Sports
September 1987 (Bandai/Nintendo)
This is going to be the shortest review ever for Juggle Chainsaws. For a few good reasons.
First, I need to get back into the swing of things. Short review means I can get it out into the world and back on a roll. Ah, how I long for the days of the launch titles where I pumped out all 18 or so games in a few weeks.
Second, and most importantly, I can’t get the damn game to do anything except give me false starts. I gave it way more time than it deserved the game seriously just sucks. Making people exercise by playing video games? Come on, like that will ever happen1. But let’s take a look at each individual event because that’s the only way to look at this and make any sense.
100 Meter Dash
Look at how close the runners appear to be on the track. Then look at the bar at the top of the screen to show how much I'm winning by. That's just insane.
This is the only one of the events really worth playing. You run on the mat. Which sucks because you have to run in place and run fast at the same time. And the mat tends to slip around.
But my problem wasn’t with the mat, it was with getting the thing to work in the first place. I pressed every button I could, nothing happened. Magically I got the idea that maybe I’d have to stand on the mat. I pressed those buttons, held them down, and I was good to go.
This would have been a lot better with an actual mat, but not by much. Running in place really isn’t my thing.
The weirdest part though is how the game handles the position of the runners on the track. It looks like they’re on a lane side by side in the same line of sight2. For the entire race it looks like you’re neck and neck with the competition.
But take a look at the progress bar at the top of the screen. I’m way ahead of my opponent. How in Hell did that happen? I would have been happy with Bandai putting something between the lanes so it was more obvious that I wasn’t really right next to the other runner the whole time.
110 Meter Hurdles
This one holds a special place in my heart because I ran that in high school. Not very well, but I competed and that’s all that counts.
That being said, I can’t really recommend this part of the game. You have to use terrible form because of the control scheme. Although there isn’t really a way to use good form so I don’t have any idea how it could be any better. Maybe some sort of convoluted method where you jump from pairs of buttons? But then at some point you’d have to turn around and that would be a pain in the ass.
Which really illustrates my point. This isn’t hurdles at all. It’s running with some jumping straight up in the air thrown in. And the hurdles are much further apart than they’d be in real life. A good hurdler will take three steps between hurdles3. Here you take a lot more than that.
Maybe I’m wanting too much realism in a video game.
Triple Jump and Long Jump
Falling down is not a foul. But here it is. I'll chalk it up to technical limitations.
I’m lumping these two together because essentially they’re the same thing, at least as far as the game goes. Run for a bit, then jump in the air. For long jump you jump once. For triple jump, you jump three times. That’s the only difference.
I’ve got a big problem with this one too, and I think it’s a bigger flaw than the hurdle problem I’ve already talked about. Namely, what’s counted as a foul.
In an attempt to keep people from jumping off the mat and getting back on five minutes later with a miles long jump, Bandai made it so if you’re in the air too long you get a foul for that jump. I’m not sure how they decided what was too long, and I’d like to imagine that some NBA player could jump high enough that the game would think he cheated. But that’s not the problem I have with this.
My problem is what the player does on screen that results in a foul. He falls down.
In real life this is a good move. Your distance is measured from the furthest point back of your landing4, so jumpers are taught to fall forward. That’s exactly what the player does on screen.
But for some reason the game wants this to be gymnastics with it’s “land and don’t move” philosophy. Too bad that isn’t accurate.
I get why they did it. But would it have been so hard to just have a point where the player will start to come down anyway and show that they had their foot past the jump line and faulted that way? I don’t think so. The way they showed things here is a needless stray from reality.
Maybe the fact that I ran track in high school keeps me from liking this. Maybe it’s that I don’t have a Power Pad and it’s nowhere near as much fun when you’re just pressing buttons.
But this game is just not good to play. Buying however is another story altogether. A complete copy of the game recently sold for around $8,000 so if you can get your hands on that then you should definitely do it.
- In case you didn’t catch that, the previous sentence was full of sarcasm. [↩]
- I’ll ignore the part where lanes on a track don’t have grass between them anyway. [↩]
- I took 4 because I’m short and I sucked. Maybe I sucked because I’m short, but that’s a discussion for another time. [↩]
- Which means that if you put a hand behind you when you land and hit the ground the measuring stops where your hand hit. [↩]
Anyone who pays through the nose for this game instead of the few bucks to get World Class Track Meet (which is different only by its title screen) is a fool.
Some people like collecting. And to them I say “What’s the point in having the game if you’re not going to play it?”
Obviously I think those people are just weird.