My first foray into Koei strategy games went better than I expected.

There’s a long introductory scene before this, it’s nice.

To Beat: Win Scenario 4
Played: 5/30/18 – 6/7/18
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Gemfire Ending

So here we are at the dreaded Koei game. I was fearful of this day. Koei is responsible for creating strategy games on the NES, often games based on historical figures and their conquest of territories. These are very sophisticated games with thick manuals and a staggering number of options when considering the scope of the NES. When I put together my list of games to play for this project, Koei games were the very first ones to get put aside. One brief look at each game was enough for me to decide that I wanted nothing to do with them. Now that I’m over two years into this project, it was finally time to get acquainted. I did my research and learned that for a first-time player to this subgenre, Gemfire is the one to play first. That turned out to be a very wise decision.

Koei was first established in 1978 by Yoichi Erikawa and Keiko Erikawa. Their first strategy game was Nobunaga no Yabo in 1983, better known as Nobunaga’s Ambition in the west. They became known for creating this and other strategy games in this similar style, including many sequels to Nobunaga’s Ambition. In 1988, Koei created a subsidiary in North America for localizing their games outside of Japan. This is how the NES received Koei’s games. Koei would later acquire Tecmo in the late 2000s and the company is now called Koei Tecmo Games.

Gemfire was developed and published by Koei, just like all of their other NES games. It was first released on the Famicom as Royal Blood in August 1991. It was widely ported to other home computers and consoles throughout 1991 and 1992. The NES version came out in March 1992.

The graphics are quite nice.

Gemfire is a fantasy-based war strategy game with an involved storyline. The kingdom of Ishmeria was attacked by a sorcerer named Zemmel and his Fire Dragon. The water creature Pastha appeared to extinguish the flames of the dragon and keep the kingdom from burning down but it was not enough to stop the dragon. The King of Ishmeria summoned his six wizards and sorceresses to seal the dragon. Just as they were about finished with their spell, Zemmel cursed them before fleeing. This caused the six wizards and sorceresses plus the Fire Dragon to turn into gems. These seven gems were inlaid into a crown called Gemfire. The King discovered the crown held special powers and he used them to help his people and bring peace to Ishmeria.

Eventually the King grew old and passed down both his reign and Gemfire over to his son, King Eselred. Unfortunately, he used the power of Gemfire to oppress his people. His daughter, Princess Robin, was kind and hoped to stop her father. One night she peered into the throne room and found the King asleep, holding Gemfire. She sneaked in, grabbed the crown, and broke the spell. She removed the gems and threw them out of the castle. But just as she was removing the final gem representing the Fire Dragon, King Eselred awoke and stopped her. Feeling betrayed, he locked Princess Robin away in a tower. However, the spell was broken, and the six wizards and sorceresses resumed their normal form. They sought out other rulers of Ishmeria, vowing to use their powers for good. Their hope was for someone virtuous to restore Gemfire and bring unity and peace back to Ishmeria.

At the start of the game, you will choose from four scenarios. The map is the same for all scenarios and is split up into 30 numbered provinces. Icons on each province indicate the ruler of that province. The scenarios differ by which families rule over which provinces, and what families you can choose to control for the game. You pick the scenario and the family you wish to control. You also get to select an advisor that can give you tips during the game. In any case, the goal is the same. You must rule over all 30 provinces. By doing that, you will collect all the gems and restore Gemfire, and of course, beat this game.

You’ll see this screen a bunch.

A large portion of this game is menu-driven, so the controls are straightforward and you can figure them out depending on the situation. Use the D-pad to move a cursor around. Sometimes this is an arrow on the map, sometimes it is an arrow at the bottom of the screen, and sometimes it controls a square box around some icon. You use the A button to make selections and press the B button to cancel or go back. When you need to enter in a number, you press Up and Down to increase or decrease the highlighted digit. On the main game screen, you can press Select to bring up an options menu. Here you can save or load a game, set the text speed, during the sound on or off, and quit the game. If you choose Quit, you can let the computer take over and play out the rest of the scenario. Be warned that this may take hours if you let it run, but it’s neat to see this game have that capability.

The game begins in January of Year 1 as noted at the top of the screen. Gemfire plays out a little bit like a board game. Each of the 30 provinces gets one turn per month. The turn order is random. You get to make a turn for each province you control each month. You can also decline to make a move, but there are so many things you can do in this game that you should be able to find something to do. After all turns are taken, the calendar moves to the next month. At the start of each month, there are special events that randomly occur. Weather negatively affects some regions of the map. For instance, snowstorms may affect northern provinces, or flash flooding may hurt southeastern provinces. The plague can come upon any region. There are also elves and ogres that can influence individual provinces. Some help and some hurt in various ways.

The main screen contains a bunch of information. The right side displays the calendar date and the map of Ishmeria. The left side contains province specific information. On your turn, you see your province data here. The top-most box shows the ruling family’s name, province number, province name, and family crest. Below that is the current ruler of that province with a space for a symbol of the status of that province. For instance, one province is the home province and there are certain moves only the home province can make. Below the ruler is a set of province data, four icons representing your commands, and the text box at the bottom.

It’s a good idea to start developing early.

The province data is very important to understand. The dollar sign indicates the amount of gold you have, the apple indicates how much food you have, and the little people icon shows how many soldiers you have in your army. These are your assets for the province. The right side shows statistics. The flag indicates the measure of the people’s loyalty to their leader. The plant icon is your farming statistic. This is how effective you are at growing crops. The castle icon shows the level of protection of the province. The higher this stat is, the better you are at defending from attack or some natural disasters.

The four icons near the bottom left are for your main commands. From left to right, they are military commands, domestic commands, diplomacy commands, and vassal commands. On your turn, you get a cursor hovering over those icons. Pressing A on one of them changes the main commands over to subcommands. Each of the four main commands has four subcommands, so there are sixteen different commands you can select. Some of those commands have even more options available to them as displayed in the text box. This is where the game really got my head spinning at first, but soon enough I got the hang of it and it wasn’t all that bad.

The military commands are straightforward. I’ll capitalize the subcommands so you can see them more clearly. You can Attack a neighboring province. First, choose how many troops you want to send into battle. This costs some gold and you also have to send food with the troops for the fight. You can Recruit more troops into your army which also costs gold. You can Move Troops to a neighboring province you control. While you send troops, you can also send any amount of food or gold along with them. You can also Hire Monster to add a fifth unit to your army. I’ll get more into fifth units later in combat, but all armies have four standard units plus an additional fifth unit. From the Hire Monster command, you can Hire a monster or Dismiss one you previously hired. When you Hire, you get a list of available monsters. You can put the cursor over the monster to display a panel showing the size of the unit, the quarterly cost in gold to retain the monster, and the attack range in battle.

Other provinces may decide to attack.

Domestic commands are also easy to understand. The Develop command lets you build up your province. For ten gold, you can pay for Cultivation to increase your farming stat or Protection to build up your protection stat. You can engage in Trade with a merchant. You can either Buy or Sell food in exchange for gold. Before you decide, you see if food prices are low, average, or high. You can play this like the stock market by buying low and selling high. Another subcommand is Give Food to your people. This increases your loyalty stat. You can also Transport food and gold. This is different from sending your troops from the military command in three ways. You can transport between any province you control, not just your neighboring ones. You can choose whether you want to Send to a province or Receive from a province. Using the Transport command also does not end your turn. You can transport goods as many times as you want, plus get another turn to do something else.

Diplomacy commands are a bit more involved. Use the Ally command from the home province only to either make or break alliances. You can only be allied with one family at a time. If you have no ally, you can send a proposal to any family you want. If accepted, then there is peace between the two families and you are unable to attack each other’s provinces. You can break an alliance if you want out of the deal. The Negotiate command lets you perform a couple of secret missions. Here you can select Defection to entice a vassal from another family to leave them and join you, or you can choose Surrender to perhaps force the entire family to give up if you would really overpower them. A successful surrender turns over all their provinces and gems to you! The Sabotage command lets you choose a province to potentially damage their fields and that ruler’s reputation. The Plunder command lets you send spies into a neighboring enemy province to steal gold and food from them. This also damages the invaded ruler’s reputation.

All other commands go into the Vassal commands. The View command is an expansive command that allows you to look up just about all data in any province. You can View any single province, a list of family members from any family, a list of land data for any family, and look at any fifth units you have hired. The only thing you can’t look up freely are enemy’s fifth units. The Change Lord command lets you appoint vassals to any province you control. This can only be done by the home province. The Entrust command lets you give control over to the current ruler of the province. When you do this, you no longer provide monthly commands from that province, thereby speeding up the game. These three above commands can be done as many times as you want within a turn. The Search command lets you spy on another province to see its fifth unit or any gems they hold. This costs five gold.

You can look up the enemy army size before you invade.

The rulers and vassals also have statistics associated with them. You can use the View command to look at the ruler data. The sign icon represents leadership and how effectively he or she can rule a province. The sword icon is for commanding ability when going to war. The heart icon is for charm which gives you a better chance at making alliances or recruiting other vassals. The last icon is for fame which helps you with secret missions like sabotaging enemy provinces. You can also see which gems that leader holds.

A large part of Gemfire is in the combat system. You can initiate battles on your own with the Attack command or respond to an enemy’s attack on your land. If the enemy engages you first, you have the ability to either Fight, Retreat, or Surrender. If you Retreat, you must choose either a neighboring province or the home province and the enemy will take control of your province. Surrender is an option of last resort since you turn over your goods to the enemy. If you decide to invade an enemy province, then you get to choose how many soldiers to send over. You also need to send food along to sustain your troops for the expected duration of the battle. In either case, you also must choose a fifth unit. This can be one you hired or one of the wizards or sorceresses if you hold their gem. For the wizards and sorceresses, there may be a number next to their name. They are required to rest a certain number of months between battles and this number means they still need to recharge and cannot be used in this fight. Hired monsters or soldiers do not need this rest and can enter any battle without limitation. You also get to see the attack power and attack range of the fifth unit. If you do not have a fifth unit available then you can go without one, putting you at a significant disadvantage for the fight.

The battle screen contains a bunch of information. The attacking side is always on the left and the defending side is on the right. At the top of the screen on each side is the name of the ruler in charge of the battle. Below that are two numbers. The first one is how much food you have with you, and the second number is how many days you can last on your current food supply. The top center shows the day of the battle along with a picture depicting the time of day. Battles begin on Day 1 and days are split up so that each side gets four turns per day. The sides of the screen show the battle units along with how many soldiers are in that unit. Each side gets four units automatically, which are one cavalry unit, one archer unit, and two infantry units. The number of troops you bring to the fight are divided evenly among these four units, so for instance if you bring 200 troops then each unit will have 50 troops each. The fifth unit you brought along also appears here. The center of the screen is the battlefield. Battles are fought using a grid-based system.

Strategize for both the offensive and defensive.

Each battle unit behaves a little bit differently. On your turn, you may command all of your units. Select a unit to get started. First you can move from one square to another. Cavalry units can move up to three spaces, while archers and infantry can only move up to two spaces. Fifth units may move either two or three spaces depending on the unit. After you move, you can select an additional action. All units can simply wait, ending control of that unit for the turn. If you are in attack range, you can attack an enemy unit. Archers can only attack two spaces ahead, while other units can only attack adjacent units. Fifth units have their own range, and some can attack from several spaces away. Archers and infantry can build a fence on an open, adjacent square. This occupies the square and can set up a blockade. Fences may also be broken, which takes a turn and may not always work.

Press B to bring up an options menu. Choose Done if you have made all of the movements you want for your turn. You can Retreat if the situation is out of hand and the options are the same as retreating prior to a battle. You can select Auto Mode and the computer will play out the rest of the battle for you. You can also turn the battle animations off and on.

Attacking a unit brings up the battle animation screen. You will see the size of the units on each side of the fight. The bottom of the screen shows what kind of attack you are performing. Attack an enemy straight on to do a frontal assault. You can also approach the enemy from the side for a flanking assault, or if you get the opportunity you can approach the enemy from behind for a rear assault. You will do more damage catching an opponent with a rear or flanking attack, and similarly you should be mindful you don’t put yourself in a position where the enemy can attack you from the rear or side. The defending side counterattacks automatically if they are in range, reducing the amount of attacking units to a lesser degree. Attacking with a wizard or sorceress loses attack power every time. If an enemy unit is reduced to zero, that unit is defeated and removed from battle. Wizards and sorceresses cannot be defeated and will flee the battle on their own if they are low on power.

Detailed battle animations are neat to look at.

There are several ways to end a battle. Each side has a flag as one tile on the battlefield. If an opposing unit occupies the flag, the battle ends immediately. Battles end when all units are defeated or if one side retreats. One side wins if the other side runs out of food. If you are on the defensive side, you win if you repel the enemies for five days. The winning side attains control of the province. Furthermore, if the attacking side wins, they may decide the fate of the defending ruler. If there is enough gold or food remaining, they can buy their way free from you. Otherwise, you have some options. You can try and Recruit the ruler to join your side as a vassal. You can simply Release the ruler to retreat elsewhere, or you can Banish the ruler away from Ishmeria forever.

This was my first time playing through Gemfire and my first attempt at a Koei game period. These games attracted a small number of loyal players and most of them are on the uncommon side. Gemfire is a late NES release and one of the harder ones to find. I bought my cart only copy used for $62 in early 2015. It sells for around $80-$90 today and my price was maybe a touch above market value at the time I bought it. Gemfire was one of the last twenty or so licensed games I bought for my collection. Going through some old emails, I see I bought it just a few days after my daughter was born! My copy of the game came with a hard plastic case with Power Line instructions glued on the inside, which I later sold.

My run began by selecting the Gemfire scenario with Erin of the Blanche family as my ruler of choice. I have read that the last scenario is usually the one you want in these games, so I chose that here. My first name is Aaron so it made sense to choose my namesake as my character for this game. It turns out this is as close to easy mode as Gemfire gets. Erin begins with seven of the thirty provinces under his control, comprising the entire northeast corner of the map. The game manual gives some advice for the early part of the game which I followed for the most part. The first several turns I focused on developing my cultivation and protection. Cultivation is especially important because food is the only resource you can provide on your own. Once harvest rolls around in September, you can begin trading food for gold and using that to build your army. Early on, the Divas family approached me to form an alliance. They controlled a row of provinces just south of mine, providing an instant protective border between me and the Lankshire family with King Eselred, so I accepted that easily.

The end of the game becomes a formality with all this power.

This setup allowed me to begin my conquest of the map. My overall path for the game was in an S shape. I struggled for the first two or three battles and had at least one embarrassing loss when I left my flag wide open for no reason. That was all I needed for the combat system to click with me. My main idea was to gather troops into provinces with only one or two neighboring enemies and then steamroll them into defeat. Ideally, I could empty out a province of soldiers when attacking, leaving my old province defenseless but also landlocked away from any further threats. I focused mostly on military might and didn’t bother with trying to negotiate my enemy into surrender. I had it set up where my enemies hardly messed with me, allowing me to drive the offensive. Soon enough I was taking over fortified provinces with relatively little loss. Adding gems and the corresponding wizards and sorceresses helped me even further. It took time, but I took over everything with little issue after my first few struggles. Maybe I could have sped things up by pushing toward forcing surrender instead, but I had fun the way I played it.

These Koei games are really involved titles from the NES perspective, and if you’re like me you would probably find them intimidating without much fun to be found. For this type of game, I found Gemfire engaging and fun. The initial complexity is going to be an issue. In time, I was able to weed out what options weren’t so important and identify a successful strategy that led to a surprisingly easy completion. This is a beautiful game. The graphics are clean and the animations looks great on this hardware. The soundtrack is so good. This has to be one of the most underrated NES soundtracks just because of how obscure this game is. I need to repeat and re-emphasize this point. There is absolutely a steep learning curve here. This may be the most inaccessible 3/10 difficulty game on this entire list of games in my assessment. This game is not for everyone and I think most people won’t bother with it. If you have wondered what playing one of these games is like, I don’t think you can go wrong with trying out Gemfire. I think it’s a great game and a perfect introduction to this specific genre. Now I feel much better about tackling one of the more complex strategy games by Koei later in the project.

#88 – Gemfire

Do what the title says and blast your way through this action driving game.

Pretty nice tune here.

To Beat: Reach the ending after Level 50
To Complete: Beat the game and play all levels
What I Did: Completed the game without dying
Played: 5/28/18
Difficulty: 6/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: RoadBlasters Longplay

I’m noticing that a lot of video game names are long and complicated these days. Part of that is because modern games are also longer and more complicated, and they do seem to trend that way all the time. It’s tough to sum up modern games with short names that can also carry the idea of the game itself. The other part is that most of the simpler names are already taken. With early games especially, the ideas are simple enough to sum up in a word. I’m thinking of games like Asteroids or Centipede where you don’t need to go any further in explanation to know what they are about. RoadBlasters has a straightforward name and you know what you are getting into when you play it.

RoadBlasters originated as an arcade title in 1987. It was both developed and published by Atari Games. The arcade version came in both a standard upright cabinet and a large, cockpit-style cabinet. This game was ported to various home computers and game consoles, including the Atari Lynx and the Sega Genesis. The NES port, released in January 1990 in North America, was published by Mindscape. PAL versions were released in Europe sometime in 1990. A lot of what I read said that Atari Games or Tengen developed the NES version, but I believe it was Beam Software as they are mentioned on the title screen for producing the game.

RoadBlasters is a driving game that’s more of a shoot-em-up than a racing game. There’s no story here for a change. You drive an armored car that is outfitted with guns on the front. Simply drive ahead and blast away anything that stands in your way. Your task is to reach the end of each course before running out of fuel. There are 50 courses in RoadBlasters and you beat the game when you reach the end of the final course.

Blow them up! It’s more of a shooter than a driving game.

This game has simple controls. You use the D-pad to drive. Press Up to accelerate and Down to brake. If you let go of both Up and Down, your car will maintain speed as long as you stay on the road. Press Left or Right to steer in the desired direction. Press the A button to fire your main guns. You have unlimited shots! The B button is used to launch any special items you have. The Start button pauses and unpauses the game.

The game screen mostly consists of the open road and your car with the view from behind your vehicle. The bottom part of the screen contains all pertinent information. The left side shows your score multiplier. The small, vertical rectangle to the right of the multiplier is an indicator light that flashes when you are approaching mines. Next to that is your fuel gauge, both your normal fuel and your reserve fuel tank. You also see your current speed as well as your score. The round number is displayed in the upper-right corner of the playfield.

One of the main mechanics to this game is the score multiplier. It begins at one and can go as high as ten. You accrue points rapidly just by driving and the multiplier determines how quickly your score increases. Every way you can earn points is influenced by the multiplier, whether it is from shooting enemies or earning a bonus at the end of each course. You increase the multiplier by one when you shoot down an enemy, but it decreases by one if you miss with a shot. You really need to work on your accuracy and not just spew fire all over the road if you want to have a high multiplier.

Orange cars sometimes leave behind fuel pickups.

Another mechanic is the fuel system. Naturally, you use fuel in this game as you drive and you don’t want to run out before reaching the end of the course. There are a few ways to earn fuel. Sometimes there are fuel globes on the road and all you have to do is drive over them to add fuel. There are green ones that appear on the course that add a tiny amount of fuel, and there are orange ones you get by blasting certain cars that add more fuel than the green ones. Many levels have a checkpoint halfway through that automatically refills your main fuel tank back to the starting amount. You also have a reserve fuel tank. Only when you run out of fuel in the main tank will you automatically draw fuel from the reserve tank. When you complete a course, you get a point bonus that doubles as a reserve fuel refill. The more bonus points you get, the more reserve fuel you get. This is the real reason why you want to keep your multiplier as high as possible. A multiplier of ten at the end of the level fills up your reserve tank all the way.

There are some special items available. Periodically, a support plane will fly above and drop off some special gear containing one of four items. The item name will appear on the bottom of the screen after you collect it. The U.Z. Cannon mounts a turret on the top of your car. There is an ammo meter and the U.Z. Cannon is lost as soon as you run out of ammo. Firing the U.Z. Cannon does not affect your multiplier so you are more at liberty to fire at will. The other items can be used three times each. Round icons at the bottom show how many uses are remaining. The Electro Shield causes your car to flash colors for a while and you can drive through anything on the road unscathed. The Nitro Inject gives your car a huge speed boost. Normal max speed is 212 but you can get up to 298 with it. The Cruise Missile destroys everything on the road. Be careful because it also removes fuel globes on screen. All items are lost when either you use them all up or you crash your car.

Speaking of crashing, that’s another interesting thing about RoadBlasters. In most games, you would normally lose a life or lose a bunch of time when you crash. Here you can crash just about as often as you want and you come right back. The only penalty is a slight loss of fuel since you have to accelerate from a standstill each crash. I wrecked my car plenty of times when playing through RoadBlasters. It’s nice that the game is lenient in this regard.

The U.Z. Cannon is helpful against these off-road turrets.

There are several types of enemies and hazards on the road. The most common enemy is the orange Stinger car. These are taken down with one shot and can hide precious fuel globes. Small motorcycles can also be shot down, but they are a narrower target. Blue Command Cars aren’t damaged by normal fire and are often in your way. You can take them out with Cruise Missiles or the Electro Shield. Rat Jeeps are annoying enemies that only show up on a few courses. They drive in front of you from behind and then slam on the brakes to try and crash into you. You can blow them up but be quick. Gun Turrets sit on the sides of the road and shoot at you. They are difficult to shoot because of their positioning and are best left alone in my experience. Mines are telegraphed by the flashing indicator light but are tough to see on the road even if you know they are coming. Just avoid them. There are also rocks on the road that cause you to crash. Finally, oil slicks cause you to spin out and lose control when you drive over them. They are not deadly on their own if you manage to stay on the road.

The fifty stages in the game are grouped into twelve regions. At the start of the game, you may select from any of the first three regions, skipping some levels if you choose. When you complete a region, you are brought back to the select screen and you can choose a new region. This is really nice for practicing certain sections or getting to the end of the game faster. If you want to play every course in the game, then you must select the next region manually each time you get the opportunity.

You lose a life anytime you run out of fuel and are unable to reach the end of the stage or a checkpoint. You can continue from the start of the current course. After two continues, you have to start all over.

It gets tense when fuel is running low.

I have beaten RoadBlasters many times before. This was one of the earliest NES games my family owned and one of the few that was purchased new. I still have the same cart we bought back then and that’s what I used to play this time. I also beat RoadBlasters a couple of years ago for the NintendoAge NES contests. This is an affordable NES game that only costs around $5.

RoadBlasters isn’t exactly what I’d call an easy game. Some of the levels are very dependent on fuel globes and you need to be almost perfect to get through, even with a full reserve tank. You also have to do the dance of driving without shooting unless it’s necessary to keep the multiplier up so that you can top off your reserve tank for later. My past experience paid off big time, for I had no trouble beating RoadBlasters this time around. I played through every course and didn’t lose a life. My final score was a little over 1,950,000 which was better than I scored during the last NintendoAge contest. There were a few close calls in some of the later levels where I just barely survived, but overall I am very pleased with my run and my video longplay. It takes about an hour and a half to do a full run and it was good to get it done on my first try.

RoadBlasters is a fun action game that plays well on the NES. The controls are simple and work well for this kind of game. You can start out with easy levels or fast forward to some more difficult levels right away. This makes RoadBlasters a good game to play for just a few minutes or for longer stretches. The graphics are good and the roads curve quite a lot without any technical issues or slowdown. The sound is lackluster. All you hear during the game are car noises and sound effects. That can be exhausting for such a long game. The few songs that do play on the title screen and after each course are catchy and provide a nice sound break after the droning of the main action. One knock against RoadBlasters is that it’s a long game that is very repetitive if you take on all fifty courses. There’s also little room for error with only two continues to draw from. I’d say this a good NES game and a fun one to try out, even if you don’t care for racing games.

#87 – RoadBlasters

#87 – RoadBlasters (1,953,567 Points)

Punch, kick, and flip your way through this challenging action game.

The title logo palette changes, I think this color looks best.

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Reach the ending without warping
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 5/19/18 – 5/26/18
Difficulty: 9/10
My Difficulty: 9/10
My Video: Kung-Fu Heroes Longplay

As you may know, before I started Take On The NES Library, I generated a randomized list of games and I am clearing games in that order. Once that list was set, I have completely ignored it aside from revealing only the next game in the list as I finish new games. I love the mystery of it all and I’m glad I’m doing it this way. Still, there are a few games that I remember where they fall on that list. For no particular reason, I remembered that Kung-Fu Heroes appeared somewhere in the 80s. Well, here we are! Perhaps this game stuck out to me because I knew that it was a sneaky difficult game. Let’s jump in and see what I was up against.

Kung-Fu Heroes began as an arcade title named Chinese Hero. It was developed by Nihon Game and published by Taiyo System in Japan and Kitcorp in North America. It released in 1984. A Famicom port of the game released in 1986 under the name Super Chinese. That version was published by Namco under the Namcot label. The NES version wouldn’t come out until March 1989. The NES version was also developed by Nihon Game, but by then they had renamed the company to Culture Brain. They also published the game on NES. Kung-Fu Heroes is the first game in the Super Chinese series. There were three Famicom games in the series. Super Chinese 2 would release on the NES as Little Ninja Brothers, and Super Chinese 3 is exclusive to the Famicom.

Kung-Fu Heroes is a top-down action game. You’ve heard this kind of story before. Monsters come and capture Princess Min-Min while also taking away ten treasures. You control either Jacky or Lee to battle the monsters and restore peace. (I wonder where their names came from?) Kung-Fu Heroes has a two-player mode with simultaneous gameplay if you want to tackle the game with a friend. The game takes places over eight castles with four areas each. Your task is to defeat enough monsters in each area so that the door opens to the next area. Once you complete all 32 areas, you save the princess and beat the game.

A nice courtyard becomes a battleground.

The controls to this game are more complicated than they first appear. You walk with the D-pad, moving in the four cardinal directions. Press A to punch. You reach forward by stepping quickly ahead and back when you punch and enemies break apart completely when you defeat them. You can perform the moon sault kick by pressing the B button. This also acts as a jump button. Hold down a direction and press B to jump kick into the air. You can defeat some enemies while airborne, and others you can defeat when you land on top of them with the kick. If you press B while standing still, you will perform a special move called the miracle kick. During the miracle kick, you move really fast and can jump much further than with the moon sault kick. There are a few other things you can do under special circumstances that I’ll cover later.

It’s a little unclear what you have to do in this game when you first start playing the game, so I’ll clear that up first. All the action takes place on a single screen. Enemies will appear one at a time periodically from the sides of the screen. There will be no more than four enemies on the screen at one time. After defeating twelve enemies, the door at the top of the screen will open, accompanied by a loud beeping noise. Unfortunately, there is no indicator for how far you have progressed within a level. Sometimes you don’t need to defeat all twelve enemies. Either way, as soon as the door opens the enemies speed up significantly. You can continue to beat them up if you want. To end the level, walk through the open door.

The top of the screen contains most of the information you need during game play. The first row has a bunch of icons and counters. The first one is of a little face that displays how many lives you have remaining. The next one is a letter K which indicates how many miracle kicks you can use. The second player also has these indicators on the right side of the screen. There are three more counters in the middle that are shared between both players. E indicates the number of E-balls you have, the fist icon indicates your punching power, and the money bag displays how much money you have. The second row on the menu bar contains the score for each player. In the middle of the row is a space reserved for any permanent treasures you acquire.

Punch to collect treasures, for nothing is fist-safe.

As you can see, there are a lot of items and abilities in this game. Most of them are acquired through collecting items within each area. Many levels will contain several rocks or blocks. You can punch these blocks to reveal an item that emerges from the block as a bubble. Then punch the item to collect it. The most common item you will see is a treasure box. This will hold one of many different items or upgrades that may not be immediately apparent. It may upgrade your punching power one level, which caps out at three, and you need certain power levels to defeat certain enemies. It may give you five miracle kicks. It might give you a money bag, which you can hold up to six. It might also contain one of the ten treasures. A new treasure will appear blinking at the top of the screen when you get a new one.

Another item you can find is a key. Collecting this opens up a staircase on the block where the key came from. It will close up after some time, but you can enter the stairs before then to go to one of two areas. The more common area is the bonus room. This is a timed room that generates items for you to collect. Red apples just give you points. The E balls are better in that collecting five of them gives you an extra life. This is also what E balls do in the main levels, however collecting them in the bonus area is separate from collecting them during levels. Also, in the bonus areas are a stream of bullets that you should dodge. Dying in the bonus area just ends it early without losing a life. Besides the bonus room, stairs may also lead to a warp room. In this room there are two holes and you can jump in the one you want to advance either a few levels or several levels ahead.

Some levels contain a gun ball item. This is a ball with the letter G on it. When you collect it, you can fire gun balls when you punch for a short time. Firing horizontally causes the gun balls to bounce on the ground as they move ahead. Firing vertically throws them in a straight line very quickly. There are a few upsides to the gun ball. You can use this to kill enemies that usually require more difficult techniques to defeat. Enemies will run away from you while the gun ball is active, and they are unable to shoot projectiles of their own. A few enemies take several gun balls to defeat, so fighting them may not always be worth it.

Bonus rooms are full of items and bullets.

The final items you can collect are question balls and 1ups. Blocks that do not hold items any more, or blocks that don’t hold items at all, can still be interacted with in a couple of ways. Some blocks go flying when you punch them. You can shove the blocks into other enemies and defeat them for more points than with standard attacks. Otherwise, you can keep punching an empty, stationary block to eventually generate a question ball. This will either contain a money bag or an X ball. The X ball resets your money bag count to zero. These blocks are the easiest ways to collect money bags but it is risky. 1ups are uncommon items that tend to appear on empty spaces and you reveal them by punching the air. Makes sure to take note of these special locations if you happen to find one. Finally, the last thing you can find in the levels is another bonus area called Break Time. This takes you to a separate screen where you gain half a million points and can take a free 30-second break if you desire. You can’t control your character or do anything aside from leave early.

Money bags are used to trigger two special items. Simply collecting five money bags generates an E ball somewhere on screen, and remember, five E balls equals an extra life. If you have six money bags, you can redeem them for a P ball. Press A and B together while standing still to make the P ball appear. Be patient because the controls for this are very rigid and I think you have to press both A and B together on the exact same frame to get the P ball to appear. Collect the P ball to turn invincible to enemies for a little while. Enemies turn blue and will run away from you. You can defeat them by simply running into them. It’s a great way to help when clearing difficult rooms.

The ten treasures you find throughout the game all have various effects. Most of them boil down to making it easier either to defeat or to avoid certain enemies. A couple of them reveal hidden dangers in later levels. If you mysteriously die in some of the later levels, you might be missing a treasure that could help. One treasure is a sword. You unsheathe the sword by pressing both A and B at the same time while you are walking, and you put it away the same way. The trigger is similar to the P ball and it’s important to remember the difference so that you don’t accidentally reveal the P ball when you don’t need it. Our hero will hold the sword out while it is in use. There are a couple of enemies that are only vulnerable to the sword.

Uni-Gon is the closest thing to a boss in the game.

There is a wide variety of enemies in this game. Most of them have different attacks, too. The standard commando enemies can punch and kick just like you. There are spear men and gun men. There’s a coffin enemy that will hold you inside of him briefly. A couple enemies fire medusa beams that freeze you for a bit and leave you vulnerable. One enemy just pushes you around. There are two large enemies that you need to watch out for. Uni-Gon is a huge, mummy-like monster that pursues you alone. All other enemies leave when he shows up. He can also breath fire. You can defeat him by punching him five times, but it is extremely risky. I’ve only done it once and usually I just avoid him until he goes away. If you can defeat him, he will leave an E ball behind. The other large enemy is a dragon. He is only vulnerable to the sword and you also have to hit him five times.

There are other features to some levels. One useful feature is the quick passage. These are doors on the left and right edges of the screen and most levels have them. If you walk through the door you will wrap around to the other side of the screen. Some levels have two pairs of quick passage doors. These are most helpful in evading Uni-Gon, but enemies can use them too so that’s another thing to keep in mind. Some levels have wells in them. These are just like the holes you enter in the warp room, only these kill you if you fall in. Some levels have fireballs streaming out of these wells. They are deadly to the touch, even if you are jumping in the air or are invincible with the P ball. Stay away. Some levels have pools of water or lava, and those kill you too. Finally, a few of the later levels have moving or disappearing blocks within the water or lava. If you can get on top of those blocks for just a brief time you will earn a bunch of points as well as some E balls.

You start the game with five lives. You can earn up to nine through the various methods already described. It’s a little frustrating to get good enough at the game to go beyond nine lives only for them not to count. There are no continues to the game either. There is a continue code I found by holding A and pressing Start at the title screen. It will take you back to the first area of the castle you were on. However, it is not listed in the manual so it is off-limits for me. The only nice thing Kung-Fu Heroes does for you is that you will always start each new level with at least three lives. If you finish a level with one or two lives remaining, you will get three lives to start the next area. I believe this is a holdover from the arcade game. It’s very generous, but it also speaks to the difficulty of the game in that death is so swift and frequent that those extra lives don’t always help.

If you’re playing for score, don’t miss Break Time.

This was my first time beating Kung-Fu Heroes. This is a game I have tinkered with a little bit off and on. Mostly I didn’t get through the first castle before turning off the game, but it was fun to pick up and try out a few times. I also played this game for the NintendoAge contest a few years back, but I didn’t get much beyond the third castle. I remember buying my copy of the game at my local game store several years ago when prices were still cheap. This game is still cheap today if you are looking to buy a copy.

I was able to beat the game in about a week. I sure played the game a lot in that one week, however. I think it took me over thirty attempts to beat the game. I took detailed notes on item locations which I found helpful for learning the game. By the end, I had all the item locations memorized that I needed. The first couple days of attempts didn’t get me very far. This was because I was spending all the time combing levels for items while also properly learning how to fight the enemies. Soon enough I was getting to the 6th, 7th, and final castle somewhat regularly when I hit another wall. Many of the final areas have no items along with difficult sets of enemies. A few areas include enemies that cannot be defeated, so you have to wait for them to leave so they can be replaced with enemies you can attack. I could do the early game really well only for it all to be wiped out in a flash at the end. I resorted to warping just so I could quickly get to the end of the game to practice. I beat the game that way once, and then the next day I beat it again without warping. The game loops continuously after you beat it, but the difficulty does not seem to change and there’s no special ending beyond the first loop.

It gets tough when there are no items late in the game.

Beating this game requires good technique and strategy. I found each enemy has either a specific way to beat them or a preferred way to beat them. Mastering the moon sault kick is important since you can dodge enemy projectiles and even get a nice point bonus for jumping over attacks. Then you land on top of the enemy to defeat it. It’s dangerous to jump on enemies that can also jump since they will evade your attack. For them, I approach them from the side and punch them or slice them with the sword before they go airborne. Defensively, I always keep my finger on the B button to moon sault kick my way out of danger, such as when the lightning obstacle quickly appears. I didn’t have much use for miracle kicks offensively, but they are very helpful as an evasive maneuver since you move so fast. It might not be best practice, but I use miracle kicks sometimes to go straight at the open door when it’s surrounded by enemies. Miracle kicks are also useful in the bonus room and they are unlimited for that room only. I just avoid both Uni-Gon and the Dragon. Shuffling back and forth through the quick passage keeps Uni-Gon away pretty easily. I also came up with a nice strategy for the final area. I saved four E-balls and six money bags for that stage since it’s the hardest one. I spent the money bags on a P ball when there were four enemies on screen, and then I went to town wiping out as many enemies as possible using the quick passages. Uni-Gon appears here and I can beat him with the invincibility, and then he drops the fifth E ball I need for an extra life. This level is still awfully tough after that, but every little bit helps.

I enjoyed my time with Kung-Fu Heroes. It does feel a little out of place for a 1989 NES release. The graphics and aesthetic are nice. The music is catchy at its best, and a bit dull at its worst. The controls are fine aside from trying to press A and B together. The action is very quick. This is an easy game to pick up and play for a few minutes or to sit down and try to dig into it. This game is also part of a trend among early NES games I’ve noticed where there is more internal complexity to the game systems than it first lets on. All the treasures with different effects and all the other things to keep track of like miracle kicks and money bags seem so overwhelming for what looks like a simple action game at first glance. Therefore, this game is easy to start playing but tough to master. This is a game for people who like quick action games and don’t mind a challenge in the endgame, but I think it’s also a great NES game if you don’t take it too seriously and just want to carve up some enemies for a little while.

#86 – Kung-Fu Heroes

Bringing the heat!

Even the logo is heating up!

To Beat: Finish 9 races
My Goal: Get the high score
What I Did: Finished three loops with a score of 544
Played: 5/17/18 – 5/18/18
Difficulty: 1/10
My Difficulty: 1/10
My Video: Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat Longplay

As evidenced by my review of Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge, I am not a fan of racing video games. Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat is a bit of an outlier in that I find it mostly enjoyable. The differences between the two games are clear. Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge focuses on realism and the grind of a full season. Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat is a pick-up-and-play arcade style game. If I have to play a racing game, I’d rather do it the Danny Sullivan way. It helps too that this game is unbelievably easy.

Danny Sullivan is a former racer who primarily competed in open-wheel car racing. His career began overseas competing in Formula Three and Formula Two racing. In 1982 he debuted in the PPG Indycar series in the US, and the next year he was recruited by a team in Formula One, which is the highest level of open-wheel auto racing in the world. He only competed there in 1983 before returning to the US and the PPG Indycar series in 1984. He won the Indianapolis 500 in 1985, the premier race in North American auto racing, and he also won the PPG Indycar series championship in 1988. Danny Sullivan briefly dabbled in NASCAR in 1994 before retiring from auto racing for good in 1995.

Danny Sullivan was well known enough to star in his own game, Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat. It was originally a 1991 arcade release, developed and published by Leland Corporation. The game was ported to the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and Commodore 64 in 1992 in Europe. Those versions were developed and published by Sales Curve. The NES version was released in August 1992 in North America, and also appeared in Europe in 1992. This port was developed by Rare and published by Tradewest.

Is that a Transformer in his glasses?

Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat is a top-down single-screen racing game. You compete with four other racers, including Danny Sullivan in the yellow car, across multiple laps of nine different tracks. In single player mode you control a red car. The game continues to loop over all nine tracks again until you lose too many races, and sadly there is no real ending to the game.

The controls are simple. While driving, you hold A to accelerate and release A to brake. The B button uses a turbo for a quick speed boost. You steer with Left and Right on the D-pad. Up and Down have no function in the game so there’s no need to worry about shifting gears. You also use Left and Right to enter your initials at the beginning of the game or to select any upgrades later on. Both the A button and B button are used to confirm selections. The Start button starts the game and pauses the action during a race. That’s all there is to it!

The first thing you’ll do in the game is press Start on the name entry screen. Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat supports up to four players at the same time with the NES Four Score accessory. First player gets the red car, second player blue, third player green, and fourth player white. Danny Sullivan is always the yellow car for a total of five players. Each race has five drivers going at once and computer opponents fill in all remaining slots. You will first enter your initials and then the driver you want. The driver selection is just cosmetic so pick the one that looks the neatest or most like you or whatever. The game proceeds once all players have made their selections.

Make Danny do all the work.

From here the game shows the location of the next race, but before you get to the action you can select upgrades for your car. You begin with $100,000 to spend on your vehicle any way you want and you win more money the more you play. The easiest way to jump into the action is to let Danny choose your upgrades for you. Danny’s Choice is pre-selected, so press A or B if you want him to choose. He will spend as much available money as possible on what he considers the best upgrades automatically. Then you can press A to begin the race.

Here are the upgrades you can pick from if you want to decide yourself. Turbos cost $30K for a pack of 10. These are quick bursts of speed you can engage at any time during a race by pressing the B button. You begin with 60 of them and can hold up to 200. All remaining options are permanent upgrades for your car. Brakes cost $30K and let you stop faster when you let go of A. Tire upgrades cost $40K each and better tires let you reduce skidding on the track and give you better turning speed. The Crew option costs $40K and lowers the amount of time you will spend in pit lane. MPG costs $50K per upgrade and gives you better gas mileage so you don’t have to make pit stops as often. Finally, the Engine upgrade increases your acceleration for $50K each. You start at level one across the board and can upgrade each option as high as level ten over many races.

Now it’s time to race! Gameplay is in the top-down view and you can see the entire race all at once. The action is very straightforward, simply drive along the track in the direction everyone else is going. Left always turns your car left and Right always turns your car right relative to the direction you are driving. It might be a little disorienting to turn your car while heading downward, but with a little experience it becomes second nature. If you need a little burst of speed for any reason, simply tap B to use a turbo.

I don’t know why the highway runs across the track.

The bottom of the screen displays specific information color-coded within a small box for each player. The left side of the box is the condition indicator of the car. This lets you know if you are okay or if you need to make a pit stop. The middle contains an indicator for your RPMs and what gear you are driving in. The right side displays a bar on top for fuel and a bar on bottom for your turbos. Fuel decreases as you drive, and turbos decrease as you use them. Even though you can purchase many turbos, your car can only hold 25 at a time, so the bar indicates how many you have while in the car.

Somewhere on the track is a large sign that displays other information common to all drivers. The top part of the sign shows who is winning the race. The sign displays which lap each driver is on, color-coded to match the race car, as well as the position order. If your color is on top, you are leading the race. The final lap is displayed as F. Below that shows how many total laps are in the race along with the time elapsed for the current race.

You will need to make pit stops in the game. The indicator on the bottom of the screen lets you know if you need to pit, and also a member of your pit crew in your matching color will hold up a sign on the race track letting you know that way. To pit, simply drive onto the spot in pit lane of your color. You don’t have to let go of the gas or anything. You will stop automatically and your pit crew will go to work, repairing any damage to your car, refueling the car, and maxing you out on turbos. Keep in mind that the race is still going on while you make your pit stops, so make them count.

Pit stops allow you to refuel, repair, and replenish turbos.

Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat has a damage system as well. If you collide with a wall too hard or another racer rams into your car, you will see small pieces fly off. If this happens too many times, either the front or back of your car will catch on fire, reducing your driving performance dramatically. You can make a pit stop to fix the damage, but this will set you behind a lot if you need to make an extra unscheduled pit stop because of this. This can also work to your advantage because you can intentionally damage Danny or any of the other drivers, putting them in the same predicament and giving you the upper hand.

There are nine tracks in all. They are Western Canada, New Jersey, Southern California, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Eastern Canada, Colorado, and the Tradewest Speed Bowl. All tracks are five laps long except for eight laps in Illinois and twelve laps in the Tradewest Speed Bowl. The two longer races are simple, round tracks, while the other ones can have several twists and turns.

At the end of each race, you earn both points and money depending on how well you do. First through fifth place earns you 20 points and $100,000, 16 points and $90,000, 14 points and $85,000, 12 points and $80,000, or 10 points and $75,000 respectively. You will see the standings for the current season of nine races. Then you have the opportunity to spend the money you just earned on more upgrades for your car. For the Tradewest Speed Bowl, both the points and dollar amounts are doubled. In addition, there is a bonus dollar award after this race depending on the final standings from the entire season of nine races. This award money is also double the purse for any individual race. You end up with a huge influx of cash for finishing the season that you can put toward the first race of the next season.

Get knocked around too much and your car catches fire.

If you are unable to win a race, you lose a life. You get three lives to start the game. You can’t earn any more of them, and there’s no way to see how many you have remaining. If you lose all three lives, you can continue up to three times. Losing a life always puts you at the next race no matter how badly you do. When all lives and continues are exhausted, your final score is shown and ranked against the high score chart.

I have played Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat before as part of the NintendoAge weekly contests. I only played a couple of times that week and performed reasonably well for a new player. I bought my copy at a game store for $8 sometime in 2014. I had never been to this game store about an hour away from home, so I made the most of it and bought a small handful of games for solid prices. This is an uncommon game, so I was happy to snag a copy the first time I saw it for sale. The game sells for around $20 now, mostly due to relative rarity.

I knew I could beat the game again since I did it once before during those contests. I decided I would play through the game twice, once to warm up, and again to record. I set a soft goal for myself of reaching the top score on the high score list, so I had to earn over 500 points to do that. I had not reached that score when I played the game for the contests, and on my first attempt this time I still fell short. Lucky for me, during my longplay video I earned 544 points over exactly three seasons of racing. I lost the Tradewest Speed Bowl on my last life, meaning I earned a bunch of bonus money that I wasn’t able to put to use. That didn’t matter anyway since I had maxed out on upgrades late in the third season. I was happy getting that far in the game with a nice score.

Danny becomes too much to deal with at the end.

One aspect of the game that can be really annoying is Danny’s aggressiveness level. If you are behind in the race, Danny eases up and goes slowly. He gets more aggressive if you start closing in on him, and if he is behind you he goes all out. This is often referred to as rubberbanding, as if you and Danny are connected by an invisible rubber band and he is easily able to close the gap between you two if he is behind. There is a tricky balance when making games to build this kind of effect into the game without making it visibly appear to be unfair. In this game, the developers didn’t come up with a good way to balance the difficulty other than to give Danny impossibly high speed when he is trailing. The rubberbanding here is one of the more severe cases I’ve seen. Losing a race because Danny drives faster than you possibly can is both frustrating and unfun. The best technique I found was to stay just ahead of Danny at all costs so that he will at least keep pace with you. Earlier in the game I could skip a pit stop late in the race and just turbo my way through the course if I ran out of fuel. Later on, Danny will become too much to handle unless you can play perfectly for a long time.

Having said all of that, you might be wondering why on earth I could rate Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat a 1/10 in difficulty. If you have been paying close attention and done the math, you may have figured it out already. You can see all the races and effectively beat the game without doing much of anything at all. The key is that you don’t have to repeat levels in this game if you lose a race. With three continues of three lives each, plus the three lives you start with, you can have up to twelve lives total. With only nine races, you can lose every race and still go partway into the second season. I tried it for myself and it works. Start each race and put the controller down. Coming in last each race still gets you 10 points and a trip to the next race. Make sure to continue when given the option. You don’t even have to buy upgrades. With the bonus points from the final race, you can earn 130 points and 8th place on the high score list by barely lifting a finger. I’m not saying you should play the game this way, but if you wanna stick it to that rubberbanding cheat I can’t say I blame you.

Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat is a fun racing game. For a single screen game, there is plenty of variety in the race tracks and there’s enough room to get around them. The tiny car sprites are well detailed and animated. I didn’t notice much flickering where I might have expected to see some. The track details are also well drawn. The music is solid as well. Four player games don’t come around often, and I imagine this would be a fun one to try with a group of people. The only real downside is the frustrating rubberbanding AI of Danny Sullivan. In the long run of this NES completion project, this game will only be memorable for how simple it is to see everything in the game without actually needing to play the game. That only affects me, and I certainly don’t mind an easy clear on occasion. For everyone else, this game is worth at least one try.

#85 – Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat

#85 – Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat (High Score)

This Contra sequel is just as good as the original.

This title screen enters from both sides together, pretty neat!

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Beat 3 loops
My Goal: Finish 3 loops with a no-death first loop
What I Did: Met my goal
Played: 5/11/18 – 5/14/18
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Super C Longplay

Contra is a game that practically needs no introduction. A sequel would seem inevitable, but it may not be the one you expect. Just looking at the NES library, the obvious conclusion would be that Contra Force is the sequel. Contra Force as it turns out wasn’t meant to be a Contra game at all, and Super C is the actual sequel. It annoys me somewhat when connections aren’t always apparent. I can look past that here because Super C is a fun, solid follow up to the original smash hit.

The arcade game Super Contra was released in early 1988. It was developed and published by Konami. A home port of Super Contra came to the Famicom in February 1990, and the NES version was renamed Super C when it released in North America in April 1990. The PAL release in Europe and Australia was delayed until 1992. There it was called Probotector II: Return of the Evil Forces, and just like the PAL conversion of Contra to Probotector, the human characters were replaced by robots. Two home computer ports for Super C for the Commodore Amiga and IBM PC released in North America in 1990.

Super C is a side-scrolling action game. The story is a basic one. Bill and Lance, also known as Mad Dog and Scorpion, are taking a relaxing vacation a few months after defeating Red Falcon in the original Contra. Of course, Red Falcon wasn’t completely defeated, and now he has regrouped and is back at it again. You are thrust back into action as Earth’s only hope against evil. Just like last time, your journey will take you through eight stages of shooting action, and if you clear them all you win the game. The arcade version only has five stages, so hey, more bang for your buck in Super C.

Shoot the core!

The controls are identical to Contra. Use the D-pad to move around, press A to jump, and press B to shoot. You curl up during jumps so you have a smaller hitbox, and you are always moving sideways until you land. (I guess this is a Konami thing, since Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles also does this.) Hold Down to lay out on the ground and shoot. While holding Down, you can press A to jump down through some ledges. All your weapons have unlimited ammo, so you can mash the B button to fire away at everything. You can shoot in all directions, including diagonally, by holding the D-pad in the appropriate direction. You can fire diagonally upward and downward while either walking or airborne.

The powerups are almost exactly like Contra as well, and all of the same powerups are back this time. You shoot flying pods, or sometimes a large wall sensor, to uncover the bird-shaped upgrades. The letter on the item denotes what it does. The M gives you a machine gun that shoots straight ahead, and you can hold down the B button for continuous fire. The L gives you a laser that is one long, powerful shot. You can only have one on screen at a time and firing again removes the old shot if it’s still on screen. The laser beam is wider in Super C than in Contra. S is for the spread shot, which fires a fan of five bullets ahead. The F is the flamethrower. This weapon acts differently here. In Contra, it is a spiraling shot. In Super C, it is a large fireball that spreads out smaller flames when it hits something. You can even charge this one up by holding B, releasing a large fireball when you let go of the button. The R gives you rapid fire on top of whichever weapon you currently use. It makes your bullets faster so that you can fire more quickly. The B is for a barrier shield. This causes you to flash for a few seconds and enemies and their shots can’t hurt you. There is a powerup with no letter on it that destroys all enemies on screen as soon as you touch it. All powerups are lost when you die, sending you back to the fight with your standard gun.

Top-down levels give you a different perspective on the action.

Most stages in the game are played from the side scrolling view. Play usually moves to the right, but some levels are vertical, and some stages scroll in different directions at times. For example, the first stage has you walking to the right, but there are slopes upward and as you walk the view pans upward slightly to follow the path. Speaking of slopes, they are a new addition to this game. Simply walk straight ahead to go up or down them. The grade is somewhere around 30 degrees, and when you fire diagonally while walking on a slope, you will fire parallel to the slope instead of at the normal 45-degree angle. If you need to fire purely diagonally, you have to jump off the slope and shoot in mid-air.

Levels 2 and 6 are played from a top-down view instead of side-scrolling. Here you can walk in all eight directions and fire your normal weapons with the B button. The A button does nothing in this mode. Play proceeds upward for both stages. It’s more straightforward than the bases in Contra, and it is in line with the arcade version that also features these levels.

All levels end in a boss battle. The bosses seem a lot bigger and more dynamic in Super C compared to Contra. I believe this is tied to the game’s use of the MMC3 mapper chip. One of the capabilities of the chip is better handling of performing a screen splitting technique. Take the helicopter boss at the end of the first stage, for example. It is too large to display with sprites, so it is drawn on the background. The helicopter can move around independently of the ground that stays put. The game is programmed in a way where it can scroll the screen for the helicopter, but when it reaches a certain vertical position, it will stop scrolling and leave the ground alone. This is used to great effect for several screen-spanning bosses in the game.

This walking robot isn’t even the boss of this stage.

Super C has some other features. The most notable is the two-player simultaneous play. Player 1 plays as Bill with blue pants, and Player 2 is Lance with red pants. The game has a scoring system. Points appear on the screen between levels, as well as the second player’s score, the high score, and the level number. During gameplay, there are flags in the corner for how many lives you have remaining. It will only display up to four flags even though you may have many more in reserve. You can earn extra lives through scoring points. I could not determine exactly when you get new lives, even after reviewing video, so I just have to guess. You get an extra life for around every 25,000 points scored.

Our heroes are quite fragile, so they die instantly from taking a bullet or colliding with an enemy. You respawn right where you left off without a break in the action. Should you lose all your lives, you can continue from the start of the stage with three new lives. You can only continue twice before needing to restart the entire game.

I have played a lot of Super C and have beaten the game many times before. I wasn’t aware that this was the sequel to Contra for quite some time. I picked the loose cart up sometime in the mid-90s, probably at my local used game shop. I imagine it didn’t take me too long back then to figure the game out and beat it, so it was a game I went back to often. I even played the game recently for the NintendoAge NES contest and performed relatively well. It is a common cart that sells for around $15.

One of the rare games where bubbles are a viable threat.

For games I know quite well, I like to go above and beyond just beating the game. I set two personal goals for Super C. First, I wanted to beat the game without dying, and second, I wanted to complete all three difficulty loops. I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble beating the game three straight times since I can comfortably beat the game once with a bunch of extra lives, and that part held true. Beating the game without dying was much harder. Super C is a relatively quick game to play, but death is swift and one mistake means restarting. I needed around 30 tries over a few nights to finally get the no-death run I wanted. Now this only applies to just the first loop of the game. I allowed myself to die in the other two loops, and that occurred more than I would have liked. Those deaths were mostly from mistakes I made. I didn’t find Super C to be much more challenging in the later loops. I could tell that the basic grunt type enemies appeared a little more frequently, but that’s the only increase in difficulty I noticed.

Super C is a must-have NES game. The graphics, gameplay, music, and controls are all top-notch. The game runs with very few if any graphical glitches or slowdown. There are several neat surprises as you play and more interesting level design this time around. I really like the boss battles and the well-used technical effects. The weapons are all helpful and fun to use. The two-player mode makes the game all the more sweeter. It is a challenging game, but it’s also one that many players have already beaten. A 7/10 difficulty rating seems right to me, but I could see the argument for going either direction with it. I think it’s a game that is fun to keep learning and improving on. The only downside I can see is that the game almost feels like a Contra expansion pack. Re-read this review just to see how many times I said Super C is just like Contra in this way or that way. I understand that might be a turn-off to someone looking for something a bit more advanced or expansive. My viewpoint is real simple: “What’s wrong with more of something good?”

#84 – Super C

Bag and behold the biggest black bass believable!

The music is much better than I expected.

To Beat: Reach #1 ranking
To Complete: Reach #1 ranking and finish the season
My Goal: Be #1 on the final day of the season
What I Did: Met the goal
Played: 4/27/18 – 5/8/18
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: The Black Bass Final Tournament

I am not interested in fishing. At least as an adult. I fished a few times when I was a kid just because you’ll try lots of different things at that age. Dealing with the hooks, live bait, and the caught fish was all handled for me when I was young. Thinking of doing that now almost sends shivers up my spine. Just let me stay inside with my video games, please! Despite my attitude about it, fishing is still a very popular outdoor activity. If you consider it a sport, it may well be the most popular sport in the world. It’s no surprise then that there is an NES fishing game. If I have to go fishing, I’d much rather do it this way!

The Black Bass first released on the Famicom in October 1988. It was published by Hot-B and developed by Another Ltd. This is the same developer who made Championship Bowling. The NES release came to North America in September 1989. This game is actually a sequel and is known in Japan as The Black Bass 2. Japan’s original The Black Bass game first appeared on the MSX computer in 1986, followed by the Famicom release in 1987. The title screen of the NES version calls the game The Black Bass USA, which is how this game is sometimes referred to in Japan. There have been many games in The Black Bass series since these games, including the NES sequel The Blue Marlin.

The Black Bass is a fishing game with no story. Your task is to enjoy fishing for Black Bass in several tournaments. There is a ranking system that scores you on how well you performed during the tournament. If you do well enough, you can go to different lakes in later tournaments that have bigger fish to catch. The ultimate goal here is to achieve #1 ranking out of a pool of 200 contestants.

You better do what the man says.

There are twelve tournaments you will play in The Black Bass. The tournament season begins in June and ends in September, despite the manual claiming it ends at the end of October. Each month has three tournaments, always on the 5th, 15th, and 25th of each month. There is a clock system in the game denoting the start and end times of the tournament. Each one begins at 6:00am, but the ending time varies depending on the calendar date of the tournament. Early season and late season tournaments have shorter durations than the ones in the middle of the season.

After the title screen, you have some selections to make. First, you enter your name in. This is six characters long consisting of just A-Z. The cursor points to the first character and you have to scroll through the list of characters with Up and Down for each and every character. Press Left or Right to position the cursor to the next character and input that one from scratch. Press A to lock in your name choice. Now you have three more options. You can begin a new game as a new player. This puts you at Lake Amaya on June 5th for the first tournament. The other two options require a password. You can either continue a game mid-season, or just see your stats. Passwords are 16 characters long consisting of A-Z and 1-5, also with the long entry method. This system is tedious, for sure. Also, be careful of zero, O, and Q which look a lot alike. If you choose stats, you see a screen with your information and then you go right back to selecting another option. You have to put the entire password back in if you want to continue a game with the same password after checking stats, so it’s really not worth it.

Once you start a new game, first you see a screen from I guess the tournament director. This shows the lake you are on, the date, and duration of the tournament. The next screen has even more information. Again, you see the lake, date, and timeframe of the tournament. You also see your ranking, which begins at 200th place. Next is the weather conditions. I have seen Clear, Cloudy, Light Rain, and Heavy Rain. You also see the temperature outside and the depth of the lake. Next up is the map screen. This is an overhead view of the entire lake. A small blinking boat shows your current location. You can use the D-pad to move the boat around and choose where you want to start finishing. This screen also shows the current time. Press A to choose your location, and finally it is time to start fishing!

You can boat to whatever spot you want instantly.

The fishing mode starts with your character at the bottom of the screen. There is a white cursor that you can move with Left or Right. This is the direction of your cast. When you decide on the direction, press A to begin casting. This starts a power meter at the bottom of the screen that grows and shrinks. When it lines up with the power you want, press A again to cast out your line. The screen will scroll vertically a long way to keep up with your lure, but it does not scroll sideways. If you cast off the sides of the screen, you lose your lure and have to cast again with a different one. It’s best to shoot it straight up the center most of the time. You can also press and hold B while in the air to try and hit the brakes on your cast and stop it short.

Once your lure is in the water, you have a different set of controls to move it around. Press Left or Right to move the lure sideways. You can press Up to move the lure toward the surface of the water. Press and hold A to reel in your line. If you hold down both A and B at the same time, it will pull the line in all the way back to the boat automatically. This is useful if fish just aren’t coming or you get your line caught on something. The bottom of the screen shows how deep the lure is in the water, and this is also expressed by the same red bar used for casting. The idea of fishing is to move the lure around in such a way to make it attractive to fish, as if the lure is struggling. Sometimes a shadowy fish will appear from off screen and approach your lure. The fish can either bite or leave, and if he bites you try and catch it. If you’re like me, you probably won’t even hook a fish the first time, so we will come back to this later. You are done for now once you reel in your line all the way.

The menu screen should appear next, containing a bunch of different options. You can select the lure you want from a list on the Select Lure screen. Each one is named along with the number you have. Press Up or Down to select the lure, and press Left or Right to change the color between Red, Blue, and Silver. The quantity depends on color and lure type, and you don’t have every option at the start of the game. Choose the one you want and press A to select it. Some lures float on top of the water, and others sink. Each one has its own feel for how you move it around in the water, so feel free to experiment with different ones to find those you like.

By the end of the game, you can use any lure you want.

The next two screens are informational. Select Data For This Point to see the map of the lake. There is a message on the side of the screen that either says “Here is nice bass point” or “This point has little bass” depending on where you moved your boat. You want to fish only at those nice bass points, so you go to this screen to see if you are in a good spot for fishing. Press A to advance to the next screen. This shows the current time, current weather conditions, and the end time of today’s tournament. Press A again to go back to the menu screen. The Your Results So Far Today screen gives you exactly what it says. It shows three at a time the ten biggest fish you caught today, including the kind of fish, its weight, and which lure you used to catch it. The final screen displays the number of bass caught today and the average weight, plus the number of bass caught total and the average weight over all tournaments. Go back to the menu with A.

The final three options are Move, Casting, and End. Move brings you back to the map screen to reposition your boat to a new fishing spot. You go from that screen right back to fishing. Casting sends you back to fishing at your current location. End is used when you are completely done fishing for the day. Only use this option if you are sure you are satisfied with today’s catch or you don’t have enough time remaining to catch any more fish.

Now we are on to the good stuff. You’ve casted your line and attracted a nice fish that bit your lure. Now its time to try and reel it in. The bottom of the screen now shows a picture of a fish. This indicates the strength of the fish, and over time as you fight the picture changes to a more pathetic looking fish. This goes all the way down to an image of fish bones once you get the fish very tired. You also see the depth of the fish in both numeric form and red meter form. Press the A button to reel in your line. You can use the D-pad to try and pull the fish in a certain direction. The B button is for thumbing the line. This essentially acts as a brake by holding your thumb down against the line to keep it from moving. It helps if the fish is trying to swim away. If you decide not to try catching the fish, you can try pressing Select to let it go. This doesn’t always work and you only get one try to free the fish.

If it’s not a black bass, it’s not worth your time.

There are several scenarios where the fish can get away. While you are fighting the fish, you also have to manage the strength of your fishing line. There is a shrill ringing sound you hear whenever the line is close to breaking. You need the sound on while playing The Black Bass to tell since there’s no on-screen indicator. You can cool the line down by letting go of the buttons, but this also allows the fish to recover his strength too. You have to find your technique to manage both of those things so that you can successfully catch your fish. If you reel in too hard for too long, the line will break and you lose both your fish and your lure. This can also happen if the fish gets too far away from the boat or if it travels off the sides of the screen. At random, the bass can also leap out of the water. This can cause the fish to come off the line, either by taking the lure with it or letting it all go completely. Often enough the fish will stay attached and you can continue the fight. What happens seems to be completely random, so it’s not your fault if the fish gets away this way.

To catch the fish, you need to pull it down to the bottom center of the screen. You can do this by wearing out the fish completely so that it is easier to draw in, or sometimes you can catch a fish quickly by hooking it close to the boat. Once you get it all the way in you will see the fish go into a basket. Now you get a celebratory screen of your catch! The most important factor is the weight of the fish you just caught. You get to see the weight tick up from zero pounds and it’s exciting to see how high it goes whenever you reel in a big one. You see the time of day the fish was caught and how long it took you to bring it in. You also see the type and color of bait used. Then you go back to the menu screen.

The tournaments go on for quite some time, but eventually they all end. As soon as your reach the end time, fishing ends abruptly, even if you are in the middle of a fight. You can also choose to quit prematurely with the End option from the menu. This brings you to one more menu. Choosing Ceremony shows your end results from the day, including your new ranking. You also get your password for the next tournament. If you rank well enough, you advance to the next class and get a nice little ceremony to celebrate your accomplishment. If you don’t think you did well, you can choose to Go Back Home from the menu, sending you to the title screen. You can also view your results from today and your overall results from the season.

It’s big indeed!

The ranking is determined on how many bass caught, the biggest one you caught today, and the average weight. Other fish caught such as trout or pike do not factor into the ranking at all. The rank you can get also depends on which tournament class you participated. The starting class is Class C which is for participants ranked 101 through 200. Class B is for places 51 through 100, and Class A is for 1st place through 50th place. The top five in each class advance up to the next class, while the bottom five go down a class. It seems counterintuitive, but it is not a huge loss to go back down a class. Twelve tournaments are a lot, and you can rise up from 200th to 1st place in three tournaments if you are really good. Rankings are also based on the current tournament and are not driven on cumulative results over the entire season. When you advance to Class B, you compete at Japan Lake. At Class A, you alternate between Lake More and San Lake. The lakes at higher classes contain larger fish, so not only is the ranking standard higher, but the difficulty of landing heavier fish also increases.

The ending condition for The Black Bass is up for debate. The game does not end officially until all twelve tournaments are completed. Since the goal of the game is to get the top ranking, that is what I chose as the minimum for considering the game beaten. I don’t think it’s fair to say you beat the game by participating in all tournaments dead last. On the other hand, some say you need to both get 1st place and finish the season, since you don’t get a real ending if you don’t complete the season. My personal standard is to do both things, but I took it a step further and insisted on finishing the final tournament in 1st place.

This was my first time playing The Black Bass. I had no intention of playing this game until the very end of the project, since a long game of all fishing seemed very unappealing at the time of compiling my game list. I picked the game up in an eBay lot for a few bucks. The game falls in the middle of the pack in collectability as a semi-common game costing around $5-$10.

Now I have him right where I want him.

The Black Bass is a long game and I made it longer by not figuring things out right away. My first day of fishing was just figuring out how the game works on a basic level. I finished right where I started in 200th place. The next day I bumped up to 143rd place, but the following day I stepped back to 156th place. At this point I thought there was no way I would improve from here, so I started over. I failed to understand that rankings are only for the day of the tournament, and past days do not factor into it at all. The manual didn’t really explain it clearly, but I suppose I shouldn’t expect it to. The other thing I did was put in a special code listed in the manual to help out. If you input the name “HBMAX” the meters change. Cast out your line and the display where it normally shows the depth of the lure now displays a number of the desirability of the lure to fish. Now you can see if how you are moving the lure around is helping you out or not. You want to get the value at or above 6.0. Once you are fighting a fish, this number switches over to the tension of the line. Once it hits 10 you get the chiming sounds, at I think at 12 is when the line breaks. I think it’s useful to try it out once or twice to ensure your technique is solid.

I started completely over from here. My other sessions allowed me to find all the good bass spots and I was able to advance to Class B on my first try. The next day at Japan Lake did not go well and I got bumped back to Class C, but then I went on a winning streak. I won Class C, Class B, and both Class A tournaments, one at each lake, all in a row. That put me halfway through the season in first place. I wanted to speed my way through the other tournaments just because it was taking at least an hour to do each tournament. My goal was to see how few bass I could catch and yet do well enough to stay at Class A. I had a couple of failures, but I managed to finish most of the remaining tournaments in half the time it should have taken. I wanted to finish the last two tournaments both in 1st place to show off the final tournament in my gameplay video. In the penultimate tournament I thought I did well but ended up 6th. It took me three tries to get first place at the last tournament, mostly because it is the shortest tournament and therefore more restrictive in time to catch enough big fish. I think it was worth it to end up in first place at the end of the season. My biggest catch in my video was a 16-pounder, and my biggest overall was 18.1 pounds. I know there are 20+ pound bass in the game but I wasn’t fortunate enough to bag one.

Some of the bass spots have many obstacles.

Here are several tips if you want to play this game yourself. Each lake has five locations good for catching bass. You can check the Data for this Point screen to see if you are in one of those spots, but there’s a better way to check. All poor fishing spots are in empty, dark blue water. If you are fishing anywhere else, then it’s a good spot. I found the type and color of the lure really didn’t matter much. It may have some effect on either the visibility or desirability, but not much. The pencil bait is the most responsive bait to control so I used that one the most. I switched over to the plastic worm for the middle of the day because it seemed more helpful in getting fish to show up. You have to be able to tell roughly the size of the fish you want as it is approaching your lure so that you can back out quickly if it’s not one you want. My luring technique was a quick move left, a quick move right, a quick move up, and repeat. A good technique is to try and hook fish near your boat so that you don’t have to reel them in as far. You can also try landing a fish in front of a rock or something solid to give the fish a harder time to get away. To catch bigger fish, you need to wear them out. My philosophy is to always keep the fish moving. Thumb the line with B when they are moving away from you, and then start reeling once they stop moving. Ideally, you want the fish to be at least one notch below full strength before your line starts to fatigue with the warning chime. Then it’s a matter of managing your line while keeping the fish from straying too far away. It may take some time, and they can always jump and get away anyway, but eventually it will wear out all the way and then you can finish the job. Finally, try and release any fish if it’s either not a bass or too small. It might not always work, but it never hurts to try. It’s always successful to let a fish off during Class A tournaments.

The Black Bass was more fun than I expected. I would say the graphics are average, but the music is good and a lot better than I would have guessed. There’s a good variety in both lakes and prime fishing spots. The mechanics are sound and have some nuance, which makes it difficult to start playing but becomes more engaging later on. The biggest negative is that the gameplay can become very sluggish. Some lures are very slow to move and it takes a long button press for the lure to respond to your movements. This gets worse when a fish enters the screen. There doesn’t appear to be a lot going on and yet there is some significant slowdown. Your lure can get stuck in some environments and it is especially frustrating when a huge bass bites and you can’t move it at all. Password entry is tedious. The season is long, and the gameplay gets repetitive. I still don’t like fishing, however, even with the issues this is a fun fishing game.

The developer Another Ltd created the only NES bowling game, Championship Bowling, and here they made one of two fishing games on the console. I don’t know if working on one-off NES games like this was something that was planned or not. Championship Bowling is a solid bowling game, and The Black Bass is an equally solid fishing game.

#83 – The Black Bass (1st place)

#83 – The Black Bass

Turtle power! Times four!

The music starts simple and builds up nicely.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 4/26/18
Difficulty: 9/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Longplay

If you have been reading along for a while, you probably know that I am all about video games, and not much else. For instance, I don’t watch too many movies and often don’t watch the ones that have NES games tied to them. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were quite the phenomenon in the early 1990s, so much so that even I was all about them for a time. I had a bunch of the toys, I watched the cartoon, I saw the movies, and of course I played a lot of the NES games. The first of these games poses a stiff and often unfair challenge but is still a well-remembered game regardless, owing a debt to the source material for keeping it held in esteem among 90’s kids like myself.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. They first appeared in a 1984 comic book published by Mirage Studios. The two creators were approached by licensing agent Mark Freedman to try and expand the franchise. They teamed up with Playmates Toys to create a line of action figures, and the company insisted on creating a cartoon to help tie in with the toy line. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series began in 1987, and though it took a little while to catch on, it blew up in popularity over the late 1980s and early 1990s. The comic book continued to run alongside the TV show, and several movies and video games followed throughout the 1990s. The series is still going on today, most notably in the Nickelodeon animated series ending in 2017, with a new series slated for the network later in 2018.

The NES game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (abbreviated TMNT) was first released on the Famicom in May 1989. The NES release in North America followed soon after in June 1989, and the PAL release occurred in August 1990. Konami developed the game. It was published by Konami in Japan, under the Ultra Games label in the US, and Konami’s Palcom label in Europe and Australia. The Japanese version was called Geki Kame Ninja Den, meaning Legend of the Radical Ninja Turtles. The European version was renamed Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles to remove references to ninjas, just like with Ninja Gaiden. This version of the game was ported to various home computers, and even appeared in arcades as a Playchoice-10 title.

You can explore the map or get into the sewer.

TMNT is a side-scrolling action game. The plot begins with the standard “save the girl” trope, as Shredder has captured April O’Neil and you have to get her back. Ultimately, your task is to locate and defeat Shredder, the leader of the Foot Clan. The turtles want to retrieve his Life Transformer Gun, which they hope to use on Splinter to restore him back to his human form. This journey will take you through six stages, culminating in a final battle with Shredder himself.

When you start the game from the title screen, you are first dropped into a top-down view of a portion of the New York City streets. You control a tiny Ninja Turtle here. You can walk in four directions with the D-pad, and attack straight ahead with the B button. Right next to you is an opening to the sewer, and you can go inside if you want. There the gameplay changes to the side-scrolling view where the action takes place. You can also walk around the building and take the path on the left but be careful if you do. Right around the corner is a large steam roller that will drive toward you, and if you touch it you get crushed and die instantly, or in this game, get captured. You can explore the map freely and go in and out of the sewers or doorways freely as well. The idea is to locate the end level boss and defeat him to move on.

You can press Start to pause the game. This brings up an information screen. On the left side there is a minimap of the current area. Red squares indicate where you can walk around, and white squares indicate entrances to the side-scrolling areas. There is also a small, flashing plus sign that shows where you are on the map. On the right side is a small profile of each of the four turtles: Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello. You see a small picture of each turtle, his shortened name, a life bar, and what special weapon he has, if any. You can switch between turtles anytime in this game. Press Up or Down to highlight which turtle you want, and you will control him directly when you unpause. The lower part of the screen shows an informational message from one of the other characters, typically master Splinter.

Words of encouragement AND character selection!

Most of the game is played within the side-scrolling areas. You move around with the D-pad, jump with A, and attack with B. The turtles take high, loopy jumps and will curl up into a ball. You can take shorter jumps by tapping the A button. Once you start moving sideways in the air, you can’t stop until you land, making precision jumps on small ledges difficult. The B button attacks straight ahead. You can attack above by holding Up and below by holding Down when you strike with B. Your turtle crouches with Down while standing on the ground.

The lower part of the screen during gameplay holds vital information. The left shows both your current score and high score. The middle part displays your health bar. You begin with eight squares of health and you can get damaged in half-square increments. Below that is an enemy health bar that only appears during bosses or stronger enemy encounters. The right side shows your main weapon, sub weapon, and any other items you may encounter.

Each of the Ninja Turtles is known for mastering a specific weapon and you get to use them as your default weapon depending on which turtle you choose. Leonardo wields a katana. This has the best total range for all directions. Raphael uses sai, which is easily the weakest weapon in the game. It is very fast to deploy repeatedly but has virtually no range and isn’t as strong as you might expect given its natural handicap. Michelangelo wields nunchucks, which have good horizonal range but weak vertical range. Donatello is a master of the bo staff. This weapon has the best reach, but not necessarily the best range. Attacking enemies at your feet is tricky since you either have to attack while crouched, which gives you very little range, or attack downward while jumping. However, the bo is the most powerful of the standard weapons, therefore making it the most useful weapon in the game.

This screen should bring back some painful memories.

There are secondary weapons in the game that you mostly pick up from defeated enemies. They are uncommon drops, but you will see a few of them during play. Shurikens are simple projectile weapons that pack some surprising punch. There is also a three-way shuriken with a much wider range. Boomerangs are slow moving and don’t travel very far, but they come back toward you and you can grab them again to add them back to your stock. There is also the infamous scroll weapon that is not dropped by enemies and can only be found in a few places. This is a wide projectile attack that does heavy damage. Each weapon pickup gives you twenty ammo. Grabbing a new weapon replaces an old one, so typically you will switch turtles to spread the weapons around.

Other items are planted in the levels. Health-restoring pizza is the most common pickup you will find. Slices restore a quarter of your health, half pizzas give you back half of your health, and a full pizza restores it all. This only applies to your active turtle so you may choose who gets health if several turtles are in danger. Missile pickups give you ten missiles for the turtle van in the overhead view of Level 3. Ropes are used in special sections to help you cross large gaps. Finally, there is an invincibility item in the shape of a Ninja Turtle face. Grab it to ball up and swing your weapon all around you for several seconds. Then you can wipe out pretty much any enemy by bumping into them.

There are a lot of weird enemies in this game. Some are TMNT staples, like foot clan soldiers and mousers. There’s an enemy that’s all legs that jumps off ceilings with reverse gravity. There are weird glowing men, and chainsaw-wielding freaks, and flying saucer shaped robots, and men completely on fire, and robot soldiers with detachable heads, just to name a few. Some enemy encounters lock the screen for awhile and one of the stronger enemies will appear with its own dedicated health bar. There’s a weird quirk about the enemies that happens a lot in this game. Most areas have two enemy groups but only one is active at a time. The one you get when you enter a new screen appears to be chosen at random. You’ll find you prefer certain groups over others. Even weirder is that the enemy group can change in the middle of an area if all on-screen enemies are cleared out first. It’s one of the stranger game mechanics I’ve seen, which seems to fit given the equally strange enemies within the groups.

Heads will fly.

Let’s take a brief look at the stages in this game. This is already dipping into spoiler territory, if you care about such things. The first level is a good introductory stage to get used to the map and game mechanics. You will face both Bebop and Rocksteady as bosses here. The second stage is the infamous dam level. In the latter part of the stage you go underwater to disable eight bombs before time runs out. Swim by tapping A to rise and the D-pad to move around. There are electrical barriers and painful seaweed to deal with, but the timer is essentially the boss of this stage. In Level 3, you take control of the turtle van, or party wagon, as you seek out the boss. You can fire small bullets or large missiles that take out barricades in your way. Level 4 takes place at an airport and contain 18 numbered areas to explore. Level 5 has a dark map with searchlights that drop foot soldiers near you if you get caught. The boss is randomly hidden within one of the sewers and the enemies are very difficult. The final area has no map, playing only in the side-scrolling view. This large area contains one of the nastiest stretches of gameplay I’ve witnessed in this project.

You can survive a long time in this game because you manage four full health bars all at once. Inevitably, one turtle will succumb to damage or an instant death trap. In this case, that turtle gets captured and you have to go without him. There is one spot each in Levels 3, 4, 5, and 6 where you can recover a captured turtle, but you can only get one back per level. If all turtles are lost, it’s Game Over. You can continue twice which sends you back to the start of the level.

TMNT was one of the NES games I acquired back in the Ninja Turtles heyday of the early 90s. I have played the game a lot and have beaten it many times before. I remembered all the main points of the adventure despite not playing through the game for a long time. I think the last time I played through the game before now was in college just to show off to my friends. It’s regarded as a difficult NES game for good reason.

Some areas get clogged up with enemies.

It took me two attempts to beat the game. The first time was meant to shake off the rust, so to speak. I almost beat the game anyway. I was able to reach the last level without too much trouble, but that nasty corridor I mentioned earlier reared its ugly head and I couldn’t make it through. That spot is a long area littered with these flying robot soldiers that shoot lasers. They appear constantly throughout the length of the room, while the height of the room gets narrower and you have no room to dodge. They take at least two hits to kill with the best weapons as well. There is a bit of a trick to passing through the area, but it eluded me the first time through. I was successful on my next attempt though I had to use up both continues before figuring it out.

I will defend TMNT as a fun game, but it is kind of a mess in a few regards. The turtles themselves are unbalanced. Raphael is practically useless, mostly serving as either a damage sponge or special weapons expert. Donatello is easily the best character, but the game gets a lot more challenging should you lose him. The changing enemy group mechanic is strange and can hinder you as much as it can help you. I think some enemies take too many hits to beat. I can try and skip some, but that becomes an issue because there is significant slowdown and flicker when too many enemies are stuck on screen. The slowdown isn’t helpful from an enemy avoidance perspective since your movement is on the sluggish side normally. Many areas are too narrow to properly avoid enemies anyway. Another bonus mechanic is that a turtle gets an attack power boost when he is low on health. However, this doesn’t always seem to work, and I don’t think it’s something you can depend on even though it is useful when it happens.

Now that I’ve said my piece on TMNT, I think it is a disappointing game. The technical issues and balancing issues mentioned above hold the game back. I expect more out of a Konami game on NES. TMNT lacks the typical Konami polish, particularly from a 1989 release. By then, Konami had already released several games, including ones I’ve already played like Top Gun, Contra, and Gyruss. All of those games are a better technical experience than TMNT. The game does have some good qualities. The music is really good, and the graphics are solid. I like the overhead map and the variety of the gameplay it provides. The idea of switching between the four turtles each with different weapons is a great idea. I think the difficulty curve is even and each stage is harder than the one before it. The structure of a great game is here, but it falls a tad short of the mark for me. Maybe it’s the nostalgia talking, but I find TMNT to be a fun game anyway despite its flaws.

#82 – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The thrills and heartbreak of NASCAR, now on your NES!

Featuring one of the few songs in the entire game!

To Beat: Win the Championship Season
Played: 4/17/18 – 4/23/18
Difficulty: 9/10
My Difficulty: 9/10
My Video: Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge Final Races

Let me be clear of something right away. I don’t like racing, I don’t like NASCAR, and I don’t like racing video games. I can understand the appeal of the sport, I suppose, but it’s just not for me. I only wanted to play a few of the more popular NES racers, some of the more arcade style ones like Rad Racer and R.C. Pro-Am. Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge was nowhere in my radar. Sure enough, this is a game that tries to emulate real racing with the ability to customize cars. That’s the kind of complexity that scares me a little bit. Though I did have some struggles with the game, I was able to figure it out enough to share my findings with you today.

NASCAR stands for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. It was founded by Bill France Sr. in 1948 in Daytona Beach, FL. The company headquarters is still located there today. NASCAR as most people know it these days arose from the Strictly Stock Division of racing, which was one of the three initial divisions created for this form of auto racing. Today, NASCAR sanctions over 1500 races every year, mostly across the US and Canada.

Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge was developed by Distinctive Software and published by Konami. The original release was on MS-DOS in 1990, with NES, Amiga, and Macintosh versions appearing in 1991. While not the first game featuring stock car racing, it is believed to be the first game with the NASCAR license. The NES version of the game was released in December 1991 and only appeared in North America.

It’s not fun watching Bill Elliott win all the time.

In this game you compete in several NASCAR races against other drivers, including Bill Elliott. He was a 1988 Winston Cup champion and a very popular racer during his time in NASCAR. He is the best racer in the game and the one you want to beat if you hope to finish this game. Each race consists of sixteen drivers and there are four tracks to choose from. Two courses, Daytona and Talledega, are high-banked ovals, and the other two, Sears Point and Watkins Glen, are road course with various twists and turns. There are several options to play the game, but to beat the game you want to compete in the Championship Season. This consists of eight total races so each track appears twice. You and the other racers earn points based on the overall standings after races are finished. If you are in first place in the standings after the season, you win the game.

The driving in this game takes places in first-person view from inside the car. The controls are straightforward. Use Left and Right on the D-pad to steer the car. The A button hits the gas to accelerate, and the B button brakes. Release the A button and press Up to upshift the car and Down to downshift the car when driving with manual transmission. That’s all you need to know!

There’s a lot of information inside the car. The top of the screen displays how many laps are remaining and which position you are in the race. You also have a rear-view mirror to see anyone coming up behind you. The bottom of the screen has even more information. To the left of the steering wheel is your speedometer, and through the wheel is the tachometer to see your RPMs, or revolutions per minute. The steering wheel is static but has a little knob on it that moves as you drive so you can more accurately see how you are steering. The three gauges in a row on the right are for oil pressure, temperature, and fuel. Below them are the damage light and the fuel warning light. The far right displays a flag indicating the current race conditions, and under that is the gearbox and gearshift. It might seem overwhelming but it’s really not.

There are many options for setting up the game listed out on the main select screen. The first option is to choose your track, and you go to a screen that shows a map of each course along with the name. Use the D-pad to select a track or choose the Championship Season if you want to play a full game. Press the A button to decide, and then you can choose how many miles you want to run. You can choose from 10 all the way up to the full 500 miles. The default is 20 miles, and that’s what I went with. On the next screen you can choose which car you want. Your choices are a Pontiac Grand Prix, a Ford Thunderbird, or a Chevrolet Lumina. Each one handles a bit differently, but it’s not clear what the differences are just from looking.

So many options it’s hard to find the main game.

The NASCAR license screen lets you enter your name for the standings. Use the D-pad to choose a letter and press A to enter it. There are arrows at the bottom to reposition the cursor, and the RUB option deletes the highlighted character. Select the End option when you are finished. You can also press Select to put the cursor to the box below to enter your password. This applies to the Championship Season only and is a huge, 35-character password. It’s a little longer and a little less complicated than The Guardian Legend passwords.

Auto-qualify can be set to either Yes or No. This determines if you run qualifying laps before the race to determine your pole position. If you choose No, before you start the race you will run two laps on the track yourself. Then your time is compared with the other racers. Your rank here determines both your starting position for the race and which pit area you will use for pit stops. If you choose Yes, then this process is done for you and you are given a randomly selected position. Unfortunately, this position is always near the back of the pack, but it saves you time if you want to get into a race quickly.

The skill level can be set to either Novice, Rookie, or Pro. In the Novice level, the opponents drive slower and you cannot crash. This is perfect for practicing courses under normal racing conditions. In both Rookie and Pro levels, you can crash. The Pro level racers go all out compared to the Rookie level drivers. The bad part is that when you run the Championship Season, you are locked into the Pro level no matter what.

Once you have made all your selections to this point, it is time to race. Well, almost. The final two options are Race and Practice. The Race option is for running an actual race, either a single course or the Championship Season. First you see the track you have chosen. Then you will see the standings if you are in the Championship Season. Next you will fine tune very specific settings for your car, and you can watch the animation of the crew making changes to your vehicle if you want. Finally, it’s time to drive either in the actual race or qualifying if you haven’t done that already.

Watching the mechanic work!

Practice mode puts you in special situations. You get another screen and can choose from Drafting, Passing, Following a Line, or Pitting. Choose your option and then you can read some advice from Bill Elliott himself. Then you can tune your car and go right to practicing. Some of these techniques are really valuable to learn.

Drafting is an important technique you will want to learn. This happens when you are following behind a car closely. The lead car moves so fast it creates a partial vacuum behind it, so following a car gives you less air resistance and you can go faster. The idea is you can let off the gas a little bit while still maintaining the speed to stay behind the lead car. This allows you the opportunity to sling shot by hitting the gas and using the additional acceleration you saved by drafting to pass the lead car. Trying to sling shot at the wrong time can leave you out of position to draft the car if you are unable to pass them during the move.

Another important technique is holding a line. The idea is that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, so you go faster along the track if you can hold a line versus moving around along the track. On an oval course, the best line is the inside track during the turns and the outside track during the straightaways. For the road courses, it’s more important to get through curves as quickly as possible.

Fine tuning your vehicle is the most important process for racing in this game. The manual covers all this information really well. The first two options on the left are the most straightforward. You can choose either a manual or automatic transmission, and also either the racing engine or qualifying engine. The automatic transmission means you don’t have to shift gears while driving, however this engine will always fall short of peak performance. You must learn to drive manual to have a shot at beating the game. The qualifying engine is designed to give you the best performance for qualifying, but it is prone to failure if you are running a long race.

Ah, the open track, no one in sight! Oh it’s just qualifying…

The other three options on the right are more detailed. The first of these is the spoiler angle. You can set it anywhere between 20 and 70 degrees. When the angle is higher, this puts more force down on the car. That helps you hold a line better and not slide out so much during turns. Lower spoiler angles help the car run a bit faster at the expensive of less handling.

The gear ratio can be set at predefined values between 2.00 and 4.57. This determines how many RPMs you run the engine. If you run at too many RPMs for too long, your engine with blow up and you will be knocked out of the race. Lower gear ratios run at higher RPMs, which means you get better acceleration but have to shift more often. Higher ratios give you less acceleration and may prevent you from running at optimal speed. This is the setting you really want to tinker with the most to get the best top speed out of your car.

The last option is tire stagger. This is the size difference between the inside and outside tires. This is most important on the oval tracks with the high-banked curves. A higher tire stagger helps you hold a line within a curve better, which in turns helps you go a bit faster. If you are pointing too much toward the inside of a curve, you might want to increase stagger. If you are sliding toward the outside wall too much, you might want to decrease stagger.

During a race you might need to make a pit stop to repair damage, adjust settings mid race, or refuel. There are red arrows along a portion of the track that point to the pit lane. Cross the red-dotted line and drive to the end of it to enter the pits. The view will change to a top-down view, and here you always drive automatic to help make this easier. You need to remember which position you started in so that you can stop at the same numbered pit area, and you want to come to a complete stop. If you go too far, you have to make another lap and try again.

Don’t forget to make an accurate pit stop.

On the pit stop screen, you have to work quickly. You see your position and stopwatch for time spent in the pits. There are a bunch of meters showing how different components are doing, and you see your spoiler angle and tire stagger at the bottom. You can tell your pit crew to focus on any of these items by selecting one with the controller. The top meter is fuel, followed by left side tires, right side tires, all tires, and general damage. Pick an option to perform repairs by replacing tires, fixing damage, or refueling. All repair or replacement options include refueling. Replacing tires or repairing damage take the longest. It’s up to you to decide what you want to fix to get better handling. The race is still going on in the meanwhile, so the less time you spend in the pits, the better your position.

As you could probably guess, this was my first time playing Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge. I don’t remember where I got the cart, probably in one of my random eBay lots. It costs around $5 or a little more, so it’s not expensive. I bet there are more copies of this game floating around because it’s a Konami published title and that keeps the price down. In my experience, it’s a game I don’t see around much even though it’s readily available online. My collection copy is the only copy I’ve owned.

It really helps to read the manual for the game before playing it. There are hints for how you might customize your car to get the best performance. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you everything. First you have to select a car, and then the tweaks you need are dependent on the particular car. I think there are hidden stats on each of the three cars, and I bet one of them is geared toward the highest speed and other toward the best handling. I messed around with different cars and settings in the Practice mode. I started out with drafting practice since that seems like the most important skill in the game, and I couldn’t keep up with Bill Elliott at all. I got my car to top out at 199 mph but that was too slow.

After a few hours of getting nowhere, I took to the internet for help. There is not much to go on. GameFAQs has two FAQs on this game, and neither one is very detailed. One of them had speed/handling stats for the cars, but I have no idea where that came from or if it is even accurate. Ignoring that, I looked on YouTube. I found a video where the creator wins Daytona using the Chevrolet Lumina. He got the car to top out at 202 mph which was better than I figured out on my own for any setup. I copied his configuration to get that top speed, and now I was at least keeping pace with Bill Elliott in practice.

You can extensively customize what you want to fix.

It was time to start trying out the Championship Season. The first race was the oval track at Daytona. With the 20 mile default race, that meant 8 laps around the track. I decided to qualify myself. I wasn’t placing that well at first, about as well as auto-qualifying. The strategy is to take the turns as far inside as you can. Near top speed, you need to rapidly tap Left as you hold the gas the whole time through the turn. With the proper settings, you can stay on the inside without veering off line for best results. To get into the turn, I let off the gas briefly to help steer. It’s a precise setup and technique, and any variance means you can start sliding out and lose speed.

There is an easy trick that really increases the odds of winning a race on an oval track. At around four laps in, the low fuel light flashes and you have to make a pit stop. Everyone will pit halfway through the race. You have enough fuel to go further than that. I didn’t pit with everyone else and tried to do so on the next lap. If you are near the lead, that will put you in first place for a little while. Now I don’t think you can get by the whole race without stopping for fuel, which is too bad because that would almost assure first place every time. What you can do is make your pit stop and fill up your gas tank only about halfway. You can leave pit lane anytime you want for any repair other than tire changes. You can save several seconds by filling up a bit and leaving early. It doesn’t seem like much, but saving just a few seconds extends your lead by a lot. Once I figured out the driving and pitting techniques, I had no trouble winning first place on any oval track. So that’s half the game figured out.

The road courses, on the other hand, I found much more difficult. The imminent danger here is crashing. It only takes one crash to knock you out of the race entirely. The first road course is Sears Point, which in my opinion is the hardest course in the game. It is almost all turns with few places you can speed up. The opponents are strong at taking turns, and they tend to get in your way when trying to pass. My keys to success here were learning the course and determining what top speeds I could take each turn without crashing. A couple turns are so sharp that I have to slam on the brakes early just to go slow enough to clear them. You then have to remember to downshift to get the best acceleration and get back to good racing speed. I had to tweak the settings again, most notably increasing the gear ratio so that I could get better acceleration at the expense of needing to shift more frequently. The good news is that with the default settings, you only run three laps. The bad news is that no one pits so you can’t save time there. It’s best to finish at least 3rd, but maybe you can get by with a spot or two lower if you can make it up later.

I can barely see Bill Elliott behind all this traffic.

The other road course in the game is Watkins Glen. This course has fewer turns than Sears Point and contains some long straightaways where you can build up good speed. Again, it’s best to learn what speed you can take each turn for best results. I figured out an exploit on this course. If you stay on the far outside entering a turn, you can drive straight as fast as you want and the outside grass of the course nudges you along through the curve. That means for a right turn, get all the way left to start, and vice versa. As long as you get all the way to the side and drive completely straight, you won’t crash. You do lose a lot of speed doing this and it damages your car, but it is much more consistent than braking and steering into the turn yourself, plus avoiding crashes is wonderful. I learned I could also use this strategy on Sears Point, but it was not very effective since there isn’t enough room to build up speed for the really sharp turns. I didn’t crash, but I always lost position. But the strategy is perfect for Watkins Glen.

My entire run of the game took 12-15 hours to complete. I reset the game countless times after crashing or finishing poorly, and luckily the game retains your password when you reset so you can go right back where you left off. I managed first place on all the oval tracks and I always gained 10 points in the standings each time. The way the scoring works is that there is a 5 point difference between places within the top 6, a 5 point bonus for leading any lap, and a 10 point bonus for leading the most laps. You can’t get both bonuses. Bill earned the 5 point bonus since he led initially, but then I got 10 points for leading the rest of the way after pitting. The second race, Sears Point, was where I spent the bulk of the time playing. I managed a first-place victory after many attempts but broke even in the standings. Bill got the 10 point bonus for leading the first two laps before I won the final lap. Race 4 at Watkins Glen I won and extended my lead by 15 points by leading all laps. Race 6 was a replay of Sears Point and I just barely finished in second place, losing those 15 points right back to Bill in the process. That gave me a 40 point lead entering the final race at Watkins Glen. In my gameplay video I attempted the course a couple times and only finished once in 5th place. That was good enough to secure a 10 point season victory!

I found Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge to be, well, quite a challenge to play. The game itself is well made. Graphics are quite nice. The physics and handling are about as realistic as you would expect on the NES. There isn’t a bunch of music in the game, but the few tracks are well composed. There is no music when driving. You hear the engine and squealing noises as you drive around, but the audio cues you get are very helpful as your attention visually is often divided. The passwords are awful, especially with punctuation like slashes involved. I think they could have been made smaller, but it’s really a minor gripe. Kudos to Distinctive Software for creating a quality NES racing title. This game did not turn me into a racing fan and I am not going to start liking playing racing games very much. I just think it’s important to give credit where it’s due. Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge is a good NES game, even if I don’t care for it.

#81 – Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge

Candy is dandy, and jelly beans are really keen.

Nice music here, and if you wait a bit, some credits!

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Reach the ending with all treasures
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 4/7/18 – 4/11/18
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
Video: A Boy and His Blob 100% Longplay

Today we are dipping back into the NES library to play another weird game. A Boy and His Blob: Trouble in Blobolonia is an adventure game that doesn’t have a parallel I can think of to any other game of its time. I’ve talked about what I consider weird or quirky games before, specifically Ghoul School and Mendel Palace come to mind, that have a unique personality or feel to them. A Boy and His Blob certainly fits that bill, and I believe it is a more accessible game that has a wider appeal than those other two games I covered. Let’s take a deeper look and see what we are getting into.

A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia was released on the NES in North America in January 1990. It was developed by Imagineering and published by Absolute Entertainment. This was one of the first NES releases for both companies. The Famicom version, named Fushigi na Blobby: Blobania no Kiki, was published by Jaleco in November 1990. The name translates to Mysterious Blobby: The Crisis of Blobania. The PAL version was released in 1991. The game is attributed to David Crane, who was lead designer and developer on the game. A Game Boy sequel, The Rescue of Princess Blobette, was first released in Japan also in November 1990. This sequel predates the original in Japan by a few weeks, while the other versions released in 1991. WayForward Technologies developed the Wii remake of A Boy and His Blob in 2009, the same year the NES game appeared on Wii Virtual Console.

A Boy and His Blob has a simple story that is nearly summed up in the title alone. You play the role of the boy who makes friends with a blob from outer space. According to the manual, the blob’s name is Blobert. He is from Blobolonia and he is looking for help in defeating his evil emperor, who makes everyone eat marshmallows and chocolate instead of health-promoting vitamins. To defeat the emperor, you need vitamins. (Those are harmful to the emperor, you see.) To get vitamins, you need money, and you get money by finding treasures in the underground cave. The blob can turn into various objects by feeding him certain flavors of jelly beans, and you will need the blob’s abilities to achieve your goal of defeating the emperor.

Your good friend will follow you anywhere.

The starting controls are simple. You control the boy directly and the blob will follow after you. Press Left or Right to walk around. The boy has significant inertia, so he is slow to start moving and slides around a lot. Press the A button to toss a jelly bean. I suppose you could call it jelly bean inertia because he takes a little while to pluck the jelly bean out of the bag and toss it. You can move while tossing to throw the jelly bean farther ahead. If you throw a jelly bean off screen, the camera will follow it until it hits the ground. This is helpful when you don’t know what’s below you, for instance. The B button causes the boy to let out a loud whistle. This calls the blob toward you, and it transforms the blob from any object back to normal blob form. Press Select to change the flavor of jelly bean you wish to throw. You can cycle through the list in reverse by holding Down and pressing Select.

The top and bottom of the screen contain all the information you need to play. The top displays the current score, the number of treasures remaining, and how many lives you have left. The bottom of the screen shows which jelly bean you have selected along with how many of that flavor you have remaining.

The fun of the game is making use of the blob’s many transformations. You need to feed the blob a certain way. First, stand a step or so away and make sure he is facing you. You can use the whistle to help guide him. Then simply press A to toss the jelly bean. It should fall right into his mouth, and then he shrinks down into a ball before transforming. If a jelly bean hits the ground, it’s gone forever. If you throw a jelly bean near the blob that he doesn’t reach, he makes a sad face. Try not to do that!

A happy blob is a helpful blob.

Let’s take a look at what each jelly bean does:

Licorice is for Ladder. You can press Up and Down to climb the ladder to reach ledges about half a screen in height. Sometimes the ladder will go through a ledge above it, and sometimes it doesn’t. You have plenty of licorice jelly beans to use if one ladder doesn’t pan out.

Strawberry is for Bridge. Position the blob next to the edge of a ledge and feed him a jelly bean. He will stretch out horizontally to the opposite ledge so you can safely cross.

Coconut is for Coconut. This transformation is the most direct, for sure. You can pick up the blob in coconut form. Press A to drop the coconut blob or press B to throw him ahead. He will roll for awhile and usually the camera will follow him so you can see what’s ahead.

Cola is for Bubble. The blob turns into a large bubble just your size. You can walk into the bubble and bounce along. While inside, you will fall slowly and you can even breathe underwater.

Cinnamon is for Blow Torch. This is another transformation you can pick up. This time B doesn’t do anything when held. The blow torch is active while you are holding it.

Apple is for Jack. Haha, it’s a cereal joke. This is just like a jack that lifts up a car. You can’t pick it up either.

Vanilla is for Umbrella. This is a useful one. This is grabbable like the coconut and blow torch, only the boy holds the umbrella up over his head. You can use this to fall slowly and also protect your head from falling objects.

Many transformations are helpful tools.

Tangerine is for Trampoline. This lets you jump super high, though it is tricky to use. Walk up to the trampoline to start bouncing. Hold Up to bounce higher and hold Down to bounce lower. You stay locked in place above the trampoline until you reach the top of your bounce. Then you can hold Left or Right to get out from above the trampoline, hopefully to a nearby ledge so you don’t fall to your death.

Root Beer is for Rocket. Blast off to the skies! More on this one later.

Honey is for Hummingbird. The blob will fly toward you and travels through any solid ground with ease. It’s useful for getting the blob back to you if you leave him behind as a trampoline.

The ketchup jelly bean is the one flavor the blob doesn’t like. He will flat out reject them. What it does instead is instantly teleports the blob to wherever it hits the ground. This is your failsafe to get the blob back if you become so separated that you can’t reunite by normal means.

Punch is for Hole. Yes, the blob can turn himself into the absence of material. If the ledge is thin enough, you can place a hole and fall through it. There’s a trick to use the same hole more than once. If you fall through and whistle without moving, the hole will fall to you. As soon as it hits the ground, you will fall through it again. Otherwise, the blob goes back to normal.

Lime is for Key. This is yet another grabbable form. Certainly, it is useful for something.

Orange is for the Vitablaster. You might be able to guess what this one does by name alone. More on this one later.

He can even become transparent and help you breathe underwater.

A Boy and His Blob is divided into two clear halves. The first half of the game is the treasure hunt. You will try out all the different transformations and explore the caves below the city subway. There are many treasures here, as well as different traps and things to avoid. Bouncing worms show up in several places and you die if you touch them. Spikes and falling rocks defeat you, as well as entering water without the bubble. You also die if you fall from a height greater than roughly a screen and a half tall. Caves are dangerous for a young boy!

While there are a finite number of treasures, you don’t need them to find them all to finish the game. Two of the treasures are bags of extra jelly beans. One of those bags holds both the Lime and Orange jelly beans among others. These are the only two kinds you don’t begin the game with, and you need them to beat the game. Once you are satisfied with your underground excursion, make your way back up to the surface. On the far right is a health food shop. Depending on how many treasures you found, you will get a predefined assortment of Vitamins A, B, and C upon entering the store and spending your hard-earned treasure. Now’s the time to use the Root Beer jelly bean to create a rocket taking you to Blobolonia.

Seeking the emperor in Blobolonia is the second half of the game. There’s no real exploration here, rather it’s a gauntlet of enemies and traps. This is where the Orange jelly beans and the Vitablaster come in handy. You can pick up the Vitablaster like other carryable forms. Hold the Vitablaster and press Select to cycle between Vitamins A, B, and C. You also see the ammo count next to the selected type. Press B to fire a vitamin, and the type of vitamin determines its flight path. Vitamin A fires in a long arc. Vitamin B travels a short distance and bounces straight up when it hits the ground. Vitamin C is a completely straight shot. You can also press Up or Down while holding the Vitablaster to aim either straight ahead, at a 45-degree angle, or straight up. There are marshmallows, cherry bombs, popcorn, and chocolate kisses you can shoot with the Vitablaster to clear the path ahead. On Blobolonia you can also collect peppermints. These are displayed on the top of the screen once you get one, and you earn an extra life for every five peppermints you collect. Hopefully you saved up enough lives for this part of the game.

Killer marshmallows are the least of your worries.

You begin each game with five lives. The boy is pretty fragile so they can go fast. There are no continues in the game either, and there’s no way to earn extra lives until you get to the latter half of the game. Fortunately, the game is on the shorter side and you can try again quickly.

A Boy and His Blob is a game I had growing up and I’ve beaten it many times before. I’m not sure how I ended up with the game in the first place, but it was probably through a yard sale or game store or something. I seem to remember either renting it or playing it at a friend’s house before that.

Even though I knew how to beat the game, I haven’t played it in many years. I forgot the path I used to take through the cave to get all the treasures. It only took a few tries for it to all come back to me. I remembered all the transformations and what to do with them too. I spent a few attempts over a couple of days to hone my skills back in, and then set out to record a full run. I’m pleased with how my video longplay turned out. I only died one time in a pretty tricky spot, and I feel I played well for the rest of the game. After I finished playing the game, I looked at a map of the caves and discovered that it is all a lot smaller than I remembered. This is probably why I didn’t have much trouble finding all the treasures again.

A Boy and His Blob was a game I fondly remembered from my youth, and from my experience I believe it’s an NES game that more people remember than you might think. Overall, it’s a solid game with a unique, quirky hook to it that keeps you coming back. The graphics go for a lifelike look which doesn’t hold up as well today but is fine for playing. The detailed character animation does hold up well. The music is awfully catchy and suits the game well. The blob has a lot of charisma and character as he can transform into so many different things and even shows emotion at times. The main downside to the game is a lack of precision. The boy’s movement is very slippery, and sometimes you can’t get the blob to cooperate with you either. You end up using extra jelly beans to help position the blob just so, which slows the game down. Some transformations don’t quite work right in specific situations. Also, precise jumping with the trampoline is often an exercise in frustration. Some players would appreciate a map of the game too, though it’s not as bad as it first appears. The fun of the game will likely override those concerns. It’s a fun adventure to take if you are trying to beat the game, and it’s also enjoyable just to tinker around with.

#80 – A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia

A much more expansive adventure awaits in Dragon Warrior II.

The gang’s all here!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 3/16/18 – 4/7/18
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Dragon Warrior II Final Area and Ending

I know this is a website about old NES games, but this is also a website about nostalgia. Each of these games I’ve been playing has been enjoyed by someone who will remember them fondly. It’s not necessarily about the games themselves, but about the people you played them with, the friends you shared tips with, or the memories you had playing them and what it was like to live your life back then. Perhaps I’ve always been focused on nostalgia because I have made time to play my old games over the years. Sometimes it takes an older game to drop you back in time in a powerful, almost surreal way. Dragon Warrior II is a game that does this for me. It helps that it is a fun game to play even now.

For more information about the Dragon Quest series of games, check out my Dragon Warrior post.

Dragon Quest II: Akuryo No Kamigami was released on the Famicom in January 1987. The name translates to Dragon Quest II: Gods of the Evil Spirits. It was developed by Chunsoft and published by Enix. All the Dragon Quest games on Famicom were brought over to the NES several years later. The NES version was renamed Dragon Warrior II and was released in September 1990. This game was ported a lot more than I thought. There was an MSX version in Japan in 1988 and a Super Famicom version in 1993. Game Boy Color received a combination cart of Dragon Warrior I and II. There are also mobile versions and a Wii version in the Japanese compilation Dragon Quest 25th Anniversary Collection.

The story of Dragon Warrior II is explained through an introductory cutscene exclusive to the NES version. All is peaceful in the kingdom of Moonbrooke until the forces of the evil sorcerer Hargon appear suddenly. The king fights valiantly but is no match for these creatures. He and the rest of the castle are taken down, but not before a single soldier barely makes his escape. This man somehow makes it all the way to the kingdom of Midenhall to warn the king there before he succumbs to his injuries. As the prince of Midenhall, it is your duty to go on a grand adventure to defeat Hargon. Do so and you win the game.

The situation is pretty dire.

Structurally, Dragon Warrior II is a lot like the original game. You still walk around with the D-Pad, press A to open the command menu and give commands, and press B to undo or go back. You are still adventuring around, fighting enemies, getting stronger, exploring caves and towns, upgrading equipment, collecting items, etc. I will still give my traditional amount of detail, but rather than retread a lot of old ground, I will focus more on the differences added and implemented into Dragon Warrior II from the first game in the series.

The first thing you may notice is the Command Menu is updated. There are six commands here instead of eight. Five of these commands are the same: Talk, Spell, Status, Item, and Search. The displays are a little different, but they function the same way. The new command is Equip which lets you swap your weapon, armor, shield, and helmet for a different one you are holding. You may also choose to unequip something and go without if you choose. Three commands from Dragon Warrior are no longer here: Stairs, Door, and Take. You will automatically go up or down stairs when you stand on them, which is an obvious, much welcome change. Door and Take were both redundant commands. Keys are treated as items so you use them through the Item screen, and Take was rolled into the Search command. The popup Status Menu is also streamlined. It appears at the bottom of the screen this time and only displays the first four characters of your name, your HP, and MP. If you want to see Gold or Experience, pull up the Status menu instead.

Some of the basic structures have been changed. You can see the differences from the opening cutscene. All map objects in the first game were all the size of one tile, but that’s not the case here. Castles are four tiles big and towns are two tiles long. That’s all though; everything else is one tile. There are still caves like in the original game. Monuments are special points of interest and are often friendlier environments than enemy-ridden caves. There is a different kind of grass tile that looks like bushes. These are just cosmetic changes, but they do make the environment more interesting. The size differences also help make you feel smaller and the world around you feel bigger.

Slimes and slugs go well together.

Venture out into your first battle to find that you may have more than just a single enemy to deal with this time. It was a logical next step to have more than just one-on-one battles, right? To handle multiple enemies on screen in a fight, the pretty battle background from Dragon Warrior was replaced with a plain black battle screen. Your Status Menu is displayed at the top, and the lower left contains the Command Menu. These options are Fight, Run, Parry, and Item. Parry is the only new one here, which puts you in a defensive stance. You take half damage but don’t do anything else. The lower right display shows the enemy names and how many of them are still active in the fight. Instead of targeting a single enemy when you fight, you get to choose which enemy group to attack. If there are multiple enemies in a group, you attack one at random. If there are no longer any enemies in the group, you will whiff and not hit anyone. Lame, but it happens. When battles play out, the lower half of the screen describes who is attacking who and for how much damage, same as before.

Caves have received a major overhaul. You no longer need to carry torches or use the Radiant spell to see where you are going, so already that’s a huge improvement. Narrow corridors are no more. Caves have the same tile size as the castles on the overworld, so the normal tunnels are always two tiles wide and they are often much longer as well. There are cave entrances where you cannot see where you are going until you walk through to the next room. Then the newly entered room of the cave is drawn while the room you just left is shrouded in darkness. It helps maintain a bit of mystery since you can already see the entirety of the current room. Later in the game, you explore towers that have the same attributes as caves, just with a different tileset.

The most significant change in Dragon Warrior II is the addition of two party members. You will have to go solo for a while before eventually meeting up with the Prince of Cannock. He is given a name at random and you don’t get to change it. My companion was named Esgar. He is not as strong as the main character and he cannot equip as many weapons or armor, but unlike our hero he can cast magic spells. Now you get the ability to heal without resorting to medical herbs or going back to the inn, and you get some extra options in battle as well as another attacker. Sometime later you find the Princess of Moonbrooke. She was named Roz in my adventure. She is the weakest physical attacker but has the most powerful magic. It’s a well-balanced party.

Join forces and help each other.

There are many spells in Dragon Warrior II that can be used by the Prince or Princess, or sometimes both. Some spells are only usable in battle, and some are only usable in the field. When you pull up the Status for a spell caster, the last screen will be a list of spells in each of those categories. If a spell can be used anywhere, then it appears in both lists. The spells can be further categorized into healing spells, field spells, attack spells, and effect spells. Let’s go into more detail!

The healing spells are Heal, Healmore, Healall, and Revive. The three “Heal” spells all restore some HP to one party member. It should be clear by the names that Healmore restores more than Heal, and Healall restores all HP to the affected party member. Revive can bring a fallen party member back to life with a single hit point. The Prince gets Heal, Healmore, and Revive, while the Princess gets Healmore and Healall. HP restoring spells can also be used in battle but Revive is only usable on the field.

These are the field spells: Antidote, Repel, Return, Outside, Stepguard, and Open. Antidote cures one member of poison status so that they don’t take damage while walking about. Repel wards off weaker enemies for a while. Return sends you back to the last place you saved the game. Outside takes you back to the entrance of a cave or tower you are exploring. Stepguard protects you from taking damage from certain tiles that normally hurt you when you walk on them. The Open spell opens doors without using a key. The Prince gets Antidote, Return, Outside, and Stepguard. The Princess learns Repel, Antidote, Outside, Stepguard, and Open.

The Prince has attack spells to aid in combat.

The attack spells are Firebal, Infernos, Firebane, Explodet, Defeat, and Sacrifice. Firebal does a relatively small amount of damage to one enemy, though it is useful in the early going. Infernos and Firebane have the same effect, dealing damage to all members of an enemy group. Explodet does a lot of damage to all enemies. Defeat can be used on an enemy group and may defeat an enemy outright if it works. Sacrifice instantly defeats all your enemies as well as the spellcaster. The Prince learns Firebal, Firebane, Defeat, and Sacrifice, while the Princess learns Infernos and Explodet.

The final set of spells are the effect spells. They are Sleep, Surround, Stopspell, Defence, Increase, and Chance, and they can only be used in battle. Sleep may put members of an enemy group to sleep. Surround generates spirits around an enemy group that causes enemy attacks to miss more often. Stopspell is used on an enemy group and can block enemy spells if it is effective. Defence lowers the defensive stat for an enemy group, while Increase adds defensive points to all party members. The Chance spell has many different effects and one is applied at random when it is cast. It’s a risky spell with the potential for a huge payoff. The Prince gets Stopspell and Increase, while the Princess learns Sleep, Surround, Defence, and Chance.

Having three party members mixes up things somewhat. Menus now include an additional option for which member you want to command. Each character has his or her own set of eight items to hold. Party members may trade items or throw them away through the Item menu. This includes your weapons and armor, unlike Dragon Warrior where they don’t go against your total item loadout. When you buy items, weapons, or armor in the shop, you must choose a member to receive it. The shopkeeper will tell you if the recipient is unable to equip the armor or weapon, which is helpful even though you learn by trial and error. Often you have to shuffle items around to make room for something specific, and those item slots fill up pretty quickly. You can also utilize the House of Healing. Here you can curse poison, remove cursed items, and revive a fallen party member. It costs 20 gold for each experience level of the defeated party member to revive, but it’s often better than losing half your gold when everyone falls.

Drag your partner’s corpse to the House of Healing.

Once you recruit the whole party and explore the world more, you eventually find a ship. This is when the game switches from a linear style to an open world adventure. You can dock the ship at any walkable world tile, leading to vast exploration. This is also where the game takes a sharp upturn in difficulty. Since you can go wherever, you may stumble into an area with much stronger monsters. Go directly east from the port town and you might see something familiar. There’s an island which plays the world music from Dragon Warrior, and indeed it is a more compact version of Alefgard. You can go to Tantegel Castle or pay the Dragonlord’s ancestor a visit in Charlock Castle. It’s a nice throwback that shows just how much larger the world is in Dragon Warrior II. From there, you will need to track down some additional keys, as well as five crests required to reach the end of the journey.

There are a few miscellaneous changes I noticed in Dragon Warrior II. In the first game, you could sell old equipment for half of the original purchase price. In this game you get 75% back. That helps offset the extra equipment you need for the other party members. There are many more quest items in this game that take up precious item slots. I’m not sure if you could sell them in the first game, but you can this time. If it was one you still needed, you can go back to where you found it and get another one. Enemies may drop items after battle. I noticed that you can’t earn two of the better item drops, so if an enemy drops something you already have, you get additional gold instead. You can also get poisoned. This only affects you as you walk, and your experience level is temporarily replaced by “PO” to indicate you are poisoned. This is the only effect obvious on screen. I think it would have been nice to know at a glance if a character is asleep or had spells stopped in battle.

I have played Dragon Warrior II a few times before. The first Dragon Warrior was one of those formative games that introduced me to the genre. I knew there were other NES games in this series, but they were always so expensive to buy even used. Dragon Warrior II might have been the first NES game I played on my PC once I discovered emulation in the late 90’s. I remember sitting at the family computer exploring towers and grinding levels while listening to music. Good memories! Eventually I tracked down all four NES Dragon Warrior carts back when you mostly sent money orders in the mail to buy things from eBay. I’m pretty sure I beat the game on emulator, and I had all the save files used up on my cart copy. I don’t remember exactly but I’ve probably beaten the game at least three times before.

Having a full party gives you the most options.

It’s an RPG of course, so Dragon Warrior II took a long time to finish. I believe I spent 30-40 hours beating the game. The game goes along at a reasonable speed until you get the ship. It’s almost overwhelming to have the entire map at your fingertips, and the new enemies you encounter are quite challenging. The first major goal is to track down the Golden Key, and though I remembered where it was it still took a while to track down. I wrapped up the middle part of the game up quickly. The final cave is really tough to both navigate and fight through. I was under leveled, but this was also the best place to gain experience. For as much time as I spent playing from the start of the game up to the final cave, I spent just as much time getting past it and grinding experience levels before the final showdown. The character levels cap at 50, 45, and 35, and I was 6 or 7 levels shy of that before beating the game.

Dragon Warrior II is a challenging RPG. Even early in the game, some large enemy groups can cause trouble. I already mentioned it gets harder once you meet new enemies after adventuring on the water. Some of the locations you need to visit are out on the open water and tough to find for the first time. A couple of the crests are difficult to locate and require a specific hint from someone likely on the other side of the world. Perhaps the worst of all is the combat near the end of the game. The odds are constantly stacked against you. Enemy effects are always more effective against your party. Your attack spells can miss, while the enemy attack spells never miss. Enemies tend to gang up on one party member, and if a critical hit slips in there, you will likely die. The Prince is the only one with the Revive spell, and though there is an item that does the same thing, you can only hold one of them at a time. Some of the final enemies can cast Defeat and Sacrifice against you. While Defeat usually misses, Sacrifice is instant death and there’s nothing you can do about it except try again. Of course, I rated the game a 5/10 in difficulty because you can reduce the difficulty by grinding longer. It’s just unbalanced at the end of the adventure and there’s not much room for improvising if you get in a bad situation.

Dragon Warrior II is a huge step up from the original. Everything is larger: the world, the dungeons, the characters, the items, the spells, the enemies, etc. The graphics are good. Though they are similar to the first game, this game expands the tileset a bit while adding many new, larger, and more detailed enemies. The music is excellent all around with some great themes that are often underappreciated. On the one hand, Dragon Warrior II is several degrees more complex than Dragon Warrior, but on the other hand it’s not so complex that it becomes overwhelming or unmanageable. New elements are introduced at a reasonable rate and it’s not hard to keep track of everything as you go. The downsides are the spike in difficulty in some combat sequences, getting lost trying to locate important items for the end of the game, and all the level grinding needed to stand a decent chance at the final dungeon. This might be my favorite NES RPG as I find it hits the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity, all while both looking and sounding great. If you like RPGs and haven’t tried Dragon Warrior II, I would recommend giving it at least a few hours of your time to see if it grabs you.

#79 – Dragon Warrior II