If you were to ask anyone about Japanese monster movies, the firs thing that would probably come to their mind is the Godzilla franchise. As one might expect, James Rolfe is a Godzilla fan, and has been since his youth when he would on occasion see Godzilla films on TV.
Later in life, he would get the chance to discover the depth of the series and experience all of them, but for now let’s go back to his childhood and, more importantly, games. Godzilla games, to be precise. What could go wrong? Giant monsters battling, destroying cities? Seems like a great idea, right? We’ll see about that.
We start of with Godzilla on NES, a strange combination of strategy game and side scroller. You control Godzilla and Mothra moving over a hexagonal “board” if you will, fighting through level after level of crazy crap to eventually encounter level bosses which start off, oddly, as obscure characters barely in the Godzilla franchise proper.
It’s got the usual problems – odd controls and annoying, repettitive game play. They use the same enemy monsters each level, but add one more each time. A big problem comes in that if you take too long to fight the enemy monster, the battle just ends. It’s not a fun experience, and really gets the Nerd angry.
Next up is Godzilla 2, also on the NES. This is a straight out strategy game, where you play as the military fighting the monsters, with combat decided by a slot machine mechanic. Poor game play and absolutely terrible music make this one worse than the first in the Nerd’s opinion.
We move on to Godzilla on Game Boy which is… a cute puzzle platformer? What? Seriously? It’s a joke of game, given what Godzilla is, and James abandons talking about it quickly.
We move on to the SNES and Super Godzilla. While certainly a better looking game, it has it’s own problems – destroying buildings hurting you being the most noticeable aspect. That’s nothing, however, compared to the controls in combat. It’s a strange hybrid of things, requiring odd timing and control inputs that are unusual for, well, most any game. It works — I’ve played this one before and eventually got the hang of it – but it’s extremely odd and James, amazinly, says he still prefers the NES version to this one, and says the Godzilla game of his dreams would be just a simple tournament fighter (like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat.) As it would turn out, the game was made, but was only released in Japan.
Godzilla – Kaiju Daikessen. A Godzilla tournament fighter that, while perfectly average, would have been amazing to have back in the 90’s. It turns out this game was mentioned in Nintendo power as coming soon, but it was never released. This disappointed James who, 15 years later (at the time this episode was made) says he’s “still pissed” about it. I would be too, honestly.
We move on to the Godzilla games which came in more recent times, beyond what the Nerd traditionally plays. These are epic 3D fighters which don’t hold back, and take advantage of everything the consoles they were on (PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube) can provide. They aren’t perfect, but they are far better than what came before, making James wish he had been born slightly later.
After a traditional Nerd rant involving a series of Kaiju, he finally has to vent his frustrations by coining a new piece of profanity which is, of course, censored. Obviously the word he said was nonsense, but the joke is there, stressing how upset he is at the whole situation.
Final Rating: 4/5
This is a pretty solid episode. The anger factor is high, but it’s balanced with the more emotional and, well, real, frustrations James expresses in these games just not being what they could have, or should have, been. It’s beyond question that this episode stems from his own feelings as a kid — he talks about it constantly and in a way isn’t even the Nerd character here. It’s, honestly, more of James as himself finally getting to express how upset he was and, in a sense, still is, over how the Godzilla franchise was treated, gaming wise, when he was a kid.
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