They See Me Rollergamin’… They Hatin’

Just to let you know, I’m still alive here, even though not updating in over a week kind of breaks down to a three month coma in INTERNET TIME.

Rollergames (NES)
1990 Konami

The Short Version: Unfun at any speed.

The Long Version: Rollergames was one of my own private hells as a kid. Nobody else had heard of it or owned it, so often times it felt like it was the game version of Harvey the Rabbit and only I could see it. It falls into the category of games that were punishingly hard because of sucky controls, and also one of those games where Game Genie really didn’t help all that much because the game was ALL ABOUT cheap pitfall death. In fact, they could have called it Cheap Pitfall Deaths: The Game, and saved us a lot of headaches.

The chairman of WAR, the World Association of Rollergames, has been kidnapped by ninjas skater bois. Are you a bad enough dude, dudette, or fatass to save the chairman!? That’s pretty much the plot, though it’s delivered in tragically coherent English for the NES by a pair of announcer dudes. Or, as the manual put it (Copy pasted from Console Classix becuase I’m too lazy to dig out the physical manual I actually legitimately own for once:

Get ready to be rocked, rattled and rolled!
Short on funds for a worldwide terrorist blitz, the underground criminal organization VIPER (Vicious International Punks and Eternal Renegades) has infiltrated RollerGames - the most popular sport of the 21st century. With their greedy sights set on the games' mega prize money, they've corrupted three skating teams and abducted the games' beloved commissioner, Emerson "Skeeter" Bankhead. Now, somewher beneath the city, he sits bound and gagged, at the mercy of these cowardly creeps.

The CIA and FBI lack the speed, cunning and sheer brute force for this job. So it's up to you and your own three teams of free-wheeling skate wizards to rescue the commissioner and stop VIPER from unleashing its venom on the entire city. This is one fight that cannot be fought like a gentleman. You're going to have to take it to the streets, the sewers, the junkyards - just about any place your eight wheels can go (and even a few places they can't).

But even your cat-like reflexes won't guarantee success as you choose and lead your teams through the six muscle-aching stages, all peppered with dastardly deathtraps. Open manholes, greasy oil slicks, combat helicopters and blood-thirsty dogs are just a few of the dangers that await you.

Of course, you'll also have to punch and bodyslam your way pas chop-happy judo masters, skateboard thugs, motorcycle madmen and more.

And considering the odds of survival, now might be a good time to hang up your skates and bow out gracefully. But remember, the lives of thousands are hanging in the balance. And if you choose to accept this job and fall flat somewhere along the way, you can count on VIPER to roast your ball bearings for dinner!

Wasn’t Konami awesome at writing manuals back in the day? See also: Contra 4 manual for a more recent example.

You have your pick of three ‘teams,’ though I’m at a loss as to why they put it that way rather than choosing a ‘character’- you only ever see one member of each. Your choices are a long haired guy dubbed “The California Kid,” from the Rockers, Some Menopausal Pink Haired Chick, from the rather unfortunately named “Hot Flash,” and a fat guy named Icebox from the T-Birds. So I assume that ‘Fat’ is its own gender to Konami. Good to know. “HUGE” gets its own bathroom of City of Heroes, come to think of it, maybe it’s not just them.

Basically, Rollergames rolls out like a Double Dragon kind of game, except you’re on rollerskates the whole time, with all that entails for your ability to control yourself. It actually jerks back and forth between high-speed skating segments and straight beat-em-up encounters at a couple points a stage. When you’re in ‘skater mode,’ the emphasis is on dodging shit and punching other kinds of shit in an effort to make sure only your knuckles are encrusted with shit. Most enemies go down with one punch, but then again so do you- graze a hazard and you’ll fall down with the same squeaky-fart noise that Konami used as a ‘death’ sound effect in every game they made for the NES. At least you have a life meter, though you’ll soon find that’s the very least they could have done…

At about the halfway point of each stage, your chosen skater will strike a pose while a ‘dramatic’ musical chord rings out- again though, this is a Konami game on the NES, so in actually it’s a syntho-BUHHHHHHHHHHHHH sound. Then you get to wail on some other skaters in a more meaty, satisfying way. Headlocks, jump kicks, the works. You can also do a ‘super’ move at the expense of a power stock, which was really pretty standard in this kind of game. Hot Flash chick does a cartwheel kick thing, California Kid does a jump kick that’s somehow better than his normal jump kick, and the fat guy throws his gut at the enemy for suitably huge, girthy damage. At the end of each stage is a stupid, gimmicky boss battle preceded by another Double Dragon mode brawl. Bosses range from an old man or butch old woman in a business suit who runs around flailing his/her arms wildly until they get tired (your chance to move in and wail), a random beturbaned guy with a polearm who tries to stab you through a grated floor, and a dude on a jetski with a box of grenades.

The more disturbing reason I started thinking about Rollergames is that, while scouring Youtube one day, as I often do, I found out that it was a real tv show. The corny team names and weird costumes? All based on real people. The WAR! Bad Attitude! The Maniacs!! That means the spazz boss of Level 1 whose method of attack is running around flailing like a retard until he gets winded is a real human being. They might even have a family. The assholes on jet skis in the jungle level? Probably either real skaters or production members. The guys in riot gear throwing firebombs? TONY FUCKING DANZA. EIGHTIES!! Actually most of the bosses are the over the top charicatures of the ‘team managers’, so seeing some of them in live action was kind of terrifying. If I met these people, they just might make me jump barrels on a highway.

Oh, right. I didn’t mention the highway levels. Rule of thumb: Autoscrolling in games where you’re not an airplane leads to serious ass suckage. Every other level though, you must skate along the freeway (whuh) dodging hurdles, traffic cones, and shit like that, in addition to numerous thugs who are also capable of rollerskating at 50 miles an hour on rough asphalt. These segments are way too similar to the Speeder Bike stage of Battletoads, right down to the ‘hit A at just the right split second or you die’ ramps. To cap it off, for some reason the boss of each highway stage isn’t even a real boss- the first is the ‘Muck Truck’, which drops a fucking endless supply of oil barrels out its back ends, which you have to dodge for oh, somewhere around seven hours. The second highway boss is an Apache chopper that rains bombs ahead of you so you have to weave and jump around the explosions- which breaks down to the exact same thing with worse sound effects and different ‘hazard’ sprites. To cap it off, these dodging segments are done with absolutely no music! Sheer monotony, broken up only by the drone of the truck, the chopper blades, or the annoying, rapid fire whistling bomb noise.

If there’s a plus to be had, the music that IS there is mostly pretty catchy. Much like Bayou Billy, it’s possible to at least groove along with that while falling to your death repeatedly. Level 3, a junkyard where you dodge wrecking balls not tethered visibly to anything then proceed to negotiate some kind of a sewer ish area with your first taste of how horrible the jumping sections can be, had a really catchy tune that permanently etched itself into my brain after far, far, far too many accidental plunges into the crap water. After a while one day, I settled for repeatedly launching myself off into the air, just to see how far I could fly before splashing to a watery grave. I guess they should get some credit for not having invisible walls all over the place, keeping you on the platform/one plane of the background, but no, wait- the jumping sections are often set up to be played like a 2-D platformer. Moving up and down either grinds you against the wall, slowing you down or worse, bouncing you backward into DEATH, or just directly into death without the wall acting as a middle man.

Your journey to rescue (uh) “Skeeter” takes you first through the mean streets of Genericville, followed by a high speed chase down the freeway. Afterwards you screw around in a construction site/sewer (my theory is they forgot what generic fighting game setting they were using halfway through) and then it’s back to the freeway for that fucking helicopter battle. Afterwards, the jungle stage, which I have never personally beaten, which I assume is followed by the finale, or another palette swapped highway stage.  I really have no desire to see what awaits at the end of the game- if you can make it to the cavern section of the jungle area, you must negotiate a long… long… long, thin platform which breaks away in completely random spots, and as a coup de merde, the exit to this section is actually a cave in the background, rather than say, at the end of a long, offscreen jump off the platform you’ve been carefully crossing. There isn’t much indication that hole in the wall is a door to the next section and not just ANOTHER HOLE IN THE WALL LIKE THE DOZEN YOU JUST PASSED. Some might call that a learning experience. I call it quitting time.