The Gadget Twins Should’ve Been Seperated At Birth
There used to be a grocery store called Delchamps where I used to live. Before it suffered that midlife crisis called bankruptcy, it offered rentals of Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo games. I rented games often – since I couldn’t build a permanent game library, renting different titles gave me enough variety to keep my Sega Genesis interesting. That’s good, because I got bored easily back then. The kids on my street only wanted to play games like baseball and tag. Never anything I wanted to play, like Escape From Auschwitz.
Renting games was risky business, though. A poison-tipped adventure. This was before the widespread use of the Internet. These days you’d pop on Google and look for game reviews before you plunked down cash. But in the 90s? All you had was game magazines and word of mouth, so I never knew what to expect. Would this game be awesome? Would it be terrible? Or it would be MORE terrible, like the Cold War if making nukes earned extra lives?
Guess which category The Gadget Twins falls into!
Published by GameTek and developed by a group of barnacles, The Gadget Twins stars two cartoon planes named Bop and Bump. You’ll know these planes well because the extremely creepy title screen will never let you forget. The plot is that the planes have to chase down a guy named Thump who stole an artifact called “The Magic Gem”. What a boring idea for a plot device. Maybe I’d care more if the artifact was something interesting. How about “The Magic Gem That Turns Into A Spaceship With Free Taco Bell Inside?”
The Gadget Twins uses a weird attack system. You have a gadget equipped to each of the four cardinal directions. Boxing gloves, claws, what have you. By pressing B, you switch clockwise to the next gadget. With some quick switching, you’ll be able to attack in different directions and fight enemies from all sides. Unfortunately, several things will make this more difficult, one of them being that you are currently playing The Gadget Twins.
Another is how you take damage from enemies. Unlike better Sega Genesis games, you don’t have any invincibility time between hits. This means that an enemy can run into you and drain your health bar in seconds as long as you touch. Since enemies are constantly flying at you, this will happen 300% of the time. It’s so bad, you might as well replace your health bar with a sign that says “OUT OF ORDER”.
And even if you actually kill the normal enemies, bosses are a different story. Below is a diagram of every potential weak point you can hit on the first boss in the game. Where do you think you’re supposed to hit this boss in order to do damage?
The true answer is that you can hit this guy in several places, but it seems like he absorbs tons of damage before losing health. Either that or you have to hit the boss in a certain pixel for it to work. This quickly becomes an equation of crumminess, considering you’ve got a dinky claw and the boss is jumping around with a claw attack long enough to strike children that haven’t even been conceived yet.
And if THAT wasn’t bad enough, the peppy music endlessly rages in the background, only changing SLIGHTLY for a boss. You’ll get caught on walls, coins spiral away like Scrubbing Bubbles if you don’t pick them up, and sometimes you’ll glitch and drop to HALF of your movement speed. “Did anyone TEST this game?” I questioned rhetorically, knowing full well the answer was a resounding “NO”. Nothing works here. The game is playable, but it’s like playing with a GI Joe after Cobra threw his arms in a prison camp near the driveway.
Fortunately, The Gadget Twins is an obscure game. I actually take a bizarre pride in discussing it on this blog. Like an ugly child that will make you millions on the sideshow circuit, without being bundled by crutches such as “compassion”. This doesn’t mean you should play it, though. The Gadget Twins sucks the big one as well as its children. Do something better with your time. Preferably away from the creepy child-sucking video game. I think John Walsh wants to talk to this guy.
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Yay, more bad cartoon goodness. I especially liked the claw so long it can reach unconceived children joke.
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Matt Willard Reply:
July 2nd, 2010 at 9:12 AM
There’s also a joke about male confidence somewhere in here but I’d rather not dig for it :V
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That is a spiffy carpet.
Also, the expression on Bop and Bump’s face is terrifying. :<
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Matt Willard Reply:
July 2nd, 2010 at 12:06 PM
If they ask you to “come play with us”, don’t do it. Mostly because their game is terrible.
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