Who is Here?

Who doesn't like scholarly retro reviews? Sit back and enjoy some critique on the culturally crucial classics, Karnov and Socket.

Karnov is Here

Socket is Here

Let's Meet Socket Part 2

In Part 1 of each Let's Meet, you'll find an introduction to a game's history and gameplay. In Part 2, you'll come away with something neat about the game.


It's been a week since I brought up Socket, the poor man's Sonic. Each world in Socket has three stages which progress from straightforward to labyrinthine. The maze stages are satisfying because they center around some navigational idea.

There are three main parts to a Socket maze: the direction you generally want to travel, a navigation mechanic, and the proper approach to that mechanic.

For instance, in the Stone Age's maze, the direction is downward, and the navigation mechanic is the one-way door. If you approach one of these doors from the side with the doorstop, you can go through. If you approach that door from the other side, it won't budge.

For most doors, the proper approach is pretty simple. It's a matter of asking yourself if you've been on the other side. If you have, don't go through the door, since you'll be looping back on yourself; otherwise, go ahead and take the door. It's a three step process:

1. Can I go through this door?
2. Have I been on the other side of this door yet?
3. If not, go through the door. If so, go past the door.

However, because gameplay in Socket is typically pretty laid back, it's a step in thought that you might not normally take. When you're in the habit of just going forward until something stops you, you might not stop to think that you've already been on the other side of that door.

Let's take a look at a particular moment from this stage.

MS Paint is my image editor of choice.

Say you enter this part from just above point A. You won't be able to go through the door at point A, so you'll cross the lava pit to your left and hop downwards. If you keep going left, you'll hit a dead end, so your only option is to go right and cross the lower lava pit. From here you have two choices.

You're supposed to go through the door at point B. You've never seen it before, so you should take it. If you do go through, you'll end up finding the warp zone entrance at point C, which takes you forward through the stage.

If you decide to explore and go up, you'll find the door at point A again, only this time you can go through. If you aren't thinking, you might decide to wander through, only to end up where you started.

If you come into this part of the level from the opening on the left, you aren't given as much warning about looping back on yourself. If you wander upwards, you might end up looping back on yourself, since you haven't seen the door at point A yet. However, you shouldn't wander upwards, since the door at point B is available to you earlier. Remember the three step process; if you find a door that you haven't seen before, you should go through it--no buts about it.

It's worth noting that this segment enforces the stage's downward sense of direction. If you enter from above point A, you have to fall to reach point B. Also, at point B, the correct path is not upward.

These rules aren't immediately obvious. Instead, you come to learn them as you play the stage and as you find what takes you forward and what doesn't. However, the rules are simple, meaning they're easy to pick up when you give the stage a little time.

Personally, these "rules" aren't something I recognized until recently. Before, they had just been something I intuited. And while some mazes have similar rules, none of them share the exact same rule set. With each new maze, you explore and find a new way through.

The rules are also bent every now and then to allow for variation. For instance, near the opening of the stage, there are several one way doors open to you. If you take the very first one available to you, your trip through the stage is very short. The thing is, it's hidden beneath you, so you might not notice it. The rules are bent, since the stage doesn't force you to find that particular door, and there are other ways forward. But it does reward you if you find it. Since you followed the rules and took the first door possible, you clear the stage much faster.

That aspect also aids the stage's sense of downward direction; you come across the hidden door by going down as soon as possible. If you go right instead of down, you'll miss it.

Socket has one effective way of creating themed mazes, but it's hardly the only way of doing it. For instance, Zelda dungeons don't follow Socket rules. Part of what makes Socket interesting is that there are certain rules for interacting with objects—for instance, you want to go through some one-way doors but not others. In Zelda, on the other hand, there's generally only one way to interact with objects. You hookshot to the target, you blow up the crack, so on and so forth; you never want to refrain from hookshotting or bombing. Instead of following Socket rules, Zelda has its own ways of making mazes interesting.

Let's Meet Socket Part 1

In Part 1 of each Let's Meet, you'll find an introduction to a game's history and gameplay. In Part 2, you'll come away with something neat about the game.

So Yourself says to me, he says, “I'm gonna need youse guys to cover the blog while I'm on the run. Try to think of something that will score some serious hits.” Of course, I knew just the thing. As we get closer to yet another US presidential election, what is the one game that people are clamoring for?

Socket (US/EU)/Time Dominator 1st (JP)

Developed and published by Vic Tokai

Genesis – 1994

That Japanese box art makes Socket look so cool. So cool.

For those of you not in the know, Socket is part of that era of gaming when everything needed a platforming animal mascot. As you can tell from its western box art, it relies pretty heavily on being confused for Sonic. Heck, the first world is called Emerald Forest, and it bears an uncanny resemblance to Green Hill Zone. It's worth noting that my esteemed colleague Yourself has mentioned that Socket isn't developer Vic Tokai's only copycat IP.

Each world consists of three stages. The first is fast and linear, the third is a maze, and the second is a middle ground between the two. This sort of level progression is something you see every now and then in old platformers like Kid Icarus, Alex Kidd in Miracle World, and plenty others.

Unlike a good number of those games, not many people are aware of Socket. In general, Vic Tokai didn't put out memorable games. Among the best known ones are Psycho Fox, Decap Attack, Clash at Demonhead, and Trouble Shooter. When these games are remembered, it's fondly, but you'd be hard-pressed to find them on a top 10 list. Vic Tokai made neat games with fun mechanics, but never anything truly compelling. There's no mindblowing developments, but there is enough to leave a smile on your face.

That's where Socket comes in. It's what happens when a Vic Tokai game doesn't have any unique charm: the only appealing part has been left out.

Most of the time, you'll hear it called a poor Sonic clone and dismissed immediately. If the writer has given it some time, like this guy, you'll hear of the maze stages. I tried to find a blog post with someone who didn't like the maze stages, but instead I found that post where the guy actually liked the game. He seems to enjoy the mazes, too.

Regardless of whether or not it's a good idea to put maze stages in a game that masquerades as Sonic, I'm going to talk about those mazes next time.

A maze can be an arbitrarily-constructed sequence of hallways, where finding your way through is a matter of memorizing what to do at each juncture. Or they can follow a theme, where knowing what to do at each juncture is a matter of pattern recognition.

One thing I've always liked about Socket is that its mazes belong to the second camp. They're simplistic, but they still know how to follow a theme. And that's what I'll talk about next time.

History01: Victory for Vic Tokai

Do yourself a favor and go check out the Wikipedia page on Vic Tokai right this instant. Back? That's right! Today I'm here to tell you about a Japanese cable and DSL provider! You thought this blog was all about video games, but we've got a lot more in store for you. Prepare to be educated!

Wait, what's that? You read past the first two sentences of the article and saw that the company also developed and published video games in the late '80s and '90s? Well, aren't you a smart brain. I was ready to deliver a dissertation on the market trends of internet service providers in 21st century Japan and you jump in here with this game bullshit. Fine. I'll go click through a bunch of links and YouTube a bunch of longplays and come back to you the BORING reader with some BORING information on their BORING period of experimentation in the BORING field of video games.

Ha, and your name is Bert! Asshole!

Tricked you! I actually knew all along that Vic Tokai was a games company. In fact, it was just today that I learned about their history in telecommunications. Yeah, so they made a bunch of okay games, mostly for the Genesis/Mega Drive and NES. Some are remembered fondly, some are shockingly derivative of more famous games, and most have simply disappeared over the years. I'm going to talk to you a little bit, in person, about a couple games they developed. For the most part I'll be skipping over anything they published but didn't themselves create.

So let's start with an 'over the view'. The only Victor Kai game I've heard mentioned by anyone ever is a Sega Master System platformer called Psycho Fox. It's one of those games you may hear mentioned as "one of the only SMS games that doesn't completely suck". Some people think it sucks though. Some think it's just alright. If one thing is true, it's that it's for the Sega Master System. Hm you know actually I told a lie at the beginning of this paragraph. There's one other VT game you may know by name: Clash at Demonhead. This one came out for the NES and had a kind of weird Metroid / Bionic Commando thing going on, where the levels were on a world-map, but had different entrances and exits that would take you on different paths. Hey and there's Decap Attack, THAT one actually made it onto the Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection that came out on 360 a few years back. But is it truly considered an Ultimate Genesis game? Certainly it was one of the lesser known in that anthology. And by "lesser known", I do mean "starred a mummy" - but he's a good mummy. From here, we're only going to get more obscure.

Past that pack of popular platformers players probably precognize, ol' Vicky T. is notable for one other thing: a bunch of games dangerously derivative of far more famous fredecessors. Mega Man, Mario, Sonic - Tokai has copied from the best of the best, and they do little to hide it. Ever looked through the video store or Netflix and seen those fake-out movies that are intended to trick consumers into believing they're related to their more famous counterparts? Transmorphers, Almighty Thor, The Terminators, Snakes on a Train - just look through the IMDB for The Asylum and you'll find a litany of these shameless ripoffs. Well, that's what Vic Tokai was up to in the video game industry of the early '90s. Maybe their replicas weren't as much mean-spirited cash-ins as uninspired filler, but you've got to chuckle as soon as you power on The Krion Conquest, Kid Kool, or Socket (aka Time Dominator). And maybe it's what you would expect from a cable company feigning to be a game developer. Anyway, grab some popcorn (ugh) and check these out. Try to guess what classic each copies from! (Hint: you'll know immediately)

Check back later for Part 2, where I'll discuss some of VT's original games in a little more depth. And feel free to make a marijuana pun at your leisure; I'm not going to because I didn't drop out of high school to work at Home Depot.