Take on the NES Library

Welcome to the 2019 Year In Review!

I am pleased to report that, unlike last year, I remembered to do this Year in Review on time!  I have just completed the process of going through all the games and categories, trying to jog my brain for any memories or opinions over a whole year’s worth of gaming.  It is a labor of love, that’s for sure, as I find it hard to get started and even harder to flesh out my final choices.  I’m starting to notice it is getting harder to remember events from last year, mostly because my thoughts are starting to bleed back into prior years.  I also know things about way more NES games than I ever have before.  In spite of all that, I feel good about my choices and I hope that you will enjoy reading through them.

There were some things that both made gaming easier and harder in 2019.  The biggest life impact is that my wife and I welcomed a new baby boy into our family back in August.  For the first month or two, that meant lots of overnight feedings and restless nights.  Definitely a great thing, but also very exhausting.  Within a few days of his birth, my daughter started half-day preschool.  We had been pretty lax about her sleep schedule, but we took the opportunity to set up a bedtime routine.  Consistency has really helped all of us to better adapt to all the life changes going on around us.  Outside of family, 2019 was one of the most challenging years in my job.  I have had to work extra hours from time to time.  This started a little bit in 2018, but I was required to travel periodically for work throughout 2019.  Certainly, a baby becomes a time priority and that took away from NES time, but a scheduled bedtime for my older child and improving sleep schedule for my newborn has helped offset that and given me enough time to play.  Traveling for work actually helped since I was able to take my laptop and practice games on emulator.  Any extra downtime in the hotel became game time.  I still do split time between NES and Switch gaming since Switch is more convenient for commuting and gaming in bed.  I have not yet been able to take advantage of Nintendo Switch Online for the best of both worlds, but maybe soon.

In 2019, I completed 33 NES games, starting with Smash T.V at #111 and ending with Metal Gear at #142.  This year in review will cover those games and all in between.  I start with a lengthy list of complementary categories and then pick usually two to three games for each one with a brief explanation of each choice.  The only format change from last year is that I came up with a clever way of including games that don’t fit any of the main categories.  Let’s get to it!

The 2018 Take On The NES Library Year In Review

Hardest Game

To The Earth:

In 2019, I rated two games 10/10 in difficulty.  Comparing the two, I went with To The Earth as the hardest game of the year.  This is a Zapper target shooting game set in space with fast enemy movements and predictable patterns.  The game has an evenly paced difficulty curve until the end of Stage 3 when the challenge skyrockets.  (Pun intended.)  The final stage is one of the most difficult single levels I’ve ever played, requiring perfect knowledge and almost perfect Zapper alignment and timing.  I am happy to have this one done while my eyes are still decent.

High Speed:

Hot on the heels in difficulty is High Speed.  This one feels vastly different from To The Earth’s difficulty yet it is so challenging in its own way.  High Speed relies on having that special run where shots are constantly made, extra balls are won, and mini games are cleared.  Those mini-games are the determining factor.  Car races are easy enough, but pachinko requires some very specific inputs and a healthy dose of luck.  You can spin your wheels for a long time playing those games over and over, only for a ball to go the wrong way down a drain pushing you into an early exit.  Pinball was never my strong suit and High Speed forced me into improving my game.

Boulder Dash:

I didn’t find this to be quite as difficult as the above, but this game seems to trip up a lot of people and I thought it was worth mentioning.  At the onset, there are six worlds of four levels each.  It begins simply; just collect enough gems to exit through the door.  New things are introduced gradually.  Clearing four levels at a time can be a chore, but soon enough all levels are done.  From here things really get tough during the second, third, and fourth loops.  The requirements are stricter and layouts are tweaked.  By the end you have to puzzle your way through very precise, lengthy solutions, all while beating sets of four stages before you run out of lives.

Easiest Game

Videomation:

Any time you have a non-game, that immediately is the default for easiest game.  Videomation is a drawing and animation tool for just messing around with.  Still, there is quite a lot you can do with it with stamps, animation paths, letters, shape tools, and a pretty neat arrow cursor.  It seems pretty advanced by NES standards as well.  Even I, a non-artist, was able to draw something with it and it turned out okay.

Magic Johnson’s Fast Break:

As far as actual games go, this one was the next easiest game from 2019.  It was the only 2/10 game in difficulty rank for the year, and that was pretty much because I won a game on the hardest difficulty on my first try.  My default gameplay in basketball is to shoot threes, so I picked the best player for it and figured out that shooting from the top of the key was my best bet to sink one.  I won handily after digging out from an early deficit.

Shortest Game

Marble Madness:

This is the quintessential pick-up-and-play title on the NES.  If you only have a few minutes to spare, you can do no wrong with a quick attempt at Marble Madness.  The game’s six stages are all short, and since it is a race against the timer you are either going to win quickly or fail quickly.  Full playthroughs of the game only last 3-4 minutes.  I wanted to go for a deathless run but my best after an hour of attempts was a two-death run.

Videomation:

This is a bit of a cop-out answer, but it makes perfect sense in this category.  This game has no goal whatsoever.  If you just draw a circle on the screen or something else simple, that’s enough to say you drew something.  My doodling took longer than Marble Madness at least, since I felt like I needed to put in a tiny bit of effort.

Longest Game

Genghis Khan:

Koei games are likely to dominate this category when they are played.  These can be very long, drawn out campaigns even when you know what to do.  The learning curve is very steep for someone like me as well.  Once I got going, I ran into either some bad luck or poor planning and ended up having to reconquer several territories, wasting even more time.  Menuing became a real chore at the end.  I played this a lot just after my son was born, which meant I could only play in 15 minute bursts here and there while taking care of my baby.  It may not have been the longest game played in pure hours, but it sure felt like the longest one.

Dragon Warrior III:

This is probably the true longest game of the year.  I clocked in at over 35 hours with much better timekeeping than any other game I played this year.  I estimate about 30 hours at most for Genghis Khan.  I spent the exact same number of days playing both.  Dragon Warrior III was much more fun to play and therefore felt like a shorter game.

Bases Loaded II: Second Season:

I would be remiss without mentioning the latest installment in the Bases Loaded series.  Normally this would be the longest game of the year, but I got a couple of RPGs come up that took just a bit longer.  The first Bases Loaded was roughly a 40-hour affair while the second game was much swifter at a 25-30 hour estimate.  Still, it was an 84-game season ending in a 79-5 record, and that is going to take a long time no matter how quickly the games are played.

Oldest Game

Wild Gunman:

Ah, a good old Black Box game.  Wild Gunman was one of the NES launch titles releasing in October 1985, making it the earliest NES release I played in 2019.  The arcade version was a full decade earlier, releasing in 1974.  This is easily the oldest game I’ve played in a long time.

Tag Team Wrestling:

Last year I played one NES game from 1985 and one game from 1986.  Tag Team Wrestling released in October 1986.  Release dates of NES games are notoriously hard to track down, usually only found to the month, which in and of itself may not be completely accurate.  The trio of Chubby Cherub, M.U.S.C.L.E, and Ninja Kid all released at the end of October 1986, while Tag Team Wrestling has no specific date I could find within the month.  That leads me to believe that Tag Team Wrestling was the first third-party NES release.  Either way, it was still the second earliest game I played in the year.

Genghis Khan:

This game came out in 1990, but the real Genghis Khan lived from 1162-1227.  That’s pretty old if you ask me.

Newest Game

Dragon Warrior III:

There were no 1993 or 1994 releases played in this review period.  You have to go down to March 1992 to get the first hit in Dragon Warrior III.  It was the only 1992 release I played too.  Making this even weirder is that Dragon Quest III in Japan came out way back in 1988.  It is such a bizarre selection for Newest Game, but that’s how it goes.

Space Shuttle Project:

Here we have the true Newest Game.  Space technology sure feels new and futuristic, right?  Well, maybe not now.  Space Shuttle Project released in November 1991.  I have to imagine this will be the only 1991 release I’ll play to be declared Newest Game.  However, we can only look so far to the future, and stranger things are bound to happen.

Best Character

Kabuki Quantum Fighter:

Now that we are into the more subjective categories, this one was an easy choice to get started.  This game follows the story of soldier Scott O’Connor who is input digitally into the computer world taking on a completely different form than an ordinary soldier.  Obviously, his hair attack is unique for its time and is the game’s defining feature.  There is also a lot of grabbing, climbing, and hook swinging, and it all feels great.  He is the best character is terms of both aesthetic and moveset.

Mappy-Land:

Mappy as a character is in kind of a weird place.  He is not such a recognizable character, and trying to control him in-game feels limited.  That works fine in the contest of the classic Mappy arcade game, but not so much in Mappy-Land where the developers tried to introduce moving obstacles and platforms.  In fact, it would be fair for Mappy to be upstaged completely by his enemies.  But I don’t care about any of that.  Mappy is cute and is a much more interesting character than just anyone from a game I played last year.

Ice Hockey:

I have to pick this game entirely for the fat skater.  The normal one is kind of boring, and the skinny one looks good but wasn’t as effective a player.  The heavy one to me is the iconic character from this NES game and he was the best scorer, knocking around everyone in his path.

Worst Character

Bad Street Brawler:

This game is kind of a mess, and in part it has to do with the limited nature of Duke Davis.  He can only walk left and right with limited, clunky jumping, and for whatever reason he is forced into using specific attacks per level.  A few of these attacks are really good and you wish you could use them in all levels, but it just cannot be.  His sense of style is very early ‘90s, but it’s just too gaudy for my tastes.  Put it all together and it’s pretty clear what the worst character of the year is.

Wall Street Kid:

For as poor a character as Duke Davis is, the Wall Street Kid is just as boring.  He is completely driven by greed and just goes with the flow of whoever is around him.  He does the same things day in and day out.  He and his girlfriend Priscilla have no personality whatsoever.  Whatever.  I guess I hope he decides to do things for the betterment of mankind with his vast fortune.

Best Ending

Dragon Warrior III:

If you are going to spend a long time playing one game, you really hope the ending you get for all your work delivers.  This game features an interactive ending, which are often the best kind.  You get to make your escape, make you way back to the home castle, and be applauded by everyone you talk you.  The ending completely clears up who you are before heading to some nicely done end credits where you take one final tour of landmarks of your journey.  Good stuff.

Dirty Harry:

This game has quite the surprise ending, for as rough as the game is up to that point.  The final end screen where you go head to head against Anaconda is pretty basic on its own.  You get treated by a very lengthy audio clip of Dirty Harry giving his well-known speech from the movie.  There hadn’t been any sampled voices in the game, but they put a really long one in at the end completely out of nowhere.  It’s totally unexpected and pretty cool.

Thundercade:

The ending to this game is decent enough, but what really sets this game apart is the bonus ending.  To see it, you need to leave your NES on for almost an hour after getting the normal ending.  You’ll see a procession of tanks and soldiers proceed down the screen, followed by some Japanese text that clearly wasn’t known about during transition to the NES.

Worst Ending

Amagon:

This year didn’t really have endings that were truly bad.  Amagon’s ending is fairly basic but it’s not all that bad.  What puts it in this category is the awful ending music.  The rest of the game has pretty decent tunes, so to be rewarded with something so grating at the end is pretty weird and out of place.

Metal Gear:

Again, this is not a bad ending; it’s actually a pretty good one.  What stands out to me about this one is how you don’t really get the time to enjoy it.  I take pictures of the end screens of games, but the one I wanted at the end of the ending only stays visible long enough to draw the text before fading out back to the title screen.  I really don’t understand why there isn’t any kind of delay there.  Perhaps I should have seen this coming, as the title screen barely stays visible before heading to the attract mode.

Videomation, Xenophobe, Wild Gunman:

This category would not be complete without mentioning the games that had no ending.  All of these are a little different.  Videomation isn’t even a game so of course it ends when you decide it ends.  Xenophobe has a level ending but that doesn’t change upon beating the final level aside from bonuses awarded.  Wild Gunman has the closest thing to an ending with the “Master” text after beating Game C.  The other two modes have no ending at all and I had to settle with the Game Over screen on those.

Best Box Art

Werewolf: The Last Warrior:

I called this one back in the review for this game and it held up over the rest of the year.  I love the visual of the werewolf literally ripping out of an NES cart where you can see the circuit board and chips inside.  I like his giant claws and I dig the yellow and red color scheme.  It is a pretty simple cover really, but I like every aspect of it.

Metal Gear:

There is something about this cover that is just striking to me.  The art of Solid Snake is incredibly detailed, complete with his full gear and items along his belt.  The split white and black sections are distinct and set the title apart while giving full height of the box to Solid Snake.  There’s even a glimpse of Metal Gear itself, which you don’t fully grasp until you get far enough into the game.  Very solid box art.

Street Cop:

This is kind of an unassuming game and graphically in game is pretty dopey looking.  Despite that, the cover grabbed me in two ways.  There is something so goofy about a cop flying upward on top of a giant floating badge, I love it.  I also appreciate the subtle fingerprint graphics along the edges of the art.

Worst Box Art

Casino Kid:

There weren’t many bad covers this year, at least not any I found to make fun of.  Casino Kid’s box isn’t so much bad as it is dull and lifeless.  The playing cards are fine, but they are flanked by some dumb looking dollar signs and text and a boring background.  Unless you already like card games, this will not attract your attention.

Xenophobe:

I decided to mention this cover because it is so disparate between the look of the cover and the actual game.  The alien on the cover is vicious looking and highly detailed, while the aliens in game aren’t really scary aside from their relative size to the player and respawning capability.  The rest of the box is ordinary anyway.

Best Graphics

Tiny Toon Adventures:

The best looking NES games make you forget you are playing an NES game.  Tiny Toon Adventures graphically looks and feels a little bit like Super Mario Bros. 3, which is a fine pedigree in itself.  Konami did a very good job adapting the characters to sprites as all of them are highly detailed with great animation and coloring.  

Tecmo World Wrestling:

I picked this game mostly because it surprised me on how good it looked.  The animations during super moves are very well done and set this game apart from the other wrestling games.  Normal moves and animations work well too.  I also like the font used.

Worst Graphics

Dirty Harry:

True to form, this is a dirty looking game.  This game is full of rundown buildings that I guess fit the mood of this game, I just don’t think it looks very good.  The worst offender graphically is the mountain climbing section in the last stage.  It’s a muddy looking background with random looking footholds where you can’t tell what is safe to stand on.

Tag Team Wrestling:

It is perhaps a little unfair to go after one of the earliest third-party NES games, but this one didn’t really have much character.  The players and opponents are really dull looking with almost non-existent animation.  I’m not sure what the object you pick up outside the ring is supposed to resemble.  Good thing looks eventually got better once the NES picked up steam.

Best Soundtrack

Shadowgate:

The original MacVenture games do not have any music during gameplay.  The soundtrack was added specifically to the NES version and it became one of the defining features of the port.  It is a moody, atmospheric soundtrack with good tunes pretty much all across the board.  The whiny low-on-torch music is really bad, encouraging you to put up with the torch system just to get it to go back to the good stuff.

Tecmo World Wrestling:

I had to put this one on the list solely for the title screen music.  It is so good!  It is a real shame that it only exists on the title screen because the screen typically isn’t left up long enough for the song to kick in.  The rest of the music is no slouch either.  I found it helped put me in the mood to grind out many wrestling matches.

Magic Johnson’s Fast Break:

This game is more or less a throwaway title in terms of gameplay, but luckily the music was composed by Tim Follin, who will always get a shoutout from me whenever his music comes up.  The title screen and menu music has some real nice depth to it.

Worst Soundtrack

Dirty Harry:

The music in this game suffers in a couple of ways.  The melodies themselves are kind of “bleep bloop” fare from what I remember, so already that is poor.  The other thing is that the volume is incredibly low and it is very hard to hear the baselines, which is where a lot of the music sits for this game.  I didn’t really hear that much of it when playing on TV.  It wasn’t until I watched back my recording that I got to hear a lot of what I was missing.  Alas, it’s not enough to save this one.

Xenophobe:

I am probably being unfair to Xenophobe here.  The title screen jingle, while brief, is quite good.  What really puts this one down is that there is hardly any music during gameplay.  Most of what you hear is during level clearing, and in this case there are a couple of different tunes that are pretty much the same with slight differences.  I only picked up on that when listening to the music later on.  For a game having little music, variety would have helped.  Late Sunsoft NES games were a master class in NES music, so it is disappointing that this title has so little to offer.

Best Gameplay

Kabuki Quantum Fighter:

This is such a fun game and one that I have played and gone back to many times over the years.  The climbing and swinging around holds a lot of the appeal to me in the game.  There are plenty of places to get a grasp of the hooking mechanic with a mostly gentle learning curve.  The bosses are varied and fun to fight, and you acquire more special weapons the longer you play.

Smash T.V.:

This is a pretty simple game that I think they did a lot with.  Now the gameplay is kind of samey, and some of the screens really drag on a long time.  These are valid criticisms.  What I like is that there is a good variety of enemies and weapons just about all the time.  The randomness means that you approach challenges differently depending on what you happen to have at the time.  Best of all is that even though there are tons of things moving all that time, there isn’t slowdown and virtually no noticeable flicker.

Worst Gameplay

Tag Team Wrestling:

This game suffers both from its control scheme and its length.  To do moves, you initiate a grapple which gives you an exclusive timer where you tap A to scroll through a list of moves to pick the one you want with B.  It is kind of a clever way to incorporate so many moves, but in practice it becomes pre-planned button mashing, and you have to do it so, so much.  That may be acceptable in a shorter game, but you need to win 35 matches to beat the game, plus replays if you lose once along the way.  It’s such a drag.

Videomation:

This should probably be expected here in this category.  Logically it makes sense.  It isn’t a game; therefore, it has no gameplay.  Bad gameplay should always trump no gameplay, so that means I had to put Videomation here.  It’s still a good tool as far as the NES is concerned though.

Best Controls

Smash T.V.:

Dual stick shooters like Smash T.V. do not play well with the limited inputs on the NES controller, and trying to play this game becomes more frustrating than fun.  The developers had the idea to incorporate a two-controller scheme for a single player where one D-pad moves your character and the other D-pad lets you shoot in any direction.  This is the ideal way to play Smash T.V. by far.  This game even supports the Four Score so that you can play two-player simultaneous each with the two-controller setup.

Shadowgate:

It might seem a little weird to put this point-and-click style adventure in the category of best controls, but it fits.  The controls are so intuitive and work exactly like you would hope they do.  Your pointer shifts seamlessly from the free pointing in the main window to locking down to checkboxes in the side menus, attaching to the one in closest proximity.  It frees you up to focus on puzzle solving without getting bogged down in the details.

Worst Controls

Bad Street Brawler:

Here’s where I can beat down on the Power Glove.  I don’t care that it is iconic and memorable, the controls are so poor that it barely works.  I tried everything, multiple times, and sometimes it works okay and sometimes you can do nothing with it.  If I could get it to work optimally all the time, I’d probably have a shot at beating the game with it, but otherwise I couldn’t stand trying anymore after a few weeks of trial and error.  Using the normal controller is much better, but not great either with the weird jumping and hitboxes with the various attacks.

Bases Loaded II: Second Season:

This one is a bit of a stretch.  The game does control pretty well.  My main gripe, still, is that the baserunning controls are not good.  It is just so ingrained in me to use B toward where you want to go forward and A toward where you want to go back.  Many NES baseball games do this, so it is still odd to have one that doesn’t.  To my credit, I did finally get used to it in this game.

Street Cop:

I don’t mean to be so negative on games with seldom used peripherals, honest.  I don’t think most games from last year had bad controls.  Therefore, ones like this stand out.  It is a little rough to make progress in this game as it is just as much a thought exercise as a physical one.  This is the clumsiest cop ever.  At least this game has responsive controls, and I enjoyed getting used to something very different from the normal.

Best Playthrough

Shooting Range:

This still feels like an odd choice for me at the top of this category, but when I went back over everything, this one took the top spot.  I wanted the Gold Medal for scoring at least 40,000 points, and unless you get a perfect bonus game, this is hardly obtainable.  I fell well short several times.  When I did finally get the perfect bonus, I ended up scoring over 50,000 points.  That gulf between best score and second best score made this my best playthrough.

Kabuki Quantum Fighter:

This is a game I am very familiar with playing, so it would have been hard for me to do badly at this game.  If I did, I would have replayed anyway.  I spent some time with the game several years back and got very consistent at no-death runs.  I accomplished that here on my first attempt.  I rate this at about medium difficulty, so a deathless run is moderately impressive.

Marble Madness:

I went into playing this game with the mindset of a deathless run.  Again, it’s a game I know well, plus it is very short which lends itself to multiple tries in one sitting.  I gave myself an hour of time for the best run I could get, and I came away with a run where I died twice.  A no-death playthrough of Marble Madness is quite an accomplishment, so I feel really good about what I achieved.  Maybe someday I will put in the time to go deathless.

Worst Playthrough

Tecmo World Wrestling:

I am not a fan of wrestling games, but I can give this one a lot of praise for its music and graphics.  However, beating this game was painful, physically for sure.  There was so much hyper button mashing taking place that I got fatigued.  Making things more challenging is that losses in this game set you back to the previous wrestler on the ladder, and also the strength training between levels features even more button mashing.  I thought this game got hard at the end and it was made worse with the progression setbacks and muscle fatigue.  I scratched and clawed my way to victory, but it wasn’t pretty at all.

Genghis Khan:

I don’t feel too bad about struggling in this game, as it is far away from my wheelhouse.  There were two things that happened in my long playthrough that made it one of my worst.  First off, sometime in the midgame I lost several territories due to revolts from the leader I put in place.  By then, the bulk of my army was heading toward the other side of the map, so it took me several hours to reverse course to reclaim my losses.  The solution I came up with was to put all distant territories under direct control.  This led to my second issue of all the excess menuing needed as each territory you control requires you to make a turn every month in game time.  Conquering the last few territories took a long time.  It was ugly, but effective.

Best Moment

Casino Kid:

While you benefit from skill in both blackjack and poker, you do need luck to stand a chance.  In the final poker match of the game, I was given the best possible luck you can get.  Poker is five card draw, but for one hand I was dealt a royal flush, straight up.  You can’t do better than that, and I was able to take advantage by betting the max bet and having it called by my opponent.  It was such a cool moment and I doubt will ever happen again.

High Speed:

This game offered a steep challenge, particularly in the pachinko mini-games.  Under a time limit, you fire balls upward from a cannon at the bottom trying to get them to fall into cups strewn along the playfield.  Later rounds put some of these cups in super difficult places to reach, requiring either perfect frame precision or fortuitous collisions with other shots.  My winning run was full of great moments on both the pinball side and the pachinko side, but what got me mega hyped was hitting the final cup on a pachinko board on my very last ball just as time expired.  I had it happen to me twice, and those were some of the most relief-filled moments I’ve had in the entire project.

Worst Moment

Tag Team Wrestling:

This game is such a slog.  Since you have to play so many matches, I was able to develop a good quick winning strategy.  Throw your opponent outside the ring, get him trapped in the corner, and time your moves so that you can get back in the ring in time before the 20 count that disqualifies your opponent.  Finding my rhythm was the key to success, but I seemed to lose it at the most inopportune time.  In one run, on the final match, I got disqualified on the outside by fractions of a second, which triggered a mild controller toss and a power down of my NES.

Bases Loaded II: Second Season:

The full story of this is pretty good I think, so you’ll have to read the review if you want to see the details.  In the first Bases Loaded, I won my final 79 games in a row after discovering the super pitches.  In this game, I almost pulled off a similar streak after a slow start, suffering a single loss near the end of the season that was entirely preventable.  It is minor in the grand scheme of things, but at the time it was immensely annoying and depressing.

Kabuki Quantum Fighter:

Everything about my playthrough was solid, but I completely forgot about one thing at the very end.  Kabuki Quantum Fighter has a sound test after the credits, but I cut my video recording off right before I touched a button the started up the sound test.  Oops!  I was annoyed for missing that in my video for sure.  Moreover, that screen teases a sequel to the game that never happened, which in itself can be perceived as a bad moment.

Best Surprise

Street Cop:

Power Pad games are often overlooked due to the hardware requirements required for play.  This worked out to my advantage.  I put together a decent run of the game for video, then I checked out speedrun.com and found out that would be the fastest time submitted.  Granted, there was only one other time submitted, but I have claimed it as a world record run!  I imagine there are faster playthroughs out there, so I may have to defend it someday, but for now I am once again a world record holder!  (I lost the one I had claimed for AD&D: Heroes of the Lance … by quite a lot.)

Space Shuttle Project:

This game was such a joy to discover.  It is hard to know what kind of game this is only looking at the cart.  What I discovered was that it is a mini-game compilation where you prepare a shuttle, launch it, and perform basic space missions.  The game lost its shine for being too drawn out and repetitive, but the first few passes were so unexpected and fun.  I hope I find more surprises like this in the NES library.

Worst Surprise

Bad Street Brawler:

More bad mouthing the Power Glove!  Knowing the history, I should not have expected much.  The Power Glove was a little bit rushed to market with Bad Street Brawler sort of shoehorned in as part of the Power Glove Gaming Series.  The only other title bearing that moniker is Super Glove Ball launching a year later, which I hope means it is a better Power Glove experience.  That said, I came in with the expectation that the Power Glove should work fairly well with Bad Street Brawler and I came away angry and confused.  History may rewrite itself once I play Super Glove Ball but suffice it to say I have higher expectations for it.

Dirty Harry:

The first stage of Dirty Harry is a very complicated building maze.  Going down alleyways sort of turns you 90 degrees so that the streets and alleyways are connected in 3D space.  Understanding that helped make a little sense out of the structure, but it is still tricky to navigate without a map.  I got pretty far into the stage and started exploring buildings in a remote corner of the streets looking for surprise.  In the deepest room of the deepest building in the deepest street is what is called the Ha Ha Ha room.  It is a room with no exit, effectively a soft lock, and you are forced to reset and try again.  It is pure evil in video game form.

Metal Gear:

There were multiple mini-surprises here, aspects of the game that detracted from my experience.  The card key system forces you to equip the exact key you need to open a door, and you don’t know what key works unless you memorize it or choose the proper one randomly.  Some building rooms form giant holes once you step within range, leaving you with virtually no time to back up and escape death.  Navigating the maze rooms are a requirement to beat the game, but you both have to recognize what they are and figure out how to get through them with no in-game knowledge given on how to proceed.

Best WWF Game

WWF Wrestlemania Challenge:

So here is where I include all of the games that haven’t already been mentioned!  WWF Wrestlemania Challenge was one of three wrestling games on this list and it sits firmly in the middle.  It’s not a good or memorable as Tecmo World Wrestling yet was infinitely better than Tag Team Wrestling.  It wasn’t that memorable for me really, simply a decent game that wasn’t too hard to clear.  And clearly it was the best wrestling game bearing the WWF license.

Best Destruction

Cabal:

This is a pretty good port of the arcade game.  There’s so much shooting and plenty of things to shoot.  I would say its defining feature, aside from the gameplay perspective, is that the backgrounds are destroyable.  They come crumbling down after much firepower, opening up clear space so that enemies can’t hide from you.  Very satisfying.

Best Familiar Game

Kabuki Quantum Fighter:

This was an easy pick for me.  Kabuki Quantum Fighter is one of those games I will go back to if I have a little bit of free time to kill.  I always have a good time breezing through it with its strong controls and great graphics and music.

Dragon Warrior III:

I have sort of a love/hate relationship with this game, for technical reasons.  I owned this game as a teenager and tried to play it several times, only for my dirty NES console to get bumped, resetting the game and destroying my save.  I gave up on it for a long time before finally beating it through emulation in my 20’s.  This game absolutely holds up as one of the best NES RPG’s, and though it took a long time to clear, the mix of familiar and somewhat unfamiliar on this second-ever playthrough kept me going.

Best New Game

Metal Gear:

For all of the warts and issues this game has, I still think it was one of the best NES games I played last year.  The graphics and music are pretty good.  This game had a dungeon crawl feel for me throughout the first half of the game, and I found it exciting to get just a little bit further through the buildings and find new stuff.  There are some cool boss battles here and plenty of weapons to fight them with.

Shadowgate:

This was one of those games that passed me by when I was younger, partly by chance and partly by choice.  I am trying to be open minded about NES games now and I was intrigued by trying to figure out this game.  I came away mostly impressed at the quality of the game with its near-perfect controls and music, and also slightly annoyed from menuing through old items and struggling with puzzle solutions.

Space Shuttle Project:

I only mention this game here because it was such a pleasant surprise to see what this game was and that it was of good quality to boot.  I remember smiling big my first time through a mission, slightly frowning more and more the longer it took to get to the end of everything.  This game suffers from repetitiveness big time, but the first few times playing were quite enjoyable.

Worst Game

Dirty Harry:

This game was a real mess.  The controls are clunky, the graphics are muddy and murky, the music is way too low, and the navigation of the first stage alone is maddening.  The whole game could have been the first level and it would have been plenty tough with just that.  The game gets a little better later on, but still not great.  The final level’s mountain sequence is really rough, and sometimes you get stuck backtracking through it if you make a wrong move past there.  Not so much fun at all.  I will say, the ending to this game is pretty special considering what you have to put up with to see it.  It’s a shame that most players won’t see it.

Videomation:

We are capping off this year’s review with, you guessed it, the non-game Videomation.  I mean, what else could it be?  Thanks very much for reading, we’ll do this again next year!

Get your cardboard box ready.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 12/14/19 – 12/27/19
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 7/10
My Video: Metal Gear Longplay

Metal Gear is one of those long beloved series in all of video games.  It didn’t really start out that way though.  It didn’t catch on until Metal Gear Solid came out on PlayStation, which in my opinion was the turning point for the series and elevated creator Hideo Kojima to auteur status.  While not normally my kind of game, I have played some of the Metal Gear Solid series.  Therefore, I came into Metal Gear on NES knowing the sensibilities of the Metal Gear series but not so much how to approach or play this particular entry.  How much of Metal Gear Solid and its ideas originated from earlier titles like this one?  I doubt I’ll be able to answer that question, but I can provide some background information and my thoughts on how this game played.

The first Metal Gear released on the MSX2 in Japan in July 1987.  It was developed and published by Konami and designed and directed by Hideo Kojima.  Metal Gear was quickly ported to Famicom for release in December 1987, and it reached the NES in North America in June 1988 and Europe in 1989.  The North American version was the first NES game Konami published under the Ultra Games label.

The overarching story of Metal Gear is already fairly well known, and the NES version does not differ much from it.  You play the role of Solid Snake, a fresh recruit of the special forces unit called FOXHOUND, who is sent on a special mission codenamed Intrude N313 by his commanding officer Big Boss.  FOXHOUND’s best agent, Gray Fox, was previously sent to a fortress near South Africa called Outer Heaven run by an evil dictator.  Gray Fox was to investigate Outer Heaven and neutralize any imminent threats found within, however, FOXHOUND lost contact of Gray Fox.  Solid Snake has been sent to find out what happened to Gray Fox.  I’m jumping ahead a bit, but a little while into the game you find out Outer Heaven is housing a weapon of mass destruction called Metal Gear, a walking tank capable of firing nuclear weapons from anywhere in the world.  Your mission then is to destroy Metal Gear.

Metal Gear, the game, is a top-down action-adventure game.  Solid Snake is controlled with the D-pad and he can move in four directions.  Press the B button to punch.  The A button fires weapons though you do not start out with any.  The Start button simply pauses the game, while the Select button brings up a selection menu.

The game begins with you being airdropped into the jungle.  Upon arriving you are immediately called via your transmitter as the word “CALL” is flashed at the bottom of the screen.  Press Select to bring up the menu, then choose “TRANS” to use your transmitter.  There you will automatically receive a message from Big Boss.  He gives you the frequency on the transmitter where you can reach him again if needed.  After the message is over you’ll hear this super-annoying horn sound.  At this time, you can tune the transmitter to help you send or receive messages.  Use Left and Right on the D-pad to scan through frequencies 120.00 through 120.99.  If someone is already trying to reach you, simply landing on the proper frequency will deliver the message automatically.  If you want to reach out yourself, tune the frequency and then press Up to switch to Send mode.  Solid Snake will call for help and in the right situation with the right frequency you will make contact and get a message back.  As you can imagine, using the transmitter is good for advancing the story and getting tips on forward progress.  When you are all done, press Select to go back to the action.

Your first task is to proceed through the jungle, moving downward through several screens.  Here you get a taste of using stealth to make your way forward without being noticed.  If you walk in front of a soldier, he sees you and puts the game into an alert state.  Firing a noisy weapon also draws attention to you.  Defeating all the enemies on screen or simply moving to the next screen is enough to escape the alert state and go back to quiet.  Until then, all enemies start moving in on you.  Soldiers have guns and aren’t afraid to use them.  If some enemies are left alone long enough, other enemies may start appearing and make things more difficult.  Of course, you can avoid alert state by staying out of line of sight.  You can punch enemies three times without them seeing you to take them out and stay quiet.  You can also wait for soldiers to leave or fall asleep, giving you an edge.  The third screen of the game introduces you to guard dogs that go alert when you get near, which always happens.  I found it is best to be as quiet as possible and avoid confrontation, but it is helpful to know how to navigate the alert state as it is hard to avoid sometimes.

Getting out of the jungle is not an easy task.  Not only is this first part of the game pretty challenging, it was also a little unclear how to get out of the jungle at all.  Go down far enough and you reach a fence locked off by a gate that you can’t open.  It turns out you need to enter a covered truck simply by approaching it from the back.  If you’re like me and didn’t know about that until the end of the section, it’s a good idea to go back and investigate the other ones you passed as some of them contain items or weapons.  When you have something usable, you can go into the menu and equip it.  There are two screens for this, one for weapon selection and the other for item selection.  The weapon selection screen shows all weapons you’ve collected as well as ammo for each.  Simply point the cursor to the weapon you want, then press Select to leave the menu and equip your new weapon.  Choosing an item from the item selection screen functions in much the same way.  Sometimes items, such as rations, must be used from this screen with the A button.  A few items are equipped permanently without you selecting it, but most items need to be selected to be used outside of the menu.  Anyway, one of the trucks in the jungle transports you in front of the first building.

Most of the game is spent inside of buildings.  These can have pretty large layouts with multiple floors, so creating a map might be helpful, or maybe you can do what I did and memorize the basic structure.  To get inside of the initial building to begin with, you need to locate and equip a keycard.  Many of the rooms inside the buildings are behind locked doors that require some keycard.  These secured rooms hold a majority of the weapons and items in the game.  More commonly you will find ammunition for your weapons or rations for restoring your health.  You can also find captured soldiers, who you can free simply by walking up to them.  They will sometimes give you advice or at the very least a thank you.  For every five captured soldiers you free, you go up in rank.  Increasing your rank increases the size of your health bar as well as letting you hold more ammo.  You can go up to four stars in rank, and you need that rank to finish the game.  If you shoot and kill a hostage, then you go down in rank, so don’t do that.

There are several weapons in the game.  You can fire standard bullets with either a handgun or machine gun.  The handgun shoots straight while the machine gun fires bullets one at a time in a spread pattern.  A grenade launcher and a rocket launcher fire their respective shots.  Plastic explosives blow up on a timer, while mines explode on contact with an enemy.  There is a remote-controlled missile.  When firing this weapon, you sit still while you set the rocket’s direction with the D-pad.  You can also pick up a silencer for your handgun and machine gun so that you can use them without causing alerts.

You will acquire roughly a screen full of items of all sorts.  Many of these are the card keys, and some of them are items that open up progress in a part of the game, which makes them just like keys.  I won’t go through all of the items but a few of them have different uses.  The binoculars let you peek into an adjacent room briefly to see its layout.  A mine detector lets you see hidden enemy mines in a few screens.  Infrared goggles allow you to see invisible lasers that alert the enemy when touched.  A gas mask lets you breathe in a gas-filled room so that you don’t suffer any damage.  The antidote is good for curing poison if you get bitten by a spider.  Not everything is required to beat the game, but it’s a good idea to pick up whatever you find.

When you die, you can choose to Continue or End.  Continuing puts you at a checkpoint with all of your stuff intact.  Evidently checkpoints are determined by your rank, not by your equipment or by distance reached.  This means a one-star rank puts you back all the way at the start, which is definitely frustrating when you’ve reached deep into the building.  Choose End to see your password.  Passwords are 25 characters long consisting of all capital letters and numbers 1-6.  This is a game where the passwords store all of your information, such as weapons, items, hostages saved, and even your ammo counts.  Part of the password is a checksum just to ensure you have entered a valid password and aren’t just typing in random stuff on the password screen to try and skip ahead.  This game takes several hours to play through for the first time and so passwords are appreciated.

This was my first time playing through Metal Gear.  I knew about this game and read about it a lot in old gaming magazines.  I never ran into a copy back then, but then later when I got one I didn’t play it past the first few screens.  I was more intrigued by it conceptually than I was interested in actually playing it.  That was how I felt about the Metal Gear Solid games too.  However, years ago I decided to finally buy Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection on PS2 and played through all three games at that time.  I struggled through them but wanted to see them all to the finish.  I suppose that satiated me as I haven’t touched Metal Gear again until now.

Playing through Metal Gear on NES for the first time was an interesting experience.  The first stretch of the game is tough on a new player and the game doesn’t open up until you get through the jungle.  I really got into it once I reached the first building.  At that point, Metal Gear starts to feel like a dungeon crawler.  I explore the building, getting a little bit further each time and picking up new items that make future runs easier.  I caught my groove in the middle part of the game before getting hung up some toward the end.  I have the map that was included with the NES game, and I looked at it once or twice just to make sure I understood the layout of the game.  This wasn’t a spoiler free playthrough because I needed to look up the solutions to the maze zones.  It was frustrating that the game didn’t tell you anywhere what to do there, and I gave up trying to figure it out on my own.  I would say my time with the game was fun with a few annoying parts.

I was able to record a full playthrough of Metal Gear.  My first time through the game took about 8 hours or so.  The second time for my longplay was much faster at around 1 hour and 45 minutes.  The game really isn’t all that big once you know where everything is and how to navigate the buildings.  I wanted to beat the game without dying but I didn’t quite get there.  I died once to the tank by mistake in the middle of the game.  I also died a few times trying to get through the dark rooms with all the holes.  I only cleared that part once in my first playthrough and I don’t think I ever found the right strategy for it.  That section is completely skippable, so after a few deaths, I went the long way around just to get it done.  I’m not completely happy with this run but it is good enough.

It’s hard to play this game without noticing how glitchy and unpolished it is, so I want to list some things I took note of during my time playing.  The most obvious characteristic of the game is its poor English translation.  Some examples are the well-known “I feel asleep!” and “The truck have started to move.”  This lack of grammar and spelling is all over this game, some things more obvious than others.  The card system has a major flaw in that doors require a certain card and only that card can be equipped to open the door.  There’s no indication what card is needed, and there are eight cards total, so you have to go in and out of the menu over and over swapping cards until you find the right one.  It is possible to reach late game sections early in the game and that causes some weird things to happen.  I had my transmitter go off only to pull up the transceiver to nothing.  Something happened to one of the characters and I presumed them dead though you can backtrack and communicate with them as if nothing happened.  There are also hints you can only get once when you rescue prisoners.  If you speed through the text or skip it, then it’s gone, and it might have been a vital clue for what to do next.  All of these things detracted from my enjoyment of the game a little bit.

There’s one more oddball thing about Metal Gear that has nothing to do with the game itself.  I’ve mentioned screw variants before on this blog.  To quickly recap, early NES games had five screws holding both sides of the cartridge together, and sometime in late 1987 the molds changed to a three-screw design for all future licensed NES carts.  Metal Gear was released long after three-screw carts were the standard, but somehow a few copies out there are in the five-screw form factor and I happen to own two of them.  These late five-screw variants are exclusively Konami or Ultra published titles, and all of them are missing the Caution label on the back of the cart.  These carts technically should not exist, but there are a couple of theories.  One is that these are refurbished games that were sent back for repair and they were fixed using leftover five-screw shells.  Another theory is that these were sample carts used for demos or in kiosks.  Whatever the case may be, these are very hard to find, and I am not sure if every Konami game has one of these variants as some have not yet been discovered.  Variant collectors will pay a lot of money for these.  I have a few others in my collection that I’ll mention when I play those games in the future.

Metal Gear is a game that both has a lot going for it and has a lot holding it back.  The graphics are very nice with lots of detail.  Even though the color scheme is a lot of green, brown, and gray, it still looks good to me.  I am not a fan of the font with the empty lines across almost every character.  I think the music is good.  The controls function appropriately with clean design.  The gameplay is fun and engaging, and I enjoyed exploring the buildings and sneaking past the guards.  I can see why this was a popular game for its time.  All the glitches and weird inconsistencies I mentioned before break the immersion a little bit.  Snake only moves and attacks in four directions which feels limiting, though at least the enemies behave the same way.  This is a game that will grab you by its story and its exploration, and it’s safe to say it delivered for me in both those departments.

The second season went more smoothly than the first.

To Beat: Win the World Series
Played: 11/11/19 – 12/12/19
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Bases Loaded II World Series and Ending

Uh oh, here we go again!  The first Bases Loaded was a very easy game that took a really long time to beat, solely because you are required to grind through a full season to get the ending.  Bases Loaded II: Second Season has a similar requirement to the original.  I’m not sure to what end the developers were able to take feedback from the first game to apply it to the second, but I did notice differences between the games that made the entire playthrough of Bases Loaded II more streamlined.  Despite the improvements, this is still a long season and another game to grind.

For more information about this series, check out my review of the original Bases Loaded.  In this review I will be focusing mostly on the changes made to this game.

Bases Loaded II: Second Season was first released on the Famicom.  In Japan the game is called Moero!! Pro Yakyuu ’88 Kettei Ban, which translates to Burn!! Pro Baseball ’88 Decision Version.  The game was developed by Tose and published by Jaleco, releasing in Japan in August 1988.  The NES release in North America was delayed until February 1990.

The first differences are notable before even starting the game.  The title screen contains Start for a new game or season and Continue to resume an existing season.  When starting a new game, you will first decide if this is a 1 or 2 player game.  A single player game always begins a season even if you just want to play one game.  First choose either the Eastern or Western division, then select a team and the opposing team.  For a two player game, you first choose a calendar date sometime from 1989-1993 (I guess they didn’t expect people to be playing this game now), then each player selects any team.  The teams in this game are the same one from the first game with half of the teams in the Western Division and the other half in the Eastern Division.  Teams only play against teams in the same division in the season mode.  The Continue option first prompts you for a password which is in the same format as the first game.  The character entry is slightly changed in that each character has a scrolling animation when moving to the next character.  This is the kind of design decision that infuriates me.  This game is long enough, why lengthen it even a little with unnecessary animation on password entry?  Before starting each game, you have the option to modify the lineup.  The Player Change option substitutes bench players into the lineup, while Line Up rearranges the order of the lineup.  Choose Play Ball to start the game!

The pitching controls are the same: Hold a direction and press A to choose a pitch, hold a direction while winding up to set direction, and press directions while the pitch is moving to adjust it mid-flight.  In this game you cannot adjust the pitcher’s position on the mound prior to the pitch.  The manual has a chart with some detail pitching stats.  Each player’s ERA is listed, top speed in MPH, which role they play, i.e. starter or reliever, and curve ball ability separated by vertical curve, left curve, and right curve.  Curveball scores are from 0-15, which mean 0 being no curve and 15 as maximum curve.  These metrics are not listed in-game (aside from ERA) but are useful to know.

Fielding has a couple of differences.  First is that you can now dive for a ball by pressing B.  Just B alone makes your fielder jump, and B with a direction dives in that direction.  The jumps and dives only work when you are close to the ball.  The other, more significant change is that there are two fielding views.  The first game has the view from up above behind home plate while the second game has views from above both the first base and third base dugouts.  When the home team is batting, the view is behind first base, otherwise it is from behind third base.  This is a very strange decision.  You can plan ahead if you think about it, but I just adapted from game to game. Due to the perspective, I found right field defense tough from the first base view and left field defense difficult from the third base angle.

Hitting has one minor tweak and one hidden feature I discovered.  In the last game you bunt by pressing B before the windup.  This time all batting is done by the A button, so to bunt you tap A to prepare the bunt before the pitch or you do a very quick half swing when the pitch arrives at home plate.  When you set up the bunt early you can aim the bat with the D-pad just like in the original Bases Loaded.  There is an advanced hitting technique I discovered very late in the season that may have been present in the first game, I’m not sure.  There are nine hitting zones you can target with the D-pad, either low, middle, or high combined with left, middle, or right.  As you are swinging in one of those zones, you can shift the D-pad direction to sort of swipe the bat in between those nine zones.  You have to swing toward one of the nine zones with A and then immediately after press a nearby D-pad direction.  It’s tough to explain, hopefully that was sufficient. Sometimes pitchers will throw pitches in between the standard bat zones and they are nearly impossible to hit unless you aim in between zones.

Baserunning is exactly the same between the two games from what I noticed.  It retains the strange convention where the D-pad direction is the base either behind you or where you are standing.  While holding the direction, you press A to retreat or B to advance.  I didn’t really grasp it the first time around, despite the long season, but I got it this time.

The biggest difference in Bases Loaded II is the introduction of the biorhythm system.  This mechanic attempts to simulate streaks and slumps over the course of a long season.  There are three ratings, physical, sensitivity, and intellectual, that are rated with a score from -8 to +8 for each player.  There are in-game charts of these three ratings for each player that are displayed either after the game for the entire lineup, for a relief pitcher, or a pinch hitter.  Charts are color coded with red for physical, blue for sensitivity, and white for intellectual.  Each space on the grid on the x-axis represents a single game, while each mark on the y-axis represents a point of the stat.  The bottom of the screen shows the actual values of those stats for the next game.  Curvy lines are animated on the grid for each of the three stats going out the next 20-30 games.  When two or all three of those lines come together at the top of the chart, you know that player is going to be a major force for a few games.

The biorhythm ratings mean different things for pitchers and hitters.  The pitcher physical stat relates to stamina and for how long the pitcher can both control his pitches and throw them at a high speed.  Pitcher sensitivity is the adrenaline level and affects how fast pitches are thrown.  The pitcher intellectual rating influences the tightness of the curveball, though it will not suddenly give a curveball to a pitcher whom does not already have one.  The hitter physical stat correlates to getting base hits.  A hitter with a high physical rating will tend to get base hits more easily.  Hitting sensitivity is for power and how far a ball can be hit.  The hitter intellectual rating is for clutch hitting and the ability to get hits with runners in scoring position.  As these stats fluctuate game per game, they determine how well a player will perform in relation to his natural abilities.

To beat this game, first you need to win 75 games out of a 130-game season.  This requirement is similar to the first game’s winning condition of 80 games out of 132.  This time, when you win 75 games, you have won the pennant in your division and you get to face off against the winning team from the other division in the World Series.  The opposing Western Division champ is Los Angeles and the opposing Eastern Division champ is New York.  The World Series is a best-of-7 series against one of those two teams.  If you win four of those games, then you win the season and beat the game.  So, you need 79 totals wins, one less than the 80 in the first game.

I had never beaten this game before, but I had a much quicker time finishing the season off in the second game than I did in the first game.  One major contributor was that the pace of play was greatly increased.  Minor actions like throwing pitches back to the pitcher that were very slow in the first game, while still present, take place faster here.  There are a few small tweaks like this that add up to a lot of time savings per game.  In Bases Loaded, games took 25-30 minutes, while in Bases Loaded II matchups lasted closer to 20 minutes each.  Perhaps my favorite new feature in this game is a mercy rule.  If a team is leading by 9 or more runs after at least 5 innings, the leading team wins automatically.  Games won by the mercy rule, if finished optimally, could run closer to 15 minutes total.  I won enough games by the mercy rule to reduce my total game time by a few hours over playing the full 9 innings every game.  I estimate I was able to complete this game in about 25-30 hours as opposed to 40 hours in the first game.  It is still a long, repetitive game, but it was a significantly improved experience.

For my playthrough of the game, my team was Kansas of the Western Division.  The manual has all the stats you need to compare the teams, and Kansas stood out to me for a few reasons.  They have two players appearing in the short list of best players in the league.  Yu is second best in homers and third best in average in the league, while Binder is third best in homers.  (It helped too that the Chicago Cubs have Yu Darvish pitching for them now, who is an incredible pitcher!)  I also wanted to find a pitcher with modest curving ability in all directions.  The pitcher May on the Kansas squad fits the bill for that.  I considered picking Omaha again like I did in the first game, but their team is uninspiring on the stats sheet and none of the same players from the first game show up at all.

In the original game, pitching was so consistent that I was able to figure out a super pitch that the opponent could do nothing with.  I spent a lot of time messing around with the pitching to try and find this game’s version of a super pitch, but sorry to say I did not find one.  I had hoped May would be able to find that sweet spot with his modest curve and throw balls into a dead zone consistently, but it just didn’t pan out.  I had to be more creative in finding exploits for this game.

For pitching, I eventually settled on throwing fastballs fading slightly down and right.  I wanted to induce groundballs where possible.  I ended up allowing mostly fieldable balls in play, a few strikeouts, some hits, and the occasional home run.  The best exploit I found was my ability to pick runners off base.  With a runner on first, I would do a pickoff throw to second base and have the shortstop run the wrong way toward left field.  Go far enough and the runner will take off toward second.  When the runner reached about two-thirds of the way to second, I would throw to second to get the runner to go back toward first, then I would throw to first to get the runner caught in a rundown.  I would usually make the out at second base as baserunners are slower to take a base than to retreat to their previous base.  If that failed, sometimes throwing a ball home or to first with a runner on second got him to leave his base.  I had a few backup pickoff strategies that mostly worked out.

There is another pitching strategy applicable to this game that also applied to the first game that I forgot to mention in that review.  It has to do with pitcher rest in between games.  Normally, starting pitchers cannot be used for a few games after they have pitched in a game.  The password only tracks wins and losses for your team, so all you have to do is reset the game and apply the latest password, and then you can use whatever pitchers you want in any game.  If you play multiple games per session without resetting, then you have to deal with pitcher rest.  This was much more important in the first game where I needed to constantly use my pitchers with the super pitch.  In this game, I mostly rotated between three starting pitchers.  May was my preferred pitcher, and Holler was really good too.  I used Anders occasionally, but I may have been better off skipping him more often.  In a few cases, I used Antman in relief because he has a decent ERA and a marvelous name.

On the hitting side, I had to play things straight for the most part.  Just put the ball into play and hope for the best.  Watch the opposing catcher’s glove during the pitch to determine where to aim your bat and try to make contact.  I got pretty decent at the timing for stealing bases and with a good baserunner I could take second base easily.  Another minor trick I picked up was with a runner on third, I could distract the fielders into throwing home to get batters to reach either first or second base.  Otherwise, the computer-controlled defense was very good.  Most of the times I got caught in a rundown ended with me getting called out on the bases.  The opponent’s pitching was really feast or famine.  Many pitchers just throw hittable junk near the middle of the plate and often I could score a lot in those games.  A few pitchers found the unhittable zone I was hoping to find when I was pitching.  It was most of the way through the season before I figured out I could put the bat in that zone with just the right touch and hit those pitchers too.  I suppose the opposing batters already could do that when I was pitching.

Over a full season, there were various events I took note of.  My season record at the end was 79-5.  Somehow, I won the very first game I played, I’m not sure how that happened but it did.  I lost the next three games, then I won a game, then I lost another game.  With a 2-4 record, I went 77-1 the rest of the way to finish off the season.  My first mercy rule win came in Game #13, a 9-0 victory after 7 innings.  The next game I hit a grand slam to win 12-1 after 6 innings.  I won 25 games total by the mercy rule, about a third of my total wins.  Two games ended in a tie after 12 innings and I was credited with a win in both.  Game #29 was a walkoff win 1-0.  In Game #44, down 1-0 in the 9th, Norton hit a 3-run homer to win that one for Kansas.  Yu bailed me out with a late two-run homer in a 2-1 win in Game #57.  Every player in my lineup hit at least one home run in the season.  Yu didn’t turn out to be near the offensive powerhouse I expected.  He didn’t hit his first home run until Game #37.  He did have a 3-game stretch where he hit 5 homers.  Saigun had a major hot stretch at one point.  He had a 3-homer game and hit 3 grand slams within a 6-game stretch.  The World Series ended up being a complete joke.  I won 10-0, 9-0, 9-0, and 5-0.  All four games combined were completed in just over an hour, which was easily the quickest stretch of games I played in the whole season.

You might be wondering about what exactly happened in the one random loss I had in the season, and it is so dumb that I have to tell the story here.  It happened in Game #71, breaking a 64-game winning streak.  Once I got good, I still knew that I was susceptible to a loss at any time.  I was vulnerable to the solo home run and any lapses in defense.  I had a few near misses along the way.  Therefore, it wasn’t necessarily a surprise, but frankly it was upsetting that it happened at all, especially so close to the end of the season where a loss feels like a huge waste of time.  What happened was I ran into a hot team.  Two opposing players were knocking the cover off the ball hitting long fly ball outs and some solo home runs.  The game prior I won 6-4, allowing 4 solo homers.  In this game, I had a 3-1 lead in the 9th when things unraveled, but not in the way you are expecting.  I was getting sleepy and nodding off a little in this game.  I had a runner reach second base, and sometimes you just cannot get him to move off the base on a pickoff attempt, which is what happened here.  A base hit scored him, and then more bad defense brought that runner around to tie up the game.  I woke up then and pushed the game into extras.  I made it to the 11th inning still tied 3-3 in fear of a game ending solo homer.  One of the hot batters stepped up to the plate, and I figured he was gonna go deep.  That’s when I had a revelation.  Why don’t I throw pitches way off the plate to walk him intentionally, then pick him off the bases?  It was so obvious I was surprised it took me that long to think of it.  The next pitch I tried to throw something different.  Maybe I was still tired and my thoughts didn’t translate down into my fingers because I threw a meatball right down the middle that sailed over the fence for the game-ending home run.  I went to bed sad after that loss.  At least it made for a good story!

I thought Bases Loaded II: Second Season was a major improvement over the first game with a few issues.  The pace of play is increased to a more sensible level, making for more engaging gameplay.  The graphics aren’t changed too much from the first game, but they are pretty good.  I like the pitching windup animations, and bunting, though mostly unused, had really smooth animation too.  The music is just okay, nothing memorable to me.  There is good variety in control in both pitching and hitting and everything responds appropriately.  The only minor issues were the timing when you can dive on defense and the silly baserunning controls carried over from the first game.  A gameplay nitpick is the unnecessary view shift on defense, as it is disorienting when suddenly in the next game you might see the field from the opposite angle.  The hitting perspective, while nice to look at, still takes some getting used to.  The second game was a little more difficult to win, but it was still pretty easy overall.  The glitches I found from Bases Loaded were all cleared up in the second game.  While it has a few new issues, this was the better game by far, though that doesn’t mean I ever want to play it again.

You decide if things are cleared for takeoff.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 11/8/19 – 11/11/19
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Space Shuttle Project Longplay

I get a lot of excitement out of playing NES games where I don’t really know what to expect, and much of the time I’m delighted with what I end up playing.  I was very intrigued by this game just by name alone because it doesn’t really give you any indication of exactly what kind of game it is.  Is it a space adventure, a simulation game, or something completely different?  Space Shuttle Project turns out to be a little bit of everything and it is one of the more unique NES games I have played so far.

Space Shuttle Project is an NES game exclusive to North America.  It was developed by Imagineering and published by Absolute Entertainment.  The game was released in November 1991.

The best way to summarize Space Shuttle Project is that it is a mini-game compilation.  You play the role of a recently promoted Shuttle Commander.  Your job is to support six high priority missions vital to the space program.  You are responsible for everything from pre-flight checks to space missions to shuttle launches.  To secure your job for the sake of your country, you must successfully complete all six missions.  Of course, you also win the game if you do all those things.

Beginning the game throws you into your first challenge right away.  You are required to pass the security check.  You are given a 4-digit code as well as the name of a shuttle.  Next you enter your name up to 6 characters.  Use the D-pad to choose a character, A to select, and B to backspace, then select End to lock your name in.  Now the code display is cleared and it is replaced by rotating digits.  Hopefully you remembered your code or wrote it down.  For each digit, wait until the corresponding number in your 4-digit code appears, then press A quickly to lock it in place.  You repeat this for all four digits and the shuttle name.  If your code matches exactly, then you pass, otherwise you have to try again.  You get a few tries before you are locked out completely, losing the game before you even start.

Each mission is broken up into four stages and the first of these is the launch preparation.  This is a side scrolling platformer section where you run around to set up the shuttle for launch.  You begin at the bottom of the long elevator shaft.  Use Left and Right to walk on the platforms and press Up or Down when on the elevator to move it.  First activate the Oxygen pump at the very top.  The lever for the pump is flashing so you know which one it is.  Press A when in front of the pump to activate it.  Now you have to start the Hydrogen pump below it, however activating oxygen now sets a moving obstruction in front of the elevator’s path.  Wait for an opening and try not to bump into the blue piece or you will get briefly stun locked.  The hydrogen pump activates another blocker.  Now you will need to escort each crew member from the bottom of the elevator shaft up to the shuttle door, back and forth for every person.  A message on screen will alert you to when you have brought the last crew member so that you can board the shuttle yourself.  You are on the clock the entire time and if you don’t get everything done you lose a life and have to start over.  The timing for the launch preparation is fairly tight so you need to move quickly while avoiding getting bumped on the elevator as best you can.

The second stage of the mission is shuttle lift off.  You are first presented with a long list of items you will be doing.  Don’t be intimidated by this, you don’t need to memorize this list!  The shuttle launch begins automatically and then you support the different individual steps of the launch via various indicators that play out like tiny mini-games.  In this stage you see a side view of your shuttle, and at the top of the screen is the control panel which shows the different indicators.  Many of these indicator mini-games are simple timing events.  There is a meter shown with a vertical bar that moves left to right.  Press A when the bar is in the white band.  Some operations like thrusting or braking use the thrust indicator.  You control the bottom arrow and you follow the top arrow with Left and Right as it moves back and forth.  These are all you need for the first mission.  Extra steps and different indicators appear in later missions.  During lift off you set your navigation via the tracking indicator.  There is a gray sine wave with a tiny white dot overlaying it.  As the dot slowly passes from left to right, you use Up and Down to keep the dot on top of the sine wave as close as possible.  Valve adjustment is done via the test indicator.  There is a set of six lights that glow in sequence and you have to repeat that order to pass using Left, Right, and A to turn on each light.  Completing this indicator gives you an extra life as a bonus.  Vernier adjustment is done by moving an arrow above and below a bar through a gap that passes back and forth.  The gap moves quickly but eventually does a slow pass which is when you make your move.  The gimbal indicator game is played by bouncing a vertical bar back and forth between two zones on a meter.  When the bar touches the left zone you press B, and when it reaches the zone on the right you press A.

The third stage is the actual mission that is different every time.  The first of these missions is a satellite launch.  Your job is to carry a satellite by hand from the space shuttle up to its orbital path at the top of the area.  You have limited oxygen which acts as your mission timer.  You control your astronaut’s thrust with the D-pad.  Since you are in zero gravity, you will keep drifting along until you thrust in the opposite direction to slow down and change course.  There are other satellites floating past that you must avoid, as colliding with them costs you a life.  Once you get to the top and place the satellite, it needs a little time to open up its panels.  The best way to avoid a collision during this action is by placing the satellite while moving in the direction of orbit.  Along the way, there are round energy panels that sometimes appear in orbit with the moving satellites.  You can touch these safely for an extra life.  You might also see an oxygen tank that refreshes your oxygen levels.

The second mission has you building the space station.  You have to carry panels from the space shuttle to where they are needed on the space station itself.  This stage scrolls from left to right and has the same movement controls as the previous mission.  As you scan the space station you will see background panels that appear darkened.  These are the missing ones that you have to align with carefully to automatically put the new panel in place.  Then you must move carefully back to the shuttle so that you can re-enter it from the hatch on the top to retrieve a new panel.  The shuttle restores your oxygen level.  You can also restore oxygen from permanent tanks that are on the background.  Just fly over them to restore oxygen.  You need to apply four panels total to complete this mission.  This mission is reprised in both Mission 4 and Mission 6.  The difference is you need to fly farther to place the panels and you have to set more of them in subsequent missions.

For the third mission, you are fixing a satellite already in orbit.  Here the space shuttle is in the lower left corner while asteroids are circling Earth.  Among the asteroids is the satellite.  Approach the satellite carefully, grab it, and take it back to the space shuttle.  You enter from the top of the shuttle like in Mission 2 but here it is flipped so you approach from below this time.  Inside the space shuttle you automatically do the repairs, so now you need to go back through the asteroids to place the satellite back into orbit.  Once that’s done, re-enter the shuttle to complete the mission.

In the fifth mission, you are rescuing a stranded cosmonaut.  This is similar to the first mission where you need to go up the screen, though this time it is much further.  You will need to add some oxygen via floating tanks found on your path.  Once you get to the top, go up and around the Russian spacecraft to retrieve the cosmonaut, then proceed carefully back down to the space shuttle.

Finally, the fourth and final stage in every mission is the re-entry back to Earth.  This plays out the same way as the shuttle launch in the second stage, only there is a different order to the mini-games required to land safely.  There are also a couple of new indicators unique to re-entry.  For setting movements like roll and pitch, you use the maneuver indicator.  This is the same as the normal timing mini-game only with pressing a D-pad direction instead of A.  The other new one is the alignment indicator.  You will see an outline of your shuttle and a second outline will separate from it.  You use the D-pad to guide the two outlines back into alignment, then press A to lock them in.

I’ve casually mentioned this already, but this game has lives, in the gaming sense.  Every time you make a mistake on a mini-game, fail to prepare the shuttle for launch, or crash into something in your space suit, you lose a life.  The penalty varies depending on the stage and mission.  Messing up a timing mini-game proceeds normally.  Crashing in your space suit sends you back to the shuttle.  Failing the pre-check means you repeat the entire process.  I think these penalties make sense given the situation.  You begin the game with five lives and remaining lives carry over from any stage or mission.  You can only have up to nine lives even if you go over.  If you run out of lives, you must restart the entire mission all the way back to pre-check.  You can reset your lives by starting a mission using the password.  Your password is the same format of the 4-digit code and space shuttle name as entered in the opening mini-game.  It’s pretty clever to recycle a game mechanic as password entry.

This was my first time playing through Space Shuttle Project.  When testing out my cart I only cleared the first stage of the first mission.  That meant I was aware of code entry and the shuttle setup, but nothing beyond that.  This game is not incredibly common but not too hard to find.  Loose cart copies are selling for around $15.  I got my first copy from a seller back on NintendoAge with three other games for $30 total, if memory serves.  A friend of mine traded with me for a condition upgrade, which I gladly appreciated.

This game was not too difficult for me to beat.  In a way the first mission was the most difficult one because you don’t quite know what to expect over all stages.  The shuttle pre-check stage is a little tricky especially in the later missions.  At best, I finish with about 10 seconds to spare so there’s not much wiggle room for error.  Both the take off and the landing stages were the easiest for me to clear.  The mini-games are easy enough, and you play them so much that they become second nature almost right away.  The space missions are not as varied as they first appear.  You move through obstacles and things in every mission, only the layout changes in the odd numbered missions.  After a few missions I had this game down pat, beating it with passwords over a couple of days.

You can probably guess that this game becomes quite repetitive.  There are cutscenes and animations that are repeated every stage during launch and re-entry.  These scenes are well made and neat to see, but only for the first couple of times through.  After that they feel long and drawn out, which is quickly made apparent during a longplay.  My recording of the whole game took over an hour and it could have been sped up by several minutes with some quicker or skippable cutscenes.  It is a boring video to watch, but it is complete and I played well with only minor mistakes.  I did figure out one little trick to save time.  During the even numbered missions, after you place a panel, you can intentionally crash so that you restart back at the shuttle.  If you are holding anything, you lose it, but for the return trip back to the shuttle, since you aren’t holding anything it becomes a nice time saver.  Over the full game I had plenty of extra lives to burn for this.

There’s one bonus tidbit about this game that I want to share.  I didn’t know about this before I completed the game and I would have showed it off if I did.  It’s really simple.  There is a bad ending to the game triggered when you lose all your lives during the opening mini-game.  At the end of most missions, you see a newspaper with a headline detailing your successful mission.  In the bad ending, since you failed to authenticate at the start, the paper announces your arrest for impersonating the shuttle commander.  It’s a nice Easter egg to find that’s right there for the taking.

Space Shuttle Project was a pleasant surprise for me to play.  This is a simple game that takes multiple, unexpected forms as you go.  The graphics and animations are well drawn and nice to look at.  The music is just okay, nothing notable.  The controls are spot on once you know what to do.  Some of the shuttle mini-games are not immediately intuitive but control correctly when you know how.  The gameplay is on the simplistic side and there’s not much meat to each mission, even the ones in space, though those are the most fun.  I really enjoyed the first few missions and then the game was a bit of a drag, slogging through the same things over and over.  Playing a single mission was quite fun for me, but too much more than that is overkill.  It’s too bad the game overstayed its welcome, since this game made me genuinely happy before I got tired of playing it.  

A Wild Gunman appears!

To Beat: Win 0.4 Round in Game A, Win 0.6 Round in Game B, Win 20 rounds in Game C
What I Did: Beat Game A, Maxed out score in Game B, Beat Game C
Played: 11/2/19 – 11/6/19
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Video: Wild Gunman All Modes Longplay

It’s time for another Black Box game!  This iconic set of early NES titles is 30 games long, and I have now completed five of them.  Considering I’m just over 20% of the library completed, that’s pretty close to average pace.  Four of the Black Box games are Zapper games, and this is the second one of those I’ve played, the first being Hogan’s Alley.  The Black Box Zapper games are distinct from one another in playstyle, though I find it interesting that both Hogan’s Alley and Wild Gunman carry one major similarity between them.  To know what I’m talking about, you will have to read on!

Wild Gunman originally was an electro-mechanical arcade game released by Nintendo in 1974.  The game featured projection video on film of a gunslinger that you shoot when his eyes flash.  Depending on how quick you are to the draw, you will see another video of the outcome.  This version was brought to America by Sega (yes, Sega) in 1976.  The home version was released in a different year in four territories: Japan in February 1984 on Famicom, October 1985 in North America, February 1986 in Canada, and February 1988 in Europe.  This was the first Zapper game released on the Famicom, while it was released in North America alongside Hogan’s Alley and Duck Hunt.  There is a big box Famicom version of Wild Gunman that comes with a revolver-shaped Zapper gun and a holster to put it in for the most authentic experience.  Nintendo knew they could not get away with a light gun that looks like a real gun in America, so instead we received the futuristic looking Zapper light gun we all know and love.

Wild Gunman is a timed shooting game designed to play like an old wild west style shootout.  The first thing you’ll do is hook up your Zapper.  If you want to read more about how the Zapper works, I wrote up some information in my Operation Wolf review.  When you turn the game on there are three modes to choose from.  You can press Select on the controller to toggle between the modes, or you can fire your Zapper off-screen to adjust the cursor.  When you are ready to play, either press Start or fire at the screen.  The only other use of the controller is to pause the game.

Game A is the standard mode most people think of when they know of Wild Gunman.  You are presented with a single gunslinger as he moseys his way to the middle of the screen.  Each gunman has a specified amount of time between when he draws and when he fires, as displayed at the top of the screen.  You have a timer as well that ticks up from 0.0s at the draw.  You wait until the gunman’s eyes light up and he says the word “FIRE!” in a speech bubble.  Then you draw your weapon and shoot.  You will knock him over if you fire first, then you can see how quick you were and how much time you had left to shoot.  Each gunman gives you reward money listed on the bottom of the screen as points.  You also get a thousand bonus points for every tenth of a second remaining.  You have three lives in this mode.  You lose a life if you get shot or if you shoot too early and cause a foul.  One interesting tidbit about this mode is that the game does not check to see if you shot at the screen, only when you pulled the trigger.  I don’t think any other NES Zapper games of the era worked that way, so you can play this mode on your modern TV if you want.

In Game B, you have to fend off two gunmen at once.  The same rules apply as in Game A.  Each bad guy has his own timer for shooting.  You wait until one of them yells “FIRE!” and then you shoot them both in the allotted time.  This go-around you must aim at the gunman you wish to shoot.  Sometimes only one gunslinger fires as you, so you will need to hesitate ever so slightly so you are sure to fire at just the one.  You lose a life if you shoot an unarmed gunman.  Both gunmen have reward money for points and you get the same time bonus as before for each shooter.

Game C is a different mode altogether.  This is a shooting gallery game that is very similar to Hogan’s Alley.  You are facing a saloon that has five entrances where gunmen appear.  One at a time a gunman will appear from a window or door and you need to shoot him as quickly as possible.  In each wave there will be 10 gunmen to deal with.  You get up to 15 bullets as shown on the bottom of the screen.  For each gunman you shoot, you will see a point total appear behind him that is added to your score.  The quicker the gunman shoots, the higher number of points you get, up to a maximum of 5000 points for the fastest shooter.  If you miss and get shot, you lose a life and must replay that wave from the beginning.  As in both the other modes, you get three lives for this one.

This was my first time playing through Wild Gunman.  I’m pretty sure I was too lazy to test this cart out with the proper Zapper setup.  I knew what the game was pretty much, though having a shooting gallery mode did catch me by surprise.  (This is why I enjoy digging into these games, you never know what will surprise you.)  This cart was a tougher one to track down.  I know a local store had a poor condition copy for a decent price that I passed on.  I am pretty sure I snagged this one in a random eBay lot.  This is one of those games where complete-in-box copies are worth far more than just the cartridge.  Expect to pay around $15 for a loose cart and around $100 for CIB.

Wild Gunman does not have a proper ending in any mode.  The game keeps looping for as long as you can last.  When this happens, I get to determine my own winning condition.  I don’t like rolling the loop counter like the NES Ending FAQ suggests.  The high scores for this game are also very low and don’t feel suitable either.  TheMexicanRunner had the best idea for considering Wild Gunman beaten in NESMania, so a modified version of that is what I went with.  In Game A, the gunman with 0.4s timer is the quickest draw, so beating that wave is the requirement.  Similarly, the wave in Game B where the higher timer of the two gunman is 0.6s is the requirement.  It can either be 0.4s/0.6s or 0.6s/0.6s, both are virtually the same if you have to shoot both men.  Both Games A and B are randomized so you just have to play until you get the hardest wave.  Game C has the most proper ending of the three modes.  The text on the saloon sign changes when the wave is beaten.  Normally it says “Good,” however it displays “Nice” when Wave 10 is cleared and “Master” when Wave 20 is cleared.  That’s as far as it goes, so beating Wave 20 is the winning condition for Game C.

For my playthrough, I took things a bit further.  In Game A, I cleared 20 waves before intentionally losing.  Typically, the hardest wave comes after completing 10-15 waves.  I will note that I started off playing this game by attempting to treat the Zapper like a revolver on my hip, just like a traditional wild west shootout.  I was able to clear Game A that way but wasn’t fast or accurate enough for Game B.  For my longplay I pointed the Zapper toward the screen in all modes like I normally would. In Game B, I ended up rolling the high score past one million points before letting it go.  The hardest wave in Game B comes much later, and at that point it isn’t much of a stretch to just go for the million mark.  I stuck with clearing Wave 20 for beating Game C.  I had to record my longplay video for this game in a couple of stitched-together parts.  It may not be noticeable in my longplay video, but it is not a single-segment run.  I was able to clear Games A and B back to back with no trouble, but Game C needed several attempts to get right.  I also had to re-record Games A and B because I forgot to put my name tag on the pictures I took after Game Over.  I want the scores in the pictures to match the scores in the video.

Games A and B were pretty easy for me, but Game C really threw me for a loop in how difficult it was.  Some of the gunman in later waves appear to work on the same 0.4s timing as the quickest shooters in the other modes, and that is tough to handle when you also need to aim unpredictably.  But actually, that isn’t true because I realized that the gunmen in Game C do indeed appear from the same locations every time.  There are a few different patterns where the gunmen appear from the windows and doors in the same order for a full wave.  Furthermore, these patterns are tweaked when they reoccur in later waves so that the timing of when a gunman appears from his location is slightly changed.  As an example, there is a pattern where the last two gunmen appear from the lower-left window and upper-right window respectively.  In later waves using that same pattern, the gap in time between the final two gunmen appearing may either increase or decrease.  It was necessary to pay attention to these nuances to beat this mode.  When you have to defeat ten gunmen in each of the twenty waves, mistakes are amplified when you only have three lives to manage.

Some of you know that Wild Gunman made an appearance in the movie Back to the Future Part II.  In the film, Marty jumps ahead in time to October 21st, 2015 and enters an ’80s café where he finds and tries out a Wild Gunman arcade game.  While they nailed the look of the characters in the game footage, the game play looks quite a bit more advanced than the actual game.  Plus, there was never a dedicated arcade cabinet for the Wild Gunman video game, aside from its appearance on Nintendo’s Play Choice 10 system.  Anyway, many people had fun reminiscing and celebrating the Back to the Future series on 10/21/2015, and Nintendo got in on the fun themselves.  Nintendo of Europe released the Wii U Virtual Console version of Wild Gunman on Back to the Future Day where you can use the Wii remote as a makeshift Zapper.  Nintendo of America held back Wild Gunman’s Virtual Console release until early 2016.  NOE got this one right.

Wild Gunman is a simple NES light gun game with some charm.  This has nice graphics for an NES launch game with large, detailed gunman sprites full of personality.  The music is simple in this one, but I think more fondly about the sound effects.  They help carry the gameplay and get you ready to shoot when the time is right.  The Zapper controls are nice and responsive.  I did have a little trouble with certain shots in Game C, but I kind of think that was more my fault anyway.  The gameplay, while novel for its time, is both simple and repetitive.  However, Game C kept me on my toes with its combination of memorization and twitch timing.  I was not expecting to have to develop strategies for this game.  I consider that a nice surprise, even if it meant I needed a couple additional days to clear this game.  I am glad I played the game, but considering the simplicity of it along with the required Zapper setup, I think Wild Gunman is more of a collector piece today.

Become a little looney by playing this fun platformer.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 10/28/19 – 10/30/19
Difficulty: 6/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: Tiny Toon Adventures Longplay

As a kid I watched a lot of TV.  We had cable growing up and we were a Nickelodeon family for the most part.  I only got into some of the series that were played on local TV.  I didn’t really watch the Disney afternoon stuff, shows like DuckTales or Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers or TaleSpin.  My interest more switched to Nicktoons once they got going in the early 90s.  Now I did watch a bunch of Tiny Toon Adventures, but despite that, I didn’t own or play the NES game.  I played a lot of Buster Busts Loose on the SNES, just not the NES entries.  Tiny Toon Adventures on NES is one of the games that escaped my childhood for reasons unknown, which is a shame because this platformer is really fun.

The Tiny Toon Adventures cartoon was created by Tom Ruegger.  Both Warner Bros. Animation and Amblin Entertainment collaborated on the show.  Amblin Entertainment was founded by Steven Spielberg, so that’s why you often see “Steven Spielberg Presents” on the show’s title screen.  The show ran for 3 seasons and 98 episodes between September 1990 and December 1992.  The first two seasons were in syndication and the third and final season aired on Fox.  There were also three specials produced.  The show eventually stopped production to make way for Animaniacs, however re-runs continued through syndication regularly through around 2005.  The show was also a critical success, winning 7 daytime Emmy awards.

There are about 20 or so Tiny Toon Adventures video games released between 1991 and 2002.  Konami developed all of the Tiny Toon games except for one between 1991 and 1994.  (They published the other one.)  Konami was one of the most prolific developers in both quality and quantity, so this series was in good hands.  There were three NES Tiny Toon Adventures games: Tiny Toon Adventures, Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland, and Tiny Toon Adventures Cartoon Workshop.  Tiny Toon Adventures released in both North America and Japan in December 1991, while the European release was delayed until October 1992.  It was the first console game based on Tiny Toon Adventures.

The story is your simple guy kidnaps girl plot.  Montana Max, one of the villains of the show, is upset because Buster Bunny wins the award for Best Student Film at the Acme Acres Animation Festival.  So, in a fit of jealous rage, Montana Max has Babs Bunny kidnapped while on her way over to Buster’s house to celebrate his win.  Now, Babs and Buster are not related, just friends, so this particular version of this old story trope seems extremely lazy to me.  Anyway, Buster Bunny, along with help from Plucky Duck, Dizzy Devil, and Furrball, set out on a journey to save Babs.  There are six stages in this game you will have to complete to beat the game.

Tiny Toon Adventures is a platformer with standard controls.  Use the D-pad to walk around Left or Right.  The A button is for jumping, and if you hold A you get a big height boost after bouncing off an enemy.  You duck by holding Down.  The B button is mostly used for running when it is held down.  While running, press Down to do a slide maneuver.  There are also swimming controls.  Tap the A button to rise in the water and hold Up and press A to jump out of the water.  You can also shoot whirlpools underwater with the B button to fend off underwater enemies.

There are a few items that will help Buster and his friends.  Carrots are the standard collectible in this game.  There’s a counter for them on-screen and you can hold up to 99 of them.  Other items are found in balloons that appear periodically.  Leap into the balloon to pop it and reveal the item inside.  The most common item is the Toon-a-round, a ball with a star shape on it.  Collect this to change characters to either your designated partner or back to Buster.  Hearts give you an additional hit point from the bad guys.  Collecting a second heart while already having one gives you an extra life instead.  There is also a stopwatch that freezes the enemies temporarily.

At the start of each stage, you speak with Shirley the Loon who helps you pick your partner for the upcoming stage.  Sometimes, if you wait long enough, Shirley will recommend the best character to pick for the upcoming stage.  Each character plays similarly to Buster with some additional moves.  Plucky Duck can glide in the air by tapping A repeatedly. He is also a more effective swimmer than the others.  Dizzy Devil cannot slide, but he has a special spin attack when B is pressed.  There is a little meter that ticks down while spinning and you have to let the meter recharge before performing another spin attack.  Furrball can climb walls.  Push into the wall to grab on, then press A to hop up the wall.  Press the opposite direction and jump to leap away from the wall.

Hamton the Pig plays a useful role in this game.  Instead of being a playable character, he hangs out in a shop of sorts.  In some stages you will find a door to a room.  Go inside to pay a visit to Hamton.  He will exchange every 30 carrots into an extra life.  These are optional rooms of course but every little bit helps!

Most of the game’s stages have a similar flow.  Most often there are three sub-levels per stage.  Completing a sub-level gives you a score bonus for any leftover time.  The second level in the stage ends with an encounter with Elmira.  Just like in the cartoon, she loves to give our heroes a squeeze.  When that happens, however, you get sent back to the start of the entire stage.  You need to avoid her and wait it out until the exit door appears.  The third sub-level culminates in a boss fight.  Each of the defeated bosses drops a key that you will use to pass through Montana’s Max’s mansion.  This level structure lasts for most of the game before changing it up at the end.

This was my second time playing through Tiny Toon Adventures.  I beat the game with a friend a few years ago, just passing the controller back and forth.  I think it took us a couple of hours to get to the end.  This was my first time playing solo.  This game is fairly common and costs around $10 for a loose cart.

My playthrough of this game was pretty standard.  For my characters, I went with Shirley’s suggestions of Plucky in World 2, Dizzy in World 3, and Furrball in World 4.  In the other levels I picked Plucky because I found slow falling the most helpful ability.  Furrball is probably the best choice in the final stage, though I went with Plucky and stayed as Buster for the entire level.  The first time I sat down to play it I ended up finishing the game in about an hour.  A couple days later I recorded my longplay.  I did end up restarting once during recording because for some dumb reason I kept dying in the first stage.  When I try to run through this game quickly, I make lots of mistakes.  I spend most of my time just walking, which works because the timer isn’t an issue and I gain some leeway to react to enemies and traps.  I had a few deaths here and there, but I didn’t have any trouble clearing the game both times.  I even triggered the optional boss fight with Duck Vader in my video.  If you beat him, he drops a big heart worth three extra lives.  I didn’t need any more lives but I was happy to just show off and win that fight.

This time I am not too confident in my difficulty assessment.  I felt like I came into this game with fresh eyes as my past experience with the game was long enough ago that it didn’t make a difference.  The difficulty is kind of all over the place, with some surprisingly tricky spots.  Some of the enemy patterns and approaches can be tricky.  You only can take one hit and that’s only if you get the heart pickup.  Avoiding Elmira is harder in the earlier stages than the later stages because they slowly turn into platforming challenges rather than avoidance challenges.  Lives are fairly generous and you get I think four continues.  Bosses are relatively simple though the last two fights got pretty tough sometimes.  The final stage is definitely the hardest one, they got that part right.  Smart character selection can mitigate some of these issues.  I found the game easy and originally decided to put this right at average difficulty.  After some more thought, I bumped it up from 5 to 6.  I’m not sure which is better but close to average difficulty seems right to me.

Tiny Toon Adventures is a fun platformer and a great debut for these characters in a video game.  The graphics are bright and colorful with large, detailed character sprites and portraits.  Konami really nailed the look of these characters under NES limitations.  The music is very good, including an excellent rendition of the theme song.  The controls work very well and I like the variety of moves you get with the selectable characters.  Gameplay is standard hop-and-bop platformer fare, but done well with a few neat ideas mixed in.  There are only a couple of things about the game I don’t like.  First, I feel the difficulty curve is uneven.  Second, the running speed seems pretty fast.  I’m good at platformers but I had trouble going quickly through this game.  These are nitpicky items however.  This is a well-made game that is fun to play, even if the source material doesn’t interest you.

Enter the castle and solve its mysteries, if you dare.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 10/17/19 – 10/27/19
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: Shadowgate Longplay

This is another first for Take On The NES Library.  Yes, these are still happening more than four years and over a hundred games in.  This time I have played my first NES point and click adventure game.  The only other point and click games I’ve ever really played are some of the Professor Layton games, though I like them more for the outright logic puzzles.  This kind of game is not really my style, but I was intrigued at the idea of trying one for myself.  I think Shadowgate may be the most popular NES game of this style, and it was an interesting playthrough that I enjoyed.

Shadowgate is the third game in the MacVenture series of point-and-click adventure games that were originally created for Apple Macintosh.  The MacVenture games all have a common interface design but are separate games story-wise except for the two Déjà Vu games.  While Shadowgate was the third MacVenture game released, it was the first of the three games eventually ported to the NES.  Shadowgate was first released in 1987, developed by ICOM Simulations and published by Mindscape.  It was ported to many different PCs before reaching the NES in December of 1989.  The PAL version was released in Europe in 1991.  The NES port was published by Kemco*Seika and I believe Kemco also ported the game to the NES.

Shadowgate has a basic storyline.  The evil Warlock Lord is set to bring destruction to the world by raising and releasing the Behemoth.  You play as the last of the line of kings, and per your lineage you are the only one who can stop the Warlock Lord from his evil scheme.  You start the game at the front door of Castle Shadowgate.  You will need to use your reasoning skills, as well as equipment found along the way, to infiltrate the castle and make your way through to the Warlock Lord to put a stop to his plan.  Do so, and you win the game.  But beware, there are plenty of traps and enemies along the way that are out to get you.

The MacVenture point-and-click interface seems to be well ported to the NES.  You control a hand-shaped cursor that you move around the screen with the D-pad.  The left side of the screen is the viewing window where you see the scene set ahead of you.  The cursor freely moves across this window and you can set it on top of anything you see.  The right side and the bottom of the screen contain different options for you.  These are little squares labeled with text.  The cursor snaps to these squares as you move the cursor toward them.  The programming here is good as you can move the cursor to whatever you want both efficiently and intuitively.  The A button is used to select either commands, items, or objects in the viewing screen.  The B button cancels one of the commands you have previously selected.  Both the Start button and the Select button display a hint during gameplay.

Interactions in this game utilize a verb-noun structure.  You need to select an action, your verb, and then apply it to an object, your noun.  The actions are all listed out at the bottom of the screen.  The objects are things either visible in the viewing window or in your inventory.  Select your action, then select the object you want, and see what happens.  Sometimes you need to select two objects, most commonly when you want to Use one thing on some other thing.  Actions stay selected until you choose a different one, so you can use the same command over and over quickly.

These are the commands you can perform:

Move: Lets you move from one screen to another.  This command has a small mini-map below it that is freely scrollable with the cursor.  It contains squares for each of the exits relative to their positioning in the viewing window.  Often you can Move somewhere using either the square on the mini-map or the location itself in the viewing window.

Look: Lets you examine objects in the viewing window or objects you are carrying.  This gives a text description of the item in question that might give you some information on how to use that item.

Take: Lets you add an item in front of you to your inventory, which is represented by a card system in the window on the right.  Each item is on its own line and you can page through multiple cards worth of items using the Up and Down arrows in the Card section of the menu.  You also learn a few magical spells in the game which are kept on their own separate card at the end of the inventory.

Open and Close: These commands are mostly used to open and close doors, but they do have some non-obvious uses from time to time.

Use: This is primarily how you apply an item from your inventory to something in front of you.  As far as I remember it’s the only command where you have to choose what to use and what to use it on.

Hit: Smacks something!  You may want to tread carefully using this against the creatures in the castle, but there are other uses too.

Leave: You can leave an item behind.  In the right situation you can use this command to thin out your inventory.  Fortunately, you can hold as much stuff as needed.

Speak: Talk to someone!  Not everyone talks back though.

The final two options in the lower right are Self and Save.  You can use Self to perform a command on yourself, such as if you want to eat something or use an item on yourself.  You can even hit yourself if you want, the game will let you try whatever!  Save records your progress to the battery backup.  It doesn’t hurt to save often in this game.

This game also has a system involving torches.  To get anywhere in the castle you need to keep a lit torch on you at all times.  You can see two torches at the top of your inventory and how the flames are doing.  You can also point the cursor to the flame and use it just like an inventory item.  When the torches start to run low, the music switches over a very queasy tune reminding you to light up another one to keep going.  If both torches are out, it goes dark and you end up tripping to your death, every single time.  There are a finite number of torches in Castle Shadowgate, but if your torch goes dark the game gives you back a partial torch for free, so you are never locked out from completing the game.

Speaking of death, there is a lot of dying that goes on in the game.  There are plenty of creatures and traps to deal with and you can suffer a grizzly death if you do the wrong thing or aren’t careful enough.  When you die you get a visit from Death himself as you get to read the description of how you met your untimely demise.  It is fun to see all the different ways you can perish and to read all the text written about it.  Dying puts you back one screen and you will keep respawning on that screen if you die there again without leaving.  A little tip here: I put the respawning system to good use whenever I got into a room with a puzzle where I died a lot.  I would go into that room, leave the room, and kill myself somehow so that I would always respawn in the room I was trying to solve.  It saved me a little bit of time at least.

This was my first time playing through Shadowgate.  I know this was a popular game back in the day, but I didn’t own a copy until my adulthood collecting days and I didn’t bother playing past the first screen when I tested my cart.  I have owned a few extra copies of this game and I think I’ve sold them all.  It is an inexpensive game to buy, floating around in the $5-$10 range.

I’m sure you are wondering if I was able to complete this game without any outside help, and the answer to that is no.  I really like to give puzzles an honest effort, but I’ve also decided now that I’m getting older that I value my time more and I don’t feel bad about looking up something if I’m truly stuck and have tried everything I can think of.  Rather than looking up answers directly on an FAQ or something, I decided to try a more official approach.  There is an official Shadowgate Hint Book created by Kemco*Seika that you could mail order from a form on the back page of the manual.  It cost $5.95 plus taxes and shipping, but thankfully we have the internet so I just did a search online and downloaded a PDF scan of the hint book for free.  The structure of the hint book is quite good.  It is laid out in the form of questions roughly ordered to how you would solve those events in the game, or around where you would find an item and wonder what you could use it for later.  The book comes with three levels of hints, A, B, and C.  A hints are gentle, B hints are a little more direct, and the C ones pretty much tell you what to do.  The hints are numbered and are all mixed up as well so that you are less likely to see relevant clues for where you are stuck.  This was the only help I needed to beat this game.  I used several A hints, some B hints, and a few C ones.

It’s hard to talk more about this game without mentioning specific puzzles, so that’s what I’m going to do here.  If you still want to try this game for yourself, now is the time to look away and just skip to the end.

If I had to guess, I would say I solved 80-90% of the games puzzles completely on my own.  Some of those solutions I’m pretty proud of figuring out with only my intuition.  I solved the game’s final puzzle on my own, after re-reading the poem I found early on and piecing the parts together.  The puzzle with the sphere was pretty clever.  That’s one of the few uses for the Leave command and that’s because you need to Take the sphere back after releasing it from the ice it made with your torch.  For whatever reason the entire usage of the sphere was intuitive to me from the start.  Sometimes I solved a puzzle accidentally.  There’s a puzzle where you have to collect a flute from the top of a fountain that I think ends up killing you if you try to grab it unprotected.  You need to find and equip a gauntlet that protects you from the dangerous fountain water.  I figured out the gauntlet on my own before even getting there so the problem was already solved.  There’s also one place where you find a key under a rug that you burn away with the torch.  There are a few rugs you can burn up earlier in the castle to no effect, so it was nice to have that experimentation pay off later.

Here are some of the puzzles I remembered needing significant hints on.  The first major place I got stuck was getting past the room with the high ledge that breaks when you try and climb up.  There are two torches in this room that you cannot take with you.  The secret here is you are supposed to Use the left torch on the wall, which causes you to pull on it like a lever, opening up a passage to another room.  Nowhere does the game indicate you can Use things you don’t possess, so I thought that was a little misleading.  I didn’t figure out the Epor spell because you have to Look at the writing of Epor on the wall twice.  (That spell isn’t mandatory, it turns out.)  I completely missed where you can pick up rocks to equip on your sling to take out the cyclops.  The most significant puzzle I didn’t figure out was near the end when you need to pull a set of levers in a certain order.  Several rooms back with the sphinx, there are etchings on a staircase that show the state of the levers at each move.  I know I saw something in the hint guide eluding to those etchings, but even then I didn’t bother noticing them and as a result I was completely lost on that puzzle.

Now that I’ve beaten Shadowgate, I have three observations about its structure that I hope I will be able to apply to Déjà Vu and Uninvited later in this project.  First, Shadowgate has a lot of room exits that you either cannot reach or die trying.  They are essentially fake exits.  I know I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to climb the broken ledge, or pass the dragon in the hot room, or break down the landslide in the waterfall room, among others.  The hint book helped me understand that these are simply red herrings.  Second, almost all items in the game are used exactly once, if they are used at all.  Some of the extra items were potential solutions to the sphinx’s riddle, but there were plenty of things that had no use whatsoever.  All of these things remain in your inventory.  It would have been helpful to know to stop trying to use items after they were already used.  There is one place in the game I found, the lake room, where you can toss unnecessary items.  Once you freeze the water over, there’s no other way I found to shed excess items.  That happens pretty early in the game too, limiting its usefulness.  Searching through your vast inventory for a puzzle solution becomes tedious at the end.  Third, the torch mechanic is completely useless and a waste of time.  When torches go out, you die, only to be restored with a partial torch good for a bunch of moves thereafter, and then you go back only one room.  The only good reason to light torches when low is to save you some time and avoid the annoying low-light tune.  I think the torch mechanic is unique to this game, which I certainly hope is true.

I am by no means an expert in these kinds of games, but in the end, Shadowgate was a fun experience for me and I enjoyed it, when I wasn’t stuck that is.  The presentation is really nice in this game.  The graphics are very detailed and there are a variety of rooms and settings you will come across in the castle.  The music in this game is top notch and a quality addition to the game.  The controls are excellent, giving you complete control of your cursor or locking it to the menu items when you need it.  I noticed the cursor speed slowed down intentionally in some rooms when you require more granular control.  This attention to detail is impressive for an NES game.  The puzzles in this game are mostly good.  Some were obvious, some were clever, and some were a little unfair.  It’s hard to pin a difficulty on this game, but I went down the middle with 5 because the whole game is a mental exercise with a well defined set of options.  The game becomes trivial to play when you know all the solutions to everything.  I can see why this game is more popular than I realized.

Not to be confused with Amazon.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 10/5/19 – 10/12/19
Difficulty: 6/10
My Difficulty: 6/10
My Video: Amagon Longplay

The process of reviewing games after I beat them is interesting in part because my opinion can fluctuate all the way until the end of the game. At first blush, Amagon is a solid, but uninspiring platformer. It quickly becomes quite a challenge. As I’m battling through, a few neat surprises show up improving my disposition toward the game. Then the crushing difficulty settles back in and I make no movement ahead. Finally, all of a sudden, the game clicks with me and it almost becomes trivial to complete the entire game. If I reviewed the game after playing only a little bit, I would have dismissed it as frustrating. Instead, I have more measured thoughts on what this game accomplishes. Let’s get to the bottom of what Amagon is all about.

Amagon appeared only on the NES and Famicom. The Japanese release, named Totsuzen! Machoman, arrived in December 1988. The NES release had the name changed to Amagon when it came out in April 1989. The game was developed by Aicom Corporation. The Famicom version was published by Vic Tokai, while American Sammy took publishing rights for the NES version. This game hasn’t seen a re-release anywhere, so the only official way to play this game is with the actual cart.

The story is a simple one. Amagon is a marine sent on a mission to check out a strange island from which no one has every returned. Amagon flies to the island only to crash land his plane on a beach. At the opposite end of the island is another beach where his rescue ship is located. Armed with only a machine gun, Amagon makes his way across the island to secure his mission and return home safely. His journey covers six geographical zones, each containing two stages each. The game is won once all twelve levels are completed.

Amagon is a run-and-gun game with simple controls. Use Left and Right to walk around, press and hold Down to duck, and you can jump with A. Jumping is rather stiff. Amagon jumps very high but doesn’t cover much horizontal distance. Amagon wields a machine gun with B. Bullets are only fired straight ahead and reach about half of the width of the screen. He begins with 300 bullets as indicated at the top of the screen. Once you run out of bullets, he will hold his gun over his head and you can only use it as a short-range melee weapon with B. The Start button pauses the game.

Enemies can drop powerups that help Amagon. Bullet packs add 20 bullets to his ammo. The always appreciated 1ups give you extra lives. A powerup showing a flexing man is called the Mega-key. This powerup doesn’t seem to do anything at first glance, other than to sometimes display “Go!” at the top of the screen. The rest of the powerups increase your score. Clearly marked powerups increase your score by 500, 1,000, 3,000, or 5,000 points. A crown gives you 10,000 points. As you can see, most of the powerups are only for increasing your score, and there’s a good reason for that.

Amagon is a fragile character. A single hit from an enemy or an enemy bullet will defeat him. The key to getting far into this game is to use the Mega-key to transform into Megagon. To use the Mega-key after you collect it, first you need to have scored at least 5,000 points. This is what causes “Go!” to display at the top. Then press Select to become Megagon. Now you are a bulking behemoth of a man that can both deal tons more damage to enemies and also absorb damage from enemies with his newly acquired health bar. You trade 5,000 points from your score for each unit of his health bar. Megagon can have a maximum of 14 health points if you have 70,000 points or more. You remain as Megagon until either you run out of health, you reach the end of the stage, or you fall into a hole. Running out of health transforms you back into regular Amagon. Reaching the end of the stage also puts you back to normal, though your leftover health converts back into score for the next level.

Though Megagon is very powerful, there are some tradeoffs to assuming his form. The controls are the same for both characters. You trade your machine gun for a punching attack. The hitbox for this attack is incredibly generous. While it doesn’t hit too far in front of him, punching has a very tall range. You can punch low enemies while standing while also reaching enemies just above your head. Punches are eight times as strong as Amagon’s regular attacks, so this is the preferred way to fight big enemies and bosses. Enemies defeated while you are Megagon do not drop powerups, which matters if your score is low or if you could use an extra 1up somewhere. Megagon has a special laser beam attack performed by holding Up and pressing B. This is a tall wave shot that tears through enemies and is twice as strong as his punch, but at the cost of one health point. You can’t use this if you are out of health either.

The different zones in the game all have a similar structure. You begin on the coast, then you travel through the jungle, river, deep jungle, and the mountains before finishing at the beach on the opposite side of the island. Each zone has two stages. The first stage usually ends in a fight with one or two of the larger enemies in that zone’s enemy set. The second stage culminates in a boss battle. These battles are pretty weird as you fight things such as a double-sided lion head and a walking tree.

Amagon has a continue system and you get unlimited continues, but there’s a catch. First off, the continue system only kicks in once you reach Zone 4. When you run out of lives and have the opportunity to continue, you can only resume play from one of the zones you’ve already cleared on that credit. For instance, if you continue from Zone 4, you can only choose from Zones 2 and 3. From there, if you lose in Zone 3, you are forced to restart from the beginning. You keep your score when you continue, which helps a little. Continuing almost isn’t worth it if you have a low score, since that limits how far you can get as Megagon.

This was my first time playing through Amagon. I have tinkered with this game a bit before and I always failed out in the first stage. I am glad to have finally figured this game out since I did enjoy my little time with the game. This is an affordable cart at around $5. I have had a few copies of this cart during collecting. I actually owned a copy of this game that did not work. The cart itself was in great shape, the pins were nice and clean, and the circuit board looked to be in good shape. It just wouldn’t do anything inside the NES. I ended up keeping the shell and swapped in a good circuit board before offloading the other copy as broken in an eBay lot.

I pretty much summarized my experience playing through Amagon in my introduction to this blog post. This game is tough to get started. Falling spiders get in your way. Flying birds move quickly and are tough to react to. Jumping is more helpful in the vertical than the horizontal. You fall fast so you don’t cover much distance, meaning gaps are tough to cross and enemies aren’t so easy to jump over. Wasps fire bullets in a spread pattern and I needed a strategy to cope with them. You don’t get a Mega-key until near the end of the stage and everything is out to get you before that point. This part teaches you how to be effective as normal Amagon while allowing you to build up some score for your upcoming transformation to Megagon. Getting to that point however is pretty challenging, especially for the early part of the game.

The game does get easier once you clear the first stage, but while progress was steady for a little while, I really struggled once I got to Zone 3. That’s the river zone, which provides dangers like leaping fish and logs floating on the river. I had many runs die out once I got this far, and it never really felt like I was learning anything about the patterns and enemies coming up. The solution to all this was really quite simple: Be Megagon every possible chance you get. I was focusing too much on progressing as Amagon because I didn’t want to miss any extra life drops and I wanted to keep my score high for later. I’m also a powerup hoarder in games by nature. I do well enough from playing that way for the most part, so I suppose that’s why I was hesitant to give in to becoming Megagon more often. Many levels give you a Mega-key very early in the level so there’s big incentive to use it right away. I did well as Megagon so I always traded back extra health for points at the end of the stage, and I never came close to running out of score. I did play more early game as regular Amagon than was really necessary, the parts that I learned anyway. A bit of a buffer is always nice just in case. I more or less breezed through the rest of the game once I embraced the Megagon strategy.

Amagon is a solid NES game, but I don’t think it presents itself very well overall. Graphically the game has a cartoony look that is more simplistic in nature. The music in the game is just okay, mostly unmemorable. The ending theme is awful and not a suitable reward for finishing this tricky game. The controls are responsive. The stiff jumping makes things tougher than they need to be sometimes, particularly during the small amount of necessary platforming. Playing as Megagon is pretty fun, ripping through enemies and bosses with relative ease. The better you play, the more time you’ll have as Megagon. For me that meant the game became more fun once I got better. The boss fights were a pleasant surprise that I was not expecting to see in this game. I think that was because the overall presentation of this game feels like a game from a couple years earlier than when it was released. NES games were getting quite advanced and polished by 1989 and Amagon feels dated by that standard. I classify it as an average run-and-gun style platformer, though as usual, I had fun with it.

Shoot the background and the enemies within.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 9/27/19 – 10/2/19
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Video: Cabal Longplay

Cabal turned out to be a pleasant surprise for a couple of reasons. First, it has a style of gameplay that is not commonly seen on older consoles like the NES. I don’t think it’s wholly unique on the console, but it is underrepresented at least. The second reason is it turned out to be an easier game than I anticipated going in. With so many games to play, I’ll always appreciate that. It’s always a good time blowing stuff up, and you’ll get a lot of that in playing Cabal.

Cabal first released in the arcades in 1988. The game was developed by TAD Corporation, published in Japan by Taito, and published in North America and Europe by Fabtek. The game was successful enough to be ported over to the NES and various computers. The NES version released in June 1990 in North America only. Here it was developed by Rare and published by Milton Bradley.

The story here is a simple one. You play the role of a soldier ordered by Major I.M. Havoc. The Dreaded Republic of Allied Terrorists, i.e. D.R.A.T., is planning a massive terrorist assault and you are the one tasked to diffuse the situation. You get to go in alone, or with a partner, into the terrorist camp and destroy it from within. Leave no man standing, that sort of thing. Your mission covers five levels of four scenes each. Complete each level to win this game.

Cabal is a shoot-em-up from a third-person perspective. Your character sits along the bottom of the screen shooting into the background while various enemy soldiers fire at you. Your attention is divided two ways. You shoot at the enemy via a targeting reticle on the screen and you move this around freely. When you are shooting you stand in place, leaving yourself open to attack. When you stop shooting, then you control both yourself and your crosshairs. To succeed in this game, you need to juggle between shooting at the bad guys and getting out of harm’s way.

Here are the controls for Cabal. Use the D-pad to move your crosshairs in all directions. Press and hold the A button to fire your machine gun and its unlimited ammo. Holding down A locks your feet into place. If you tap and release A quickly, you will lob a grenade. It has to be a very light tap. You have limited grenades as displayed on the bottom of the screen. Holding down the B button gives you some advanced movement options. B with Left and Right lets you run. If you press diagonally up with B held, you will jump and dive into a roll, while diagonally down with B does a duck and roll. While rolling, you can change directions a little bit to help dodge.

In addition to the perspective, another neat thing about this game is all the things you can destroy. Different enemies appear constantly, sometimes hiding behind parts of the background. With enough firepower, you can destroy many of the obstacles in the way. Buildings, towers, walls, stationary vehicles, all are fair game. For larger objects, they might go through several phases of damage before crumbling entirely. Sometimes it is helpful to remove the hiding spots in order to defeat enemies more quickly. Most levels begin with walls in front that give you some temporary protection from enemy fire. I say temporary because they will fall to firepower eventually, including from your own shots if you aim too low.

There are some powerups that aid you. Sometimes enemies drop these when defeated, while others are revealed from your various acts of destruction. The most common pickups are stars that are just for points. You may find extra grenades for your stash. You can also pick up some temporary enhancements for your machine gun in the form of a red rifle and a blue rifle. I believe the red rifle gives you wider crosshairs while the blue one gives you faster rapid fire. Honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference between the two, though the extra firepower certainly did help take down more stuff.

This game has a common flow over its five stages. You need to defeat a certain number of enemies per scene to clear it. There is a long Enemy bar at the bottom of the screen that shrinks for every enemy you defeat. Once you defeat enough bad guys to empty the bar, the level ends immediately. All remaining destructible objects are knocked down while you run gleefully forward toward the next scene. Completing the fourth scene in each level opens up a boss battle. The boss’s health bar is displayed at the top, simply shoot the boss enough to take it out. The bosses are damage sponges so this will take some time.

There are several types of enemies that appear throughout the stages. Standard green soldiers are the bulk of what you’ll see. They walk across the screen, eventually stopping to fire at you. The white soldiers are really annoying. They behave similarly to the green soldiers, only they stop to lob grenades that you can shoot to detonate while airborne. They also roll out of the way when shot. They take quite a lot of firepower to defeat. Tanks sit still for a while before driving forward and shooting. A direct grenade takes them out, or a lot of machine gun fire. Helicopters swoop across the top of the screen and fire a stream of bullets. Bombers quickly appear to drop bombs straight down. You can blow up the bombs before they land just like grenades. Soldiers in scuba gear pop out of the water briefly to shoot you. There are also harmless medics that pass by. They don’t appear often and I always avoided shooting them so I don’t know what happens if you shoot them.

This game has both lives and continues. You begin with four lives. You get an extra life for beating the end-of-level boss, but that’s all. When you run out of lives, you can continue three times. Continues are essentially an extra set of lives and you keep playing right from where you died with no interruption or setbacks. If you are score chasing, keep in mind that continuing resets your score back to 0, but that’s the only drawback.

This was my first time playing through Cabal. I’ve only played this during cart testing and only played just a few scenes. I don’t think I did very well playing. This is not a super common cart, but it isn’t terribly hard to find and it’s not that expensive, selling for around $6 or so.

I expected this game to be much harder to beat than it was, considering my brief experience from the past. It turns out, at least for me, that the first few stages are pretty challenging compared to most levels in the game. I found a good strategy that was most helpful for the middle levels in the game. It took me four attempts total to beat the game. On the third attempt, I got all the way to the final boss and lost. I had no trouble on the fourth try, only needing to use two out of my three continues to beat the game. A couple days later I sat down to record my longplay video and that time I needed all three continues to win. Still, it was a pretty comfortable victory considering that.

I have some observations about the game that led me to discovering a solid strategy. It didn’t take long to see that the enemies always appear from the same locations at the same intervals. Soldiers often walk in from either side of the screen. Once you clear out the obstacles and take out a few soldiers close together, they will reappear in the same order. I got into a rhythm where I could empty out the screen and figure out about when the next wave would walk in. I positioned my guy on the side of the screen where the most soldiers appeared so that I could blow them away right when they appeared, before they could stop and fire. Often, I had enough time to get the ones on the other side of the screen too. Levels with mostly green soldiers are easy with this strategy, but it gets trickier with enemies like white soldiers and the scuba divers. What helps with that is I noticed that rolling on the ground is very effective at avoiding standard fire. Either you can’t get hit while rolling or your hitbox is very small. I got into the habit of rolling constantly anytime I was under fire until I found a safe spot to open up and fire. This is not a foolproof strategy, but it kept me from dying enough to beat the game.

Cabal is a fun shoot-em-up on the NES that I enjoyed played. The graphics and animations are pretty good. There can be a lot of activity going on the screen at once, from destructible buildings to grenades exploding to blankets of bullet fire, sometimes all at once. Unavoidably, the sprites flicker, but the game whistles along and I didn’t remember any slowdown. The controls might seem cumbersome at first, but I adapted to them quickly. Controlling both your player and the crosshairs takes some getting used to, and I can see it not clicking with everyone. I don’t remember much at all about the music, which usually tells me that it wasn’t that great anyway. The boss battles are pretty well done but tend to drag on a bit. The levels can drag on too. This is a repetitive game by nature, but it is a short enough game that it is okay by me. There is a mix of good and bad things here, but overall it is a fine game.

Saturday was the four-year anniversary for Take On The NES Library!

In last year’s anniversary reflection, I commented on how it was my most prolific year to date in terms of games completed and how I hoped to keep up that kind of pace going forward. Specifically, I thought in Year 4 I could beat my average in completions per year. It turns out I hit EXACTLY average. This year I finally got around to creating a table showing progress year-over-year, so let’s take a look at that:

Year	Beaten	Total Beaten	Yearly Average	Days/Game	End Date	Average Difficulty
1	38	38	38	9.6	7/14/2033	5.5000
2	24	62	31	11.8	6/27/2037	5.4355
3	43	105	35	10.4	1/5/2035	5.3238
4	35	140	35	10.4	1/3/2035	5.3214

(Note: It must be some sort of rounding thing in that my estimated end date is now two days earlier.)

How I managed an average number of completions this year is a bit interesting. I know that I played several games this year that took a long time to play. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this here before, but I’ve put my programming skills to use by having my master game list for my project in an SQL database. This lets me generate pretty much any kind of report that I want. I decided to look at how many games took me longer than two weeks to finish. In total, there have been 18 games like that. In the last 12 months, I have played 8 of those games, and I’m in the middle of another long one right now. My suspicions were right in that Year 4 has been the Year of the Long Game. Some of those were difficult games that took time to master, while others were just lengthy games, overall a nice mix. On the other end of the spectrum, looking at games that took a week or less to complete, there were 23 of them played in Year 4. That’s a decent number, but it ended up as my lowest percentage of all four years so far. This data suggests that I should have come in under my average this year. I think the difference between past years is that I spent less time in between NES games, often jumping from one to the next either same day or the next day. That is tougher to check in the database, so this is just a hunch for now. We could also be looking at small sample size issues as well.

The other new data point I checked up on is average difficulty rating. I crossed the 20% mark of games completed this year, so that is a large enough sample to see how balanced I am at rating relative difficulty. The numbers suggest that I am doing well representing the library as a whole. My 1 to 10 point system means that the average difficulty should be at 5.5. In Year 1, I hit that number exactly, while it has lowered slightly each year since. I certainly feel like I am getting better at beating NES games than when I started, so perhaps that is some bias I have toward that average trending downward. As long as it holds in the 5.x range, I will be satisfied.

I suppose this anniversary update has become an analysis of project metrics. I certainly had a good time looking at all the data and figuring out some trends, hopefully you did too. I’m already excited to see what findings I will have next year.

My biggest non-data-related takeaway from this year is that I am still having a blast combing through the NES library. This year featured some challenging games and some long games, but my enthusiasm remains high. Even playing games I’m not so crazy about, it feels like this is what I’m meant to be doing. To what end or purpose, I don’t know. I’m not setting the world on fire playing these games alone in my basement or anything. There’s not some grand lesson or divine gift given only to those who beat every licensed NES game. I just think this is a fun project that gives me something extra in my life to look forward to. Thanks for reading and following along on my progress. Here’s to another year!