If the first three Bases Loadeds weren’t enough for you, surely a fourth will quench your thirst.

In Bases Loaded 4, Jaleco Game Design Co. did away with the bells and whistles that made Bases Loaded 3 a fresh and interesting title.

Jaleco did try to secure the license of Major League Baseball for Bases Loaded 4. This was the first time MLB granted its teams and players’ likeness to a video game, and it’s not hard to tell that Jaleco took this seriously, as all the teams are present:

• New York
• Atlanta
• Boston
• Philadelphia

My personal favourite team also makes an appearance – the Utah Mormons. They’re a strict bunch, but they’re fair. What they lack in muscle mass due to steroids, they make up for in muscle mass from trying so hard to make Mormon babies all the time.

Your hard work will pay off some day, Mormons. Frankly, I think MLB will allow your honest and drug-free ways to flourish.

And while one might think a game would get boring after the fourth title, this thought is incorrect. Bases Loaded 4 remains just as fresh as the day Pac-Man, the first title in the series, was released

Yup, this sure is a baseball game.

Final Score:  

Welcome to the third installment of Roarin’ 80s’ four part series on the War on the War on Christmas where are doing our darndest to put the Christmas back in Christ. To do this, we are reviewing the overlooked Nintendo Entertainment System gem Bible Adventures.

In this particular episode, we will be focusing on David and Goliath.

This is a game that all fans of the underdog psychological archetype should pick up and never put down. This might prevent potential players from playing it, but that’s probably for the best.

David and Goliath grabs players by the throat and throws them into the heat of the action as they recreate the legendary story of the 5’5” David killing the 5’10” giant Goliath. Chapter by chapter and verse by verse, the story comes alive as players walk to the right, pick up a squirrel, and stand under a flashing arrow – a style of game play that differs drastically from the previous two titles on Bible Adventures.

I needed my pastor to put smelling salts under my nose in order to help me regain consciousness. Talk about intense!

Fans over the underdog should pick this game up and never put it down. Go forth, Christian soldiers! Unfortunately, if you’re unable to put it down, you won’t be able to load it into your NES – rendering the game impossible to play.

Actually, that’s not a bad feature.

Final Score:  

Mystery, murder, and more sexual innuendo than you could even begin to care to shake a stick at… Friday nights on Fox.

Murder, She Wrote is a twenty-four-hour reality television show that follows the life of the sultry Angela Lansbury (photo on right) – a young executive assistant working in the cutthroat city of Cabot Cove, Maine. Landsbury finds herself knee-deep in all kinds of hilarious as she travels about the city fetching items for her boss, Charlene Stapleton – played by Kirstie Alley and voiced by Sylvester Stallone.

Beginning with its first episode on March 7^th, 1980, one of the recurring gags that kept the show together was the death of a character, which, while often scripted by the producers, was sometimes accidental. The ever-concerned Lansbury would usually spend ten-minutes of the show breaking the fourth-wall, pleading with the director and camera operator to stop filming. It was unorthodox and unprecedented, but audiences ate it up like Lansbury’s famous ‘New England clam chowder’ (wink, wink).

Contrary to popular belief, scripted deaths and safety violations – present in any non-unionized (read: good) workforce – were not where the show got its name. At the end of each episode, Fletcher would sit down at her computer and type reflections about the day into her electronic diary: “I am so tired… All the time. I wish that falling beam spilled my brains over the set… Please kill me. This job is murder,” she wrote.

A-hah! Oh Lansbury, you lovable scamp.

Decades ahead of its time, Murder, She Wrote paved the way for the success of the snuff-reality television that viewers love today. Unfortunately, the show was cancelled after its 28^th season, when Lansbury found a stray pair of shoelaces and hanged herself in her dressing room/storage shed.

The show that helped generations of humans realize their humanity.

Final Score:  

Are you a bad enough dude?

Bao Xiao Tien Guo (Explosion Sangokushi) is the second release from our South Korean guerrilla Nintendo Entertainment System video game programming comrades Waixing Computer Science & Technology Co., Ltd. – the first release being Bing Kuang Ji Dan Zi: Flighty Chicken.

For Explosion Sangokushi, the developers decided to move away from the high school home economics project of taking care of an egg. Realizing that not everyone would become a parent and that most students at the school of Waixing Computer Science & Technology would become custodians, Explosion Sangokushi embraced the groundskeeper genre of gaming.

This worked for two reasons. If players were destined to become janitors, they were given an overhead view of the world that could be used to maximize their shift by allowing them to find shortcuts on the grounds. And if players worked their way up the chain, they would surely find themselves in a supervisory position: if they are smart enough to press the ‘A’ and ‘B’ buttons, they can figure out how to boss the other custodians around and become king of the schoolyard.

…Just beware of the Ides of March because you’ll get your comeuppance. Oh yes, yes you will.

Excellent point-and-click adventure game.

Final Score:  

Buy another Nintendo Entertainment System and daisy-chain it to your first because you’re going to need twice the power in order to handle this cartridge.

Bio Senshi Dan: Increase Tono Tatakai is the sequel to the highly successful Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa. Bio Senshi actually picks up where Bio Miracle stops – with players ‘dropping acid’ and getting on an ‘elevator’.

The style of play has changed between the two releases, however. While Bio Senshi is still a platformer, it is a bit more nuanced than Bio Miracle. Players are able to return to crawling by pressing ‘down’ on the control pad – one of few holdovers from the first release – and they’re also able to turn around to face the background by pressing ‘up’. The ‘B’ button attacks with some sort of stick, while the ‘A’ button is, once again, used for jumping.

Bio Senshi Dan rebuilt the genre of run and jump platforming on the NES, and it would build a time-machine in order to go back in time and influence such games as Metroid and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

Despite its influence, Bio Senshi Dan was only moderately successful in its lifetime. If you see this cartridge sitting at the end of someone’s driveway or resting against a bus shelter, do yourself a favour and pick it up.

Each keystroke of this review was stroked in order to support the troops, and each word that was read means that 25-cents went to the United States Army in order to provide funding for a Kevlar vest, which the troops will pass around amongst themselves.

Final Score:  

In 1973 Angus and Malcolm Young decided to take the same song they’d been playing for 5 years and start a band around it. After hours of reading the bottoms of toasters, blow driers, and sewing machines, they finally settled on the name Made in Taiwan.

Unfortunately there was a backlash looming against products manufactured outside of their native Australia (whose only remaining export was crocodile skin boots), so they were sent back to the drawing board. Finally they emerged with the name AC/DC.

In 1974 Bon Scott joined the band and began singing their one song.

By 1975 they’d completed their first nine song single – T.N.T. It featured the song T.N.T. along with the song T.N.T. under different names. It was an instant hit in Australia, reaching #1 on the charts and earning the band several hundred koala pelts.

Their next single, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, was released in 1976. It featured 9 more of the same song. Australians couldn’t get enough of the song. An album was sold for every house in the country – meaning the album went quadruple oxidized copper by American standards.

Unfortunately in 1980 Bon Scott died while performing on stage. He was in the middle of singing T.N.T. and forgot the words midway through it. An autopsy determined his brain had atrophied into the consistency of unstirred pudding from constant exposure to AC/DC.

Bon Scott was replaced by Brian Johnson, and the band released another 15 albums over the next five years – an incredible feat considering the band had not been in the studio since the original recording of T.N.T. in 1974.

Throughout the 80s AC/DC continued releasing the same album. Each time they grew more and more successful – though they were paying the price by being subjected to their own music. Angus Young was affected the most – physically shrinking from 6’0” to 5’2” over the course of the 80s due to the weight of his own terrible music resting on his shoulders.

In 2008 the band released their autobiography “T.N.T.: 35 Years of Our Hit” In the foreword Malcolm Young is quoted as saying “We threw the same s#@! at the wall for 35 years, and it kept sticking. By the end of our careers the wall is covered in s#@! and it stinks in here. I wish I could escape my life, but I’m afraid if I kill myself they’ll be playing my own music in Hell.”