By the turn of the millennium a technology known as VIRTUAL REALITY will be in widespread use. It will allow you to enter computer generated artificial worlds as unlimited as the imagination itself. Its creators foresee millions of positive uses - while others fear it as a new form of mind control...
| Developer: | The Sales Curve | | | Release Date: | 8th November 1993 | | | Systems: | SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy |
Hello, everyone! I'm going to take it easy and play a 16-bit movie license today. This game was recommended to me because it has flashy graphics and fancy effects. The person recommending it to me hadn't actually played it themselves, but what can you do?
I'm not going to go in-depth talking about the original film. In fact I played the game before having seen it! But I'll warn you about potential spoilers for it anyway now if you'd rather not read anything like that.
The game begins with an eerie synth chorus and droning sounds, and sinister, artificial swirling plasma and 3D effects, together with the text from the movie, to make things all nice and authentic.
Leave it on long enough and the music kicks into a catchy Amiga-esque theme (YouTube link) and you get some neat stills from the movie telling you what's what. I haven't seen the movie since I was very tiny, so I'll just have to take the game's word for it all.
Here's the plot, according to the game:
Jobe was a simpleton. Everybody called him the Lawnmower Man. Dr. Angelo experimented with virtual reality to vastly increase Jobe's intelligence. The research was funded by The Shop. Their interest was its potential military use. They programmed Jobe with their own V.R. treatment and created a monster. Only Angelo and Carla can break into Jobe's virtual domain and defeat him.
Because this is the nineties, the only way to stop a problem in the digital world is to put on your slinky super-suit, dive into virtual reality and give whoever's inside a firm kick to the glossy, untextured balls. We might even meet the guy from Time Commando in there.
There's two main The Lawnmower Man games: an action game on the SNES, Mega Drive and Game Boy, and an interactive movie type thing on the Sega CD and MS-DOS. I'm going to be sticking to the platform game today because I want a nice easy game to have fun with after the epic trial of The Speris Legacy.
If you'd like, you and a friend can be a pair of blue and red Pierce Brosnans. Live your dreams, it's virtual reality!
On the way, I come across a wee lumbering gibbon also out for a walk. With a gun. The flashing skull and blinking exclamation mark indicate that this guy is probably not my friend, so I let him have both barrels, blasting him into a million pieces.
Youch! I thought I was being clever by getting down, but one shot from the soldier's rifle and Pierce is obliterated. It all happened in an instant; I had to slow these gifs down a little to show you what even happened.
There's data in them there trash bins. When I blow 'em up, shiny CDs burst out for bonus points.
Not that I have much of a frame of reference, but this game doesn't look much like a SNES game to me at all. The ridiculous, pointless interface that takes up a third of the screen is classic 8-bit Batman.
I doubt the developer put those bars in to speed things up. Perhaps they wanted the gameplay window to be widescreen to make everything extra cinematic? It would look so much better without the interface at all - like Another World almost.
Let's give it a shot. Click here to see the above gif with the interface edited out.
Doesn't that look better? It looks so... well... good.
With our little lanky hero running about on top of buildings, it looks like Canabalt.
The Canabalt guy is so small!
I can't control my speed, but I can swoop about in four directions to avoid the pillars and gateways rushing towards me. At the end is a set of giant spinning golden EXIT letters, and we're done.
These guys run straight at you (like everything has so far), but now when you hit 'em with plasma they bounce all over the place!
The car is the first boss - it drives back and forth trying to kill poor Angelo, with a grenade launcher dude popping out every few laps to fling out bizarre darkness grenades that discombobulate me on contact.
Each of the bouncy, Blues Brothersy discs fills up the little gauge in the top left beside my lives. When it exceeds the lower red margin...
Clad in the Virtual Suit, Angelo can take one additional hit... and that's it. He's got no extra attacks, no increase to his feeble speed, and he could already jump higher than a tree.
I love our oblivious lanky little hero man, with his bouncy floppy mop of hair, cream casual slacks and blank shiny specs. He's got a Japanese cartoon look to him - and he really is a zany scientist after all.
Gotta wonder where he got his hands on that bizarre double-shot electric rifle in the first place. Are we in virtual reality already or what? I'm super confused now.
If you're at all curious, the Mega Drive version has a case of The Same. The Mega Drive hardware has a SNES-sized video mode, so they didn't even have to redraw anything for the Mega Drive, just suck out a few colours.
The Mega Drive version cuts out the very first part of suburbia, beginning the game at the 'Industrial Zone' flight sequence. Other than that, it's the same. Even though the in-game bloke has changed, the little computer at the bottom still shows his original sprite when you collect enough CDs to transform.
Next, these rooftops lead to another dead end and another digital gateway, this time to 'Virtual Atlantis'. It's the same as the 'Industrial Zone', except with new graphics and the added challenge of obstacles above and below.
Getting hit in one of these flying stages is bad news. Touching an obstacle in here makes you instantly explode in the real world. And in the game too.
In the Mega Drive version they added a health bar for the flight sequences, which is good since they're three times as long for no good damn reason. There's also a difficulty selection in case you want less spongy foes. Which you do.
The Game Boy version is surprisingly authentic! Similar levels, similar controls, similar weapons, identical music. They've changed the energy mechanic for the Virtual Suit so it's a lot easier to regain the extra hit-point if you lose it. Combine this with the almost completely platform-free levels, and the shooty stages of the Game Boy version are over before you know it.
Angelo does not move very fast at all.
Whoops he's dead. Did not see that coming.
His first pass shatters me into chunks, but he didn't count on my Virtual Suit letting me reform for another attempt. And then I try to jump over him and explode because his collision box is a huge rectangle despite most of his sprite being quite low to the ground.
Grr.
I've got continues though, and they plop me right back in the action without a pause. Now that I know I can't get anywhere near him and I need a long running jump to get anywhere, I know I can handle this.
I like how they've chosen to represent this particular VR episode with Angelo looking uncomfortable as hell in the VR gear.
I don't understand what the biohazard symbol represents. They probably shoved it in to look cool. Hey! That's the health bar from the Mega Drive version! So you have a health bar in VR sometimes on the SNES? Why?
Having witnessed my wolficide, VSI (the company with all the VR labs, I suppose) sends out a chopper to track me down! But, wait! It's indestructible! It's landing and letting me fly it!
I take it over a small destroyed bridge and decide to stay on foot since the fuel is limited. I double back and shoot the chopper for giggles, and it turns out it's full of tasty score multipliers so it's probably good that I did.
They don't fire back, they just drive back and forth, hoping I'll making a mistake. It was safe to land on the first car boss, so it might also be the case here. I'm not going to test that theory.
They're doing that segmented-sprite snake thing bosses do where they move and wriggle and thrash about. They're firing balls of napalm at me, but I can jump past those or shoot them to disperse them safely.
After a few hundred triangles to the face, the pumps lie in smoking ruins.
I've slowed this gif right down for you: Take a look above the fire guy's head, he's got some bona-fide heat haze coming off of him! Clever!
And if that sounds difficult, try doing it on a thirty year old original Game Boy with a teeny ghosty screen! Kudos for keeping the wiggly petrol pipes though!
Phew. After thoroughly blasting the heck out of the station, the nozzles, the pumps and the elemental, it's time to head back into cyberspace for some more technicolour madness.
We've half-morphed into a glider, and we're shooting through cyberspace at incredible speed. There's arrowheads to avoid and round things to shoot, moving walls and closing doors. It's all very swish. It's all very long too - there's multiple stages, including one where you go 'outside' and shoot some space invaders for a bit. Health bar's on the other side now, just to throw me off too.
The level designer wanted this to be more puzzle than action, so you can't jump or duck when on a lift, and you get reset for free if you somehow fall off the edge of something. Since there's no way to know what a lift will affect until you use it, it's all trial and error.
That'd all be fine if there weren't respawning soldiers everywhere shooting Brosnan to bits every five bloody seconds.
There's tons of oddball gun upgrades in this level. The triangle bullets are a firepower upgrade over the regular balls, and now I can fire four of them at once, two of which curl backwards on themselves over my head.
This thing is some kinda cargo nozzle thing I guess, but it's got lasers on it anyway because this is a videogame factory. To escape, you've got to shoot these giant dice at the sides of the level, but also make sure you stay away from the nozzle otherwise it'll descend onto your head.
The lift puzzles here are broken up with digital gateways containing VR flight or shooting sequences. Once you've completed them, the gateways remain open so you can use them to backtrack to earlier sections of the level containing lifts you may have moved.
This pink VSI chopper isn't too happy that I blew up its brother for score multipliers, so it's going to slowly float around the edges of the screen and fire a skinny little missile at me occasionally. No problem.
I have absolutely no clue why the factory is guarded by a swarm of wasps. Why is this here? I mean, it's cool and all, but what even is going on?
Beside the wasps was a gun upgrade that fires angular streams of homing balls, so all I had to do to get past this was stand still and hold Fire.
This boss was pretty straightforward too. He moves up and down, charges up, fires a horizontal beam that slides up and down, and you've got to move to the correct level to avoid it. Can't say fairer than that. My mega-gun now fires rings of particles - when I saw the effect I was like 'oooo'.
There's a little bit of an explosion and the camera unlocks, letting you go past. Of course, the gyrating neutralised laser emitter is STILL DEADLY(!?) in this state and touching it kills you instantly, so that was great.
It feels kind of weird that I've reached him already. I've only been playing for half an hour, and it feels like I ought to be on level 3. First there was the town, then the gas station, then the everlasting factory which I guess counts as two parts. If I was any good at this, I could've probably gotten here in half the time.
Anyway, now I need to defeat Jobe in cyberspace to prevent him escaping into the global network.
He doesn't kill you in one hit, but you do have to repeat this damn shooty phase of the fight seven times, increasing in length each time, and it only counts if you then hit a moving target behind Jobe or you have to do it again.
Even the Game Boy pulls out the stops to give you this very nifty interpretation on the faux-3D Space Harrier-perspective Jobe battle. When your Brosnan slides against the edge of the screen, the arena rotates to give you a change to hit several targets around the edge. I breezed through it.
The SNES on the other hand - throwing my hands up, this fight is a giant pisstake in a game full of them. When I played the fight on the emulator for the pictures, I made a tally of each time I had to reload a save state thanks to the limited continues. I can't imagine how long it would take to get up to here every time I got dinged thanks to a bit of unfair-feeling collision detection. Licensed damned platformers, man.
But, hypothetically, let's say I did manage to defeat all those bosses, all those cyberspace flight sections, all those lift puzzles and all those gibbons. What happens next?
This game is out of control! Is it ever going to end? I feel like I've been playing it forever!
I like how the caption the High Scores is written in the movie font, for extra gravity.
I suppose I'd better watch the movie now, because I'd love to see how they got from that to this.
ONE WATCHING THE MOVIE LATER
Alright. The last half of that movie was, as the saying goes, pretty mental. After getting a dose of Bad Drugs, Jobe becomes a vengeful maniac with virtual reality flavoured esper powers, killing people left, right and center, and Angelo has to scoot to the classified lab and tell him to knock it off. I can see why they wanted to make a game out of it!
How closely did the game stick to the movie? Pretty close in fact, at least in visuals and elements. Skipping backwards and forwards a bit through the movie, we start with the cast's disgusted faces, Angelo's gigantic house where the game begins, cybermonkeys with guns, inexplicable soldiers everywhere and no law enforcement, Angelo dressed like his game sprite in a blue shirt and cream slacks, guys being exploded into flying coloured balls, big green hexagons, flying through cyberspace...
The female player in this game, Carla, doesn't do much in the film, and definitely doesn't ever go into cyberspace, but if Dr. Alan Grant can become a dino-shooting mercenary for hire in Jurassic Park II: The Chaos Continues, then a random mom can pick up a cybergun and help save the world. The game designer must've really been having a laugh though, making the first enemy in the game that Angelo has to blow up the beloved test subject monkey that he fails to save at the beginning of the movie.
Later, we've got the VR flight sequence with the arrowhead obstacles, the war scenes with the gun arm, the 'THREAT' text and reticle, the biohazard symbol and gauge, the evil van, the gas station, the biker, even the possessed gas pumps and the fire guy were there!
In the movie these things happened miles away from Angelo while he was on a road trip, but since they were still ESP manifestations of Jobe's, yeah why not throw them in as bosses?
Hell, even the bees were part of the movie. They were roughly in the correct place too!
CONCLUSION
It's definitely from the same stable as other movie licensed games of the late eighties, like Batman or Terminator 2: Judgment Day on the Amiga. It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that, with everything as hard as butts. It's not a good game because of the one hit kills and absence of checkpoints, but it's an interesting challenge!
Right before submitting this post, I had a revelation that makes the complete game design make more sense. Angelo's got one hitpoint, two if you're lucky, and uses a bunch of different rapid-fire weapons. He moves slowly from left to right, over relatively simple levels, fighting a lot of bosses, meeting lots of strange, varied enemies along the way.
The platforming parts of The Lawnmower Man are Ghouls 'n Ghosts! And that's why it drives me up the bloody wall.
I ought to like The Lawnmower Man. Wolfchild and Jewel Master are two of my favourite 16-bit era games, and I never shut up about either of them. I like going from place to place, getting weird powers and shooting guys, and The Lawnmower Man is full of variety. It's only when a game is ball-crunchingly difficult like Lethal Weapon that I begin to wonder if I just don't like shooty platformers. No, I just don't like ones where the challenge is to do it all consecutively without making a single mistake.
The Mega Drive one might be the easier one since it lets you make mistakes in the flight levels and they didn't include the stupid car level, but there's so much VR flying I just wanted it to end. They've got slightly different bosses and VR sequences, so if you're curious about The Lawnmower Man you might as well try all the ports. It towers above all of this kind of thing that you'd have seen on the Amiga. It's really odd that it wasn't on the Amiga come to think of it. It even sounds more like an Amiga game than a SNES game - I couldn't tell the music was by Amiga veteran Allister Brimble (Superfrog, Troddlers) without looking it up, but I could recognise some samples like the meaty bass sounds.
The Game Boy version of The Lawnmower Man is an inconsequential whiff of a game. The screen is too small to include any of the vehicle bosses or the lift puzzles, so the game becomes mostly a left-to-right sprint to the exit door. The difficulty comes from the awkward hardware and the amount of hits every enemy and boss takes - If you put the cart into a SNES Super Game Boy so you can use an auto-fire pad, the game's over in a flash. We're talking twenty minutes or less.
The developers went all out on every version to include as many special effects they could think of, so they get kudos for that. The worst part of the Game Boy's VR flight sequences is that the 'EXIT' caption is an obstacle that will kill you if you crash into it!
If you want to try a solid, quirky and annoying game, The Lawnmower Man will suit you just fine. Just don't expect to finish the game first time, unless perhaps your reflexes have been improved by nootropic drug therapy and VR conditioning.
Advanced Lawnmower Simulator is probably at least as good as this. Maybe.
ReplyDeleteAdvanced Lawnmower Simulator never tasks you with driving across post-apocalyptic suburbia to go down to the shop, so it's going to have to take second place in this lawnmower game contest.
DeleteYou make a point that is both good and fair.
DeleteThe next game is System Shock?
ReplyDeleteYeah, next week's game is the original System Shock.
DeleteIf it weren't for the fact that all the bonkers stuff in this game comes straight from the film, I'd say this was a secret Hideo Kojima project.
ReplyDeleteMaybe he's a big Lawnmower Man fan!
DeleteThanks for this one Mecha! I’m a big Stephen King fanatic and this movie has always fascinated me. It’s as far removed from the short story as Running Man and the whole thing is wonderfully dated and shitty. I’ve never actually played the any of the games but this was probably the best way to experience them.
ReplyDeleteThose particles explosion gifs are fantastic to watch (Good legal weed here in Canada)
Canabalt is Tom Cruise
mecha-neko'se patience is something out from this world. I don't have seen this movie yet, but something so crazy like that is a must-see.
ReplyDeleteI'm playing the original System Shock right now. That's a great timing ❤
Thank you very much! Glad you liked the post. ^_^ The game is a lot crazier than the movie, but there are some weird special effects at the end.
Deletelol man i am so blessed to have stumbled upon this blog. and to think it was written on blogspot in 2021. you're incredible!
ReplyDelete