Athena
Well,
things started out a bit shaky in terms of game quality. I mean, Athena's
titular first appearance (or at least an appearance that influenced
the Athena of today) is on that list of games that every gaming humor
site has to make fun of, like Daikatana or Deadly Towers. It's like
an unspoken law or something. (-edit: just this morning, Something Awful
posted an Athena article. See my point?) So, I won't go into excruciating
detail about it. Suffice it to say it wasn't the best Greco-Roman NES
platformer adventure I played.
Basically,
for the unitiated, the plot follows the goddess Athena on a quest to
relieve her boredom. So she puts on a little red bikini (a subject explored
with much love and care by the awesome Tong
Poo) and wanders around beating up indistinct critters, as seen
in every other NES game ever made. Really, with a vast wealth of fantasy
beasts from Greek mythos at your disposal, you'd think they could come
up with better enemy grunt types than horse-headed knights.
As
she explores the Land of [whatever], certain enemies drop things like
helmets and shields and whatnot, which have different colors and properties
that aren't readily discernible from the properties of her own head.
I guess the bikini thing is some sort of parallel to Arthur's boxers
from Ghosts n' Goblins- an out-of period piece of garb possessed of
innate sexiness. Kudos to the Greek god of spandex.
Crystalis
Athena
and Kensou supposedly both show up in bit parts during the course of
the game, probably as townspeople. In any case, I can't remember them
and am just going by my sources.
(And a helpful email attachment. See right.)
Psycho Soldier
After
apparently getting tired of all that excitement, Athena was resurrected
in modern day Japan to fight alien mutants in the streets with incredible
psychic powers. She also picked up an energetic young partner by the
name of Kensou who could also fling big balls of energy around with
plucky abandon.
Largely
unremarkable in terms of gameplay, Psycho Soldier was a landmark game
in certain respects. For starters, it had a fully digitized opening
song. Yes, song, as in with vocals. Granted, in this post-Playstation
era of CD quality sampling and what have you, a little J-pop ditty (translated
in the most insipid manner possible into English) doesn't sound as impressive
on its own, but in 1986... yeah. Probably not too impressed by that
either. The song also lead to her future image as a pop idol. Who blows
crap up with her mind.
The
game also introduces several motifs that come up again in her later
appearances, such as Psycho Balls, those little beads, and gratuitous
phoenix/dragon imagery. See sidebar at right.
As
I mentioned before, aside from the whole schoolgirl fighting aliens
while causing somewhat mass destruction angle, the game itself isn't
particularly outstanding. The thing that really irks me about the whole
game is the auto scroll. Isolated auto-scrolling segments in a game
are bad enough but the entirety of the game pushes you along at a steady
clip. Take a moment and reflect on that, you kids these days, with your
non-linear plots and FMV, CD-ROM software and memory cards.... there
was once a time when games grabbed you by the shoulders and marched
you for levels on end with no food, water, or entertainment value. And
that's the way we liked it!
FIRE!
FIRE! PSYCHO SOLDJAH!