Eliminator Boat Duels

     There are certain types of games an experienced player learns not to like. For example, helicopter games, any sports game with a year in the title, and educational platformers. So, as I browsed a rom listing looking for To the Earth (which I owned, previously panned, and wanted to get screenshots of for the sake of completeness) and found Eliminator Boat Duel. I hadn't played a lot of boating sims. The closest I'd come before was a certain stage of a certain diabetic-themed game. So I decided to give it a shot.

     Eliminator Boat Duel is about some boat racing tournament where you go two out of three rounds with a hilariously charicatured opponent. Unfortunately, since all the charicatures are of boring white person types, it's not nearly the same 'should I be laughing at this?' kind of hilarity you get from say, Pizza Pasta in Punch-Out!!.

     Seasick Sidney is the first competitor. Armed with his wits, his weak constitution and a resemblance to Woody Allen, he may be the 'easy' opponent, but he still usually wins by computer error of some sort or another. I'm guessing he was designed as a sort of living tutorial, he uses reverse psychology to get the lesson across. "Don't damage my boat by jumping on it!" You can probably send him crying to his daughter-wife with a fairly average level of skill.

     The New Age Retro Hippie is attacking! He's exponentially harder that Sidney. It may be the strange scent wafting from his untamed beard and white-guy dreadlocks, but I blame it on the stars. He makes a point of reading his horoscope aloud to you before every race. Beating him, I'd say... is a 50/50 chance. Provided the Space Scorpion and Galactic Siamese Twins are in the 8th House of Wax or something.

    Ah, Surfer Bob. Sweet Jesus, I hate Surfer Bob. His slack-jawed mouth-breather face appears to taunt you after every loss, and trust me, you will lose to him because the computer cheats. I'm not just being bitter. In the first part of the race, you basically time your start with the flag-waving girl. Press the button at the right time, and you take off like a rocket in the early stages. Against Bob, however, good timing just increases the amount of 'neck and neck' cinematics you get at the start of the race. Then he always breaks ahead. Die, Surfer Bob.

     There's a handful of bikini girls in this game. I can't help but wonder if that was supposed to be a selling point of some kind, but they can only make bikini girls so hot with only 8 bits to work with. As a result, the trophy presenter has the body of a cheap surf shop t-shirt cartoon character, a broken neck, and a mass of television snow for hair. I have a thing against anyone who tries to convince me that Girl X is attractive when they exist within a sub-Funky Winkerbean level of artistic skill. The Arch Hall, Jr. lookalike they dubbed the hero is just the nail in the coffin.

     There's also a slow-mo feature that comes into play in the event of a neck and neck finish, which involves the four or five bikini background girls jumping up and down (that's two frames of animation, of course) shouting in bold flashing letters, 'WE WANT A SLOW-MO!" or something like that.

 

-MANNA

"Boy, your son can really draw, can't he?"

PH34R S34S][X0R

The look of a man with bamboo shards in his urethra.