Title: Interplay Collection 1
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Early 2020
Prelude
Finally working backwards a bit, we’re covering the first of the two Interplay Collections! I covered the other one already, so which games were deemed best to fit on the first volume? Let’s take a looksee.
Presentation
NES/SNES/Genesis stuff here, all emulating as they should. No oddities with faded backgrounds and credits like in Clayfighter 2. One of the games here is a Famicom port which still has ending text in Japanese, but otherwise there’s really nothing else I could think of Blaze needing or wanting to change. Solid even as an early release!
Gameplay
Six more games are up today; let’s look into em!
Battle Chess (NES)- The NES version of Interplay’s very popular chess game! Known for fancy animations and a good visual style, only one of which carries over to this NES version.
Yes, there are battle animations by default whenever a piece engages with the other piece on the other side. They look rather decent enough, but after watching a few of them you’ll grow annoyed by how long they take. Thankfully, disabling the animations is easy as can be, making it just an ordinary, 8 bit version of chess, and one that works pretty well against a friend or the computer.
My favorite aspect of this game is how if you really want, you could completely change the pieces of the board, making for fully illegal or chaotic games! Want to replace the pawns with Rooks? Go for it! So at the very least, Battle Chess has a little bit going for it to make it worth a play, though if you don’t like chess already, you won’t like this.
Titan (NES)- Oh god. This is a Famicom port of a home computer game, and having actually played the home computer versions, those weren’t good games. But they still played a whole lot better than this port, which just feels incredibly clunky and weird.
Starting up the game, you get to the first set of stages and are met with complete silence. Only the ball bounce sound effects can be heard, making it very akin to a computer game in that regard. Yet the game starts off so, so boring to the point it becomes torture to play. There aren’t many enemies in the early stages, or even ways to die!
The stages are long, even when you know what to do, and they’re just boredom inducing every step of the way. I jumped to the final stage via a password, and while dying was way more common now, that still didn’t make Titan any less boring! Why this oddball was included, I dunno, since this was easily an obscurity best left in the past.
Clayfighter (SNES)- The prequel to the fighter I really dug on Interplay 2! Sadly, this one is a lot more simple and less fun, as to be expected from the fighter that came first. Slow, clunky combat, unsatisfying characters, and a tedious gauntlet of foes without the insanity or speed of Clayfighter 2 just make this incredibly dull in almost every possible fashion. Decent with a friend, but otherwise entirely forgettable if it wasn’t for the art style.
Earthworm Jim (Genesis)- The second game was one I dug in the first stage, only to see it fall apart with silly gimmick missions afterward. So I was pleasantly surprised that this original game, while not as strong as the highest highs of EWJ2, still managed to be a much more enjoyable experience all around.
You got satisfying action stages, and intermission levels that are actually way more fun to goof around with than whatever the hell they were thinking with the Puppy minigame in 2. The bosses are decent, even if they are far from great, and while this first game still has a lot of jank to it, I at least feel compelled to finish this one and keep on pressing ahead. All the more reason to be thankful the horrific creator doesn’t own the IP anymore.
Boogerman (SNES)- This game is just… Weird. A platformer staring the titular character who can do all sorts of crude humor, from passing gas on command, burping or throwing snot at enemies. Not only is the theming strange, but the level design is just incredibly dull to boot, to the point I don’t even think I’d like this game much with a normal plot to it.
Sadly, even if you are into the sort of stuff Boogerman does, you just don’t have that much of a fun game here. It definitely is the weirdest game on Evercade by far for that alone, but when you peel back that layer and just get a boring, dull platformer, you’ll probably just go to Earthworm Jim instead.
Incantation (SNES)- This obscurity is from Titus, ala Prehistorik Man, and being a hyper rare SNES game I was eager to see if this was yet another hidden gem. Sadly, it isn’t, but it manages to hold up a good enough fight that I can at least say the devs tried.
In this game you control a mage, who must set out to rid the land of evil! Pretty simple stuff, and you have your typical jump/attack setup for this one, along with a stomp that helps a few times in the game. You can occasionally find different upgrades for your fire attack, but most of the time you’ll just be shooting what comes your way and trying to make it to the end of the stage or the next boss.
Baffingly, what started off as a decent little game fell apart not due to the level design getting worse, (though it and the later bosses do get a bit obnoxious, but not enough I felt the game was unplayable) but rather both due to the stingy checkpoint system along with how the game abruptly ends. You clear a good chunk of stages, end up in a city area for a bit more action and you already hit the credits once that world boss is cleared.
I know retro games are short and sweet, but Incantation feels just barely undercooked enough that I couldn’t help but wonder if it got rushed out the door somehow. That final act really was shakier than the fun earlier parts of the game, but hey, you have an affordable means to nab this game and it is at least worth a full playthrough to see what the devs were going for.
Conclusion
Interplay 1 sets out to be an introduction to Interplay and some of their gems, but ultimately I just found it to be a little lackluster. Actual hits like Earthworm Jim and Incantation pale compared to the second volume’s pick of games, and while Battle Chess is fun, it still is just chess at the end of the day. Then you have the absolutely abysmal Titan and bad Boogerman to end up the collection, and you have a pretty weak, yet curious grab bag of games.
Do the positives outweight the negatives here? Not much for my tastes, but I still feel like I barely got my money’s worth via my Chess playtime and finishing both of the platformers I noted as liking. Clayfighter is Clayfighter, and once you see that once, you won’t want to play it again; at least not compared to the superior sequel. If you can only pick one of the two Interplay volumes, 2 is still the easy way to go.
I give Interplay Collection 1 a 6 out of 10.