CoinOps & Vision - Bringing the Arcade to your home in spectacular style!

Bringing the arcade to your home

Microsoft's first foray into the console market, the Xbox, appeared in 2001 (or 2002 for us European gamers) and was a huge success. But, while I have fond memories of playing Halo 2, Mercenaries, Brute Force and Tao Feng : Fist of the Lotus with my buddies in our earlier twenties, it is not a console I hold with much regard these days. Aside from the games mentioned above, there isn't much else in the Xbox's library of games that holds any appeal. Even games such as Toejam & Earl 3 and Sega's arcade beat-em-up Strike Out left me extremely disappointed. Add in the fact that it's a fairly ugly brute of a console, with one of the worst official controllers ever made - right up there with the Atari Jaguar and Sega's horrible Dreamcast controller - and you have a machine that I am happy to leave in the past. Until now!

Retro Review - Chuck Rock (Mega Drive / Genesis)

What shall we call this guy who chucks rocks?

The imaginatively titled Chuck Rock puts you in the, no doubt incredibly stinky, loincloth of the knuckle dragging titular hero. Chuck is a neanderthal man with a penchant for lobbing great hunks of stone around the place. Handily for him this skill will come in rather handy as he sets off to rescue his fair maiden from a boxing glove clad dinosaur named Gary. Nonsensical plot devices aside, Chuck Rock is a standard 2D platformer which sees you traversing such prehistoric locales as swamps, grasslands, snowy mountains, and underground caverns. There is even a delightful trip into the insides of a large reptile in store for our hero. As well as being able to pick up rocks of various sizes Chuck can also use his rather substantial belly to good use, butting away the reptilian foes as they come close. He is also surprisingly nimble for a fat man, able to perform a jumping kick to take down any flying foes. The rocks can not only be used as a crushing weapon, but can also be used as a shield to protect Chuck from air projectiles or bouncing boulders. They can also be used as handy platforms, allowing Chuck access to higher platforms that might otherwise elude him.