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Hoskat

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  1. Hoskat

    Prince of Persia

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Adventure
    Publisher: Virgin Interactive
    Total time played: 5 Hours
    Short review: A port of a classic computer game that features some innovative ideas but clunky controls hold it back from being great.
    Interesting links related to 
    Speedrun (21min 42sec) History and Review by Arnpoly Soundtrack It’s Hard to Go Backwards
    In 2003 I bought Prince of Persia: Sands of Time on the XBOX and played the heck out of it. It was so fun, fast paced and innovative. You could run on walls, you could slow and reverse time and fight all the bad guys you wanted. About this same time I found a copy of Prince of Persia on the NES and tried it out. I was very disappointed in the bad graphics and clunky controls so never even made it past the first level. It was hard to appreciate the original when I saw the difference a large budget and 15+ years of graphical and mechanic improvements made on the game. It was 16 years before I gave the original another shot. By this point I have forgotten most of the XBOX game and am able to play the original with fresh eyes…and, it is actually pretty good.
    This XBOX game looks a bit better than the NES version.
    It’s Like Playing A Movie
    The game developers used a concept called “rotoscoping” to make the character animations feel more fluid and life like. I believe it is the only NES game to use the technique. Learn more about the history of the game by reading Arnpoly’s review.
    In game graphics showing the rotoscoped character jumping.
    Grainy footage of the actual capture session for Prince of Persia taken in 1985. This still was colored and digitized and used in the game.
    Basically, the developers filmed a man performing all of the moves from the game and then colored over the film and digitized it. It definitely makes the character’s in game motions feel more fluid and life like and gives an interesting look to the graphics. The same technique has been used by Richard Linklater in his movies A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life.
    A Scanner Darkly – the movie was filmed and then each frame was hand colored to give it an animated look.
    The other reason the game plays like a movie is that the controls are so stiff and delayed that when you hit a button you have to wait so long to see the character perform the action you never really feel like you are in control and feel more like you are watching someone else play the game.
    Controls
    See the photo below for the game controls. They are pretty complex for the NES. The only issue, as stated above, is that the controller response is really laggy. Many times I would try to tap forward or jump and the character wouldn’t move so I would do it again and he would then move twice and fall off a cliff or walk into spikes. You have to be very patient, as they say, slow and steady wins the race.
    Straight from the horses mouth aka instruction manual.
    Plot
    Basically your job is to save the princess, how original. The catch is, you only have 60 minutes.
    60 Minutes
    The game design is fairly unique. For one, you have 60 minutes to complete all 12 levels. That means if you beat a level too slowly you stand no chance of beating the game. Luckily after each stage you get a password.
    The strategy I used was as follows:
    Play through level one over and over until I could beat it in about 2 minutes. Record the password on my best run through the level. Play through level 2 until I could beat it quickly and then reset the game and enter the password I got for beating level 1 quickly.
    Record the password after beating level 2 quickly, practice level 3…rinse and repeat.
    This way I didn’t have to beat all 12 levels in a single play through by playing perfectly. This would be nearly impossible as sometimes jumps would be really hard, and sometimes they would be easy and sometimes enemies would destroy me in seconds and sometimes I would destroy them in seconds.
    With more responsive controls I would have been much more likely to play through all 12 levels without exploiting the passwords.
    Traps and Enemies
    Each level is a unique maze where your goal is to find the path to the exit. But, along the way you must find the button to open the exit door and avoid all the traps. Learning the levels and trap locations wasn’t too difficult. The hard part was making all of the hard jumps and defeating all of the enemies. Neither of these tasks would have been difficult with more responsive controls.
    Floor Buttons – In order to open doors you must find and step on the special floor tiles that are actually buttons. Some buttons close doors as well, so you have to be careful where you step.
    Spikes – Look closely at the floor tiles, some of them have small black holes, if you walk over these spikes shoot through the floor and kill you. You can tap the B button to tiptoe past these without getting hurt or you can jump over them.
    Enemies – There are a few enemies that appear throughout the game and require you to engage in a sword battle (you find the sword in level 1). A swings the sword, B blocks and you can move left and right. I personally found no difference in animation between the A and B button and the block didn’t seem to work. There also was no rhyme or reason to when I would hit an enemy and they would hit me. Some fights I was killed very quickly, others I killed them easily. These battles are really quirky and on the verge of being glitchy. I personally never found satisfaction in the battles and don’t feel like they added any value to the game. I would have been fine with just the traps and mazes.
    Level 6
    To beat each level you must find the exit door and enter it. For some reason level 6 ended with a dead end that left only one option…to jump into a large pit. So, I made a leap of faith and jumped. The game immediately showed me a password and continued by showing my character falling into what looked to be the previous level where I had to grab a ledge or fall to my death.
    This is the end of the stage…just jump in the hole.
    I actually thought the game had glitched out so I looked up online what was happening and it turns out it was just a weird way to end/start those levels. It is the only game I can think of that starts a level where you have to immediately grab a ledge as you fall or get a game over.
    This is how level 7 starts…with you falling from the ceiling. Grab the ledge or it is game over.
    Level 12 and the Final Battle
    Level 12 is the biggest level in the game and also the hardest. The path you need to take is pretty straight forward but the issue is that you are constantly climbing up and if you miss a jump you will fall through multiple screens to your death.
    There are 2 jumps in the level that gave me a lot of trouble and hitting them both perfectly took probably 30ish attempts. I ended up watching a few YouTube videos and counted the footsteps I heard before the jump and tried to do the same. Again, the issue is that from the time you hit the jump button until your character jumps is delayed way more than you expect so you have to jump way earlier than you need to and finding the sweet spot is tough.
    After both of the hard jumps you fight a skeleton, which, if my memory serves me correctly it is the only enemy you fight in the game who looks different than the guy you usually fight.
    After you beat the skeleton you don’t enter a door to exit the level, you just walk off screen and are taken to level 13 which is really short and features the final boss fight. This boss looks just like every other enemy you fight and on top of that he is no more difficult than a regular enemy.  It was kind of a letdown.
    Final Thoughts
    You know, this game is actually pretty fun. I know I keep mentioning the controls, but that is the only thing keeping the game from being great. Even with the slow to respond controls the game was pretty fun and innovative.

     
     

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  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
    Genre: Arcade
    Publisher: Bandai
    Total time played: 2 Hours
    Short review: An arcade classic that is easy to learn, tough to master and a ton of fun to play.
    Interesting links related to 
    100k Point Speed Run (3min 46sec) Video Review (Classic Game Room) Soundtrack Demons of Death!!
    The subtitle to Galaga is “Demons of Death” which I never realized even though it is right there on the box and front of the game cartridge. But, for some reason the title screen of the game just says Galaga. Not a big deal, just something I found interesting.

    Less is More
    There are a lot of very simple yet challenging games and Galaga is close to the top of the list. Every stage is the same, enemy ships fly in from all sides of the screen and fly around until settling near the top of the screen. They shoot projectiles at your ship which is at the bottom of the screen. You move left and right and shoot vertically with either the A or B button and try to destroy the ships. If you take too long to defeat the ships they will fly down in seemingly random patterns and try to destroy you.
    The game only requires 3 buttons…left, right and shoot. It doesn’t get much easier than that and somehow it is still challenging and very fun. There is an art in creating something so fun and timeless that is also as simple as it is.
    Shoot them before they shoot you.
    Captured
    The “Galaga” ships are the green ships that always sit at the top of the screen and take 2 hits to kill. If you shoot them one time they turn blue, the second shot makes them explode. Every once in a while one of the ships comes down just past the midway point on the screen and shoots out a beam that if you touch it causes you to lose control of the ship as it attaches to the top of the Galaga ship.
    If you are on your last life when this happens you will get a game over. If not you lose a life. But…if you shoot the Galaga ship that has captured your ship it returns to you and attaches to your current ship. This makes your ship twice as wide and allows you to shoot two bullets at a time.
    Enter the beam to maybe get a nice double ship advantage. But, only if it isn’t your last life and you don’t accidentally shoot yourself.
    This is a double edged sword as it greatly increases your chance of shooting the enemies but it also doubles their chance of shooting you. In my experience it is well worth it to do this. You have to be careful though, if you accidentally shoot your own ship and not the Galaga you get 1,000 points but blow up your captured ship and lose that life.
    How Do You Beat the Game?
    This question depends on who you ask. According to www.NintendoAge.com the game loops after 3 stages so after 3 stages you have seen all the game has to offer.
    The arcade purists say you need to get to the “kill” screen where the game runs out of memory. This happens sometime after level 200 (this may only apply to the arcade version).
    The Mexican Runner, well known to be the first person to beat every NES game and record video of each says to beat the game you need to play to level 32. The reason for this is that after every 3 stages you go to a “Challenging Stage” which is a short bonus stage where 40 ships weave around the screen. If you shoot them all you get a 10,000 point bonus which helps out a lot as you get an extra life at 30,000 points, 70,000 points and every 70,000 points after that.
    After playing through 9 different “Challenging Stages” the pattern and ship types repeat. So, after all of those stages you have seen literally everything the game has to offer.
    What did I do? Well, I really like this game and I know if I let myself I could play an hour every night indefinitely and just kind of zone out. I’m not great at the game and I don’t want to waste too many hours on it so I just played for a couple of hours and consider it beaten since I beat the in game high score of 30,000, in fact I more than doubled that score (even though, this is still a low score to many better gamers than me). The farthest stage I reached was 12.
    Sure, maybe it is cheap to wuss out on not playing to stage 32, but, with 500+ more NES games to beat I have to move on before I get obsessed with this game again.
    Friday Nights
    Back in elementary school I spent a lot of weekends staying the night with my friend Jimmy. We both were huge into Nintendo and spent most of our time playing games. He had around 20 NES games and I had around 10 so I was like a kid in a candy store at his house. Galaga was one of the games he had that we would spend a lot of time playing because it was quick and easy to pick up and play. In fact, the copy of the game I have today is the copy we used to play as kids. I don’t think either of us were great at the game but it was a short enough game that we could easily take turns and neither got bored.
    Move your ship along the bottom of the screen and destroy everything.
    Geometry Wars
    15 years after those Friday nights playing Galaga I lived with another friend named Jeremy who was the first person I knew that owned an XBOX 360 and he bought a digital only game called “Geometry Wars” which has a similar game play style to Galaga. In this game you control a ship that can freely move around the screen and your only job is to shoot enemies which come at you from all directions. We spent an embarrassing amount of hours taking turns playing this game and going for high scores. It wasn’t until YouTube came around that we realized our high scores were not so high at all. There is something humbling about finding out you suck at something you thought you had mastered.
    It looks like a lot is going on but the game is simple. Shoot bullets out of your little white ship and destroy everything on screen.
    Stats
    One thing I really enjoy about Galaga is that when you get game over the game presents you with a few in game stats. It tells you how many shots you made, how many hit a target and the percentage of hits you had. In games today it is very common for dozens of stats to be kept but in early NES days it was a unique and interesting bonus to a really fun game.
    Final Thoughts
    Of all of the arcade classics that were made to make the player keep popping quarters and were later ported to home consoles, I think this is my favorite. The true goal of the game is just to get the highest score possible. As there is no true end I never feel satisfied that I’ve “beaten” it. Even if a game is not fun and has a sub-par ending I still feel satisfaction that I’ve completed it. So, even though I enjoy playing Galaga more than most games I don’t get that endorphin rush that I’ve beaten it. It’s definitely a classic and I can’t wait to play it again in the future.
    In fact, my daughter showed some interest in Galaga today so I let her try and on her first attempt she got 2,000 points. Of course she wasn’t really looking at the TV and just kept saying “Ree” (which is red in her language) referring to the color of the button she was hitting on the controller.


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  4. Hoskat
    Genre: Soccer
    Publisher: Tecmo
    Total Time Played: 20 Hours
    Short Review: The most unique sports game on the console plays more like a role playing game. Luckily, you don’t need to know much about soccer to get a lot of enjoyment out of this game.
    Interesting links related to Tecmo Cup Soccer Game
    Soundtrack Playthrough (4 hours 4 minutes) Instruction Manual Not What I Expected
    When I was 5 years old my mom signed me up to play soccer, my first team sport. When we arrived at the first practice I cried and refused to get out of the car. That was the end of my soccer career. With the exception of gym class I’m not sure I’ve ever played soccer. Needless to say, I don’t know much about it other than there are 2 teams and the goal is to kick the ball into the other teams net and whoever has scored the most at the end of the game wins.
    I was not looking forward to this game, a 30 year old game about a sport I know nothing about. I was fully expecting this to be a huge slog, it was not. I never felt like I fully understood this game, but, this was not because I don’t understand soccer, it was because the game was a black box that even the internet couldn’t fully help me understand. I never got a handle on it and I’m going to spend the next several paragraphs complaining about the game a lot. But, somehow I still enjoyed every minute of playing it.
    So, it’s like Blitzball?
    When I described this game to my brother he said it sounded like the mini game Blitzball from Final Fantasy X. I’ve played through that game twice and while I have played Blitzball I never focused on it. It was a side quest/mini game that I didn’t really enjoy. I definitely see the similarities with Tecmo Cup Soccer and maybe now that I’ve finally grown to love this type of game I should revisit Blitzball.
    Blitball from Final Fantasy X is a more sophisticated version of Tecmo Cup Soccer A Text Adventure With RPG Elements
    I used to play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on my grandfathers Apple IIe computer. It was a text based game where you literally typed in the command you wanted and the system would respond with text that told you the outcome of your selection. It was a very primitive game that required precise typing to accomplish the goal. There were no images at all, the game took place mostly in your head.
    Tecmo Cup Soccer is similar but adds a visual layer and instead of typing your commands free form you select them from a menu. The visuals in the game are stunning and remind me of the great cut scenes in Ninja Gaiden.
    Ninja Gaiden is well known for incredible cut scenes What’s the Story?
    I didn’t expect a soccer game to have a story and the story is pretty thin but the first time I turned on the game I was surprised that this wasn’t a typical sports title. It isn’t a game that keeps track of wins/losses or goals scored. It is a very linear game. You play soccer matches, your players get better and eventually you win the tournament. I actually appreciated this.
    That linear goal is wrapped in a story about a boy named Robin Field whose dad is a big soccer star. He trains Robin and his brother Cecil to play soccer and then leaves with a note saying he will see them at the Tecmo Cup, the biggest soccer tournament in the world. In order to get to the Tecmo Cup Robin must first assemble a group of friends and win the national tournament and then take the best players from every team in the national tournament and play in the Tecmo Cup.
    Between each game and each half of a game there is a screen or two of generic text about wanting to win the next game
    Throughout the game you will see a lot of screens like this with generic platitudes. Several times throughout the game you see a cut scene with a guy named Lucas who says he will join the team after his injury heals. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for him to join but it wasn’t until the final game in the Tecmo Cup that Lucas can play. Yes, he is the best goalie in the game by a long shot but I don’t think the 15 or so cut scenes with him saying he would be back soon was worth it.
    Stats
    In a traditional role playing game each player has stats that determine how they will perform. These stats include things like Hit Points, Magic Points, Agility, Luck, etc. In Tecmo Cup Soccer each player has similar stats that determine how good they will perform.
    Offense
    Guts – This is equivalent to stamina. Each move in the game reduces this number. The more guts you have the more this player can be used in the game.
    Dribble – The higher this value the better the player will be able to evade opponents as they surround him with the ball.
    Pass – the ability to pass the ball successfully to a teammate without it being intercepted.
    Shoot – The higher this value the more likely a shot will go into the goal.

    Defense
    Tackle – The ability to slide and kick the ball away from an opponent
    Mark – Blocks an opponent from dibbling past you or passing the ball
    Cut – Cuts off the opponent from passing the ball

    Goalie
    Punch – When the opponent shoots on your goal this will have your goalie punch the ball away. The ball gets loose and there is a chance it will go back to the opponent.
    Catch – Instead of punching the ball away the goalie will catch the ball allowing him to then pass it to a teammate.
    Pass – The higher this value the better chance that the goalie’s pass will make it to a teammate.
    Pre-Game Setup
    Before each game you sit in the locker room and your coach fills you in on the latest changes. He first will list off all of the players who have gotten better since the last game and then you have a few options:

    Advice – The coach will tell you about the team you are about to play. It is always something generic like “Don’t let Ayerton get the ball, he’s a tough opponent” Memo – This is where you talk to Anne, who I think is Robin’s girlfriend. She always says how good of a job you are doing and then provides you with a super long and complex password so you can pickup where you left off. L. S. – This stands for League Standing. This option only appears during a few games after the national tournament but before the Tecmo Cup. It shows your wins/losses which determines if you win the preliminary tournament or not. Member – This only appears after you win the National Cup. It allows you to sub in players from the bench and build the team you want. Start – Starts the game The Main Game (Offense)
    Each game starts off with your team, The Tops, getting the ball, the second half always starts with the other team getting the ball. The game consists of 2 30 minute halves. But, these are Nintendo minutes where each minute is closer to 10 seconds. An entire game came be played in under 15 minutes.
    When you have the ball you see your character on the top half of the screen running on a soccer field. You never see another player. Under the large animation of your player you have a bunch of stats. On the left you see the time left in the half and the current score. In the middle you see a view of your player’s location on the field denoted by the soccer ball. You always go towards the goal on the top of the field. On the right hand side you see your players current stats. Each second that passes the Guts stat lowers as the player is using energy which lowers his stamina.
    At any point you can press the B button to bring up the action menu. This moves the image of the field up next to your player and replaces it with “What now?” where you can choose to dribble (up button), pass (left button) or shot (right button). Depending on your selection here changes what happens next.

    If you chose to shoot the ball you will see an animation of the ball flying through the air, sometimes it passes other players, sometimes it is intercepted and sometimes it makes it to the goal where you see the goalie dive to stop the shot. Sometimes he does, and sometimes the ball goes into the net. Sometimes the ball goes through the net, sometimes it hits the goalpost and there is even a chance that the ball hits the goalpost so hard it explodes. In my experience, it didn’t matter what stats my player had, it didn’t matter which team I was playing, it didn’t matter if I did a special shot (more on that in a second). It always seemed completely random what happened when I would shoot the ball. This is my biggest gripe in the game. No matter how good my stats were there was no way to see the stats of my opponent so I never knew if the matchup was even or not. I never could get a handle on any of this. I’d watch YouTube videos and see people playing who were at a much lower level than me dominating every team.
    Nothing I have found online explains any strategy for where to put which players on the field or how to do know if a pass or shot will be successful. Anyway…
    As you level up your players their stats increase making them stronger dribblers, shooters, passers and gives them more guts to perform these actions. In some cases the player even learns a special shot. This shot is much more powerful than the regular shot and is accompanied by a special animation and flashing screen. These special shots use a lot more guts than a regular shot and sometimes a player can only perform 2-3 in a game before they run out of guts. So, use these only when you are sure to score (as if there was a way to know this).
    I read a walkthrough online that said some team (I forget which and am too lazy to look it up again) has a really strong goalie. If you score on the goalie it hurts his morale (not a stat that is visible to people playing the game) and it makes him easier to score on a second time. The note also says that he is really good at blocking special shots and your regular shots have a better chance of scoring against him. I probably shouldn’t put too much stock into a random internet article I read but if this is true it makes me really mad. What is the point in having special shots that seem to be much better than the regular shot if in some cases those shots are not worth shooting? I’m ok with this if there was any note or memo or player comment or any indication at all how you could use this knowledge to your advantage.
    Passing the ball is another annoyance for me. I learned a strategy in the final game of the Tecmo cup that would have potentially made the game easier for me. When you bring up the “What now?” menu you can choose to pass the ball. When you want to pass the ball you see a different view of the field and this time you actually get to see where the players are located. You have the option to chose one of 4 players to pass to. When the player has the soccer ball by their name they flash on the screen above so you can see where they are in relation to you.

    What I didn’t learn until the last game was that if you cancel the pass and then select pass again the players you can pass to change. I always assumed I only had the option to pass to the 4 players under “Whom?” and many times the player I wanted to pass to was not in the list. Passing was another huge black hole for me. Sometimes I would see my player with the ball, there would be no opponents anywhere nearby and the player I was passing to was also wide open. I would pass to him and the pass would be intercepted. Other times I’d pass the ball to a player who had 3 or 4 players around him and the ball would go right to him. I never saw any indication with all of the on screen graphics that would let me know which pass was going to work and which wouldn’t. It always seemed completely random, which is fine, but, having the screen visualizing where the players are wasn’t necessary since it didn’t seem to help me at all. I feel like showing a picture of a bag of marbles while I selected who to pass to would have been just as helpful.

    If you bring up the action menu and decide you don’t want to pass or shoot you can always select “Drib” which will take you back to the main screen of your player kicking the ball down the field.
    Sometimes I’d bring up the menu, look at my players location to the opponents on the pass screen and try to map out how to keep dribbling to avoid the players. Just like I mentioned above this was pointless. Sometimes I’d pull up the pass screen, it would show me as wide open so I would continue to dribble. I’d take one step and an opponent would intercept me. What is the point of showing a map of the field and all of the players locations if it is an inaccurate representation?
    Like in an RPG there are random encounters. This is where 1-5 members of the opposing team appear and try to stop you from reaching the goal. When this happens your player has the option to keep dribbling, pass the ball to a teammate or shoot the ball at the goal. After you make your selection a few animations will play out showing how your player fared against the opponents. Here lies a problem. You can see your players stats on the screen, you cannot see your opponents. The rule of thumb if the opponent has a real name and not just a number it means they are one of the better players on the team. So, again, no matter what I selected the outcome always seemed random. Sometimes 5 opponents would surround me and my player would have a low dribble stat and I’d dribble and pass all 5 players. Other times one opponent would be in front of me and my player with the strongest pass stat would have the ball and attempt to pass to a guy with no opponents in between and the ball would be stolen. It makes no sense.

    The Main Game (Defense)
    Anytime you don’t have the ball you are on defense. It always felt like I was on defense much more than I was on offense. The screen looks similar to when you are on offense except you can’t see the stats of the player with the ball. The soccer ball on the field at the bottom of the screen represents where the player is on the field. Notice anything? There is no way to know where your players are in relation to the ball. So, how do you make your players try to steal the ball?
    Well, the truth is, I don’t know. When the other team had the ball I would just randomly push the D-Pad in a bunch of directions hoping that I was invisibly controlling a player of mine towards the ball. But, since I couldn’t tell where I was in relation to the ball I didn’t know which direction to press. This may have just been placebo and the real way to stop the ball was just wait for a random encounter. Again, I don’t understand this game mechanic at all.
    When an encounter did happen it would show a list of all of the players on your team who are around the ball. You get to select what each player would do to try to stop the opponent. Tack, Cut, or Mark. Tackle attempts to steal the ball, cut attempts to cut off a pass and mark tries to block the player’s path forward. As you guessed, there is no rhyme or reason as to which of these commands would work. No matter how good my players stats were the outcome always seemed random.
    with a cut stat of 107 this is what I’d select. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn’t. What Happens If The Game Ends In A Tie?
    National Tournament (basically the first 1/3 of the game)
    The game ends in a shootout. Each team picks 5 kickers and each gets one shot to score a goal. The only choice you have to make is to kick to the right or left. If the defender dives left and you shoot right you score. When you are the goalie you do the same, choose whether to dive left or right. If you chose correctly you block the shot. Whoever has the most goals at the end of the shootout wins. If there is another tie you do another shoot out.
    Preliminary League Tournament (2nd 1/3rd of the game)
    This is a tournament where every team plays every other team. If the game ends in a tie the game ends in a tie. After all teams play all other teams the winner is determined by number of wins, ties and losses. If there is a tie in win/loss stats the winner is determined by points scored.
    Tecmo Cup (last 1/3rd of the game)
    In the Tecmo Cup when a game ends in a tie you play 2 more halves, each is 10 minutes instead of the regular 30 minutes. If there is still a tie you then go to a shoot out.
    Level Up!
    After each game (I think they are called matches in soccer) your coach will tell you if any players on the team “got better.” If a player is on the coaches list they have leveled up and all of their stats increase. In some cases a player will learn a special move like a more powerful shot. In the case of Damon, he learns a new dribble move where he basically plows over members of the opposing team. There isn’t a special command for this, it just happens. Another example of something that I don’t fully understand why it works that way.
    Depending on which team you are playing against, if you lose you will rematch the team or be forced to go back a game and play the team before the current opponent again. Again, there was never an indication on what would happen if you lost. If I lost a game for the first several hours of my playthrough I would just enter the password and try again. But, then I realized I needed to level up because I was never going to beat a team without good stats. Luckily, I found a team that if you lost against you would play them again. I kept losing on purpose just to improve my players. I never saw any clear indication but I suspect that if you pass a lot your pass stat will go up more. If you dribble a lot that stat will go up, etc.
    By the time I reached the final game most of my players were on level 16 or so. When I checked out YouTube the videos I found of the final game most of the players were on level 13. So, I had more than enough stats to dominate the final game. Except, I didn’t dominate because stats don’t seem to matter. I took me half a dozen tries to beat Brazil Jr. in the finals of the Tecmo Cup. No matter how hard I tried I just could not score a goal. I tried regular shots, every super shot I had including Damon’s Blast Shot which is the most powerful in the game. The goalie on Brazil was insane!
    More than one time it was tied 0-0 with less than a minute left and Brazil scored a goal right as the timer went to 0. Talk about frustrating!

    The Final Game
    Do you know how many times I played the final game? Me either, but it was a lot. I would lose and instead of resetting and putting in the password to try again I would let the game kick me back 2 games and then fight my way through those teams in order to level up again and again. After doing this a few times I was finally ready. Most of my players had Guts over 900 and were level 18 or 19.
    Even with this I would still struggle to score goals and the computer would seem to always get the best breaks. I know the game is decided by a bunch of hidden stats and random numbers but I just wish I knew what those were. It bordered on unfair. On the last game I was up 1-0 with less than 2 minutes left. The best player on the other team got the ball and went straight across the entire field without one of my players stopping him and shot to tie the game at the last second.
    Then in overtime neither team scored so it went to a shootout which is pure luck. This actually happened probably on 3 occasions on the last game and I just never could get the game to go my way, until I finally beat it which took wayyyyy longer than it should have.
    Final Thoughts
    Even though I never felt in control of the game and I used more brute force than strategy to play through Tecmo Cup Soccer Game I still somehow really enjoyed it. The animations are up there with NES Open Golf and Ninja Gaiden as some of the best on the NES. I hope at some point in the future someone way smarter than me decodes the code behind this game so I can finally learn when a pass or shot will be successful or not. I did have a lot of fun in middle school playing World Cup Soccer but haven’t played it since then. I imagine that is the only soccer game on the NES that will even hold a candle to how fun this game was.
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  5. Hoskat

    Ferrari Grand Prix

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Racing
    Publisher: Acclaim
    Total time played: 10 Hours
    Short review: Billed as a racing simulator it is more of a generic racing game with simple controls.
    Interesting links related to Ferrari Grand Prix
    Soundtrack Full Playthrough (The Mexican Runner) Story
    There isn’t one. But, I’ll make one up.
    You are the new guy on the track and have to prove yourself in your rookie season over 16 courses around the world to win the most points at the end of the year and be crowned the F1 champion.
    Controls
    The controls are simple. A goes, B stops and the D-Pad steers. If you really want to torture yourself you can select to play with a 3 speed manual transmission where Up and Down shirt gears. There is an advantage of the car’s top speed being 10km/h faster if you select the manual transmission but it isn’t worth the headache.
    Also, you can forget about braking with the B button as I never once used it in the embarrassing number of hours I played this game. In fact, it wasn’t until today (8/25/19) when my daughter woke up from her nap and came into the living room and saw me playing the game and wanted to play that I noticed the car had a brake light. Instead of racing the track she was obsessed with hitting the B button and saying “ray uh uh bake ight”  (red circle brake light) and driving the car in the grass. She didn’t care about winning a race.
    Qualifying
    Before each race you must do a single lap around the track to prove you are worthy to drive in the race. Before the race begins you will see the track record and the slowest time needed to qualify. Qualifying is a joke. Of the 16 races (and dozens and dozens of attempts) only 3 things happened during the qualifying lap.
    I barely let my tire run into the grass for a split second somewhere on the lap and did not qualify for the race. I qualified for the race but start in 26th position (last place) I raced a near perfect lap, cutting corners, never letting off the gas and was fast enough to start the race in 18th place. Seriously, those are the only 3 scenarios, in fact, I would venture to say it is impossible to get the pole position on any of the qualifying laps. If anyone has a video of someone doing this I’d love to see it.
    To Rub Is To Race
    Your car is red, the other racers are red, blue or yellow. There doesn’t seem to be any other distinctions between the cars. The goal is to finish in first place, or as close to first as possible. The first 6 place finishers earn points toward their season total with first place being 10 points, 6th place being 1 point and 2nd-5th place getting some number of points between 1 and 10.
    Of the 16 courses in the game I finished first in exactly 1 race. I’m honestly not sure if this is because I’m just not good at this game or if it is rigged like qualifying where you just aren’t capable of winning sometimes.
    Pretty much every track looks just like this.
    Ahead of Its Time
    While racing there were a couple of neat little things that were pointless, but inventive.
    First, there is a rearview mirror where you can see behind your car. This is the earliest game I can remember having this feature. Unfortunately it is very small and only shows a car for a split second before it blows right past you. It is pretty pointless, but still cool to have.
    Below the rearview mirror is a radio which displays text of hazards on the track such as oil, lets you know if your tires need to be changed and congratulates you for making a good move by passing a racer or scolding you for making a bad move.
    There is also a map of the track that shows where on the map you are as well as the 3 racers in first second and third place. Using this map is crucial to know when sharp turns are coming or if you are getting close to finishing on the podium.
    Pit Stop
    You start each race with a new set of tires and can basically floor the gas pedal and still easily go around each turn. As you run off the track, hit oil spots or wreck into other cars your tires begin to wear. This happens quickly and you will notice that it is much harder to control the car which requires you to make a pit stop. The pit stop is a mini game where you alternate between the A and B buttons as quickly as possible while 8 guys remove and replace your tires.
    Just like a real pit stop the other racers keep going and you will lose a few places while you pit. I read online of a guy who could get through the pit stop in about 2.5 seconds. I averaged 4.5 and was as slow as 6 seconds. I guess my reflexes just aren’t what they used to be.
    Pit Stop
    The good thing is, the more you play the better you get at the game and the better you get the less you have to make a pit stop. In fact, on my final run, most races I never once had to pit which meant I saved several seconds and usually finished in a higher position.
    That Yellow Car!!
    I never found a rhyme or reason, but, every few races one of the yellow cars that was around position 10 would randomly burst into flames and wildly ping pong back and forth across the track. If you touch this car you also catch on fire and the race immediately ends. The car isn’t usually on fire as you approach it and when it bursts into flames you have less than a second to maneuver perfectly. More times than not I failed and this ended the race for me.
    Thank Goodness For The Password
    After each race you get a password that allows you to restart the game from that race and ranking. If it weren’t for this I don’t know if I could have finished the game. Much like in Prince of Persia I used the strategy of practicing a race until I mastered it and then capturing the password. I would then do the same with the next race using the password to restart when needed. This way I could practice each race multiple times without having to start over.
    The one headache with the password is that it doesn’t save your name. So, each time after entering the password you have to re-enter your name.
    The Final Standings
    A perfect score would be beating all 16 races in first place and earning 160 points. I finished the game 57 points. Thankfully the game is forgiving in this way as I don’t know how long it would have taken to win all 16 races. At least one race ended because I caught fire and at least one race I didn’t qualify so didn’t even get a chance. Yet another race ended when I was too far back to win so the race ended.
    That is another interesting feature. Every time you would hit a checkpoint your radio would set a race position limit, if you dropped below that limit at any time the race ends. I’m not sure why this feature existed, my guess is because of system limitations. The game may not have been able to have 26 finishers and record their times and position, this way the game only has to display the top 6 finishers of each race.
    Final Thoughts
    As far as racing games go this one is very mediocre. The music is subpar and the action isn’t nearly as good as a game like R.C. Pro Am or Rad Racer. I did like that you raced through an entire season and your results were cumulative, but it wasn’t enough to save the game.
    The graphics were pretty bland with only the top half of the screen really changing between races. sure, I saw the Eiffel Tower and Leaning Tower of Pisa and some bridges throughout the 16 levels but 80% of the screen never changed.
    It may be worth racing once or twice just to say you did but I wouldn’t bother trying to complete the game unless you are a glutton for punishment.


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  6. Hoskat

    American Gladiators

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Sports
    Publisher: Gametek
    Total time played: 7 hours
    Short review: A pretty decent version of one of my favorite gameshows from childhood, American Gladiators.
    Interesting links related to American Gladiators
    Speedrun (MixMastaPJ) (22min 08secs) Written Walkthrough Soundtrack Arnpoly Written Review I’m Back!
    Technically I never left, but, it has been 3 months since I beat an NES game so I figured I’d fill in my fan on where I have been.
    My 3 year old daughter has discovered video games (NES and Switch) and has decided her bedtime is about 10pm. So, my free time is spent playing Mickey’s Safari in Letterland, Fisher Price: Firehouse Rescue, Fisher Price: I Can Remember and just recently she discovered Kirby. When we aren’t playing NES we are playing Mario Odyssey or Link’s Awakening on Switch. So, I haven’t had the energy or motivation to play games on my own after playing so much with her recently.

    This Is Just Like The Show
    I have played this game several times over the years and always loved how similar it was to the show. Sure, not all of the events are here and neither are all of the gladiators, but, it is a really great representation of why I loved the show show much.
    The intro is unique to any other game on the NES. As the credits are playing before the title screen your character jumps around the screen across the credits as if they were pathways. It is a pretty cool effect. Unfortunately, you can’t skip it and it takes 15-20 seconds to actually get to the title screen and the older I get the more every second counts. Free time is harder to come by
    how cool, your characters runs across the copyright! How to Play
    You don’t get to pick a character or enter a name, you just hit start and choose an event. There are 5 events to choose from, all from the hit TV show but most of them have a little spin to make them more game friendly and less realistic than on the show. You can play the events in any order. There are 4 regular stages and a final stage where you must tackle “The Eliminator”. I’ll discuss each of the events in the below sections.
    You start the game with 5 lives and earn an extra life one of the 3 ways:
    Beat all 5 events, you get a life when you go to the next stage. Put a ball in all 5 canisters in Powerball Get the trophy at the top of the 4th rope swing in Human Cannonball Human Cannonball
    Human Cannonball I always start each stage by tackling Human Cannonball because it is the event that I feel I am the worst at. If I can get it out of the way first I have a better chance of beating all the events.
    You start on the left side of the screen and the goal is to knock the gladiator on the right side of the screen off of his pedestal. Both your pedestal and the gladiators are going up and down and the rope swings back and forth above your head. This is an event of timing. You must first time your jump to grab the rope as close to the bottom of the rope as you can and release from the rope at the perfect angle to knock the gladiator down.
    Each level adds some element of difficulty, for example, the speed at which the pedestals go up and down, the speed of the rope swinging and sometimes the gladiator is off screen and you must swing for several seconds to finally reach him.
    The 3rd gladiator of each level has a power-up that looks like a fist, it flies across the screen and if you time it right you can grab it and gain the ability to move up and down the rope. If you don’t get this power-up wherever you grab the rope is where you are stuck.
    On the 4th Gladiator at the top of the rope is a trophy that houses a 1UP. You can only get this if you picked up the fist power-up on the 3rd gladiator. I can’t tell you how many times I reset the game because of how many times I flew over the gladiator or hit his pedestal. I think the key is to release the rope right as your character stretches his legs out in front of him.
    Human Cannonball Joust
    Joust As a kid this was my least favorite event in the game. No matter how much I played it I never figured out how to get any better at it. Much like Human Cannonball you have to face 4 gladiators to win. After the 3rd gladiator a flashing pugil stick flies towards your character. If you can grab it the 4th gladiator can be knocked off the pedestal in 1 hit.
    Thanks to the internet this event finally started to make sense. The gladiator can attack high, mid or low. You have to counter his hits:
    If he attacks high you attack low If he attacks mid you attack high If he attacks low you attack mid That’s really all there is to it. The tricky part is that even though each gladiator has a simple pattern they repeat over and over again they don’t attack at the same frequency so you can’t learn the rhythm, you have to kind of feel the attacks on the fly.
    After each gladiator you have to jump between a few platforms to get to the next gladiator. This was pretty simple but I did fall more times than I care to admit costing a precious life.
    I found the 3rd stage to by far be the hardest for Joust. In fact, the 3rd stage joust may have been the hardest stage in the entire game. For this reason, after I beat the 3rd stage I would start each attempt by entering the password to start on the 4th and final stage just so I didn’t have to do that 3rd stage Joust again.
    This was a double edged sword, because I didn’t play the first 3 levels I wasn’t able to build up a large amount of extra lives which come in handy on The Eliminator, but, I didn’t have to suffer through 3rd stage Joust.
    Joust! The Wall
    The Wall! To me, this is the most well thought out and fun event in the game. The goal is to reach the top of the wall while avoiding gladiators and making sure not to miss a hand hold.
    The controls are pretty complex yet intuitive. The A button controls your right hand and the B button controls your left hand. Tapping either button while hitting any direction on the controller will reach your hand to grab the wall. In order to keep from falling one of your hands must be on the wall at all times.
    In the later stages this takes a bit more skill as in some places the hand holds are spaced to where you have to perfectly place your hands to grab them. On top of this, gladiators come at you from all directions. I found it best to move into a spot where the gladiator is forced to miss hand holds or hits a wall or falls off the wall. The gladiators in this event are stupid and always come at you in a straight line even if there are obstacles in the way.
    I think this is the event in the game people remember most, and for good reason. It is fun, it is challenging and it is fair. If you fall it is your own fault.
    The Wall, you better be careful rounding those corners. Assault
    Assault, those tennis balls are shot at 100mph! As a kid watching American Gladiators on TV this is the event I would have been the most afraid to do. The gladiator shoots tennis balls at the contestant at 100mph. I would not have wanted to get hit with one of those!
    In the NES game you are tasked with defeating the gladiator one of two ways:
    Hit him with the guns scattered along the stage 3-4 times Reach the end before you are hit 3 times. The gladiator is not stationary in this event, he moves back and forth across the screen randomly shooting balls at you. 3 hits and you are a goner. In the first couple of stages I found picking up the guns, hiding behind the barriers and shooting the gladiator was a good strategy. In the 4th stage I found just running back and forth to get to the end was the way to go. This event is pretty random and even though I beat it more times than I didn’t it was never a sure thing.
    Should I shoot or should I run? Powerball
    Someone was sure to get tackled in Powerball every episode. A breather from the other intense events. Powerball is the only event in the game where you can’t lose a life. The goal of the event is to put a ball into each of the 5 canisters scattered across the play field. It won’t be easy though as 3 gladiators spastically run all around the screen. If a gladiator touches you the ball you are carrying is knocked from your hand and you must run across the screen to pick up another.
    If you put a ball in all 5 canisters before time runs out you get a 1UP. It is possible to actually earn 2 1UPs on each stage but I was never fast enough to pull it off.
    I usually saved this event for last simply because it was a sure thing to beat it. I didn’t want to waste time playing though it early only to get game over on one of the harder events.
    Put the balls in each canister for a 1UP The Eliminator
    This is a pretty great final stage of a game. While it is nothing like The Eliminator in the show it is also very similar to The Eliminator in the show.
    This final stage is broken out into 5 sections. If you die you return to the beginning of the section where you died.
    Section 1 – Platforms
    Not a lot of room for error here. In this section you move from left to right jumping between platforms while the screen slowly auto scrolls. While you jump around off screen gladiators throw an insane amount of medicine balls at you. If you are hit by a medicine ball you are knocked back a few feet. If you are ducking when hit by a medicine ball it bounces off of you. The trick is to avoid as many balls as possible and duck for the ones you can’t avoid.
    The biggest issue with all sections of this stage is that if the auto scrolling screen catches up with you and you go off the left side of the screen you lose a life. This wouldn’t be so tough but the game is very unforgiving because if you are even close to the left side of the screen you lose a life. I’m not sure if this is a glitch or just bad hit detection but I found it to be the most unfair thing in the entire game.
    Section 2 – Hand Bike
    No way I could do this in real life. A staple of the TV show this section features a hand bike where you must use your upper body strength to pedal a bike while hanging. In the game the medicine balls are still coming fast and furious so the ultimate goal is just to move back and forth on the hand bike while avoiding the balls. I found this to be the easiest section of The Eliminator.
    Section 3 – Conveyor Belts
    Those are conveyor belts This plays exactly like section 1 except instead of jumping between platforms you are now jumping between conveyor belts adding an extra layer of difficulty as the platforms now move under your feet.
    Section 4 – Hand Bike
    This is exactly the same as section 2
    Section 5 – Zip Lines
    This part is just about as hard and unforgiving as the final boss in any NES game. In order to beat this section you have to perfectly time your jumps between 8 zip lines. Each zipline is faster than the last and you must find the perfect place to release and jump to the next one.
    It took me probably 20 attempts to actually get this far as the entire Eliminator stage is no joke. I probably had another 5 attempts and never got past the 3rd zip line when I had a great idea. I needed to study this last section of the game. I watched several YouTube videos at 25% speed to find the perfect place to release from each zipline. After a few tries I was able to get to zipline 5 but I still felt like there was more I could do.
    I ended up taking a screenshot of each of the 8 ziplines at the exact moment when I needed to release.

    Finally
    It has been 3 months since I beat a game on the NES. But, that is because I haven’t had much time to play. I would go 2-3 weeks at a time without getting a chance to play American Gladiators. I was ready to be done with it, not because it isn’t fun, not because I didn’t enjoy playing it, but, because 3 months is too long to spend on a game. If I take this long between every game I’ll still be trying to beat games when I’m 126 years old.
    On the attempt when I beat the game I was doing really poorly on The Eliminator. I ended up losing 5 lives on section 1 leaving me with only a single life to beat the entire level. Somehow that is exactly what I did. When I got to the ziplines I knew I had a chance. I was excited to try out my new strategy. Luckily you can pause the game so I would pause on each zipline and study the picture to know exactly where to release my hold. And, on my first try I beat it. Hopefully the above images can help others conquer this challenging last level.
    This was actually a pretty fun game. It isn’t an all time classic but I can definitely see myself pulling it out from time to time and playing through it. Now, I need to hop over to YouTube and watch some clips of the TV Show.
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  7. Hoskat
    Genre: Arcade/Puzzle
    Publisher: American Softworks
    Total time played: 40 Hours
    Short review: It starts off as an arcade game and very quickly becomes a puzzle game that appears to be more luck than skill. Well known to be one of the most difficult games on the NES.
    Interesting links related to The Mutant Virus
    Forum post where a community is attempting to master the game. Full Playthrough part 1 – TheMexican Runner  Full Playthrough part 2- TheMexicanRunner Video Review – Only Level 1 This Random Game Selection…
    After finally beating Destination Earthstar I was hoping the NES God’s would throw me an easy game. Instead I was presented with a game that if it weren’t for the website NintendoAge.com I would know nothing about. What I learned reading about the game is that it is hard and there doesn’t seem to be a consistent strategy to beat the game. In fact, this post is keeping track of all people on the site that have beaten the game, to my knowledge it is the only game on the site that is tracked this way. As of this writing in 2018, only 7 of the 30k+ members of the site have beaten the game. I’m sure the game has been beaten by way more people than this, but, let’s just say, this information really intimidated me.
    What is the game about?
    The game is about a computer virus that is taking over a computer. Your job is to shrink down, go inside the computer and kill the virus.
    Blue is good, green is bad and the black dots are what causes the virus to expand.
    If This is True it is Super Cool
    When trying to find a pattern for the way that the virus expands I ran across a video about a 1970’s computer program called “The Game of Life” where a programmer named John Conway made a program that showed how it would be possible for non-intelligent life to expand with just a few simple rules.
    After watching the video I am pretty sure the game designers for The Mutant Virus used that program for inspiration. The virus spreads so fast that it would be impossible to test the theory without using an emulator to slow down the frame rate, but, either way, the use of this 1970’s program and thought experiment makes the game way more interesting.

     
    Controls
    B button – Acts a thruster, propelling you forward in whichever direction you are facing
    D-Pad – rotates your character in place if you aren’t moving, changes directions if you are moving.
    A button – this shoots your gun, holding the button acts as a rapid fire.
    B + Up – Turbo boost which moves your character forward at a high speed
    B + Down – Slows your character to a stop almost instantly
    Select – Rotates through your weapons (see below for more info)
    Start – Pauses the game

    Weapons
    SF – Short Fire – shoots your weapon just a few feet in front of you. Handy to use if you are directly on top of the virus.
    LF – Long Fire – shoots your weapon across the screen for attacking virus that is far away.
    AU – Auto something?? – Seems to shoot across the screen until it comes in contact with a virus. Seems to be more handy than SF and LF.
    SG – Super Gun – you won’t get this until level 3. This gun is incredible, it bounces off of walls and seems to clear out the virus much quicker than other guns. But, if you lose a life you lose the gun.
    CM – Counter Measure – These weapons are scattered throughout rooms in each level and are displayed as horizontal tubes with 0’s or 1’s on them. These act as a bomb that continually ejecting antidote to fight the virus. Some explode vertically, some horizontally, some at an angle. I never got comfortable with which color/number combo did what. These can be dropped a single time by pressing A+B with the CM weapon selected. The bomb will pulsate antidote continuously where it is dropped. Even if you leave a room and come back the CM weapon keeps blasting out antidote where you dropped it.
    Puzzle Game?
    Each stage has a number of rooms. Each room has a virus that expands in both a random and predictable pattern. Each room has a virus epicenter where the virus is pumped into the room. This epicenter is not always easy to see as the virus spreads so fast and chaotically it is hard to tell from where it is originating. The CM’s are absolutely necessary to defeat certain rooms.
    If you drop a CM in the wrong location you might as well die and start over as it will be near impossible to beat the stage. The farther into the game you go the more rooms there are to clear and the more possibilities you have for using the CM in the wrong place.
    To my knowledge no one has successfully mapped out a consistent way to beat each stage so there was a lot of trial and error.
    The Difficulty Spike is Insane
    After hearing horror stories on how hard this game is I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the first level was. It gave me a huge confidence boost.
    At the beginning of level 2 I was humbled almost instantly. The virus expanded much more quickly and my gun seemed to do much less damage. I took dozens of attempts before I started making progress. I would say that the difficulty spike between level 1 and 2 is greater than the spike between Level 1-1 and Level 8-1 in Super Mario Bros. 3. It could be the highest difficulty spike I’ve ever experienced in a game.
    You won’t believe this, but, level 3 is even harder. You do gain the super gun in the first room of the level, but, if you die you lose the gun making the level near impossible to beat.
    How to Die
    If you hover on top of the virus you will hear a ticking sound that means your health is being drained. If you hover for too long you will lose a life. This isn’t a big deal as you have 5+ lives with each continue. But, if you are carrying a SG and die you lose the weapon until you get a game over.
    Some rooms have a giant hole that opens/closes and spits out a white fire/ghost thing that flies in a straight line until it hits a wall and then ricochets off the wall. It doesn’t move that fast but it does kill you in a single hit and based on how your character floats as if he is in outer space this thing will kill you a lot.
    Good news, there are infinite continues so losing a life doesn’t cost you anything but time. If you are brave enough to leave on your NES for weeks you could beat the game and never have to replay older levels. I did this, but, in the 21st century way. I used my Retron 5 to create a save state at the start of each level. So, I was virtually pausing the game. Plus, it gave me the ability to practice a particularly hard room over and over. But, I did eventually get good enough to beat each level with a single continue.
    Retron 5 Failed Me!!
    After 50+ attempts I finally beat level 3, and right as the game was transitioning from the final room in the level to the cut-scene before level 4, the system froze. I was devastated because of how long it took me to complete. I took a couple of weeks off as I didn’t have the motivation to continue knowing it would take dozens of attempts to replay through that level.
    I decided to play on the original NES instead of the Retron-5 to minimize the game freezing. I even took apart the game cart and hardcore cleaned the pins inside to make sure it wasn’t a dirty game causing the errors.
    Game Genie to the Rescue
    Since the game has infinite continues and I had been attempting to beat the game on and off for 3+ months I decided that I would just use game genie codes to start on level 4 until I beat it and then use a game genie code to start on level 5. This would mitigate any issues with lost power or leaving the NES on for weeks at a time.
    But, much like I learned there were no cliff notes for Gone With the Wind the day before the test in high school I learned there are no level select game genie codes for The Mutant Virus.
    I emailed my friend Arnpoly from Take on the NES Library to complain about my predicament only to learn that he knows how to create game genie codes from scratch. Less than 48 hours later he emailed me the following codes:

    Confidence was restored thanks to these life saving Game Genie codes. Now, I could start on level 4 each night after my daughter went to bed instead of suffering through the first 3 levels again.
    Level 4
    Thanks to the guys on Nintendoage.com for making this handy map.
    There are 7 rooms in level 4 and 2 SG’s (super guns). That means if you die with the SG you don’t have to restart the game, you can keep going. But, if you die two times with the SG you might as well start over.
    I learned that if you are holding a CM and die you don’t lose it. Also, you cannot hold a CM and a SG at the same time. So my new strategy was to exchange my SG for a CM when my life got low. Then, when I died I could just pick up the SG again after I re-spawned. This is easier said than done but at least it was one way to improve my gameplay.
    I had no problem clearing all 7 rooms, the problem was that I could never clear them all in a single attempt. I’d play through once and one room would be a piece of cake and easily beatable in a couple of minutes, but, the next attempt the room would be nearly impossible.
    I had a lot of confidence when I had cleared 5 of the 7 rooms and still had both SG’s. I felt that I was finally going to beat the level and then the game froze again. It seems the game itself is glitchy as I couldn’t blame the Retron-5 or a dirty game for the issues.
    The next serious attempt I made the game froze again almost in the same spot in the same room. I switched up my strategy and went to the room where the game kept freezing first meaning I wouldn’t lose a half hour of work if it froze again. Eventually the stars aligned and I finally took down level 4.
    Stage 5 – The Final Countdown
    Thanks to the guys on Nintendoage for making this handy map.
    I took a short break after level 4 as the holidays were fast approaching. It was probably two weeks after beating level 4 I actually gave level 5 a shot and I died very quickly. I did a bunch of research and watched TheMexicanRunner’s take down of level 5 multiple times and I read through the NintendoAge strategy thread until I had it memorized.
    I ended up using GuitarZombie from NintendoAge’s strategy to take down the level. Due to the random nature of the virus outbreaks I had to make some on the fly adjustments but this was the general order:
    – Start in room 1, take blue 0.
    – Go to room 3, use blue 0 between VSs, clear it.
    – Go to room 4, clear it, take green 1
    – Go to room 2, use the green 1 on the bottom, clear room. Grab green 0
    – Go to room 6 (room 2 to 5, to 7, to 6) use green 0 on Virus Spitter, clear room, Take SG
    – Go to room 7 (clear room?), take blue 1
    – Go to room 8, use blue 1 on virus spitter, clear room.
    I actually took down level 5 in around 10 attempts, much faster than every level except the first one. Even though it took fewer attempts each attempt took at least 30 minutes because the final level featured 8 rooms to clear, the biggest number yet.
    The virus in level 8 is ruthless, it kills you very quickly and even when you think your blue wave of antidote is making good progress the virus can take back over very quickly. You don’t seem to earn points as quickly meaning you don’t earn extra lives that often. This is the only level where I consistently got game over because I was out of lives and not because I lost my SG and needed to start over. The thing that makes the last level a nightmare is that every few minutes one of the rooms flashes and you are presented with an audio warning and a message that there has been a virus outbreak. If this happens you have to stop what you are doing and go immediately to that room to get it under control.
    The virus outbreaks always seemed to happen when I had a room 90% cleared and was battling the virus for that last 10%. If you leave a room and come back you are pretty much guaranteed that your progress will be erased. On the run that I finally beat the game I would stay put if I was close to clearing a room and hope I made it to the outbreak before it was too late (if you are too late it is instant game over).
    The one saving grace in the final level is that there is a SG that you can pick up that never goes away. That means if you die you don’t lose it. The bad part about this is that it is buried deep in the level and I had 3-4 rooms cleared before I was able to pick it up. I technically could have gone to the room holding the SG at the start but then I would lose several minutes of virus clearing time and give more rooms the opportunity to have an outbreak.
    I Did It!
    I would say The Mutant Virus is 90% luck and 10% strategy. No matter how much you play the game if the computer doesn’t want you to win you aren’t going to win.
    I have been playing The Mutant Virus since August, making it’s 5 months completion time the longest of any game I’ve finished so far. Part of that time was me dreading playing the game and not playing for weeks at a time. That is why I beat Baseball in November, I needed a confidence boost and wanted people to know I hadn’t quit the blog.
    I would say I did play the game for around 40 hours over that 5 month period. If it hadn’t been for Arnpoly and his game genie code creation I don’t know that I could have beaten this one. Our house lost power 2 times during severe storms since August. If I had chosen to leave the NES on I would have twice had to start over. I know some game playing purists would say that I cheated using the level select code on game genie but I gained no advantage by doing this. I did save a bit of time but I beat each level fair and square and felt the greatest sense of victory I have ever experienced playing an NES game. With this game in the rearview I feel unstoppable. I’m sure I’ll change my mind whenever the next broken, slow, boring, or super hard game appears on the list.

     

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  8. Hoskat
    Genre: Action
    Publisher: Culture Brain
    Total time played: 7 Hours
    Short review: The best tournament fighter on the NES mixed with a very forgettable side scroller. If it weren’t for a few gripes this game would be a classic.
    Interesting links related to Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll
    Video Walkthrough Video Review (CGR Undertow) Soundtrack  
    Two Games In One!
    Throughout the course of Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll you will play two distinct games, one is a side scrolling platformer that plays like Karate Kid or Kid Niki. It is pretty bare bones, quick and easy.
    The second is a early Street Fighter prototype that features 1 on 1 fighting that requires a little strategy, but, a lot of luck and quick fingers.
    Tutorial Stage
    The first time I turned the game on I decided to play it blindly. I quickly ran through the first side scrolling stage and was presented with a tutorial for the Street Fighting section of the game. You then play through 3 training matches.
    My first attempt was not good and I ended up getting game over. I was given the option to continue or get a password. I decided to call it a night and wrote down the 4 digit password. The next night I tried again, the password takes you to the start of the game, there was no difference in just hitting “game start”
    It took a few tries to get the hang of the fighting stages and even with the tutorial it doesn’t teach you everything you need to know for later in the game.
    This tutorial is long and boring, doesn’t tell you everything you need to know and if you fail the next stage you must watch it all again.
    What it Takes to Win
    On the surface the game is really straight forward. You plow through the Journey stages and then defeat all of the enemies in the one on one fighting. But, if you don’t pay close attention you will never truly beat the game.
    You have to collect 6 scrolls throughout the game. Some of them you get just for beating a stage but most you get by defeating an enemy in a very specific way. If you explore the Journey stage well enough you will get a clue to how to defeat the fighter who holds the scroll. These clues are actually pretty decent but unless you know you can’t beat the game without following the instructions you won’t know what you are missing. Each enemy that must be defeated in a specific way can also be beaten the regular way. If you do this the game goes on but you don’t earn the scroll you need to get the true ending.
    Side Scroller
    There really isn’t much to these levels.
    Up jumps, A and B attack.
    Every normal enemy moves quickly from one side of the screen to the other, a single punch or kick defeats them. Once 5 enemies are killed the screen darkens and a mini-boss appears. The mini-bosses all have a unique look but are all dispatched in the same way. Punch and kick them until their life bar is gone, try to avoid their projectiles, but if you can’t, it’s not a big deal because you have a much longer health bar than they do.
    Throughout the 3-4 Journey stages I only died a handful of times.
    Not much to see here, just a simple side scrolling level.
    Each boss you defeat drops an item. The items are used to make the stage easier. There are 5 items to collect, the first 4 make the stage easier and the 5th item is a key that you need to exit the level.
    I didn’t pay much attention to what the scrolls did, I know one makes you jump higher and one allows you to shoot a projectile. The other two didn’t do enough for me to notice.
    The levels are all very short and if you don’t defeat enough enemies to make the boss appear before reaching the door the stage scrolls back to the beginning. The key here is to stand at the beginning of the stage and move as little as possible. Stand in a single spot and kill enemies until the boss appears, defeat the boss, get the item and repeat.
    My goal was to have all 4 upgrade items and the key before I walked halfway through the stage.
    After every 5 enemies the screen darkens and a mini-boss appears.
    The only other advice I have for this stage is to punch every statue in the level. There are hidden items in many of them. These include a health refill, a 1-UP, and a couple of small upgrades to make these stages easier.
    Also, if you collect all 5 items and kill 5 more enemies the mini-bosses still show up. So, once you collect all the items you need don’t kill any other enemies to avoid unnecessary mini-boss battles.
    One on One Fighter
    This is the meat of the game, I’d say 90% of my time was spent defeating the 12 opponents in these one on one tournaments.
    The Basics
    The fighting basics are really straight forward. If a red circle appears on your head press UP to block, if the red circle is on your mid-section press RIGHT to block, if it is on your feet press down to block. UP also jumps if there is no red circle on you.
    If a red circle appears on your enemy press UP, RIGHT or DOWN plus A or B to attack them. This is what the tutorial tells you.
    90% of my time was spent on these tournament levels.
    More Than the Basics
    While you are fighting bottles will fly around the screen, if you grab the bottle  it will appear as a white shape below the 6 squares in the top right of the screen. Pressing SELECT will use a bottle which refills a bit of your health. The bottles you collect will follow you to the next battle if they aren’t used. I found it necessary to hoard the bottles until the final battle as it was by far the toughest.
    There is a KO meter across the top of the screen. As you hit your enemy the meter fills up, as you get hit it goes down. If the meter fills up all the way you can perform a couple of special attacks. Pressing UP+A+B will perform a spinning kick that if it lands will take off a significant portion of the bosses health. Pressing DOWN+A+B will performing a spinning foot sweep which is more powerful than the traditional kick.
    The most useful attack in the game is the throw. To perform this you must perfectly block an attack at your head by pressing UP as your enemy attacks. If you do it properly you will hold the arm of your opponent for about a half second. While holding the arm you must quickly press DOWN+A to throw the enemy over your head. This takes off a significant amount of your enemies health.
    A few enemies throughout the game will have a blue circle appear on them instead of a red circle. If you hit this blue dot a few seconds later a red star will appear. Hitting this red star will defeat the enemy in a single hit.
    But There’s More
    There are 3 enemies who must be defeated in a specific manner in order to collect their scroll:
    Scroll 3 – Defeat the 3rd opponent of the 2nd tournament by doing the following:
    Do not attack the enemy at all. After 5-10 seconds a red star will appear somewhere on his body. Hit this star to immediately transform the enemy into his true form. Defeat this form to collect the scroll.
    Scroll 4 – Defeat the 3rd opponent of the 3rd tournament by doing the following:
    Do not attack the enemy that much as you will want him to grab before you defeat him. The grab doesn’t happen too often. If you defeat him before this happens you won’t get the scroll. There is no warning that he is about to grab you, it is the only move in the game that doesn’t first show a red circle on your body. When he grabs you must quickly tap LEFT and RIGHT over and over to escape the hold. If done correctly the enemies true form appears. Defeat this form to get the scroll.
    Scroll 5 – Defeat the 2nd opponent of the 1st round of the 4th tournament by doing the following:
    Build up your KO meter all the way and perform the spinning kick when the enemy has just a few bars of life left. This will turn him into his true form. Defeat him to collect the scroll. As a side note, this was by far the hardest enemy to defeat and collect the scroll. He had a few moves that are hard to dodge making it hard to fill up the KO meter.
    Scroll 6 – Defeat the 1st enemy of the 2nd round of the 4th tournament by doing the following:
    Perform two throws in a row by blocking an attack on your head and quickly pressing DOWN+A. After the 2nd throw a red star appears on your enemies feet. Perform a spinning sweep by pressing DOWN+A+B, if this move lands the enemy will turn into his true form. Defeat him to collect the scroll
    A red circle on your head means to block by hitting up on the controller.
    Oh, It’s One of Those Games…
    After beating the Journey stages and Tournament stages and collecting all the scrolls you are rewarded with an ending screen and then told that in order to really save the day you must play through the game again, pick up the same 6 scrolls as before but this time also find 4 Crystal Balls hidden throughout the Journey stages.
    The Crystals are found by punching statues found throughout the Journey stages and are really simple to find. It is just a shame you have to play through every level again to see the true ending, which, is just a single screen shown after the screen you saw by beating the game the first time. The only change in the 2nd quest is you don’t have to play through the fighting tutorial again which saves a few minutes.
    Password
    From what I experienced while playing and saw online there are only a few passwords in the game. They aren’t even useful. They never start you in a place that saves you much time from just starting over. The only password I found useful was “BAAA” which took you to the first of the final 6 Street Fight matches in the first playthrough of the game.
    Once you beat the game once you have to beat it again, because I was afraid the password I was given would not start me on the second quest I ended up playing through the second quest several times in a row until I beat it, just to be sure.
     
    Severe Frustration
    A few of the one on one fights are tough but fair. If it weren’t for having to defeat a few select enemies in a specific way this game would have been great. I would guess that 50% of my play time was trying to collect scroll 5. Even if I collected this scroll I would usually get so excited and miss die on the next boss. After collecting scroll 5 there are till 4 additional fights and 1 additional scroll to collect. If you get a game over you go back to the side scrolling stage before the final 6 person tournament. This was very frustrating as that last stage and tournament were half of the games length. It was almost not worth having continues or passwords.
    Final Thoughts
    The side scrolling portion of the game is very forgettable. The fighting portion of the game is the best 8-bit version of a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat game I’ve ever played. This game came out before either of those making it a pioneer in the tournament fighter genre. Honestly, the game would have been just as good if it were just a fighter. It make other NES fighters Urban Champion and Karate Champ look like the developers didn’t even try. If it weren’t for the frustration of beating enemies in a specific way this game would almost be a classic.
    **Note**
    The screen in the photo below is shown after both the first and 2nd quests. The ending screen that is unique to the 2nd playthrough disappeared before I could snap a photo. I am not wanting to play through the entire game again to get a picture of that screen which was a let down anyway. So, you all will just have to take my word that I got the true ending.

     

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  9. 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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  10. 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.
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  11. Hoskat
    Genre: Basketball
    Publisher: Milton Bradley
    Total time played: 1.5 Hours
    Short review: A primitive basketball game featuring 2 of the NBA’s all-time greatest players.
    Interesting links related to Jordan Vs. Bird One on One
    Written Review – Arnpoly Soundtrack Video Playthrough An Interesting Work Around
    Old video games always were always trying new things to portray sports in a way that hid the limitations of the primitive hardware. Many of the early NES sports games were pretty bad with stiff controls that only followed the very basic rules of the sport. Jordan vs. Bird knew they couldn’t do a full 5 on 5 basketball game the way they wanted to and decided to make it a 1 on 1 game that freed up some processing power to make the game more fun.
    In my opinion it didn’t work and the faux variety of game modes didn’t help. All of this is just me speculating. It is also possible the developers just wanted to do something different to stand out from the pack of other NES basketball games. In that way, they succeeded.
    Michael Jordan and Larry Bird
    Without a doubt, these two guys are 2 of the best NBA players of all time. In my opinion Jordan is the best NBA player ever (although my limited sports knowledge makes my opinion worth about as much as an NES copy of Jordan vs Bird). Larry Bird is a legend but still doesn’t get the credit he deserves. I saw an infographic a few years back that showed that Larry Bird actually had better stats at almost every point in his career than Lebron James.
    Jordan was his own brand and rarely lent his likeness to sports games. That is why in many games of the 1990’s and 2000’s the Bulls would have a generic player wear #23 who happened to be the best player on the team. I wonder if Jordan got a bad taste in his mouth from the mediocrity of this game he gave his name to?
    3 Game Modes
    In Jordan Vs. Bird there are 3 game modes and all are pretty much just not a lot of fun. You can chose to play a full game of basketball, a shortened game to 11 or 15 points or just shoot around and warmup.
    You can choose to do a slam dunk contest against another player, practice dunks or follow the leader where you must do the same dunk as the other player.
    You can choose to participate in the 3 point contest or just practice shooting.
    One on One
    In this mode you take control of either Michael Jordan or Larry Bird and play half court basketball. There are a few options to choose from including if you want to play a full game or just play to 11. You can also choose the length of the quarters and the difficulty. I played on multiple difficulties and didn’t notice any difference.
    There isn’t much to this game. A shoots if you are on offense and B swats at the ball if you are on defense. When shooting the ball the goal is to hold A and release it towards the top of your jump to release. If you wait too long the invisible referee will call traveling. I believe the closer you release the ball to the top of your jump the better chance it has to go in. If you are close to the basket and hit A you will perform a dunk.
    It took me a few tries to win for some reason. The computer AI is not that smart so it should have been easier than it was. I played as Jordan and 90% of the time I could just run around Bird and dunk for an easy 2 points. I struggled more on defense. Most of the time I could just tap the left or right button and run Bird into the bottom corners of the screen and swat the ball away from him. But, a lot of times he would just launch a shot and it would go in. He hit a lot of 3 pointers which meant my 2 point dunks weren’t enough to beat him.
    Anyway, after a few games I bested him. I didn’t play as Bird and I didn’t play best to 11 or 15. I just did the straight 2 minute quarter full games
    At least it is easy to see the score, the shot clock, the period, the time and tell the players apart. Slam Dunk Contest
    In this game mode you have the option to play against the computer or with up to 3 friends. I played against the computer and we competed in a Jordan vs Jordan dunk contest. That’s right, only Jordan dunks so no matter how many players are in the contest they are all Michael Jordan.
    There are 10 dunks to choose from and some look pretty cool for the NES. The problem is that they are hard to do. This is more of a timing game than anything. You need to know when to release the ball during your jump to make the dunk and score the most points. The computer is really good at this and you basically just need to practice for a while to get the timing down and also get really lucky. Many times my dunk would go in and I’d get 4’s and 5’s from the judges. The computer would do a dunk that looked identical and get 8’s and 9’s
    There are judges who score your dunks, the highest score after 3 rounds of play wins. I’m unsure if the winner is determined by total score over the 3 rounds or if the winner is the person who wins 2 of the 3 rounds.
    The first column dunks originate from the left side of the basket, 2nd column from right in front of the basket and right column from the right side of the basket. 3-Point Contest
    After learning that you can only be Jordan in the dunk contest it probably comes as no surprise that you can only be Larry Bird in the 3-Point Contest.
    This one took a minute to get the hang of. There is a rack of balls set up in the right corner of the floor and you hit a button to grab a ball and then tap A to jump and at the peek of your jump tap B to release the ball. This is different than how you shoot in the other game modes. You get 1 point for each ball that goes in the basket and 2 points if the last ball of each rack goes into the basket.
    After shooting the 5 balls in the first rack a new rack appears which you must run to and shoot again. You have 60 seconds to shoot 30 balls. Highest score after 3 rounds win the contest. Again, I’m unsure if it is a cumulative score over 3 rounds or just the person who wins 2 fo the 3 rounds.
    There is a pretty big glitch here. If you shoot a ball and pick up another ball before the first ball goes in then your first ball disappears. So, you have to wait for every shot to go in or miss before attempting another shot.
    The judges don’t have much to do here, they just show how many balls are left in each of the 5 racks you are shooting from. Be Careful When Pausing The Game
    On more than one occasion while I was playing someone would come into the room and say something and I’d go to pause the game. Muscle memory tells me that Start pauses NES games. On rare occasions Select pauses a game, this is one of those times. In most games where Select pauses the game the Start button does nothing, but not in Jordan Vs. Bird. The Start button takes you back to the menu of the game where you select which game mode you want to play. There is no “are you sure” message or anything, if you accidentally hit start it is basically the same as pushing the reset button on the console. Who thought this was a good idea?
    Final Thoughts
    This felt like a game that everyone knew some kid who had it. I remember playing it as a kid but I don’t really have many memories from it. It is a bit different than other basketball games from the same time and I feel like it is one of the first games people remember when it comes to sports and the NES. After playing it in 2021 I’m pretty sure they remember the game because of the 2 superstars attached to it and not because of the fun gameplay.
    This is not a good game. It was ambitious but there just isn’t enough meat on the bone to make it fun to play. It is glitchy and somehow it is both too hard (dunk and 3 point contest) and too easy (regular game) at the same time.
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  12. 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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  13. Hoskat

    R.C. Pro-Am

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Racing
    Publisher: Rare
    Total time played: 25 Hours
    Short review: Dodge road hazards and collect upgrades to your remote control car in this fast paced racing game.
    Interesting links related to 
    Race Track Maps Speedrun (20min 44sec) Tool Assisted Speedrun – All GoldMedals (39min 06 sec) Soundtrack Oh, I Get It!
    I played R.C. Pro Am for a long time as a kid before I got the gimmick of the game. The R.C. stands for Remote Control and you use your NES controller as simulacra for the hand held remote controller that would pilot a real life remote control car. So, for accuracy sake, there is no more accurate game on the NES for mimicking a real life activity. At the start of each race you even see little radio waves hitting the antenna sticking out the top of your car to let you know that you are no controlling the car remotely.
    See the radio waves? What attention to detail!
    How To
    The goal of the game is to finish in 1st, 2nd or 3rd place. There are only 4 racers, so basically, if you don’t come in last you move on to the next race. This is really easy to do in the first several races and then becomes easier said than done as the game progresses.
    The game features a top down view that takes a few minutes to get used to. But, once you do, the game is pretty simple (not to be confused with easy) and the controls are perfect. B is used to make your car go forward, you steer with right and left as if you were sitting in the drivers seat of the car. What this means is that if the car is driving towards the bottom of the TV screen you use the right controller button to turn towards the left side of the TV because from the perspective of the drivers seat you would be turning right.
    The A button is used to shoot projectiles you pick up at your enemies, kind of like a very early Mario Kart prototype, your enemies don’t get the luxury of projectiles so this gives you an advantage.
    How to Beat the Game
    I never realized how many NES games don’t have true endings. According to the cover art of the game box there are 32 tracks so one would assume that after the 32nd race the game would end, that is not the case.
    From what I’ve read and watched online there are not 32 tracks, there are 24 tracks and after finishing the 24th the tracks loop, so, track 25 looks the same as track 1. But, that also isn’t quite right. Some of the 24 tracks are the same and just feature hazards in different spots. Anyway, most people agree, after track 24 you have beaten the game.
    If I was really hardcore I would try to fill up the trophy screen with 48 trophies (the most it can hold). And, if I was REALLY hardcore I’d try to fill the trophy room with 48 gold trophies. I found a tool assisted video online where a guy does this, I’m not sure I would be ever good enough to do this, but, the room looks so good this way…
    Screenshot from a tool assisted YouTube video. I wish I was good enough to do this.

    Powerups
    Tires – Increasing the stickiness of your tires making steering easier. The more you collect (up to 4) the better your steering gets. Sticky tires follow you from race to race, until your car is upgraded. Each time you pick this item up you get a short speed boost as well. Turbo Acceleration – Increasing the acceleration of your car allowing you to get to your top speed faster. The more you collect (up to 4) the better your acceleration gets. Turbo acceleration follows you from race to race, until your car is upgraded. Each time you pick this item up you get a short speed boost as well. Higher Top Speed – Increasing the top speed of your car. The more you collect (up to 4) the higher your top speed gets. Higher Top Speed follows you from race to race, until your car is upgraded. Each time you pick this item up you get a short speed boost as well. Collect power-ups to make your car faster.
    Letter Block – Each level contains a letter that eventually spells out the word Nintendo. If you collect all 8 letters your car is upgraded from a truck to a jeep. If you spell out Nintendo again it is upgraded from a Jeep to a race car. Each car is a little better than the last. To be successful you need to collect these letters in the first 16 levels so you get the fastest car in the game on level 17. This gives you several levels to pick up power-ups you will need to beat the game. The later in the game you get the fastest car the fewer power-ups you will be able to pick up. Missile –  This power-up gives you the ability to shoot missiles at cars in front of you, be careful you only have a limited amount of shots. Bomb – Much like the missile, the bomb allows you to attack other cars, this time the bomb drops behind your car stopping approaching cars before they can pass you. Star – A star adds one shot to your missiles or your bombs. Roll Cage – Picking this up makes your car invincible from wrecking for several seconds. This is also the only power up in the game that the other cars can pick up. Zippers – Red arrows scattered throughout certain courses that act as short turbo boosts for your car. These items aren’t actually picked up, they stay on the track and are necessary to hit on multiple laps in some of the later races if you want to win. Hazards
    Water Puddle – Blue puddles that slow your car down. While annoying, these are the least dangerous hazards in the game.
    Oil Slick – Hitting these black patches cause your car to spin in a circle. You don’t lose momentum but you lose the ability to steer for a few moments. If you are on a long straight away these aren’t a big deal, but, if you hit one around a curve you will wreck and it takes a second or two for your car to be fixed. If you have the roll bar power-up your car won’t crash.
    Hard to believe anyone could live through a mangled wreck like this.
    Skull and Crossbones – Slows you down and takes away one missile or bomb
    Pop Up Barriers – On long straight aways a small barrier will go up and down in the middle of the track, sometimes you get lucky and it is lowered when you pass, other times you crash into it.
    Rain Clouds – Moves back and forth across the track, if you hit them you slow down.
    That Orange Car!!!
    Every once in a while the Orange Car gets an insane speed boost that lasts the rest of the race. There is literally no way to catch the car and many times he will lap the other racers and finish the race a lot earlier than you expect. The game is a little different from most racers in that when the first car crosses the finish line the race ends for everyone. So, if the Orange Car is going H.A.M. you have to be conscious of what place you are in the entire time. You may be on lap 3 of 5 when the Orange Car finishes and if you are in 4th place it is game over for you.
    It took me a long time to realize that I had control over when the car speeds up. Every 10 times you shoot a missile or bomb (or maybe hit the other cars, I’m not positive) the car takes off. The count continues between races so sometimes the car explodes with speed the first time you hit another racer with a missile or bomb.
    Some players use this to their advantage by getting the car to go fast from the start of a difficult race so the race is shorter for everyone. Since the Orange Car will finish at least one lap ahead of you that means you have one lap less to race and less racing means less obstacles to avoid. I never used this strategy because I liked saving my projectiles for the last few races.
    Game Genie
    In the 4th grade I stayed the night with my friend Brandon who owned this game. This was the first time I played the game and Brandon told me it never ended. I didn’t believe him so we spent hours trying to see how far we could get and prove there was an ending. Of course we were only 9 so probably didn’t even get to race 10.
    Brandon had a trick up his sleeve to prove it to me. He had a game genie and he knew the code to make the other cars go crazy. So, we popped in the game genie and put in the code and just as he said the computer racers just drove in circles once the race started meaning there was no competition for us. We played for a long time getting to level 50 and we just couldn’t play anymore. So, we hooked up the NES Advantage controller, leaned a heavy jar of pennies on the controller and on the B button and just let the game play all night. It wasn’t pretty but the car scraping along the walls eventually made it to the finish line in first place.
    The next morning when we awoke we found the game was still going and the level count in the bottom left of the screen showed some gibberish. It was either a letter/number or number/symbol combo, it was almost 30 years ago so I don’t remember exactly. But, I do remember that Brandon was right, the game does indeed go on forever.
    My Biggest Struggles
    Level 22
    There are a few tough levels in the game but I found this to be the toughest. The track is one you have seen before (Level 17 maybe??) and features 4 oil slicks on the first turn. The race is 5 laps and you must play perfectly to win. The other cars are much faster than you so if you hit those oil slicks one time or miss the zippers on the straight away you don’t stand much of a chance. It is possible to overcome a couple of minor mistakes but you have to hit all the curves perfectly. Most of my good runs ended here.
    Level 24
    The final level is the longest, both in course length and number of laps (9). It may just be me, but I felt all the turns to be backwards on this race. I felt like I was writing with my left hand, riding goofy foot on a skateboard or hitting a backhand in tennis. It just didn’t feel natural to me and took a lot of failed attempts to get the hang of it. On top of this there are no power-ups or stars (ammo for your projectiles) on this course. So, if you don’t have a maxed out car and a lot of projectiles to spare this race is going to be tough. All of the cars drive nearly perfectly and are just a little faster than you are. Since you only get two continues before starting over it takes a lot of time to practice this race enough to beat it.
    NES Limitations
    Without going into specifics (both because I don’t fully understand and don’t feel like typing it all out) the NES is limited to a specific number of sprites (car, road hazards, power-ups) on screen at once. To get around this, the programmers coded in sprite flickering that allows more than the NES limit of sprites on screen at once. What happens is the sprites flicker at different intervals very quickly so that no more than the limit are on screen at the same time. Because they flicker so quickly the human eye doesn’t really notice, or notice enough to hinder gameplay.
    The problem with this is that R.C. Pro Am moves really fast so the sprites are only on screen for a split second before you have driven past them. Even with the fast flicker you sometimes just don’t see items. This is a problem if you don’t see a water puddle or oil slick which can slow you down and is also a problem if you can’t see a letter or power-up that you need to progress in the game. It isn’t hindering by any means but you really need to know the courses like the back of your hand so you know where the power-ups are even if you can’t see them.
    Conclusion
    After 25 hours of playing over 3 months I’m still not sick of this game. There are not many games that remain fun after that many hours. If you are looking for a fun game to kill 15-20 minutes you will be hard pressed to find one better than this. But, if you want to beat all 24 levels you are in for an uphill battle. Even with the difficulty though the game isn’t unfair and the difficulty curve feels perfect.

     

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  14. Hoskat
    CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
    CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE TO YOUR COMPUTER
    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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  15. Hoskat

    Episode 36 – Mike Tyson

    By Hoskat,

    CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
    CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EPISODE TO YOUR COMPUTER
    The guys sit down to discuss one of the most iconic sports figures of all time, Mike Tyson. They talk about his early life, boxing career, controversy and what happened when boxing ended.
     
    Young Mike w/ his trainer, Cus D’AmatoYoung Mike in the ring.Would you want to fight this man?The fight that proved Tyson wasn’t invincible.Arguably the most infamous boxing match of all time.Probably the most famous face tattoo ever.One of the first documentaries on TysonMike Tyson even has a cartoon!This is a much more entertaining and accurate source of information about Mike Tyson than our podcast. 
    After boxing Mike Tyson has become a marijuana farmer
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  16. Hoskat

    Dragon Warrior 2

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Role Playing Game
    Publisher: Enix
    Total time played: 30 Hours
    Short review: The first of 3 sequels to the grandfather of all NES JRPGs. It will take a keen eye to notice any graphical differences between the original and this sequel but under the hood it features many noticeable improvements.
    Interesting links related to Dragon Warrior 2
    Speedrun (4Hours 41min 52sec) Soundtrack Video Review (SuperDerekRPGs) Written Walkthrough (Jason Venter) Walkthrough and Maps (Mike’s RPG Center) Dragon Warrior 2 Unveiled Secrets PDF scan  
    A Noticeable Improvement
    This was my first (and honestly, probably last) playthrough of Dragon Warrior 2. When I first turned the game on I was almost distracted by how similar it looked to the first game. The graphics are identical as is the music. But, I quickly noticed two things:
    I found that the battles seemed to be faster paced and I began leveling up much quicker than I did in the first game (more on this later). The battle scenes now were on a black background where in the first game they showed the enemy with a different background depending on the location of the battle. At first I was disappointed that the battle graphics weren’t even as good as Dragon Warrior but I quickly realized why. In the first game you never fought more than one enemy at a time. In part 2 you can fight up to 7-8 enemies at a time depending on their size. Taking out the battle background allowed for more intricate character sprites and more on screen enemies at one time. As I got farther in the game this really changed my strategy as every battle had the chance to be a combo of enemies I had never seen before. This was a huge improvement over single enemy battles that played out the same way every time.
    Dragon Warrior 1 battle screen. Much prettier, but the 75th time you fight the golem it gets a little old.
    7 enemies at once? I’ll take the black background in exchange for tough battles like this one. (Thanks google images, I forgot to take my own photo)
    P-A-R-T-Y? Because I gotta!!!
    For the first time in a Dragon Warrior game you aren’t alone on your journey. It takes a few hours of quests and grinding, but, you eventually find a Prince and Princess to help you out. The combination of two additional party members and battles with random combinations of enemies really fleshes out the battle system.
    Prince
    The prince is not nearly as strong as the hero and can’t use many of the stronger swords or armor in the game. He does however have the ability to use magic which comes in very handy. At the beginning of the game I used the prince to heal the party during and after battle. As the game progressed he gained a very helpful spell called “Firebane” which attacked every enemy on screen. The Prince also has the ability to cast “outside” which will exit a cave immediately and “return” which will instantly transport the party to the last town in which you saved your game. These spells were a necessity when I would explore a bit too far from safety and be on the verge of death.
    Unfortunately it seemed that more times than not when I was deep in a cave and in danger it was because the Prince was dead meaning I could not cast “outside” or “return”.
    Princess
    The princess quickly differentiated herself as a better healer than the Prince as she starts  the game with the “Healmore” spell which as the name suggests, heals more than the “heal” spell. Eventually she also learns “Heal All”, take a guess at what that spell does.
    The princess is very weak physically but carries spells that can aid in battle such as “sleep” which puts the enemy to sleep causing them to miss a turn to attack, “Defense” which lowers the defense of the enemy making my attacks against them cause more damage and “Surround” which causes the enemy to miss 25% of their attacks against me. As the game progressed I learned that using the “Staff of Thunder” weapon as an item in battle causes the Princess to cast “infernos” which is a fire spell that attacks all enemies. This spell came in very handy early on as it gave the Princess some much needed attack power and didn’t use any magic meaning I could use all the magic to heal the party when needed.
    The Map
    The map of Dragon Warrior felt big enough to feel like an entire world but small enough to never get too lost. Dragon Warrior 2 does something special, to understand you need to know the story of the game.
    Basically, this game takes place several generations after the end of the first game. You are the descendent of the first game’s hero and it is up to you to save the world. The game designers took the map of the first game and changed it up slightly as hundreds of years would naturally do. But, if you recently played the first game or grew up playing it you will recognize several of the locations.
    The map to Dragon Warrior II is massive, too big in fact. I never truly felt comfortable navigating without a map.
    See that red square? That is the ENTIRE map of Dragon Warrior. All the rest of the map is brand new for Dragon Warrior 2.
    A huge play area like this would be a welcome addition to almost any game. But, in order for the map to be a plus and not a minus the player needs to ability to access the map, along with your current location in game. That feature does not exist in Dragon Warrior 2. So, without a physical map, internet map or strategy guide it would take until the end of time to know where you are going in this game.
    How Would I Know That?
    Dragon Warrior 2 features a lot of things that you couldn’t possibly know unless you had a guide or got lucky. In fact, I’m starting to think this game was made with the purpose of requiring the player to buy a strategy guide to succeed which of course would increase the profits of the game maker.
    Luckily for me the internet exists so I didn’t have to buy the guide
    The point of the game is to collect 5 crests, use them to enter a cave to get something or other and use that to do something else and then use that one item to open a cave and then a bunch of other cryptic things.
    I’m being vague on purpose for 2 reasons…I’m too lazy to research again the exact item names/locations and my description is about as much direction as the game gives you.
    Let’s talk about the Sun Crest. Look below at a map of where to find it. How would you ever find that without knowing where to look? I didn’t even know you could walk on the outside of the walls, and even if I did discover that I wouldn’t have known to search that perfectly regular piece of grass.
    See the bottom arrow? You can walk through that X which I thought was a wall. The top arrow is where you search to find the Sun Crest.
    One Little Time Saving Secret
    Without this little “hack” I learned online I don’t think I would have had the energy to finish the game.
    When you fight a battle inside the jail cell of a castle you earn the item “Staff of Thunder” which I mentioned early as the weapon of choice for the Princess. If you sell the staff at the item shop you earn $25,000 gold. If you then visit the king and save your game and then turn off the Nintendo, when you turn the game back on you can fight the jail cell battle again earning another “Staff of Thunder”. I did this about 6 times which meant I then always had enough money to buy items/weapons and stay at even the most expensive inns. As Forrest Gump said “That’s one less thing”. As I never needed money I could focus on other things. I imagine this little hack saved me about 10 hours of grinding to earn money early in the game.
    “If He Dies, He Dies”
    If a character falls in battle you have a couple of choices to bring them back to life.
    Go back to the nearest town and pay money to the holy man who can revive them. This is a very handy option as it doesn’t cost too much money and you are one cast of “outside” and “return” away from brining the deceased party member back to life. But, if you are near the end of a quest or dungeon it doesn’t make sense to leave and then have to start all over. Unfortunately, for about 90% of the game this is really the only option. There is a small island in the bottom right corner of the map which is a small desert with one green square. If you search this square you find an item called “Leaf of the World Tree” which will revive a character who has fallen in battle. This is very handy to have so you don’t have to stop your quest and return to a village to revive. But, you can only carry one at a time and the location is so far out of the way it is actually quicker to have the holy man revive the deceased member of the party and start your mission over. The Prince learns “Revive” late in the game allowing him to bring someone back to life as long as he has enough magic. It did come in handy in the final castle but it would have also come in handy through the other 95% of the game had he learned the spell a little earlier. The Dungeons
    The game starts off with caves and dungeons that are not too bad. They are small enough and only have one or two paths to explore. As you get a bit farther in the game the dungeons get insane:
    They are much larger, some consist of up to 7 or more large floors to explore. There are multiple branching paths Some of the paths are maze like in that if you don’t walk in the exact right combination of squares it loops endlessly. The whole screen isn’t lit up only displaying a few squares at a time. This is to be like the small area that a torch would light up if you were really inside, I thought it was a cruel trick the game makers were playing on me. There are invisible trap doors that  will cause you to fall to a floor below Some rooms have enemy encounters with every single step you take The last major cave in the game is called “The Path To Rhone”. In order to even find the cave you have to stand in a specific location on the map and use an item to open up the hidden entrance. Again, without a strategy guide this would have been impossible.
    Once you are inside each of the floors is littered with everything I mentioned above. Sometimes while attempting to get through I would encounter 4 green dragons which I did beat one time but was so severely injured I didn’t stand a chance at progressing farther.
    I would venture to say it took 20+ attempts for me to actually make it through the cave. Even with 2 different maps I found online, one showing the path to take and the other showing all the trap doors it was nearly impossible. Some of that was that I tried to go through the cave at too low a level and the enemies were too strong for me.
    The Grind
    Earlier I mentioned how quickly I started earning level ups early in the game. This was a dirty trick played by the game makers. They made the game feel fast paced until I was hooked and then decided to make leveling up feel like such a grind. When I passed through the “Cave to Rhone” which is the final cave before the final castle I was level 20. According to guides I read the final boss shouldn’t be attempted until level 30-35. It took me longer to level up from 20-35 than it did for me to start the game and get through the “Cave to Rhone”. What this means is that from a time perspective, preparing for the final battle took as long as the other 95% of the game.
    The Final Battle
    After I got to level 31 I walked to the final castle and when I got inside it looks just like the castle I started the game in. I stayed at the Inn to refill my life and walked around confused.  I then used one of the online guides to find out I needed to take the 5 crests I had collected to a spot on the opposite side of the world to get an item that when used in this castle reveals that it isn’t a castle at all but a place full of monsters and the final boss.
    So, after spending 30 minutes getting the item I missed I came back, used the item to reveal the true castle and began exploring. Several of the rooms were floors covered with life draining designs. I used the Stepguard spell every few steps to protect my party from injury. Basically, just the game makers way of making sure you have less magic when you get to the end.
    Eventually I had to use the guide again to know to use the Eye of Malroth on a square deep in the castle to reveal yet another illusion.
    Luckily after this point the game wasn’t too unforgiving with mazes. However, the enemies here, even at level 31 were intense. I found running was the best option for most battles.
    Isn’t it obvious, turn right to reveal a hidden door.
    However, there were 3 battles you couldn’t skip, enemies which guarded staircases that were much more powerful than any I’d faced so far. The good news is that while grinding levels I picked up a cursed sword and cursed armor. Since the castle was cursed I could freely use these items which also happen to be the strongest in the game. Sometimes I was unable to attack because of the curse, but usually the very next turn my hero would deal over 200 hp of damage, enough to defeat pretty much any enemy in the game with one hit.
    After the 3 boss fights that didn’t tell you they were boss fights I met Hargon, who was definitely a boss. He wasn’t so bad to defeat, the Hero attacked and the Prince and Princess used Heal spells to keep everyone alive.
    After this 4th boss battle you meet the final boss. There is no mistake this is the last guy as he is huge. His attacks pack quite a punch but it only took me two tries to take him out. I expected the game to end right then and there but I had to travel all the way back to Midenhall castle, which of course I didn’t know how to get to. So, even after defeating the final boss and ridding the world of evil I still needed a guide to beat the game.
    He’s so big I didn’t realize Vari had 140HP and wasted a HealAll spell because I thought she only had 40HP
    Final Thoughts
    Re-reading everything I just wrote makes it seem like I really hated this game. But, that isn’t the case at all. I feel a great sense of accomplishment after beating it even though I had to rely on maps and strategy guides. I would have hated this game so much is I had played it as a kid without access to these online guides but I would have had all the free time in the world to explore. As an adult, I don’t have that much free time so using the guides was a necessity, and even with that, I could have better spent my time playing a newer or more polished RPG. Because I did enjoy my time with the game (when I wasn’t cussing it under my breath) and also appreciate how it was better than just about every other RPG that was released around the same time I have to give it props. 6 hearts for its historical significance. With a few minor tweaks and a game that could have been beaten in half the time without the need for external resources it could have been an all time classic.


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  17. 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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  18. Hoskat
    Genre: Platform
    Publisher: Seta
    Total time played: 3 Hours
    Short review: A very simple platform game with horrible graphics, one hit deaths, no link to the reference material and no depth.
    Interesting links related to Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    Speedrun (10min 25sec) Soundtrack Video Review (Under the Radar Games) My First Time
    The summer when I was 15 years old I set a goal to beat every NES game I owned. I decided I would beat games in alphabetical order. The first game alphabetically that I owned at the time was Adventure of Tom Sawyer.
    My brothers friend Eric game me this game (per notes on an old spreadsheet I found). But, I never remember any of my other friends owning it, mentioning it or even seeing it at the video store. I’m pretty sure Seta decided to make the game in hopes that parents would buy it since it was based on a classic novel it must be an educational game.
    I was less patient at 15 than I am now. I played the game for 10 minutes and decided it was too hard because I couldn’t even beat the first stage. The graphics were awful and even though the controls were fine, the one hit kills made it not worth playing. I ended up shelving the game and my dream of alphabetically beating every game and went back to playing Final Fantasy VII and Bottom of the Ninth ’97 on Playstation 1.
    20 Years Later
    I’m not sure why I decided to give this game another shot. I don’t really have a rhyme or reason for the order I’m playing these games. I apparently am much more patient now than I was back then because very quickly I was able to learn the enemy patterns and slowly progress my way through all the stages.
    As I got deeper into the game I noticed some weird inconsistencies. The first stage has horribly plain graphics but the last stage looks like a decent NES game and most of the bosses are pretty impressive looking.
    I also expected at some point for there to be a bonus game or a secret hidden in a stage but I never found it.
    Graphics don’t get much more plain that this.
    Source Material
    If I have ever read Adventures of Tom Sawyer I don’t remember it. I’ve seen the movie with Jonathan Taylor Thomas (or was that Huck Finn?). Even though I haven’t read the book I am familiar with the source material because it is almost common knowledge.
    The games stages put you on a pirate ship, rafting down the river, in the clouds, in a cave and even a haunted mansion. There is decent variety in level design but the graphics just are never impressive.

    The enemies throughout the game feature pirates, lobsters, a giant crocodile, bats, birds, a giant mouse, a giant octopus, a pink gorilla, flying fire breathing dragons and an Indian on a dinosaur. I’m 100% positive the book featured none of that nonsense.
     
    How to Play
    The controls are simple, A jumps and B throws rocks in a small arc.
    Throughout the level you can either jump over enemies or hit them with a rock. With the exception of the mini-bosses and the end of stage bosses every single enemy is killed with one hit.
    There are 3 item drops that are possible when you kill an enemy:
    A square block with a T in it – If you collect enough of these I think you get an extra man, I never collected enough. But, as the game has unlimited continues and the levels are pretty short I never missed the extra lives.
    A square block with a skull in it – This takes your T count back down to 0. Again, not a big deal.
    Slingshot – The slingshot gives you a short window where your projectiles are fired straight out in front of you instead of in an arc. Since every enemy dies with one hit and you get used to the arc shot that you have it most of the time there was really no advantage to this.
    Final Thoughts
    The game is very frustrating but the enemies spawn in exactly the same place every time allowing you to beat the game by memorizing the levels. Since there is hardly any depth and pretty ugly graphics there aren’t many reasons to play the game. However, the controls are pretty tight so it isn’t as bad as some other games on the system. I doubt there is a game based on an intellectual property that has less to do with the source material though.

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  19. Hoskat

    Contra Force

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Action
    Publisher: Konami
    Total time played: 1.5 Hours
    Short review: By far the weakest of the NES Contra game. It shows signs of intelligent game design but is ruined by slow down and some poor design choices.
    Interesting links related to Contra Force
    Soundtrack Live Speedrun (17min 32sec) Written Walkthrough Where Did I Get This Game?
    At some point over the past 25 years I picked up Contra Force but I have no idea where. The fact that I don’t remember probably means it was cheap or free. However, I am still haunted by what I did after getting my mint condition copy along with the original box and manual, also in mint condition.
    In 2008 after the stock market crash I was laid off from my job. I immediately went into survival mode and started restricting my spending and selling things I didn’t need. One of those things I didn’t need was a box of video game boxes. I decided I would never own all NES games complete so there was no reason to keep the 200 or so boxes and manuals I had. I ended up selling them all for $35 on Criagslist.
    Of all the things I sold, the mint condition Contra Force Box and Manual and complete copy of Rockin’ Kats are the ones that bug me the most. Just those 2 things are worth close to 10 times what I sold the boxes for. Oh well, live and learn.
    Contra?
    What happened? Contra and Super C are both Konami and NES classics. They are fast paced, have great guns, responsive controls and interesting levels and bosses. Contra Force was clearly not supposed to be a Contra game. It feels like this was going to be a stand alone game and at the last minute the developers slapped the Contra name on it to increase sales. Based on how expensive the game is i 2018 I am guessing they didn’t move many copies.
    Sometimes Less Is More
    I don’t even want to get into the initial character selection menu where the up, down, left and right directionals buttons on the control seem to move the cursor in random directions. I’m not going to go into how each character has multiple weapons with an upgrade system similar to Cobra Triangle, Life Force or Gradius. Just know, I have complaints about all of those things too.
    I want to talk about the multiple options you have in game for controlling two characters at one time.
    Sorry for the crappy image quality, it’s the best I could find online and honestly the image quality sums up how useful these options are.
    Pause Menu
    On the pause menu you can use any of the 4 characters at any given time. You start with 3 lives for each but if any one character gets a game over the whole team gets a game over. Luckily there are unlimited continues.
    Notice in the above image that Smith is set to 1Player. You can select any player to be the one you control, in fact, the game lets you set any number of players to 1Player, you just can’t unpause until only one player is set to 1Player.
    You can set a secondary character to any of the 6 options from the screenshot above. This will provide you 5 or so seconds of another character helping you out. The only problem is, you NEVER need the help and even if you did having an extra character on the screen slows the game down so much it is basically pointless.
    It was a good idea, but it just isn’t executed well so instead of being innovative it just becomes an option that you will never use bloating the game.
    Weapons

    Each of the 4 characters has some combination of these weapons. I found the only useful weapons to be HM (Homing Missle) and FT (Flame Thrower). Some of the weapons were so useless I would take an intentional death just to get rid of them.
    5 Levels
    Everyone knows a good Contra game has to have 8 levels, this one only has 5. I will give the game a little credit that in those 5 levels there is quite a bit of variety including 2 overhead and 3 side scrolling stages. The stages are all pretty large and the side scrolling stages give you the ability to move up and down as well, in fact, there is almost a chance you can get lost in the last level as there is no clear direction where to go.
    Wing Walking in Level 4
    Level 4 has to be the highlight of the game though. You get to walk across the wings of a plane, and, when you get to the end another plane flies by and you have to jump across to the wings on that plane. The level even features wind, if you aren’t moving the force of the wind will force you right off the back of the plane.
    Glitchin!
    As cool as Level 4 was the other 4 levels are not cool at all. There are some funky hazards and platforming required that are nearly impossible. Stage 3 features a bunch of chains you have to hang from and jump between but not being able to gain momentum between jumps meant I spent a lot of time getting through this short section of the game.
    That was until I found an interesting glitch that made that section really easy. If you hold down the jump button and pause the game and then unpause the game without ever letting go of the jump button your character jumps again in mid air. Using this technique I was able to jump right past this section of rope jumps.
    Final Thoughts
    The game wouldn’t be that bad if it had more polish. My biggest gripe is how slow the game is and how clunky the controls are. It wouldn’t be that bad if the 2 Contra games that came out first didn’t have such incredible controls and speed. The secondary character mechanic is definitely a nice touch, but it wasn’t implemented correctly. There shouldn’t be a time limit and it shouldn’t cause the game to slow down so much. Having the ability to switch between multiple forms of help that were needed to get through specific sections of the game would have added a nice bit of strategy. Instead we get a feature that isn’t needed at all to beat the game.
    Because of the games sub-par programming I had to rate it 2 stars, with another month of polishing and cleanup of the code and maybe even removing the Contra name which provides insane expectations this could have been a game people remembered.

     

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  20. Hoskat

    Bases Loaded

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Baseball
    Publisher: Jaleco
    Total time played: 50 hours
    Short review: To pick up and play a single game with a friend can provide some mild entertainment. But, if you try to play through a season you are going to quickly learn to hate this slog of a baseball game and look for any shortcuts to end games quickly.
    Interesting links related to Bases Loaded
    Soundtrack Take On The NES Library Written Review Aqualung Video Review Insturction Manual (PDF) Fun For 1 Game
    Bases Loaded is a game that every 80’s kid either had or knew someone that had it. It is a huge step above Nintendo’s original Baseball but still very dated. I hadn’t played the game in over 20 years until my friend Aaron game to visit and we played through a game against each other. We both had a lot of fun but not enough fun to play a second game.
    To beat Bases Loaded you need to win an entire season. In real baseball that means 162 games. But, thankfully Bases Loaded doesn’t require that, you just have to win 80 games out of 132 game season. But, since the game only remains fun and interesting for 1 game playing through 80 games was a huge chore. On top of this, because the game is trying to be a realistic representation of a baseball game it is very slow, taking around 30 minutes to play one game.
    My Team
    I knew this was going to be a long slog to beat so I wanted to make it as short as possible. I ended up reading reviews and watching videos for any tips to make the game shorter. My main source was from Arnpoly’s Take on the NES Library.
    Arnpoly played through the game recently with the Omaha team so I decided to do the same. It wasn’t until I was 10 games into the season that I realized Omaha is not a great team, so, playing with Omaha is like playing on hard difficulty. But, I wasn’t about to play through those first 5 hours again so I was stuck with Omaha.
    The Glitch
    I’m not sure if it was intentional or a glitch, but, luckily some smart gamers discovered that many pitchers have a pitch that is un-hittable by the other team. For the Omaha team both Foot and Waters have a pitch that cannot be hit.
    Foot’s pitch is performed by pressing Down and Left + A before starting the windup and then Down and Right before the pitch is released. It took me several games to realize that the best practice is to release Down and Left for a split second and then hit down and right. I originally tried to slide from Down and Left to Down and Right without ever lifting my thumb off of the directional pad. Doing this motion meant about half of the time the super pitch failed and the batter would hit the ball. When done correctly the super pitch works until Foot gets tired in or around the 5th inning. There is no physical indication that the pitcher is tired, but, the other team will start hitting the ball eventually and that is how you know it is time to switch pitches.
    Once Foot is tired he has a second secret pitch that is performed by pressing Down + A before starting the windup and then pressing Right on the directional pad before the pitch is released. These two pitches combined can get me into the 7th or 8th inning. Once the second pitch stops working I switch over to another pitcher, Waters.
    Waters has the same Down + A and then Right pitch as Foot. So, combining these two pitchers gets me through every game. I did not throw 80 no-hitters because it is hard to perfectly execute over all 9 innings but it was good enough to go undefeated (80-0) during the season.
    The Glitch Quit Working
    Bases Loaded is pretty realistic, in fact, after every pitch you have to wait for the catcher to throw the ball back to the pitcher. This is a nice touch that gets old midway through the first inning on opening day.
    Anyway, the game is also so realistic that after a game the pitcher you used in that game becomes unavailable for the next 2 games meaning I had to play several games using pitchers who I could not find their secret un-hittable pitch.
    What I learned was my new technology was cheating me out of using the same pitcher every game. After each game a scoreboard shows your record and a password so you can pick up where you left off next time you play. I decided to use my Retron 5 to create a save at the end of each game so I didn’t have to type in a password every time I turned on the game. As I stated, I was trying to make this game as short as possible and saving 1 minute each time I turned on the game by loading my latest save state instead of typing in a password would save me almost 1.5 hours over the course of the game.
    But, I then learned that entering the password lets you start where you left off but the password isn’t long enough to store who you used to pitch in the last game. What this means is I could use my Foot/Waters combo in every game. This ended up saving me much more time over the 80 games than not entering the password.
    Other Glitches
    Just a few other fun things I saw why playing the game:
    I once returned to first base on a pop fly thinking the defense would catch the ball, I was wrong. When the ball dropped I tried to run to second but two runners were on first base and there was no way to separate them. Both runners ran together and were both thrown out at second base. A few times I would hit a ground ball to the pitcher and he would just hold it allowing me to run around the bases for an easy inside the park homerun. Only 3 of my players hit homeruns throughout the season. The cleanup hitter, which was expected), the #7 batter who had 25 homeruns and the pitcher who had a .192 average and 0 homeruns. The pitcher also hit the longest homeruns of anyone. If a runner scores with two outs and on the same play the batter is thrown or tagged out the run still counts as long as the runner was tagged after the other runner scores. I haven’t followed real baseball in years but am almost positive the run doesn’t count if the 3rd out of the inning is recorded on the same play as another runner scoring. Batting
    Again, trying to get through the game as quickly as possible meant I needed to score runs early and then just get out on purpose as I knew the other team wouldn’t score with my pitching trick. If I was lucky I would score a run or two in the first inning and just coast through the rest of the game by bunting every pitch. If you can hit the bunt on the first pitch it saves you around 40 pitches per game, and each of those pitches requires the throw back to the pitcher. So, the time savings really adds up.
    Batting isn’t so bad and is probably the most fun part of the game. The catcher will move his glove as the pitch comes into home plate and you move the D-Pad to where the glove is and press A to swing when the ball’s shadow is over home plate. It definitely takes a while to get used to. If I hadn’t been focusing on scoring 1 run and then bunting the next 20+ batters I think I could have gotten really good at hitting.
    That’s Different
    In most baseball games that came before and after this one the view you see while playing is from behind home plate looking out at the pitcher and field. Bases Loaded flips this and your view is from behind the pitcher looking into home plate. It is a bit odd since really no other game does this but that is what makes the game unique.
    On top of this, while running bases the controls seem weird at first. B advances the runner and A makes him go back to the previous base. you control which runner moves by pressing the direction of the base the runner is currently on. For example, a runner on first bases who you want to run to 2nd base requires you to press B+Right. Most other games require you to press a button plus the base you want the runner to go to (in this scenario B+Up). Other than these minor things the game controls how you expect it to.
    Stats
    For me, the most fun part of watching/playing baseball as a kid was keeping track of stats. Who hit the most HR’s, who has the highest batting average, etc. Bases Loaded has some cool features where players get tired and you can sub in new players which is rare for a game of this era. Each player has a batting average and home run total but these numbers are static. That means the first game of the season and the 80th game of the season you are looking at the exact same stats for your players. I know these early NES games couldn’t have handled the amount of computer power and storage space needed for stats and that is a huge downer for me in this game. It removed all incentive to play the game for real and made me focus even more on beating it as quickly as possible.
     No Hitters and Triple Plays
    Even with the pitching glitch I mentioned above you have to pitch perfectly to keep the other team from getting a hit. After about 30 games I realized the controller I was using was worn out so using a different controller greatly increased the number of no hit games I had.
    It took 27 wins but I finally threw a no hitter.
    Around 25 games in I got a triple play which I don’t think I have ever done in a video game before. The bases were loaded and the batter popped a fly ball to second base. I caught the ball and was close enough to step on second base to get the runner out who was halfway between 2nd and 3rd. I then threw the ball to first base before that runner could return to the bag. It was a very satisfying series of events after giving up 3 hits and having the bases loaded with no outs.
    Just a few more of my 20+ no hitters. Also, what does “YUK DUM BOO BUM” mean?

    Slow and Steady
    Some NES games are really hard and I would play for days never making any progress. These are the most frustrating of all NES games. Bases Loaded is not this kind of game. Bases Loaded requires nothing but a lot of time and persistence to beat. After learning about the super pitch and getting the hang of hitting, the game produces absolutely no challenge.
    In fact, for almost every game I played I was either listening to podcasts or watching TV shows on my laptop. While I complained the entire time I played through the game it is nice to have the time to veg out and just relax while still slowly making progress through the game.
    Final Thoughts
    Famous retro gamer and speedrunner, The Mexican Runner, was the first person I ever heard of that beat every NES game. He recorded his entire journey so watching him play through games is where I do a lot of my research on how to best beat these games. His website is super detailed with stats from his journey to beat every game. The most interesting stat about Bases Loaded is that it took him 46 hours to beat. That is the 3rd longest game out of every game on the system. This gives me great satisfaction to know there are only two games longer than this one left on my journey, Miracle Piano (Where I will actually learn to play piano) and Might and Magic (which I know nothing about).
    However, with that good news comes really bad news. There are 4 Bases Loaded games on the NES and they are all very long. So, even though I’ve beaten the longest and most boring of the bunch there is still a lot more Bases Loaded in my future.
    I am both very proud to have finally finished Bases Loaded and I am very embarrassed that I’m pushing 40 years old and spent 50 hours playing a 30 year old NES game that just isn’t that fun. I feel like the semester of a really easy yet boring class has just ended.
    I highly recommend playing through a game or two with a friend, but, I would never wish playing through an entire season on my worst enemies.

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  21. Hoskat

    Battle Chess

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Board Game
    Publisher: Data East
    Total time played: 1.5 Hours
    Short review: If you are a fan of chess and looking for a challenge this game will give it to you. But, if you want to play a 30 year old chess game there are better options.
    Interesting links related to 
    Speedrun (3min 29seconds) Video Review (CGRundertow) Soundtrack Let’s Talk Box Art
    If you were a kid in the early 90’s and a fan of video games the cover art of this game would really grab your attention as it looks like an action role playing game. If I saw the box without the title I would guess it was a Gauntlet or Golden Axe game. If I had rented this game as a kid I would have been very mad when I got home.
    It’s Chess
    This is chess, nothing more (well, a little more that I’ll complain about later). If you look at it as a chess game only it is ok. But, there are a couple of major issues. First, it is very very slow. When you make a move it can take the computer up to a full minute to make their move. Yes, I realize that this is realistic to actual chess, but this is a video game and if you can’t improve on the real world version of the game then it shouldn’t exist.
    One Thing Sets It Apart
    The one thing that sets Battle Chess apart from other chess games is related to the “3d” game mode where all of the pieces have a bit more detail and when one piece captures another you are treated with a short animation battle between the pieces. The animations are actually pretty good for the NES but they are very slow and you will get tired of watching them before the first game is over.
    Thankfully the developers realized that not everyone would want to see the animations and allows the player to turn them off. But, turning the animations off removes the only thing that differentiates this game from other chess games.
    What’s that brown blob that appeared after the pawn jumped?
    Speaking of, the game Archon (which as of April 2019 I have not played for this blog) features chess battles where the player actually controls their piece in battle and has to defeat the enemy. So, if you want to play just chess, The Chessmaster is a much better game and if you want to control chess pieces that fight, Archon is the better game.
    Take Your Time
    Conceptually I understand why it takes so long for the computer to make a move in this game. There are near infinite possibilities for moves and there is obviously some logic happening behind the scenes to make sure the computer makes a move that is competent for the difficulty setting the player is playing on. I could forgive this if I hadn’t played The Chessmaster which looks better, plays better and has many more difficulty settings without the long wait between each moves.
    Difficulty
    There are 6 difficulty levels. Novice and Level 1-5. I decided to give Level 2 a try as I figure it would be like playing on Medium difficulty. After about 10 attempts I realized I was not that good at chess so I dropped down to level 1. I attempted a few more times and wasn’t getting any closer to outsmarting the computer. I’m honestly not sure if I am that bad at chess or if the computer is just insanely hard. So, I ended up playing on novice and still losing more than a few times before finally beating the computer. This has been a rather humbling experience for my confidence in my chess skills.
    Final Thoughts
    I’ve pretty much said everything that needs to be said…If you are looking for a great chess simulator, play The Chessmaster, if you are looking for an action game based around chess, play Archon. If you are looking to be disappointed by an overly difficult game with cool box art play Battle Chess.

     

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  22. Hoskat

    Back to the Future

    By Hoskat,

    Genre: Action
    Publisher: LJN
    Total time played: 10 Hours
    Short review: Does a decent job of hitting all of the beats of the film of the same name but it fails to make a video game worth playing.
    Interesting links related to Back to the Future
    Speedrun (17min 11sec) Soundtrack Video Review (Angry Video Game Nerd) Video Review (LJN Defender) Where Have I Been?
    It has been a while since I posted a review which means it has been 3 months since I have beaten an NES game. This is partly due to the fact that I lucked into a PS5 and have been playing through Spider-Man Miles Morales and partially because I started a YouTube channel where I am posting short spoiler free movie reviews. No fear, I’m still playing NES and hope to have a nice run of fun and easy games so it isn’t 3 months between reviews again.
    An All Time Classic
    To me, Back to the Future is a perfect movie. On top of being a perfect movie I also have a strong nostalgic attachment to it based on how young I was when I first saw it. As much as me and pretty much everyone else my age loves the movie I don’t really remember anyone ever talking about the NES game. I wonder why?
    It’s Kind of Like the Movie
    On paper this game sounds just like the movie. We get to see our hero Marty McFly riding a skateboard down the street, we see him in the 50’s diner, trying to keep his mother from falling in love with him, inventing rock n roll to make his parents fall in love and barreling down the street at 88mph to travel back to 1985. We even see the photo of him and his siblings that is slowly fading away. How could the game fail?
    Level 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5
    The first stage of the game you find Marty walking vertically from the bottom to the top of the screen. The goal is to get to the end of the street before time runs out. On the way there you have to dodge bullies like Biff from the movie. You also can find a skateboard just like Marty in the movie and it makes you move a lot faster. It’s so much like the movie!! At the bottom of the screen is a photo of your family. If you take too long to complete the level the family photo fades away. This also happens in the movie, if Marty doesn’t get back to modern day before his photo fades he won’t exist. To combat this you must pick up a lot of clocks in the street to delay the photo from fading.
    Oh, also, there are open manholes, a lot of bees, hula hooping girls, bowling pins, men carrying invisible panes of glass, oil slicks and other obstacles that aren’t in the movie. I guess they just needed to add a few things to flesh out the levels and make them more game like.
    Hope you like this screen as you’ll be seeing it a lot. But then the next level is the exact same thing again, and so is the next level and the level after that. In fact, the only differences in the levels are the color palette and how many obstacles there are. Honestly, the level design isn’t bad. The issue is there is only really one level in the entire game. It’s the repetition that makes the game so bad.
    Tips
    Points are your friend, you get extra lives pretty frequently (I think every 30,000 points). If you pick up a bowling ball you can hurl it at enemies and rack up points quickly. Bees and Bowling pins each reward you with 500 points so knock out as many as you can. You keep the bowling ball until you die. Pick up as many clocks as you can, if you don’t the photo of your family in the bottom of the screen will slowly fade away. If it disappears you lose a life. In the last stages (after the guitar mini-game) I don’t think you need to pick up clocks anymore because it seems the photo no longer fades. The “Time” in the bottom right corner counts down really fast, if it hits 0 you lose a life. In the later levels if you hit a single object in the level and fall over it is nearly impossible to complete the stage before time runs out. The skateboard is your friend. You travel much quicker on the skateboard meaning you can finish levels quickly and every second left adds to your score. You keep the skateboard until you die. The skateboard doesn’t appear unless you have the bowling ball. At the end of each stage if you jump in the air you will earn between 100-900 points depending on how high in the air you are when the stage ends. The bees attack Marty from every angle and circle around him constantly, if you stand close to the bottom of the screen the bees will disappear when they try to fly behind Marty. This is a must in later stages. Music
    The movie Back to the Future has an iconic score and soundtrack. The music is timeless just like the movie. The music in the game isn’t horrible, it has a pretty decent little melody to it. But, just like the repetitive level design the music in the game is also repetitive. The melody in the ONLY song in the game (other the the guitar mini-game which has a rendition of Johnny B Goode) is short, very very short. You will hear the less than 10 seconds loop something like 250 times as you play through the game. By the end you will have been driven crazy by the song.
    Have you ever heard how police will sometimes blast annoying music to draw people out of a house or building during hostage situations? I honestly can’t think of any song that would drive someone out quicker than the song in the game.
    Mini Games
    The game features a map that has a few iconic locations from the movie. As you progress through the one level over and over again you reach one of these locations and play a mini game from the movie. In fact, these games are by far the best part of the game even if they are all short and not that fun.
    The game map The Diner – Marty finds himself behind the counter at the diner throwing milkshakes at approaching bullies. In order to beat the game you must hit 50 bullies before a single bully makes it to the diner counter. To me, this is the hardest mini game in the entire game. The issue is Marty can stand in 6 different positions behind the counter and must be perfectly aligned with the approaching bullies to hit them. As you hit more bullies they move faster making it imperative to have perfect placement and quick reaction time to beat the level.
    As you get close to 50 bullies they began throwing projectiles at Marty adding another layer of complexity. If you are lucky, a waitress will bring you a milkshake, if you pick up the milkshake you can hit the B button to clear all bullies from the screen. Honestly, once you get past this mini-game the rest of them aren’t that bad. While it only takes 50 points to win the maximum score is 99. On more than 1 occasion I scored all 99 possible points.
    The School – On the surface this mini game looks and plays a lot like the diner mini game. But, now you are on the left side of the screen and instead of hitting bullies with milkshakes you are blocking kisses with a school book. What makes this easier than the diner is the hearts always come at the same rate and are pretty easy to catch. Again you must catch 50 to beat the level. I was able to score the maximum score of 99 points more than half of the time.
    The Dance – In the movie’s climax Marty plays guitar on stage at the school dance where his parents fall in love and in the process he invents rock n roll music. In this mini game Marty must catch music notes to fill up the heart meter until his parents kiss. This is the easiest mini game in my opinion…once you know what to do. Marty can face left or right and move his guitar to a high position, mid position or low position. Notes fly at him from both directions and he must align his guitar to catch them. The sharp notes always land in the high position, the regular notes land in the mid position and the flat notes land in the low position. Once you know this the game is pretty easy.
    I bet Chuck Berry will want to hear about this. The Lightning Storm – The final level is just like the climax of the movie. Marty must drive the Deloreon time machine at 88MPH and hit the pole right as lightning strikes in order to generate the power needed to return to 1985. It is an all or nothing event and the game takes this a little too seriously. You get a single try on the final stage, if you don’t do it, no matter how many lives you have left it is game over! Talk about unfair. If you hit any lightning bolts in the road it slows you down quite a bit. From what I can tell this is 100% luck as the lightning strikes so quickly it is almost impossible to dodge.
    No Cigar
    I experienced the greatest frustration any gamer can experience. I got as close to beating this game as humanly possible without doing it. As stated above you must be traveling 88MPH in the final stage as you cross the “finish line” or it is an instant game over. On one of my attempts I crossed the line going 87MPH. This is equivalent to being at the final boss in a game and getting game over when one more hit would have killed him.

    Where is doc?
    It wasn’t uncommon for NES games based off of movies like Batman to have incredible cut scenes recreating scenes from the movie. Back to the Future didn’t do that. There were cut scenes but it was just text scenes like you may see in a silent film. If other games didn’t have great cut scenes I wouldn’t feel like this was an omission but just a limitation of the hardware. But, if Ninja Gaiden can have killer cut scenes that makes me think the programmers of Back to the Future were just lazy or ran out of time.
    But, I can live without the cut scenes if the game included the co-star of the movie Doc Brown. He is such an iconic character and is a huge part of the story. He deserved more than being the voice of the words in the silent movie style cut scenes.
    Final Thoughts
    I honestly didn’t hate this game. it is really simple and repetitive but is mildly entertaining. It hits a lot more of the movie beats than most games in the genre even if the co-star of the movie, Doc Brown, is never shown on screen. I’d say this game is worth playing but not worth the time investment to beat. It is a short game, 15-20 minutes, but, it will take you dozens of attempts to get through it unless you get really lucky. By the time I beat the game I could get to the final stage every time. From what I’ve read and watched online the Deloreon stage seems to just be pure luck. The lightning bolts seems to be random and appear so quickly they are hard to dodge. You have to use your instincts to anticipate where they are going to land and get lucky. I had some theories that the better you did in the mini-games the easier the final stage would be but I ended up scrapping that idea after my dozens of attempts did not produce results to back up my hypothesis.
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  23. Hoskat
    Genre: Platform
    Publisher: Konami
    Total time played: 2 hours
    Short review: A sad followup to a decent NES game that has more in common with Adventures in the Magic Kingdom than Tiny Toons.
    Interesting links related to Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble In Wackyland
    Soundtrack Video Review (Brotherhood of Gaming) Tool Assisted Speedrun (13min 13sec)
    An unneeded sub-par sequel
    When I was a kid I played the Tiny Toons NES game quite a bit and really enjoyed it. Revisiting it as an adult I really didn’t care for it that much. But, somehow I never realized that a sequel had even been released. It came out in 1993 and I had moved on to Sega Genesis and was probably obsessing over Mortal Kombat at the time. Finally, 24 years later, I decided to give it a shot. It is like the game designers took everything good about the first game and removed it. All that is left is a shell, a game with only 5 levels and no way to change characters.
    How to play
    The game has just as much in common with Adventures in the Magic Kingdom as it does with the original Tiny Toons. The game starts off with a level select screen that looks like a theme park map and you are tasked with “riding” four different rides. If you can finish the ride you get a golden ticket. Getting 4 golden tickets gives you the ability to enter the castle at the center of the park.
    The one feature of the game I kind of like is that the points you collect on each level can be traded in at the ticket gate for extra tickets. This is essentialy your lives. You start off with 10 tickets and each ride costs a different number of tickets to ride. If you run out of tickets and you don’t have enough points to buy more tickets it is game over. Of course there are continues, so it isn’t truly game over. Also, once you get all four golden tickets and reach the final stage there is no more need for tickets meaning you can try the final level 100 times and never get a game over.
    Unfortunately none of the levels feature a checkpoint meaning that if you die you must start at the beginning every single time. Most of the levels can be beaten in under 2 minutes, but if you make it 1 minute and 59 seconds into the level and die you have to play the entire thing again. Each stage features 3 ways to die:
    Falling into a hole Getting hit 3 times without picking up a heart which restores one hit point. Running out of time (this is only an issue on the bumper cars and final stage as the other 3 are all self scrolling stages.) Choose your stage
    Level by level
    Rollercoaster – Cost to ride – 4 tickets – Play as Babs
    In this level you ride a “roller coaster” through a bunch of obstacles that require you to jump, duck and even hang upside down from the roller coaster cart. Be prepared to play this level a lot as there is a lot of trial, error and memorization needed to reach the end.

    Train – Cost – 2 tickets – Play as Hampton
    This is probably the easiest of the games levels. Basically you move left to right on top of a train car while jumping over signs, ducking under tunnel entrances and hitting birds or bad guys that come your way by tapping B and lunging into them belly first. Other than the final level this is the only one that features a boss. The boss is a dog who pops out of holes in the front of the train. In order to beat him you must bop him with your belly a few times before he punches you to death (it sounds more violent than it is).

    Log Flume – Cost – 3 tickets – Play as Furball
    This level is very similar to the roller coaster level. But, now you are riding on a log through water instead of hanging from a roller coaster track. The level is slightly easier than the roller coaster level because you don’t have the option to hang upside down giving you one less move to have to consider when avoiding obstacles.

    Bumper Cars – Cost – 1 ticket – Play as Plucky
    A top down view of a small bumper car arena that has bumpers that bounce you around like in a game of pinball. There are 3 different arenas where you must knock two opponents into the small hole into the floor before they knock you in the hole 3 times. There isn’t much strategy involved, I found just brute force and button mashing got me through this stage pretty quickly.

    Funhouse – Cost – 50 regular tickets or 4 golden tickets – Play as Buster
    Like most NES games the final level is the hardest in the game. This one required me to look up how to beat it online, but not for the normal reason you would expect in a maze level.
    There are several different sections of this level all involving platforming. The goal is to jump over holes, kill the bad guys, walk through the maze of doors and walk on both the floor and ceiling until you find the end. There was one specific spot that I could not get past. I was on the ceiling and there was a wall in front of me that I could not jump over and the gap at the bottom was too small to walk under.
    Halfway there. Now to run and slide again.
    I didn’t realize that holding B while walking allowed you to run, the reason I didn’t know this is because I was 95% of the way through the game and I had never needed the feature. Once I figured this out I was able to run and slide under the small gap at the bottom of the wall to progress. This was pretty tough as I was on the ceiling but the down arrow on the controller still made me duck, it just wasn’t intuitive.
    Once you finally get through the maze you come to a room with your secret admirer, Elmira. You must jump across small ledges above her to the door on the opposite side of the room. If you fall she will smother you with kisses, but she does not take away a heart like every other enemy in the game, she takes 10 seconds off of the game clock. This is the only stage I ever ran out of time on and I did it more than once. The key is to just not touch Elmira.
    I figured getting passed her was the end of the level, but there was still quite a bit to go. Luckily, no more mazes. After finally getting through the entire level which took more time than all of the other stages combined (because I kept dying) I reached the final boss, Montana Max.
    Max rides in a blimp and throws bombs that you must kick back into him. It takes 5 hits to beat him and luckily I did it on my first try because I was sick of playing the final stage.
    Final Thoughts
    While this is not a good game I can’t fault the controls or the graphics. There are some good ideas that just weren’t completely fleshed out. If there had been twice as many levels, the ability to play as whatever character you wanted and some of the longer stages had checkpoints this would have been a great game. But, I rated it 3.5 hearts because it felt like the game designers were being lazy and it isn’t one that has a lot of replay value.

     
     

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  24. 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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  25. 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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