Take on the NES Library

DEC

2018

#103 – Baseball Simulator 1.000

Possibly the most detailed and comprehensive NES baseball game.

Pronounced “one thousand,” not “one dot oh oh oh.”

To Beat: Win a season
What I Did: Went undefeated in a short season in the Ultra League
Played: 10/15/18 – 10/20/18
Difficulty: 1/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Baseball Simulator 1.000 Final Game

There are so many baseball games on the NES that each one should have something interesting or unique to offer. At least, I would hope that’s true. R.B.I. Baseball is always the nostalgic choice for all the good memories I’ve had playing games with friends. Bases Loaded emulates the grind of a long season. Baseball Simulator 1.000 hits along both of those lines but dials it up even further in a few different ways. While I did not spend a huge amount of time playing Baseball Simulator 1.000, it is definitely in the running for my new favorite NES baseball game.

Baseball Simulator 1.000 was developed and published by Culture Brain. The Famicom version was first, releasing in October 1989 under the name Choujin Ultra Baseball. The NES version came out in March 1990. There are several other games in this series, all on Super Famicom. The only other game to get a US release was Super Baseball Simulator 1.000 for SNES in 1991. In Japan it is known as Super Ultra Baseball. A direct sequel on Super Famicom was released in 1994. The other three games were Japan-only baseball games named Ultra Baseball Jitsumeiban. These games have the same structure as the others but include licensed rosters from the Japan’s NPB league.

Baseball Simulator 1.000 has several game modes with a wide variety of configuration options. You can play a simple exhibition game by yourself or with a friend, or you can play a full season. There are three leagues of teams to choose from for playing a season, one of which is the Ultra league where players have super skills that can be strategically deployed. You can create your own teams or even your own league. In season play, statistics are calculated for the duration of the season. Things like batting average, home runs, and ERA are tabulated and you can see how your players stack up with the rest of the league. To beat the game, simply be the league champion at the end of a season.

Lots of stats in this one!

The first menu screen presents you with five options that do a pretty good job of outlining what features to expect in the game. Exhibition mode lets you play a simple game. You can play this game with either one or two players. In single player this is just one game, but for two players you can also choose to play a best-of-seven series. Season mode is the primary mode in the game. You can choose the number of games you’ll play in the season from either 5, 30, 60, or a whopping 165 games. Season play is contained in one league of six teams all vying for the best record. Edit mode lets you take an existing team and edit it in many ways to create a brand new team. In the New League option, you can take any six teams you want in the game and combine them together into a new league that you can play in the Season mode. Finally, if you just want to sit back and watch the computer go at it, you can select Watch and just watch a game.

The in-game controls are largely the same as in R.B.I. Baseball, so I recommend reading my review there if you want more detail. I’ll cover the highlights. Batting and baserunning I believe is exactly the game. You can move your batter around the batter’s box with the D-pad and press A to swing the bat, tapping A to bunt. While baserunning, the D-pad points to whichever base you want. Press B with a base direction to advance a runner and use A instead to go back.

On defense, you both pitch and play the field. For pitching, you can move the pitcher left or right prior to starting the pitch with A. You can use the D-pad to influence the direction and movement of the pitch both prior to the pitch and when the pitch is on the way to the plate. A quirk about this game is the “pinch” indicator which sometimes turns on during a crucial plate appearance. The pitcher will start to sweat and can have an effect on his performance, either positively or negatively at random. On defense, you control most of the fielders at the same time, but more specifically the ones closest to where the ball is headed. Move on top of the ball to grab it, then press A and a direction to throw the ball to that base. Press B and a direction to run the ball there yourself. In this game, you can press A to jump or dive for a ball that is just out of reach.

Get a view of some fielding stats and make adjustments.

You can do player substitutions. Before a pitcher winds up, either team can press Start to call time. While batting, you can choose a pinch hitter. He will play the field wherever you sub him, no problem. Well, unless you are hitting for a pitcher, in which case both pinch hitter and pitcher are out of the game and you must choose a new relief pitcher after the half inning. On defense, you can sub out either the pitcher or any fielder. This brings up a view of the entire field with a small table for each player. Select a player, then choose Change from the box on the lower right. One thing you cannot do is swap two fielders already in the lineup; you must sub in a brand new player. If you choose a player and select Move, you can shift the fielder to just about any position on the field you want no matter what position they currently play. So, for example, if you know the batter will probably hit the ball to right field, you can move several fielders out there for a better chance of making a play. The custom fielding positions reset back to default after that batter is finished. There are a few limitations. You cannot move either the pitcher or the catcher, you can’t put a fielder in between the pitcher and catcher, and you can’t put a fielder in foul territory.

The main feature that sets this baseball game apart is included in the Ultra League. In this league, pitchers can use Ultra Pitches, batters can perform Ultra Hitting, and fielders can do Ultra Fielding. These are special, supercharged moves that can really swing the game in an instant. Each team in the Ultra League has a set number of Ultra Points for each game played, and performing an Ultra Play requires spending some of those points. Ultra Pitchers and Ultra Hitting costs 3 points each, while an Ultra Fielding play costs 5 points. To choose an Ultra Pitch, press Up twice before the windup. You will see an icon appear next to the pitcher. Then press Up or Down to choose the Ultra Pitch you want. While batting, press B to show the Ultra Hitting icon, then swing normally with A to use it. To perform an Ultra Fielding move, press B while the fielder is near the ball.

The Ultra moves can be intense

The Ultra moves themselves are fun to use with a wide variety of interesting effects. There are pitches with all sorts of movement, including a snaking pitch and a super fastball. You can throw a stop ball that freezes on the way to the plate by pressing A. You can throw a pitch that splits up into many balls. There’s a pitch that disappears on the way to the batter, and another that is a heavy ball that the batter has to hit just right to put it into play. On the hitting side, you can simply do an Ultra move that hits the ball with more power. There’s a hit that casts multiple shadows on the ground so it’s tougher to see where the ball will land. There’s a hit that spins the ball off in a drastically different direction when it hits the ground. There’s a missile hit that pushes the fielder back far, sometimes even through the outfield wall. For fielding, you can jump super high or do a super dive. You can also throw the ball extra fast to help catch a runner between bases. This isn’t a full list, but a good summary of the kinds of things you can do in the Ultra League.

There are six different stadiums in the game. You can pick which one you want to play in an exhibition game, or in a season you can assign each of the six teams to any stadium you want as their home field. The stadiums have different dimensions and characteristics, just like baseball stadiums in professional leagues. One stadium that stands out from the rest is the space stadium. Graphically it is unique, but here there is less gravity so the ball can really carry. It’s possible to hit some long homeruns, especially in the Ultra League.

Baseball Simulator 1.000 features a full Edit mode where you can build a team. To start, you must pick one of the eighteen built-in teams as a base. When creating an Ultra team, you have to use one of the existing Ultra teams as a base. You also can’t have the original team and the edited version of that team in the same league together. Other than that, there’s a lot you can change. You can rename the team and any of the players. You get to distribute both batting stats and pitching stats. You can a base amount for the entire team in each category and you can distribute those points as you see fit. You can edit things like their contact ability, power, running speed, position on the field, and fielding ability. For pitchers, you can choose if he is left or right handed, pitching speed, stamina, and strength of breaking pitches. Pitchers all have the same, weak hitting stats that cannot be changed. If you are editing an Ultra team, you can also choose and distribute the Ultra moves. You can create up to six new teams altogether.

Good idea to have the ball hit directly to the pitcher.

Season play is also a comprehensive mode. While only one season can be saved at a time, there are many ways you can choose to go through it. For a new season, first select a league. This can be one of the three built-in leagues or the fourth custom league. Then assign home stadiums to each team in the league. Next, choose the season length from either 5, 30, 60, or 165 games. Since there are six teams, each team will play against each of the five other teams the same number of times. For each team, you then select which teams are played automatically by the computer and which ones are played manually by a player. You can play an entire season automatically if you want. The game will generate a schedule of the order of games played and go through them one at a time. If a team is set to Manual, then that game will be played with a player at the helm. If both teams are set to Auto, you can then choose if you want to watch the game or skip it. Skipping a game simulates the contest more quickly than watching the game play out. All stats are kept and calculated from the simulated game.

The season ends whenever a team clinches the league championship. As the season draws to a close, the standings will display the Magic Number. This number is wins by the first place team or losses by the second place team needed to secure the league title. A Magic Number of 0 means that team wins the league no matter how the rest of the games play out. You then see a victory celebration for the winning team. If two or more teams are tied after season play, there will be playoffs to determine the winner. The playoff bracket is set up automatically and are single elimination games. Most likely there will only be two teams tie, so in that case a single game determines league champion.

This was my first time playing through Baseball Simulator 1.000. I do like baseball quite a lot but I’m not so interested in baseball video games, so this has sat on my shelf for some time. This is the first game with a battery backup I’ve played in a little while, and thankfully my battery was still good. I probably picked this game up in a lot of games for next to nothing. A cart-only copy costs around $6, so it’s quite affordable for baseball fans.

This poor fielder is getting knocked into the wall by an Ultra hit.

I figured that if I’m going to play this game, I might as well play in the Ultra League to check out the enhanced features. The ending is the same no matter what. I also decided on a short, five-game season. A friend of mine suggested I play with the team called Heroes, which is the team with the icon of a smiling baseball abbreviated HE. (You can read his review of the game.) This team is likely the best team in the game for a few reasons. The team has the most Ultra points of any team in the league. The starting pitching is very strong and each pitcher can last several innings. This team also has two players that are borderline ludicrous. The leadoff hitter, Boyd, is the fastest player in the game easily. Anything hit on the ground is a guaranteed hit, and usually more. In one game, using an Ultra Hit, I performed an unheard-of infield inside-the-park home run. Yes, he’s that fast. The fifth hitter, Bret, has some of the best power in the game. When combined with Ultra Hitting, you should mostly hit home runs with him. I only hit nine homers with him in five games since I was a bit conservative with spending Ultra points, although he did have one four-homer game.

I went undefeated in a short season and all the games but one were blowouts. This game has the same rule from R.B.I. Baseball where games are called if one team is winning by 10 or more after any inning. The first four games went as follows: A 12-2 win in 5 innings, a 15-1 win in 6 innings, another 12-2 win in 7 innings, and a 14-0 shutout in only 3 innings. I hit nine home runs in both the first and fourth games. Game 2 was the four-homer game by Bret, and Game 4 was played in the space stadium which explains all the home runs there. The fifth and final game of the season was the biggest test by. Both teams were undefeated so it functioned the same as a one-game playoff for the title. I played a full 9 inning game and won 7-4. It got a little scary at the end because I gave up a three-run homer in the bottom of the 9th and they had the tying run at the plate. I just barely held on. That team had really good pitching and they messed up my rhythm. I also played conservatively with the Ultra moves the entire season. I rarely used Ultra Pitches or Ultra Fielding, spending most of my points on Ultra Hitting. Even then, I mostly utilized Ultra Hitting when I had runners on base. The idea was to keep the rally going or go for the big home run. I had an easy time with the game up until that final game, but it still wasn’t too tough.

#102 – Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular

I like good alliteration, and I like this game too.

Where’s the rest of the title?

To Beat: Score 10,000 points in the Total Game Mode
To Complete: Score 15,000 points in the Total Game Mode
What I Did: Scored 16,460 points
Played: 10/9/18
Difficulty: 2/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular Longplay

Today we have a sports game that doesn’t feel like one. I remember one time when I was browsing through game lots on eBay. I was looking into one where the seller highlighted that there were all good games in the lot and no sports titles. Just about the first game I saw in there was this Snoopy game. I just rolled my eyes and said, “oh come on, the word sports is right there in the title!” Sports games have this negative stigma with them, particularly in collector mindsets for older systems. Games like this will blur the lines and somehow avoid all that negativity. I can see why Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular would fit that mold with its cartoon events that don’t always make sense but are pretty fun to play.

Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular was released on the NES in April 1990 in North America only. Kemco both developed and published the game. This is another game with an interesting background. It is a loose port of the game Alternative World Games created by Gremlin Graphics in 1987 for Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. Kemco adapted the game for the Famicom in September 1988. In Japan, they had the licensing rights for Disney, so they made Donald Duck the main character and named the game Donald Duck. Capcom held the rights for making Disney games in the US, so when Kemco brought the game over, they licensed the Peanuts characters and changed the game into Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular.

Try to keep up, Spike.

The game is an Olympic-style contest. These are Snoopy’s International Games consisting of six different events: Sack Race, Boot Throwing, Pogo, Overboard, Pile of Pizza, and River Jump. You can play the game with either one or two players. Should you choose two-player mode, two events are simultaneous play and the rest are alternating play. The games are set in Italy and Greece so you have nice architectural backdrops to go along with the silly games. You can play events individually for fun or practice, but the main mode is the Total Game mode where you play all six events in a row. In this mode, you want to break the world record of 10,000 points to win 1st place and beat the game.

The Sack Race takes place on a city street. You control Snoopy and either the second player or computer controls his brother, Spike. You begin waiting behind the starting line waiting for a balloon to pop to signal the start of the race. Press and release the A button to jump forward. Just tapping A will only perform a tiny hop. You’ll have to learn the rhythm to go as fast as possible. Use the D-pad to adjust your position on the street. There are manholes littered around the course that open at random, and if you get caught up in one you will trip and fall behind. You can’t interfere with your opponent at all, so you only need to worry about the manholes. If one player falls too far behind, Woodstock will push that player up to close the gap so that both characters remain on screen. You have 50 seconds to reach the end of the course. In the Total Game mode, you earn 40 points for every second remaining on the timer, minus some points if you need a Woodstock push.

Weeeee!

In the Boot Throwing competition, you want to throw your boot as far as possible. Begin by pressing Down, then rotate your thumb around the D-pad in a counter-clockwise motion. It turns out you only need to alternate between pressing Down and Right, but doing the rotation helps greatly. This will wind up your throw, and then you press A to let it loose. With good timing you will throw it far ahead, but you can also throw it straight up, straight into the ground, or even backwards for no distance. On a forward throw, Woodstock will go out and tell you how far you threw. You get two separate throws. The best throw I could do was 30 feet which was worth 500 points. The scoring is prorated for shorter distances, and both throws are scored separately and added together for the event.

The Pogo event is a simple obstacle course. Press Right to move Snoopy forward and press and hold A to bounce high. Snoopy will do small bounces automatically. He also cannot move backward. There are four tall walls of equal height that Snoopy must jump over to get all the points. If you crash into the wall, the event ends right there. This event takes a lot of practice to get the timing and button presses right. For the Total Game mode, each wall cleared is worth 250 points.

Looks like I will just barely clear the wall.

Overboard is a two-player pushing game. You are on a boat in a canal, and as Snoopy you try and push Spike off the boat. Use the D-pad to walk around and tap the A button quickly to push. This is kind of a button masher, at least in my experience. The boat also rocks side to side, which from your view is in and out of the screen. You can use Up and Down on the D-pad to favor either side of the boat, and you want to be on the high side of the boat as much as possible. You can get knocked off the back of the boat or fall off the sides in the middle of the boat if you don’t adjust your position. You are trying to push Spike off the right side of the boat. The scoring in this game is a little different. If you fall then you get no points. The base score is 1000 points, and you lose 20 points for every second of the match, rounded up. For example, if you win in five seconds, take 100 points off the base score for a total of 900 points for the event.

Spike is having a rough day.

The Pile of Pizza event asks you to carefully carry a large stack of pizzas across the finish line. Similar to the Sack Race, you press and release Right on the D-pad to move forward. You can hold right to keep walking, but you are going to drop a bunch of pizzas. If you walk too fast or too erratically, the stack will shake enough to drop pizzas. This is a tortoise and the hare situation where slow and steady wins the race. Tap out Right a little at a time to inch forward and keep your pizza stack nice and tall. Your stack is displayed as ten pizzas high, however the game counts each one as two pizzas for a total of twenty pizzas. This game has another interesting scoring setup. You get 80 seconds to complete the event, but you can get a perfect score of 1000 by carrying all pizzas past the finish line with at least 20 seconds remaining. You lose points for every second taken beyond 20 seconds remaining, and you also lose points proportionally to every pizza dropped.

The River Jump is straightforward. This is kind of like a pole vaulting event, only you are using the pole to jump over a river instead of clearing the high bar. Press A rapidly to run. When you get to the river, press B to stick your pole in the water. This is an all or nothing event. You get 1000 points if you make it across and nothing if you don’t. This event seems to give people a lot of trouble, and the reason is the manual doesn’t make it clear exactly how this event works. What you are supposed to do is press A quickly to run, then press and hold B at the river’s edge for a while before letting go of the button to dismount. When you learn the timing, it becomes the easiest event.

No leaning for this tower.

In the Total Game mode, when all events are completed, the scores are added together to give you a sub total. The scoring screen has a field called Clear Point which starts at 2000 points. If your total is more than that, you get to compete in the same six events again. If your cumulative score after two rounds is more than 5000, you get to do all the events again the third time around. Your final score is the sum of the score in all six events played three times.

I spent a week in 2017 playing Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular for the NintendoAge contest. I managed a score of 16,930 and placed 4th that week. I could have sworn I’ve played this game for points before that, but it didn’t show up in the contests before then and I’m pretty sure I didn’t play it on my own. In a different contest year, I won a copy of this game and that’s the copy I kept for my collection. It’s slightly less than common but one I’ve owned a couple copies off. It sells for around $8 or so.

It’s not as tough as it seems.

I think this is a game that many players could do well enough to beat after a couple hours of practice. The events are all small and you can practice them quickly to get the hang of them. If you are pretty good at about half of the events, that can earn you enough points to clear the game. When you beat the game, you get a medal depending on your score. Just beating the game gets you the bronze medal. You need at least, I believe, 12,500 points to get the silver medal and 15,000 points to get the gold medal. While optional, I knew I wanted to get 15,000 again. It took me about half a dozen tries to get a run I was happy with. I struggled with the timing on the Pogo event and Boot Throwing was inconsistent. I’ve never been great at Overboard either. Most of my attempts would have ended in the 13K-16K range. I didn’t want to just barely get 15K, rather I wanted a run with few mistakes. I’m happy with my longplay video with a score of 16,460. The only thing keeping me from 17K were some bad boot throws. It’s possible to get over 18K by playing near perfectly on all events.

Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular delivers all that the title describes. The graphics are nice and Snoopy is a good fit for the game, even though that wasn’t how it was imagined originally. The music is decent as well. The controls all work like they are supposed to. A mini-game compilation may not appeal to everyone, but as these kinds of games go I think this is a good one. There is a good variety of events and they all perform well with no obvious glitches or exploits. The only downside is that it’s a short game and there’s not much lasting appeal beyond beating the game. It’s a fun game to try out, but maybe not one you need to own unless you are a collector.

#102 – Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular

#102 – Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular (16,460 points)

tag : donald, duck, kemco, silly, snoopy, snoopy's, spectacular, spike, sports, woodstock

by : arnpoly

comment : 0

NOV

2018

#101 – F-117A Stealth Fighter

Not exactly a stealth mission, but whatever.

So dark and stealthy

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Get the highest rank and win all medals
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 9/22/18 – 10/8/18
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
My Video: F-117A Stealth Fighter Final Mission

Flight games are way out of my interest level and not really in my wheelhouse. So far, I have dealt with two such games with mixed results. Top Gun had fast action but was difficult. Laser Invasion had several different modes and was a surprise fun game on my list. Those two games had the benefit of being developed by Konami, one of the most prolific and successful developers on the system. How do other developers fare in this genre? F-117A Stealth Fighter is an ambitious game featuring open-ended missions and a lot to keep track of throughout. Let’s take a closer look.

F-117A Stealth Fighter has quite a convoluted past. Let’s start with the PC game F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter from 1991. That game was a remake of F-19 Stealth Fighter from 1988, which was itself a remake of Project Stealth Fighter from 1987. Those games were all computer games developed and published by Microprose. The NES game appears to be a trimmed down version of those games. F-117A Stealth Fighter on NES was released in December 1992, both developed and published by Microprose. It turns out that I unintentionally broke my rule of playing games out of order, sort of. F-117A Stealth Fighter is not a sequel, but more of a spiritual successor to the game F-15 Strike Eagle, which debuted on computers in 1984. That game had a couple of sequels released in 1989 and 1992 before the original F-15 Strike Eagle was ported to the NES in early 1992.

F-117A Stealth Fighter is a flight combat game. You are simply the pilot of the F-117A who carries out several missions. These missions are comprised of flying your fighter through enemy territory to destroy a primary target and a few secondary targets. There are six main missions in the game. Do well enough in those missions to unlock some secret missions. Complete the secret missions to reach the ending and beat the game.

Travel the globe!

Before you get started, use the main menu to set up your game. There are four options here. You press Select to make decisions on this screen, and then press Start when you are ready to fly. The Options selection lets you choose what kind of game you want to play. You can play the game single player, with a friend as a team, or against a friend in competition. Team play is interesting in that the first player controls the F-117 fighter’s movement while the second player controls the weapons. I have no idea how the competitive mode works; the manual doesn’t even mention it. The other three options on that screen are for starting up a saved game with a password. The Theater screen lets you pick which mission you want to try. You can only do the Libya mission at first. The Enemy level can be chosen from Green, Average, Veteran, or Ace. You can also decide which missiles you want to bring along using the Weapons screen. There are different loadouts of air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles to choose from.

The controls are complex for an NES game. The view is in first person from inside the cockpit. Use the D-pad to steer your F-117A fighter. Up and Down are inverted in this game, while Left and Right steer your aircraft in the appropriate direction. The A button fires your Vulcan Cannon while the B button launches missiles. You have to be locked on to a target before firing missiles, while the Vulcan Cannon can be shot at any time. Press Start to launch decoys, either chaff or flares depending on the situation. The Select button is used for many different things. Simply press Select during a mission to bring up the map screen. Hold Select and press either Up or Down to adjust the throttle, which speeds up or slows down your fighter. There are two screens in the center of your cockpit display. The left one is toggled by holding Select and pressing B. This side displays either a minimap or your radar. Hold Select and press A to toggle the right screen between your missile ammo and current damage display. Press Start and Select together to toggle autopilot. Then your fighter jet will automatically steer toward whichever main target you chose on the map screen.

See the lay of the land and choose your target.

There is a ton of information on screen that is useful during play. The main action takes place on the top half of the screen. The square in the center is the focus of the action and you have to have an enemy within that square to target it with missiles. There will be a lock indicator that appears around the target when you have successfully locked on. The red arrow around the perimeter is your navigation arrow. This points to either the primary target, secondary target, or home base, whichever you selected. On the map screen, you press Left or Right to adjust which target you want the arrow to point. (You can also eject from your fighter jet from this screen.) On the right side of the center window is an altitude indicator. When you are flying too low, this indicator will blink red.

The bottom half of the screen shows all the bells and whistles from inside your cockpit. On the far left, you see your digital altitude display, the speed display, and your compass display. The compass displays from 0 to 360 degrees depending on your flight direction. 0 is due north, 90 is due east, 180 is south, and 270 is west. Above those displays on the top is your autopilot indicator. Just to the right of that is your throttle gauge and your fuel gauge. In the middle are the map/radar displays and the weapons/damage display. Above the weapons/damage display are four indicators. Lock displays when enemy radar has locked on to you. The I or R display lights up when either an enemy infrared missile or enemy radar-locked missile is headed your way. The Fire indicator lights up when you are locked on to a target and can fire a missile. To the right of that is your stealth gauge. On the far right is your decoy ammo and Vulcan cannon ammo. The long box at the bottom is a text display for various events, and next to that is your score.

The idea in each mission is to destroy a primary target on the ground. You can set the navigation arrow to point toward it and go straight there if you want. That might not be the best course of action. Piloting a stealth fighter means you can opt to sneak in as quietly as possible. The stealth meter has two bars on it. The left one shows how effective the enemy radar is, while the right bar is how visible you are. I’m not really sure I understand it, but from experience you want the left bar to be higher than the right bar. By avoiding enemy bases on the map, you keep the enemy’s radar less effective and the left bar higher on the display. The way you fly influences the right bar. Flying slower, lower, and away from radar stations keep your visibility low. When the bars cross, the right one will turn red and that means you are being tracked by radar. Since you have to get close to enemies to take out the targets, this is inevitable. Soon an enemy will lock on to you with a missile.

Enemy fighters are ruthless in this game.

When you get tracked and locked by an enemy, there’s really no maneuver you can do to avoid missiles. You want to pull up your radar to see the missile approaching and press Start to launch a decoy. If done at a good time, this should steer the missile away from you and you can proceed. The radar is also helpful for seeing nearby enemy fighters and ground targets. While you can steer away from ground targets, enemy fighters are relentless and will follow you around if you let them. With the help of radar, get the enemy fighters in front of you and blow them up so that they will stop bothering you. Take the time needed to blow them up so that you can continue with your mission.

There are two ways you take damage. Enemies will fire with cannons if you get too close to them. Eventually this will knock you out of commission, though the damage is slow to build up. Most of your damage will come from enemy missiles that you couldn’t decoy or were targeted from too close. These have the added detriment of sometimes disabling some functionality of your stealth fighter. Any damage that affects your fighter’s capabilities will cause the right-hand display to switch over to a top-down view of your fighter highlighting where the damage took place. The status bar will tell you what part got hit. Often the missiles will disable something you can live without, like your digital altimeter, speedometer, compass, or autopilot system. If the fuel line gets hit, you will start to lose fuel much faster, affecting the amount of time you can maintain flight. You can’t fire missiles or decoys if those systems are hit, and if your Vulcan cannon is damaged you will fire sporadically. Losing your radar display puts you at a significant disadvantage. The worst is if you take a direct hit to the engine because then you are done for. I think it’s best to be generous in deploying your decoys so that you can maintain top performance as long as possible.

It hurts to lose your radar.

Changing your weapon loadout can be helpful for clearing some missions. You set this up in the Weapons option before each mission. You can hold two types of missiles at once and there are several predefined loadouts set up for you to pick from. To use missiles in combat, simply press B when you lock on to an enemy by getting it in front of you. For ground targets, you must be at 20,000 feet or below to be able to lock on. I found that it didn’t really matter what type of air missiles you use as the basic ones were incredibly accurate and deadly. The air-to-ground missiles however have varying results. The basic ones are not very effective, but you can opt for fewer, more powerful missiles that don’t often miss their mark. The longer you play the game, the more weapon packs you can choose from. Later, you can get missiles designed for taking down boats, as well as some highly accurate air-to-ground missiles in higher quantities. There’s even a weapon set that gives you extra fuel and another that gives you extra ammo for your Vulcan Cannon. Be sure to check the weapons screen between missions to see what’s changed.

The enemy ground targets in a mission have various icons to represent them. You can see these icons on the map or on your minimap during flight. It took me a while to realize that you can derive some benefit from taking down specific units. Little satellites are radar stations, and destroying them reduces the effectiveness of enemy radar targeting. Destroying runways helps keep enemy fighters out of the air. Two important ones replenish some of your supplies on the fly. An icon shaped like a capital A is an ammo dump that restores all of your Vulcan Cannon ammo when destroyed. Blow up the oil well over the water to restore all your fuel. I’m not sure what effect some of the other ones have. It’s not a bad idea to plan your route around specific targets.

Once you have completed your mission, land back at the home air strip. You have to be flying lower than 10,000 feet while over the runway to engage the landing sequence. This view changes to behind the stealth fighter. Simply use the D-pad to steer in all directions, and remember, use Up to go lower here. I think you can crash if you descend too quickly but I never had that happen, just be careful.

Easiest landing sequence thus far.

After the mission, you go through debriefing where your score is totaled. Destroying the primary target gives you 10,000 points, each secondary target is worth 5,000 points, other ground targets are worth 3,000 points each, and enemy fighters are worth 1,000 points each. Then, optionally, you may earn bonus points. I’m not sure how the scoring works for these. You can get points for saving missiles, flying stealthily, or landing well. Your mission score is then added to your total score over all missions to date. These are just the base points for the Green difficulty level. These point values are doubled for Average, tripled for Veteran, and quadrupled for Ace difficulty.

You earn medals and ribbons for meeting certain criteria. Each of the six main missions award you a medal if you score enough points. Unfortunately, the digital manual I found for the game was almost too blurry to read, but I can tell you the point thresholds are 50,000, 125,000, 175,000, 200,000, 300,000, and 325,000 for each respective mission. There are four additional medals that can be earned in any mission. One you get by completing any mission, and another you receive by clearing multiple missions. The Air Force Achievement Medal is awarded by destroying at least 15 enemy airplanes in a single mission. The Superior Service Medal is earned by destroying at least 75% of all ground targets in a mission. You can only get each medal once, but you can earn more than one at a time. You also receive ribbons and get promoted for meeting certain total score thresholds. To achieve the highest rank of General, you must score 4,000,000 points cumulative over all mission attempts. Just keep playing long enough and you will get there!

While the ribbons and associated promotions are merely cosmetic, the medals have a greater significance. Earn all ten medals to open up some secret missions. The only way to beat the game and see the ending is to complete these secret missions. Furthermore, completing the final secret mission and scoring at least 325,000 points earns you the Congressional Medal of Honor, the game’s highest award. If you’ve gone this far, you might as well go all the way.

The explosion animation is pretty neat.

This is a lengthy game, so good thing there are passwords. These are displayed after completing a mission or if you eject from your stealth fighter. The game calls them save codes. These passwords are eight characters long, consisting of most of the alphabet, digits, and a couple of symbols. Your total score and all medals are maintained within the passwords, Also, your difficulty level and last mission completed will be pre-selected on the Options screen. There is a weird quirk around these passwords. If you crash your fighter, then your career is over and you get no password. You can choose to eject from your plane if you start to spin out or whatever. In that case, sometimes you get rescued and sometimes you get captured. You get a password either way. If you get captured, sometimes your password doesn’t work right away! It’s a coin flip whether or not you get free or remain captured, but if you don’t get free, you have to enter your password from scratch and try again. You don’t get any points or medals for failing a mission, so there’s little benefit in keeping your new password at all unless you succeed in a mission.

This was my first time playing F-117A Stealth Fighter. Nearly all flight simulator games of this ilk were relegated to my deferred list, including this one. This is an affordable game, but not too common. I think I picked my copy up at a used game store near me for under $10, which is the going rate for a loose cart right now.

The reason for the discrepancy in my difficulty ratings for this game was that I learned something most helpful about this game just prior to the final secret mission. I looked online but didn’t see this fact documented anywhere. So, here’s a red-hot tip for this game. If you have not yet destroyed the primary target in a mission, you can land back home and refresh your stealth fighter as many times you want while remaining in the mission. Before that, I was planning a single route around the level map that netted me the most points while also managing my initial ammo and fuel. The final mission would have been a real pain without learning this trick. It’s kind of a miracle that I managed to get as far as I did. I was all set to rate this game a 9/10, but I think I’ve had enough of them this year! It is a difficult game to get into and any kind of loss or missing a medal costs you a lot of time. That to me justifies 7/10.

Be decorated with medals and accolades.

I played through most of the game on Veteran difficulty. While a harder difficulty, I didn’t find it that much more challenging than the easier difficulty levels, at least once I learned the ins and outs of gameplay. Getting triple points was quite lucrative for only a modest increase in difficulty. Ace difficulty on the other hand is ridiculous. My technique for decoying missiles is to wait until it appears on the radar before deploying a decoy. Unless you are flying directly at the missile, that should be enough to keep it from hitting you. On Ace difficulty, I needed two or even three decoys per missile to keep from getting hit. Enemies are more aggressive and appear more frequently, and it takes fewer hits to knock you out of the sky. While I’m sure these things all increase with the difficulty, it became far too overwhelming for me to stick with Ace difficulty. I completed one mission on Ace just to see if I could do it, and it was not worth it at all. I could only knock out one or two ground targets of any kind before needing to return to base. I repeated that several times just to clear one mission. Even with that strategy, it still took a few attempts to get it right. In my video, I played only the final mission on Veteran difficulty. I returned to base a few times just to ensure I could earn enough points safely. I set it up so that I would get both the final medal and final promotion at the same time, thereby meeting every possible goal of the game to cap it off.

F-117A is an alright game, but not one I’m planning on returning to. The graphics are serviceable, as in not too exciting but not bad. There’s very little music to speak of and what’s there isn’t very good. I found the controls to be stiff. This game suffers from some moderate to severe frame rate issues. I get that there is a lot to cover all at once, and I imagine the game performs many calculations to handle the flight angles and missile trajectories and all that. When the frame rate drops, the controls become less responsive. As a result, there’s a lot of wiggling back and forth to stabilize your fighter so that you can move in a precise direction when you need it. My other issues are just minor gripes. The Select button is an odd choice as a confirmation button instead of using A like many games do. The password system has some annoying quirks to it and it’s annoying when passwords don’t work right away. While rough around the edges, I could see this providing some fun with the freedom to play the way you want to among all the missions. I just hoped for more polish out of an NES game from 1992.

#101 – F-117A Stealth Fighter

tag : decoy, f-117a, f-19, f117a, fighter, microprose, missiles, nighthawk, project, stealth

by : arnpoly

comment : 0

NOV

2018

#100 – Milon’s Secret Castle

I like to think every castle has secrets like this.

They never show above the castle during the game, just here.

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Beat the game twice to see a special message
My Goal: Complete the game and beat the first loop without dying
What I Did: Met my goal
Played: 9/8/18 – 9/17/18
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Video: Milon’s Secret Castle Longplay

Here we are at triple digits! It took nearly three years to get here, but now that I’m at Game #100 there’s really no turning back. I could have picked any game I wanted to play here and I don’t think anyone would have complained. Instead I decided to keep on trucking with whatever happened to be here on the list. Milon’s Secret Castle is not a flashy choice for a milestone game whatsoever. The good thing for me is that I grew up with the game and have played and beaten it quite a few times before. For this special occasion, I was successful in beating the game without dying for the first time. I even learned a few things in the process. Let’s get started!

Milon’s Secret Castle first appeared on the Famicom in November 1986 titled Meikyu Kumikyoku: Milon no Daiboken. That translates to The Maze Suite: Milon’s Great Adventure. The NES version was delayed almost two years, appearing in September 1988. The game was both developed and published by Hudson Soft in both regions. Milon’s Secret Castle was re-released on Wii Virtual Console in Japan and North America in 2007 and in PAL territories for the first time ever in 2010. There was a sequel on the Super Famicom in 1996 called DoReMi Fantasy: Milon no Dokidoki Daibouken that made its North American debut on Wii Virtual Console in 2008.

Milon’s Secret Castle is a platformer game that takes places inside many rooms of a large castle. In the story, people communicate exclusively through music. Milon is unable to make music and can’t communicate with the people in his land, so he decides to leave hoping to find others like him. Before leaving he decides to visit the queen in the castle, which was a good thing. An evil warlord has stolen all the musical instruments, taken over the castle, and locked away Queen Eliza. Milon volunteers to resolve the problem. The castle’s magician provides Milon the ability to shoot bubbles. He also tells Milon that Eliza has left tools and money throughout the castle to help. Milon must seek and defeat the seven demon monsters inside this maze of a castle before taking on the evil warlord himself.

The scale of the size of the castle here is not too far off.

The game begins with Milon outside the castle. With limited abilities, he is restricted to the first floor for now. He can walk around, jump, and fire bubbles even though they have no use outside. Milon can enter doors by standing in front of them and pressing Up. The first floor has three doors. Two of them lead to maze rooms, and the third leads to a shop. You may also discover that you can enter windows outside the same way you enter doors. The solitary window of the first floor leads to an empty room and you can’t do anything here for now. The action takes place within the maze rooms so this is where you start.

Controls are basic, but movement takes some getting used to. Move left or right with the D-pad and press A to jump. You discover right away that Milon is slow to accelerate from standing skill. Once you get him moving by holding the directional button, he can go pretty quickly. You jump up quickly enough, but side-to-side movement depends on how fast you are moving before jumping. You need to get a running start to make far jumps. Milon can adjust left or right a little bit while jumping or falling. The B button fires bubbles that move in the direction he is facing at a slight upward angle. If you hold Down and press B you will shoot bubbles with a slight downward slope. Bubbles are used to defeat enemies and break blocks within the maze rooms. They travel a short distance before popping, and they also travel through walls unless they hit something significant.

Who knew bubbles were such a good weapon?

The maze rooms for the most part have several things in common. There are different enemies wandering around that you can fight off with bubbles. Most enemies in the game take one hit to defeat, but some take a lot more. There are breakable blocks all over the place in this game. Usually they block off some path within the room, but other times you’ll find money tiles inside. Collect the money tile to add a dollar to his stash as indicated in the upper left of the screen. To exit the maze room you must find the hidden door that is revealed by firing a bubble at its location. You need the key to take the exit to go back outside the castle. The key appears within the room in one of a few predefined spots after defeating enough enemies or breaking enough blocks. The collected key is displayed in the upper right of the screen. Once you collect the key, you keep it permanently and can take the exit anytime. All this means you really need to cover these rooms in bubbles to reveal all of their secrets.

There are other items to collect besides money. Defeated enemies may leave hearts behind that restore a point of health. Milon’s health bar is the vertical bar on the left. After defeating several enemies, an umbrella may appear. This powerup floats up and can get away from you. Grabbing it lets you blow an additional bubble on-screen. Milon starts out with having one bubble on screen at a time and you can shoot up to three at once if you collect two umbrellas. Milon goes back to one bubble whenever you enter a maze room from the outside. Most maze rooms have a honeycomb hidden within a breakable block. This increases your maximum health while also fully restoring Milon’s health. You definitely want to find these. Shooting certain locations may also reveal the Hudson bee. This powerup flies away and can get out of reach like the umbrella. Collecting the bee produces a shield around Milon that lets him take a couple of hits without losing health. You can also collect hearts while holding the shield to strengthen it.

Item shop, hints, and an inventory screen all in one.

Spend Milon’s hard-earned cash within the shops. Some of the shops are found through doors or windows into the castle. Others are hidden within the maze rooms themselves. The shops double as an inventory screen, so you can see the items you’ve purchased and collected throughout the adventure. Milon can walk along the bottom of the shop and jump into a button with his head to interact with the shopkeeper. In addition to purchasing items, you can get hints here for locating items you need. The Power option in some shops let you buy health. You can even get free money occasionally. The main draws here are the permanent items that increase Milon’s abilities.

One of the first-floor shops contains the hint “Bump head to find box.” In each of the maze rooms, there is a music box. There is a specific solid tile that you need to jump into from below to reveal the box. Touch the music box to go to a musical mini-game. Musical icons will arise from the bottom of the screen and you want to grab as many notes as you can. There are three kinds of icons to collect: Notes, sharps, and flats. Sharps count as two notes, while flats take away one note. The number of notes collected is displayed at the top. After some time, the bonus game ends and you earn money. You get a dollar for every four notes collected. If you somehow grab 50 notes or more, then you get a dollar for every two notes. This is a good way to save up for expensive items. A great detail about this mini-game is that every time you play it, the background song gets more and more complex each time as new instruments are added. You can only use each music box once, so to get the full effect you have to find them all.

Stay sharp and don’t fall flat.

Armed with all this knowledge, it’s time to clear the first floor. There are two items you must collect to proceed, which are the shoes and the medicine. The shoes let you bounce up high on certain floor tiles, allowing you to reach areas too high to jump normally. The medicine causes you to shrink whenever you touch a green glove present in some areas. A smaller Milon can fit into tiny gaps to reach previously inaccessible areas, and also gives you a smaller hitbox. For some reason acquiring these two items allows a demon monster boss to appear in the empty first floor room through the window. Go there and beat him by shooting him a bunch of times in the head with bubbles. These bosses are no joke and quite challenging. The defeated boss drops a crystal ball that opens the door to the second floor. There are seven bosses and seven crystal balls in the game. Not only do the crystal balls open pathways deeper into the castle, but they also gradually enhance your bubble by making it bigger, faster, and travel farther.

Access to the second floor starts to open the game up more. Now there are more maze rooms and shops, as well as more money, items, and powerups to go with them. You also have access to the well in the lower right corner of the castle. This area and others like it don’t count as maze rooms. There’s no key and hidden door to be found, instead you exit off one of the sides of the screen. The areas often consist of multiple, connected rooms. There are still items to be found there, as well as money, honeybees, honeycombs, etc. The well in particular has a unique way to exit. There is an enemy resembling a small octopus that takes several hits to defeat and drops a balloon. Grab it before it floats away and it will take you up out of the well.

The well is the first real challenging area.

There are some inconsistencies and a couple other miscellaneous points I want to mention. In addition to the crystal balls, there are two secret items you must track down to beat the game. Money can only be collected once, which is a problem as some items are expensive. Fear not, for there’s one room in the game that replenishes most of its money each time. It does get tedious farming money. One of the maze rooms does not have a honeycomb in it. I went crazy looking for it until I gave up and looked it up after I beat the game. They made up for it elsewhere as another area holds two honeycombs. Another area has a hidden exit that is really tricky. This secret castle does have some baffling mysteries to it.

Milon dies when he loses all his health. Normally the game starts all over again when this happens. There are continues in the form of a continue code, but luckily for us it is spelled out plainly in the manual. On the title screen, hold Left and press Start to continue. This only works after you have collected the first crystal ball. It seems to me there are two different types of continuing. Sometimes continuing plays a different introductory tune and you get dropped off in the same room you died in. Other time, it plays the normal intro song and drops you off at the starting position with all your collected items and money intact. Either way, continues are unlimited and better than starting over each time.

Milon’s Secret Castle was a game I’ve had since childhood. It was bought used since I only had the cart and I read the manual for the first time playing it here. I remember seeing this game in the rental stores and reading about it in some old gaming magazines we had. That was how I knew about the continue code and how to make progress in the game. I distinctly recall getting stuck on the first floor for a long time until later seeing how to proceed in one of those magazines. The game is inexpensive at around $6 and easy to find.

Milon used Bubble Beam. It’s super effective!

Even though I picked the game up for the first time in many years, I still knew enough to clear the game on my own over a couple of hours. I tinkered a little bit more to locate all the hidden music boxes and honeycombs, and then set out to try and beat the game 100% without using a continue. It took a few attempts but I was able to get it done. Some minor missteps in routing and a little bit of health farming are the only issues with my recorded video. Somewhere in post-completion research I found out that there is a hidden ending screen if you beat the game twice in a row. The second loop is hard mode. The differences I noticed are that both the bosses’ attacks and the umbrella powerup move much quicker. Continues still work here thankfully because I needed them. Beating the game the second time gave me the additional screen for what I consider the best ending. It’s underwhelming but still a decent achievement.

In the interest of full disclosure, as well as make an interesting discussion point, due to my inability to set aside a large block of playing time, I used a cheat code to enable hard mode. This is a good of a time as any to talk about NES cheat devices. The most popular one of the era was the Game Genie. It is a passthrough device that you put your cart into and then insert the connected cartridges into your NES. A menu comes up when the game is turned on and you enter either six or eight letter codes to get different effects to appear in your game. You can get more lives, skip levels, jump higher, etc. I have a little bit of expertise in building my own Game Genie codes by using an emulator and debugger to find parts in the game code that I can change to trigger the desired effect. In this case I couldn’t figure out how to enable hard mode with a Game Genie code. There is another NES cheat device called the Pro Action Replay. It functions similarly to the Game Genie but uses a different set of codes. The primary difference between the two devices other than the code format is that the Game Genie can set different ROM addresses while the Pro Action Replay can set RAM addresses. The NES Ending FAQ author did some legwork for me by figuring out that setting the RAM address $00B8 to 01 enables hard mode. Don’t worry if I’m going a bit over your head here. The takeaway is that the Pro Action Replay is the more appropriate device for turning on hard mode. Now I don’t own the Pro Action Replay, but the AVS console I use does accept its codes. Even better is that the AVS also accepts what it calls RAW codes, which I figured out means if I enter the code 00B801 (meaning set $00B8 to 01), I can get hard mode like I want. I played normal mode and hard mode two separate nights and then combined the footage into one longplay video. I hope this was an interesting look into NES cheat devices. I also hope that this doesn’t cast any doubt into the validity of my playthroughs. I don’t use cheat devices even for practice and I didn’t know how to enable them on my AVS until now. You will have to take my word for it though, so I do hope you believe me!

Disappearing floors make this maze room frustrating.

Milon’s Secret Castle has the reputation of a difficult game and I can see why. For a long time, I could not figure out how to get out of the first floor. I bought the medicine, but I couldn’t reach the green glove to use it. I believe the upper portion of the second maze room on that floor is unreachable from the start. It’s too high to reach with even a running jump. I found out there are shoes in a hidden shop up there, but I don’t see how to reach that shop without the shoes! The place I buy shoes is in a hidden shop in the first maze room. On the bottom right there is a discolored block next to two breakable ones. What you are supposed to do is push the block by walking into it for several seconds, then shoot a bubble to reveal the hidden door to the shop. I get that this discoloring is the tell, but this is a terrible idea. There’s no indication at all you can even push blocks, and then you have to push for what seems like forever before it actually moves. If you didn’t already know what to do, it would be hard to stumble upon it. There are other things about the game that can cause issues. Using the hammer item is not exactly obvious to me. The third floor has some rooms that are hard to understand without having certain items or seeing the proper pathway. Combat also proves challenging sometimes. Milon has a ridiculously short invincibility period upon taking damage, so if he gets stuck on top of an enemy his health drains fast. Bosses are difficult because they throw projectiles at random and Milon lacks the mobility to dodge them effectively. He jumps fast but otherwise accelerates slow, so quickly jumping to dodge projectiles is the only way. There are items later that allow you a different, safer strategy to boss fights. Until then, you either get lucky or get good at dodging.

I think Milon’s Secret Castle is an interesting NES game that was released too late on the NES. I’ve seen this happen quite a lot in this project already. For 1986, this is a complex game that plays pretty well. For 1988, while it still has good secrets and complexity, the controls and movement feel like a significant step back. The graphics and music are both pretty good. I like the different items and the effects they have on both Milon and the world around him. The main issues I have are the controls and the obscurity of some of the secrets and traps. Though they diminish the experience a little bit, I have seen far worse things already in NES games than this. This is probably nostalgia-tinged, but I do like this game. It’s worth a look for fans of Metroid.

#100 – Milon’s Secret Castle

tag : castle, daiboken, eliza, hudson, kumikyoku, maze, meikyu, milon, milon's, music, queen, secret, soft

by : arnpoly

comment : 0

OCT

2018

#99 – Sky Kid

Take to the skies in this lengthy shoot-em-up.

It’s called Sky Kid, not SkyKid.

To Beat: Defeat the spaceship to see the ending
To Complete: Complete two loops
What I Did: Reached the halfway point of the second loop
Played: 8/21/18 – 9/7/18
Difficulty: 9/10
My Difficulty: 9/10
My Video: Sky Kid Longplay

This project is constantly full of surprises. Most of them are good, and I’d like to think I have hit a nice string of positive surprises. Sky Kid was the kind of surprise that blindsided me a little bit. Here we have a cutesy shoot-em-up game with little airplanes, tanks, and loop-de-loops. It’s just the happiest looking game. Underneath the pretty exterior, however, is something far more devious than I would have imagined. Sure, the missions get more challenging as you go, but Sky Kid just keeps going and going. Just how many missions does this game have? I won’t keep you waiting too long for the answer.

Sky Kid was first released in the arcades in Japan in December 1985. It was developed and published by Namco. It was quickly followed by a sequel, Sky Kid Deluxe, in February 1986, featuring expanded missions, enemies, music, and other features. The original version of the game was ported to the Famicom in August 1986. The NES port came out later in September 1987 and was published by Sunsoft. Both the arcade version and NES versions were released on all versions of the Virtual Console.

Sky Kid is a horizontal scrolling shoot-em-up. You play the role of Baron and the second player is called Max. The names are short for Red Baron and Blue Max. There’s no story here, just fly your plane through the standard missions as they are called out on the screen. Sky Kid features a whopping 26 missions. It may not sound like a big deal, but trust me, it’s quite a lot for a game like this. The goal of the game is to destroy a spaceship that appears in the final mission. Do that to get the ending.

Up, up, and away!

The controls are simple. Use the D-pad to fly in all directions. This game is an auto-scroller so when you fly left or right, you are actually just speeding up or slowing down. The A button fires your machine gun. You have unlimited shots and can have three bullets on screen at a time. The B button lets you perform a loop-de-loop move. If you collect a bomb, drop it with the B button. The Start button pauses the game.

All missions share the same structure. You begin a mission on the runway with the goal of bombing the target. Then the game starts scrolling to the left, instead of to the right like most horizontal shooters. You have to steer upward right away so you don’t crash into the scenery ahead. When you approach the end of the mission, you will see a row of three girls wearing red. Soon after that is the runway with text on the screen telling you to Land Here. Simply touch the runway to land and end the mission, no matter if you actually bombed the target or not. If you skip the runway you will be taken over open water and will automatically crash into the sea. I guess this is the way the game tells you that you have no more fuel. Crashing past the runway does complete the mission, at least.

A game mechanic clear from the start is that you can fire your machine guns in three directions. Shots will fire only in the direction you are facing. Fly up and your plane will angle upward, allowing you to shoot diagonally. Same thing goes for flying down. Hold steady to shoot forward. To take advantage of this style of aiming, the game has both air enemies and ground targets for you to blow up.

You can aim upward or downward toward pesky enemies.

The loop-de-loop is a handy maneuver that you can perform at any time. Simply press B while holding still to fly quickly in a clockwise arc. This moves you backward to the right a fair distance and you can use the move while being tailed to get behind the enemy. You can also perform an upward loop by pressing B while flying up, and a downward loop while flying down. The upward loop pushes you both up and to the right a little bit, while the downward loop pushes you down and slightly forward. Beware that some enemy aircraft can also perform loops. While in the loop, you are invincible to both enemy fire and enemy planes, so this is both an evasive move and a defensive move. You can’t just spam the loop-de-loop the whole time because there is a brief delay between finishing one loop and starting another, not to mention you can still collide with the scenery while looping and die that way. You can loop as many times as you want! You can also shoot your gun while looping. With good timing you can fire backward. In my experience this isn’t something you can reliably count on, rather it’s more of a happy accident if you hit someone behind you.

In addition to the basic air and ground enemies, there are large bases on the ground. You destroy these bases with bombs. As you are flying along you will hear a beeping indicator over the music to tell you a bomb is approaching. The bomb lays on the ground and you pick it up simply by flying into it. Now you will hold the large bomb underneath your plane. You can deploy the bomb at any time by pressing the B button. Now since the B button is used for this purpose, that means you can’t do loops while holding a bomb. Ground bases are comprised of three parts and you want to aim for the center section. Hitting the middle destroys the entire base and gives you more points than if you hit either side of the base.

Sky Kid also has a recovery mechanic for when you get shot or fly into an enemy. When you get hit you start to spin out and descend, and you lose complete control of your plane. You can regain control by holding Up on the D-pad while pressing A and B rapidly. You are bound to hit the loop button after recovering like this, and normally that is okay. It does put you at risk of colliding with something else and spinning out all over again. It takes longer to recover for every time you get hit and eventually you will end up crashing if you take too many collisions like that. During a two-player game, a player can shoot his partner to recover him during a fall instead of performing the button mashing. Teamwork does make a difference!

Enemies come from almost every direction.

There is a wide variety of enemies and enemy types. Air enemies are mostly planes that resemble yours, however there are a few different movement patterns and tactics to deal with, plus they can enter the field from either the left or right side of the screen. Large planes fly in from the right side and drop several slow-moving bombs that you can destroy with normal fire. There are green parachute enemies that have an upper and lower portion. You get a point bonus for destroying both parts before they get away. Ground targets include armored cars that have no guns and tanks that either fire straight ahead or up at an angle. Ground turrets fire large shells that have a spread effect when they blow up, and these shells are even aimed at you a little bit. Boats can fire both normal and large shots. Submarines pop up briefly but give you a point bonus if you take them out. In later levels, if you hang out in the upper-right part of the screen for too long, Kamikaze pilots will come at you and detonate large explosives. There are other hazards that show up in later stages.

At the end of each mission you can earn bonus points. Sky Kid keeps a tally of each air target, ground target, and base you destroy within the mission. For both air and ground targets, you get a medal for every five enemies of each type you shoot down up to a total of six medals for destroying thirty or more enemies. The bonus points are awarded depending on your medal count. You get 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 5,000, 7,000, or 10,000 points for one through six medals respectively. You earn a large medal for each base you destroy which is worth 10,000 points. You must blow up the entire base by hitting the center to earn the medal.

Drop your bomb early so that it hits the center of the base.

Missions 8, 16, and 24 are Shooting Gallery stages. There are no enemies at all, just targets to aim at. These are short levels and are a nice breather from the normal firefights. After the mission you get medals and bonus points depending on how well you do. You can earn up to four medals for a total of 20,000 points. I know you get 10,000 points for three medals. I never scored any worse than that. Interestingly, there is no bonus for shooting all the targets beyond the 20,000 points for four medals. You are allowed to miss either three or four targets and still get the best bonus.

There are a few other fun ways to earn even more bonus points by clever use of loop-de-loops. Some stages will have ladies dressed in blue. Fly above her and loop to cause her to release several hearts. Each heart collected is worth 1,000 points given out in a special scene after the mission. Some levels have large billboards in them. Loop above the billboard to generate either a medal or an explosive. The medal is worth 1,000 points but the explosive will kill you. I think this was more lucrative in the arcade version. In this port it’s neat to try but not worth it. Some stages have background elements that you can interact with by looping. For example, in the second level, you can loop while flying in front of the sun to turn it into the moon. This also changes the entire color palette of the level from day to night. You get a 1,000 point bonus too. There are a few of these one-off type interactions over the course of the game.

Each game of Sky Kid begins with three lives and you can earn more lives through your score. You earn a life at 30,000 points, another at 80,000 points, and one for every 80,000 points thereafter. There are no continues in the game and no other ways to earn extra lives. Every life you can earn and every life you can save from crashing matters in this game.

Break the targets!

This was my first time playing Sky Kid on NES. I know I tested this game when I bought my cart but I only vaguely remembered it. I believe I bought this game at a local game store for cheap. Sky Kid was featured on a James and Mike Mondays episode in February 2016 and the game shot up in value for a short time. It started under $10 and peaked at $25 and above for loose carts only. Now it has settled back down into the $10-$15 range. For some reason, 5-screw variants of Sky Kid tend to sell at $15 while 3-screw copies sell for closer to $10. As far as I know, there’s no real difference in rarity between the two games.

It turns out I was misled a little bit on where the game ends. The very useful NES Ending FAQ states you get the ending by blowing up the spaceship in Mission 11 and every eleven missions after that. It also says later that you have to let it go in Mission 11 and get it when it shows up next in Mission 26. Allow me to clear it all up here. The spaceship does appear in Mission 11 but it is just a tease. You need a bomb to destroy it as your bullets go right through it harmlessly, but the issue is there isn’t a bomb available until after the spaceship leaves. You could theoretically beat the game in Mission 11 if you used some kind of cheat code to get a bomb early, and it sounds like that’s what the author of the FAQ did. In Mission 13 there’s a large blimp that appears and you can shoot it down by dropping a bomb right on top of it. It’s not the spaceship though. It counts the same as blowing up a base and the game keeps going. I had hoped that maybe the game looped after Mission 15, and that Mission 26 was just the second run of Mission 11 with an early bomb. That was wishful thinking too. Indeed, there are 26 unique missions you have to play under normal circumstances.

What a tease!

Playing through the whole game is quite a feat. I really had no idea this game would be so challenging to beat. I wish now that I had better documented my attempts. I estimate that it took me 30-40 attempts to beat the game over 15-20 hours total. Progress through the game was slow but steady. At first I could only beat a couple of missions. By the end of the first day I reached only Mission 7 or 8. Missions 11-14 represented the first major roadblock and a noticeable bump in difficulty. Mission 20 was a particularly challenging one as it introduces a new hazard that appears to be somewhat randomized. The last two missions are very difficult. Once I was consistently reaching the 20’s, it became a matter of getting that far with enough lives in reserve to survive until the end.

I experienced several near misses and heartbreak before finally beating the game. I reached Mission 25 seven or eight times and Mission 26 at least four times. One time I got to Mission 25 with four or five lives in reserve and lost them all in a row. I had a run where I played almost perfectly through the 20s only to have the TV get shut off during the final mission. My AVS console is powered by the TV through USB so that run vanished when I lost power to both. I saw the Mission 26 spaceship for the first time on my last life of a run. I picked up the bomb I needed, but I got shot soon after which causes you to drop the bomb. I watched the spaceship go by hoping the stage would repeat somehow. It turns out the final mission has no runway, just the final expanse of water. Watching my plane crash into the sea was devastating. The next time I saw the final spaceship I kept my bomb and didn’t miss. Sky Kid’s second loop increases the difficulty by making everything fire much more frequently. In my longplay video, I got up to Mission 39 before losing for good. Reaching halfway through the second loop was more than I could have hoped for.

The action can get a little overwhelming.

I have a few tips and observations of the game that might be a little helpful. I appreciate that Sky Kid has some innate risk and reward elements to its playstyle. If you think about it, the safest place for you to be is the top of the screen. Being as high as you can offers you the most time to make a recovery if you are shot down. It also helps you fly over the hills and buildings that often appear in a level’s landscape that force you to the top anyway. Now you don’t want to be in the upper-right corner because that triggers the Kamikaze pilots. I found the safest location on-screen is a bit left of center at the top. There’s enough time to handle threats from the left while keeping distance from everything else. Ground turret shells can still reach you but there’s enough time to react. If you are being pursued by a plane from behind, you can sometimes do a loop at the top of the screen so that they will follow you and despawn. Now you could stay up there the whole game but you will forfeit a lot of points. Bombs must be obtained from the bottom of the screen and blowing up bases is the key to racking up points and extra lives the fastest. Besides, you are in danger at the top of the screen more often than you would think. There’s room here to play the way that fits your style. I like to score a bunch of points anyway, but here it’s a good strategy because I know I’m better off with more lives and more chances. I tend to stay in the middle of the screen where I can just reach the ground targets. Of course, there’s value in learning the mission layouts and being in position to nix enemies before they become threats. You do have to know some of that to have any shot at later challenges. I have proven you can beat the game with an aggressive approach, and I’m sure you can beat the game with a low score and conservative approach as well.

Sky Kid is a cute shoot-em-up that is fun to play. The graphics are cartoonish in quality and lack some detail, but it looks nice for an early NES game. One graphical issue I failed to mention is the white text is hard to read against a light blue background. There are only a few short songs in the game but they are upbeat and happy for the most part. The controls are responsive. Looping is a fun mechanic that can bail you out of a tough spot but can also get you in trouble if you abuse it. There are several neat details and embellishments such as interacting with background elements and all the ways to earn points. This is a game suitable to play casually, with a friend, or just for points. Trying to beat the game will test you for sure and not many are going see it through to the end. Because this is a simple game, I am going to assume that most people interested in NES games will pass over this one in favor of better, more complex games, and I think that’s okay. Even an average NES game can still provide a good time.

#99 – Sky Kid

tag : baron, kid, loop, loop-de-loop, max, namco, sky, skykid, sunsoft

by : arnpoly

comment : 2

OCT

2018

#98 – Defender of the Crown

One must obtain the crown before he can defend it.

The detailed title screen sure looks like a PC conversion.

To Beat: Defeat the Normans to reach the ending
Played: 8/15/18 – 8/19/18
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: Defender of the Crown Longplay

The beauty of this NES completion project is that I get to experience new games and am able to build an appreciation of them I would not have had naturally. Defender of the Crown at first glance lulled me in as something interesting. I mean, it’s a Konami/Ultra game and they make great games, so it ought to be good. Then I booted it up and saw that it was a strategy game with a goal of map conquest. I turned a complete 180 from my original impression in my head. I put the game on my deferred list. Fast forward to now and things are much different. I have now beaten Gemfire, a game that I originally didn’t want to play but ended up liking quite a bit. Defender of the Crown is also more action based than I first realized which is another way the game appeals to my tastes. I started up the game with feelings of intrigue and excitement, rather than an attitude of indifference. Would I have a good experience after all?

Defender of the Crown is a game for the Commodore Amiga that released in 1986. It was developed by Cinemaware as their first release. It was best known for setting the graphics standard in video games at the time of its release. Later the game was ported to various home computers while taking a hit in the graphics and audio compared to the Amiga version. The NES port of the game was released in July 1989 in the US and in PAL regions in July 1991. Ultra Games published the US version and Palcom published the PAL version. Beam Software appears to be the developer but the evidence I have found isn’t conclusive. It’s possible Konami developed it themselves.

Defender of the Crown is a strategy title that includes some action elements. The game takes place in England in the year 1149, mired in a civil war. The king has died and someone has to take the throne. To the north are the Saxons displayed in blue, and to the south are the Normans in orange. You play the role of one of the Saxon lords. Your task is to take over all three Norman castles, thereby ending the war so that you can be crowned king. The other Saxons are your allies, but they too want the crown and may come after you as well. You will beat the game if you turn the entire map to blue.

Hey, it’s Robin Hood!

There are many different modes to this game so the controls change frequently to follow suit. Most of the time you will control a cursor on the map screen. Use the D-pad to move the arrow and press A to make selections. The map shows all the separate regions of England. There are colored shields with symbols on them that denote which lord owns that territory. Your army is displayed as a man on horseback within the region you currently occupy. At the start of the game you are randomly assigned one of the three Saxon castles. This map fills up most of the screen, but there is a white banner in the upper left corner that acts as your menu. Press A while on the banner to bring up the menu. A dagger appears as the menu cursor.

Before starting a game, you get to choose one of four knights as your main character. They are Wilfred of Ivanhoe, Wolfric the Wild, Cedric of Rotherwood, and Geoffrey Longsword. Use the D-pad or the Select button to switch between profiles, then press A on the one you want. Each knight has ratings in Leadership, Jousting, and Swordplay ranging from Weak to Average to Good to Strong. The manual says Wilfred of Ivanhoe is the best knight to start off with, and this is the one I chose to play.

After choosing your knight, and before each turn, you see your status screen. You get to see your character portrait, as well as the portrait of the fair maiden should you rescue her. At the top is the current date, both month and year. Below that is your monthly income and your current gold. Next are the Leadership, Jousting, and Swordplay ratings. At the bottom the current forces of your army are shown. You see the number of soldiers, knights, and catapults in your army. You also see how many soldiers are staying behind to defend your home castle. You always get the first turn every month. You will see the map activity of the other lord’s turns afterward. While you can see the location of your army, you cannot explicitly see where the enemy armies are positioned on the map.

Study the map, then conquer it.

The main menu in the corner of the map screen contains your main commands. Tournament lets you spend five gold to hold a jousting tournament. Conquest is one of your primary commands. It contains sub commands that allow you to move your army and forces around the map. Go Raiding lets you do a raid for gold against one of the castles. Buy Army lets you spend gold to buy more troops. Use the Read Map option to check the stats on any of the provinces. You can also choose to Pass your turn.

With the Conquest command, you can control your army. The sub commands are Read Map, Move Army, Transfer, and Done. Read Map under the Conquest command is the same option as on the main menu. Move Army lets you move your army between territories, but before you can do that, you first select the Transfer command to move troops between your castle and your army. You begin the game at your home castle with 20 soldiers and none are in your army, and you can’t move your army with no one in it! On the transfer screen, you see Soldiers, Knights, and Catapults in the middle. On the left side is the count of each in your home garrison, and the right side is the count of each in your army. Use the D-pad to move the dagger cursor and press A to select a unit type. You can use either Left or Right to move troops between the army and garrison, and then press A again to de-select the cursor. Choose Done when finished moving troops. This action doesn’t cost a turn.

Now that you have troops in your army, you can use Move Army to move them to a new territory. You can move the army to any adjacent territory you already own without losing your turn. You can also move freely through other Saxon territories and you decide if you want to just pass through or attack them. If you move to either an empty or hostile territory, this will end your turn. It’s a good idea to use Read Map to examine other territories. Pull up a territory to see the name of it, who owns it if applicable, the number of vassals, and the monthly income generated from owning the territory. Moving to an empty territory claims it for yourself, and in addition, the number of vassals in that territory are added to your army. Adding vassals only happens when taking previously unclaimed territories and not when taking a territory from someone else. If you move to a territory owned by someone else, and there’s no army or castle there, you claim it. Otherwise you will do battle with the occupant. More on that later. All claimed territories generate income that you earn in gold at the start of every turn.

Try to hit the center of the shield to knock him off.

You can compete in jousting tournaments either by paying five gold from the menu or participating for free in a tournament arranged by someone else. You can either compete for Fame or for Land. If you have no land to gamble, or if the game doesn’t let you choose, you automatically compete for fame. When jousting for land, you get to pick an enemy territory that you want to claim. Then that ruler will choose one of your territories and the winner of the joust gets both. When jousting for fame, select the name of the lord you want to compete against. The tournament can last for three rounds as long as you keep winning, and you can only compete against a lord once per tournament. One key point here is that jousting for fame will increase your Leadership stat if you are successful. In fact, Leadership is the only rating that can either rise or fall depending on actions you make throughout the game.

The joust consists of two phases: The joust and the morning star battle. The joust portion is the face-off on horseback that you would normally think of. Two riders on horseback take opposing sides. The action takes places from a first-person perspective with the opponent approaching from the other side of the low fence. Use the D-pad to adjust the position of your spear. Movement is erratic and stiff, but what you want to do is try and put the tip of the spear as close to the center of the opponent’s shield as you can. Then you see an animation with the results. One man can be knocked off his horse, or neither. If no one falls you try again up to three times. If you are unsuccessful by the third attempt, you automatically get knocked down. The worst possible outcome is if you accidentally spear and kill the opponent’s house. This is considered most dishonorable, and if you do that you lose most of your stuff. The results of this joust play into the morning star battle.

Morning star your opponent into submission.

The other half of the match is the morning star battle. You are the blue knight on the left and the opponent is the red knight. There are health bars at the bottom for each participant. Winning the joust gives you a larger health bar. Use Left or Right on the D-pad to move your fighter. Press the A button to swing your morning star. This does a high strike. You can do a low strike by holding Down when pressing A. You have a shield that defaults to defending low. Hold B to raise your shield and block high. The idea is to hit where he is not blocking by striking when his morning star is pointed the farthest away from you. The winner of this fight wins the round.

Swordfights occur when you go on a raid, or if another ruler approaches you to save the damsel in distress. This takes place from a side view. You approach the castle and must take out three guards outside. Then you go inside to battle with the captain of the guard. Use the D-pad to inch either Left or Right. Press A to strike with your sword, or you can parry by holding Up and pressing A. You can also escape by moving all the way to the left but that reduces your leadership rating. The best strategy is to hit him with as much space between the two of you as possible, then back up a bit and strike again. It’s possible to get through without damage though I haven’t done it. The outside guards have small health bars, but the captain inside has a long health bar plus the advantage of stairs on his side of the room. If you initiate a raid and win, you steal half the gold from the enemy castle.

Raiding a castle for gold isn’t supposed to be easy.

As the main purpose of this game is map conquest, you need to build up a powerful army by spending cash and buying troops. Use the Buy Army command. All troops purchased here are assigned to your home castle, so to use them in your army you need to be able to move the army home and then transfer them over. There are four types you can buy. Soldiers cost one gold each and are the bread and butter of your army. Knights cost eight gold each. Naturally with the price difference you will have far fewer knights than soldiers. Knights are powerful fighters on the battlefield but are not that useful for defending your home turf. Catapults cost fifteen gold each. You must have at least one catapult if you intend on attacking an opposing castle. You can also buy castles here for twenty gold. This option lets you build a castle on a territory you occupy and provides you ten soldiers to go along with it. A castle on a territory gives you an option to defend yourself and makes things more difficult for enemies to claim it.

Battles take place out on the open field between opposing armies. There’s no action here, rather the battles play out automatically via what amounts to invisible dice rolls behind the scenes. The battle screen displays one soldier per every 25 commanded and one knight per every 10 commanded on each side. The actual numbers are displayed at the bottom. There is a menu at the bottom where you can change your tactics. Use the D-pad to position the cursor and A to make your selection. The command may take some time to take effect depending on your leadership level. The idea to battles is that there are different tactics you can try based on the situation. Hold Your Ground is suitable when you have the size advantage and are a strong leader. Ferocious Attack is a risky move that could help if you are outnumbered. Bombard takes advantage of your catapults. The Outflank tactic can be effective if you are a weak leader with the larger army. You can also Retreat, which saves your men but affects your leadership rating. Battles can play out very fast so you need to make quick decisions for best results during battle.

Punch a hole in the enemy’s defenses.

If you have a catapult, you can perform a catapult siege against your enemy. Simply attack an enemy castle with a catapult in your army. This mode is all about timing. You get six times to attack the enemy castle before engaging them in battle, no matter how many catapults you have. Each time you get to choose your ammo from either a boulder, disease, or Greek fire. Then you get a view of the castle from behind your catapult. Press and hold A to pull the catapult back and let go to fire away. The castle has a low wall in the front. What you want to do is hit the top of the wall with a boulder first to break a hole in the castle. You can expand the hole with multiple boulders by hitting the top of the wall each time. Then you can use either the Greek fire or disease shots to fire into the hole in the wall you made. The fire shot defeats 10% of the home army, while the disease can kill enemy soldiers over time, particularly if you score a hit with it early in the siege. After all attacks are made, then you go automatically into a normal battle.

Should an enemy attack one of your castles, you then play yet another mini-game to defend it. This is a crossbow battle played from a first-person perspective from inside your castle. Enemy soldiers will pop up at predefined points on the wall and fire at you. You move the crossbow at the bottom of the screen with the D-pad. It moves freely left and right, while it will sit at only three vertical levels that you can shift between by pressing Up or Down. Press A to fire arrows. The number of hits you can take and the number of enemy soldiers you have to dispatch depend on how many soldiers are in each army. The higher your leadership rating, the faster you can slide the crossbow around the screen. The enemy’s leadership rating determines how quickly enemy soldiers fire. If you lose your home castle, you lose all your territory and the game is over. This goes the same for enemy castles, so if you successfully take the enemy’s home castle you get all of their territories.

Outnumber your opponent for best results.

Finally, in a pinch, you can call on Robin Hood to help you. On your turn, point the cursor to Sherwood Forest in the center of the map and press A to talk to Robin Hood. He will help you out up to three times during the game. He can help you raid a castle, siege a castle, or help you out in battle. To use him, you must perform one of those three actions right after asking him for help, otherwise you forfeit his assistance. For the normal battles, Robin Hood will swoop in and knock out a chunk of the opposing army.

This was my first time playing Defender of the Crown. I’m glad I got to play it since it was something I had ignored for a long time. A cart copy only costs around $5, but even with that price it’s not one I see as often as I would expect.

The 5/10 difficulty rating I gave Defender of the Crown is misleading. If you haven’t played this game before, you will get destroyed quickly and often. Any time I encountered an enemy on the map, I suffered for it heavily. The fights I did win left me so crippled that I didn’t last much beyond that, and the ones I lost were over almost as fast as I could issue any command. I fared a little better with gold raiding and the joust, however, you can’t win a game with those skills alone. I couldn’t maintain territories long enough to have enough gold to afford even a modest army. The castle defense sections were also tough to get the hang of. Several attempts ended swiftly. I combed through the manual several times for help, and against my normal policy, I also read parts of an FAQ I found online. The FAQ really helped to clarify the tips in the manual and steered my focus, rather than tell me outright the best way to win the game. I was now able to put together a successful strategy for beating the game. My first win was a little drawn out, but I played a few more rounds and started to win pretty easily. My experience with Defender of the Crown went just like AD&D: Heroes of the Lance. The game starts off challenging, but soon gets much easier when you learn to make sense of what to do.

Defending your home turf is the most important ability.

Here was my strategy for beating the game. If you want to figure it out yourself, now is the time to look away. The first thing you need to do is learn the map. Take some time to use the Read Map feature and check out the territories to see which ones are valuable. There is one near the middle of the map that is really good and one of the starting positions will allow you to claim it right away. Instead of building up my army early on, I spent my gold on castles to lock down the best territories. To properly defend the castles, you really need a quick crossbow. This leads to the most important piece of advice. The key ingredient for success is maintaining a high leadership rating. As you could tell from reading here, many positive outcomes all throughout the game are born from having high leadership. If no one started up a tournament after sticking castles on two or three territories, I made sure to hold one to joust for fame and build up my leadership. The sooner you get to Strong leadership, the better. Then you’re in the driver’s seat. Make sure you keep ten soldiers in each castle, especially the ones that border enemies. You can use your army to help distribute soldiers all over your territories, all on one turn. Having a bunch of castles and getting good at defending them with the crossbow is what you want to focus on. You can opt to play the long game here and start rolling out castles on more territories, slowly dominating the map that way. My way was a little faster. Once I had a territory in reach of an enemy’s home castle, I then splurged on a single catapult and the biggest army I could get, splitting my money about evenly between soldiers and knights. Sometimes I went on a gold raid against a home castle for a nice cash infusion. You can also borrow soldiers from castles that aren’t at risk from enemies to add to your army. Do the best you can at a catapult siege, but even if it doesn’t go the best, I vastly outnumbered my opponent anyway and just did Hold Your Ground until victory. Taking a home castle can give you other territories all in one shot. It should be easy to win from here.

I guess you could say I had a love/hate relationship with Defender of the Crown. I was never interested in this game. When it appeared on my list, I was excited to try it. I liked it at first, even though I got hammered. Then I started to dislike the game from all the losing. Once I figured it out, then I had a lot of fun with the game. The graphics are pretty decent. They are a far cry from the original Amiga version, but are more than passable. I don’t remember the music very well, which I suppose means it’s forgettable. I found the controls to be slow and stiff, especially in the jousting and sword fighting. I realize that this is not exactly selling the game to you. What I enjoy about the game is the variety. There are several ways to play this game and you only have to work hard at one or two of them. There are different characters with his own strengths, plus some random starting positions that give you some replayability. It’s a quick game too, which is unusual for a map conquest game. I think it’s the ideal pick-up-and-play game of this style and I can see myself playing it through again, which I would have never said just a few months ago.

#98 – Defender of the Crown

tag : beam, cedric, cinemaware, crown, defender, england, geoffrey, hood, ivanhoe, jousting, konami, leadership, longsword, normal, robin, rotherwood, saxon, software, ultra, wild, wilfred, wolfric

by : arnpoly

comment : 0

OCT

2018

#97 – Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers

If you ever wanted to throw a friend, here’s a great way to do it!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Chip and Dale!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 8/12/18
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers Longplay

We are almost at 100 NES games into this project, yet somehow this will be the fourth Disney Afternoon NES game on the list already. Sure, I handpicked DuckTales to round out my first ten games, but then TaleSpin followed quickly after. DuckTales 2 was beaten just a few months ago. I did not watch much of those cartoons in the Disney Afternoon lineup, but I sure played a ton of Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers over the years. Time to play it again and document it all!

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers was an animated series from Walt Disney Television Animation. It was created by Tad Stones and Alan Zaslove. The series technically started with a preview episode that aired in August 1988. The full series began on the Disney Channel in March 1989 with a 13-episode run in its first season, which included that preview episode. Season 2 ran 47 episodes from September 1989 through May 1990. The first five episodes of the season were initially created as a standalone movie named Rescue Rangers: To the Rescue. The third and final season was an abbreviated five episode run from September 1990 through November 1990. Reruns were aired as part of the Disney Afternoon from 1990 through 1993.

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is one of the few releases to launch near simultaneously in both Japan and the US. Both the Famicom version, named Chip to Dale no Daisakusen, and the NES version were released June 1990. The PAL version would wait until December 1991. There was also a port to the Playchoice-10 arcade machine. Capcom both developed and published this game. Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers was included as part of the Disney Afternoon Collection compilation released in 2017.

Small cutscenes progress the story.

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is a side-scrolling platformer. The Rescue Rangers work together to find their neighbor Mandy’s missing kitten. Chip and Dale go hot on the trail and fend off a bunch of mysterious robotic enemies. It turns out to be a distraction as their enemy Fat Cat captures Gadget, one of the Rescue Rangers. Now the remaining Rescue Rangers have to work their way through several levels to find and defeat Fat Cat. Simply reach the ending of this story to beat this game.

At the start of the game you decide if you want to play single player or two-player mode. In single player you then get to pick if you want to control either Chip or Dale. Both play the same so just pick the one you like more. In two-player mode, player 1 is Chip and player 2 is Dale. Two-player mode is simultaneous play which I have found is a big draw to this game.

The controls are normal platformer controls. You move around with the D-pad and press A to jump. You can control your fall with the D-pad for good old precision movement. Hold Down to duck low, and if you press A then you will jump down through ledges. The B button is used to pick up and throw objects. Normally you will throw crates but there are other things you can grab. Push into the crate from the side and press B to pick it up. You can move around like normal when holding a crate. Press B to throw the crate sideways the length of the screen. You can hold Up and press B to throw a crate straight above your head, like you have super strength. If you duck while holding a crate you will hide inside of it. You’ll see your character’s eyes peeking out. While hiding like this, enemies can walk right into the crate and take damage, acting like a shield of sorts. If you throw the crate while hiding you will throw it low across the ground. In the two-player mode, you can throw crates at each other, stunning your partner briefly. You can also pick the other player up, carry him through the level, and throw him around. Press Start to pause the game, and press Select to also pause the game and bring up a status screen.

Always carry a crate along.

A little information is on-screen during play, and the rest of it is shown on the status screen. The top of the screen shows your health meter in the corner. You get three hearts of health and damage from an enemy causes you to lose a heart. In this game there is no way to extend the maximum health meter. There is also a C or a D displayed above the health depending on if you are playing as Chip or Dale. The status screen from pressing Select shows your character portrait along with the number of lives, flowers, and stars you have collected.

There are powerups and collectibles you can find. Flowers are the most common item you will see all the time out in the open. Meanwhile, stars are usually found hidden behind a crate. Once you collect either 100 flowers or 20 stars, a 1up star will float into play from the side of the screen. You can occasionally find 1up stars hidden in crates. You can tell the difference as 1up stars flash colors and normal stars do not. Health-restoring acorns can also be found in crates. Normal acorns restore one heart and blinking acorns restore all health. While not a powerup, I want to also mention the metal crates. You can’t throw these, but you can pick them up, drop them, and stack them to build makeshift stairs.

Large treasure boxes may hold special items. You can find full-health acorns inside them sometimes. You can find a powerup with the letter P on it that helps you carry heavy items. There are some things like large apples that you can pick up but they slow your movement and you can’t jump as high. When carrying an apple you can see Chip or Dale visibly sweat because it’s so heavy. With the P powerup you can carry big items the same as normal ones. Boxes may contain a hunk of cheese that lures fellow Rescue Ranger Monterey Jack. He will go after the cheese while knocking a hole in the wall that opens up the next screen. The best powerup is Zipper, another Rescue Ranger. He provides temporary invincibility and knocks out all your enemies for you while it lasts.

Choose your own adventure!

You jump right into the action after the initial story sequence in a new game. The end of this level is when Gadget gets captured. After a message from one of the characters, you get to choose the next level you want to play from the map. Each area is identified by a letter of the alphabet, and you can fly your plane to the one to want. Of course, you have to beat a level before you can pass it on the map to the next one.

At the end of each level before the map screen, you get to play a bonus game. This is a single-screen platforming segment with a few crates that have items inside. You want to find stars and 1up stars here if you can, but the bonus game is over so quickly that you have to be intentional on where you want to look. In two-player mode this is especially devious as you can stun the other player with thrown crates, losing precious bonus time in the process.

The levels themselves are mostly straightforward platforming. There are locations where everything is large in contrast to your small size. You can run around library books or jump over steaming pots in the kitchen. Some stages have interactive elements. For instance, you can turn off streams of water in the way by jumping on top of and turning the tap. You can also hit switches with crates to turn things on and off. The path of the level may take you in any direction, but you always stay on track and the screen doesn’t scroll to let you backtrack.

Turn the tap to shut off the upper valve also.

Most stages end in a boss battle. Instead of the bosses dropping throwable items, you get a single red ball used to attack. This ball acts like the crates but it is permanent. Throw it into each boss five times to defeat it. The ball always rebounds off the wall and flies backwards before dropping to the ground after its next collision with one of the sides. This is so you can’t lose the ball behind some of the larger bosses in the game.

You start the game with three lives. You can play when the status screen shows zero lives remaining, so you always have one more life than it appears. The same thing happens with continues. You can continue up to three times from the start of the stage where you died. Before your last continue, the Game Over screen will display “Continue 0.” I think it’s nice to have what feels like an extra continue just in case you need it!

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers was a game I’ve owned since I was a kid and I have played through the game countless times. We did not own this new, but it sold well enough that there were a lot of second-hand copies floating around. I don’t recall how I got my first copy but I have had a few other copies I bought within game lots on eBay. As a popular, yet common game, it always sells for around $10-$15.

This huge boss is probably some kid’s toy robot.

I have played a lot of this game, but I hadn’t played it recently. I liked the idea of trying to beat the game without dying, but this time I just wanted to beat the game well enough to move on to the next one on my list. I died four or five times in my run and I didn’t get too far in before I died the first time. It’s not a great outcome, but I’m satisfied with it. I made sure to play all the stages. Poor Area E gets ignored by just about everyone since there’s really no reason to play it due to its location on the map. I wanted to give it part of the spotlight during my playthrough because it’s a good level like the others.

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers is a great NES game suitable for any collection. It has colorful and detailed graphics, peppy music, responsive controls, and fun levels. The enemies and traps are interesting with some creative behavior and interactivity, and the boss battles are well made. The levels are in some unusual but clever settings and they really suit the game well. My only gripes are that the game feels a bit too short and the game difficulty is mostly easy. A few of the levels can be skipped over entirely making for an even quicker game if that’s what you want. These are minor complaints. This is an excellent game made even better by supporting two players. Games like this tend to make me crave more of it, but lucky for me there’s an NES sequel coming up someday. I haven’t yet played Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2, nor do I know much about it at all, so I am very much looking forward to playing it!

#97 – Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers

tag : afternoon, alan, animation, capcom, cat, channel, chip, daisakusen, dale, disney, fat, gadget, jack, monterey, monty, n, rangers, rescue, stones, tad, television, walt, zaslove, zipper

by : arnpoly

comment : 0

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2018

#96 – WWF Wrestlemania

Whatcha gonna do brother when Hulkamania runs wild on you?

Shiny colors!

To Beat: Win the Tournament
Played: 8/6/18 – 8/8/18
Difficulty: 6/10
My Difficulty: 6/10
My Video: WWF WrestleMania Longplay

I was a teenage boy and for a season I was really into professional wrestling. I happened to get interested in WCW during the time when it overtook WWF in popularity, and then I unceremoniously got out of it sometime before WWF acquired it. The NES wrestling games vastly favored the WWF license over WCW with four NES titles to one. I am familiar with many of the WWF stars from this period as they eventually crossed over into WCW. Hulk Hogan on the cover of NES WWF WrestleMania, for instance, was a huge part of the nWo and his entry into that group was very shocking for me as a young fan. Playing this NES game rekindled a lot of nostalgia for that period in my life. Of course what matters now, nostalgia aside, is if the game is any good.

The current WWE began in 1952 as Capitol Wrestling Corporation and was created by Jess McMahon and Toots Mondt. It was part of the broader National Wrestling Alliance, or NWA. The owners at that time, Mondt and Jess’s son Vincent, withdrew from NWA in 1963 over a dispute and created the WWWF, which eventually rejoined in NWA in 1971 and was renamed to the World Wrestling Federation, or WWF, in 1979. Vincent McMahon Jr. created Titan Sports in 1980 and bought Capitol from his father in 1982. Vince Jr. helped usher in the WWF Golden Age in the 1980s. WWF acquired its main competitor, WCW, in 2001. In 2002, WWF was renamed to World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, after a dispute with the World Wildlife Fund. WWE is currently the biggest professional wrestling promotion in the world.

WWF WrestleMania is the first of four WWF licensed NES games. The other three games are WWF WrestleMania Challenge, WWF WrestleMania: Steel Cage Challenge, and WWF King of the Ring. WWF WrestleMania was developed by Rare and published by Acclaim Entertainment. It was released in January 1989 on the NES in North America only.

Awww yeah, wrasslin’!

WWF Wrestlemania is a straightforward professional wrestling game. There are six characters to choose from: “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase, Bam Bam Bigelow, The Honky Tonk Man, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, Andre the Giant, and Hulk Hogan. Matches take place between two wrestlers in the ring until one of them wins by pinfall. The game supports up to six players though only two may play at one time. One or two players can play a standard match, or one to six players may compete in a Tournament format. To beat the game, you have to win the Tournament mode in single player.

At the start of the game you will choose the number of players and the corresponding mode. A name entry screen appears for each player after the mode is chosen. Use the D-pad to move the cursor and press A to make selections. Names are up to six characters long. For multiple players, odd numbered players use the first controller and even numbered players use the second controller. After name entry, choose from one of the six wrestlers. Press Up or Down to choose. You will see his profile picture and some short stats. Press A on the one you want. After all selections are made, you will see the Pre-Bout screen with the participants of the next match. Now the fun begins!

Fights take place on a single screen with the stats on top and the match on the bottom. On each side of the top of the screen are the character portraits and the vertical energy bars for each player. In the center is the match timer and the bell that rings at the end of the match.

Bam bam on Bam Bam.

The controls are a little more complex than they first appear. You walk around the ring with the D-pad and you can walk in all directions. You can press either A or B to do some basic strikes against your opponent. From here it gets more complicated as some wrestlers can’t perform certain moves. I won’t go into all these details, but the manual has a couple of charts detailing all this and I suggest you look that up before trying this game. One more thing all wrestlers have in common is running mode. Press and hold either Left or Right, and then hold A to engage running mode. You can let go of the D-pad, and then let go of the A button to stay locked into running mode without touching any of the buttons. You will rebound back and forth between the ropes until you press a button to get out of the mode or your opponent gets in the way.

The remaining moves can only be performed by some wrestlers. While in running mode, you can press A or B to do a running attack. You can do a different move by pressing either A or B while holding Up or Down. One of these, usually with the B button, is how you pin your opponent when they are laid out on the mat. If you have your back to the opponent and press A and B at the same time, you will do a strong back move. If you are facing your opponent and press A and B together, you can do a bodyslam. However, you need to have more energy than your opponent to pull off the bodyslam, otherwise you will default to the back move. Finally, some wrestlers can do a move off the turnbuckle. To climb up on the turnbuckle, you need to engage running mode while all the way at the bottom of the screen. Just as your approach the corner, press B. If your timing is good, you will climb onto the turnbuckle and then dive off all in one move. Even though there are turnbuckles at the top of the screen, you can’t climb on those. Weird, I know.

To win a match, first you need to drain all of the energy from your opponent. When he’s down, you need to pin him. Stand next to him and press either Up or Down combined with either A or B depending on your wrestler to pin. A three-count will start, and if your opponent is still down at three, the bell rings and you win the match. Often, just getting the energy bar emptied is not quite enough to keep him pinned down. Sometimes he will get up right away and other times he will stay down for quite some time. You can get a feel for when he will stay down longer than usual with some experience. On the flip side, your opponent is also trying to drain your energy and pin you too. You will rise automatically if you are knocked down with energy remaining, but if you don’t, mash the Up button on the D-pad to get up as quickly as you can.

High octane pinning action!

There are a few additional mechanics and things to look out for in the game. Energy meters slowly grow over time. You have to keep up the offensive or your opponent can get back into the game. There is an additional way to earn back some energy in the form of a powerup. That’s right, this game has a powerup called the energizer. Each wrestler has his own energizer listed in the game manual. Energizers appear from the top left of the screen, go across the top of the ring, and then exit on the right side. You want to collect your energizer if you are near it, and likewise you want to keep your opponent away from his. There is also an anger mechanic. If someone gets hit a bunch, his skin will change color from pink to red. Moves do more damage while in this angered state.

The timer is of some importance as well. There is no timer in a standard match, either single player or two-player. In fact, a two-player match with one person is a great environment for practicing moves and timing, all without worrying about the timer. The timer runs in tournament mode only. It counts up to three minutes, and if there isn’t a winner to that point, the match is considered a draw. You will get an instant rematch, and these will continue until there is a clear winner.

To win single-player Tournament mode, you pick a wrestler and then you have to win against all other wrestlers in order. You can tie via the timer as many times as necessary, but lose once and you’re out. A multi-player tournament functions more like an actual tournament. The computer controls the remaining wrestlers and everyone plays each other once for a total of fifteen matches. Whoever wins the most matches wins the tournament, and the tiebreaker is whoever has the quickest average match time over matches won.

Ooooh, that’s gonna leave a mark.

This was my first time playing WWF Wrestlemania. This game was originally on my deferred list, but I can’t remember why I put it there other than my general disinterest in sports games. This is one of the most common NES games out there. Right now, I have four extra copies I haven’t bothered to sell yet. It only costs a few dollars if you want a cart.

I did not have the easiest time beating this game. I decided to go with “Macho Man” Randy Savage (RIP) as he was one of my favorite wrestlers growing up. Taking the wrestlers in order means The Million Dollar Man is the first wrestler, and he really is a pushover for the most part. For a while I couldn’t beat anybody else. I found trying to beat anyone else in a fist fight is useless. Those guys can rifle off back moves quickly before I could barely get out one. Running attacks are more useful especially if you can knock the guy down with them. You can go right into another running attack and knock him down as soon as he gets up. This strategy doesn’t work on the heavier wrestlers. My path to victory was abusing turnbuckle moves. The problem then is getting the opponent into the corner with you to get in range for the move. I try to get the opponent to run after me into the corner so I can climb the turnbuckle. Knocking him down gives me enough room to back up and run again. I tried to time it so that I was climbing up when he got up. That way he will chase me into the corner, trying to take advantage of having my back to him. I can get into a loop, but it doesn’t always last. Your timing has to be really good too so that you don’t miss the turnbuckle climb. I think the presence of the timer, combined with energy regeneration, encourages repeating powerful moves over and over to win. It might be a cheap way to win but it worked for me. I can win most of the time with this strategy, but even then, winning all five matches was a little harder than it seemed.

Take this opinion with a grain of salt because I haven’t played any other wrestling games on NES, but I don’t think WWF Wrestlemania is all that good. Rare usually makes fun games but not this time. The level of presentation and polish from a Rare game is still there. There are some nice graphical effects on display. The character portraits look pretty good on the NES. Everything up to the gameplay is solid, and then the annoyances begin. I had a tough time lining up properly with the other wrestler, and when I did I would get beat down before I could get enough hits in. Movement around the ring is cumbersome and slow. It’s easy to get trapped in the corner and hard to get back out. The act of pinning a wrestler is a lot harder to perform than it should be. The timer gets in the way of a more thoughtful match, resulting in exploiting moves just to win in time. These control and balancing issues add up to a more frustrating experience than a fun one. I hope later games are better than this one.

#96 – WWF Wrestlemania

tag : acclaim, andre, entertainment, giant, hogan, hulk, macho, man, mania, randy, rare, savage, wrestle, wrestlemania, wrestling, wwe, wwf

by : arnpoly

comment : 0

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2018

#95 – Bomberman

You’ll get to blow up a lot of bricks and things over all these stages!

It’s Bomberman, not Bomber Man.

To Beat: Reach the ending
What I Did: Beat the game without dying
Played: 7/30/18 – 8/1/18
Difficulty: 2/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Bomberman Longplay

The Bomberman franchise is one with a long history and a loyal fanbase. I think Bomberman really grew in popularity on the Super Nintendo with the Super Bomberman games. The simple nature of the game, combined with the SNES Multitap, made it a perfect party game for multiple people. He would have his solo adventures, and those games have their fans too, but the multiplayer is what most people remember and what they would prefer to play. I’m more a fan of the solo outings, and that’s what I got here with the NES version. Bomberman comes from a humble beginning, as this early title is a bare-bones adventure.

Bomberman got his start on home computers in Japan and Europe in 1983. The game was remade for the Famicom, releasing in December 1985. It was developed and published by Hudson Soft. The NES version would wait until January 1989. Since then, there have been dozens of Bomberman games spanning various consoles and computers. There wouldn’t be another Bomberman game after the Famicom/NES release until 1990, but then there were multiple games released every year all the way through 2010. There was another long hiatus until Super Bomberman R came out on the Nintendo Switch in 2017.

Bomberman is a top-down action game with kind of a sad story. Bomberman is named appropriately as he makes bombs all day in an underground compound and he doesn’t like his situation at all. He hears a rumor that if a robot like himself leaves the compound for the surface then he will become human. He leaps at the opportunity but other robots pursue him. Luckily, he has unlimited bombs of his own making which will help him. You beat the game by clearing all 50 stages.

Make way for Bomberman!

The game has simple controls. Bomberman can walk in four directions with the D-pad. The A button places a bomb which is locked to one of the tiles on the playfield. Eventually it blows up leaving a brief trail of fire on the playfield. Later in the game, Bomberman can detonate his own bombs with the B button. The Start button pauses the game. That’s all there is to it.

Bomberman is a really simple game too. Each stage is two screens wide and free scrolls left or right to follow the action. The playfield consists of indestructible columns spaced evenly apart. Sprinkled among the level are bricks that can be destroyed with a bomb blast. Usually you are blocked from parts of the stage and you have to bomb your way through. The goal of the game is to defeat all enemies in each stage, then locate the exit door and leave. You have to drop bombs in spots where the enemies will walk into the blast and get themselves killed, or you can trap them with your bombs near an explosion. All enemies plus Bomberman are killed by a single bomb blast, so there is a strategy element as you also need to keep yourself out of harm’s way. A chime will play when all enemies have been defeated. The exit door is hidden behind one of the destructible walls. It’s completely random so sometimes you’ll find it without trying and other times it’s one of the last bricks in the whole level.

There is a little information on the top of the screen during game play. The level timer begins at 200. Now usually you would lose a life when time expires, but here a bunch of strong enemies are introduced when the timer hits zero. In the early game, that’s just as bad as death. In the middle is your score. You earn points through defeated enemies and you can score more points per kill if you defeat multiple enemies with a single explosion. On the right side, labeled Left, is the number of remaining lives. You start with three lives and you earn one after beating each stage. That’s very generous!

Setting up chain reactions is both fun and dangerous.

The primary mechanic in Bomberman is the bomb blast. When a bomb is placed it stays dormant briefly before exploding. The blast extends outward in the four cardinal directions. It won’t travel through the solid columns or the destructible bricks, but it will rip right through enemies and Bomberman himself. If an explosion hits another bomb, that bomb also explodes immediately. Naturally, you can set up multiple bombs and set off a huge chain reaction. It’s all very intuitive and satisfying to rain fire on large portions of the stage. The catch of course is that you should be thoughtful in your placement so that you don’t get yourself caught up in the blast, whether you get greedy with bomb chaining or trap yourself in an unescapable spot.

Bomberman can find powerups. Each level has exactly one powerup hidden somewhere within a breakable block, just like the exit door. Collecting the powerup causes the music to change, which is an interesting and unusual way of reminding you that you don’t need to hunt for the powerup anymore. Here are the powerups you can find. The bomb powerup lets you lay one extra bomb on screen at a time. The smiling flame powerup extends the bomb blast one tile in each direction. At the start of the game, Bomberman can only lay one bomb at a time with a tiny blast radius. By collecting multiple bomb and flame powerups throughout the game, your bombing ability grows fast. The speed skates let Bomberman walk faster. The wall walk powerup lets you walk through the breakable walls, and the bomb walk powerup lets you walk through your own bombs. The detonator powerup is a heart with a small bomb on it. This lets you blow up the oldest bomb with the B button, and also causes bombs to stay dormant until you blow them up yourself. The flame proof powerup looks like a little person engulfed in flames. This keeps you from being hurt by your bomb blasts. The mystery powerup looks like a question mark and gives you temporary invincibility from enemies and bombs. All powerups except for the mystery powerup last until you die, while the bombs, flames, and speed skates are permanent upgrades.

It does make sense that you could also blow up both the powerups and the exit door. You might not want to do that. Blasting either one spawns several enemies which are typically more challenging ones than the initial enemies in that stage. Not only that, but if you blow up the powerup you lose it, putting you at a double disadvantage. The lesson here is that you want to be careful with explosives.

Blow up enemies in the bonus level without concern.

There are bonus stages sprinkled between some levels. The standard unbreakable columns are still there but there are no bricks to deal with. Each bonus level features only one enemy type but there are a lot of them and they keep coming. Bomberman is completely invincible from both enemies and explosions here, so this is a great place to go wild and set up huge chain reactions. This is simply a point-scoring affair, but it’s a fun break while it lasts. The bonus levels occur after every five levels for most of the game. For some reason they put the bonus areas after levels 39, 44, and 49 instead of multiples of five like it started out. I get that they didn’t want the game to end on a bonus stage, but I think they could have just adjusted only the final bonus level instead. I’m all about the minutia here on the site, so I just had to let you know about this.

Bomberman also features some special, hidden items. These are nothing to get excited about and are just for points, but they might appear in a playthrough when you don’t expect them. There are six of them. Each stage has one and there is a specific method to get it to appear in the stage. I’ll spare you the details on this one. Most players will not come across them at all because the requirements are kind of ridiculous. I didn’t in my playthrough, though I believe I found one in a past playthrough.

Lastly, there is a password system. Lose all your lives to get the password. These are 20-character passwords consisting of the letters A through P only. Passwords save the stage you are on, the number of bombs you can deploy, the blast radius, and even your score. Nice!

Strong powerups like this give you great versatility.

Though I have played Bomberman before, I haven’t played it all that much. I am pretty sure I played the SNES Bomberman games before playing this one, and it feels primitive in comparison. At least I had the basic idea down for how the game works. I beat the game for the first time a few years ago as part of the NintendoAge contests. Bomberman is a common game but it’s one of the more expensive commons, selling for over $15 for a loose cart today.

I think Bomberman is a really easy game. I was able to beat the entire game on one life on my second try. While the difficulty of the levels increases as you play, I believe the first level is the hardest one. You have little explosive range so you have to get a little too close to the enemies and they are tough to reach with bombs. You start off with a flame powerup in Stage 1 which helps out greatly. In Stage 2 you can get an additional bomb, and in Stage 3 you can get the detonator, putting the game into easy mode. With the detonator and cautious play, you probably shouldn’t die anymore the rest of the way. The flame proof powerup comes late in the game and pairing it with the detonator is ultra-powerful. Then you can drop bombs and immediately detonate them at your feet, essentially surrounding yourself with a fire shield for as long as you keep pressing the buttons. Even without the best powerups, you can still password creep through the game the long way.

Bomberman is a basic, but fun game. The core gameplay is solid, laying the groundwork for future titles. Aside from that hook, the game was primitive by the time it released on the NES in 1989. From a 1985 perspective, I can see why this was well regarded. It’s a fun game with a bunch of levels, randomly generated obstacles, and some neat powerups that make you feel very powerful by the end of it all. The music is catchy enough in its simplicity. The graphics do well enough to carry the idea of the game, but don’t offer anything further. I’m glad to have played it, but I don’t plan to go back to it.

#95 – Bomberman

tag : bomb, bomber, bomberman, detonator, explosion, fire, flame, hudson, man, soft, walk, wall

by : arnpoly

comment : 0

SEP

2018

#94 – Volleyball

Nintendo’s Black Box Volleyball is the only game of its kind on the console.

Good on the players to practice before getting started.

To Beat: Win a single match
To Complete: Win a match against Russia
What I Did: Won a match against Korea
Played: 7/15/18 – 7/17/18
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 7/10
My Video: Volleyball Longplay

If you have been following my project closely, you probably will disagree with my initial tagline. After all, I have already played an NES volleyball game already in Kings of the Beach. The only other games are Super Spike V’Ball and the unlicensed Venice Beach Volleyball. The main difference between these games and the original Volleyball is that the other games are beach volleyball and this one is standard volleyball. That means this game is a full six-on-six match while the others are strictly two-on-two. I can see why two-on-two volleyball makes sense on the NES. A four-player sport is perfectly suited as a Four Score title, and fewer characters on screen reduces the amount of flicker and graphical issues. It’s interesting to me that the first volleyball game on the NES is the only one to tackle a standard game, and it does a noble job of it. It’s also quite a bit more challenging than I bargained for.

Volleyball first launched on the Famicom Disk System, releasing in July 1986 in Japan. The NES version arrived in March 1987, and the PAL version followed in November 1987. It was developed by both Nintendo’s R&D1 division and Pax Softnica. Interestingly, this game is credited on the title screen to Tomoshige Hashishita (written T. Hashishita), which is unusual for early Nintendo games. I don’t know if that means he was the main developer, designer, or perhaps the sole creator of this game.

As mentioned in the introduction, Volleyball is the only NES game that covers a standard game of volleyball. Two teams of six players each play in a normal game. You can play in either the men’s or women’s league. In a two-player game, each player chooses his or her own team, while in single player, you will play as the USA team. There are eight teams in all to pick from. There are no additional gameplay modes in Volleyball, so winning a single match is good enough for completion.

Nice touch to animate teams lining up.

The game is structured in the same way as other volleyball games on the system with the same mode of play. One team earns possession of the ball and one player serves the ball from the back line into the opponent’s court. Each side may hit the ball three times before they are required to return the ball to the other court. A team earns the serve if the ball falls within the opponent’s court or the opponent fails to return the ball after three hits into the team’s court. If the serving team wins the serve again, they also score a point. Each match consists of up to five sets. In each set, the score is reset to 0-0 and the first team to 15 points, while also winning by two, wins the set. The first team to win three sets wins the match.

A good place to start with this game is the training mode. This is selectable from the title screen and you go straight into playing without choosing teams. This is for single player practice only. There are two differences between training and the standard game. First, the speed of the ball is decreased, and second, the active player’s uniform changes to red. This will help you see which character you are allowed to control at any given moment. Certain game situations force you to control only a subset of the team at one time, so training mode gives you an immediate visual of who you control so you can get the hang of it.

The scoring display is at the top of the screen during gameplay. The viewpoint scrolls from left to right to follow the action and the scoreboard is in the center making it visible at all times. The three-letter team abbreviation is displayed vertically on the appropriate side. Next to that is a column of five rectangles. This represents each set and the team that wins each set has their light turned on. The current set will blink on both sides of the scoreboard. In the center is the score for the current set. Below that are a series of lights that show which team is the serving team.

Good timing on your serves is always helpful.

The first thing you will need to do in single player is serve the ball. The server waits behind the back line for the referee to blow the whistle. Press A to toss the ball in the air and then press A with good timing to hit the ball to the other side. If you hit the ball early, you will do a high serve, and if you wait until the ball is low to the ground, you will perform a low serve. Be careful not to let the ball hit the ground or you lose the serve. You can also aim the serve by holding a direction on the D-pad while you hit the ball.

The D-pad controls the team members while the ball is in the air. There is a line close to the net on each side called the spike line, and there are three team members on either side of the line. You control the set of three players behind the line if the ball is hit toward the back, and you control the three players by the net if it is hit near the net. The ball casts a shadow on the court and you use this to anticipate where the ball might land according to its flight path. The ball often gets hit high above the playfield to where you can’t see it, and the shadow is usually all you can go by. Get into position and press either A or B to receive the ball. The B button is a low hit that is not often used. The third hit automatically sends the ball to the other side of the court.

You can also aim the ball a little bit while receiving. Simply hold the D-pad in the desired direction of the hit as you smack the ball. Holding down the button also locks the player in position and he or she cannot move unless you release the button. If you press toward the opponent’s court, you will hit the ball there even if you aren’t on the third hit. Another wrinkle is that if the center player receives the ball and you direct the ball either up or down, control is locked to only the player on that side in the same row.

Spiking is an essential skill here.

You can spike the ball on the third hit. The first hit is the bump, second is the set, and third can be the spike. Get the player into the position where the ball is expected to land, then press B to jump. Hold the button and you will spike the ball at the top of your jump. You can also aim the spike with the D-pad. You can cross spike with Up or Down, or do a feint by holding back toward your court. The spike is a difficult move to pull off with the arc of the ball and anticipating the shot without seeing the ball the whole way.

On defense, you can block the spike in much the same way. Simply press and hold the B button to jump by the net. If you press the D-pad toward the net, you will do a double block with two defenders. Optionally, while the ball is in the opponent’s court, you can press A to bring the front row of defenders together in a tight row automatically. One big difference here is that you cannot direct the ball on a block directly with the D-pad like you would in other situations. The direction of the ball coming off the block is determined by the angle of the block. For instance, if you block the ball using the right side of your body, the ball will shoot off to that side.

There’s a few more tidbits about the game. The seven teams you compete against are Russia (USSR), China, Cuba, Japan, Brazil, Korea, and Tunisia. These teams are in order of difficulty from hardest to easiest as determined by head to head ranking in the 1981 and 1985 World Cup tournaments. At the start you can select from either the men’s or women’s teams which determines the speed of the ball during play. In addition to player sprite changes, the ball moves faster in men’s mode than women’s mode. Lastly, teams switch sides after each set. If the match is tied two games to two, teams will switch sides in the middle of the set once one team scores eight points.

I love getting the other team to whiff on a hit like this.

This was my first time playing and beating Volleyball. Despite being a pick up and play style game, this is not one I spent much time with in testing carts. I do recall this was my 400th licensed NES cart I bought for my collection. That wasn’t planned or anything, just how it worked out. I have had a few copies of this game pass through my hands. The game primarily is found in the original 5-screw form factor, but there were some copies made after the conversion to 3-screw carts. I have a couple of 3-screw variants of Volleyball that are a bit more valuable than the 5-screw cart. The game sells for around $10 for a loose cart.

I had heard that Volleyball is a difficult game that you might not expect, and I agree with that assessment. I really wanted to beat the hardest team, Russia, but first I started on the opposite end with Tunisia. I ended up winning my first match in four sets, giving me a false sense of security for the harder difficulties. The Tunisia team makes a lot of miscues that you can benefit from. I played a few matches with Russia and got destroyed every time. My best single set over all attempts was a 15-4 loss. I played the middle difficulty Japan team a few times and also got my butt handed to me. I did figure out an exploit on serving against Japan. When on the left court, I could hit a low serve to the bottom right corner and the defender would whiff on it most of the time. That could only help me win two sets and I didn’t play well enough to win the entire match. I settled with beating the second-weakest team, Korea, but it was a close game. I won in five sets 15-10, 15-12, 5-15, 13-15, 15-8. That match was the one I recorded for my longplay. I had thought about stepping up a team at a time just to see the toughest team I could beat. I didn’t have a chance to win against a tougher team before leaving on vacation, and I wanted to move on to something else once I got back home. As much as I wanted to stick it to the Russians, this would have to be good enough.

The ball can easily go above the screen.

I had some issues with the game that made it difficult to play. I found the controls got in the way of keeping the ball in play. One example is if a ball is hit near the spike line. Either the front row or back row will be active at once, and sometimes I anticipate that the ball will land in a spot where the inactive group should get it. There is a little bit of time to recognize which group of players is moving, but I found it wasn’t enough for me to recover from a misjudgment. Another control issue occurs when setting the ball with one of the middle players. Setting off to one side leaves only the player on the same side active for the spike. I guess I just messed up the controls in the heat of the moment, but I left myself in situations too many times where I hit the ball to a non-moving player. Defense in Volleyball is really challenging and I just could not figure it out consistently. The ball moves so fast enough on opposing spikes that you really need to block. A successful block requires both good jump timing and good positioning. If the opponent hits the ball off the edge of one of your blockers, it flies off the court and there’s nothing you can do about it. I also either spiked or blocked the ball into the net a lot. It’s so cramped by the net that I can’t tell the outcome until the referee sorts it out. I didn’t play long enough to tell if either bad timing or bad luck caused issues with maintaining possession of the ball. It was a struggle at times to string points together but I managed the best that I could.

Black Box Volleyball is a noble, early effort on the NES, but I didn’t really have a lot of fun with it. The graphics are extremely basic, but that’s to be expected for an early game. Simple sprites help keep the action fast while avoiding graphical flickering. The music is not that bad. There are some shared sounds and songs from other early games Nintendo put out, but they are good enough. The action is very fast. Normally I find that a good thing, but I think that works against the game in this case. Too often the ball gets hit high in the air and you are left to guess when and where it will land, with not much time to react. Good luck defending enemy spikes or smacking the ball through their defenses. The speedy pace, difficult teams, and some control issues further mar the experience. It’s not an awful game, but there are better NES volleyball games.

#94 – Volleyball

tag : black, box, hashishita, nintendo, pax, r&d1, softnica, tomoshige, volleyball

by : arnpoly

comment : 0

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An 8-bit Extravaganza!

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#98 – Defender of the Crown

#97 – Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers

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#94 – Volleyball

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