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Hoskat

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  1. Hoskat
    CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
    CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE
    The guys sit and discuss the music of 1987. Matt and Luke found the year to be underwhelming, Jason had a hard time narrowing his picks. Matt talks about the time he met one of the biggest rock stars of all time, got backstage passes to a legendary band’s concert and met a satanic metal head.
    Spotify playlist of all songs on the list: 
     
     
    Matt’s #5 – Aerosmith – Dude Looks Like A Lady

    Matt’s #4 – Guns N Roses – Welcome To The Jungle

     Matt’s #3 – Eazy-E – Boyz N Tha Hood

    Matt’s #2 – Michael Jackson – Man In The Mirror

    Matt’s #1 –
    R.EM. – It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)


     
    Jason’s #5 – Richard Marx – Endless Summer Nights

    Jason’s #4 – White Snake – Still Of The Night

    Jason’s #3 – The Breakfast Club – Right On Track

    Jason’s #2 – Depeche Mode – Never Let Me Down Again

    Jason #1 – Prince – You Got The Look

     
     
    Luke’s #5 – George Harrison – I’ve Got My Mind Set On You

    Luke’s #4 – Rick Astley – Never Going To Give You Up

    Luke’s #3 – Fleetwood Mac – Little Lies

    Luke #2 – George Michael – Faith

    Luke’s #1 – R.EM. – It’s The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

     
    Left Photo: Matt (right), his dad (left) and Los Lobos guitarist David Hidalgo (Middle)
    Right Photo: Matt, his mom and dad and members of Los Lobos
     
    Glen Benton, lead singer/bassist of Deicide who Matt ran into at a concert.
    View the full article
  2. Hoskat
    Genre: Action Adventure RPG
    Publisher: Culture Brain
    Total time played: 10 Hours
    Short review: An ambitious game that fits snuggly in the action, adventure and RPG genre
    Interesting links related to The Magic of Scheherazade
    Speedrun (1hour 5minute) Soundtrack Video Review (TwoHeadedGiant) Arnpoly Written Review One Memory
    It’s funny how a single memory about a game can stick out so strongly in your mind. A memory about a game I never played that really isn’t even a large part of the game. Back in the early 1990’s my mom rented this game and played it for a few days. There was one part in the game where she was walking through a cave and kept falling into holes. We tried and tried but no matter what the holes seemed to always get us.
    We decided to call the 1-800 Nintendo help line. The man on the phone told us that the holes never move and that the best way to get through that section of the game is to put a piece of tape on the TV every time you fall into a hole and then the next time you get back to the place in question you can avoid the tape and avoid the hole.
    It worked! She was able to get through this section with tape on the TV. Literally all I remember is tape on the TV. I asked my mom about this recently and she has no memory of it.
    What Kind of Game?
    This is an action game with fun sword, shield and magic rod gameplay. It is an adventure game that takes you through time and lets you explore much like The Legend of Zelda or Willow. It has turn based battles like Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy. It has a cool mythological story like The Battle of Olympus but instead of ancient Greece it takes place in the Middle East. It also has some cryptic puzzles much like Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest.
    The Magic of Scheherazade is ambitious. It tries to fit a lot of cool concepts into the game and while most of them work none of them are 100% perfect. It is a fun game and luckily some of the more tedious stuff can be skipped completely. I liked this a lot more than I expected to.
    The Instruction Manual
    I don’t always read the instruction manual before playing a game (or before putting together IKEA furniture) but in this case I did and I’m glad I did. It is probably the most detailed manual of any NES game I’ve played. In fact, both the manual and game sometimes give too many hints. As an example, anytime there is a hidden room on a screen a message pops up and says “Use Oprin here” which is the magic that reveals hidden rooms. To me, it is cool that there are hidden things in the game but the fact the game tells you when there is a hidden room and tells you how to make it appear seems pointless. Just make the room not hidden and save me from having to cast a spell.
    Upon further research, it turns out that if your helper has died in battle they will not be able to tell you to cast Oprin until the holy man in town revives them. But, I never lost a single helper in battle so I didn’t realize this was the case (more on this below).
    Box Art
    The word Scheherazade is so illegible on the box it looks like a Scandinavian heavy metal band logo. The graphic artists gave up and just added the word Scheherazade again in legible font below the illegible font.
    Button Assignments
    This game explores a lot of unique ideas that aren’t seen in other games. On the surface, the game looks and plays like most other overhead action adventure games on the system. Many games feature sub-weapons that can be assigned to a button or used by hitting a combination of buttons but this is the first game I can remember playing where the player can set what both the A and B button do. Each button has a list of commands that grows as you progress through the game. While it seems that it gives you a bit of flexibility in how you play you quickly learn that even though you have the ability to change your play style I pretty much stuck with the magic rod on the B button and the Pampoo healing spell on the A button for most of the playthrough. Having to select an item to JUMP or SPEAK slows down the game. I wish the game was smart enough to know I was in a town and when I hit a button in front of a townsperson that I want to speak.
    So, in theory, this is a cool concept but it added a bit of extra work on the players part.
    Class Assignments
    At the start of the game you can select your character to be a Fighter, Magician or Saint. In a lot of RPG’s this selection will impact the entire game and how it is played. In The Magic of Sheherazade it doesn’t really effect anything. The Fighter is better with the sword, the Magician is better with the magical rod and the Saint is better at defense.
    But, at any time you can change your class by visiting any town’s holy man. This makes the selection much less important. I found the magician to be the most well rounded and only changed away from that class if it was needed for the story. In some cases you have to change classes to get a certain person (or tree) to talk to you.
    Buying Items
    Ah, the tried and true store that is in every RPG ever. When you visit a town you can buy a few items that are pretty standard throughout the game. The thing that makes it unique is that you can ask the clerk for a discount. He will either lower the item price or get mad and kick you out of the store. There is no penalty for asking for a discount and getting kicked out. You can just walk back in and buy the item. This is another cool concept that in execution is a bit unneeded.
    Bread – You can hold up to 10 of these. As you may have guessed eating this restores some health. Unlike many games if you run out of hit points your character auto eats bread and restores some hit points. So, think of this as a get out of dead free bread.
    Mashroob – I kept calling this a mushroom throughout my playthrough, it works exactly like the bread except instead of replenishing hit points it replenishes magic points.
    Carpet – Allows you to fast travel to a town. In theory this is a good idea but I found it didn’t work how I wanted it to as the town I wanted to go to either wasn’t in the travel list or I forgot the name of where I wanted to go and traveled to the wrong place.
    R. Seed – This rupia seed can be planted at the bottom of a hidden staircase somewhere in the world that is revealed by casting the Oprin spell during a solar eclipse. If you then travel forward in time through another hidden staircase somewhere else in the world and return to where the seed was planted you are rewarded with hundreds of coins. As enemies only drop 1 coin at a time and on rare occasions a 20 coin Money bag planting this seed it a must. As ridiculous and complex as it seems this is actually not bad as the hidden stairs aren’t that hidden and solar eclipses happen fairly often.
    Key – These are needed to open doors in the final temple of each chapter.
    Horn – In the final temple of each chapter you come to a room with 3 stone gargoyle statues. If you touch one they come to life and are hard to kill. If you hit them with a horn they stay stone and the locked door in the room opens. Again, it seems like there is no way you would ever figure this out but it is spelled out in the manual and townspeople remind you.
    Map – Buying a map is kind of pointless. It doesn’t provide you an overworld map, but a cheap graphical representation of the final temple in the chapter. In my experience the map was useless and the temples were generally small enough that 5 minutes of exploring would be enough to know where to go. Again, another concept that didn’t add anything to the game.
    Loan – This is the only game I can think where if you don’t have enough money to buy an item you can get a loan from the shop. I did have to do this a few times and then worried constantly that the loan would come due or would gain interest that I couldn’t repay. You never have to get a loan, but, doing so will save you a lot of time grinding and building money. Luckily I was able to pay back my loan by harvesting the Rupia Seed tree in the future.
    The Eclipse
    This is the only video game I know of that has an eclipse. As mentioned above, planting a R. Seed during an eclipse will reward the player with hundreds of coins. But, that’s not all. You also become more lucky if you visit a town casino during an eclipse. I wish I could talk more about the casino but I never spent any time in one. This is another example of a cool concept in the game that wasn’t needed.
    In a few of the chapters you could do some task to get a special spell that is only used in that chapter that would accomplish something to make the game a bit easier. As an example, in Chapter 2 there is a huge desert you walk through and it slowly drains your life as it is too hot. But, if you have the right spell and cast it during the eclipse it causes a huge rainstorm which turns the desert into a nice grassy field. This again is not needed in order to beat the chapter but it is a nice touch and something unseen in other NES games.
    Turn Based Battles
    When you start out the game you are in a town and you talk to people and then you exit the town and you are in an overworld much like in The Legend of Zelda or Willow. As you walk from screen to screen sometimes enemies appear that you can take care of with your sword or rod. This is the “action adventure” part of the game. But, every once in a while when you exit one screen and before the next screen loads you are thrown into a turn based battle much like in Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior.
    Example of a fun action adventure style battle. The first time this happened I was very confused. This is not the game I thought I was playing. The turn based battle is a bit clunkier and more complex than other classic RPG’s on the NES. You have to choose who you want to fight along side you and choose a formation. The farther into the game you get the more companions you have to choose between. I did a few of these battles and did not enjoy them at all.
    I did some research on the world wide web to see if I could pick up some tips to make them more enjoyable and less tedious. What I found blew my socks off.
    A random turn based battle in the middle of my action adventure game. It turns out, you don’t have to ever fight these battles. Before the enemy attacks you get the option to escape from the battle. If you try and fail you then must pick a formation and companion to fight alongside. If you choose “fight alone” you get another chance to escape. If this fails the battle begins and you get first move. At this point you can try to escape again. If you fail this 3rd time you are going to lose some hit points as the enemy will attack.
    But, in my experience, only a handful of times was I unsuccessful at escaping before I got attacked and I never had to try to escape more than 1 time after the battle actually started.
    I wish I could regale you all with tales of my hard fought battles and how the game has a cool feature that allows you to try to “make peace” with the enemy. But, alas, I never learned this game mechanic because I literally escaped from every battle. This is another example of a cool feature that wasn’t needed.
    Level Up
    Because this is an RPG you earn experience points for defeating enemies and every so often you character gains a level where your health, magic and attack power goes up and every once in a while you learn a new spell. The game has an interesting feature where you can only level up 5 times in each chapter and when you beat the chapter your character is automatically leveled up to the max level allowed for that chapter.
    I usually maxed out or got close to it in each chapter just by wandering around trying to figure out what to do but I like the idea of never being too weak to succeed in a chapter as you are auto-leveled up between chapters.
    This feature is the reason I never felt the need to learn the turn based battle system. I found much more success finding an easy enemy in the overworld and just fighting them over and over to get much needed experience.
    How To Play
    As I’ve mentioned above, the game is broken out into 5 chapters and each follows a very similar structure. I’m not going to walk through each chapter I’m just describe how the game plays in general.
    First off, this is a typical “save the princess” game where you must rescue a damsel in distress in each chapter and the last chapter you rescue your girlfriend/wife/something?
    You start each chapter in a town where you are told to talk to everyone. In the town the people will give you mild hints on what to do. You can visit a shop to buy items, a hotel to replenish your health/magic. Some towns have casinos. There is usually a holy man who can change your class or give you a password so you don’t have to beat the game in one sitting. Lastly, there is a university where you can pay some money to take classes to learn new skills.
    The university is sometimes hidden, but, don’t worry, your little helper will tell you when to cast Oprin to make it appear. Typically there are 3 classes in the university, 2 of which teach you a new battle formation to use in the turn based battles. As I mentioned above, I didn’t need this but never knew what I’d learn taking a class so learned them anyway.
    The last course will usually upgrade your sword, rod or armor. The upgraded item is proof that you have completed the class and is needed to talk to another wise man somewhere in the chapter. If you have the upgraded item the wise man will teach you a spell.
    Once you have explored everything the town has to offer you leave and explore the overworld. As the chapters progress the overworld maps get larger requiring more exploration. Usually there is another town to discover but the same amenities are found there. While exploring the overworld you will find a hidden door that takes you either into the future or the past. If you go through the door you will explore the same map in a different time. This is usually where you complete some other task that gives you access to the final temple of the chapter.
    Once you have completed this task you can then visit the final temple which plays much like a Zelda dungeon where you must fight guys, explore rooms, open locked doors and eventually get to a boss.
    The Bosses
    The end chapter bosses all look pretty cool and remind of the bosses in Fester’s Quest where they are huge, you are small and the background is solid black.
    Chapter 2 final boss Some of the bosses required certain spells or techniques to defeat. Because of this it is always important to talk to everyone in every town and explore every nook and cranny of every chapter. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t tell you when you’ve found everything and more times than not I got to the boss and could not defeat them.
    Luckily this is 2020 and the internet exists and led me in the right direction to find whatever person, place or thing I was missing to defeat the boss. I don’t think I would have liked the game nearly as much if I couldn’t use the collective knowledge of retro gamers on this game. I enjoyed figuring things out on my own, but sometimes that wasn’t possible so the internet saved me.
    Final Thoughts
    There is a lot to do in The Magic of Scheherazade. It is a very polished game that takes the best parts of a lot of other NES games and crams them into a tight 10 hour package. Unfortunately, the way the multiple games game mechanics are worked in seem like afterthoughts. Many of the cool features of the game can be completely skipped and aren’t needed to beat the game. I was thankful one of those was the turn based battles as I didn’t want to dive into learning that mess. But, the cool chapter specific spells that change the landscape, the planting a tree in the past and picking its fruit in the future and the inclusion of casino games were all ambitious but not needed to beat the game. I’m glad I got to experience some of these things but wish they had been more integral into the game play.
    The Magic of Scheherazade is a great game that I bet most people haven’t played or even heard of. If you read the manual and have Google close by there is a lot to enjoy about it. I think this one falls into the “hidden gem” realm for me.
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  3. Hoskat

    Vice: Project Doom

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Action
    Publisher: American Sammy
    Total time played: 3.5 Hours
    Short review: An action platformer that plays like Ninja Gaiden mixed with Batman, with some first person action as well as some driving levels. The game also has a pretty involved story.
    Interesting links related to Vice: Project Doom
    Soundtrack Speedrun (14min 28sec) All Cutscenes
    Fresh Air
    After so many long, hard and/or boring games in a row it was nice to get a short and to the point game with good controls, a good story and no unfairness…well, almost no unfairness.
    That’s Different
    The first stage of the game is a top down driving stage that plays like Spy Hunter where your goal is to drive fast and clear anything in your path with a gun. Before playing the stage you are presented with the beginning of a story that feels like a futuristic film noir. After beating this level you are presented with more story and then finally, the title screen. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a game with playable prologue before the title screen, at least not on the NES.
    Starts out as a driving game Hey, Wait A Minute
    After the first driving level I had assumed the game was a driving game, but, I was wrong. The first level after the title screen is a side scrolling platformer that plays like a mixture of Batman and Ninja Gaiden, but, not as good as either of those.
    The bulk of the game looks and plays like this. Controls and Gameplay
    The gameplay is really straight forward, A jumps, B swings your sword. Most enemies are killed with a single hit and bosses are all pretty easy with easy to distinguish patterns. Throughout each level the enemies you kill will drop 1 of 5 items:
    Coin – Collect 100 of these for an extra life. There are unlimited continues and levels are pretty short so I never really felt the need for these extra lives.
    Skinny tube?? – This replenishes 2 points on your health
    Hunk of Meat – This replenishes a lot more of your health
    G – Adds grenades to your inventory. To select the Grenade, hit select until it is highlighted on the heads up display at the bottom of the screen. Grenades are thrown in an arc and have a pretty big blast radius.
    B – Adds bullets to your arsenal. To shoot the gun, hit select until the gun is highlighted. The gun has a longer range than the sword but not much longer. I found this to be the least helpful weapon in the game.
    As a side note, I used the sword 90% of the time, so much so that I rarely if ever ran out of bullets or grenades. It wasn’t until I was on the last level that I realized B was for bullets and G was for Grenades. I thought G was for gun and B was for bomb.
    Another Game?
    After a few levels you are presented with the 3rd type of gameplay, it is a first person on rails shooter where you move the cursor over the enemies and fire. There are 2 of these levels in the game, both are short, which is good, any longer and they would have gotten old.
    A different type of level The Story
    I’m not going to go into the story, mainly because I don’t remember exactly what it is about as I only read through it once. But, I can’t think of another game on the NES with a more detailed story. In fact, this video, shows just the games cutscenes and is 14 minutes long! Compare that to a game like Super Mario Bros. which has 0 cutscenes and no story.
    Pretty Shallow
    The music in the game is pretty great, the controls are solid and the level backgrounds and gameplay is pretty varied. But, there really is no depth to the game, no strategy. For the most part, you just use your sword and walk through the levels fairly easy. I’d say of the 11 levels I got through 6 of them on my first try. With unlimited continues it was easy to practice the harder levels until I mastered them.
    I also found the enemies to be pretty random and not detailed. There didn’t seem to be any consistency to the enemies, it was just a bunch of random guys with non-memorable looks. But, as I said earlier, the game is mainly polished and feels incredible after the last few games I’ve had to suffer through.
    That Final Level Difficulty Spike
    As expected, the further into the game you get the harder it is. The final stage was pretty difficult, guys jumping out and throwing stuff at you from every which way. There are even some big holes you have to navigate while dodging triple ninja stars thrown by Ninjas who come out of the holes. Not only that, the narrow platforms provided disintegrate if you stand on them for too long. I spent more time on this level than all other levels combined. But, I eventually got pretty good at the level and could get to the final boss every time.
    The Final Boss
    The final boss is pretty underwhelming, its just a guy who looks like you, he jumps between the middle and both sides of the screen and fires his gun if you are not close to him and swings a sword if you are. After a few tries I found the secret, when he lands a jump and shoots his gun you can hit Down+Forward and run toward him in a ducked position avoiding his bullets. Get close and hit him a few times with your sword. If you hit Down+Forward to early, before he shoots his first bullet at you, he will shoot from a crouched position and you won’t be able to run toward him. After getting the feel for this he is easy to beat.
    The Final Final Boss
    This is one of those games with 2 final bosses and of course the final final boss is massive and a nightmare to beat.
    The first 5 or so times I got to the final boss I didn’t get a single hit in before I died. After watching some videos I found a strategy, stand under his legs so that when he lands a jump you can swing your sword at him from below. This didn’t work for me, you have to be in the perfect position or he is going to kill you quick.
    After a lot of trial and error I found that you can easily dodge the projectiles he fires when he lands. After dodging, throw a bomb to do one hit point of damage. Unfortunately, I never had enough bombs to actually beat him. If you die on the final boss you have to play through the final stage again, I was able to find a spot in the final level where I could farm bombs. As it turns out, the enemies re-spawn if you walk off screen and then walk back. On top of this, the enemies always drops the same items. So, I was able to gather a lot of bombs and refill my health before the final fight.
    I was feeling confident with full health and 32 bombs, more than enough to beat the boss. But, after hitting him twice the screen turned red and I died. I thought the game glitched so I tried again, same result. It turns out there is a timer in the game, one that never came into play before this level. There isn’t time to farm health and bombs because then you won’t have enough time to beat the boss!!
    After some trial and error I learned that throwing a grenade at the boss right before he lands his jump allows you enough time to dodge his projectiles and because the grenade explodes so slowly it actually hits him two times. With this new strategy I only needed half as many grenades!

    This guy took longer to beat than the rest of the game combined. Final Thoughts
    After a bunch of brutal and un-fun games Vice: Project Doom felt like a masterpiece. But, it isn’t a masterpiece, it is just a really solid game that is in the top 20% on the NES library but never reaches that all-time classic feel. As detailed and long as the story was I was disappointed that the end of the game was just a quick story wrap up and this:

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  4. Hoskat

    Clu Clu Land

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Arcade
    Publisher: Nintendo
    Total time played: 15 Hours
    Short review: An arcade style Pac-Man knock off that is addictive even if the controls aren’t quite as easy to pick up as I would have liked.
    Interesting links related to Clu Clu Land
    Soundtrack Instruction Manual Video Review (CGRUndertow) Full Game Playthrough (23min 47secs) Hi, hello, how are you?
    Remember me? I play Nintendo games and try to beat them. But, I’ve been MIA since May 10, 2022 and haven’t beaten a single NES game. I took a short break after finally beating Solomon’s Key thinking that Clu Clu Land would be a cake walk since I thought I just needed to go for a high score. I expected to be done with the game when I was tired of playing it since there is no ending. What I discovered was there are 20 stages before it begins looping and getting through those 20 stages took longer than I expected. Now, 90% of that is because I didn’t play it enough days in a row to finally get good at it. I have no one to blame but myself.
    What is Clu Clu Land?
    At first glance it is basically a Pac-Man knock off. It was one of the games for the NES that came out the day the NES was released way back in 1985. In 1985 video games were still trying to figure out what they were and almost all home console games were versions of existing arcade games. Since arcade games were meant to suck quarters out of your pocket they needed to be simple to learn, hard to master and never end. The designers wanted you to feel like each time you played you got a little better and constantly come back for more.
    Clu Clu Land was not an existing arcade game, but, it sure seems like it would have been. It has all the hallmarks of a game that would have been successful in an arcade. The goal of the game is to move your character (Bubbles) around the screen uncovering hidden gold bars. Once all of the gold bars are revealed the level ends. You can see how many gold bars are left on the stage by looking at the “LAST” number at the top of the screen. It is a simple concept and easy to pick up. There is a bit of a story if you read the manual but the story doesn’t need to exist. All you need to know if that you want to uncover gold bars, not fall in the black holes and not come into contact with the sea urchins.
    Characters and Collectibles
    Bubbles – The main character of the game, she moves in a straight line on her own, she will change direction if she hits a wall or if you reach out and grab one of the poles in the stage. The controls are simple but do take a while to get used to. If you are moving left to right you will hit UP and DOWN to grab turn posts . If you are moving up and down you will hit LEFT and RIGHT to grab turn posts. You can grab a turn post and as long as you hold down the direction Bubbles will spin around and around until you let go. It takes a bit of practice to get the timing down. Pressing A or B will shoot an electric shock wave that freeze sea urchins and makes them non-dangerous to Bubbles for a few seconds, in the later levels the sea urchins are non-dangerous for very little time.
    Sea Urchins – These are the blue spiky looking guys. They come out of the black holes and try to touch you. Much like the ghosts in Pac-Man if they hit you you lose a life. Luckily Bubbles can shoot a projectile by hitting A or B, which the manual calls “Electric Shock Waves”. If you hit a sea urchin they will turn yellow/orange. If they are not blue you can push them around the stage without getting hurt. Push them into a wall to get 500 points. If you kill a sea urchin another will come out of the black hole shortly.
    Gold Bars – The most lasting legacy this game has is the gold bars. They are the exist same sprite as Rupee’s in The Legend of Zelda that game out a bit after Clu Clu Land. So, you could say, without Clu Clu Land we wouldn’t have Zelda’s iconic Rupee. These gold bars are hidden around the stage, if you pass between two posts where a gold bar is hidden it will be revealed. Each level features gold bars in a pattern. You will play these levels a bunch and eventually memorize all of the patterns the gold bars could be. Sea urchins are unable to pass through the gold bars.
    Black Holes – The little multi-colored octagons are black holes, This is where the sea urchins will emerge and if you run into one you will lose a life. However, if you are holding onto a turn post you can swing through a black hole no problem.
    Turn Posts – These are the white circles all over each stage, use them to change Bubbles direction by reaching out her arm and grabbing them like a kid grabbing and spinning around a flagpole at recess.
    Fruit – Much like Pac-Man, every once in a while fruit appears somewhere on the screen, pick it up to earn extra points.
    Rubber Trap – A pink bar that spans 2 posts that Bubbles bounces off of and changes direction. Like the gold bars you can’t see these until you run into it and reveal it. These can be pretty annoying and it is possible for a stage to have 2 rubber traps next to each other and Bubbles can get caught bouncing between them indefinitely with the only way out being to run out of time or get hit by a sea urchin.
    Bonus Sack – A money bag that appears on the screen sometimes. The manual says it gives you 11,500 points, I’m pretty sure that isn’t true, it was much fewer points.
    Bonus Timer – A clock that will randomly appear on the screen, get this to freeze all the sea urchins on the screen for several seconds. I’m embarrassed by how many times I hit a frozen sea urchin and lost a life.
    Bonus Flag – A white flag that randomly appears on the screen. This is a 1-UP. You know how I learned this? By reading the manual after I beat the game. I never knew how I was getting extra lives while playing, I thought it was every so many points. If I had known I would have beaten this game months ago. I almost never picked up these flags figuring they just gave me a few points.
    The Levels
    There are 5 regular levels, 1 intro level and 1 Bonus level. After playing through each level you get to the bonus stage and then the levels loop. In each of the 4 loops of the game Bubbles gets faster and more sea urchins can be on screen at once. After playing some of the later stages when Bubbles is really zooming around the first few levels feel painfully slow.
    The manual was nice enough to show you all of the possible shapes the gold bars could be laid out for each stage.
    Read the Manual
    You know the old trope that men never read instruction manuals before putting together furniture, fixing a carburetor or cooking a meal? Well, I didn’t read the manual before playing Clu Clu Land and it cost me months of trial and error. So, from now on I plan on reading the manual before I play the game.
    If I had read the manual I could have seen the shapes above and had a better idea of what each level had in store. I would have also known the white flags were the only way to earn extra lives.
    I also would have seen the best part of the manual, one that is totally something I would do because I’m lazy. In the bonus stage you are supposed to get 3,000 points for finding all the gold bars (which are blue in the bonus stage). But, the game was programmed incorrectly and you only get 30 points. Instead of fixing the code they just put a note in the manual. Also, they a call the “Gold Bars” “Gold Nuggets” in the note. Not a lot of consistency in the manual, feels right at home with something I’d write.
    Frustrations
    Clu Clu Land is surprisingly addicting. I would say it is in the top tier of the NES release titles (called Black Box games). There were a couple of minor issues I had to keep it from being perfect.
    The number in the top left of the screen is how many lives you have left. This number is always 1 less than the number of lives shown on the screen you see between levels. I kind of get why it is this way, but, it is just not a great UX experience. The screen between levels is painfully slow and cannot be skipped. Pausing the game is instantaneous, unpausing the game takes about 2 seconds. The controls are easy to pick up but they are a bit more sluggish than I like. When you shoot the sea urchins to turn them yellow/orange they sometimes don’t push the way you want them to and you’ll have to change directions to push them into a wall Bonus Stage
    I never successfully revealed all the blue gold bars on the bonus stage. My highest number was 60 in the allotted time. I did always enjoy these stages as they were a nice breather after the yellow stage before it which was always pretty tough. Lucky for me, the bonus you get for clearing the stage is less points than you get for not clearing the stage.
    The Loop
    After beating all of levels 4 times the game starts over and Bubbles is super slow again. There is one small change though, and one I’m thankful I didn’t have to play through to “beat” the game. When you cross over a gold bar more than once it changes colors and then if you cross over it again it changes colors back. All the gold bars on the stage need to be the same color to beat the stage. I’m sure it is possible but would be so hard as the shapes the gold bars make on the stage make it nearly impossible to pass over them all without passing over at least one of them twice.
    Final Thoughts
    I was familiar with Clu Clu Land and have had it in my collection for years but had never played it before. It should not have taken me 6 months to beat, but, most of that time was spent not playing video games and then when I would finally get back to it I’d have a short learning curve of relearning the control nuances. If it weren’t for the few gripes I mentioned above this would be a nearly perfect game. Honestly, it feels like a smart phone game that you can pick up and play for a few minutes at a time and never get tired of playing. This game is way better than it needs to be and while I don’t recommend playing it until you clear all 21 stages I do suggest playing for a bit just to see what all the cool kids were playing in 1985.
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  5. Hoskat

    Bad Dudes

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Action
    Publisher: Data East
    Total time played: 2 hours
    Short review: An early beat em up that plays similar to Double Dragon but doesn’t have quite as much charm.
    Interesting links related to Bad Dudes
    Speed Run (15min 07sec) Soundtrack Video Review (TheHeineHouse) Memories
    I have a vague memory of playing this as a kid. I’m pretty sure that there was an extra lives code that we used to beat the game. The only things I remembered were that the Level 1 boss is Karnov from the NES game Karnov and that at some point in the early 90’s I rented Two Crude Dudes on Sega Genesis which felt like a sequel to Bad Dudes.
    What’s the Story?
    In the late 1980’s everything was bad. First there was Michael Jackson’s hit song Bad and then there was Bad Dudes on the NES and then there was Lucas from The Wizard, he had the Power Glove…which was also Bad.
    In this game two bad dudes are hired to rescue the president. That’s right, the secret service couldn’t handle it so they hired two guys in black tank tops to do the job.

    I’ve always wondered why the president was kidnapped by ninjas. We never find out. Controls
    This is one of those unique NES games where B jumps and A attacks. No matter how many games I play like this it never feels natural.
    Jump: B
    High Jump: B + Up
    Jump Down to a Lower Platform: B + Down
    Jump Kick: B + A
    Spinning Jump Kick: B + A + Right or Left
    Punch: A
    Foot Sweep: A + Down
    Fire Punch: Hold A until character begins flashing and then release A
    Pick Up Item: Down + A while standing next to item
    Power Ups
    What would an NES game be without enemies who drop powerups? Luckily for us only the red enemies drop power ups so we know if we see a red ninja we definitely want to take him out and see what goodies he leaves.
    Clock: if a ninja drops a clock you can pick it up to add some time to the stage. At the end of the stage you get points for how much time is left on the clock. But, points don’t matter and I never once ran out of time so this power up was useless. I still always pick it up though.
    Soda: If you’ve ever played a beat em up game before you probably already know that a soda replenishes health. The powerups stay on screen until you pick them up or walk out of frame. This was handy if I found a soda can while I had full health. I could fight some guys until I needed it and then pick it up.
    Nunchaku: the weapon of choice for Michaelangelo Turtle (I assume that is his last name). This weapon seems to be much more powerful than the regular punch and has a longer range. It does have one downside though. The gray ninjas throw what I assume are ninja stars at you, you can punch or knife them out of the air but your dude isn’t bad enough to swat them away with the nunchaku so you almost always take a hit.
    Knife: Pretty much the exact same benefits as the nunchaku but can hit the gray ninja’s ninja stars out of the air so this is a much more useful weapon.
    Stage 1 – The Streets
    To no ones surprise the president wasn’t on the streets In this stage your bad dude takes it to the streets where he must fight a bunch of street ninjas before finally reaching the stage 1 boss, Karnov. Being the first stage a spent the first few times I played Bad Dudes to try out all the moves mentioned in the section above and mastered them as best I could. Then, on subsequent playthroughs I discovered that if you just do the spinning jump kick across the stage you can skip most of the enemies and reach the boss in well under a minute.
    In a game like Double Dragon you can’t move forward until all enemies are defeated. On top of that you earn experience points that help you learn new moves. In Bad Dudes none of that happens, you can rush through the stages and not kill all the ninjas because there is no advantage for doing so. This is the type of game where you would expect to earn an extra life when you hit a certain number of points. But, you’d be wrong. The only way to earn an extra life is to complete a stage.
    To beat Karnov I found hitting him with the fire punch and then immediately jumping up or down to the higher/lower level and waiting on him to jump next to me and then hitting him with the fire punch again worked wonders. Most times I could beat him without taking a hit.

    Karnov, the stage one boss in a perfectly timed screenshot where it looks like his chest is censored
    Stage 2 – Top of the Truck
    How are there so many guys on this moving truck? The bad dudes now find themselves on top of a really long semi moving down the highway. This is an autoscroller level meaning you can’t move forward until the screen scrolls by itself. The screen scrolls very very slowly so be prepared to punch and kick a lot of ninjas. You can’t skip fights in this stage like you could in stage 1.
    Be careful, you can fall between the trailers and land on the road below. This doesn’t kill you but does take a big chunk of health and because the truck is moving it is hard to jump back up top. Eventually the truck stops and you must defeat the stage 2 boss.
    After I beat the game I found out the best strategy is to stand on the hood of the truck and hit the guy with the fire punch as he tries to jump up and hit you. But, I took the less glamorous approach of just mashing buttons.
    I didn’t know his name but called him long claws short boy Stage 3 – The Sewer
    What was it with ninjas hanging out in sewers in the 1980s? No ninja turtles here, just regular old ninjas. This stage I handled much like stage 1. Just jump kick as fast as you can to the right until you reach the boss. There are some spots where you have to jump over holes which makes this slightly harder than stage 1. If you fall in the hole you don’t lose a life you just lose some health from the stinky sewer water touching your tank top.
    The boss in stage 3 is a regular looking ninja. But, as you approach that regular ninja turns into 5 ninjas. Lucky for us the NES isn’t super powerful so even though there are 5 ninjas on screen only 2 of them can attack you at once. Once you defeat 4 of the ninjas you get to fight the main ninja. After hitting him a couple of times he turns back into 5 ninjas. Rinse and repeat a few times to take him out.
    It is impossible to get a shot of all 5 ninjas on screen due to the NES screen flicker. I won’t explain how it works here but is a neat trick to get more items on screen at once than the NES hardware can handle Stage 4 – The Jungle
    The jungle plays just like the streets and the sewer with a different background. In the jungle you fight some more ninjas. This is the first stage to feature vertical scrolling.It is pretty clunky but makes the stage feel bigger than it is. After you reach a certain spot in the stage and clear out all the ninjas the screen freezes and then begin to very clunkily pan down. Once the screen stops moving you can drop to a lower level and continue forward. This doesn’t add much to the game but I guess the developers wanted to try it out anyway.
    The stage 4 boss is impossible if you don’t know what you are doing and super easy if you do. My first couple of attempts ended on this stage. The boss is really strong so you want to not let him hit you (seems so obvious). When the boss is close, hit him with a fire punch, he will jump back and wave his arms and then walk towards you again. Hit him with another fire punch where he will jump back and do a back flip kick. Be sure you aren’t too close when he does his punch or back flip kick and you’ll be fine. This fight is all about timing and going slow and steady.
    A robot! Stage 5 – The Train
    Just like the top of the truck level, but, now we autoscroll left This is the stage that gave me the most trouble. It is another auto scrolling stage but this time it scrolls much faster. It isn’t super fast but much faster than the snails pace of stage 2. The gaps between the train cars are larger making it easier to fall below and take out a lot of your health. There are also a lot of ninjas here. The regular blue guys aren’t bad but the gray guys that throw projectiles, the fire ninjas (yes, fire ninjas), short guys, jumping sword guys, girl ninjas and even a green Karnov (stage 1 boss) make this stage much harder than anything that came before.
    On top of the storm of ninjas the final boss is tough. He swings a rope with a spear on the end of it above his head. (This could be (but I doubt it) where the idea for Scorpion’s weapon in Mortal Kombat came from.)
    I never found a good strategy on this guy. Much like the stage 2 boss I just mashed buttons and tried to dodge his attacks. The key for me was to not die in earlier stages. Since you earn an extra life at the end of each stage it would be possible to have 5 or 6 lives on this stage giving me a little buffer.
    While each stage ends with a digitized voice saying “I’m Bad” I would have preferred this boss saying “Get Over Here” Stage 6 – The Cave
    These bad dudes have literally looked everywhere for the president. The cave plays just like the streets or the jungle or the sewer. There is one added stage obstacle, the falling stalactite. Much like the earlier side scroller stages I’d just run and jump as fast as I could through the barrage of enemies, over spike pits, holes and dogs (yes, we are fighting dogs now, or maybe foxes?)
    There really isn’t much to note about this stage that is different than what we’ve seen before. The final boss is fast and has a long stick that does a lot of damage. The one saving grace is there is a red ninja who drops a can of soda that sticks around once the boss shows up. I used this to my advantage and picked it up at the last moment when my health was low. Even so, this guy was hard to beat without losing a life.
    Prepare to lose a life on this guy
    Stage 7 – The Warehouse
    lots of ninjas on screen at once here After searching high and low we ended up in a warehouse full on ninjas where every enemy you have encountered in the game has come to heal after you beat them earlier. The stage itself is just as straight forward and easy to skip as most of the others but once you get to the end you are faced with the famous old school video game boss rush mode where you must fight every end stage boss in a row. It seemed like they were all a little easier than when you first fought them but I can’t be sure since this time they don’t have a life bar.
    You also don’t fight the bosses in the same order but Karnov is still first making him the only boss you fight 3 times. They must have really liked this character as he ended up getting his own spin off game after Bad Dudes. It has been a while since I’ve played Karnov but I’m pretty sure there is no mention of the time he was involved in capturing the US President.
    After defeating all the bosses again you meet the final boss of the game and fight him on a helicopter. Things don’t get much more epic than this on the NES. The boss looks like the lead singer of an 80’s hair band and honestly I can’t tell you much else about him. I had 1 life left so was pretty nervous once I got here and just mashed buttons and somehow took him out. I don’t remember what kind of moves he performed as I think I got lucky and caught him in a pattern where he couldn’t hit me.
    A fight to the death on the side of a helicopter. Final Thoughts
    Bad Dudes is a bit clunky to play but is pretty fun. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of it and there does seem to be some skill involved. It took me 7 tries to beat the game which is much shorter than the past few games I’ve played. The game is not easy but not frustratingly hard. I would say the difficulty balance is nearly perfect. This isn’t a great game but it is a good game and one I’d recommend playing. From beginning to end you can beat it in 20-30 minutes. I’ve now saved the president and seen one of the greatest end screens on the NES where the President thanks me for saving his life by going to get a burger with me. Classic.
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  6. Hoskat

    Thundercade

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Shooter
    Publisher: American Sammy
    Total time played: 12 Hours
    Short review: A pretty straight forward auto-scrolling shooter where you kill hundreds of guys while riding on a motorcycle.
    Interesting links related to Thundercade
    Full Game Playthrough (Arnpoly) (27min 22sec) Soundtrack Review (Take On The NES Library) Ahh… Memories
    I rented this game one time as a kid and remember nothing about it but I remember a lot about the situation surrounding me renting the game. It was a Friday night and my dad took me to the video store and then to Arby’s. As we pulled in the driveway my cousin Sarah burst through the front door to greet us, she was going to be staying the night that night.
    As she ran down the sidewalk to meet us her foot hit the edge of the sidewalk and her leg gave out, she broke her ankle right there in front of me and my dad. Needless to say, we went to the hospital for her to get a cast. I remember nothing about the actual game, but the vision of Sarah breaking her ankle is burnt into my mind.
    Another Arcade Port
    The game started in the arcades and was made to be hard so you kept putting in quarter after quarter. It falls into the shooter genre called “Bullet Hell” where no matter where you are on the screen there are dozens of bullets headed your way. I was actually pretty impressed how well the NES levels and the arcade game levels matched. So much so that the same power-ups are located in the same places. The NES seems to have a bit fewer enemies, probably because the NES hardware couldn’t handle it. I’m thankful for this as the game was hard enough without double the enemies.
    6 bad guys and a tank to worry about (From the Arcade Game) How Do You Win?
    B shoots and A uses your bomb. The goal is to stay alive until the screen stops scrolling. This game is only 4 levels long and can be beaten in about 20-25 minutes. That is if it doesn’t take you 100 attempts like it took me.
    Throughout each level you control a motorcycle and move around the screen in all directions dodging bullets and shooting bad guys. To help you along your way you will find different sidecars that add fire power to your arsenal. These sidecars are hidden inside bushes, trees or inside buildings. To find them you must blow up everything in your path.
    The Powerups
    There are a lot of power-ups in the game but they fall into just a few categories and are pretty each to keep straight. Your motorcycle can have two different gun power-ups, one sidecar on each side of the bike. The key is, you have to run into the power-up on the side of the motorcycle you want that power-up. More times than I care to admit I hit a power-up with the wrong side of my bike replacing a good gun with a crappy gun.
    Green Guns – These guns shoot bullets about halfway across the screen and there are a lot of variants. Some shoot forward, some shoots sideways, some shoot 1 bullet, some shoot 2 bullets wide, some shoot big bullets that do a lot of damage and some shoot double bullets that do a lot of damage.
    Red Guns – These guns shoot bullets the full way across the screen and for that reason are much better than the green guns. All the same shooting variants are available for the red guns.
    Bombs – You start each life with 3 bombs and use them by hitting A. These bombs clear all bullets off of the screen and blazes a path about 3x as wide as your motorcycle and wipes out all enemies in its path. If you use a 2nd bomb within a few seconds it covers the entire screen instead of just the straight wide path up the middle. Each level has several hidden bombs, the most I had at once was 6, but, that is because I used them a lot during tough sections and unloaded them on the end level bosses.
    V Gun – This is the most powerful gun in the game and adds a sidecar to each side of your bike that shoot a double wide big bullet at a 45 degree angle. The game gets much easier with this gun. Even though this was the best gun in the game I prefer the double forward shooting red guns to this one as I found it easier to clear a path in front of me.
    Now we’re cooking with gas!
    1UP – Adds an extra life. Each level has a couple of these scattered throughout. If you want to beat the game you will need to remember where they all are.
    The Bosses
    At the end of levels 1, 2 and 4 there are bosses. Level 3 just ends as your motorcycle drives off the screen. Both level 1 and level 2 feature the same boss, a giant plane that moves left and right taking up half the screen with 5 guns that each shoot a 3-way shot at you. This is where I used most of my bombs.
    If you beat the boss quickly enough a B appears behind the plane and if you pick it up it takes you to a bonus stage. If you don’t beat the plane fast enough it eventually just moves towards the bottom of the screen and drives away. If this happens you don’t get a bonus stage or a cut scene, your bike just keeps driving and the next level starts. I found this to be a nice touch and it makes the game feel like one huge level (all 4 levels combines are still shorter than level 1 of Ikari Warriors).
    But, if you want to beat the game you better beat the plane and get to that bonus stage.
    Level 1 boss…looks just like Level 2 boss Bonus Stage
    In the bonus stage a big plane flies over and drops a lot of parachutes that contain power-ups. There isn’t a way to get every parachute but you want to get as many as you can. Most of the time the parachute contains a missile that shoots with your regular gun, unfortunately it only lasts a few shots so it isn’t much help in the next stage.
    The parachute could also be a V Gun, a bomb or a 1UP, if this is the case the parachute opens up and you see what the item will be. My goal was to always try to get the 1UP.
    Get them parachutes Are You Kidding Me?
    Is Thundercade hard? Yes, yes it is. But, it is also fair. I just didn’t know that for my first 60+ attempts. For weeks (maybe months, its hard to know for sure in 2020) I played Thundercade on my Retron 5 on my 65″ HDTV. Even though every time you play the game the enemies appear in the same locations and the power-ups never change locations I just couldn’t get a feel for the game. On a couple of attempts I’d get to the end of Level 3 but the game was starting to feel impossible.
    On a whim I attempted the game on a tube TV with real NES hardware and on my very first attempt I got to the final boss of the game. Lag on HDTV’s is real y’all! I guess it was subtle enough and I had no history with the game that I didn’t notice but once I played on real hardware on an old TV the difficulty of the game dropped 50%.
    Are You Kidding Me Part 2?
    I got pretty good at the first 3 levels of the game over my dozens and dozens of attempts. Many times I could get to the final boss without ever using a continue. A few nights before I beat the game I was having a pretty good run and was on the final lead up to the end of the game when the power flickered and the game reset. It defeated my confidence and I decided to call it quits for the night.
    I went upstairs and complained to my wife about it and that is when I learned she was trying to turn on the smart lights in our living room but hit the wrong button and accidentally turned off the power strip in the game room. Sometimes having smart plugs throughout the house can be painful.
    That Final Boss
    The final boss of the game is a power plant with 10 windows. Each window features a guy who pops up, shoots some bullets and then ducks out of sight. Your bombs are no help here, they do not remove the onslaught of bullets and I didn’t notice them doing any damage to the guy either. Also, having upgraded weapons didn’t seem to help here either. The sidecars make your motorcycle wider and easier for the bullets to hit.
    To win you must shoot each guy a lot, I have no idea how many times because I was too busy dodging bullets. But, I do know that the guy turns red when he has only 1 hit left. I can’t tell you how good it felt to get that last hit on the red guys. Each one you kill means that is one less bullet coming at you.
    In theory, this should make the boss easier as you go along, and it does. I had more than one attempt where I got in a groove and would knock out guys one at a time only having 2 or 3 left. I would start tensing up thinking “this is the time” and then without fail a bunch of helicopters would appear out of no where and shoot at me. These helicopters show up in every level and were my biggest cause of pain throughout the game. They move erratically and shoot erratically making them hard to dodge. I found these guys showing up on the final boss as the only unfair part in the game. In fact, two times I had only one guy left on the final boss and he was red, that means a single shot from me would kill him. But, those helicopters showed up and killed me. Every attempt I would shoot around 5,000 times (the game keeps track) and I was 1 shot from the end and died. This is the most frustrated I’ve ever been playing a game.
    It took several tries but I eventually got lucky enough and finally beat the game. I never really learned a strategy to make the final boss easier. But, on my winning attempt I was in the zone, I had 8 lives and had yet to use a continue when I finally got to the power plant. I blew through the boss so quickly I never once got shot and the helicopters must have been scared because they didn’t show up. This is one of the few games I can remember 1CC (1 Credit clear), meaning I did it without continuing.
    The Final Showdown Final Thoughts
    I feel so stupid wasting several hours over several weeks playing the game on a TV with lag that would never let me beat it. Now I’m wondering if my struggles with Best of the Best and Ikari Warriors can be partially blamed on the TV? I disliked those games so much I shant be attempting them again on a tube TV so that mystery will remain a mystery.
    Once I played Thundercade under the right conditions I grew to like it quite a bit. It is basic but it has a pretty fair difficulty and good amount of gun combinations that made it never boring. It isn’t an all time classic but it is in the top of the mid-tier of NES game

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  7. Hoskat
    CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
    CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE TO YOUR COMPUTER
    The guys sit down to discuss their favorite Amusement Park and County Fair memories from the past 30 years.
     
    That first hill into the small tunnel on the Beast at King’s Island is killerMatt and Luke both had these cheap Beast hats with a built in mulletThe Vortex at King’s Island is about to be removed but the guys have so many memories of riding it.That slide on the right is a doozy!Flight of Fear at King’s Island was previously known as The Outer Limits
    The Smurf’s ride from King’s Island

    Panthom Theater, that replaced the Smurf’s ride at King’s Island

    Evil Knievil at King’s Island

    The band Matt discovered the night before a King’s Island trip
     
    Jason and his family at King’s Island in 1986
     
    Loch Ness Monster at Busch Garden’s Williamsburg with the interlocking loops.Matt loved this runaway ski lift coaster so much he bought a shot glass so he’d never forget it.  
    Son of Beast at King’s Island, the only wooden coaster with a loop (until it was torn down). Look how much wood!Chang at Kentucky Kingdom, a stand up coaster that packed a lot of G-ForceMatt and Luke’s dog Boomer who ran away to join the carney’s at the fair and later found Matt at Sears.
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  8. Hoskat
    CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
    CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE TO YOUR COMPUTER
    In their first episode recorded remotely the guys sit down to discuss the our favorite TV shows that premiered or ended in 1995 and the biggest events of the year including the OJ Simpson Trial, Cal Ripken’s Ironman record, a murder on the Jenny Jones show and celebrities who died on Christmas Day.
     
    Matt’s #5 – The Critic

    Matt’s #4 – Mr. Show

     Matt’s #3 –  Full House

    Matt’s #2 –  Ren & Stimpy

    Matt’s #1 – The State


    Jason’s #5 – Taxicab Confessions

    Jason’s #4 – Full House

    Jason’s #3 – The Love Connection

    Jason’s #2 – Supermarket Sweep

    Jason’s #1 – Batman: The Animated Series


    Luke’s #5 –  Sliders

    Luke’s #4 –  Mad TV


    Sopranos on PAX TV (edited for content)
    Luke’s #3 –  The Drew Carrey Show

    Luke’s #2 – My Brother and Me

    Luke’s #1 – Goosebumps

    Ryan Gosling int he Goosebumps episode “Say Cheese and Die”
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  9. Hoskat

    Krazy Kreatures

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Puzzle
    Publisher: American Video Entertainment
    Total time played: 45 minutes
    Short review:  A puzzle game that is simple enough for a chile, fast paced enough to entertain people with short attention spans, difficult enough  to be rewarding and easy enough to complete.
    Interesting links related to Krazy Kreatures
    Krazy Creatures James and Mike Mondays NES Gameplay
    I picked up Krazy Kreatures (which my computer keeps auto correcting to Crazy Creatures) about 20 years ago. I don’t remember where I got it or how much it cost but I do remember playing it my junior year of high school while talking on the phone a lot (this was before texting and instant messenger was a thing).
    I had never heard of the game before and I have never met anyone who had this game as a kid or even knew it existed. In fact, I forgot it existed even though it was sitting right there on my shelf.
    The game is really easy to play but kind of tough to explain…here goes.
    There are 32 waves (levels) where the titular Krazy Kreatures try to fill up the screen before time runs out.  Mike Matei (in the linked video above) says each level looks like someone dropped a box of animal crackers on the ground. This as good of a description as any.
    Your job is to move the Kreatures  into rows of 3 or more, think Dr. Mario.  For example, if you move 3 cats into a line they disappear from the screen.  The first 15 or so levels are pretty simple and almost therapeutic if you like organizing and categorizing things (which I do).  Each level has a timer and the kreatures keep bombarding the screen until you make a certain number of lines. Once the line goal is met a timer counts down and you have time to make more lines for extra points with no further kreatures appearing on the screen.
    On the left you see a stage where there are a lot of empty spaces and places to move the Kreatures and on the right you see the panic of needing to clear some Kharacters (see what I did there) from the screen before every space is filled up.
    There is a little strategy involved but not a lot.  You will have no trouble beating the early stages.  As you progress you will need to line up 6 or 7 creatures in a row which is hard as there is a constant barrage of them flying around the screen and landing in your way. The game is really fast paced so even though me and my friend Chase were playing cooperatively it was impossible to come up with a strategy to work together and several time we got our cursors confused with each other or would move a piece out of a line the other was working on.
    I think this may be the hardest game to describe but the easiest to understand once you see it in action.  I really enjoy this game even if it doesn’t seem quite as polished as many other games on the NES (look at the crappy ending screen) it still has its charm and based on the 4 people who watched us play it seemed to be somewhat interesting to watch as well. It would have gotten a higher score if there was a little more variety in gameplay or level design.  32 levels seemed just about the right length as the game does become repetitive even though it is fast paced.
    I believe this is the first unlicensed NES game I have beaten for the blog.  It may also be one of the last as most of the unlicensed games are garbage are impossible.  Krazy Kreatures may also be the best unlicensed game on the entire system (Micro Machines may give it a run for its money though).


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  10. Hoskat

    #46 - TV of 1985

    By Hoskat,

    The guys discuss the best TV shows of 1985. Turns out, Jason is really into cartoons aimed at young girls, Luke talks about watching G.I. Joe while sitting on a warm vent, Jason talks about the weird ritual he had when his ex-girlfriend was in the bathroom and Matt Mr. Belvedere's himself.
  11. Hoskat
    CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
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    The guys sit down to discuss one of the 1980’s and early 1990’s biggest icon’s, Pee-Wee Herman. They go into the man behind the gray suit, Paul Reuben, as well as all of the movies and TV shows the character was associated with.
    1950’s TV character Pinky Lee inspired Pee-Wee Herman’s style. 
    Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Check out that thumb.Pee-Wee agreed to dress in drag to help this hardened criminal get through a roadblock. He escaped prison after cutting the “do not remove under penalty of law” tag off of a mattress.Francis has a HUGE bathtub.Is this not the coolest bike on the planet?The man, the myth, the legend!There is not a 80’s kid in the world who wasn’t scared by Large Marge.Pee-Wee with his co-creator Phil Hartman on the set of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.Ricardo was a regular at the play house.Larry Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis and Miss Yvonne in the Playhouse.Not sure what is happening here, but this is the kind of wacky antics we would look forward to every Saturday morning.Pee-Wee sitting on Chairy.Conky spitting out the word of the day.Paul Reuben’s in Buffy the Vampire Slayer…a much different character than Pee-Wee Herman.Arrested after an unfortunate incident in a movie theater.Not a great follow up to Pee Wee’s Big AdventureHalloween 2010, Matt as Pee-Wee Herman and Jenny as Antoine Dodson.He couldn’t resist taking this picture. 
     
     


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  12. Hoskat

    Dragon Warrior

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: RPG
    Publisher: Nintendo
    Total time played: 14 hours
    Short review:  The first accessible RPG on the NES.  Not as good as Final Fantasy due to an unnecessarily menu system but still a classic.
    Interesting links related to Dragon Warrior
    Speedrun (tool assisted in 17min 47sec) How to beat Dragon Warrior in 5 minutes Soundtrack Video Review (CGRUndertow) Dragon Warrior dungeon maps I first heard of this game through Nintendo Power and it wasn’t something that really struck my 7 year old fancy.  However, my mom and a friend of hers bought it on release day, plowed through it in a week and then sold it to a local video store before I had a chance to play it.  I ended up buying all 4 Dragon Warrior games for $2 each at a yard sale a couple of years later and played through the first game in high school.
    Dragon Warrior is the first RPG I played and I loved it.  But, that is because it was the first RPG I had played.  The game is very basic compared to other games in the genre.  The story is very typical “save the princess.”
    The game features a large overworld similar to Zelda where you walk long distances to reach towns to buy better weapons and longer distances to find dungeons where you pillage treasure and fight monsters.  That is pretty much the entire game.  It is a loooong game by NES standards.  While walking around the overworld you are randomly thrown into battles with enemies ranging from a small slime to a giant dragon.  As you start the game you are very weak, have no money, no weapons, no armor and no experience.  The only way to get these things is to fight monsters.  As you kill enemies you earn experience points and gold.  Experience points help your character level up which increases your hit points, magic points, attack power, speed and every once in a blue moon you learn a new spell.  The gold is used to buy stronger weapons, tougher armor and healing herbs.
    The enemy that drops the most gold is the “Goldman” who I did not encounter often enough.  He would drop up to 199 gold with each fight, other enemies drop between 1-99 gold mid-way through the game.  Some of the items cost over 10,000 gold so, I spent a lot of time trying to build up gold.
    Here is the Goldman – I forgot to snag a photo of him on my play though. So I would like to thank “Davy” and Google for helping me out.
    If you were to break down the game it would be 90% fighting the same enemies over and over trying to level up, 10% actual progressing the story.  Not to mention, without a map of the overworld and all of the caves you are going to spend a lot of time wandering aimlessly looking for something to do.  As the game progressed I went from being mad at how many fights I got into and how much time I spent grinding gold and experience but at some point I quit getting mad and found the fighting to be almost therapeutic.  The music fits perfectly and every time I would get a level up or acquire a new item that makes fighting a little easier I got a little rush. But, once I had the best sword and armor and no longer needed gold for anything I started to grow tired of fighting enemies again but I had to keep doing it as I wasn’t strong enough to fight the Dragonlord.
    I spent many hours walking back and forth in this area collecting gold and experience.
    The enemies kind of guide you on your journey. If you find a new enemy and it kills you really quickly you probably aren’t ready to go that way just yet.
    At the beginning of the game you are given the option to choose the speed at which the text appears on the screen throughout the game.  If you do not choose “fast” you are going to regret it.  Each battle is filled with text of the attacks you and your enemy do and after a very small number of battles you will be pulling your hair out wishing they would go by faster.  Later RPG’s keep the same formula but the battles are now more action based and don’t require as much reading.
    My biggest gripe about the game, other than the amount of time I spent trying to build experience, is that you have to open the menu and select “stairs” to walk up or down stairs, select “door” to open a door, select “talk” to talk to someone.  In the other great NES RPG Final Fantasy all of this is done by hitting the A button, you don’t have to open a menu.  The menu and the level grinding make Dragon Warrior drag on longer than it needs to.  I understand that back in the early days of gaming programmers wanted people to get their money’s worth out of a game so they did anything they could to make it longer but in 2016 I would rather play a shorter game that isn’t so tedious.
    Looks like pre-Mortal Kombat Noob Sabot moonlighted as a Demon Knight in Dragon Warrior
    I ended up beating the game on level 19 which required 22,000 experience points.  To put that in perspective, I don’t know that I found any enemy who gave me more than 54 experience points per battle and a lot of the enemies give 2-10 experience points per battle.  Well, that is unless you count the metal slime which gives 115 experience but I only was able to defeat 2 of them while playing.
    My routine was as follows:
    walk to a spot where the strongest enemies I could beat were Fight enemies until my hit points were low Use the heal spell to replace hitpoints fight enemies until him hit points were low and I had no more magic power to perform heal spell Use herbs to heal myself until I ran out of herbs walk back to a village and stay at the Inn to replace my hit points and magic power. repeat Eventually, when I got the strongest armor in the game I no longer needed to do all of that as each step I took replaced one hit point.  This means I didn’t need to use as many heal spells or herbs which meant I didn’t have to walk back to town to stay at the Inn as often.  But, even with that I still had to spend 3-4 hours fighting random battles from the time I was able to fight the final boss until I was strong enough to defeat him.
    The game is still a classic and if you are looking to play an RPG for the first time and have 12-15 hours to kill this one will teach you the basics without confusing you with difficult spells and complex side quests.

     

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  13. Hoskat
    Genre: Adventure
    Publisher: Broderbund
    Total time played: 6 hours
    Short review:  A clone of Zelda II that is harder than Castlevania III and more cryptic than Castlevania II featuring characters from Greek Mythology.
    Interesting links related to The Battle of Olympus
    Speedrun (31min 09sec) Soundtrack Video Review (HalfBlindGamer)
    Written Walkthrough My first memory of this game was during the brief period of my childhood when I was obsessed with Greek and Roman Mythology.  I would rent this game and the movie Clash of the Titans on a regular basis.  I always enjoyed the game but never beat it. Playing it as an adult I see why, it is probably the hardest game on the NES that I have played for the blog up to this point.
    Let’s get this out of the way right up front, I had to use save states to beat this game.  In the game your currency is olives  which enemies drop when they are killed. In most games to pick up an item you walk over it, in Battle of Olympus you have to kneel down in front of the item, a realistic touch. When you die you lose half of the olives you have collected.  At the beginning of the game this isn’t that big of a deal but when you have to get through a maze of enemies while trying to not fall into holes to get to a remote location with 70 olives to buy a sword or 80 Olives to buy the Power Bracelet it becomes an issue.
    At first, I tried to play the game legit only using the save states to not have to write down the extremely long passwords. Honestly, the passwords in this game, and Metroid, are so long that it would take 5 or more minutes to input them just to start the game.  The save states allow me to just turn on the system and start playing which means that 5 minutes that used to be for inputing a password is now for getting farther in the game.
    The Retron 5 save states saved me from having to enter a long password like this each time I turned on the game.
    I ended up dying over and over trying to get the final sword in the game.  Each time having to spend 20+ minutes getting back the olives I lost when I died.  After several tries I gave up and just decided to create a save state at the beginning of the part of the world where the sword was and when I died I would reload that saved game so I didn’t have to spend all the time collecting olives again.  Technically this is cheating, but I never used the save states to advance slowly through hard sections, I used it solely to save time from collecting the olives over and over again.
    The story is very typical of an NES game but features a lot of the mythological Gods and creatures that I loved as a kid which made it a little more special (even if all the Gods look just alike).
    The game has a few major flaws.  First off, it is impossible to know where to go or what to do.  You can walk into each cave or building and talk to the townspeople who will give you hints on where to go next but I didn’t find the hints obvious enough to help.  I had to rely some on video and written walkthroughs.
    World map – looks simple enough, right?
    The game starts you off inside a house in Arcadia.  When you leave you can walk to the left or right.  If you walk one direction you end up going to Argolis, the other direction takes you to Attica or Peloponnese?  I honestly can’t remember, it made no sense.
    I would have been ok if you walk right or left and ended up walking to another part of the map but that isn’t how the game works.  The small hut in the picture below takes you to a different spot on the map.  It is almost as if that entire part of the map is inside this small house. The map made even less sense to me than the map in Friday the 13th (which at the time of this review I still can’t beat).  Luckily you eventually get a harp that allows you to call pegasus to pick you up and take you to a pre-determined location on the map (but, there is no rhyme or reason as to why calling Pegasus in Pythia takes you to Laconia.) Unfortunately you can only use the Pegasus when you are standing in front of a specific small statue.
    Walking into this house takes you to a different spot on the map
     
    Riding the Pegasus to somewhere.
    Or what about this one.  Do you see the black rectangle in the middle of the black area behind this woman that is inside a tree?  This takes you to another spot on the map as well, things like this are so easy to miss.
    How did I miss the door behind the old woman? Because it is nearly invisible.
    Once you get a handle on how to navigate the world (you won’t ever feel comfortable) you have to stay alive.  At the beginning it isn’t too bad but as you progress and get stronger weapons and items the enemies get harder.  There are bats throughout the game that I never once felt comfortable attacking.  Their patterns seemed random and they were perfectly positioned to knock me into a hole on a regular basis.  I found them to be more annoying that the Medusa’s in the Castlevania games. Speaking of Castlevania, there are also little jumping monkeys similar to those in Castlevania that I never felt comfortable fighting.
    Castlevania monkey on the left, Battle of Olympus monkey on the right.
    I appreciated that the game had secrets but I didn’t like that the things needed to advance even a little bit into the story were hard to figure out.  The walking between different sections of the map never felt comfortable and as the game progressed there were more mazes.  Mazes in the forest, mazes in the mountains and mazes inside castles.  The final stage of the game is a maze of death.  I gave up and had to look at the map online because I was tired of wandering in circles getting killed by bats and monkeys  and gargoyles and snakes and medusas and never getting anywhere.
    The menu featuring the 4 weapons you use throughout the game on the first row. The second row is the harp that calls Pegasus, the Ocarina which calls a dolphin, the flask which refills your life bar and the two crystals which make hidden doors and the final boss visible.  Third row is the shoes that allow you to jump higher and walk on ceilings, the shield, the number of salamanders you have (another form of currency that I never even had 1 of), the power bracelet which makes your attacks stronger and a key that opens a door.
    When I started playing the game I thought “this game is very fun, the controls are tight, the graphics are bright, the music is good and each part of the world looks different so it is never boring.” At first it is every bit as enjoyable as Zelda II and even non-gamers could pick up the controller and have some fun. But, if you goal is to beat the game it isn’t going to happen without some help (save states, video walkthrough, written walkthroughs or 100 hours of practice).
    If I wasn’t dying I was getting lost.  This could have been a perfect game if the difficulty had been ramped down by 50% and there was an easy way to navigate between worlds and the townspeople actually gave you better clues to find hidden doors and items that only appear if you are standing in a certain location and blow on your ocarina.
    I’m glad I’ve finally beaten Battle of Olympus but I’m sad I couldn’t do it without the use of save states. The controls, graphics and sound are all an 8 heart game, the difficulty, mazes and cryptic gameplay are horrible meaning I couldn’t justify giving the game more than 4 hearts.


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  14. Hoskat

    Nescape

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Puzzle
    Publisher: Khan Games
    Total time played: 3 Hours
    Short review: A point and click adventure in the vein of Shadowgate where your only job is to escape!
    Interesting links related to Nescape
    Kickstarter Project A New Game!
    It has been 25 years since the NES had an officially released game but since then dozens, if not hundreds of “homebrew” games made by small teams, or in some cases, a single person are still coding out and releasing new games using antiquated assembly language. Seeing what these developers can do to push the boundaries of the NES hardware is pretty incredible.
    What is it?
    NESCAPE, developed by Khan Games takes a simple point and click formula and combines it with real life escape logic to create a new and unique puzzle game. The game, at first seems pretty simple, you are trapped in a room and must escape. The room is full of puzzles that must be solved in a specific order to get out. Although the entire game takes place in a single room there are 4 screens that you click between, each represents a wall in the room. And, there are 4 phases for each of the 4 walls so there is definitely more to do than you see at first.
    Every kid I knew had one of these, but, this is the first time I’ve seen one in an NES game.
    Eww, a bug
    The first time I played the game I accidentally turned on my flashlight and then traveled in a specific direction causing the game to lock up. Luckily it happened 2 minutes after I started so a simple reset wasn’t a big deal. A quick search online let me know that I wasn’t alone, the games developer didn’t know about this bug until the game shipped. He has agreed to fix all copies of the game if you want to ship back to him. But, since it requires such a small specific group of steps that is easily avoided, I’ll probably just keep my copy with the bug in tact.
    Even with the bug, the game is still much more polished than a lot of officially released NES games.
    How Do You Know What To Do?
    You don’t, and that is the point. The game starts you off in a pitch black room, all you can see if your cursor which is an eyeball. Luckily the answer to the first puzzle, where the light switch can be found, is in the instruction manual. If it wasn’t you would spend a lot of time poking around in the dark.
    At the start of the game my advice is just to click on everything and see what you find. There are several puzzles scattered along the 4 walls and the game gives you just enough information to be able to deduce which puzzle requires your attention next.
    I’d be lying if I said I didn’t play The Simpson’s theme song on this thing.
    Fast Paced
    The game itself isn’t fast paced but because it is a new game it was able to avoid all the programming pitfalls that slowed down older games. Playing some older games is tough today because of how slow the cursor moves or how many extra steps are needed to complete a simple task. With 25 years of programming from the last official NES game the new developers can really make new games more fun for newer audiences and streamline the commands needed to complete tasks.
    Across the bottom of the screen is a spot to hold up to 8 items. To select an item you simply click on it to highlight it. Until you click the item again or click another item you have the item in hand. This saves some time when trying to figure out which lock a key belongs in. Select the key once and try all the locks, older game would have made you select the key before testing each lock.
    These symbols have to mean something.
    Gross, A Slide Puzzle
    As a kid it seemed like every restaurant, toy store or friends bedroom had some form of a slide puzzle game. I was never any good at them even though I’ve probably spent dozens of hours of my life trying to figure them out. When I saw one pop up early in Nescape I was afraid this would be the end of my journey. The puzzle is a 3×4 picture of a mask.
    I actually solved the puzzle my first time (it took 15 minutes) but even so I spent an hour or so laying in bed that night watching videos on YouTube of strategies to solve slide puzzles that I hoped would make solving the in game slide puzzle easier. Unfortunately I never found a video for a 4×3 slide puzzle so the tips I found only went so far.
    The dreaded slide puzzle!!
    Of all the puzzles in the game this is the one that took the longest to get past every time I played. Luckily the game is pretty short (if you know what to do) and I only had to complete the puzzle 5 times as that is how many attempts it took me to escape.
    Why Do The Lights Keep Going Off?
    Throughout the game the room goes through 4 transformations. I think of these as 4 different stages. Once you solve certain puzzles all the lights turn off and you are taken back to the pink wall where you must again find the light switch (it is in the same spot every time). Each time this happens there are subtle changes across the 4 walls and new puzzles are revealed.
    Impossible
    There were 3 times in the game where I had to rely on the internet for help. None of these were things I couldn’t have figured out on my own, in fact, I knew exactly what to do, I just couldn’t deduce something because of hardware limitations.
    I played this game on a real NES on a tube TV that is pushing 25 years old. I didn’t realize it at the time but apparently the color on the TV isn’t as good as it once was. There was a puzzle in the game that featured some colored lights on the wall and some candles with different colored flames. One of the flames and colored lights on the wall was red but it looked gray on my TV. So, I was confused why there were 2 gray lights and candles. When I looked up a screenshot online I noticed right away that my TV was the issue, not my brain.
    That second row is red…it looked dark gray/black on my TV.
    The other item that messed me up was the walkman. At three different times in the game you find tapes for the walkman that play a single word that you must use to solve a puzzle. The first word came through pretty clear but the second and third words were impossible to decipher through my crappy tv speakers and the NES’s crappy sound chip. So, again, I knew what to do I just couldn’t understand the word the game was yelling at me.
    There were a couple of other graphical limitations that made some puzzles harder than they needed to be, but nothing impossible.
    Final Thoughts
    I’m a big fan of escape rooms. I have done 9 different rooms and as of now I have never not escaped. This is not because I’m great at them, but because I make sure I play with smart people who are easy to work with.
    This NES game feels very similar to an escape room. It takes elements of other point and click adventures like Shadowgate and cleans up the things that slowed that game down. It adds a clock that makes it the perfect game for modern speed runners to try to keep besting their high score.
    But, the game isn’t without its issues. The biggest one being what I mentioned above with the bad sound chip and color/graphical limitations of the system making a couple of the puzzles harder to solve than they need to be. Also, once you figure out what to do the game can be beaten very very quickly making subsequent playthroughs less satisfying (this is also true of real life escape rooms). Also, there wasn’t really much of a story other than you need to escape the room. Honestly, I am not much for stories in older games but having just a little something more would have really made this game stand out.
    But, the game designers should be very proud. They made a game that is highly playable in 2019 and is much better and more polished than over half of the games from the NES library. I will definitely pull this one off the shelf to show friends when we have a game night.

    Spoilers (Walkthrough)
    If you get stuck and need a little guidance I have a rough layout of how to navigate through the puzzles below. Highlight the text to reveal. But, please, try to play through the game on your own. There is nothing more satisfying than solving puzzles on your own. Plus, the developers put a lot of time and effort into making the game and cheating makes their effort less valuable.
    Turn on light (located just to the left of where your cursor starts the game) Pick up flashlight and hairdryer on white vanity Use the flashlight on all 4 walls to reveal shapes on the photos hung on the wall. Find the order that makes sense for the pictures and enter the shapes into the blue box get key, paper and walkman from the blue box use key on desk with statue sitting on it get extension cord combine hairdryer, extension cord and use on the outlet on the wall. use hairdryer on the statue to reveal a key. use key on the chest by the clock to reveal the dread slide puzzle solve puzzle and pick up tape and paper combine two papers together use the code on the paper to move the grandfather clock hands pull lever inside clock Turn on light (switch is in the same spot as before) pick up the 4 paintings and place them on the wall where the frame outlines can be seen. putting paintings on the wall reveals a panel in the wall with 4 buttons each with 4 positions. Listen for the note in each column that is different. Play those notes on the piano  get the ball from the piano Use ball on maze on the left side of the pink wall Get key Use key on blue wall desk Get batteries combine batteries, walkman and tape select walkman and press anywhere in the room to hear a word. enter the word in the typewriter (YOU) turn on the lights (switch is in the same place) pick up matches inside typwriter arrange newly visible wall switches to where each row has a white light light candles in the order of the white light switches (using the color behind the light where it matches the light of the flame). When all candles are lit and stay lit examine the tree get symbols off tree branches (notice how many leaves on each branch) Pull books out of shelf where the symbols match what you saw on the tree. Play game located above white vanity where you find the differences in photos. Pick up key near grandfather clock on the wall. Use key on white vanity pick up tape and play in walkman enter word you hear in the typewriter (SHIVER) Turn on light (switch in same spot as before) rearrange the pic over the phone (not a slide puzzle) pic up hammer on shelf use hammer on piggy bank pick up 3 coins look at typewriter and solve the fiddle (look at first letter of each word) use 3 coins in phone enter number from typewriter view the rearranged pic with the flashlight to reveal morse code alphabet decode message playing over phone. enter decoded word in silver box with word lock Play simon says (write down the order as it is about 10 sequences long) get tape enter word in typewriter (WARMS) turn on light (switch is in same spot as before) use key in lock in the door on the pink wall The end  
     

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  15. Hoskat
    Genre: Action
    Publisher: Color Dreams
    Total time played: 1.5 Hours
    Short review: A short find and seek action game with clunky controls and repetitive music
    Interesting links related to Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu
    Soundtrack No Death Playthrough (15 minutes 37 seconds) Video Review (AVGN)  
    To my knowledge Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is the only game that mentions alcohol or being drunk in the NES library. I would venture to say the name alone is why the game could not get the NES seal of approval and was forced to be released as an unlicensed game. Even the great Punch-Out was forced to sensor the game for its NES release.  Vodka Drunkinski from the arcade game was changed to Soda Popinski on the NES.
    Several years back I passed up buying Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu at a local game store and then proceeded to lose about 4 eBay auctions trying to buy it. Last week a friend from my hometown saw it in a store and asked if I had it.  By the time I saw the message he had left the store.  I happened to be in town about a week later to help my brother and dad build a wooden fence at my brother’s house. When we finished the fence I drove to the store and picked up the game for a better than eBay price.
    I came home and cleaned the cartridge and tried it out.  I had never played the game before and didn’t know what to expect.  When Round 1 began I was caught off guard by the awkward controls. A shoots, B waves a fan to block projectiles (I never once used this) and UP jumps.  It took a while to get a handle on the controls.
    I moved from the left of the screen to the right while shooting my projectile at snakes and bats.  Certain places I would shoot would make a red and white yin/yang symbol appear.  Other spots would reveal a scroll which powers up your projectiles until you get hit by an enemy.  There was also a book that provides an extra life, a walking man that fully refills your health, a small pearl which replenishes two health points and a necklace which provides invincibility in exchange for around 10 seconds of the most annoying fingernails on a chalkboard type sound effect I’ve ever heard in a video game.
    I played the first stage for a few minutes and reached the end of the screen and nothing happened.  I ended up turning the game off figuring there was something I was missing.  I eventually read online that the goal of each Round is to collect 8 of the yin/yang symbols. Once this is accomplished a door appears and the character is automatically transported to it no matter where on the screen he is at the time the last item is collected.  The door leads to a boss. Each boss is beaten simply by shooting them while avoiding projectiles.  All of the bosses seemed to follow the same pattern and take about the same number of hits to kill.  In fact, every boss in the game can be beaten by being patient and waiting on the floating platform until the boss walks under it, drop down and shoot while the boss has his back turned. When he turns around, jump back to the platform and repeat. Once the boss is dead you need to shoot around the room to find the hidden key to complete the level.
    The final two rounds (rounds 9 and 10) of the game are nothing but boss fights.  In the earlier boss fights if I got hit a few times in the process it was no big deal as health regenerated after each level. The final bosses are still pretty easy, the difficult part is fighting so many in a row and your health is not regenerated between matches. Although, if you are lucky sometimes the bosses will drop health when they die.
    Each of the stages is also about the same difficulty.  There are a lot of cheap hits where the  enemies hit you before you know they are there.  The hardest part is finding the arbitrary places where the yin/yangs are hidden.  Some stages feature set pieces of blue or red yin/yangs that look identical to the ones you collect, however you can’t pick these up.
    Collect the red yin/yangs but not the blue yin/yangs.
    The game I could most closely relate this to is Milon’s Secret Castle where everything is hidden and only becomes visible when you hit the secret spot with a projectile.  I think Milon is probably a better game even though I haven’t played it in years.
    Master Chu is not that hard and can be beaten in 15-20 minutes.  But, the arbitrary hiding of the items you collect, clunky controls, repetitive music and uninspired boss fights make the game below average.  It isn’t absolutely horrible but it also is not very memorable.
    I should also note, the last review I completed for Krazy Kreatures stated that I would probably never beat another unlicensed game…little did I know the very next game I beat would also be unlicensed.


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  16. Hoskat

    Ghostbusters

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Arcade
    Publisher: Activision
    Total time played: 1 Hour today (dozens of hours since I was a kid)
    Short review: A poorly executed licensed game with a near impossible final stage that almost ruined one of my favorite 80’s franchises.
    Interesting links related to Ghostbusters
    Soundtrack Video Playthrough (17 minutes 23 seconds) Video Review (AVGN) Stairwell Glitch (James and Mike Mondays) For this game I have to go way back in time.  My grandfather lived out of town when I was young and I didn’t get to see him as often as I would have liked.  But, when I did visit we always had a lot of fun and he would introduce me to movies that I had never seen.  The most memorable of those movies being Ghostbusters.  I was definitely too young the first time I saw it but that didn’t stop it from becoming one of my favorite movies of all time.
    As well as owning the movie (which he undoubtably recorded off of HBO) he had an Apple computer and the Ghostbusters game.  This is my earliest gaming memory, playing the Apple version of the Ghostbusters game that was later ported to the NES.
    This scene was not featured in the NES game.
    I never did beat the computer game and never did own the NES game as a kid because it wasn’t that good and I played it more than enough times on the computer.  But, in high school, my friend Jimmy (who I have known since I was 7 and still work with today) gave me his copy of the NES game.  I played it a bit but after determining the stairwell scene at the end of the game was impossible put it back on the shelf for almost 20 years, until today, when I finally beat it.
    Let’s talk about how to play the game:
    The point of the game is to earn money by defeating ghosts to buy equipment that will be used to kill Zuul.  Here are the screens you will see in the game:

    This is the main screen of the game.  You control the Ghostbusters logo and drive up and down the streets searching for buildings that flash red and then enter those buildings to capture ghosts.
    If you drive your logo over the yellow ghosts they freeze in place which accomplishes 2 things:
    It keeps the ghosts from entering the Zuul building which slows the PK Energy meter at the bottom of the screen. This meter determines when you can enter the Zuul building to fight the final boss. You don’t want the meter to fill up too quickly or you won’t have the items you need to fight the boss and you don’t want it to fill too slowly or you will slowly go mad from the monotonous gameplay and annoying music. The ghosts will appear on the driving screen when you enter a building.  If you have the ghost vacuum you can suck them up on the highway and earn quick money. The “specialty” buildings are as follows:
    GS – Gas Station – you will most likely spend a lot of time driving to and from the gas station as the Ecto-1 guzzles gas more ferociously than a Hummer.
    GBHQ – Ghostbusters Headquarters – If you have the regular trap you will need to visit GBHQ after capturing every ghost to empty the trap. If you have the super trap you never need to visit GBHQ.
    Shop – Where you spend your hard earned money to upgrade your equipment.
    Zuul – Once the PK Energy is high enough you will be asked to enter this building via a scrolling text on the screen. You can ignore it if you aren’t ready for the final fight but if you ignore it too long the game ends.

    The shop will need to me your first visit of the game. You start off with $10,000 to spend however you wish. There is a second page of items you can purchase if you keep scrolling down.  I typically buy the following items to start the game:
    Ghost Vacuum – used to suck up ghosts in the driving stage that you drove over on the map screen. This is the quickest way for me to make money in the game.
    Capture Beam – a short beam used to capture ghosts on the ghost busting screen. This is a short beam that I upgrade to the much longer hyper beam as soon as I can.
    Single trap – I use this until I have enough to buy the super trap which doesn’t need to be emptied and is a huge time saver.
    The ghost food, ghost suit and sound generator are needed during the stair climbing portion of the game.  But, thanks to this video I learned about a small glitch in the level that keeps you from needing those items and greatly increases the speed at which the game can be played.
     

    Once you have loaded up on items and driven over all the yellow ghosts on the map screen and selected to enter a building that is flashing red you are greeted with the driving stage.
    If you have the ghost vacuum you can drive over a ghost in the road and hit the A button to suck it up.  If you hold down your car slows down making it easier to avoid obstacles and uses less gas but drags on the stage for far too long. If you hold up you fly through the stage, use a lot of gas and risk getting hit by other drivers.
    If you are hit by another driver it will cost you between $200-$400 which adds up fast.  Notice in the image above there is a distance meter on the left and gas gauge on the right. The distance meter changes based on how long you drove around on the map screen before entering a building. If the gas gauge hits E while driving the Ghostbusters get out of the car and push it to the nearest gas station which means you don’t get to go to the building you selected on the map screen and fight ghosts.  In the driving stages you can pickup red gas barrels as you drive but I found myself missing almost every single one of them.
    The driving stage is great for making quick money if you have the ghost vacuum but everything else about it is pretty annoying.

    If you happen to make it to your destination without running out of gas you will be greeted by 4 ghosts.  The controls here are a little wonky. To start both ghostbusters move together and are holding the trap between them.  Move where you want to drop the trap and hit A. Now you control the left ghostbuster, if you tap B you can control the right ghostbuster. Up and down change the direction of your proton beam.  I found that never adjusting the proton beam path was very effective. If you move the proton beam of a ghostbuster and it touches the other ghostbusters beam the stage is over.
    If the ghosts enter your beam they are frozen, you can walk them over to the trap and hit A to deploy the trap and capture the ghosts.  You want to get as many ghosts in your beam as possible because the dollar amount collected for each subsequent ghost doubles.  1 ghost nets $200 and if you get all 4 ghosts you get $3,000. Be careful as you only get to deploy your trap once so make sure as many ghosts are in its path as possible.
    After the ghost stage you are returned to the map stage. If you have the regular trap you will need to go to GBHQ to unload the trap. If you have the super trap you can just enter another flashing red building.
    This sequence of events is the entire game until you enter the Zuul building.

    After you bust ghosts for a bit and upgrade your gear you are asked to enter the Zuul building.  Once you do you are greeted with this lovely stairwell and 4 ghosts.  This is where my game always ended when I was a kid.  If you get hit 3 times by the ghosts it is game over.
    If you are lucky enough to have the anti-ghost suit you can get hit either 5 or 6 times. If you have the sound generator the ghosts move much slower and if you have the ghost food it attracts the ghosts but as soon as the food is off the screen the ghosts come right back for you.
    There are a few things that make this stage impossible without the glitch mentioned above…
    you don’t move by holding left and right. You move by holding left or right while tapping the A button. One tap equals 1 step. It takes about 100 steps to walk across the floor and up the stairs and you have to climb up 23 flights of stairs.  If you don’t have a turbo controller you will hit the A button a minimum of 2,300 times.  I actually didn’t use a turbo controller and my thumb was cramping by the top of the staircase.
    The key to the glitch that makes this stage beatable is discussed in this video but for those too lazy to watch the video I will explain:
    Walk up to the 4th floor and stand in front of the door, let the ghosts hit you twice and then open the door to reveal a ghosts who will hit you a 3rd time.  Typically this means game over but for some reason if the ghost behind the door hits you on your last life it makes it to where you can get hit unlimited times by the ghosts.  By doing this I was able to get to the top of the stairs with no trouble, I probably got knocked down around 25 times by the ghosts which is almost 10 times as often as the game allows under normal conditions. What this means is that I would never have been able to do this without the glitch.

    Here is the final screen of the game.  Zuul stands motionless in the middle of the screen and shoots projectiles at you while the two demon dogs do the same. Zuul also releases cute little white ghosts with their tongues out.  This screen of the game plays like a bullet hell shooter and took me several times to actually beat.  If you need some reprieve from the bullets you can walk towards the bottom of the screen and are greeted by StayPuft climbing the building.  The more times you visit this screen the closer to the top he gets, and if he reaches the top of the building it is game over.
    There are two reasons to walk into the StayPuft screen:
    to clear the Zuul screen of bullets and ghosts. When you walk back into the Zuul screen after seeing StayPuft the screen is clear giving you the change to get in a few hits before all the bullets are back. On accident.  If you get anywhere near the bottom of the Zuul screen it will scroll to StayPuft, I did this on accident more than I did on purpose. After you defeat Zuul you are greeted with one of the worst ending screens of all time.  So. Many. Typos.
    Without the glitch in the stairwell stage Ghostbusters would be impossible. Since this game is one of my earliest video game memories and reminds me of my grandfather I have a soft spot for it but even so, I cannot justify giving it a very good review score because it is not a good game.
     



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  17. Hoskat

    Ghoul School

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Adventure
    Publisher: Electrobrain
    Total time played: 1 hour 15 minutes (using walkthrough)
    Short review: A horror themed game featuring the exploring mechanics of Metroid and item system of Mega Man or Zelda.  Unfortunately it does not live up to any of the games that influenced it.
    Interesting links related to Ghoul School
    Soundtrack My Video Playthrough (1 Hour 13 minutes) Tool Assisted Speedrun (TAS) AndrewG1990 (5 minutes 27 seconds) Video Review (BenevolentDick) Walkthrough provided by Arnpoly Written Review (www.takesontheNESlibrary.com)  
    When I was about 15 my mom agreed to take me to a flea market to look for NES games if I agreed to go to a psychic fair with her.  At the psychic fair I had a crazy woman tell me that the rock sitting on the table in front of her was haunted by a spirit so evil that she kept the rock buried deep in her backyard when not attending psychic conventions.  I am not sure if she was trying to scare me (it didn’t) or was just crazy (she was).
    After leaving the fair my mom took me to a flea market where I met another woman, this woman had a large box full of hundreds of NES manuals for $1 each.  This was in 1997 and no one really cared about NES at the time so she didn’t have a lot of people at her booth.  I remember pulling out a stack of manuals for the game Princess Tomato In The Salad Kingdom.  At the time I had never seen this game before and only recognized the name from the NES rarity guide online.  I decided that I didn’t want to waste a dollar each on a bunch of manuals so bought the only game she had, a complete in box copy of Ghoul School for $5.  Unfortunately I sold the box and manual years ago in a lot of empty boxes and manuals for $35 on craigslist.  Some of the boxes included Contra Force, Gyromite, all 3 Castlevania’s, all 3 Double Dragon’s and Rockin’ Kats…my single biggest regret in my collecting history.
    On the way home I read the manual and studied the box art and couldn’t wait to play. When I got home and popped the game in I gave it about 5 minutes, realized I had no idea what I was doing and put it on the shelf until today.
    This game is fun, the music is better than average, the controls are tight and there are more than enough weapons and shoes that change the way the game is played to keep anyone interested. Unfortunately there is one thing that makes the game nearly unplayable, the confusing navigation.
    The game features over 100 different rooms and no map system. There is nothing that tells you where to go or where you have been. Basically you just walk around aimlessly until you find an item and then find a place to use that item. It is much like Metroid in this regard, but even though Metroid is hard to navigate I found it slightly more intuitive than Ghoul School.
    Thankfully my friend Aaron (Arnpoly, who writes the amazing www.takesontheNESlibrary.com) wrote a really detailed and easy to follow walkthrough that I followed to the T and was able to beat Ghoul School in just over an hour.
    The game features the following weapons which are collected throughout, each weapon has a strength and weakness:
    Bat – The first weapon you get in the game, decent range and attack power but once I got the weapons I only used the bat to take out the vents on the school’s roof.
    Towel – I personally never found this short range weapon of any use at all.
    Deweytron – a long range gun. This is a very weak weapon but allows you enough distance to kill most full sized enemies without taking any damage.
    Spinal Zap – kills most enemies in 1 or 2 hits but has no range meaning you are likely to get hit while using it. Still, this is the weapon that I used most.
    Digestaray – shoots in an arc allowing you to hit the really short enemies. The enemies are very fast and if they get too close to you it is near impossible to get far enough away to use this weapon to kill them.
    Sickle – short range, effective against the undead ghostly figures or plants enemies you encounter in a couple of rooms.
    Sandwich – used to kill Frankenstein in the cafeteria.
    Embalm Fluid – great for killing the slimes on the ground and a must have for rescuing your girlfriend after defeating the final boss.
    Gamma Gun – Long range weapon much like the Deweytron but is almost as powerful as the Spinal Zap. By far the best weapon in the game.
    As well as having a multitude of weapons to choose from you also have 3 pairs of shoes and a secret golden apple which reduces enemy damage by 50%:
    Sneakers – regular old sneakers
    Spring Shoes – allow you to jump much higher, the shoes make you taller meaning a larger hit box for enemies projectiles.
    Suction Shoes – wear these to walk on the ceiling to avoid enemies or spike beds.
     
    The goal of the game is to rescue your girlfriend and turn the school from Ghoul School into Cool School.  You start the game with 5 lives, if you lose a life you start in the room where you died which is very helpful.  But, if you lose all 5 lives you start back at the beginning of the game which means you have to find your way through the maze to the spot you died.  This happened to me 2 times while playing the game today and I then spent the next 10 minutes trying to figure out where to go again.
    I wish I would have liked the game more but the inability to play it without a walkthrough or drawing your own map really decreased my pleasure.  There are several good tunes and the designers had fun with enemies and classrooms.  You fight a skeleton in the anatomy lab, a musical note in the music room, basketballs in the gym and a plant in the botany classroom.If you took out the navigation, made the game more linear with multiple levels and bosses or added in a map system I would have rated the game on the same level as Metroid.
    The game isn’t hard, even the final boss is a piece of cake if you have the right weapon but because of the navigation issues it would have taken me 50+ hours to beat without a walkthrough.

     
     

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  18. Hoskat

    Qix

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Puzzle
    Publisher: Taito
    Total time played: 1 hour
    Short review: An unappreciated NES puzzle classic that is addictive, fun and rewarding while also keeping you on the edge of your seat.
    Interesting links related to Qix
    Soundtrack Qix high score run by Playing For Points (4min 50sec) (131,226 points) Video Review (Retro-Matric Gamer)  
    When my family got our first computer in 1996 I spent way too many hours playing the game Jezzball that came on the computer.  It was a simple puzzle game where you would draw lines with your mouse to trap balls that were bouncing around the screen. It was just a fun relaxing game to play after a long day of school.

    I have been familiar with the game Qix for a long time but after 20 years of collecting NES games have just recently added it to my collection. It isn’t particularly rare or expensive, I just had never seen it in person to buy. From watching gameplay footage I always expected it to play a lot like Jezzball, and I was right.
    Qix follows a very similar gameplay structure to Jezzball but actually has a bit more strategy involved.  Instead of trying to trap bouncing balls you are trapping a bouncing Qix which looks like a bunch of rotating lines.  The Qix cannot hit you when you are not drawing a line but if it hits you or your line while it is being drawn you lose a life.  On top of avoiding the Qix you also have to avoid what appear to be sparks that travel around the edge of each line you draw.  Unlike the Qix these sparks can hit you when you are not drawing a line.  If you draw a line and pause before finishing it the line acts as a bomb fuse and causes you to explode.  As you progress farther into the game there are multiple Qix and multiple sparks as well as other floating objects that will kill you if you hit them and give you extra points if you trap them.
    The goal of the game is to draw lines and boxes on the screen to cover a certain percentage of the screen.  The first few levels require 65% coverage but as you move up in level you must cover 70, 75, 80, or 85% of the game board to move on.

    When drawing a line there are two ways to do it. Draw by holding the A button to move quickly or draw by holding the B button to move slowly.  Using the B button gets you more points but is more dangerous.  The strategy I found was to make a bunch of small boxes stretching almost across the screen using the quick draw A button and then closing in the final small space with the slow draw B button to maximize points.
    Getting a high score is the name of the game is so the more points you earn the better.  For each percentage of the screen you clear over the required amount you earn 1,000 points.  The most I ever got was 25,000 points for clearing 90% of the first stage when only 65% was required.

    If there are two Qix on the screen and you draw a line separating them the stage ends regardless of how much of the screen is cleared. Your reward for doing this is that your points double going forward, if you do it again your points triple. I assume they quadruple if you do it a 3rd time but I never did that to test my theory.
    There is no end to the game and I could see myself playing this for hours and hours and never get sick of it so I decided once I beat the computer high score of 100,000 I would consider it beaten.  Googling the game I couldn’t find any scores higher than about 135,000 but there is no way that is correct because I am not very good at the game so I should not be so close to the world record.  However, the game is one no one talks about so maybe no one really ever gave it a chance to master.
    Qix is a lot of fun, fast paced, makes you think (but not too much) and is a game that you get a little better at each time you play it. I would definitely consider this an NES hidden gem.


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  19. Hoskat

    M.C Kids

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Platform
    Publisher: Virgin Interactive
    Total time played: 4 hours
    Short review: McDonalds propaganda wrapped up in a surprisingly fun and innovative platformer that is a complete rip off of Super Mario Bros. 3 with graphics that are designed for children who are much too young to fully enjoy this game.
    Interesting links related to McKids
    Speedrun (22minutes 24seconds) Soundtrack Video Review (CG Undertow)  
    When I was about 11 years old a friend whose judgement I did not trust told me that M.C. Kids was a really good NES game.  I brushed him off and thought there was no way that a game about McDonalds with kiddie graphics could be any good.
    Over 20 years later I finally gave it a shot and was pleasantly surprised. The game is clearly a Super Mario Bros. 3 knockoff featuring a similar overworld map and level layout.  Each level features some pretty innovative and continually changing game mechanics that make it more interesting than most NES platformers.
    Example of a world overview map. Look similar to Super Mario 3 much?
    Where the game loses some of its charm is in how the game progresses. The basic story is Hamburglar stole a magic bag from Ronald McDonald and you have to get it back by playing through 6 worlds, each ruled by a familiar McDonalds mascot.  The catch is that you can’t just reach the end of the 6 levels in each world, you have to explore each level and find a hidden card.  Each world requires you to find a different number of cards to move on to the next. If you beat the level without finding the card you will need to play it again…and again…and again until you find it. To make matters worse, the overworld map will show you when you have completed a level, but it won’t tell you if you have found the card in that level. More than once I found myself replaying levels looking for a card that I had already found.
    The thing is, some of the cards are hidden really well and I found myself struggling to find them even if the actual stage wasn’t that large.  I think that as long as you reached the end of each stage you should have been able to beat the world and move on. The hidden cards would have been a good bonus feature to add replay value to the game, I didn’t like that it was required to move on.  But, the good thing about this gaming mechanic is that you are never required to beat every stage in a world. So, if you only need 3 cards to progress, you only need to play 3 of the 6 stages in the world. This kept me from having to play some particularly tricky stages throughout the game.
    There are unlimited continues, however, if you continue you have to start the world you are on completely over. A couple of times I would have completed 4 or 5 of the 6 stages, found the hard to reach cards and then would get a game over. This would force me to pay all of those stages again.
    Luckily, I eventually found a level that featured this little scene:

    I discovered I could pick up one of these extra lives while standing on the other, I would then pick up the second extra life and fall to my death.  But, each time I would do this I would gain one extra life. The best part was that this was the very first scene in the stage so it was about 10 seconds of gameplay to get an extra life.  I would do this over and over until I had 20 plus lives, once I was running low I would come back and do it some more. This kept me from having to ever get a game over and start a world over.
    Throughout each level you had a few goals.
    Collect little “M” icons that are the equivalent of coins in a Mario game. If you collected 100 throughout the level you would be treated to a bonus game when you beat the stage. If you could beat the bonus game you would earn several extra lives. I only made it to the bonus a few times and never completed it. This wasn’t a big deal as I never ran out of extra lives thanks to the trick I talked about in the last paragraph.
    Bonus stage I never completed
     
    2) Look for the hidden card
    Here is a hidden card
    3) Don’t fall into a hole
    4) Don’t get hit by enemies enough times to run out of hearts
    There were several unique features that make this game better than average:
    This digging looks very similar to Super Mario Bros. 2
    If you run into the little star at the end of the platform you can walk upside down similar to Metal Storm.
    Somewhere in the level is a block to fit into that hole which will allow you to access new areas.
     
    Zippers are trap doors that take you to hidden areas full of extra lives, magic cards or both.
    There was even a stage that took place on the moon where the jumping mechanics completely changed and forced you to relearn the controls.
    The final world takes place inside a cave where everything is tinted red and there is lava that kills you in one hit if you touch it. The frustrating part is that you can’t tell how much health you have because the heart meter blends into the background. A lot of new game mechanics are added in this world. You are forced to navigate the lava by riding on a lava rock that must be found and thrown in the lava like a boat. Earlier in the game you would do this with a bucket in water but if you fell out you didn’t die instantly. The second mechanic involved floating treadmills that traveled on a track in the opposite direction of the direction you walk.  This took a bit of getting used to. Luckily there were only 3 stages in the final world, however, all three were very difficult.
    When you enter the 4th and final stage of the final world you are greeted with a short ride on a lava rock and a couple of runs over bridges were you must outrun a fireball and then greeted with the final boss of the game.
    The final boss is fought in the 3 waves, the first you fight what look like sperm in a turtle neck sweater, then a magic wand and then a rabbit in a hat. It took me 20 or so tries to finally beat the three waves and in turn the game.  The sperm and the rabbit were easy but the magic wand was tough and required you to be running full speed and jumping into it holding a rock while avoiding the magic the wand shot at you, it was tougher than it sounded.
    You tell me a better way to describe than “Sperm in a turtleneck”
    The magic wand that gave me so much trouble.
    Honestly, if the game wasn’t such a clear ripoff of Super Mario Bros. 3 or wasn’t a money grab for McDonalds and had graphics and marketing that aimed it at an older demographic it could have been a classic game on the system. The difficulty is perfect, it gets harder as the game progresses but never so hard you can’t proceed. The controls are really tight and the music is better than average. Honestly, this is a really good game and everyone should give it a shot, don’t let the kiddie graphics and McDonalds propaganda scare you away.


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  20. Hoskat

    Ninja Gaiden

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Action
    Publisher: Tecmo
    Total time played: 8 hours
    Short review: A puzzle game disguised as a fast paced action game featuring revolutionary cut scenes and some of the most stress inducing levels on the NES.
    Interesting links related to Ninja Gaiden
    Speedrun (12minutes 29seconds) Speedrun w/ no sword Soundtrack Video Review (CG Undertow) Video Review (Angry Video Game Nerd) The game
    The game is pretty straight forward, A jumps, B swings your sword. Once you have these basics down you can begin to add in some other moves.  The games features a wall jump mechanic that allows Ryu to reach high spots by jumping back and forth between two walls. Ryu will automatically attach to a wall if you jump into it and the just tap left/right to jump back and forth.
    Also, throughout each stage there are stationary items that can be hit with your sword that drop goodies. Some drop ninpo (ninja magic) and others drop secondary weapons. This is equivalent to the heart and sub-weapon system in the Castlevania series. To use your secondary weapon you tap UP + B. The secondary weapons include everything from ninja stars to fire to super fast sword slashes.
    The secondary weapons are not needed to beat any part of the game but the right weapon can turn certain stages from near impossible to doable.  The key here is to know which weapon is needed in each situation.  Several times I had a good weapon and hit the wrong stationary item and replaced it with a crappy weapon; memorizing where all of the powerups are located becomes more important the further into the game you go.
    Difficulty
    The difficulty in Ninja Gaiden is through the roof. This game is always one of the first mentioned when someone refers to “Nintendo hard”. But, with some patience and practice and lots of memorization the game becomes very manageable. It is never unfair although it does a few things that make it harder than most.
    When you get hit you fly backwards, the game designers always seem to put enemies in the perfect spot to where you fly back and land in a hole. Most games feature a cool down period after you get hit to allow you time to get out of danger. Not Ninja Gaiden; if you get hit you are never invincible to allow you time to escape danger or catch your breath. Several times I would get hit, fly back, hit another enemy and then fly back into yet another enemy or into a hole. Enemies re-spawn quicker than any game I can think of. If a bird appears on screen and you stand still and kill it as soon as the bird is dead another bird appears. This works for all enemies, if you are in a bad spot and kill an enemy another is coming at you before you have time to react. This means you have to know all the safe spots to stand to kill every enemy. The farther in the game you get the more this becomes important. Visuals and Music
    Some of the levels look better than others but overall Ninja Gaiden features some very memorable graphics. Each stage has a unique look and no matter the number of enemies on screen the game never slows down.
    The game features an actual story with dialogue and beautiful cut scenes that are easily the best in the NES library. Ninja Gaiden is a rare exception of a game that is known for what happens between levels as much as the actual gameplay.
    The music is absolutely classic. I don’t think it is top 5 best music on the NES but it is definitely top 10.
    My First Time
    I don’t remember the first time I played Ninja Gaiden but I do have a strong memory from the 5th grade when my brother, my friend Nathan and I rented Ninja Garden and obsessively played all weekend on my families floor model console TV.
    We would take turns, each time we would get a game over the control would be passed to the next person, as we got further into the game sometimes the game overs would happen as often as every 30 seconds.
    After 2 days of playing we finally reached level 5.  We played over and over for at least an hour when things got out of hand. Nathan died and his anger was expressed in the form of his fist into the control panel of the TV.  From that point forward the remote control quit working on the tv.  I decided it was time to give the game a rest and reached up and pushed in the power button. Nathan grabbed my hand before I could release the button turning off the system, he said he could beat it and wanted one more try. For the next 20 minutes I sat with my finger holding in the power button as Nathan tried over and over at level 5 and failing.
    We finally had a MacGuyver moment and leaned one of my parents heavy encyclopedia volumes in front of the Nintendo holding in the power button. We tried for another hour before finally giving up. Level 5 was impossible.
    My College Experience
    My freshman year of college I moved into a spare room at my aunt’s house which was close to the college campus where I was attending school.  I hooked up my 13″ tube TV and my surround sound system and would play NES with chip tunes blaring loudly from my speakers.  I hadn’t played Ninja Gaiden in 8 years and decided that now that I was older and had hundreds more hours of gaming experience I could knock it out.
    I rolled through the first 4 levels and after some work I was able to patiently learn level 5 and get to stage 6 which I had never seen.  As it turns out, stage 6-2 is probably the hardest stage of any game on the NES. I left my NES paused for a week and would try dozens of times every day after class but could never get past 6-2. I eventually had to call it quits leaving the game unbeaten again.
    A bat, a bird, a ghoul throwing knives and a hole. This single screen caused me 500+ deaths and an embarrassing amount of time to get passed.
    Modern Day
    Fast forward 16 years and I finally decided to give Ninja Gaiden another shot. The main reason is that two friends of mine recently beat the game. I figured if two friends of mine can beat the game then so can I.
    I now have a Retron 5 allowing me to create save states and that keeps me from having to leave the NES on for weeks while I play the game.  I didn’t cheat, I would create a save state when I was done playing the game based on where I started when continuing.
    This time I really struggle with stage 4-3 and the twin dogs boss at the end. After two days of trying I finally got passed and got through level 5 quickly even though I struggled with it so much as a child.
    After finally mastering level 4-3 these stupid dogs kept killing me.
    When I finally got back to level 6-2 I was hoping that I could breeze through it now that I’m older, more mature and more confident in my NES abilities.  I was wrong, so very wrong.
    I wish I had kept count at how many times I died, I would bet it was easily 500+. I finally gave in and watched some YouTube videos on how to get past the stage. This is where I learned something about the game I had never thought about. The game is portrayed as a fast paced action game but it is actually more of a puzzle game.  Every time you play the game the enemies always follow the same patterns and appear in the same spots. Even though the first few stages are easy enough to run through the later stages should be taken very slowly and you will need to memorize where to stand and where to jump and which magic to use to get past each stage.
    Once I realized this I was able to zen out and calmly take stage 6-2 a few steps at a time until I was able to get through it most of the time with no trouble. 6-3 was tough but after the gauntlet of 6-2 it didn’t take too long to master it with my new found realization that Ninja Gaiden is a puzzle game, not an action-platformer.
    But, the most annoying challenge still was yet to come. The final boss of the game is fought in 3 waves. If you die on any of the waves you are transported back to stage 6-1 even if you still have extra lives.
    So, what this means is that if you don’t beat all 3 forms of the final boss on your first try you have to fight your way through 6-1, 6-2 and 6-3 just for another attempt. The only consolation prize is that if you beat a form of the boss you start at the next form the next time you get back to the boss.
    Everything I read online said form 1 was very easy.  I did not find this to be the case.  It probably took me 15 tries to finally knock him out.  That wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to play through all of level 6 after each death.
    Wave 1
    The second form of the boss I found to be nearly impossible. I watched YouTube videos and read walkthroughs and although I felt I was doing what I had seen others do I could never get more than 1 or 2 hits before dying.  That is when I learned if you get the SpinSlash ninpo it will kill the 2nd wave of the final boss in one hit.  So, that meant I had to find the SpinSplash somewhere in level 6 and then make it to the final boss without accidentally picking up another weapon and also having ninja power left when I got there. What makes this tough is that anytime you jump and press the B button to attack the SpinSlash activates, since so many enemies require the jump + attack maneuver to get passed I was alway running low on ninpo. Luckily after only 5 or so tries i was able to get to the boss with SpinSlash and 5 ninpo, enough for one use.  That one use was all it took, just as the walkthrough said, SpinSlash killed the 2nd wave boss in one hit.
    Wave 2
    The final boss (wave 3) should not have taken so many tries. Everything I read, every video I watched and talking to my 2 friends all told me that the final boss was the easiest of the 3.  I easily died more on the final boss than both other forms combined. I would estimate it took me 50 attempts to beat this boss. The strategy was pretty straight forward:
    Kill the head, when it falls off you are guaranteed to get hit at least once Kill the tail Kill the heart Step 1 and 2 were pretty easy but killing the heart was tough. The boss would randomly throwing dozens of shrimp shaped projectiles that I couldn’t find any pattern to which hit me over and over. Each time I got hit it took off 3 pellets of health meaning if I didn’t get to the boss with near full health it would only take a few hits to kill me, factor that in with a guaranteed hit when the head falls off meant I had to play almost flawlessly.
    I’m not sure what I did but on my winning run I jumped and landed on the bosses heart and instead of jumping and swinging my sword I could just swing the sword over and over again. I am not sure if I was standing in a place where the projectiles couldn’t hit me or if I just got lucky and didn’t get hit.

    After watching the final cut scene that nicely wrapped up the story I can finally say I beat Ninja Gaiden. I am looking to playing through Ninja Gaiden 2 as I hear it isn’t quite as hard as the original. But, I hear part 3 is near impossible because you do not get unlimited continues.


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  21. Hoskat

    Barbie

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Platform
    Publisher: Hi-Tech Expression
    Total time played: 3 hours
    Short review: A stiff platformer aimed at young girls that would have been a piece of cake if it weren’t for the broken controls.
    Interesting links related to Barbie
    Speedrun (12minutes 42seconds) Soundtrack Video Review (CG Undertow) Video Review (Angry Video Game Nerd) My History with Barbie
     
    I grew up with a brother and most of my friends didn’t have sisters who were into video games so as a kid I never ran across Barbie. When I was 14 I met a kid named Andy in Freshman year French class.  We became good friends, played on the school baseball team together and ended up living together in college. But one of the first interactions we had was talking about video games.
    Andy kept talking about a game called Earthbound on the SNES that came in a huge box that he got for Christmas one year. He said it was the best game ever made. I had never heard of it. Andy’s parents were divorced and his mom lived a few hours away, and that is where his copy of Earthbound was. To this day, I have never played through it. I did play about an hour on an emulator once and was digging it but hated using the computer keyboard as a controller so ended up quitting.
    Anyway, back to Barbie.  Andy found out I collected NES games and gave me all of his games as he no longer was playing them. Among the games was Barbie. I’m not sure why Andy had Barbie as he didn’t have a sister.
    I popped in the game just to make sure it worked, and it did, so after no more than 2 minutes I turned it off. I didn’t play it again until this week when my friend Jason beat it. The same Jason who beat Ninja Gaiden a couple of weeks ago. I asked how hard Barbie was and he said “easier than Ninja Gaiden” which was all I needed to hear.
    Difficulty
    Jason was right, Barbie is easier than Ninja Gaiden, however, it isn’t as easy as it should be. The game consists of 5 levels, none of them on their own are hard but there are several places where I could never find a way to get past an obstacle without getting hurt. On top of this, you only get 1 life per continue and 2-3 continues (I’m not sure how many as I played the game so many times one play through ran into the next). There are never any holes to fall into that kill you instantly like almost every other platformer on the NES but even without the instant deaths the final level is a nightmare, more on that later.
    How to Play
    Basically you just move left to right until the stage ends. Barbie wears a charm bracelet that features 3 charms. You can throw one of the charms by pressing the B button on the controller. The longer you hold B the farther you through the charm. Each of the 3 charms do different things but I couldn’t ever figure out which charm would work on which in game object so I just threw all 3 until one worked. All charms look the same and they were unlimited so there was no reason to not just throw them all.
    Some charms would cause in game items to do different things. In one stage throwing a charm to a dog makes the dog grab a ball or a newspaper and run off with it. If you don’t do this the ball/paper will hit you taking one hit point away. Other charms make birds or Cadillacs fly creating a platform for you to jump onto and over an obstacle.
    The rest of the levels typically consist of fountains or trays of food spewing projectiles that you have to avoid as you move through the stage. You start with 5 hit points which are represented by Z’s, if you lose all your Z’s you wake up and it is game over. Throughout each level you collect items such as giant letter B’s which sometimes will give you an extra hit point. You can also grab a bubble to make you invincible for a short while. Each stage has a collectable item that gives you points. Points do nothing so they aren’t worth getting. These items include pearls, starfish, music notes and records. Barbie is about as basic as it gets for gameplay.
    Visuals and Music
     
    Barbie is large and wears several different outfits throughout the game which would probably have made me happy if I were a small girl and it were 25 years ago. The level design leaves a bit to be desired though. Each level features a minimal color palette and way too many things going on in the background.
    Was the baseball wallpaper necessary?
    Boss Battles
     
    The plot of the game revolves around Barbie falling asleep dreaming about all of the shopping she has to do the next day. I have no issue with the story or the levels. But, the bosses are a little underwhelming.
    How scary, a pizza oven boss

    The dreaded banana split boss!
    The final boss, which I didn’t take a photo of is a juke box that spits out music notes. To beat the juke box you must jump on the 3 coins that are placed on the floor. When you jump on the coin about 15 times it begins spinning really fast, make all the coins spin at once to beat the game. Wow, what a final boss!
    Barbies outfits
    I honestly didn’t pay that much attention to what Barbie was wearing, but I do know she changed several times throughout the game. At one point she was a mermaid, and the game play on that stage was not nearly as good as the gameplay in The Little Mermaid. She also wore a poodle skirt at some point and when you beat the game she puts on the ballroom gown. But, I’m sure no little girl ever saw the ending due to the nearly impossible final stage.
    The final stage
    The final stage consists of a staff of music with notes strung along it in a seemingly meaningless pattern. I can’t read music but I am pretty sure it would not have played a pretty tune if if someone actually transcribed the notes. The stage features the only real platforming in the entire game. You must jump across about 30 music notes, spinning records and some yellow balls.  The notes do nothing when you land on them, the records spin so if you stay on it too long you will fall off and the yellow balls begin falling when you land on them meaning you must jump to the next platform immediately.
    If at any point across these 30 jumps you falls you land on a blue path below that pushes you back to the start of the level. You don’t die, but you are forced to make every single jump again. I fell off with the end in site more times than I like to admit. On top of this, there are a few flying projectiles that you must dodge while jumping between the notes, a couple of them I found impossible to dodge which means you only get a finite amount of attempts before it is game over and Barbie wakes up.
    If this were Super Mario Bros., Mega Man or a Bucky O’Hare game this level would not have been hard. But, because the hit detection in Barbie is awful this level became a nightmare. I would, more times that not, jump and land directly on a platform and fall right through it. I eventually discovered that not only did it matter where you landed, it also matters where you jump from on the prior platform. This stage was all about trial and error and even then I still fell a lot. If I landed on the platform every time I should have this final stage would have been a breeze. But, I wasn’t going to give up right at the end. Much like Ninja Gaiden, I spent more time on this final stage than all other stages combined.
    Barbie is not a good game, not even for little girls. It is short and playable which is why I stuck with it. I see what the game designers were trying to do and if it had been a bit more polished it wouldn’t have been bad. But, because they appeared to rush it to market the game is worse than average.

     
     

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  22. Hoskat
    Genre: Action
    Publisher: Capcom
    Total time played: 3 hours
    Short review: The sequel to G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero that features more complex gameplay mechanics and level structure and never quite captures the magic of the original
    Interesting links related to G.I. Joe: The Atlantis Factor
    Speedrun (9minutes 50seconds) Speedrun (tool assisted) (7minutes 15 seconds) Soundtrack Video Review (Classic Game Room) Video Review (Haruokay) Game walkthrough (wish I had seen this before I played) My History
    Like most kids who grew up in the 1980’s I lived and breathed G.I. Joe for a few years. I used to watch the cartoon (along with The Real Ghostbusters) every morning before school. I had dozens of the action figures and would take them to friends houses and play with them every weekend. I even turned my room into an obstacle course full of zip lines made of yarn at one point. But then, I out grew G.I. Joe and ended up selling all my action figures at a yard sale for probably a quarter each.
    The original NES game has always been one of my favorites and I even prefer G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero to Contra. I also find that the original has some of the best music on the system, so much so that I once recorded the music on a cassette tape by holding a cheap microphone to my TV so I could listen to the music while I was out on my paper route.
    Fast forward to 2003, it was my senior year of college and I moved into a house with 5 roommates, 4 of which I had been friends with for years and one guy i had never met who was a classmate of one of my other roommates. His name was Wes, and living with him exposed me to two NES related things I had never seen before.
    Wes owned a top loader NES which was the first one I had ever seen. In fact, to this day, I still don’t own one. He had the sequel to one of my all-time favorite games, a sequel I didn’t know existed, G.I. Joe: The Atlantis Factor. I remember being so excited I couldn’t contain myself. I immediately popped the game into Wes’ top loader and turned it on. I played the first level and it seemed like the game was going to be just as awesome as the original. That is until I got to the mini-boss with the sledge hammer about 2 minutes into the game.  No matter what I did I couldn’t beat him.  Keep in mine this was pre-YouTube so I couldn’t watch others play the game. After a dozen or so attempts I gave up and decided that the sequel was too hard.
    After a year of living together Wes and I parted ways for a few years until he ended up moving in with me post college for a bit. This time, when he moved out to get married he gave me his copy of this game and that is the copy I played today.
    How to Play
    The game is pretty straight forward. Choose a stage, reach the end and fight a boss or collect a radio. When you defeat a boss you earn another playable character. If you find a radio you earn the ability to call a sub-character to either revive a dead character, re-fill ammo or re-fill your health.
    Each character starts off with a punch and a gun. You can alternate between them by pressing the Select button.  When you defeat an enemy they will usually drop an item that may include:
    POW – collect 4 of these to level up the selected weapon. Each weapon maxes out at level 4, meaning 16 POW blocks will max out your weapon.
    Bullet – refills ammo
    K – refills a bit of health
    Chevron – extends your life bar and refills your health.
    As you progress through the game you earn new weapons including missiles, laser and other guns. Each of these can be leveled up as well. The strongest weapon in the game is the laser, but it uses 4 bullets per time fired meaning it doesn’t last long.
    The levels are fairly varied, the most common being the “move left to right, fight a mini boss and then fight the boss”. Other stages have you rescuing hostages or placing bombs.  Some stages do not have a boss, and when you reach the end you collect a radio. Watch out, if you get a game over you lose all of your collected radios and you can’t go back and collect them again meaning you can’t call your sub-character to help you out.
    Map screen with helpful numbers added
    The above image is the map screen where you select your path to victory.  The path I took was 1 – 2 – 6 – 11 -13 -16.
    By the end of the game I had amassed 3 radios and 3 playable characters (General Hawk, Wet Suit and Duke).  I got Duke pretty close to the end and he wasn’t leveled up at all. Both Hawk and Wet Suit were close to max level on every weapon and had the maximum amount of health. My strategy was using Wet Suit throughout each stage and switching to General Hawk for the mini-boss/boss fights as he would have a full health bar.
    One of my issues with the game was that I didn’t even see half of it. Since I took the shortest path to the end I had no reason to play through the other stages. By playing those unneeded stages I risked getting game overs and using my radios prematurely.  I almost wish the game was linear making me play through each stage. But, I understand the developers were just trying to make a game that gave the player more choices.
    Another issue is that several stages had a large under water part that only Wet Suit could explore. I discovered this by accident by falling into the water. I was disappointed that this was optional and not at all needed to complete the game meaning I usually never explored.
    Difficulty
    The first stage is a nightmare, it took me 13 years to play the game a second time because of how hard the first level was. Honestly, it is just the mini-boss that is so hard. Strange thing is, there are 4 different mini-bosses you fight multiple times throughout the game and the hardest one whose pattern I could never quite get down is the one you fight right at the beginning of stage one.
    As you progress through the game and start maxing out your weapons and collecting other playable characters the games difficult goes from “extremely hard” to “slightly harder than average”.
    I also found the character select screen shown before each stage to be needlessly confusing. I played for a while before realizing that hitting “decide” allowed me to change the playable characters.
    Visuals and Music
    The graphics look no better than the original and the music, while enjoyable, doesn’t have the same classic feel as the original.
    Verdict
    The game developers took some chances to make the gameplay different than the original. But, too much of the game didn’t need to be played to reach the end. The ending says “to be continued” and there was never another sequel which is very disappointing. I would have been happy with a “The End” or “Congratulations”. It is a great game, but if you only play one G.I. Joe game, make it the original.


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  23. Hoskat

    Tecmo Bowl

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Sports
    Publisher: Tecmo
    Total time played: 5 hours
    Short review: Considered to be the first great sports game on the NES and the first to feature real teams and players. Fast paced arcade action that is easy to learn and hard to master.
    Interesting links related to Tecmo Bowl
    Gameplay Footage Soundtrack Video Review (PatTheNESPunk) All I know about Football…
    Growing up I was a huge baseball fan and got into basketball during the Dream Team NBA/Olympics era but I was never really into football.  I put off playing Tecmo Bowl for a long time and when I finally did I was blown away.
    What I realized playing through the game this week is that almost all I know about football I learned from this game. I understand  the down system, the extra point, the punt return, the field goals and the kickoff. I have picked up a few other football rules over the years watching the Super Bowl (which I usually watch for the commercials) but 90% of my football knowledge comes from Tecmo Bowl.
    Tecmo Bowl is probably my favorite sports game on the system (not counting Mike Tyson’s Punch Out as a sports game since it is more of a rhythm game). When I played Tecmo Bowl it was usually with friends and I usually lost but it was so much fun I didn’t care. If I did play the game 1-player I would play a game or two and turn it off. It wasn’t until now that I actually played through the entire game where you must beat each team once to win the Tecmo Bowl.
    Pick A Team
    Anyone who has ever played this game knows one team is better than all the others, the L.A. Raiders. Bo Jackson is the best player in the game and also one of the most impressive athletes in human history. Seriously, the 30 for 30 ESPN film on him is jaw dropping.
    At first I felt like I was cheating because if Bo broke through the defense he could pretty much run for a touchdown every time. But, as I got farther in the game the defense got better, stronger and faster and I realized if it weren’t for Bo Jackson I wouldn’t have been able to beat the game.
    How to Play
    Tecmo Bowl is to football what NBA Jam is to basketball. Some of the rules are there but anything that may slow the game down was not added.
    There is no pre-game coin toss, the human player always receives the kickoff in the first quarter and the CPU player always receives it in the 3rd quarter. There are no fumbles There is no 2-point conversion. There are only 9 players on each team and whichever you select before each play is the only one you can control during the play. The clock stops after each play which leads the 1:30 quarters last for up to 5 minutes. Some plays only last 1 second. After each play you are taken to a screen with 4 plays, usually 2 running plays and 2 passing plays
    Select the button combination for the play you want.
    When both teams have selected the play the action begins. The offensive team will hike the ball with the A button and the team will automatically move into formation of whichever play was selected. If the computer team picks the same play as you do they will get through the defense and sack the quarterback. Since there are only 4 plays that means the defense has a 25% chance for a sack on each play.
    While running with the ball if you tap the A button it will help ward off would be tacklers. Bo Jackson can always push a defensive player off that tries to tackle him, he will only go down if two or more players tackle him at once.
    My Strategy
    Since there are no fumbles in the game I used running plays about 95% of the time. The other 5% I would try a passing play which almost always ended in throwing an interception. So, instead of the 4 plays you have to choose from I only ran the 2 running plays. A human player would have easily figured this out giving them a 50% chance to blitz my quarterback each play, but the computer player never caught onto my strategy. Of the dozens of touchdowns I scored I would guess Bo Jackson scored all but 3-4, which were scored by Marcus Allen.
    On defense I almost always selected a passing play so my team would be in formation to sack the quarterback if he tried to pass and if not I could use the one player I controlled to hunt down and tackle whoever held the ball. I didn’t figure this strategy out until mid-way through the season and when I did the game got a lot easier. As there are no fumbles the only chance to  stop the opposing team was to blitz them 4 times before they made it 10 yards to get a first down or to intercept the ball.  Using my strategy I would get 3-4 interceptions per game and as I never used passing plays I never gave up any interceptions.
    I also never kicked a field goal and the only time I did a punt kick is when I selected “UP+A” for my Bo Jackson running play on 4th down before selecting “cancel” on the field goal/punt options.
    As far as kicking extra points I probably only missed 3 the entire game, and the reason was that the defense broke through and stopped me. I actually think it may be impossible to miss the kick otherwise.  I never did get a handle on stopping the other team from kicking an extra point. I always would select a player in the back of the defensive formation and had no issue breaking through and reaching the kicker but most of the time he still kicked the ball and scored the point. Luckily, these extra points never decided a game for me.
    Difficulty
    The first few games were a piece of cake and then the computer players all got faster, dove and slid longer distances and seemed to pick the same play as me more than the 25% chance that should have been.
    I found teams that had 3 passing plays were easier to defeat as I had a chance to intercept a pass 75% of the time. I lost a few games but unlimited continues and a password system made progressing forward much less time consuming. If I were forced to win all games in a row without losing a single game you wouldn’t be reading this blog right now, if ever, as I would have given up.
    The two teams that gave me the most trouble were Denver and New York. I’m not sure if it was due to the point in the season I faced them, if I played them before solidifying my strategy or if they were just good teams.
    Interesting Observations
    I think of the NES as a very kid/family friendly system. Somehow the provocative shots of cheerleaders shown during halftime made it through the censors.

    Since I spent so much time scoring touchdowns with Bo Jackson I saw the short animation of two players high giving after scoring. Why wouldn’t they show the guy who scored the touchdown celebrating?

    Final Thoughts
    Personally, I like this game more than its superior sequel, Tecmo Super Bowl. Because this game has fewer plays to select and features less authentic action I find it easier to play. You won’t find a male from 30-40 years old who doesn’t have fond memories of playing this game. It is one of the few games that can be liked by sports fans and non-sports fans alike.
    A look at each game of the season (minus the Tecmo Bowl which I won 40-20 against the Miami Dolphins. The score flashed so quick I didn’t get to snap a photo):






     

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  24. Hoskat
    Genre: Platform – Puzzle
    Publisher: Kemco
    Total time played: 2 hours
    Short review: A simple puzzle game spread across 60 levels where the goal is to collect the carrots and not touch Sylvester, Wile-E-Coyote, Daffy Duck or Yosemite Sam.
    Interesting links related to The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle
    Soundtrack Speedrun (Tool Assisted by Brandon Evans in 40min50sec) Video Review (Angry Video Game Nerd) Can I compare this game to Pac-Man?
    While playing through this game I kept thinking to myself that it was fairly similar to Pac-Man. Each level consists of a room full of stairs and doorways (maze in Pac-Man). There are carrots scattered around the room (pellets in Pac-Man) that you must collect and there are bad guys in the form of Looney Tunes characters (ghosts in Pac-Man) that you must avoid. If you touch a bad guy you lose a life and have to start the level over. If you collect all the carrots you move on to the next level and receive an extra life. The game is kind of a puzzle game and kind of a cat and mouse game.
    I need to get that carrot without touching those bad guys.
    How to Play
    Stairs – hit up to go up the stairs, hit down to go down the stairs.
    Doorways – There are two doorways in the game, one door which appears to have a set of stairs inside of it and one that is just a black opening. These stairwells connect, if you hit up on the door with the stairs you will go inside and appear in the door that is all black. If you hit down on the black door you appear in the doorway with the stairs.
    Pipes – These work exactly the same as the doorways, up goes up a pipe and down goes down a pipe. The difference is, to know where the pipe leads you have to follow the pipe path on the screen.
    Carrot Juice – a small bottle that makes you invincible for a short time. If you run into a bad guy when you are invincible they fall over and disappear.
    Boxing glove – If you pick up a boxing glove you tap the B button to shoot it across the stage in front of you. If it comes into contact with a bad guy he falls over and disappears.
    Anvil, box, safe – These items can be pushed into an enemy or pushed off a ledge onto an enemy, either way the enemy falls over and disappears.
    Carrot with a circle and slash – this is a tricky item. When you pick it up it appears Bugs dies, but he is taken to a bonus level. If you complete the bonus level you receive 3 extra lives, if you fail the bonus level (which I almost always did) you are taken back 3 levels in the game.
    Level Design
    There isn’t a lot of variety in this game (really only 2 level designs), but as the levels are all very short I still enjoyed playing as every 2-3 minutes I made tangible progress towards the final stage (level 60).

    The only two different looks you get throughout the 60 levels.
    One Major Flaw
    The one major flaw of the game is the control. Bugs continues to move after you stop hitting the right/left button. If you begin going down stairs and realize that you are going to bump into Sylvester at the bottom you can’t turn around and go back up the stairs. If you are trying not to walk off of a ledge you better gently tap the directional buttons because if you hold them down and then let go you are going to move about 2-3 steps before Bugs finally stops. The game was easy enough that this never really became an issue but if the game had been 10% harder it would have been controller throw annoying.
    The superior Bugs Bunny game
    Even though Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout offers more variety in gameplay (barely), is longer and has more characters it features an infuriating refresh rate that makes playing it almost vomit inducing. The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle has a very smooth refresh rate and is easy on the eyes. Even though the game doesn’t have much variety or challenge it is a simple game that is moderately fun. I would almost go as far as to say it is slightly educational as you have to think about the path you need to take in each level. Most levels you can do it in one try but a few are like chess games where you need to think a minute. Of course, the game has unlimited continues and you start on the stage you died on so there really isn’t a penalty for messing up.
    I put off playing this game because 60 stages sounded daunting, but the stages are short and fairly easy so I plowed through this slightly better than average game in just 3 sittings of around 40 minutes each.
    I’ve got to give a shout out to Arnpoly at www.takeontheneslibrary.com who gave me the suggestion to play this game. Life has gotten hectic recently and I haven’t had much time to devote to the NES, this game was able to be played in small doses so it didn’t interfere much with my day to day activities.


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  25. Hoskat
    Genre: Educational
    Publisher: Konami
    Total time played: 10 minutes
    Short review: Tiny Toon Cartoon Workshop really tried to make something unique and give kids the ability to make their own cartoons. Unfortunately the NES limitations and unintuitive controls make it virtually unplayable.
    Interesting links related to Tiny Toons Cartoon Workshop
    Soundtrack Gameplay Footage A completed cartoon by HexenDarkside “Murder In The ACME Woods” My video attempt to play this “game” Not good in 2017 – or ever
    I was always intrigued by games that let you design your own game. Games like RPG Maker, Little Big Planet, Minecraft, Super Mario Maker and probably some others I’m forgetting. But, all of those games have one thing in common…I’ve never actually played them. The idea sounds great in theory but “ain’t nobody got time for that”. I barely have enough time to play games that other people make. So, I always shy away from these games because I’m afraid I would like them too much and lose several hundred hours of free time that I don’t have making something that isn’t as good as what a game making professional can make.
    All that aside, I decided to give Cartoon Workshop a try because it is on the NES and I’m determined to play everything on the system. It has been sitting on my shelf collecting dust (a lot of dust and gunk too) for years. In fact, whoever I got the game from must have been a slob. It took about a dozen q-tips to clean it well enough to get it to play in the NES, and it took another 5 minutes of wiggling around and blowing to get it to play even after a thorough cleaning (and if you watch my video play through you will see that even after all of that the game is still dirty and froze up on its own).
    How to play
    This isn’t a game maker, it is a cartoon maker. You choose 2 characters, each doing a small handful of actions and place them on a back drop. You then give each character motion, add some pre-scripted text, sound effects and music and watch your masterpiece.
    As a young kid in the 90’s, before the internet, before smart phones, before HDTV, before YouTube, before affordable intuitive editing software and every household with a computer Cartoon Workshop may have been a decent experience.
    Controls
    I can’t really go into much detail on the controls because in my short play session I never really got a good handle on them. Basically, you click around until you figure something out, realize it would have been easier if the controls were programmed differently and then giving up.
    What changes would I have made?

    At the top of the screen are your controls. The first option is to choose character 1, then you select your scene. But, if you select your scene it gives you a warning that changing your scene will erase your progress. So, why not have you pick what scene you want on a previous screen and then not give you the option to accidentally erase all of your work while you are still working? Also, this would clear up more screen real estate for other options.
    Second, give the ability for the creator to type their own text bubbles. I understand why Nintendo probably didn’t want this option, kids would type cuss words and make Tiny Toons characters say/do things that neither Warner Bros or Nintendo would approve of. But, this game came out pre-internet, so who would have seen it? You may have shared your naughty cartoon with 4 friends but it would not have been enough to tarnish the name of the cartoon company. However, in retrospect this was probably a smart move because the internet does exist.
    Third, have all of the controls on screen at all times and make them consistent. I feel like sometimes B did something under one setting that A did under another setting. In my short time with the game I never felt comfortable doing anything.
    Fourth, add the ability to save cartoons. This was always my gripe with Mario Paint as well. Why not splurge and add a battery backup so after spending 2 hours making a masterpiece you can save it and show your friends? I realize in this day and age that isn’t as big of a concern, but in the 90’s unless you were really tech savvy you would have had no way to save your work.
    Conclusion
    Is it bad? Yes, very. But, some of that has to do with the fact that I’m not a child stuck at home with no other entertainment. I played this knowing that much better examples of the same type of application exist. But, if I had played it years ago I probably could have had a weekends worth of fun with it. I give it an A for effort and originality which is why I rated it 1 heart and not 1/2 a heart


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