COMMODORE 64 FOOTBALL GAME COVERS: WEIRD, UNSETTLING.

The era of the Commodore 64 is often fondly remembered as the time of the bedroom programmer, a magical period in the history of digital entertainment when a hit game could be produced by one man in a flat above a chip shop, new titles were sold for one pound ninety-nine and the top programmers of the day lived the lives of international playboys, spending their days painting the Commodore logo onto the taut young flesh of European supermodels like some terrible remake of Goldfinger.

It's better than a lot of tattoos.

This wave of amateur games-developing talent brought a wide variety of titles to the market, but they all had one thing in common: they needed a picture to go on the front. How else would you know whether you were buying a deep-space shoot-em-up or a platform game about a disgruntled miner? Non-existent development budgets meant that certain sacrifices had to be made when it came to cover art - artistic skill and talent, usually. Yet somehow these covers were often charming in their graceless wonkiness, and so I've put together this little look at some of the finest works of art to grace the tape inlays of the Commodore 64's many football games. Why football games? Because they demand artwork that depicts passion, dynamism and men with loose perms and tight shorts (this was the eighties, after all). Also there are loads of them.
Here we go then - C64 football game covers. You might notice that some of these pictures are from other systems, but the same artwork was also used for the C64 version.

Kick Off

Or Dino Dini's Kick Off, as I knew it. Who the hell is Dino Dini? I always assumed he was an Italian footballer. That seems logical, right? Turns out he was just the guy who designed the game and he happened to have a name that sounded like a Serie A superstar. Forget that, though, and check out this extremely unorthodox tackle. The serene expression, the hand gently caressing his rival's hip: the guy in the striped shirt is more content in this one beautiful moment than he has ever been in his entire life. Red isn't so pleased about the whole thing. You can tell this because he's about to scrape his boot right down stripey's crotch.
This is a decent start, though. At least this cover is full of action...

Kick Off (Re-release)

...unlike this one. You're really not selling me on the joy of physical movement here. Maybe I'm reading this all wrong - judging by the lines in the background, this version is actually the tragic story of a man who has been shrunk to a fraction of his normal size and placed into a game of table football, forced to play a sport he can barely comprehend for the sick pleasure of his captors. Now that sounds like a great idea for a movie! We'll get Shia LaBeouf and digitally clone him so he can be all the other, non-human players. It's the role he was born to play!
Also, the name of the company that released this doesn't help. Every laxative manufacturer in the world will be kicking themselves that they didn't think of it first.

Track Suit Manager

The name implies a kit-man simulator, or possibly a simulator of the guy subordinate to the kit-man: too young and inexperienced to deal with the actual kits, he has to content himself with managing the tracksuits until the current kit-man dies in a mysterious washing-machine-based "accident".
Not really, it's just a management sim. The screaming, chicken-like face of the Roy Hodgson look-a-like gawping in from the left should tell you that much. That old man is taking a good look at his player's muscular thighs, and he likes what he sees. Unfortunately the football pitch they were going to use for their next match is slowly being consumed by a dying sun, so the game is postponed until an alternative venue can be arranged. At least the manager's still happy, his heart burning with the thrill of the game and possibly some undiagnosed angina. Is there any other manager out there who can match pseudo-Roy's passion for the game?

Soccer Boss

Aagh! That's not an attractive look, is it? His eyes somehow seem to be sunken and bulging at the same time, which is interesting, but the real focus here is a mouth so cavernous that the Soccer Boss regularly wakes up to find teams of potholers exploring the regions around his molars. Actually, I think there might be something wrong with his sight because he's not even looking at the match. I'm no expert on the ins-and-outs of football management, but I'm pretty sure you should at least be facing toward the pitch.
A final note before I move onto the next picture (I can't stand to look at the Soccer Boss' demonic face any longer): I think the artist was told that football trophies often have ribbons on them but had never actually seen it happen in person, because the FA Cup generally doesn't come with a Minnie Mouse bow.

Football Frenzy

No, I won't mock this upstanding young man even if he is wearing a tie so vile even Stevie Wonder would smack him in the mouth (possibly with his piano). So what if he's wearing a rosette extremely similar to the ones given out at my infant-school sports days? I can't heap any scorn on this man, because if you look behind him he's clearly managing a team of wounded war veterans. What am I, unpatriotic?
One word of advice to Alternative Software: if your game has "Frenzy" in the title, your cover art should probably be a little more dynamic than a man in a suit standing in front of some other, seated, men.

Keith van Eron's Pro Soccer

Look, I'm trying to stay away from any jokes about what this sinister, gloved (no fingerprints, see?) man is going to do to those children, so instead I'll point out that despite football being really the only sport than can claim to be loved in all corners of the globe, this is the whitest picture I have ever seen that wasn't of me dancing.

European Football Champ

This cover might look reasonable enough at first glance, but when you look a little closer you'll notice that the artist went out of their way to depict exactly how you shouldn't play a game of football. The perspective makes the striker look a giant who's hurdling over two tiny defenders, but I have more of a problem with the fact he's not going anywhere near the ball. And don't shut your eyes! That's the first rule - never take your eye off the ball. Okay, it's the second rule, after "don't play against a race of elfin little people".
It's not just the players who are struggling, either - the referee has let play continue while he books the two players engaged in a bout of handbags, clearly contravening the rules of the game. He's so distracted that he doesn't even noticed the strange yellow fountain of alien spores being released into the atmosphere from the stands. I imagine that's what the stream would look like if you took a leak in zero gravity.

Footballer of the Year

"ME GIANT MAN CRUSH PUNY HUMANS!"

Graeme Souness: Soccer Manager

A cardboard cut-out of a Liverpool player glides down the touchline as the floating head of Graeme Souness looks on, silent rueing his decision to go for the "Varnished Oak" setting at his local tanning salon. I don't know why the background is slightly pixellated: maybe it's to show that Souness' mind is as precise and clinical as a supercomputer. Maybe Graeme is a big fan of quilted blankets. All I can say is that it reminds me of checking the football scores on Teletext, another one of those quaint old customs that has been destroyed by the internet like posting a letter or using correct spelling and grammar.

Bundesliga Manager

I've saved my very favourite 'til last, and boy does Bundesliga Manager's cover pack a raw emotional punch. Just look at that guy in the middle, who is presumably the Bundesliga Manager of the title. Not for him the excitement, the sheer joy of succeeding at the top level of world football (a scenario demonstrated by the group of players mucking about with a cremation urn in the upper-right corner): in his miserable, briefcase-strewn existence there is room only for disappointment, failure and all-consuming guilt. Those papers in front of him? That's a petition signed by thousands of supporters in favour of having him ejected from Germany using a large catapult of some description, maybe a trebuchet... look, they haven't quite sorted the details out yet, okay? The important thing is that this man knows he will die alone and unloved.
The guy on the phone behind him is actually talking to the Samaritans, hoping for some advice on thwarting BM's imminent suicide attempt. Don't be fooled into thinking this is an act of compassion, though - the man on the phone is the team's assistant manager and he simply doesn't want the job on a more permanent basis. What I'm saying is the top level of German football is a viper's nest of pain and degradation, especially if you look like shamed British comedian Chris Langham.

Christ, he looks like something out a Heironymous Bosch painting. Not one of the nice ones either, I mean one of the ones with all the bum-demons.
Football on the Commodore 64, then. Suddenly "The Beautiful Game" has never seemed like more of a misnomer. That said, so many game covers nowadays are simple created by posing in-game assets against a dark background that I do genuinely miss the often baffling yet endearingly cack-handed artworks of yesteryear.

BONUS! Street Cred' Football

A warning to my fellow humans! Aliens have arrived on Earth and are attempting to assimilate themselves into our societies! You can spot these alien intruders fairly easily, as they have not yet learned to accurately mimic human faces. Also they play football by punching the ball around using a series of motions not unlike those found in our Earth kung-fu, only really fucking stupid-looking.
Obviously this the game's title is laughable, because if you were to wear clothes like that and perform similar hand motions your "credibility" on the "street" would diminish very rapidly indeed. You know what else shows this game up as possibly not being as hip as it would like to be? They used an apostrophe to indicate that "Cred" is the abbreviated version of "credibility". That's kind of amazing.

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SHUFFLEPUCK CAFE (NES)

Thwinck.
Thwinck.
Thwinck.
That's right, it's air hockey time again. This isn't your standard "neglected table in a cinema lobby" air hockey, though - this is air hockey... in space! What do you mean, we've already had one of these? Oh yeah, that one. Well, this is different - it's got robots and aliens and stuff. Which Paddle Fighter also had. Nuts. Oh well, here's Broderbund's 1990 puck-em-up for the NES, Shufflepuck Cafe.

Shufflepuck Cafe was originally developed for the Apple Mac, and Broderbund eventually ported it to many of the home computers of the time, but this article is about the Famicom version. That's partly because of a graphical factor that I'll talk about in a bit, but mostly because I haven't played a NES game for a few weeks and I was starting to miss them - after a while, my feeble brain starts craving the simplicity of two-button control systems.

Shufflepuck Cafe only actually received a Famicom port in Japan: for whatever reason, the West was deemed not ready for the kind of thrills only high-speed intergalactic bar games can offer. Luckily there's a translated version by someone calling themselves MadHacker, (unless that's their real name, in which case I can only offer my condolences,) so we can enjoy the game in full English. And why would an air hockey game need to be in English? Why, so we can experience the fabulous story, of course!

You're the galaxy's top salesman of Krypton-3, a substance that is never defined but which I assume is some kind of futuristic encyclopedia set, or possibly a revolutionary new miniature vacuum cleaner. You're tootling around space, looking for the next astro-senior-citizen to fleece with your overpriced cosmo-wares when your rocket-car breaks down and you find yourself at the Shufflepuck Cafe of the title. You need to use the telephone to call whatever the interplanetary equivalent of the AA is, but to get to the phone you must first beat the degenerate patrons of the Shufflepuck Cafe in a tournament. Not a shufflepuck tournament, though: the game is rather misleading on that front. Nope, it's air hockey all around. So, you step into the bar...

...which promptly falls silent as the inhabitants turn to stare at you. Walking into a bar and having everyone in there stop talking and stare at you like something out of An American Werewolf in London is, as I can attest from personal experience, pretty goddamn unsettling. Just look at these guys! I started a game of Dark Souls at the weekend and that felt warm and inviting compared to this. To be fair, the first thing I did on Dark Souls was kick a zombie off a cliff and that always makes me feel at ease, but still: the Shufflepuck Cafe is not a place for the faint of heart.
This screen is sort of a hub area, and you can click on each bar patron / weirdo to engage them in an air hockey duel. I thought this was all there was to the game, until I looked online and found out you can click the "champion" sign to enter a tournament and face each character in turn. Let's do that, shall we? Who's up first?

This is Skip. He's new to air hockey and he looks like a typical nerd, but I'd be cautious - he's sitting in the (apparently) dangerous Shufflepuck Cafe without being hassled or violently murdered, so there must be something else to him. He's probably a serial killer who specialises in posing his victims like life-sized dolls at a tea party. It's always the quiet ones.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you how this works, but I'm going to do it anyway otherwise we'll both be sitting here in silence, awkwardly clearing our throats every now and then. You use the d-pad to move your paddle and try to hit the puck past your opponent's paddle and against the back wall. Doing this will score you a point, and the first to fifteen points is the winner and gets to keep all their internal organs, you know, internal. It all works as you'd expect and the paddle moves about quite smoothly, although there is one problem. Your paddle has two speeds it can move at, fast and slow. Slow is far too slow to be of much use, so you want to be in fast mode all the time. The trouble with this is that you have to hold a button down to speed your paddle up, meaning you have to play the whole game with your thumb clamped down as firmly as if you were trying to staunch the flow of blood to a particularly nasty paper cut. It's not much of a problem, but the fact that it could have so easily been avoided is a little irritating.
Of course, Skip here is really bad at air hockey and even the most uncoordinated, slack-jawed dolts (like me) can beat him with ease. Next opponent, please!

Yeah, she looks like a real barrel of laughs. Or possibly just a barrel, with a face painted on. This is Visine, and she's a creepy little prick.

See what I mean? Sure, I'll enter an air hockey tournament, who am I going to be playing? A giant, moon-eyed floating head with eyebrows bigger than my forearm. I see. I'll get my coat.
Of course, Visine is a tougher opponent than Skip, but that's not really down to any talent on her part - she tries to beat you through sheer awkwardness. The only shot she ever plays is to hit the puck from side-to-side so that it advances slowly down the table, bouncing back and forth between the side walls. It should be easy, but if you're just getting used to the game it can actually be quite hard to hit the puck despite it having all the velocity of a tortoise with a cold. This makes it particularly embarrassing which you swing for the puck, miss it entirely and then see it slowly dawdle against your back wall, your impotent frustration only rising as you look down the table at Visine and her big stupid face, her saucer-eyes silently mocking you.
I'm sure you'll figure it out eventually, though. Next up is Vinnie.

A face like a scrotum trapped in an industrial lathe and he's still less creepy than Visine.

At least he doesn't have any infuriating gimmicks: he just plays a good, honest game of air hockey and is a bit better at it than Skip and Visine. You're okay by me, Vinnie, even if you do look like the bastard offspring of E.T. and a mandrill's arse.

Finally, a participant with some class! This handsome green fellow is Lexan Smith Washington (at least in this translation): a champagne-quaffing playboy who, judging by the shape of his head, belongs to a race who evolved from bicycle saddles.

He's a fairly standard opponent with an interesting flaw: as the match goes on, he sips from his glass of champagne and gradually gets hammered until he's much less difficult than he was at the start. At least, that's what I heard - I can't say I noticed it at the time I was playing him, so maybe this piece of character-based gameplay fun was left out of the NES version.

Your fifth opponent is The General, and I'm not sure whether this introduction means that's a metaphorical mask or he's literally wearing the hollowed-out head of a pig in an attempt to put me off my game. Either option seems equally likely.

There's not much else to say about The General other than here's yet another example of pigs being depicted as militaristic villains in a videogame. Man, pigs sure do get a harsh ride from games developers and it's hardly justified. I've never known a pig to place a country under military rule after a bloody coup. Maybe developers should look to dolphins if they need an anthropomorphic race of intelligent villains - after all, dolphins are where the real threat lies. I don't trust anything that has that many teeth and smiles all the time.

Things get spooky with the next opponent, Nerual. It seems that there aren't enough things dying in the universe at the moment, so the grim reapers of the galaxy can put their bony feet up and relax with a drink and a nice game of air hockey. I guess even the timeless arbiters of our final end get bored of chess eventually.
Also, that skull planet in the background totally reminded me of (and here's a bit of nineties British heavy metal esoterica for you) the covers of Praying Mantis' albums that were illustrated by Rodney Matthews.
Nerual's strategy is to grind away your resistance through sheer boredom. He returns your shots with little speed, but is very difficult to get past and relies on you making mistakes to claim victory. This means he's incredibly tedious to play against, but the silver lining to this dismal cloud is that I can show you that graphical thing I mentioned at the start, demonstrated here through the magic of an animated gif.

As you can see, the puck moves into and out of the foreground, with the "3D" effect in this case being created through the use of sprite scaling. Quite a few NES games used sprite scaling, usually in order to mimic Sega's Super-Scaler games such as Space Harrier, and a lot of the time the results were frankly disappointing. Shufflepuck Cafe keeps it simple, though, and the puck moves about in a nicely fluid manner that provides the level of precision needed to make this kind of 3D, Pong-style game anything other than an exercise in extreme frustration. In fact, I think it moves even more smoothly than it looks here, because I am bad at making even the simplest of gifs.
Once Nerual is out of the way, you're into the semi-finals and a beautiful young lady appears to challenge you.

I'm not so much startled by her beauty as I am by the fact she's dislocated both her shoulders and yet she's still smiling. Am I good enough to take her serve? No, no I am not. This is because Bejin is a cheating scumbag.

She's got psychic powers, and rather than using them for good by catching criminals or something, or instead of even using them for fun, she uses her psionic mind-force to cheat at air hockey. Whenever she serves, she magically places the puck in your half, waves her hands about and then teleports it at high speed into one of the corners. It's almost always a guaranteed point for her: I tried using guess work and pre-covering one of the corners with my paddle but I'm either very unlucky or Bejin knew exactly what I was trying to do and sent it over to the other side. God knows how she's survived this long without receiving a brual shanking, The General doesn't look like he'd take kindly to cheaters.
The fight with Nerual was dull, but at least it was fair. This kind of straight-up cheating brings shame on scantily-clad psychic princess everywhere, and I'm sure there are enough of those in videogames to form an angry mob that will bring you down, Bejin. I'm hoping they'll bring you down, at least, because I sure has hell couldn't. What's this? A password that’ll let me skip to the next opponent? Ah ha ha, so long you black-hearted harpy!

The next opponent is indeed the last opponent, a charming young chap called Biff. One day, I'm sure I'll meet a Professor of Experimental Particle Physics or a ballet director or even just a regular, friendly guy named Biff - but not today. This Biff is big, mean and carries a tiny wrestling ring with him wherever he goes, presumably just in case he wants to make his two pet hamsters fight.

As I'm sure you've already figured out, Biff takes all the best elements of the previous challengers and combines them into an air hockey performance of such raw power that they have to bring in a new table between each rally, the previous one having being compressed into a single diamond by the heat and pressure generated by Biff's... air hockeying? That doesn't sound right.
However, he's not the hardest opponent to beat because he's not a dishonest, cheating swine. He might look like Charles Bronson cosplaying as Zangief, but he's a man with principles and as such he puts up a very difficult but fair fight. More fool him, because that means I can beat him. Let that be a lesson to you, Biff: cheats - at least in videogames - always prosper.
And then you're done, Shufflepuck Cafe is complete and you can call roadside assistance to fix your "Nash Sombrero" (space-car). You'll be swindling housewives everywhere into buying Kryton-3 in no time!

You don't get to see any of that, though. Broderbund must have exhausted their storytelling capabilities on the fairly involved intro, because all you get when you complete the game is the same picture of each character as before with their names written underneath. Oh, and the Pony Canyon (a Japanese record company / publishing firm who published the NES version of SC) logo. How rewarding.

It's pretty obvious what that wrap-up here is going to be, because it's only a simple NES Pong game after all. There's no way it's going to sustain your interest for more than ten minutes these days - there are better in-browser versions of the same thing - and it was hardly jam-packed with features even in the days of the Famicom. That said, it's not without its good points. The graphics are very nice, and the characters are all interesting and have a surprising amount of personality despite their small number of animations. I particularly like the way Biff reacts to each point scored with either a tiny scowl or smirk, depending on who scored. It even just about makes up for the near-total lack of music - each match is only accompanied by the sound effects, which is a shame but better than Paddle Fighter's one goddamn track that was repeated forever.
One of the most interesting things about SC is the final character that I've yet to mention. His name's DC3 and he's a robot.

A shufflepuck robot, to be precise, and he's interesting because you can set all his playing parameters however you want. You can change the size of his paddle, how fast it moves, things like that, essentially letting you play against whatever level of opponent you feel like while avoiding bullshit like Benjin's psychic antics. It's not much, but in a game as slim as this every little helps.

In conclusion, Shufflepuck Cafe is better than Paddle Fighter, which I'm aware is hardly heady praise but what else can I say? If you're really desperate to play an 8-bit Pong clone and perpetuate the stereotype of porcine evil, then Shufflepuck Cafe is probably the best one you're going to find. And as there's no music, you can make yourself a mix-tape of bombastic eighties rock anthems to listen to while you play for that authentic "sports movie" experience. That's VGJUNK for you: always finding new ways to make twenty-year-old videogames about air hockey slightly better. My mother would be proud.

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McDONALD'S TREASURE LAND ADVENTURE (GEN)

It's time to put a smile on your face and a dangerously high level of cholesterol in your arteries! It's time to hunt for treasure and wield ancient magical powers! It's your chance to play as the world's most famous clown! No, not Charlie Sheen - it's time to take on the role of burger-shifter and face-painted nightmare beacon Ronald McDonald in the 1993 Megadrive / Genesis golden-arches-em-up McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure.

I know, I know: it sounds bad. A licensed platformer based on a fast-food franchise, and not even a franchise with a cool mascot like Colonel Sanders or Pasty Pete, the eight-foot tall sentient Cornish pasty who promotes Greggs. Don't despair just yet, though - a glimmer of hope breaks free of the clown-spawned darkness! You see, while this game undeniably boils down to McDonald's: the Platforming Videogame, it wasn't developed by the usual peddlers of slapdash marketing tie-ins. Without an Ocean Software or LJN in sight, McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure was developed by cult favourites Treasure.

I don't think Treasure ever made a bad game. If they did, I've never played it. Dare I dream that MTLA might actually turn out to be... good? I haven't been this excited about a McDonald's product since I got a back-flipping toy Goomba in my Happy Meal when I was a kid.
Of course, Ronald needs a motivation for all this platforming nonsense and as it turns out, his impetus is greed.

Ronald finds part of a treasure map in the woods. Every time I found paper in the woods it turned out to be discarded pornography, but this is the Magical Forest and apparently fragments of treasure maps are more magical than waterlogged copies of Razzle. While that's patently not true to a thirteen-year-old boy, it's a good enough way to start an adventure, I suppose.

The plot of this McDonald's game is simply to amass more material wealth. No tacked-on, faux-moralistic ideas like celebrating the power of friendship or protecting the environment - Ronald just gotta get paid, maybe even finding enough treasure to buy his freedom from McDonald's Corp. and spend his retirement doing what he loves best: abducting children and mailing them back to their parents piece-by-piece. Well, he is a clown, after all.

Here we are in the Magical Forest, and already this looks promising. The graphics are clean and sharp, with an interesting art style pitched somewhere between other Treasures games like Gunstar Heroes and Sonic the Hedgehog. It looks, in short, like someone who knew what they were doing made it.
The gameplay will be instantly familiar to anyone who's ever played a 16-bit videogame before. You must guide Ronald to the exit, jumping from platform to platform, avoiding the various enemies, spreading the message of cheap, convenient foodstuffs to all who cross his path and ruthless eliminating those who don't listen.

Ronald's got a few other moves besides his basic jumping skills. The first is a grappling-hook-type power that lets you grab onto certain outcroppings and propel yourself upwards. It's called a "scarf" in the game, but it's clearly a series of handkerchiefs knotted together. It's this kind of deception that proves you should never trust grinning corporate mascots, especially when all the evidence points to them being a disturbing mixture of clown, children's magician and multi-million dollar propaganda icon.

As for defeating your enemies, this is accomplished by the magic rays Ronald can shoot out of his fingers. Ronald's mastery of the black art of sorcery was an aspect of his character that I must admit I overlooked as a child, although McDonald's must share some of the blame because they never really drew attention to his arcane powers. They should have pictures of him sacrificing a goat on the Happy Meal boxes, just so we're fully informed about the kind of man we're allowing to entertain our children.

There are only four worlds, but each world is split into quite a few smaller stages that vary in length: some are full-on platforming or forced-scrolling areas, like an act in a Sonic game, while some are very short but with an unusual obstacle in the way that almost gives the stage the feel of a puzzle game. This being a Treasure game, new gameplay mechanics and set-pieces pop up one after another, taking something that could have easily been a one-note borefest like Mick & Mack: Global Gladiators and transforming it into a game that's worth playing. The first world alone sees Ronald travelling through the forest as day turns to night, climbing a robot tree, riding giant frogs and eventually entering an advanced underground facility.

I say advanced - I think it just seems that way after you've spend some time in a colourful world of clowns and enchanted forests. I suppose it can't be that advanced, because every five seconds Ronald has to find a "Safety Zone" or risk being swept away by the torrents of water that erupt seemingly without purpose. Anti-clown defences, perhaps?
The underground base is also home to one of Ronald's lovable friends: unreformable villain and compulsive fast-food thief the Hamburglar. He's got a favour to ask of you:

Okay, this might look like a simple enough scene but there some disturbing undercurrents going on here. First off, ha ha ha - he wants to get his hands on Ronald's pair of jewels. Hamburglar must come from a world without innuendo (or morals). While we all love a good bollock joke, things develop a more sinister air when you realise that the jewels actually measure Ronald's health and when he runs out of jewels, he dies. The Hamburglar is demanding that you pay him with your very life essence in order to proceed with the game. I didn't want to go too far down the "McDonald's is aligned with dark forces beyond the ken of man" route, but it's hard to ignore the fact that this supposedly child-friendly mascot is draining my health like some cheerfully vampiric muppet.

Most worrying of all is the fact that the Hamburglar is a shameless, unabashed felon and Ronald is expected to entrust his magical life crystals to him. If you're such an incorrigible repeat offender that your crime starts being used as your given name, you're not someone who should be trusted, you’re certainly not someone that children should be exposed to and you might want to look into therapy for your severe kleptomania.
So, you give the disturbing little child-man your jewels, he gives you a hint about how to defeat the boss and you're free to head onwards and encounter said boss.

It's a giant, mobile tomato whose playful expression rather contrasts with the bleak background decor. Looking at those flickering candles and strange sculptures, it seems like it'd be more suited to an aristocratic tomato vampire. That all begins to make sense when you discover that this tomato is a vampire. He's normally impervious to even Ronald's diabolical magicks, and the only way you can hurt him is by letting him eat some of your health.

It might look like he's vomiting up the contents of his previous blood supper, but that's actually a beam that steals Ronald's health. You need to let this beam hit you then blast away with your magic while the tomato is chewing and vulnerable. All the bosses share this weakness, and thus every boss battle also has an infinite supply of small enemies wandering about which can be killed for health pick-ups. It's certainly unique, but this tomato has met his match and is dispatched quickly enough.

Ronald beats the shit out of him and takes his piece of the treasure map. Remember that, kids - if someone has something you want, just beat them up and take it. Now the clown has half of the map as well as the logging rights to the Magical Forest, allowing him to deforest the whole area and plant enough soya to feed McDonald's vast herds of chicken. Time for stage two!

It's Magical Town, but you spend half your time here making your way to the town itself via several forced-scrolling sections on a train. Treasure really ramped-up the cute factor here - if anything involving clowns can ever truly be considered "cute" - with everything taking on a pastel-toned, almost Kirby-esque feel. Those little guys in the train windows certainly look like they could have come from a Kirby game, at least, but as cute as they are they're still trying to murder you. They're determined that Ronald won't reach his destination alive, which is terribly suspicious: what lies at the end of this train line that the bad guys are so desperate to keep Ronald away from? What are you hiding? I'll do whatever it takes to find out...

...no matter how many bunny-eared ballerinas I have to crawl over to get there. It was at this point, as Ronald hopped between the glassy-eyed dancers that filled the rail tunnel, that I realised McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure has absolutely fuck all to do with McDonald's. All you'd have to do is change the sprites of the McDonaldland characters - not a huge task as there are only five of six of them - to something else and you'd have a completely original platform game that first-time players would never suspect was once a corporate tie-in. You wouldn't even have to change Ronald's sprite to something else, because this really does feel like a game where you should be controlling a clown. Just alter his colour palette slightly, change his name to Randy McDandy or something, and pow! You'd be left with another quality product from the folks at Treasure without the taint of the McDonald's name.

Sadly, we're stuck with Ronald. The train journey ends eventually, and Ronald sets out into Magical Town on a quest to... wait, what was he doing? Oh yeah, finding the pieces of that map despite having no clue where they are or who owns them. He's just going to roll into town and use his magic to dispatch anyone who stands in his way, killing indiscriminately until he locates the next section of the map. No wonder those guys on the train didn't want Ronald to reach town.
Magical Town is also inhabited by a great many sumo wrestlers whose foot-slams are so powerful they can alter the terrain around them. My favourite bit of the stage is this neat little section where Ronald has to make his way up a building site, the scaffolding swaying in all directions as the sumos pound their feet. Treasure also gave the sumos a pair of rather pronounced hot-pink nipples. It's not important, I just thought you might like to have that knowledge tucked away in your head as you look at the sumo's disturbing grin in the screenshot above. Ask yourself this: why is he so happy?

Then there's the boss. I have no idea what it is supposed to be. It looks like a large maggot or grub with handles sticking out of either end, elongated arms and the helmet from a green suit of medieval armour glued in the middle. Oh, and the helmet is wearing a bow. I'm pretty sure that's not what it's supposed to be but with this visual it's very hard to argue that this isn't a stretchy-armed helmet maggot.
You fight him like the last boss - let him drain your health and them hit him while he's chewing on your delicious energy crystals. It turns out that the hang-glider grub thing was being piloted by a little gremlin kid.

"Please stop crying" - the second-most common sentence uttered by clowns, just behind "I've got puppies and candy in my van". Rather than straight-up brutalising him, Ronald buys the gremlinoid's silence with some crystals and takes the third part of the map. With only one section remaining, Ronald heads to stage three: the Magical Sea! Really? Magical Sea? If you just keep calling everything "magical" then it's just going to devalue the word "magical". Are you like this everywhere you go, Ronald? "Here's a magical window, and a magical toilet, and a magical bunk-bed I used share with my magical cell-mate Magical Harry before I stabbed him with a magically-sharpened toothbrush."
There are two types of stages in the Magical Sea - on a pirate ship or inside a pirate ship.

I don't think much to this remake of The Birds.
You should know what to expect by now: platform japery with the odd interesting twist. For example, in the area pictured above you have to contend with the large waves that splash across the screen now and then. Just before that, there's a section where Ronald travels in some small rowing boats that are cut in half by submarine saw blades, gradually drifting into two halves and sinking slowly. MTLA's quality comes from the balance of three elements - a solid base of tight, responsive controls and good hit detection, interesting twists to the standard platforming formula that appear with pleasing regularity, and attention to small details that highlights the amount or work and care that went into making the game - things like the cloud-platforms grimacing under Ronald's weight when he jumps on them.

Anyway, the pirate ship is a maze of doors, zip-lines and rolling barrels which pulls of the neat trick of being a maze level in a platform game that doesn't feel like a tedious, needlessly-confusing slog. It helps that you encounter this guy along the way:

He's a fearsome-lookin' knight who puts up his dukes and then backs away, inviting you to come and attack him. He backs away and backs away, keeping his guard up... until he backs up so far he falls into a hole and dies. These pirates - a group of people you'd think would be used to guarding treasure maps - are woefully unprepared for Ronald McDonald and his magical onslaught.

Of course, the pirate cap'n is the boss. His is a fascinating backstory - you see, Scarlet Johansson's lips escaped from her face and fled Hollywood, eventually settling into a life of plunder on the Spanish Main. Also he has a big hat, which he can use as a weapon. The same boss rules apply, although this is a more interesting fight as he can summon various enemies by pulling the two ropes in the center of the room, and what starts off seeming like it's going to be a straight-forward battle quickly becomes an exercise in finding a safe place to stand and remembering to let him hit you with his life-stealing breath-beam so you can hurt him.
And hurt him you shall, because Ronald will let nothing stand between him and that map, not now, not after all he's been through - the thunder gnomes, the ballerina tunnel, seeing Hamburglar dragged off to prison after his years of compulsive shoplifting finally caught up with him. Once Cap'n Hotlips is defeated, Ronald finally has access to the completed map. But where is the treasure located?

It's on the moon! Sorry, a moon. It is not specified which moon. Phobos, possibly. Ronald's magic is not yet advanced enough to let him cross the vast interstellar gulfs, so he decides to turn to The Professor for help. Let's just hope he's not a professor in seventeenth-century Russian literature or something like that. He's probably a real renaissance man, someone who knows something about everything, a true intellectual titan. After all, anyone appearing in a McDonald's-themed videogame is bound to be a bastion of scientific rigour, right?

I wouldn't trust this man to sell me a whoopee cushion, let alone build me a manned space vehicle. He's like a cartoonified version of John McCririck, except presumably less misogynistic. However, Ronald's quest for riches has blinded him so thoroughly that he'll let this "Professor" - whose doctorate is never revealed, by the way - fire him to the moon.

Of course you fucking crashed, did you see that Professor?! Ronald's mission has switched from finding the treasure to basic survival, and you've got to find a way to repair the ship before Grimace starts looking like a Happy Meal and the McDonaldland family are forced into cannibalism. It's time for the final stage: the moon! It's magical!

Fortunately for Ronald, every clown's blood-pact with the dark lord Satan gives them the ability to survive on atmosphereless planetoids, and that's where the world begins. Then you get chased by a really cool UFO. It's got a laser-firing dragon head that uses its advanced energy weapons to blow whacking great chunks out of the floor, hoping to see Ronald fall to his grisly death. Then Ronald is taken aboard said UFO, and the main bulk of the world begins. Speaking of bulk, Ronald probably weighs a good thirteen or fourteen stone, plus his baggy clown robes and giant shoes add considerably to that. With that in mind, look at these poor cat-things:

First evolution shafts you by moulding your species into overweight, winged cat-creatures with genitalia shaped like subway straps, and then a fat clown appears and grabs you by the dick. No wonder their eyes are bulging out.

As you might expect, the final stage is a mixture of all the things you've faced before, putting your jumping and scarf-whipping talents to the ultimate test. Although, what the final stage reminds me of most is the Chemical Plant Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog 2: between the rotating platforms made of square blocks pictured above to the strange blue liquid that the enemies squirt at you to the overall mechanical nature of the stage, it's a comparison that's hard to ignore.

Then Ronald gets past a guard by slipping him some drugged life crystals. The saddest part is that we are no longer disgusted by Ronald's behaviour: indeed, we have come to expect it.

His terrifying rampage is nearly over, though, because we're at the last boss. It's that green dude at the bottom of the screen, not the pretty adorable slug-monster in the middle (who looks like an escapee from The Trap Door). The fight has a rather unusual set up: you can't tell from the screenshot, but the three levels spin around like sideways roulette wheels. When they come to a halt, you can jump into any door on your level and you'll emerge from the other door with the same pattern on. You've got to let the boss hit you with his health-draining ray, then get onto the same level as him so you can shoot him, and then get back out of a door because if you're trapped on the same level as the boss you're guaranteed to take some damage.
Sadly, it's not nearly as interesting a final boss battle as the rest of the game made me think it might be. In fact, it ends up being kind of tedious and you spend most of the fight waiting around for the doors to line up correctly or for the boss to not be standing directly outside the only door you could exit from. It's not exactly difficult, though, and with a bit of patience you'll be able to defeat your final opponent.

Beaten and cowed, the once-proud leader of the Moon People grovels before his new master. Ronald, fickle as ever, announces that he doesn't want the treasure after all; he just wants to go home. Fortunately the treasure happens to be a rainbow bridge that takes them back to McDonaldland.

Well, that was convenient. Ronald and his friends return home, the Moon People are left to rebuild their shattered civilisation and all is right with the universe.
I've played some really bad games I'd never heard of before over the lifetime of VGJUNK, and McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure could so easily have been one of them. A licensed fast-food tie-in, and something as generic as a platformer at that? Lesser hearts would tremble at the idea, but then Treasure came along: beautiful, wonderful Treasure, and they crafted a game that has almost nothing to do with the fast food giants and everything to do with good, solid game design.
Presentation-wise, it's hard to fault MTLA at all - the graphics are gorgeous, and the wonderfully geometric art style makes it that bit more interesting than your usual "grass-n-hills" type background. I don't think there's a colour in the Megadrive's palette that isn't used at some point, and the graphics are matched by some really excellent music.

As for the gameplay, it more than matches up. It's fast-paced, there's always something new happening and the stages are varies without ever descending into cliches like "ice world" or "fire world". Everything works just as it should, and in a way I feel bad that a game as good as this got lumbered with the McDonald's name. It's not quite a true hidden classic - there are a few too many blind jumps for my liking, and overall it's rather short - but it's certainly not far off, and I would unreservedly recommend it to anyone with a love of colourful, well-constructed platform games. Look past the name and give McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure a chance, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Oh, Ronald: everything you say sounds like a threat.

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