Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Gargoyles - SEGA Style!

When I was young, one of my favorite shows was Gargoyles on the Disney Afternoon.  I believe I've discussed the opening to the cartoon once before, but I don't think I can overstate just how enjoyable this was.  Initially, I was just excited by the sheer number of former cast people from Star Trek: The Next Generation who were going to be on it, though I had a really hard time believing that "Commander Riker" would make an effective bad guy.

Man, was I proven wrong.


Once I got into it, I was hooked.  I don't think I missed a single episode for the first season, because I knew that if I did I'd have missed out on part of a story that would continue on later.



When I saw that there was going to be a Gargoyles video game, I got even more excited.  Scaling buildings as Goliath, punching vikings and robots, matching wits with David Xanatos, flying (okay, gliding) through New York City, it was going to be excellent.

When I put the game in and started it up, and I saw this title sequence, I was ready to go.


In the game, you started in the past and ended in the present (the 90s), and the game loosely follows the story of the cartoon show in the same way that The Cat In The Hat movie was loosely based on the book in that it has characters with similar names.

Your primary opponent in the game is supposed to be Demona, the female gargoyle from Goliath's past who was simultaneously the seductive (to a gargoyle) temptress and insane psycho killer who was willing to turn an entire city of people into stone just so she could walk down the street cheerfully swinging a mace around.

Instead of closely following the story like many Disney video games tried to do (Disney's Aladdin and The Lion King video games, for example, stuck pretty close to the story if it did add a lot of filler), the game has the Eye of Odin, an insanely powerful mystical artifact that doesn't appear until season 2 be the cause of everything going wrong in Goliath's life.

One thing that is rather cool (if totally wrong in the face of mythology) is the fact that when one viking gets his hand on the Eye, he starts swinging a hammer around and summoning lightning bolts.


Though, it's the eye of "Odin" not the eye of "Thor."  Nice try, though.

Oh, and I can't forget to mention the deadliest boss in the whole game...an elevator.

No seriously, the hardest fight in the whole game is an elevator, because it tries to make you fall and die while you're climbing around the outside.  It sends shock-waves of energy out from the "core" inside of it, it stabs spikes through the wall to push you off, and you spend most of the battle jumping off the elevator and gliding back on (while it's plummeting forever without hitting bottom) and swiping at it while clinging to it.

I couldn't find a good picture of it, but at this link is a great playthrough of the fight.  You might note is takes away every life the guy has just to beat that one boss.

While the story is completely inconsistent with the source material, the gameplay is fun for a basic platforming with some interesting gimmicks (climbing walls and gliding) thrown in, and the art style is rather interesting (they used hand-drawn and colored sprites for the human and gargoyle characters while the robots you fight are done in CG).    I played the game for days (mostly because of that one elevator boss) trying to beat it, and was happy to go back and play again to see if I could do it with fewer continues or fewer lives lost.

Now I just wish they'd bring the brand back, give us a huge open world New York in the night time as we fight robots, sorcerers, and everything in between.  Throw in some stealth game play if the media is around, allow for different styles of play for different characters (brute force for Goliath, tactics for Hudson, gadgets for Lexington, speed for Brooklyn, resisting damage for Broadway), bring back the original voice talent, and throw in some other settings with the use of time travel or having Puck send us to mystical realms to "test" us.  It's not like the series didn't have enough possible settings, fighting evil everywhere from the past to the present to a possible future, from South American rain forests to the aboriginal Dreamtime in Australia.

After all, if they can redo Ducktales and have it look as good as they're now advertising, why not bring back a few more classic Disney licenses?

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