The Brothers Duomazov: TaleSpin

Radiance - 1991 - U.S.A.

HuCard

Oh man, this game is fucking awful. It's horrid. Heinous. My good brother IvaNEC is probably a little more diplomatic in his assessment of the situation, so I'll defer to his synopsis on this one. It's safe to say I never want to have to touch this game again with a ten foot pole, so I'm going to forgo the obligatory screenshot session and leave you instead with some advice: do not ever buy this game, do not accept this game if someone offers to give it to you as a gift, and upon unwanted receipt of this game, dispose of it promptly.

The first time I powered up TaleSpin on my Duo, a black hole materialized in my game room with the apparent mission of ridding the universe of fun and good times. I tried to turn my Duo off as quickly as possible, but the damage was done. I immediately caught myself about to leap out my third story window to a splattery concrete end, and instead drove myself to the ER. They said my brain had been completely depleted of serotonin and dopamine, the neurotransmitters fused. They had never seen anything like it. A steady year-long diet of Xanax, Valium and Prozac was my only recourse and to this day I still have flashbacks, a side effect of the post-traumatic stress disorder I've since been diagnosed with.

~ TALESPIN ~

Radiance Software / NEC

HuCard

1991

While people don't typically heap praise on this cartoony action-platformer, they don't often give it the shellacking it deserves either. So for a long time I actually thought I would enjoy the game, as something about the look of it in the few screenshots I'd seen appealed to me.

But this is one of the few Turbo titles that actually look worse when viewed on a television screen than when seen in screen caps. The backgrounds lack detail, the enemy designs are uninspired, and the scenery is bland. The music and sound effects are even more offensive than the visuals, as they're of such revoltingly low quality that they'd be deemed unacceptable for a low-level NES cart. But the horrible controls and ill-conceived stage designs are the aspects that are truly unforgivable, as they "team up" to make the experience as aggravating as possible. But don't worry: it's easy to come up with "strategies" that'll enable you to cheese your way through the levels, and most of the bosses require you to do little more than hold down the fire button (even the last battle is a complete joke). To top it all off, the ending stinks.

I try to look for the good in everything and all that, and I guess the "good" in this case is the variety in weapons you use and challenges you face. You toss snowballs in the cold level and wield an air hose in the underwater level; and there's a sidescrolling shooter stage, a stage that lets you control some other bum, and vertically scrolling "sky skiing" bonus strips. But when everything looks so terrible, sounds so terrible, and plays so terribly, variety can hardly offset all the negative stuff.