REMOTE CONTROL (NES)

People who know me in real life will tell you that one thing I'm good at - possibly the only thing - is the storage and subsequent retrieval of utterly useless pop-culture trivia. Genuine superpower or sign of a diseased mind? I'm not sure, but my ability to remember Buffy the Vampire Slayer's middle name without consulting a wiki* but not the quadratic equation is further evidence that trivia and mathematics are stored in the same area of the brain and space in there is strictly limited.

Why am I telling you this? Because for once it might come in handy as I take a quick look at RSP and Hi-Tech Expressions' 1990 NES version of the MTV game show Remote Control.

It's a quiz game, but unlike Quiz and Dragons or Quiz Daisousa Sen it's one that's based on an actual television show and not the mad pub-quiz-meets-Dungeons-and-Dragons fantasies of some Japanese game developer. Remote Control was a gameshow that ran from 1987 to 1990 on MTV, and it's very much of its time - loud, frantic, as garishly coloured as a rainbow that hijacked a Skittles truck and crashed into a paint factory. It looked like this:

Apparently it was also the first non-music show that MTV developed, so if you're the kind of person who laments over the days when MTV was about the music, man, then I suppose this is the show you should be blaming.
Now that I've built myself up as a repository of pointless facts, this is where my ill-founded bravado comes crashing down. Most of the questions on Remote Control are about TV, movies and music, and they have a distinctly American slant, as you would image. As such, I know jack shit about them, but hopefully I'll have absorbed enough information on them through other, later media to power me to victory. I mean, I've never seen Welcome Back, Kotter but I've heard it mentioned before. They probably made a joke about it on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I sure hope "things they made jokes about on MST3K" comes up as a category.

There are no options to fiddle about with or anything, so I figured I'd dive right in and select a character. Well, an avatar, really. There are a few different faces to choose from, all of them rendered in this strange, angular manner. I won't be picking this guy because I'm not sure I want to play as someone if I can't tell whether their eyes are closed or not, their face puckered and shrivelled as though a fresh layer of skin has grown over their eyeballs.

Of course, eyeball problems are solved if you wear a Starfleet-issue Geordie La Forge visor! This futuristic cyberpunk is leading the pack at the moment - with a style so sharp, how could they not be? - but I suppose I'd better check out the other options.

No, wait, I'm going with this one. That upbeat manner, the charmingly naive way they're not even looking at the camera, it's a winning combination. I'll just press the A button to select this character, then...

Aaagh! Sweet Jesus, what's wrong with your face? It looks like someone skinned their head, turned the flapping flesh-sack inside-out and crudely reattached it. No wonder they've got sad eyebrows, unless those are the original incision marks. They do look kinda raw.

What's actually going on is that you can press the A and B buttons to get a preview of your chosen avatars' "happy" and "victim of a deranged ritualistic killer" face. "Sad" face, I mean. It may seem like a frivolous touch but I'm glad the developers included it, because otherwise I might have selected this weirdo and then been shocked into a brain embolism when I got a question wrong and his face morphed into that nightmarish visage.
In the end I chose a nice young lady with a hoop earring and the hair of the drummer from a Motley Crue tribute band. You'll see her soon enough.

Not content with scarring my mind, Remote Control has decided to do the same to my retinas. The host's shirt alone has inflicted irreparable damage on my optic nerves. His podium looks like a sculpture produced by an alien race whose eyes can only register frequencies of light outside the normal spectrum of human comprehension. The whole thing is animated, too, a swirling void of shifting colours that could be called psychedelic if "psychedelic" meant "having food colouring injected directly into your eyeballs while someone hits you in the face with a cricket bat."
Let's see our contestants, the colourful man says. Yes, let's. I need the respite.

That's me on the left. I'll be competing in this battle of the minds against a surly ventriloquist's dummy and Sue, a part-time library assistant.

First things first - I have to choose a category from the nine available. You pick one by selecting a number from around the edge of that TV screen there. As an attempt to unnerve my competitors, I picked number four because of its association with death in Chinese culture.

The category is Video High, which I guess is about TV shows set in high schools. All of Remote Control's questions are sorted into categories like this, some more loosely than others, and I think I might have a chance with this one unless it's a question about a show that I've never seen or something.

Aww, c'mon, I was only three years old when 21 Jump Street started, and also I'm not American. All I know about it is that it starred Johnny Depp and it was something about policemen hanging around schools and trying to fit in with the youth? It doesn't sound very wholesome, if you ask me. So I guessed, and I guessed wrong. A poor start, but I'm sure I'll turn it around with the next question.

Oh dear, that is unfortunate. Bon Jovi is not a specialist subject of mine. The only (semi) interesting trivia I know about JBJ is that the letter that Laura gives James in Silent Hill 2 actually has the lyrics to "Blaze of Glory" written on it. The disease that took James' wife must have been truly terrible if she spent the last moments of her life scrawling down the words to a rock ballad written as a tie-in with the Emilio Estevez movie Young Guns II.

Look at the way the host is clutching his temples. Even he is struggling to read aloud this appalling slur on Washington think-tanks everywhere.

Ah, but you see the humour of the situation is derived from the fact that the question isn't really about Bon Jovi and instead requires knowledge of an unrelated scientific matter. Knowledge which I happen to possess, because I am a bit of a dork who spent large portions of his childhood reading about things like the Turin Shroud, and thus I gained some points by knowing that the answer is carbon-14.

So Remote Control goes on, firing trivia questions at me, some I knew the answer to and some I didn't. It all zips along at a merry old pace, although I was occasionally hampered by the developers' rather odd decision to map "press the buzzer" and "select your answer" to different buttons on the pad. It's presumably meant to make you feel like you're pressing a real, dedicated buzzer, but more than once I failed to answer the question in time because I was repeatedly slapping the buzzer instead of actually saying words and while it looks like you've got five seconds to answer these must be ultra-efficient German seconds or something because they tick down very quickly.

A comprehensive knowledge of the sitcoms and heartthrobs of the late Eighties is obviously a helpful thing to have while playing Remote Control, but if you dedicated your life to something more useful than squirrelling away nuggets of pop-culture ephemera - so pretty much anything else, really - you can get by with pure guesswork.

Here, for instance, I had no clue as to the actual answer but I buzzed in anyway, perhaps my father's insistence that knowledge counts for nothing and bravado is all that matters in this world having finally sunk in. As far as I can tell there's no penalty for answering incorrectly, which means you've got a one-in-three chance of taking the points without having any idea what the answer is. Also, sometimes one of the answers will clearly be false, as with the carbon-14 question, raising your odds to 50%. This, coupled with the fact that your competitors have the mental acumen of a bag of aquarium gravel, means you can do surprisingly well even if you've lived most of your life in a system of underground caves.

Plus the game threw me a bone a few times. This question appeared in the category "PhD TV," a category reserved for questions that are supposedly more difficult than the others. Not for me, though. This one was almost too easy. Moments after I had answered correctly, a self-satisfied smirk on my face as I raced into a commanding lead, I realised I was playing a twenty-three-year-old NES game alone on a Friday night, correctly answering questions about Star Trek. It was only my tight-fistedness vis-a-vis the phone bill that kept me from talking to the Samaritans for the next few hours.

So, what else does Remote Control have to offer? Well, it tries to keep up the pretence of being a TV show by having a commercial break (although with no commercials) in the middle, followed by something billed as "Snack Time". Don't get too excited, judging by this screenshot your snack consists of crumpled-up balls of paper. Filling, but hardly nutritious. The contestant in the middle looks real pleased about the paper buffet, but then again they look like the kind of person who spent their junior school days chewing on lined sheets of A4.

Once you reach the end of round two, the contestant with the lowest score is disintegrated by the electric fury of the almighty Zeus himself. They love game shows, those Greek gods - after all, what else do they have to up on Mount Olympus these days but watch TV? - but woe betide those who anger the gods by not remembering that Elizabeth Carlyle was a character from the soap All My Children, for the wrath of Zeus is swift and furious.

Now that there only two contestants remaining un-vaporised we can move on to the final round. It works differently to the ones before: the titles of TV shows appear, but one of the words in each title has been changed according to a theme, in this case sports terms. To score points you have to select the correct word from the list to complete the real title. In this case, the famous dam-based sitcom One Beaver at a Time has been changed to "One Play at a Time," so selecting "beaver" from the list will give you the points. (I accept no responsibility if you decide to play Remote Control only to find out that One Beaver at a Time, no matter how magical it sounds, is not really the correct answer.)

Hooray, I won, thanks to some solid guesswork and the occasional piece of actual trivia knowledge. I'm sure the host has some kind words of congratulation for me. Hang on, "Today I am proud to be your video game"? I think that shirt has seeped into your brain, game show man.

Yes, I am a winner. A happy, cheerful winner. My smile and voluminous hair lets all those around me know just how much of a winner I am.

A winnnnnaaaaAAAARRRGGH!
I suppose I should tell you whether Remote Control is any good, which is a pretty easy thing to do when it comes to quiz games. Quiz games live or die based on two criteria: their presentation and the questions. To go back to Quiz and Dragons, it's a simple trivia game gameplay-wise but the setting, characters and graphics make it a much more enjoyable experience than it really ought to be. The Buzz! games get you involved via having an actual buzzer to press. Remote Control... well, going on what I've seen of the show it's based on I'd say that the game captures a decent amount of the feel of the original, so well done to the developers for that. Still, it's not what you could call an attractive game. I'd recommend you wear shades while you play it, something that'll not only protect your eyes from the flashing barrage of neon pixels but will also help you become absorbed in the radical and tubular late-Eighties zeitgeist. The sounds and music are barely noticeable, and when you add in the game's complete lack of options and alternate game modes it's safe to say that Remote Control's presentation won't be winning it any awards.

The questions don't save it, either, and even on only my second game there were plenty of repeated questions, so longevity can't save it either. Actually, you could only play it about once a year in order to give yourself a chance of forgetting the answers, so maybe it could last you for decades. Speaking as someone who is playing the game literally decades later, my advice would be don't. Okay, that's a bit harsh. Play it once, then bury it in a time capsule, unearth it in the astro-year 2023 and then have another crack at it. There's a whole category of questions about M*A*S*H in this game. M*A*S*H will have been off the air for forty years by then. That'll be a challenge, then.
* Buffy's middle name is Anne, by the way.

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BEETHOVEN'S 2ND (SNES)

Beethoven was a 1992 movie about a dog that was much larger than average. No, that was the whole thing. The dog was big. The movie audiences of the early Nineties were clearly much less sophisticated than they are now, and Beethoven was such a success that a sequel was released. The dog is still large in the follow-up, but now he has fathered a litter of puppies. The puppies have gone missing! Oh no! I'm getting all this information from the SNES game based on the film, by the way. I've never seen Beethoven's 2nd and that's not going to change, not even for the sake of this article.

Here we go, then - a SNES game based on the hastily-arranged sequel to a family movie about a big dog. It's RSP and Hi-Tech Expressions' 1993 I-really-wish-this-was-Cujo-em-up Beethoven's 2nd: The Ultimate Canine Caper.

Well, that's what it's called some of the time: the title screen just says Beethoven's 2nd, but the cover art calls it Beethoven: The Ultimate Canine Caper. I think I'll just call it Beethoven's 2nd. Normally I'd point out that this lack of clarity on something as basic as the game's goddamn name does not bode well, but this is Beethoven's 2nd. You know exactly how this is going to be.

Mission one: rescue Chubby, the young St. Bernard with body image issues. He's somewhere in suburbia. If I had to guess, I'd say this rescue mission is probably going to involve walking from left to right and jumping over things.

Well would you look at that, it's a platformer. Of course it's a platformer. What else was it going to be, a first-person shooter? Beethoven's Assault Rifle Rampage? C'mon, think it through.
Beethoven has the usual platformer tricks up his shaggy sleeves: he can walk around, he can jump, he's got a projectile attack in the form of a bark that you can charge up by holding the button down. You'll notice that none of this has anything to do with Beethoven's size, which is, after all, his most prominent feature. You can't even jump on enemies to hurt them, which would surely be your go-to method of attack if you were the size of an adolescent horse. No, touching enemies always hurts you. Hell, touching pretty much anything hurts you.

This poodle? Don't touch this poodle. It will hurt you.

This cat? Don't touch this cat. It will hurt you.

This radical skateboarding child, a youth so hip that you suspect that the words "tubular" and "gnarly" were invented just to describe him? Don't touch the kid. It will hurt you, despite this screenshot showing that Beethoven is almost twice his size and from that height would crush the child to death easily.

Look, Beethoven, you had trouble with children, smaller dogs and cats, for chrissakes. I think the man with the gun might be a bit too much for you to handle.
And these are the living enemies, the obstacles that can be dealt with by barking at them a few times. There's also plenty of hazardous scenery around that'll kill you if you're not careful. Not gaping chasms that litter the landscape, or course - this is the suburbs, there's no place for that kind of thing around here. No, your real nemesis will be the humble garden gate. There are seemingly hundreds of them for you to jump over in the first two stages, and if you time your jumps wrong you'll take damage, presumably to indicate that Beethoven has managed to impale himself on the sharp slats of the gate.

This will happen to you a lot, because (and I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear this) this game has some extremely wonky jumping physics. Normally Beethoven jumps in a very vertical manner with not much horizontal distance. Obviously this isn't helpful for getting over the gates, because you don't want Beethoven belly-flopping on to the sharpened wood. The game gets around this by also including a strange lunging jump with more length to it, but the problem with that is there's no way to tell when it's going to come out. I played through the whole game and I'm still not sure whether it's automatically activated by being close to an obstacle or if it's triggered by holding the d-pad for a while to build up some speed. All I can tell you is that sometimes Beethoven will put some effort into it and probably make the jump, but other times - and without warning - he'll jump pretty much straight up. Bad enough here in the suburbs where a missed jump will cost you some health, but later in the game there are gaping chasms that litter the scenery.

After much searching, Chubby has been located. Beethoven expresses no emotion. Finding his lost children is a job like any other, and Beethoven works without feelings. Finding his son or giving a lost skier some brandy from a little barrel around his neck, it's all the same to Beethoven.
Why was Chubby on the roof? Who knows? And indeed, who cares? I'm just happy to be free of this nightmarish suburban gate-gauntlet.

Except now I have to go through another stage, but this time carrying my offspring past the many dangers of the suburbs. Luckily I can leave Chubby at the starting point, clear out all the enemies and then go back to fetch him. I'd recommend doing this for all the puppy-escort stages, because Beethoven can't bark with a puppy in his mouth and the developer's one sop to Beethoven's size was to make him awkward and unwieldy to control, so good luck dodging attacks when you're in charge of a dog so big you could hollow it out and use it as a two-car garage.

I dropped Chubby off with his mother. Neither parent moves or makes a sound. I feel like I'm looking at a divorced dog couple sorting out child custody arrangements.

That's Beethoven's 2nd, then. Each area split into two stages, the first one where you locate a missing puppy and the second where you bring them back to share the uncomfortable silence that lingers between their cold, distant dog parents.

The second area is the park, where vicious squirrels throw nuts at poor old Beethoven and there is much to be feared from the falling of deadly apples. Really? Beethoven can be killed by falling apples, as though he'd been somehow transported to the start of I Wanna Be The Guy? I don't think the puppies have been kidnapped or anything, I think they're trying to distance themselves from their father out of sheer embarrassment.
Oh, and there are barbeques instead of pointy gates in the park stages. I do hope you managed to figure out the jumping mechanics.

What else? Oh yeah, sometimes Beethoven gets wet, be it from a broken water fountain or a dripping pipe, and being wet is his secret weapon. I mean, it's an actual weapon.

If you press A while Beethoven's wet, he shakes himself dry. The flying water droplets instantly destroy any enemies they touch because... I dunno, maybe Beethoven shakes so hard that the droplets act like a powerful water cannon. Maybe it's not water, and Beethoven is covered in an acidic powder that only requires rehydration to be turned into a deadly corrosive liquid. Whatever the explanation, it's useful maybe twice in the entire game. Both of those times I forgot the ability even existed and therefore never used it.

Why would I need to rescue a dog from a kennel? That's where dogs live! I'm sure... Tchaikovsky? Called your dog Tchaikovsky, huh? Well, whatever floats your boat, but if you're sticking to composers I'd have gone with Johann Sebastian Bark. Anyway, I'm sure Tchaikovsky will be fine if he's in a kennel.

Oh, I see, "kennel" was actually a code word for "enormous warehouse filled with vicious dogs, men with guns and vast, towering spires of poorly-balanced crates". I can see why you'd want a code word for that, it's a bit of a mouthful.

Here's where the bottomless chasms come into play, with crates that plummet without warning into the inky blackness that lies at the bottom of the "kennel," costing Beethoven a life in the process. I can't say whether the developers didn't include much platforming out of laziness or because they realised that trying to have fun while making Beethoven jump from platform to platform is like trying to have fun while your testicles are hooked up to a car battery, but we can all be grateful that this kind of falling-block nonsense is kept to a minimum.

Full disclosure: the first thing I did in the second kennel stage was to try dropping the puppy into the blackness below. You know, just to see what would happen / whether puppies bounce. I'm not proud of my actions. Anyway, Beethoven wouldn't let go unless his offspring was on solid ground. He must have some fatherly instincts after all.

There are moving platforms in the kennels. It really says something about the unambitious blandness of Beethoven's 2nd that I was momentarily taken aback by the concept of moving platforms. So taken aback, in fact, that I threw Beethoven down into whatever primordial murk lies at the kennel's floor. This time I did feel bad, but only because it meant I'd have to start the stage again.

The final stage is "The Wilderness," a barren landscape filled with mountain lions, rocks, gun-toting Park Rangers who look like they belong in a French kid's cartoon and a large supply of deadly twigs.

Yes, deadly twigs. You see that log that Beethoven's standing on? The log is safe, the log is solid, forget about the log. Focus instead on that tiny sprout that the giant and presumably fairly powerful dog is standing over. That thing will hurt Beethoven if he touches it, because boy are his paws delicate. This is what happens when you pamper your dogs too much, people. The only reason Beethoven's owner didn't carry him around everywhere in a handbag is because to do so would require a wheeled handbag so large you'd have to pay road tax on it.

Speaking of logs, here's a nice summation of the occasional deep ineptitude to be found in this game. If Beethoven walked to the right from his current position, you'd expect him to drop down and land on the log, correct? Sure, he'd hurt his dainty feet on the twig, but he'd be safe on the log, right?

Wrong, he somehow falls through all those potential landing sites and plummets to his death. Good work, dog-killer. The problem lies in Beethoven's innate dog-ness. A bipedal platform character, like Mario, has a very obvious contact point with the ground he's standing on. It's his two feet, which when viewed from the side pretty much look like one foot and one place that he needs to have on solid ground to keep himself safe. Beethoven doesn't have a clear contact point - it's not quite his back legs or his front legs but some undefined point in the middle, leaving you to guess whether you're going to land on your target platform or not, making the very core of the gameplay unpredictable and frustrating.

Still, it's not all bad. This stage does at least feature this background, which goes down as the one thing I genuinely liked about Beethoven's 2nd. If I took the same amount of time I spent playing through this game and spent it staring at this image instead, I'd be a happier person all around.

That's Beethoven - big enough to scare away a mountain lion, has trouble with twigs. I bet the mountain lion wouldn't mind standing on a twig.

The end of the game comes without fanfare or excitement - no final boss or surprise obstacle here - as you reunite the last of your puppies with its mother. How the mother got up here in the first place is never explained.
This image gives me a chance to mention one last grievance with this game, and that's your health bar. At the top-left of the screen there are usually some paw-prints that indicate how much health you have. Take a hit, lose a paw, seems sensible enough. Notice that here, I have no pawprints and yet still I live, because the developers of this game took the baffling decision to eschew the established traditions of every videogame ever and not have you die when your health reaches zero. You get an extra hit after that. A minor quirk, to be sure, but one that is all the more aggravating in its pointlessness.

"Hooray!" exclaims the ending message. "you saved the puppies." is scrawled below in handwriting that was probably intended to be charmingly childlike but which puts me in mind of a deranged serial killer. I feel like anyone who doesn't manage to complete the game finds a package on their doorstep a few days later that contains a mutilated dolls head and a note that says "you didnt save the puppies why didnt you save them you will PAY."

Too dark? Here, have a cute drawing from the credits. Aww, that's kinda nice.
Beethoven's 2nd was not nice. You and I both knew it was going to be bad, but it's bad more through unrelenting tedium than anything else. Yes, the controls are gummy and unpleasant, yes, getting Beethoven to to what you want is a pain in the backside, but that's not really a problem because the whole game is so flat and lifeless. Walk from left to right, jump occasionally, bark at a thing, question the purpose and trajectory of your miserable life. You don't need good controls for that.

It's not a terrible game because it doesn't try and fail at enough thing to qualify as something really awful. It seems fair to compare it to the SNES Wayne's World game - both came out around the same time, both platformers based on movies made by minor developers. Beethoven's 2nd is better - okay, not better but less horrendous - than Wayne's World because it does what it does fairly competently and doesn't try things it can't accomplish, like including maze-like stages that are still navigable or getting Bohemian Rhapsody to not sound awful coming out of a SNES. The fact that Beethoven's 2nd didn't piss all over something I love helps, too.

In the end, Beethoven's 2nd suffers the worst fate of any videogame - it's just boring. Too boring to love, too boring to hate, just boring enough to make you wonder if doing the housework would be more enjoyable than playing this game. Turns out it falls somewhere between doing the vacuuming and scrubbing out the bath.

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