GameCola: Inside the Guide (6-10)

-- By Michael Gray

Hey howdy do, everyone! Welcome to Inside the Guide, the only column on GameCola that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the art of writing guides for videogames. Of course, I haven't written any guides in a long, LONG time, and I've totally forgotten everything, but that doesn't stop me from writing about it.

But first, here's a behind-the-scenes look at this column itself. Last month, I wrote about Tiny Toon Adventures, and I thought it was completely awesome. But when the article appeared on GameCola, I thought it was kind of lame. So, this month, I'm going to try to redeem myself and write a COMPLETELY AWESOME article about Tiny Toon Adventures. Specifically, I'll be discussing Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland for the NES.

So, when I played this game, it was the first time I'd seen any Tiny Toon-related material in over ten years. Playing this game jogged my memory, and I started remembering random facts about the TV show. I mean, RANDOM facts. I figured that only Tiny Toon fans would read my guide, so I put the random facts in. Here are a few of them:

Animals from Wackyland start to die whenever they leave home.

In one episode, there was an Odd Couple spoof with Hampton and Plucky.

Holy crap, does anyone else remember the episode with the baby whale whose mother was kidnapped by someone who wanted to KILL her for NO REASON AT ALL? That was the SADDEST EPISODE OF TINY TOONS EVER, AND IT MADE ME WANT TO CRY!!

You can tell a game is good when they misspell "abuzz" in the opening scene.

This is the whale that made me want to cry.

This game isn't very complicated, or difficult. Basically, it's five minigames put together with a carnival theme, just like Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival. There is something strange about this game, however, and it's not the fact that the game is called "Trouble in Wackyland" when Wackyland is not mentioned EVEN ONCE in the game itself. No, what's strange is that all the character designs from the first Tiny Toons game were removed and replaced with uglier versions. That confused me. Why would they redo the game's graphics just to make all the characters look worse?

Programmer 1: Hey, you know the character designs from Tiny Toon Adventures 1?
Programmer 3: Yeah, they were pretty good.
Programmer 1: Let's make them worse in Tiny Toon Adventures 2!
Programmer 3: Brilliant!
Programmer 1: Hey, what happened to Programmer 2?
Programmer 3: She's busy making out with Michael Gray.
Programmer 2: Michael, you're so sexy!

As you can see here, Furball is the only character whose design was improved in this game.

Piggy wants some cake!

What's that? I've just been informed by the editors that I need to stop joking around and talk about my guide for this game, seeing as this article is supposed to be about my guide. Mean old editors. [Note to editors: Not true! I love you! Gina, come over to my place someday so I can Pimp YOUR 'Cola!]

So what to say about my guide...well, when reading it just now, I noticed that I wrote "Hmmm, the scenery disappears. Wait a big, and you can finally get on the engine." TYPO! No one's mentioned this to me, so either no one has read the guide, because this game isn't exactly flying off the shelves at your local GameStop, if you know what I mean, or my readers are too lazy to inform me about typos, because they don't read my writing carefully, because sometimes I have a tendency to write really long sentences, and, since people have short attention spans nowadays due to TV and the Internet, they can't be expected to pay attention during an entire sentence when the sentence is abnormally long, although, if you double-check the sentence where the typo occurred, you will see it is not an abnormally long sentence, but, instead a relatively short one, so I can assume that the latter suggestion, that my readers are lazy, is false, and that my former suggestion, that no one has read the guide, is true, although it certainly could be a combination of the two, and furthermore [Editor's note to Michael: END YOUR DAMN SENTENCE ALREADY], um, that's that.

OK, that's my article, everyone! I'd love to write more, but I think someone has come to see me. (Leaves computer and opens door.) Oh, hey, Gina! How's it go–OWWW! NOOOO! STOP HITTING ME! I DIDN'T MEAN IT! WAAAH!!! WAAAH!!! What? No, I'm not crying because you hit me, Gina, I'm crying because I loved that whale.

-- Michael Gray {10-2007}

Rate this article —