Felix the Cat, the wonderful, wonderful game.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 10/28/18
Difficulty: 2/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Felix the Cat Longplay

I’m starting to get a little worried that I’m running out of easy NES games to play.  Felix the Cat is another example of a solid platformer game that can be beaten with no prior knowledge in an hour or two.  Perhaps I never realized the NES has a bunch of easy platformers.  I have already beaten such games as DuckTales, DuckTales 2, Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, Puss ‘n Boots, and Wacky Races, all within the first 20% of this project.  Let’s see how Felix the Cat stacks up against those titles.

Felix the Cat is a cartoon character created in the late 1910’s.  Felix was either created by the cartoonist Pat Sullivan or his lead animator Otto Messmer.  His first appearance was in the short animated film Feline Follies in 1919 before he was even named Felix.  The cartoon cat’s popularity waned in the late 1920s in part due to making a late and poor pivot to movies with sound.  The Felix the Cat comic strips lasted in various forms from 1927 through 1966.  He also had a TV series from 1959 to 1962 produced by Joe Oriolo, who would go on to obtain the full rights to Felix the Cat in the 1970’s.  There have been a scattering of films and cartoon shorts related to Felix the Cat throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s.

Felix the Cat managed to get a single video game.  Felix the Cat was released on the NES in North America in October 1992 and a PAL release also in 1992.  A Famicom release in Japan appeared to have been planned but was cancelled.  A Game Boy port was released in North America and Europe in 1993.  It features the same game play but with fewer levels.  Hudson Soft developed and published the NES game.  The Game Boy version was developed by Hudson Soft as well but was published by Electro Brain in North America and Sony Electronic Publishing in Europe.

Felix the Cat is a straightforward platformer game.  The story is just another version of the typical trope.  The evil Professor has captured Kitty Cat and wants Felix’s Magic Bag of Tricks.  Felix of course uses the powers available from the Magic Bag to go and rescue his girlfriend.  The game takes place over nine areas, including multiple rounds per area.  You win the game when you clear all nine areas and save Kitty Cat.

The controls are what you expect from a platformer game.  Use the D-pad to walk around.  The A button jumps, and the B button attacks.  You can press Down to crouch for dodging, but it doesn’t make your attacks any lower.  The manual says you can hold Up and jump with A to jump higher, but it doesn’t work.  You don’t really need a higher jump anyway.

The primary gimmick to this game is that Felix has many different weapons he can produce out of his Magic Bag.  Felix can only use one of these at a time.  The default weapon is a punching bag which is a short-range attack.  By collecting hearts and powering up, Felix undergoes a short transformation and either changes his outfit or his gear, enabling him to switch up attacks.  One upgrade gives Felix a top hat and he can radiate a circle of stars that damages nearby enemies.  Other transformations give Felix a vehicle to ride in and some projectile attacks.  The effects of powering up depend on which level you are in.

As you go through the levels, you will find tokens shaped like Felix’s face.  For every ten of these you collect, a heart appears that you grab to power up.  When you do this, the game displays a series of ten small hearts in the upper left corner of the screen.  This acts as your timer for the powerup as they slowly dwindle away as you play.  For every five Felix tokens you collect, you will create a few milk bottle powerups.  Each of them restores two hearts to your meter.  Collecting a heart also fills up your meter.  As long as you keep a steady pace through the stages and keep collecting tokens and powerups, it is not too difficult to remain powered up.

Felix does happen to be pretty fragile.  One hit from an enemy or falling into a pit loses a life.  This puts you back to the default state.  Levels have checkpoints at arrow signposts and you go back there when you die.  Powerups are great in that they also act as a shield when taking damage from one of the bad guys.  When you are powered up and take a hit, you simply drop back a level.  Many stages provide Felix with three distinct levels of powerups which gives you some leeway if you make a mistake.  I found that I played slowly and conservatively at the start, and then got progressively more aggressive and quicker once I knew I could take damage and still be alright.

Each of the nine areas in the game can have multiple rounds.  Levels are straightforward left-to-right affairs with some verticality to them as well.  The last round in the area ends with a large magic bag.  Stand on top of the bag and press Down to enter the bag and go to the boss fight.  The bosses in this game are simple and take just a few hits to beat.  You then earn a nice point bonus and move on to the next area.  Sometimes you are treated to a small cutscene where you take a phone call from the evil Professor before pressing onward.

You can also find the large magic bags within individual levels.  Some are on the main path and others are found high up off screen that you can reach through platforming or bouncing on large springs.  Enter these bags to go to a bonus room.  These rooms consist of several Felix tokens and contain an exit magic bag.  Leaving the bonus area can sometimes drop you off further ahead in the level.

There are other types of stages than just platforming levels.  There are swimming levels, flying levels, and even a space level.  There are different transformations you get to support these other stage types.  For example, you can fly in an airplane or man a hot air balloon.  In these levels you have to keep pressing A to stay afloat or to swim around.  Variety never hurts in a game like this.

Extra lives are very easy to come by in this game, even though there are no extra life pickups to be found.  For every 100 tokens you collect, you earn a new life.  Collecting a heart while fully powered up gives you an additional Felix, and you also get a life for every 50,000 points.  If you can get through the first area or so without taking any damage, you are well on your way to stocking up for the rest of the game.  Should you run out of lives, you can continue up to three times.  Continuing places you at the start of the current round, which is a slightly worse position than a normal death.

I have played and beaten Felix the Cat once before as part of the Nintendo Age weekly NES contests a few years ago.  It was a one-life contest and I got near the end on my first life over just a few tries.  I went ahead and beat the rest of the game then just to see what was left.  This is a later release that is uncommon.  I have owned a few copies of the game cart.  Two I bought at local game stores.  One cost $12 and the other cost $10.  They were selling for $30-$40 at the time so it was a no-brainer to pick them both up.  I acquired a third copy as part of a mega haul of games I found on eBay late in 2014.  A loose cart of Felix the Cat now costs upwards of $60.

I didn’t have any trouble beating Felix the Cat again.  This is an easy game to beat for the very first time playing if you are any good at platformers.  There are quite a lot of areas and the levels themselves seem to go on and on at times.  It feels that you are making progress for most of the game, with a few sections that seem like they will never end.  Some parts of the game do take some careful play to clear effectively, but by then you probably have a huge stash of lives to burn so it’s no big deal.  I think the game takes about an hour to beat if played blind, maybe longer that that if some of the later sections cause some problems.  My longplay video took a little over 45 minutes with a little over half a dozen deaths.

Felix the Cat is a good NES game but isn’t anything special.  The game plays and performs very well.  The graphics are cute and nicely animated.  Felix has a lot of expressions in all his movements and attacks.  The controls are spot-on and handle properly through all the movement variety the game has to offer.  The gameplay is solid but nothing more.  Don’t get me wrong, the game is good, it’s just that it feels so ordinary.  This is the kind of game that you can shut your brain off and mindlessly play.  You’ll have a good time doing it for the first or second time, and then there’s not much reason to go back to it.  I bet some players get bored of it and quit partway through.  From my perspective, it’s hard to have a problem with a game that plays great and is just a bit bland in gameplay. 

A game with surfboarding animals can’t be all that bad, right?

To Beat: Finish Round 5 in Street Skate Encounter and Round 1 in Big Wave Encounter
To Complete: Finish Round 12 in both modes
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Reached Round 13 in both modes
Played: 11/29/16 – 11/30/16
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
Video: T&C Surf Designs Longplay

Town and Country Surf Designs: Wood and Water Rage is an NES game notorious for not being very good. Certainly that was my impression of the game ever since childhood. Now that I have beaten the game, I realize that the game is misunderstood. I wouldn’t go as far to say that it is a good game, but once you break through the shell of bad impressions, there is a playable game here that has a few neat ideas.

T&C Surf Designs is a company that specializes in surfboards, clothing, and accessories. They first opened a store in Hawaii in 1971 and expanded to clothing in 1976. Sometime in the 1980s the company adopted cartoon characters named Da Boys for a line of shirts that became very popular. These characters created by Steve Nazar would form the basis of the NES game. Da Boys would disappear for many years before being revived in 2016 under the name Thrilla Krew. T&C Surf Designs is still in business today.

T&C Surf Designs: Wood and Water Rage was released on the NES in February 1988. The game was developed by Atlus and published by LJN. It was only released in North America. There was a sequel to the game named Town and Country II: Thrilla’s Surfari, released in 1992. These two games are the only games bearing the company name or characters.

Wood and Water Rage has two distinct modes named Street Skate Encounter and Big Wave Encounter. As you can probably tell by the names, the first is a skateboarding game and the second is a surfing game. There is also a third mode named Wood and Water Rage that combines the two by cycling between levels in both games. To beat the game, you must meet the conditions for both modes either separately or together in the combined mode.

When you begin the game you choose one of the modes with the option of either 1-player or 2-player. Multiplayer is alternating play and otherwise identical to the single player mode. After you choose the game mode you choose which characters you want. There is Tiki Man for skateboarding and he pairs with the surfer Kool Kat. You can also choose Joe Cool for your skateboarder and he teams with Thrilla Gorilla on the surfing side. The characters are purely cosmetic. My favorite is Kool Kat just because he surfs while wearing a tuxedo, which is beyond cool.

In Street Skate Encounter, your goal is to reach the end of the course. Play takes a side-scrolling perspective starting on the left and moving right. You must dodge hazards and obstacles in order to reach the finish line before time runs out. You only get one minute to clear the course but it is a short stage. If you either run out of time or run out of health, it’s Game Over and back to the title screen.

To control your skateboarder, use the D-Pad to move in all eight directions. The game autoscrolls but you can speed it up by moving right or slow down by moving left. You can also tap the B button to push yourself forward. I don’t know if it’s necessary, but I always tap the button repeatedly to maintain speed. You can jump with the A button, but when you do this you jump in the air and your skateboard stays on the ground rolling beneath you. If you want to jump and bring the skateboard with you, hold Left while jumping.

This mode has a few interesting mechanics to it. There is a life meter in the bottom right corner of the screen consisting of some round symbols. You earn life points periodically as long as you skate quickly, and you lose some if you crash. Depending on how you crash you either lose two or three life points. If you max out at eight life points the timer freezes, so skating perfectly means you cannot run out of time.

There are ways to earn extra points while skating. There are four different colors of coins that appear at regular intervals in the stage, and collecting them will give you points. Red coins give you the most points and blue give you the least, with pink and green ones in between. If you only collect coins of the same color, then each successive coin gives you double points up to eight times the base value. There are some moving objects in the way such as a toy car or a ball and you get points if you jump on top of them with your skateboard. There are also barriers that give you points if you jump over them and let your skateboard roll underneath. You can also grind on the guardrail at the very top of the playfield and you get points for doing that.

After you clear a round, the next time through is the same level except you begin farther to the left. This means that you gradually expand the beginning of the level and the course gets longer the more times you play it. The fifth time through the course is the first instance of playing the entire level. Hopefully by now you have learned the course well enough to keep going without crashing so that the timer will freeze.

In the other mode, Big Wave Encounter, your goal is to surf long enough to reach the pier on the beach. Just like in skateboarding, play is side-scrolling and moving to the right. You want to surf both to the right far enough to avoid crashing within the big wave tailing you and high enough to avoid crashing on the bottom of the screen. There is no timer in this mode; it is all about surviving to the end. You also have health points in this mode and if you run out it is Game Over.

The surfing controls seem straightforward but they are the cause of all the confusion and misunderstanding of the game. You use the D-Pad to move in all eight directions. If you hold the A button it shifts your balance forward, and holding the B button shifts the balance toward the back of the surfboard. That’s all there is to it, but in practice it seems that no matter what you do you always end up losing ground and getting knocked off your board into the water.

Aside from just trying to stay on top of the water, there are obstacles that can also knock you down. There are people on inner tubes, jumping fish, and birds that you should avoid. You will also come across bananas that you can collect for points. I never bother with them since I am so focused on keeping afloat.

Your surfing style can also net you some additional points. You earn a tiny amount of points just for staying alive, but if you surf inside the pipeline you get a larger amount of points periodically for as long as you stay on your board. If you surf up off the very top of the wave, you will catch some air and land toward the bottom of the screen and earn even more points. The best way to earn score is to do a turn at the top of the wave. The easiest way to do this is to surf straight up and then turn downward as you touch the top of the wave. If you can pull this off at the very top of the wave you get points as well as an additional life point. You can do this many times in a row to boost your health to the maximum very quickly, so this is the best strategy for survival.

Wood and Water Rage has no ending in any of the modes, and so I get to figure out what it means for me to beat the game. The Street Skate Encounter mode lets you play the full level on Round 5, so clearing that round qualifies as beating that mode. The only difference in the later rounds is that your starting health is reduced. I believe on Round 12 you only get one point of health to start so that is the most challenging round. The Big Wave Encounter has a more unclear ending condition. The level seems to get longer in later rounds but there is no definitive way to tell. It may cap out at five rounds like the other mode, but if you clear at least one level that should be good enough. Just like in skateboarding, the starting health is the lowest at Round 12. To master the game, you should probably complete twelve rounds in both modes.

Wood and Water Rage was a game I had in my childhood collection. I am sure it was a garage sale pickup for cheap since I wouldn’t have been interested in this game on my own. With that in mind, this game did not get much play time. The skateboarding was fine but not all that gripping, and I did not understand the surfing at all. I would occasionally mess with it and then go on to something different.

Now that I am going through all the NES games, I have finally given it a fair shake and I see that it’s not all bad. The Street Skate Encounter took a few practice runs to learn the controls and layout. Timing jumps off ramps is still something I flub up occasionally, and I will get nailed by one of the moving obstacles sometimes. Otherwise, I didn’t have too much trouble with this mode. The Big Wave Encounter still was as confusing as ever until I had the aha moment of earning life points by turning downward at the top of the wave. Once I did it a couple of times, I saw how easy it was to pull off and I could keep doing it as much as I needed. This little trick makes the surfing easier than the skateboarding, which is something I could have never envisioned. This also led to reducing the difficulty assessment for the game to below average.

I met my goal in both Street Skate Encounter and Big Wave Encounter separately, but I also decided to play the combined Wood and Water Rage mode for my video longplay. Since Round 12 in each mode is where the difficulty is the highest, then clearing Round 24 was my goal here. I only make one attempt at it and I came up short. In Round 21, I crashed right in the beginning of the level and that was that. Mistakes sure are costly in this game. Nevertheless, I am still pleased with how I played.

My big takeaway from playing this game is that it is far too easy to overcomplicate something in my mind. I figured that the surfing would be very difficult to figure out when all along the solution turned out to be both simple and repeatable. The skateboarding by contrast was almost the opposite, requiring a more traditional approach. The game overall is not too complicated with some understanding of the mechanics, and it turned out to be more enjoyable than I expected. However, don’t be fooled. The game is very lean in terms of content, and what’s here is nothing to be excited about. I prefer to lean on the positives, and it’s always nice when a game can surpass my expectations at least a little bit.