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Archive for the ‘NES ABC’ Category

NES ABC: Action 52

14 Sep

ToastyFrog’s NES ABC: Action 52
Active Enterprises | Crummy omnibus | 1991

TOASTY: By the time Nintendo was ready to pull the plug on the NES, game cartridges offered roughly several million times more capacity than when the system first launched. Eh, maybe my numbers are a little off, but the difference in size between a ’83 release like Donkey Kong — which didn’t even include all the arcade version’s stages due to memory limitations — and Kirby’s Adventure is pretty significant. Somewhere along the way, enterprising Asian pirates had an epiphany. “Hey,” they realized, “if we take one of these big modern chips, we could cram a whole bunch of tiny old games in there!” And thus was born the multicart.

Generally, multicarts consisted of a dozen or so really old NES games, with occasional classics like Contra sprinkled amidst forgotten clunkers like Bird Week, although you’d often find versions claiming to offer 50, 100, even 1,000 games on a single cart. Actually, these usually just had a dozen titles, too, but hid them behind a grafted-on front-end that would let you select among several weirdly modified alternate versions of the games. Kind of like all those alternate modes on Atari 2600 carts, but with less thought given to playability. Sure, Gradius is fun… but is it even more fun when the Vic Viper is invisible? (Spoiler: No.)

Meanwhile, back in America, the nation’s inherent Protestant work ethic refused to let home-grown companies like Color Dreams and American Video Entertainment subsist on piracy. No, they made their own original games. Sure, those games were no damn good at all, but you have to admire the underlying ethics behind them. (Never mind about the fact that they were technically illicit releases.) At the vanguard of America’s NES efforts was the nation’s single most epic 8-bit console work ever: Active Enterprise’s Action 52. Putting most Asian multicarts to shame, Action 52 contained no less than 52 unique titles. Even more impressively, intellectual theft was right out; all 52 selections were completely original.
YUKI: That’s really kind of amazing, and inspiring. I’m glad to hear you people weren’t actually as useless during the Famicom era as you seemed to be.
TOASTY: Eh, heh, well… the sad truth is that Action 52 contained 52 games, but each one was worse than the last. The graphics were atrocious. The sound was grating. The controls, lacking. Most of them weren’t even properly playable. The prospect of buying 52 games for $200 seemed pretty appealing until you actually saw the games in question. And then your parents would be horrified by the money you wasted and would never let you buy another videogame for as long as you lived. Just think of how many lives were destroyed by this one game. Well, one collection of games. Well, collection of “games.”
YUKI: Oh. That sounds completely terrible. I thought we were only touching on notable games with this ABC series?
TOASTY: Well, it is notable if only for Active Enterprises’ outsized ambitions. Despite the fact that even the apologists have to admit that it’s a waste of silicon, the company hoped to use Action 52 as a springboard to launch their very own intellectual property. As this was during the peak of the Ninja Turtle fan craze, AE decided to jump on the bandwagon with their own answer to Battletoads. And that answer was: Cheetahmen. Despite the fact that Cheetahmen — one of the 52 games here — wasn’t really finished, or good, or interesting, the company had a sequel waiting in the wings, ready to unleash upon an unsuspecting public.
YUKI: Oh my god, Cheetahmen!? I know them. They’re famous in Japan, or at least on certain Japanese sites. The legendary kusoge that inspired countless videos and musical remixes! Cheetahmen! I had no idea that this is where they were from. I feel like a great mystery has been solved, and my life is a little more fulfilled now.
TOASTY: Why is it that Japan only latches onto the terrible things about American gaming? Why not take pointers from good things, like BioWare games or well-crafted first-person shooters?
YUKI: I don’t know, probably for the same reason most Americans think that Japan consists of Godzilla sniffing used schoolgirl panties he bought from a vending machine as he fights ninjas dressed like Hello Kitty.
TOASTY: Ah, ignorance: The universal language.

 
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NES ABC: Abadox

30 Aug

Hey, look, I did another one of these. I probably ought to try not to let a month pass between each entry of the NES ABC. In my defense, I’ve been a bit occupied with certain other projects lately.

ToastyFrog’s NES ABC: Abadox
Natsume | Semi-horizontal Shooter | 1990

TOASTY: You know how these days Natsume is pretty much “the company that coasts along on endless Animal Crossing games”?
YUKI: That’s Harvest Moon. There’s a big difference, and anyway Harvest Moon came first.
TOASTY: Eh, whatever. Where I was headed with this is that unless you’re a 12-year-old girl, Natsume is pretty much worthless to you, because all they make is the same worthless cutey-cute farm simulation over and over again.
YUKI: You’re a jerk.
TOASTY: I’m a…? Er, anyway, my point is that it could be worse. Natsume could be the company they were in the NES days. Back then, instead of endlessly rehashing their own creation to the point of stupidity, they were much less ambitious. Instead, they rehashed everyone else’s ideas. You know how Shadow of the Ninja was such a convincing Ninja Gaiden ripoff that Tecmo went ahead and published the Game Boy Shadow of the Ninja as a Ninja Gaiden game? Well, after playing Abadox, it’s clear to me that this was Natsume’s primary tactic at the time: swipe a game from someone else, do the absolute minimum necessary to avoid a lawsuit, and wait for the money to pour in.
YUKI: Abadox? That’s just a generic shooting game, right? I don’t see how that’s such a ripoff. It’s just trite.
TOASTY: Well, then, clearly you have never played Abadox. Or maybe you’ve never played Life Force? Because that’s what Abadox is, you know. It’s Life Force. Totally and completely. OK, sure, you control a guy in a suit instead of a spaceship, but that just means Natsume ripped off Section-Z a little bit, too. Other than that, the two games are embarrassingly similar: you scroll automatically left to right through grotesque biomatter as naggingly familiar waves of enemies attack. Spiky protuberances emerge from the ceiling and floor. At one point, you have to shoot through weak bits in a wall to advance. And then you meet the boss, a sort of lumpy brain-like thing that has to be shot in the eye. And this is just the first stage!
YUKI: Wasn’t Life Force the one that switched between horizontal and vertical shooting? So it’s just a coincidence. The similarities obviously end once you reach the second level.
TOASTY: Oh, you think so? What if I told you the second stage of Abadox is also a vertically-scrolling level?
YUKI: Come on, it can’t really be that shameless.
TOASTY: You’re right, Abadox isn’t completely the same as Life Force. The vertical stages scroll downward instead of up. As this is possibly the only shooter in the world to play like this, it’s bafflingly confusing. Like playing Mario right-to-left.
YUKI: But still… I mean, it doesn’t have the same power-up system as Life Force, right? That’s kind of a trademark.
TOASTY: No, you’re right: Abadox has a strictly linear power-up system. But Life Force on NES is a weird mash-up of the arcade games Salamander and Life Force, and the Gradius-style upgrades were added somewhere along the way. Back in the earliest chunks of its DNA is a linear power-up system startlingly similar to Abadox’s. The whole thing is some sort of proto-Life Force.
YUKI: Wow. Is it like this all the way through the game?
TOASTY: Beats me. All I could think about the entire time I was playing is how much better Life Force is, so I bailed midway through the second level and destroyed the Bacterions a few times instead.
YUKI: And you call yourself a reviewer? Where’s the due diligence? I bet the game probably gets a lot better after the first few stages.
TOASTY: Yeah… maybe not. But, here’s some actual research for you: If you happen to notice the music sounds a lot like the tunes from Life Force’s Konami cousin Contra, that’s because Natsume actually employed one of the sound programmers for the NES version of Contra as the composer for this game.
YUKI: Wow, that’s impressively brazen. My respect for this game has just increased dramatically.

 
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NES ABC, Part Four

24 Jul

I should be working on GameSpite Quarterly 2 layouts, but I felt the need to revisit the NES ABC project just to avoid anyone thinking it’s a dead project a mere three posts in! After seeing the results, though, it probably wasn’t time well spent. I work better when I focus, so this particular entry’s artwork is a bit lacking. Ah well. Complaints I don’t want to hear: (1) A Boy and His Blob should be filed under B; (2) technically, this drawing is of a girl and a frog-thing rather than a boy and a blob; (3) this is about the NES game but uses the Wii remake’s art style; (4) this is about the NES game but uses the Wii remake’s art style badly. Thanks for your cooperation, citizen.

ToastyFrog’s NES ABC: A Boy and His Blob – Trouble on Blobonia
David Crane/Absolute | Magical Jellybean Quest | 1989

Yuki: I really enjoyed this game when I was young. I suspect the fact that I was too young to properly understand what I was supposed to be doing contributed to my enjoyment. Instead of trying to win the game, which I have recently discovered is a frustrating and unforgiving taskmaster, I simply had fun playing around in underground caverns with a boy and his adorable, mysterious Blobby, which would transform into strange shapes when fed candy. Another thing I recently discovered is that the cute version of the game I played was not the same as its original American version, in which the boy was an awkward stick-person and Blobby was a couple of simple geometric shapes. I think is is the only instance I know of in which an NES game was reverse-localized, with the ugly being taken out for Japan instead of added for the U.S.

ToastyFrog: Don’t be racist. America is land borne from a grim, hardscrabble existence. Ugly things remind us of our ancestor’s hardships. In that sense, A Boy and His Blob is a true act of patriotism, ’cause man is it ugly. It can be forgiven that, though, because it’s suffering an identity crisis. It’s really a good game on the wrong system, you see. It’s very much the successor to the Pitfall! games, which were masterpieces on Atari 2600. It has the same sense of exploration and treasure collecting and unflinching difficulty, but it also adds a strange mutant creature to the mix. If this had been a 2600 game, wow, it would have been heralded from on high. But it arrived instead a few years too late and with a look that didn’t really fit the NES’s general style, so the whole thing feels a little off. It’s interesting and fun, if you’re patient enough, but don’t expect to be coddled. Something tells me the upcoming remake is going to ditch the difficulty along with the ugly, but since the NES game’s difficulty mostly stems from awkward collision detection and untelegraphed, blink-and-you’ll-die hazards, I think I’m OK with that.

 
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NES ABC, Part Three

17 Jul

ToastyFrog’s NES ABC: 8 Eyes

Thinking Rabbit/Taxan | Sluggish Platformer | 1990

I like reading science fiction, especially stories about alternate realities. But some theoretical realities are too frightening to even contemplate! Like the one that Taxan’s 8 Eyes came from, for example. Clearly, this is the hellspawned creation of a dark alternate world where Castlevania was made by a bunch of soulless monsters who hate fun (and people who like to have fun). What a terrible world that must be.

A lot of 8-bit action games were directly inspired by Castlevania, but 8 Eyes was a lot more blatant about it than most. The whole game appears to have been traced from screenshots of Simon’s Quest, and the action even revolves around visiting a series of mansions — sound familiar? Unfortunately, the developers must never have played the game they were knocking off, because they completely failed to realize that what made Simon Belmont’s adventures so fun was that he was a limited but capable hero, with a lengthy attack range and access to useful secondary weapons. The hero of 8 Eyes is merely limited, not capable. His attack is a stubby little dagger rather than a whip, and nearly every enemy in the game has a longer reach than him and can soak up multiple hits; in order to hurt foes, you have to stand within their range and soak up their retaliation. Hit-and-run tactics work from time to time, but the controls are so poor (and the foes so much speedier than the lousy protagonist) that without impossibly great timing you’ll just leave yourself even more open to attack. You do have subweapons, and you can even choose from among them! But they all suck, and ammunition is beyond scarce.

The selling gimmick for 8 Eyes is that the hero is accompanied by a falcon, which is ostensibly capable of attacking foes. In my experience, though, he just flies around and take damage, even when I put him on the offensive. Supposedly 8 Eyes is slightly easier if you play it cooperatively with someone else controlling the bird, but I can’t think of anyone I dislike enough to inflict this game upon. I watched some YouTube playthroughs of this game out of curiosity and discovered that the only people who can play it well are soulless robots, probably ones that came from the same grim universe as this game.

In short, 8 Eyes clearly exists to tease Castlevania fans with a game that looks terribly enticing but is actually about as fun as running a cheese grater over your eyeball. It’s not often a game makes me genuinely angry, but this insult makes me want to find the portal to that other world and stuff it full of high-yield bombs so that we can destroy the demonic fiends who created it and ensure they never hurt us again.

 
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NES ABC, Part the Second

15 Jul

Hmm, I still have some rust to knock loose, it seems. This drawing took me much longer than it should have, but the background is still kind of terrible. Please bear with me! Sooner or later I’m bound to get it right.

For the record, this NES A-Z project isn’t “one title per letter” or anything that limited. Neither is it comprehensive. I’m trying to strike an interesting balance. I guess we’ll see.

ToastyFrog’s NES ABC: 3-D WorldRunner, (The Adventures of)

Square/Acclaim | Fakey 3D Platforming | 1987

Yuki: I have always been confused about why Americans seem to hold the Square that existed during the 8- and 16-days in such high regard. Yes, they made some very good RPGs, but also they were responsible for an ocean of trash. Before the Square name became the same as Final Fantasy, it was seen similarly to many other hated developers, most of which are long dead now. Eventually I discovered the reason America loves Square, though: mostly you only received their good games here, the Final Fantasy and Secret of Mana type games rather than the racist Tom Sawyer adventures. On top of that, the company was very devious and tricky, publishing their worst games under the names of other companies.

The Adventures of 3-D WorldRunner is one such game. It was published by Acclaim, a name that inspired no hope of quality for NES fans. Such a clever ruse! By giving this terrible game to a terrible publisher, Square made money, yet most people didn’t realize the true origins of this bomb. Maybe if you were very clever, you would have recognized the stupid 3D glasses gimmick from another more popular early Square game, the racer Highway Star which was called Rad Racer over here. But because they hid behind Acclaim, Square is able to publish popular games now without having to account for their former sins. Not so in Japan! I read all of those hateful reviews of Dragon Quest IX and most of them are by people who still hold a grudge over Square’s early 8-bit games. (The rest are by 2ch’ers angry that Enix hasn’t made a DS sequel to Lolita Syndrome.)

So what is 3-D WorldRunner? Well, it is similar to Sega’s Space Harrier in that it features a character advancing along a pseudo-3D checkered playing field, avoiding hazards. However, Square decided to remove all the good things about Space Harrier, like the music and the impressive scaling graphics and the flying and the shooting. Yes, this is a game about an unarmed man jogging across a vast checkerboard, trying not to run into things. That is all. It is not a very good premise for a game, if you want my opinion.

Like many old Square games, 3-D WorldRunner was programmed by Nasir Gebelli, the Iranian savant who could do very impressive things with humble game hardware. Unfortunately, it seems his inspiration ran out at “create a colorful false 3D game technology” and no one bothered to develop an actual game out of his impressive idea. In modern times you would call this a tech demo, but back in the old days it was deemed acceptable to box it and ship it and charge the same price as a real videogame for it. I am always amused when I look back and see the “Nintendo Seal of Quality” on NES games.

Apparently this game was popular enough to warrant a sequel, called J.J. or Jumping Jack, but I don’t know if it was any better than this.

ToastyFrog: Yeah, I tried it. Was it any better than the original? Well, let’s put it this way. You know how Final Fantasy got its name because it was Square’s last desperate attempt to create a successful, profitable game, and if it had failed it would have spelled the end of the company? Well, J.J. was the last game Square made before Final Fantasy. In other words, it was the final straw that led them to give their RPG such a fatalistic name. J.J. was very nearly the game that was so bad it killed Square.

Yuki: Oh. Well, I suppose that answers that question.

 
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NES ABC: 1943

13 Jul

Since we’ve reached the midpoint of the GameSpite Quarterly 1 online edition (both in terms of content and in terms of the quarter itself), I’ve decided to take this week off from the rather time-consuming process of online prep. Instead, I used my weekend to ride herd on the deadline for next issue’s content (we’re just missing three articles out of fifty now, I think), to kick off a new project I’ve been mulling for a while, and to play Dragon Quest IX. Um. Mostly the DQIX thing, actually. But also, the new project is below, and hopefully should shed a little light on what I’ve been working toward for the past few days. Perhaps you will think it’s dumb, but who knows! Maybe not.

ToastyFrog’s NES ABC: 1943 – The Battle of Midway

Capcom | Vertical World War II Shooter | 1988

Snappy Internet pundits can’t seem to resist mentioning the fact that Capcom’s 194X series is a group of vertical shooters developed in Japan, and whose premise revolves entirely around one American fighter craft single-handedly striking down upon the Japanese fleet what might be the nation’s single most humiliating military defeat in its entire history. Lots of people like to speculate that this speaks of some sort of collective contrition or self-effacement on behalf of the people of Japan, but I’m pretty sure that’s a load of hooey. (I asked Rorita about the psychology behind this game and she kicked me and told me to leave her alone, which suggests the Japanese retain their indomitable spirit! Or at least no small measure of early-morning crankiness.)

Nah, I don’t think 1943 is Japan’s way of saying “We’re sorry for World War II,” because by many accounts the game and its predecessor (bearing the unexpected title of 1942) caused a bit of a stir upon their release many, many years ago. And any time someone mentions Dragon Quest these days, some Internet kid thinks it’s the height of cleverness to post a link to articles about how DQ composer Koichi Sugiyama is a hardline nationalist at the vanguard of a movement to proclaim to the world, “Screw you guys, we were totally awesome in World War II, and we’d happily pillage the Chinese mainland again if we had to do it all over!” OK, sure, that’s pretty questionable, but the dude’s like, 90. His nationalism is pretty much the celebrity version of a cranky old man shouting at kids for wearing loud clothes.

So no, 1943 doesn’t say anything about Japan as a whole. But it does say a lot about series creator Yoshiki Okamoto: namely, that he’s a wacky sumbitch.

Anyway, you might wonder why I began this A-Z chronicle of unique NES releases with a game whose title begins with a number, and which is probably better known for its arcade incarnation. For the former, I can only say it was a pointless arbitrary decision. For the latter, however, I’ll say that 1943′s NES port deserves a mention for being probably the most conservative of Capcom’s late ’80s arcade-to-NES conversions. The company’s early NES ports like 1942 and Commando were, let’s be honest, kind of terrible. But starting with Section Z, someone in the publisher’s dank bowels realized that Nintendo’s home console just wasn’t up to snuff when it came to depicting high-octane arcade releases, so they’d be better off building replay value by adding some depth rather than churning out more shallow, watered-down efforts such as Trojan. This philosophy reached its pinnacle with Bionic Commando, which took loose inspiration from a pretty wretched arcade game and made it excellent. The nadir was Strider, which… yeah.

1943 came midway (pun only slightly intended) between Bionic Commando’s inspired rethinking and Strider’s completely missing the point. On the surface, it looked to be a visually downgraded, if fairly faithful, rendition of the arcade game. Players controlled a P38 Lightning against endless waves of Zeros before diving to a low altitude for a strafing run on a fleet of battleships. It didn’t look as pretty as the arcade version, but everything else about it was satisfyingly consistent. However! As an NES-exclusive embellishment, Capcom added a tiny touch of what modern-day PR flacks would call “RPG elements” in the ability to upgrade the P38. After every few stages, players were given the opportunity to enhance different aspects of their plane, boosting its defensive power, or the duration of its special weapon counter, and so forth. It’s a modest addition, but it adds some variety and replay value to what would otherwise be an utterly straightforward shooter. So that’s good.

In any case, I don’t feel bad about blowing up the Japanese fleet in this game, ’cause Japan went and dredged up the Yamato to turn it into a spaceworthy vessel while in the thrall of some sort of manic, rekindled nationalism the ’70s anyway.

 
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