How Billy Madison, Mortal Kombat and Donkey Kong Are Related

In the film Billy Madison, Adam Sandler’s character has a small “debate” with a third-grade classmate on what video game was the best ever. The kid says Mortal Kombat and Billy says Donkey Kong.

Billy’s love interest in the movie is his 3rd grade teacher Veronica Vaughn, played by actress Bridgett Wilson.

Who went on to play Sonya Blade in the Mortal Kombat movie seven months later (Billy Madison was released February 1995, Mortal Kombat in August of ‘95)

20 years later, the movie “Pixels” is released. A movie about Adam Sandler fighting off a race of aliens that appear in the form of video game characters.

The final battle takes place between Adam Sandler’s character and Donkey Kong.

Billy Madison has the deepest video game-to-film lore. He hooked up with Sonya Blade from Mortal Kombat and destroyed Donkey Kong in Pixels, which was tragic, because In Billy Madison his favorite game was Donkey Kong and while he thought Mortal Kombat was very good, he clearly doesn’t share the same affinity for it as Donkey Kong.

Billy Madison, Mortal Kombat and Pixels is the greatest video game-to-film trilogy of all time.

Of all time.

Nintendroid’s Lazy Boy No-Chew Review: Muscle March (WiiWare)

Muscle March (WiiWare)

Bandai-Namco

2009

Proof-positive that even the funniest jokes get old after a while.

Muscle March has a lot going for it in terms of it’s premise. Thong-wearing bodybuilders and a polar bear chase random thieves to recover their stolen protein powder in surreal surroundings to an uber-kawaii soundtrack.

If you laughed or at least smirked reading that, good. Now read that paragraph over and over for about five minutes. Gets old pretty quick huh? That’s Muscle March in a nutshell.

The first time playing it, I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen in a video game. After playing two levels of the game and hitting a wall with it’s ridiculous spike in difficulty, the joke gets old and the game gets downright frustrating.

Before the game begins, you’ll select a character at the select screen. The options are purely cosmetic, with no stats that I could tell. So if you ever wanted to be a oily heartthrob with a long, curly mustache or a polar bear in a speedo, here’s your chance.

After selecting a character, a short cutscene will play showing a thief (ranging from a football player to an alien) stealing your precious protein powder. The bodybuilders yell out “THIEF” and the game begins.

The gameplay is motion-based and simple (at first). You mimic the pose on screen to fit through the hole in the wall that the thief has left behind. If you fail to make the right pose, you crash through the wall. If you crash three times, you restart from the beginning. Once you get close enough to the thief, a quick-time event will require you to shake the Wiimote and Nunchuk as fast as you can to dash and tackle the thief. Once you catch the thief, another thief comes along, takes up the protein powder and the chase begins again.

Sounds pretty simple at the beginning, the first two stages are fairly easy, then the game becomes all about luck. The motion controls in this game are decent but when the action picks up and the thieves start posing unbelievably fast, the motion controls simply just can’t keep up. So once you hit the third level of the game, it becomes nearly impossible.

Once you hit the game over screen about three times, and have to play the first two stages all over again the joke becomes stale. Muscle March has no multiplayer, two modes of play (story mode and “endless run”) and from what i’ve watched on Youtube, the game only has 6 or 7 levels altogether. Simply put, the novelty factor isn’t worth the money. 

 Muscle March is good for a laugh but I wouldn’t pay for it. It’s like buying your friend a 20 dollar blow-up doll for his bachelor party. It might be good for a hearty chuckle, but at the end of the day, he’ll probably throw it in the garbage and you’re out 20 bucks. Jokes on you.

My Grade: D

Nintendroid’s Lazy Boy No-Chew Review: Wreck It Ralph (Wii)

Wreck It Ralph (Wii)

Activision

2012

Wreck It Ralph makes his “IRL” debut on the Wii. Touted as a video game heavyweight in the movie, does that star power transition to the actual video game?

The short answer is not really. If I can compare the Wreck It Ralph video game to anything, it’s CM Punk’s MMA career. Let me explain, CM Punk the pro wrestler was one of the best. Multiple championships, classic matches, the guy was the best at what he did. While not an actual fighter, he played a darn good one on T.V.

Leaving his wrestling career behind, CM Punk goes to UFC to fight. Could the guy that fictitiously took down the likes of John Cena and Brock Lesnar in the wrestling world, translate that over to an MMA career and leave a trail of competitors in his wake? Nope. He was beaten within a minute by a kid named Mickey Gall and hasn’t been heard from since. Except on Twitter.

In a strange way, that speaks to Wreck It Ralph’s situation. In the movie, Ralph is the main antagonist in a fictional arcade game called Fix-It Felix Jr. The game is held in high regard the way that we look up to the likes of Donkey Kong and Pac Man. While Fix It Felix Jr, wasn’t a “real” game, it played a darn good one in the film.

After seeing the movie we all wanted a real Wreck It Ralph video game. Fix It Felix Jr got a mobile port of the game featured in the movie, but we wanted to play through Ralph’s adventure. A game with racing segments, platforming and on-rails shooter segments spanning across the worlds seen in the film, maybe some cameos thrown in for good measure. We don’t get any of that with this game. While Ralph and Felix look like legit video game stars in the film, their ACTUAL video game debut was straight bargain bin fodder. Does the CM Punk comparison make any sense now?

Wreck It Ralph isn’t a terrible game. It controls well, and I feel like I found myself enjoying it in short bursts. The game’s biggest problem is that it plays it TOO safe. No creativity, nothing that made the film stand out is featured here. This is as bare-bones of a side-scrolling platformer that you’ll get.

All I can remember of the story is that it takes place after the events of the film. Ralph drops a Hero’s Duty bug egg into a swamp in Sugar Rush, birthing a bunch of bugs to wreck havoc in the worlds featured in the film. Now it’s up to Felix and Ralph to hunt the bugs down and destroy them.

All you do is get from point A to B, by solving some very simple puzzles and stomping out bugs. Some puzzles can only be solved by Ralph or Felix, so the game allows you to switch both out during gameplay. Felix has a double-jump for reaching high platforms and Ralph has a ramming attack, useful for busting through obstacles. It breaks up the monotony slightly but not much.  

If you want to distract yourself from the monotonous platforming, each level features a Hero’s Duty medal and “Easter Egg” you can find to unlock bonus content like concept art and extra stages. Hunting medals and eggs was actually the highlight for me because you were required to explore the levels to find them. While there wasn’t much to really explore, it was a fun distraction from just running from right to left.  

Every level feels like the last one with a coat of paint thrown over it. While you do get to travel between the games seen in the movie, none of the characteristics that made those games look fun are actually featured. No racing segments, no shooting segment, just level after level of the same platforming you got tired of after the first world. Even the boss fights were underwhelming and slowed down an already bland game.

If I can give Wreck It Ralph credit for anything, they at least got most of the original cast to reprise their roles (minus Ralph’s actor John C Reilly). I think that’s where most of the game’s budget went to because the entire game screams “cheap” Save from the beginning and end game cutscene, which was actually well done, the rest are so embarrassingly cardboard, they hardly qualify as cutscenes. Personally, I think this game was a victim of rushed production to meet the release of the film. They’re glimpses of things throughout the game that hinted at different types of gameplay and between-stage segments (building cars in Sugar Rush, the elaborate voice acted cutscenes clashing with the low-end visuals) but due to time and budget constraints, this was what we got in the end.

I’m only being hard on Wreck It Ralph, because there’s a ton of wasted potential here. Wreck It Ralph could’ve been so much more, but instead of Activision taking their time and giving the public something of substance, they chose to play it safe and strike while the iron was hot and rush it out to coincide with the film’s release. I would only recommend this if you can get it cheap (5 bucks tops) and want something easy to play and complete in an hour. While it isn’t the worst thing i’ve played, it doesn’t do it’s source material justice. Stick to the mobile port of Fix It Felix Jr.

My Grade: C-