Where there’s lightning, there’s Thundercade.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 3/10/19 – 3/16/19
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 7/10
My Video: Thundercade Longplay

Thundercade appears to be an unassuming game. It’s a scrolling shoot-em-up and an arcade port. These are things we’ve seen come up time and time again, and there will be plenty more like this. There’s just one thing that sets Thundercade apart from the rest. This game is hiding a deep, dark secret. Not a malicious one this time, but it’s something quite extreme that I haven’t seen before on the NES. But before we get there, let’s take a look at this game.

Thundercade was released in arcades in 1987. It was developed by SETA and published by Romstar. The game is also known as Twin Formation in some regions. The only other platform the game appeared on was the NES in July 1989. The NES port was developed by Micronics, published by American Sammy, and released only in North America. This is the first American Sammy published game I have played for this project.

Unlike the arcade version, the NES version included a brief story in the manual. The AATOM, Atomic Age Terrorist Organization of Miracali, has built a nuclear power plant and are threatening to destroy the world with it. You play the role of a combat motorcycle driver under Operation Thundercade with the goal of stopping the terrorist threat. The mission takes place over four areas, culminating in a final battle at the nuclear plant. Destroy the power plant to complete your mission and beat the game.

This is a relatively simple game with simple controls. Use the D-pad to move your motorcycle in all directions. Press B to fire your cannons. You have unlimited shots but no autofire. Press the A button to deploy bombs via your air support. Bombs typically remove all enemy shots from the screen while dealing heavy damage to parts of the screen. If you deploy another bomb right after the first, then the bomb pattern for the second bomb covers more of the screen. You start the game with three bombs as indicated by the B in the lower left of the screen. You also see the number of lives remaining at the bottom and your score on top. This game has two player simultaneous play with the second player’s information on the right side.

Your normal cannon fires single bullets straight ahead, which are weak in the thick of the fight. Supplement your firepower by attaching side cars. This setup is reminiscent of Tiger-Heli (another Micronics-developed NES port) and its support helicopters. You can find side cars out in the open or within destructible objects like buildings. Simply drive into them to attach them to your motorcycle. They attach to whichever side of the motorcycle you touch and you can have one on both sides at the same time. Collecting a new side car replaces the old one on that side. Some side cars fire shots horizontally while others supplement your vertical shots. You can mix and match to your heart’s desire. Side cars are destroyed when shot, acting as defensive tools since they shield you from taking damage. Your motorcycle is otherwise destroyed in a single hit. There are several different kinds of side cars and you can find more powerful ones later in the game.

There are other pickups to find besides side cars. Red bomb icons add a bomb to your reserves. You can also find 1up icons for those precious extra motorcycles. The V-shaped icon is a Vulcan cannon which is a very powerful weapon. You automatically get two side cars with cannons that fire large bullets in a V-formation. This is hands down my favorite weapon in the game. You get to keep it until you die, lose a side car, or collect a different side car. These items are all hidden in the environment and you need to blow up various objects to reveal them.

There’s one more item that sends you off to a bonus game. At the end of the first two stages is a boss battle with a huge gunship. It has multiple turrets that you must destroy. If you take too long to defeat it, enemy support helicopters start appearing and the fight is much more difficult. If you can manage to defeat the gunship before that happens, then the bonus stage item appears behind it. The bonus game is an opportunity to grab a bunch of items. The view changes to side scrolling and a plane will fly overhead, dropping the goods. Steer left and right to collect them as they fall. Most of the items are parachutes that contain four missiles each. At the start of the next stage, you will automatically fire these powerful missiles when you shoot your normal cannons. Too bad they only last at the start of the following stage because they are quite powerful. You can also collect bombs, 1ups, and Vulcan cannons from the bonus stage. You also enter the bonus stage for free just for completing the third stage.

There’s an interesting game mechanic that comes up from time to time. There are sometimes inclines or other hazards such as pools of water that you can jump over. Simply drive into the obstacle to fly high. While airborne, your movement is slowed considerably, but you fly over all enemies’ shots and so you can’t be hurt during this time. Just make sure to steer to a safe landing spot.

While you don’t have too many lives to spare in Thundercade, there’s only a few ways you can be killed. You can touch most solid objects freely without being damaged. You will die however if you get squished against the bottom of the screen due to scrolling. Enemy bullets and the enemies themselves will beat you when you touch them. You are able to defeat basic enemy soldiers by driving into them. Given your advantage over them it makes sense, but not too many games implement a feature like that.

You start the game with three lives. You don’t earn lives from points in this game, only from 1up items. There are several of them in the game if you know where to look. Dying gives you a new motorcycle as play continues, as well as a fresh set of three bombs. Lose all of your motorcycles and it is Game Over. You then see a screen showing a map of your overall progress, the total number of shots fired, number of enemy hits, and your hit rate as a percentage. It’s curious to see your hit rate in a game that encourages you to shoot everything, thereby decreasing your rate. You get the same screen after completing each stage too. You can continue your game twice and the game will place you at a nearby checkpoint within the current stage. If you can clear the third stage, you earn a third continue.

This was my first time playing Thundercade. This is a game I know I’ve seen before in old gaming magazines that I never got a chance to play until now. It looked interesting but not interesting enough to rent or find cheaply. It turns out it is a cheap, common game that can be had for about $5.

Playing this game can be a bit slow going at first, but most of the game isn’t really that difficult. Bombs and side cars are plentiful and they helped me make rapid progress. After a few tries, I reached the final stage. I found that the last half of the final stage was a steep upturn in difficulty. There’s a big section with these huge turrets that emerge from the ground. Not long after they pop up they fire a string of missiles in your direction. Having good side cars is crucial here, otherwise your normal shot can’t really keep up and there’s not a lot of wiggle room to get around. The final showdown at the nuclear plant is also really difficult. There are ten snipers that briefly appear at each of ten windows. All of them aim at you but at different intervals, so you have to weave around all the bullets carefully over just the lower part of the screen. Worst of all is that your bombs here don’t remove enemy bullets. It can be a long, grueling fight. Each sniper takes several hits to defeat, but eventually you’ll defeat a few making the fight easier the longer it goes on. My run for my longplay video was just okay. I used a continue in Level 2 and another in the last stage. I’ve made it to the last part on the first credit before.

Now it’s time for the big reveal of this game’s deep, dark secret. This isn’t exactly a spoiler since it’s easy to miss. Thundercade has a special ending. If you beat the game, you might notice that this game doesn’t loop again like many shooters do. You have to let the game sit on the ending screen for roughly one hour of real time before the special ending appears. There will be a procession of tanks and soldiers, followed by a developer message written in Japanese. I suppose the localizers missed this entirely, but can you blame them? Thanks to The Cutting Room Floor, you can read the translation of the special message. After all that wait, it doesn’t stay on the screen very long before going back to the title screen. I left my recording running so I captured the special ending. I left the room with the game running but managed to walk back in the room in time to watch most of this ending live.

Even though Micronics has a poor reputation as far as their game output on NES, Thundercade is a pretty decent shooter that I enjoyed. The whole package is not incredibly special. The graphics are okay. They did a good job with all the destructible buildings and things. The music is repetitive – there’s only one main song throughout most of the game – but I found it catchy enough and didn’t get tired of it. The controls were responsive. The game mechanics have mostly been found elsewhere, which is a little disappointing. Overall, I consider it an average, run-of-the-mill type game. There are plenty of better NES shooters, but Thundercade isn’t all that bad and it is worth trying out if you like shoot-em-ups.

Now Get Ready To Catch The Magic!

To Beat: Win a game
Played: 3/10/19
Difficulty: 2/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Magic Johnson’s Fast Break Longplay

I realize that many of these reviews I write are too wordy and descriptive. It’s kind of my thing and I’m not going to stop doing it this way. Deep dives can be interesting and fun! Magic Johnson’s Fast Break is testing my ability here. So far, I have been able to find enough to write about for all the sports games I’ve done so far, but Magic Johnson’s Fast Break is such a bare bones game that this is destined to be one of my shortest reviews. Sorry if that will disappoint you! I’ll see what I can do.

Magic Johnson’s Fast Break was originally released in arcades in 1988. It was developed by Arcadia Systems. The game was also called Magic Johnson’s Basketball in some cases. It was released on several home computers as well as the NES. Software Creations developed and Tradewest published the NES version of the game. It released in March 1990 and was a US-only release.

Since it’s called Magic Johnson’s Fast Break, Magic Johnson’s likeness is featured in this two-on-two basketball game. This game was also sponsored by Pepsi and you can see the old Pepsi logo in the game. Leaving some of that graphical flair aside, this is a simple basketball game. You can only play single games and you just need to win one game to consider this one beaten.

When you start up the game, you’ll see a nice-looking title screen. Leave it on the screen for awhile and you’ll see a profile for Magic Johnson next to a picture of his face. Then you’ll see some developer credits. You’ll also see an attract mode of the game play. Press Start to bring up the menu. You can choose from either one-player, two-player, or four-player game. Yes, Magic Johnson’s Fast Break supports the NES Four Score accessory. After this selection, for a single player game only, choose the computer’s difficulty setting from A-E. A is Rookie, B is Average, C is Advanced, D is Expert, and E is Professional. Then you start the game!

This is a two-on-two full court basketball game. You control the blue team with your basket on the left. The opponent is the red team shooting for the opposite basket on the right. Two-player games have the first player playing the blue team and the second player using the red team. In a four-player game, the first two controllers are for the blue team and Controllers 3 and 4 are used to move the red team. Each game of basketball consists of four, three-minute quarters. Every quarter begins with a jumpball to see which team gets control. Press either A or B to jump for the ball and pass it to a teammate. During play, the view scrolls left and right to follow the ball-carrier.

Controls in the game are easy. Use the D-pad to move around. You only control one player at a time as indicated by an arrow. Switch control to the other player by pressing B. When holding the ball, B passes the ball to the other player while also switching control. Press A to shoot the ball or press A to try and steal the ball from the opposing team. You also steal the ball if you are in the middle of a pass attempt between players. You can press A to jump and try to recover a rebound.

The referee will blow the whistle to signal the end of the quarter. You transition over to a statistics screen. You see the score for both teams. You can view the attempts, shots made, and percentages for both free throws and field goals. For three-point shots, you only see the number made. You also see the number of rebounds and steals. Press A to move on. You get to see Magic’s face again along with some advice for the next quarter based on how you played.

You can get fouled in the game or commit fouls. The most common violation you will likely see is the back court violation. Once you bring the basketball to your half of the court, you can’t step back over the line again or you cause the violation and have to give up the ball. This is not actually considered a foul, however. Each team can commit up to five fouls each quarter and turn the ball over to the other team. Any fouls after that award free throws. There was only one foul in the entire match that I committed, so I didn’t see anyone shoot any free throws and I don’t know how it works. If back court violations had counted I might have seen some free throws.

Magic Johnson’s Fast Break also has a salary system. Depending on the difficulty of the opponent and how well you play against them, at the end of a game you will be given a salary. You don’t get to spend the money on anything; you just see what you earned. If you think that sounds like a high score table, you would be correct. You can enter in your initials and everything. There’s no visibility into the scoring system at all, just the final tally at the end.

This was my first time playing Magic Johnson’s Fast Break. This is the third of ten NES basketball games I’ve played so far. It’s a common cart that is dirt cheap. If you collect NES, you probably have this one already without even trying. I have only owned a few copies of this game though. One copy I sold had checkerboard lines cutting through the entire label down to the plastic. I guess someone thought so highly of this game that they decided it would be more fun mutilating the game than playing it.

When I booted up the game for the first time, I decided to try playing on a lighter difficulty just to get a feel for the game. My goal is always to find some kind of exploit in the AI or a way to consistently hit three-pointers. I played through a quarter on Average difficulty, and though I didn’t find a good technique, I was leading by 10 points already. I reset the game, started the recording, and set the game to Professional difficulty. After the first quarter this time, I was losing by a score of 38-24. I figured it out partway through the second quarter, cruising to a final score of 139-101. The best place I found to shoot threes is from the top of the key. (I think that’s the right terminology.) On an inbound, position your other player at either sideline at midcourt. Then pass the ball to him and you will be in good position to go right to the spot and shoot. Any misses are compensated by the times you will steal the ball back from the opposing team. I didn’t have any trouble taking and keeping the lead once I got consistent at getting to the right spot to shoot. I finished with a salary of $2.4M which was good for 2nd place. A better first quarter should have put me at the top spot but reaching the top of the chart was not important to me for this game.

I guess that’s pretty much everything to say about this game. It’s not an awful game, just trimmed down to the bone. The music was written by Tim Follin, my favorite NES composer, so it’s got great tunes that are a bright spot here. The graphics, controls, and gameplay are all at least average. It’s a very easy game to beat and the quickest one to finish so far. Compared to the other two basketball games I’ve played, Roundball and Jordan Vs. Bird, I would put this one at the bottom of the list. There’s just no substance to this game at all, especially for a 1990 release. The game kind of reminds me of NBA Jam without any of the things that made that game interesting and fun. There’s no player selection, no dunks, none of that good stuff, just the same visual perspective, the two-on-two action, and lots of stealing the ball. Happy to have another game quickly checked off the list!

Another one of Namco’s iconic characters gets his own land!

To Beat: Finish Level 4-8
Played: 3/8/19 – 3/9/19
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Mappy-Land Longplay

Mappy was a popular arcade game by Namco that released in 1983. The NES received many arcade ports during its lifespan, including many other Namco classics such as Galaga and Pac-Man. Mappy did get a Famicom port but never saw an NES release. Instead, what we got was Mappy-Land, a console-only sequel that extends the formula from a score-based arcade game to an adventure game. Let’s dive in and see how that panned out.

Mappy-Land was developed by Tose. It was first released on the Famicom in November 1986. There it was published by Namco. The NES version in North America came out way later in April 1989, published by Taxan. It was also included on Wii U Virtual Console worldwide in 2015. This game and the arcade original were the only two Mappy games released in the US. Japan had the arcade sequel Hopping Mappy in 1986 and a Famicom platformer in 1989 called Mappy Kids.

In Mappy-Land, you play the role of Mappy over four different stories, most of which center around Mapico, Mappy’s girlfriend. In the first story, you are collecting cheese as a present for Mapico’s birthday. In Story 2, you gather wedding rings because Mappy wants to marry Mapico. The third story has you collecting Christmas trees for a party. In the final story, you find baseballs for Mappy Jr.’s birthday party. Each of these stories consist of eight areas, so in all there are 32 areas to clear in Mappy-Land to consider the game beaten.

This is a simple maze-chase style game with equally simple controls. The D-pad controls Mappy. You can walk left and right. Press Up or Down to use ladders. The B button lets Mappy perform a small jump. Most items are in the air and Mappy jumps to grab them, and even though B-button jumping is normally something I hate, it didn’t bother me this time. The A button is used for deploying weapons. That’s all there is to it.

The ground rules for this game are also simple, mostly following from the original Mappy arcade game. You start on the bottom left and the enemies, the cat Nyamco and his crew of Mukies, begin pursuing Mappy from the upper right. This is a scrolling game that expands several screens horizontally. The structure of each level is four floors high that are sometimes connected by ladders. Empty vertical columns often contain a trampoline at the bottom that Mappy and the enemies can use to switch between the floors. Mappy passes through all enemies unharmed while on the trampoline. You can only get off the trampoline while moving upward, and after a few consecutive bounces the trampoline will vanish until you either get off or fall through to your death. Mappy loses a life if he collides with an enemy or if he falls, except when he is either on or leaving a trampoline. You can also fall on top of a partial ladder and be okay. The goal of each level is to collect the six items from the story, then exit to the right.

Since you can’t always navigate your way around all the pursuing enemies, you have some defensive weapons at your disposal. These are displayed in a row at the top of the screen and you can collect more as you find them. Press A to use them, however you can only the item positioned at the end of the list, so the last item collected is the first one used. You start off with three cat toys. Mukies will get distracted by them allowing you to pass through them, but Nyamco is unaffected. Coins do just the opposite; they distract Nyamco but the Mukies don’t bother with them. Pots cause Mukies to faint, letting you pass by safely. Fish are thrown forward and bounce ahead, which causes all enemies to chase them.

Each of the eight areas has a different visual theme, a different costume that Nyamco wears, and a unique attacking weapon that shows up at fixed locations in the stages. The first area is Railroad Town and it contains pulleys. Grab one and Mappy will slide to the left, knocking out any enemies in the way. The second area is Western World and there are punching bags. Jumping into one cause it to rock back and forth for a while which knocks out passing enemies. The next area is Tropical World with fireworks. These are like bombs. Set them up with a jump and they will sit there until an enemy passes and it explodes. The fourth area is Jungle World. This area has a different structure from the others. There are no weapons here, but the level layout is a wide open space with no floors and no enemies that actively pursue you. There are trampolines strewn about, many of which are high up off the ground and slide left and right. Use these trampolines to catch and cling to vines that help you cross pools of water. You can fall safely after bouncing and you can control Mappy with Left and Right as you fall, but you must land on a trampoline after leaping from a vine or you will lose a life.

The fifth area is Pirate World. This one has horizontal bars and Mappy will swing around them for a time, hitting any enemies that pass by. The sixth area is Ghost Town which also has a different play style than the other stages. This is another open area where Mappy uses a balloon to fly around. Use the D-pad to fly in any direction. Mappy is armed with an infinite use flashlight that he shines when you press A. The cats fly around as ghosts and you can vanish them with the flashlight. Here you collect keys to open a door leading to a side area. You have to find an item here that lets you pass through to the end of the stage. The next area is Seventh Avenue and it contains sticks that you bop from underneath to hurt enemies above you. I never was able to utilize these when I played. The final area is Muky Town. There are bowling balls that roll along the ground when you release them, taking out enemies along the way. Instead of going off to the right when you collect all the items, you must enter the castle door in the center. This takes you to another side area with no enemies and a new set of items. You must collect all the items here and reach Mapico at the end of the area before the level song completes. If you fail, you are awarded no bonus points but you get to repeat that part again as many times as needed without losing any lives. Complete it to earn a point bonus, then you go to the first area of the next story.

As you proceed through the stories, the enemies start chasing you faster and thus are harder to avoid. Some areas also have the exit blocked, just like how I described above about Ghost Town. In that case, you need to locate the sub area that opens once all items are gathered. Inside the sub area, you have to collect another item that lets you pass through to the end of the main area outside. The entrance to the sub area is often telegraphed by a doorway in the background that you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.

Now I’ll cover a few miscellaneous features and tips about Mappy-Land. Sometimes, the necessary sub area is made a little bit harder to find because you need to jump into the entrance. This tripped me up on one specific level. You can use both kinds of weapons together. For instance, you can distract a bunch of Mukies with the cat toy and then run them all over with the pulley in the first stage. Combo attacks like this also earn you a bunch of points. It is also possible to jump over a single enemy if you get trapped. I wasn’t aware this was possible until I re-read the manual after beating the game. Even though it’s not necessary for beating the game, I know it would have been handy to know that.

Mappy begins with two extra lives. There are no extra life pickups but you do earn a free life at 40,000 points. I didn’t score much higher than that so I don’t know if you can earn more lives or not. Dying in a level maintains the items collected, and that’s helpful for clearing some of the more difficult areas. You have unlimited continues to use when you run out of lives. You go back to the title screen but you can choose the Continue option on the main menu to restart the latest level. Be careful to manually select the Continue option so that you don’t accidentally start from the beginning and lose your progress. Mappy-Land has your back anyway in case that happens. The game features a built-in Stage Select option. You can choose to play any story and any odd-numbered area in that story. This means you can skip straight to 4-7 from the start and only have to play two areas to get the proper ending!

This was my first time playing through Mappy-Land. I only played one area during my initial cart testing. I remember reading about this game in my old gaming magazines. I didn’t get a chance to try it until I collected the game as an adult. I haven’t personally come across many copies of this game, but it is reasonably common. A loose cart sells for around $8 or so. My copy has some label peeling, so I wouldn’t mind running into a condition upgrade in the future.

I didn’t have much trouble beating this game for the first time. This is a straightforward game that you can just keep trying until you get through. There are a few tricky spots to cope with. Jungle World is cumbersome at first with the floating trampolines and unintuitive physics. If you don’t catch the vines in the right way, it is possible to fall to your doom between them. It reminds me of Spelunker but not in a good way. Some of the later levels are laid out where one of the objects you need is located on a one-way path. It can be tricky to get the enemies to cooperate so you can get through, but that’s why you have your weapons. I would take an intentional death just to ensure I could get an item in an out of the way location. This is a minor spoiler, but there’s a level where the floors are invisible unless you have a torch that you found in the previous area. If you have to continue on that stage then you are locked out of the torch altogether. While possible to navigate blind, it is really helpful to see the layout at least once before. I didn’t have to go back a level via the stage select or anything, but that was an option I might have considered if I were stuck for a long time. My longplay video was my second attempt and it went well enough. I got stuck for several minutes on 4-1, which was the only major blemish in an otherwise average run.

I had a fun time playing Mappy-Land, though it’s not without its issues. The graphics are simplistic but detailed enough with the different backgrounds and costumes for Nyamco. They might be nice for 1986 standards but not as great by 1989 when it reached the NES. I liked the music and how there was a different song for every area. They even brought back the original Mappy song for one of the sub-areas. The controls are easy to learn and use. The gameplay is okay but it gets repetitive. It’s not a terribly long game, but 32 levels of being chased around simple mazes is quite enough. The mechanics drag this game down a little bit. Mappy can fall from any height after bouncing off a trampoline and be fine, yet if he takes a tiny fall of a ledge he dies. But you can fall onto a half-ladder with no trouble. The rules don’t really make sense, but to be fair, neither does passing through deadly enemies on the trampoline. The Jungle World is the worst offender here, trying to flesh out some platforming that doesn’t fit the style of this game. Ghost Town with the floating balloon does it much better. The game is a little bit janky overall. I haven’t sold the game well here, but I had fun playing it and I appreciate its modest difficulty and some nice touches along the way.

Just your everyday police officer.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 2/27/19 – 3/2/19
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Video: Street Cop Longplay

We are dipping back into the world of Power Pad games for this one. Street Cop by name alone would not provide any indication that this is meant for the Power Pad. It seems to me like it would be some kind of action or adventure game instead. It turns out that’s exactly what it is! There is nothing else like this game on the NES and I’m excited to share it with you today.

Family Trainer: Manhattan Police is the sixth game in the Family Trainer series of Power Pad games on the Famicom. The game was developed by Sonata (later known as Human Entertainment) and published by Bandai. The Famicom version came out in August 1987. The NES version, renamed Street Cop, was released in June 1989. The NES versions of the Bandai Power Pad games did not appear in the same order of release as Japan. Super Team Games, for instance, was the next game in the Family Trainer series in Japan but appeared on NES several months before Street Cop debuted.

Street Cop is an action/adventure game that uses the Power Pad controller. You play the role of “Little Ben,” a new police officer fresh out of the academy. He always hoped from a young age to be a detective, and you get to help make his dreams come true. In this game, you take to the streets of Manhattan. There are six stages in the game, each one featuring a bad guy on a wanted poster. You beat the game once you arrest all six main criminals.

Before we get into the game description, let’s recap briefly on the setup for this game. You will plug a standard controller into the first controller port on the NES. Then plug in the Power Pad to the second controller port. This game uses Side B of the Power Pad. In this configuration, there are three rows of four buttons each. All buttons are numbered from 1 to 12. The first row contains buttons 1 to 4, the middle row is 5 through 8, and the last row is 9 to 12.

Here is how you control Little Ben with the Power Pad. The neutral position is standing on buttons 6 and 7, right in the middle of the Power Pad. Alternate presses by either walking or running on those buttons to move forward. There are three different running speeds depending on how quickly you move. If you jump in place, Little Ben will jump, but you need to be standing on both buttons before you jump and sometimes it doesn’t respond like you would expect. You face either left or right and you are locked into that direction. To turn around, step once on either 10 or 11 in the bottom row. To move sideways, step on either 5 or 8 to sidestep one time in that direction. You will move in or out on the screen depending on the direction you are facing. If you need to walk into a building or down an alleyway, turn right by standing on 3 and 7 or turn left by standing on 2 and 6. The idea is you need to turn your body and face in the direction you want Little Ben to turn. The corner buttons are for using items. Thrown items can be tossed by pressing 1. Little Ben wields a baton at the bad guys by stepping on 4. Either 9 or 12 is used for any secondary items you may be holding. You also have the option to use the controller for a couple of options. Press B to use throwing items and press A to swing the baton.

All six levels have similar structure. In each stage, you see a wanted poster with the main bad guy you need to arrest. At the bottom of the wanted poster are images of some cohorts of the criminal along with a count. First you need to track down and capture all the cohorts. Then you will be able to track down the primary baddie. Some levels have two different types of cohorts. Each stage has a different layout you must explore.

The bottom of the screen shows information you need. On the left is the stage timer and Little Ben’s health meter. You get ten minutes to clear each stage. In the middle is the map of the level. Your position is represented as a blue dot, while an X appears where a bad guy is located. The right side shows how many cohorts are left to track down, as well as ammo for any items you find.

Capturing criminals can prove to be a little tricky. You can only go after one at a time. If his or her position shows up on the map, you first have to chase them down. When you catch up and see them, then you have to line yourself up with the criminal. The city streets have three running lanes. You can do the sidestep maneuver to change between those lanes at any time. The bad guys also switch lanes frequently. Once you get lined up with them, then you need to draw close enough to use either your throwing items or your baton. While enemies move relatively slowly, it’s tough sometimes to get everything to line up while navigating the controls. An easier way to catch a criminal is to knock them down by running into them at full speed. It doesn’t always trigger, but it works often enough that I found it to be the preferred method of fighting. Many enemies take more than one hit to defeat. Sometimes it works out where I can run into them once, and when they get up they walk right into me so I can baton them.

Each stage has a unique criminal to capture as well as some minor differences in the gameplay. In Stage 1, you capture Snatcher Joe. This is a basic level with only one strip of street to explore. This is a great introduction to the controls with plenty of time to meet your goal and get acquainted with the movement. As you walk through the city, there will be other pedestrians walking around, but you don’t interact with them and just walk right past them. It should be clear enough who is good and who is bad. Along the way you may find soda cans. Just walk into them to collect them, then press 1 to throw them. This simple stage does have one little trick to it. You might meet up with the enemy on the map but don’t see him walking around. In that case, he is hiding in one of the trash cans on the top row. Go up to the trash can and smack it with the baton to lure the bad guy out. He won’t hide again unless he goes off screen. Once all the cohorts are gone, then track down Snatcher Joe. He takes several hits to capture.

Stage 2 has you looking for Speedy Louis. This stage is more expansive than the first one, with a larger map connected with various alleyways. You will need to learn the turning controls to proceed down those paths. Another thing you need to learn is watching yourself on the map to make sure you are going the way you expect. When on the top row of the map, if you run to the right for example, your position on the map moves left instead. Just something to be aware of. This stage introduces a couple of new elements. There are some sewer entrances as holes on the street. Avoid them. Falling into one is always a setback and there is nothing down there for you to find at all. If you get stuck there, you need to move all the way to the right, jump onto the rightmost step, and then jump again to get out of the sewer. This level also introduces some other powerups. A clock adds one minute to the stage timer, up to the initial ten minutes. Picking up a can with a heart on it refills a portion of your health meter. Specific to this stage, you will find throwable bombs used as projectile weapons. One guy also holds a V-Max Turbo Drink. Just having this in your possession lets you run fast enough to chase down Speedy Louis.

In Stage 3, you must locate and capture Animal S. This stage consists of two long streets connected by a warehouse. If the enemy shows up on the other side of the street, then you need to cross through the warehouse. That section is a pure side-scrolling area with a single lane through to the other side. You’ll have to jump over boxes to get across. This stage has oranges you can pick up for throwing weapons. You also find a hyper drink useful for capturing Animal S. Animal S is one tough character. He has a charge attack that knocks you down on contact. He is very tough in a straight up fight. Here you will want to press 9 or 12 to use the hyper drink. You will turn red for a short time and Animal S can’t hurt you. Throwing items are also effective, especially when the drink effects wear off.

In Stage 4, you go after Big Burger. He can be found at the top of a skyscraper under construction and you will need to climb up after him one floor at a time. This level features stores that you can enter. Go inside and look for useful items. Mustard is the throwing item of choice in this stage. You can also find dog whistles in pet stores. Pressing one of the rear corner buttons blows the dog whistle, calling a dog on screen that attacks any bad guy in sight.

Stage 5 features Bloody Betty. She likes to shop so you will find her in one of the stores. You’ll need to explore all the doors here looking for items and her cohorts. The special items in this stage are throwing bombs and dog whistles. This level also features the subway. If you find Bloody Betty but let her get away, she will escape to another town. In that case, you will use the subway to travel over there, but you’ll have to search for her and defeat more cohorts all over again.

The final stage squares you off against Don Mayonecheese. This level is a tricky one. There are three separate towns in this stage connected by the subway. Each town has a hideout where you might find the final boss. First you need to defeat the baddie that holds the key to the hideout. Then you can enter the hideout and search for Don. Of course, you have to defeat all the cohorts first per usual, both on the streets and in the hideout. You’ll be able to find bullets for your gun in case of a shootout as well as dog whistles in the stores. However, neither of those are effective against Don Mayonecheese. You’ll have to use all of your skills plus a little luck to finish the game.

There are no passwords, saving, or lives in this game. You can run out of health or run out of time, and then it’s Game Over. The good news is that you have unlimited continues. The bad news is that, if you are like me, you will need a rest break in between attempts. This is a more cerebral game than the other Power Pad games I’ve played so far, but it can still wear you out with all the footwork needed.

This was my first time playing through Street Cop. I didn’t bother testing out any of the Power Pad games beyond making sure they booted to the title screen. I remember watching TheMexicanRunner play this game so I already had an idea of how it works. This is an uncommon game that sells for around $20-$25. The only copy I’ve ever seen in person was the one I bought. I think I snagged it for around $8. This was at a game store where the owner didn’t yet understand how to value games using the Internet, so I ended up buying several uncommon games there for great prices before he caught on.

I am glad that this ended up being a Power Pad game that I didn’t have to completely exhaust myself to play. I can’t help but break a sweat playing these games, but Street Cop took longer for me to get to that point. I even played it while I was a little bit sick and that seemed to have no effect on me. Once you get a handle on the controls, this game isn’t too difficult. You are free to pause with Start at any time to take a quick break. The enemies move slower to compensate for your lack of reaction time. The only real danger was running out of time, which happened a few times. I only had to continue at most twice per level before I cleared it. When I recorded my video longplay, I didn’t need to use any continues and only took small pause breaks in between levels. The only blemish on the run was skipping a cohort in the fourth stage. I was able to find the final boss in the second building I tried. Quite a solid run overall. I noticed I have the best completion time for this game (I can’t imagine that many people would try speedrunning it) so I have submitted it to speedrun.com as a new world record! I wonder how many more accidental speedruns I am going to get out of this project.

Street Cop is a basic action game. The graphics are simplistic but carry the idea well. The music is fine, nothing special. The controls work well and are more responsive than I would have guessed. The only tricky move is jumping which doesn’t always trigger. The gameplay is simplistic, but that’s what you want when playing a game with your feet. This is a notable game because this is the only game on the NES, and maybe one of the only games ever, with this kind of control scheme and gameplay merged together. There is strategy and exploration in what amounts to a fitness game. I think the developers did a great job of varying your goals and designing the stages. Sure, combat is usually the same, repetitive action, but there’s just enough variance and some clever boss encounters to make this game worthwhile. Good on the developers to try something different while getting it to work well. While it is tough to recommend any of the Power Pad games today, if you happen to own one and are looking for something that’s a little bit different, I think you might have fun with this game.

Go ahead, make my day.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 2/8/19 – 2/23/19
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
My Video: Dirty Harry Longplay

Dirty Harry shares something in common with Gilligan’s Island. Trust me, these are comparisons I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be making on this blog. Nevertheless, this is a trivial one at best. One of the dates on Dirty Harry’s copyright screen is 1971, the year the film came out. It is the second earliest year displayed on an NES game that I’ve seen so far, several years after Gilligan’s Island’s 1964 debut. While Gilligan’s Island is still a weird choice for an NES game, Dirty Harry was timelier at least and would seem to make for a decent game. In reality, the game is at best passable.

Clint Eastwood stars in the film Dirty Harry. It was released in 1971 and was produced and directed by Don Siegel. It follows the story of inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan of the San Francisco Police Department as he tracks down a killer named Scorpio. The movie was both a critical and financial success and is regarded as one of the best movies of 1971. There were four Dirty Harry sequels: Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, and The Dead Pool. The final film released in 1988, which is inside the NES life span and could explain why an NES Dirty Harry game was made.

Dirty Harry on NES was released in December 1990 in North America only. It is sometimes referred to as Dirty Harry: The War Against Drugs though I cannot figure out where that subtitle originated from. It is not listed in any of the packaging, manual, or screens within the game. Dirty Harry was developed by Gray Matter and published by Mindscape.

The game has a unique story from any of the other Dirty Harry films, though there are scenes borrowed from some of the movies for this game. The Anaconda is a new drug kingpin hailing from Colombia who has taken out The Dealmaker, the most successful criminal in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Anaconda is also taking over all the drug gangs in the city and killing anyone else who stands in his way. Not to be deterred by the police chief, Harry Callahan sets off on a mission to find and capture the Anaconda. The game takes place over three stages: The city streets, the waterfront docks, and Alcatraz Island. If you can capture The Anaconda on Alcatraz, you win the game.

Dirty Harry is a side-scrolling platformer. The controls for this one are a little clumsy. Use the D-pad to move around as usual. Up lets you climb ladders, enter doors, and walk up alleyways. Down does the same thing under or in front of you, otherwise you use Down to crouch. The B button punches. If you hold Up and press B, you kick instead. The A button is used for your gun. First press A to hold out and aim your gun, then press A again to shoot. Firing only work if you have both feet on the ground. You can press Up and Down to adjust the angle of your gun prior to firing. To jump you have to press A and B together. It sounds bad, and it’s not the best control, but jumping is surprisingly responsive. You can either jump straight up and down or jump forward at a fixed distance.

Press Start to pause the game and bring up the inventory screen. The top row of items are selectable with Left and Right. Put the cursor over the item you want and unpause to equip that item. Some items can only be used in certain situations and you default to the gun if that item can’t be used. If you run out of bullets, you can still hold out the gun but cannot fire. The second row of items cannot be selected and are used automatically as needed. Following the items are your score, health meter, and number of lives remaining.

You will spend most of your time in the first level if you are playing this game. The game starts out in the city streets. The layout here is parallel city streets connected by alleyways or sometimes doorways. For example, you start on one street, then you can go down the alley to another screen, and finally go out the alleyway on the other side onto a different street. All of these sections are side scrolling and there’s no map or compass to guide you. You must also enter buildings. Inside buildings, there are doorways and hallways you move through. Sometimes you can exit a building from the opposite side onto a different street. Other times there might be side doors that lead back into an alley. There is also a sewer system. These are side-scrolling sections with several different entry points on the streets. Passageways are typically blocked off by sewer grates and you have to locate switches to open them up so you can pass. The description here doesn’t really do justice on how tough this level is to navigate.

The buildings are where you find most of the items in this game. Once you enter through a hallway door, the rooms within are purely side-scrolling with no depth or other exits aside from the opposite end of the room. Some rooms have boxes in the background or on the floor. Kick the boxes in the background to break them and collect their contents. You can open boxes on the floor by jumping on top of them. There are also safes that can only be busted by blowing them up with explosives.

There are many items to collect. You can find bullets for your gun, either a small pack of 10 bullets or a large pack of 25 bullets, which is the max Dirty Harry can hold. Plastic explosives blow up safes. Select the explosive and then press A to set one up that explodes shortly after. You can also hurt enemies with these. Chili dogs restore half of your health meter and you get a little eating animation to go with it. The harpoon gun and missile launcher are powerful firing weapons that have limited ammo. Grappling hooks are used for swinging over treacherous areas. Bulletproof vests absorb enemy bullets for a while. The gas mask lets you survive in poisonous rooms. The flashlight lets you see while exploring the sewers. Crowbars are used to open locked doors within the buildings. You can find money bags or stashes of drugs that you confiscate for points. You can also find badges for extra lives that are sure to come in handy.

With all the ways you can go, the first stage is one gigantic maze. The city streets often have large walls that are too high to jump over. Sometimes you can do some platforming across ledges high enough where you can cross over the walls. There is some honest-to-goodness level design here where you need to plan out your movements so that you don’t fall. Since jump distance is fixed, you can get a feel for what you can do and it will always be consistent. The problem is there are some sections of forced high ground traversal where if you fall, you have to backtrack through the city to get back to where you were. It’s laughably easy to get lost when everything kind of looks the same.

There are many enemies in this game and they are all out to get you. Gang members run the streets and roam the halls. Some bad guys hang out on the rooftops and throw out grenades, bricks, or nets that trap you. Some just go straight to shooting. Enemies pour out of windows and bash you with punches or pipes. There can only be I think two enemies on the ground at once, but when you defeat them they will keep appearing. Buildings have huge snakes that guard drugs and money. You can jump on them to either stun them or kill them; the outcome seems to be random. Some rooms have lasers sliding across the floor. The sewers also have traps such as dripping sewer sludge, electric shocks, giant rats and cockroaches, and even remote-controlled cars. Falling into sewer water is instant death. All of these dangers are just in the first stage alone, though you will see other similar threats in the other two stages.

Dirty Harry faces several bosses in this game. Many of them are really large people that pack a lot of firepower. Usually you need to use your best weapons to take them out most effectively. Some of them require different tactics where you need to either trap them somehow or figure out how to pierce their defenses. There can be more than one boss in a level, so you can’t really tell from those encounters that you are at the end of the level. A good thing is that many defeated bosses give you three lives for winning.

Levels 2 and 3 are, thankfully, more straightforward affairs. There’s little exploration but more challenging enemies and tricky platforming. In the first level, you get nearly all your items from inside the buildings. After that, you don’t go into buildings any more, so sometimes defeated enemies will give you items. The item drops appear to be scripted and sometimes you can use that to your advantage.

Dirty Harry includes a password feature and continues. The passwords are five characters long A-Z. In this game you only receive two passwords that are simple words that are easy to remember. There is a third password I’ve found online that I believe gives you unlimited lives. I didn’t use it, but I found it easily just by doing some basic research on this game. If you’re not into passwords, some continues might help. The system in this game is a little weird. In the first stage only, you can continue up to three times with a fresh set of lives. You continue exactly from where you died if you ran out of health. In the other two levels, you are only given one continue. It doesn’t matter if you survive the first level with all continues intact or use them all up. Continues do refresh your gun ammo back to the maximum.

This was my first time playing Dirty Harry. Surprise, surprise, I haven’t seen any of the movies either. I’m sure I would like them if I ever gave them the chance. This is not an expensive game but is not commonly found either. It costs around $6-$8. I believe my collection copy is the only one I’ve owned, though I have seen it in stores on occasion.

As you could imagine, I spent most of my time figuring out the first stage. It is truly a nightmarish level. There are loops in the map that I had to take several times before I realized I was just retracing my steps. It’s not clear right away that you have to do platforming without falling on some streets to reach new areas. The sewer system is confusing and complicated with all the traps and switches you need to find. I couldn’t figure out one of the bosses and had to look up the solution online. I normally hate doing that but I’m glad I did here. I spent maybe a week and a half of playing before I learned how to clear the level. Things proceeded much more quickly after that. I beat the second level in about 30 minutes. The last level was pretty challenging but I beat it in a couple of days anyway.

There are some really bad design choices in the first level alone that are sure to turn people off of the game. Some people will hate the forced platforming sections, but I like them. I think it is one of the few elements of the game that has real design to it. They are a lot like jumping puzzles and you have to reason your way through the jumps. What I don’t like is falling down and having to backtrack because those sections always lock you away so that you just can’t go back directly and retry. You also get to cope with enemies that are trying to knock you down. A particularly egregious example of this is at the end of the first stage. There is a large expanse you must cross by hand-walking your way across a power line. Enemies are shooting at you and one bullet knocks you down. For a large portion of that section, if you fall the only way out is through the sewers. There you are led down into a one-way section that puts you all the way back to the start of the level. It takes at least five minutes of real time to backtrack to where you can try again, plus you will likely lose several lives along the way. It’s complete trash, but not as trash as the “ha ha ha” room. One building contains a room with the words “ha ha ha” written on the side. The room doesn’t contain an exit door so once you go in you are stuck. The only way out is to reset the console and start over. This room is deep in the level too. I can’t tell if maybe this was a default room and the developers neglected to link the door to an actual room, or if the developers left this in as a dumb joke. I tend to believe the latter, but who knows?

I ended up beating Dirty Harry four times. I realize this is way too many times to beat this game, but I have my reasons. The first time was playing normally, and right after that I beat the game from the start just to see how I would fare in a complete run. I started doing a little research and discovered a claim about a secret ending that was eluded to in both this FAQ and the game manual. From what I gathered, the idea is that if you recover all the items in the game, you will receive a special medal from the police chief at the end. I haven’t found any further evidence and didn’t find a video of said ending, but I had to give it a try for myself. My third time through the game was a failed attempt at the best ending. I used a map I found to make sure I didn’t miss any of the buildings in the first stage, which did lead to some rooms I missed on my own, but it wasn’t enough. I even tried poking at the game on an emulator with a debugger to see if I could discover anything and got nowhere. Chalk this one up to a rumor I suppose. The fourth time through was for finally recording a proper longplay video. I thought I would try cutting straight to the chase in the first level and that was a bad idea. I skipped a bunch of items and lives, and then due to some bad mistakes in the run I ran out of lives. I needed to start the final level over a few times before I could beat it with the password. It’s not my best effort, but it’s a documented completion at least which is always my goal.

I’m sure the Dirty Harry movies are great, but this game is not very good. The graphics are passable with a lot of samey-looking buildings. Some of the building residents are interesting looking, and I dig the security lasers in the buildings, so it’s not all bad. The music has some decent depth to it, though the base sounds are so low that I barely heard them while playing with a relatively low volume. The controls work okay. I’m not a fan of two-button jumping but it works fine. I found the controls a little bit sluggish at times, like when pointing and firing weapons. The gameplay is challenging but not in a good way. The forced backtracking when making mistakes is bad, you can easily get trapped between two enemies and get knocked around, and the navigation around the city is both confusing and frustrating. I sort of appreciate the jumping puzzles centered around Dirty Harry’s fixed jump length, but I reckon it is more of an inconvenience for many players. For all the warts this game has, the ending is unique and was one of the neatest parts of the entire game. Even then, it’s not exactly a suitable award for putting up with the difficulties of playing Dirty Harry.

High Speed, high stakes, and high scoring.

To Beat: Board the rocket to beat the system
To Complete: Beat the game and get the high score
What I Did: Beat the game with a score of 62,356,760
Played: 1/14/19 – 2/2/19
Difficulty: 10/10
My Difficulty: 10/10
My Video: High Speed Longplay

It’s another milestone here at Take On The NES Library. Game #113 is the first NES pinball game. There are a grand total of six NES pinball games, so I’m not that surprised the first one took some time to show up. Pinball machines are always a good time, even though I tend to fail out after only a few minutes. I have only been a casual player but I’ll play every time I see a machine. I know I would have to dedicate myself to playing a pinball game for a long time to get good at it. That’s what I had to do here to play High Speed. I don’t know if it’s due to my lack of experience, but this was a very challenging game to beat and another 10/10 in difficulty.

The High Speed pinball machine was released by Williams in 1986. Designer Steve Ritchie was inspired to make the game by his own police chase in California where he was supposedly driving at 146 mph. High Speed was a popular machine with a production run of 17,080 machines, which is well above the average of 2500 machines per run. The NES game was developed by Rare and published by Tradewest in North America in July 1991. PAL regions received the game in 1994. This was the final NES pinball game released by date.

The controls are simple. Any direction of the D-pad flips the left flipper, while the A button triggers the right flipper. There is an upper flipper on the right side of the playfield that also is triggered by the A button. The Select button nudges the table from the right while B nudges it from the left. In my experience, Select directs the ball slightly to the left and B nudges it to the right. The Start button pauses the game but you have to hold it down for a little bit before pausing kicks in.

Begin your game by launching the ball from the plunger on the bottom-right. Hold the A button to pull the plunger down and release the button to launch the ball. You can control the strength by how long you hold the button down. I like to launch at a little greater than half-strength so that I have better reaction time for hitting the ball with the upper-right flipper.

The bottom of the screen displays the text that would normally appear at the top of the actual machine. You can see your score on the left and miscellaneous text on the right for different events during game play. The score display only contains seven digits but the game maintains score up to one hundred million. A neat feature of this game is the split-screen effect. The playfield is too tall to see the whole screen at once. There is a screen split at the bottom of the screen so that the flippers are always visible. The top part of the view scrolls upward enough so that you always see the lowest ball.

High Speed also contains voice samples. These are like the ones on the actual pinball machine. The downside is that playing the samples freezes the board entirely during its duration. They are short clips, but in a long game you will hear them all the time. Fortunately, you can disable them if you want. On the Pause screen, there are two boxes you can toggle with the A button. The left one toggles the music and the right one toggles the voices.

The playfield contains a long lane on both sides that the game calls highways. They connect at the top and you can loop the ball all the way around. There is a smaller lane left of the right ramp that contains an eject hole. The ball is held briefly before being sent down the right lane in front of the upper flipper. There is a ramp in the middle of the playfield. It is best hit from the upper flipper. The top of the ramp connects to two return lanes, one on either side of the playfield, that drop the ball above the corresponding flipper. The ramp also exits by the upper flipper again, creating another loop. There is a set of three pop bumpers below the ramp as well as some targets indicated by stoplights. At the bottom by the flippers, each side has a slingshot and two lanes. One leads the ball to the flipper and the other leads the ball down the drain.

As you play the game, the stoplights will go from green to yellow to red. You can advance the stoplights by hitting the targets or more commonly by taking the ramp. When the light is red, take the ramp to start the police chase. This triggers two voice samples along the ramp loop. During the police chase, hit the ramp again to initiate multi-ball. The ball is locked and you get two more to launch from the plunger for up to three-ball multi-ball. This also triggers the jackpot. It starts out at 250,000 points and increases as you score points on the board. The jackpot maxes out at two million points. Hit the ramp one more time during multi-ball to claim the jackpot. This also locks the ball until all other balls are either locked in the same way or lost down the drain. Going back to one ball stops this sequence and the lights go back to green.

The inner lanes near the flippers light up the two outer lanes at the top of the playfield. These are only lit for a little while. Take the lane to get the highway bonus. The highway bonus points increase the more you take those lanes. Once those points max out, you can then trigger the hold bonus feature which maintains your main bonus score to the next ball after you lose one. Advance one more time to trigger the extra ball. You then have to shoot the ball into the eject hole to collect the extra ball. It is best to maintain both multi-ball and the extra ball for as long as you can.

The NES version takes the standard game play up a notch. There are items appearing on the board that you collect by hitting them with the ball. Money bags give you points and subsequent money bags give you progressively higher amounts. There are also safes and helicopters that eventually trigger a couple of mini-games. Those are fine, but in an evil twist, there are also several enemies on the board you have to deal with that mess with your ball or flippers in various ways. Enemies stay away while you have multi-ball enabled, which is another fine incentive. You can also fight back.

Here are each of the enemies. Water puddles just slow your ball down. You can destroy it by hitting a ball over it quickly. Tumbleweed will grab your ball and drop it directly down the drain in the middle. You can destroy it with a fast ball or by shaking the table as it descends. Rust balls attach to your flipper mountings and destroy the flipper completely. Supposedly you can shake them off the flipper but I never got that to happen. A simple touch of the ball removes them from play. Should you lose a flipper, you will automatically trade a previously collected safe or helicopter to recover your lost flipper after a short time. Heli-bombs float toward your flipper and blow them off when they detonate. You can touch the bomb with the ball to destroy it. To foil the bomb, you can flip them up briefly with the flippers. If it explodes while not touching your flipper, it does no damage. Acid patches grab your ball and try to dissolve it. You can shake the playfield when held to remove the acid. The manic mechanic chases your ball and slows it down, eventually destroying it if contacted too many times. You can damage the mechanic with a fast ball and eventually drive it away. Barriers block the two upper lanes. You can destroy the barrier by hitting it twice from the front or once from behind. Finally, the magnetic helicopter pulls your ball toward the middle of the playfield. Eventually it will collect the ball and try to carry it away. When held, shake the table quickly to destroy it. All enemies are defeated when you start up multi-ball.

There are two mini-games that take place on separate screens. These appear by collecting either three safes or three helicopters. Collecting three of each will interrupt whatever mode you are currently on except for active multi-ball. Three safes create one large safe in the center. Hit a ball inside when it opens to take that ball to the pachinko mini-game. If multi-ball is in effect, you can send multiple balls to the game. The mini-game starts once all balls either enter the safe or are lost. Similarly, three helicopters send in a big helicopter with a dangling rope ladder. Send a ball up the ladder to board the helicopter for a racing mini-game.

Let’s start with the racing mini-game. It takes place on a miniature pinball table. There are four cars and you are the red car. The idea is to win the race by hitting the red car to speed it up or hitting an opposing car to slow it down. Every ball you bring in is included for the duration of the race. Losing a ball down the drain sends it back up to the playfield for free after a brief delay. There is a 59-second timer. The race ends when either time expires or one car has completed nine laps. There is a lap counter at the bottom and the cars are ordered by their place in the race. There are some objects on the field like rocks or trees. You can destroy them and sometimes they drop a powerup. You can get a timer increase or a bomb that spins out all opposing cars. There are also nitro boosts that appear at random and you get a big speed burst by collecting that. To beat the race, you need to place either first or second. You earn some points based on how well you completed the race. You only play one race at a time. Beating three separate races triggers a nice fireworks sequence.

The other mini-game is pachinko. Instead of flippers, you control a mini-cannon at the bottom of the table. Use Left or Right to aim the cannon and press A to shoot a ball upward. There are pegs and cups on the board and to beat the table you have to collect a ball in each cup. There is a drain at the bottom that collects the balls and puts them back into the cannon. You get either 59, 79, or 99 seconds to complete the board depending on how many balls you brought into the mini-game. There’s a ball meter at the bottom and I don’t fully understand how it works. You can’t run out of balls but when it is low you can’t shoot as many at once. The meter slowly fills back up all the time. Sometimes, a clock will appear that adds time if you collect it. Every two pachinko boards completed starts up a fireworks sequence. You also get points for how well you played the mini-game.

The fireworks sequences from either game unlocks some special bonuses features. You collect these special bonuses by getting the ball into the eject hole. In total, there are eight pachinko boards and six races for a total of six sets of fireworks and six bonuses. The bonuses are, in order, Kickback, Ball Return, Saucer, Drive Again, Lightning Bombs, and Rocket. Kickback lights the two outer flipper lanes to kick up and recover a ball heading down the drain. Ball Return acts like an extra ball by sending the lost ball back into play right away. The Saucer bonus sends a UFO onto the playfield and you can send a ball into it. This takes you to a screen where it claims you “beat the system so far” and gives you a cool one million points. Drive Again is an extra ball. Lightning Bombs are really powerful. You get three of them and you can activate them by pressing A, B, and any D-pad direction. It sprays lightning across the screen that both collects powerups and defeats any enemy on the playfield. Too bad you get them so late in the game. The Rocket is a lot like the saucer. Board the rocket and you get a screen claiming “you’ve beaten the system this time” and earn two million points. After all that, the sequence starts over again.

I have played a little bit of High Speed in the past. It was a Nintendo Age weekly contest game back in 2014. That week I struggled with the game and scored about 3.4M on my best attempt. The winning score that week was over 18M. I like playing pinball, but on actual machines and not so much video game versions. This game sat for several years until I beat it now. High Speed is a relatively common game that sells at around $8 or so for a loose cart.

I have three main sources of information I use to determine when to consider a game beaten: The NES Ending FAQ, NA’s “Can NA Beat Every NES Game” yearly thread, and TheMexicanRunner’s website. In this case, all three sources had different ideas for considering High Speed beaten. The NES Ending FAQ says there is no ending and to max out the score at 99,999,999. The NA thread says to get first place on the game’s high score chart, which is surpassing 51,627,910 points. TMR’s goal was to beat the system twice by completing every mini-game. My take is that TMR got this one right. Beating the system twice ensures you have gotten all possible bonuses and beaten all distinct mini-games, plus you get a screen saying you “beat the system this time” which is pretty clearly an ending to me. Certainly, it’s possible to max out the score without beating all the mini-games, but I think you have to see and clear all the unique content to consider the game beaten.

TMR had High Speed as one of his ten toughest NES games, and I would have to agree with that. This is certainly worthy of the coveted 10/10 difficulty rating. I would guess I spent about 20 or so attempts where I scored under 4M points. I had some sudden improvement and then went another 20 attempts hovering between 7M and 16M for most tries. I needed around 10 more attempts to put me over the edge. It seems to me that if a game takes me around 50 tries or more to beat, then it is probably going to be a 10/10. This is now my 3rd 10/10 game along with Ikari Warriors and Q*bert. I would slot High Speed below both the other two in difficulty comparatively.

This is a challenging game for a few reasons. For pinball in general, you have to be good at making shots you want while also keeping the ball from situations where you are likely to lose it. In real life, I will have balls come right down the middle through the flippers. I found that didn’t happen all that often in High Speed, at least with a single ball in play. I was more likely to lose balls down the side, particularly the left side. (Left side kick back is often enabled when the right side is not, meaning balls may favor falling to the left if caught in between.) You have to constantly nudge the table to your advantage, for example, when that kick back is missing. There were two shots I had issues with when hitting the ball with the very edge of either flipper. Hitting the edge of the left flipper sends the ball off the right side, off the left side, and then right down the center. The edge-of-right-flipper shot goes off the left side, off the right side, and directly down the outside drain. I had to recognize those shots right away and start shaking the table to try and recover early. The left flipper shot can be saved with some Select button shaking, but the right flipper shot will sometimes go down the drain no matter what you do. Multi-ball causes complications too, since ricochets go down immediately or I don’t notice balls falling down the side drains. You also need to be careful not to shake the table too quickly or frequently so that you don’t cause a tilt condition and the table stops working. Just like a real machine! It is a necessity at times when the ball gets caught by an enemy. You just have to be aware of when you get in danger that you try and ease up on shaking for a while. These were specific issues I needed to grasp to beat this game.

The pinball part is hard enough to learn, but the pachinko boards are on a whole other level. They seem harmless at first but soon they start to feel impossible. There seems to be some randomness, but even after beating the game I am not so sure. I can fire a string of balls in a row that all fall down the same way. There is a trick to this that is not mentioned in the manual or anywhere written that I saw. You can speed up a ball by holding down the A button. You can visually see smoke behind the ball when it is going really fast. This will allow you to change up some of the ricochet angles and make some cups possible to reach. Even knowing that, often it is hard to tell how to reach certain cups on the board. I know for one shot I first had to tap A to clear a peg, then hold A to send it to a distant cup. Another issue is that some of the lower pegs are put in places where they end up blocking most of your shots. You would think that would help narrow down possibilities, but that wasn’t the case for me. If you fail, you have to collect three safes and try again. You can do this as often as necessary. It just puts more risk on you keeping things up on the pinball side.

My winning run was something magical. Before that, I mustered a 26M run and a 44M run. The 44M game was particularly infuriating in that I was one pachinko game away from getting the rocket. In fact, I was one cup away that I just could not figure out how to reach. I had four tries at that last board and always came up short. The winning run was as close to perfect on the pinball side as I could have possibly hoped. I needed the help of several extra balls for sure. I just happened to counter and save nearly every bad shot. I also found the timing for the left-hand lane. I had started avoiding it because if I missed to the left the ball would find the drain way too often. I couldn’t believe how many times I hit that lane this time. I ended up beating all the mini-game boards and scored 55M all on Ball 1. At least two pachinko games were won after time ran out on my last ball or two. I spent over two hours playing on a Saturday morning, and I had to lose intentionally just to appease my family and get on with our weekend. I finally ran out at over 62M points but I think I could have maxed out the score on that attempt if I wanted to and had more time.

One thing that helps is that when you really get good at the game, you’ll find that extra balls are plentiful. The extra ball you get from the eject hole can only be collected one at a time, but you can get it again after losing a ball. There are some other ways to earn extra balls that stack on top. Collecting Drive Again from the bonus features gives you an extra ball. The Ball Return bonus feature is like a hidden extra ball since it comes into play immediately instead of awarding bonus first. There is also a sun-shaped powerup that bestows an extra ball. The enemies’ appearances are scheduled by a lengthy sequence and the extra ball shows up at the very end of that sequence. Any time you lose a ball, you get the right to earn it back from the eject hole, no matter how many other balls you have saved up. I was able to stack up a bunch of extra balls and keep them going for a long time. It’s too bad that getting that far requires a lot of time, patience, and learning.

I believe that High Speed is a really good NES pinball game. The graphics are nicely drawn. The music is pretty good even though you will hear the same couple of tunes a lot while playing. If you don’t like it you can just turn it off. The voice samples sound a bit muffled, but it’s the type of sound quality you would expect to hear from a police radio, so in that way it fits perfectly. Unfortunately, the samples interrupt game play so often that I know it used up several minutes of a two-hour run. The gameplay is good and varied with the mini-games. Admittedly, I’m not a huge fan of the enemies on the table, seeing as they caused me much hardship that I could have done without. However, it’s something you don’t see often in a pinball video game, and it makes for an interesting feature that you can employ only in a video game. One problem I have with the game is that the balls move very slowly if two or more are at the flippers at the same time. Perhaps the game was not programmed for handling multiple calculations with the angles. What happens is you will hit one ball and then the other ball goes full speed, meaning it goes through the flippers unless you react instantly. Multi-ball is so important that I feel cheated if I lose it due to technical issues. This is a very difficult game to beat and a big one checked off my list. For casual play or even longer sessions like I had, it is a competent pinball game with some unique features. It’s worth checking out.

Wrestling with my first Tecmo sports game!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 1/5/19 – 1/13/19
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 7/10
My Video: Tecmo World Wrestling Longplay

Today we have another NES wrestling game. I am surprised at how many of them are on the system. There are four WWF games and a smattering of others, even a first party Nintendo title. I know that Tecmo Bowl and Super Tecmo Bowl are highly regarded football games and Tecmo makes good games in general. That alone made me hopeful that Tecmo World Wrestling would be a solid entry. Let’s see how it fared.

Tecmo World Wrestling was released in Japan, North America, and Europe. The initial version was on the Famicom. In Japan it was named Gekitou Pro Wrestling!! Toukon Densetsu and was released in September 1989. The NES version came out in April 1990 and the PAL release was in November 1990. The game was developed and published by Tecmo in all regions.

There isn’t much story to go along with this game. You are competing in a tournament to become the champion of Tecmo World Wrestling and win the title. The matches feature a live announcer, Tom Talker, who will provide commentary throughout the game. There are ten wrestlers to choose from, each with special techniques that not all other wrestlers use. Win matches against all the other competitors to win the game.

At the title screen, you select between single-player or two player mode. Multiplayer only has one-on-one matches where each opponent chooses a wrestler. Choosing single player mode presents you with a booklet featuring two wrestlers per page. Press either A or B to flip pages to view two more wrestlers. There are ten wrestlers in the game: Akira Dragon, El Tigre, Pat Gordon, Rex Beat, Jackie Lee, Boris Chekov, Mark Rose, Julio Falcon, Randy Gomez, and Dr. Guildo. First find the page of the wrestler you want. Then move the star cursor to either the left or right page with the D-pad. Press Start to choose that wrestler. After selection, choose your name. The wrestler’s current nickname is the pre-provided value. Use the D-pad to move the cursor around, press A to choose a letter, and press B to go back a letter. Finally, press Start to play.

Before your first match, you get to do muscle training to get stronger. You also do this after every loss. You can choose between squats, sit-ups, and push-ups. Each choice seems to be the same, just with different animations. This is a button-mashing mini-game where you press A as fast as you can for 10 seconds. You’ll see the workout animation along with the timer, power level, and push meter. The push meter is what fills up as you mash the A button and once it’s filled up all the way you will add a notch to your power meter. You begin at Power 0 but can go all the way up to Power 7. The power meter determines how powerful your moves are when fighting an opponent.

First, let’s cover some basic ground rules. The object is to knock your opponent down and pin him to a three-count to win the match. You can also win by submission by forcing your opponent to give up. Matches are seven minutes long and are considered a draw if there is no winner after time. Wrestlers fighting outside the ring begin a twenty-count and lose by disqualification if one is still outside the ring after the count. If both wrestlers reach the twenty-count, the match is considered a draw. There is also a five-count and associated disqualification for climbing and hanging out on top of the turnbuckle.

Matches are shown in a split screen view. The top half contains all the action in the ring. The screen can contain the whole width of the ring but slides over a little to show the outside of the ring on either side if one of the wrestlers gets thrown out. The bottom half contains the status bar. You see the match timer and stamina meters of each wrestler. Two player mode also features what is called a biometer underneath the timer. It changes between red for player one and blue for player two. Whichever color is more full on the meter means that player will have better power and defense for a time. At the bottom is the running commentary by announcer Tom Talker. He clues you in on what moves are being performed and makes the matches more entertaining.

I have not yet played Pro Wrestling, but thanks to this article at Hardcore Gaming 101, I have learned that the control scheme between the two games are similar. You can move freely around the ring with the D-pad. Double tap either Left or Right to run in that direction. You can bounce along the ropes until you press the opposite direction to stop. Press Up when in the corner of the ring to climb on the turnbuckle and press Down to get back down. If your opponent is outside the ring, you can walk into the ropes to go down on the floor with him. Move toward the ring to go back inside from the floor. To pin a downed opponent, press B while standing next to him. Mash the A and B buttons to break out of a pin. You can also clinch an opponent simply by walking up to him.

There are a surprising number of attacking moves in the game. You can do basic strikes by pressing A or B. You can do two different attacks with A and B while running. You can do a jumping attack off the turnbuckle. You can also attack an opponent while he is laying on the ground. Most of the moves are done from clinching with the opponent. Simply pressing Left or Right will throw your opponent toward the ropes. The other wrestler is also trying to do a move during the clinch, so I found you have to mash the button to get your move in hopefully. The A and B buttons do different moves, and there are also different moves when combined with a D-pad direction. So there is an Up and A move, a Down and A move, a Left or Right (toward the opponent) and A move, as well as moves swapping in the B button.

Wrestlers also have special moves. These are moves that replace default moves and only apply to certain wrestlers. For example, the normal Left+A move while clinching is the Back Drop. Akira Dragon and Jackie Lee will do a German Suplex instead, while El Tigre and Mark Rose do the Northern Right Suplex. (That particular move is a mistranslation and should actually be the Northern Lights Suplex.) Furthermore, most of these special moves only are used when the wrestler is low on stamina and the common, default moves are used with higher stamina. It’s all very complicated and the manual is really important in detailing what moves you have available. I think the high/low stamina moves make the matches more interesting as the stronger, more exciting moves will occur toward the end of the contest.

Tecmo World Wrestling features what the manual calls Zoom Mode. These are cutscenes that occur whenever a wrestler does one of his signature moves against an opponent with little or no stamina remaining. They are just like what you see when scoring a touchdown in Tecmo Bowl. These scenes flow freely during the match, replacing the action briefly while leaving the bottom half of the screen with the timer and commentary intact. They are very well animated and neat to look at. I think they serve as a nice little break from the action but do get repetitive after a while.

In the single-player mode, you will match up against each other wrestler in order. Each win advances you to the next wrestler. Losing a match or a draw puts you back to the previous wrestler instead of a rematch. You are forced to put on a big winning streak to make progress in the game, and of course each wrestler gets more difficult the farther you go. Being able to do some training and increasing the power meter after each setback helps you do more damage in subsequent matches, plus you can keep playing and continuing for as long as you want. After winning against all nine wrestlers, there is one more wrestler remaining known as the Blue Mask. He was disqualified from preliminary matches in the competition, but he is the strongest wrestler in the game with all the best moves.

This was my first time playing Tecmo World Wrestling, as will be the case with all other wrestling games on the NES. I was surprised to find out that this game is really cheap online. It should only cost around $5 and is probably cheaper bundled with other games. I’ve had an extra copy or two through all my game buying, but it doesn’t seem quite as common as the pricing would normally indicate.

A good way I would describe this game is exhausting. It’s not on the level of Super Team Games, but it wears my forearms and fingers out for sure. The controls are complex enough so that there is some nuance to the action, but ultimately most of the time is spent button mashing. The obvious button mashing occurs during the training. It is very easy to go up one power level during training and very hard to go up two levels at once. My button mashing technique is to lock my arm and vibrate it to rapidly tap the button. I can keep that up for the ten seconds but usually I fell one notch short of that second power level. In the matches, later ones especially, I reserved that technique for when I needed to pull off a well-timed move or kick out of a pin with no stamina left. This game can be beaten quickly, but lose a few matches and all of a sudden it takes a while to complete. It really wore me out, and losses were demoralizing.

My completed run of the game on my longplay video is bad. I think it’s one of my worst videos. I was able to beat the game one time before when I wasn’t recording and just chipping away a couple matches at a time over a day. The next time I played, I set up the recording and got all the way up to the Blue Mask but failed over a few tries before calling it quits for the night. After a day of rest, I got up early in the morning on a Sunday and grinded out a win. It took me two hours to finish the game. I reached the Blue Mask about four or five times and each match progressively got better. It shouldn’t have been that way since I know I got more tired as I played, plus my power meter dipped down to level 4 at one point and I was too tired to possibly upgrade twice per attempt. I had to take a ten-minute break near the end of the game and didn’t bother editing it out as I feel the resting is part of the experience. My family was waking up and I was running out of time for playing, but I managed to beat the Blue Mask by disqualification with a perfectly timed pile driver on the outside. Any way I can get a win in a game like this, I will take it.

My wrestler of choice was Dr. Guildo and I had a decent strategy to progress in the game. I picked Dr. Guildo simply because he was the only US wrestler and I get a kick out of representing my country in games like this. Plus, he’s the biggest wrestler and looks pretty cool. I highly abused his Giant Swing move. Knock the opponent down any way you can, and press toward the opponent and B when he is on the ground to grab him by the legs and swing him around. This move often throws the opponent directly out of the ring. At about half stamina or less, he would lay down long enough to do an attack from the top of the turnbuckle to the floor, which does some of the highest damage I found in the game. The Giant Swing is a sure thing when you can get your opponent down, but it causes issues with trying to pin your opponent with him usually getting thrown out of the ring where he can’t be pinned. Once I get the opponent with almost no stamina, I would do some kind of knockdown move, do an elbow drop or two while knocked down, and go for the pin. Often that was enough to win though the later opponents were more likely to kick out.

This is a challenging game, but I have a theory on how it works so that I decided to reduce its difficulty rating a little bit. This is just a theory based on my own experience and may not be accurate at all. I get the feeling that this game intentionally gets easier the longer you play and that it also uses the two-player biometer in the background so that the opponent ends up stringing a bunch of moves against you no matter how well you are playing. My first match with Blue Mask in my video I got destroyed, even with a full power meter. After several other attempts that got a little better each time, I dominated that final match. While out of stamina, Blue Mask then got into a stretch where I could not do anything against him. At that point I’m sure I was working off a bit of adrenaline that could have increased my finger speed. I was not at max power since it decays the more you lose and I couldn’t build it back up. With a partial power level and general fatigue, it doesn’t make sense to me that I could hit every move at the start of the match and then not be able to do anything productive at all for a time. In my mind the dynamic balancing has to be intentional. Just keep playing and grinding. This game would benefit greatly if it had passwords. As it turns out, the Japanese version does have a password system that was removed for the US and PAL releases. Maybe the difficulty does slide down as some sort of counter measure. I’m getting into conspiracy theory territory now, so I better quit while I’m ahead.

Tecmo made another great game with Tecmo World Wrestling. This is an early contender for best NES wrestling game. The graphics are excellent with great animation and detail. I’m particularly fond of the text font. The cutscenes do get repetitive, but they look great and I welcome the small break to rest up for the rest of the match. The music is equally excellent. The title screen theme doesn’t usually get heard the whole way through and that’s a shame. It’s not so much underrated as it is under heard. The controls, while complex, are responsive. The least impressive part of the game is in the gameplay loop. Matches tend to get repetitive and for me it devolved into both explicit and implicit button mashing. I suppose that just comes with the territory and I will have to live with that, but it wore on me and got me more irritable the longer I had to play. The presentation is right and the gameplay at its core is solid, so for a wrestling game you can’t go wrong with Tecmo World Wrestling.

Big money! Big prizes! I love it!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 1/2/19 – 1/4/19
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: Smash TV Longplay

I had Super Smash TV on the SNES growing up. I probably got it from a yard sale or something, but I remember spending a lot of time playing the game. I wasn’t really that good at the game though. Maybe that version is really tough to beat. I didn’t know the NES had a port of the game until I started digging deeper into the library. With as frantic and sprite heavy as the SNES version is, it blows my mind that they even tried to replicate this style of game on the NES, let alone pull it off. Even though I still can’t believe this game exists on the NES, I’m glad it does.

Smash TV is a 1990 arcade game both developed and published by Williams. The game creators are Eugene Jarvis and Mark Turmell. The game was ported to several home consoles under the title Super Smash TV. The home computer versions, as well as the NES version, retained the Smash TV name. The NES version was released in September 1991. It was developed by Beam Software and published by Acclaim Entertainment. The game also had a PAL release in 1991.

Smash TV takes place in 1999. Thankfully, we didn’t get this timeline where TV has become ultra-violent. Game shows have turned into life-or-death competitions with huge prizes at stake for the survivors. Smash TV is the biggest hit show at the time where one or two contestants fend off hundreds of opponents in the arena in hopes of becoming grand champions. You play the role of one of these contestants as you try to survive over four levels.

This game is a top-down twin-stick shooter game. Hordes of enemies appear from the four doors on each side of the room. Your job is to shoot down all of the threats that appear before you can move on to the next room. Of course, since it’s a game show, you also want to pick up as much cash or prizes as you can carry. Clearing each room opens at least one exit to an adjacent room. There is a map that shows which rooms connect so that you can plan your way to the boss room at the other end of the stage.

The basic controls are simple enough but tricky to use. Use the D-pad to move in all eight directions. The A button fires your weapons in the direction you are moving. The B button lets you focus your firepower in the last direction you shot so that you can shoot and move in different directions at the same time. This is a far cry from the arcade version where you had two joysticks for independent walking and firing at all times. The SNES version with the four face buttons on the controller worked well for a twin-stick setup. Fortunately, there’s a much better way. Smash TV on NES features a two-controller setup. Plug two controllers in and hold one in each hand with the D-pad at the top. The controller 1 D-pad moves the player while the controller 2 D-pad controls shooting. Smash TV has a two-player mode and supports four controllers so that both players can enjoy the two-controller setup. I highly recommend playing this game with the dual-controller option.

Your standard weapon is a pea shooter with unlimited ammo. While sufficient, you will do better with different weapons. Pickups appear on the ground as square icons while you fight. There are three special weapons. First is the scatter gun. This gives you three-way shooting which clears up a lot of space. Next are the missiles. These are powerful, piercing shots that can take out a row of enemies or even some stronger ones in just one hit. The spew weapon looks like a grenade and fires a swarm of short-range projectiles out in front of you. Each of these three weapons has limited ammo. Underneath your score is a green bar that indicates how much ammo you have. Grab a new weapon to change weapons or grab the same one to top off your ammo.

There are other helpful pickups too. Cash, gold bars, and presents are just for points, so while not necessary for survival, this is kind of your goal and you might as well grab some. The shoes increase your walking speed, but it seems to last just for your current screen and you lose it if you die. A circular ring icon is the shield, which makes you invincible so you can defeat enemies by running into them. This is given to you by default when you begin a new life. The icon with triangles gives you ninja blades. These are five blades that circle around you and wipe out enemies. Individual blades eventually go away after hitting so many targets. This powerup stops you from moving all the way to the edge of the screen, so that’s something to keep in mind. A little person icon gives you an extra life.

There are several types of enemies to deal with. Most of the enemies are standard grunts that always move toward you. Others take more effort to defeat. Orbs bounce around the playfield and shoot lasers. Shrapnel bombs walk the perimeter before exploding into shards that kill you. Tanks absorb a lot of firepower before going down. Wall gunners are very resistant to firepower and repeatedly shoot at you. Huge robot snakes slide around the screen and you have to destroy each piece of it to put it down. Red swarmers are many little red dots that clump together and fly around the screen. There are also stationary mines that kill you if you take a wrong step.

After the first screen of each stage is completed, a map is displayed. This shows the end level boss room as well as any treasure rooms. These rooms provide you with a bunch of cash and prizes from the moment you step inside. The rooms then get filled with enemies and tend to be more difficult than other rooms. These are good places to go if you want a high score.

Each stage ends in a boss battle. The arcade version has huge bosses that weren’t possible on the NES hardware. On the NES, they are smaller in size and seem to be easier fights than on other platforms. The cobra boss takes on a different form than the arcade version so that fight is the most different from the others. No matter what, you have to use a lot of firepower to put them out of their misery.

You begin each stage with five lives. Extra life pickups appear at random, but they tend to show up often. Due to the nature of the game and all the constant enemies, death is common. This is a problem for a few reasons. There are no continues in the game so you have to start all over if you run out of lives. You are capped at nine lives and can’t pick up any more beyond that. Also, each new stage after the boss puts you back at the default number of lives, so there’s no benefit to stockpiling lives in early levels since they don’t carry over to later stages.

I beat Smash TV once before back in 2014 as part of the NA weekly contest. I got 4th place that week with a score over 12 million points. I don’t remember where I picked this game up. It’s not very common but not too expensive when you do find a copy. Carts cost around $10. An interesting side note on collectibility is that Acclaim at one point manufactured their own carts. This matters because their carts have poorer quality labels where the glue bleeds through the white part of the label and the label fold starts to chip a little bit. My copy of Smash TV looks really good all things considered, but some of my other Acclaim games are not so hot.

While Super Smash TV is challenging enough that I haven’t yet finished it on my own, the NES port of Smash TV is easier. That’s not to say the game is easy at all. I didn’t have a lot of trouble with the game playing it for myself. There’s a bit of luck involved if you happen to run into more extra lives than usual, but skill is king and what will push you through. To that end, using the two-controller setup is essential for succeeding in this game. I tried out the normal control setup for a level or so and managed okay, but that would become a problem in the later levels where the enemies get tougher and the screens take longer. There’s no substitute for having separate movement and shooting controls in all directions.

This game was tough to pin a difficulty on. I’m not so sure my past experience beating the game helped me that much. It was more my skill with this style of game. I don’t hear about people playing and beating this game very much. In the contest I played in 2014, only four people beat the game, and there were a lot of skilled gamers playing then. I don’t think this is an undesirable game that people are avoiding because they don’t think it’s fun to play. My gut tells me that this is an above-average game in difficulty that I happen to be good at. Having no continues bumps it up a notch too.

One thing I noticed playing this time was that my ending score was significantly lower than what I scored back in 2014. I played through all levels taking the top route just because I like consistency. The first stage has only one treasure room that is located on the top route so I just stuck with that path in the other levels too. Based on my 2014 score and forum posts from that week, I am pretty sure the lower routes in the other two stages are more lucrative for scoring. Points in this game are highly correlated with the number of enemies defeated. This leads me to believe that in general the upper routes have fewer enemies and therefore are easier than the lower routes. The ending doesn’t change on score or route or anything like that, and there’s no difficulty setting, so just pick whichever way you want.

There’s one more interesting tidbit about this game. The arcade version and at least the SNES version from my experience feature keys as item pickups. After the third stage boss, there are key rooms that unlock depending on if you hold enough keys. The manual for the NES game briefly mentions both key rooms and keys. However, there are no keys to pick up in the NES version at all. You still get to play the key rooms anyway between the third boss and the final boss which is often considered the fourth and final level of the game. It’s just a small, weird oversight of the NES port.

Smash TV is a really fun action game and the NES port is a great one to play. The gameplay and controls are both excellent. Movement is responsive and enemies get blasted constantly. The graphics are on the simplistic side, but the sheer number of enemies and bullets rendered on screen at the same time is awfully impressive for the NES. There is some sprite flickering which is to be expected, but there is either infrequent or no slowdown. The music is okay but gets repetitive and takes a backseat to the action anyway. The game is also repetitive and lengthy and will wear out your thumbs after some time. Smash TV on NES is an admirable port and worth playing for NES fans, even though I like the SNES version much better.

I can’t imagine anyone really dreams about pipe laying.

To Beat: Beat Round 16-1 in Game B
To Complete: Beat Round 16-4 in Game A, Beat Round 16-1 in Game B, and get the high score in Game C
My Goal: Complete the Game and get the high score in each game mode
What I Did: Met my goal
Played: 12/14/18 – 12/26/18
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Videos: Pipe Dream Game A, Pipe Dream Games B & C

I have not played a puzzle game for this project in a very long time. Tetris certainly counts as a puzzle game and I think you can count Lemmings too. Other games like Mendel Palace and Q*bert are more action and arcade oriented and less centered around puzzles. There’s a fair amount of other puzzle games on the console so maybe this is a turning point where we will see more of them come up soon.

Pipe Mania is a 1989 Amiga puzzle game developed by The Assembly Line. The game was widely ported to many different platforms by Lucasfilm Games over the next couple of years, where they distributed the game as Pipe Dream. A popular version was the Windows version as part of the MS Windows Entertainment Pack. The NES version was released in September 1990 in North America only. This version was developed by Distinctive Software and published by Bullet-Proof Software.

Pipe Dream is a straightforward puzzle game. The game takes place on a grid and you have to build the longest consecutive pipeline as possible. One piece is the start where the liquid called the flooz will flow from. You get a series of pieces at random and must lay them down on the board so that you can build out a pipeline to help contain the flooz. The goal in each level is to meet a minimum pipeline length before moving on. There are three different game modes.

The controls are simple. Use the D-pad to move your piece around the grid. Press A to place it down on the board. The Start button pauses the game. The Select button speeds up the flow of the flooz, typically used when you have built a long enough pipeline and want to complete the level quickly. There is a menu before play that you control with the D-pad. Up or Down moves the cursor and Left and Right adjusts the values on that line. On the menu you can change the number of players, game mode, starting level and round, and the game music.

The screen consists of the top status bar, the main playfield, the flooz timer, and the dispenser of pieces that you will place on the board. The status bar contains your score and your bonus points. Wrenches are shown which act as your lives. You also see the level number and round number. Level represents the complexity of the game board, while round influences the speed of the flooz. Dist is how many tiles the flooz must occupy before you can clear the stage. There is a vertical bar to the right of the playfield called the flooz timer. It counts down before the flooz starts flowing out of the start pipe, giving you time to get a head start on building your pipeline. The dispenser on the left side is your queue of pieces to place on the board. The bottom most piece is the current piece you are placing, and the queue is always five deep so you can start to plan out your moves a bit ahead of time.

Your dispenser only distributes a few types of pieces. There are straight pieces, both vertical and horizontal. There are four elbow pieces. You can’t rotate the pieces you are given so you’ll need to wait for a specific elbow. There are also cross pieces that you can use both horizontally and vertically. In later levels, you will get arrow pieces and the flooz may only flow in the pointed direction.

The first level just contains the start piece while later levels introduce other special fixed pieces on the board. Reservoir pieces are thick, straight pieces that take longer for the flooz to fill up. These are nice to incorporate so that you get some more time to work in a round. Conversely, pump pieces speed up the flooz for several tiles. An end piece is labeled with an E. You are not required to finish your pipeline with this piece, but if you do you get double bonus points. Tunnels may also appear on the playfield edges. They aren’t pieces, but instead let you direct the flow from one edge of the playfield to the opposite side.

It’s very likely that you will put a piece in the wrong spot. As long as the flooz hasn’t entered a piece already, you can drop a different piece on top of another one. This is called blasting a piece. The primary downside of blasting a piece is that there is a slight delay introduced before you can drop the next piece. You also lose 50 points per blasted piece.

Pipe Dream has two ways of scoring points. First are the non-bonus points which are scored per piece as the flooz moves through. Normal pieces give you 50 points. One-way pieces earn you 100 points. Special pieces are more lucrative. Reservoirs give you 200 points each. Pumps give you 1000 points, which is the price to pay for forced increased flow speed. Crossing a tunnel gives you 800 points. End pieces don’t award you any points. Once the flooz can’t proceed any further, the level ends. Each piece not used by the flooz loses 100 points. A pump piece speeds up the flow temporarily, and you can also force the speed to increase for the rest of the round manually by pressing Select. The base points are doubled for each piece filled during the fast flow.

The big points are earned through bonus points. You earn bonus points each time you create a loop in the pipeline through one of the cross pieces. Basically, you need to guide the flooz through a cross piece in both directions. The first loop gives you 100 points times the level number. Subsequent loops increase this value by 100 times the number of special pieces on the board, tunnels excluded. Let’s use Level 3 as an example. This level has two special pieces, the start piece and a pump piece. The first loop is worth 300 points. The second loop adds 200 points to the first loop score, and so on for each further loop. So, loop 1 is worth 300 points, loop 2 is 500 points, loop 3 is 700 points, and so on.

There are also loop bonus multipliers granted for including special pieces within a loop. So, for instance, if a reservoir is one of the pieces within a loop, your bonus is doubled. Pumps give x4 multiplier, while incorporating a tunnel gives you a x8 multiplier. These multipliers are additive if multiple special pieces are included within a loop. Including both a reservoir and a pump gives you a x6 multiplier, as an example. Once you can wrap your brain around using tunnels in a loop, you can get a huge multiplier giving you a bunch of points. If you can do these things while also linking to the end piece, that doubles your entire bonus score for the round. There’s one additional bonus. If you somehow manage to have the flooz touch every square on the playfield, you get 10,000 points times your level number added to your score.

Pipe Dream features a simultaneous two player mode. Both players can lay pieces on the game board and each player gets their own dispenser. You need to work cooperatively to make it through each round. The fun of it comes if you want to compete for score. Each player gets credit for the basic scoring for each piece utilized, including losing points for blasting pieces or leaving some unused. The player dropping the piece that directs the flooz into a special piece gets the points for that special piece.

There are three game modes that all function about the same. Game A is Standard Play and for each level you play four rounds. In Game B, Tournament Play, you only play one round per level. Game C is one-shot play and you only play a single round. The gameplay in each game mode is exactly the same. In Game A, you can choose the starting level from 1-12, but you always begin at round 1. Game B is the opposite; you pick the starting round from 1-4 but always begin from level 1. For Game C you can pick both the level and round you want. The main games have 16 levels. In Game B you play only 16 boards, but in Game A you play a whopping 64 game boards. Once you complete Level 16 in either mode, you start back at Level 1 on a new round. In Game A you go to round 5 and in Game B you go to round 2. Sadly, there is no ending to this game as play will continue indefinitely. Each game mode has its own high score table as well.

After every four rounds in Games A and B, you play a bonus game. This is a falling block style game. The starting piece is in the center and new pieces appear from the top left corner, one at a time. Each piece slides along the top of the playfield automatically and you press A to drop it straight down. Then a new piece will appear. Simply build the pipeline as long as you can for the most points. Typically, you will have a very short pipeline because you can only see one piece at a time and all pieces fall to the bottom of the pile every time. Still, it’s possible to do a loop or two for some big bonus points if it comes together correctly.

Pipe Dream has lives in the form of wrenches. You get three wrenches at the start of modes A and B. If you fail to meet the minimum pipeline length, you lose a wrench and start the round over. You can’t earn any more wrenches throughout play. There are no formal continues in the game, but in Game A you can choose your starting level up to a certain point which achieves the same function.

This was my first time beating Pipe Dream. I’m sure I’ve tinkered with the game a little bit but didn’t play beyond one screen. This game was supposed to come one game earlier in the list sandwiched between Robocop and The Terminator. I had a little problem with my game cart. I normally play on my AVS so I can record video in 720p, only this time the graphics were glitchy and the game would not play. That cart worked just fine on a regular NES console. I really like having HD video longplays where possible, so instead of recording off my CRT and stock console, I decided to try buying another cart in hope that it would work. While waiting for my replacement to arrive in the mail, I decided to skip ahead and beat The Terminator. Luckily the other cart worked great and I was able to clear the game.

Pipe Dream has an unclear winning condition with all the modes and levels and whatnot. My take is that the levels are what is most differentiated in the gameplay. There are 16 levels in all, so beating Level 16 should be enough to consider the game beaten. The quickest way to get that done is to play Game B, so that is what I chose for considering the game done. Just for completeness sake, I also did all 64 rounds of Game A and also played some Game C as well. I ended up beating both Game A and Game B and set the high score in all three game modes. I had to continue a few times in Game A and I beat Game B on my first attempt. It took me quite a few tries to get a good round going in Game C.

I believe the trick to getting high scores in Pipe Dream is to best understand conceptually how looping works. The way I think about it is that a loop begins when the flooz passes through a cross piece the first time and it ends when the flooz crosses it the second time. Any piece in between that is part of the loop. What I do is put a cross piece in the pipeline early on, cross it once, and then leave it alone. Then I work on directing the pipeline through as many special pieces and tunnels as I can before I connect it back to that initial cross piece. Pulling that off makes almost the entire pipeline one giant loop and makes it eligible for a huge multiplier. My best multiplier was a x48 in Game A and I managed a x40 in my Game C high score.

Pipe Dream is a good puzzle game that is a good fit for the NES. The controls are simple and responsive. The graphics are nice for a game like this. I thought the music was catchy and not bothersome. The gameplay is solid and I found it very satisfying whenever I got the right piece at the right time to pull off a clever turn in the piping. It felt good to pull off a big multiplier too. The game modes leave a little to be desired since the game is almost always the same no matter what, and playing an extended game gets tiring and monotonous. That kind of comes with the territory of a puzzle game like this. I would say this game is best enjoyed by fans of puzzle games, otherwise, you probably won’t find the game interesting.

I’ll be back.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 12/17/18 – 12/19/18
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 7/10
My Video: The Terminator Longplay

I wasn’t actually supposed to play The Terminator yet.  I had a different game scheduled for this slot that I could not get running on my AVS.  It was a weird case where I could get the game to play on a stock console but not the AVS.  That’s what I use to help record my longplays, so not having it playable there was a temporary dealbreaker.  I skipped ahead one game to The Terminator, which conveniently puts it right next to RoboCop, another 1980’s gritty action film franchise that is tied together through the RoboCop vs. the Terminator series.  RoboCop did well enough in its conversion to the NES, so let’s see how The Terminator fared.

The Terminator film was released in 1984.  It was the first major film both directed and written by James Cameron.  The movie is about a cyborg sent from 2029 back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor.  The future intelligence network known as Skynet plans to initiate a nuclear holocaust but would be foiled by John Connor, Sarah’s son.  A Resistance soldier, Kyle Reese, also goes back to 1984 to save Sarah from the Terminator so that John can be born and eventually lead the Resistance to victory.  The movie was made on a small budget with little hope for success, but the reception was positive and the film was a financial success.  The Terminator became a franchise, spawning five feature films with a sixth movie slated for 2019, many comic books, and a television series.  Of course, there have been many video games based on the series and franchise.

There were several games based on the first Terminator movie.  Sunsoft was set to create the first Terminator video game for the NES, but the license expired before the game was finished.  Sunsoft would go on to retool and release the game anyway as Journey to Silius.  The first Terminator video game was an action-adventure game on DOS in 1991.  There were later games on the SNES, Sega Genesis, and Sega CD.  The NES version was released in December 1992, created by Radical Entertainment and published by Mindscape.  The game had a PAL release also in 1992.

The Terminator on NES more or less follows the plot of the movie.  You play as Kyle Reese, the resistance soldier from 2029 on a mission to save Sarah Connor from the Terminator.  You go through several missions.  You start in 2029, then you go back to 1984 and find Sarah, then you escape from the Terminator, and finally head into a factory where The Terminator is destroyed.  There are six missions total and you beat the game once all are finished.

The Terminator is a side-scrolling action platformer, mostly.  There are a couple different modes of play that appear periodically in the game, so the controls vary as well.  The platforming sections where you play as Kyle usually have the same controls.  You use the D-pad to move around.  This is a game where the B button is used for jumping.  When standing still you do a taller jump than when you are moving, and there is also a slight animation that occurs before you go airborne.  The A button uses weapons, which are typically either punches or kicks but can be guns, grenades, etc.  You can press Select to switch between weapons.  There is an icon at the top that shows which weapon is active, along with any required ammo.  The Start button pauses the game.

Sometimes there are items on the ground that you can pick up.  Just like in RoboCop, you have to stand over them and press Down to duck and pick them up.  Mostly you will find hearts that restore some of your health.  You can also find pickups like grenades or other special items that are stage specific.  Enemies don’t drop these so you have to keep an eye out in the stages.

The first stage has some unique considerations from most of the other stages.  Kyle Reese starts out with a machine gun when he is in 2029.  Press and hold A to fire the gun.  You will automatically squat down before letting off firepower, so like with jumping you have to allow time for the animation to complete.  Bullets are unlimited.  While holding A to fire, you can press Up or Down to aim your gun at a different angle.  You also get grenades for use on distant targets.  First Select the grenades, then press A to lob them.  The longer you hold A, the farther you throw.

Near the end of the level, you have to hop in a pickup truck and avoid attacks from Skynet as you approach the base to time travel.  This is an auto-scrolling segment moving to the left.  Press Left to speed up and Right to slow down.  The truck is equipped with a gun and you can adjust its angle by pressing Up and Down.  The A button fires the gun.

The second level puts you in 1984 without any of your equipment you had in 2029.  You have to rely on punches and kicks to make it through, in fact you are stuck without a gun or grenades for the rest of the game.  Press Select to choose which weapon you want and press A to attack.  You also find baseballs in this stage alone that you can throw to ward off enemy dogs.  They don’t do damage but act as a distraction.

In Levels 3 and 5, instead of traveling on foot you drive vehicles.  Unlike the truck section in Stage 1, these are top-down driving sections.  You use the D-pad to steer your vehicle Left and Right.  Press Up to speed up and press Down to slow down.  These are looping stages and all you have to do is travel far enough to eventually end the stage.  There is a counter on screen that shows how much further you have to go.  When it reaches zero, the level is complete.  Of course, you will be pursued by the Terminator in a vehicle of his own.  You take damage when he bumps you or shoots you.  You can fire back if you want for points, even though I don’t think it slows him down any.  Press B to fire to the left and press A to fire to the right.

You begin the game with two extra lives.  Falling off the stage or running out of health costs you a life.  When you run out of lives, it’s Game Over and there are no continues to bail you out.  The only way to earn extra lives is through scoring.  You get a new life every 50,000 points.  Scoring is slow enough where you will only gain a life or two through casual play.  Every little bit helps with this one.

This was my first time playing through The Terminator.  I didn’t mention it up above, but this is one movie I have actually seen.  I haven’t watched all of The Terminator films but I think I have seen the first three or four.  This was one of the first NES games I picked up in the summer of 2013 when I decided to get back into NES collecting for good.  It was in the same lot of games where I got Alien 3.  Each game averaged out to $5 in that purchase, which is much better than the $20-$25 a Terminator cart will cost today.

This game has a reputation for being difficult.  One review I read said the game is impossible.  It is a difficult game but not nearly as bad as it was made out to be.  After all, I completed it for the first time after three days of playing.  I can see where that impression comes from just from the first level alone.  I’m confident that the first stage is the hardest part of the whole game.  First things first, you have to cope with the jumping.  The collision detection is pretty bad.  You have a large character sprite and the exact bottom-center pixel of the character is where you need to touch a ledge in order to land on it.  Inevitably you will miss ledges and fall to your death.  Furthermore, you are pursued by enemies that appear at random and can knock you down or drain your health fast.  You have to allow time to get your gun out, and the grenades are both limited and difficult to aim properly.  Early in the stage you have to navigate some small conveyor belts with these enemies, and you can fall off into the pit while you have your gun out firing.

All that is just the first half of the stage.  The rest of it is even worse.  At the top level, you first need to jump across moving platforms that inhibit and influence your jumping in unexpected ways depending on which direction they are moving.  Later are these ankle-biting turrets.  Some you can duck under and fire, while others are too low to handle that way.  You can take them out with grenades and the tricky aiming.  Or you can go toe-to-toe with them with your gun and lose a bunch of health in the process.  If you survive that, then you have to do the truck section.  I can’t for the life of me figure out how to dodge the attacks from above.  Since you can’t jump here, you have to rely on changing speeds to dodge.  The terrain is hilly and you are always bouncing around and can’t reliably aim your gun.  It’s really tough and I got stopped here my first day after many tries.  Survive that part, and you have to outrun another machine with the truck.  I don’t believe it is possible to dodge this at all; I survived through attrition.  You would think that would be the end of the stage, but nope, there is one more platforming section.  This features retractable spikes and platforming across single tile ledges with pits underneath.  This is where the collision detection flaws are most evident.  This game was not designed for precision jumping but you have to do it anyway several times over.  You are also limited on lives since you’ll probably lose at least one life just getting this far.  While not super easy, the game lets up a lot after beating this stage.

There’s one trick that really helped me figure out this game.  I learned it from the Angry Video Game Nerd in his The Terminator review.  There’s a great spot in the first stage where you can camp out with your gun and defeat unlimited enemies without suffering any damage.  Get set up properly and hold down the A button to rack up the points and lives.  I know this was deliberate and I don’t know why, but you max out at only six extra lives.  It takes about two to three minutes per extra life and it gets tiring to hold the button down for the ten or fifteen minutes needed to grind.  The Nerd used a monkey wrench and clamped down the A button on his controller instead.  I am not a handy guy at all, but I do have a monkey wrench, though I have no idea where I left it.  I improvised by finding something heavy and stable enough to set down on top of the controller to keep the button pressed.  Having six lives each attempt gave me the leeway I needed to learn the rest of the game quickly.

By the time I beat the game initially, at best I could get through the whole game with only losing two lives.  I spent one in the truck part of Stage 1 and another in the driving portion of Stage 5.  Playing normally without grinding gave me enough points for two extra lives, so I had a couple extra to spare anywhere else just in case.  While recording my longplay video, I died both in Stage 1 and Stage 5 as expected.  I burned one spare life in the final stage, giving me a somewhat comfortable win.  Once you know what to do, the game is short.  I finished my playthrough in about 20 minutes, which is about half the time it would take if I needed to grind for lives.

The Terminator is a lackluster NES game.  The character graphics in-game are kind of dopey looking.  The environments look just okay.  The best graphics are the digitized character portraits between the stages.  The music and sound effects are bland where they exist at all.  The controls are okay and you can get used to the floaty jumping.  However, the poor collision detection makes the already loose controls much more difficult to manage.  The vehicle sections, while a nice break from the platforming, are not that interesting or involved.  The high level of difficulty right out of the gate is a big turn off as well, and no continues and few lives mean you may not be spending much time with this game.  As far as Robocop vs. Terminator is concerned, on the NES, Robocop wins in a landslide.