Take on the NES Library

Is it a run-and-gun game or a maze game? Well, how about both!

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Beat the game on Hard difficulty
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 9/25/16 – 10/2/16
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
Video: Alien 3 Longplay

Hot on the heels of Bram Stoker’s Dracula comes another licensed NES game based on a movie. Both games are late, obscure NES releases that even share the same developer. I thought that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was pretty fun, so let’s see if the same holds true with Alien 3.

The film Alien is a 1979 science fiction movie about a crew who comes across an old alien spacecraft. One of the crew members becomes the host to one of the aliens who then attempts to kill every living thing on their spaceship, and the crew is forced to come up with a way to get rid of the alien to ensure their own survival. (Hopefully this is a sufficient explanation since yet again I have not seen the movie.) The film was both a box office and critical success and is widely regarded today among the best movies ever made. Later there would be three movie sequels, a prequel movie, and a spin-off series Alien vs. Predator. Currently there is another prequel movie in the works and possibly more in the future.

This popular series made its way into several video games based on most of the movies. Alien 3 was the base of three distinct games. The SNES game was released in 1993 and it is run-and-gun platformer with a mission-based style. The Game Boy game is a top-down survival adventure style game. The Master System version is a run-and-gun platformer with maze-like levels. This version was also released on the Genesis, Game Gear, Commodore 64, and Amiga. The NES version of Alien 3 has the same format as the Master System version but it has a unique set of levels. Because of the different stages it can be considered a fourth unique adaptation of Alien 3. The NES version was developed by Probe Software and published by LJN. Acclaim manufactured the carts and may also have had a role in its publishing. It was released in March 1993 almost a year after the film and also has a PAL version that was released in Europe and Australia.

In Alien 3 your goal is to guide Ripley through the prison on Fiorina 161. The aliens have taken the prisoners captive and along the way you must seek out and free each of these prisoners as well as escape safely to the next area. There are many aliens that will stand in your way including the guardian alien boss battles. There are eight levels total in the game as well as four boss levels. Clear all the levels and you win the game!

Before starting the game there are some options available on the title screen. You can turn both the music and sound effects either on or off. There is also a Configure menu with more options. Here you can set the difficulty level to either Easy, Normal, or Hard. You can also play any of the songs and sound effects, as well as set the number of lives from one to nine. The defaults are Normal difficulty and three lives.

The game has pretty nice graphics. The backgrounds and sprites are clear for the most part and there is a fair amount of color considering the mostly drab setting of a prison. However, what stands out the most in this game is the music. The soundtrack to Alien 3 was written by Jeroen Tel and the sound to me is both atmospheric and tense. It’s worth listening to outside of the game for sure.

The controls are straightforward. Use the D-Pad to walk around. You can use Up and Down to climb ladders, and Up is also used to open and close doors. The A button jumps and the B button fires your weapon. Weapons can be aimed diagonally upward as well as straight up for a total of five different firing directions. Press Select to change weapons and press Start to pause.

You begin the game with a full assortment of four weapons. The base weapon is the pulse rifle that is weak but has a high rate of fire. It is an effective weapon but burns through ammo very quickly. The flamethrower is an excellent close range weapon with a large swath of flame to engulf nearby aliens. The grenade launcher is a powerful weapon at long range with a lower rate of fire as a trade off. The hand grenades can be tossed and bounced on the ground and they pack a pretty good punch if you can get the timing right. All of the weapons prove useful especially when utilized in the correct situation.

There are a number of pickups as well that will help you out. There are ammo refills for each of the four weapons. First aid kits will restore your health just as you would expect. There is also a radar item that will active the tiny radar in the corner of the status bar. The radar generates a little blip in the direction of a nearby prisoner.

There are only a few enemies that show up in the game. The most prominent enemy is the adult alien though they do have a variety of patterns and moves to mix things up. Some move fast and some move slow. Sometimes they spit acid at you. Other times they latch on to the ceiling and drop down right in front of you if you get too close. The other enemy type is the face-hugger. These are small aliens that burst out of pods and latch onto your face if they touch you. If this happens you need to shake Left and Right on the D-pad to get them off. I never let them latch on to me in all the times I played but that is how the manual describes it. You can also destroy their pods before they come out and defeat them that way which is much easier.

The game is an action game on the surface but it really plays like a maze game. Each level is an arrangement of corridors, shafts, and dead ends. You need to search out all of the paths in order to locate the prisoners and find out which sections are best left ignored. Each stage has a set number of prisoners that you must untie and free, and then once all the prisoners are saved you will need to locate the exit in order to escape.

The aliens in the game are not nearly as scary as the time limit. On the one hand you need to take the time to explore everything in order to find both the prisoners and the proper route through the facility. On the other hand, you need to rush through everything to make it to the end in time. There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing the last stretch of the stage just as you run out of time knowing you will need to repeat the level all over again. The one nice thing the game does for you here is that if you missed any prisoners the game pans through the level revealing the location of each missing inmate. However you also get to see that prisoner get murdered right before your eyes as a little mental punishment.

After every two stages there is a Guardian level where you square off against one of the boss creatures. The levels themselves are small battle arenas so the focus is purely on combat. There is still a relatively strict time limit in place so you need to work quickly. You might think the Guardians would actively hunt you down, but instead they have a set pattern that they patrol constantly. The key here is to find where the save spots are and fire away until you defeat the boss. I found these fights to be much easier than the normal levels.

I mentioned earlier that there were three difficulty levels. I only played the game on Hard difficulty and tinkered a bit with the lower settings. As far as I could see, the only difference is that the time limit is lower on the harder settings. I think everything else is the same though I haven’t played enough to see if there are other changes.

This was my first time playing through Alien 3. I remember acquiring this game in an eBay game lot in the summer of 2013. I think it was in the first batch of games I bought whenever I decided that I would pursue NES collecting for good. I would say it’s an uncommon game so that was a good pickup for me at the time. I know I had a double of the game that I sold off at some point as well.

Alien 3 is the type of game where you need to play it over and over again just to make a little bit of progress each time. I finished the game in a week over close to a dozen attempts. I insist on beating the game on the hardest difficulty right off the bat, but in this case I could have benefited from learning the levels on Easy and then putting it all together for a run on Hard. I think there is at least some benefit to learning the levels under a tighter timeframe that probably helped me out a little bit. A week is a good amount of time to spend on a game anyway!

I was able to capture my winning run on video. It was a really solid run with only a few minor mistakes and stumbles, but that is only because I had to hone in my strategy through repetition. It was very close to being a deathless run as well. It was close enough that I decided to leave that death in there as a reminder of how mean this game can be sometimes. Other than that one big mistake it was a nice run for my first time clearing the game.

I decided to rate Alien 3 with a 7 on difficulty just because it is a game you have to learn over time. There are no continues so you can’t really grind through the game apart from starting from scratch each time, though you can set up to nine lives for the most opportunities to practice the later stages per attempt. Actually, I was all set to give it an 8 in difficulty but I realize that I only made it harder on myself so that I could clear it on Hard.

Alien 3 is a competent and playable game, but it has a few issues that make the game not as much fun as it could be. The most notable issue is that the screen scrolling only kicks in when you get really close to the edge of the screen. You can hardly see what is in front of you and it is very annoying. I actually wonder if that was done intentionally to introduce the element of surprise when an alien shows up in your face. Either way it is not a fun gameplay element to have so little visibility. The other somewhat related thing is that I don’t find the aliens to be that much of a threat in the first place. I found that unless you play very carelessly you are more likely to run out of time than to run out of health, at least on Hard difficulty. I was more concerned with running recklessly through the stage to outrun the clock and just take damage in places to get through quicker. There are other more minor issues as well. The jumping is kind of loopy and slow, and the screen scrolling stutters sometimes. The boss battles are pretty lame. There are also a lot of dead ends and loops in the stages that are frustrating to pass through.

Alien 3 is a competent and playable game, but it is these issues that really hold the game back from being a better game. I can see that there is a good game there that just can’t shine through like I would want. Mediocre games such as Alien 3 are really not that bad for me in terms of my project, but I would not give them a strong recommendation either. Alien 3 is fine but there are better games out there that are more worth your time. If anything it is worth checking out just for the music!

Let’s kick the board game format up a notch with Archon.

To Beat: Win a match
To Complete: Win as both the Light team and Dark team
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 9/21/16 – 9/23/16
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
Video: Archon Longplay

Today is a big day for Take On The NES Library! I am finally incorporating game play videos for some games going forward, and we are kicking off this momentous occasion by talking about the first strategy game covered on this site.

Archon: The Light and the Dark was originally released in 1983 for Atari 8-bit computers. It was developed by Free Fall Associates and published by Electronic Arts. The game is notable both for being among the first titles published by EA and a huge hit for Free Fall Associates. The game was so popular that EA wanted a sequel quickly, so the developers released Archon II: Adept the following year in 1984. The original Archon was ported to many home computer systems and was a success on pretty much every one. The NES would receive a port of this game all the way in December 1989 published by Activision and Bullet-Proof Software.

Archon can be adequately summarized as an action chess game. There are two sides, light and dark, composed of fantasy creatures that duke it out for control of a 9×9 grid. Each side takes turns moving a creature from one space to another. If a character is placed on a square occupied by a member of the opposite team, the gameplay switches to the combat arena. Here you take direct control of your creature as you attempt to defeat the opponent by thumping or shooting them enough to deplete their life bar. Defeated creatures are removed from the board and the winner occupies the square. There are also five power spots on the board: One in the middle of each of the four edges of the board and one in the center. You can win by either destroying all of the enemy creatures on the other team or by occupying all five power spots at the same time.

The game board consists of light squares, dark squares, and shifting squares called Lumina squares. Light squares and dark squares always stay the same, but the Lumina squares change color throughout the game after every other turn. There are five different shades of Lumina square: light, light blue, blue, dark blue, and dark. All the Lumina squares start off blue and shift toward dark, then reverse and shift toward light. This cycle repeats through the course of the game. The color of these squares is important because light characters are stronger on lighter squares and dark characters are stronger on darker squares. It is to your advantage to engage in combat on those squares when they match your color.

There are several types of creatures in the game and they can be separated into two groups. There are ground creatures and flying creatures. Ground creatures cannot move through squares occupied by other characters and must have a direct walking path to the desired square. Flying creatures can go over units and land on any square within flying range. Each character has a range of squares they are allowed to travel during a move ranging from three squares to five. If a ground character can walk four squares, then it gets a combination of four horizontal or vertical steps and that’s all for that turn. If a flying character can move four squares, then it gets up to four squares of horizontal movement and up to four squares of vertical movement. As a result, flying creatures can cover significantly more ground per turn than ground creatures.

Ground characters on each side match up against each other on the board for the most part. The leaders are the light Wizard and dark Sorceress. They are the only characters capable of spell casting which I will get to in a little bit, and they also move via teleporting which evidently is exactly the same as flying but with a different animation. The light Knights and dark Goblins are the pawns of this game with short range attacks and weak stamina. The light Unicorns and dark Basilisks are quick and reasonably strong. The light Archers and dark Manticores are a tad on the weaker side but have long range attacks. The light Golems and dark Trolls are very slow but very strong.

The remaining matchups demonstrate the differences between the two teams. The light Valkyrie is a bit stronger than the similar Archer. On the other side, the dark Banshee has a scream attack that drains the enemy health when in close range, and it is the only attack in the game that allows the character to move while the attack is in action. The light Djinni is the best light attacker though only a little better than the Valkyrie. Opposite it, the dark Shapeshifter turns into whichever enemy opposes it in combat, matching its stats exactly. The light Phoenix can explode dealing massive damage when touching an opponent while doubling as a defensive move that nulls any attack during the move’s duration. The dark Dragon has both the strongest long-range attack in the game as well as the most health.

Combat is pretty straightforward. The arena contains the two combatants and a seemingly random arrangement of objects. You can move in eight directions and attack with the A button. When you or an opponent fires off an attack, there is a delay before the next attack is allowed. This recharge time varies per character. A noise will sound whenever the next attack is ready to go. The tone is a higher pitch for the light character and a lower pitch for the dark character so you can easily distinguish the two. The objects in the arena are stationary but shift state frequently enough that there’s no real way to determine how those spaces will behave. Sometimes attacks will go right through them and sometimes they get blocked. Character movement through these obstacles may or may not be permitted or it might be allowed at a slow, plodding pace. It adds enough randomness to the battles so that combat is tense and exciting.

Both the Wizard and Sorceress have access to the same complement of spells. Each spell may only be used once per game, and the spell may not target a character stationed on one of the power spots. If the Wizard or Sorceress is defeated then no spells may be cast by that side. Another interesting wrinkle is that using a spell drains a bit of health from the spellcaster. To use a spell, press A when selecting the caster and a spell dialog will appear at the bottom of the screen. You may cycle through the spells with Up and Down and cast the spell by pressing A. You can also select the Cancel option if you don’t want to use a spell.

There are seven spells in Archon. The Teleport spell moves any character on your team to any square not already occupied by another team member. You can move a character onto an opponent to engage them in battle directly. The Heal spell restores the health of any one of your characters. The Shift Time spell reverses the flow of the Lumina squares. The Exchange spell swaps any two creatures on the board no matter which team they belong. The Summon Elemental spell calls a temporary elemental to attack any opponent on the board. It could be an earth, air, water, or fire elemental that is chosen at random and each has different characteristics in combat. Either win or lose, the elemental is removed from play after the battle is over. The Revive spell brings a defeated creature back into play. The revived character must be placed on a square adjacent to the spellcaster. The Imprison spell can be cast on any creature locking them to the board. The affected creature is not able to move on the board until the Lumina squares match the team color, though opponents may engage an imprisoned creature in battle at any time.

One more interesting thing to mention is that there is the possibility of a tie game. If there are few characters remaining on each side and no combat or spellcasting occurs in a set number of turns, the game will be called a draw. This was implemented to encourage combat. The other more straightforward stalemate happens when the last two characters on the board kill each other at the same time.

This was my first time playing Archon but I had great success for a beginner. I started playing as the Light team and I got beat down pretty quickly. I was losing characters left and right as I got used to the combat and characters. About halfway through the match the game clicked with me and I started mounting a comeback, but despite that it started to look like it was too little to late. The best character I had remaining was my Wizard and I decide to go for broke and try to take out the Sorceress. She had not moved the entire game and her square is always dark, but despite the disadvantage I managed to win that fight. After that I picked off all the remaining enemies for a win by brute force.

Since it didn’t take me very long to win the game and the dark team plays differently from the light team, I wanted to get a win from the other side. This was the run I recorded for YouTube. It did not start out particularly well but I ended up winning in half the moves required for my first victory. I also won the match by occupying all five of the power spots instead of defeating all the enemies.

Archon is a fun, short game that might be worth a look if you are interested in chess or light strategy games. The graphics and music are adequate and don’t get in the way of the action at all, but the gameplay is solid and that’s what’s important in a game like this. I didn’t even mention yet that the game has a 2-player mode that is sure to be a lot of fun once both players get a few matches under their belt. For myself, I enjoyed playing the game but unless I get another player involved I don’t see myself playing very much more Archon in the future.

Today marks the one year anniversary for Take On The NES Library!

What started off as an idea to get some play out of my NES collection has turned into something really good thus far. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get it off the ground at all due to the long time with building the website and structuring everything in a way I could be happy with. I spent about four months off and on figuring out WordPress and the design I wanted for the website, as well as randomizing and working the master game list. Finally on November 23rd, 2015, it was time to pop in Super Mario Bros. and take off on this long journey. The next day I furiously wrote and published my first of many blog posts and I have been sprinting ahead ever since. So far things have gone just as well as I could have hoped for. I have a very long way to go, but the fact that I am still going strong after a full year makes me feel pretty good about seeing this all the way through. I’m excited to sit down and play each and every new game and I hope to continue that enthusiasm for years to come.

Just for fun, I ran some numbers to get a glimpse of just how long this whole project may take. Though I have only written and published posts for 30 licensed NES games, I have actually beaten 38 games total. Now 2016 was a leap year so that makes 38 games beaten in 366 days, which comes out to roughly 9.6 days per game finished. I count 669 unique licensed NES games, so I am on pace to finish Take On The NES Library in 6,443 days. That makes the last day July 14th, 2033. Only 16 1/2 years to go! Of course there will still be other NES games to play aside from just the licensed games, so there is opportunity here for this site to never really have an ending if that’s what I want to pursue.

I also want to do some kind of special year in review post, and since I started this close enough to the end of the year I think that will be something I will write up in January. I think it could be fun to treat it like an award show and hit all the high points and low points of this project. But that’s for another day, so for now here’s to one year of Take On The NES Library and let there be many more to come!

Can you make all the pieces fit? I sure hope so!

To Beat: Complete any round
To Complete: Win a round on the highest difficulty against the computer
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 9/16/16
Difficulty: 1/10
My Difficulty: 1/10

As discussed here on this blog before, there were many companies that wanted to get a piece of the NES pie, including popular toy maker Fisher-Price. Developed for kids, Fisher-Price: Perfect Fit was just the game I needed to check off the list as I have been waiting to balance out all that time spent on mastering Ikari Warriors. Contrary to the title, this game isn’t exactly a good fit for the current NES collector or player unless you want to feel that satisfaction of completing any old NES game.

Fisher-Price was founded in 1930 by Herman Fisher, Irving Price, his wife Margaret Evans Price, and Helen Schelle. They originally made wooden toys but eventually switched to plastic in the 1950s which helped the company continue to grow. The Quaker Oats company bought Fisher-Price in 1969 after Herman Fisher retired. Fisher-Price became an independent company once more in 1991 and was bought in 1993 by Mattel.

In addition to their toy lines, there were a number of PC games bearing the company name. Three of these games were ported to the NES: Perfect Fit, I Can Remember, and Firehouse Rescue. The earliest release of these three was Firehouse Rescue but it turned out to be the last of the NES ports so I will be covering that one last. These three games appear to be the only console releases of any Fisher-Price video game. The early Fisher-Price games are all published by GameTek, and Perfect Fit on NES was developed by Beam Software. This was a US exclusive title.

Perfect Fit is a game meant for young children, so the controls and rules are quite simple. The object of the game is to match up pieces with their places on the puzzle. These pieces can be letters, numbers, toys, and other objects like that. One at a time, these pieces will drop down a chute on the left side of the screen. On the puzzle there will be silhouettes of these objects. You have to move the current piece on top of the matching shadow and press A to put the piece down. Get it right and the next piece will come down, but if you get it wrong you will hear a buzz and you get to try again with no further penalty. Place all the pieces correctly and you win! There are three puzzle boards to solve and you win the game when you complete all three.

There are three difficulty levels. Level One has few pieces to solve so this mode is great for a first time young player. Level Two introduces a flip mechanic. In this mode there are two fields below the chute labelled “Flip Image” with arrows. One field is for flipping the piece horizontally and the other is for vertical flips. If you need to flip the piece to get it to match up, simply place the piece over the appropriate field and press A to flip the piece in the direction indicated by the arrow. This difficulty also introduces a time limit and scoring. In Level Two you get six minutes to finish all the three puzzles and for every second left at the end of the game you are awarded 10 points. Difficulty Level Three is the same as Level Two but with a stricter time limit of three minutes and 20 points awarded for each remaining second at the end.

This game has a two player mode where players take turns solving their own puzzles and compete for the higher score in the scoring modes. Before starting the game you get to enter your name for display on the level start screen and high score screen. There is also a single player mode versus the computer. The CPU opponent is named Electro. Ultimately this gives no advantage when playing. It’s mildly interesting watching the AI bumble through piece placement. I found while playing that the AI always attempts to place the piece in the correct spot but does not know which way to properly flip the piece, so it will alternate between horizontal flips and vertical flips and test each time to see if the piece actually fits. Despite the slow going it seems to be able to solve all the puzzles in time.

One minor oddity about the scoring system is that the way to get the best scores is through Level Two difficulty. There is a maximum score and points are essentially lost the longer the game goes on. That maximum score is the same for Levels Two and Three but the point loss is twice as fast in Level Three as it is in Level Two. The high score chart is shared between these difficulty levels. I suppose if the game designers really cared about scoring then there would be some kind of point bonus just for playing on the harder level.

This was my first time playing Perfect Fit and there’s a pretty good chance that it will also be my last time playing the game. While playing I completed all difficulty settings both alone and with the CPU player. It was overkill even though the game didn’t take too long. I also played with my daughter in the room to see how interested she would be in the game. She is not quite two years old yet so she’s not really ready for the game yet. She does enjoy holding the controller and pressing buttons for a few minutes, and she also knew what each of the letter and number pieces were. I think the graphics may be a bit too primitive for her to recognize any of the other pieces when I asked her what they were.

There’s really not much else to say about Perfect Fit. It plays well but doesn’t do much to hold your attention. Kids today have much better options for introductory gaming. The only thing perfect about it is that is it a very easy game to clear for the sake of an NES completion project like this one. Perhaps there’s a benefit here for easing a child into using a game controller if he or she is interested in playing NES games. Otherwise there’s really no reason to play Perfect Fit.

I played through Perfect Fit on my NES top loader and not long after that I received my AVS console. Aside from a few exceptions like Zapper and R.O.B. games, going forward I will be playing everything else with my AVS. I also have started capturing footage starting with the next game so there are gameplay videos coming soon. I didn’t make one for Perfect Fit but I don’t think it’s a big loss!

All the shorts-eating you could ever hope for!

To Beat: Reach the Ending
Played: 9/5/16 – 9/14/16
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 7/10

I think it’s safe to say that The Simpsons has been the most successful US cartoon of all time. Such success leads to branching out all over the place and particularly into video games. There are many Simpsons games and today I will be writing about the first one!

The Simpsons show was created by Matt Groening and debuted on FOX on December 17th, 1989. The family was actually created two years prior appearing in animated shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show before appearing in their own half-hour show, and the series has lived on ever since. As of this writing, The Simpsons is in its 28th season spanning just over 600 total episodes. It is the longest running American sitcom and is near the top of many other lists of long running television programs. I have watched several episodes of the show but not regularly since I was a teenager.

There are over 20 Simpsons video games spanning the NES all the way to Xbox 360, PS3, and mobile. Bart vs. the Space Mutants was released in February 1991 and it is the first game with The Simpsons license followed just one month later by the arcade game simply titled The Simpsons. The most recent game is Tapped Out on iOS and Android which is still receiving gameplay updates today. The NES had four titles in total: Bart vs. the Space Mutants, Bart vs. the World, Bartman Meets Radioactive Man, and Krusty’s Fun House. Bart vs. the Space Mutants also appeared on the Sega Genesis, Game Gear, and various PCs. The NES version was developed by Imagineering and published by Acclaim. It was also released in Europe in late 1991.

Bart vs. the Space Mutants is a sidescrolling platformer. Aliens are attempting to take over the world and Bart Simpson eavesdrops in on their diabolical plan. They need to collect specific items in order to build an ultimate weapon, and so Bart sets out to remove those items before the aliens get them first. The story plays out exactly like this in the gameplay. Each level begins with the aliens discussing what object they need to collect, and then you set out to collect a specific number of that item to help clear the level.

The graphics have a cartoon look to them that is pulled off well on the NES. All the characters are recognizable and there are many objects that only appear once in the game so there is a lot of variety. The main issue with the graphics is that it can be tough to distinguish which background elements you can interact with in some areas. The music isn’t that bad either. The rendition of The Simpsons theme is done quite well, and there are some voice samples included too. However much of the soundtrack isn’t all that memorable.

The controls in this game are more involved than your typical platformer. The D-Pad moves Bart and the A button jumps. Bart can do a super jump by pressing both A and B at the same time and the feel for this is important as this move is used often. The run button is also A, so Bart jumps first and then he runs once A is held down. The run button is not obvious but it does come in handy. The B button is used for specific weapons. The game also has an inventory system. You can cycle through the inventory by pressing Select, and if you hold Down and hit Select the items will scroll in reverse order. Press Start to use the selected item. The Pause option shows up as part of the inventory so you will need to select the Pause option and press Start to pause the game.

One of the default items is the X-Ray Specs. The aliens disguise themselves as ordinary humans walking the streets, so the X-Ray Specs can reveal if a person of interest is either a normal person or one of the aliens. When you use the Specs the entire screen color changes to sepia tone and the alien heads are revealed if a person is indeed an alien. If it’s an alien Bart can jump on his head to defeat him. However if it is not an alien then Bart takes damage for trying to hurt an innocent bystander. When an alien is bopped a trinket is left behind that represents the proof of their existence. That’s how it’s described in the manual! Collect enough of these proof tokens in a level and one of Bart’s family members will help out in the boss battle at the end of the level. Progress is tracked by spelling out the letters of the name of the family member. For instance, the first level spells out MAGGIE and so six proofs need to be collected, one for each letter in her name. It is not required to do this but it can be helpful.

The other default items are coins. Bart can find these behind objects in the levels by jumping around. Do this in the right places and bouncing coins pop out. These can be spent just like money in certain places in the game. They also grant Bart extra lives if you collect enough. When you earn 15 coins you automatically earn an extra life, but it only costs 10 coins to buy one. I assume this was done so that you will never have fewer than 5 coins at any time unless you intentionally spend them.

There are some other items that appear but are not part of your inventory. Krusty the clown emblems give Bart an extra life and they are most helpful. Jebediah Springfield bestows the power of invincibility if you are able to locate his severed statue head powerup.

The status screen at the bottom has all the necessary information for playing the game. It shows which family member is featured in the stage along with how many letters are currently spelled out. Next to this are tiny Bart heads that show how many hits are remaining. For each life, Bart can take two hits from enemies. If he has been hit once already then one head will display and the next hit will cause a loss of life. Next to that in the status screen is the current inventory item, the score, remaining lives, the level timer, and the number of remaining goal items required to complete the level. If you reach the end of the stage without meeting the goal requirement, then the boss will not appear and you will need to backtrack to find more items. Finally on the far right the current weapon ammo is displayed.

Here are each of the five levels in the game:

Level 1 is the streets of Springfield. Bart must collect (or destroy) purple colored objects. These take all kinds of different forms and there are a number of ways to deal with them. The most common way is to collect the spray paint weapon and change the color of purple items to red, rendering them completely useless to the aliens. Other purple things need to be hidden or removed in specific ways. The first level of the game has a puzzle feel to it that is kind of a novelty for its time. This is also the main level where you purchase items to help with the purple cleanup. For instance, you can buy a wrench and use it on a fire hydrant to spray a stream of water that washes off fresh purple paint from a nearby awning. The level is challenging because there are only a few excess purple items that can be bypassed. Maggie is in this level and she will help by rolling bowling balls that Bart can use to damage the boss.

Level 2 is the Springfield shopping mall and the goal items are hats. There are stray hats all over the level but you can also lift them off a person’s head if they are wearing one. This is where the game ditches the puzzle elements of the first stage and switches to a more straightforward platforming challenge. There are lots of enemies that walk and fly around and you just need to get by them since there are no weapons in this stage. There are also areas of wet concrete that kill Bart if he sinks in them. These sections have tricky jumps that are pretty unforgiving. Marge is in this level and she will help deflect some of the boss projectiles for you.

Level 3 is Krustyland and Bart must get rid of balloons. There are some carnival mini games that Bart can play as well as one puzzle challenge for free balloons if you can figure it out in time. Bart can find slingshots here. They only damage a couple of enemies but they are most helpful in popping floating balloons that are too high to reach. There are some neat setpieces here and some tough platforming as well. Lisa can occasionally stun the boss to give Bart a breather during the fight.

Level 4 is the Springfield Museum of Natural History and Bart is collecting the exit signs. You only need to deal with six exit signs, so the level is more about surviving the obstacles than any other level in the game. Bart can get a dart gun here that can hurt some enemies as well as blow away the exit signs that are otherwise unreachable. This stage has the toughest platforming with sections that must be navigated perfectly. In some areas it is really difficult to tell what is a platform and what is just background detail, and also some of the platforms are not as big as they appear. I found it very frustrating. At the end of the stage, Homer will drop wet towels that block projectiles and cause the boss to slip up a bit.

The final level is the Springfield Power Plant and Bart must find all of the nuclear power rods. This is a large maze with multiple floors to explore. Bart can take the elevator as well as emergency stairways and he must take every path to explore every nook and cranny of the place. There are doorways here that are blocked off unless you have the keycode to open the door. There are 16 rods to find but Bart can only hold four of them at once. You have to go into the basement and drop them off at the reactor to collect more. All of the family members are here and they assist Bart in their own way. Lisa knows the door codes and she will share one if you talk to her. Marge will take your collected rods to the reactor for you sparing you a trip to the basement. Homer will scare off all the enemies from the screen if you give him a box of donuts that you find throughout the maze. Maggie wanders around but she does help you out in a specific way.

In Bart vs. the Space Mutants, you begin with 3 lives and can collect up to 9 total. There are no continues and no passwords, so the game must be cleared in one try. The challenge here comes in several ways. The first stage requires the most thought initially but it is the easiest level once you know how to do it. The three middle stages have some tough platforming and several instant kill spots. Sometimes you will have to spend all your lives getting the feel for overcoming an obstacle and then you have to start all over again. The final level doesn’t have a map of any kind, so if you miss a rod or two you are up against the clock if you get lost. The penalty for failure is steep and the game is lengthy enough that it takes several long attempts to get good enough to beat the game. I think 8/10 difficulty is a fair assessment.

I have played and beaten Bart vs. the Space Mutants but not since I was a kid. I owned all three of the “Bart” NES games in my childhood collection and I beat all three back then, but I didn’t retain a whole lot of knowledge from prior play. I remembered all of the puzzles in the first stage but that was about all I could recall.

I foolishly thought that my old knowledge would be good enough to clear the game quickly. I beat the first level with relative ease on my first playthrough, but the rest of the game featured the same kind of incremental progress I experience when playing new games. I think it took me around a dozen tries to finish this game. The latter part of the museum level took a lot of practice, and the final maze really got to me. I am generally good with maze levels and mapping things out in my head, but I got down to the last two rods and got completely stuck until I got Game Over. It’s frustrating getting so close to the end like that. Luckily the next run was the winning run and I had plenty of lives left over for a comfortable win.

The Simpsons is such an iconic television series and by extension I think there is a lot of nostalgia for Bart vs. the Space Mutants. The development team managed to put in a lot of Simpsons references in the game and the Simpsons theme sounds nice on the NES. From my playing experience, the game is rough around the edges and not all that fun to play at times, but the first level at least is genuinely clever and holds up nicely today. It’s a mediocre game with a few redeeming qualities.

A fun platformer that will only haunt you just a little bit!

To Beat: Reach the ending playing on Hard difficulty
Played: 8/31/2016 – 9/5/2016
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 7/10

It has been well over a month since I played through Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but in this case delaying the writeup plays into my favor a little bit. My last horror themed game, Ghoul School, was beaten back in April on the wrong part of the calendar. This time I get to share Bram Stoker’s Dracula with you as we approach Halloween.

The film Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released in November 1992. It was directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola and is based on the novel Dracula written by Bram Stoker, hence the name. It was released to generally positive reviews and performed well in theaters grossing over $200 million on a $40 million budget. Like most other movies that led to an NES game, I have not seen the film.

Surprisingly there were many different games that spawned from the movie. The NES version is a platformer that shares gameplay with versions released on the Game Boy, Game Gear, and Sega Master System. The Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis received their own version of the game that is a more action based platformer. The Sega CD version is yet another variation of a platformer game that isn’t all that great but does have fuzzy digitized movie cutscenes included. The Amiga version uses similar if not the same graphics as the Sega CD version yet it is another unique platformer game. Finally, the DOS version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula isn’t a platformer at all, but a first-person shooter in the vein of Doom or Wolfenstein 3D. It is amazing to me that a movie license like this led to five distinct video games plus several console variants. There’s a YouTube video from Gaming History Source that has some footage of each game to compare and contrast the versions.

The NES version of the game was released in September 1993. The game was published by Sony Imagesoft and developed by Probe Software. The Psygnosis logo appears in game before the title screen so they probably had some hand in either the development or publishing but there’s no solid information on their exact role for the NES title. I do know Psygnosis developed the other versions of the game as well as published the Amiga and DOS versions. The game was not released in Japan, but it was released in Europe. I was not able to nail down a release date for Europe but I suspect it was sometime in late 1993.

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula on NES, you play as Jonathan Harker as he seeks to defeat Dracula and save Mina Murray from his evil clutches. Your mission is to clear each of the seven scenes in the game and defeat each form of Dracula that you encounter along the way. Now the game manual describes seven scenes, but each scene is comprised of a daytime stage and a nighttime stage so there are actually 14 levels total. Each of the nighttime levels ends in a boss battle with one of Dracula’s forms.

Before starting play there is an options menu. Here you can choose your difficulty level of either Easy, Medium, or Hard as well as toggling your jump and attack buttons. There is also a sound test where you can play any of the sounds or music tracks you like.

The game plays like a typical platformer game. Jonathan can jump with the A button and attack with a short range knife with the B button. There is no run button in the game to change the player speed but it’s not really needed because Jonathan scoots along pretty fast. He can crouch by pressing Down to dodge some enemy attacks. Also while crouching the camera will pan down to show what’s below, and similarly you can look upward by holding Up while standing. Jonathan has a jumping smash move that is triggered by pressing Down while jumping. This move is typically used to destroy certain floor blocks to open a path forward.

The bottom of the screen displays the status bar. This is fairly bare bones and it takes up a decent chunk of the screen despite being sparsely populate with game info. You can see the number of lives remaining, how much health you have, how much time is left on the clock, what special weapon you have equipped if any, and how many shots remaining on the weapon. The game does have a scoring system but this only appears on the status bar when the game is paused by pressing Start. The pause screen also shows how many credits are left.

Throughout the levels there are question blocks that look like they belong in a Mario game. These boxes contain various powerups to help along the way. You can slash them with your knife or perform the jumping smash move to open them. The powerup floats upward when released from the box so they can get away pretty easily if left alone too long or if the box is opened unintentionally. Using the jumping smash to open the box makes it a bit easier to collect the item because generally you grab it as you slam into the box, but then you collect the powerup immediately without seeing what it is first. It’s kind of an interesting trade off when you think about it.

There are quite a few items to collect but most of them are standard fare. There are three different kinds of health pickups that restore a tiny bit of energy up to full health powerups. There in an invincibility item that lets you wreak havoc for 10 seconds. There’s a clock item that adds 20 seconds to the level timer. Gold coins give points and the diamond gives you even more points. There are also extra lives that show up from time to time, but even better than that are continue credits that let you continue if you run out of lives. There are no continues to start with so you can only get them by finding them in the stages. You will definitely want to memorize where the credits are hidden!

The other set of powerups are special weapons that temporarily take the place of the knife attack. These powerups are all throwing weapons and they have a limited number of uses before running out. The axe weapon slightly arcs through the air when thrown. The torch leaves a flame the spreads on the ground for a short distance that can hurt enemies that come in contact with it. The rock is tossed out in a straight horizontal line, and the triple rock is a three-way attack that has the best range.

The levels tend to be somewhat maze like. There are occasionally branching paths and dead ends, but mostly there are hidden rooms and caches of items tucked away in certain places. The hidden rooms are often enclosed behind fake walls that you can pass right through despite appearing solid. The primary path to the end of the stage winds around a lot so there is a little bit of memorization involved in finding the best way through the stage. There are lanterns throughout each level that act as checkpoints and are activated by touching them.

There are all kinds of enemies that inhabit the levels. Many of them are what you would expect to find in a game like this such as bats, zombies, skeletons, wolves, etc. There are skulls installed in the walls that shoot fireballs. There are hands that grab out at you from the background and ghosts that pop out right in front of you. There are retracting spikes in the walls, moving platforms, and crumbling platforms as well. There is enough variety here to make the game interesting to play.

Aside from a few problematic enemies, perhaps the biggest threat in the game is the level clock. I find the amount of allotted time tends to be fairly tight late in the game so there is a balance between exploring the stages for items and moving forward to reach the end. One of the frustrating aspects of the clock system is that hitting the checkpoints does not save the time remaining when they were touched. So for instance if you die 60 seconds after activating a checkpoint then you don’t get that time back. I know I got stuck in situations like this where dying in a bad spot meant that I didn’t have enough time left to reach the end of the stage.

There are a few interesting mechanics in the game that are worth mentioning. First, the daytime levels have a bit of a grace period at the start of the level where there are no enemies to deal with. Thematically it makes sense that in a horror game there would not be many daytime threats. Eventually it starts to get dark and when that happens not only do the enemies start appearing, but the screen dims a bit and the music changes to something bleaker. The nighttime levels have the enemies and traps enabled the whole way through.

Another unique aspect about the daytime levels in that each one has Van Helsing hidden somewhere. He will aid you if you find him though the benefit is not immediately evident. The bosses at the end of the nighttime levels cannot be attacked with the default knife, so if you do not have a special weapon the game will provide rock ammunition. Finding Van Helsing turns those rocks into triple rocks which make the fights significantly easier.

Finally, one recurring threat is the Bride of Dracula. These encounters act as a sort of a mini-boss battle. Here you cannot do damage to the Bride and all you need to do is survive until she goes away. When you reach her chamber she will appear, sweep across the room in some kind of pattern, and then vanish. She will repeat this several times before leaving. These parts are all about both recognizing the pattern and learning how to dodge her in that pattern. The encounters ratchet up in speed later on and the patterns get more challenging to learn.

This was my first time playing through Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I remember testing the game after I bought it and playing through the first stage. At the time I thought it was a pretty decent game and having played through it I enjoyed my time with it. I didn’t recall how I got the game in the first place, but thankfully my email records had that answer! I see that I bought the game on eBay in November 2013 for $8.99 shipped in quite nice condition. That must have been a case where I saw the listing come up and knew that it was a good price for that game. I imagine it was around a $15-$20 game when I bought it, and now it has creeped up in the $30 range.

It should be no secret by now that I like to try and beat games on the highest difficulty whenever possible, so given the choice of three difficulty levels I picked Hard from the beginning. For this particular game, that was a good choice because the game can only be beaten on Hard difficulty. Easy difficulty ends after the first two scenes, and Normal difficulty ends after the first four scenes. Hard mode is the only way to play all seven scenes. The only other differences that I have found is that the powerups are more lucrative in the easier levels. Hard mode has only small hearts, Medium replaces some of the small hearts with medium hearts, and Easy mode contains large hearts. You also get fewer uses of the special weapons the higher you go in difficulty.

It took me about a week to beat the game over 7-8 attempts. It’s the type of game where every time you play you get further while breezing through the earlier levels more quickly. This is especially true once I found where the extra lives and continue credits were hidden. However, it wasn’t exactly smooth going. One enemy type that really gave me trouble were the ghosts that pop in right in front of you. They are fine once you know where they are, but if you don’t you really have to tiptoe through the stages so you don’t collide with them as they appear. That strategy runs counter to wanting to move through the levels at a brisk pace once the clock becomes an issue. Some of the Bride portions really took some time to understand the patterns as well. Those two elements were what made the game challenging to me.

My winning run had an exciting finish. This will spoil the last level a bit, so skip ahead if you want to try this game out on your own. It was my first time playing the last stage and I had one life remaining on my final credit. I got about halfway through the level and I got completely lost. I found a room with a bunch of clock items in it which helped get my time up, but I was otherwise going in circles trying to find the boss. I ended up running out of time. Dying does not reset the clock, and every single time I had run out of time in any prior run I was on my last life anyway. As it turns out the game does give you one minute back on the clock if you run of time with lives remaining. So now I had 60 seconds to try and finish the game on my last life. I found some more clocks to give me some more breathing room, and I was able to find Dracula’s hiding spot. Down to my last bit of health and not having seen this form of Dracula before, I managed to defeat him anyway and beat the game. I wasn’t really looking forward to spending another hour or so to get back to the end of the game and lucky for me I didn’t have to try again!

Bram Stoker’s Dracula on NES is not well known at all but I think it is a pretty good game and a nice surprise. Developers had a pretty good grasp of what could be accomplished on NES during the last couple of years and they made a competent game out of this one. It’s not a masterpiece and probably not a hidden gem, but it was good enough and I enjoyed tackling this game.

You would think this game stinks, but it’s actually really fun!

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Beat the game with each character
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 8/30/16 – 8/31/16
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10

This is one NES game that stands out almost completely because of its unfortunate name. It’s also known based on the high price tag a loose copy of the game commands. The going rate in October 2016 is around $120 for just the cart and with NES game prices showing no sign of slowing down that price likely will be outdated in a matter of months. S.C.A.T. fits the profile of a high value NES cart as it is both a late run title and a quality game.

S.C.A.T is interesting in that it has three different names depending on the region where it was released. The Famicom version is called Final Mission and it was released in June 1990. The game was localized for North America as S.C.A.T. in June 1991. The game was renamed once again to Action in New York for its European release sometime in 1992. The game was developed by Natsume and also published by Natsume in both Japan and the US. The publisher for Action in New York is Infogrames. I have found several claims that Action in New York was also released in Australia and published there by Konami, however I cannot find solid evidence to back up those claims. As far as releases go, S.C.A.T also saw Virtual Console releases on Wii, 3DS, and Wii U in both North America and PAL territories.

S.C.A.T is a side scrolling shoot-em-up. The story goes that aliens led by Vile Malmort are planning to invade Earth through an “Astrotube” connected to New York City and the Special Cybernetic Action Team (abbreviated of course as S.C.A.T.) was formed to combat this invasion. You play the role of one of two S.C.A.T members and you can choose either the blue clad Arnold or the red clad Sigourney. I’ll leave it to you to figure out how those character names may have been inspired! Both characters play the same so the choice is just cosmetic. This game has a two player simultaneous mode where controller #1 is Arnold and #2 is Sigourney.

The game play feels reminiscent of Burai Fighter that I played earlier this year. The player sprites in both games are an armor-wearing human wearing a jetpack and the character can fly freely in eight directions. In both games the levels are auto scrolled and change direction periodically however the level is laid out. Here is where the games diverge somewhat, but this is the general idea of how both games play.

A unique feature of S.C.A.T. is the inclusion of two attack orbs that constantly swing back and forth in half circles, one above and the other below the player. The character’s primary weapon can only be fired either left or right, but the orbs fire their own shots in a wide range of directions both upward and downward depending on where they sit relative to the player. They can fire straight up or shoot at an angle either forward or backward. This is really useful for targeting enemies along walls and in hard to reach spots. Furthermore, the orbs can be locked in place at any time by pressing the A button. You will have to use good timing during combat to lock them to the angle you want. They can be unlocked by pressing A again, allowing them to resume their arcs. The key to success in S.C.A.T. is to get the hang of being able to lock the orbs in the optimal direction so that you can attack any threat in firing range.

There are item pickups that will help power up Arnold and Sigourney. These are represented by gray squares with a letter written on them. The L powerup changes the standard gun into a laser that can be auto-fired by holding the B button. It can cut through walls although not consistently so, limiting its usefulness. The W powerup is a wide beam that shoots a tall but powerful shot that can hit multiple targets just because the shot is so large. The B powerup is a bomb shot that generates an explosion on contact that can deal extended damage to stationary targets and anything that flies into the explosion. You can only have one of these weapons at once, so any other powerup will replace the current weapon. There are a couple of other non-weapon powerups. The S powerup increases the movement speed, and the R powerup restores two points of health.

You begin the game with six bars of health. When shot you lose a bar of health, so you are able to take some hits before being killed. However, you can be crushed by the stage hazards or pinned against the wall by the screen scrolling which is always instant death. If you die it is Game Over but you may continue at the start of the stage and there are infinite continues. The screen displays up to eight points of health but it is possible to get more than that with some good dodging and some health powerups.

S.C.A.T. has five levels each with a boss battle at the end:

Stage 1 is the New York City ruins. Despite the theme of a wrecked iconic city, this level is a good introductory level that is not too difficult so you can get the hang of positioning the orbs. The level winds around skyscrapers and such which demonstrates just how small you are. The end of the stage has you blowing up the core of a large battle tank.

Stage 2 is the Subterranean Realm. You wind through underground corridors and the enemy attack steps up a bit. One enemy of note is an excavation drone that sort of acts like an arm rising out of the ground that reaches out to you. When you destroy it the pieces fly outward that you also have to dodge. The boss is a large worm that winds around the screen and only its head is vulnerable. This boss happens to be very similar to the boss at the end of Stage 2 in Burai Fighter. It must be coincidence!

Stage 3 is the Astrotube. The level is mostly comprised of a very long vertical section where you fly up the Astrotube from New York up to the aliens. When you get settled into the tube the scrolling goes super fast for awhile and it’s a great effect. The boss I guess is some kind of large enemy base where you have to blow up all the weak spots that also fire away at you.

Stage 4 is the Battleship. To me this is the coolest level in the game. It takes place outside of this gigantic enemy dreadnaught and you fly around the outside of it while destroying all the cannons and enemy hatches that sit along the exterior of the ship. The boss appears to be the back engine of the ship and you need to destroy all of the cores.

Stage 5 is the Orbiting Platform. This level has a couple of nasty gimmicks that set it apart in difficulty from the rest of the game. There are diagonally oriented cannons that intermittently fire off very long laser beams. The shots reflect off of the walls so you have to be mindful of where they end up so you can sit in the safe spots. In some places they bounce several times before eventually landing off screen and in some spots there are more than one to work with at a time. There are also crushers that kind of slowly work their way up and down and you have to fly through when they leave you enough space. They don’t seem like much of a threat since they move slowly, but if you touch the end of them you die instantly. The final boss is Vile Malmort himself.

I mentioned earlier that S.C.A.T. is an expensive game and unfortunately for me it is one I had to pony up and pay retail price to acquire. This was one of the last games I needed to buy to finish off the licensed NES set and at that point stumbling into a copy for a great price was unlikely. I wish I had kept better collecting records, but for this game it turns out I gleaned some information out of some emails with a very good friend of mine. S.C.A.T. was the 12th to last licensed NES cart I bought for my set and I won it in an eBay auction for a little over $80 shipped in March 2015. That was a decent price at that time and in light of current pricing I can’t really complain.

S.C.A.T. was a new completion for me. As usual, I had not played it before aside from cart testing. I was aware of the game and I knew it would be one I would like. I wouldn’t say it’s an easy game, but I managed to beat the whole game on my first night with a few continues. I found out early on that the wide beam weapon is clearly the best weapon in the game. Not only does it cover a large area in its path but it also destroys larger enemies in less time than the other two weapons. It definitely helped me beat the game on the first night. I think the whole game took about an hour to finish and about half that time was spent on the final stage alone. Those lasers required some memorization to clear and the last boss is difficult to avoid taking damage. Other than that I found the game to be a romp, but it was fun while it lasted. The ending was pretty cheesy, and that is something I have noticed with a few NES games I’ve done already.

Now for a tiny little spoiler! After I beat the game I checked out the trusty NES Ending FAQ and it states that the ending varies a bit different depending on which character you play with. I figured since the game was short enough it wouldn’t be unreasonable to play through it again to see the other ending. The second time through S.C.A.T. I only died once on the final stage. I’m sure I clear it without dying pretty easily if I wanted to. Back to the endings, the FAQ says that the ending changes again if you beat it in two-player mode. So if you want to see everything you will have to beat the game three time in total. Since I play alone I am fine seeing just the two single player endings. I believe the differences are only in dialogue so it’s not like I missed out on much anyway.

There are some differences between the various versions of the game. The Famicom Final Mission has some significant differences than S.C.A.T. For starters, the game is much harder on Famicom than NES. You start with only three health instead of six, and taking damage causes you to lose your weapon back to the default. S.C.A.T. lets you keep your powerup until either you die or grab a new one. The orb shots are much weaker and they do not automatically orbit the player. Instead you have to aim them by press A and inching either left or right. When you do that they slide behind you a bit and that’s how you set the aim. Press A again to lock them into place just like in S.C.A.T. Final Mission does not show the map screen in between levels like S.C.A.T. does, and Final Mission has both playable characters as men instead of having both male and female players. Finally the introductory cutscenes are different. The ones in Final Mission are much darker as they show the annihilation of New York.

The changes between S.C.A.T. and Action in New York are minor. The characters were renamed Silver Man and Spark, and the team is called S.A.T. instead of S.C.A.T. The title screen was also changed obviously. Other than that the game play is the same as the US version.

S.C.A.T. would be an easy game to recommend if it weren’t for the high price tag. Thankfully it is still on Virtual Console as that version is much more affordable. If you like shoot-em-ups then you will like this game. The graphics, sound, and gameplay are top notch, the difficulty is fair, and you can even play through it with a friend if you are inclined. I just wish they had picked a better name for the US release!

The last couple of weeks have brought about some things that will lead to some major changes to my project and this website. Let me be clear that I am not stopping anything and these changes could be very good! I have also had a few other thoughts that I might as well air out now and get some discussion going. Even though this is my pet project I do want to keep this interesting for you and everyone else that has been reading and following along thus far. With all that in mind, let’s get started!

I have recently made two purchases that directly impact Take On The NES Library. The first purchase is the brand new RetroUSB AVS console! I have been using it for a week and a half and I really like it! In case you haven’t heard about it, the AVS is a brand new HDMI based NES console. This is great for me because aside from a few exceptions I do all my NES gaming on a flat screen TV. It displays games in clear 720p and it has a good amount of customization options to the video to make it look just about as nice as possible on my TV. Some other features that I really like about it are the Famicom slot, PAL region support, and the Scoreboard for uploading high scores on dozens of games. It has held up very well with every game I have tried so far. I am planning to use it as my primary system for playing NES games going forward.

Even though the AVS is a great system, I do have a couple of concerns around legitimacy. The AVS contains a built-in Game Genie for applying cheats without using any extra peripherals. Unfortunately with that as part of the firmware it’s not easy for me to prove that my playthroughs are cheat-free. Up until now I have played on a top loading NES and I have included a picture of my TV screen and console when I beat the game. From there it will be obvious if I am using a cheat device and that approach will not cut it with the AVS. The only way to really prove it is with video. Otherwise, legitimacy is only as good as my word. Though my detailed reviews and stories may be good enough for most readers, I am certain there is at least one person out there that would be willing to call me out and claim that I have not cleanly beaten some game. It may never happen but I don’t exactly have a leg to stand on in an argument if it comes up. The other concern is about accuracy. It has come to light recently that the AVS plays games a tiny bit slower than on an original NES console. Informal testing has shown that the AVS plays about a second behind an original console for every 10 minutes of play. It is a very small imperceptible difference, but it’s there. Both of these issues in my mind are not enough for me to stay away from using the AVS for my primary console. If I am able to win on an AVS, certainly I can win on a normal console and I would be able to back that up and prove it in some extreme case of doubt.

The other device I bought is a brand new Elgato Game Capture HD. This is very exciting! With this device I can connect my console with my PC and record video of my playthroughs, and combining that with the AVS will produce high-quality video for personal use. It’s obvious there are some great possibilities for enhancing the site with this. One thing I want to try is uploading games to my YouTube channel. I’m not that big on video editing but it shouldn’t be too difficult to create longplay videos for games I finish. I imagine there are quite a few obscure NES games that don’t have a lot of video on the web and I will be able to generate some archival footage that may prove useful. Videos will also provide me proof of victory that could come in handy! The video quality is so good with the AVS that I can grab my own screenshots from the captured video for use in my blog posts. I have resorted to extracting images from emulators or finding them on the web, so the ability to generate my own screenshots on console is really going to enhance my reviews as well.

Another benefit of the capture device is that I can stream gameplay on my Twitch channel. This is actually the main reason why I bought it, but for a non-obvious practical application. My wife likes to watch me play but it’s been difficult to set it up when my young daughter isn’t sleeping well. Streaming lets me play downstairs while she watches and lays in bed upstairs! We have already tried it a couple of times and it works well. The Elgato makes it easy to stream and I should be able to broadcast a few times a week whenever I get to play. My schedule makes it difficult to stream at a convenient time, so when I do it will generally be after midnight for up to an hour on a good night. Despite that it’s another way to expand my reach for the site!

Since I started the blog I have kept a tight lip on what games I am playing until I reveal my review. I have wanted to keep things a surprise in the same way that the next game I play is a surprise to me. Obviously if I am going to start live streaming that will be impossible. I have had more than one person show interest in my current progress and I suspect it will be better overall if I am more transparent with my progress especially if that information is going to be out there anyway. Therefore I am going to start revealing more about what’s happening here on places such as my Twitter account and my Nintendo Age discussion thread. I hope these things may spark some more interest and discussion in what I’m doing here.

In the spirit of transparency, I am revealing today that I have been working a bit on the side learning to play piano using the NES Miracle Piano Teaching System. A little over a month ago I bought the CIB Miracle Piano set from a collector that was selling off all of his games. The set is a bit challenging to track down and I jumped at the opportunity to obtain a good condition set for what I think is a good price. This appeared on my list immediately before Ikari Warriors but at that time I didn’t have the set so I couldn’t even show it off. Good thing I put it off! I have the entire setup connected to my CRT TV in my office for the near future so that I can work on the teaching program a few times a week. Now, I have no music experience in any form whatsoever so I am learning from scratch. From what I have done so far I think the program is quite good, but it is also shaping up to be a very difficult endeavor. It may be harder to finish than Ikari Warriors! I have just started Lesson 8 out of 36 total lessons and this new lesson really beat me up when I first started. It will take a lot of effort to finish everything but I am dead set on completing it. I estimate that it will take me at least a year to finish the program but at this point I won’t be surprised if it takes two or three years to complete.

A part of my project methodology has been bothering me for awhile. When I first created my master game list I bumped a number of games that I wasn’t interested in trying to beat down to the bottom of my list. That mini-list mostly consists of sports games, strategy games, and flight simulation games. There were 83 games that got this treatment which is really a significant portion of the library. I’m starting to regret that choice. There’s really no point in delaying these games considering my goal of beating them all. I did that initially to minimize the chance of losing interest in the project if I got stuck with a long uninteresting game. I think I have proven by now that I am willing to spend a lot of time working through any game so I want to reintroduce those skipped games in some way. The most likely option is to periodically sprinkle one of these games into my master list. Another possibility is to work on two active games, one from each list. If I decide to go that route I will defer that until after I finish Miracle Piano since that is already my alternate game!

Since I’ve been working on the website and project I have always been thinking of doing things to expand my reach and get the word out about Take On The NES Library. I am getting ready to take a big step forward with attempting to expand my content to Twitch and YouTube. I am wondering if I should take it even further and set up dedicated channels and accounts for the blog, or if it is fine using my personal accounts for that. I even wonder if I should bother trying to market the site in the first place and just stick to word of mouth and keeping things small. I don’t really have the bandwidth in my life to have a dedicated streaming schedule or upload schedule. I have a hard enough time keeping up with posting reviews every couple of weeks. It’s probably best right now to stick with my foray into video and see how that goes first!

I think that’s all that has been on my mind. I would love to hear from you! I know my blog comments have barely been used, but please feel free to try them out and send something my way if you have any suggestions for how I can further improve this site. You can also find me on the Nintendo Age forums as arnpoly as well as that active forum thread there specifically for this project. Keep your eyes peeled for more frequent updates!

As long as you don’t fly into the sun, you will probably enjoy this game!

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Get the best ending
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Got the best ending
Played: 8/22/16 – 8/29/16
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 6/10

It’s always a good day whenever one of the classic NES titles comes up in my list! It can be a little rough around the edges at times, but Kid Icarus has a lot of neat ideas that come together well for a game this early in the library.

Kid Icarus was first released on the Famicom Disk System in Japan on December 19, 1986 under the name Hikari Shinwa Parutena no Kagami which translates to Myth of Light: The Mirror of Palutena. It was co-developed by Nintendo R&D1 and Tose with R&D1 handling the design and Tose handling the development work. The game took advantage of the expanded capabilities of the FDS by including more game content than what was previously done on cartridge, a save game feature, and enhanced audio. Kid Icarus was later ported to a cartridge for release in Europe in February 1987 and a few months later in North America in July 1987.

Kid Icarus received a sequel on Game Boy in North America in November 1991 and Europe in May 1992. Curiously it was not released in Japan until appearing on the Japanese 3DS Virtual Console. The gameplay is very similar to the NES version but it is an all new game. The series would then go into hibernation for over 20 years aside from seeing a Virtual Console release in 2007. The newest title in the series is named Kid Icarus Uprising released in 2012. In that same year the original game received a 3D Classics remake on the Nintendo 3DS.

Kid Icarus is a side-scrolling platform action game. You play as the angel Pit in his quest to save the goddess Palutena and Angel Land from the evil Medusa. The game takes place over four main areas: Underworld, Overworld, Skyworld, and the Palace in the Sky. The first three areas are comprised of four sections each and the final section is a fortress that plays differently than the rest of the game. The object is to recover one of the sacred treasures in each of the three fortresses and use all three of them for the final battle against Medusa.

The first thing you’ll notice when playing Kid Icarus is that play advances upward with vertical scrolling. This is one of the few early NES games to employ vertical scrolling like this as a main component of the game right from the start. Unfortunately the game only handles one-way scrolling upward, and if you happen to fall back down you will die regardless of what platforms you left behind. This is why Kid Icarus seems to be regarded as a difficult game because the early game platforming must be completed with minimal mistakes. The reasoning behind the vertical level is symbolic as Pit begins at the bottom of the Underworld and must ascend upward to reach the Overworld. Stage 2 switches to more traditional horizontal scrolling before going vertical again in the Skyworld. The overall idea here makes sense from a storytelling perspective but it tarnishes the initial impression of the gameplay experience.

One neat aspect about the vertical levels is that Pit can loop around the screen horizontally. You can leave the screen on the left and reappear on the right, and vice versa. This leads to some interesting level design in a few places where you will need to take advantage of the looping mechanic to overcome some obstacles.

Pit can walk left and right and jump typical of a normal platformer game. He can fall through some thin flooring by pressing Down, which can sometimes lead to unintentional falling to your death. He can also shoot arrows from his bow to the left, right, and upward. Pit also has a health bar and he can take a few hits from enemies before defeat. The enemies tend to appear in groups though there are stray single enemies every once in awhile. When they are defeated they leave hearts behind and these are used as currency. Small hearts are worth one, large half hearts are worth five, and large full hearts are worth ten. Pit can hold up to 999 hearts and there are many items that can be found or purchased with these hearts. You can track just about all of the items on the subscreen that is displayed when the game is paused with the Start button.

There are several types of chambers that appear throughout the levels by way of open doors. Among the most common rooms are two different kinds of shops. The basic shop has items that are fairly priced. The mallet is the cheapest item and is a limited use subweapon that can be equipped by pressing Select during play. It is very strong but each mallet acquired only allows for a single swing before it is depleted. They have a special use in the end of level fortresses that I will cover later. The Water of Life chalice restores some health, and the Water of Life in a bottle will automatically deploy its health boost as soon as Pit runs out of energy. The Angel Feather lets Pit survive a fall off the bottom of the screen by initiating a brief period of flight to recover onto a ledge. These are very useful but are pretty expensive and therefore are not as easy to acquire when you really need one early in the game.

The other kind of shop is the Black Market. This shop is overpriced compared to the normal shop, but these are worth visiting in some situations. The Water Barrel item can only be purchased on the Black Market and it allows Pit to hold more than one Water of Life bottle at a time. If you don’t already have a Water of Life it gives you one for free, otherwise the one you are carrying gets saved in the barrel. There are also some other special items that show up here under special circumstances that I will also mention later.

There is a treasure room that contains eight pots each with a question mark on them. You can destroy a pot to reveal an item but it costs five hearts per pot. You may destroy as many pots as you want. Collecting a revealed treasure removes all the remaining pots but you can grab all the items you found. However one of the pots contains the God of Poverty and if you find him you lose all of the items and are booted from the chamber empty handed. If you break all the pots and leave the God of Poverty for last, the final pot instead contains a more substantial treasure. The bonus treasure can be an Angel Feather, a Water of Life Bottle, a Water Barrel, or the Credit Card. This is the only way in the game to obtain the Credit Card. You can use it in the Black Market to buy items that you cannot afford. Of course if you do so you will be in his debt and are unable to buy any more items until you pay off what you owe him.

Another type of room is the Sacred Training Chamber. A God in this room will summon a bunch of randomly moving enemies that look like floor tiles. The object here is simply to survive, and if you do so you are rewarded with your choice of one of three special weapons. The Fire Arrow adds a little fireball to the standard arrow that deals extra damage to an enemy. The Sacred Bow increases the range of Pit’s arrows. The Protective Crystal spawns two crystals that spin quickly around Pit and give him a way to easily defeat weak enemies up close. Over the course of the game you can acquire all three at once, however you cannot use them until you have enough health. There are some enemies in the game that will steal one of these weapons if they collide with Pit. You can recover the stolen weapons by buying them for very inflated prices in the Black Market, or you can earn it back by completing the training again in a later chamber.

The other three chambers you can encounter are more straightforward. The enemy lair contains a swarm of enemies that all drop big hearts for a quick money boost. The Strength Upgrade chamber contains a God that will give you a stronger arrow. There are five levels of arrow strength and you increase it by one for each God you find in this chamber. However, there are some special hidden requirements defined by how well you play that determine if you qualify for the upgrade at all. Finally there are hot springs that restore your health slowly just by relaxing inside!

To cap off the normal item list, sometimes in the levels you will find a harp that turns all of the enemies into mallets for a brief period. This is the easiest way to collect lots of mallets. You can also find the chalices here that restore health.

There is a scoring system in place as well. The score for the current level and the total cumulative score appear on the subscreen. You get points for defeating enemies, although the enemies inside the enemy lairs do not give any points at all. After each section is completed your points are added to the total score. Reaching specific point intervals here will trigger the message Power Up and Pit is awarded an increase to his maximum health. You begin the game with one segment of health and can get up to a maximum of five.

As mentioned above, the last section of the first three levels is a fortress that mixes up the formula of the game. The fortress is a non-linear maze that contains a boss hidden within. There are even more items here that assist in exploring the fortress. The check sheet is a blank map of the fortress that draws a grid on the subscreen. It must be found in a specific location in the fortress. The pencil can be bought in a shop and marks off each room on the check sheet that you enter for the first time. The torch must also be bought in a shop and it highlights the current room Pit is in. These items are helpful to show both where you are and where you have been so that you can narrow down where the boss is located.

There are a couple of interesting elements in the fortresses. There are statues scattered all around the fortress that can be broken with the mallet revealing a centurion. Each centurion saved here flies away for now but shows up later during the boss fight to aid Pit in the battle. On the flip side, there is an awful enemy type unique to the fortress called the eggplant wizard. They toss eggplants around that turn Pit into an eggplant himself should he be struck by one. While in eggplant form Pit is unable to fire arrows at all and it is a permanent state that leaves Pit defenseless. The goal from here is to find a nurse inside the fortress who will restore Pit back to normal at no cost. The eggplant wizards are often placed along the critical path to the boss and it is a huge hassle to go back and find the nurse.

When each fortress boss is defeated, one of the sacred treasures is left behind inside a treasure chest. When all three chests are collected all treasures are revealed and equipped for the final level and showdown against Medusa. Here the game switches play to an auto-scrolling shooter that is unique to this last area.

Just like Metroid before it, Kid Icarus was updated to include a password system for its NES cart release. The passwords are 24 characters long and comprised of many different characters. The long passwords allow a lot of information to be stored within them. When you continue your game with a password, it saves the level you last played, your heart balance, and all your items, weapons, and upgrades. Even though they are tedious to document and input, it works just as good as a save game and makes it much easier to slowly work though the game a stage or two at a time.

Kid Icarus was one of the titles I have held onto since childhood. I know that I spent some time with it growing up but I could never quite remember if I had played the game all the way through for myself. I definitely beat the game with a password taking me straight to the final level, but I imagine I pulled that out of Nintendo Power or a guidebook. As an adult I have picked it up casually a number of times and I always would stall out prior to the first fortress. The first level is quite difficult with the vertical layout combined with a lack of powerups and abilities for starting out. It took me a dedicated effort this time to finally mark it off as complete.

During my playthrough I really struggled to get through Level 1-3. I did not earn enough points in the first two levels to increase my health bar which really made things harder on myself. I also insisted on clearing the first Sacred Training Chamber since I didn’t how many opportunities I would have later on in the game. It was tough but I made it through after nearly a dozen attempts.

From the first fortress onward, the game eased up in difficulty considerably. In the fortresses all the enemies respawn any time you leave the room. I found an area near the boss that had a hot spring a few rooms away from a room full of enemies that left behind big hearts. Between those two rooms I maxed out on hearts plus I managed to earn enough points to max out the health bar at the end of Level 1. Having full health allowed the weapon I earned prior to kick in which also helped. I focused more on the platforming and I was able to beat the game without too much trouble. I would say the third fortress was the hardest challenge remaining and that took some practice with some of the eggplant wizard placements.

Once I completed the game, I decided to investigate how to get the best ending. I had collected everything except for the credit card and I was missing two strength upgrades. I figured that had something to do with it and it turns out my suspicions were mostly correct. Here is how the endings work. There are four separate goals to complete: Have the maximum health bar, have maximum strength, have all three special weapons, and have the maximum number of hearts. You get a different ending for how many of those goals are completed at the end of the game. I got the middle of the road ending by having all the health and all three special weapons. I would have had enough hearts had I not spent some on a Water of Life right before the third fortress boss, but I missed out on two of the strength upgrades and I couldn’t understand why I missed them.

The easiest way to get the best ending is to start a new game immediately after winning. You will restart at Level 1-1 with everything carried over from the end of the previous game. Since I already had found two of the strength upgrades the first time through I earned those again which put me at maximum strength. Then it was only a matter of making sure I had enough hearts before the final level to meet all the requirements.

Now this replay wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. Upon beating the game the first time, I killed myself off in Level 1-1 and saved my password to play later on. When I started up the next day and input my password, I began at Level 1-1 but I had lost all of my progress. It was the same as starting a brand new game. I thought that I had either messed up my password or the passwords don’t work on subsequent playthroughs. I found out there is a glitch in the game where it does not save your data on any password starting in Level 1-1. If I had gone on to at least Level 1-2 and took my password there, then the data would carry over. I suspect that when the game loads the first stage it always runs the code to initialize the game state even if the game is loaded from a saved password. I had actually started to replay the game from scratch for a little while before using my old password to resume at the start of the final level.

There are some interesting technical tidbits I think are fun to examine for a little while. Some fine folks have deconstructed the system by which you qualify to earn the strength upgrades. It really is based on how well you play. There is a hidden scoring system calculated behind the scenes in each stage and you need to earn a certain number of these “skill” points to trigger the god to appear in the Strength Upgrade Chamber. Some actions add skill points and others take away points. I won’t go into all of them. You earn points for things like defeating enemies, collecting hearts (but not when you are maxed out), buying an item, or just entering any chamber. You lose points for taking damage, shooting arrows, or breaking pots in the Treasure chamber. Typically all you need to do is take your time and kill many enemies and that will be enough to earn the upgrade.

The password system retains all of the data associated with a playthrough, but it also contains information that determines if the password is legitimate or not. The first 22 characters of the password translate to all of the data the game tracks between sessions. For instance, some of the characters relate to the saved score, some of the characters track how many hearts you have, and so on. The final two characters are called the checksum. Basically the game runs some kind of formula against the password and generates the checksum and adds it to the end of the password. Upon submitting a password on the continue screen, the game runs the same calculation and sees if the last two characters of the submitted password matches the checksum. The password is accepted if it matches and rejected if it doesn’t. Many of the more well-known passwords are not hard coded in the game but are just a byproduct of how the password system works.

The final tidbit I want to share is that the endings differ between the Japanese release and the US release. Not only are the endings a bit different but the way to get them is completely different. The ending calculation in the Japanese version is the number of health bar segments plus the number of strength upgrades minus the number of deaths in the game. This number determines which of the five endings is received. The best ending in the NES version is not present in the Japanese version. Instead of that ending, there is an even worse version of the bad ending that takes its place. The Japanese version does not allow you to replay the game with item carryover, so instead you would have to play near perfectly in one try to qualify for the best ending. The save system in the Disk System version was likely the driver behind the ending criteria. The method in the US version works better for me anyway!

Kid Icarus is one of those classic NES titles that I think belongs in any library. The graphics are not too bad and the music is pretty catchy. The controls are a little slippery at times but they perform well enough. The major thing going against it is the uneven difficulty curve. The game starts out challenging and gets easier the further you go. Too bad many people would likely give up before getting to some of the later parts of the game that are a lot of fun to play. I enjoyed the game a lot and I am glad that I can finally claim for certain that I have beaten this game!

This simple shooter does not crank up the fun to the max as the name might suggest.

To Beat: Defeat the Dragon after Level 4
To Complete: Complete 3 loops
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Completed 3 loops
Played: 8/20/16, 8/25/16
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 3/10

Playing games at random like I am doing for this blog means that progression is going to be terribly unpredictable. Ikari Warriors and MagMax couldn’t be any more different in terms of time spent beating the game. While I am thankful that MagMax was a very welcome breather in terms of pushing toward the overall goal, the game itself was not all that interesting.

MagMax was released in the arcades in Japan in 1985. All versions were developed by Nihon Bussan. The arcade version was also published by the developer under the brand Nichibutsu. The NES port was released on the Famicom in March 1986. The US version was published by FCI and was not released until October 1988, nearly two and a half years apart from the Famicom release. The game also received ports to the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC all in 1987.

MagMax is a side scrolling shooter. The story goes that aliens conquered the Earth and put the super-computer beast Babylon over the humans. The people fight back by creating a mech named MagMax that is their only hope to take back Earth.

The game has two somewhat interesting gimmicks going for it. The first feature is that as you play you collect and merge the different parts of MagMax to create a fully powered robot. You start off with a basic spaceship that eventually becomes the midsection of MagMax. You can attach the head and legs separately as you come across them. Each segment has its own gun adding more shots to the fray. There is also a wave beam gun that attaches to the head providing even more firepower. You are completely MagMax whenever all four pieces are put together.

The other feature is that there are two separate fields of play and you are able to switch between them periodically. The game starts on the surface and from time to time there will be warp holes that show up. You can choose to descend down the hole and continue play underground. Similarly there are warp holes underground that bring you back up to the surface. The surface has different enemies and obstacles than the underground. The other difference between the fields is in visual perspective. The surface is sort of halfway between side view and top down view while the underground is purely side view. No matter which side you choose, play always scrolls to the right.

When only the basic starting ship, it only takes one hit to lose a life. However, as you merge with the other parts of MagMax, both the head and the legs can be destroyed separately which lets you take a bullet and survive. You lose your extra firepower but you stay alive which is a fair tradeoff. It gives you a bit of a cushion to survive until finding other replacement parts to build back up to full strength. It should be noted that the wave beam gun gets destroyed along with the head if that part is lost.

The difference in perspective means that each field plays a little bit differently. On the surface, the full MagMax stands taller than all the enemies, so the bullets fire slightly downward and move forward across the ground. The enemies also fire across the ground, so the player hitbox is merely the bottom part of the MagMax. Bullets that appear to hit the top of MagMax actually travel behind it due to the perspective. The wave beam gun on the surface is a constant beam that drags along the ground in front of the player. This can be used to destroy enemies that are otherwise immune to standard shots.

The underground perspective plays by different rules than the surface. The most visible change is that having multiple parts attached gives the MagMax three distinct vertical levels of shooting the standard beam. In effect this is akin to a spread shot. The downside is that the hitbox is the exact size of the MagMax so when fully powered up the hitbox is three times larger than with the bare ship or on the surface. The wave beam gun underground provides a fireball that blasts across the screen cutting through all enemies in its path.

There are many different types of enemies to deal with. They are your typical nondescript robot ships for the most part all with different attack patterns. The surface tends to have more stationary targets, many of which are only vulnerable to the wave beam gun. The underground tends to have more waves of moving enemies that can be destroyed with any weapon. A few elements in the game have unique properties. There is an enemy type that fires a spread of cannonballs when it’s destroyed that can also defeat other surrounding enemies for bonus points. Underground there are stalactites that will fall to the ground when shot. If an enemy is hit by one of these on the way down it is destroyed for bonus points.

You start the game with two lives and you can earn more from points. There is an extra life at 30,000 points and another awarded at every 50,000 points beyond that. It does take some time to accumulate enough points to rack up lives but each one is worth it.

There are four levels in MagMax that blend seamlessly into the next during play. They are the forest, desert, sea, and automated city. At the end of the second and fourth levels you get to square off against Babylon himself. The battle is exactly the same both times and you will come across him on both the surface and underground. After the fight in the fourth stage there is a little bit further to go and then the game loops back to the beginning. Consider the game beaten when this loop point is reached.

This game was another new one for me. I didn’t have much trouble with it at all. In fact I beat the game on my very first try. I kept playing and ended up dying for good early on in the second loop. Even though I beat the game I wanted to take it a step further by playing an entire loop on the surface followed by another full loop underground. That way I get to experience the full content of the game. My second attempt was all I needed to complete that goal.

Having completed all of the surface followed by all of the underground, I can safely say that going underground is significantly more difficult than above. Almost all of the difficulty underground can be attributed to the larger hitbox of MagMax. When fully powered up, the spread firepower is excellent but with the large hitbox it doesn’t last very long. The enemies underground seem to swarm me more. I think MagMax moves slower underground but that may just be me. I did notice that having the legs increases the movement speed and I think that is more important to survival then having the head and wave beam gun. Overall the easiest way to beat the game is to stay above ground as much as possible.

A few days after beating MagMax I did a bit more research and found out that there is a small change even deeper into the game that I should see for myself. After completing three full loops of the game on one credit, the word “MEIGETSU” appears for a little while above the score counter. It is unclear exactly what this means or is supposed to indicate. It seems to translate to something like “harvest moon” or “great moon,” but I have no clue how that applies to MagMax at all. Either way, I went back and beat three loops so I could see the text. I did notice that the game got harder in the second and third loops, so it is possible that this message indicates that the difficulty is maxed out. I didn’t play a fourth loop to see if I could tell the difference. Anyway, now I think I have seen everything there is to see in MagMax.

The NES port of MagMax is really faithful to the arcade version. It looks and plays just about the same. From what I can tell there are only two noticeable differences. The surface view has a neat parallax scrolling effect in the arcade version where the bottom of the screen scrolls by a bit faster than the top of the screen. This effect is not present in the NES port. In the arcade version Babylon moves around a bit so his attacks are harder to dodge than in the NES version where the boss is stationary.

There is a neat minor Easter egg that I noticed right away when booting up MagMax for the first time. The default high score is set to 65,020 which is clearly a nod to the 6502 processor that the NES runs. I think that reference would have been lost on everyone when the game first came out.

I thought it was a bit difficult to pin an appropriate difficulty rating on MagMax. My decision of 3/10 was the first thing I thought off and I decided to make it stick. The game is very short clocking in at around 10 minutes. There are no continues and only a few lives, but the MagMax pieces doubling as an extra hit goes a long way toward extending each life. By staying on the surface and getting some practice it should not take very many attempts to complete one loop. It is not a cakewalk necessarily, but it is easy enough that 3/10 works I think.

It would be easy to cut MagMax some slack if it were released in the US much closer to the Famicom release. It’s not a great game for 1986 though it is acceptable, but the more than two year delay before the US release does not distinguish this game at all from its contemporaries. I know I would be disappointed if I got this game new in 1988. The good thing is now the game is both common and cheap, and it is much harder to be disappointed when both the acquisition cost and amount of time one would reasonably get out of it is so low. Overall this game is not special and it is fine to skip.