MICKEY'S SAFARI IN LETTERLAND (NES)

If you’ve read any other VGJunk articles, you’ll know that I need some help with this whole “writing words” business. I’m not too proud to admit it, and I’m willing to seek out the help I need so long as I can get it from a cartoon mouse in a pith helmet. Thankfully, in 1993 Beam Software released a NES game called Mickey’s Safari in Letterland!

The titular Mickey is, of course, helium-voiced Disney mascot Mickey Mouse – everyone’s favourite animated rodent, unless you’re British in which case we’ve got Dangermouse, thank you very much. Yes, I’m still unable to see the appeal of Mickey Mouse, and I’ve still yet to meet a child that likes Mickey Mouse. What are you, Mickey? What is the point of you? I suppose his selling point is that he can slip easily into any number of different roles, like on this title screen where he looks more than ready to venture to foreign climes and oppress the natives for King and country. But, you know, in a family-friendly way. There’ll be lessons about appreciating the differences of other cultures and such.

Three difficulty levels are presented to you when you hit start. “Super Advanced” is rather overselling things. So is “Advanced.” Even “Normal” isn’t exactly what you’d expect. All the difficulty levels are very, very easy, because (as the title might have clued you in) Mickey’s Safari in Letterland is an educational game aimed at very young children. What joy! Delight unbounded! You can learn and have fun at the same time, education and entertainment fused into one. Edutainment, if you will. Combined with the star power of Mickey Mouse, this is sure to be a real winner.

Here’s a map. I was going to say it’s a world map, but it’s not a map of our world. Not with those continents it isn’t. The weird thing is, one of the locations is “Yukon,” which is real place on Earth. Most of the others are generic places like “pyramid,” “swamp” and “jungle,” which could be anywhere. There’s a pile of laundry on my bathroom floor that you could basically describe as a “pyramid,” but the Yukon is oddly specific. Could you not have gone with “tundra” or something, Beam Software? I’m sorry, I don’t know why this is bothering me so much. Let’s just go to the bloody Yukon, shall we?

Goofy’s going to drive Mickey to the Yukon in their their military surplus vehicle. That’s right, he’s been reduced to the role of Mickey’s chauffeur, a role that you’d think he’d be terribly unsuited for. I mean, have you seen the size of Goofy’s feet? Putting him in charge of a pedal-operated vehicle seems like an accident waiting to happen.

The latest iteration of Disney on Ice takes a dark turn as Mickey resorts to seal-clubbing for a quick profit. No, of course not, he’s going to leave this cute seal well alone while he undertakes his quest to do… what, exactly?

Why, to find gems, of course! The gems have letters on them, which is what makes this “Letterland” and not just “land.” Get near a gem and press B, and Mickey will scoop it up using the butterfly net he’s carrying. Each stage has three gems to find, and because I’m playing on “advanced” mode – that is, “medium” mode – they are not exactly difficult to track down.

As for the actual process of getting to the gems, it turns out that Mickey’s Safari in Letterland is a platformer. You jump over enemies and across platforms, with the occasional extra feature to spice things up, like these ice-slide in the Yukon stages, and you grab things things with your net. So far, so much like a great many other NES platformers, but there’s one big difference: Mickey cannot die. I don’t mean in the sense that he’s a huge global brand and beloved cartoon friend who will remain in the cultural consciousness long after you and I are dead, either. I mean that none of the creatures can hurt him, and there are no bottomless pits to fall down. The various animals that inhabit the levels will make Mickey stumble if he touches them, wasting precious gem-hunting seconds, but that’s all they do. At the very worst they might bump you off a platform, forcing you to climb back up, but as most stages in this game take less than a minute to complete even that isn’t going to slow Mickey down too much.
I’ll be honest, I kinda like this approach. Mario gets hurt when a turtle walks into his foot, Megaman can be damaged by bubbles, so it’s nice to play a game where a snowman slowly walking into you is a minor inconvenience rather than an agonising, potentially fatal encounter.

At the end of each stage there’s an ancient stone tablet for Mickey to collect, so I guess he really is travelling to distant lands and stealing their artefacts for the museum. The spirit of colonialism lives on in Mickey Mouse, but I’m sure he’s got a good reason for grabbing these things.

If you collected all three gems in the stage, you’re shown a quick scene of the object that the three gem letters spell out. In this case, it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood. Mickey gets very excited by this, frantically hopping up and down. Mickey seems like the kind of character that’d get excited by wallpaper paste or manilla envelopes, so this makes sense.
The thing is, this entire section feels completely pointless for what is supposed to be an educational game. Sure, you might teach kids simple three-letter words, but they can get that kind of learnin’ from books. Why not at least make this a mini-puzzle where you have to spell out a word using the letters you picked up? You know, something interactive? Unless that picture of a log is merely meant to be your reward for finishing the stage. I certainly hope not.

As for the stone tablets, Mickey chucks them into a machine operated by Goofy. The machine is made of paint rollers, a metal dustbin and the scavenged remains of a church organ, but what does it do? I have no idea. Cleans the stone slab, maybe? Look, Mickey and Goofy have been given a large amount of grant money for their letterology research, so you can bet you’re ass they’re not going to spend their time using hot soapy water and toothbrushes.

Once the slab is cleaned, a letter is revealed. You must then select the matching space on this alphabet chart and press A. It’s marginally more educational than a picture of a log, I’ll give you that. Impressively, Mickey has a voice sample for each letter of the alphabet, plus a few others for short phrases like his trademark “oh, boy!” They’re even recognisable as Mickey’s voice, too, which is bordering on the miraculous for a NES game.

After that, it’s back to the Yukon for another stage of snowy frolics and snowman-dodging. Or walking through the snowmen. It’s not like you need to avoid them.
That’s how Mickey’s Safari in Letterland works, (at least in Advanced mode,) then. Go through two simple platforming stages in each “world,” collect the gems and the stone tablet, put the tablet in its correct alphabetical slot, repeat for each world in the game.

The next world I visited – you can do them in any order you like – is the Caribbean. Again, that’s a real-world location, although I don’t think the real Caribbean is 90 percent enormous sandcastles with hammocks that double as trampolines stretched between them. It all looks rather nice, and as NES games go MSiLL has some good (if not quite excellent) graphics. 1993 was pretty late in the NES’s life-cycle so I suppose you’d expect it to look better than earlier games, but it’s big and colourful with some cute enemies and a lot of extra animation flourishes that help to sell the cartoon theme.

Is it just me, or is there always something slightly unsettling about seeing a human ear on its own? I find it very difficult to see a picture of a solitary ear without imagining it’s been sliced off a person’s head. Why yes, I did watch Reservoir Dogs when I was a young teen, why do you ask?

Mickey’s invulnerability even extends to monkeys dropping coconuts on his head. It’s a good job he’s wearing a helmet, a blow from a falling coconut can be enough to kill a man so who knows what it would do it a mouse. In fact, the problem of killer coconuts is such that there’s a Wikipedia page entitled “Death By Coconut,” thus fulfilling my desire for unexpected internet absurdism for today.

Onward to the jungle world, where adorable mushroom-men roam the land and Mickey uses a yawning hippo as a springboard, seemingly unconcerned by the hippo’s reputation as the deadliest killer in Africa. Mickey later use the same tactic with crocodiles, so it’s safe to assume that he’s become aware of his own immortality. He laughs in the face of danger now. Nothing, nothing can stop him.

Here’s an example of MSiLL’s presentation taking pains to be more engaging than you might expect from an educational game made by Beam Software – when walking over dangerous ground like the tops of these waterfalls, Mickey will carefully tip-toe across rather than using his usual jaunty, “I have transcended death” stride.

Things get a little more complicated in the pyramid world, where simply walking to the right won’t find you all the gems. There are multiple pathways and even hidden passages, obscured by blocks of hieroglyphics that it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise were walk-through-able. It’s a welcome mix-up of the gameplay, this sudden need to pay even the scantest amount of attention. Even Mickey looks like he’s having fun, but then Mickey always looks like he’s having fun. Mind, I bet Carter had the same beaming smile and can-do attitude when he was raiding Tutankhamen’s tomb.

Well, this proves that this game doesn’t take place in the human world, what with all the ancient pharaohs being mice and ducks and whatever the hell Goofy is. Is Goofy a dog? My confusion stems from Goofy looking nowt like a dog, you see.
It was at around this point in the game that something occurred to me: this game isn’t bad. Sure, it’s not very engaging to anyone over the age of six thanks to its complete lack of challenge, but there’s the core of decent platformer here. Mickey controls fairly well, his movements and jumping physics are sensible and predictable, there are a few gameplay sections that would fit nicely into a “proper” platformer. Yes, I’d say that with a little work and the removal of Mickey’s invincibility you could make a perfectly acceptable 8-bit platformer out of Mickey’s Safari in Letterland. I doubt it would ever reach that top tier of true classics – it’s a bit too stodgy and predictable for that – but I’ve certainly played worse NES platformers that weren’t intended as edutainment for the wee bairns.

There’s a forest world, as mandated by Videogame Law. It’s got all the usual features of a videogame forest world: blue skies, lots of greenery, precious widdle woodland creature, trees with the haunted expression of someone having their soul sucked out of their arse by a demonic vacuum cleaner.

Here’s another minor animation flourish: whenever Mickey has crawled through one of these tunnels he gets up and dusts himself off. It’s cute. The first time. The second time, less so. By the fifth time, the few seconds Mickey spends wiping himself down have extended into an unending chasm of misery, time itself seemingly warped by a cartoon mouse’s desire for a clean shirt. This is also true whenever you fall from a high place: the fall won’t hurt Mickey, but after seeing the same unskippable animation of him hauling himself back up to his feet for the thousandth time you’ll wish it bloody hurt him.

There’s one water fountain shaped like Goofy in the game. Just one. I suppose one is all you need. Who made this, and why is it in the middle of the forest? I assume Goofy made it to satisfy his rampant vanity, but then dumped it in the woods after the (fully deserved) mockery that he received for making a water fountain in his own image.

The final world is the swamp, complete with the cabin from the Evil Dead movies. I’m looking forward to seeing Mickey decapitate Minnie with a shovel.

The rotting shacks and dilapidated paddle steamers mean it’s difficult to play this stage without whistling “Duelling Banjos” to yourself at least once, which brings me to the game’s soundtrack – it’s definitely above average, and almost exactly what you’d expect from a Mickey Mouse platformer. Not amazing, and not likely to haunt your memory after you stop playing, but chirpy and tuneful. MSiLL is really trying hard to get me to like it, and honestly I think it’s sort of working.

As I was jumping around and grabbing these gems, it occurred to me that Mickey is the wrong choice of Disney star for this game. I feel I should really be playing as Scrooge McDuck. Sure, Scrooge is more likely to keep the gems and stone tablets for himself than donate them to the museum, but I still think he’s be a better fit for this kind of adventure. Every day he’s out there making duck tales, after all. What’s Mickey usually doing? Being cheerful and kind to his friends? That’s not that kind of attitude that gets ancient civilizations ransacked, now is it?

In the end, I managed to overcome Mickey’s innate niceness and finish all the stages, delivering the slabs to the museum as promised while an alphabet of gems bounces along the bottom of the screen. Goofy receives no credit for his role in this task.  That’s it, the game’s over. In the interests of completion and because I’m willing to suffer for you, dear reader, I went back and played through the game on the “hardest” difficulty setting. In that case there are four or five stages in each world, meaning you have to collect a slab for all twenty-six letters. The only thing that changes at the end is that there’s a credits roll with the names of the staff. Goofy remains unappreciated. It was not worth the extra effort.

Well, it finally happened. I played an edutainment game that doesn’t feel lazily put-together, utterly pointless or downright insulting. Don’t get me wrong, there’s very little of educational merit in this game, and certainly nothing that you couldn’t get out of a kid’s book for (at the time, certainly) a fraction of the price. However, Mickey’s Safari in Letterland is a game made for very young children that I can actually imagine very young children wanting to play. It’s got a very solid gameplay core with plenty of attention lavished on the presentation, and the fact that Mickey cannot be harmed means even the youngest can play it without getting frustrated – and if they do learn anything along the way, that’s a bonus. Am I recommending that you go out and play it? Oh my, no. You’ll be bored almost immediately. But we can appreciate MSiLL for what it is, even if it doesn’t answer the most pressing question of them all: what is the point of Mickey Mouse?

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ROLLERBLADE RACER (NES)

I can’t really think of a good way to begin this article, so I’ll just come right out and tell you it’s about rollerblading. “But VGJunk,” a hypothetical pedant might shout, “I think you mean it’s about inline skating because ‘rollerblade’ is a trademarked brand name,” but that’s where you’re wrong: this game is fully licensed and officially sanctioned by RollerBlade, Inc. themselves. That’s right, if you want the real, authentic rollerblading experience, you’re going to have to play Radiance Software and Hi-Tech Expression’s 1993 NES falling-over-em-up Rollerblade Racer!

Here’s a title screen with all the thrill and excitement of a letter from the bank informing you of their updated terms and conditions. I suppose title screens don’t have to be interesting or look good, really. You’ve already bought the game, and you’re not going to be looking at this screen for long unless you really like the registered trademark symbol. The word “SUCKER!” flashing on a blank background might be more appropriate but would be a little too on-the-nose, so instead we get this.

This is Kirk, star of Rollerblade Racer. Hi, Kirk. Let’s be blunt, Kirk looks like a massive dork, with his colour-coordinated safety gear and his rumpled socks. Mind you, I wasn’t expecting the star of this game to look cool. Despite rollerblading’s attempts to cast itself as a hip and radical means of personal transport, it certainly never felt that way when I was a kid. There was a very clear hierarchy when it came to the coolness of wheels you attach to your feet: skateboards were by far the coolest, rollerskates were extremely uncool and considered to be just for girls and rollerblades were only slightly above that. Then razor scooters came along and muddied the waters, but fortunately by then I was into my teens and thus beyond the age when such things are important. I was too busy trying to get hold of trainers that weren't from the market and made by companies like Adodos and Mike to worry about the trendiest way to fall over and graze your elbows.

Speaking of coolness, I feel like “bladegear” is too cool a phrase to be used in this context. As a name for all your hacking tools in a futuristic cyberpunk dystopia, sure, but not to describe plastic knee-pads and your mum’s old bicycle helmet.
Anyway, Kirk’s got a mission: he wants to participate in the Super Rollerblade Challenge, but before they’ll let him in he needs to earn 5,000 qualifying points. Fortunately for him the eyes of the Super Rollerblade Challenge Observation Team are everywhere, tireless and unblinking, so he gains those qualifying points simply by skating around his neighbourhood. Let’s go and do that, then.

What we’ve got here is an isometric skate-em-up, which is pretty much what I expected. Up and down on the d-pad control your speed, left and right do their usual thing and the buttons either make you jump or duck. What’s missing from this rollerblade race is the racing aspect, because there are no other competitors and it’s not even much of race against the clock: you can run out of time, but you get a fairly generous allotment. No, the real goal is to earn points, which you do by jumping (and receiving a bonus based on your remaining time). You don’t even have to jump over things, and any successful landing will net you points so you might as well be jumping all the time.
In fact, I’d strongly advise you to be jumping all the time, because Kirk lives in a blasted urban hellscape. Rabid dogs, open sewers, cracked pavements – all these thing and more conspire to keep our plucky young hero away from the Super Rollerblade Challenge, and jumping over them is the best way to avoid them.

It was at this point that I realised Rollerblade Racer is essentially Paperboy, probably because Paperboy also features hazardous children on tricycles. It’s Paperboy without the newspaper-delivery bits, then. So, erm, Boy? Yeah, let’s go with that. Paperboy was almost a decade old by the time Rollerblade Racer was released, which is possibly why it feels trite and over-familiar even in these early stages, and the inclusion of the hottest skating trend of the nineties isn’t doing much to elevate it. Still, we can all enjoy Kirk’s splay-legged jumping pose. I particularly like the way his hands have been replaced by small plastic spoons.

After one stage, Kirk has already amassed over half the points he needs. The spies of the Super Rollerblade Challenge, lurking in the bushes near his home with their telephoto lenses, were suitably impressed by the way he jumped over all those dustbins.

Just like Paperboy, there’s a bonus round after each main stage. In this case it’s what I would describe as the crappiest version of Donkey Kong, if I hadn’t played so many unofficial home computer ports of Donkey Kong. Skate forwards and jump over the barrels, that’s all you need to do. The only problem you should have is getting over the first barrel, because it’s right in Kirk’s face and you haven’t had time to build up any speed. Once you’re past that (literal) hurdle it’s easy going, although that didn’t prevent me from contorting Kirk into whatever this pose is supposed to be. Maybe he’s a big fan of The Specials. There's definitely some level of ska music involved in this stance.

Do we have to, Kirk? Can’t you just save your energy for the big day? I know I’m only two stages in but I think I’ve already extracted the maximum amount of fun I can from Rollerblade Racer. It’s relatively competent on a technical level, with decent collision detection and controls that are heavy and sluggish but not to a hugely frustrating degree, but it’s also extremely boring.

The next stage takes place downtown, and I think it’s actually easier than the first stage because there’s less stuff in it for Kirk to trip over. It’s just as run-down as the suburbs, though, and just as packed with wild dogs. Dogs are your constant harassers in Rollerblade Racer, appearing in every stage and lunging at Kirk with such ferocity you have to assume he’s using Pedigree Chum as cologne.

And they look so innocent when they’re waiting for Kirk to pass by, too! I’m certain that all dogs are fundamentally Good Boys, but in this universe there’s just something about rollerblading that sends them into a frenzied bloodlust. Maybe they’re from an alternate timeline where their wolf ancestors were hunted by primitive men wearing inline skates.

Bonus stage 2: the traffic cone labyrinth. Kirk’s arms continue to atrophy, having now withered away to the shape of udon noodles. As he collapses to the ground, his enfeebled arms unable to break his fall, I’m finding it extremely difficult not to fill this paragraph with jokes from the traffic cone scenes from I’m Alan Partridge.

I fell over one too many times and got a game over. See, this is why you should have just waited for the main event once you’d collected the requisite amount of points, Kirk. You just had to push it, and now night has fallen and you have to make you way home in the dark. You saw how bad the city was in the daytime, right? There’s no way Kirk’s going to make it before he’s devoured by the roaming bands of toxi-mutants and the feral dogs with a taste for human flesh.

Having survived the night by hiding in one of the many dustbins left haphazardly in the middle of the road, Kirk resumes his skating odyssey with a trip to the beach. Oh look, he’s getting some sunbathing in. Well, you’d want to look your bronzed best for the Super Rollerblade Challenge, wouldn’t you?

The beach is much the same as the other stage. The puddles of water are patches of sand now, but there are still dozens of killer dogs patiently waiting for their chance to rise up against their human masters. One new thing are the frisbees, which you have to duck underneath. Anything that adds a bit more complexity to Rollerblade Racer is welcome, I suppose, although once you’ve built up enough speed you’ll be past most frisbees before they get near you.

The next bonus stage is a trough. That’s it, you ride through a gutter that’s got ideas above it’s station. You might think it’s a gnarly half-pipe that you can do all kinds of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater style tricks on, but no – approaching the lip of the pipe will cause Kirk to fall over just like he does when confronted by small puddles, grass, kerbs and slightly uneven tarmac. All you need to do, especially because you’ll long-since have collected the 5,000 points, is hold up on the d-pad until you reach the end of the stage. It’s not so much Skate or Die as it is Skate and Die of Boredom.

Boring in a different way, mostly because it forces you into repeated attempts and rote learning of obstacle locations, is the final stage before the big challenge. It’s a park, with narrow pathways, bridges over rivers and staircases to contend with. There are also multiple unattended babies just sitting around, so if you’re looking for a free baby, perhaps one that you can raise as a warrior who will avenge your death when the hordes of rabid dogs finally overwhelm you, then I suggest you get down to this park.

Most of the things that try to ruin Kirk’s day are fairly innocent. The dogs are simply acting on their animal instincts, the beach balls and frisbees are unfortunate mis-throws, the children on tricycles don’t really know what they’re doing… but then there are these guys. They see Kirk skating towards them and they purposely stick out their legs to trip him up. There’s nothing accidental about it: they saw a kid rollerblading along the path and thought “it’d be really funny if I legged this child up.” I think that makes them the most evil villain I’ve ever faced in a videogame, and I’ve completed Wolfenstein 3D.

At last, Kirk has reached the Super Rollerblade Challenge. It might look like the first bonus stage, but that’s only because it is the first bonus stage. But wait, there’s more! It’s also the other two bonus stages! You play the three bonus stages as one consecutive stage, then they repeat a couple of times. That’s it. That’s what I needed all those points to participate in, despite having already played the constituent parts. The developers are showing the kind of innovative thinking you usually only see when the Royal Family needs to come up with a name for a new baby, and honestly it’s about what I expected. I had imagined there might be some other people here - a crowd, even - but there’s no evidence that the Super Rollerblade Challenge isn’t all a product of Kirk’s fevered imagination and he’s set the whole thing up on his suburban street.

Best of all, if you move over to the left and jump onto the pavement, you can stay on the pavement for the whole stage, completely avoiding all the obstacles. Amazing, truly amazing.

The game ends with the same screen as when you get a game over, except now Kirk is waxing lyrical about the quality of the final course. Kirk is easily pleased, isn’t he? Well, as long as he had fun, that’s the main thing. Wait, hang on – further reading implies that Kirk wasn’t actually competing in the Super Rollerblade Challenge and the organisers just let him on the course to piss about for a while. Next time he’s going to compete? Oh no, I’m not falling for that. The game restarted and as far as I could tell it was identical, so there’s no way I’m going through all this again on the off chance there’s another ending. I’ve had enough of that sort of thing, what with playing Ghouls ‘n Ghosts recently. As far as I’m concerned, Rollerblade Racer ends right here, right now.

Some games are bad because of awful design choices, or a lack of budget, or thanks to offensive content… but some games are just a bit rubbish, and that’s the category into which Rollerblade Racer squarely falls. I’d like to think I try to give all the games I write about a fair shake, but sometimes a game just rubs me the wrong way for reasons I can’t really explain. I think in this case there’s an air of laziness that hangs over proceedings, a lack of ambition that’s hardly surprising when you consider it’s a rip-off of a decade-old arcade game. It’s not that terrible to play – I’ve certainly played worse – but the stodgy controls, ugly graphics and lack of anything unique means it’s destined for that great grey void where all the uninspired and forgotten console games end up. So why did I bother writing about it? I haven’t got a clue, pal. Maybe deep down I’m bitter about never learning to rollerblade as a kid.

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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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