This game is not so bodacious, dudes!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 11/5/18 – 11/28/18
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure Final Level

Another day, another video game adaptation of a movie I haven’t seen.  In this case, I have at least played the game before.  Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure seems like a strange choice for a tie-in video game.  It could make for a decent educational game with all the historical figures from different time periods.  Instead, we ended up with a game that’s not much educational but has all the fun of an educational game, meaning it’s not that exciting.  Kudos to the developers for trying, at least.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a comedy from 1989.  In the movie, two high school students from San Dimas, California get access to a time machine that allows them to collect various historical figures to help them complete a history project.  Stephen Herek directed the film which stars Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, and George Carlin.  While not a critical success, it performed well at the box office.  A sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, was released in 1991.  A third installment is reported to be in the works as of May 2018.

The movie spawned several video games that are all unique from each other.  The NES game, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure, was released in August 1991.  It was developed by Rocket Science Games and was published by Acclaim Entertainment under the LJN label.  This wasn’t the first game based on the movie.  The PC version from 1989 was a graphical adventure game.  The Game Boy game, aptly title Bill & Ted’s Excellent Game Boy Adventure, was a puzzle platformer.  Finally, the Atari Lynx version also from 1991 is a top-down adventure game.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure on the NES is an isometric adventure game with a plot loosely based on the movie.  Rufus from the movie summons both Bill and Ted to help on an important mission.  Space-time rebels have used the time machine to take historical figures and put them in the wrong time periods.  Both Bill and Ted must work separately to find each person and return him or her to the correct time period.  They need to do this because if history isn’t made right again, our heroes will miss the big concert that will launch the career of their band the Wyld Stallyns.  Unfortunately, they only have access to a pay phone that requires coins before they can time travel.  Your job as Bill or Ted is to find both the historical figure and a specific item that you can use to lure them back home.  You beat the game once you finish all six levels.

After finishing or skipping the introductory story segments, you are presented with a phone book of sixteen historical figures.  (Interestingly, none of these people played a part in the film from what I’ve read.)  The last page in the phone book is your password, which is a seven-digit telephone number that always starts with the fictitious prefix 555.  As you thumb through the phone book, you will come across a second telephone number on one of the pages that blinks red.  This is the number for the person you need to locate in the wrong period.  Press Select at any time to bring up the telephone.  Press A to dial digits and press B to undo them if you make a mistake.  When you have the blinking red number entered correctly, press A to connect the call.  You also use this same telephone screen to enter passwords.

Placing a call puts you in the Circuits of Time.  This is a mini-game that allows you to complete the call.  There are circuits in the background along with circled junctions, one of which contains a spinning phone booth.  Most of the junctions contain one digit of the call you are placing.  The idea is to move to the right from junction to junction until you get to the junction with the last digit of the phone number.  If you don’t do anything on this screen for too long, you will automatically transfer the phone booth to the next junction along the circuits.  You want to avoid this if possible because each automatic transfer costs two coins.  You start out with 15 coins but they get spent very fast this way.  What you can do is press A to launch the phone booth out of its junction in the direction it is facing.  This costs no coins and lets you skip ahead digits if you aim properly.  There is also a red floating junction that you can control with the D-pad used to catch the phone booth if it goes in the wrong direction.  Some junctions contain skulls which both deduct a coin and fire off the phone booth in a random direction, often setting back your progress.  When you reach the last digit, you will have to leave things alone and let the call finish.  The circuit ends in a three-way fork, and as the call is finishing you can take the top fork by holding Up, the bottom fork by holding Down, or the center fork without touching the D-pad.  This determines where you land in the next area.

The main part of the game takes place on the ground in one of five time periods: Medieval World, Western World, U.S. Revolutionary World, Modern World, and Ancient World.  These levels are in the isometric perspective and you can walk around freely.  Use the D-pad to walk around.  Pressing Up moves you to the upper-right and all the other directions follow from that same angle.  It acts just like the default movement in Q*bert.  Press the A button to jump.  You take pretty large jumps and you can leap over some areas you can’t normally walk on.  However, if you land in a non-walkable area you will fall down and get temporarily stuck.  The only way out is to jump your way out, and sometimes it can take several jumps to get back on the path.  Use the B button to toss out your Good Stuff to help ward off some of the angrier locals.

Pressing either Start or Select during gameplay brings up a menu screen where you can see and do a few things.  The upper left shows where you place another call, should you so choose.  Hold Up and press A to bring up the touch pad to place a call.  In the upper right are the keys you need to get you out of jail.  Your Good Stuff is in the middle, along with a red selection box that you can move to choose which item you want to use with the B button during play.  You also see your coin count and which historical items you have collected so far.

As you are exploring the worlds, there are locals also moving around.  There are three types of locals who are distinguished by how they behave.  One type is the standing local.  You can walk up to them and talk to them.  They can give you items, coins, or hints on where items or historical figures might be found.  They also might tell you to leave them alone.  After speaking with them, they turn into the second kind of local which is the walking local.  They move slowly and mind their own business.  Don’t try to talk to them or even walk up to them.  When they are on the move they get angry and standing in their way will cost you a coin.  If you don’t have any coins left, then you get thrown in jail instead.  The third kind of local is the angry local.  They will pursue you directly with arms outstretched.  If you get caught by one of them, you get thrown directly in jail.

When locals are causing you trouble, you can use your Good Stuff.  These are four different disposable items that affect the locals.  Press the B button to throw them.  You can throw different distances depending on how long you hold the button.  Pudding cups draw all locals toward them.  You normally want to throw them in the opposite direction you want to go.  Should a local grab the pudding off the ground, all the locals will go back to their original state except for the one who got the pudding.  That person mellows down.  Firecrackers have the opposite effect; when you throw one everyone runs away.  You can also throw a firecracker close enough to someone to blow them up.  Harsh!  Highly dangerous textbooks are smart bombs that clear the screen of locals.  Finally, cassette tapes start up some music that makes everyone dance.  Now you can go freely for a little while, but you still need to keep from running into a dancer or you’ll get tossed in jail.  Also, when the music runs out, any local on screen will switch to angry mode.

At the start, you are dropped off in a world you don’t know while trying to find someone without knowing their location.  You are going to need some assistance from the locals.  Occasionally, a standing local will provide some information on where you might look for items or which direction you should go to find the historical figure.  You will have better luck holding conversations with people indoors, but they aren’t always easy to find.  Throughout the worlds there are several buildings or houses with open doors.  Sometimes the door is locked and you can’t get in.  Other times you come into an empty room.  These rooms often act as warp rooms where you can jump to a different building across the map by leaving through the other door in the room.  Other rooms will have someone standing inside that you can talk with.

You can engage in conversation with a person within their home or building.  Walk up to them to start talking, then press A to advance the dialog.  When it is your turn to respond, you will see some possible numbered responses.  Press A to cycle through the different options, then press B on the one you want to say.  Each person has at least one possible conversation where they will be persuaded to help you out by giving you a hint on where you can find something outside.  Say the wrong thing and you will either anger all the locals outside or even get thrown directly in jail.  You get to learn which things to say to help get what you want.  After you leave, you can’t go back into the building you just left until you enter another one first.

The historical figures will always be located inside one of the buildings, however either they won’t be in the room or the outside door will stay locked until you first hold their historical item to lure them out.  There are both sixteen historical figures and sixteen historical items in the game, and it’s up to you to figure out which item belongs to which person.  All the people and items are listed out in the manual, so I did some pre-work to try and match them up beforehand.  Some pairs make sense right away, like King Arthur and the Holy Grail.  Some of them are silly matchups based on jokes, like Julius Caesar and Salad Dressing.  A few of them had an unexpected match.  For instance, I assumed Elvis would like the CD Player but that’s not the right pairing.

Finding the items is one of the biggest challenges in the game.  The items are located outside in very specific locations.  These are all off the main walking path and you have to reach them by jumping on top of them.  Did I mention they are invisible?  The hints you get for their locations are generally unclear, like “check the last fence” or “there’s something near a rock in the north.”  What helped me the most were the maps listed in the manual.  They give you the general structure of the world as well as a few specific locations marked.  They show you where the jail is, as well as the lower, middle, and upper portals, which correspond to which branch you took entering the world through the Circuits of Time.  The unmarked dots on the map represent either a building you can enter, a hidden stash of Good Stuff, or one of the historical items.  (I deduced that after playing for a while.)  The specific location of those dots on the map are not accurate, but they do help determine how many things you should be looking for between intersections.  You will still have to comb over areas well enough to find the item spots.  When do you find one, write the location down so that you can better find it again later.

The maps also indicate horse paths and canoeing sections.  You can take a canoe or ride a horse by approaching the path from the southmost entrance and hopping on.  Both generally function the same way.  Use Left or Right to steer, press Up to move faster and press Down to move slower.  On horseback you can jump over obstacles with A.  In the canoe you can find items on bubbling spots in the water.  If you make it all the way to the end, you earn some coins.  If you crash, then you don’t get anything.  Falling in the water pushes you all the way upstream, while if you fall of the horse you have to walk from where you landed.  I had a bad habit of missing the jump to the canoe at the start of the path, which also pushes you all the way upstream with no rewards.

When you find both the item and historical figure, you get a chance at sending them back to their own time.  You speak with the person and select the item the same way you handle conversation dialogs.  Pick the wrong item and you get thrown in jail, plus you have to locate the historical figure all over again.  Choose the right one and they will call a phone booth over so that you can complete the call through the Circuits of Time.  Completing the call returns the person, but if you run out of coins you get returned to the world and must collect enough coins to try again.

I’ve mentioned jail a lot and all the different ways you get sent there.  The concept is simple enough.  You can get out of jail by using one of your skeleton keys and walking right out the door.  It’s weird that the jailer doesn’t confiscate your things.  If you run out of keys, you are stuck there and it’s Game Over.  The worst part of jail is that it’s often located far away from where you need to go.

There are six levels in the game.  In Levels 1 and 2, you only have to return one person.  In Levels 3 and 4 you need to find two people, and in Levels 5 and 6 you get to return three people.  Each historical figure is in a separate world along with his or her corresponding item, so thankfully there are no crossing time periods to match an item up with its historical figure, at least that I noticed.  After completing each stage, you get to see the Wyld Stallyns in concert.  While not great musicians, they do progressively get better the further you get in the game.

I’m not sure how I ended up with this game, but I had just the loose cart in my childhood game collection.  I do remember spending some significant time with the game, but I have no idea how far I got or what I accomplished.  With no manual I had to go at it truly alone.  When you’re a kid who likes video games, you will spend a lot of time playing just about anything.  A loose cart is cheap, but in my experience, it was one I didn’t see much.  I believe my childhood copy is the only one I’ve owned.

It took me some time to get going on this game.  I managed to clear a couple of levels in the first week mostly by dumb luck.  A few days in I figured out what kind of information I could glean from the maps, so then I started mapping everything I could find.  Most of my time spent playing the game was doing the mapping and carefully examining every stretch of land.  I figured out most if not all of the possible landing spots for the historical figure in each world as well as all item locations but one.  Each world has four historical items but I only located three in the U.S. Revolutionary World.  The last level turned out to be pretty challenging and I just barely finished it in my video.  I ran out of keys after returning two of the three people and had to play super carefully.  The last person was in the U.S. Revolutionary World and the item I needed was found in the third and final position I documented, so I almost got stuck not knowing where the item would be.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure is always perceived as an undesirable NES game.  My view is that the game is essentially video game busy work.  The recipe for success in this game is having a good sense of direction and taking notes all the time, with a side of endless perseverance.  I made progress just about every time I played, no matter how little time I spent.  Every element on the map marked, every conversation I figured out, and every historical item properly associated with its owner helped the next time I played go a little bit smoother.  This makes the game tedious to play, but not necessarily difficult.  The number of angry locals increases in the final stages, but by then you know how to handle them with items or getting yourself off the main path where they can’t reach you.  The person’s location and items are always randomized, but there are only so many places they could be and you will narrow things down.  Sometimes you just get lucky and find what you need right away.  I imagine few people have beaten the game due to the time it takes to build up a knowledge base and catch a lucky streak, while stretching that out over several levels.  I feel comfortable saying it’s an average difficulty game with an above average amount of time and effort needed to see it through.

I will say that Bill & Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure is mostly a technically solid game.  There aren’t that many NES games with isometric viewpoints, and this game manages that along with a jumping mechanic for veering off the path occasionally.  The graphics are nice, particularly the character sprites and some of the background elements.  The music is pretty good but they didn’t loop any of the tracks, while eventually results in silence a lot of the time.  The controls work well.  The only sticking point is that jumping when off the path only works if you allow Bill or Ted time to stand up first.  The music issue is kind of bad, but other than that the game works well enough.  It’s just that the gameplay is dull, repetitive, and dragging.  It’s like filling out a spreadsheet where the cursor repositions itself at random.  One wrong step and you get thrown in jail, and now you have to backtrack or try a different way.  You are asked to do this history hunting too many times over.  I’m not sure what they could have done to make the game more varied.  Maybe you already knew about this game and just thought maybe you misunderstood it.  I’m here to tell you all your assumptions were true.  I don’t hate this game, but I wouldn’t recommend playing it.

This Contra sequel is just as good as the original.

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Beat 3 loops
My Goal: Finish 3 loops with a no-death first loop
What I Did: Met my goal
Played: 5/11/18 – 5/14/18
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Super C Longplay

Contra is a game that practically needs no introduction. A sequel would seem inevitable, but it may not be the one you expect. Just looking at the NES library, the obvious conclusion would be that Contra Force is the sequel. Contra Force as it turns out wasn’t meant to be a Contra game at all, and Super C is the actual sequel. It annoys me somewhat when connections aren’t always apparent. I can look past that here because Super C is a fun, solid follow up to the original smash hit.

The arcade game Super Contra was released in early 1988. It was developed and published by Konami. A home port of Super Contra came to the Famicom in February 1990, and the NES version was renamed Super C when it released in North America in April 1990. The PAL release in Europe and Australia was delayed until 1992. There it was called Probotector II: Return of the Evil Forces, and just like the PAL conversion of Contra to Probotector, the human characters were replaced by robots. Two home computer ports for Super C for the Commodore Amiga and IBM PC released in North America in 1990.

Super C is a side-scrolling action game. The story is a basic one. Bill and Lance, also known as Mad Dog and Scorpion, are taking a relaxing vacation a few months after defeating Red Falcon in the original Contra. Of course, Red Falcon wasn’t completely defeated, and now he has regrouped and is back at it again. You are thrust back into action as Earth’s only hope against evil. Just like last time, your journey will take you through eight stages of shooting action, and if you clear them all you win the game. The arcade version only has five stages, so hey, more bang for your buck in Super C.

The controls are identical to Contra. Use the D-pad to move around, press A to jump, and press B to shoot. You curl up during jumps so you have a smaller hitbox, and you are always moving sideways until you land. (I guess this is a Konami thing, since Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles also does this.) Hold Down to lay out on the ground and shoot. While holding Down, you can press A to jump down through some ledges. All your weapons have unlimited ammo, so you can mash the B button to fire away at everything. You can shoot in all directions, including diagonally, by holding the D-pad in the appropriate direction. You can fire diagonally upward and downward while either walking or airborne.

The powerups are almost exactly like Contra as well, and all of the same powerups are back this time. You shoot flying pods, or sometimes a large wall sensor, to uncover the bird-shaped upgrades. The letter on the item denotes what it does. The M gives you a machine gun that shoots straight ahead, and you can hold down the B button for continuous fire. The L gives you a laser that is one long, powerful shot. You can only have one on screen at a time and firing again removes the old shot if it’s still on screen. The laser beam is wider in Super C than in Contra. S is for the spread shot, which fires a fan of five bullets ahead. The F is the flamethrower. This weapon acts differently here. In Contra, it is a spiraling shot. In Super C, it is a large fireball that spreads out smaller flames when it hits something. You can even charge this one up by holding B, releasing a large fireball when you let go of the button. The R gives you rapid fire on top of whichever weapon you currently use. It makes your bullets faster so that you can fire more quickly. The B is for a barrier shield. This causes you to flash for a few seconds and enemies and their shots can’t hurt you. There is a powerup with no letter on it that destroys all enemies on screen as soon as you touch it. All powerups are lost when you die, sending you back to the fight with your standard gun.

Most stages in the game are played from the side scrolling view. Play usually moves to the right, but some levels are vertical, and some stages scroll in different directions at times. For example, the first stage has you walking to the right, but there are slopes upward and as you walk the view pans upward slightly to follow the path. Speaking of slopes, they are a new addition to this game. Simply walk straight ahead to go up or down them. The grade is somewhere around 30 degrees, and when you fire diagonally while walking on a slope, you will fire parallel to the slope instead of at the normal 45-degree angle. If you need to fire purely diagonally, you have to jump off the slope and shoot in mid-air.

Levels 2 and 6 are played from a top-down view instead of side-scrolling. Here you can walk in all eight directions and fire your normal weapons with the B button. The A button does nothing in this mode. Play proceeds upward for both stages. It’s more straightforward than the bases in Contra, and it is in line with the arcade version that also features these levels.

All levels end in a boss battle. The bosses seem a lot bigger and more dynamic in Super C compared to Contra. I believe this is tied to the game’s use of the MMC3 mapper chip. One of the capabilities of the chip is better handling of performing a screen splitting technique. Take the helicopter boss at the end of the first stage, for example. It is too large to display with sprites, so it is drawn on the background. The helicopter can move around independently of the ground that stays put. The game is programmed in a way where it can scroll the screen for the helicopter, but when it reaches a certain vertical position, it will stop scrolling and leave the ground alone. This is used to great effect for several screen-spanning bosses in the game.

Super C has some other features. The most notable is the two-player simultaneous play. Player 1 plays as Bill with blue pants, and Player 2 is Lance with red pants. The game has a scoring system. Points appear on the screen between levels, as well as the second player’s score, the high score, and the level number. During gameplay, there are flags in the corner for how many lives you have remaining. It will only display up to four flags even though you may have many more in reserve. You can earn extra lives through scoring points. I could not determine exactly when you get new lives, even after reviewing video, so I just have to guess. You get an extra life for around every 25,000 points scored.

Our heroes are quite fragile, so they die instantly from taking a bullet or colliding with an enemy. You respawn right where you left off without a break in the action. Should you lose all your lives, you can continue from the start of the stage with three new lives. You can only continue twice before needing to restart the entire game.

I have played a lot of Super C and have beaten the game many times before. I wasn’t aware that this was the sequel to Contra for quite some time. I picked the loose cart up sometime in the mid-90s, probably at my local used game shop. I imagine it didn’t take me too long back then to figure the game out and beat it, so it was a game I went back to often. I even played the game recently for the NintendoAge NES contest and performed relatively well. It is a common cart that sells for around $15.

For games I know quite well, I like to go above and beyond just beating the game. I set two personal goals for Super C. First, I wanted to beat the game without dying, and second, I wanted to complete all three difficulty loops. I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble beating the game three straight times since I can comfortably beat the game once with a bunch of extra lives, and that part held true. Beating the game without dying was much harder. Super C is a relatively quick game to play, but death is swift and one mistake means restarting. I needed around 30 tries over a few nights to finally get the no-death run I wanted. Now this only applies to just the first loop of the game. I allowed myself to die in the other two loops, and that occurred more than I would have liked. Those deaths were mostly from mistakes I made. I didn’t find Super C to be much more challenging in the later loops. I could tell that the basic grunt type enemies appeared a little more frequently, but that’s the only increase in difficulty I noticed.

Super C is a must-have NES game. The graphics, gameplay, music, and controls are all top-notch. The game runs with very few if any graphical glitches or slowdown. There are several neat surprises as you play and more interesting level design this time around. I really like the boss battles and the well-used technical effects. The weapons are all helpful and fun to use. The two-player mode makes the game all the more sweeter. It is a challenging game, but it’s also one that many players have already beaten. A 7/10 difficulty rating seems right to me, but I could see the argument for going either direction with it. I think it’s a game that is fun to keep learning and improving on. The only downside I can see is that the game almost feels like a Contra expansion pack. Re-read this review just to see how many times I said Super C is just like Contra in this way or that way. I understand that might be a turn-off to someone looking for something a bit more advanced or expansive. My viewpoint is real simple: “What’s wrong with more of something good?”

The thrills and heartbreak of NASCAR, now on your NES!

To Beat: Win the Championship Season
Played: 4/17/18 – 4/23/18
Difficulty: 9/10
My Difficulty: 9/10
My Video: Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge Final Races

Let me be clear of something right away. I don’t like racing, I don’t like NASCAR, and I don’t like racing video games. I can understand the appeal of the sport, I suppose, but it’s just not for me. I only wanted to play a few of the more popular NES racers, some of the more arcade style ones like Rad Racer and R.C. Pro-Am. Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge was nowhere in my radar. Sure enough, this is a game that tries to emulate real racing with the ability to customize cars. That’s the kind of complexity that scares me a little bit. Though I did have some struggles with the game, I was able to figure it out enough to share my findings with you today.

NASCAR stands for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. It was founded by Bill France Sr. in 1948 in Daytona Beach, FL. The company headquarters is still located there today. NASCAR as most people know it these days arose from the Strictly Stock Division of racing, which was one of the three initial divisions created for this form of auto racing. Today, NASCAR sanctions over 1500 races every year, mostly across the US and Canada.

Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge was developed by Distinctive Software and published by Konami. The original release was on MS-DOS in 1990, with NES, Amiga, and Macintosh versions appearing in 1991. While not the first game featuring stock car racing, it is believed to be the first game with the NASCAR license. The NES version of the game was released in December 1991 and only appeared in North America.

In this game you compete in several NASCAR races against other drivers, including Bill Elliott. He was a 1988 Winston Cup champion and a very popular racer during his time in NASCAR. He is the best racer in the game and the one you want to beat if you hope to finish this game. Each race consists of sixteen drivers and there are four tracks to choose from. Two courses, Daytona and Talledega, are high-banked ovals, and the other two, Sears Point and Watkins Glen, are road course with various twists and turns. There are several options to play the game, but to beat the game you want to compete in the Championship Season. This consists of eight total races so each track appears twice. You and the other racers earn points based on the overall standings after races are finished. If you are in first place in the standings after the season, you win the game.

The driving in this game takes places in first-person view from inside the car. The controls are straightforward. Use Left and Right on the D-pad to steer the car. The A button hits the gas to accelerate, and the B button brakes. Release the A button and press Up to upshift the car and Down to downshift the car when driving with manual transmission. That’s all you need to know!

There’s a lot of information inside the car. The top of the screen displays how many laps are remaining and which position you are in the race. You also have a rear-view mirror to see anyone coming up behind you. The bottom of the screen has even more information. To the left of the steering wheel is your speedometer, and through the wheel is the tachometer to see your RPMs, or revolutions per minute. The steering wheel is static but has a little knob on it that moves as you drive so you can more accurately see how you are steering. The three gauges in a row on the right are for oil pressure, temperature, and fuel. Below them are the damage light and the fuel warning light. The far right displays a flag indicating the current race conditions, and under that is the gearbox and gearshift. It might seem overwhelming but it’s really not.

There are many options for setting up the game listed out on the main select screen. The first option is to choose your track, and you go to a screen that shows a map of each course along with the name. Use the D-pad to select a track or choose the Championship Season if you want to play a full game. Press the A button to decide, and then you can choose how many miles you want to run. You can choose from 10 all the way up to the full 500 miles. The default is 20 miles, and that’s what I went with. On the next screen you can choose which car you want. Your choices are a Pontiac Grand Prix, a Ford Thunderbird, or a Chevrolet Lumina. Each one handles a bit differently, but it’s not clear what the differences are just from looking.

The NASCAR license screen lets you enter your name for the standings. Use the D-pad to choose a letter and press A to enter it. There are arrows at the bottom to reposition the cursor, and the RUB option deletes the highlighted character. Select the End option when you are finished. You can also press Select to put the cursor to the box below to enter your password. This applies to the Championship Season only and is a huge, 35-character password. It’s a little longer and a little less complicated than The Guardian Legend passwords.

Auto-qualify can be set to either Yes or No. This determines if you run qualifying laps before the race to determine your pole position. If you choose No, before you start the race you will run two laps on the track yourself. Then your time is compared with the other racers. Your rank here determines both your starting position for the race and which pit area you will use for pit stops. If you choose Yes, then this process is done for you and you are given a randomly selected position. Unfortunately, this position is always near the back of the pack, but it saves you time if you want to get into a race quickly.

The skill level can be set to either Novice, Rookie, or Pro. In the Novice level, the opponents drive slower and you cannot crash. This is perfect for practicing courses under normal racing conditions. In both Rookie and Pro levels, you can crash. The Pro level racers go all out compared to the Rookie level drivers. The bad part is that when you run the Championship Season, you are locked into the Pro level no matter what.

Once you have made all your selections to this point, it is time to race. Well, almost. The final two options are Race and Practice. The Race option is for running an actual race, either a single course or the Championship Season. First you see the track you have chosen. Then you will see the standings if you are in the Championship Season. Next you will fine tune very specific settings for your car, and you can watch the animation of the crew making changes to your vehicle if you want. Finally, it’s time to drive either in the actual race or qualifying if you haven’t done that already.

Practice mode puts you in special situations. You get another screen and can choose from Drafting, Passing, Following a Line, or Pitting. Choose your option and then you can read some advice from Bill Elliott himself. Then you can tune your car and go right to practicing. Some of these techniques are really valuable to learn.

Drafting is an important technique you will want to learn. This happens when you are following behind a car closely. The lead car moves so fast it creates a partial vacuum behind it, so following a car gives you less air resistance and you can go faster. The idea is you can let off the gas a little bit while still maintaining the speed to stay behind the lead car. This allows you the opportunity to sling shot by hitting the gas and using the additional acceleration you saved by drafting to pass the lead car. Trying to sling shot at the wrong time can leave you out of position to draft the car if you are unable to pass them during the move.

Another important technique is holding a line. The idea is that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, so you go faster along the track if you can hold a line versus moving around along the track. On an oval course, the best line is the inside track during the turns and the outside track during the straightaways. For the road courses, it’s more important to get through curves as quickly as possible.

Fine tuning your vehicle is the most important process for racing in this game. The manual covers all this information really well. The first two options on the left are the most straightforward. You can choose either a manual or automatic transmission, and also either the racing engine or qualifying engine. The automatic transmission means you don’t have to shift gears while driving, however this engine will always fall short of peak performance. You must learn to drive manual to have a shot at beating the game. The qualifying engine is designed to give you the best performance for qualifying, but it is prone to failure if you are running a long race.

The other three options on the right are more detailed. The first of these is the spoiler angle. You can set it anywhere between 20 and 70 degrees. When the angle is higher, this puts more force down on the car. That helps you hold a line better and not slide out so much during turns. Lower spoiler angles help the car run a bit faster at the expensive of less handling.

The gear ratio can be set at predefined values between 2.00 and 4.57. This determines how many RPMs you run the engine. If you run at too many RPMs for too long, your engine with blow up and you will be knocked out of the race. Lower gear ratios run at higher RPMs, which means you get better acceleration but have to shift more often. Higher ratios give you less acceleration and may prevent you from running at optimal speed. This is the setting you really want to tinker with the most to get the best top speed out of your car.

The last option is tire stagger. This is the size difference between the inside and outside tires. This is most important on the oval tracks with the high-banked curves. A higher tire stagger helps you hold a line within a curve better, which in turns helps you go a bit faster. If you are pointing too much toward the inside of a curve, you might want to increase stagger. If you are sliding toward the outside wall too much, you might want to decrease stagger.

During a race you might need to make a pit stop to repair damage, adjust settings mid race, or refuel. There are red arrows along a portion of the track that point to the pit lane. Cross the red-dotted line and drive to the end of it to enter the pits. The view will change to a top-down view, and here you always drive automatic to help make this easier. You need to remember which position you started in so that you can stop at the same numbered pit area, and you want to come to a complete stop. If you go too far, you have to make another lap and try again.

On the pit stop screen, you have to work quickly. You see your position and stopwatch for time spent in the pits. There are a bunch of meters showing how different components are doing, and you see your spoiler angle and tire stagger at the bottom. You can tell your pit crew to focus on any of these items by selecting one with the controller. The top meter is fuel, followed by left side tires, right side tires, all tires, and general damage. Pick an option to perform repairs by replacing tires, fixing damage, or refueling. All repair or replacement options include refueling. Replacing tires or repairing damage take the longest. It’s up to you to decide what you want to fix to get better handling. The race is still going on in the meanwhile, so the less time you spend in the pits, the better your position.

As you could probably guess, this was my first time playing Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge. I don’t remember where I got the cart, probably in one of my random eBay lots. It costs around $5 or a little more, so it’s not expensive. I bet there are more copies of this game floating around because it’s a Konami published title and that keeps the price down. In my experience, it’s a game I don’t see around much even though it’s readily available online. My collection copy is the only copy I’ve owned.

It really helps to read the manual for the game before playing it. There are hints for how you might customize your car to get the best performance. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you everything. First you have to select a car, and then the tweaks you need are dependent on the particular car. I think there are hidden stats on each of the three cars, and I bet one of them is geared toward the highest speed and other toward the best handling. I messed around with different cars and settings in the Practice mode. I started out with drafting practice since that seems like the most important skill in the game, and I couldn’t keep up with Bill Elliott at all. I got my car to top out at 199 mph but that was too slow.

After a few hours of getting nowhere, I took to the internet for help. There is not much to go on. GameFAQs has two FAQs on this game, and neither one is very detailed. One of them had speed/handling stats for the cars, but I have no idea where that came from or if it is even accurate. Ignoring that, I looked on YouTube. I found a video where the creator wins Daytona using the Chevrolet Lumina. He got the car to top out at 202 mph which was better than I figured out on my own for any setup. I copied his configuration to get that top speed, and now I was at least keeping pace with Bill Elliott in practice.

It was time to start trying out the Championship Season. The first race was the oval track at Daytona. With the 20 mile default race, that meant 8 laps around the track. I decided to qualify myself. I wasn’t placing that well at first, about as well as auto-qualifying. The strategy is to take the turns as far inside as you can. Near top speed, you need to rapidly tap Left as you hold the gas the whole time through the turn. With the proper settings, you can stay on the inside without veering off line for best results. To get into the turn, I let off the gas briefly to help steer. It’s a precise setup and technique, and any variance means you can start sliding out and lose speed.

There is an easy trick that really increases the odds of winning a race on an oval track. At around four laps in, the low fuel light flashes and you have to make a pit stop. Everyone will pit halfway through the race. You have enough fuel to go further than that. I didn’t pit with everyone else and tried to do so on the next lap. If you are near the lead, that will put you in first place for a little while. Now I don’t think you can get by the whole race without stopping for fuel, which is too bad because that would almost assure first place every time. What you can do is make your pit stop and fill up your gas tank only about halfway. You can leave pit lane anytime you want for any repair other than tire changes. You can save several seconds by filling up a bit and leaving early. It doesn’t seem like much, but saving just a few seconds extends your lead by a lot. Once I figured out the driving and pitting techniques, I had no trouble winning first place on any oval track. So that’s half the game figured out.

The road courses, on the other hand, I found much more difficult. The imminent danger here is crashing. It only takes one crash to knock you out of the race entirely. The first road course is Sears Point, which in my opinion is the hardest course in the game. It is almost all turns with few places you can speed up. The opponents are strong at taking turns, and they tend to get in your way when trying to pass. My keys to success here were learning the course and determining what top speeds I could take each turn without crashing. A couple turns are so sharp that I have to slam on the brakes early just to go slow enough to clear them. You then have to remember to downshift to get the best acceleration and get back to good racing speed. I had to tweak the settings again, most notably increasing the gear ratio so that I could get better acceleration at the expense of needing to shift more frequently. The good news is that with the default settings, you only run three laps. The bad news is that no one pits so you can’t save time there. It’s best to finish at least 3rd, but maybe you can get by with a spot or two lower if you can make it up later.

The other road course in the game is Watkins Glen. This course has fewer turns than Sears Point and contains some long straightaways where you can build up good speed. Again, it’s best to learn what speed you can take each turn for best results. I figured out an exploit on this course. If you stay on the far outside entering a turn, you can drive straight as fast as you want and the outside grass of the course nudges you along through the curve. That means for a right turn, get all the way left to start, and vice versa. As long as you get all the way to the side and drive completely straight, you won’t crash. You do lose a lot of speed doing this and it damages your car, but it is much more consistent than braking and steering into the turn yourself, plus avoiding crashes is wonderful. I learned I could also use this strategy on Sears Point, but it was not very effective since there isn’t enough room to build up speed for the really sharp turns. I didn’t crash, but I always lost position. But the strategy is perfect for Watkins Glen.

My entire run of the game took 12-15 hours to complete. I reset the game countless times after crashing or finishing poorly, and luckily the game retains your password when you reset so you can go right back where you left off. I managed first place on all the oval tracks and I always gained 10 points in the standings each time. The way the scoring works is that there is a 5 point difference between places within the top 6, a 5 point bonus for leading any lap, and a 10 point bonus for leading the most laps. You can’t get both bonuses. Bill earned the 5 point bonus since he led initially, but then I got 10 points for leading the rest of the way after pitting. The second race, Sears Point, was where I spent the bulk of the time playing. I managed a first-place victory after many attempts but broke even in the standings. Bill got the 10 point bonus for leading the first two laps before I won the final lap. Race 4 at Watkins Glen I won and extended my lead by 15 points by leading all laps. Race 6 was a replay of Sears Point and I just barely finished in second place, losing those 15 points right back to Bill in the process. That gave me a 40 point lead entering the final race at Watkins Glen. In my gameplay video I attempted the course a couple times and only finished once in 5th place. That was good enough to secure a 10 point season victory!

I found Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge to be, well, quite a challenge to play. The game itself is well made. Graphics are quite nice. The physics and handling are about as realistic as you would expect on the NES. There isn’t a bunch of music in the game, but the few tracks are well composed. There is no music when driving. You hear the engine and squealing noises as you drive around, but the audio cues you get are very helpful as your attention visually is often divided. The passwords are awful, especially with punctuation like slashes involved. I think they could have been made smaller, but it’s really a minor gripe. Kudos to Distinctive Software for creating a quality NES racing title. This game did not turn me into a racing fan and I am not going to start liking playing racing games very much. I just think it’s important to give credit where it’s due. Bill Elliott’s NASCAR Challenge is a good NES game, even if I don’t care for it.