longer development times and appeared on more powerful systems.

The graphics for your guns are displayed a little lower than in some of the other ports so that you can see more of the viewing area. When standing on a ledge this gives you more visibility in the area under you.

The verdict?

It depends on what you want.

Console	Pros Over 32X	Cons Over 32X
Jaguar	Takes up more of the screen, more levels, better music, enemies fight each other and you can sneak up on them, takes up more of the TV screen	Clunky controls, movement controls make precision movements impossible (such as lining up a shot), music only plays in between levels, image output is darker and less colorful
3DO	more levels, better music, you can change between fists and chainsaw, enemies fight each other and you can sneak up on them, their button configuration allows for easier strafing, they implemented invisibility for you (and the enemies), brightness of sprites changes depending on lighting, better lighting effects	lower framerate (if you lower the in-game screen size this is less of a problem, and a smaller in-game screen is less of a problem with bigger TV screens these days, but then the graphics appear pixelated), controls are clunkier but not Jaguar bad. Strangely, in the 4th map you can run between two ledges and skip a chunk of the stage- there was no geography change to allow this.
GBA	more levels, better music, controls are smooth as the PC version, you can change between fists and chainsaw, enemies fight each other and you can sneak up on them, their button configuration allows for easier strafing	teensy screen unless you’re playing it on your TV but this obviously means more pixelation, plus all the blood is now green, the bodies of dead enemies vanish to keep the game running smoothly. Enemies don’t explode if you overkill them. Strangely, in the 4th map you can run between two ledges and skip a chunk of the stage- there was no geography change to allow this. In my opinion, the music is worse than the 32X version- the tracks here sound like if you hummed the PC version’s music to someone from memory and they made a 20sec clip from that using the original Game Boy’s sound system.
PlayStation	Many more levels plus some exclusive to this and the Saturn release, better music, you can change between fists and chainsaw, enemies fight each other and you can sneak up on them, their button configuration allows for easier strafing, colored lighting effects (this and the atmospheric items mentioned in the next column make it feel more like Doom 64 than the PC Doom, easier to believe with all the PC elements that were removed!), has the missing monsters kinda, has one of the missing levels, brightness of sprites changes depending on lighting, gameplay takes up more of the TV screen. Introduces a “new” enemy that is just a tougher/different colored version of an old one, and also some Doom 2 enemies appear in Doom 1 levels on higher difficulty settings.	some areas you need to progress through that are full of monsters are pitch black so they can see you but you have to fire blind (at least that’s a con for me- I play games, not podcasts!), the controls are a hair slower. Neutral but most of the sound effects and all the music was replaced to achieve a different atmosphere,- love it or hate it… or hate it because now the doors and elevators you open by stepping in a particular spot farther away are whisper quiet which makes it hard to hear when a secret one moves and sometimes even harder to run to it because the well-lit area it was in is now pitch black. Due to graphical limitations some rooms are not as tall as in other ports.
Saturn	Many more levels plus some exclusive to this and the PlayStation release, better music, you can change between fists and chainsaw, enemies fight each other and you can sneak up on them, their button configuration allows for easier strafing, has the missing monsters kinda, has one of the missing levels, brightness of sprites changes depending on lighting, gameplay takes up more of the TV screen. Introduces a “new” enemy that is just a tougher version of an old one, and also some Doom 2 enemies appear in Doom 1 levels on higher difficulty settings.	lower framerate, clunkier controls (handles almost like the 3DO version), graphical glitches where enemies can do anything from half disappear to appear to be right in front of you despite being on the other side of a wall. Neutral but most of the sound effects and all the music was replaced to achieve a different atmosphere except like the PlayStation version it means some secret doors and elevators triggered by stepping on a particular spot farther away are whisper quiet. It doesn’t have the lighting effects or absolute darkness of the PlayStation version or as many music tracks- almost feels like a beta of the PlayStation port! Due to graphical limitations some rooms are not as tall as in other ports. Strangely, in the 4th map you can run between two ledges and skip a chunk of the stage- there was no geography change to allow this. This game is also at like twice the speed of the other ports, but the framerate is so low that you can’t tell except that you fire your weapons faster. The “new” enemy is almost indistinguishable from the other version because they don’t implement the recolorization properly, though sometimes it looks a hair bluer.
SNES	more levels (some from the PC version that only appear in this port), more colorful (because more of the PC textures are here), better music, you can change between fists and chainsaw, their button configuration allows for easier strafing, brightness of sprites changes depending on lighting, better lighting effects, gameplay takes up slightly more of the TV screen, and probably the most faithful to the architecture of the PC version’s levels	lower framerate, clunkier controls, no textures on the floors and ceilings (unless the sky is visible), everything looks like it was rendered smaller so it’s all more pixelated, not all levels are accessible on every difficulty- you can only get to later stages on higher difficulties. Enemies don’t explode if you overkill them.

See all them factors? I have no idea which one is important to you, and they might even change depending on what game you plan to play after (for example, if you intended to play Doom 64 after playing Doom and Doom 2 you’d do well picking the PlayStation port as a prelude, given that the added lighting effects and changed music and sound effects mentioned above make its style the closest- Doom 64 was actually a heavily modified version of this port). As for me, if I’m short on time then it’s the 32X version, but if I have a while it’s the SNES version. The other ones I break out only every so often. I think it might’ve been 4 years since I played the 3DO and Jaguar versions, and I’m pretty sure until now I hadn’t touched the Saturn version since Obama’s first term.

Same room, same angle, Saturn on the left, PlayStation on the right. This is what I mean by lighting effects- the PlayStation changed the tint to blue for most of the room but yellow on the platform. This is not a feature that the original game could pull off and is only present in the PlayStation port.

Luckily if you just want the PC experience on a console they ported that to the Xbox 360 and PS3 years ago, and it’s even officially been ported to the Switch (plus the PS4 and Xbox One). But if you have none of those or somehow read this anytime before 2012 and want a console port then this is probably useful.

In case you couldn’t tell, I enjoy this game. Each version is a unique experience. But don’t think this is my favorite game series, my favorite is Mega Man X and I have 100% done comparisons like this for it. Trouble is that those versions of the game are all much closer than the Doom ports… for whatever reason. It’s almost as if porting a revolutionary “3D” first person shooter was much harder than porting a 2D sidescroller.

Did anyone test if the Sega Genesis’ keyboard could work with this DOS prompt?

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (Sega CD, 1994) – Part of Sega CD Sunday

I never watched the show and it is taking much self-restraint to not add an apostrophe to “Morphin”. That said, I probably would’ve liked the show as a kid, but only after I started watching Godzilla movies.

This game is,  I think, a better learning aid than it is a game. I think it compresses 10 half-hour episodes into about 50 minutes. So if you’re a nerd on the go and have only an hour to pretend you like Power Rangers to impress a date, plug this in. Oh yeah, trigger warning: the black ranger is a Black guy, the yellow ranger is an Asian girl, and the pink ranger is a cisfemale. Now go complain to someone with a time machine to make sure this doesn’t happen. I think The Rock has one.

The Game

Self-explanatory for what to do with the A, B, and C buttons from the picture at the left, but at the right the lighting bolt indicates which direction on the d-pad you press. In this case, down.

How can they make a game out of TV shows you ask? Pretty easily. Scenes from the show play, then more scenes from the show play. But these “more scenes from the show” are actually fight sequences. When they start, a health bar appears in the lower left corner of the screen and prompts for you to hit a button appear towards the center of the screen. If you fail to press the correct button when its prompt shows up, you lose health. As the difficulty increases, you have less time to hit a button, and it sure seemed to me like more button prompts appeared too. And if you lose all your health, a sequence plays of the Power Rangers in sorrow as their big mech thing falls into a lava stream like it was Doc Brown at the end of Star Trek III.

I could make a Green Giant joke and some reference to his height coming from his vegetable intake, I could say he’s a jolly green giant walkin’ the Earth with guns, but instead I’ll point out that this guy probably needs an aspirin after being stretched to 10 times his normal size.

Now you will have to play the highest difficulty if you want all ten adventures. Playing it on the lowest difficulty only gets you to the end of the story about the Green Ranger joining.

Overall

A good crash course I guess, not really much memorable about it though. Pressing the right button at the right time is good for a frantic rush though. If you’re a fan of the show you’d probably find it more enjoyable just watching the episodes rather than sitting there saying “Hey, weren’t these other fifty scenes in that episode? Whoops, no time to think of that because I need to press whatever the heck button that is!”, unless you want to frantically press buttons in familiar settings or unless you’ve watched the show so many dang times you need something to keep it thrilling (like how I’ll change between the Full Screen Laserdisc, Full Screen CD-I, Widescreen DVD, and Director’s Cut of Star Trek II because each version looks different or has different scenes, just to keep it unique after 28 years of watching).

Sure, they get to use an apostrophe here but I can’t!

The Terminator (Sega CD, 1993) – Part of Sega CD Sunday

Resuming the conversation from Wheel Of Fortune, this was released for $53.99 in 1993. That would make it $96.10 in 2019’s money. I saw it in several used video game stores around New Year’s for $109.99 so it’s safe to say its value has gone up a bit. As for my copy- I don’t even remember when I bought it, but I know I wouldn’t have spent $110 on it if I were sober, and I’m ALWAYS sober. I don’t think I’d have spent more than $75 on it, probably half that, so I must’ve bought it during a lull in the market.

The Game

In the police station, you periodically run into obstacle Terminators. You can only knock them down, you can’t kill them permanently. They’re like a tougher version of Harry and Marv in Home Alone 2 on the SNES.

It’s a platformer, based on the movie. You start by killing Terminators in the future with future weapons. You can get powerups to make your gun stronger Then you travel back to the early 1980s where you kill a bunch of punks and a police helicopter. Then you fight punks in a club, with the background music being some kind of dance song that samples lines from the first Terminator movie. Then you kill a bunch of what I guess are policemen or escaped criminals at a police station. Then you destroy machines in a factory. I got to the second-to-last level here. While in the past, you can get powerups to make your shotgun stronger. First it shoots faster, then it shoots stronger (and different) projectiles. No wonder Joe Biden said they’re good for self-defense- firing a plasma burst from your shotgun would scare anyone away.

Those skulls follow you around the first little bit of level 2. Someone either really liked them or just learned how to have a foreground element follow you.

In between each level, and at the beginning, you’re treated to a horrible looking video of a scene from the movie relevant to what you’re doing/did.

The sprite animations are nicely fluid, the controls are pretty good, and the music is CD-quality because obviously you’re playing on a CD.

That said, there was a drawback that held me up for quite some time. Sometimes a section of the level looks like a background detail, so you might miss a platform you need to hop on simply because it doesn’t look like a platform. That really only happened in stage 2, but it was a damned nuisance. Or maybe my brain saw “oh ok, sometimes background objects can really be foreground objects” and I never noticed later. Either way, I spent like 5 minutes scratching my head about this before looking up on YouTube what to do.

What’s with that stupid grin?

Overall

It’s not worth $110. It’s a quick game, if I didn’t suck at video games in general that aren’t Mega Man X then I’d probably have knocked this off no problem in 45 minutes or so just

As you can tell, Virgin had a hand in both this game and the Sega Genesis one.

like some user on YouTube did. It’s not particularly hard.

When I looked up this game, I saw several sites saying it wasn’t the same as the Sega Genesis version. Aside from a shared title, I wondered why they kept insisting. So I looked at a video of the Sega Genesis version- it actually does look pretty similar to this. Now, when the sites say the Sega CD version had new gameplay modes, I don’t know what it means. It has more levels, and takes longer to beat, but it certainly doesn’t have anything more than platforming action. So… I guess if you want a cheaper Terminator platform fix, get that version, because the added bells and whistles are not worth an added $100 to the price.

oops

Tomcat Alley (Sega CD, 1994) – Part of Tomcat Tuesday

An FMV game. For those who don’t know, basically it’s like the “timed events” in modern cutscenes where you have to press a button at a certain point. Except this is the whole game.

Some crazy Russian guy stole a bunch of Russian hardware and now plans to illegally immigrate from Mexico, bringing his bombs with it. While Democrats might plan to welcome him with open arms even after he kills everyone in their sanctuary cities (like they do with MS-13), your job is to be an R.I.O. on a fictitious F-14X, which can carry like 5 times the missile load of a normal F-14, and stop the ex-Russians.

Gameplay

In between some of the cutscenes, you are presented with this overlay over a video playing. The large green rectangle in the middle is your targeting reticle/cursor. You use the d-pad to move it around the screen… slowly. You would move it over the missile icons on the lower left to select which type you want, and over the word “AIR” to switch from air-to-air weapons to bombs. On the opposite are icons  for countermeasures, changing the camera, and using the radio, which are only used when you are prompted.

You’re at this screen for like 5 seconds, either to select the flashing icon or target an enemy and fire. Then you’re whipped back to the rapid-fire scene changes for the mission.

Don’t worry, you’ll know when to deploy countermeasures….

While it’s easy to highlight a stationary icon, it’s rather difficult to lock onto the enemy. the enemy plane bounces around the screen like a ping pong ball, Eventually your reticle turns red and holds on the target,  giving you about a second to realize this and press the A button to fire a missile at it. Oh, and the missile you need to use can vary by aircraft you’re trying to shoot down, so if your reticle isn’t turning red it might be because you have the wrong weapon. It’s on you to figure it out.

You also use the reticle, which is a cursor, to do more menial stuff like select a waypoint to follow, select a target to follow from a distance (they show up as little red arrows you can point and click on). When doing this or turning on the devices/changing weapons you press the button down until it turns blue, indicating you’ve successfully highlighted it, and then release.

The second green square is an enemy jet. Try to hold your cursor square over it until it turns red to blast it. Otherwise, if you press the fire button a video plays of you missing and then the enemy ends up behind you, costing you a countermeasure or a life if you’re too slow.

Overall

I didn’t last too long. I wasn’t agile enough with the cursor, and I ran out of countermeasures in a mission (I think I also shot down my wingman in an earlier mission when the footage jumped and I lost my lock on the MiG). You get a game over right away, no lives in that situation. You can also get a game over if you miss too many of the prompts for action.

The enemies look well enough like MiGs, hard to tell with some, but others are definitely. And sometimes you just see a model exploding. Anyway, once you run out of countermeasures, game over if someone gets behind you. Which is what ended my playthrough.

I guess I’d best describe it as sort of like if the movie Top Gun were made into an FMV game. It’s got frantic action, but it’s mostly a visual experience, all you do is move the cursor around really. A step down from Rebel Assault, where you could at least move your ship.

Children Of Battlezone (M1 Abrams Battle Tank, Battle Tank, Super Battletank, T-Mek, 1988-1994. Part 9 of the War Games series)

It’s because they’re obvious Battlezone knockoffs.

.Well, the elections are over so that makes this the last of this particular series, though I’ve got a few more games to review out of all this. A fitting way to end would be to revisit the follow-ups to a game covered in a previous entry, while also discussing a game that covers the last battle of the Cold War

Battle Tank

That enemy tank looks like an American-made M48 or an M60. Which is odd, because the only tanks with anything approaching a 150mm gun like the tank you drive in this game has are the American-made M551 Sheridan and M60A2 Starship, which mount a 152mm gun. The next closest gun on a tank is 128mm. You also fight Apache helicopters. Is this like a second Civil War?

Battle Tank on the NES puts you in the driver’s seat of a tank of some fictional variety. Ostensibly you’re playing as an M1 Abrams affiliated with NATO, but what you drive is not an Abrams and it looks very much like you are fighting NATO, based on the vehicles you encounter.

Battlezone already gave us first-person tank combat, and with its simple interface Battle Tank seems to follow-on in the Battlezone spirit (unlike one of the other games we’ll be getting to). Upgrades from the Battlezone formula include health, multiple weapons, and a better radar screen, as well as more enemies and actual missions to conduct. Rather than flying saucers, tanks, and missiles, in Battle Tank you face tanks, helicopters, random objects to destroy, minefields, and fortifications.

M60A2 “Starship”, the tank I assume you play as because the Abrams just isn’t as well-endowed with its barrel size. Image from the Danville, VA tank museum

It looks alright, and plays good especially compared to a game I will review in a moment. I found the controls awkward because I grew up with the many more buttons on the Super NES controllers, playing Super Battletank 2 (occasionally, but enough to build habits).

 

 

 

M-1 Abrams Battle Tank

A Soviet T-64, with the Soviet’s well-known trapezoidal prism chassis. The bright red feather at the top indicates it is a male. Female T-64s are attracted to the tank with the brightest feather, as they know that a T-64 with such distinct plumage must be a strong warrior to have survived natural predators like the M60.

It might be unfair to say these are all knockoffs of Battlezone just because Battlezone came first and was pretty much the same game. But even if such a statement were fair, Abrams Battle Tank would be an exception. It’s more of a simulator than a game. It was originally released on one of them thar 1980s computers I can’t be bothered to look up the name of. I never played the computer version, but my difficulty with the controls makes a lot of sense if the game originally took advantage of the many more buttons a keyboard offers.

 

First of all, I hate simulators. They’re dry and unfun because of their focus on realistic controls. One glaring flaw in that notion is when the simulator is of a vehicle that requires more than one person to operate it. 4 people are needed for an Abrams. So you simulate handling 4 positions at once. Could be worse, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy on the PC is a simulator where you simultaneously must manage the jobs of anywhere between 80 and 430 different people.

Is that supposed to be George H.W. Bush in the upper left? It looks like they shrank George W. Bush’s face and pasted it on Richard Nixon’s head.

Second, Abrams Battle Tank does it poorly. They should not have taken the 3D polygon approach. The game did not have a smooth framerate, which only exacerbated frustration caused by odd controls and needing to control so many positions at once. And controlling the tank gets very awkward. While Battle Tank had the turret move with the tank, always facing forward (with limited traverse to target the enemies in front of you), in Abrams Battle Tank the turret (and any point of view you scroll to that is based on it) could be facing whatever direction. So you could be facing front with the commander or driver perspective, but then end up staring in the turret’s direction from the gunner or cupola positions. And re-orienting the turret to the front is a bit difficult.

 

Third, it might’ve been easier on the computer but is really lousy on the Genesis. The buttons could certainly have been better- instead of scrolling through the different perspectives in the tank with a pop-up menu, you could do it with the number keys. It’s like the pacing was slowed by that, but they either didn’t care to change the rest of the gameplay accordingly or they just assumed the naturally slow nature of polygon graphics on video game systems at the time compensated.

Super Battletank

“…looks so real that you’ll wonder if it’s Super NES or CNN.” If it looks real then there’s no way it’s from CNN.

Back when “VCR-quality video sequences” was a selling point. Also, I think you are fighting T-72 tanks in the game. While Iraq did have T-62 tanks, most of the Iraqi heavy divisions had the T-72. Not like I can tell the difference.

Super Battletank isn’t simulating a fictional war between an M60A2 and the rest of NATO. Instead, it simulates the First Gulf War. It’s basically Battle Tank but with spiffy new graphics… and actual enemies that the U.S. fought. You still meet minefields and fight helicopters, tanks, fortifications, and have to blast various static objects.

From the Game Gear version.

You actually do get to drive an M1 Abrams in this game… I think. I’m pretty sure a real Abrams doesn’t have these big windows immediately under the cannon. Anyway, there are only 10 stages. I managed to get to stage 9, before being defeated by my own ignorance. You do I have a set amount of lives, but I was not counting so I don’t know how many.

You have I guess pretty much the same weapons in Battle Tank on the NES, and the same number of things you can control. You just have more buttons with which to control things.

This is what a Wii-U would’ve looked like in 1995.

This game came out across multiple platforms. No computers, but we did see it on SNES, Sega Genesis, and Game Gear. The Game Gear version looks pretty good, fairly similar to its console counterparts. I tried to get pictures from each, but it didn’t go too well with the Genesis version. First, my original copy simply didn’t work. I tried to find one in a used game store, and went to half a dozen but didn’t find it. Finally I find it and try it on my Sega Nomad (because my Genesis is 200 miles away), and sure enough my Nomad doesn’t work. I probably should have tested that console in the last 5 years, and maybe brought its battery pack too (without it, you can only power it via an outlet.

 

You’ll notice in the graphics for this game that they went for the best realism the console at the time could offer, achieved by scanning images for sprites rather than 3D polygon work. And it looked great; flowed smoothly, gave a level of realism within technological limits that worked well. Hear that guys behind M-1 Abrams Battle Tank?

that’s totally a T-72

Yes, I understand games like Star Fox on the SNES are meant to push the envelope of what the console can do, and not necessarily go for great artwork, but M-1 Abrams Battle Tank puts too much effort into being a realistic tank simulator for me to let them get away with lousy graphics when superior options were available. In other words- their controls were so bothersome and intricate and distracting to me that I want to complain about everything I can from that game. Hmph!

The Last Major Cold War Conflict

The Cold War still had 10 months left when the Gulf War wrapped in February of 1991. So while the Soviet Union was still around, they were able to see how their equipment faired against the West. While the Soviets had a few valid points in their post-Gulf-War review, sometimes they were just laughable. In comparing the T-62 and the M1 Abrams, a Soviet General said the T-62 was perfectly acceptable because the Abrams kept needing to have sand cleaned out of its filters. Which did nothing to affect how the gun works, and the gun of an Abrams routinely blasted Iraqi tanks before the Iraqi tanks could even get into firing range. However, as the article referenced above states, this was not a battle of Soviet vs American weaponry like the Korean War. Iraq’s military and training were mixtures of Soviet and Western practices, plus whatever they learned from their recent war with Iran. Iraq barely had Soviet advisers to tell them about what weapons they did have, and their technology was far behind what the West and even what the Soviets had (as you’ll see in the NYT article, Soviet leaders did admit to some inferiority).

But the Soviets seemed to have a bout of Multiple Personality Disorder when dealing with the Iraq crisis. Aside from “we have no advisers yes we do” schism, they also started by breaking with Iraq and condemning them both for invading Kuwait and wiping out Iraqi communists over the years. Yet they still kept their advisers and the like in there. Then of course the Soviets were/weren’t sharing their intelligence on Iraq with the U.S. Yeah, it was a mess and this fractured response was symbolic I guess of the Soviet Union’s dissolution.

Moving Right Along

Alrighty… maybe later I’ll cover Super Battletank 2. That had a fun new gameplay mode, but otherwise was fairly identical to Super Battletank.

As for this next section, since there is no way I could possibly write this after knowing how the midterms turned out, I wrote two different sections. One for a Republican victory, one for a Democratic victory. The first covers Republicans, the second Democrats… even though I wrote the second first because that’s what I expected, a Democratic House and another 4 years with Nancy “Hamas Is A Humanitarian Organization, MS-13 Are Divine Beings, and Republicans Are Legislative Arsonists” Pelosi as House Speaker because she is so connected in the Democratic Party that removing her would be like removing the screen from your monitor and expecting it to work. If Democrats sweep the House and Senate, section 2 is still mostly valid, just figure that they’ll have more progress in trying to impeach Trump but will still be wasting everyone’s time. Also, if section 2 is true, where the hell was Russia? Didn’t they hack the election already? Trump will be sending Putin a nasty letter for sure! And I guess the GOP kinda sucks at suppressing voters.

By the way, no better place to note it I guess, but Trump has actually been delivering on his promises. So with all the negative coverage, accusations of hatred that have led to no tangible policy measures (I’ll stop you right here- children in cages was Obama’s fault, and the liberal 9th Circuit Court’s ruling made child separation into law, and the travel ban was something Obama considered. Are liberal black Obama and the liberal 9th Circuit Court racists? Oh yeah, and to you folks at Vox, with your 2017 headline “Trump says Obama banned refugees too. He’s wrong.”, I guess since you liberal reporters gloat over having sex with mass murderer Fidel Castro you would not see Cubans as refugees, so you would not believe that the many Cubans who Obama banned from entering the U.S. were refugees.), it’s all aimed at carrying Democrats into power. Proof positive whose side ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, Univision, Telemundo, and Hollywood are on. If any were impartial, this would’ve been reported. If you only had those networks for reality, America would right now be a place where a white male can go out and rape the first woman he comes across and gut the first black or Jew he sees, all while the economy is failing and Trump is sending illegal immigrants to concentration camps. That’s what the Left believes is happening. Depending on how the election went, I guess Americans might believe it too.

1. Communism Fell… Or Did It?

A mighty T-72, symbol of the USSR and communism, late of the Iraqi Army, crushes an unsuspecting car at the Danville tank museum.

The Midterms showed that the American voters were willing to put off communism for one more election cycle. But DNC Chairman Tom Perez noted that there weren’t any moderates left in the party, that socialist Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (who believes you have no right to question her, your only role is to obey her commands; who believes that a male challenging her to a debate is sexual harassment, a belief which the Left immediately claimed was true as indicated by Jessica Valentine at Medium with her headline “Yes, demanding women debate you is like catcalling”.) was the future, with her unfunded policies and hatred of the liberal media because even they can’t make her interviews look good (She’s one of those slogan people Khrushchev was critical of in Khrushchev Remembers– the type of person who can spout Communist slogans, would give their life for Communism, but has no clue what they’re fighting for or what their slogans even mean… I like this, I wrote this line BEFORE I knew of how when asked how to pay for medicare her response was “you just pay for it”). So… some future for the party.

And the more they lose, the louder the liberal media screams. Until eventually the public thinks that so many screaming people can’t be wrong, or until the voices of m

oderation are drowned out by the screams. Or until the folks our liberal schools and colleges have been grooming to be good little Stalinists takeover.

So with another election not going the way they planned, what else can we expect from the Left? They still have two largely unassailed bastions of liberalism- the courts and the Deep State. Like with the many 9th Circuit Court cases, and the many Deep State acts of sabotage, we can expect this to be the crutch the Left leans on to get what they want.

The Left is being stubborn as a… as a… did I make this joke already? I’m not a fan of this symbol of communism. Needs less blue, more red, and change white for yellow.

But don’t be fooled by the crutch. The reason the Left isn’t using its left leg to walk is so that when they kick you with it you’ll be all the more surprised. I’m thinking of the mobs here. Like a faked injury, liberals in power and in the media claim that mobs aren’t a working part of their group. But they encourage the mobs, sic them on targets, and then liberal leaders claim that the threat of the very liberal mobs they encourage is enough to stop conservatives from entering their town. Mob rule, in other words, as we see in Portland. As we saw in Baltimore when the mayor told police to stand down.

My prediction, in other words, is the same five tactics the Left has been using since Hillary lost, except much more intense: officially smearing anyone disagreeing with them as being racist/sexist/Nazis/etc because liberals (much like their face of the future Ocasio-Cortez) can’t be bothered to argue their points and instead think you should just believe them merely because they tell you to, and if you don’t believe them then it’s not  because the liberal is wrong, it’s because you’re wrong, ie racist/bigoted/Nazi/or just stupid. Tactic 2 would be liberal courts passing the liberal agenda into law on their own, 3 would be the Deep State doing that as well, 4 would be mob violence, and 5 would be censoring opposing viewpoints while claiming to be a neutral centrist group- like liberal Google censoring Republicans and then claiming they’re not politically biased, with no Democrat talking points regardless of how extreme they are being censored.

And remember- the culture wars are ongoing. Communism has repeatedly failed, but the Left still wants to bring it to you. The idea keeps coming back. American youth now want it, badly. The media is happy with it too- even in 2009, Newsweek proudly declared that under Obama we were all socialists (which is ironic given how one of my college professors insisted that we didn’t have socialism, and given how many times the media claimed calling Obama a socialist was fearmongering). The Cold War ended, but it was not the end of history. We haven’t run out of history quite yet.

2. So… The Soviets Won This Cold War

Kiss it goodbye. Well, not literally unless you want a smear on your monitor, but you get the idea. Image from National Conference of State Legislatures.

Yup, even though Republicans kept the Senate, Democrats gained a majority in the House. We know what to expect- votes to engage impeachment hearings (on Trump and Kavanaugh) that will be just as futile as Republican votes to overturn Obamacare when Obama was still President. You remember- those safe ones that allowed RINOs to hide, until they had to put their money where their mouth was and we learned that fair-weather rightwingers were at best center-right, maybe center-left.

I don’t at all believe that the Democrats will have invited such people into their ranks. The most we could hope for there are 2016 Clinton liberals masquerading as Ocasio-Cortezes. I’ve been watching this circus closely for four years- it always seems like Republicans are the ones trying to hold themselves together and get the party to vote as one organ, while Democrats seem to do that every time it’s not just before an election (at which point those in red states have to pretend they’re just as red to keep their jobs).

I’ve already shared what liberal rule looks like. We all hope I’m wrong and that things will go alright, but as you’ll recall last time we had a Republican President, Democrats in Congress refused to let him stop the Housing Crisis, and Democrats just let the Housing Market burn, and then used that to win the 2008 elections. What will they do to regain the Senate and White House in 2020?

As you can see, white is not present on this flag. Image from wikimedia commons.

We’ve seen them attack people wholesale based on race and religion, we’ve seen them say people are guilty of crimes solely based on party affiliation that had nothing to do with those crimes (both with Kavanaugh and, let’s be honest, that whole Russian Collusion thing), we’ve seen them protecting Deep State swamp creatures (even going so far as to offer to hire them). So in all honesty we now have 4 years of corruption, gridlock, and destructive policies, while anti-White/anti-Capitalism/anti-American rhetoric will fill the airwaves even more since liberals will believe Democrats regaining the House was more than just a pattern as they dismissed it in 2010. They will tell America, as they have every day since Trump was elected, that we need to end our system of government and that anyone supporting Trump or Republicans is in the minority, and that what was a pattern merely 8 years ago is now a referendum.

They want to destroy white people, want white men GONE. They want to destroy males. They want to destroy our economic system. They want to destroy our economy. They want to destroy our position in the world, leaving power vacuums that countries like Russia can fill, much like ISIS filled the void Democrats were warned about. Which means these lines of thought are what Americans voted for. While it fits the pattern that we’ve seen for decades, as the media has conveniently forgotten with their “referendum on Trump” talk, in today’s political climate a very dangerous thing has been unleashed, like with Obama’s Presidency. Bouncing between Republican and Democrat is normal. But Obama came in and left us with a radicalized Democratic Party out to destroy the country. Now the tide is bringing that party back in. The anti-Trump, anti-America, anti-White, anti-Law screeching the media is prone to on every issue from terrorism to the economy will only increase now that they believe the public is listening. They’re not going to shut up, they’re going to rightly believe what they’re doing is working.

Pictured here is a gathering of America First and MAGA supporters, according to the Left. They had an odd way of showing it. Image from National Post

Democrats think you are a Nazi for supporting America, but Democrats also believe that joining the Taliban to kill American soldiers is perfectly acceptable. You’ll note in that link that the Democratic candidate for Arizona Senate believes Americans are the terrorists, like Don Lemon as you’ll see in a moment. Nicholle Wallace stated in the Nazi clip that to love this country is to be a Nazi, to put the interests of yourself and your home country above those of others like say China or Syria makes you a Nazi, while another Democrat says that it doesn’t matter if you join the Taliban to kill Americans. These are the people that just gained power in Congress. Elected officials sworn to serve America’s interests who think that doing so makes them Nazis.

What do YOU think they’re going to do? Democrat Don Lemon says whites are the largest source of terror, but Democrats have no problem if an American helps foreign Muslim terrorists kill Americans, in fact Lemon says we should not take action to stop Muslim or any other foreign terrorists from entering the country. This is mainstream thought on the Left, coming from candidates and mainstream media outlets. They dehumanize people they disagree with. They hate America (look here- Farrakhan, who Democrats love, is even chanting their party line that Obama‘s team tried to downplay as meaningless), hate Trump, hate white people, so they dehumanize them by equating them to pretty much the only villain’s they acknowledge in history aside from Confederates: Nazis. It’s ok to punch a Nazi, it’s ok to punch anyone who likes America, it’s ok to chase them out of public spaces (coming from the Washington Post no less), it’s ok to censor them, it’s ok to ban them, it’s ok to form mobs to attack them. How long before it’ll be ok to load them into boxcars (it’s already ok to try to assassinate them)? Seems like the Left is the one leaning towards Nazi ideology.

Maybe they made that statement after playing From Russia With Love, where Bond is a mass murdering terrorist who mass murders white terrorists and innocent Soviet soldiers.

So if you think Don Lemon declaring on CNN that white male Republicans are terrorists, that we don’t have to worry about terror threats from around the world and thus should open our borders to the next band of 9/11 hijackers, if you think Don Lemon, a mainstream thought leader listened to by mainstream allegedly centrist Democrats, if you think that rhetoric from him is outlandish, by the time 2020 rolls around you’ll be looking back and thinking he was very tame and controlled. Just like you’ll be looking back at the mobs in Portland, the mob that chased Milo Yiannopolous out of Berkeley and left injury and fire in their wake, and the mobs that chased Republicans out of restaurants and thinking how restrained they were. The mobs saw you vote the way they wanted you to vote, and realized their thus far non-lethal terrorism is working, and so will continue with it, maybe even intensify it. Afterall, with liberals dismissing mob violence, it’s not so crazy an idea that liberals will dismiss any charges against mobs once they’re in power. Like whites in the south not charging lynch mobs.

Liberals in power will not be so merciful or tolerant as conservatives. (Honestly, if they win enough seats to impeach Trump and make it stick, I would not be surprised if they acted on America’s “it’s legal to forcibly sterilize people” rule, and start sterilizing conservatives, probably in the name of fighting global warming. I did mention that some not-very-far-left figures wanted us to stop having babies to save the Earth, and since liberal scientists already view conservatives as inferior, genetically different with liberals having a liberal gene that makes them more open to differences despite the many displays of rancid intolerance you’ve seen presented to you here and in my past posts, it stands to reason that with the entire party radicalized -as party Chairman Tom Perez stated- anything can happen. The ideas and legal groundwork are all there, you can hardly call it paranoid ranting if they keep telling us this is what they want to do and already have the ideological, legal, and scientific infrastructure in place to make it happen. Remember- all rightwinger white males are terrorists, Lemon isn’t the only one who says so. Mainstream thought. If it’s ok to punch a Nazi, isn’t it ok to experiment on one too? 5 years ago you would be shocked to hear mob violence, and punching people, be considered good behavior and condoned by a mainstream political party, so who’s to say in 5 years we won’t be at this point either? It only took 10 years for Jews to go from discrimination to mass extermination, at the hands of the National Socialists. What will Ocasio-Cortez’s breed of Democratic Socialists do?)

Just an aside to debunk Don Lemon’s remark- he cites how jihadists killed more, but white male terrorists had led more attacks. This stat debunks his argument: those jihadists are a very small percent of the population. Just a couple of them in the country.

#AlQaedaSoWhite

They launched fewer attacks. Yet more died. Meanwhile, whites are the MAJORITY race in this country. Statistically, if the terror statistics reflected the population, whites should have killed WAAAAY more than those few jihadists. But they didn’t. Whites killed fewer. Jihadists, even at the small fraction of a percent of the population that they’re at vs whites at’ 60%, are clearly more dangerous. Or to put the argument into language the Left understands: guns (whites) are big and scary and so widespread in the country and so prolific that we have a 1 in 315 chance of dying from them every year, while the chance of a car accident (Jihadists) killing you is  1 in 491. But only 38,000 people died from guns in 2016, versus 40,000 dying from cars. You, liberal, want to ban the gun (whites). So at least you’re logically consistent- you want to liquidate the lesser of two evils because it happens more frequently, and claim that you’re saving the world and ushering in a peaceful utopia by doing so. Also, like Don Lemon, you claim it’s a false comparison, that cars are above criticism, like how Don says he tells people not to criticize any ethnicity that isn’t white, according to his own words.

Also, let’s turn the Left’s word association games against them on the Lemon issue. Blacks are the largest bloc of terrorists in the country, exponentially moreso than whites. How? Only 106 deaths, according to Don, came from white terrorist attacks over many years. Blacks killed 7,405 other blacks in just one year, 2016. 17,250 people were killed that year. Blacks are 13% of the population, but responsible for 42.9% of the murders. We have statements along the lines of “most black killings in Baltimore were gang-related”, and if we are to believe Don Lemon and his ilk’s gun control meme then every shooting of a black person is by a gang member who illegally got a gun, or at least a black person who got a gun from a gang member. So what is a black gang? A local political group. What is a political group? People who come together to exert control over a region or a group of people or both, ie a gang. So when gangs use murders to intimidate people, to increase their political power, to destroy the political power of those nominally in charge of the area as evidenced by how black males at 6% of the population are behind 42% of police officer killings, isn’t that terrorism, since terrorism is the use of violence for political ends? Gangs kill to get power and stay in power. Terrorists kill for the exact same reason. So, Don, it seems your own skin color should, as you say, have travel bans placed on it. (Look, if Trump is literally Hitler as various media outlets and panels declared simply because he said he’s a nationalist, then black gangs get to be terrorists.)

What “winning” looks like to the Left. Images from AP, RWC, Fox News, and Quora

Yeah, at least 2 more years of the media thinking Lemon, mobs, screaming, and Stalinism is a successful strategy, with the DNC Chairman telling us it’ll only get worse. I’m not going to say Kristallnacht will happen tomorrow, even though Republicans have already been firebombed, shot, ran off the road, dragged behind cars, mobbed, chased out of restaurants, and the suggestion has been floated of denying Republicans the right to vote and the right to live, all of which I’ve discussed previously. But I will say I’ve heard glass shattering in the distance… probably the local RNC HQ. Or maybe, just maybe, that wasn’t glass shattering, but Fort Sumter taking a hit. Will the Left (who traded plantations for welfare, equality-for-only-the-whites for communism/equality-for-only-the-strong, and whips for peer pressure) rise again?

Bonus Stage!

I’ll end on a high note. T-Mek. It’s like Battlezone, and was made by Atari. Except Shao Kahn from Mortal Kombat exclaims things at various points, and you’re fighting for the amusement of an alien warlord or something. It’s easier than Battlezone, and you have more weapons to choose from.

Made by Atari, and even has the crosshairs and radar from Battlezone

It’s a fancy offering for your Sega 32X, one of the less-than-40 games made for it. If you’re collecting-to-collect it’s usually a cheap grab, but if you’re collecting-to-play then you’ll find this is superior to some other games, like BC Racers and that motorbike one. That one was AWFUL. BC Racers just had a bad frame rate and slow controls, not too shabby (except it runs worse than Super Mario Kart which it’s a clear imitation of), but T-Mek came off as faster.

What Do You Think?

Not much to say now. Polling places are closed, voting is done. I’ve said it all above. Try to have a good day (as mentioned before, I’m writing this the night before)?

 

After Burner I, II, and III (Various, 1987-1991. Part 5 of the War Games Series)

Arguably, your 1987 game appearing in a 1991 hit movie is better than a certain arcade game from 1983 appearing on a certain hit show in 1986. Terminator 2 Screenshot From Electronic Playground.

As we watch the Democrats peddle their warmongering interventionist and laissez-faire let’s-wait-for-war attitudes, ie as they play their war games on their way to the fall brawl known as the midterm elections, where voters will probably vote Democrat to bring us nookular annihilation, I’ll take a look at some literal war games. Cold War video games, anyway.

Image from WWE Network

Today, we briefly address no-fly zones and Leftwing swarm tactics, looking at various entries in the After Burner series.

The Game

You fly an F-14 in all versions of the game, but the more astute among you may notice that’s an F-15 on the Sega Genesis cartridge. And yes, on the lower left that’s an NES cartridge. I’ll explain later.

The difference between After Burners I and II was unknown to me, based on my experience with the home ports. Turns out there’s a good reason for that. The sequel’s biggest change was adding 3 levels at the end. Makes no difference to me, out of 18 levels in the first and 21 levels in the second I only managed to get to either level 4 or 5.

Can you guess which is After Burner II and which is After Burner? Yeah, me neither. Clockwise from top left: After Burner Complete (Sega 32X), After Burner II (Sega Genesis), After Burner (Sega Master System), After Burner (NES)

There are more ports than these, and in fact more After Burner games than these. Some games that aren’t titled After Burner apparently are considered by fans to be part of the series. Phooey on all that, my focus is on the After Burner games in my possession, the ones that just so happen to have been released during the Cold War (except number III, that was 9 months too late).

What Do You Do In The Game?

You move your plane around the screen trying to avoid enemy missiles. You hold down the button for the machine gun in some versions (it fires automatically in others) and fire missiles at planes when you lock onto them. You do that by moving your crosshair over an enemy plane. The gun isn’t totally useless, it does destroy planes too.

Yeah, that’s it. It’s an arcade game, what did you expect?

There is some small variety in enemy planes. While you fly an F-14, in the first two games your basic enemies look like… I don’t know what the hell those are. Single-engine F-5s (not a real thing). An F-16I but without the intake underneath? The enemies that shoot back at you look like maybe MiG-25s. There’s another enemy that

How a B-1 re-arms you is anyone’s guess.

looks like it could be a MiG-23 if you squint… or a Harrier. It will also shoot you. And then you get re-armed by a B-1 Lancer. The “B” means “Bomber”, not “Boy I sure have a lot of weapons to share”. Look, you’re not in this game to be technically accurate, you’re in it to destroy anything that isn’t the ground.

Being re-armed is significant, though it may not seem that way. You do not really have infinite missiles, just a lot of them. I’ve run out before.

After Burner Complete (Sega 32X)

This version was as near-perfect an arcade port as had ever been made to that point. Too bad it was 7 years old by the time of its release. From my understanding, the only difference between this and the arcade is the frame rate, which was cut in half though it still looks pretty smooth. As the title screen indicates, this is pretty much After Burner II despite the title being only “After Burner Complete”. Maybe that was just Sega admitting that they’re the same game. Out of the versions reviewed here, this is by far the best, though not the best available. After Burner II was ported more faithfully than this to the Sega Saturn, and later appeared on the PS2.

Still, I like this one. Maybe because I saw too many Sega 32X commercials and was brainwashed by them. I’m pretty sure they’re over-selling what the 32X can do. In reality it came off as being a slight improvement over the SNES. The SNES version of Doom packed in more enemy types and more stages than the 32X version. And didn’t end with a DOS Prompt. The SNES Doom levels were also complete, whereas the 32X has sections cut out of some. As for games like Shadow Squadron and Star Wars Arcade, those just look like graphically-improved versions of Star Fox. Not even next-gen really, just a little better and they ran a little smoother. And then you have Mortal Kombat II, which on the 32X was barely equal to the SNES version.

After Burner II (Sega Genesis)

This is a step down obviously, despite the “II” in the title. It’s still quite playable, don’t worry about that. Fewer enemies on screen, fewer colors too so the backgrounds look different. It’s also a little slower, or at least choppier than on the 32X release. I still got my butt kicked by the enemy, because I suck at this game. They just keep coming at you until you’re blown apart. The game’s designed to eat quarters in the arcade so it makes sense that it’d be so darn hard to play.

After Burner (Sega Master System)

This was a bad idea. Very slow and choppy. Very few enemies on the screen. The unresponsiveness makes it hard to dodge missiles and aim at enemies. This is what happens when your arcade machines are a generation ahead of your consoles and you don’t know how to work around that. They can get an ok version of Commando and Zaxxon on the Atari 2600, why can’t they get this right?

After Burner (NES)

Everything wrong with the Master System version, but worse. This scene might as well be actual gameplay footage. You’ll also notice that the sprite for your jet is smaller, and you’re now shooting down F/A-18s rather than Russian jets.

You might also have noticed that this is a Sega game on the NES when the two companies were in direct competition, just as I’m sure you noticed the black NES cartridge in the picture near the top of this piece. Look at you being so observant! The story goes that this is an effort to create games for the NES without dealing with Nintendo’s harsh policies (only Nintendo can publish the game for 2 years, and you only can release 5 games on Nintendo consoles each year). Tengen produced their special games like After Burner in special cartridges with the right anti-copyright chips to play on regular NES systems with no modifications. However, folks who own a Retron console will find that these games don’t work on those.

After Burner III (Sega CD)

I know, I know. It differs from the other games here and did not come out during the Cold War. But it felt weird not including it since it was the only After Burner game I owned that didn’t fit the mold.

Anyway, in this game you take a cockpit view, and occasionally get into a third-person view, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same game. Fire your guns and missiles at a never-ending stream of enemies. Being on the Sega CD allows for better sound effects and music. But you are shooting at what appear to be F/A-18s, and occasionally an F-14 gets behind you. At that point the game switches to a third-person perspective to help you lose the enemy. Another unique feature is that every so often you switch from shooting enemy planes to shooting enemy bases on the ground.

The intro tells you that the enemy is building bases and airfields all over a desert, and in the game they use F/A-18s and F-14s. Did Iran and Kuwait become allies? Did Australia buy the remaining Iranian F-14s?

For those not getting the joke, Iran was an American ally, so close that they’re the only country we ever gave F-14s to back in the 70s. Then the government was overthrown, hostages were taken, and then President Jimmy Carter was overthrown, becoming the last Democratic President to serve only one term.

On To War

Endless war seems like a very liberal thing to do. To be fair, war is now in vogue with feminists (heh, get it?), so they were right when they said she was a feminist icon. Image from the Associated Press

Maybe the foreign policy adviser to Hillary’s campaign was playing this game when he or she told Hillary that a no-fly zone over Syria, in which we’d shoot down Russian jets (and they’d shoot down ours), was a good idea. How hard could World War III be if one jet can knock down hundreds of enemy jets? Look at that score of over 3,000,000! Let’s just hope it’s a non-nuclear third world war like in Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising. (I had considered buying an old computer and reviewing that game, by the way, but it looks boring. Yes, they did make boring video games about World War III.)

And when it comes to war, Democrats want anything but boredom! Heck, Democrats got so mad about Vietnam being boring, not having the glory of World War II, that they decided to start a war in Chicago. And when the war dragged on too long, Democrats got bored and moved on to being mad at Nixon, and cut funding to South Vietnam (Dems controlled the House that year) which led to their surrender when otherwise they could’ve at least stalemated. Just like how Democrats got bored of that thing in Iraq they all were excited about at first, and moved on under Obama, despite warnings that something like ISIS would happen if the U.S. left.

“Woo yeah! Libya was a great war! We was all pew pew pew ‘Murica!” Image from evil.news

Now Libya, THAT’S how a real Democrat war would look! Bomb the crap out of them, remove the government, then pack up and leave. So what if the country fell apart and is now a hotbed of terrorism and slavery? So what if they had to tell little white lies about Gaddhafi, who was actually very cooperative until Obama and Hillary stabbed him in the back? You see, Obama and Hillary lying to get us into war with Libya (saying the government was responsible for mass killings), to collapse Libya and leave, was ok because they knowingly did it, whereas when Bush “lied” (the assertion that he did not is coming from Bob Woodward, whom you guys on the Left are currently worshipping after his anti-Trump book Fear was published) to get us into Iraq and try to rebuild Iraq, it was wrong because he was just going based on the faulty data he had at the time, which even liberals eventually admitted was accurate. Makes sense.

A Pattern Emerges

Run in, shoot them up, run out. The media does that to Republicans, tried to do that to Kavanaugh. You might have heard Rush Limbaugh’s term “drive-by media”- it’s because they drive up, fill you full of bullets, then quickly move on, leaving you for dead. Kind of like how Democrats pursue their little wars. Why do you think Obama was so reticent to attack ISIS? A: it was not going to be a quick and glorious victory like toppling Gaddhafi, and B: acknowledging their existence would be pretty much admitting that leaving Iraq was a bad idea, that it had consequences that were worth our time and money to deal with. Well, the DNC’s media is pretty much the same way with its attacks. For all of those reporters and pundits who occasionally forgot to use the word “alleged” or something similar with Kavanaugh, do you think we’ll be getting a retraction? Nope, their clips were emptied and they’re moving on.

Liberal protesters demonstrating their strong-style. Images from AP, RWC, Fox News, and Quora

You’ll notice a pattern with some of these games too that I’ve been looking at for this series. Missile Command, Battle Zone, and this one. Never-ending waves of enemies. MAS*H gets partial credit because it never ends but you’re not fighting anyone. I guess After Burner gets only partial credit too, since even though you’re fighting enemies it does have a finite number of levels.  So it is beatable, eventually. If you have too much time on your hands to perfect your skills.

I digress. My point is you’re resisting wave after wave of attacks, this strong relentlessly aggressive style that the Left employs for its wars both abroad and at home against Republicans. Much like how the Soviets fought their wars- overpower the enemy with sheer numbers. How appropriate, given the Cold War tone of the games we’re looking at, that we’d find such a connection between the USSR and modern Left.

What Do You Think?

Sounds like a fun game? Vote for the Left and make it happen! War may be a fun video game, but Leftists calling for it or Civil War because they’re drive-by tactics failed have no idea what they’re talking about. If this writer is shaking with rage right now, just because Senators representing 44% of the country made a decision affecting 11.1% of the Supreme Court, having only altered 22.2% of it since Trump took office, how will she feel when the bodies of her revolutionaries are in the streets? By the way- as for that 44% meme other liberals have propagated, while technically true, polls actually show a slight majority (46% to 45%) supported Kavanaugh just before he was confirmed, and another poll saying 60% of the country wanted Kavanaugh confirmed if the FBI cleared him (and sure enough the FBI found nothing backing the accusations). And how’d the vote go? 50 Senators for, 48 against. Seems right to me, even a little under what should be expected based on that 60% number. But not to the Left, because Kavanaugh was guilty, not even “until proven innocent”, simply “guilty but we never found evidence“. Go ahead, vote for witch hunts and kangaroo courts.