Good Enough 4 Me Pt. II
Video games are a strange, shallow medium. Unlike any other form of electronic entertainment that comes to mind, video games have practically no sense of history. You can walk into any chain store and buy most of the worthwhile movies and albums produced in the past 20 years, but aside from the odd, imperfect "classics" collection or illegal ROM dumps hosted by people who "want to preserve the art" (oh, and acquire lots of free games in the process, thanks) you'll be hard pressed to track down a video game released more than two or three years ago. This is partly the result of the technological nature of games - console hardware becomes obsolete in less time than it takes Spielberg to crap out a new Jurassic Park movie. But when a title produced in a lot of tens or hundreds of thousands (see also: Xenogears, Final Fantasy Tactics?, Klonoa?) can be considered a rarity while the console upon which it first appeared is still alive and kicking in the market, it says a great deal about the ephemeral nature of the medium.
That's why The Goonies as a film is currently enjoying new life as a shiny special edition DVD laden with restored footage and director's commentary, and as a video game is collecting dust in the orphaned NES pile at your local pawn shop. (Of course, it can also be found by braving websites saddled with ImAg1nAtIv3 CaP1TaL1zAt10N and enough pop-up banners to make an adult image gallery webmaster blush with humility, if you must.) And really, it's a bit of a shame. While the game's visuals obviously haven't shored up against the march of 15 years quite so impressively as those of the film - geeky kids are basically the same from decade to decade, but 3-color sprites don't really pass muster when Final Fantasy X?'s summoner's kimono looks more realistic than the clothing I wear in real life - but despite some notable flaws, the game is still actually pretty darned good.
The plot of the movie The Goonies was an ABC-After-School-Special-calibre take on It's A Wonderful Life (a bunch of kids go exploring into ancient booby-trapped tunnels and find enough treasure to save their beleaguered town while battling a fake octopus and discovering their self-worth). However, The Goonies II is even more enjoyably ridiculous, without the overtones of Jimmy Stewart. The menacing Fratelli family has broken out of jail and decided to take revenge on the kids who landed them there in the first place. So do they do the smart thing and kill the children in their sleep or poison the Goonies' families? No, instead they kidnap the Goonies (except Mikey, who was probably off forging a deal with Pepsi for more gratuitous product shots) along with Annie the Mermaid. Who is Annie the Mermaid? Lord knows, but apparently she's pretty important, seeing as how she seems to have replaced Sloth, making the poor dumb mutant the first victim of the modern video gaming trend of replacing ugly guys with scantily-clad women.
Somewhere between the movie and the game, the Fratellis (despite having been in jail!) managed to turn the immense system of caverns beneath the rundown restaurant in which they had holed up into a complete video game world. Not only did they add various respawning enemies to their hideout, but they also installed a central heating and cooling system in order to create both a lava and ice cave, as well as a tropical cave complete with geysers and an underground lake! Luckily, they also left the necessary tools for moving through their hideout laying about, albeit frequently hidden until you beat on the walls.
Inexplicably, there are scads of old men and women living in the Fratelli's brave new world of death, offering advice to passing strangers. One can only assume they grew bored with Hyrule? and decided The Goondocks would be a much more interesting place to stay. Or maybe they were just trying to find a freezer full of Swensen's ice cream, took a wrong turn and ended up forever lost among regenerating skeleton apes and attics (larger than the houses below) full of furious armored knights. Anything can happen in a world where angry gangster families kidnap fishgirls, and probably will. The less logical, the more likely.
The original Goonies arrived long before Hollywood was savagely mutilated by blatant product-endorsement films like Mac & Me, so anything more than a little trail of Reese's Pieces and alien debauchery with Budweiser was considered taboo. Goonies really pushed the era's limits of cross-promotion with its wanton endorsement of Pepsi, Swenson's, Baby Ruth and so forth. And frankly, I think Konami totally missed the boat on this one. After all the Pizza Hut ads in TMNT 2, it's pretty obvious Konami? isn't afraid to pimp their games for cash - so why not Goonies II? Instead of picking up stupid little hearts to restore health, you could grab Baby Ruth candy bars, or for more potent energy restoration, eat some Rocky Road ice cream. If nothing else, do it for Sloth.
For its time, Goonies II was a rather ambitious game, with a full inventory system, a logically arranged series of caverns with far more cohesion than, say, Metroid, and both dialogue and statistic building - certainly enough to earn it the coveted "RPG elements!" bullet point in these more enlightened times. But hark, Goonies II suffers from a horrible shortcoming. A portion of the game involves walking into rooms and finding hidden items. Almost all progress in the game is made by exploring these rooms. Punching the walls and floor and ceiling. Hitting the walls and floor and ceiling with a hammer. Wearing glasses. Checking a transceiver. Lighting a candle. Over and over again, casing every bloody inch of the game until you punch and hammer the walls into submission and find every frustratingly-obscured secret.
This was probably intended to add depth and play length to the game. In actuality, it killed the pace of the adventure and made advancement so annoying that most people called it quits after a few frustrating hours, punching an old woman who whimpered "Ouch! What do you do?" on their way out as their only form of vengeance.
This game would have scored higher - and been remembered with far more fondness - if the interior exploration scenes had been nixed or at least made less irritating. It also would have helped if you could have played each individual Goonie as you rescued them - swinging Sloth-style from the ships's mast or using Data's gadgets would have been great. And while Chunk would have been worthless from a gameplay perspective, who could resist the urge to play as a boy who embodies the worst Jewish and fat-kid stereotypes all at once? Hopefully Konami will resurrect this series for modern systems - a pleasant affirmation of the company's historical roots often missing in the gaming medium - and let us battle One-Eyed Willy and Ma Fratelli in glorious 3D. And hopefully, they won't let Apoloosa touch it, if you please.
Extra: The Goonies... I
It may come as a surprise to many when they learn that The Goonies II earned the roman numeral at the end not because it was intended as a sequel to the movie, but because it was the sequel to an NES game entitled, with impressive originality, The Goonies.
For the longest time, I figured The Goonies was just a random platform adventure game with a license slapped on to it for the American release. It seemed like a master stroke of genius compared to some of the licensed games that appeared on the NES (i.e., M.C. Kids, Total Recall, Thunderbirds). But no; recently I discovered a Japanese ROM of the original Goonies game (which I had played a few times on a Playchoice system long ago), and it was called The Goonies over there as well. Come to think of it, that Cyndi Lauper song is in the game an awful lot, which probably should have been a dead giveaway.
I'm not even going to hazard a guess as to why Nintendo? used the PlayChoice system to promote sales of a game which was never made available for American home consumers, as the enigmatic workings of their late-80s corporate hivemind are beyond the feeble grasp of my own intellect to discern. However, what I can say with authority is that US gamers really didn't miss all that much.
While Goonies II was a freeform adventure with unlimited continues and an ever-growing inventory, Goonies was your basic straighforward action quest, divided into large timed levels and a rather ungenerous approach to continuing. A number of elements seen in Goonies II originate here, including the slingshot and the lugubrious chore of hunting keys.
However, here Mikey lacks his trusty yo-yo and is limited to kicking his enemies (which mostly consist of large yellow rats and white foxes) and dropping bombs which have a tendency to explode at inopportune moments. Such as when you're standing directly in front of them. And for some reason various treasures have been hidden in midair - you can only reveal them by kicking nothingness. Ah, those Fratellis, crafting such a devious Zen exercise to tease our minds.
Still, there's one incredibly cool thing about The Goonies: every once in a while, the ghost of One-Eyed Willy will hover across the screen. I had to dock a half-point point from the score for Goonies II for failing to reproduce this chilling touch of cine-magic terror. If the dessicated corpse of Chester Copperpot had been installed as the final boss of Goonies, it could possibly be one of the greatest games ever. Instead, it has to settle for a meagre "ho-hum."