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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This challenging top-down shooter is an early contender for most difficult NES game ever.

To Beat: Reach the ending after Level 4
My Goal: Beat the game without using the continue code
What I Did: Beat the game without continues
Played: 4/26/16 – 8/18/16
Difficulty: 10/10
My Difficulty: 10/10

I think that I have accomplished many impressive feats in a number of NES games over the years. Name a popular NES game that has any pedigree of difficulty and I have most likely beaten the game with ease many times over. There are many other NES games out there that are less talked about that also pose a stiff challenge. This is where Ikari Warriors fits in. I have come to find out that the NES version is known primarily for two reasons. One reason is that it is part of a series of three NES games, and the other is that it is generally mentioned in a short list of the most difficult NES games to clear among players with a broad understanding of the library. Now that I have experienced this game in full on my own, I can attest that it deserves its rank among the most challenging games on the console.

Ikari Warriors started out in the arcades in Japan in February 1986 titled simply as Ikari, meaning Fury. It was released worldwide a month later in March 1986. Ikari Warriors was developed by SNK and published by Tradewest in the United States and Europe. It is regarded as the first major arcade hit for SNK in the US. The NES game was developed by Micronics and published by SNK. It was released on the Famicom in Japan in November 1986 and it made its way to North America in June 1987. In addition to the NES version, it was also ported to the Atari 2600 and Atari 7800 as well as several home computers.

The arcade cabinet utilizes rotary joysticks, and though the game was not the first to use that type of joystick it is the first major hit to use one for the controls. A rotary joystick is a standard eight-way joystick that can also be twisted like a dial or knob providing additional input into the game. In Ikari Warriors, the player character can walk around by tilting the entire joystick and aim weapons in another direction by rotating the joystick handle in the desired direction.

Ikari Warriors is a vertically scrolling top-down shoot-em-up game. Paul and Vince are two soldiers who are tasked to invade an enemy nation as their plane crashes into enemy territory. The game begins with the crashed plane at the bottom and play constantly continues upward as they make their way deeper into enemy territory. In single player only Paul is used. Paul is equipped with a machine gun capable of firing three on-screen bullets at once. He is also armed with grenades that can be thrown in an arc and they deal more damage than the standard bullets. Press A to throw a grenade and press B to shoot the machine gun. Ammunition is limited to a max of 99 bullets and 99 grenades, and while that sounds sufficient it is easy enough to run out of weaponry in a critical spot unless more ammo is found.

There are a bunch of enemies to contend with along the way. Most of the enemies encountered are blue foot soldiers but they have several different attack patterns that they can use and you can only tell how they will behave by observing them. Some soldiers simply run forward and retreat, some shoot bullets and change walking direction every few steps, some chase you around, some toss grenades, some hide underwater and pop up occasionally to shoot, some snipe you from afar, some fire missiles, and some trigger a suicide explosion when you get too close.

There are also several types of larger enemies that require more than the standard bullet to dispatch. There are tanks that drive around a defined path and shoot missiles, including a big tank that can be difficult to take out. There is a large stationary tank that fires a spread shot as well as a large fortress with a gunner inside. There are other enemy types that are local to specific areas in the game and as a result they appear less frequently than the standard enemies described here.

In addition to the enemies there are three other recurring hazards that must be dealt with. The ground in Ikari Warriors is scattered with landmines that only reveal themselves when in close proximity. There is ample time to recognize and avoid them, but in the heat of battle a little bit of lost focus is all it takes to collide with a mine and lose a life. The next recurring annoyance are sensors that also show up when standing nearby just like the landmines. Get too close to a sensor and a guided missile shows up from offscreen and explodes right on top of the sensor. In some cases, it is possible to run right through a sensor and miss the eminent explosion entirely, although that is a risky strategy that does not always work. The third danger is what I like to call the “hurry up” missile. The game requires constant progress and so to enforce that if the screen does not scroll for awhile or even advances ahead too slowly, a series of missiles will fire down randomly from above until you make enough forward progress. It’s really important to take your time in this game while also being mindful of moving forward enough to avoid triggering these missiles.

Fortunately Paul and Vince have a number of upgrades and pickups that are essential to completion. The most important of these is the rideable tank. A flashing stationary tank indicates that it is ready for personal use. Press A while standing on the tank to get in. While in the tank you can only attack by pressing B to fire missiles that deal grenade damage at the cost of one grenade. When on foot grenades only deal damage when they hit the ground, but missiles fired while in the tank hurt enemies at any time along the flight path. The tank does not take damage from bullets, but being hit by a grenade, missile, or even a grenade explosion causes the tank to stop working and self destruct after a few seconds. In that case, you must exit the tank by holding the A button and pressing B and get out of the way quickly. The other benefit to the tank is that you can aim in one direction while moving in another direction. The NES does not have any sort of rotary joystick, and with the lack of buttons on the controller that means on foot you can only fire weapons in the direction you are walking. The tank gets around this by taking advantage of the unused A button while riding. Hold the A button and press the direction pad while not moving to rotate the turret in one of eight directions.

While tanks are incredibly useful, they do have some drawbacks. Typically a tank will start off with 100 units of fuel that tick down via an onscreen counter. When it reaches 10 it will set off an annoying low fuel chime, and when it hits 0 it stops working and starts the self destruct sequence. Just like when the tank is destroyed you can escape when out of fuel, but you must be quick! Tanks also cannot be driven in water. The game is very intentional about placing bodies of water where you are forced to ditch the tank to proceed forward.

It’s worth mentioning that in a few spots you get the chance to pilot a helicopter for a very short time. You can fly over the water and most solid obstacles as well as fire both a triple shot and missiles if you so choose. The only problem is that it only starts with 28 units of fuel, but it is fun and helpful while it lasts.

Aside from the heavy equipment there are several other powerups. The basic ones are usually dropped when pink soldiers are defeated. The F powerup allows bullets to penetrate walls and other solid obstacles. The L powerup extends the range of shots and the S powerup makes shots travel faster. The B powerup strengthens the grenade by greatly extending the damage radius of the blast. All four of these powerups will also apply to the missiles fired while riding in the tank. Occasionally a green soldier will appear that leaves a K powerup behind that destroys all enemy soldiers on screen when grabbed. There are also ammo pickups typically found when destroying the larger stationary enemy types. Grenade ammo restores 50 grenades up to the 99 maximum and the bullet ammo fully restores the bullet count back to 99. The fuel pickups are the best. Not only do they restore fuel back to the maximum of 100 if you are riding in the tank, but they also act as both grenade ammo and bullet ammo even when not in the tank. Sometimes when destroying a small enemy tank a regular rideable tank is left behind that you can get in. These tanks can be a really useful surprise but they only give you 32 fuel to start with so their use is limited.

There is also a set of special powerups that do not appear from enemy drops except in some very rare cases. These powerups are hidden throughout the levels and are made visible by shooting their hiding places. Memorizing the location of these special powerups is essential to success in Ikari Warriors. The SS powerup doubles the walking speed from lethargic to at least an acceptable pace. The knife powerup allows Paul and Vince to defeat most enemy soldiers by simply bumping into them instead of taking a death when that occurs. It also makes them immune to a few types of enemy attacks making the knife more of a defensive upgrade than an offensive upgrade. There is a super fuel powerup that looks like a fuel can with the letter H written on it. It restores all ammo as well as setting the fuel to 200 when in a tank, though I found that only came into play one time in the entire game. There is a triple shot powerup which sounds great but ultimately it should be avoided at all costs. Upon collecting the triple shot all bullet powerups are stripped away. If you have the triple shot and grab a bullet powerup, then you lose the triple shot. Now only does it downgrade your machine gun but it also affects tank missiles so it is not worth it at all. Finally, the heart powerup is the most critical powerup in the entire game. Collecting a heart allows you to keep all of your weapon powerups including super speed and the knife if you die. It only works once so you will need to find another heart if you die while having one.

There is also one more set of items that simply add to your score. An ammo box is worth 1000 points, the clock is worth 2000 points, and gold bars add 5000 points. There is also the bikini-clad Athena from another popular SNK arcade game that bestows a random number of points. You can earn 1500, 2500, 5000, or 10,000 points when you touch her. That is not nearly as creepy as it sounds!

You may have noticed I did not mention any extra life pickups. That would be because there are none in the game. The scoring items are useful because you can gain extra lives via point milestones. You get an extra life at 50,000 points, another at 100,000 points, and an additional life at every 100,000 points beyond that. You start the game with two lives and adding more through score is the allotment for the entire game. While there is a score counter, grenade counter, and an ammo/fuel counter, there is no way to see how many lives you have other than tracking it mentally yourself.

There are no continues in the game, so when the lives are through it is Game Over and back to the start. Now there is a continue code that is just about as well known as the game itself. There is a lengthy delay between losing the last life and Game Over, and if you input the buttons ABBA within that period you will respawn with two additional lives. It is a simple code, but unfortunately it is not published in the manual that came with Ikari Warriors. Therefore to me the usage of the continue code is strictly off limits. As it turns out there is a specific part of the game where the continue code is rendered useless anyway.

I think the picture is starting to paint itself for why Ikari Warriors is so challenging, but it gets far worse from here. While the arcade version and all the other Ikari Warriors ports to my knowledge contain only one long level, for some reason the developer Micronics decided to lengthen the NES game considerably by adding three more levels of equal length. I watched a full playthrough of the arcade version and the entire game consists of the first three-quarters of NES Ikari Warriors Level 1 with the other quarter of the game loosely resembling part the end of Level 3. This is the root of why Ikari Warriors is such an incredible gaming feat to finish. The four long levels add up to about an hour of play all the way through with a strictly limited allotment of lives. Even with the continue code there is still a portion of the game that needs to be memorized where the code fails, not to mention the effort it takes just to reach that point in the first place.

Truly the way to beat Ikari Warriors on NES is to flat out master the game all the way through by playing it over and over again. Many of the enemies and powerups are predetermined so the game is largely an exercise in anticipating the enemy threats and developing the muscle memory to fight through these threats in an appropriate manner. However some of the enemies and hazards have randomness to them that can easily throw a wrench into the best laid plans. One unexpected fatal attack with no heart to revive powerups can utterly cripple a playthrough at just about any time. The game also pulls a dirty trick by removing all powerups at the start of a new stage unless you happen to hold a heart all the way to the end of the previous level.

Naturally with the amount of time I spent trying to beat Ikari Warriors I think it is clear that this was my first time beating the game. There is no special story to how I got the game because it is pretty common to find and cheap to boot. I think it’s easy to find because it is both an early NES game and one that not many people want.

Here are some statistics of my time spent with Ikari Warriors that should indicate just how deep this rabbit hole went. I started playing the game on April 26th and my winning run was on August 18th which is a span of 115 days. There were 14 days where I was not able to make an attempt so I played the game for 101 days. It took me a whopping 328 attempts from the start to beat Ikari Warriors and my total game time was 103 hours and 50 minutes. (My timekeeping was rough at best but it’s reasonably close.) Including off days I played slightly fewer than three attempts per day with an average play time of 19 minutes per run. The most impressive stat of all is that I did not break a single controller while playing this game. Talk about willpower!

I also documented some milestones because why not?

• 05/08/16 – Attempt #91 – Finished Level 1
• 05/13/16 – Attempt #106 – Cleared Level 1 deathless
• 06/15/16 – Attempt #210 – Finished Level 2
• 06/28/16 – Attempt #237 – Cleared Levels 1 and 2 deathless
• 07/13/16 – Attempt #269 – Finished Level 3
• 08/04/16 – Attempt #303 – Reached the Final Boss

 

My last day of playing Ikari Warriors was somewhat interesting due to some external circumstances. I have had times where I really struggle to get gaming time in my personal life and I had to go to some lengths to try and get attempts once each good run started reaching 45 minutes and beyond. I typically stay up really late to play but sometimes I sleep for a couple of hours and then wake up to do some chores and sneak in some video games while everyone else is asleep. My winning run happened during the early morning but this time it was way later than normal. I got up at 3:00 a.m. to do dishes and then against my better judgment I decided to start a run after 4:00 a.m. My penultimate run was a pure throwaway run when I lost all my lives at the very beginning of the game, and then I started a new game and made it to the end. I finished at 5:20 a.m. and my hands were shaking as I took as many pictures as I could while trying to cherish the moment. I was beyond pumped but I had to keep it down not to wake up anyone. I tried to go back to bed for a little while but I think I got barely a few minutes of sleep after all of that!

My winning run was really solid from a game play perspective. I cleared the first two levels without dying which had been a problem on many late attempts. I died once at the end of the helicopter section in Level 3 and I took an intentional death at the end of the stage to clear it. I never could figure out how to finish that section without dying so sacrificing a life there to ensure forward progress is the next best thing. Level 4 was the best I have done on that stage. I can’t remember if I died once randomly there but if I did it was only once and in a good spot. The final segment of the last stage is very difficult but manageable with all powerups intact and I got there with maybe five lives remaining. I died a few times to the last couple sets of enemies and I lost all of my powerups right before the final boss. I died once or twice to the final boss but I managed to get into what I think was a safe spot and I beat the game from there. I think I may have had one life remaining but I could very well have been on my last life. The ending screen is just horrible but oh so sweet to lay eyes on!

I think most people would agree that the legitimate way of beating Ikari Warriors is to avoid using the continue code, even though the premise of trying to beat the game on a single credit is ridiculous enough to begin with. The question I have is if the developers intended for players to use the continue code to work through the game normally. The ABBA code is both short and easy to remember and there is a long enough window before the Game Over screen to input the code successfully. On the other hand, there is a stage select code that is a whopping 32 key presses long, so why would the continue code be so much shorter if it were really meant to be hidden? The thing is that I can’t find any evidence of how the continue code was first revealed. It’s not included in the manual, so perhaps it was spread by word of mouth, published in a gaming magazine, or revealed publicly by the creators somewhere. The truth may never be known. That said, there’s a documentary video of SNK on YouTube that contains a segment about the decision to add the continue code to the NES version of Ikari Warriors. I will leave it up to you to decide what that true intention was.

I really can’t recommend anyone to try and play through Ikari Warriors like I did. I was dedicated to beating this game as much as anyone and it took every ounce of effort and time I could pour into it. The game itself is competent for 1987 but not particularly notable outside of its crushing difficulty. The player character is way too slow for this kind of game and the NES port is hurt by not allowing walking in one direction and aiming in another. The graphics are okay and the music is okay as well even though there are only two songs in the entire game that loop constantly. The game is average at best and the difficulty for sure drags it down to below average overall. If you are dead set on trying it out, please consider using the continue code. If you want to try beating it the same way I did, then you have my deepest sympathy.

I don’t know if Ikari Warriors is the hardest NES game, but of all the games I’ve played on the console I know this is easily the most difficult game I’ve finished and I consider my victory one of my top achievements in all of gaming. In spite of all the flaws and difficulty, I had fun with it. If I ever have the opportunity to show off my NES gaming skills this will be the game I pick now that I know I can handle it, and now I won’t be embarrassed to use the continue code!

I’m willing to bet the name of the game was thought of first.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 4/16/16 – 4/22/16
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10

With a game library as big as the NES has there are sure to be several interesting games hidden away. Well, interesting is a word that can certainly be used to describe Ghoul School but I’m not sure it’s the best one. There is absolutely an intriguing game here that is pretty creative but ultimately it falls flat in a number of ways. However, just like several other games I’ve covered, it has grown on me and I’m glad to get to share it with you.

Ghoul School was released on the NES in March 1992 and it is exclusive to North America. It was developed by Imagineering and published by Electro Brain. I was surprised to learn that Imagineering developed several games for the NES but having looked at various lists online most if not all of their games are not regarded very well. Their best known games are the three Bart Simpson games on the NES. Electro Brain published six games on the NES and all of them are ones that could be consider obscure.

Ghoul School is a side-scrolling platformer. You play as a high school student Spike who finds a mysterious skull and brings it to school which ends up causing all sorts of nefarious creatures to take over the place. It’s up to you to both rid the school of evil and save the head cheerleader. You start off in the main hallway of the school armed with only a baseball bat, but you can explore the school freely searching for more weapons and items that will help you explore the school. It is very reminiscent of Metroid in this way. Each room is individually numbered and displayed at the top of the screen to help keep track of where you are in the school.

There are several weapons to find in the school and you can switch to any collected weapon you want. Everything has unlimited use so fire away. One of the first weapons you will find is the towel which has better range and is also somehow more powerful than the bat. There are also a number of guns that let you attack from a distance though they generally deal less damage. Some weapons fire downward to help you attack enemies on the ground. There is usually one weapon best suited for a particular situation so there will be lots of switching weapons around.

There are also a couple of different pairs of shoes you can equip. You start off with basic sneakers but you will also need to find the spring shoes and suction cup shoes. The spring shoes cause you to jump higher and they also make you taller. These are needed to pass by tall obstacles in order to explore further in the school. The suction cup shoes let you walk along the ceiling provided the ceiling is low enough to reach with a jump.

You will also find apples that restore your health. Green apples restore a quarter of your health and red apples fully restore your health. The best of all is the golden apple. There’s only one of these in the game but it is a permanent upgrade that cuts your damage received by half. Enemies don’t drop any health pickups so you will have to seek out these items as you explore the school. If you play the game for a little while you’ll figure out where you can generally find the healing items.

The school map contains a lot of areas that you would expect to find in a school. There’s a gymnasium, cafeteria, office, library, and so on. These one-off locations are the areas you want to search out because they contain the weapons and shoes you need to progress onward. These areas also feature unique ghouls that are tougher than the standard enemies and they often require specific weapons to take them out. Think of them like bosses. There are several of these unique enemies which is a nice touch.

Now all of this so far may sound pretty good, but there are a number of things that really hurt the game and make it hard to play. The biggest sticking point is the physics of the character. Spike feels very heavy to control. He takes some time to build momentum and takes even more time to slide to a stop. The jumping is very stiff and doesn’t seem to respect gravity. He falls down just as fast as he jumps, and this makes it very hard to make long-distance jumps. These movement problems are really evident early in the game when you have barely any attack range with the bat. You have to get really close to deal damage and more often than not you will run right into the enemy until you get used to the controls. Some of the early enemies attack really quickly as well leaving you with a small window to get in and hurt them.

The other physics related complication is that colliding with the enemy gives you really severe knockback. Trying to fight enemies with short range attacks is so frustrating in Ghoul School. Either you don’t get close enough to deal any damage or you get too close and get thrown backwards. Now for some reason the developers decided to place enemies right at the entrance to some of the hallways. What happens is that you try to get close enough to attack and if you accidentally touch the enemy then you get thrown back into the previous hallway. Now you have to start all over and try fighting the enemy again. This happens in several locations and it only provides unnecessary frustration. The only solace here is that once an enemy is killed it remains dead. It will only respawn after you travel many rooms away.

Along the same lines, there are some enemies that are too low for you to properly attack. One little recurring nuisance of an enemy is called Blinky. They scurry around at ankle level and they run super fast. You can’t duck in this game and the majority of the weapons attack too high for you to deal with these critters. The weapons that do reach down don’t shoot downward quickly enough to be effective. For example, the first weapon you will come across that can reach tiny ground enemies is called the Digestaray. It shoots a straight shot that curves toward the ground. To use it against Blinky, you need to have it already equipped and start firing off shots the moment you see it running on screen. If you wait too long you will shoot right over its head and now you have no chance of killing it. Blinky will never leave the screen instead opting to run around you just outside of attack range and it will bounce you all over the place with the knockback. They don’t do much damage at all, but they make it really tough to make any kind of forward progress in the room.

The whole game really boils down to exploring one giant maze. A large portion of the game map consists of similar looking hallways and similar looking classrooms that for the most part don’t hold anything of interest in advancing your quest. The hallways often have doors that lead to isolated classrooms, and the hallways link together via walkways and stairways at the end of the hall. Each end of the hallway can have up to three exits: Forwards, upstairs, or downstairs. Many of the hallways are just empty dead ends. It is very confusing to make sense of the layout. Having every single room in the game numbered is about the only thing that makes rooms distinguishable.

You will see your health bar on the top of the screen as well as the health bar of the enemy you are fighting. There’s also a scoring system that doesn’t really mean anything since there’s no high score keeping. It doesn’t show up during game play, but Spike has five lives in all and you see how many lives are remaining in between lives. There are no extra lives in this game. It’s not obvious but you do continue when you start over. You start back at the school entrance with all of your collected items intact. There’s no saving in this game and no passwords so you will have to beat it all in one shot.

The graphics in this game are more than adequate. It very clearly looks like a school. There are several interesting setpieces that are unique to the areas they are found in. For instance, the weight room has a huge, detailed exercise machine right in the middle. You can walk behind the bookshelves in the library and see yourself peeking behind the gaps in the books. The graphics may not be super great but they are interesting to look at. The character designs are really strange and creepy. Many of the enemy types look like people and they are generally drawn very tall and lanky. Spike changes visibly when switching weapons and shoes for a nice touch. The music isn’t too bad. Perhaps it might be grating to some but I didn’t really mind it.

I bought my copy of Ghoul School on eBay for $10 a couple of years ago. It was selling for around $15 at the time so it was a nice deal, but I missed that the fold on the label was completely torn off so that the end label and front label are split in two. It’s not awful but I’ll want to upgrade it at some point if I ever run into another copy. My local store had one for $10 for a long time but the end label was faded really badly so I kept passing on it. It eventually got bumped up to $18 and since then someone bought it. It’s not a game I’ve seen around much so I’m not surprised someone else snagged it.

This was my first time beating Ghoul School. I had only tried it when I got the cart and I pretty much dismissed the game as weird right away. When I started out this time, I wandered around and almost instantly got lost. I have a good sense of direction overall but this game made me at least question it a little bit! I realized the only way I was going to make sense of this school was to go old school and draw a map. The art of video game map making goes back a very long way but I believe this is the first time I have ever drawn a map for a game. It turned out to be a very good decision since I only had to hit the unnecessary portions of the map once. Each time I played I got a little bit further and it didn’t take that many attempts to complete the game.

Without spoiling a lot of the game, there’s not much more for me to say about Ghoul School. What I will say is that I found the game got more interesting the farther I went. The last quarter of the game in particular did a few things that I thought were really kind of neat. I believe I have almost all of the game mapped out in my notes. After I finished the game I combed over my map and tried to find all the rooms by number and there were some I did not account for. I’m not sure if these are rooms that I missed or rooms that were not used in the game at all. I think I developed a pretty good route through the school and now I can finish the game relatively quickly. I’m toying with the idea of writing up a more thorough walkthrough. If I ever do that, I’ll host it on the blog and link it here. I’ve peeked at a few walkthroughs online and I’m sure I could do a better job.

UPDATE 7/18/16: Indeed, I did create a Ghoul School Walkthrough. Check it out!

It’s hard for me to recommend playing Ghoul School, but after wading through the control difficulties and getting a handle on the map I really enjoyed this game. Metroid-styled platformers are one of my favorite types of games and so now I have a soft spot for this weird little NES adventure. One final thought: It’s too bad that this game didn’t emerge on my list around Halloween as that would have been most fitting.

That menacing dragon and his friends pose quite a stiff but fun challenge.

To Beat: Finish all 7 stages
To Complete: Beat the game on the highest difficulty
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 3/31/16 – 4/14/16
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 9/10

I’ve taken on a number of shooter games already for the blog but there has yet to be a more typical style space shooter until Burai Fighter. The game stands out a bit with its bright yellow label, but behind the scenes there is a fun and challenging action game that is worth a play.

Burai Fighter was originally developed for the NES and released in March 1990. It was developed by KID and published by Taxan. It was released on the NES in Europe and Australia later in 1990 and was also released on the Famicom in July 1990, published by Taito. Burai Fighter was also developed for the Game Boy and was released first in Japan just prior to the Famicom version, debuting in June 1990. It would come out in North America and Europe in 1991. The Game Boy game is called Burai Fighter Deluxe even though some elements of the game were lost in moving to the handheld. There was also a Game Boy Color version released in Japan in 1999 as Burai Fighter Color and in North America in 2000 as Space Marauder.

Burai Fighter is one of the first games designed and produced by Ken Lobb. He is perhaps best known as a designer for the original Killer Instinct. After Taxan closed, he briefly worked for Namco contributing on Splatterhouse 2 and 3 for Sega Genesis. Next he would work for Nintendo where he worked on Killer Instinct and other games such as Super Punch-Out!!, Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, and many others. He left Nintendo to work at Microsoft Game Studios where he is still employed today. It’s always nice to see where a well known personality in gaming starts out!

Burai Fighter is a shoot-em-up where you control an unnamed protagonist in his efforts to defeat the evil Burai and their armies from taking over the universe. You are equipped with a jet pack that lets you fly in any direction as the game scrolls forward. One of the unique features of this game is that the scrolling isn’t just in one direction. The scrolling direction changes in whichever direction the level was designed though it does follow a linear path. It’s important to pay attention to your surroundings so that you can avoid getting trapped if the level veers in an unexpected direction. Because of this scrolling, you can fire your gun in eight directions. Holding down the fire button locks the direction you are shooting so you can maneuver at will while firing in whatever direction you want.

There are three types of weapon enhancements to your standard gun. The Laser changes your standard shot into a high powered beam similar to the Laser powerup in Gradius. The Ring power fires a round projectile in addition to your standard gun and this shot can go through walls. The Missile powerup also augments your standard gun but always fires to the right no matter what direction you are aiming the basic shot. These weapons can be powered up by collecting powerup icons. The letter on this icon cycles between L, R, and M for their respective weapons. You can switch your weapon by grabbing this icon whenever the letter on it changes to which weapon you want. Certain enemies drop these but they are also scattered throughout the levels. There are a couple of other powerups to collect. The S icon increases your movement speed, and there is a spiked ball you can grab that rotates around you killing most enemies when they touch it.

Each weapon type can be powered up between three different strengths. Collecting 5 icons of the same type gives you the Level 2 weapon, and collecting 10 icons gives you the Level 3 weapon. The Level 2 Laser fires a second laser in the opposite direction of your shot, and the Level 3 Laser shoots in all four diagonal directions plus it restores your basic gun for even more firepower. The Level 2 Ring similarly adds another Ring shot behind you, and Level 3 adds a spread effect in the direction you are aiming. The Level 2 Missile adds missiles that shoot to the left, and the Level 3 Missile adds missiles that fire both up and down giving you four missiles at once. The game keeps track of how many icons of each type you have so you know when you are about to add some firepower. When you die, the weapon currently in use goes all the way back down to zero. However, the other two weapons maintain their current level so this is less of a setback than in many other shooters. Of course if you have to continue then everything resets back to square one.

Lesser enemies will occasionally drop these shards that you can collect in order to fill a meter at the bottom of the screen. This meter has notches in it breaking the meter down into eight segments. Each segment of this bar represents a cobalt bomb that you can fire off by pressing A. This is a very powerful bomb that destroys all bullets and most enemies on screen. However it deals no damage to the bosses. I found it especially useful as a defense move to get out of situations where I was trapped by oncoming enemy fire. If you are able to fill the meter up completely it will award you an extra life but you lose all your bombs in the process.

Burai Fighter has seven levels in two distinct styles. The majority of the levels play out with the multi-directional linear scrolling as described previously. Each level has a boss encounter at the end. They are huge screen-sized bosses with lots of moving parts and they put up quite a fight. These levels also contain hidden rooms that can be found in the gaps on the edge of the screen. When you find a hidden room the level scrolls briefly to reveal the room and all the nice powerups and prizes hidden inside. There are ten hidden rooms in the game and they are difficult to find. I only found two or three of these rooms when I played and I had problems getting in to the room even when I knew where it was. Maybe there’s a trick to it that I didn’t figure out but after awhile I didn’t even bother looking for them.

Levels 3 and 6 deviate by playing from a top-down perspective. These stages were removed from the Game Boy versions. Before you start the level you are presented with a map indicating your starting position and the location of the base that you must destroy. The map shuffles these placements every time you restart the level so some attempts will have a more favorable setup than others. The idea is to head in the direction of the base and destroy all the targets on the base once you find it. If you get lost trying to find the base it is almost always a lost cause since you only see the map one time before the level. The other important element is that you cannot lock the firing direction in these stages. You can only shoot in the direction you are moving. This can be pretty challenging whenever you are being tailed by an ever-growing group of enemies. The level ends whenever the base is completely destroyed. It’s a short stage and it’s a decent diversion from the normal levels.

Graphically the game has very nice visual effects and the coloring is pretty bright and varied for this type of game. The level graphics themselves are kind of non-descript and don’t really stand out much aside from the organic look in Stage 2. I like the music in this game, particularly the track from the first level. This game really shines in visual flair. The game makes heavy use of rotating individual sprites, such as in the swinging arms of bosses and the star splash effect when using a cobalt bomb. It’s even evident from powering on the game and watching the letters in Burai Fighter form a circle and rotate around. This makes the game look really interesting.

There are three difficulty levels in Burai Fighter: Eagle (easy), Albatross (normal), and Ace (hard). Each difficulty level increases the number of enemies and the rate of enemy fire. There are multiple endings based on the difficulty level, so in order to get the best ending you have to take on the challenge of the hardest difficulty. Fortunately to help out there are not only unlimited continues but also stage passwords. The passwords are only four characters long and they are actual English words so they are really easy to memorize and input. The downside with simple passwords is that the game will start you off with no powerups every time.

This was my first attempt at beating Burai Fighter, but I had completed the first level on Albatross difficulty when testing out my cart. From that short experience I knew this game was good and I was very excited to take on the challenge. Since I want the best ending I started right off on Ace difficulty. The first level took a bit of time though I learned it fairly quickly, but Stage 2 slowed me down almost from the start. That level goes on for awhile and it winds around with different challenges at every turn. Each continue is a setback as it bumps you back to the start of the stage. About halfway through I got my groove and that led me to finishing the stage. Level 3 is the first top-down level and I died and lost my weapons while trying to get my bearings. After that small setback it didn’t take too long to finish, and Level 4 also went by quickly.

Level 5 was my biggest stumbling block in the whole game. The initial scrolling segment is really erratic with tight quarters and it took a lot of trial and error to figure out the best way through the mess of enemies. This was where I realized I should probably start using cobalt bombs! Even with the bombs I needed lots of practice on this stage. The boss was hard too as there are several moving parts to account for and avoid. Level 6 is the other top-down stage and this time I cleared it on my first try! The final level is the hardest of all but I spent less time here than on Stage 5. The final boss is the Slimedragon that you see on the cover of the game. The best way I can describe this creature is he is an elusive bullet sponge. It’s okay once you figure out the rhythm of the fight but the battle goes on and on for quite some time because he is so hard to hit. Beating that boss was a real feel good moment and a weight off my shoulders.

Now, it’s spoiler time! Skip ahead if you don’t want to know what happens next. After sitting through the ending, the developers felt that it was a great time to reveal that the game actually has a hidden fourth difficulty level labeled Ultimate that contains the true best ending. So it was back to the drawing board for another playthrough. From what I could tell there were no significant differences between Ace and Ultimate. The enemies move a little bit faster and fire more bullets. The bosses have higher health as well. I thought for awhile that the scrolling was a tiny bit faster than before but now I’m not so sure that’s true. This mode was no cakewalk for certain but I got through it quicker the second time around since I already knew what to expect in the levels.

This game was quite a challenge even with continues and a password save. Having to beat the game on the hardest difficulty may have made it seem harder to me than it really was. I don’t think Burai Fighter is in true top tier difficulty but it’s up there. I am guessing clearing the game on Eagle difficulty is still a stiff challenge but much more manageable than the higher levels. My difficulty assessment here is really a gut feeling and may be completely off base. Either way, I am sticking with my choices.

I get the impression that Burai Fighter is an unheralded good game on NES since I hardly ever see it discussed. It’s a great original title that I think would be a lot of fun for shooter fans. I particularly like the bosses and how they are technical showpieces while they also pose a nice challenge. The game has this visual pizzazz to it that doesn’t show up in many other NES games. Plus the game is still very affordable for a loose cart. It’s a mystery to me why this game is not more popular. It’s a fun game and I recommend it!

Float up, up, and away in this exciting balloon busting Black Box game!

To Beat: Pass Phase 12 in the main game and get Rank 1 in Balloon Trip
To Complete: Roll the score (1,000,000 points) in the main game and get Rank 1 in Balloon Trip
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Completed the game with scores of 1,194,750 and 28,260
Played: 3/29/16 – 3/30/16
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 2/10

Arcade style games such as Balloon Fight pose some interesting questions around what it means to beat the game. On a game that has no ending, how do you determine when you’ve played enough of the game to consider it done? Similar to my dilemma with Tetris, the answer is not always clean cut but I believe a line can be drawn. In this blog I will outline my thoughts as well as cover a very fun black box NES title.

Balloon Fight was originally developed as the arcade title Vs. Balloon Fight released in 1984. It was developed by Nintendo’s SRD division. Later in January 1985 it was released on the Famicom and that port was developed by HAL Laboratories. Balloon Fight came out in the US in August 1986 and in Europe in 1987. All versions of the game were published by Nintendo.

There was a sequel called Balloon Kid that was released on Game Boy in the US in October 1990 and Europe in January 1991. It is a side scrolling platformer game instead of a single screen arcade style game. It was later released on Famicom in March 1992 rebranded as Hello Kitty World. The game is more or less identical to the Game Boy game but with Hello Kitty and other Sanrio characters in place of the original characters. Japan would later receive Balloon Kid in the form of Balloon Fight GB for the Game Boy Color in 2000.

Balloon Fight is a single-screen platform action game. You control a balloon fighter who takes flight by flapping his arms and using balloons above his head to take flight. The object of the game is to eliminate all the other balloon fighters on the screen by popping their balloons and subsequently knocking them out. The game plays very similar to the arcade classic Joust by Williams Electronics released in 1982. By ramming into the other enemies’ balloons they will float down and you can bop their parachute to remove them from play. If the enemy lands on solid ground you can still ram into them to take them out, but wait too long and they will reinflate their balloons and attack you more aggressively. The enemies can knock out your balloons as well but you are able to take an extra hit. You start with two balloons and the enemy can knock out one of them leaving you with just one. Flying with only one balloon is more difficult because you need to flap longer to gain momentum. One more hit and you will lose the other balloon and go falling to your death.

There are three different versions of the enemy balloon fighter that you can distinguish by the color of the balloons they carry. The pink balloon fighter is the weakest, the green balloon fighter is stronger, and the white balloon fighter is the most difficult one. More points are awarded for defeating the stronger enemies. There are other obstacles to contend with too. Each stage has water at the bottom that contains a big fish. Swim too closely to the water and the fish will pop up and eat you up. This can also play to your advantage with the enemies can be eaten too. When you knock out an enemy a bubble will emerge and float up from the water that you can pop for bonus points. Some of the later levels contain stationary spinning bumpers that will launch one of the fighters away upon contact. There are also clouds in the background that will periodically generate a lightning bolt that launches a spark. These sparks are tiny but deadly to the touch for the player and they bounce off the platforms and the sides of the screen until they hit either the player or the water at the bottom. The sparks act as a “hurry up” mechanic that appear continuously when playing the same level for a little while, and they appear quite early in later stages.

There are 12 unique level layouts in Balloon Fight. Once Level 12 has been completed the game continues on to Level 13 but it loops back to the Level 4 layout. You can keep playing for as long as you can handle and the game will keep looping through Levels 4-12. You start the game with three lives and that is all you get for the entire game. There are no continues and no way to earn extra lives. Getting a high score in this game is a test of endurance and careful control.

After every three stages there is a bonus round. Here there are no enemies and balloons float up out of four background pipes. You pop the balloons for points and if you can pop all 20 balloons in the stage you are rewarded with a large point bonus. The bonus stage layout is the same but there are three different difficulties each with a different color balloon that floats at increasing speeds. If you play for a long time you will see the fastest balloons every round. The order in which the balloons emerge from the pipes is completely random so you will be on your toes trying to pop them all. Another benefit to the bonus stage is that it will set you back to having both balloons if one was lost earlier.

The controls for Balloon Fight are simple but they take time to master. You press A to flap your arms and you can repeatedly press A to fly higher and higher. Alternately, hold B to auto flap. Balloon Fight is very momentum based and each flap will slightly adjust your velocity. Turning around is challenging because each flap also lifts you up as well as nudging you horizontally. Especially when the sparks are bouncing around with multiple enemies on screen it is really important to be in control of your fighter or you won’t last long.

Balloon Fight can be played in two-player simultaneous mode. Work together with a partner to clear the screen of enemies, or you can attack each other if you want. I believe in the bonus room it is safe to attack each other without losing a life. I’m sure it’s a blast to play this way but I’ve never had the chance to play two-player mode.

Finally there is another game mode called Balloon Trip. This is an endless scrolling level scattered with sparks that send you to your doom. You only get one life in this mode. The game scrolls to the left starting with a short pre-defined level layout. Past that the level consists of random sparks that slowly move around. This is purely about surviving the obstacles and lasting as long as you can. You slowly but continuously rack up points just by staying alive, but there are also random balloons to collect for points. Occasionally a bubble will rise out of the water below and popping it freezes the screen for a short time so you can get yourself in good position to survive. The big fish is hiding in the water as well so it’s important to stay high. If you can collect a bunch of balloons in a row without losing any off the screen scroll, then you get a nice point bonus as well as advancing all balloons to the next level of balloon that awards more points. There are three different balloon colors just the same as the bonus round in the main game. There is also a ranking system that compares your score against the top 50 scores so you can see how you stack up. There’s no way to see the top scores and they reset when the game does, but it is there to kind of track your progress when you play.

Balloon Fight is a game that I have always found interest in but took me a long time to find a way to play. My first experience with the game may have been on an emulator back in the 90’s. I know I unlocked it as one of the NES games you can play within Animal Crossing on GameCube and that was one of my most played games there. Later I would buy it on Wii Virtual Console. However I didn’t own an actual cartridge of it even though I had collected many NES games early on. My local store got a copy for $10 and I bought it the first time I saw it. The only other copy I’ve seen was a really beat up, filthy copy for about the same price and I passed on it.

I have played the main game before most recently in 2014 as part of the NA weekly contest. I scored 1,239,250 which was good for 4th place that week. I’ve sunk a bit of time into Balloon Trip but I can’t remember if I have ever gotten Rank #1 in that mode. The score to achieve isn’t all that high so it’s very possible that I’ve met that before as well.

Even though there are only 12 unique levels in the game, I much prefer to keep going until I reach the point of highest difficulty. Unfortunately for Balloon Fight there isn’t any information I could find on how the game ramps up in difficulty. From my experience, it seems that the enemies themselves do not get more aggressive or faster, and the level layouts seem to maintain the same mix of enemies every time. What I did notice is that in later loops, the enemies initially inflate their balloons quicker so that they are airborne sooner. It did seem that I reached a point where that timeframe didn’t go any faster but I can’t be 100% sure. So, in lieu of playing to the unknown point of max difficulty, I decided to aim for maxing out the score. The counter is only six digits and after 999,950 it rolls over back to zero and starts over. I felt a little bit bad about not finishing all the difficulties of Operation Wolf last time so I decided to go a little deeper with Balloon Fight than I would normally.

I was able to max out the score in my 7th attempt over two nights of play. The first night I played three attempts maxing out around 700K. I then tried Balloon Trip and I beat the high score with Rank #1 on my very first attempt. However, I missed my shot at taking the picture so I had to try again. I don’t remember how many more tries I needed but it wasn’t very many. The next night on the main game I nearly rolled the score on my fourth overall attempt but I ended just short at 970K. I had missed a perfect on a couple of the bonus levels and one of those would have bumped my score over the million mark. The next two attempts were not nearly as good but on the seventh and final attempt I surpassed a million points on my last life. I finished with a score of 1,194,750 on Phase 54 and I didn’t miss a single balloon in any of the bonus rounds. Here was when I went back to check my personal best score and I saw that I was just short of surpassing that mark. However, for the purposes of this blog, Balloon Fight is now checked off the list!

I base my difficulty rankings on what it takes to simply beat the game, and in this case it makes sense to say it’s beaten whenever the levels start looping again. Since Balloon Trip is never ending, beating the top score is the most logical landmark. Considering all that, this is a pretty easy game once you get used to the controls. Balloon Trip seems harder than the regular game but since each run can be so short it’s just a matter of time before an attempt is good enough to take top honors. I beat both modes on my first try and I only kept playing to max out the score on the main mode.

I mentioned before that the NES version of Balloon Fight was developed by HAL Laboratories, but it was specifically programmed by the late Satoru Iwata. He was developing Balloon Fight alongside the team creating the arcade version, and when they compared versions they noticed that the NES game controlled better than the arcade game. Mr. Iwata explained to the other team he accomplished this by saving the tenth’s place of the character position instead of rounding it off to the nearest integer. To actually locate the character on screen requires ignoring the decimal places, but by keeping that data in the movement calculations it leads to much smoother looking movement of the characters on screen.

Balloon Fight is a simple but well executed and fun early NES title. I think it is one of the better black box titles as it is fun to pick up and play while providing long play for more experienced players. The control is very well done and the graphics are simple but clear. The only negative graphically I find is that it is tough to distinguish between the pink balloon enemies and the white balloon enemies. The sound is very basic as well since it is limited mostly to the sound effects driven by events in the game play. There is a nice tune in the Balloon Trip mode which I find pretty catchy. This game is enjoyable to play and that’s what really matters.

Gun down the enemy forces in this Zapper-compatible version of the arcade classic.

To Beat: Beat all six missions to reach the ending
To Complete: Beat four loops
My Goal: Beat the game with the best ending
What I Did: Beat the game with the best ending and reached Loop 3 Mission 6
Played: 3/18/16 – 3/25/16
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10

It’s a landmark day for Take On The NES Library as I have come to the first Zapper game on my list. Operation Wolf is not one of the first Zapper games that comes to mind, but it’s a pretty good one and it looks to be a mostly faithful port of the arcade title.

Most people with knowledge of the NES from its heyday will certainly remember the Zapper peripheral. It was first released on the Famicom in 1984 as a pack-in with Wild Gunman. The Zapper later launched along with the NES in 1985 for use in launch titles Duck Hunt, Hogan’s Alley, and Wild Gunman. Perhaps it is most remembered for being part of the NES Action Set which included the Zapper and the ubiquitous Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo cart. The light gun has a gray color scheme that was changed to orange in 1989. This was done in compliance with changes in US gun regulations requiring toy guns to look like toy guns. The two Zappers are identical aside from the color differences.

The Zapper works by detecting the presence of light through a photodiode within the device. When the gun is fired, the NES draws a black screen on one frame followed by other frames of a black screen with white boxes indicating the location of the hittable objects. The zapper can detect the white light from the box drawn on-screen to determine if a target is hit. In the case of multiple targets, the game will show more frames like this with only a portion of the objects highlighted. This process is repeated until it can narrow down which target was hit.

That explanation might be a little hard to follow but a possible example may help. Say there are four enemies on the screen and the trigger is pressed. The first frame will be an all black screen and the second frame is a black screen with white boxes placed on top of only two of the four targets. If the Zapper detects light this time, then it knows you shot one of the first two targets but it doesn’t know which one. The third frame draws the black screen and only one white box for one of those two targets. If the Zapper sees light on this frame then you shot the first target, otherwise if it doesn’t pick up light then you shot the second target. Going back to the second frame, if the Zapper doesn’t detect a hit, then it will draw white boxes on the next frame for the other two targets to see if you hit one of them. If so, then it will draw a fourth frame to determine which of those two was shot. If it does not detect a hit here, then it means none of the targets were hit because by this point all four were checked. If that is all still a bit murky, don’t worry! The basic idea is that the game will test half of the targets at a time for a hit and it keeps whittling it down until it can find the one you actually shot.

It’s worth mentioning that the first all black screen is really important. The Zapper can detect light from the television as well as light from other sources such as a light bulb. If the Zapper game doesn’t check for a non-hit at first, then there is nothing to stop you from aiming the gun at a light bulb tricking the game into thinking you are always making contact with a live target. TVs in the US run at 60 frames per second so it would be more or less impossible to shoot at a light bulb while rapidly turning it on and off to fake out an NES Zapper game.

The Zapper technology only works on older tube TVs called CRT TVs; the games are not playable on modern TVs such as LCD, Plasma, or LED televisions. The reasoning is that the Zapper is very dependent on the timing of the individual frames of video displayed on the screen as illustrated above. Newer TVs have additional processing time that results in lag where the actual picture on the TV appears one or more frames later than the NES recognizes. For most other games this slight delay is not noticeable, but since the Zapper is tuned to the timing of older TVs it causes the game to not register any hits at all when played on a modern television. Therefore, I had to use my CRT to play this game.

Now that the Zapper talk is out of the way it’s time to talk Operation Wolf. Developed and published by Taito, Operation Wolf is an arcade game released in 1987. The arcade cabinet is fashioned with a mock submachine gun used to aim at the enemies and it contains a motor inside of the gun housing to simulate recoil. It was ported to many home consoles and computers, including the NES in 1989. This is the first Taito game covered for the blog. Taito published 26 NES games in total so they are one of the largest publishers for the console.

Operation Wolf is also a game series spanning four games. The second game, Operation Thunderbolt, was released in 1988 in arcades. It would see an SNES release several years later. There were also arcade titles Operation Wolf 3 in 1994 and Operation Tiger in 1998. Operation Wolf was also released in 2005 as part of Taito Legends as well as an NES Virtual Console release in 2008. Sadly, the Virtual Console version does not support the Wii remote as a Zapper.

The object of Operation Wolf is to survive six missions of infiltrating terrorist strongholds in order to save prisoners and take them back home to safety. Each mission has a number of enemy soldiers, tanks, helicopters, and boats that you must defeat before advancing to the next area. Enemies will run across the screen and you shoot them before they shoot you. If you hold B on the controller while shooting with the Zapper then you will fire a grenade that does a lot of damage within a wide range. The game also features controller support by way of a targeting crosshair on screen. Before the start of play you can choose either controller or Zapper, and if you choose controller you can also set the speed of the crosshair from one of five options. Use the D-Pad to aim the cursor, press A to fire your standard weapon, and press B to launch a grenade.

On screen you will see a bunch of statistics. It shows the score, number of magazines as well as the number of rounds left in the current magazine, number of grenades, number of prisoners saved in later missions, and the number of enemy soldiers, helicopters or boats, and tanks remaining in the level. There is also a damage meter that nearly spans the entire bottom of the screen. The enemy counters represent your progress through the level. The stages keep going until either you destroy the number of enemies remaining or you take too much damage. They also end if you are completely out of ammo.

There are several powerups to help you out. Ammo is limited but you pick up extra magazines and grenades by shooting the icons for them on screen. A power drink with a letter P on it will reduce your damage meter. A bullet with the word “FREE” written on it will give you unlimited rapid fire for 10 seconds. Barrels explode just like grenades when they are shot. There are also crows, pigs, and chickens that travel across the screen in some of the levels. You can’t kill them but you can shoot them and they will occasionally drop extra ammo to help you out. There are also civilians and prisoners that run across the screen trying to head for safety. Don’t shoot them because if you do it will increase your damage meter.

There are six missions: Communication Center, Jungle, Village, Ammo Dump, Prison Camp, and Airport. In the arcade version you can play the first four levels in any order you like. Clearing all four will unlock the Prison Camp followed by the Airport. The NES version is linear so you must beat all six missions in order. There is also a sort of a seventh mission that appears randomly in between stages. If you see the message “Warning! The enemy has located you!” then that means you have to survive another round of enemy forces before reaching the next stage.

Each level has something slightly unique about it. The Communication Center is the exception as it acts a little bit like a tutorial level. The Jungle has a boss fight at the end. An enemy is holding a civilian hostage and uses her as a body shield so you must be careful to aim for just the enemy. Completing the Village level heals you up quite a bit, and completing the Ammo Dump rewards you with a full complement of 9 magazines and 9 grenades. The Prison Camp features prisoners that run across the screen calling for help. Your task is to lead them across the screen to safety. There are five prisoners in total and each one will be chased by a knife soldier. He should be your primary target since he kills the prisoner if he reaches him. You can kill the prisoner with your weapons as well so be mindful of that. The game keeps track of each one you save. In the Airport mission, you must lead each prisoner to safety again that you helped in the prior mission. The ending you get depends on how many prisoners you save and you will lose the game if you survive all the missions without saving a single prisoner. The Airport ends with a final boss battle where you must destroy the enemy Hind helicopter. These things would all be spoilers if they weren’t spelled out clearly in the manual.

The game ends if you suffer too much damage, but you are allowed to continue once if you are defeated in any of the first four missions. There are no continues given for the last two stages. It’s frustrating to die at the end of the game but it is pretty short so it doesn’t set you back as much as it first seems. The manual indicates that Operation Wolf has four levels of six missions each. It means that the game loops right after you beat it and there are four total playthroughs of increasing difficulty. There is no difference in the ending when the game is beaten for the fourth time and it restarts the game at Loop 4 difficulty when finished, so it’s not really essential to beat the game four times in a row. One thing I noticed is that if you get Game Over and have to restart the game, then it will start you at the same difficulty loop you were on before. That acts like a continue in its own way.

This was my first time playing through Operation Wolf. I set up my CRT from out of storage whenever I started the blog so I haven’t played any Zapper games in a very long time. I have several Zappers but the one I was using has a loose trigger which didn’t feel great while playing. I recently purchased a R.O.B. set on eBay with all the parts for Gyromite for an excellent price, and that set included a Zapper that felt like it had never been used. I switched to that while playing and it will be my go-to Zapper from now on.

It took me awhile to warm up to playing Operation Wolf with the Zapper. I simply was not all that good with it to start and it was wearing me out physically after a couple of attempts in a row. Firing grenades in particular was difficult to get comfortable with. I would aim and shoot with both hands which caused me to stumble around with my free hand looking for the controller’s B button whenever I needed to let off a grenade. I could get away with it because I played while sitting, but it would have taken me a lot longer to beat the game if I had to stand up and shoot the gun with just one hand. With two hands I could shoot both faster and more accurately.

Overall it took me around ten tries before considering Operation Wolf finished. I think I advanced farther and farther with each attempt. The game is pretty short and the health bar is generous enough to absorb some mistakes made with shooting, so I figured average difficulty is appropriate for completing one loop of the game to get the ending. The first time I beat it I managed to save three prisoners which rewarded me with the second best ending. My accuracy wasn’t quite up to snuff with just the zapper and I would shoot too many prisoners. I decided to play through again using the controller and the slowest cursor setting in hopes that I would be more accurate overall. I beat the first loop and saved four prisoners which was good enough for the best ending, and during my second loop I saved all five. That was the picture proof I kept. During the third loop I made it most of the way through the airport stage before running out of grenades. That left me too vulnerable to attack when I focused on the helicopters with just the standard weapon. I really had no chance and that leads me to believe that doing all four loops is best accomplished with the Zapper. And really, a Zapper compatible game should be played with it if possible.

My intention from the beginning was to beat one loop of the game with the best ending since I knew there was no other reward for playing four times. It can be argued pretty easily that it should take all four runs to beat Operation Wolf considering it is called out that way in the manual, and I’m fine with that criticism if you happen to take that stance. In my opinion the game is long enough to justify a single loop.

Operation Wolf on NES looks to me like a well done port of the arcade game. Using the Zapper makes this one of the better ports by default and this game is quite playable and fun using it. The controller is okay in a pinch but not the best way to play the game. The graphics are alright. The brief story images between levels are well detailed and everything is clear during gameplay when it matters. There is not much sound to speak of which may be a turn off. There are only sound effects during game play, and the brief songs on the title screen and between levels are not that notable. For me, gameplay rules the day, and Operation Wolf is a fun game where that is concerned.

I feel the need … the need for speeding this game back to my shelf!

To Beat: Finish all 4 missions to get the ending
To Complete: Beat the 2nd loop
My Goal: Beat the game
What I Did: Beat the game and a small part of the 2nd loop
Played: 3/5/16 – 3/16/16
Difficulty: 9/10
My Difficulty: 9/10

Please forgive me if I screwed up this blog post already with that initial reference. I haven’t actually seen the movie. Now before you leave in disgust, at least stick around to hear about the NES game. But first, and bear with me, let’s discuss the movie.

Top Gun was released in theaters in May 1986. The movie tells the story of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a US Naval Aviator attending the Top Gun school in order to follow in the footsteps of his father who was killed. Maverick is a reckless and aggressive pilot and his techniques eventually lead to the death of his wingman during a training exercise. Despite his struggles with the incident he eventually graduates only to be thrust into an emergency situation right away. Maverick and the team are able to overcome the conflict and make a triumphant return in the end. I hope I summarized that well enough. The movie had mixed reviews by critics, but it was a box office smash. It was the highest grossing film of 1986 with over $350 million earned worldwide. It would spawn several video games including two on the NES. There is also a movie sequel in the works as of this writing.

Top Gun on NES was developed and published by Konami. It was released in the US in November 1987, in Japan in December 1987, and in Europe in November of 1988. It is the first of several flight simulation games on the NES. In Top Gun, you play as Maverick on a top secret assignment spread out over four in-game missions. The game plays from the cockpit view of an F-14. There is a lot of information available here such as your altitude, speed, missile count, missile type, radar, damage indicator, fuel gauge, and plane orientation as shown from behind. Then in the windshield there is a targeting reticule that shows where your cannons shoot as well as the targeting area for launching a guided missile. Enemies will fly in from behind or come right at you and you can use the unlimited shots of your cannon by pressing A to take them out, or you can use homing missiles with the B button. When an enemy is within your targeting area, hit B once to lock on and hit it again to launch a missile.

At the start of each mission you get to choose from one of three different missile types: 40 T-11 Hound missiles, 20 T-22 Wolf missiles, and 10 T-33 Tiger missiles. It’s the typical quantity for damage tradeoff as the T-11’s are weak, T-22’s are average, and T-33’s are strong. You can choose the missiles you deem suitable for the mission at hand.

Now there is more to it than just taking down enemy fighters. At the end of each mission, you must land your plane on the aircraft carrier. The game switches to landing mode and you can control your speed as well as the angle of your aircraft. The radar screen shows the current orientation of your plane as well as giving you recommendations such as “Speed Up!” or “Left! Left!” The idea is to get your plane as close to 200 altitude and 288 speed as you can when you reach the carrier. The game provides a moderate range of acceptable values that will allow you to land successfully so you don’t need to be exact. Too far off from those measurements will cause a crash that is shown in the landing cutscene and it will cost you a life, but if you are successful you get to watch yourself make a graceful landing.

The second, third, and final missions are long enough that you won’t be able to make it all the way through on a full tank of fuel, so in the middle of the mission you’ll hear an alarm indicating low fuel. When that happens, you press Start to call in a refueling tanker. When everything is clear, your jet automatically flies upward, the radar zooms in, and you see the tanker come into view dropping its refueling boom in front of you. There is an ‘X’ on the hood of your jet as shown on the radar screen and you must align your fighter properly to latch on and refuel your plane. This reloads all of your missiles too. This plays out very similar to the landing sequence although this time there’s no numerical range to aim for. It’s more visual and it requires more of a feel for it, but it is similar to getting a feel for landing. If you are unable to refuel the game will resume, however with not enough fuel to survive you will soon crash and lose a life. In a way it’s worse to miss refueling because you have to wait out the inevitable death.

The missions all play out typically the same way. You are approached by a number of enemy formations from the air, sea, or land. You can take them out with your weapons or you can dodge their attacks and keep moving forward. Many enemies are passive and are just there for points. Other fighters will attack with cannons that deal damage to your aircraft and some other fighters launch guided missiles of their own. They seek out your plane and they are fatal. One hit and you are a goner no matter how much damage your jet has suffered. You can maneuver your way around them or if you are really bold you can shoot them down with your cannon. It is practically essential to learn how to destroy enemy missiles to survive this game all the way to the end.

The first mission is a training mission that takes place above the clouds. No refueling is necessary and there are no ground targets so it is a good introduction. The second mission takes place over the ocean so there are boats and battleships to deal with below. The third mission is similar except it is over the desert and there are enemy jeeps and tanks to fight on the ground. The air attack gets more difficult here as well. The fourth mission is a nighttime mission and the difficulty is cranked up to the max. Expect a lot of evasive maneuvers and guided missiles.

Occasionally during the mission an enemy fighter will lock on to you from behind. When this occurs an alarm sounds and you see the enemy’s location in your radar screen. You must shake them off of you by moving from side to side. It takes a more rhythmic rocking back and forth to get them off. At the same time you can still be attacked from ahead so it can get a little frantic sometimes. If you can’t get them off they will shoot you down so getting rid of the rear enemy is always the priority.

Aside from the first mission, there is a target that you are required to take out as part of the mission. It’s a fancy way of saying there is a boss battle at the end. The target is stationary but it has a health meter that appears on screen and it take a lot of damage before being blown to bits. During the fight you are being attacked constantly by enemy fighters while enemies at the target are firing at you as well. Take out the target and your mission is successful after you land the plane of course.

This was my first time playing Top Gun. I don’t care much for flight simulators so it’s not a game that I would normally play. In fact I know I moved several games like this all the way to the bottom of my list for the blog. I only kept it on the normal part of my list since it is developed by Konami and they typically make great games.

Top Gun is a cheap, common game but it took me a really long time to acquire a copy for my collection. If memory serves I had over 500 unique NES carts before I owned Top Gun. I have owned the sequel Top Gun: The Second Mission since childhood and I had multiple copies of that game before I owned the original. It’s just one of those strange, loopy coincidences. Of course, as soon as I finally got one then they started pouring in from all the eBay lots I was purchasing at that time. I was up to six copies before I sold them all off.

Top Gun is a really hard game. My biggest struggle with the game was dealing with enemy guided missiles. At first, I was always getting hit by them while banking away as far as I could away from it. I eventually learned that I could dodge them by flying away from them either left or right while rocking up and down. It’s harder to hit a more randomly moving target. That strategy failed whenever an enemy straight ahead decided to fire a missile at me. Then I realized I could shoot them down but it took some serious practice to get the hang of it. If you miss then that pretty much spells the end of your fighter and your life. It gets worse. Starting in Mission 2 some enemies fire three guided missiles at once. This frustrated me so much! I did develop a strategy. The set of three missiles always come in the same formation: one high, one low, and one middle-right. I would destroy the top missile, then fly high and left to completely skip the bottom missile and do the up and down wiggle to dodge the right one. If the enemy is just a little bit to the left to start with, then I would have to destroy the top two missiles and dodge the bottom one. The bottom missile was almost never a factor, although one time I managed to destroy all three in a crazy moment of panic.

The real reason this game is so difficult is that you only have three lives to work with for the entire game. There are no extra lives and there are no continues. Not only do you have to contend with so many homing missiles and all the enemy fire, but you also need to learn how to refuel your plane as well as land your jet consistently. Every mistake is magnified. The only saving grace is that the game is relatively short. The missions tend to drone on for quite awhile because the pacing is slow, but the entire game can be beaten in under 30 minutes.

After much frustration and a bunch of attempts I finally managed to beat Top Gun. I wasn’t keeping track of how many tries it took before I won but I am estimating 15-20 attempts. The second mission is a large bump up in difficulty and that is where I cut my teeth on everything the game has to offer. I found the third mission easier than the one before, but the final mission was quite the challenge. The third time I made it to Mission 4 I was completely in the zone and I made it through to the boss with two lives remaining. I lost them both. I was really upset at that loss. By that point I was getting good enough to get to the final mission nearly every run. My real vice in all of this was the second mission. No matter what I did I always lost at least one life there. I said to myself that once I cleared Mission 2 without failure, then that would be my winning run. Wouldn’t you know it, I was right! I no-deathed the game up to Mission 4 only to lose two lives in the first half of the mission. I kept my cool, beat the final boss, and landed the plane without any problems. I’m sure I would have lost my mind if I failed to land the plane at the very end of Top Gun!

Since beating Top Gun I have learned a few additional things about it. The game loops once you beat the game and in my brief experience with it after winning it is indeed harder than the first run. I encountered more guided missiles than the first loop. However, according to the NES Game Endings FAQ there is no different ending upon beating the game again so I am not going to bother with it.

Another tip is that you can cheese your way through the game by flying up and right the entire time. Doing this will avoid all enemies and missiles so you will only have to deal with the refueling sequences, landing sequences, and the targets at the end of the mission. I didn’t try it so I don’t know for certain. Even if I knew about it before hand, I wouldn’t bother beating the game that way. I suffered through it the right way!

There is another ending of sorts to Top Gun that is quite a bit better and easier to achieve than the actual ending after Mission 4. If you are able to best the high score of 50,000 points, you are awarded the designation of Top Gun indicated by a screen that acts like a certificate of achievement. It’s pretty neat. I’ll include a capture of the screen from my best score during my winning run so you can see what it looks like!

From a technical standpoint, Top Gun is a well made game. It looks nice graphically and it controls and plays well, especially considering that it is one of the earlier NES game made. There is a variety of activities in the game to mix things up a bit. Overall, I don’t really care for it. The difficulty is a big turn off here, and the game eventually get monotonous after playing it over and over again. The first mission amounts to a forced five minute tutorial which is great for just starting out but it doesn’t take long for it to be so dull. This is not really my type of game anyway. Still, I consider beating Top Gun to be quite the achievement. I feel it’s the hardest game I’ve conquered so far. I hope it has prepared me well for playing the sequel whenever it comes up!