Become a little looney by playing this fun platformer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are the commands you can perform:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not to be confused with Amazon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shoot the background and the enemies within.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Become a world-conquering emperor from the comfort of your own home.

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Get all endings on the highest difficulty
What I Did: Reached one ending on difficulty level 2
Played: 8/15/19 – 9/21/19
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 6/10
My Video: Genghis Khan Ending

Here we are at another Koei simulation game. I have written in several places on this website that I have dreaded playing these games and have tried to delay them in various ways over the years. This is now my second Koei completion. The first Koei game I beat was Gemfire, which proved to be the ideal introduction to this style of game. There aren’t too many systems involved and combat was fun and engaging. From what I can tell it has a different feel than some of the other, deeper games. Genghis Khan is one of the earlier NES entries, but is more complex than Gemfire and probably falls in line with the bulk of the historical Koei titles. I can’t say if this game was a good next logical step for attacking these strategy titles, but it did fit the bill.

The game Genghis Khan was originally called Aoki Ookami to Shiroki Mejika: Genghis Khan for its Japanese release. It first came out on the PC-9801 in December 1987. Other versions include the Japanese MSX and X68000 ports in 1988, the North American DOS port in 1989, and the European Amiga port in 1990. The Famicom port released in April 1989. The NES version released in North America only in January 1990. This game is actually the second game of a series but is the only one to appear on the NES.

Genghis Khan is a turn-based tactical strategy game. The ultimate goal of the game is to unify all countries on the map by taking them over and ruling over them all. To that end, there are a couple of ways to get started. The Mongol Conquest mode begins in the year 1175. You play as Temujin, the young ruler who eventually becomes Genghis Khan. This is a single player mode only where you unify Mongolia by controlling 14 tribes. Completing that mode puts you into World Conquest mode, or you can start from World Conquest directly. That mode begins in the year 1206. This mode is multiplayer and you can play up to four players taking alternating turns. Starting off on this mode, you can choose from one of four rulers: Genghis Khan of the Mongols, Richard I of England, Alexicus III of the Byzantine Empire, or Yoritomo of Japan. You win the game if you unify the world with any of these leaders.

Normally, I would defer a lot of the explanation of a game to something I already wrote about if it makes sense. Direct sequels are the best case of this, but Koei games seem like a good fit. Comparing my two experiences of Gemfire and Genghis Khan, I think the two games are different enough to warrant separate explanations. That means this is going to get very detailed and lengthy. I need to say a lot to do this game proper justice. If you like long posts and reviews, you will probably like this one. I just want to be upfront so you know what you are getting into!

First things first, you need to get a leader. Your leader has six abilities statistics: Leadership, Judgment, Planning, Charm, Body, and Battle. You can have points distributed randomly by the game or choose them yourself. You also need to set the stats of your four princes. I just took what the game gave me, but some people opt to keep rerolling random stats until they get strong ones. Once all people are set, then you can pick the skill level from 1 to 5, 1 being Easy and 5 being Hard. While I’m all about beating games on the hardest difficulty, I’m not interested in that on these titles. I went with Level 2 since I have a little Koei experience by beating Gemfire.

This game follows a standard Koei flow. You see a map of the world along with each country numbered. Each territory gets one turn per season, the order of which is randomly generated. Computer players take their turns automatically and you can see some events of theirs such as declaring war. Your leader starts off at his home base and when his turn comes up you get three moves per turn. For other territories under your rule, you can assign a prince to rule them automatically, or you can rule them directly from afar but then you get only get one move from a limited subset of moves.

There are events that regularly or randomly occur each season, taking place before countries take their individual turns. Many things happen every Spring. Taxes are collected, the troops are paid, food is distributed, and everyone ages a year. Sometimes children are born. At the start of Fall, both food and specialty items are collected as taxes. Various natural disasters can occur year-round, damaging affected countries. Sometime a prince may rebel, either attacking his home country, or making his country independent. If that happens to one of your princes, you either deal with the attack or lose that territory.

The main display has a ton of information to show and moves to choose from. At the top of the screen, you see the year, season, country number, name, and ruler’s name. The left-hand side contains all of main orders you can issue. Many orders here link to sub menus where you can choose your specific action. The lower-left corner shows how many orders you have left this turn as well as the current market rate for trading, and also which player is in control in a multiplayer game. The center column contains a picture of the ruler, if it is the home base or a territory under direct control, and a picture of that country’s specialty item. The right side contains a bunch of other statistics for the country. You see the amount of gold and food available, as well as the number of troops. The next section is for this country’s skilled workers. These are townspeople, masons, food producers, and artisans who produce the country’s specialty item. Other country-specific stats at the bottom of the list are morale, economy, defense, arms, and skill. Finally, a descriptive text box rounds out this screen.

Many different events and outcomes are influenced by the country’s statistics. Low morale may cause an uprising in the country or theft of the food supply. The economy stat helps determine how much money is collected during tax time every spring. The defense stat shows the strength of the country’s castle, which is helpful during battle scenes. The higher the arms stat is, the more damage weapons such as arrows from archers do in battle. The skill level of your troops determines how much damage they will deal in a battle. These stats fluctuate all the time in this game due to planned or unplanned events.

Utilizing your commands properly depends on the leader’s individual ability statistics. To issue many commands, you have to spend some of those points in one or many categories, while the success of some actions depend on how many total points in a stat you have at the time. For instance, going to War decreases multiple stats including your leader’s Battle stat, but a higher Battle stat means you will perform better during the war. While some of the ties between commands and leader abilities are obvious, many are not, and you need the manual at your side or some kind of lookup chart to see the cost and effect of every move.

Now let’s look at each command individually, starting with the Tax command. This command lets you set the tax rate as a percentage. You can also collect a special extra tax optionally once per year that is best taken sparingly.

The Assign command allows you to update your mix of people in either the labor force or your army. As mentioned above, there are five types of skilled laborers: townspeople, masons, food producers, artisans, and troops. You can set how many of each laborer you want. This is a useful command for increasing your troops before war time or building up various aspects of your country. You may also decide the distribution of your army. You can have up to 10 units on the battlefield. You select one of the unit slots, choose the unit type from either cavalry, infantry, or archers, and set the percentage of troops assigned to that unit. You can configure the entire army in a single move.

The Give command is a simple command that lets you give some of your country’s assets back to the people. You decide from either gold, food, or the specialty item and how many units you want to give. This command is strictly for increasing morale.

The Train command allows you to train your troops, one of your princes, yourself, or your people. Training the troops increases your country’s skill stat. You can increase one of the abilities of one of your princes in your command. You can also increase one of your own stats, either Leadership, Judgment, Planning, Charm, Body, or Battle. This was one of my most used commands because it doesn’t cost any stat points to raise a stat. Training the people lets you prepare people to be drafted later into the army.

The Trade command lets you buy items, sell items, or hire troops. The way this works is there are three merchants, China, Islam, and Uighur, that run different trade routes throughout the year. First select a merchant to see if they are available for trading. When choosing to buy or sell, you see a list of all the possible specialty items plus food. Weapons appear only on the buy list. A price appears next to the item if it is available. You can choose an item, then select quantity to spend your gold. You can browse the buying and selling options for free without using a turn, but any single transaction counts as a move. You can also select to hire troops to add to your army. All of the prices fluctuate depending on the seller and the overall market rate. Buy low, sell high!

The People command has a ton of options. You can change the leadership of a territory abroad, either by moving princes around, assigning a new prince, or taking direct control. You may choose an outstanding man from your army and promote him to a prince or demote a prince back to a common soldier. You can promote one of your sons to a prince once he reaches a certain age, or you can marry one of your daughters to a prince to gain his loyalty. Princes may betray you at any time unless they are related to you. You can also use this command to draft people into the army.

The View command has many options to view statistics. You can view your own countries without costing a move, but viewing other countries costs a move and requires that you have already sent a spy there. You may look at country data or ruler data. You can pull up a list of every country you have a treaty with and how long the treaty lasts. You can also see your list of available princes, children, and stock of specialty items.

The Move command lets you move different things around between adjacent countries you control. You can move your home base to another country. (A little tip here: If you do this with moves remaining, you will lose them, so always do this on the third move of your turn.) You also have the options to move gold, food, items, troops, or skilled laborers between territories.

The Policy command is a highly detailed command that lets you set many different settings for one of your princes ruling a country abroad, all in one move. You can set internal policies like setting the tax rate, assigning the labor and army, and how to treat your army and citizens. You also get to choose external policies, such as allowing declaration of war, negotiations with foreign countries, and whether or not to send supplies to neighbors. If you don’t set policy, princes will make their own decisions.

The Treaty command lets you make a deal with an adjacent enemy territory. This is where you can ask for and set alliances for five years with neighboring countries. You can also try and strong arm one of your enemy neighbors into paying you in gold, food, and items. Foreign countries are usually resistant unless you are much stronger than them. Also, if an enemy asks this of you and refuse, they may decide to go to war with you immediately.

The Spy command lets you pay some gold to send a spy to a foreign country. You can send a spy to report on a foreign country so that you can view that country’s and ruler’s data. A spy can be sent to damage an enemy’s castle and town or even the ruler himself. This command also lets you search your own country for a spy and eliminate him if found.

The remaining commands are War, Pass, and Other. War lets you declare war against another country. You decide how many troops to send, though you need enough gold to pay them and food to sustain them during the fight. You can fight as your main leader and act the battle yourself, or you can send a prince to battle automatically and you just view results. The Pass command lets you end your turn early, forfeiting any moves remaining. The Other command lets you tweak various game settings, such as setting the text speed, toggling music, sounds, and animations, stuff like that. You can save your progress here to the battery backup, as well as end your game if you are done this session.

The battle screen is a major part of this game. Starting off a battle shows a quick summary of both sides in the combat before moving to the battlefield. Each battlefield consists of a map of squares staggered to resemble a hex map, and each country has its own battle map. There is one town square and one castle square on each map. All other squares are assigned a terrain which influences how you move through that space. There are entry and exit points along the edge tiles of the battlefield labeled by a number. The number indicates which numbered country uses those squares to enter or leave the battlefield. The attacking army first places each unit in one of his numbered entry squares, then the defending side places each unit on any other square in the field. Unit squares display the type of unit, either cavalry, infantry, or archer, the unit number, the number of soldiers represented in groups of 10, and a color, either red for the attacking side or blue for the defending side. The unit number of your leader is either 0 if it is your main ruler or an asterisk if it is a prince. Now the battle can begin, attacking side first.

Since you can only attack enemies in adjacent squares, you will use the Move command to get in position. Each unit has a mobility counter that reduces some for every square you move during your turn. The more difficult the terrain, the more mobility required to move there and the more men you will lose in crossing that space. The Move command can also be used to divide a unit into multiple units or combine units. You may decide how many soldiers to split off and then move that portion to an adjacent square as its own unit. Simply moving one unit onto another unit of the same type combines those units into one.

Use the Attack command to fight another unit. This is where the unit types come into play. Normal attacks by any unit engage an enemy on an adjacent square and cause losses on both sides. Archers can attack with arrows on a unit one square away in any direction. Infantry units can set up an ambush. The unit will go into hiding in a nearby square and become invisible. When an enemy moves onto a square next to the hidden infantry unit, it immediately reveals itself and attacks at higher than normal damage rates. You can also set up a duel against rival leader units, if the other side accepts. The winning ruler of a duel may take the loser captive, ending the battle immediately, or take a portion of the losing troops over to the winning side.

Miscellaneous battle actions are done from the Other command. You can demand the enemy commander to surrender. You can move your leader to one of the exit squares and request reinforcements from a neighboring country you control. The attacking side’s main unit can raid the defending town for food, or any unit can hunt for food in one of the forest tiles.

These are the remaining battle commands. You can Pass a turn for any unit, which increases its mobility by one for the next turn. You can Flee to a neighboring country you control through the exit squares. You can use the View command to see how many units are in each army, the leader data for both leaders, and other detailed stats for each army. The Recon command lets you view the battlefield, either letting you scroll around the map or sending you to a different screen displaying the entire battlefield.

If you win the battle, you take control of the affected country and must make several choices after. First you decide who rules this country, either one of your princes, the defeated ruler, or yourself under direct control. Then you decide the fate of the enemy ruler. You can kill him, set him free, or make him one of your princes. You may also see one of the outstanding men from the enemy’s side and you can choose if you want to recruit him as a prince or not. The enemy gets to decide your fate if you lose a war. If you fight as the main leader and you are killed, you can choose one of your sons to rule in your place. If there are no sons of age to do this, then the game is over. (Fortunately, this doesn’t erase your save or anything.)

As with all Koei titles, this was my first time both playing and beating Genghis Khan. The Koei games tend to be more uncommon and therefore more expensive, however Genghis Khan is one of the more affordable entries in the series. Loose carts go for around $10. I once picked up a lot on eBay of a few of the cheaper Koei titles complete in box which included Genghis Khan. I have both the thick instruction manual and the special map/poster combo that came with this game only.

These are tough games for me to get into and I struggled quite a lot early on. The proper method for starting something like this is to jump in and try different things without being afraid to fail. Get a feel for the game first. That way you can see what things work and what don’t so that you can develop a game plan. Then you start the game over and go at with your game plan. The problem with that is that you might get a few hours in that first time and then you have to burn all that progress down when starting over. Therefore, even though I know how I should attack this game, I keep pushing forward on my initial save file because I have a fear of wasting all that time. That fear has decided that continuing a game in a less favorable position is better than starting over from more of a neutral position. The next Koei game I play I am making sure to try going about it in the proper way I described, even if it goes against my own impulses.

My first major hurdle in the game was expanding my empire by just one country. I learned battle well enough to win a country, but then both of my territories were vulnerable to further attack. The enemies knew this and took advantage right away, leaving me in a much worse state than I was before. I know I failed in taking advantage of treaties, but I also didn’t build myself up enough to have enough manpower to manage two territories. I went about bulking up my forces through an economic game plan. I kept enough troops available to discourage war and funneled most of my leftover laborers toward making both food and specialty items. Selling specialty items is a given, but selling excess food was a surprise money maker. My wealth went into hiring more troops, which could then be converted into more food and item producers, completing a nice circle of economic growth. Now I could start my conquest, pulling in more countries under my rule. My Gemfire strategy of isolating territories from enemies and then funneling their resources toward countries on the front lines was in full effect.

From here I started cruising to victory. I had the eastern part of the map conquered and had a prince in charge of each territory. I learned the most efficient way to battle was to put all my troops into one cavalry unit and to weaken the enemy enough to win in a duel. (I figured out the single cavalry unit strategy on my own, and found a tip online suggesting that focusing on the leader’s body and battle stats have a positive effect on winning duels.) I really thought I had the game all figured out but then the game presented a new challenge.

The latter part of the game turned into making total game plan adjustments that I never really figured out the best way to handle. What happened was I started losing far away territories to uprisings. I had several of them happen within a year or two in-game time. There weren’t enough loyal princes to have a family member in charge of everything. What I maybe could have done was go all in on save scumming and just reset any time this happened, which was a strategy I was already using partially. With so many countries to take over, how could I be sure I could get through any season without at least one revolt happening?

The strategy I ultimately went with was to go back and re-take the countries I lost and place them all under my direct control. That way I could be sure a leader wouldn’t revolt. While an effective strategy, having to make a choice on every territory each turn meant it took forever to make progress on the overall map. Each turn took several minutes of menuing. It was awful, but it got the job done. The plan I really thought would work better was to drain an isolated country of resources, leaving just enough to sustain the people, then put a prince in charge with policy not to grow troops. If they do revolt, they would be weak and easy to reclaim. I attempted that early on but I couldn’t figure out if it was actually helping. I never got the right laborer mix that avoided morale or economic problems in those distant territories.

I spent a lot of time finishing this game, both in real time and game time. I didn’t keep track of my hours, but I suspect I spent around 25-30 hours beating the game over the course of five weeks. I played a lot the first week or so and then chipped away a little bit at a time until I got it done. As far as in-game time is concerned, I needed 60 years to unite the world under Tegighiz in 1266. In my timeline, Genghis Khan died in 1241 and his son Tegighiz assumed the leader role up to the game’s completion. We are making our own history here, which really is the point of a Koei game when you think about it.

I experienced a couple personal milestones while playing Genghis Khan. My wife and I had a baby of our own during this playthrough. I was off work a lot, but with two kids including a newborn that needed to be fed and changed multiple times during the night, I was very busy all the time. I sacrificed a lot of sleep that I probably shouldn’t have just to have 30 minutes here or an hour there playing Genghis Khan. The other big piece of news is that with this completion I have now finished over 20% of the licensed NES library! It works out that every 67 games completed is just over a new tenth of the library finished. I have a long way to go, but 20% complete with a diverse mix of games finished is no small feat. Expect 30% completion a couple of years from now!

Genghis Khan is a complicated NES strategy game that has a lot of offer if you are into this type of game. The graphics work well for this kind of game. The character portraits are varied and there are some decent animations for some actions. I ended up turning them off only to save time. The music is pretty good overall, though it ended up being an annoyance. Regions of the map have their own theme music, but the music changes all the time if you have multiple provinces under direct control all over the map. The controls for entering in numerical inputs can be a little bit slippery and you pass digits you want, but everything else works well enough. This seems to be another game that only caters to a specific audience. I am no expert on whether or not this is a good Koei game, but from my perspective, I had some fun with it and I think it is a solid title.

It’s gambling that’s wrapped up loosely in an RPG.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 8/6/19 – 8/10/19
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Casino Kid Ending

Today we have our first NES gambling game. I’m a little surprised that there aren’t that many of these games on the console. It seems like they would be more plentiful as gambling is quite popular. My guess is that they are too simple to make a full game from, and most people would rather have the thrill of putting money on the line in the hopes of a big payday. From glancing through the short list of gambling games, replicating a huge day at the casino seems to be the common approach. This is what Casino Kid does, using two casino games combined with some light RPG elements. It’s an interesting idea for a game, so let’s take a look and see how it shakes out.

Casino Kid was both developed and published by Sofel. The Famicom release is named $1,000,000 Kid: Maboroshi no Teiou Hen and is based on the manga 100 Man $ Kid which ran from 1986-1988. The game was released in Japan in January 1989. The NES release was localized to Casino Kid in October 1989. It appears the Famicom and NES releases are significantly different. The Famicom version follows the manga, while the NES version has those references removed and contains somewhat simplified gameplay. The NES would later receive an exclusive sequel Casino Kid II in 1993.

In this game, you play the role of the Casino Kid. You step foot inside a prominent casino with only $500. By playing multiple rounds of Blackjack and Poker against several dealers, you earn $1 million dollars and the right to square off against the Casino King. Win against him to become the new Casino King and win the game.

Casino Kid starts off looking like a top down RPG. You need to walk around the casino looking for opponents to play. Use the D-pad to walk and press A to talk to someone. There is only one active blackjack dealer and one active poker player at a time. Blackjack dealers appear behind tables and you have to talk to them from across the table, while poker players are just standing around. Talking to the wrong one gets you brushed off, however, sometimes the person will give you a hint to where you might find the opponent you need to play next. Tourists and casino workers also give you some basic hints about the names and personalities of the different players. While walking around, you can press Select to see how much money you have and your password for later play. Passwords in this game are 30 characters long, all capital A-Z. Lengthy, but not bad.

Walking around the casino for your next matchup is just window dressing for the meat of the gameplay, which are the games of blackjack and poker. The screen layout and basic betting structure is the same for both games. Your cards are on the bottom of the screen and the opponent’s cards are at the top. The middle of the screen contains a picture of your opponent along with a textbox for dialog. Below that is the amount of money your opponent has, the current bet, and your total money. Each matchup has a specific betting range. For instance, the first opponent establishes a betting range of $10-$100. During betting, you press either Left or Right to choose the amount of your chip. In the example case, you can choose from either a $10 chip or a $100 chip. Then you can press Up or Down to either add or remove chips for your bet. You will press A to place your bet.

First, let’s cover blackjack, quick and dirty style. Your goal is to have a higher point value in your hand of cards than the dealer without going over 21. The face value of each card is its point value. Jacks, queens, and kings are worth 10. Aces are worth 11 if the total would be under 21, otherwise it counts as 1. First you place your bet, then the dealer gives you two cards face up, and the dealer gets one card face up and the other face down. Casino Kid shows your total in the corner of your hand of cards. You can decide if you want to Hit and get another card or Stand and go with what you have. If you stand, the dealer plays his or her hand. The dealer always hits on 16 or lower and stands on 17 or higher. Either player loses when going over 21, otherwise the higher value wins and earns the bet. Getting the same total is called a push and no money is exchanged. If you are dealt both an Ace and a 10-point value card, that is considered blackjack and you win automatically. Blackjacks are paid 3 to 2 in this game, meaning you earn your wager plus an additional 50%.

There are some additional choices you can make during blackjack in certain situations. If you are dealt two identical cards, you can decide to Split hands. This lets you play two hands at the same time against the same dealer hand. You must play one hand all the way before playing the second hand. If you split Aces, you are only allowed to draw one additional card. If you win both hands, you effectively double your original wager. I believe you can get the additional payout if you get blackjack on a split hand as well. The double down option lets you double your bet while hitting only one card. A common double down situation is a 11-point hand with a high probability of getting a 10-point card on your extra card. A third option is surrender. Immediately and only after the initial deal, you can surrender your hand and forfeit half of your initial wager. I never used this option but it can be helpful to limit your loss if you have a high probability of losing your hand if you tried to play.

Now let’s talk about Poker. Your goal is to get a better five-card hand than your opponent. There are many variants of Poker, but in Casino Kid you play five-card draw. At the start of every hand, both players put a little bit of money into the pot, called ante. Each player is dealt five cards face down. You get to see your cards. Next is a round of betting. Players alternate first move here every hand. You can either place a bet or fold your hand. The opponent can either call the bet and chip in the same amount, raise the bet by throwing more money in, or folding their hand to quit. If play continues, you choose which cards you want to hold and you are dealt replacement cards for the others. You can see how many cards your opponent chooses to hold. Armed with that knowledge, there’s another round of betting before revealing hands. The best hand wins all the money in the pot.

The ranking of hands in poker, from best to worst, are royal flush, straight flush, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, one pair, and high card. You may know what all of these terms mean already. If not, many of these hands are self-explanatory but I’ll review a few of the others just in case. A full house is a three of a kind and a pair together. A straight occurs when all five cards are in ascending rank. For example, a 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 is a straight. The ace can either be the low card or high card but doesn’t wrap around. A flush is when all five cards are the same suit. A straight flush then is when you get both a straight and a flush. A royal flush is a straight flush with an Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and 10. Usually the type of hand determines the winner. Ties are broken using the remaining cards in the hand. For example, if both players have a pair of 5’s, whoever has the next highest card is the winner. While uncommon is it possible to tie outright, in which case each player gets their half of the pot back.

In both blackjack and poker, there is a hidden menu. Press Select during either placing a bet in blackjack or placing your ante in poker. Your options here are to Bet All Money or Final Hand. Bet All Money does just that, up to either your max or your opponent’s max. However, your opponent may not let you bet everything. Final Hand means you play out that last hand and then go back to the casino floor. You get to keep your winnings as well as maintain your opponent’s cash stash. There may be some strategy here in stopping early to have a better shot at winning a different game. A better use of the Final Hand is to get back to the floor so you can get your password for later if you decide to quit mid-game.

This was my first time playing Casino Kid. I do like card games a little bit. I’m pretty sure when I tested my copy at least I found an opponent and played a few hands before switching to something else. This is a common cart that is only worth a few dollars. The sequel, however, was an uncommon, late release and is much more valuable.

My playthrough of the game ended up being more tedious than fun. Once you’ve played a little bit of blackjack and poker, you’ve seen everything the game has to offer. Beating the game became a test of optimization for me. To that end, my efforts started out poorly. Poker ended up being fairly manageable. Even without making max bets all the time, betting twice per round goes a long way toward exchanging money quickly. After several hands, my opponent offered to go all in and bet everything, to which I gladly agreed. In blackjack, this situation never happens. In fact, for some opponents, the max bet is so small that you have to win about 50 more hands than the dealer to empty them of cash. You can try counting cards to help your odds, but the better option in my mind is the Bet All Money option in the Select menu. After playing awhile, the dealer will accept your request and now your fate rests in one or two hands. I was totally fine with that. The sad thing is that I wasn’t aware of that option until roughly halfway through the game, so I wasted a lot of time. I read the manual before playing these games, but I need to revisit them after playing some because I often end up missing these little tips to speed things up. Armed with a better game plan, I made short work of the rest of the game.

After playing eight rounds of blackjack and eight rounds of poker, you finally earn the million dollars and get to face off against the king of the casino in poker. This is a long, drawn out match to the bitter end for a couple of reasons. You are unable to bet everything you have, no matter what the situation. This is what sped up the other poker matches. Early poker opponents wore their emotions on their sleeve to where you can figure out if they have a good hand or not. Even later opponents sometimes have a tell in that they can show opposite emotion in trying to bluff you. You don’t get that with the king. You need to make smart bets, fold when hands are bad, and go for broke when you get something good. It took me over 30 minutes to finally overcome the king and beat the game. While it started looking bad at times, I did have a little unexpected help. I ended up getting a royal flush one time, dealt straight up. The odds of that are so low that I felt the game was taking pity on me and did it on purpose. I caught it on video so I have proof it happened. If only I could have that luck for real!

Casino Kid is a fine gambling simulation to play for fun, but offers little beyond that. The graphics are pretty good. Character portraits are a nice touch, and the playing cards are clear to read. One little thing I noticed was that some people in the casino are purely background elements and you have to get an eye for them so you don’t wait around hoping they will walk out of your way. The music is pretty good, in step with the presentation. Controls are accurate, though betting can be cumbersome since you need to switch chip size to place a precise bet. The core gameplay is solid. Betting rounds are done well in poker and there are all the different options in blackjack. The major issue I had with beating the game is that it drags on a long time. I finished the game in maybe 6-8 hours but it’s a lot of repetition. I would have liked pick up and play options to jump straight into the cards. These are fun poker and blackjack games but there’s some rigamarole just to get to playing. This game tries to be something of a gambling RPG, but history would prove that gambling works better as a mini-game in an RPG, making Casino Kid feel quite outdated. You can’t blame them for trying something different though.

The game with the hair whip.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 8/5/19
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Kabuki Quantum Fighter Longplay

There aren’t many NES games that have a more interesting title than Kabuki Quantum Fighter. Once you know a little more about the background of the game and a bit of history, the title makes perfect sense. Your main character resembles an ancient Kabuki dancer, complete with elaborate makeup and clothing. The game takes places inside of a large, probably quantum computer. And, of course, in a game you will be doing some fighting. There you have it: Kabuki Quantum Fighter. Beyond the surprisingly accurate name, this is a real gem of a game that I enjoy playing quite a lot.

Kabuki Quantum Fighter was first released on the Famicom under the title Jigoku Gokurakumaru. The game was developed by Human Entertainment. The Japanese release was published by Pack-In Video and came out in December 1990. The NES release shortly followed in North America in January 1991, published by HAL America. The European NES release was in February 1992, published by HAL Laboratory. Sadly, this game has not been re-released digitally and is only available on these older platforms.

The game’s story takes place in a futuristic Earth. The planet has a main defense computer that has been affected by a nasty virus. The only way to combat the virus is to go inside the computer and take it out from within. You play the role of the brave Colonel Scott O’Connor who has volunteered to neutralize the threat. To do this, he has to be converted into raw binary data through the untested Image Transfer System in order to fight the virus. The transfer works, but his appearance is altered to that of one of his ancestors who was a Kabuki dancer. To beat the game, just clear the game’s six stages.

Kabuki Quantum Fighter is a platformer with a standard control scheme. You use the D-pad to walk around left or right. The A button jumps and you can control the height of your jump with how long the button is held. The B button attacks, only this game uses Scott’s flowing red locks as a whip to damage enemies. You can crouch down by holding Down. Your attack in the crouched position is a short-range punch. There are hooks scattered throughout the stages than you can hang from by jumping into them from below. While hanging, the B button performs a sweeping kick. You can drop down from hanging by pressing Down or you can jump with A, allowing you to flip up to a higher ledge or to another nearby hook. You can attach to some walls and you can climb them by pressing Up or Down. The Select button switches your weapon, and the Start button pauses the action. You can switch weapons while paused.

Your status bar is at the bottom of the screen. On the left, you see your life bar, your chip meter, and the boss’s health bar. Below that is your score, the number of lives remaining, and the stage timer. The far right contains an icon indicating your currently equipped weapon. Nice and straightforward.

Normal attacks are all short range, so to compensate you can use special weapons. (Of random note: The names in game don’t line up with the ones in the manual, so I’m going with the in-game descriptions for these.) You begin the game with one special weapon and earn others by completing stages, using memory chips for ammo. The first attack is the energy gun, which is a tiny projectile attack. In level 2, you get a larger, upgraded version of the energy gun. In level 3, you get the fusion gun which is a three-way spread attack. Starting in level 4 you can use quantum bombs. These are sticks of dynamite thrown forward in an arc and they have a wide attack splash. Finally, in level 5 you earn the remote control bolo. This is a set of three star-shaped weapons that home in on and wrap around enemies, dealing small damage for as long as they last. Naturally, the better weapons use up more of your chip stash.

Enemies in this game sometimes drop basic items. Hearts refill a segment of your health meter, and flashing hearts refill several segments at once. You can also grab chips as ammo for your special weapons. Flashing chips give you several rounds of ammo. Occasionally, enemies will drop clearly labeled 1up items. There’s enough versatility in the move set that these pickups are enough for this game.

Kabuki Quantum Fighter plays out similarly to Ninja Gaiden but has a few significant differences. Each level is a long scrolling stage. Some levels have more than one of these segments. At the end of each one, you get some bonus points for each bar of health and each chip you have remaining. Then the bars refill back out along with some extra health and ammo. Every level ends in a boss fight. There is a neat mechanic that appears only during these boss encounters. When you pause the game and press either Up or Down, you can exchange your health for chips and vice versa. This gives you some choice during fights. Do you want to sacrifice health so that you can do more long range attacks with your special weapons, or you do you want to give up your special weapons and try to fight close quarters with extra health points? You can mix and match as much as you want as long as you have enough health and ammo to swap. After beating the bosses, you can view cutscenes that progress the story and show you which new weapon you have acquired.

The enemies are quite varied from what you would expect fighting inside of a computer. Sure, there are tiny tanks and some robot-esque enemies. There are also flamethrowing heads, jumping dogs, hovering mouths, and gremlins that throw boomerangs, among others. The designs definitely make the game more interesting. There are also different kinds of traps you contend with. These are things like spike pits, conveyor belts, flowing water, and spike balls. A devious little device you’ll see sometimes is a hanging hook with a tiny conveyor belt on top. I give the designers credit for combining things in interesting ways, even if it’s a little mean in that case.

Kabuki Quantum Fighter is a game I have owned since childhood and have plenty of experience in playing. I’m pretty sure this game was a bargain pickup for brand new back in the 90s. Unfortunately, I don’t think I kept the box and manual for this one unless it somehow turns up at my mom’s house. This is a reasonably affordable game, so I’m not too upset about it. Carts copies sell for around $15 today.

This is a game I have gone back and played many times over the years, so I breezed through it again for this playthrough. I completed the game without dying and I only used special weapons once or twice. I always use weapons on the final boss, but with a little practice I’m sure I could beat it without. (That’s an idea for a future challenge run, deathless and no special weapons!) My longplay video of the game was solid, however there was one omission I’m minorly annoyed about. After you beat the game and get through the credits, you can press B to see the sound test. You see a unique animation of our hero along with some text indicating another future adventure that never came to be. I cut the video before that only to see it come up when I was messing with the controller afterward. Oh well.

It is tough for me to pin a difficulty on a game like this that I know so well, but I decided on average difficulty. For the most part, the action is straightforward enough. There are plenty of item drops and even some places to grind them if necessary. Special weapons help for tricky spots. Being able to trade up for more health on the bosses also makes battling them easier. You also get two continues for when you run out of lives. That’s all the good stuff. Now what really makes this game difficult are the vertical levels. There are a couple of these in the game that you have to climb all the way to the top. By this point, you should have experience with the hanging hooks, and now your skills are put to the test. It is really easy to fall down. So not only do you have to manage your health for longer if you fall and enemies respawn, but also the timer becomes your biggest enemy. You do have plenty of time to complete the level since I can do it with a lot of time left over. These stages are difficulty spikes the first time through.

I played Kabuki Quantum Fighter for high score as part of a weekly contest several years ago, and that gave me with a new way to play the game that I appreciated. The rules were one life only, scoring as many points as possible. It turned the game into a bit of a puzzle. I paid attention to the enemies and how many points I could earn from each one. Then I needed to grind the most lucrative enemies by scrolling back and forth to keep spawning them. I needed to know how much time it took to get from the grind point to the end of the level so that I had as much time to grind points as possible. The other thing I strived for was beating the bosses with normal moves. After I beat the boss, I would swap for as many chips as possible, hopefully up to the max. You trade chips for health at a two for one rate, so more chips mean more bonus points at the end of the level. That also means you might not have that much health for the next stage. I also wanted every extra life I could find since those go for big points at the end of the game. I must have enjoyed doing all that because I know I won the contest that week.

I really like Kabuki Quantum Fighter and I think it is a great platformer on the system. The graphics are well drawn with some good animation, particularly on the player character and the bosses. I think the music in the game is great with several good tunes. The controls work well, giving you many options with the short range standard attacks, long range special weapons, hanging from hooks, and climbing walls. Swinging around is a lot of fun and you have pretty good precision to jump from one hook to the next. The boss encounters are all varied and are pretty good fights in general. Personally, I wish the game were a little bit longer. I think they could have done more with the mechanics to make some additional challenges in the stages. I am a big fan of Kabuki Quantum Fighter and I encourage you to check this game out if you haven’t tried it.

Ripping straight out of your NES!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 7/25/19 – 8/1/19
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
My Video: Werewolf: The Last Warrior Longplay

I’m just going to say this right away.  I think Werewolf: The Last Warrior is gonna be my favorite NES Box Art of 2019. The obvious element is the giant werewolf ripping out of the cover, but look closely and you will see that he bursts right out of an NES cart.  You can make out the gray lines and the chips on the green circuit board inside.  At this time, very few people took the carts apart to see what was inside because new carts didn’t need to have the pins cleaned. I bet this aspect of the cover was underappreciated.  Some other parts of the cover I like are the red text on yellow background for contrast and the huge claws on the werewolf.  With a box cover so awesome, the game inside has to be equally good, right?

Werewolf: The Last Warrior debuted on the NES in November 1990.  The game was developed and published by Data East, with development credit given to Sakata SAS.  The Famicom release came later in June 1991, published by Takara.  There the game was called Cho Jinro Senki Wourufu, translating to Super Werewolf Chronicle Warwolf.  Europe also saw an NES release in September 1991.

In this game, you play as Chief WarWolf.  The evil Dr. Faryan has created a bunch of bio-monsters that have imprisoned nearly everyone in the world.  Guess who is the only hope for civilization?  With the help and powers of the Great Spirit, you can become Werewolf which will give you the abilities needed to defeat Faryan and save humanity from his evil schemes.  There are five stages in the game, culminating in the final battle with Faryan. Beat all the levels to beat this game.

This is your typical platforming game with a mostly familiar control scheme. An obvious downside right off the bat is that you attack with A and jump with B.  I have no idea why developers did this as the convention of using A to jump and B to attack was the de facto standard.  I’ve played games long enough to be able to handle it no problem, but otherwise there is this artificial learning curve added for no real reason other than to be different.  The rest of the controls are fine.  Press the D-pad directions to move around.  You can duck with Down and climb ladders with Up.  The A button does a simple punch and you can punch high while standing or punch low while ducking.  You also wield a Power Ray as a charge attack by holding A to charge and letting go to unleash the attack.  Pressing B jumps normally, but you can do a higher jump if you hold Up while pressing B.  Start pauses the game.  While paused, you can press Select to show your score and number of lives remaining. 

At the start of the game, you meet the Great Spirit.  The game switches over to a brief cutscene where the Great Spirit gives you some advice.  Immediately after this you are thrown into a fight with one of Faryan’s death slaves. This enemy has a health bar displayed at the bottom and is a recurring mini-boss throughout the game.  Defeat him and he will leave behind a red W.  Collecting this item turns you into Werewolf.  Then you get another cutscene where you see his transformation.  Don’t worry, this scene only happens the first time you transform.

In Werewolf form, you have several new options available.  You maintain this form until you are at about a quarter of health remaining.  By default, your attacks are twice as strong as normal.  Your Power Ray now attacks everything on screen via a shock wave, but this deals you a lot of damage just to perform the move.  You also get four new movement abilities.  You can crawl into tunnels too big for you to enter normally. Simply walk into the tunnel to start crawling.  You can perform a backflip that makes you invincible to all attacks by pressing both A and B together.  You can climb walls in Werewolf form.  Simply jump into a wall to cling to it.  Now you can climb the wall by pressing either Up or Down.  To get off, you press the direction opposite the wall and press B to jump off.  Lastly, you can cling and hand-walk along ceilings with your claws.  Jump up to the ceiling, then hold Up and press A to dig your claws in.  Then you can use Left or Right to move across the ceiling and press Down to disembark. Getting hooked is tough.  You have to connect just as you are falling from the top of your jump so that you touch the ceiling with the tip of your claws.

There is an anger meter at the bottom of the screen.  You collect these tiny, white bubbles that add a notch to your anger meter.  When the meter hits five bubbles, then you transform into Super Werewolf.  In this mode, you have all the same powers and abilities as Werewolf, but your attacks double in strength, you move faster, and you jump incredibly high.  The downside is that this mode is temporary as the bubbles gradually decrease.  (I guess they pop?)  Once you run out of bubbles, you switch back to Werewolf mode until you collect enough bubbles for another transformation.

There are several other items you can collect in this game.  Finding items is weird.  Some of them are dropped by enemies, and others you find by striking objects in the levels.  Sometimes these locations are obvious, like posts or boxes.  Other times you find items by hitting ledges or other places you might not expect.  It doesn’t hurt to attack random things just in case.  Anyway, here are the other items to look out for.  Small hearts heal one health point while large hearts are full health refills.  Little red bubbles defeat all enemies onscreen.  Big red bubbles make you invincible for a little while.  Why bubbles are so powerful in this game, I have no idea.  Hourglasses give you more time, dollar signs add points, and 1ups are obvious. Some enemies drop a bullet behind that gives you a single shot attack of your own with A.

The final item you need to watch out for are the blue W’s.  While red W’s upgrade you to Werewolf, the blue ones downgrade you.  They take you from Super Werewolf back to Werewolf, or from Werewolf back to plain War Wolf form.  If you grab one as War Wolf, it deals a significant amount of damage.  Therefore, you want to avoid these at all costs.  The game puts you in some situations where if you reveal a blue W, you are forced to pick it up to proceed.  Just be careful.  The manual suggests there is a way to somehow use both a blue W and a red W to go directly to Super Werewolf.  I have no idea how or if that works, and I didn’t find any information about that mechanic.

The levels in this game are usually laid out a specific way.  Stages move from Left to Right with a few exceptions. Stages also typically have a high section and a low section.  You can find ladders to climb between sections and sometimes you can choose between the upper path or lower path all the way through the stage.  This can add some replay value if you want to try a different path and it lets you experiment to find the best way through a level.  All levels end in a boss fight with one of Faryan’s stronger creatures.

This game treats lives as continues.  When you fall into a pit or run out of health, it is Game Over.  If you have any lives remaining, then you can Continue from the Game Over screen or select End to start over.  When you run out of lives, the game puts you at the same screen only you are forced to choose End.  You start the game with three lives.  You can earn more by collecting 1up items or for every 50,000 points earned.  Every time you die your score goes back to 0, so you are incentivized to play well enough early to earn more lives for later.

This was my first time beating Werewolf: The Last Warrior.  I sort of remember testing this game out one time and playing until I died, which didn’t take too long that time.   I might have went further if I knew the controls.  I bought my cart copy of the game at a game store about an hour away from home that I have only visited one time.  I think I paid either $7 or $8 for it.  The game sells now for around $10 which I believe is the same as the going rate was when I bought mine.

Beating this game was yet another installment in the series of “making incremental progress each playthrough.”  The first stage has at least a couple of spots that are tough to pass until you get a grip of the controls and all the moves you have available. The worst stopping point was the waterfall stage.  This is one of those two-tiered horizontal levels where the lower section is all water. Evidently, in this universe, werewolves cannot swim, so once you fall in you have to watch yourself drown.  There are leaping fish that can easily knock you in the drink, in part because you have a tough time hitting enemies in the air. Their placements are not quite consistent either.  It makes for a tough section and you can bleed your remaining lives away in a flash. Some other parts of the game aren’t much easier, but the waterfall was the worst I experienced.  I could have knocked the difficulty down a point or two if that stage were easier.  Still, completing the game in a week isn’t all that bad and it was a straightforward game to boot.

What I will remember most about Werewolf: The Last Warrior is how janky the game is.  I’ve already mentioned a few of these instances of jankiness, such as B button jumping, tricky ceiling clinging, and the seemingly random locations of hidden items. There are plenty more.  The backflip maneuver is very helpful in crossing some parts where taking damage is eminent, since you are invincible during the flip.  One downside of that is that there are two forced jumps associated with the move, and if you didn’t plan carefully, you could leap right into a pit.  Another quirk is that during a backflip, the screen does not scroll ahead.  You can backflip all the way to the right and then walk against the right side of the screen, leaving you completely defenseless to the dangers right in front of you.  Bosses soak up a lot of damage before going down and end up being very repetitive as a result.  Super Werewolf status makes them pretty manageable, but you may only build up to that state once or twice in the whole game.  If you are plain War Wolf, forget even trying to fight a boss.  Your attacks have one-fourth the power of Super Werewolf, and even if you play the fight perfectly you will probably run out of time before winning anyway.  There are still other minor nuisances that don’t even make a blip compared to these issues.

Werewolf: The Last Warrior is a game that falls short of most other NES platformers. I would say the graphics are just average.  Most of the sprites are large and detailed.  The Werewolf character has a lot of different poses and such for all the moves available. The music is pretty decent.  My favorite song is the one that plays when you are normal War Wolf, but unfortunately the more you hear that song the worse you are playing.  The controls take some getting used to with the B button jumping and handling specific moves like backflips and wall climbing.  The gameplay has some notable flaws.  The jumping is rather stiff and favors more vertical leaping than horizontal, which is tough considering most of the game is horizontal scrolling. Bosses and some enemies take way too many hits to defeat, leaving the timer as more of a threat here than in other games. You can tell that Ninja Gaiden was an inspiration for this game with things like its interstitial cutscenes and wall climbing moves.  Those are some huge shoes to fill, and in my opinion, Werewolf isn’t half as good as Ninja Gaiden.  It’s not terrible and there are sure to be some people that will go to bat for the game, but I’d rather play something else.

Here’s another accurately named game.

To Beat: Reach the ending
My Goal: Beat the game with the Power Glove
What I Did: Beat the game
Played: 7/2/19 – 7/21/19
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
My Video: Bad Street Brawler Longplay

This is another one of those milestone posts. There aren’t too many of them left, so let’s enjoy them while we can! Not only am I going to cover Bad Street Brawler, but we are also going to talk about the Power Glove. While maybe an odd choice for a compatible title, it does bear the label “Power Glove Gaming Series” on the cart. Sadly, it doesn’t play very well as one, leading me to believe this was just tacked on and not specifically designed to work with the peripheral. Still, I made it a point to play this game with the glove and try to make sense of it for you.

Bad Street Brawler was originally named Bop’n Rumble when it released on the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS in 1987. In Australia, the game was renamed Street Hassle. This game was developed by Beam Software and published by Mindscape. The NES version was renamed to Bad Street Brawler when it released as a Power Glove compatible title in September 1989. This port was also developed by Beam Software but published by Mattel, the manufacturer of the Power Glove accessory.

The Power Glove was an officially licensed peripheral for the NES that was made by Mattel, releasing in October 1989, a month after Bad Street Brawler. The Power Glove was heavily inspired by the Dataglove originally created by Thomas Zimmerman. VGL, Zimmerman and Jaron Lanier’s company, partnered with Abrams/Gentile Entertainment to possibly adapt the glove for video games. They pitched the idea to Mattel, who eventually pitched the idea to Nintendo, making it a reality for the holiday season in 1989. The Power Glove ended up selling well but didn’t work very well with Nintendo’s back catalog of games. There were only two NES games released for it before the glove was discontinued the following year. Still, it remains one of the most recognizable gaming peripherals of all time. You could say it laid the framework for motion controls in more modern gaming, such as the Wii and today’s VR headsets. There is a very good documentary from The Gaming Historian that will give you much more information about the glove’s history.

The Power Glove is a right-handed controller that you wear on your arm attached by Velcro. A wire from the Power Glove connects to a box that has a second wire going to the NES and the third to a set of three sensors that are positioned around the TV screen. The glove contains two ultrasonic speakers that interface with the three ultrasonic microphones on the sensors by the TV. This triangulates the glove’s position so that it can detect both roll and yaw. Conductive ink in the fingers allows the glove to detect finger bends from all fingers aside from the pinky. All these inputs translate into button presses on the NES. A set of lights on the corner TV sensor translates which directions and buttons are held down. The glove comes with 14 built-in programs that you can set with number buttons on the glove. These programs map movements and gestures to NES button presses. Bad Street Brawler comes with its own program along with some special programs that can be used in other NES games. First you initialize the program on Bad Street Brawler, then you turn the game off and quickly insert a new cartridge while the glove briefly “remembers” the program during power down. The Power Glove also has the same buttons as an NES controller so that you can use the glove as a controller itself or get direct inputs while using the glove. Finally, the Center button on the glove resets the positioning in relation to the sensors during a game. The Power Glove came with a couple of detailed manuals that show how the glove can be used and which programs might work best for some games.

Bad Street Brawler doesn’t have much of a story. You play as Duke Davis, a definitive 1980s Cool Guy. He wears big sunglasses with a yellow vest and green shorts. Basically, the streets are filled with criminals and Duke wants to clean up the streets. He will beat up the bad guys and take their weapons, throwing them away in the dumpster after each stage. In this game there are 15 levels and you must clear them all to beat the game.

The controls in this game are simple enough … with a controller that is. Use the D-pad to move around Left or Right. Press Down to duck and press Up to jump. You have three different attacks at your disposal in each stage called Force Moves. One is triggered with A, the second with B, and the third with both A and B pressed together. You can also press Start to pause the game. Controlling the game with the Power Glove is more cumbersome. Your steady arm movements control Duke’s movements. Move the glove up, down, left, or right to move Duke in that direction. The A button move is performed by rotating your wrist left or right. This action both moves Duke in the turned direction while rapidly pressing A. Bend your thumb to do the B button move. Bend the middle finger to perform the A and B button move. (I bend all my fingers aside from the thumb for this.) If you push the glove forward toward the screen, you do a special move once per stage called the Glove Zap. This automatically defeats one enemy. From watching the lights on the sensor, I learned the Glove Zap is actually performed by pressing both Left and Right together, which makes this move impossible to perform on a standard controller and making it ”exclusive” to the Power Glove.

Each level flows the same way. You begin on the left and need to make your way to the right. Enemies will appear two at a time on screen. You can fight them or you can simply run all the way to the right. Each level has three points where the scrolling stops and you are forced to fight a couple of bad guys before continuing. At the bottom of the screen you see your health bar, the active enemy’s health bar, your score, and lives remaining. The top of the screen displays some buildings that indicate how far along you are in the stage. Every three levels there is a stronger encounter, often with a unique enemy, at the end of the stage. The music changes to signal the event. Upon victory, you are rewarded with an extra scene of Duke celebrating his win or chatting with the local media.

At the beginning of each stage, you are placed on a special screen. You can read some encouraging words from Duke as well as practice your moves against a punching bag. The Force Moves change between levels and each stage has its own set of three moves. This gives the game some variety since you can’t get comfortable with any one move. It is helpful to see what moves you get in a safe space before tackling the level itself.

There are fifteen Force Moves in the game broken up in the manual into three groups. The first group is called the Fast-Footwork Force Moves. The Drop Kick is a standard kick. A Sweep Kick is a low kick that knocks the enemy into the air and stuns him briefly. Trip just knocks a guy down by pulling his legs out from under him. While attacking, you duck down and can avoid some attacks. The Roundhouse Kick is a powerful move with a very long windup that leaves you vulnerable. The High Kick is similar to the Drop Kick, only Duke does a tiny hop during this kick. I like this move a lot because the hop also dodges enemy bullets.

The next set of moves are the Fist-To-Fist Force Moves. Punch is just a standard attack. The Pile Driver lifts an enemy over your head before slamming him literally into the ground, stunning him briefly. The Stooge Hit is analogous to the Roundhouse Kick. It has a significant windup but is pretty strong. The Ear Twist is such a goofy move. You grab the guy by his ears and pull on them. You can hold the move down for a little while and increase the damage. The Arm Spin acts similar to the Ear Twist. You grab an attacker by the arm and spin them around. You can hold the move for more damage, then toss the enemy behind you. It’s a nice move for avoiding combat.

The final set is Fancy Force Moves. In the Aeroplane Spin, you lift an enemy overhead, spin him around a while, and then throw him to the ground. The Body Fling is another attack that doubles as a dodge. You jump into the air and slam on top of an enemy, sending him into the ground with a brief stun. The Gut Knee is an amazing move. You grab the enemy slamming your knee into his gut. This knocks the bad guy into the air, putting you in the best position to grab him again while on the way down to land another Gut Knee. The Head Butt causes the enemy to recoil a bit on attack. Lastly, the Bull Ram does a brief dash forward and you toss the enemy into the air.

There are a few items in the game. An orange spy often appears after forced encounters. Sometimes he will drop a bomb that hurts you if on screen when it blows up. You need to either move forward quickly or hit the bomb with a low attack to disable it. The spy also can drop a heart with wings. Grab it to restore all your health. Some fallen enemies also drop a weapon. You just collect these for points later. At the end of each stage, you see a cutscene where Duke throws each item into a dumpster and gets points for each one.

You start the game with two extra lives. You can earn more lives every 10,000 points. However, you cap off at five lives and any earned beyond that are forfeited. Every death starts the stage over. You can continue twice with a fresh set of lives from the same stage you died. Your score resets to 0, but you do get a chance to enter your initials on the high score list!

This was my first time beating Bad Street Brawler. I first played the game a few years ago for the Nintendo Age contests and reached the final level, only to fail pretty hard when I got there. This is a relatively common game though I do not know if it sold as well as the Power Glove did the first year. I have had a few copies of the game through buying lots. It will only cost you around $5-$7 if you are looking for one.

If you were paying attention, I sort of gave this away already. Unfortunately, I did not complete this game with the Power Glove. Not even close. I spent about three weeks with this game with the intent of beating it with the Power Glove but the results were too inconsistent. The furthest I reached was Stage 8, which is honestly an achievement in and of itself. Most of my runs ended in Stage 3. The mix of enemies, the available Force Moves, and no healing item until the 2/3 point of the level caused me to crumble up a lot. The first time I cleared Level 3, the game locked up on me and I was forced to reset. Perhaps I should have taken that as a sign to move on, but I kept at it. I had a few runs to Stage 5 and one or two to Stage 6 or 7. There wasn’t even any sign of continual improvement because good attempts were scattered among multiple Stage 3 failures. I do think if I kept at it for a long time, maybe things would have clicked and I would have figured it out. Ultimately, I did not want another Ikari Warriors situation where I spent four months on the same game. Settling on a controller clear for this game sounded just as good. I bought a Power Glove with the intent to use it for both this game and Super Glove Ball, so when I reach that game I will have to make good on clearing it with the glove.

This game is still difficult even on controller. Many of the enemies in this game are borderline unfair. A baseball bat wielding punk is a common enemy that normally isn’t hard to deal with. If I let him get close enough to hit me, I normally get whacked a few times before I can counter or escape. Skateboarders telegraph their attacks somewhat, but if you get hit it drops 40% of your health bar in one shot. Good luck if you have to fight two of them at once. Knife-wielding women are hard to approach when they start throwing blades. The worst enemy in the game is the break dancer guy. When he rolls around, he is invincible. You have to get close enough to get him to stand up but stay far enough away to hit him. Then you only get one hit in before his routine loops. Normally I try and jump over him but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I will say most stages are pretty easy. You can run past most of the level and get at least one health refill in the stage. Some Force Moves let you dodge attacks and some let you stun lock enemies where you hit them over and over before they can recover. The levels without these helpful moves are much harder to clear.

My winning run of the game was one of those magical, miracle runs. It started off well enough. Stage 12 is one of those tough levels that typically costs me several lives, but I coasted through everything else. I reached the final stage with 3 lives and both continues but then it all went downhill. The last stage is very hard. It starts off with two break dancers, and then the first forced fight is between a break dancer and a knife thrower. Most of the time I didn’t get past that part. Then you have to pass the next third of the level before you can get a health refill. On one life I scrolled away the health pickup and died shortly thereafter. It was starting to look like a failed run. On my last life of my last continue, I finally broke through. I just barely survived the first section with only two health points left, and I got down to one just before I got the health refill. I had a solid final boss fight to put this game in the books.

I would go as far to say that playing with the Power Glove worked out better than I expected. After all, I’ve heard plenty of tales over the years that the Power Glove is unplayable garbage and what have you. Some facets of the Glove worked out better than others. The directional movements were pretty much spot on. The first thing to figure out is how to position your arm in the sweet spot. For me, it was about 5-6 feet away from the TV screen in the center of the three sensors. You will have to center the glove a ton with the Center button, but Bad Street Brawler provides enough opportunities to do that without pausing. Twisting my wrist to the right worked out okay, but to twist left far enough I had to lift my elbow which was very uncomfortable. The finger bends were by far the most inconsistent, or at worst not working at all. The instructions say to make a fist a few times to calibrate the glove. Maybe I wasn’t doing it right, but I had wildly varying results that often changed mid-game. Grabbing with my four fingers worked much of the time, but bending my thumb rarely worked. Losing the thumb control cost me one entire move unless I used the B button on the glove. I only got it to work well once or twice.

I know I have not made a case for the Power Glove being feasible as a controller, but perhaps I am still optimistic. The trick seems to be finding the optimal conditions. Unfortunately, the documentation around this feels incomplete. This is my best guess at what you need to do to set it up properly, at least for Bad Street Brawler. Get your arm into that sweet spot I mentioned above: In the center of the sensor zone about 5-6 feet away from the TV screen. Press Start to get to the menu, hold your glove in position, center it, make 2-3 gentle fists, center it again, then start the game. On the intro screen, test out all your moves. Make more fists and re-center as often as needed. Now, I couldn’t get it to work consistently well so this is still not optimal. I would say, at best, I was operating about 80% as efficiently as I would with a controller. The Glove Zap is quite helpful when used strategically, closing that control gap a tiny amount. If I could get the calibration routine right, really homed in my Power Glove dexterity, and keep the glove from going out of whack randomly in the middle of a level, I could definitely see me beating the game this way. But that’s just too many factors that have to line up to make it happen, in any sensible timeframe at least.

I understand why Bad Street Brawler was selected as the first of the Power Glove Gaming Series. It is an inherently simple game. Simply walk left to right and beat up a few bad guys using rotating move sets. It’s not a great game though. The graphics are okay, but the color choices are garish are unappealing. The music is just okay. It’s a little bit catchy at times but the tunes are short loops that may become grating. The controls work well with a standard controller and poorly with the Power Glove. The gameplay, despite trying to vary things, is essentially repeating the same things. Some of the enemies, even the early ones, can cheap shot you unfairly. While it is fun and encouraged to stun lock enemies, getting stun locked yourself is frustrating. Overall, this is a below average game. It has kind of grown on me though and I do like it a little bit.

More dragons, more warriors.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 5/24/19 – 6/30/19
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Video: Dragon Warrior III Final Area and Ending

Exactly 50 games later, I’m back with another Dragon Warrior game. The NES does have a few JRPGs of this style, yet the only ones I’ve played so far are all Dragon Warrior games. Actually, I haven’t played many RPGs on this project yet period. The only games remotely close in style I’ve beaten already were AD&D Heroes of the Lance and Gemfire. It’s just a curiosity of the randomized list. I am not complaining though since I thoroughly enjoyed playing through Dragon Warrior III over the course of several weeks.

Dragon Quest III: And thus into Legend… was released in February 1988 on the Famicom in Japan. Just like the other games in the series, the NES version wasn’t released until way later and it was renamed to match the others. Dragon Warrior III appeared on the NES in March 1992, over four years later! The game was developed by Chunsoft and published by Enix. There were many ports and remakes of this game. A Super Famicom remake released in 1996, and the Game Boy Color port appeared in 2001. The game was also ported to mobile phones as well as the Wii. The English Android/iOS release in 2014 added the subtitle The Seeds of Salvation.

For more information on the series, check out my previous posts of Dragon Warrior and Dragon Warrior II. For this review, I will be focusing on things new to this installment in the series.

The story for this game is simple. Our hero awakes on his 16th birthday at home in the kingdom of Aliahan. He is now of age to begin a great adventure, and that first step begins with visiting the king. When you meet with him, he tells you of the archfield Baramos and gives you the task to defeat him. From here, you will travel the world in search of Baramos.

One of the first things you will do before you leave the castle is build your party. On the west end of town is Luisa’s Place and you can do a few special things here. The first counter you will see is for the Vault. You can leave items and gold here and retrieve them later. There is a cost associated with retrieving stored items, but since you will hit full item capacity on your journey this is a great place to stash things for later. Saving your gold here protects it from being lost if your party is wiped out in battle. Past the Vault is the counter where you can add new members to your party. In Dragon Warrior III you can have a party of four people. The default characters available for your party right now are a Soldier, a Pilgrim, and a Wizard. This is the recommended party for starting out and the group I went with. These members are pre-assigned a name and a gender. My party was all men. I had Ragnar the Soldier, Petrus the Pilgrim, and Mathias the Wizard.

If you go upstairs, you can register brand new party members. You can choose the name, the sex, and the class. There are eight characters classes in Dragon Warrior III. Your main character is the Hero class which is an exclusive class with strong stats all around as well as some unique spells. The Soldier is a very strong warrior that can equip most weapons and armor. Soldiers level up quickly but cannot cast spells. Pilgrims are average strength characters with a set of healing and effect spells. Wizards are more fragile but can cast powerful attack spells. More or less, Pilgrims have white magic and Wizards have black magic. Fighters have very high agility, leading them to attack quickly in battle and they have a high critical hit rate. The tradeoff is that the Fighter cannot equip most things and is more effective fighting with bare hands than with most weapons. The Merchant is an average character with a couple of unique capabilities. Merchants can obtain more gold from defeated enemies in battle and they have the ability to appraise items. Select an item held by a Merchant and choose the Appraise option to see who can use the item or how much it might be sold for in a store. The Goof-Off does not offer much in battle. They do have a very high luck stat which helps in getting rare item drops from enemies. Finally, the Sage is a strong class with average battle capabilities but can cast both Pilgrim and Wizard spells. Unfortunately, you cannot start off with a Sage and have to wait to add one to your party until later in the adventure.

With a full party, you are now ready to leave town and begin your adventure, just in time to see the next major development of Dragon Warrior III. This game has a day and night cycle which can impact your journey. The longer you walk outside, time passes and the color palette changes to indicate the time of day. Stronger monsters may appear at nighttime. Shops are closed at night, though inns are always open. Towns are often different at night as far as the townspeople and what they tell you. Several events in the game occur only at day or night. There are a few things you can do to influence the cycle, aside from wandering the overworld. For instance, staying at an inn always brings you back to the start of the day when you wake up. Later in the game, you have more direct options to change to either day or night.

Some towns or castles in the game contain a battle arena. This is like a gambling mini-game where you can watch a fight and bet on which monster will win. You can get the odds of victory or see what other spectators think might happen in a match. You can then place your bet, pick your fighter, and watch a battle play out automatically among the monsters. This is something I only did one time just for kicks. I would rather spend time continuing the journey, but who knows, maybe this is a good way to earn cash quickly if you can game the system somehow.

Speaking of combat, random battles in this game are just like in Dragon Warrior II. Enemies can appear in groups and you decide which group you attack. There is still the problem of wasting an attack on an enemy group that no longer exists. However, I figured out over the course of many battles that your party members do attack somewhat intelligently. When attacking a group, the attacker tends to target the monster with the most HP remaining that they can take out in one hit. In Dragon Warrior II, it sure seemed random which player hit which monster. This is quite helpful for the speed of the game because combat is already plentiful in these games. One issue with this I found was that the AI tends to spread hits around evenly in a group if all the monsters have high HP, meaning those baddies tend to stick around longer. A more intelligent system might opt to gang up on one monster in a group in those situations. As it stands, I do like this hidden system and I’m glad it’s something I paid attention to.

There is one new status ailment in the game. In addition to becoming poisoned, confused, put to sleep, or cursed, now you can become numbed by paralysis. In this state, you cannot do anything except wait it out. It will eventually go away by walking on the world map, or you can use an item or spell to remove the status. Should all your party members become numbed, you lose the fight. I had this happen to me one time and I made sure it didn’t happen again.

The spell list is more expansive in this game. Three character classes, Hero, Pilgrim, and Wizard, all get spells and some are unique to that class. Many of them are various attack spells that are elemental in nature and can target individuals, groups, or entire enemy parties. Rather than go over every spell, I want to draw attention to a few interesting ones. There are two revive spells. Vivify only works half the time to bring back a party member with half HP, while Revive works nearly every time and gives full HP. X-Ray is used to examine treasure chests before opening. Some treasure chests are enemies and this spell lets you know if the chest is safe or not. The DayNight spell lets you switch between day or night. You can turn invisible with the Invisible spell, which can be useful for encounters both good and bad. Bounce can be cast on an ally to have all magic spells bounced back to the caster. BeDragon lets you turn into a dragon and breathe flames every turn for the duration of a battle. Transform lets the caster turn into another party member for the entire fight. The last two related spells I want to mention are Expel and Limbo. This lets you knock enemies out of fights with no gold or experience gained. Expel works on a full party while Limbo only targets one enemy but is much more successful. Sometimes a enemy will cast Limbo on you, and if it works that member is removed from the party entirely. Don’t worry, you can get your ally back but you have to look for him somewhere in the world.

A good part of the way through the game, you can find a place that lets you change your character classes. There are a few rules around this. First off, you cannot change your Hero at all, since he is one of a kind. A character must reach at least level 20 before changing class. After class change, that character goes back to level 1 with half of his current stats. He keeps any spells learned to that point. This is also the only way you can become a Sage if you meet the criteria. Since each class has some better stats than others, you can shape your party any way you want, given enough time grinding for levels.

The overall flow of the game is similar to the previous one. Roughly halfway through the game or so you get a ship that opens up the entire world. This time instead of collecting five crests, you are searching for six orbs. The map is just as large as in Dragon Warrior II, maybe even larger. Since early on you move around through travel doors between some destinations, it can be a little tricky to piece together the entire map. This game came with an insert containing the world map and charts for monsters, spells, weapons, armor, and items. The manual is a tall, 80-page book that even contains a partial walkthrough and tips for some more difficult sections. While not essential to beating the game, it does help. I did not need the walkthrough but I did refer to the map once or twice.

I beat Dragon Warrior III one time before about 10 years ago. I remember spending a lot of time sitting on the couch in my apartment just grinding away at the game on an emulator. I had picked up all four Dragon Warrior loose carts many years before but I was not able to beat the game on a real cart until now. I had tried several times. It always happened after playing for a few hours where the console got bumped, the game locked up, and I was forced to reset to an empty save file. This was long before I knew how to take games apart and clean the pins. I have owned at least a couple of copies of this game before, including my current CIB copy with the map in decent shape. Just to be sure, I know I let my old cart go in favor of a different one with a confirmed good save battery. Now that I clean carts and consoles I didn’t have any issues holding a save the entire time playing. Dragon Warrior III has always retained value. Loose carts sell around $50-$60 with CIB copies at $150+.

It had been long enough since my first playthrough that I didn’t remember all that much about the finer details of this game, including where most of the quest items were. I knew enough though to have a solid attack plan, particularly around class changes. I changed Ragnar from a Soldier to a Fighter and converted Mathias from a Wizard to a Sage. Switching to a Fighter was a bit experimental. I thought it might be useful to have a decent fighter with high agility. That worked out for a couple of reasons. Fighters are better at getting critical hits and his attack stayed high enough that I could deal out some heavy damage early in a turn. The other thing is that Fighters only benefit from a few cheap pieces of equipment, versus Soldiers that can equip many expensive items. Extra gold in my pocket freed me up to spend on my other characters earlier. Having a Wizard become a Sage gave me two good characters with healing spells, since Sages learn two sets of magic. I always opt for having good healing options in my RPGs whenever I get a choice.

There were a few interesting notes concerning this playthrough. I spent over five weeks beating the game, and one of those weeks I was away on business. I was able to take my game with me in an unexpected way. The AVS can connect to a computer and it has the capability to both apply and back up save files from an emulator. Before my trip, I dumped my save file to the computer, then I continued that file on my laptop that I brought with me. When I got home, I put my updated save file back to the cart and completed the game from there on normal hardware. I’m really glad I tried out that feature. I’ll be using that again to back up save files on longer games. This time I kept better track of my hours spent on the game. I beat the game in a little over 36 hours, right in line with the 30-40 hour estimate I had in mind. I feel like I did very well in solving issues and finding items as they came up throughout the game. Perhaps I had some of those events stuffed into my subconscious from my previous playthrough. Lastly, I am a tiny bit disappointed that I remembered a twist that occurs in the endgame. It would have been nice to have experienced that anew.

If you like these kinds of games, you will find a lot to like about Dragon Warrior III. In some ways it doesn’t feel all that different from Dragon Warrior II. It certainly is less of a leap from the second to the third as it was from the original to the sequel. Most of the main beats are the same. There’s a linear start, then the world opens up with a ship, then you explore the world looking for items, then that opens up the end of the game which is quite challenging. Then again, this game is quite different. The map is new, the enemies are almost completely different, there are more spells to learn, more items to buy, and more places to visit. Changing classes has a huge effect on the way the game is played, making it easier if you can find the right tweaks to make and put in the time to build up your characters. The difficulty curve is gentler than the second game which I found a welcome improvement. The graphics, music, and gameplay are all very good. I imagine the NES version is not the definitive version of Dragon Quest III, but the game does stand up as one of the best RPGs on the console.