2017 Year In Review
The last blog for games finished in 2017 has been posted, so that means the Year In Review is back! Last year I published this post in June, and now I’ve gotten it pushed up to March. Maybe next year’s entry will come even sooner.
My project and website are still chugging along after my second full year, but things did slow down quite a lot in 2017. At the start of the year, I was feeling convicted of my approach to ignore a bunch of NES games from the library. I have decided to work two lists and slowly incorporate all those neglected games. The first from my so-called snub list was Bases Loaded. That required a full season of games and took me two months of real time to beat. Almost immediately after that, the Nintendo Switch came out. Breath of the Wild has been an enormous time sink to say the least. It’s been a full year since release and I still haven’t beaten the game, and I’ve been playing it several nights a week for most of the year. A large chunk of time went into Super Mario Odyssey too. Those two games have sucked away over 250 hours since launch, though admittedly some of those hours would not have went toward the project just because playing the Switch in bed is so darn convenient. If all that wasn’t enough, I also took a month break to participate in, and win, the NintendoAge 2017 NES contest. I really wanted to be farther along than I am, but then I also wanted to do all this other stuff. I have focused on beating more games in 2018. Maybe I can make up this year for a slower last year.
Even in a lean year, I still managed to finish 24 games for the project in 2017. From Rollergames at #45 to Super Team Games at #68, there’s plenty of good and bad things within those games to build up a decent review. For the Year in Review I am taking the same approach as last year. I have several categories and I will try and pick two games for each one. Every game will get a final word, even if it doesn’t fit in any of these categories.
The 2017 Take On The NES Library Year In Review
Hardest Game
Right off the bat, I’m starting up some controversy with this pick. I didn’t have any 10/10 rated games in 2017 and Ninja Gaiden was the only one I scored a 9, so it’s the hardest game by my standards. Now I didn’t have any trouble beating the game because I’m so familiar with it, but I stand by my statement that the last area is very difficult to complete blind.
There were a few games I rated an 8 that could have gone here, but I’m going to say Super Team Games because at first I thought I might not physically be able to beat this game. This was the most exhausting game on my list, and I would rather go back and play any of those other games than to put up with Super Team Games again.
Easiest Game
This was a pretty clear choice for easiest game. Dragon Warrior doesn’t require any dexterity to play well and you can always make progress in experience by fighting. Some of the puzzles are obtuse but that’s the only source of difficulty I could find.
Just mash A.
This game did not start out easy, but once I got the hang of it and figured out the pitching exploit, I couldn’t lose. Seems like easiest game material to me.
Shortest Game
Ten frames of bowling sure go by fast, especially when you just push buttons and don’t have to wait long for the pins to be set back up. Bowling a perfect game is even faster.
This game gets the secondary honor just because it was far shorter than I would have expected. There aren’t too many NES platformers that can be casually completed in around 15 minutes for the full game.
Longest Game
This baseball game took me around 40 hours to complete, making it by far the longest game of 2017. Winning 80 games when each game lasts 25-30 minutes seems even longer.
I saw this screen for hours and hours.
RPGs will likely dominate this category for years to come. Dragon Warrior is one of the shorter RPGs on the console, but it still took many hours to complete. In a lean year for completions it didn’t have much competition.
Oldest Game
The arcade version of Burgertime was released in 1982 which is the earliest game on this list. The NES version came out in May 1987, so Burgertime is also the earliest NES release I played last year. (Somehow I left the NES release date out of my review, so it’s a good thing I can clear it up here.)
Here is another separation of arcade version to NES game, though there is less of a time gap. Section Z hit the arcades in late 1985 and the NES reimagining came out in July 1987, two months after NES Burgertime.
Newest Game
There was a revision to the back label that occurred sometime in June 1992. It’s a curious decision given the Super Nintendo was in full swing. Gargoyle’s Quest II, released in October 1992, was both the latest NES release and the only game with the new back label on this list.
I’m surprised I didn’t beat any NES games from 1993 or 1994 last year. There are 55 North American NES releases in those two years, so I might expect to beat a couple of them a year. M.C. Kids was a February 1992 release and is the runner-up. There were a couple of January 1992 releases that just missed the mark.
Best Character
I’m a big fan of Firebrand and this series. He is not incredibly nimble or anything, but he has a lot of versatility. He can hover with his wings for awhile and cling to walls, so he can travel just about anywhere he wants. Later, he can make platforms in mid-air or cover spiked walls. These are great abilities. Perhaps his best quality is his blazing speed on the overworld, keeping those sections as brief as possible to better emphasize the action sequences.
Firebrand can go just about anywhere.
Like Firebrand, on the surface our hero isn’t all that exciting. He has a short sword and a limited charge attack. The ability to turn into a flying dragon at nearly any time is really fun to use and helps out a lot in a jam. That alone earns him a spot here.
I have to give a special nod here to our pal Duke Togo. He is a master at hand-to-hand combat, uses a sniper rifle professionally, can scuba dive, and pilot a helicopter. He also gets to stop for a quick smoke break and gets laid a couple of times. What’s not to love?
Worst Character
This award doesn’t go to just one character, but half of the entire party in this game. Once I got into it, I realized I only needed three of the eight characters to beat this game. The spell casters Raistlin and Goldmoon are essential, while Caramon handles the fighting. Sturm is at least good for absorbing some damage in the front row. The rest were completely unnecessary. That means that Tanis, Tasslehoff, Riverwind, and Flint were the worst characters of the year.
You get to see all the useless characters for the whole game.
I have nothing against the character of Rambo or any of the movies or anything like that. I even liked the NES game. It’s just playing as Rambo feels very clumsy and slippery. He’s also a known name and can’t hide behind obscurity. That makes him a good fit as one of the worst characters.
Best Ending
This game has it all. The great cutscenes from the rest of the game carried through to the ending. Ryu saves the day, there’s a beautiful sunset, and there are some great tunes to go along with it. Easily the best ending of the year.
Rambo gets some credit here too because of the interactive ending. Talking to the characters again and walking around gives it ending more meaning. Dragon Warrior does this too, but you can’t turn a character into a frog there, so Rambo gets the nod.
Worst Ending
After all of those games and all of those hours, all you get is a crummy parade. At least it’s an actual ending, and honestly I’m not sure I should have expected anything more grandiose as a reward. The return on investment is very poor, so that’s why it goes here.
Burgertime, Sky Shark, Tiger-Heli
The worst ending in an NES game might be no ending at all. That’s a good philosophy to have because I like to document actual ending screens. Otherwise, I have to fake it, and that can sometimes be problematic. I played three games last year with no ending, so they all share this dubious distinction.
Best Box Art
Sometimes the box art doesn’t properly capture the spirit of the game it’s advertising, and less often they can get away with it if the game is good enough. Ninja Gaiden is a great example. Why is Ryu so high above the ground, and why is the city below him engulfed in flames? Neither is indicative of gameplay, but the visual idea sure is awesome. I like it!
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but this box art is really cool. I love how Peter Pepper is holding this burger that is still being built, and running away with this look of fear as he is pursued by angry anthropomorphic food items. I guess it just all comes together in a neat way.
Worst Box Art
I realize there’s only so much you can do for art of a bowling game, but this one is pretty lackluster. The flying pins are scattered way too much for that kind of throw. I doubt the bowler would be in that exact position after the ball reaches the pins. The large bowling pin is just there to take up space against the plain black background. It’s a boring cover.
Most of the box art from this past year isn’t outright awful. The box art for Heroes of the Lance isn’t that terrible either. This is a case where the art is so misleading that it’s bad, especially since the game isn’t that interesting. Warriors with lances riding dragons is awesome in concept but there’s none of that in the game. I get that it’s there because it’s from the Dragonlance series, but I bet this box misled a bunch of people.
Best Graphics
The main reason I chose Dragon Fighter is for a neat graphical effect in the first stage. The snow falling in the background is multilayered because of two different sets of repeating snowfall tiles in columns next to each other. It’s a simple effect but it looks nice. The rest of the game is well drawn and animated as well, so Dragon Fighter isn’t just a one-trick pony in the graphics department.
Such beautiful falling snow!
I had a few candidates here but I decided on M.C. Kids. It has a very clean look with some smooth animation. The McDonalds characters look better than I would have expected. I don’t remember any graphical glitches or flickering either. Solid game!
Worst Graphics
None of the games on this list have terrible graphics. The only things that stood out last year where graphical glitches. Tiger-Heli is full of them. The whirling blades of the Tiger-Heli take up enough sprite slots that a couple of enemies next to them will have missing tiles. The game flickers a lot to try and spread out the sprite tile gaps and it’s just a mess. I think it’s a little unfair to Tiger-Heli because the developers were trying the best they could under the limitations of a new system at the time.
This was easily the best image I got from this part.
Speaking of graphical glitches, Section Z has them too. The NES can only display eight sprite tiles in a row. Any additional tiles are left blank. Unlike Tiger-Heli, this game does not have a sprite cycling routine to manage missing tiles. The game mostly stays away from situations where this would be an issue, but there are a few sections with a row of enemies that can have a couple not drawn on screen at all. I know I got killed by an invisible enemy once and that should never have happened.
Best Soundtrack
The composers of Konami always seem to make rockin’ music, and they nailed it with Rollergames. I believe the developers used the oft-ignored sampling channel to drive the bass line, so the game has a rich sound to it. The music is usually upbeat and meant to get you moving, so it’s a great fit for the game too.
The soundtrack to Ninja Gaiden has several songs that are instantly recognizable and well-known. It’s a great soundtrack to fit the action and it’s an excellent fit on this list.
Worst Soundtrack
There’s not much music in the game, and what’s here isn’t great. At least it’s not ear-grating, but I would normally expect better from an original NES game.
I get that it is an early NES game based on an early arcade port, so the music wasn’t as high a consideration. I don’t even know what music the arcade game had, if any. What we get here are a couple of short loops of music that aren’t anything special.
Best Gameplay
The reasons why Firebrand is such a great character are mostly the same reasons the gameplay is so fun. Firebrand covers vertical movement with climbing and horizontal movement with hovering. This makes the levels large enough to incorporate some alternate paths. His abilities scale nicely and give a good difficulty curve for the game. The bosses are fun to fight too, and the fetch questing isn’t so bad.
I like the movement Kiwi Kraze offers. The platforming is basic, sure, but hijacking balloons and flying them around is quite fun. This opens up the levels quite a bit and there’s plenty of room to explore and search out the right path through the level. Bosses are neat too, especially the first one.
Stealing balloons at its finest.
Worst Gameplay
Power Pad games should be simple enough to do what they set out to do. World Class Track Meet handles things okay, but Super Team Games feels like it takes a step backward. You can run fast on the Power Pad and not actually run fast in game. Most of the events are run and jump, or run in a different way. It’s not fun and it’s exhausting on top of it. The skateboard race is better, and I’m sure the multiplayer is even more fun, but the single player drags things down too much.
Variety can often make for good gameplay, and most of American Gladiators is fun to play. The real offender here is the Human Cannonball event. It should just be a matter of timing, but the later levels will automatically knock you out even with perfect timing. Rather, you have to wait an arbitrary amount of swings before the gladiator lets his guard down. That’s poor, non-intuitive design.
No, don’t go yet.
Best Moment
Even though the game has one unfair event, the last part of my run was my best moment of the year. I played through the whole game and reached the Eliminator with plenty of lives. I got to the last part easy enough and then proceeded to completely blow it, almost. On the second to last try, I beat the game for the very first time. I was relieved!
Figuring out the perfect 300 game started to seem like it would take a miracle after the first couple days of attempts. The first three or four frames would go well and then I couldn’t throw a strike. Once I found my second shot to pick up the remaining strikes, it was an incremental process of going perfect further and further into the round. I’m pretty sure this was the first time I bowled a perfect game either in real life or in a game, so I found it exciting to figure out a repeatable strategy.
Worst Moment
I casually played through Rambo the first time. I knew I could beat the game quite a bit faster once I knew what to do, so I decided to do a longplay the second time around. Unfortunately, my computer crashed partway through recording and I lost the entire first half of the game.
In Act 3, you dive through the water and explore a base in the first-person mode. I wandered around for a long time and wasn’t getting anywhere, finally deciding to quit for the night. That was when I read the manual and discovered it contained maps. One of those maps was for a fake base, and it matched up perfectly with the area I stumbled around in. Oops! The next time went much better.
Best Surprise
You might think I’m mentioning this game here because I had a better time with it than I expected, but I’m going in a different direction. I discovered a little while back that speedrun.com didn’t have any recorded runs of Heroes of the Lance on NES. I looked up some longplays on YouTube and no one beat the game any faster than I did. I submitted my recording and I am currently the world record holder for the NES version!
I wanted to try beating the game without continuing just because it’s a game that I enjoy playing. I should be good enough to beat it this way, and I did just that. That’s when I discovered the ending has a few extra scenes if you beat the game without continuing. I found no evidence of this online from what I could find either, so it was a pleasant surprise to stumble on a best ending I didn’t know existed.
Worst Surprise
When playing a game for the first time, you just kind of roll with it. I reached a part far off the beaten path that I thought was required, only to have to turn around after gaining nothing. I had to wander for a while but I eventually figured out what to do. I looked up an FAQ after I beat the game and realized I had somehow missed an entire side section of the game. Supposedly, I was late reaching a certain part of the game that locked me out without me knowing.
This is a game where the action gets crazy and anything can happen. The sun tile is usually a gift when it appears, flipping all the tiles on the board and killing most enemies in its wake. Some late levels in the game give you an early sun tile that ends up revealing a screen full of enemy warp tiles. Now you have to deal with the max number of enemies with more to come when you knock them out. Not cool!
This level still gives me nightmares.
Best Familiar Game
It might be a surprise to see this here just because it wasn’t mentioned so much in the above categories. I find this one of the most fun games to play on the NES. I like screen clearing games like this along with the bonuses and boss fights. It’s a great pick up and play game and one I go back to repeatedly.
I sought out Gargoyle’s Quest II in college after stumbling upon it in emulation. I knew I had to have a copy of it, and I ended up playing through it a few times. I know I’ll play it again someday because it’s fun and has a good challenge in the later stages.
I have to give a shoutout to Ninja Gaiden here. It’s a great NES game that I enjoy a lot. I like the above two games a little bit better, but I need to mention it here so I don’t get yelled at by everyone.
Best New Game
Super Mario Bros. 3 is still one of the greatest NES games and you get that same vibe with M.C. Kids. I enjoyed seeking out the puzzle cards while playing, and the gimmicks such as block throwing and running on the ceiling add a lot to the experience. It has nice graphics and great music on top of it all. Don’t be fooled by a McDonalds themed game. It’s a good one.
The left platform is too close to what’s in Super Mario Bros. 3.
I have really fond memories of playing through and learning this game, more so than most of the other games I played last year. I like the music even though it’s mostly one song, and snatching balloons and flying around is a fun gameplay mechanic. The sudden rise of the difficulty in the late game holds it back just a little bit.
Worst Game
It’s a novelty of a game with the Power Pad. It’s too bad the game itself isn’t that much fun to play. There’s only a little bit of content here to hold your attention. The single player tournament is too repetitive, and you have to start over if you lose any race. In a year of mostly good games, this one offers the least.
This really isn’t a bad game, but it’s a slow-paced shooter that isn’t as much fun as other games. Plus, the graphical glitches are so prevalent you might end up missing something important on-screen.
Ignored But Not Forgotten
In closing, here are some final words on the games I played in 2017 that didn’t get mentioned in any of the categories above.
Maybe I should have put this in Newest Game because there are new games of Jeopardy! airing on TV nearly every day. An outdated Jeopardy! game doesn’t offer that much worth mentioning.
Sports games will tend to draw the short straw on these lists. Kings of the Beach is a good volleyball game made by a good developer. It deserves better.