DEAD CONNECTION

Quick, think of a good videogame about gangsters. No, I don't mean gangster like 50 Cent, I mean gangster like smuggling hooch, wearing fedoras and going insane in prison due to the effects of syphilis (unlucky, Mr. Capone). You might well be struggling to come up with one, but next time someone asks you this question, you'll have an answer ready in the form of Taito's 1992 you-dirty-rat-'em-up Dead Connection.

The year is 1953. The place, according to the intro at least, is "A big city somewhere". Well, that's helpful. Within this city are men of justice, heroes who fight to rid the generic city of crime - but not small crime, oh no. They've got much bigger fish to fry.

A gigantic crime, huh? Sadly, the gigantic crime was not whale smuggling or producing bootleg planets as I had hoped; instead, it's the grim spectre of organised crime that you'll be fighting against in Dead Connection.
Our heroes are galvanised into action after a woman is brutally gunned down by a cheerful psychopath with a cigar and a tommygun.

Pretty horrifying, I'm sure you'll agree. The man behind this heinous crime is a strangely familiar-looking Mafia boss named Don Nerozzia.

You come into this arcade on the day my shoot-em-up is to be released and ask me to give you some change in ten-pence coins. Don Corleone Nerozzia appears to have cloned Christopher Walken to act as his bodyguards, which seems like a sound strategy to me. There's a reason he's the Don.
With your target in place, it's time to pick a character:

A fine bunch of decent, upstanding law enforcement officers. You might even say that they're, I dunno, Untouchable or something. James has definitely got a Kevin Costner vibe going on there, and Philip is somewhat Andy Garcia-ish.

Sadly, there's no Sean Connery to keep us entertained with his eerily accurate Irish accent. It doesn't really matter which one you choose, because they all play identically, and once your character is selected the game begins. Your character walks into the lobby of a swanky hotel, flashes his badge, tells people to put their hands up and then starts indiscriminately blasting away as his proud American heritage demands.

Dead Connection is certainly a shooter, alright: it has most in common with games like Smash T.V. in that it's a single screen shooter where enemies swarm in and you have to put them down with the variety of weapons at your disposal. The controls are fairly simple, although it sadly doesn't have the double-joystick system of Smash T.V. or Total Carnage. Instead, you fire in the direction that you're facing by pressing a button, and you also have a dodge button to help you avoid some of the lead being launched at your face. Pressing dodge while moving lets you do a diving roll, and pressing it while stationary makes you lie down to avoid gunfire and possibly catch up on some sleep.
One of the first things you will probably notice when playing Dead Connection is that the backgrounds are very, very destructible. First, have a look at the screenshot above, showing the first level in pristine, un-law-enforced condition. Now take a look at the same scenery at the end of the stage:

Extensive remodelling of the kind not often seen outside warzones. It might seem like a pleasant if ultimately pointless bit of graphical frippery, but it really does make the game more fun to play. That's partly down to the fact that destroying the environment can help you out by killing some of your foes. For example, on the first stage you can kick the statue down the stairs by standing next to it and pressing the dodge button, crushing any goons at the bottom beneath a vengeful lump of rolling marble. It's like Home Alone, really, except you also have to option to shoot people. You can hide behind things too, which makes a nice change from something like Total Carnage where your only defensive option is to kill everything before it fires at you. You even get a health bar, further negating the frustration of dying instantly because you got hit by that one bullet that you didn't see.

Once you finish a stage, you're treated to a nice bit of story involving all your favourite mobster cliches. I like the attention to detail demonstrated by showing the knotted bedsheets going out of the window in the background. To finish a stage, you have to defeat a set number of enemies; when there are only three remaining, three tougher-than-normal goons will appear to act as a pseudo-boss.
It's all terribly good fun, I have to say. Apart from Smash T.V., Dead Connection is probably the best shooter of this type around. The game mechanics are good, and the lack of instant deaths and the ability to dodge make it a much less frustrating proposition than most shooters. The sprites, while small, have a lot of character, and the destructible backgrounds add a lot more to the fun than you might think.

Stage two is set in a junkyard. There're exploding barrels and cars, and you can watch the sky turn from sunset to nighttime as you cower behind a pile of tyres, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the thigh. Once the stage is done, you threaten a goon into telling you where Nerozzia is hiding, which is in a restaurant.

Eschewing any notion of stealth, stage three starts with our hero driving his car through the windows at the front of the restaurant, with Dead Connection really going out of it's way to portray Federal agents as violent, semi-suicidal psychopaths who are more of a threat to the safety of the country than the Mafia. A nice touch here is that if you shoot the table, the candles fall over and set the whole thing on fire. After this stage, our heroes are kidnapped and bundled into a car. Who will save us now!?

Andy. Andy will save us. Thanks, Andy!

Stage four is set on the rainy city streets, and cars full of mobsters screech back and forth, trying to run you over. You can enter the building and head to the balcony, where you can knock the sign down onto your enemy's heads. Anyway, this stage is bound to be a breeze with Andy on our side! Isn't that right, Andy?

Oh dear. I personally thought that exclaiming that poor Andy "bit the dust" was nice and tactful. You know why Andy died? Because he wasn't wearing a hat. Shame on you, Andy.

With Andy quickly buried in a shallow grave at the side of the road, it's on to stage five: the warehouse. It's got everything you'd expect to find in a warehouse: conveyor belts, Mafia hitmen, crates. There's a switch on the wall that you can shoot to drop a crate that explodes, filling half the screen with fire; unfortunately, the epicentre is usually about three inches away from where you're standing.

What better way to relax after a fight in a grimy warehouse than with a genteel garden party? Well it was genteel until our heroes shot everyone in attendance and burned down the building. They're not anti-heroes, they're criminally-insane arsonists with a body count to rival the Black Death.

Continuing theme peaceful outdoors theme, the next stage is sent a park with a curiously British-looking red telephone box. Perhaps, in these tranquil surroundings, out heroes will rein in their bloodlust a little?

Oh no, they've drowned a man in the fountain. That's a shame. At least they're nattily dressed in their colour-coordinated outfits. Take note, Andy: hats. They could have saved your life.

The final stage takes place on an actual stage, in an opera house complete with destructible piano and curtains. The enemies here are tougher than before, and completing the stage without frequent deaths comes down to using the collectable weapons well. As well as your standard pistol, you can pick up a slightly more powerful handgun, a rapid-firing tommygun and, best of all, a shotgun that can take out multiple villains at once. Eventually, the Mafia runs out of soldiers and you've completed the game. Or have you?

Shock! It was an ambush all along! They don't look scared for their lives: they look more like they've been caught doing something naughty by a teacher and they're trying to keep straight faces while being told off. At gunpoint. By Marlon Brando.
Just when it looks hopeless for our heroes, an unlikely saviour arrives.

Miss D. E. Machina appears and shoots Nerozzia in the back. It turns out she's Andy's (understandably upset) girlfriend. Phew, thanks for the save, ma'am. I'm just sorry that in trying to save these lawmen you have stained your soul with an act of murder, condemning yourself to a life of crushing guilt for the rest of your days.

And that's Dead Connection: not a story about the sudden consequences of not paying your phone bill, but a really rather good arena-style shoot-em-up with a nice Prohibition-era setting (or at least it would be if it wasn't set in the 50's). I heartily recommend that you give Dead Connection a go: the action is fast and very fun, the graphics are detailed, the music is good and there's a nice range of (rather well done) digitised speech to enjoy. The only drawback I can think of is that it is very short: if your know what you're doing, you could probably complete it in around twenty minutes. Mind you, that might be a good thing for a lot of people. Ciao!

THE FREAKISH CONTESTANTS OF JEOPARDY! ON THE MEGADRIVE

Jeopardy! Yes, it’s that game show.

If you’re not an American, you’ll likely have no idea what Jeopardy! is. It’s a general-knowledge quiz with questions sorted into six categories and put in order of difficulty, like so:

Harder questions = more cash = fun for the whole family. In the early nineties, a company called Park Place Productions released a version of Jeopardy! for the Megadrive / Genesis, which is where the screenshots in this article come from. It’s a fairly standard quiz game and is decent enough if you like that sort of thing. It does have the nice bonus of allowing three players to play with only two pads, but unfortunately it is so glacially slow that even those fakirs who live on top of poles in the desert for decades would get frustrated with it and move onto something more fast-paced, like watching the subduction of tectonic plates.
I don’t give a stuff about that, though. I just wanted to have a quick look at freakish contestants that you can choose to act as your avatar in this grim hellscape of general-knowledge torture. And here they are!

Bank manager alert, with maybe a hint of Al Pacino in Serpico. His jacket appears to be strangely corrugated, like maybe he’s wearing a fur coat with lapels. Between his beard and grey-and-pink tie, he’s the very definition of an early nineties businessman, thus making him the most boring-looking. I bet he’s really extreeeme when he’s at home though, always riding around in his yacht and doing coke off a supermodel’s popliteal fossa. Ugh, you dirty sod, where did you think the popliteal fossa was? You disgust me.

This young lady, who may well be Dobby from Peep Show, is storing nuts in her cheeks to eat at a later date. Her most impressive feature, however, is her impenetrable helmet of hair, thick enough to harmlessly deflect a .45 round yet soft and yielding enough for a woman. Wait, what? I lost my train of thought there for a second.

This guy’s not a freak. How do I know that? Because he’s quite clearly Mathew St. Patrick, an actor most famous for playing Keith in the excellent Six Feet Under. Check it out:

Uncanny, no? I think it's the lantern jaw that does it. Maybe he was a contestant of Jeopardy! before he got famous and he was accidentally digitized into the game world where he had to find his way out by riding a magic motorbike and throwing a Frisbee and oh no wait that’s the plot of Tron. The only mystery is why he’s wearing a janitor’s coat. Actually, I don’t think that’s a coat: I think his whole torso has been carved out of wood.

Patrick Bateman? Yep, I’m pretty sure that’s everyone’s favourite American psycho. I literally cannot see anything else when I’m looking at that picture. It looks a little like this:

Or even this.

However, don’t stare at his tie too long, because it is actually a swirling vortex that leads directly to a universe of pure madness. Just so you know.

Finally, there’s this charming lady. She seems nice enough, even if her blouse does look as though someone vomited onto a Jackson Pollock painting and her eyes are two soulless black pinpricks. Hmm, those eyes are worrying me; I’ll just ask her straight out about her intentions. Hey lady, are you a raving lunatic who will creep into my bedroom while I sleep and stab me over and over again with a screwdriver, only stopping when you lose your grip on the murder weapon because your hands are slick with my blood?

Well, I’m glad we got that sorted. And those are the contestants on the Megadrive / Genesis version of Jeopardy! They sure were a bunch of freaks, huh?

ARRRGH.

Also, I am terribly immature. So long!

ALF (SEGA MASTER SYSTEM)

The Simpsons has asked many pertinent questions of the human race, but by far the most vital to the continued existence of mankind as a species is surely "Remember ALF?". At least, I think it was a question: maybe it was a command, and the writers of The Simpsons are secretly the acolytes of some ALF-worshipping cult whose purpose is to ensure that the memory of a crappy puppet-based sitcom lives on. One of the tools this insidious cult used to spread the Gospel of ALF was a videogame made in 1989 for the Sega Master System. The horror!

If you don't remember ALF, he was a lot like E.T.: a small, friendly, brown alien with a face like congealed faeces who is stranded on Earth. He lives with a family in the suburbs, generally acting like a freeloading prick and performing the mandatory hijinks while plotting to eat the family's cat.
ALF's mission is to fix up his spaceship so he can go and meet his alien friends, and there's only one kind of game that a licensed game based on an '80s sitcom can be; a side-scrolling psuedo-platforming adventure.

There's ALF, standing atop a Segway-looking thing and complaining about a lack of fuel. The graphics certainly are colourful, aren't they? Like a child ate a box of crayons and then threw up. So, your mission is to find fuel; but how? By helping ALF through this technicolour nightmare on what is essentially one long fetch quest, of course. At least ALF controls reasonably well: the D-pad moves him around, Button 1 makes him jump and Button 2 interacts with things. Once you've figured out how to move him around, it's time to start the game proper.

Oh look, I appear to have wandered into a kitchen. I have no idea if this resembles the house from the show in any way: I haven't seen an episode of ALF in around twenty years, and I have no desire to start now. I'm going to assume that, because this is a cheap and nasty licensing cash-in, it looks nothing like the house that ALF lived in on the show.
There was a cat on the counter; I picked him up and put him in my "inventory" which, given ALF's predilection for eating cats, is possibly a euphemism for "stomach". Also, there's a man in the house. He appears to be wearing all-in-one overalls in a fetching shade of maroon, and he's constantly closing and opening his fists like a serial killer waiting in line at the Post Office.
Stranger danger! Of course, touching him kills you instantly, so instead of touching the creepy man who has wandered into my house, I'm going to open the fridge instead.

Wait, what bats? Can you see bats, ALF? We've only been on two screens and I didn't see any bats. Do we need to up your dosage again? ALF picks up the salami and it also goes into your "inventory", further strengthening the case for it being a stomach metaphor. Before ALF can start ranting once more about how only salami can defeat the invisible bats that haunt his every waking moment, it's on to the next area.

It's a door, in a bedroom. It is locked. This is apparently "no problemo" because "the ALFer" will just "get a key". Hopefully it will be "no problemo" when I "stab the ALFer in the neck" because he can just "get more blood". Onwards, and downwards, to the darkened basement.

There's a rat patrolling the bottom of the staircase, so ALF vomits up the cat from his "inventory" and sets it free. It kills the mouse, and you can proceed. Turning the light on reveals...

Really? Because to me it looks like a large bill for structural repairs to the house's foundations.

Oh look, the cave is full of bats. Is there any animal I have killed more often during my career as a videogames player than bats? Castlevania and Pokemon alone must have accounted for hundreds of thousands of murdered chiroptera. I have blood on my hands, people. Bat blood, and it won't wash off.
As it turns out, a salami is not "just the ticket" for bashing in the furry little heads of the bats. That might be down to its status as a delicious meat product and not a cudgel, but I think it's mostly to do with the fact that ALF attacks by waving it feebly an inch in front of his own face like a spinster aunt who's managed to get her hand stuck to a copy of Razzle.

Why does all ALF's text make him sound like Basic Comedy Robot X-07? Still, it's funnier than the TV show. I wonder what's behind that shack?

Goddamnit ALF. Notice how he hovers in the air just long enough to deliver what I think is supposed to be a joke before plummeting to his death, instead of scrabbling at the edge of the pit, desperately trying to save himself. Now that's commitment to a bit. Happily, when you die you restart at the entrance to the cave, meaning you don't have to slog past the salami-fearing bats again. With his new-found wealth, ALF leaves the cave and heads for the shops.

The mean streets, mid-afternoon. The worst scum in the city patrol the tarmac on their bizarrely-proportioned bicycles, running down any alien that dares to step off the pavement. Hellishly jaunty music plays, set on a five-second loop, the pitch so high that the neighbourhood's dogs are preparing a lawsuit against the composer. A bleak place, where the weak are crushed and only the strong ooh look a shop! Let's go in!

Luckily, ALF has managed to find a shop that takes unprocessed gold as payment. They're selling a key. A key that unlocks the bedroom door in ALF's house. I think you should back slowly out of the shop, ALF; don't make eye contact and don't you dare stop to make a wisecrack.
Back in the house, you can use your new key to open various closets until you find a swimsuit.

Ha ha, oh ALF, you're a laugh riot. Looking at ALF's body shape, I'm not sure that swimsuits going to fit him properly. I think there's going to be some... overspill. It's times like this that I'm glad about the rudimentary nature of 8-bit graphics.

There's a pond in the back garden that you can dive into to test your new swimsuit. I was rather hoping that, as a puppet made of foam rubber and fake fur, ALF would just disintegrate in the water and I'd be spared any more of his smug antics, but sadly that's not the case. The pond is far deeper than you might expect a garden pond to be, so maybe I was wrong and the ALF family own a nice property on the edge of the Marianas Trench. It's a dangerous place, filled with harpoon-firing frogmen (instant death) and adorable kitten-shark hybrids (also instant death, but just so pwecious!).
Along the way, ALF find himself a nice big treasure chest full of pirate gold.

ALF smashes through the fourth wall, and you're left to wonder if his main motivation is getting back into space or pure greed. Right at the bottom is a clam with a huge pearl that ALF can also steal.

Now that the ocean depths have been plundered for ALF's selfish needs, it's back to the shopping district to sell you loot. Selling the pearl nets you another $100, so it's time to spend, spend, spend! The five and dime store has a lantern, useful for the dark basement, and an ALF book. Oh what the hey, let's buy the ALF book and see what happens!

(Animated for your displeasure.)

What.
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
Buying the book gives you the text shown above, and then dumps you right back at the title screen. Jesus fucking Christ. Really, Sega? Do you think this is funny, you bunch of pricks? God damn you all. You know what I be funny? I'm going to track down the developers and lay traps for them. I'm going to follow them and wait until they go into a shop and start browsing items on the shelves. I'm going to build a machine that attaches to the shelves, and when they pick up a book or a DVD or a videogame to read the blurb on the back, the machine springs into action and uses compressed air to fire a huge steel boot right into their goddamn crotch.
Anyway, if you can be bothered to redo all that, you'll be back at the shop with a lantern. That means you can can go and waggle your salami in the basement until you get to the deep dark hole.

After another cave section where your primary problem isn't the bats but the appalling collision detection, ALF find the fuel he needs to power his Space Segway. Rather than slogging your way back to the house through the cave, you can just kill yourself to warp back to the basement. I think it's time you people started a letter-writing campaign to Sega, accusing them of releasing a game that promotes suicide. You might be thinking "I can see how this game would make you want to kill yourself", but that's not true at all. You just want to kill the people that made it instead.

Space scooter go! There's another brief "action" stage here, where you have to hold the button to boost upward while avoiding the... well, I'm not sure what they are. I'm assuming they're supposed to be jumbo jets, but they're clearly smaller than ALF. They can't be in the distance, because touching them kills you. So, they're either some kind of tiny spy-drone sent to kill ALF (and godspeed to them if they are), or ALF's smug egotism has caused him to swell to a size comparable to a Boeing 747. The planes are easy enough to avoid, and after a while the sky fades from blue to black. I say "fades", I mean "displays several huge bars of different shades of blue".
ALF makes a brief stop at a convenient space station to buy a space suit, and then it's more of the same, except now ALF is wearing a spacesuit and you have to avoid meteors, too. Eventually you reach an exceptionally poorly-drawn moon:

The moon looks simultaneously angry and lecherous and, despite the game not giving you hint fucking one about this, you have to land your scooter in its open mouth. Yeah, I'm sure that'll cheer him up. Inside the moon's gob, ALF finds a spaceship repair kit, and that's the end of the game. Yep, that's it, finished, you're done. Go home, back to your loved ones, and try and forget that this ever happened.
What, you want to see the ending? Okay, here it is:

Yep, it's just a brief shot of ALF in his spaceship. So long, you smug git. Then there's a screen of credits.

THESE PEOPLE. THEY ARE TO BLAME.
When the best thing you can say about a game is that it's extremely short, you know you've got something especially wretched on your hands. ALF is like some kind of master mould for crappy licensed games of the 8-bit era, a paradigm of no-fun, no-effort, no-nothing tie-ins that clogged the release schedules like lard in fat man's heart. The graphics are awful, the gameplay is shallow almost to the point of non-existence and features some of the worst collision detection I've ever come across, there are no sound effects and the music consists of about four ten-second loops of the sort of high-pitched "joviality" that could make a nun stab the Pope. But like I said: at least it's over with quickly. So long, ALF, and let's hope you stay in space, where no-one can hear you quip.