The first part of a look back at the NES hardware itself begins with the origins of its Japanese version, the Family Computer — Famicom for short. This episode adapted from the text of Good Nintentions 1985, with special thanks to Steven Lin. I realize this episode covers some of the same ground as other recent episodes and had intended to produce this further down the road (and as a single episode with the second part, the NES launch survey). Unfortunately, Hurricane Matthew threw a monkey wrench in my plans; this is all I had time and resources to produce this week. Apologies if it's less inspiring than usual.
A quick interstitial episode of the Good Nintentions origin story before we move along to the main event. The Advanced Video System never actually made its way to market, but it nevertheless existed as a key link between the Famicom and the NES and deserves study. Part 3 will be along sooner than you expect!
It's the end of the NES hardware retrospective as we know it, and I hope you feel fine. You'll probably feel better if you catch up with the first two chapters: A look at the Japanese Famicom (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ugMe...) and a brief discussion of the Advanced Video System prototype.
We start at the beginning of the NES's life in Oct. 1985, with what I have arbitrarily pegged as the "first" NES release. Of all the games released alongside the NES at launch, Baseball appeared earliest in Japan, so it's the oldest of Nintendo's U.S. launch titles. It definitely feels its age, but it's not a bad game... merely one that's been surpassed by 30-plus years of countless developers working within a fixed rule set and doing their best to create the ultimate virtual expression of the sport. Despite its simplicity, there's plenty to say about Baseball...
Good Nintentions isn't just a survey of the NES; it's meant to be a history lesson that helps contextualize the place of these old game releases in the evolution of the medium. So while Tennis is not the kind of game that causes people to tear up with nostalgia 30 years later, it nevertheless holds a place of distinction in gaming history, as outlined here.
Here we have the first NES release that wasn't based on a sport... yet it's hardly a bastion of creativity. By 1984, when Pinball debuted on Famicom, pinball had established itself as one of the most popular subjects for video games. Pinball stood apart, though, due to its remarkable quality... thanks in large part to a pinch-hit assist from future Nintendo president Satoru Iwata.
A look back at Nintendo's Wild Gunman, the first-ever NES light gun game, and a shooter whose simple design belies its remarkable heritage. Best known in the U.S. for its faked-up cameo in Back to the Future Part II, Wild Gunman was to Japanese fans at the time the latest entry in a line of product evolution that stretched back more than a decade. Both Florent Georges' book The History of Nintendo 1889-1980 and the Before Mario blog (www.beforemario.com) were invaluable resources as I researched this retrospective. Be sure to check them out!
The game that convinced Nintendo that, yeah, bringing the NES to America would be a good idea arrives at last: Duck Hunt, the iconic shooting game. It's simplistic and goofy by today's standards, but Duck Hunt didn't succeed despite those traits... it succeeded BECAUSE of them. An intuitive, whimsical, dynamic shooting game that remains a beloved classic even now—and for good reason!
We continue our journey through Nintendo's October 1985 NES lineup with the first release that had notable impact on the rest of the industry: Golf. The most widely played and distributed golf sim to debut in 1984 (in Japan), Nintendo's take on the sport codified a number of elements that would become standard for the genre, most notably the swing power meter. It's 30 years old, but it's still a pretty fun take on the sport!
There's not a lot to say about 1985's third and final NES light gun shooter, so after a brief look into Hogan's Alley this episode digs a bit into how the sausage is made — both in terms of how the NES Zapper worked, and what it takes to get the best possible footage of its games.
Pac-Man? Everybody loves that guy! Nintendo loved Pac-Man so much it made two games just like it, and this episode looks at the pair: Both Clu Clu Land and its import-only sibling, Devil World. Their similarities and differences speak volumes about the game company Nintendo was shaping up to be.
Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, this motocross game is anything but your typical racer — with its side-scrolling design and emphasis on physics and jumps, it feels almost like a rough draft for Super Mario Bros. Ah, but there's a dark and terrible secret lurking in Excitebike, hidden just off the main menu... a sign of just how much Nintendo was making up the NES launch as they went along.
This cooperative platformer occupies a somewhat unfortunate place in history: It attempted to build on the concepts of the original Mario Bros., but it arrived just before Super Mario Bros. set a new standard for run-and-jump action. It's an amusing and quirky game, but its awkward controls leave it completely overshadowed by the masterpiece that was to come.
Mario's final outing before his first adventure in the Mushroom Kingdom has little to do with any other game he ever starred in, and yet feels very much like an evolutionary step in the character's development.
The very first third-party release for NES... mostly. Developed by Irem, based on an Irem arcade game, yet published by Nintendo in both Japan and the U.S., Kung-Fu is something of an edge case. Whatever the case, though, it sure did look awesome back in 1985, with its bold graphics and proto-fighting-game mechanics.
Skipping a bit out of sequence for this one, as we jump ahead in the NES chronology to perhaps the most fascinating game to arrive in the U.S. in October 1985. Gyromite may not have been influential the way Super Mario Bros. would be, but it played an essential cornerstone role in Nintendo's eventual conquest of the U.S. And, believe it or not, when you play the game the way it was designed to be experienced — with a complete R.O.B. setup — it can be surprisingly entertaining.
Gyromite's companion release constitutes the only other game ever officially designed for R.O.B.... and, frankly, we'd all have been better off if R.O.B.'s library had begun and ended with Gyromite. Seemingly rushed to production (the game evidently hit Japanese store shelves a mere month after completion), Stack-Up makes poor use of R.O.B, of the NES, and of players' time and money. At least the music is catchy.
The NES gets its very first rendition of American football — and on launch day, too! All thanks to Irem, who provide the second third-party Black Box title with this conversion of the arcade game by the same title. It's not a straight port, though, adding an entirely new aspect to the game, as well as a multiplayer mode.
This is it: Super Mario Bros. Everything about Good Nintentions 1985 has been leading up to this grand, climactic moment, the generational leap that justified the NES and set it apart from everything that had come before. Also, it's a pretty rad game in its own right, let's not forget that. Alas, at a mere 23 minutes long, this video doesn't begin to do the game proper justice.
The NES's third year in America kicks off in fine style with Capcom's Trojan, a fairly faithful (and slightly enhanced) conversion of a Kung-Fu style arcade hack-and-slash brawler. It's an interesting nexus for Capcom's history, and a promising start for NES's 1987 lineup.
We're reaching the end of Nintendo's Black Box series of releases, and Pro Wrestling shows why: The NES library evolved beyond the basic experiences contained within the early Black Boxes. In this case, we have a remarkably well-designed wrestling game loaded with personality and memorable characters. Quite a change from all those earlier NES wrestling games... Also in this episode: Brief looks at Soccer and Volleyball.
We bid farewell to the Black Box era of Nintendo games even as we welcome an NES powerhouse into the fold. Slalom sees UK developer Rare make its console debut with a high-speed downhill racing game and the most carefully rendered video game man-butts this side of Metal Gear.
Moving on to April and May 1987, three classic arcade games (well, maybe more like two classics and one "whuzzat?") arrive on NES in rapid succession courtesy of Data East and Konami. Konami's two games share a tenuous link in their cold wars roots, while Data East's game is... well, it's weird.
Yeah, it's another Konami game... but not just any ol' Konami game. Castlevania is huge for both the publisher and the platform. A compact, challenging, six-stage adventure, Castlevania manages to be one of those rare works that nails its concepts on the first go. It may owe its basic concept to Ghosts ’N Goblins, but this adventure is so much more than its inspiration. The first NES third-party masterpiece.
Future console first-party SNK makes its NES debut this week, and... well, let's just say there's room for improvement. Ikari Warriors was good and fun in the arcades, and on NES, it exists and doesn't cause your console to self-destruct. So that's something. Also, a half-look at Bandai's first Power Pad title, Athletic World.
A new third-party challenger has appeared! Tecmo arrives on NES with two simultaneous launches, both of which more or less fall into the puzzle-platformer genre. Solomon's Key and Mighty Bomb Jack are full of arcane secrets and high difficulty levels. Just the kind of thing a growing video game boy needs in his diet.
The first of Nintendo's major releases for 1987 arrives, bringing with it some new technical innovations that will play a huge part in allowing U.S. releases for the system to maintain parity with titles that ran on pricey expansion hardware in Japan—and to go even further beyond that in the years to come. Oh, and the game itself is pretty good, too. Just be sure to take care when writing down those passwords...
Tecmo delivers its third game almost immediately on the heels of Solomon's Key and Mighty Bomb Jack, and it's a doozy. Rygar kicks off a couple of trends we're going to see a lot of in the coming years on NES: It radically reinvents an arcade game for the console, and it's pretty much a proto-metroidvania action title. Good stuff here that deserves to be enshrined in history.
Capcom continues its diligent efforts to overhaul its arcade games for NES with a revamp every bit as admirable as Tecmo's fresh take on Rygar. A liner 1985 corridor shooter becomes a complex space labyrinth demanding patience, persistence, and a willingness to plot out some complicated connections, in effect becoming an all-new game—one diminished in history by its close proximity to Nintendo's Metroid and an unfortunate decision by Capcom USA to remove the save feature present in the Japanese release.
Japanese publisher Taito makes its NES debut with a pair of games that, in stark contrast to the games that immediately precede them, quite faithfully recreate their arcade predecessors rather than reinvent them. That's not a bad thing, necessarily, but given the ambitious design of the games released on either side of this duo, it does cause Taito to feel a bit behind the curve. (They'll sort it out eventually.)
Nintendo's biggest and most consequential release for 1987, and one of the most important games of the year across all platforms, brings a newfound depth and maturity to the NES. Other ’87 releases have been flirting with the idea of merging action and role-playing concepts, but Zelda goes all-in with a sprawling, challenging journey across the land of Hyrule to rescue the princess Zelda and retrieve the Triforce of Power. And in the process, an instant classic is born.
Nintendo wraps its run of summer 1987 console masterpieces with the third entry in its not-quite-Black-Box series: Metroid. Playing like a midpoint between Super Mario and Zelda but with a flavor all its own, Metroid continues the trend of NES action games striving to present players with something more substantial than arcade-style test of twitch reflexes. (Stay tuned for the other half of this retrospective next week.)
The second half of NES Works' look back at Metroid explores the changes it underwent in coming to the U.S., how both the flow and the music of the game help shape the player's experience, and the greater legacy of Samus Aran.
Two direct arcade ports hit the NES here, and boy golly are these things not necessarily created equal. About the only thing they have in common is that they're both incredibly difficult to complete. But Athena is a hot mess of a conversion, as is the Micronics way, while Arkanoid is a pretty spectacular adaptation. Of course, to be fair, Arkanoid has an advantage here: It came with its own pack-in controller, designed exclusive for use with this one game. But even without the Vaus paddle, it's still a far sight more fun than Athena. Which isn't to say Athena was necessarily a barebones package; in Japan, it came with a special bonus pack-in that Americans were denied...
American publisher makes its NES (and console) debut with conversions of two of its own landmark computer titles: Doug Smith's Lode Runner and Will Wright's Raid on Bungeling Bay. Neither men had any direct involvement with these conversions, which instead were handled by Japanese developer Hudson. The result is a pair of visually overhauled (but generally quite faithful) ports that go a long way toward embodying the overall tone and style that would define NES games. At the same time, these ports speak to America and Japan's shared love of great games while highlighting the stylistic differences between east and west in the 8-bit era. A solid duo of classics... though perhaps a bit slow to reach the U.S. to have true impact here.
Japanese arcade giant Irem makes its NES debut—or at least its debut as a publisher under its own steam. Spelunker and Sqoon make for interesting companion pieces to Lode Runner and Bungeling Bay, one being an Irem PC port published by Brøderbund and the other being a game published by Irem itself. Anyway, both are hilariously difficult.
(That's "The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner" if you're nasty.) Four—count 'em, four!—companies make their NES debut here before going on to become third-party pillars of the platform. 3-D WorldRunner comes to us courtesy of Squaresoft (they of Final Fantasy fame) and Acclaim (they of, uhhh, Bart Vs. The Space Mutants infamy). Sky Kid is a Namco/SunSoft joint. None of these companies should need any sort of intro for anyone who has a decent familiarity with the NES, and this is where they both get their start on the U.S. side of the console. Nothing inspiring here, but these are the seeds for greater things.
Note: Since this video was initially posted to Patreon, historian Kevin Bunch has determined that the earliest mention of these games' release dates appeared in the summer of 1988 (in Computer Entertainer magazine, the only U.S. publication consistently covering console games at the time). So they appear to be totally misplaced in NES Works 1987. We take a side excursion into a nebulous place in NES history: Tengen's licensed trio of games from 1987. Or is it 1988? It's hard to say, because there's no firm record of when these games originally shipped. It's always tough to pin down exact American release dates for NES games, since Nintendo of America only officially cites release months... but what happens when Nintendo refuses to acknowledge the existence of a game altogether for political reasons? That's the conundrum that surrounds the first three games released by Atari spinoff Tengen under license by Nintendo—before they went rogue.
Another Konami shooter arrives, and this one encompasses a little bit of every other shooter to have appeared on the system to date. It's also tied to a long-running series, despite having been renamed in the U.S. So why does no one ever talk about this game? Is it because it was unbearably cute? Or is it because it was overshadowed by its own sibling release a year later?
While NES Works normally focuses on contextualizing NES games (especially those from Japan) by defining their place in contemporary video game history, and by explaining the state of the industry at the time of their initial creation (and subsequent release into the U.S., when applicable), sometimes exceptions must be made. Here we have one of those cases. While it's certainly worth understanding the import-only works that inspired Deadly Towers's genesis, a significant portion of this game's legacy came about more than a decade—or even two decades—after its U.S. debut. Here we see that sometimes a game is not nearly so remarkable as the conversation that springs up around it.
A double-header from Acclaim this week, which isn't as bad as you might expect given the publisher's track record. Neither of these games are particular standouts, but neither will have you praying for the sweet release of death, either. Tiger-Heli is a decent-ish adaptation of a decent-ish arcade shooter, and Star Voyager... well, it's ambitious, but not especially good. There were far better NES games, but there were certainly much worse as well.
The holiest of NES holy grails arrives this week: Stadium Events by Human Entertainment and Bandai. This game is worth relatively little in its European release, and has almost zero value in its reissued "World Class Track Meet" version. But stumble across the original U.S. release and you've basically paid for your retirement. Special thanks to Steve Lin for allowing me to include actual photography of this rarity here. For contrast, the backup feature: Winter Games, a complete botch job of the PC sports classic by Epyx. It has no intrinsic value, either as a game or as a collector's item.
NES Works continues (properly back in the year 1987 once again) with another pair of sports games. One is quite good, and the other... is not only kinda bad, but it also means lots of people are going to leave tired jokes about blowjobs here, because there's no 20-year-old Seanbaby joke that isn't made even better by being left as a drive-by YouTube comment. I will say this for Ring King, though: At least it has an exhibition mode, which means I didn't actually have to play it while recording footage. Quite considerate of Data East, really.
SunSoft returns to NES with their first internally developed game for the U.S., though like this episode's back-up feature (Alpha Mission) the game in question (Spy Hunter) actually hails from the arcades. Neither of these vertical shooters offer much in the way of a compelling reason to play them, aside from a pretty good take on the Peter Gunn theme in Spy Hunter. Don't worry, though. SunSoft will get a lot better. And SNK.. will get a little better, at least on NES.
After a few too many humdrum releases rounding out September 1987, October sees the NES back in proper fighting form with a string of games for the ages. First up, we have the dual debut of legendary developer Compile (under the auspices of FCI) with a pair of lesser-known classics that showcase the unique sensibilities and impressive skills for which the studio would become known.
Squaresoft returns with its second game, and its second game to feature 3D tech. This one's a little different than The 3-D Adventures of WorldRunner, though, even if what we saw in American worked the same. Ah, the rabbit hole of Japan-only Famicom add-ons! Rad Racer marks the beginning of many things, from the Famicom 3-D System to the career of mad RPG genius Akitoshi Kawazu, but it also brings us to the end of an era. Pour one out for pixellated box art, friends.
Nintendo's final release for 1987 is one for the ages: A conversion of minor arcade hit Punch-Out!! So how do you port a cutting-edge arcade game to a console that launched a year before the coin-op machine without losing its essence? If you're Nintendo, you create a fancy new microchip specifically for the task; you radically overhaul the game to emphasize precision and readability; and you enlist the support of the most popular athlete in the world. It's a combo that's hard to top—and the results were so strong that it still holds up even without the endorsement of Mike Tyson.
Konami's sixth release for 1987 is interesting in a few ways, not least of which is that NES publishers were supposedly limited to five releases per year. But when you're on fire the way Konami was in 1987, I suppose the rules get a little wobbly. The Goonies II bases its action very (very) loosely on the 1985 movie, but rather than just being some crappy licensed title (like we've seen with M.U.S.C.L.E. or Chubby Cherub), it's one of the most ambitious and complex NES titles to date. It's a bit opaque in the adventure scenes, but despite some parts that haven't aged well, it's... aged pretty well.
While the NES was an improvement over previous console generations in most respects, not everything that showed up on Nintendo's system was a clear winner versus what had come before. Case in point, Super Pitfall: An update of sorts to Pitfall! II, except far, far worse. It's an ambitious reworking of an Atari 2600 classic, but "ambition" doesn't necessarily mean "quality." Another fine mess you've gotten us into, Micronics.
After an amazing summer and autumn for 1987, the NES is well into its year-end doldrums. Don't worry, we've got some bangers (as the kids say) lined up for the grand finale a few episodes from now, but for the moment it's all tepid, dated games that pale in comparison to superior takes on these genres that have been showing up of late. But please don't give up on NES Works just yet. Did I mention Mega Man is on the way? Because it is.
Data East (finally) serves up a pretty solid game in the form of Irem's Kid Niki: Radical Ninja, but the real story here is Gotcha!: The Sport. Not only is it the debut release from one of the NES's most questionable publishers, it also very much represents a specific moment in popular and political culture. Gotcha! was based on a movie and a toy line, and its publisher's fortunes were impacted by poor toy sales right as the national conversation began to focus on some unfortunate results from America's gun culture and the early days of the the police's move toward militarization. That's quite a lot to tie to a simple NES Zapper game...
Following on from Gotcha!, LJN continues plying the same furrow with two more games based on film properties, developed by Atlus. (Or at least someone pretending to be Atlus, anyway.) Two out of LJN's three 1987 releases are pretty decent, if a bit thin in terms of content, and really only The Karate Kid hints at the kind of crap the company would make its stock in trade over the coming years. Jaws might even be considered genuinely good, if only it had been given a little more time in the oven to allow all its concepts to come together...
Two final middling releases for 1987, one of which is based on a licensed property. Yeah, you can definitely see the future of the NES shaping up here. Neither Top Gun or BreakThru is the worst game we've seen, but neither can quite make up its mind as to what it wants to be. Is Top Gun a flight sim or an aerial combat game? Is BreakThru a side-scrolling platformer or a shooter? Rather than feeling like brilliant hybrids, these both just seem a bit muddled...
We're in the final stretch of the year here with a collaboration by two companies that each made their debut earlier in 1987. This is the first of many times we'll see Rare and Acclaim work together, and in this case the studio puts its programming wizardry to work to create a technically impressive (if somewhat gangly) action platformer that would evidently do well enough to inspire a short-lived franchise. Even if it's not much to look at these days.
NES Works 1987 ends as it began: With a cool game by Capcom. But let's be real. Mega Man is much cooler than Trojan. There's a reason one series had dozens of sequels and spinoffs and the other... didn't. Capcom's first wholly original creation for NES is one of the most inventive and highly polished games on NES to date, period. With a free stage select sequence, alternate special weapons, and imaginative bosses, Mega Man stands out as a brilliant capper to an incredible year for the NES. And just think: The franchise will only get better from here, as we'll see in NES Works 1989. In, uh, a few years.
The NES's 1988 lineup begins with the debut of a gaming legacy. Renegade gave us both the River City/Kunio franchise AND the Double Dragon franchise, and given what lies ahead in the near future for both NES and Game Boy, we definitely need to have a look into the origins of these brawly species.
Coming on the heels of the NES's faithful home conversion of the not-so-faithful arcade localization of Kunio-kun/Renegade, we have Data East's almost-classic Karnov: The tale of a fire-breathing Russian strongman (who is actually dead) out to save the world from a dragon by toting around a ladder. A somewhat strange game in the Ghosts ’N Goblins/Wonder Boy II vein, Karnov doesn't quite hit the mark overall, but its NES conversion is surprisingly strong and includes a few welcome quality-of-life tweaks over the coin-op. As for localization, all we lost in the U.S. was the fact that main character Karnov was a big enough bastard in life to merit personal attention from the Hebrew god Himself.
Another Capcom creation this week. It's not quite up there with the company's best work, but you can see their collective spirit in action here—Gun.Smoke hits on a lot of popular Capcom beats all at once. It's a vertically scrolling shooter, themed around American pop culture (in this case, Western movies), whose home port contains a number of embellishments over the coin-op title to make it better suited for the NES. Despite the compromises it suffered in coming home, Gun.Smoke plays well on NES and makes a lasting impression, making it yet another top-flight creation for a valuable NES third party
Konami knocks it out of the park yet again with one of the greatest arcade conversions ever to hit the NES: Cooperative platform shooter Contra. It's a rare example of a coin-op title being ported faithfully to NES and somehow improving on the source material despite the move to inferior hardware. With its tight level design, inventive bosses, impressive weapons, and slightly combative cooperative gameplay, Contra is a true NES classic that continues to be a great time more than 30 years later.
Wishing you a Meli Kalikimaka this week, despite my rage over a bad game about wood and water. Thankfully, we have Rare to infuse a little holiday gratitude into the season with a very good, very fun, and very inventive take on racing: R.C. Pro-Am. It doesn't erase the nothing of a game that is T&C Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage from existence, but it does at least provide balance in the Force or whatever. Also this week: The mysterious NES Max. What could it be??
This week demonstrates the danger inherent in covering two games per episode as fate lands a one-two punch of mediocrity from two of the console's most dire creative combos: TOSE and Bandai, and Micronics and SNK. The results are about what you'd expect. That is to say, not so great. Dragon Power, of course, is another halfhearted attempt by Bandai to bring a Japanese game based on a manga or anime license to the U.S. without making the effort to license or localize the original work. Where Dragon Power differs from the likes of Chubby Cherub is in the fact that its source material—Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball—would go on to become one of the most successful and beloved Japanese properties in the entire world rather than just a local phenomenon. This makes Dragon Power's superficial changes all the more conspicuous in hindsight.
A pair of old-school sports games this week—one whose quality and playability transcends its visuals, and ones whose quality and playability... do not. Nintendo's Ice Hockey, developed in collaboration with NES Volleyball creators Pax Softnica, distills the essence of the sport into a take whose simplistic style makes possible some truly accessible, fast-paced gameplay that transcends its genre. It's a remarkable game in many respects! Major League Baseball is a mediocre Famista clone whose sales pitch consists entirely of, "We have real team names." Your mileage will vary, greatly.
Echoing last week's episode, this week we see a decidedly dated-looking game (City Connection) that nevertheless manages to be entertaining enough to transcend its relative age and sit comfortably in the 1988 NES lineup. On the other hand, Freedom Force is anything but dated, with some of the most stylish visuals seen to this point on NES. I'd rather play City Connection, but there's no denying the primal visual appeal of Freedom Force's attract mode.... Also, a bit of housekeeping: The host segments will be a little unusual for the next few episodes as my office space is currently unavailable for filming, forcing me to tape next to my portable photo box for the time being. Also, I realized while reviewing this episode that I made a point unclearly—I said Freedom Force is the first example on NES of a Japanese and American studio collaborating, which obviously isn't true. It's the first example I can name of the Japanese and American branches of a single studio collaborating on a proj
In the year 198X, an elite American ex-soldier traveled into the jungle for a stealth mission that ended in a showdown with a Soviet HIND-D helicopter. Sound familiar? No, this isn't Metal Gear (that's next episode), but instead a game based on a film that very clearly has served as a primary text for Hideo Kojima through the years: Rambo, aka First Blood Part II. Rambo for NES is widely reviled as one of the worst games ever released for the platform. Not only is this a factually incorrect perspective, it grievously sells short the actual ambition behind this game—not to mention the many ways in which it actually pushed the envelope of NES releases (thanks in large part to the lengthy delays that its own inspirations, Zelda II and Castlevania II, suffered en route to their U.S. localizations). Rambo is a long way from being a great game, but it's a game that makes a sincere effort to do something interesting with a licensed property. It trips over its combat-bootlaces more often tha
One of the most beloved franchises of all time makes its debut on NES, though not its actual debut; the Metal Gear Nintendo fans knew and enjoyed back in the 8-bit era was in fact a port of a minor hit for MSX/2 home computers that had shipped about a year earlier in Japan. Although Metal Gear gets the broad strokes right on NES, it trips up over a lot of minor details. And some major ones, too. Still, if a compromised take on a classic is the one that a million former NES owners knew and enjoyed back in the ’80s, there's something to be said even for that clumsier rendition of the game. Also worth noting this episode: The debut of a brand new publisher! Well, sort of.
Technos (by way of freshman NES publisher Tradewest) follows up on Renegade with a home conversion of a massive arcade hit that plays extremely fast and loose with the meaning of the phrase "home conversion." Double Dragon on NES may as well be a completely different game than the coin-op smash, as it adds several new mechanics, expands the game environments, introduces platforming sequences, helps invent the one-on-one fighting genre, and—whoops—loses the cooperative gameplay feature that gave the game its name in the first place. The end result is a game that doesn't sit well with those who demand absolute fidelity in their arcade ports, but that nevertheless stands out as one of the most ambitious, polished, and attractive games yet seen on the platform.
A pair of arcade shooter adaptations leads us into the second half of 1988 for NES Works, both of which deserve attention for entirely different reasons. Defender II sees the publishing debut of HAL Labs (via HAL America), a well-deserved turn of events for a studio that was so essential to the early success of this platform. And this conversion stretches all the way back to those early days, speaking once again to the close relationship HAL and Nintendo shared as the latter made its way into the world of selling game consoles—including a bit of borrowed audio that raises the question of who pilfered from whom? Come for the footage, stay for the educated speculation. Meanwhile, Iron Tank transforms T.N.K. III into a fairly ambitious (if not entirely refined) combat adventure with branching paths, a progressive power-up system, and even some narrative. Finally, we begin to see a glimpse of the quality that fans have come to associate with the name SNK.
This episode focuses on perception, especially vis-a-vis Bases Loaded. A certain demographic of NES owners LOVES Bases Loaded. However, in my experience, people who discovered the NES later (when better and better-looking baseball sims were available for the console) tend to find it lacking and shallow. And then there is the Japanese Famicom owner's perspective, in which Bases Loaded (aka Moero!! Pro Yakyuu) is almost universally reviled. How could so many people hold such contradictory points of view? This episode delves deeply into that question. This episode also talks about Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf. (Yes, I am aware of The Simpsons' parody. No, it's not germane to this discussion.)
We have a follow-up to a 1986 classic here, in deed if not in name: Life Force, the sequel to Konami's Gradius. Well, sort of. It's complicated. But since we never saw the actual Gradius II on NES, this will have to do. Life Force makes use of the same excellent power-up system as Gradius, with some refinements, including a new weapon option, new handling of Options, a revamped shield, and perhaps most importantly a far more forgiving respawn system upon the player's inevitable demise. Along with these improvements, Life Force also incorporates two-player simultaneous action and introduces a unique dual-format scrolling system seen nowhere else in the Gradius series. It's quality fare, and a real technical and gameplay highlight for the NES... a feat that becomes all the more impressive when you consider how it had to be scaled back from the Famicom release to work within the constraints of U.S. cartridges.
I may have gone a little overboard with this episode, but it seemed worth doing. For one thing, the creator of the Golgo 13 series, Takao Saito, recently passed away. And for another, upon revisiting this game in the context of its original release chronology on NES, I came away deeply impressed by how much the developers attempted to do here. Did they nail it? Oh, lord, no. But where this game is easily written off as a kludgey mess when viewed in light of the entire nine-year NES release library, back in autumn 1988, it tried to do a LOT with the limited resources and collective game design wisdom of the time. Containing a good half-dozen presentation and gameplay styles, a globe-spanning storyline, and a genuine good-faith effort to recreate the essence of the manga property it's based on, Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode is damn impressive for what it is. (Albeit a heck of a mess.) Kids: Beware of tiny 8-bit boobies and blood spray.
This week is a bit of an ouroboros: While the primary feature here is Capcom's Legendary Wings, this episode also touches on the NES release of Xevious, the game that very clearly inspired Legendary Wings (not to mention about a thousand other Japanese arcade games of the era). Xevious is by far the purer of the two, not to mention the fairer, but there is something to be said for that late ’80s Capcom house NES style...
Famicom mainstay Hudson finally makes its American debut this week with two sizable hits from Japan. First, Adventure Island brings a little taste of Sega to NES by converting Wonder Boy with a thinly veiled graphical overhaul. Milon's Secret Castle goes a different route, abandoning linear action for a hunt-and-explore adventure inside a castle full of monsters and annoying hidden objects. Both games share a single trait: They're designed to be obnoxiously difficult without cheat codes. Yeah, I Game Genied my way through this episode. I am very old, and there's just not enough time left in my life to deal with this nonsense.
The prevailing theme for NES games in 1988 has been multiplayer. From Contra to Life Force to Jackal, many of the best games for ’88 played best with friends. (That was probably also true for games that weren't published by Konami, even.) Fittingly, episode 88 sees not but three games that uphold that trend. First, there's Jackal, a widely overlooked but danged enjoyable co-op shooter, followed by two pretty decent game show adaptations by Rare Ltd. for the sake of newcomer GameTek. Don't despair, though: The NES has some fantastic introvert-friendly single-player titles coming up before long.
It's two for two for the road this week with Bubble Bobble, a game specifically designed to be played with another person, and Racket Attack, the second-ever NES tennis game which, like Nintendo's Tennis, offers support for doubles play (though not competitive play). Amidst all the moral panic about the way video games were rotting the brains of America's youth and turning us into violent killers, here's a pair that emphasizes cooperation. Stupid moral panickers.
More newcomers arrive on NES this episode, each bringing a musty conversion of an even older original work in tow. Kemco-Seika makes its NES debut with a two-year-old port of First Star Software's Spy Vs. Spy, which kinda-sorta puts a bow on the two-player trend of NES software by way of a competitive espionage adventure. Just as dated is the debut duology from Japanese dev Nihon Bussan, courtesy of our pals at FCI: Creaky console ports of arcade obscurities MagMax and Seicross. Not precisely the most inspiring games 1988 had to offer NES fans...
Continuing the trend of "games converted badly to Famicom in 1986 and published in America two years later," we have Bits Laboratory's disastrous adaptation of Activision's Ghostbusters. A fun, frothy, fast-paced little confection in its original Commodore 64 incarnation, Ghostbusters becomes a miserable and tedious experience on NES, bogged down by monotonous driving sequences and a viciously unfair endgame. You get the impression someone at Bits actually thought they were doing a good deed here and improving the material! And that person should be locked up in a ghost trap, or at least never allowed to touch a computer again.
Capcom kicks off one of the most important creative threads of the NES's history: Their collaboration with Disney, back in the days when Disney was simply an animation studio struggling to reinvent itself for a new era rather than an all-consuming media megalith. Ah, but this isn't really a Capcom Disney game, is it? Appearances (and packaging logos) can be deceptive... but the proof is in the gameplay, which is pretty uninspiring in this case. Also this episode: A salvo of classic games from HAL and Nintendo. The former gives us acceptable ports of arcade masterpieces Joust and Millipede, while the latter simply slaps a new wrapper on two Famicom launch ROMs without bothering to tidy up those releases' shortcomings despite the availability of more advanced cartridge tech that could have made for, say, a proper conversion of Donkey Kong. For shame.
If Super Mario Bros. was the culmination of the Famicom's early history in Japan, Super Mario Bros. 2 for NES served the same role here in the U.S. Debuting as the console hit critical mass in time for its first major holiday season in America, SMB2 sent players into a huge, imaginative game world that they could tackle with their choice of four different characters, not just Mario. Despite its complicated history, SMB2 became one of the system's greatest hits and did a great deal to define Mario in the West. Nintendo took no chances with this one, and this episode also looks at one of the keys to SMB2's staggering success: Nintendo Power magazine.
Sunsoft gets a major glow-up this episode after a mediocre start as a publisher of ancient arcade ports and one neat-but-meager light gun shooter. No one would accuse them of half-assing it this time around, though; Blaster Master shot instantly to the top of the NES all-time greats list as soon as it debuted, and it still holds up remarkably well despite some unforgiving design choices that make for some incredibly difficult scenarios. The plot may not make much sense, and the weapon degradation system can be deeply demoralizing, but on the whole Blaster Master did a lot to advance the state of the NES art. Also this episode, I take a moment to provide proper context for the whole Tengen thing I erroneously tackled back in the 1987 chronology.
Remember 1942? That really bad top-down shooter? Capcom would prefer you didn't. And, to wash that bad memory from our collective mind, we have its sequel, 1943: The Battle of Midway, simultaneously a sequel and a heartfelt apology for that previous misstep. Although this arcade adaptation fails to carry over the multiplayer element from the original 1943 coin-op, it makes up for that shortcoming by introducing a permanent skill-upgrade system. One of the better vertical shooters for NES! Meanwhile, Vic Tokai inexplicably publishes Data East's upgraded NES conversion of Bump'N Jump... well, kind of. In Japan, the home port of Bump'N Jump shipped as "Buggy Popper," which suggests it was meant to be a separate game entirely from the arcade game (alias "Burning Rubber"). Anyway, it's super dated. But still kinda fun?
I can't believe I completely failed in this episode to draw attention to the fact that Dr. Chaos is, in fact, a Superman villain. But then again, both games this episode read like latter-day comic book villains: Good-hearted souls with the best of intentions yet who somehow strayed from the straight-and-narrow path and now simply cause pain and suffering (especially among Gen X kids). The ambitions greatly outstrip the execution with this episode, as two attempts to tap into the exploratory action trend that dominated the NES in 1988 utterly fail to provide players with compelling reasons to delve into their worlds. Suffering from grievous design, visual, and technical shortcomings, both Dr. Chaos and Superman rank among the bottom tier of NES games to date despite their creators' obvious and admirably grandiose visions.
This week we have a pair of perfectly tolerable games that seemingly no one remembers. Yes, by late 1988, the NES library had grown sufficiently large that it could contain games beyond "brilliant" and "execrable"—works of competent mediocrity doomed by their lukewarm nature to be relegated to the dustbin of obscurity. Cobra Command takes a mundane auto-scrolling shooter and turns it into a Choplifter-inspired adventure with a touch of exploration and puzzle-solving. A fine start! But utterly relentless in its difficulty level and saddled with some very strange, almost "sticky" controls. It's fine, almost good, but it just misses the mark. Meanwhile, Anticipation offers inclusive thrills (if you are a preppy, 30-something Caucasian) and demands you deduce the nature of premade connect-the-dots puzzles before your competition does. It's fine. It exists, and it rounded out the NES library with more family-friendly board games. But does anyone want to play it today? I can't imagine.
In this episode, I learned that the Power Pad is not really designed for use on hardwood floors. Bring back that deep-pile ’70s shag, baby. My feet are killing me. Super Team Games gives us the last of Nintendo's casual-appeal titles for 1988. There's still one final Nintendo-published game for the year, but it's kind of the opposite of casual-appeal—really, the closest Nintendo themselves ever got to "git gud" difficulty on NES. But Super Team Games is meant for small people to pretend to exercise with, or for big people to be uncomfortably intimate with. As for the headline feature, Blades of Steel, it's an even more casual-appeal approach to hockey than Nintendo's Ice Hockey. You don't have to make any meaningful choices in this game besides deciding when to shoot for the goal... and how hard to hammer the punch button during player-versus-player fights.
Two games about American youths wasting their lives. Two games with various ties to Atari. Coincidence? Yes, actually. Sometimes, this stuff just happens. Skate or Die! may bear the Ultra Games branding, but it really owes its existence to Electronic Arts—and ultimately, to the former Epyx crew that EA hired up when Atari Corp. sabotaged that company. And while Paperboy for NES comes to us from Mindscape, the original game debuted in arcades under the Atari Games label, only to be converted to NES by Tengen (AKA Atari Corp.), who was also filing charges against Nintendo and pilfering documents in order to attempt to sabotage THAT company. It's like poetry... it rhymes.
One of December 1988's all-timers arrives this week, and while it may not be the best-remembered of the bunch (not when the other two big releases belonged to huge ongoing franchises), but I'd argue that it's the best and most polished. It's also the most fearless; Bionic Commando didn't so much ask players to learn an entirely new style of platform gaming as demand it as the price of entry. But once you got a handle on the grappling mechanics, Bionic Commando played like nothing else on the system, becoming a fast-paced action game with breezy, high-speed action through a dozen stages linked by an interesting narrative and well-conceived adventure gameplay flow. It remains the gold standard for grapple-based action gaming to this day, and for good reason: It rules.
A curious release this week, as we come to a game that shipped twice for NES: Once with Nintendo's approval, and once illegally. Ever the rogue, that Indiana Jones. Like Tengen's early conversion of Gauntlet, Temple of Doom adapts an arcade game but makes quite a few changes to its structure, format, and objectives. Capcom didn't have the monopoly on dramatic reinterpretations of coin-op titles for NES, it seems, although Temple of Doom is no Bionic Commando. On the other hand, we also have Data East's disappointingly literal interpretation of Midway's Rampage. Of all the games that could have benefitted from some sort of enhanced gameplay loop or added depth for its console iteration, this is it. But no, Data East simply stripped it down and removed features, making for a game with little challenge or variety over its entire running length.
Sunsoft blew our minds with Blaster Master, but the company did not suddenly become some 8-bit powerhouse after releasing that game. Here's the rocky portion of their road to greatness, a pair of NES conversions that will leave you scratching your head. In the case of Platoon, you'll be left wondering why they thought THIS license was suitable to a platform primarily advertised and sold to children. In the case of Xenophobe, you'll be confused about how meager a port such a technically adept company managed to produce.
It's the most wonderful time of the year: Time for a Castlevania retrospective. As NES Works 1988 winds down, Halloween 2022 seems like the perfect time for a proper look back at Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, one of the most ambitious and frustrating games of the NES era. The second of the NES's "weird sequels," Simon's Quest combines a lot of different influences and ultimately does a lot to define the series' future... even if it would take a while for the series to realize it. In the meantime, NES kids had a whole lot of Nintendo Power coverage to help them solve Dracula's so-called "riddle."
A lot of shenanigans happening with the NES timeline here at the end of 1988, a situation that I'll explore more next episode. For now, it's worth noting that this episode brings us: 1. Two games that may or may not have actually debuted in the U.S. in December 1988, and 2. Two games from the same franchise, possibly released simultaneously by different publishers. Bomberman and RoboWarrior don't share much branding in common in the West, but both hail from the same germ of inspiration. RoboWarrior, AKA Bomber King, would branch off briefly to become its own thing under the auspices of developer Aicom, who kind of Hudsoned Hudson here by creating a variant of that company's franchise and then claiming it as their own. Sort of. Except that outside of Japan it was reskinned into someone else's thing. It's complicated. Othello, however, is not complicated. This is the fourth time this channel has looked at an Othello game. You know the drill.
We end NES Works 1988 here with a game that (probably) actually shipped before December 1988 in scarce quantities. Aw, it's Nintendo's very first high-demand holiday rarity! They certainly would return to that well over the years. It's hard to say where to place this release in the ’88 timeline, because Nintendo originally announced Zelda II for a release early in the year but ended up kicking this particular ball down the road over and over again, and games media reporting didn't have much to offer back then. This episode deals with the whys and wherefores of its delays and the tantalizing nature of this long-promised Zelda sequel. Did Zelda II turn out to be worth the wait? Well... feelings are mixed on that one. Zelda II stands alone in the Zelda franchise for many reasons—its side-scrolling perspective, role-playing elements, limited lives, and the fact that it's the one entry in the series to demand genuine skill and dexterity—but you can't deny the influence it exerted on later