In this Angry Video Game Nerd episode James takes a look at a couple of games in the Transformers franchise, one for the Commodore 64 and one for the Nintendo Famicom.
Opening up, the Nerd poses the question of what format you usually play games on. For the most part, in the case of the Nerd, games have come on some form of ROM cartridge but Transformers for the Commodore 64 comes on a cassette tape. Yep, plain old audio tape!
This was actually a common data storage medium in the early days of home computing, but was more common in Europe than here in the United States. Still, we got our fair share of software distributed on the format, and the Nerd spends a moment relaying the frustrations of waiting for the inherently slow format to load the game, followed by a quick look at said game in action. It’s, interesting, I guess, mixing strategy and first-person elements and does have some awesome music, but otherwise, it’s not what he’s looking for.
To find that, a side scrolling Transformers game more like most titles of the era, the Nerd has to look to the Famicom — the console the NES spawned from. He spends a moment talking about the console and some of its unique traits, such as the second player controller having a microphone, before he gets to the Transformers game in question – Transformers: Mystery of Optimus Prime.
Right from the get go we reach the first frustrating aspect of the game — the difficulty. It’s one of those one hit death kind of games, with quite a bit going on with minimal ability to avoid the enemies and their shots. That’s not ignoring how enemies take more than one hit themselves, and that even hitting them is difficult. It’s incredibly unforgiving, to say the least.
The Nerd gets an idea on how to get better at the game — Billy Mitchell, the (then) world champion of Donkey Kong had a custom hot sauce available at the time and the Nerd decides that downing some of that will heighten his senses and give him the edge he needs to play the game well. It’s an out of place reference but eh, it’s something fun.
Anyway, he continues to try to get through the game, running into frustration after frustration, fighting pathetic bosses and dealing with maze levels in an already intense game, only to defeat Megatron and still have more game to play! Yep, the game doesn’t end when you think it does, meaning you have to go back through the last level in reverse and then finally he finishes the game for a congratulations screen written in Romanji, of all things.
The Nerd finishes by comparing the game to the Transformers franchise itself, wondering who it’s even targeted at. It’s too hard for most gamers, and too little like the actual Transformers franchise to appeal to hardcore fans, it’s like it doesn’t know what it wants to be. By contrast, while not great itself, the Commodore 64 game at least showed transformations, had the music, and acknowledged many of the Transformer characters.
In the end, James parodies the Transformers movie (the animated one from the 80’s) only to be taken out by the Famicom which is, as you would expect, itself a transformer. A neat little ending, I’d say.
Final Rating: 3.5/5
This is a pretty decent episode. It’s nothing too special, but getting a look at the Famicom back in 2009 was still a somewhat neat thing, and seeing an example of a game from Japan that we didn’t get here in the States was also special in that time, especially given how incredibly difficult it is. James covers it well enough, I think, sticking to classic frustration with the game for comedy . His complaints here seem pretty valid, and on a whole the episode entertains while being decently informative – not something you would expect from most Nerd episodes, but it happens. In the end, it’s one I like.