Monday, March 30, 2020

Goof Troop (Super NES, 1993)

What's this? I was asking the same thing. It's an old Capcom game with great music, and it's like an hour long. Probably not ideal in-era, but here we are in the age of being cooped up inside, so why not play the long-forgotten prequel to Kingdom Hearts?

Note: not actually prequel to Kingdom Hearts




Sometimes I have a shot of the title screen as the top image on a post. This is not one of those times. What an awful green. So far, it's more like Oof Troop.

Fun Fact: I never watched this show as a kid. Not once. I saw a lot of Duck Tales and Tail Spin though.

We start with Goofy and Max fishing, when a pirate ship goes by and the menace theme from Wrath of Khan plays.

Character select, but it isn't much to write home about. Where...is Donald Duck? Where.. is Mickey Mouse? Where...is the NA-CHO MAYN?

The world map, showing all five stages. It's like a 1-hour demo of Four Swords Adventures for the Gamecube if it took place on Koholint instead of Hyrule.

First of all, Goofy has terrible posture.

Keelhaul Pete is the big bad of the game. Everyone thought he was swallowed by a whale. Everyone. Now he's back, and he wants revenge.

Even worse...he's brought a Cabin Boy. My God.

Wait, what?

You defeat foes around the island by pushing blocks at them. It's a puzzle-type game so far.

The first usable item I get is the Hookshot. Wait...Hookshot...pushing blocks... this really is a Zelda clone.

You can also defeat foes by throwing pots at them. ...Zelda?

This works for me because throwing pots at foes was one of the things I really liked in Zelda 3, and it's a mechanic that didn't get much use after the first few areas.

*you're

 Preparing the battlefield for Massacre.

This game doesn't mess around. The sliding block puzzles are already getting complex even on stage 1. When you push a block, it slides until it hits something.

The goal is to get the blocks onto the star switches.

Here's another deceptively challenging one. This is tough for me, so it's gotta be great for kids learning problem-solving skillz.

I'VE GOT YOU WHERE I WANT YOU NOW, PUZZLE.

Wonder what the Nintendo Power coverage of this game looked like. ::looks at shelf::

I like the way the page rolls up on the side like a tattered treasure map. Nintendo Power is so rad.

Here's (hyuck) Jester Hole.

It's actually a bunch of pirates who pop up whack-a-mole style. Throw barrels at 'em. No big whoop. Also this is WAY too hard for a first boss. I thought this game was for kids!

Second stage looks like Okinawa about to get a monsoon. Over there we see Senor Benjamin preparing another battlefield for Massacre.

The hookshot can be used to form a rope bridge from hook-to-hook, though it gets consumed by this. Luckily you can find new hookshots laying around.

Cannons are a major threat in this game. Get hit by their bombs head-on and you lose a life. However, dodge the bombs and they land, where they can be picked up and thrown back to take out the cannons.

Second boss. He spits fire. Is he from the show?

Stage 3 is a castle. No relation to Hyrule Castle, but you can't tell from...

...how it looks. It even has the cannon-walls from LTTP.

One fun thing to do is knock guards into pits by stunning them with the hookshot.

I find a shovel. Should I dig up this room?

...I dug up the room. There's one extra life in here so it's worth doing. You start with 3 lives and can have up to 10. Getting hit consumes one (and you continue going from where you are), so really it's like having more hits. It's important to get as many lives as possible while scrounging through these levels.

It's the SUPER CANNONBALL ROOM from LTTP.

Not crazy about this: Some rooms have limited visibility, or none if you aren't carrying a torch.

Third boss is two skeletons, who look like refugees from a David S. Pumpkins sketch. "We're gonna scare the hell out of yooou!"

They throw these crossbone things, and lots of 'em. Pick those up and throw them back. After a while their heads fly off and chase you around...yeah, like that one boss in LTTP. I'm starting to think this isn't a Kingdom Hearts prequel, but in fact an LTTP sequel.

Elsewhere, Pete and his son PJ are having a feast with the pirates. Wait, so PJ is the Cabin Boy we keep hearing about?

I got excited thinking stage 4 was an ice level, but it's only this one room. There are all of these unlit torches (and unlightable, for that matter) which makes one wonder if there were some scrapped game mechanics around this point.

Here's a puzzle that I never figured out. Turns out you don't need to go this way at all, though. Weird. Yeah, there was definitely some cut content in stage 4.

Here's a particularly annoying puzzle where you have to push this bomb block to the left and then run all the way through a zig-zag to get to it and knock it onto the switch before it blows up. You have like one second to spare because there's no run or dash button.

Starting to look a little Turtle Rock ish here.

"Turtle Rock Says know ur damn role"

The next boss is twin centipedes*. This one's tricky because you can fall off the platforms and take damage. Rocks fall from the ceiling and you throw them at the bosses.

* - Note: They could be millipedes, and if so I apologize.

Finally, after an epic journey through ::checks notes:: four stages, we arrive at the final stage.

This ship doesn't look anywhere near as good as the one in Seiken Densetsu 3, proving that 1995 SNES > 1993 SNES.

Yeah, pretty much.

This last area is full of pirates, and there are times where Goofy's lack of a weapon becomes a real issue as you try to sneak past foes. There are usually barrels around to throw at them, but not always.

Sliding block puzzles everywhere!

The return of the dark room, except now you can't see shite!

Now hold up. It turns out that Pete and PJ are "imposters" who were found by the pirate king, Keelhaul Pete. So there are two Petes? And the pirate version wants to do away with the normal guy version? Is this like Man in the High Castle? What's the deal with Pete?

The final puzzle of the game, and maybe the toughest, is this relatively-unassuming room. The problem is you have a small area to work with in terms of getting the blocks over to the switches.

Finally. Keelhaul Pete. He's like a destitute man's King K. Rool.

He turns into a tornado to attack, like a significantly less-hot Valvalis.

He also has a grappling hook attack. You catch the bombs he throws and throw them back. No big whoop.

That's it for this game. Clear time is for stage 5, not the whole game. I could see this game being good for kids because of the puzzle-solving elements and it'd probably keep them busy for significantly longer. It's tougher than I expected, and the last couple stages would probably take a little kid numerous tries.

Now that Keelhaul Pete is successfully apprehended, I can rescue...Regular Pete and his son.

...looks like they're already about to be fed to a large sea creature. Goofy makes a snarky comment and takes his sweet time reeling them back to the boat. Gawrsh, indeed.

And that's Goof Troop for the SNES. Why did I play this? I don't know. I'd like to play more random short SNES games though.

Here's the very Donkey Kong Country 3 sounding OST. Of particular note is the boss theme, which is the first couple minutes of this video and sounds like it'd be De-Generation X's theme if they were also The Oddities.

I don't know.



3 comments:

  1. Nice review!
    My boys and I really enjoy this game.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It seems like it'd be a great multiplayer game. Sorta like Zelda fused with Bomberman.

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  2. Yeah, those pots were potent, they could even take out the blue armored soldiers.

    I can't believe they pulled the ol' Pete switcheroo on you.

    ReplyDelete