September 1987 (Bandai/Nintendo)

This is going to be the shortest review ever for Juggle Chainsaws.  For a few good reasons.

First, I need to get back into the swing of things.  Short review means I can get it out into the world and back on a roll.  Ah, how I long for the days of the launch titles where I pumped out all 18 or so games in a few weeks.

Second, and most importantly, I can’t get the damn game to do anything except give me false starts.  I gave it way more time than it deserved the game seriously just sucks.  Making people exercise by playing video games?  Come on, like that will ever happen¹.  But let’s take a look at each individual event because that’s the only way to look at this and make any sense.

100 Meter Dash

Look at how close the runners appear to be on the track. Then look at the bar at the top of the screen to show how much I'm winning by. That's just insane.

This is the only one of the events really worth playing.  You run on the mat.  Which sucks because you have to run in place and run fast at the same time.  And the mat tends to slip around.

But my problem wasn’t with the mat, it was with getting the thing to work in the first place.  I pressed every button I could, nothing happened.  Magically I got the idea that maybe I’d have to stand on the mat.  I pressed those buttons, held them down, and I was good to go.

This would have been a lot better with an actual mat, but not by much.  Running in place really isn’t my thing.

The weirdest part though is how the game handles the position of the runners on the track.  It looks like they’re on a lane side by side in the same line of sight².  For the entire race it looks like you’re neck and neck with the competition.

But take a look at the progress bar at the top of the screen.  I’m way ahead of my opponent.  How in Hell did that happen?  I would have been happy with Bandai putting something between the lanes so it was more obvious that I wasn’t really right next to the other runner the whole time.

110 Meter Hurdles

This one holds a special place in my heart because I ran that in high school.  Not very well, but I competed and that’s all that counts.

That being said, I can’t really recommend this part of the game.  You have to use terrible form because of the control scheme.  Although there isn’t really a way to use good form so I don’t have any idea how it could be any better.  Maybe some sort of convoluted method where you jump from pairs of buttons?  But then at some point you’d have to turn around and that would be a pain in the ass.

Which really illustrates my point.  This isn’t hurdles at all.  It’s running with some jumping straight up in the air thrown in.  And the hurdles are much further apart than they’d be in real life.  A good hurdler will take three steps between hurdles³.  Here you take a lot more than that.

Maybe I’m wanting too much realism in a video game.

Triple Jump and Long Jump

Falling down is not a foul. But here it is. I'll chalk it up to technical limitations.

I’m lumping these two together because essentially they’re the same thing, at least as far as the game goes.  Run for a bit, then jump in the air.  For long jump you jump once.  For triple jump, you jump three times.  That’s the only difference.

I’ve got a big problem with this one too, and I think it’s a bigger flaw than the hurdle problem I’ve already talked about.  Namely, what’s counted as a foul.

In an attempt to keep people from jumping off the mat and getting back on five minutes later with a miles long jump, Bandai made it so if you’re in the air too long you get a foul for that jump.  I’m not sure how they decided what was too long, and I’d like to imagine that some NBA player could jump high enough that the game would think he cheated.  But that’s not the problem I have with this.

My problem is what the player does on screen that results in a foul.  He falls down.

In real life this is a good move.  Your distance is measured from the furthest point back of your landing⁴, so jumpers are taught to fall forward.  That’s exactly what the player does on screen.

But for some reason the game wants this to be gymnastics with it’s “land and don’t move” philosophy.  Too bad that isn’t accurate.

I get why they did it.  But would it have been so hard to just have a point where the player will start to come down anyway and show that they had their foot past the jump line and faulted that way?  I don’t think so.  The way they showed things here is a needless stray from reality.

Maybe the fact that I ran track in high school keeps me from liking this.  Maybe it’s that I don’t have a Power Pad and it’s nowhere near as much fun when you’re just pressing buttons.

But this game is just not good to play.  Buying however is another story altogether.  A complete copy of the game recently sold for around $8,000 so if you can get your hands on that then you should definitely do it.

1. In case you didn’t catch that, the previous sentence was full of sarcasm.
2. I’ll ignore the part where lanes on a track don’t have grass between them anyway.
3. I took 4 because I’m short and I sucked.  Maybe I sucked because I’m short, but that’s a discussion for another time.
4. Which means that if you put a hand behind you when you land and hit the ground the measuring stops where your hand hit.

Yes, this is real. How awesome is that?

First off I got the most interesting email from Jim Welch of Morgoodr Games.  He’s on a mission to make an NES game called Goats Vs Nazis.

I think that’s cool enough in itself, but it gets better.  He’s started a Kickstarter project so anyone who wants to can help out.  You can get your name in the game.

How cool is that?

I’d love to see this game actually happen.  So if you have the means please consider donating to the project.  And if not, then share it with other people so maybe they can help it out.

The second part of our magical triforce of awesome is that I teamed up with Nintendo Legend’s Eric Bailey to make a video about Pro Wrestling.  The highlights are the destruction of my 0-1 rating scale and the mention of poop.

Come on, what were you expecting out of a game like Pro Wrestling?  It gets the standard praise for not being M.U.S.C.L.E. but that’s about it.

Finally, I was helping out Keith from NES-Bit with a few magazine articles.  You should definitely check that out.

Starting tomorrow Sunday or Monday you’ll be able to see new posts brought to you by the letter S.  Again that’s S, as in “Suddenly Something Surfaced, Sans Sanity.”

Wow, I’ve got to get out more.

September 1987 (Hudson/Broderbund)

I was all set to give this game a thumbs down.  Like Winter Games it’s a port of an already existing game.  It doesn’t seem to get any real upgrades for the NES version.  It has a wonky control scheme.

Worst of all, it just drops you down in the middle of the world without any sort of explanation about what’s going on.  There have been and will be more games that do this.  The Legend of Zelda for one, and people still love that game so the whole suddenly materializing in a world thing obviously isn’t the kiss of death.

That doesn’t make it any less annoying though.  Especially in a world where publishers are moving away from even having instruction manuals packaged with the game.  In a way, I think that’s better than the 4 page manuals I get with Madden.  But that’s a discussion for another time¹.

The story for the game is pretty standard.  The bad guys are trying to take over the world and you are the lone person who can stop them.  I still think that’s crazy, but whatever.  I don’t think we’re going to get away from the lone gunman thing for a while.  With shooters it just feels weird.

All of the islands look the same. A bit of a different layout but essentially the same thing.

The first thing you need to know is that you really are dropped down in the middle of the world.  Take off from the carrier and go try to bomb some factories.

Just like every other game known to man you have a certain number of bombs you can carry and unlimited machine gun ammo.  The difference here is that you can go back and land on your carrier and refill your ammo.  To make it even better you can get the damage at least partly repaired.  None of the other shooters that I can think of right now have a place where you can always refill your health instead of having to hope an enemy drops some energy.

The best part though is that on the islands you can find a spot to steal bombs from the Bunglings.  How many other games let you steal ammo from the enemy?  And no, enemies dropping items doesn’t count.  Shame on you for thinking that.

Essentially all of the islands are the same.  But for some reason that just doesn’t seem to matter.  I still think it’s weird that a flying vehicle can machine gun down a tank on the ground but complaining about that is like complaining that the free cookies you’re getting are chocolate chip instead of peanut butter.

Where did that enemy plane come from?

If the game was just flying around and bombing factories it would be another bland shooter and probably would have gotten that thumbs down I initially wanted to give this one.  But just when you think you’ve got things figured out the game throws a wrench into the works.

Suddenly a plane comes out of nowhere and will start to attack you.  But that’s not even the worst part.  The plane doesn’t even really care all that much about you.

What it does care about is getting rid of your carrier.  The screen flashes, you have alerts sounding, and you’ve got to get back to where you started in order to save the carrier from being destroyed.

Technically there’s a two player mode.  I tried it.  I don’t get it.  I was playing with myself so maybe it would have helped if someone was playing with me.

Once you destroy all six factories you win the level and get to do it all again, harder of course.

Obviously this isn’t as good as 1942 or Gradius.  On the bright side, it’s a metric-ton better than Section Z.  But then again, that’s not really hard to pull off.

1. One of these days I’m going to get around for these discussions for another time.  But we’ll get to that later.

September 1987 (Pony Canyon/Acclaim)

Yeah, this is what I’m coming back with.  School’s starting back up on Tuesday in the heat of summer.  My wife just got air conditioning in her classroom back.  Makes perfect sense doesn’t it?  I don’t think so but I’m doing it anyway.  I can stretch things by saying that since this is essentially a collection of mini games it’s like a kindergarten class, especially when you factor in centers¹.

Plus I have a strange desire to end September with games that start with the letter S.  I’m not sure if I’m making another kindergarten connection there or if there’s some other sort of psychological thing that I should start worrying about.

Ok, let’s get serious about this.  If you can’t get a copy of the manual forget it.  If you can get a copy then make sure you read it because this thing has no in game instructions at all.  Not that having instructions makes the game any fun.  But it is nice to have some idea of what you need to do.

Not that it will help much.  To put it very bluntly, this game stinks worse than a monkey’s butt².  I think the best way to do this is to look at each event of the game by itself.

Hot Dog Aeriels is a totally worthless event.  The manual first explains it as ski jumping.  That would be pretty lame on the NES³ but whatever.  So instead they turned it into a freestyle skiing game somewhat reminiscent of Ski Free.

Let’s totally ignore the fact that the game was released in 1987 and tied to the 1988 games in Calgary.  At which point freestyle skiing wasn’t an event yet.  That didn’t happen until the 1992 games in Albertville.

Just like the game, I fell flat without fail.

Scoring is pretty simple.  So simple in fact that the manual tells you exactly what your score will be based on what tricks you pull off.  As far as the scoring cares there are flips and stunts.  It doesn’t really matter what tricks you do.  Sure, you get a better score if you do different ones.  But since there’s only about 8 or so different combinations there’s only so much of a score variance you can have.

Figure Skating is pretty much the same way.  There’s a list of 7 tricks that you have to pull off.  Do each trick once in a minute without falling down and you should get a pretty good score.  Right now my world record is 0.0.  I fell down a lot.  Needless to say this is pretty worthless as well.

So lets’ move onto the games that are somewhat worth playing.  It’s less depressing that way.

Speed Skating is just a race.  Hit Left on the D-pad to move your left leg and right to move your right.  Obviously you’ll want to alternate since moving the same leg twice in a row doesn’t really work out too well.  I’d write more, but that’s about it.  It’s a race, so do it fast.

Bobsledding is my favorite.  Partly because something has to be the favorite.  But mostly because it really does play like a mini game.  It’s really too bad that it has to be the best of the bunch.

Yep, the best part of the game looks like this. I'm going to cry.

This is another racing portion, only here the only thing you control is when you turn and slow down.  You can’t really tell from the track when a turn is coming up, but you can see on a map where you are and the entire track.

The overall badness is not limited to the game though.  On the screen where you enter your name you can only move left and right.  Yep, you can’t move down the alphabet grid despite the fact that every other game on the NES where the alphabet is displayed in a grid lets you do just that.

Despite all of the negative things I’ve written, there is one major thing that this game got right.  You don’t press Select to change the menu choices.  Nintendo hasn’t done that yet in their games.  Someone should get on that.

I think I’ll compare this one to Donkey Kong Jr. Math.  It has a two player mode that makes the game worthwhile if you have it turned on already.  But then you’d have to explain why you have the game on in the first place.

1. My wife is going to kill me for saying that, so if I go a while without updating after this just assume I’ve been turned into fertilizer for the basil.
2. Which roughly looks like .
3. Not to mention the ancient computer systems that had this game first.

September 1987 (Hudson/Broderbund)

Let’s blame the lack of updates recently on a few things.

My wife finally got hired at a school.  There’s been lots of celebrating and getting ready.

Those promotions at work that have been given and taken away are finally mine.  Not a full time promotion since I still have to do some days at the old position, but it’s at least steady.

Finally, Star Voyager was really bad.  I mean, come on, if you’d played something like that would you want to come back?  It was hard to get the motivation back.

But let’s get on with the game.

Lode Runner, like Solomon’s Key, is a puzzle game that at times acts like it wants to be a platformer.  Your character travels around the level attempting to pick up bags of gold.  Enemies travel around the screen and try to catch you.  They look really familiar, but I might have dreamed about that because we haven’t seen them in any games yet¹.    I’m not going to worry about that.

This is Lode Runner. It looks really old doesn't it?

The controls, and by association the way your character moves, is just a bit weird.  You can’t jump.  At least not up, but jumping down might technically be considered falling and thus not count anyway.  The D-pad buttons move your character in the appropriate direction, that’s normal enough.

The A and B buttons though, that’s where things take a step into Weirdsville².  B digs a hole to the left and A digs a whole to the right.  Holes can either be used to trap the enemies³ or get to other parts of the level.  Just be careful because the holes fill themselves back up.  That’s great if an enemy is in the hole.  Not so much if you’re trapped in there because not only can you not jump, you can’t climb anything that isn’t a ladder.

I should make a joke about how this still looks like the original version, or at least just like ever level in this version. But that would be way too easy.

The other problem with the game is that it looks the same throughout the entire thing.  Sure, the level layout is different each time.  But that’s about it.

It’s a bit weird for me to hold this against Lode Runner though.  After all it is just a puzzle game.  Tetris won’t change much when we get that far.  Clu Clu Land didn’t change really either.

But Lode Runner just doesn’t feel like a puzzle game, which in my mind means that all of the levels should have a slightly different look to them.  Would it have been too hard to just change the background color to something other than black?

It’s almost like Hudson decided that the only way to do this game right was to do it exactly like the original, even if that means making the game look and feel really old.

I know I’ve tagged this game with Continue, implying that you can continue your game somehow.  That’s only sort of true.  You can instantly jump to any of the levels

Weirdness aside, if you like puzzle games this is worth checking out.

1. Maybe a game about a man that goes around bombing things perhaps?
2. Which is somewhere in the backwoods of Alabama for those of you who don’t know.
3. Seriously, why do they seem so familiar?

1 – I had a really bad day at work where I cut the end of a finger on each hand.  Messed up hands means I can’t play.

2 – Those work promotions that I’ve said are going to happen are finally happening.  More hours means less time to play.

3 – The school year is over so my wife is actually home at the same time as me.  Seeing her while she’s awake is a really good thing.

4 – Star Voyager was really bad and the rest of the month doesn’t look to get much better.

See, I told you the reasons weren’t very good.  But I have started playing Lode Runner for next time so look forward to seeing that pretty soon.

September 1987 (ASCII/Acclaim)

Acclaim’s not off to a good start, but at least they have something.  Maybe there’s a curse over people responsible for NES games when the company name begins with the letter A.  Maybe it’s just the result of a small sample size and a new company or two being compared to others who have been at this a while.

Whatever it is, Star Voyager is the worst game I’ve looked at so far.  No question about it.  Clu Clu Land, the previous owner of that title, can be gotten used to.  Tag Team Wrestling at least has a point.  Hell, even Karate Champ¹  attempts to be a game.

Star Voyager misses the whole point of being a game.  If I was going to write an article about how to make a terrible game, I would hold Star Voyager up as the prime example.  If there were ever a time to debut the term “craptastic” here, this game would be it because I think it fails on almost every level possible.

This is a space station. It looks like a flying saucer when you're flying up to it, then it turns on it's side because you're too stupid to come into the docking station instead of the window.

In every game so far I’ve had some idea of what to do when I just start the game.  Hey, I might read the manuals but I do it after trying the game out.  If I can understand the game without the manual that’s great.  But I’m not going to hold it against the game if I do have to read the manual to really understand things.  Instructions are there for a reason.  They don’t help very much here.

The game starts with a scene showing your character getting into a space craft.  You’re then out in space flying around with absolutely no direction at all.  The map shows where planets, asteroid fields, enemy ships, black holes, space stations, and your mother ship are.  The game gives no indication about what these things are, I read it in the manual.

Therein lies the foundation for a bad game.  The game itself doesn’t really tell you anything about what’s going on.  Sure, when you enter a sector your HUD says that a planet or an enemy or something is nearby.  But can you imagine how terrible The Legend of Zelda would be if you were told that an enemy was nearby, and if nearby meant within a 5 screen radius?

Yes, on the surface it seems like a good idea to warn players about what’s near them since there’s such a small field of view.  But why not fix that field of view in the first place?

This is a planet. Good luck landing on it.

Bus easily, the most frustrating thing about this entire game was how I just couldn’t land on a planet.  The manual doesn’t tell me that I have to do anything weird to land on a planet.  I couldn’t even crash into a planet and die most of the time.

Once I landed on a planet, I had no idea how.  I started pressing buttons to see what would happen and if I could do anything, and I took back off.  What a load of crap.

Every other time I started to approach the planet it was like the thing moved out of my way.  Planets don’t get out of your way so you can’t land on them.

For what I’m pretty sure is the first time, I went to a FAQ online just to see if I was being a complete idiot.  Turns out that I was approaching the planet too fast.  Excuse me if I’m wrong, but if you try to land too fast don’t you just crash?  I also learned that out of the nine planets in the game, only four actually have something on them.  I’m assuming I found one of those.

The whole thing is frustrating and stupid and the biggest waste of time I’ve encountered on the system so far.  Even terrible games like Ninja Kid and Legend of Kage at least have the ability to play with a friend and see who can do the best.

Star Voyager doesn’t even have that.

1. In all honesty, Karate Champ should be the reigning “worst game so far” but since I stopped doing awards I stopped worrying about that part of things.

September 1987 (SunSoft)

Another in the line of games meant to cash in on the popularity of an arcade title, Spy Hunter is another title that just doesn’t live up to the high standards set in the arcade.

Spy Hunter does have a leg up on Ghosts ‘n Goblins and other titles that feature one hit kills, a staple of arcade games which are made that way so players will have to put in more money.  You get multiple cars to try to get to the end of the level.  And you get a timer.

I’ve always felt like racing games with a timer counting down aren’t really racing games.  I think they’re platformers where you can’t jump and just happen to be in a car.  All of the elements of a platforming game are there.  You have enemies trying to destroy you.  You have enemies that have to be destroyed different ways, if they can be destroyed at all.  You have power ups.  Although Mario Kart will have power ups and that’s definitely not a platformer disguised as a racing game so that might not be the best example¹.

I’m assuming you have different levels.  This is one game where I’m not ashamed to say that I couldn’t get very far into it.  And I’ll admit that my failure to get very far has proven to be a problem in the past, such as this information pointed out from JohnG about Section Z:

The reason the continuing is like that is because there are more sections and if you get past the first part and you continue, you start in the next section’s start area rather than the beginning of the game. If you are getting sent back to the first section that means you haven’t cleared the first set of sections.

I'm assuming the black edges are because of an aspect ratio difference in the arcade monitor versus what I played this in.

So it’s entirely possible that I’m just missing something here.  With Section Z I’m sure that if the game had been fun enough I’d eventually figured that out.  But Spy Hunter, it’s just not fun.

Which is really sad.  You have a car that can go fast.  You get to shoot things and drop obstacles behind you.  You have multiple paths through the level so you can avoid certain enemies.  Even the graphics, while admittedly worse than those of the arcade version, aren’t really that bad.  A lot of elements are there to make this a pretty fun game.

But the thing that ruins this is the controls, specifically the limits of using an NES controller with a game originally designed for use on a machine that had a steering wheel and a gas pedal.  Pressing up and down on the D Pad makes you go faster or slower respectively.  This makes perfect sense, but it just is executed in a way that actually works.  Both weapon buttons work perfectly fine with the NES controller set up.

See those NES graphics? That's really not too bad.

I wish Spy Hunter had a way to continue.  A two player mode would be great.  Co-opperative gameplay would be ideal but even something where I had to take turns and compare scores would be better.  The thing keeping me from really holding this against the game is that it isn’t in the arcade version either.  And I can’t really get on SunSoft too much for not adding something new to this home port, especially when the box bills it as The Authentic Arcade Edition.  I really don’t want to play those other versions if this is the authentic arcade version.  Who knows what they’ve done to the other versions.  Although since it’s not authentic that leaves open the chance that some multiplayer stuff has been added.

Sadly I don’t have a place where I can test the arcade version.  It has to be a lot better than the NES one.  It might even be really fun.  It has to control better.

Spy Hunter is a great example of why arcade ports shouldn’t always come home.

Want to experience this game for yourself?  Then go pick up a copy of Spy Hunter for the NES.  Get a system too while you’re at it.

1. And even mentioning it breaks my self imposed rule of not talking about games that haven’t come out yet.

September 1987 (SquareSoft/Acclaim)

First off, let’s get one thing straight.  Officially this game is called The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner.  But the box just says 3-D WorldRunner.  So we’re already off to a slightly confusing start since the box says one thing and everything else having to do with the game says another.

Secondly, let’s take a look back at the last gimmick product the NES had.  R.O.B. and his two games Stack Up and Gyromite weren’t exactly turned into what Nintendo hung their hats on.  If you really want to get down to it, R.O.B. existed so parents would know that even if the video game market crashed again¹ at least the kid would have a toy robot.  With this one we get a game in 3D.  Big deal.  If the game is a flop you get 3D glasses².

Third, there’s some disagreement about what kind of game this really is.  Wikipedia says it’s a rails shooter³ but GameFaqs says it’s an action game⁴.  So what is it?  I’m going to have it as both because that makes it easier to find it no matter how people are looking for it.  But if I had to pick I’d go with saying it’s an action game.  You don’t initially have a gun and you aren’t set on one path.  Of course this is early video game stuff we’re talking about so the rails shooters of today that I’m thinking of⁵ could have evolved to that set path state of existence from something like 3-D Word Runner pretty easily⁶.

Finally, let’s remember that Acclaim’s only other game at this point is Tiger-Heli.  Nintendo is the only developer or publisher to have both good and bad games through the end of 1986.  Check the wrap up, then come back knowing that I’m right according to my own graphs.

So we have a game made by a company that’s already made a bad game, has a gimmicky product to go with it, has people disagreeing about its genre, and doesn’t have consistency with regard to the title of the game.  Things are off to a wonderful start aren’t they?

This is my attempt to make a screen grab of 3-D mode. It sort of failed since it rapidly flashes back and forth. Ironically enough, all of my attempts were of this color scheme and not the other one.

The point of that introduction was two-fold.  First, I’m really annoyed at one of my cats for thinking that sharpening her claws on my feet this morning would be a good idea.  Second, and more importantly, I want to set the stage for expectations on games for the rest of this blog’s lifespan.  Namely that expectations mean almost nothing.  Except that if Micronics makes a game somebody else could have made it better.  But that’s a post for another time.

3-D Worldrunner⁷ is like nothing the NES has seen before.  The most obvious example of that is the 3-D mode.  Thankfully it’s off by default because I can’t find my 3-D glasses from Monsters vs Aliens.

In theory the game is simple enough.  You’re forced up the screen and you have to jump over pits and avoid enemies.  There are also green columns that appear throughout the level that contain power up items.  Get the items out by running into the column.  A little weird, but not any worse that bumping your head on a floating box.

One thing to note is the special bonus stage.  If you see stars, start collecting them.  They’ll lead you on a path to a balloon that takes you to a special stage where, if you’re lucky, you’ll find a heart.  At least hearts are still good, they give you an extra life.

Level 2. New colors, new enemies, same basic idea.

In maybe the most evil move that could have been made, mushrooms are poisonous.  There’s that worry in real life, but Super Mario Bros. taught us that mushrooms are good.  And the ones in 3-D WorldRunner look an awful lot like the ones in Mario.

The controls are pretty simple as well.  Left and right move the screen left and right.  That’s right, they move the screen.  Your character doesn’t move really at all horizontally in the main stages.  Down slows you down, up speeds you up.  B shoots missiles when you have them.  A jumps.  Holding A longer makes you jump longer.

You also have full control over direction when you’re in the air, even being able to speed up and slow down.  Thankfully you don’t lose any forward momentum when changing direction in the air.  This comes in handy really quick when you realize there’s a pile of fire in your path when you’re already halfway across a pit.

In the end, 3-D WorldRunner is a dead simple game.  Go forward, don’t die, kill the boss at the end.  Repeat for 8 levels.  But it’s so addicting and so fun it’s totally worth it.

If you want to get your own copy of 3-D WorldRunner, head on over to JJ Games.  I highly doubt you’ll get the glasses to come with it though.

1. Or never came back up depending on how you look at things.
2. Really, I should give them more slack on this.  Nobody would buy the game thinking “If this game sucks at least I’ll have some cool 3D glasses.”  Mostly because 3-D glasses aren’t cool to wear around anyway, and a small part because by now the sucess of the NES has been pretty much established and if anything fails it’s going to be individual games and devlopers/publishers.
3. And they argue over the release date of Super Mario Bros. to the point where it’ listed as “By Spring 1986″ for North America.
4. I know I said I don’t look up reviews and walk throughs and stuff but I do check the developer and publisher sometimes, especially when I’m setting up the post before I’ve started playing the game.
5. Mostly Area 51
6. Unless you don’t believe in evolution.  But that’s a topic for another blog.
7. I’ll be using the short title because that’s what the box says and because I’m lazy and don’t feel like typing out the long one, especially because the box uses the short one.

Tshirt Laundry has decided that Juggle Chainsaws is cool enough share a couple of $20 gift certificates with.  I’m passing on the love and sharing those gift certificates with 2 random lucky people.

From now, 2:30pm EST on the 28th of March 2011 until around 9am EST on the 12th of April every comment left on this site by a real human person that doesn’t also write for this blog or live in my apartment¹ is an entry to win a gift certificate.

Pretty cool, isn’t it?  But it gets better.

I’ve also set up a mailing list so that I can let people who really care about this sort of thing to get news early.  Signing up for the list will allow me to give you a chance to enter contests earlier than the general public and to share any really important Juggle Chainsaws related news. Once a month is probably as frequent as things will be.  Maybe twice, but never more than that.

I promise not to abuse this list.  Partly because I don’t like it when I sign up for a mailing list and get something every day.  Mostly because it would be stupid of me to waste my time writing emails instead of playing games.

Since this mailing list is new and you’re just going to have to trust that I’ll treat your information with respect I will reward your trust by doubling the entries of every comment whose email address is signed up for the mailing list.

So let’s sum things up with a nice list.

1 – You have a chance to win a free $20 from Tshirt Laundry just by reading this blog and leaving a comment on anything here that will actually let you leave comments.

2 – I can’t win, and neither can my wife, even though the randomizer at random.org wouldn’t know who we are anyway and couldn’t have any sort of bias.

3 – You have from right now until 9am on the 12th of April to leave comments for a contest entry.  If I don’t check until after 9am, then anyone who made a comment before I saw things will have that counted as well.

4 – Spam comments and comments made by anything other than a real human person don’t count.  That means trackbacks from linking to stuff don’t count.

5 – Joining the mailing list doubles the number of entries you have.

Be sure to check out Tshirt Laundry to see what they have available.  And be sure to start leaving comments and signing up for the mailing list.  It’s what the cool kids are doing.

1. In other words, my wife and I can’t win.

March 1987 (Nintendo)

Note: Somehow I missed this game. For right now the post is going to be here and at some point later I’m going to change the date so it fits in where it’s supposed to chronologically. This won’t change the URL at all.

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat here.  Wrestling games for the NES so far have been, to put it lightly, a giant pile of poop.  Yeah, I said that.  I want to keep this relatively family friendly, but there’s no way to hide the fact that M.U.S.C.L.E. and Tag Team Wrestling are two of the worst games for the NES.  And don’t forget that in the 1985 – 1986 Wrap Up we learned that Nintendo is not immune to making bad games, coming in with about 35% of their games getting a thumbs down rating¹.

So with that in mind, my expectations for Pro Wrestling are pretty low.  I expect it to be better than those other two wrestling “games,” but by default it almost has to be.  Nintendo might have made some games that I don’t think were worth much, but none of them would be buried in a landfill or anything.

The colors, Duke! The colors!

First things first,when I started the game the title screen had color and noise.  It’s nice to see Nintendo moving away from the kindergarten collage style of title screens.  Seriously, it’s not that hard to give your title screen color.  Or at least change up the design a bit.

The only thing left to do now is to move away from using Select to change menu options and let me use that mysterious thing on the D-Pad that looks an awful lot like a down arrow.  I might be wrong, but arrows that point down tend to make things move down.  I guess I can’t get everything all in one shot.  That would make too much sense.

So let’s move onto the game itself.  Multi-player mode is a one fight and you’re done deal.  Nothing to special there.  Single player mode has you going through a campaign to win the Virtual Wrestling Association and then the Virtual Wrestling Championship titles.

This tournament is set up in a sort of funky way though.  Instead of brackets or some other form of single elimination, you either gain or lose a ranking spot based on if you win or lose.  You start off #5 and it’s game over if your rank ever falls to #6.  I’m assuming that means you can lose matches later because I wasn’t able to actually win one.

I was debating putting that in here because it makes me look like a loser.  But I think that’s an important fact because I like the game despite the part where I didn’t win a match.  Maybe that will change later as I spend my time with it but for right now I’m relatively fine with it.

Do you know how hard it is to actually do a good move and get the screen shot to prove it?

The fighting really isn’t anything special.  There are some standard moves that everyone has and each wrestler has some special moves.

One nice touch is that the referee is always in the ring, so there’s nothing magical about his appearance.

It also has all of the professional wrestling rules in place that I know of² and you can lose by being out of the ring for too long.  No chairs though, I think that comes later.

For now, let’s just be really happy that Nintendo understood how to make the isometric 3D effect actually work.  You still have to attack horizontally, but since your fighter doesn’t ever face up or down the screen and instead just slides sideways from his perspective that’s totally fine.

It’s more than totally fine in fact.  It’s maybe the smartest thing about the game.  Nintendo understood the limitations and worked within them instead of trying to push things to a level that the technology couldn’t really handle.  I have to give them a lot of credit for that.

This next part is all theoretical because, like I said before, I never managed to actually win a match.  But from what I’ve seen Pro Wrestling has a pretty good example of Engrish when you win, saying “A Winner Is You.”  Japanese games had those weird translations all the time, so that in itself isn’t all too significant.  But the fact that Tshirt Laundry has the funky translation available as a shirt is.

In the end, this isn’t a wonderful game.  It’s a solid title that I wouldn’t be ashamed to tell people that I have but wouldn’t brag about either.  I’ll bet it’s a lot more fun with another person to play with though.  At any rate, it is the best wrestling game available so far so if you like wrestling it’s essentially this or nothing.

Want to get a copy of Pro Wrestling for yourself?  Then head over to JJ Games and grab one!  You can get an NES while you’re there if you need one of those as well.

1. Let’s also keep in mind that those numbers are especially crappy because of the small sample size and that Nintendo was the only developer or publisher to receive both thumbs up and thumbs down for their games.
2. Which consist of watching a few WCW Classic things on Turner South.

September 1987 (Konami)

Wow, I turned this thing on and heard speech.  That’s a great sign.  And Konami has done good things so far for the most part so I’m expecting the goodness to continue.

And it sort of did.  But before I really go there, I have to say that sports games games have been pretty basic.  Tennis and Volleyball were basically pong.  Track & Field was all about pressing buttons fast and finding the right angle.  Even Baseball was a super simplified version of the game.  So it’s not like Double Dribble has some giant sports game set of expectations to live up to.

How you view this game really depends on what you want out of it.  There’s no season mode at all, no tournament, nothing.  Everything is a single game at a time.  You have a choice of 3 teams that you can be: New York, Chicago, or LA.  If you’re going the single player route then you always play against Boston.  In that sense the game is a bit limiting.

The menu screen is best described as innovative.  Instead of simply scrolling through the options you have a basketball player shooting into a basket and when he makes it the option changes.  It’s cool, but it also slows things down a bit.  Thankfully the only options are the length of the quarters, the team you’ll be, and the difficulty level.  When I showed it to my wife she told me that this menu system puts it way ahead of its time since a lot of games now have some sort of animation happening when a menu item is changed and games for the NES have pretty much just been the text on the menu changing¹.

Yep, no attempt at making the players look like people instead of blobs of clay.

Graphically, Double Dribble is nothing special.  Actually, that might be giving it too much credit.  The players seriously look like blobs of clay.  There’s no apparent attempt to make them look like people.  No identification at all.  No positions, no numbers, no names, nothing.

On one hand it’s a bit disorienting, especially when you combine it with the fact that the player’s skin flashes colors to indicate who you’re controlling.  And it’s not a very noticeable flashing either.  Really, it would help a lot if you had some more control over who you switched to.  On the other, it’s nice to know that I can’t get bogged down by who is on what team² or even who is going to take a 3 point shot since I saw no indication that any player in the game is any more skilled than any other player.  So no more trying to get the ball to someone other than my center outside the 3 point line like I have to do in other basketball games since I don’t actually have someone who is my designated center.

The controls are a bit weird, especially on defense.  That’s more a fault of Nintendo’s though for making a controller with 2 buttons than a fault of Konami though.  On offense B starts a shot and releasing B releases the shot.  Once again, Double Dribble has provided something that is really ahead of its time with the shot release method.  It took a bit for me to get used to this, part of the reason why the score in the above screen shot is so lopsided.  Even on dunks you have to release the shot.

On defense B switches players and A either attempts to steal the ball or block a shot depending on the situation.  Stealing the ball is actually pretty easy once you get the timing down.  Just run at the other player and hit A and most of the time you’ll have the ball.  I’m not sure if blocking a shot is actually possible or if jumping in front of the shooter is actually doing anything.  But it’s a habit I’ve gotten into and since it doesn’t hurt I don’t think I’ll stop doing it.

There are some other weird things too.  Minor things including calling quarters periods and having a jump ball before every quarter.  The one that bothers me the most though is that every foul results in foul shots.  I only had one foul in the game I played, an offensive foul, and the other team got two shots.  It’s a small thing really, and since every player has the same skill level I guess it doesn’t matter if someone fouls out since the bench players will be just as good.

These dunking cut scenes are the coolest part of the game.

So far we’re just looking at a pretty solid game considering that it’s the first basketball game for the NES.  Still pretty basic and essentially Pong, but solid.  If that were the case there still wouldn’t be anything wrong with it.

But the reason Double Dribble stands out is the cut scenes that pop up when a player dunks the ball.  Everything shows the back of the players head and I’m assuming the palyer is all gray either to make it so they didn’t have to make team specific cut scenes or because they didn’t have time or memory to go back and make them more detailed.

But I don’t care what the reason is.  Especially coming off of the lackluster presentation of the rest of the game these images are just really cool.

When the game is over³ the game just goes back to the title screen.  A bit weird for me, but it sort of makes sense since there’s no season mode or anything.

This isn’t a game I would want to play by myself, but if I had someone to play with I’d be all over it.

Want to try it out for yourself? Then head over to JJ Games and buyit for yourself. If you don’t have an NES you can get one of those too while you’re there.

1. Have I mentioned that I really love that my wife not only supports my working on this project, but is also willing to come in and help every once in a while?
2. Which is the main reason I bought Madden ’11 to replace Madden ’08.
3. The score to mine was somewhere around 78 – 42, and I don’t think I have to tell you if I won or not.

September 1987 (Irem/Broderbund)

There is no way you can know how much I wanted to like this game.  And I’m not being sarcastic at all.  Just within the first 5 seconds of experiencing this thing we’re already guaranteed to have something better than Tiger-Heli.  It’s new.  It’s different.  If Nintendo of America had let them keep the original title (Hell’s Bells) it would have a built-in theme song.  How did things go so wrong?

Before we look at that, we need to look at what is so right about this game.  Despite the reputation it’s picked up over the years there are actually some things that are pretty damn impressive.

Topping that list is the fact that the game is 3D.  Well, maybe 2.5D since you can only move on a tilted X and Y axis through the world.  But still, that’s half a dimension more than most games had at this point.  In fact outside of sports games, and we’re saying that boxing and wrestling are sports games here,  and a shooter (whose name escapes me at the moment but I want to say it’s 1942) where your plane/ship could dive down as well as move in every direction on the screen, there just haven’t been any 3D games. Before I hear about it, Slalom and Mach Rider don’t count.  You move left and right across the screen.  That’s it.

See that blue spherical blob? In theory it's going up and down. It actually looks like it's sliding across the floor. The hit detection seems to think so as well.

OK, so back to Deadly Towers.  In this weird interdimensional space you get to attack in 8 different directions. Although maybe attack isn’t really the right word since your knife is about as long as my pinky finger. I’m not sure what I would replace it with though.  Stab maybe.  But I don’t know of any real weapon that can kill a living ball of fire¹.  There’s also blobs, spherical blobs, damn-bats, and clay snakes joining the party.

To put it bluntly, there are a lot of bad guys on the screen at once.  And surprisingly the game doesn’t seem to suffer any sort of lag because of it.  And not really the amount of sprite flickering that I’d expect either.  The game just looks pretty good overall.  It’s still an early NES game and you can tell, but it’s pretty well done.  Sort of drab on the color scheme but nothing too terrible.

The music for this game is also pretty amazing.  Right up there with The Legend of Zelda if you ask me.  It made me want to grab my guitar and try to figure it out.  My only problem, and this is a bit nit picky, is that as I went through a door and up the tower the song would change or start over.  Not cool.  Thankfully the songs are short enough that you’ll hear the whole thing anyway.

My favorite part though is the way the passwords are handled.  When I’m just playing the game and die² the game puts the password in for me and I otherwise get to go on just like if I’d put it in myself.  I think that’s pretty cool.

If this game had come out later I would say it’s clearly a Legend of Zelda clone with way updated graphics.  As it stands, I’ll say that the idea of going through a world and destroying evil in an attempt to save your home isn’t exactly the most original idea for a game.  It’s a classic, and the only way to really ruin it is to add all sorts of details that just make things stupid.  Besides, the storyline for video games isn’t really all that important when you think about it.  If it was then Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat wouldn’t exist.

There has to be a reason why I’ve talked more about other games than this one, right?    I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about the worst game in history.  Are we?  Seanbaby disagrees, and that list was also put on Cracked.  So I must be wrong³.  Is that how this is going to work?

No, it’s not.  This game is pretty bad, but it’s nowhere near the worst ever.  I still don’t want to come close to playing it ever again.  But I did a quick search and found a good number of lists of the worst NES games.  Deadly Towers was only on the ones that copied the Seanbaby list.

Part of what’s wrong with Deadly Towers we’ve already touched on, mainly the lack of a weapon worth having.  I won’t get any more into that because it’s pretty self explanatory.

What kind of developer would make it possible for me to go through an invisible door and appear in another place right on top of an enemy. Say what you want about Micronics, but they never did that to you in their games.

No, the main problem with Deadly Towers is that the game tries to do too much.  The developers had so many ideas for what should be in the game and ended up putting too many of them in and sacrificing the quality of everything along the way.

That extra 1/2 a dimension really throws things off as well.  There are enemies that the instruction manual tells me go up and down.  In real life that would imply up and down off the ground.  In this game everything acts like they’re just sliding across the ground.  It makes it ridiculous.

Like Zelda, Deadly Towers has a ton of secrets.  The manual even tells you that they’re there.  But you get to the alternate world by way of secret doors.  I went through one once, and I wouldn’t be able to tell you at all how or where I did it.  The worst part was that I landed on an enemy.

Which takes us to the final nail in the coffin.  I hate it when games knock me back when I’m hit by an enemy.  It’s fine if it’s just a small amount.  But this game pushes me back at least 5 feet⁴ every time I get hit.  If that’s into another enemy then you’re just out of luck.

If you gave Deadly Towers to an N64 developer they’d be able to make a pretty solid game out of it.  Give it to a SNES one and it would be up there with Link to the Past as one of the best on the system.

But Irem either went for too much too fast or weren’t nearly as talented as they thought they were.  It’s a shame, because Deadly Towers has a lot of the elements of what makes a good game.

And in the end, that’s what makes this one so bad.

Want to experience the atrocity for yourself?  Then head on over to JJ Games and buy it.  While you’re there be sure to check out what else they have in stock.

Deadly Towers for NES from JJ Games.

1. Why I’m worried about thinking of a real weapon that can kill something that has a next to 0% chance of existing is a discussion for another time.
2. Which technically isn’t the right word because Nintendo didn’t allow death.
3. He’s also wrong about Mighty Bomb Jack.  That game just gets no love.
4. I came up with that number based on  how far the sprite slides relative to the height of the sprite and assuming that he’s at least as tall as my wife.

Shooter (Acclain/Micronics)

Helicopters are fast.  Tigers are fast.  So it would seem logical that a tiger helicopter would also be fast.  Unless I’m totally mistaken and a heli is something other than a helicopter. But if that’s the case, why is there a helicopter shooting things on the cover?

For that matter, how does Micronics keep getting jobs?  True, they’re getting around like a $5 whore.  This is their 4th publisher just in the United States.  Seriously, this is a bit crazy.

Back to the game though.  Once again, Micronics is in charge of porting an arcade game to the NES.  I’ll look at why ports are a difficult thing to pull off later, but for now let’s just assume the fact that arcade games are designed to make money in a totally different way than console games.

The problem with Tiger-Heli is that it’s like Ikari Warriors in all the wrong ways.  It’s sluggish.  The firing mechanics just seem off.  It was developed by Micronics.  I think I’d starting to see a dangerous pattern forming here.

Better watch out for that car. It looks dangerous.

The concept is simple enough.  You’re a helicopter who has to get to the end of the level and shoots things along the way.  Other people don’t want you to do that so they try to shoot your first.  The normal disabling of any thoughts of realism applies too.  For some reason tanks hang out in the neighborhood.  They’re like a bull in a china shop¹.

As you can probably guess by now, I’m really stretching to find things to say about this game.  It isn’t nearly as bad as Athena or Ninja Kid.  So there isn’t that built in ability to rip it apart².  If you’re looking for something good from me, um, the water isn’t one solid color?  Does that even count?

I could stretch things even more and say that the manual is a lot better than the game.  Actually, forgot about how I could do that.  I want to get in a second screen shot and need to fill some space.  And the manual is actually sort of entertaining in a weird kind of way.

Good thing we destroyed that car and house. Except we didn't really destroy the house, more like punched a hole in it.

I can almost hear the following conversation:

Acclaim: So, tell me about this game.

Micronics: You’re a lone helicopter going to take out a terrorist base.

A: Why don’t they just send in a lot of helicopters to take it out?

M: Because your helicopter is awesome.

A: What makes it so great?

M: It can change directions on a dime and is made from ebony metal and chrome and has unlimited ammo and is turbo powered and cost a billion dollars.

A: Again, why not just send in a fleet?

M: This has to be a sneak attack.  In the early morning.  Only we can’t have the game be that dark because people need to see what they’re playing.  And there’s only 1 of these helicopters.  Only let’s not call it a helicopter. Let’s call it a jet-copter…

A: But “heli” is part of the name.

M: Doesn’t matter…

Since this game already existed in the arcades the conversation probably never happened.  This is Acclaim’s first game for the NES.  They got an experienced developer to make the game.  And to be fair, Micronics didn’t exactly destroy 1942 so the choice was understandable.

But really, couldn’t Acclaim have taken the time to check and make sure their name was on the title screen instead of Pony Canyon, the Japanese publisher’s name?

1. The real, Mythbusters kind where you’d think it would be all destructive but there isn’t any actual damage.
2. Well, I could go on for pages about how Micronics sucks the life out of anything that they touch.  But even I would get sick of that after a while.

Sports (Namco/Data East)

This is easily the best fighting game we’ve seen so far.  Granted, the competition is Karate Champ and Urban Champion that’s not hard to do.  Even Trojan beat those games, and it was weighed down by that crappy side scrolling mode.  It also easily beats M.U.S.C.L.E. and Tag Team Wrestling by miles each.

Which isn’t to say that this is a good game by any means.  It’s more like saying it’s the best choice for a meal when your options are all things that make you wonder if anyone dropped a hot dog under the bleachers at last nights high school basketball game.  Yeah, I went there.  And it won’t be the worst place I go with this post either.

Let’s start with the graphics, because that is easily the best and worst part of this game.  The good part first.  Unlike M.U.S.C.L.E., you get to actually attack in a three dimensional world.  This isometric 3D effect actually works pretty well here.  Except for the crowd everything is pretty clear and colorful and actually a bit better than the arcade version in my opinion.  Less realistic, more cartoonish, and I like that.

Really, would it have been so hard to give the characters more of a difference than skin and hair color?

My big problem with the graphics is that the boxers are essentially the same.  They change shorts, dye their hair, and get a skin treatment so everything’s a different color.  That’s about it.  I actually think it’s hilarious that the dark skinned guy in the screen shot to the left has blond hair.  That just usually doesn’t happen naturally.

More hilarious though is how the referee and boxers just disappear when they’re not needed.  The referee is there for the start of the fight, and is invisible until a boxer is knocked down and he’s needed to do the count.  While the referee is counting, the boxer who is still standing disappears.

I’m not exactly sure where they go.  Maybe there’s a trap door and they go down to get something to eat.

But in the end, this is the NES.  And an arcade port at that.  NES games don’t have to have the best graphics anyway and there’s something to be said for staying true to the source material.  Which is just a fancy way of saying that if the only problem with this game was the graphics then I wouldn’t have a problem with it.  Sadly, there are other problems.

To say that the controls seem off would be a major understatement.  I was pressing left and the guy would move right, then left.  I would press nothing and the guy would move.  I’m fine with automatically facing the opponent.  There’s almost no time in boxing where it’s a good idea to have your back to the other fighter¹.

The B button does some sort of defensive move depending on the situation.  A punches.  Just A is a jab.  You can only do a hook punch when you’re facing the opponent vertically, and an uppercut when facing horizontally.  For a body blow you have to hit B and then A, because it makes total sense to defend and then punch.  Sadly this is the control scheme that makes the most sense.

There’s also a smattering of RPG elements in giving you a number of stat points to distribute between punch, speed, and stamina.  That in itself is fine, I like getting to make a boxer the way I want it instead of the way the developers say I should have it.  But you press left to increase your speed, up for punch, and right for stamina.  There’s no way to decrease the allotted points except for pressing down to reset everything.

The only thing I'm going to say is that this is a scene from the arcade original. Except there it was less creepy.

In the end, Ring King just really isn’t worth it.  The controls suck so much that it even makes me think that Clu Clu Land had a good set up.  Really, how does that happen?  I was pretty sure that I would never find a worse control set up than that.

I just so no point in playing a fighting game where the moves I can use are partially depending on where I am in relation to the opponent.  Distance is one thing, and I’m not saying that I should be able to stand in an opposite corner of the ring and still hit the other guy.  But I should be able to throw a type of punch no matter where I am.

I know it gets better.  It has to get better.  Doesn’t it?

1. I know almost nothing about boxing, so I’m leaving open the chance that there is actually a good time to turn your back.  But if there is, I can’t think of it.

Right now I work in a restaurant that’s only open for dinner and brunch.  There’s talks of that changing to opening up for lunch again like we did when we first opened.  Since my wife works during the day a lot of my gaming happens before I go to work while I’m at home alone.  In order to be fair to everyone my shifts are going to have to be split between lunch and dinner.  Which means some of my gaming time is getting taken away from me.

Secondly, and this is something I’m much more excited about, they’re also training me to cook.  No more washing dishes and just prepping food for me.  But that also means more hours at work and less at home.  On a happier note, it might also means I go home without looking like I jumped into the ocean on the way there.

All of that being said, updates will still happen.  I even have plans for a few features to be mixed in along the way.

Stay tuned to see what’s happening.

First, we have the Nintendo Fan Foum.  I like this because it finds the perfect space between taking the games seriously and having fun.  I’ve seen way too many video game fora where things are taken way too seriously and people seem to forget that games, and by association talking about the games, is meant to be fun.  Likewise, I’ve seen fora where it’s about video games in name only and has really just turned into an online social club for a group of friends.

One of the members there has a site that looks at newer games, SG64′s Reviews & More. The reviews are of newer games, but it is nice to see a sample of what’s out there right now.  I’m really behind in my game playing.  And I know that this guy likes older games so there’s a good chance I’ll like some of the same things that he does.

August 1987 (Nintendo)

Imagine going into this game blind.  It would be insane.  Essentially it’s what I did when I started playing.  Not because I’m crazy, just because it’s what I felt like doing.

Obviously I couldn’t go into it totally blind.  I know that the thing is essentially one giant level.  I know some of Samus’ moves from playing Super Smash Brothers.  I know that Samus is a girl.  We’ll get more into that later, but the point is that some of the magic was already lost on me since I’ve been around Nintendo stuff for so long.

Despite all that, I’ve never really played Metroid until now.  Not sure how that happened, just one of those weird things.  So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the game itself.

I’m so glad that I have the manuals to look through.  Even though the map is basically useless and doesn’t give a clear enough indication of where you start the game, it does give you something.

I looked in the Nintendo Fan Club newsletters.  Volume 2 has this blurb at the end.

Picture yourself on the Fortress Planet of Zebes in a faraway galaxy You are Samus, the greatest space hunter of all and Galactic Federation Police warrior. Your power is immense as a result of surgically implant ed robotics. But you need all of your super povrs to dual with the mechanized protectors of the Mother- brain. You’re fast; you have a wide arsenal of weapons and special powers, Without you, the Metroid will devastate the entire universe and realize the Motherbrain’s evil plan.

Notice the lack of any gender specific pronouns there?  Keep that in mind.  I find it funny that a quarterly newsletter doesn’t refer to Samus as a male character.  Reading it initially doesn’t throw any weird thoughts into my head at all.  I’m going to be the one playing the game, so it talks about what I’ll be doing with the usage of the second person pronoun.

Yep, that's totally a girl. You can also tell she's Japanese because her hair is green.

Then the game comes out and the manual repeatedly refers to Samus as a male character.  Once, or twice, I could have dealt with.  That sort of thing happens when something in a game is changed.  Besides, the reason Samus is a girl in the first place is that one of the developers mentioned that it would be great if Samus turned out to be a girl.  So it wasn’t exactly something that was planned from the beginning.

Nonetheless, the manual makes use of male references pretty often.  While the game does use some form of you/your around 30 times¹, there are also 25 instances where a gender specific word is used.  All 25 of those times the gender is male.  He is used 11 times, while his and him are used 7 times each in reference to Samus.

I would think that by the time the book went to print the decision had been made that Samus is a girl.  Yet the manual makes continual references to state otherwise.  I just don’t get it.

Update: I’ve learned that this was done intentionally as a way to keep Samus’ true gender a secret.  I only have one thing to say about: who would have thought Samus was a girl anyway?  What precedent was there to have female characters like that?  Oh well, at least it wasn’t just someone being sloppy with editing.

Until this point, if you wanted to be a girl in a game you either had to be the second player in Ice Climber or suffer through Athena.  So I would think that being a girl would be a good selling point.

But I’ve gone on for too long about things that aren’t really about the game.  Despite my confusion disappointment in all of that stuff, Metroid is a pretty good game.

The game was designed so that you would have to backtrack in order to really get anything done.  It doesn’t even really let you get into the game before it starts that.  Go right, like in almost every other game known to the western world, and you’ll pretty quickly come to a dead end that wouldn’t be a dead end if you were being weird and went left first.

Let me reiterate.  This type of thing was done on purpose and happens all the time here.  So if you don’t like it, this isn’t the game for you.

All I did for this was divide take separate screen shots, put one on top of the other, draw a diagonal line across the top layer, and erase below the line.

I only have one other major problem with Metroid.  The rooms look the same in way too many cases.  Not just similar, dead on the same.  It’s bad enough that the manual tells you that a map would be really helpful andsays if you want one you should draw your own.  Even if you do have a map, you’ll have to check it constantly and pause the game a lot to be sure of where you are.

The only other thing I can say is wrong about this game is the system for opening doors.  And again, this is something that the manual addresses though it really isn’t an issue.  Some doors let you shoot them with anything you have on hand.  Others take multiple hits from weapons that use up some of your limited arsenal of projectiles.  At least the manual tells you how to open each type of door.

Just about everything else about the game is brilliant.  The music sets the mood perfectly.  The story really isn’t that unbelievable.  Well, except for when it’s taking place.  But that’s only because we’ve already passed the year 2000 and I doubt there will be alien encounters to that extent in the next 80 years.  That’s something I can live with though.

Best of all, the manual tells you what kind of power-ups you’ll be getting in the game.  So if you get stuck you’ll know if you’re going to be able to get past that point later.

I’ll be honest.  When I started playing I was turned off by the backtracking and repetition and stuff.  But the more I played, the more I was sucked in.  Looking ahead, September doesn’t have anything that exactly makes me wet my pants with excitement.  Those posts might come more spread out if I keep playing Metroid like I have for the past week.

1. 31 by my count.

August 1987 (Taito)

Oh.  My.  Goodness.  Before anything else, I have to apologize to Slalom.  I’m sorry Rare.  Your game really isn’t that bad.  I’m still not going to say that it’s good.  But it sure does look like it compared to today’s gem.

The Legend of Kage is your basic video game story.  Princess gets captured.  Others have gone out to save her.  They failed, and you are the last hope left.  If you fail, she’s gone forever.

I really hope nobody’s holding their breath waiting for her return.  That might not ever happen.  It would also be a lot more helpful if you had the Jr. Woodchucks Guide Book instead of the actual game manual because the game manual doesn’t tell you anything at all that’s worth knowing.

Prayer. May it forever smite your enemies. And cause epileptic seizures.

The main problem with this game is that it just plops you down in the middle of a level with no indication on where to go.  Most games want you to go from left to right.  Some want you to go vertically in either direction.  The Legend of Kage wants you to go left.  This in itself would be fine, but the game gives you no indication as to how far you’ve actually gone in the level.  To be fair, the concept of space and distance in video games is all relative and arbitrary anyway.  We’ll get more into that later, but suffice to say I’m not amused by how Taito handled this one.

Mostly, it’s due to the fact that neither the game nor the manual really tells you what to do.  I found a gameplay video online and the best I could come up with is that at some point you’re magically able to move onto the second level.  No door appears, no flashing screen, nothing.  You’re just somehow able to go further left than you could before and move onto the second level.

I finally figured out that when you get all the way left and kill enough enemies a special enemy will appear.  Kill him and you get to move on.  How did I do that you ask?  Looked it up online.  I shouldn’t have to do that.

I died right after this. Took forever just to get this far, I'm not doing it again.

So why am I spending so much time talking about why this game sucks and not more time talking about the game itself?  Honestly, it’s because there isn’t much to talk about.  The second level makes you kill 10 ninjas in a 2 level side scrolling section that sill feels weird for making you go left.  Next comes a level where you go up a castle wall followed by a trip through the castle that looks an awful lot like Kung Fu.

Finally, the big boss comes out and things are on.  As long as you remember to take out his guard butterfly first.  Yeah, I don’t expect anything less at this point.

In true arcade game tradition, the game loops around a set of levels that increase in difficulty each time you go through them.  The key here is that you’re seen running off with the princess only to have her kidnapped again before you have to start over.  I don’t know about you, but if every other possible rescuer has at best gone missing and I’m the last hope I’m going to be a bit hesitant anyway.  But if I get my soul crushed by having the princess stolen back while we’re on our escape run then there’s no way in Hell I’m going back in.  Samurai honor be damned, I’ll go make myself a hut down by the river and hang out with the guy in the van every day.

This game is utter shit.  There’s really no other word for it.  I was going to say something about how the one hit kills just sucked.  Then I somehow had my costume change colors and I was able to be hit without dieing.  I guess that’s the super human power that the manual talks about.  One hit kills aren’t a problem. Donkey Kong has that and it works fine. Super Mario Bros. has that default one hit kill that can be upgraded later, which might be a better comparison to make. But I’ve always felt that a simple palet swap is a cheap way to show that you can take more than one hit before you die.

I can’t wait until the end of the year so I can do another set of graphs.  I have a feeling things will be a bit surprising.

August 1987 (Rare/Nintendo)

Holy crap. I hate Slalom.  It’s a total waste of time and I hate it and I can’t say that enough.  Maybe I’m holding to too high of a standard since it’s published by Nintendo and made by Rare.  Yep, this is the first game from Rare that we’ve run across, and also the first Nintendo game that wasn’t totally under Nintendo’s control.  Thankfully it gets better for Rare.

Officially Slalom is a skiing game.  Pick a course, go down it, go through some flags, don’t run over things unless they’re hills you can do tricks off of, and don’t get eaten.  Wait, some of those are Ski Free.  Oh well, that would have made this one better.

Under the surface it’s nothing more than a “beat the time with other racers in a predetermined spot” racing game.  Of which I can name exactly 0 that I’m a big fan of.  Nintendo has already proven with Excitebike that a real racing game can exist.

I could do better than this from my 10 minutes of practice to be a cheerleader in my high schools powder puff football game.

The saving grace for Slalom is the fact that you can do tricks.  Or at least in theory you can do tricks.  In reality you can throw your feet off to the side and your arms in the air and that constitutes a trick.  I wasn’t expecting double backflip McTwists or Japan Air 180s or anything¹.  But spins would be nice.  Flips really wouldn’t be too hard to do either I’m assuming.  Just from playing really basic Skiing games it seems that the trick staples are spinning and flipping.

But here, it’s your one trick.  Like in Tony Hawk games, you get more points for holding the trick longer.  Unlike those games, you don’t get penalized for doing the same trick over and over.  Which is good, because that would totally suck since you have no choice in the matter.

But just like with a lot of games, a good multiplayer mode can save things.  Heck, I would have settles for just a decent one.  But this acts like the two player mode in Super Mario Bros. How does it make sense at all to have players take turns in a racing game? Oh, wait, because it’s not really a racing game. I don’t care what it’s officially listed as, it’s a racing game.

Officially this is for finishing the race fast enough. But I think he looks constipated.

A few final thoughts before I buy a copy of this just so I can destroy it:

1. Why did they even bother to keep track of high scores?  They’re all lost when you turn the system off anyway?  I guess it’s good for racing people and just having the game keep track of it.
2. There are gates that you’re supposed to go through.  In the manual it shows them with an arrow on the flag.  I couldn’t really see the arrow in the game.  Thankfully it’s going between gates and not on the correct side of a pole.
3. Missing a gate makes you slow down. I guess that’s alright since missing a gate in real life makes penalty time magically get added to your time.  What isn’t alright is that you slow down so that you can look back and take a picture of the gate so you won’t miss it again².
4. The courses are essentially the same.  The obstacle placement and type changes, but that’s about it.  It’s supposed to get harder on different mountains, but I feel like I did better on the middle than the easiest difficulty setting.
5. I really wish you didn’t have to start over on a mountain if you fail a race.  If the game is smart enough to save the high score, it should be smart enough to let you skip the qualifying stage and jump straight to the race that you failed on instead of having to do all the prerequisite races again.

All in all, it’s best to just stay away.  Unless you’re a completest, like me.  Then just try to to break stuff.

1. I totally made those up by the way, unless they really are in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
2. Not really, but your skiier actively slows down so that’s what I’m imagining that he’s doing.  It’s better than anything else I can think of.

You know what the problem with Arkanoid is?  It’s just weird in all the right ways.

Let’s start with the genre.  I originally was going to go with Arcade because it doesn’t really fit anything.  Unlike Bust-a-Move¹ and other shoot stuff in order to clear the screen type games, you can’t just sit back and plan your shot.  You still have to react to way too much for me to think it’s strictly a puzzle game.  Puzzle influenced?  Easily.  But that’s not the same thing.  Luckily I looked online to see if the story was there instead of having to open the manual again and found something about the bat and ball genre.

On a totally narcissistic note, the special controller really messes things up because it changes the box size².  Outside of that though, the controller is great because it gives you a more arcade correct experience due to it giving you the ability to move your ship either quickly or slowly.  The regular controller still works, and is what I used.  But the ship has two speeds that way: go and stop.

One of my least favorite powerups splits the ball into 3 balls. I hate it because it makes me suck.

The fact that there’s a somewhat plausible story for this game still amazes me.  In my mind there are two types of games that don’t need a story.  Fighters are all about the fighting and if they have a story it’s usually pretty stupid or obviously thrown together because someone thinks every game has to have one.  Puzzle games don’t need one either for about the same reasons.  I almost counted sports games in there, but the story is that your team is playing a season.  Ok, maybe that does make it three types of games.

The story here is that you control a ship called a Vaus that escaped from the mother ship, Arkanoid.  Your goal is to fight Doh and escape the deadly space labyrinth so that you can live in peace.

That’s instantly better than Athena, where we had to forget about way too much reality even for a video game.

In theory, Arkanoid is a simple game.  Bounce the ball into the blocks and make them disappear.  Gold blocks can’t be broken and are just there to be a pain in the ass.  Grey blocks take multiple hits to break, with the number of hits needed going up as you get to higher levels³.  Essentially block colors other than that don’t matter.  Different colors do get you different amount of points, but since the same color blocks always appear in the level and you have to get rid of them all anyway, I don’t think the different point values really matter.

To contradict what I'm saying to the left, if you skip levels you won't have the "correct" amount of points for the level you're on.

Just with destroying the blocks, there’s a set number of points you’ll have at the end of the level.  Thankfully there are also obstacles floating around that give you more points if you destroy them.  Even better, you can destroy them either with the ball (which then bounces off just like if it hit a block) or with your ship.

Powerups here are mostly useful.  In the screen shot above you can see the one that splits the ball into 3.  Once that happens it doesn’t matter which ball you keep going as long as one of them is there.  Or you can be like me and try to save them all at once and wind up missing everything.

You can also have your ship grow horizontally, slow down the ball, get an extra life, catch the ball instead of just hitting it, warp to the next level, or get laser power that lets you shoot blocks instead of having to knock them with the ball.

The problem with the powerups is that they replace the one already in effect.  For the most part I’m fine with that.  I don’t expect to be able to have a longer ship and laser power, although that would be pretty cool.  My problem is that the order you get the powerups in matters a bit too much.  For example, let’s look at what happens if you get the slow down and laser powerups.

• If you get the slow down before the laser, the ball stays at the slower speed and you get the lasers.  Pretty cool because it gives you more time to shoot things.
• If you get the laser before the slow down, you lose the lasers in order to make the ball slow down.  This sucks.

I’m not sure if this was how things worked in the original arcade game or if it was a change that had to be made for the NES.  I fully understand that you shouldn’t be able to double up powers to the ship.  But you can make the ball extra slow, or slow down 3 balls.  To be fair, you have to keep the 3 balls no matter what just because it would be terrible to be following a ball only to have it disappear in order to slow things down.  But the order of the powerups shouldn’t matter if both can coexist peacefully.

One of my favorite things about "Get rid of all the stuff on the screen" type games is when the developers have fun with the shapes that they make.

Really though, despite the fact that some levels can be evil the game is quite fun.  One example of evilness is the screen shot to the left.  Yeah, you have a cute space invader.  You also have to hit most of the blocks in this level twice.

The thing that I think is really missing here is a way to continue.  No Kid Icaris style passwords here. Not even an option to continue from that level if you want to start again right there. The game does let you hit A and Start at the beginning of a level in order to go to the next one. But you have to do that before play on the level really starts, and you can only get to level 16 this way.

If you get the game today, chances are you’ll have to use a regular controller.  It’s what I used, and it works just fine.  Although I do have to admit that I would have loved using the controller designed for the game.  If nothing else, this is the only  game that had a controller designed specifically for a certain game.

All in all, it’s a fun game.  Not without flaws, but everything has those.

1. We’ll get to that if I decide to continue this into the SNES era.
2. I just got the home page fixed up so that it would show the entire box instead of the autocropped thumbnail.
3. Twice in rounds 1-8 and going up 1 every 7 rounds, ending with 5 hits needed in rounds 25-32.

Diggers Originally uploaded by r8r

I love the way things are coming together.  So before I get too far into things I have two big things that I want to take care of.

First, I didn’t start having pictures with any of the games consistently until Soccer. I did have a video in Ninja Kid, but the graphics disappeared between those two games.  Not sure why that is.  A video game blog should have pictures in it.  Honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking.  Posts that already have a picture will probably get another one simply because I can.

I’m also going to clean up the tags while I’m back there.  The big problem is that I’ve used the Continue tag for both being able to the game if you die and continuing with a password.  If there had been more than The Legend of Zelda that could actually save I probably would have done that too.  I figure it’s a good time to clean up the tags and make sure that I’m using things consistently.

While I’m at it, I’m also going to see if I can get the entire cover image instead of those zoomed in selections on the home page.  If anyone has any ideas about how I can pull that one off I’d love to hear it.

Hopefully that won’t be a long process.  But since I’ll be doing that while moving on with the project, game posts will be a bit slower.  In fact, that combined with Christmas is why you haven’t seen anything about Arkanoid yet.  My goal is to have this take no more than a few weeks.

August 1987 (Micronics/SNK)

Finally, we have a Micronics game that really sucks.  It took a while, but we’ve done it.  And oh boy, Athena sucks so hard you’d think it was a 1986 wrestling game.  Yeah, I went there.

Nothing about this game is good.  But we’ll start with the story since it seems as good a place as any.

Athena, the Greek goddess of war¹ gets bored and runs off to find adventure.  Because she can’t find enough adventure being the goddess of war.  Or being around when Zeus goes on one of his tirades or womanizing trips or any of the other soap opera type stuff the Greek gods had going on.

I could go on for a while about this if you’re interested.  If not I have it hidden so it’s easier to skip.  Show the hidden stuff

Yes, that says Pablo. I'm finding it hard to have other things to say about that.

So onto the game itself. You’d think a game about a Greek goddess would have, oh, I don’t know, some classical Greek enemies or something maybe?  No, you get normal names with totally made up enemies.  Seriously, would it be so hard to throw in some real Greek stuff?  And if that wasn’t possible², then why not just make the game about some random made up princess?  Everything that I’ve written so far here would be worthless.  Wouldn’t make the game any better sadly, but you at least would have someone going Greek Myth Nerd on it.

And no, the sad attempt at a minotaur doesn’t count for anything.  Officially there’s only one that lives in the central of a labyrinth.  The generic minotaur came about much later.  And they sure as Hell weren’t named Jazzo.

There’s sprite flicker like crazy going on here.  To an extent I’m willing to live with that.  But this is annoying to the point of not being sure if I’ve hit an enemy or not.  If I can’t tell if I hit an enemy we have some big problems.

I’m not sure why, but it also bothers me that Athena has to completely stop in order to attack.  Luckily she stops all by herself to kick³ or swing the weapon around.  I know other games have done this, or I at least think that’s the case.  Either way it doesn’t seem like that in itself is really a deal breaker or anything.  With this though it just feels… clunky isn’t the right word but it’s the first word that comes to mind.  Wonky comes in at a close second.

Just like with Ikari Warriors, Micronics has managed to take an SNK game and make it bad.  I think this one is worse.

What exactly am I supposed to do here?

Let’s take a look at the end of the first area you play in.  After going through an entire level that consisted of going right and basically staying on land we get to this.  Sure, I’ve had to go over stuff.  If I wanted to, I could have gone through some stuff.  Nothing has prepared me for an apparent leap to impending doom.

Seriously, one of the cardinal rules of game making is not to confuse the player.  I thought I’d missed something and would have gone back to try and find it if I hadn’t gotten attacked real quick.

The variety of weapons is nice.  The fact that they do different things is nice.  The fact that I lose the current one when I pick up another isn’t so nice.  This is only an NES game so I can’t expect to be able to hold onto any weapon I’ve collected throughout the game and switch it out as needed in order to complete the specific task.  Like that’s been done already, proving that it can happen.

Also, I have a hammer.  I can use the hammer to break things.  But I have to have a helmet and bash things above my head by jumping into them and risking a concussion?  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Athena does have one thing going for it.  It’s a game staring a girl.  Ice Climber had a girl, but only the 2nd player gets to be her.  And she’s all covered in snow clothes so it hardly counts.  That’s as close as we’ve covered so far.  I can’t believe I had to go there to find something good to say.

1. Other things too, but that’s the important one.
2. Copyright can’t be the issue since I have a pretty good feeling those Greek myths went into the public domain a while ago.
3. Imagine a 2 year old kicking someone and you’ll get the basic idea.

August 1987 (Micronics/Taito)

Once again we have a Micronics developed game.  Once again they manage to make something that by itself really isn’t that bad.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that the Micronics hate had more to do with not getting a free game when you were a kid.  But we’ll look more into why they have such a bad reputation in another post.

The colors are different than in the arcade version, and the sound is a bit worse.  But that’s about it.  This game definitely looks bad graphics wise, but it is pretty true to the original so I can’t hold that against it too much.

In the mold of old school arcade games, this is simply the same basic level done over and over with increasing difficulty.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun.  But nothing about it is exactly innovative.

Yep, this is the level. Exciting isn't it? Thankfully the game makes up for it.

Sure, the layouts change and there are pallet swaps for some colors.  And the enemies get smarter, can’t forget about that.  But really, the game is fun.  You waddle¹ around shooting people.  For the most part there aren’t a lot of hidden things.  Find a red door, enter red door, come out with item worth points.  If you take too long, like waiting for a bad guy to go away before coming out, then you’re forced out of the door.  Thankfully they’re rather slow on the draw so you can shoot them quickly enough.

The hidden things that do exist aren’t that bad at all.  When you get to the basement doors are invisible until someone comes out of them.  Red door are always visible though.

Enemies shoot back at 1 of 2 planes.  High bullets can be ducked under, and low ones can be jumped over.  Which is good since you have only one way of staying alive; don’t get shot.  Get to the end of the level and you drive off in a car and magically appear at the top of another building.

Fun isn’t perfect though.  If you crouch you have to actively stand up.  Which means that in order to walk after crouching you have to stand up and then walk.  That’s a pain.

I wish this game had some method of continuing when you lose your last life.  You do start at the same floor you died on if it isn’t your last life though.  Again, this is true of the original so I don’t know how much I can really hold that against the game.

1. Because there’s no way this can ever be considered running around.

But now, Juggle Chainsaws has its own fan page. Go visit it.  Be a fan.

The next time you see an update here, we’ll be starting August 1987.  There are some great games that month, including a game forever linked to Kid Icaris. I won’t ruin the surprise for you, but head over to The Games if you just can’t wait until I officially write about it.

Until then, share this site with a friend.  It will make both of you happy.

Let’s start with one thing right off the bat.  First, the first video game I ever had was The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening on my grey brick Game Boy.  Second, officially The Legend of Zelda is not an RPG.  Nintendo says so.  And who am I to argue with them?

Link doesn’t level up, despite the argument that gaining hearts can be construed¹ as leveling up.  All that really does is give you a bigger health meter.  The problem is that when you level up in an RPG 1 of 2 things happen: you pick which stats are going to increase or everything increases all at once.  Neither of those happen here.

Link gets better and different weapons.  That happens in Gradius and most of the other shooters as well.  Hell, it happens in Super Mario Bros. to.  Going from “stomp on head” Mario to Fire Mario?  Yep, that’s getting better weapons.  So that one’s out too.

So why did I bring all of this up?  Because The Legend of Zelda is such an amazing game that I can’t just tell you why I love it without repeating someone else.  I can’t go straight into what’s wrong about it because, in the end, those things just don’t really matter.

Take the dungeon order for example.  There isn’t one set order that you have to go through the dungeons in.  You’ll get your ass handed to you pretty quick if you go in the “wrong” order.  But you can do it if you really want to.

This game is so full of firsts that any fault can be easily explained away.  Here’s a quick breakdown of some things that players today might start complaining about.

Once you see this screen, you know something cool has to happen. Why would you be able to enter a name like that unless... oh crap... wait a second... WE CAN SAVE!!!!!

Saving

Saving sucks.  You have to have two controllers or switch the control pad to the second slot in order to save your game.  Or you can always die, but that just seems wrong.  Although it isn’t without precedent.  In order to get your password in Kid Icaris. So while Nintendo does have a thing against death and referring to lives as lives, they don’t seem to have a problem with forcing you to die.  And there is the whole needing to shoot yourself thing from Gumshoe to consider.

Here’s the thing though.  If I’m complaining about how bad the method of saving is, then that means I can save.  That just hasn’t happened yet.  Even the sports games existed in a world that imploded when you turned off the system.

One of the major gripes I’ve heard is that it’s impossible to know that you have to do that wonky controller stuff in order to save without first encountering death.  Here’s the thing though; the manual tells you how to do it.

This is part of what you'll see scrolling by if you don't hit start on the title screen. Easily one of the most useful demo modes ever.

Knowing Where To Begin

The world of The Legend of Zelda is huge² and you start just thrown into it without any knowledge of what to do.  There’s all of this area to explore and you can get to most of it right off the bat.  So what are you supposed to do, just run around until you figure it out?

Again the manual comes to the rescue.  Along with a quick explanation of items and enemies, there’s a walk through that gets you to the first dungeon.  Not what to do when you get there, but there is an explanation of what to do in each dungeon that in theory you should have read already, since it came earlier in the manual.

But let’s go back to talking about the enemies and items for a minute.  The manual here is great.  It has everything pictured twice.  Once in stylized form in all of its artistic beauty, and once as you’ll see it in the game.  That attention to detail is always what has drawn me to the Legend of Zelda series.

The Overall Awesomeness

This is from back when you didn’t need to look up a walk through just to get through the game³.  Even the the complete free form of hot to get through the game breaks that a little, there’s still the fact that all you need to do is find the dungeons and get through them.  None of this crazy stuff where you have to win a horse race first or make sure you talk to the right person at the right time in order to get a certain prize out of a mini game later on⁴.

If all you’ve played is the N64 and later Zeldas then this might not be as great for you.  Compared to those it can be a bit bland.  But only in the way that Super Mario Bros. is bland compared to later games in the series.

Plus, the argument can be made that this has the first made for the NES sequel.  Sure, Donkey Kong had Donkey Kong Jr. and Donkey Kong 3 and Super Mario Bros. had Mario Brothers and Wrecking Crew. But the Donkey Kong series was all first made for the arcade and Super Mario Bros. is really only connected to the other games by Mario being the main character.

The Legend of Zelda has a second quest in it that serves sort of like the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 in that it’s basically the same game but harder. You can get there by either beating the game or using Zelda as your name.

1. Thank you Anthony Kiedis for introducing me to that word.  Who says good music can’t also be educational?
2. Compared to other NES stuff at the time that is.  But today’s standards it’s just a dungeon.
3. Thank you Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask for ruining that one.
4. I totally made that up, but it would fit in well with how the series has gotten now.

July 1987 (Tecmo)

We’re going to see a ton of Super Mario Bros. clones.  I’m not going to spend this post comparing the games, but just know what essentially this is what it is.  And that it’s a sequel to an arcade game.  But we’ll talk more about that later.

Mighty Bomb Jack is the youngest Mighty brother whose task is to rescue King Pamera.  Along the way you collect bombs for points and some special items along the way.

Mighty coins are the big thing.  You change colors to let you know how many coins are in use.  Blue (1 coin) lets you open any treasure chest.  Orange (2 coins) lets you open a chest by running into it.  Green (3 coins) turns every enemy into a coin you can collect.  Pressing B uses one coin, so you have to press B 3 times to switch to green.  While any enemies on the screen are still doing their thing.

This is from Mighty Bomb Jack, but is pretty much ripped straight from Bomb Jack.

One thing to keep in mind is that is is technically a sequel.  We’ll see sequels later that are pretty different from the original.  But those at least stay in the same genre.  Mighty Bomb Jack pretty much ignores the original game except in these end level rooms.

So here’s the big problem with the game.  Well, actually two little problems that together add up to a big one.  Getting too many Mighty coins, or too much time on the timer, throws you into a torture room.  There you have to survive until the timer runs out.

Why is that an issue?  First, I’m being punished for being greedy.  That just doesn’t make sense in a video game.

Second, it’s an example of how the game out thinks itself.  I’m fine with a cap on the number of Mighty coins or the timer.  But adding this sort of twist is evil.  At least it mentions it in the book.

This is a Level 3 from Mighty Bomb Jack. Notice how it in no way resembles the previous scene from the game, except for the whole Jack and bombs being there thing.

As for the gameplay, it’s a bit iffy.  Imagine playing Mario 3 but you’re always the raccoon with the flight meter always all the way full.  It’s a bit frustrating when you don’t want to fly, but pretty awesome when you do.  The game does give you the ability to jump higher by holding up or lower by holding down while you jump.  But even the lowest jump would take some help from a spring to get Mario that high.  Hell, the normal jump still takes you almost all the way up the screen.  It’s crazy.

The height of the jumping is my main knock on the game.  It almost feels like you need to play the game a few times with the sole purpose to understanding the jump physics.  Thankfully flying is possible and ridiculously easy.  Again, it’s like they looked into the future and ripped of Mario 3.¹

Overall Mighty Bomb Jack is a pretty fun game.  Overdone in a few parts, but not in a way that really ruins it.  Once you get the jumping down that is.  And maybe the timing for when enemies show up.  You do get a warning where they burrow out of the the wall², but if they start to do that while you’re in the wrong spot during a jump you’re just screwed.

1. As a side note, maybe I should say that Mario 3 ripped this off.  It did come first.  I think it stems from the fact that Mario 3 is generally accepted not only as the best NES game ever, but one of the best video games period.  That’s the sort of thing I can’t totally ignore while I do this because it’s just gotten so ingrained in our heads.
2. The best thing I can come up with because I really have no idea what that’s supposed to be.

July 1987 (Tecmo)

I was back and forth on if Rygar should get a thumbs up because it isn’t terrible or a thumbs down because it isn’t really that good.  I finally decided on the thumbs down because Tecmo wasn’t exactly starting from scratch with this one.

Rygar started life as an arcade title.  Sort of, the arcade version is pretty different.  Sort of like how Disney’s Doug got to use the basic ideas and characters from Doug but made something different out of it.  And like Disney, the new version is worse.

This is the arcade version.

Let’s take a look at the arcade version for a minute.   As far as graphics and sound go the NES version just doesn’t stand a chance.  So we’re going to conveniently ignore those aspects.

The arcade version of the game is a pretty linear side scrolling action game.  Nothing really remarkable but fun nonetheless.

In this version you can swing your weapon in a circle around your body and hit enemies with what looks like someone doing the around the world yo-yo trick.  There are also weapons upgrades, but they happen automagically when you pick something up and I found myself being annoyed that I lost my Ultra Yo-Yo of Doom¹.

The other big difference is that you have 3 lives and lose one with 1 hit.  This makes sense, it’s an arcade game.  That’s just the way things are.

This is about 2 seconds after hitting Start on the title screen. Yes, the game just throws you in.

The NES version takes most of what’s good about the Arcade one and throws it in the “we should remember to do that” pile.  Then forgets about it.

The first thing that bothered me was that the game just starts.  Yes, I had to hit Start on the title screen.  But after that I’m just thrown into the game.  Maybe it’s because of the introduction scenes I’ve been seeing lately, but that just seems wrong.

But I’m willing to let that go.  What I’m not willing to let go is the flickering.  Sprite flicker all over the place with this.

Most annoying was the lack of Ultra Yo-Yo of Doom.  To be fair, I played the NES version first and didn’t really think anything bad about how the weapon worked.  But after seeing the arcade one I really wanted that swinging around my head action.

Tecmo also must have been playing a game where they tried to outsmart themselves.  Or maybe they just thought that a port of year old arcade game needed a console upgrade.  Never mind that Donkey Kong or Mario Brothers or Ghosts ‘n Goblins or 1942 have pulled it off rather well without major changes to the gameplay.

In the arcade version getting some of your health back is as simple as putting in more quarters.  In the console one though you have to meet up with a legendary who will give you medicine.  But you have to have a coat of arms to be able to take it.  So don’t forget that.  Or you’re kind of screwed.

The final nail in the coffin for this one is that there’s no option to continue. 1942 had it, and that game was about 8 months old when Rygar came out.  Granted, you won’t be able to continue in Super Mario Bros. 2 or 3 years later, but those games aren’t evily difficult.

Overall, Rygar is a bit better than I just made it sound.  If it was an original game for the NES it would have done better, probably getting that thumbs up.  But it wasn’t.  Tecmo had a head start and managed to flub it up.

1. I made the name up, but I think it works rather well.

Image courtesy of Phillip DiResta

Sports

July 1987 (Bandai)

You need the power pad to get this game to work.  Technically I have one, but I can’t get it to work.  So there won’t be a screen shot in this one.

Basically you’re using the power pad to run and crouch and jump and essentially playing a more boring version of DDR.

This is the part I don’t get though.  The manual says that you have to pace yourself or you’ll get tired.  Of course that’s true for the real life player.  But when I saw the demo while I was trying to get buttons to work I also saw the character get tired.  I hope that the character only shows that he’s tired while you’re not moving.

Overall though I don’t think we’re missing much.  Game FAQs has 1 review giving it 5 stars, but at the end of the review says it’s an 8 overall.  In the end it’s an exercise game.  Take that for what it’s worth.

To be honest, I probably would have given it a thumbs up if I could have gotten the power pad to work.

July 1987 (Nintendo)

It’s nice to get something good again.  And something from Nintendo, but at this point those two are essentially the same thing.

There are so many things about Kid Icarus that can be looked at.  The subtitle seems to suggest that Nintendo planned for this to be a series of games.  Or at least make a game that had the possibility of sequels.  There was another release for the Game Boy later but that’s it.  Which sucks.

Also the fact that you only have one life makes it look like an arcade port.  But it’s a Nintendo original.  This isn’t a bad thing, it isn’t a good thing.  It just is.  And while it’s annoying it doesn’t break the game experience for me.

What is key here is that the game is hard.  I used a Game Genie code that gave me unlimited energy and still had a hard time getting out of the first level.  As in I couldn’t do it.

At least I don't have to do it all in one sitting. Although having to die to get the password is obviously something that shows how old this is.

The controls here leave something to be desired.  You can’t seem to jump if you’re looking up.  Landing a jump just doesn’t feel right.

And yet I can’t make myself give it a thumbs down.  It’s a hard game, no doubt about that.  Just the way the game scrolls up is enough to wrap that up.  When you jump the level goes up with you, but it doesn’t go down when you do.  And if you fall off the screen you die, even if the platform is just a pixel too low.  Which means that it’s possible to block yourself into taking a bad path through the level.

But like Solomon’s Key it’s one that I can see myself coming back to.  And honestly the fact that it came straight from Nintendo doesn’t hurt at all.

One of the things that I’ve been giving games crap for lately is for introducing elements that just seem unnatural.  I’ve been playing the games by just grabbing my controller, firing the thing up, and having at it.

Really, how irresponsible is that?  I’ll bet that a lot of my confusion would have been cleared up about things if I had just read the manual before playing.

To be fair, I hardly ever read the manual before playing.  The manual is for answering questions that come up, not for giving me information beforehand.  It’s almost cheating to read it first.

I’m just going to have to get over that thought process though.  Maybe I’ll switch to playing first and reading second but for everything from here on out I will have the manual available in case I run into anything weird.  Like collecting hearts that don’t refill your energy or something counter intuitive like that.

July 1987 (Capcom)

Section Z is evil.  There’s no other way to say it.  I was starting to like shooters.  Section Z tried to ruin it.  I was really liking the fact that the arcade ports are starting to include infinite continues to make up for the fact that I can’t pull out my never ending supply of quarters I got from the arcade game fairy.  Section Z took that hope away.

Really, shame on you Capcom.  What were you thinking?

So here’s the deal.  Sections Z is a side scrolling shooter.  Enemies come at you from all directions, and you’re armed with a gun and fly around with a jet pack.  Sounds pretty cool so far.  To make up for the fact that turning around to shoot would be cumbersome at best the B button shoots to the left and the A button shoots to the right.  That caught me by surprise.  And I didn’t like it at first, but once I got used to it I thought it was a pretty good decision.

This is what it looks like when you get to "continue "the game from the beginning.

Here’s what ruined the game for me.  For some reason, getting to start the game over is the same as continuing.  I’m not sure who decided they’re the same.  But they’re not.

I would understand if the game just wouldn’t let me continue from where I died.  It’s not like there’s some rule saying that there has to be a continue option. Super Mario Bros. doesn’t have one. Solomon’s Key doesn’t either. It’s working for those games.

It’s also entirely possible that if I could manage to not suck so much I would get far enough into the game so that I wouldn’t get thrown all the way back.

Really though, the game isn’t terrible.  It’s just thoughtless at times.  Which really surprised me because it has branching paths instead of being strictly linear.  Really, you’d think that if they thought enough of the game to give you options on the route to take they’d make the continue work right.

In the end this really came down to the fact that if I’m going to play a shooter it’s going to be one that doesn’t make me hate myself for playing it.

July 1987 (Tecmo)

Sheesh, this is hard.  In a good way, but still hard.

Puzzle games are supposed to be hard.  It is kind of the point.  But this one really ramps it up.  I had no problem at all with levels 1 and 2, then really struggled on 3.  I guess I just prefer puzzle games where I get to play for a bit longer before I start to feel like an idiot.

The concept of all the levels is easy.  Run around with your wand and take away or create blocks as needed to grab the key and get to the door.  That in itself would be pretty easy.  But there are demons in every room who try to eat you.  And being a wizard, and by definition an old man, you can’t exactly run away.  You do have fire, and like Mario in Super Mario Bros. you have to find something else in order to get it.  The difference is that you only have so many times you can use it.  Once per bottle that you find, although some of the bottles do have super fire that just keeps going and kills everything in it’s path.

Like I said, I got to level 3 before I had trouble.  I finally figured out that I should probably be saving my fire for something more important.  Then I got to level 4.

Someone from Tecmo went into the future and realized they weren't going to work on Tecmo Bowl and did this to get even.

Seriously, what the Hell is that?  If I take too long to figure out what to do I get a dude dropped on my head from the black and gold mask thing.  If I put a block out the fireball is going to come eat me.  I’m screwed.

I read online that this is supposed to be one of the hardest games on the NES.  I believe it, although I’m not sure if they’re controlling for crappy controls with that opinion.

Here’s the thing though.  It’s not “Oh. My. God.  I never want to see this thing again!” hard, it’s “I’m sick of this, I can’t take it any more and I’m done.  But I know I’ll be back later because I can’t let this thing beat me.” hard.

That’s the way games should be, albeit a flatter learning curve would be nice.  Maybe letting me get to level 5 before I want to start throwing things.

Happy Bonus Time! Fellow MetaFilter member JHarris wrote an article looking at 20 really hard games from a game design perspective.  Here is the page that has Solomon’s Key.  That’s the only game on the list I’ve played for this project so far, but there is another one that comes out this month.

June 1987 (Data East)

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat, this is no Castlevania. But it is the only game released in June of 1987 so by definition it had to come next.

I’m not a big fan of pool games.  The physics is always different, and that throws me off.  Plus, I’m not all that good at real life pool to begin with.  Things aren’t looking so good for this one.

But really, for people who are into this sort of game, it’s not bad.  There’s both a practice and a lesson mode so you have a chance to figure out how the game works. The lesson mode is weird though.  There were times where I can’t tell the difference between what I did and what the computer did, but I missed and the computer didn’t.

Let’s be fair though, some of those shots in the lesson are pretty not obvious.  At least to me.  Maybe for a pro, but if you’re a pro pool player what are you doing playing this anyway?

For most of the time playing this, I felt like the guy who does't have the girl pining for him.

The main problem I have with this game is that you have a certain number of shots you’re allowed to miss the entire time.  You can get a game over in the middle of a game.  I just don’t think that’s fair.

Just in case you’re interested, there is a two player mode.  But I suggest you just go buy a pool table if you want to play with someone else.

If you’re really into pool games this is probably going to appeal to you.  But it just isn’t working for me.

May 1987 (Konami)

This is the game I’ve been waiting for. Super Mario Bros. is rightly an epic experience, but by now it’s been out for almost two years. And after really hitting my gaming maturity during the Play Station era, and thus pretty much taking for granted the fact that if I mess something up I can always not save it and go back to try again¹, it’s annoying that if I lose all of my lives on Super Mario Bros. I have to start all over. And as awesome as Ghosts ‘n Goblins is, that thing is hard and evil. Making you replay the entire game like that, what were they thinking? Of course, I mean that in the best way possible.

Castlevania, on the other hand, is possibly the most complete game I’ve come to so far.  Which isn’t to say that it’s perfect by any means.  But it is really amazingly good.  Like getting what you want for Christmas except it’s the deluxe version that you never asked for because you thought you didn’t have a chance at all in getting it good.  I’ll wipe the drool from my face before we go on.

Simon starts with a wimpy whip.  He might as well have the rubber snake you can buy at the museum gift shop.  Luckily, no matter what, one of the first items dropped in this game is a whip that, comparatively at least, is made out of chain.  It look like it has a spike on it too.  Best part though is that this new whip does double the damage.

The bad part is that we have the introduction to what is possibly the worst enemy in all of video games, the “will you hold still damnit so I can kill you!?” bat.  Throw in the fact that Medusa has learned how to clone herself and cuts off the clone’s heads to throw them at you from off the screen and you’ve got yourself a real battle.

I like to think that someone just off the screen has a bucket of Medusa heads that they're chucking at me.

Here’s the real bittersweet beauty in the game though.  The Japanese version lets you save since it was on the Famicom Disk System.  We didn’t get that, up to this point we don’t even have passwords to fake continue the game.  But what we do have is infinite continues.  Not an equal trade at all since Japan essentially has that too, but it’s a step in the right direction, even if I have to beat the whole game in one sitting.

The controls are what keep this game from being perfect.  Can’t control Simon in the air at all.  Which really sucks, especially if I’m hit by an enemy and double especially if I’m hit by an enemy that I didn’t know was there.  Did I forget to mention that enemies knock you a step or two?  If you’re trying to stay on a ledge this can be disastrous.

You have to press up or down to go up or down stairs.  Which is fine for going up, but if you walk over the top of some stairs and don’t press down you fall down.  Because for some reason Simon is smart enough to not automagically go up stairs but too dumb not to fall through the top step to his death.  Let’s just think that he’s feeling stupified by love.

Finally, you get to use your whip in only one direction.  That’s more of a picky thing, but it is a whip which really should give you a full 360 degrees of killing action.

But oh man, this game is just so awesome.  Partly for being a game that isn’t all super cartoony and doing that well, unlike some other things we’ll get to later.  Partly for not making me start all over when I become all dead as opposed to mostly dead.

June better have some good games, because this one was enough to carry May all by itself.

1. I do have to admit that while playing World Series Baseball ’95 and ’98, and to a lesser extent College Football’s National Championship II, I would go up to the system and be ready to turn it off if I was going to lose the game so I could do it all over.

I couldn't say it any better than this.

Actually, there are a lot of things more important than video games.  Eating is one of them.  Having a job so you can afford things is too.

Probably the most important thing though is being alive.  Unfortunately, that’s a goal that too many people have just given up on lately.

Normally I’d try to keep anything political or more controversial than my finding a way to make Donkey Kong 3 able to be seen as a good game out of this.  After all, this is a blog about video games.  But like I said, some things are just important enough to break the normal cycle of things over here.

I am proud to donate some of my server’s resources to host throw my full support behind Write Your Principal, a project dedicated to letting school administrators know that bullying based on actual or perceived sexual orientation isn’t something to be tolerated.  Principals are the focus because they’re in the same school everyday and have a better opportunity to change the school’s culture than someone simply handing down edicts from the district office.

Bullying just shouldn’t happen.  No matter what the reason.  Whether you agree with the idea of this post or not, I’d be very surprised if I found someone who didn’t at least agree with the previous statements.

Later today we’ll get back to the regular flavor posts.  And trust me, it’s a post that I’ve been looking forward to writing for a while.  But until then, think about what I’ve said here.

May 1987 (Data East)

I’m really torn on this.  This is a game that a ton of people love.  I don’t.  It has a pretty big following from what I can find.  I don’t quite see the appeal.  Maybe I’m just crazy.  Maybe I just don’t get it.  Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up on old school arcade games like a lot of the people who love this game.  I don’t know, it just isn’t really working for me.  But there has to be something there when the game is being made for phones today.

All of that being said, it was an enjoyable game to play.  I have to at least give it that much.  There were just some things that I couldn’t wrap my head around.

Sometimes it felt like I saw more of my guy's butt because of dying than anything else. Please don't hold the score against me, I started the game again just so I could get the picture.

First, there were the controls.  A lot like other games I’ve played for this project they just felt rather unresponsive.  Not to a crippling level or anything like that, but it just wasn’t right.

My other issue is purely a personal one that stems from the experiences I’ve had playing.  Namely, I expect my character to be able to fall off of a platform or ladder.  When my guy is one rung up the ladder I want him to step down and just go the direction I want him to go in.  I don’t want him to stand around impatiently while he waits for me to send him that one step down so he can run away from the killer hot dog!

I get the idea that I would have liked this better without the time off.  After all, the last game was Ikari Warriors. And Burger Time is definitely better than that game.

The real question is if I’ll come back to this.  I really don’t think so.  I know my wife will, and she’ll really like it.  But I’m just not as into puzzle games as she is.  Maybe if I want to waste some time (partly because I know I can’t get too far into it), but that’s about it.

The internet should be fixed tomorrow¹.  Which means we should have an update tomorrow.  I have been playing the games in the meantime, so update should be coming in a bit faster for a little while.

In the meantime, take a look at this tattoo.  I wish I had the balls to do something like that.  And the money, but that’s another issue entirely.  Or maybe check out the newest episode of Chrontendo if you haven’t done that yet.

If neither of those tickles your fancy, you should head on over to Retro Gaming Times Monthly and read some of the back issues. And know that starting with the November issue I’ll be helping to edit it. That should be fun.

1. I’m writing this post from my wife’s computer at her parent’s house while we’re taking care of the dogs.

I’m not the only one.  About a week ago Dr. Sparkle threw this thought out to the world.

You know, back when we were kids we sure put up with a lot in video games that we wouldn’t as adults. Even boring games got played to death, because we couldn’t just go out a buy a new game whenever we wanted. As an adult, I find myself being dismissive of NES games that don’t make a good impression in the first 10 minutes. It’s quite possible more time with Ki and Iron Tank would lead me to enjoy them; maybe I’m just an overly aggressive player and can only enjoy games where I kill everything? I didn’t care for the old Resident Evil games either.

It makes sense.  There are roughly 790 games released for the NES.  Which means over 329 days worth of playing games.  Some games I’ve spent longer with.  And I’m not ashamed to admit it, there are some games that didn’t even get that long.

I started not following the rules with the launch titles, the first of which I’ll talk about is Donkey Kong Jr. Math. It’s not really that Donkey Kong Jr. Math is a terrible game.  But do you really need to spend even 10 minutes climbing around collecting numbers in order to understand this game?  I don’t think so.

I can see myself doing this with a lot of the educational games.  Sesame Street titles aren’t something that really interest me or anyone else that I know of who play NES games now.  Likewise, Color a Dinosaur isn’t going to get much time either.  I’m not saying that any of these are a bad game, because I haven’t played them yet.  But I don’t think anyone is going to lose sleep if I shave some time off of playing them.

Since R.O.B. isn’t something I can just run downtown and pick up this is the best I can do right now.  That’s the way it will be with most other people too.  Arkanoid will be interesting with its special controller, but I think I’ll be able to handle that one.

If I already know the game well enough to write about it then I’m not going to spend a lot of time playing it again.  It’s not that the game doesn’t deserve it.  It does, I played it before when my only reason for playing it was that I wanted to.  But any time I don’t spend playing something again is time I can spend on something I haven’t played before.

This is where games like the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cart will fall too. For the most part there’s nothing added to the game so I won’t give it too much time.

On one hand I’m trying to play the games like it’s the 1980s and I can’t just go out and get something else if a game sucks.  On the other, I’ve got almost 800 games to play.  Wasting time on an essentially useless game isn’t helping anyone.  If it sucks then it sucks and hopefully there will be something else out there that will work instead.

As a side note, I’m glad we won’t get to the point where there’s a new version of s game coming out every year.

This will be great, but it also means there might be a period of silence.  I just want to make sure that you don’t think I’ve given up on this project.  I love it too much to do that.

This isn’t to say that I won’t update before the move.  I’m going to.  I just want to have things ready in case a go a few weeks between posts.

May 1987 (Micronics/SNK)

With the release of Ikari Warriors, Micronics has 3 games they’ve developed for the NES. 1942 I wasn’t a huge fan of. Ghosts ‘n Goblins I did like, in a masochistic sort of way since I sort of suck at it.  I haven’t played the arcade version of either of these games, but from the research I’ve done they’re both a lot better.

With that in mind, I didn’t really have much hope for Ikari Warriors.  Chrontendo has spoiled me somewhat since I’ve already seen that Micronics doesn’t make good games.

But let’s actually take a look at it instead of trusting what someone else has to say.  We’ve got a game where I can play with someone at the same time.  That’s pretty cool.  The box makes damn sure I know I can do that.  We’ve got a game originally made by SNK, who would eventually bring us Metal Slug.  Not to the NES though, that would be too much awesome for 8-bit gaming.  Ikari Warriors has a good start.

Possibly the best part of the game is that it shows you why you are an army of one fighting against the unlimited forces of evil.

And then it ruins it.  Part of this is undoubtedly that we already have Commando to play with.  And while that has it’s flaws, Ikari Warriors feels like you ran into one of the fuzzy things in Yoshi’s Island.

Massive sprite flickr when you start.  It magically stops when you start moving.  But I have a feeling that Nintendo got the idea for Link’s lead boots from this game.  There’s no way you’re not carrying a couple hundred extra points.  Maybe it’s all the ammunition for your gun.  It is unlimited, but it has to be stored somewhere, right?

There is a 2 player co-op mode in this game.  I’m still trying to decide if that makes it better or not.  On one hand you’d have to subject someone else to the torture.  On the other, you’d get to have some help and the whole thing could turn into a joke.

If you like shooters, I’d stick with any of the other ones we’ve covered so far.  But just as a heads up, there are 2 more of these.

Oh the pain.

April 1987 (Konami)

This is an arcade port.  Thank God, because then it has an excuse.  This thing is frustrating as Hell.

In the original arcade game there were two buttons to use for running.  On the NES there’s just one.  This makes sense with the controller layout, but it also just turns the game into a button masher’s delight.  This is fine in fighting games, partly because I’m not all that good at them.  But for some reason It’s just not sitting well with me for this one.

This is the best part of the game, at least in single player mode.

I don’t have anyone to play with at the moment, but I’m assuming it would be better if I could rub it in someone’s face when I beat her.

Let’s take a look at each of the events.  Keep in mind that when you play you can start anywhere, but after that first choice you just go through the cycle.

• 100 Meter Dash – Hit the button as fast as you can.  Nothing else to it.
• Long Jump – Hit the button as fast as you can and right before you cross the white line hit up. Hold it until you get the desired angle and then stop holding up.
• 110 Meter Hurdles – Hit the button as fast as you can.  Every once in a while hit up so you jump over the hurdle.  Get frustrated because you timed it wrong and you fall down because the hurdle hits you in the stomach even though in real life that would knock the hurdle over and you’d be fine assuming you stayed in your lane.
• Javelin Throw – Just like Long Jump, except if you throw it really high you can get that spaceship.
• Skeet Shooting – Slam the controller into your head for playing this one.  Alternate controls include summoning your Jedi powers.
• Triple Jump – Just like Long Jump except when you land you hit up again.  Then when you land you hit up again.  Get it, you’re jumping 3 times.
• Archery – Hit the button when your target gets to a certain part of the screen.  Wish you had a real bow and a place to use it.
• High Jump – Just like long jump except you want a much higher jump.  Unlike the real thing, once you start running you’re stuck with making an attempt.

As you can probably tell, I’m not that excited about any of these.  In fact, we haven’t had a truly good sports game yet. Volleyball got a thumbs up, but that was mostly because it has that Pong clone factor working for it.

Trust me, good sports games are coming.  One of them will even happen this year.  But Track & Field isn’t it.

What I am here to say is that it’s been a week since the last game and you’ll only have to wait until tomorrow at the most for the next game.

Things have gotten crazy around here.  I’m in the process of moving so not only do I have something else taking up time, it’s something pretty important that can’t be ignored.

In the mean time, go check out Retrogaming Times Monthly’s newest issue.  It’s a good read, including why PS2 could be considered retro now.

April 1987 (Konami)

I think I’m missing something here.  IGN has this in their top 100 games for the NES.  Top 7th isn’t bad and it gets even better when you discount the unlicensed games¹.

It’s not that the game is bad.  It’s not.  But the weirdness for me starts with the name.  Rush ‘n Attack.  Hmm, I wonder what they were thinking with that.  Game released in 1987, sort of sounds like a certain Communist country plus a verb, it doesn’t take half a brain to figure it out.  Not that I’m holding the obvious allusion against it or Konami or anything, but it is cheesy.  You have to admit that much.

The game itself isn’t that bad at all.  Isn’t something I’d risk a speeding ticket to get home faster to play either.

Your goal is, well, let’s take a look at the frame from some top secret video for that one.

Oh crap, the game is telling me why I'm playing. This is amazing.

First off, this is some remarkably good quality footage considering how old it is and the trouble I’m assuming someone had to take to get it out to me.  Also, their skywriting ability is amazing.  I’ve never seen a message that long that stayed so still.

In all seriousness though, I do appreciate that the game tells me why I’m playing in the game itself and not just in the manual or on the box.  Toad telling Mario that he has to save the Princess doesn’t count.  Sorry Super Mario Bros.

Much in the same way that I didn’t like shooters and now I sort of do, I feel like I’ll do that with run & gun games.  Part of me not liking this might stem from the fact that I know what’s coming up this year, not to mention Contra.  That just isn’t fair.

On a scale of ground beef from a few weeks ago to meat on a stick with a nice peanut butter sauce, I’ll give this game a hot dog.  Nice and solid when it’s in front of you, and there might be times when it’s what I really want, but most of the time I’d just rather have something else.

1. Just for the record, we’re covering most of those.

March 1987(Nintendo)

I’m doing with this the same thing I did with Donkey Kong 3, looking at it in a way that the developers probably never intended.  With this one, it’s a fancy Pong clone.

That really isn’t much of a stretch.  If Pong with extra lines can be called soccer or hockey or tennis or any other number of things, then this can be called pong.

The volleyball aspects of it are questionable at best.  Just like with Soccer you don’t directly pick which player you control.  This time you control multiple players at once.  It gets annoying, especially because there’s an invisible fence your players won’t pass through.  At times you won’t be able to move because someone you didn’t realize you were controlling doesn’t want to get shocked in the neck.

Normally you'd have 1 player with a different color uniform. In this shot, played in Training Mode, I have 2. And in the blink of an eye players will shamelessly change their clothes in front of the crowd.

Who you control is most likely tied to where the ball is going to land.  Behind the attack line and it’s a better idea to guide your back row players.  In front and you should watch the front row.  It’s those balls that are on the sideline and/or are close to the attack line where you need to pay attention.  It would be so much easier to just control 1 player all the time, or even everyone at the same time.

Spiking the ball is a lot harder than it needs to be.  I couldn’t get the thing timed right.  Then I realized I was standing in the wrong spot.  Turns out I have to be standing in the shadow of the ball and get it timed right.  So at least now it’s not a total waste of time trying.

Something trivial that bothers me is that I have to be the Uni