Saturday, December 4, 2010

TITAN: The Hero Not Appearing In This Game!

Titus Software produced a number of games for the 16-bit home computers and consoles back in the late 1980s and early 90s; the company survived until 2005, but always had a reputation for games that looked attractive but played poorly, including the infamously awful Superman for the Nintendo 64.

The company's philosophy seems to be summed up in this ad for its abstract kinetic puzzle/action game, an Arkanoid-like Breakout variant called TITAN.  The title screen in the lower right-hand corner looks like a better fit for the game's actual content, but that doesn't stop Titus from running this full-page color magazine ad with a European Metal Hurlant feel:



The logo is painstakingly airbrushed, explosions dot the imposing tower in the background, and a hero unrelated to the actual gameplay stands defiant in the foreground.  I think he's meant to look like European comic book character Ranxerox, with his upturned nose and defiant grimace, but even with Billy Idol's transplanted hairdo and a pair of oddly misshapen ears, he just looks vaguely uncomfortable, perhaps constipated:


 It's probably a good thing TITAN was not a major hit, or this bit of grotesquerie might have turned up on Saturday morning television, complete with a storyline trying unsuccessfully to merge the gameplay with the promotional art:

From beyond the planets of time and space comes THE TITAN!  PHOOM!  With his trusty Power Balls, he fights to keep the world safe from the Evil Blocks of Dr. Tauermann!  CRACK!  His Junior BlockBusters are on the alert!  KLAXON!  Along with his clumsy robot sidekick Marcello! BZZZZRT! KABOOM!

TITAN:  Don't forget to brush your teeth, kids!


JUNIOR BLOCKBUSTERS:  Yaaaaayyyyy!
 

2 comments:

  1. I have a titus cd game with this game, I loved it. Can it be played in Windows 7?? :)

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  2. It can probably be played via the DOSBox emulator -- it provides a window that behaves like an MS-DOS PC and seems to be broadly compatible, I haven't run into any issues with it.

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