The Bases are in fact still Loaded.

Admiring the home run ball

To Beat: Get a perfect 100 rating against a Level 5 team
Played: 5/27/21
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Bases Loaded 3 Longplay

The NES has several game series with an excellent third installment. Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of the best games of all time. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse is a fan favorite with an all-time soundtrack made even better when utilizing the expanded chips on the Famicom. Dragon Warrior III is often considered one of the best RPGs on the NES and one I personally enjoyed very much. Ninja Gaiden III is awesome, as is TMNT III: The Manhattan Project. Mega Man 3 might well be the best of the 6 NES installments, at least to some. Bases Loaded 3 is not considered, well, at all, when talking about great 3rd games of a series. But I can confidently say that Bases Loaded 3 is my favorite game in the series for one very specific reason that I’ll get into.

For more information on the Bases Loaded series, check out my reviews for Bases Loaded and Bases Loaded II: Second Season. As before, this review will focus primarily on the changes between the previous installments. Let’s get started.

Bases Loaded 3 was first released in Japan, originally named Moero!! Pro Yakyuu ’90: Kandouhen. That translates roughly to Burn!! Pro Baseball ’90: Exciting Edition, or perhaps Impressive Edition. It was released in Japan in July 1990, about six months after Bases Loaded II reached North America. The US release came in September 1991. Here it was called just Bases Loaded 3 but it features MLB Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg on the box cover. Like the other installments, the game was developed by Tose and published by Jaleco in both regions.

They really want you to understand what’s going on here.

Let’s get the biggest change out of the way first. Bases Loaded 3 does not require playing a full season to beat the game. In fact, there is no season mode at all! This game features five difficulty levels for the opposing team, but you’ll always start off playing the weakest, Level 1 team. At the end of each game, you are given a special screen and a rating value. I’ll spare the full details until later, but you can score up to a 100 rating with very good, efficient play. The rating determines which difficulty level you’ll face in the next game. If you lose a game, or have a low rating, you’ll go back to the base Level 1 team. To beat this game, you need to earn a match against a Level 5 team and then beat that team with a perfect 100 rating.

Here are other changes between versions that take place prior to starting up a match. From the title screen you can select Watch mode to watch the CPU square off against itself. Choose the teams and settings, then sit back and enjoy. There is also an Edit mode for creating your own team. Behind the scenes, there is a special team designated for the Edit mode, so you can only build and update that specific team. You can change any of the players’ names and stats with no restrictions or limits. Build the super team of your dreams, go crazy! In this game there are 12 standard teams to choose from, plus the Edit team. After choosing teams, pick one of three stadiums to play in. Each stadium has different outfield dimensions, so you can opt for the pitcher’s park with long distances or a more hitter friendly park with closer walls down the lines. You can also adjust your starting lineup and pitcher as you can in the other games.

The pitching is tweaked a little for Bases Loaded 3. You begin a pitch the same way as before, hold any direction and press A to target a specific location. From here on, it is handled differently. To increase the direction of the pitch, tap A between the windup and delivery. The more you tap A, the more the pitch travels in that direction. For example, for a right-handed batter, you can throw a pitch up and away by holding Up and Left before winding up with A. This pitch will target the upper left of the strike zone. By adding A button taps before the pitch is thrown, you can aim the pitch further up and away beyond the strike zone. This gives you a more granular adjustment on where to aim pitches. During the windup, to throw the ball faster, you’ll hold Up on the D-pad. Because the D-pad only increases speed during the windup, you really can’t curve the ball like you can in the other games. Finally, you can press B to initiate a pickoff move.

You can choose the field that favors your abilities.

The developers managed to set this game around yet another defensive perspective, this time putting the camera out in center field. Logically this makes sense, as now batting, pitching, and defense are all oriented the same way toward home plate, but this is uncommon compared to other baseball games of the time. The controls for choosing a base to throw or run to also reflects this perspective. Press Up to target home, Left for first base, Down for second base, and Right for third base. Another tweak the manual calls out is that the speed of the throw is determined by how quickly you get rid of the ball. As soon as you grab the ball on defense, throw it right away. This gives you the crispest throw, otherwise if you delay even a little bit the throw will be much slower. It’s an interesting timing mechanic. The other controls are the same: Press A and a direction to throw to a particular base, press B and a direction to run to a base.

Batting is made simpler here. The A button swings like usual. This time you can do a level swing, a high swing with Up and A, and a low swing with Down and A. In earlier games you could adjust your swing to reach inside and outside pitches. To do that now, you must position yourself in the batter’s box prior to the pitch. This might seem like a downgrade but this is how it is done in most other NES baseball games. To bunt, press Select. You can cancel a bunt by pressing Select again or pressing A.

Baserunning is much improved this time. They finally standardized the baserunning controls in Bases Loaded 3 to align with other contemporary NES baseball games. To advance a base, press B and the D-pad direction for the base you are heading toward. To go back, press A and the base you want to return to. The directional mapping for the bases is the same as when fielding, from the centerfield perspective. These controls are so much more intuitive to me. To move multiple runners, you have to control them separately. You can even halt the baserunners by holding both A and B together during a play.

With only the shadow in view until the end, it’s tough to place your fielder.

With the controls and other differences out of the way, it’s time to explain the new winning condition. To win the game you’ll need to understand how to score 100 points in the new rating system. To get a rating at all you need to win a game first. Interestingly enough, the rating screen is more a list of your flaws rather than how well you played. You start with the base score of 100, and most of the categories are negative factors that reduce the rating by 3 points for each infraction. You’ll see a count of the number of faults made in each category with the total score at the bottom.

Here are the 13 categories, mostly taken straight from the manual:

1. Making an error
2. Delaying a throw, i.e. making a slow throw
3. Allowing an inside-the-park home run
4. Throwing to an unmanned base
5. Forcing in a run with a walk
6. Leaving a tired pitcher in the game
7. Allowing more than 3 runs in an inning
8. Throwing a wild pitch that allows a runner to advance a base
9. Striking out
10. Getting caught stealing
11. Getting picked off or doubled off a base
12. Making a great play
13. Bonus

A few things stand out to me about this list. The manual claims a few times about playing the perfect game, but by baseball definition, you don’t actually have to play or pitch a perfect game, not even close. You can allow hits and walks, and even runs, and not necessarily be penalized for them. Most of the categories center around playing clean defense. Miscues on defense that are not necessarily errors in an MLB game tend to count against you here. Many of these are pretty straightforward to avoid. By far the hardest to avoid is striking out, this is what burned me the most starting out. For any point-reducing penalty during game play, you’ll hear a set of beeps to indicate that you messed up.

The biggest moment of the game in the 3rd inning.

The final two categories add points to your score. Funny that these are here to help cover up a mistake or two that let you maintain your “perfect” run, but I digress. A great play will add 2 points to your score. These are for very good defensive plays, such as diving for a ball just barely in reach and throwing out the runner at first base. You can’t fake these points by diving after everything unnecessarily, trust me, I tried that. The mysterious Bonus category gives you 1 point, and I have no idea how this works at all. I was just happy to see points there. Note that with these last two categories it is possible to exceed 100 points, but your rating will round down to 100 if that occurs.

The game rating determines which difficulty level of team you’ll play in the next match. Score 90 points or higher, and you’ll face the most difficult Level 5 team. Every 10 point range down from there reduces the difficulty level by 1. Scoring fewer than 60 points, or losing the match outright, will reset you back to playing the Level 1 team. To beat the game, it’s not just enough to get the perfect 100 rating. You need to earn the right to play the Level 5 team by scoring 90 points or more, and then you have to secure a 100 rating against that team to win for good.

This was my first time playing Bases Loaded 3. Just like the others, this is an affordable cart that is not difficult to find, though it is not nearly as ubiquitous as the first two installments. When you do find a cart, it isn’t expensive, about $5-$10. I have had maybe one or two extras of this game during my heavy collecting days.

The math isn’t exactly right but I’ll take it.

I knew going into Bases Loaded 3 that it would be a much quicker play than the other two games I’ve completed, but I was not prepared for just how quickly I would actually finish. These games usually have a bit of a ramp up to get a feel for the batting timing, to learn the tendencies of the opposing defense, to adapt to pitch types, etc. That ramp up also means that I’ll lose a few of the first few games before I catch my stride. This time was special because none of that really happened. The first game I won with a rating in the 80s, good enough to face the Level 4 team. In the second game, I won and got the perfect 100 rating. That earned me an audience with the Level 5 team, which I beat and got another 100 rating. Victory after only three matches!

The only bad part of it was that I didn’t capture video of the entire playthrough. I realized part way through the first game that I didn’t start the recording. At the time, I assumed it wouldn’t be a big deal because certainly I would lose a match and have to start all over anyway. To try and fix the issue, initially I intended on recording a brand new full playthrough, hoping to replicate my success from the first time. On the first game of the replay, I got a similar enough rating to get from Level 1 to Level 4, just like I did on the winning run. I decided then to call it, and so for my final video I stitched the replay of the first game together with the final two games of the winning run. There are probably some continuity errors at that split point as far as the video goes, but I’m not bothered by it. Getting the full final game with the 100 rating against the Level 5 team to finish it is really all that is needed for proof anyway. I just want to be obsessively open with my process in all this!

The developers did some good work with the tweaks they made from the prior games. I appreciate the upgrade to the baserunning controls and simplifying the batting and pitching. The outfield defensive perspective is not the greatest, but it works fine. I wish the viewpoint was zoomed out more than it is. It makes it more challenging to get your fielder in the right spot, particularly in the outfield, when you can’t see the fielder you’re controlling until the ball gets close enough. But also, I had no real trouble finishing this game, so perhaps it is fine the way it is. Bases Loaded 3 is a solid NES baseball game. I’m not saying this is an essential game that you need to play, but if you appreciate a different style of challenge in sports games, then I think this is worth trying out.

#177 – Bases Loaded 3

After this game, I can see why there would be no more Ninjas.

Prepare to be stared at the whole time.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 7/9/20 – 7/12/20
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: The Last Ninja Longplay

Ninjas are well known in popular culture.  They are traditionally known as assassins from feudal Japan, known for moving quickly, quietly, and discretely, with deadly force.  It is no surprise then that Ninjas would be the main characters in video games quite often.  The Ninja Gaiden series, for instance, is a very popular game series with sword slashing and climbing through fast-paced platformer stages.  The Last Ninja, on the other hand, features a ninja that is pretty much the polar opposite of Ryu from Ninja Gaiden.  It might seem like this would make for a bad game, but different doesn’t necessarily mean bad.  Let’s take at look at what makes this game tick.

The Last Ninja is a series of three games originally for the Commodore 64 and other computer platforms.  The games were all developed by System 3, beginning with The Last Ninja in 1987.  The game was released to critical acclaim and sold well enough to give the developers the go ahead for sequels.  The Last Ninja 2 was released in 1988 and was far and away the biggest success of the series, selling 5.5 million copies of just the Commodore 64 version alone.  The Last Ninja 3 came out in 1991, also selling millions of copies and was a critical success much like the first two entries.  Curiously, despite all of its success, this was the end of the series.  The NES version of The Last Ninja is actually a port of The Last Ninja 2.  The NES version released in February 1991, developed by Beam Software and published by Jaleco.  This is a North American exclusive game for the NES only.

The Last Ninja has a pretty lengthy story written up in the manual.  You play the role of the Ninja named Armakuni.  In the first game, he battles and defeats the shogun Kunitoki and collects sacred scrolls.  After that, Armakuni seeks to reinstate a new order of Ninja warriors.  One night there was a meeting of his inner circle, when all of a sudden he is whisked away through time to 20th century New York.  Armakuni doesn’t understand how he got there, but he knows that Kunitoki is here as well, so he goes off toward another battle against his archenemy.  There are six stages in this adventure.  Clear them and defeat Kunitoki to win the game.

The first puzzle sets the stage for the rest of the game.

This game is an action-adventure game taking place in an isometric perspective.  This is a “screen-by-screen” kind of game, where the view is locked in place and you exit either off the side of the screen or through doors to a new screen.  Contrary to other Ninja games, this has very slow movement and pacing all throughout. Levels are more or less open and often you can backtrack several screens to use new items as needed.  You use the D-pad directions to move, though the cardinal directions on the controller result in diagonal directions on screen.  For example, Up on the D-pad moves your character up and left.  If you rotate the controller in your hand 45 degrees counter-clockwise, you get the rest of the directions to line up.  I had trouble with this as it was the opposite orientation for Q*bert, and even a few years later I couldn’t wrap my head around it right away.  While moving, if you press A you will do a forward jump.  This is a fixed distance jump and you are locked into the movement after leaving the ground.

Some screens contain weapons and other items on the ground.  To pick them up, you’ll need to stand close to them and press B to bend down and grab them.  The positioning is very precise and not as intuitive as it should be, usually requiring some guesswork and wiggling about to find the right spot.  The things you collect are classified as either weapons or items.  To swap weapons, hold Select and press B.  To switch items, hold Select and press A.  To use a selected item, press B, though you must be standing in the correct, particular spot to actually use it.  The default action of the B button is a standing kick.  Press A to punch, or if you have a weapon selected, press A to attack with that weapon.

There are enemies that patrol many of the screens.  Sometimes they charge at you, while other times they walk along a set path.  Some can throw objects at you from across the screen.  You can fight them with your weapons or punches and kicks.  Your power meter is the swirly blue icon at the lower left of the screen, with two layers of health shown.  There can only be one enemy on screen and their power meter is to the left of yours.  When you deplete your enemy’s power, they crumple to the ground in a heap, but they will slowly regenerate their health before getting back up again.  You can take the opportunity to leave the room or do whatever, but if allowed to get back up you will have to fight them again.  The second time you knock them out, they stay down for good.

Piles of bodies left behind.

There are six distinct stages in the game, each one its own self-contained area.  The stages are Central Park, the Street, the Sewers, the Office, the Mansion, and the Final Battle.  The variety in the stages mostly has to do with the locale and the puzzles within.  Some levels are pretty straightforward, and others are more open ended and you will have to do exploring while trying not to get turned around too much.  The goal in each stage boils down to finding keys, finding items, or solving puzzles that let you make progress.  It can be tough the first time through to know what to do or how to clear the way ahead.  This is made more difficult because of the positioning issues I’ve mentioned earlier.  Sometimes you will miss out on the correct solution just because you were a couple of pixels off, which is very frustrating.  One more thing to know is that your items carry over from one stage to the next, occasionally in a way that can get you stuck badly if you don’t have the right thing.

At the start of the game you have five lives to work with, plus the one you start off with.  You lose a life when your energy is depleted, which can happen anywhere between slowly and instantly depending on the trap or enemy attack at hand.  In some of the levels you can pick up a hamburger for an extra life.  This game has a password system where you get a password after completing each stage.  The passwords here are 15 characters long consisting of 0-9 and the letters B, C, D, F, G, and H.  The passwords retain the current level, the items collected, and the lives remaining.  Because the passwords keep your life total, this is a game where it pays to replay levels efficiently to get a better password.

This was my first time playing through The Last Ninja.  I sort of remember seeing this game long before I played it, but I’m not sure how far back that memory goes.  I would consider this a slightly uncommon game as it is one I don’t see much.  I have owned two copies of this game, both bought on eBay.  The first one cost me $8 shipped in 2014, and the other was in a small lot of games I bought to upgrade and resell a few years later.  This game sold for around $10 back in 2014, but now is worth double or more for just a loose cart.

I spend a lot of time on the computer too.

I can see where this might be a difficult game, but I didn’t really have that much trouble with it.  I have timing data now since I’ve been streaming, and I beat this game in a little over 3 hours, spread out over three evenings.  This is the kind of game that could take a lot longer if you miss out on small details or you fail to interact with things properly.  I only had one case in this game where I looked up the solution to a puzzle.  Maybe I jumped the gun a little bit, but I was pretty well stuck for 20-30 minutes in about a four screen stretch and I don’t have much patience for that kind of stuff these days.  There’s a section where you have to get past a panther guarding a door.  You grab a chicken leg, and I assumed you had to distract it with food, but that wasn’t good enough.  You need to dip the leg into a box of poison and then you kill the panther with the tainted food.  The box looked too much like the background and I didn’t recognize that it was part of the solution.  The rest of the game I managed to figure out on my own.

I went back and recorded a full playthrough of the game after beating it on stream, and it took me roughly 18 minutes to beat the game.  In a rare twist, later on I had a much faster playthrough that is lost to time.  I had participated in the Big 20 speedrun race in September 2020, and that inspired Twitch streamer ShesChardcore to create her own version she called the Chardcore 20.  Since then there have been multiple Chardcore 20s, but I participated in the first one and The Last Ninja was included in the list.  My speedrun of the game was not well optimized at all compared to leaderboard times, but I managed a 12 minute clear of the game.  The route is pretty close to the same and most of the time saved is from kicking enemies to stun them before running past.  Imagine a Ninja running away from fights!  Anyway I failed to record that playthrough, but I am satisfied with the 18-minute run I captured.

The box of The Last Ninja has Game of the Year written on it, but I don’t find any evidence of it actually winning Game of the Year.  It was the runner-up for Game of the Year from the Golden Joystick Awards out of the UK in 1988/1989.  Even still, this was a critically acclaimed game that makes sense to reach the NES.  Based on my experience with this one, I would have to imagine that the NES port of the game misses a lot of what made the original game great.  Graphically it looks nice, with plenty of varied environments and some great animation, particularly of our hero.  The music is limited to just a few songs, but they are catchy and enjoyable to hear.  The controls do take some getting used to, particularly in my case with the “swapped” directions.  It’s in the gameplay where this game falters.  The level design is solid, and most of the puzzles are fair.  Lining up either to grab items or interact with the environment provides some of the most frustrating moments in a game in quite some time.  Enemies bearing down on you during that is even worse.  All in all, it really isn’t a bad game, but nowhere near Game of the Year material to me.
 

#162 – The Last Ninja

More dragons, more warriors.

Pretty menacing dragon there.

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

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

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

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

Scene not indicative of actual gameplay

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

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

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

Make sure to have a full party before leaving the castle.

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

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

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

Numbness is a nuisance.

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

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

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

There are plenty of dungeons, caves, and towers to explore.

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

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

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

The bad guys get pretty nasty toward the end.

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

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

#129 – Dragon Warrior III

Is it a run-and-gun game or a maze game? Well, how about both!

The title fades in a piece at a time which I thought was neat!

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Beat the game on Hard difficulty
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 9/25/16 – 10/2/16
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
Video: Alien 3 Longplay

Hot on the heels of Bram Stoker’s Dracula comes another licensed NES game based on a movie. Both games are late, obscure NES releases that even share the same developer. I thought that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was pretty fun, so let’s see if the same holds true with Alien 3.

The film Alien is a 1979 science fiction movie about a crew who comes across an old alien spacecraft. One of the crew members becomes the host to one of the aliens who then attempts to kill every living thing on their spaceship, and the crew is forced to come up with a way to get rid of the alien to ensure their own survival. (Hopefully this is a sufficient explanation since yet again I have not seen the movie.) The film was both a box office and critical success and is widely regarded today among the best movies ever made. Later there would be three movie sequels, a prequel movie, and a spin-off series Alien vs. Predator. Currently there is another prequel movie in the works and possibly more in the future.

This popular series made its way into several video games based on most of the movies. Alien 3 was the base of three distinct games. The SNES game was released in 1993 and it is run-and-gun platformer with a mission-based style. The Game Boy game is a top-down survival adventure style game. The Master System version is a run-and-gun platformer with maze-like levels. This version was also released on the Genesis, Game Gear, Commodore 64, and Amiga. The NES version of Alien 3 has the same format as the Master System version but it has a unique set of levels. Because of the different stages it can be considered a fourth unique adaptation of Alien 3. The NES version was developed by Probe Software and published by LJN. Acclaim manufactured the carts and may also have had a role in its publishing. It was released in March 1993 almost a year after the film and also has a PAL version that was released in Europe and Australia.

Let’s get down to business.

In Alien 3 your goal is to guide Ripley through the prison on Fiorina 161. The aliens have taken the prisoners captive and along the way you must seek out and free each of these prisoners as well as escape safely to the next area. There are many aliens that will stand in your way including the guardian alien boss battles. There are eight levels total in the game as well as four boss levels. Clear all the levels and you win the game!

Before starting the game there are some options available on the title screen. You can turn both the music and sound effects either on or off. There is also a Configure menu with more options. Here you can set the difficulty level to either Easy, Normal, or Hard. You can also play any of the songs and sound effects, as well as set the number of lives from one to nine. The defaults are Normal difficulty and three lives.

The game has pretty nice graphics. The backgrounds and sprites are clear for the most part and there is a fair amount of color considering the mostly drab setting of a prison. However, what stands out the most in this game is the music. The soundtrack to Alien 3 was written by Jeroen Tel and the sound to me is both atmospheric and tense. It’s worth listening to outside of the game for sure.

The controls are straightforward. Use the D-Pad to walk around. You can use Up and Down to climb ladders, and Up is also used to open and close doors. The A button jumps and the B button fires your weapon. Weapons can be aimed diagonally upward as well as straight up for a total of five different firing directions. Press Select to change weapons and press Start to pause.

You begin the game with a full assortment of four weapons. The base weapon is the pulse rifle that is weak but has a high rate of fire. It is an effective weapon but burns through ammo very quickly. The flamethrower is an excellent close range weapon with a large swath of flame to engulf nearby aliens. The grenade launcher is a powerful weapon at long range with a lower rate of fire as a trade off. The hand grenades can be tossed and bounced on the ground and they pack a pretty good punch if you can get the timing right. All of the weapons prove useful especially when utilized in the correct situation.

Applying a flamethrower to the face is often useful.

There are a number of pickups as well that will help you out. There are ammo refills for each of the four weapons. First aid kits will restore your health just as you would expect. There is also a radar item that will active the tiny radar in the corner of the status bar. The radar generates a little blip in the direction of a nearby prisoner.

There are only a few enemies that show up in the game. The most prominent enemy is the adult alien though they do have a variety of patterns and moves to mix things up. Some move fast and some move slow. Sometimes they spit acid at you. Other times they latch on to the ceiling and drop down right in front of you if you get too close. The other enemy type is the face-hugger. These are small aliens that burst out of pods and latch onto your face if they touch you. If this happens you need to shake Left and Right on the D-pad to get them off. I never let them latch on to me in all the times I played but that is how the manual describes it. You can also destroy their pods before they come out and defeat them that way which is much easier.

The game is an action game on the surface but it really plays like a maze game. Each level is an arrangement of corridors, shafts, and dead ends. You need to search out all of the paths in order to locate the prisoners and find out which sections are best left ignored. Each stage has a set number of prisoners that you must untie and free, and then once all the prisoners are saved you will need to locate the exit in order to escape.

Don’t worry … I’ll save you!

The aliens in the game are not nearly as scary as the time limit. On the one hand you need to take the time to explore everything in order to find both the prisoners and the proper route through the facility. On the other hand, you need to rush through everything to make it to the end in time. There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing the last stretch of the stage just as you run out of time knowing you will need to repeat the level all over again. The one nice thing the game does for you here is that if you missed any prisoners the game pans through the level revealing the location of each missing inmate. However you also get to see that prisoner get murdered right before your eyes as a little mental punishment.

After every two stages there is a Guardian level where you square off against one of the boss creatures. The levels themselves are small battle arenas so the focus is purely on combat. There is still a relatively strict time limit in place so you need to work quickly. You might think the Guardians would actively hunt you down, but instead they have a set pattern that they patrol constantly. The key here is to find where the save spots are and fire away until you defeat the boss. I found these fights to be much easier than the normal levels.

I mentioned earlier that there were three difficulty levels. I only played the game on Hard difficulty and tinkered a bit with the lower settings. As far as I could see, the only difference is that the time limit is lower on the harder settings. I think everything else is the same though I haven’t played enough to see if there are other changes.

It can get a little hairy when time winds down.

This was my first time playing through Alien 3. I remember acquiring this game in an eBay game lot in the summer of 2013. I think it was in the first batch of games I bought whenever I decided that I would pursue NES collecting for good. I would say it’s an uncommon game so that was a good pickup for me at the time. I know I had a double of the game that I sold off at some point as well.

Alien 3 is the type of game where you need to play it over and over again just to make a little bit of progress each time. I finished the game in a week over close to a dozen attempts. I insist on beating the game on the hardest difficulty right off the bat, but in this case I could have benefited from learning the levels on Easy and then putting it all together for a run on Hard. I think there is at least some benefit to learning the levels under a tighter timeframe that probably helped me out a little bit. A week is a good amount of time to spend on a game anyway!

I was able to capture my winning run on video. It was a really solid run with only a few minor mistakes and stumbles, but that is only because I had to hone in my strategy through repetition. It was very close to being a deathless run as well. It was close enough that I decided to leave that death in there as a reminder of how mean this game can be sometimes. Other than that one big mistake it was a nice run for my first time clearing the game.

This was not the best location for a boss battle.

I decided to rate Alien 3 with a 7 on difficulty just because it is a game you have to learn over time. There are no continues so you can’t really grind through the game apart from starting from scratch each time, though you can set up to nine lives for the most opportunities to practice the later stages per attempt. Actually, I was all set to give it an 8 in difficulty but I realize that I only made it harder on myself so that I could clear it on Hard.

Alien 3 is a competent and playable game, but it has a few issues that make the game not as much fun as it could be. The most notable issue is that the screen scrolling only kicks in when you get really close to the edge of the screen. You can hardly see what is in front of you and it is very annoying. I actually wonder if that was done intentionally to introduce the element of surprise when an alien shows up in your face. Either way it is not a fun gameplay element to have so little visibility. The other somewhat related thing is that I don’t find the aliens to be that much of a threat in the first place. I found that unless you play very carelessly you are more likely to run out of time than to run out of health, at least on Hard difficulty. I was more concerned with running recklessly through the stage to outrun the clock and just take damage in places to get through quicker. There are other more minor issues as well. The jumping is kind of loopy and slow, and the screen scrolling stutters sometimes. The boss battles are pretty lame. There are also a lot of dead ends and loops in the stages that are frustrating to pass through.

Alien 3 is a competent and playable game, but it is these issues that really hold the game back from being a better game. I can see that there is a good game there that just can’t shine through like I would want. Mediocre games such as Alien 3 are really not that bad for me in terms of my project, but I would not give them a strong recommendation either. Alien 3 is fine but there are better games out there that are more worth your time. If anything it is worth checking out just for the music!

#32 – Alien 3