Best and Worst: NES Multicart staples

[WhyNotZoidberg | 585]

On this edition of best and worst I want to highlight some games that can be found on virtually every NES multicart. Of course international gamers would know them as standalone titles for the famicom, but I grew up in Canada so I had to make due.

Best: In my opinion, no game can even touch B-Wings when it comes to multicart entries. The music is top notch and the « crash » sound effects that you hear when hitting enemies is entirely satisfying. The graphics are especially good for an early title and one of the biggest appeal for me is the game lets you select your weapon at the beginning of the game. (Hammer ftw)
 

special shout-outs to Sky Destroyer, Warpman, Moai Kun, Circus Charlie and Battle City.

 

Worst: Exerion. I’m sure this game is someone’s fetish, but if a demo was ever made to show how games can cause motion sickness, this is it. The screen is constantly scrolling vertically and horizontally. The background is always moving, but your ship and the enemies stay mostly where they are in relation to each other and all of this makes me nauseous just thinking about it. It’s otherwise a hella generic space shooter with nothing going on for it.

Edited October 19, 2022 by WhyNotZoidberg

[Tanooki | 4,933]

Hmm fun.  Yeah if we stick to the traditional era of multicarts (GBC era and before) you get a great blend of interesting titles that sit on specific systems multicarts where you can find a common list of utter gems and crap that both fly under the radar.

While the NES/FC had a good many, Gameboy had quite a few that ended up on its little carts too, some where just terrible little hacks like Super Mario 6 which was a badly re-skinned Speedy Gonzales of all things.

I have one of those FC multicarts that came with a console that ate it, a 111in1 and what's neat it came with a nice engrishy printed list of the games it had.

Often really good games ended up in there like from Konami Goonies, Gradius, and Twinbee.  Nintendo had most their blackbox games pop up but also Devil World which never came to the US which is uniquely interesting.

 

[Ankos | 439]

32 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

While the NES/FC had a good many, Gameboy had quite a few that ended up on its little carts too, some where just terrible little hacks like Super Mario 6 which was a badly re-skinned Speedy Gonzales of all things.

 

The gameboy did not have that many sprite hacks of official games when you compare it to the FC/NES stuff. I have not heard of this Super Mario 6 hack, but there is a hack of Speedy Gonzales called Sonic 6 for the gameboy, but it does not seem to dominate the world of multicarts. Volley Fire (which has good music but so-so gameplay) and Pitman are the sort of games I think of when I think gameboy multis

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

I'd say the legitimate worst are "[title] 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ..." etc.  You know, where they either put in "jump cuts" for particular levels for a ROM they've already got on there, or did another entry for the ROM with certain Game Genie codes enabled, etc.  I wouldn't give these things such a hard time if they were labeled more usefully, like "Contra 30 Man Code" or something, but seriously, multiple entries for the same game, regardless of the quality of the title, suck far more than said title itself, hands down.

[Tulpa | 3,500]

Yeah, those are annoying (although useful for those who want to practice later levels.)

Nice to see B-Wings get some love. I wish the obstacles would explode like the regular enemies do rather than just disappear when you shoot them. Probably sprite limitations, especially that early in the system's lifetime. The bosses are the most random things ever. Some are giant spaceships and some are like spiders and stuff. And yes, hammer is the weapon. The bow wave "Jump" is good, too, against the spider boss.

Battle City is on just about EVERY multicart. I think there's a law or something that mandates that it be included. But yeah, you pick a random multicart or plug-n-play and some variation of it will be there, probably multiple times. Fun game.

Some other Famicom games that tend to be on multicarts:

Field Combat is an interesting game, even though I don't know what the hell I'm doing half the time. Not as ubiquitous as Battle City, but worth checking out.

Nuts & Milk usually shows up, too. Hudson Soft game, and I think the first third party game for the Famicom.

The original Mappy is a staple, and usually pretty fun. Gets insane in later levels, but you can kite the enemies pretty easily.

Not a huge fan of Road Fighter (I think it's pretty bland), but that's another game almost guaranteed to be on there.

Galaxian, Binary Land, Karateka, Chack'n Pop, Ikki, Bird Week, Pooyan, Yie Ar Kung Fu are other games I see a lot.

 

I do like some the graphic hacks, like where they replace Mario with Shrek or some such. One of the trippiest I came across on Youtube was a hack of Duck Hunt as some sort of space light gun game. It still had the duck quacks and "fly away" intact. I was disappointed that they didn't keep the dog as an alien that laughed at you. It had some other weird hacks, too.

And some games like Harry's Story/Harry's Legend/Harry Potter and Titanic/Titenic/whatever. I'm just shocked they completely redid the graphics for what is clearly the same game.

 

 

Edited October 20, 2022 by Tulpa

[fcgamer | 4,723]

6 hours ago, Tulpa said:

I do like some the graphic hacks, like where they replace Mario with Shrek or some such. One of the trippiest I came across on Youtube was a hack of Duck Hunt as some sort of space light gun game. It still had the duck quacks and "fly away" intact. I was disappointed that they didn't keep the dog as an alien that laughed at you. It had some other weird hacks, too.

And some games like Harry's Story/Harry's Legend/Harry Potter and Titanic/Titenic/whatever. I'm just shocked they completely redid the graphics for what is clearly the same game.

These particular ones are all outside of the classic era of multicarts. I'm pretty sure that the guy I know with the Harley, his company did the duck hunt hack.

Magic Jewelry is another one that frequently appears on multicarts. Then there's Fancy Mario, where they reverse the mirroring. The worst bit of that is that it was available as a single cart too, I wouldn't want to pay full price for that crap.

Back in the day my favourite was easily Circus Chablie, followed by Pooyan iirc.

Fun thread.

[nesmaster14 | 435]

Haha, great thread!

My go-to game on 76-in-1 was Karateka.  It played/looked like nothing else on NES and was just so odd but cool.

[Tulpa | 3,500]

20 minutes ago, nesmaster14 said:

My go-to game on 76-in-1 was Karateka.  It played/looked like nothing else on NES and was just so odd but cool.

That's a Jordan Mechner game. He used rotoscoping to get the fluid animation on the sprites. For Karateka, he filmed his karate instructor performing moves. He later used that same technique filming his brother running and jumping to make Prince of Persia.

[nesmaster14 | 435]

45 minutes ago, Tulpa said:

That's a Jordan Mechner game. He used rotoscoping to get the fluid animation on the sprites. For Karateka, he filmed his karate instructor performing moves. He later used that same technique filming his brother running and jumping to make Prince of Persia.

Yep, Apple II, big fan of his stuff.  But at the time on NES it was all new to me.  The cool part of Karateka was you could flip the floppy disk and it would play the game upside-down, a clever easter egg.

But yeah, fun thread. Multicarts are fun and somewhat forgotten about nowadays with modern flash carts.  I always joked with a buddy it'd be fun to setup a flashcart like an old 999-in-1 cart or something, with half the titles poorly named and duplicates lol.

Edited October 21, 2022 by nesmaster14

[Ankos | 439]

For newer multis that have really high game counts (the type that get packed in with cheap Famiclones) I've seen a few that have Sachen titles. The same could be said for GBA multis that just have tons of PocketNES stuff on them. I think that Pyramid is pretty neat. Not the best game ever made, but pretty fun. SMB with the cheat that lets you select 256 world is also entertaining. To me these are more of good pick up and play time waster games, which I think are a good fit for multicarts. As far as games that I'd actually be interested in beating, Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu would be the big one for me. Sometimes graphical edits of it get put in, but it in some form regularly finds its way onto multis. It is a pretty good platformer with great presentation (I really like the stage 2 theme). It got a remake on the PCE if you want something that looks a little flashier, though the original looks good to me as is

[WhyNotZoidberg | 585]

14 hours ago, nesmaster14 said:

Haha, great thread!

My go-to game on 76-in-1 was Karateka.  It played/looked like nothing else on NES and was just so odd but cool.

The Mandela effect is strong with Karateka because I could swear I played it on NES outside of multicarts. But yeah it’s a strong entry for sure.

[G-type | 2,482]

On 10/20/2022 at 12:23 PM, Tulpa said:

Battle City is on just about EVERY multicart. I think there's a law or something that mandates that it be included. But yeah, you pick a random multicart or plug-n-play and some variation of it will be there, probably multiple times. Fun game.

Battle City rocks... I had a similar game on my TI-99/4a called Blasto that I remember fondly.