Don’t forget your spy gear because you will need it to make your escape!

To Beat: Win against the computer on any difficulty
To Complete: Beat all 8 difficulty levels
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Complete the game
Played: 2/1/16 – 2/3/16
Difficulty: 1/10
My Difficulty: 2/10

When playing two-player NES games, I think it’s better to have simultaneous play compared to alternating between two separate one-player games. Most of the time if the game is fun two-player it is probably just as much fun playing single player, however some games are tailor made for two players and Spy Vs. Spy falls in that category. I only player single player for the blog and Spy Vs. Spy left a lot to be desired, although I bet it really shines in two-player mode and I’m looking forward to trying it out sometime.

Spy Vs. Spy is a comic strip that debuted in January 1961 in issue #60 of MAD Magazine. The creator and cartoonist Antonio Prohias fled his native Cuba and pitched the idea of the Spy Vs. Spy cartoon to MAD Magazine in New York. They hired him and he would go on to write Spy Vs. Spy for over 27 years. The comic strip has been passed on to a few other writers over the years and it is still being created today.

The Spy Vs. Spy video game was released in 1984 for a large variety of computer platforms. It eventually made its way to the Famicom in 1986 but it wouldn’t debut on the NES until two years later in October 1988. All versions of the game were developed by First Star Software and Spy Vs. Spy is the only game they would develop for the NES. It was published by Kemco and it was their first NES release.

Spy Vs. Spy is an action game where you must race both your opponent and the clock to retrieve a set of items and escape the embassy. The embassy is a maze of single screen rooms and you can move to and from the interconnected rooms freely as you choose. This is a split screen game where both the white spy and the black spy are exploring the embassy and racing to meet the same goal. Everything is done in real time so you can see your opponent’s every move while they can also see yours. To escape the embassy and win you must first collect a briefcase, a passport, a bag of money, a key, and secret papers. Each room has a number of objects you can interact with such as furniture, pictures on the wall, doors, and so on. These hide the items you need so you will need to look in and around everything to find what you are looking for. Normally you can only hold one item at a time, however once you have the briefcase you can store all the required items inside of that. When a spy has an item you can see him visibly holding it on screen. You can also hide an item you are holding inside the furniture as well. Once you have recovered all of the items in hand, you must locate the exit door to escape and win the game.

While all this is going on, your opponent is also looking to complete the same objective so he will be actively trying to run your plan. If both spies end up on the same screen then they square off in hand to hand combat. A club and a knife are hidden in the embassy and these weapons can be held alongside one of the required items. The weapons are stronger than the default punch and will certainly swing the tide of combat. The spies don’t have to fight if they are in the same room and sometimes escaping into the next room is a smart strategy. Each spy has a power gauge which indicates health remaining. When a spy runs out of power in combat he is killed and floats up off the screen as an angel. That spy is out of the game for 10 seconds giving the other spy the advantage of free time as well as the ability to recover any items the defeated spy held. There is also a 30 second deduction to the clock when a spy is killed. Each spy has his own clock and whenever time runs out that spy is killed permanently for the rest of the game. Both spies will not necessarily run out of time at the same time which may be all the edge needed in a close game.

The other major feature of the game in which to hurt the opponent is with booby traps. The spies have a seemingly unlimited number of them to use. Holding a trap will cause you to automatically hide any other item you are carrying so that’s something to be mindful of. The traps must be hidden inside the furniture and you can see the spy laughing to himself any time a trap is successfully placed. There are four booby traps at your disposal. Both the bomb and the spring can be hidden inside any of the pieces of furniture except for the room doors. A water bucket must be hidden on the top of a closed door. The time bomb can be hidden in any room regardless of furniture. If a spy peeks into a piece of furniture armed with a trap, that spy is killed with the same penalty as if he died in combat, along with a humorous death animation. The time bomb is a bit special as it kills a spy if he is in the room for too long. You know you are in a room with a time bomb if your face turns blue, so escape right away. There are also remedies hidden in the embassy that disarm traps. A water bucket (not the trap water bucket) is found in a red fire box and disarms a bomb, the wire cutters are found in a white wall-mounted tool box and they disarm the spring, and an umbrella can be found on the coat rack and prevents damage from the water bucket trap. The time bomb is effectively disarmed if you are able to leave the room before it goes off. A remedy for a trap can only be held only if the spy’s hands are empty, so you can’t hold another item and a remedy at the same time.

This all seems really complex, and it is in the beginning, but it all eventually makes sense. One thing that helps is that each spy can also look at the map of the embassy. The map screen appears after cycling through all the possible traps. It shows the location of both spies, which rooms have items, and which rooms have traps. It is quite helpful but it does have a few shortcomings. It doesn’t show which rooms are connected, it doesn’t indicate if a room has both an item and a booby trap, and it doesn’t show the presence of an armed time bomb. Despite all that, the map is very much appreciated as it makes the levels much more manageable.

When starting a game there are three modes to choose from. Training mode simplifies the game by requiring only the briefcase and one additional item instead of needing all of them to escape. Vs Com is the main game against a computer opponent, and Vs Player is the main game against a human opponent. You can also choose from one of eight levels. Each level is a different embassy map and they are progressively larger and more complex. The lowest level embassy only has 6 rooms in total while the later levels have 30 or more rooms as well as a second floor in some instances.

I have played Spy Vs Spy before when I was a kid. One of my babysitters had an NES with some games and this is one she had. I sort of remember playing it but that’s all. I acquired the game in a three game lot on eBay around 2009. It came with Stinger and Bump ‘N Jump. It’s an ordinary game lot for sure, but the real reason I remember that lot is because those carts arrived in mint condition. I don’t like how often the word mint is used in describing condition as I feel it is mostly exaggerated whenever it’s used. In this case it’s true. They are beautiful carts and they will be on my shelf for a very long time!

I admit I was not looking forward to playing this game. I felt that it was too complicated after reading the manual and that I was going to struggle completing all eight levels. As it turned out, I more or less breezed through this game. There is a bit of a learning curve to be sure but a quick run in training mode alleviated those issues for me. I started on the levels after that and didn’t lose once. I found the AI to be pretty dumb overall. He moves between rooms slowly and focuses more on setting traps and less on acquiring the items needed to win. In the early levels, it’s possible I guess to lose if you don’t get the hang of combat and run out of time quickly. I can see it happening too if I were to get all the items and get killed right in front of the exit door. Other than that, I’m not so sure if the AI is good enough to win legitimately on its own. The later levels are big but as a result you don’t interact as much so it is more about figuring out the layout of the level and beating the time limit.

I developed a successful strategy early on that carried me through, so if you want to try this on your own skip this paragraph. You’ve been warned! I use the map to locate the rooms with items and seek them out as quickly as you can. I would usually acquire the knife during my search giving me the upper hand in combat. The priority is the briefcase so if I come across it, great! If the other spy has the briefcase, then I would go after him right away and take it for myself. I would also make a mental note of where the exit is if I passed by since it doesn’t appear on the map. I barely bothered with traps at all. One time I trapped the other spy in a dead end with the water bucket, and the time bomb is useful at the bottom of a ladder for a guaranteed kill if entering the room from above. I don’t know if this is the optimal strategy but it certainly worked for me!

There were two other Spy Vs. Spy games but neither one made it to the NES. The second game is Spy Vs. Spy II: The Island Caper which takes place on a tropical island. Features include larger rooms that scroll instead of the fixed sized room in the original game. Players must also build their own traps from parts found on the island. The game did receive a release on Famicom. The third and final game is Spy Vs. Spy III: Arctic Antics and it was only released on various PCs. This one obviously takes place in the arctic! A fourth game was planned and would have likely been called Spy Vs. Spy IV: Spies in Space if it had been released.

You may be wondering what is up with my difficulty assessment on this one. There are two things I want to address. The first is the 1/10 difficulty. I went on and on about the initial complexity and I’m not backing down from that. The game is so easy simply because it is very short. Considering strictly the bare minimum to get the ending, I say the game can be beaten in 15 minutes or less on the first time playing. It takes a little bit of time on training to get used to the controls, how the traps work, and how combat plays out. The first level has a time limit of only 5 minutes and it doesn’t take that much time to finish since that first area is so small. I’m sure it’s possible to luck into a win even if things don’t go too well. The other spy has a bad habit of running into his own traps. The ending sequence is the same after each level and the only difference is the text showing which level was completed.

The other thing you may have noticed is that this is the first time I gave a game a higher personal difficulty than the overall difficulty. I based my difficulty on my goal instead of just the minimum to beat the game. I didn’t find the game to be very difficult, but it does take some trial and error to navigate some of the larger levels. I don’t think Spy Vs. Spy is quite among the easiest NES games when going for completing all the levels.

Spy Vs. Spy is a clever concept that plays well, but it ultimately falls short as a single player experience. I am definitely keeping this game in mind to play with friends sometime. As it stands for me right now, this is just another easy title for me to mark as finished.

The title of the game is a pretty fair assessment of what to expect here.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 1/30/16
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 3/10

For as many classic NES titles as there are, there have to be others that fall on the other side of the coin. I’m sure there are many poor NES games that I will get to, but then there are others that are just kind of okay and don’t really stand out in any significant way. BreakThru seems to be exactly that kind of middling game that is buried deep within the NES library.

BreakThru was developed and published by Data East in 1986 as an arcade game. It was released on the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64 before making its way to the NES in November 1987. Data East was responsible for publishing over 20 NES games between 1986 and 1992 covering most of the NES lifespan. There really aren’t exact dates for NES game releases but from what I found BreakThru was released in the same month as Kid Niki: Radical Ninja and Side Pocket.

BreakThru is a side-scrolling shooting game where you take control of some kind of armored car. Your mission is to plow through enemy territory in order to recover a stolen aircraft. Your vehicle is equipped with a cannon that lets you shoot forward, and I guess it also has some sort of advanced hydraulic system that lets you jump. You can also speed up and slow down by moving backward or forward. Adjusting the speed more or less affects the scrolling speed of the game but you do need to speed up fast to make some jumps across obstacles. The jumping is also useful as a dodging mechanic since you can’t take any damage from enemy fire whenever the car is in the air.

There are five stages in total: Mountain, Bridges, Prairie, City, and Airfield. There are various enemy tanks, soldiers, and other hazards that stand in your way. There are no bosses in this game so levels end whenever you reach the end. The closest thing this game has to a boss is a giant helicopter that appears a few times through the course of the game. There are a few powerups that drop down on parachutes occasionally but there’s not much variety here. There are three powerups that all give you a three-way spread shot with the only difference being how long you have the weapon. There is also an extra life to grab. I found the powerups to look just about the same so I couldn’t really tell what the differences were without the manual, and they are also kind of tricky to grab in the first place. I think I had to jump to pick them up because they floated too far away if I stayed on the ground.

I picked up my copy of BreakThru a long time ago from a used game store. I bought it solely on the name. What I was really after was a breakout-style game and Arkanoid was too expensive for me. At that store the NES games were in a case with only the end labels showing so I didn’t actually get to see the game cart until after I paid. I think it was only $5 so it wasn’t that much, but unfortunately the cart had a huge crack in the back covered with tape. It’s the only copy I’ve ever had so it’s still in my collection. I took it home, played it once, and put it away for years. I wouldn’t pick it up again until it showed up in the NA weekly contest last year.

My run of BreakThru was really simple. In the prior contest, the object was to score as many points as you can before you start your last life. You only get three lives to start and they don’t show up in the levels that often, but you can also earn additional lives by reaching certain scores. I know you get one life for getting 20,000 points but that’s all I could reach. Under those conditions, I got roughly halfway through the second level. When I played this time obviously I could play however I wanted and it was much easier to get through. There are unlimited continues and each level has a pretty generous amount of checkpoints. You get to restart at those checkpoints after each death, even when continuing after Game Over. The game must be beaten in one sitting but you can just keep chipping away at it until you beat it. When I sat down to play I only intended to play for a little while just to get used to the early part of the game. I ended up finishing the game in a little over 30 minutes.

After the ending scene plays out, the game starts over from the beginning. I played the first level again just to see if it is more difficult the second time but it looked exactly the same to me. Because of that I didn’t bother completing the second loop. Now in the arcade version, I read that after beating all five levels you get to choose which level to start on the second time through. The game ends after the second loop. On the NES version, I couldn’t find any evidence of anything different after winning the second loop and there was no level select after the ending like in the arcade version. I didn’t want to spend any more time playing the game just on the chance of there being something more. If there actually is a true ending, then I guess I’ll have to go back to it sometime later!

The game may be on the short side with unlimited continues and checkpoints, but it does pose a moderate challenge. I could see there being several sections of the game that would take some practice to pass even though I got through it quickly without much trouble when I played. For instance, there are some large jumps from one bridge to another in the second level and they roll right into a first helicopter attack that catches you off guard the first time. It’s these kind of sections that put the difficulty near average. Now, if you are a purist that believes these games must be beaten on a single credit, then that bumps the difficulty quite a few notches higher. For my purposes, I think my difficulty assessment is appropriate based on what I’ve played, but of course that’s always true for these rankings!

BreakThru isn’t that bad of a game, especially as an early NES title. By today’s standards, the game doesn’t really stand out all that much and it shows its age. I haven’t played the arcade version but I’m betting it’s the superior experience of BreakThru. Either way, it’s a nice little game to check off of my list!

This is one journey that is well worth going on!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 1/25/16 – 1/29/16
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10

Okay, now we’re talking! Probably the biggest thrill of Take On The NES Library is whenever a random game shows up that I’m really excited to play and Journey to Silius fits the bill completely. Appearing on many “hidden gems” NES lists over the years, I think the cat is let out of the bag on this one. It’s a little pricey as a result but not too expensive and it’s a game that fits well in just about any NES collection.

Journey to Silius was released in the US in September 1990, just after the Japan release in August 1990 named Raf World. It was developed by Tokai Engineering and published by Sunsoft. Tokai Engineering developed three games for the NES: Blaster Master, Journey to Silius, and Super Spy Hunter. Their first game was a Famicom only game called Ripple Island and their fifth and final game is Albert Odyssey on the Super Famicom.

Journey to Silius is a run-and-gun action game. You play the role of Jay McCray as he fights a terrorist group responsible for the death of his father. You can jump and shoot a basic hand gun and you can also duck and shoot low. There are six weapons total but you only start with two and have to acquire the other four along the way. The initial special weapon is the shot gun that is a three-way shot useful for reaching high enemies. The machine gun is like the hand gun with rapid autofire. Homing missiles target the enemy for you. The laser gun shoots a beam that blasts through enemies. The grenade launcher is a single but powerful straight shot.

Jay has both a health bar and a gun energy bar indicated on the upper left of the screen. The hand gun has infinite shots but the other weapons drain your gun energy gauge. This is shared between all the weapons and when it runs out you can only use the hand gun. Enemies will occasionally drop a blue power up that refills a portion of your gun energy, and enemies can also drop a red powerup that restores some health.

This is kind of an aside, but one criticism I have about the game is the low drop rate on the powerups. The blue ones show up often enough but the red ones drop far less often. In most playthroughs I see maybe two or three health drops total, and I bet someone could play the whole game without seeing a single one. They pop up so infrequently it’s hard to believe that they exist at all. I once encountered two in a row and I didn’t know how to handle it! It would have been nice if I actually needed the health at that time.

There are five levels in total: Outside a deserted space colony, an underground tunnel, the enemy headquarters, the enemy spaceship, and the enemy factory. These are all horizontal scrolling levels with the occasional brief vertical section mixed in. Each level except the last has a mini-boss at the end that drops a new special weapon when defeated and there is also a main boss at the end of each one. The mini-bosses are unique enemies a bit larger than the normal ones but the end level bosses are huge and fill up the screen. You only have three lives with no way to gain any extra lives which contributes to the overall difficulty. The levels have checkpoints scattered about so there isn’t a ton of ground to gain back if you die, but if you lose all your lives you have to continue back at the beginning of the stage. You are only allowed three continues before having to start all over from Stage 1 so it’s important to take your time and preserve as much health as you can as you progress deeper into the game.

I remember renting and playing Journey to Silius when I was a kid. I overlooked it quite a few times in favor of something else and once I did rent it I don’t think I got very far in the game. I was really into games that had score at the time and Journey to Silius doesn’t have any points, so looking back I’m surprised I gave it a chance at all.

Journey to Silius was one of the first games I tracked down individually when I hunkered down to pursue the rest of the NES licensed set. I learned an interesting thing today. When doing some research on the game I Googled it and it pulled up my eBay order for the game in the search. I guess Google searched my gmail and noticed I had ordered it, so you can use Google to look up past orders. It’s a little unsettling that they can do that. Anyway, I won it in an auction on eBay in 2013 with no picture for $5 plus shipping. A few weeks after that my local store got a copy of the game in and I bought it for $3 which was a great deal so why not! I ended up with a third copy that I bought in an eBay lot in practically mint condition and that’s the one in my collection.

I have played the game in the past couple of years but I never committed to beating the game before. That recent experience did give me a bit of an edge for the first half of the game. Overall it took me four attempts to beat the game. My first two runs ended at the Level 4 boss and Level 5 boss respectively, and on my third try I regressed a bit and died earlier in Level 5. My fourth and winning run was quite the rollercoaster of emotion … at least it was for me. I will be spoiling the endgame so if you’re looking to avoid spoilers just skip the next two paragraphs. It’s okay, I don’t mind!

My final run started out as just about the perfect run. Mind you, I’m not saying that I’m so good that I can get far without taking damage, but on this run I limited it enough to keep alive. I made it all the way to the Stage 4 mini-boss before I took my first death and I finished the level on my next life, so I reached the final level with the two lives remaining and all three of my continues. Of course, this is where the wheels fell off. The first four levels I found myself taking things slow and focusing on killing the enemies quickly and with this strategy the game is pretty straightforward after enough attempts. The last level completely changes things. It’s an auto-scrolling level with a heavy emphasis on platforming with no enemies to shoot at all. You are fighting against the level and the level is just brutal. There are crates that fall, lava that flows down from the ceiling, conveyor belts, moving crushers, you name it. I find the jumping to be a little bit inconsistent and that becomes a problem when every jump matters. The game expects you to jump off of moving crates as well. There’s one part in particular where the best way to get through is to jump on a moving crate as soon as it scrolls on screen. Missing that, which you absolutely would the first time through, leaves you only one more narrow opportunity to get through or you have no choice but to die. It takes a lot of practice to get through this level and being the last level you have to work hard to get that far in the first place.

Pretty soon I burned through my lives and had to continue. Pretty soon I used up all of my continues too with nothing to show for it. The worst is when you are interacting with a moving platform and you somehow get pinched and immediately die. It feels like such a cheap death and this happened to me two or three times. In times like this my emotions can really vary. I can get pretty frustrated at time but here I wasn’t even angry. I first laughed it all off and accepting all these weird deaths and that shifted to getting despondent. I was already thinking about having to start the game all over again. My last continue started off better. I got a good start to the level before dying and on my second life I was finally clearing some difficult obstacles but draining health quickly in the process. At my last sliver of health I got hit by a falling crate for my second death, but somehow during the death animation I teleported into the boss room and finished dying there. I wish I knew how that happened, but I’ll take it. My last life began at the boss and I had a game plan after dying there once before in a prior attempt. It didn’t go the best but it was okay. However after the boss there is a second, final boss which is a tall humanoid robot. There is no refilling of your health and weapons before the fight so I was left with no gun power and about a third of a health bar left. I got backed into the corner and ducked, which turns out to be a safe spot since the boss stops advancing that far against the side and is unable to punch you when you duck. I got him stuck in a loop! After observing the timing for awhile I could jump up to shoot him in the face and resume ducking while missing his punches. It took a bit of time and I got down to my very last sliver of health but I beat the boss and beat the game. Whew! That was one of my best wins in quite awhile!

After the ending and credits, you go back to Level 1 exactly as you ended the final boss fight. So I started over with no weapons and that sliver of health. I kept going and it didn’t take long before I ended up dead and back at the title screen. From what little I played it didn’t seem to be any more difficult, and I couldn’t find any information on it so it looks like there is no hard mode here.

I think this has sort of become well known regarding this game, but originally Journey to Silius was supposed to be a licensed game based on the movie The Terminator. Somewhere during development Sunsoft lost the Terminator license so they took the work that was already done and retooled it into the game we got today. There is a licensed Terminator game on NES that I haven’t played much, but I think Journey to Silius is the better game of the two. Also, the game has a really good soundtrack. Naoki Kodaka is the composer for the game and his style tends to revolve around using the NES DPCM sound channel to play bass samples. The Stage 2 music is a deep, moody track and is a favorite among NES music enthusiasts.

Journey to Silius is a lot of fun to play and I’m glad that the game is getting more recognition in NES collecting circles. It feels good to beat this one having tinkered with playing it off and on!

Who needs pen and paper when you can play Pictionary on your NES?

To Beat: Finish the Regular Game
What I Did: Beat the Regular Game and Alternate Game just for fun!
Played: 1/24/16
Difficulty: 1/10
My Difficulty: 1/10

The NES has several games of game show and board game adaptations so it’s no surprise that one would show up on the blog fairly early. Pictionary plays like the classic board game but it has some surprises in the single player that make the game a little bit more interesting.

Pictionary was released in July 1990 on NES. It was developed by Software Creations and published by LJN. Software Creations developed a dozen NES games and LJN published a whopping 25 NES games by my records. There are only three developers attributed to creating Pictionary. Tony Pomfret was the programmer, Craig Houston created the graphics, and Tim Follin wrote the music. It probably should be four people as Stephen Ruddy’s sound engine was used in the development of the sounds and music. LJN has a reputation on NES for publishing many bad games but in the case of Pictionary I would say the game is pretty decent.

Pictionary on NES is a pretty straightforward board game. Up to four teams compete by drawing pictures and having their fellow team members guess what is being drawn. Correct answers allow the team to roll a die to advance their marker along the board and the first team to reach the end and guess a final drawing wins the game. Simple enough!

There are three game modes. Regular Game is the base game with some twists to it that I will explain shortly. Alternate Game is a way to play Pictionary using the NES as the game board, timer, and drawing area but you must supply your own Pictionary word cards (or your own words) to determine what to draw. The players are responsible for inputting into the game which team guessed the drawing correctly so it can handle everything properly for you. Drawing Practice gives you a free area for doodling so that you can get a handle for how the drawing in the game works. The drawing interface simulates a little bit like drawing lines with a pencil and paper. You can aim your cursor in I believe 16 different directions by pushing Left or Right. Press and hold A to draw in the direction of the cursor or press and hold B to move the cursor without drawing. Pressing Up or Down draws either a small or large circle. Select removes the last thing drawn, Start finishes the drawing early, and Select and Start pressed together erases the board. It’s a robust enough system without relying on complete freehand control.

The Regular Game mode plays more like a complete game of Pictionary with the computer providing words to draw for the teams, but most of the game is played out through mini-games instead of drawing out pictures. If there is one player per team then there will be all mini-games, otherwise there will be standard drawing mixed in. You can play single player with just one player on one team which is what I did. There are four mini-games that all play a little bit differently but they all help play out Pictionary the same way. Completing tasks within each mini-game reveal pieces of a pre-drawn puzzle and the object is to reveal as much of the picture as you can within the time limit to give yourself the best chance of identifying the drawing. Let’s get in to each mini-game!

The first one is Attack of the Paint Zombies. This is exactly like Space Invaders except the enemies are on the bottom instead of the top and you control a paint bucket dropping red paint down upon the purple paint zombies. Yeah, paint zombies, I don’t get it either. Each one you knock out reveals a square on the picture and if you get shot with paint you lose a few seconds off the timer. This one is my favorite of them all and I didn’t have much trouble revealing the whole board before time nearly every round.

The second game is The Warehouse Shuffle. I did not understand what to do in this game at all until I checked the manual. There’s just a man you control along the bottom and there are these balls with eyes that bounce around and nothing else was happening. What you are supposed to do is push up against the left side and press Up to grab boxes that are offscreen, then carry them across to the right and drop them off with Down. Each box you deliver knocks off a square and if the balls (called gremlins in the manual) come in contact with a box you lose time. You can carry a huge stack of boxes at once if you wan but you move slower the more you carry so there’s a basic risk/reward system at play. Once I knew what I was doing, I still didn’t do very well at this one.

The third game is Four Alarm Rescue. There are eight windows arranged in two rows of four columns and people randomly appear to jump out from one of the windows in the burning building. You control firefighters at the bottom with a net to catch the people as they fall. Catching each person reveals a square and having a person fall to the hard ground below removes that precious time. This game is so unfair. Often two people will jump out at the same time from opposite ends of the screen and it is impossible to catch both. Sometimes multiple people will jump one after the other from the same window but there’s no way to tell until the first person jumps out of the way. You can lose multiple people quickly if you are trying to catch a different person elsewhere. This game is very flawed and I don’t think it’s possible to reveal the whole board with this game unless the randomness is entirely in your favor.

The fourth and final game is Leapin’ Energy Capsules! This is a simple single screen platformer where you control an astronaut who is collecting these capsules or orbs that appear in a few pre-defined spots. Once you collect one or take too much time the next one appears. There are a couple of cannons that shoot a rising and falling bullet and they operate on a slow rhythm. Collect a capsule, reveal a square. Take damage, lose time. The only really annoyance is when a capsule appears in the upper left because you can only climb up to the upper level from the far right. Otherwise, this one is pretty simple and kind of boring.

Playing through the game is really simple in single player. Play the mini game and try to guess what the picture is. You get 45 seconds to scroll through the alphabet picking out letters to spell out your guess. The game shows the number of words in the answer plus the number of letters in each word just like Hangman, so that helps in solving these drawings. If you are correct, you get to roll a die and move up that many spaces on the board. There is no penalty if you miss so you just keep trying until you guess correctly. Eventually you will run into a solution and move up the board so there is really no way to lose. It took me around 30-45 minutes to reach the end of the board with I’m guessing a 30-40% success rate. And that’s the end!

In my run I tested out Alternate Game just to see what it is all about. I played with one team and it was all drawing. After the drawing phase you get to indicate which team answered correctly and that team rolls the die. I would just end the drawing early every time and say I answered it correctly so that I could always roll and move my marker on the board. It took hardly any time at all to reach the end. You get the same ending either way so you can technically beat the game without identifying a single drawing and no one would know the difference. It was an utter waste of time, but eh, I did it for completeness!

There was an unexpected casualty that happened while playing Pictionary. It was the weirdest thing. I turned the NES on and I was walking over to the couch when my hands got static shocked through the controller. Getting shocked in my basement is pretty normal in the winter but never through the game controller. Nothing worked when I tried to start the game even after powering off and resetting a few times. I swapped in another controller and that one worked fine, so I guess my controller is dead. It’s too bad because it is a nice condition dogbone controller and they aren’t exactly cheap to replace. I have a few other dogbone controllers in various states so I can probably hack together a nice working controller.

The one really remarkable thing about Pictionary is that it has a really good soundtrack. If you have heard some of the top NES music then you have almost certainly heard Tim Follin’s music and he did some fine work on the music in Pictionary. Tim has two brothers, Geoff and Mike, and all three brothers have worked in video games at some point. Geoff was also a game composer and he would work with Tim on music for several other NES games. The Follin brothers have a very distinct style to their music with very complex sounding pieces that really take advantage of the NES sound chip in ways that not many other musicians did. In Pictionary the title screen music is just awesome, and the Pictionary page on the Video Game Music Preservation Foundation website has links to all six music tracks for your listening pleasure!

Pictionary is a faithful adaptation of the board game and is a perfectly serviceable game on NES, even though it is very easy and barely worth playing even once. It’s fine but there’s so many better games on the NES. You would probably have more fun playing Pictionary with a group of friends on the actual board game but it could be fun at parties or whatever. At least the music is good! Plus, I don’t mind having a short, easy game to check off the list!

A cleverly named Disney cartoon becomes an intriguing NES shooter.

To Beat: Reach the end credits
Played: 1/22/16 – 1/23/16
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 3/10

Well that didn’t take long to reach another Disney-to-NES conversion courtesy of Capcom! Based on the animated Disney television series of the same name as part of The Disney Afternoon, TaleSpin is unique among its NES counterparts in that it’s not a platformer but an aerial adventure true to the cartoon series.

TaleSpin, the Disney animated series, had a 65-episode run all within a span of a year running from September 7, 1990 to August 8th, 1991. It tells the story of Baloo, a pilot for his freight service, and his navigator Kit as they aim to deliver goods while avoiding and fighting air pirates lead by Don Karnage and other foes that attempt to steal their cargo. I’m simplifying this as it’s a show I didn’t watch and I’m not familiar with it. The NES game was likely developed during the show’s initial run on TV since it was released in December 1991 after the final episode had already aired.

TaleSpin on NES is a horizontal scrolling shooter with a few interesting mechanics. You can fly Baloo in eight directions and fire bullets with the B button to attack enemies. If you press the A button, Baloo flips around and flies both backwards and upside-down causing the screen to scroll left instead of right. Not many autoscrolling shooters allow you to scroll both left and right at will – this is the only one that I’m aware of. Your only attack is the default shot but you can aim your shots diagonally if you shoot while moving up and down, so altogether you can fire in six directions. It’s an interesting mechanic and it makes sense since the plane banks up and down pretty severely as you fly. However it takes some getting used to and it will cause misfires. This mostly occurs because to fire straight you must not be moving vertically, so to properly aim at something straight ahead you must line yourself up and stop completely before shooting. The game will occasionally scroll vertically and in these parts the scrolling is forced with no backtracking like in the horizontal scrolling areas.

Along the way you will pick up money bags and cargo containers that look like little briefcases. Collecting these will give you money at the end of the stage that can be spent on upgrades for your plane, the Sea Duck. You can buy extra shots for your plane as well as a permanent speed increase and some armor to increase your total health. You can also buy extra lives and even extra continues if you need some additional tries. You start the game with three hearts for health but only one bullet on the screen at a time causing the game to be fairly challenging at the start as every shot counts. Buying an extra shot right away is crucial to help ease the later levels.

Enemies when destroyed will occasionally drop fruit on a parachute and this is the only way to earn points during the levels. Some parts of the levels hide pickups and they are revealed if you shoot their hiding spots. These often appears in nooks in the stages or in corners and thankfully you don’t take damage from touching the walls so feel free to look to your heart’s content. Just make sure not to get pinched by the scrolling screen as that will cost you a life. The entrances to the bonus stage are also hidden and revealed when shot. In these areas you switch to Kit who rides on this air surfboard called an airfoil. You can pop balloons that reveal fruit and extra lives and you can really stock up on lives by hitting every bonus area.

There are eight levels in total and each level ends in a boss encounter. There are a variety of locales to journey through and some of them are interesting for a shooter such as a haunted house and a baseball stadium. The bosses tend to be fairly challenging particularly since the Sea Duck is a pretty big sprite with equally large hitbox, the bosses spray a fair amount of bullets and other moving parts around, and also because each boss has an invincibility period after taking a hit.

Like I mentioned before I had not watched the cartoon basically at all, and in the same way I did not play TaleSpin on NES until adulthood. I think I bought my copy for $8 as part of a buy two get one free sale at my local game store. The game came up awhile back as part of the NA weekly contest as a high score challenge and I’m pretty sure I beat the game on either my first or second try at that time. I also got acquainted with the locations of the bonus areas back then because they are very point-heavy with all the fruit you can collect, so that experience helped me here too.

My playthrough of the game was fairly ordinary and unremarkable. I was very rusty at the start and I lost all my lives on the first level, but once I started it up again I was cruising through the levels with little trouble until I ran out of time that night and had to turn the game off. Starting over the next evening I beat the game with at least a dozen lives to spare and I didn’t need any continues to get the job done. There was one boss at the end of the fifth stage that gave me some trouble. It’s a crane with a wrecking ball that drops down on you and the boss shoots these bouncing shots so you are being attacked from above and below. It’s just about impossible to not take damage here. The only way I could beat it was to get there with full health and just sit in the middle constantly shooting it while avoiding attacks as best I could and taking advantage of my invincibility period to move to safety. I was able to beat it that way by attrition. With that in mind, here’s a hot tip for this boss! When doing some research for this post I found out that you can destroy the wrecking ball which completely takes out the attack from above. Look at me, I did it the hard way!

I had some trouble coming up with a difficulty for TaleSpin. The game isn’t exactly a cakewalk and it takes a few levels for the difficulty to ease up once you get some powerups under your belt. That was the way it went for me but once I got over that hurdle I thought the game was pretty easy. There are so many extra lives available not to mention continues I never had to touch. I decided to place the game just below average difficulty although I could be persuaded to slide the game up or down a notch.

TaleSpin is a solid experience from a good developer based on a quality Disney property, so it’s hard not to recommend the game. The mechanics are neat but they do require some practice and thoughtfulness that takes some time to get used to. Boss fights aside, TaleSpin isn’t all that memorable to me, but that’s not really a negative thing. With Capcom on NES you are pretty much assured of getting a good game no matter what and that is definitely the case here. My advice is if you decide to play TaleSpin, stick it out past the first level and buy that extra shot. I think you’ll have fun with it!

Jump, hop, and bounce your way all over the world, and make a fortune in the process!

To Beat: Reach the end credits
To Complete: Beat the game on Difficult setting with the best ending
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 1/10/16 – 1/13/16
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 3/10

The world of Disney and its many franchise characters have held a place in the public consciousness for nearly 100 years. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Disney would have a prolonged period of success in both feature films and animated TV series which just so happens to coincide nicely with the NES era. It’s no surprise then that Disney and Nintendo would converge into something special, and perhaps there is no better proof of that than DuckTales on NES.

DuckTales, the animated TV series, ran from 1987-1990 and spanned 100 episodes over either three or four seasons depending on how you want to slice it. The series centers on Scrooge McDuck, the richest duck in the world, and his three grandnephews Huey, Dewey, and Louis in their various adventures which often revolve around either obtaining more treasure or protecting his wealth from the bad guys. The series was the first Disney cartoon produced solely for syndication and that approach paved the way for other Disney daytime cartoon series to follow suit in the following years.

DuckTales on NES, however, was not the first Disney property to appear on the console. That honor belongs to Mickey Mousecapade. Capcom published Mickey Mousecapade but the game was actually developed by Hudson. Starting with DuckTales, Capcom developed the rest of their Disney-published games themselves, and all of these titles are widely recognized as fun games for the console. Many members of the team that created Mega Man would go on to work on DuckTales.

DuckTales is a side-scrolling platformer game where you take on the role of Scrooge McDuck as he goes off on a worldwide (and briefly interstellar) treasure hunt. The main feature of the game is Scrooge’s cane which is primarily used as a pogo stick. Holding down and B while in the air deploys the pogo stick allowing Scrooge to bounce higher than a standard jump, defeat enemies, and traverse hazards that would damage Scrooge when touched directly. There are five levels to start with and each level can be chosen to play in almost any order. Each level is open ended and contains branching paths, hidden secrets, and a boss fight at the end. The object of the game is to complete the levels while amassing as much treasure as you can find.

Let’s look at each level in a bit more detail:

The Amazon: This is a pretty straightforward level. Cross through the jungle, optionally go underground, and then climb up through some ruins. The middle portion of the level can be bothersome as there are bees that fly in a sine wave that spawn where they are likely to knock you right into a pit. Toward the end of the level there is a requirement to pay money to spawn a platform needed to proceed, but if you are an intrepid adventurer you can skip it without needing to pay, as I did when I played!

Transylvania: This is the most maze-like level in the game. There are a few branching paths as well as mirrors that teleport you around the level. There is also a hint that points out an “illusion” wall, and all that means is there is a fake wall you can walk through to proceed forward. There is also a mine-cart section hidden away in this level where you just ride along and jump out right before you hurdle into a pit!

African Mines: The first time you enter this level you get booted out pretty quickly because you need a key from Transylvania to proceed, so the game sends you back there to search out the key. Once you get that, you’ll find a level that is mostly linear. Hidden in this level is one of two hidden treasures that really boosts Scrooge’s money count, and there is also a huge shortcut that will allow you to skip most of the stage. Otherwise, there are a couple of tricky portions you will have to contend with.

Himalayas: This level starts out above ground under complete snow cover and if you try to pogo into the snow you will briefly get stuck. Pretty clever! The middle part of the level takes place underground with lots of spiders that zip down to hit you when you attempt to pass. This level has a lot of places where you could fall and die which makes this level a bit more difficult than the rest.

The Moon: This level starts off on the surface and there is an alien spaceship that you must explore to find a couple of items that more or less amount to keys needed to reach the ending stretch. Okay, one of the items is literally a key, and the other is a remote control. It’s more interesting than I’m making it out to be. I would be completely remiss if I didn’t mention the iconic music track that plays throughout the stage. This song always seems to come up in any discussion around the best NES music and I can’t argue with that as it’s one of my favorite game tunes as well. I particularly like this arrangement of the song!

When all five stages are finished, the last stage opens up which unfortunately is yet another trip to Transylvania with a different boss at the end. This is the biggest letdown in the game but it’s really the only glaring negative thing about it either.

I have to admit that I have never really watched DuckTales much on TV and I also do not have much history with the game either. This is one of those games that I was aware of but never owned and I didn’t bother going out of my way to get it. When I really started collecting NES again for good, DuckTales may have been the most significant omission in my collection at that time considering the quality and recognition of the game as well as the relatively cheap price. I ended up buying my copy at my local game store for $10 which was a price I couldn’t pass up. The game would later come up as part of the Nintendo Age weekly contest that I participate in and that’s when I really spent some time getting acquainted with the game.

Even though I haven’t played that much of DuckTales compared to the other games I’ve played so far, I do have a personal story about it. Back in 2009, my best friend lived a few hours away and I would go up with some friends to spend the weekend at his duplex every now and then. One of the activities we came up with was racing random NES games on our laptops to see who could beat the game the fastest. We did this maybe three or four times and one of the games we did was DuckTales. From what I remember I won every race we did except for DuckTales. I chalk that up to my inexperience with the game relative to my friends. I think now I could perform way better!

At this point DuckTales is a pretty straightforward game for me, even on the Difficult setting. The only difference I see between difficulties are the types of item drops you get from the chests. The endings are not dependent on the difficulty settings anyway. The endings are determined by the amount of money you have at the end of the game and you need $10 million to achieve the best ending. I took my time and explored everything I could remember but I only ended up with $9.5 million. There is a bit of a trick to getting more money that I ignored. In most levels you can find Launchpad and if you talk to him you have the option of leaving the level to choose a different stage. If you do that, you get to keep all the treasure you found and the level resets completely so that next time you can collect all of the money again. Doing this at every opportunity makes it easy to reach the $10 million mark.

So, back to the drawing board. My second attempt went much smoother but it ultimately ended in disaster. I fell victim to an undocumented feature. Huh? It’s not listed in the manual but there is a way to refill your health in case it is running low. When the game is paused, pressing Select refills your health but it costs $3 million. I accidentally pressed Select when trying to unpause the game and I spent that precious money. I was on The Moon which was the 5th level I was playing and I had no opportunity to grind out enough money after that to eclipse the $10 million mark. Another attempt gone to waste!

My third attempt was more or less the ideal run. There are some other ways to squeeze even more money out of a run, but I ended up with more than enough money to get the best ending. I was feeling pretty good so I decided just for fun to make one attempt at getting the bad ending. Yes, DuckTales has a bad ending and it is quite difficult to pull off. You need to finish the game with no money at all. This seems impossible since beating each boss gives you an unskippable treasure that adds $1 million to your score. However, with some creative money collecting and spending all of it on health refills, the game can be finished with Scrooge completely broke. Now the typical way to do it is to not grab any money at all except for the boss treasures and one of the two large hidden treasures. That leaves Scrooge with $6 million that can be spent on two health refills. The downside is that each level needs to be played perfectly and each level must end with less than 10 seconds remaining on the clock because every 10 seconds turns into $1000 at the end of the stage. With that method there is perfect playing combined with a lot of waiting, so I chose a different strategy. I played the game normally and had my money set up to be close to $6 million right before the boss of the last regular stage. From there I would time the treasure grab after the boss is defeated so that I would end with the exact amount I need. I had it all set up and it would have worked out, except that I died at The Moon boss on my last life. I guess I should have paid more attention to grabbing extra lives along the way!

DuckTales was remade in 2013 by Wayforward as DuckTales Remastered. Now I have no experience with the remake at all, but it came out on a bunch of platforms and I’m sure I will spend some time with eventually. I bring it up because it has an interesting tie back to the NES. Capcom sent out some promotional material for the release of DuckTales Remastered consisting of a lunchbox with promotional paperwork inside along with a gold DuckTales NES cartridge. It’s not just some kind of showpiece but rather an actual working copy of the game. There were only 150 made so they are hard to come by and expensive, and it makes for some interesting discussion among NES collectors whether or not this game is an official release.

DuckTales on NES is really a charming, fun game that looks to be relevant to the source material. It was a great cartoon series and an equally great game. It is also coming back to relevancy. Not only did it receive a recent remake, but also there is a new DuckTales animated series in production slated for a debut sometime in 2017. I suppose the saying is true that everyday they’re out there making DuckTales!

With DuckTales completed, I have now finished the first ten games of Take On The NES Library! Hooray! Now the real fun will begin as the project shifts from games I specifically chose to games that are chosen at random. If you want to know more about how I designed my master list, check out my Methodology page that explains the overall selection in far too great of detail. My list has been set for many months but by now I have mostly forgotten where certain games reside in the list. I’m excited to start jumping into the unknown. The blog posts may take a different tone for games I haven’t played. This is always a work in progress and I hope you’ll stick around to see where we go from here!

Curl up on the couch and get rolling with the game that launched an entire sub-genre.

To Beat: Reach the ending credits
To Complete: Get the best ending
My Goal: Beat the game with 100% completion and/or get the best ending
What I Did: Beat the game just short of 100% completion and beat the game with the best ending
Played: 1/4/16 – 1/13/16
Difficulty: 6/10
My Difficulty: 4/10

Metroid is yet another classic game franchise that launched on the NES, but it wouldn’t have made waves if it weren’t for the trailblazers Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda ahead of it. Take the side scrolling style of Mario and pair it with the exploration and character development of Zelda and you pretty much have the recipe for Metroid. This style of gameplay has been iterated on many times over the years and is still quite popular today in large part due to the indie games’ sea of Metroid clones — many of which are excellent games in their own right. It may be unfair to refer to modern takes on the formula as a clone, but they certainly owe their heritage to this NES classic.

Metroid was developed by Nintendo, specifically the R&D1 division, and Intelligent Systems. Generally speaking, R&D1 was responsible for creating more experimental games. The R&D4 division, later known as EAD and which had famous director Shigeru Miyamoto as a team member, was responsible for more mainstream popular titles. Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda were developed by R&D4 and I am sure R&D1 decided somewhere along the way to merge these two styles into one game.

The NES Metroid was just the start to what has been one of Nintendo’s marquee game franchises. Metroid II: Return of Samus would curiously appear on Game Boy instead of a home console. It’s a bit of a strange game but it would introduce some key elements to the series such as the spazer and plasma beam weapons. The series would come back to console form in Super Metroid on SNES, which is lauded as one of the best games ever made and my personal favorite game of all time. The series would go stagnant for eight years before having two new titles released in the same year: Metroid Fusion on GBA and Metroid Prime on Gamecube. Metroid Prime eventually became a trilogy spanning Gamecube and Wii, and the NES Metroid was remade as Metroid Zero Mission on GBA. A few spinoffs later, unfortunately, Metroid: Other M on Wii was a very divisive title among fans and now the series is back into a drought again. The foundation is strong so hopefully the series will find a way to make a triumphant return once more.

Metroid, as eluded to above, is a side-scrolling action game with a heavy focus on exploration and discovery. You play as Samus Aran, a bounty hunter set with the task of retrieving stolen Metroid organisms before they are reproduced and used as bioweapons by the Space Pirates who stole them. Samus starts off with only a short range pea-shooter but she can pick up several upgrades that give her new capabilities to explore the planet Zebes. The very first ability named Maru Mari or Morphing Ball is found just to the left of the starting screen and is needed to navigate through short passages that Samus is unable to squeeze into without it. This was contrary to typical early platformer games that primarily focus on left-to-right progression and this simple item placement emphasizes the need for exploration right away. Just as in The Legend of Zelda, nearly all the upgrades enhance Samus offensively while simultaneously doubling as tools used to progress further into the game world. For instance, bombs give Samus an attack in ball form but also break blocks that uncover secret passages to new areas. Missiles give Samus a more powerful long-range attack but also unlock doors to item rooms. By virtue of exploration and progress, Samus becomes a one-woman wrecking crew capable of handling any challenge the game throws at her. The goal of the game is to destroy Mother Brain, the core of the Space Pirate lair. To reach Mother Brain, Samus must first find and destroy two Space Pirate bosses named Kraid and Ridley. Each boss has his own lair hidden within Zebes. Samus must explore not only to find them and defeat them, but power up enough to have enough weaponry to beat them in a straight fight. Once both are defeated the path to Mother Brain is open. After penetrating the defenses and destroying Mother Brain, Samus will make her escape quickly before the base self destructs.

Metroid is a game that I have played many times over the years and I have had the cart in my collection for a very long time. My original cart has a lot of character, and by that I mean it has the label half torn off. We got it second hand and it was that way when we got it. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I got a double in much better shape. Like Punch-Out!! before it, Metroid was also re-released with an alternate yellow label that is harder to come across than the standard gray label. I have both but the yellow label version was tricky to come by without paying full price for it online.

As far as the game goes, it doesn’t have a particularly large map by today’s standards but the game seems so much bigger than it actually is due to the lack of in-game map that would become standard after Super Metroid. I have a general idea of where the main items are, but it is still pretty easy to get lost in the depths of the world trying to hit every nook and cranny for missile upgrades. I decided to take it slow and explore everything trying to find every item for 100% completion. Doing it this way gives Samus a lot more health and missiles which make the rest of the game easier as well. The game did not give me much trouble, but when it was all said and done I came up a whopping one missile pack short. I was sure I had explored everything, but I missed a side passage in Ridley’s lair that held the last missile expansion. I had to look it up after I completed the game for my sake. I didn’t get 100% as I was shooting for but I got close and it was a good enough run after having not played Metroid for many years.

Now, the Metroid story doesn’t end here! I happily went ahead playing the next game on my list while I was two blog posts behind. I soon started writing up Castlevania when conviction started to set in. Let me explain. I had just finished writing on why I did not complete hard mode in Castlevania in part due to there being no better ending or reward for finishing up hard mode. I re-read what I wrote and it hit me – Metroid has a best ending! Furthermore, it has nothing to do with item completion at all, but rather how long it takes to beat the game from start to finish. Getting the best ending in Metroid means I have to beat the game from scratch in under an hour. Now I had already finished what most reasonable people would think was good enough, but it bothered me and I didn’t want to have to explain myself again for skipping the best ending in the very next game I played! I decided if I got the time that I would take a stab at a speedrun and hope for the best. In my head I picked out a decent route that should get me close to the time I needed.

The next day, a fortuitous confluence of events happened at home that gave me a couple of free hours I could dedicate to gaming. This was one shot at attempting the best ending. I ended up making two attempts. During the first attempt about 10 minutes in I realized I skipped the ice beam when I really needed it and I didn’t want to waste time backtracking to get it. It turns out I could have doubled back a bit after picking up the high-jump boots and nabbed an alternate ice beam upgrade. I probably could have completed that run with a decent enough time but whatever.

I started over. The next run I picked up the ice beam in its normal spot and trudged forward. The first hang-up of this attempt was the Ridley fight. Ridley is ridiculously easy if you stand right next to him because he can’t move forward to run into you and his fireballs arc over your head so you can just fire away. However, he has one fireball pattern where that doesn’t work and that was the one I got. You can freeze the fireballs with the ice beam to give yourself an opening and with that technique I was able to win just barely. A little later I had all kinds of trouble with Kraid. I fought him with less health than I was used to and I ended up getting killed and had to retread through his lair. I picked up a backup energy tank for full health that I ended up spoiling on the way back to the boss. Kraid’s room has an energy tank hidden inside but it is risky to reach. I decided to go for broke and try to pick it up mid-fight and much to my surprise I was successful leading me to victory. The rest of the run was pretty smooth and I was fast enough to achieve the best ending for the first time! By my clock I beat the game in 50 minutes, and even if in-game time is kept differently I still made it under the threshold. It was fun trying a speedrun and I feel so much better about my outcome now!

Metroid was first released in Japan on the Famicom Disk System which featured additional sound channels for richer sound as well as a save system instead of the password feature on the NES cart. The Legend of Zelda was released in the US around the same time but for that game Nintendo opted to implement the save battery system, while Metroid made the switch to passwords. It’s a curious outcome that I don’t fully understand since the developers had to spend extra work coding in the password system for the NES release. After finishing up Metroid, the same development team would go right into making Kid Icarus. I won’t be covering that game for awhile but it has quite a few similarities to Metroid. Both games share the password system, they both have exploration segments, they both have long stretches of vertical areas, and so on. I have heard that both games run on the same game engine but I wasn’t able to find any hard proof of that, though with the similarities it seems likely.

For as iconic as the Metroid series is, the first installment has not aged particularly well. Many of the map screens are repeated over and over creating large expanses of dull, tedious design. It’s difficult to gauge progress with no in-game map. The passwords are long and difficult to get right as some pairs of characters in the passwords are very similar. The series would go on to fix all of these problems and deliver some of the best games ever made, and it’s easy to forget that a game of this scope and scale had never really been done before. The core design of Samus and her arsenal was so well done right from the start that nearly all of these upgrades continue to be part of her progression, and this alone is the main reason why Metroid is such a great game in spite of its flaws.

Pick up your sword, young man, it’s time for adventure!

To Beat: Reach the end credits
To Complete: Beat both quests
My Goal: Complete the game with all items
What I Did: Completed the game with all items (11 deaths)
Played: 12/21/15 – 12/31/15
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 3/10

The back of the NES box has the written line “Experience the Challenge of Endless Adventure.” While this game certainly has an ending, the Legend of Zelda series as a whole has no end in sight. Dozens of adventures and spinoffs have been created as a result of the success from this classic NES title. The original title is one of the first great examples of an “open world” style of gameplay and it also launched a formula of game design that is still revered and refined upon today.

The Legend of Zelda is the brainchild of Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka and was developed alongside Super Mario Bros. Their aim was to make a game that was different from the linear Super Mario Bros, and so The Legend of Zelda took the opposite approach as an exploratory, open world game. The game was inspired by Miyamoto and his memories of exploring the fields, woods, and caves near his home, and all of these elements are present in the world of Hyrule. The game was released in 1986 as a launch title for the Famicom Disk System in Japan, which had higher game data storage compared to Famicom carts of the time and the capability to save progress directly to the disk instead of utilizing complex passwords, thus making for a large complex game compared to other console games. The Legend of Zelda was released on the NES in 1987 in a unique gold colored cartridge and was the first NES game to feature battery backed saving. The game’s popularity in the US was just as big as its reception in Japan, paving the way for the series to continue to the present day.

The Legend of Zelda is a top-down action-adventure game featuring Link in his quest to recover the eight pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom and banish the evil Ganon from the land of Hyrule in order to save the princess Zelda. The game features a large overworld map that players must explore to find treasures and items to aid in the quest, as well as discovering the nine underground dungeons that Link must clear along the way. Link begins the quest with a simple wooden sword (if you remember to pick it up on the first screen!) for short ranged attacking and Link augments this with other weapons and items to add to his arsenal. Several of the weapons double as tools that help Link explore more effectively. For example, Link finds bombs that can be used to hurt bunches of enemies, but these bombs can also reveal hidden alcoves in the overworld and destroy walls in the dungeons. Each underworld dungeon contains one or more of these items and often these are required to either find or navigate later dungeons, which provides a sense of progression but also makes Link much more versatile for the challenges ahead. Once the first eight dungeons are cleared, the ninth dungeon is opened up for Link to take Ganon head-on. After the game is completed and Zelda is saved, a second quest is revealed that is quite a bit more difficult. The locations of the dungeons and other rooms are rearranged and the dungeons are completely different. The game also introduces a few new mechanics that are unique to the second quest. I won’t spoil them here except for one in the next paragraph. 🙂

The Legend of Zelda was a game that I owned new when I was a kid. I think I got it for either my 7th or 8th birthday. I don’t remember much about playing it way back then but I do remember poring over guides to learn where all the pverworld secrets were located, and those memories have carried over to my current playthrough. Back then, those tips helped me out a lot but took away my opportunity to try and figure things out fully for myself. Even with Link at full strength the game isn’t all that easy, however. I do remember figuring out one particular secret in the second quest all by myself that I didn’t see in a guide. One of the new mechanics in the second quest is the ability for Link to walk through certain solid walls in the dungeons. The first time it is needed in the game, I deduced that there must be one path to get into a specific room but bombing the wall did nothing, so out of frustration I just charged in and lo and behold I passed right through to the next room. Well, that blew my young mind that’s for sure!

To truly finish The Legend of Zelda, both quests should be completed and so that was my intention from the very beginning. It took me some time playing in small chunks over a couple of weeks but I was able to complete everything from memory without a whole lot of trouble. Between both quests, I died a total of 11 times which is reflected in the ending screen. I’m not sure what my lowest death count is but it is probably in the single digits. In this case, it should have been that low because I had some really pointless deaths. For fun, I took note of each death and I’ll summarize them here:

• Three deaths during early game overworld grinding. These were the most pointless deaths of all. The overworld can be dangerous at times but I have enough experience and capability early on to handle all that with relative ease. Really I died because I was playing late at night and was so tired that I kept nodding off during the game! This is not a reflection on the quality of the game in any way, shape, or form. It just shows that I can fall asleep during just about anything. Not many people can say they fall asleep in the middle of playing a video game so I guess I have that going for me!


Also comes in three-headed and four-headed varieties.

• Two deaths in Level 6. This is the first dungeon to introduce Wizrobes which are the most difficult enemy for me to handle, specifically the blue ones. They fire magic across the screen if they have line of sight to Link, they can faze through solid blocks, and they change direction randomly at will. I believe the only way to damage them is with either the sword or bombs which both require close range, making them risky to attack, and there are always multiple of them when they show up in rooms. These deaths could have been prevented though because I could easily have utilized the healing potion but I didn’t bother to buy it until my third attempt through the dungeon.


I’m telling you, these blue guys are just awful.

• Two deaths during Level 1 Second Quest. These deaths were legit as it is tough to clear this dungeon just starting out. The blue ring (cuts damage in half) would help here immensely but it is equally difficult to farm enough money up front to afford it.
• Two deaths in overworld grinding in the second quest. After dying twice in Level 1 I decided to buy the blue ring before taking on Level 2, but with low starting health and the time it takes to farm money death will happen.


Hmmm what a suspicious bush!

• One death in Level 6 Second Quest. Another Wizrobe death here plus I ran out of potion before making it back out to get more. I could have done better but I could have done much worse.
• One death in Level 9 Second Quest. Same as the death above. I don’t know the second quest dungeons nearly as well as I do the first quest dungeons so I was doing a little bit too much wandering and risking death in the process. The fun thing about this dungeon was that I completed it during a New Year’s Eve party at my house. I didn’t want to get too wrapped up in some board gaming while hosting the party so when several people started a game I decided to play in the background and see if I could beat the game before the end of the year, which I did. My friends were getting into it so it was worth it!


PATRA HAS THE MAP

The Legend of Zelda has a lot of little interesting tidbits that are known to various degrees, but there is one that I find quite interesting. The dungeons maps have a variety of shapes but they were all designed in a way that they could all fit together like a puzzle. Internally to the game code, they are laid out in a large square similarly to how the overworld is laid out but they are chopped up to make the dungeons themselves have a more interesting shape. The designer, Tezuka, was so good at piecing the dungeons together he only utilized half the space he was given, so the team decided to utilize the other half of the dungeon space to make the Second Quest. The story of this was covered in a session of Iwata Asks, and also this article has some neat images showing how the dungeon maps are stored.

The Legend of Zelda may have left the framework for future Zelda titles to follow, but the first NES entry has an identity all of its own. Future Zelda titles would evolve the formula by making the complex dungeons the real centerpiece of the experience, but by doing so the dungeon order is mostly locked down to guide the player along the desired upgrade path. Aside from a few dependencies, the player can work out the game on his own and take on the challenges out of order, so to speak. It is an approach to game design that is largely abandoned in modern gaming, but it gives the first NES game a distinct flavor and it is very much worth playing today.

Pack ’em tight and clear ’em out in the most famous puzzle game of all time.

To Beat: Set the high score in A-Type and finish Level 9 Height 5 in B-Type
To Complete: Score at least 120,000 in A-Type for the best ending and finish all combinations in B-Type
My Goal: Complete the game while scoring at least 250,000 in A-Type
What I Did: Completed the game and scored 288,320 in A-Type
Played: 12/9/15 – 12/14/15
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 2/10

I am reasonably confident in saying that most people that have ever played at least one video game have played Tetris. When people think of a puzzle video game Tetris is nearly always the first one that comes to mind. It’s the perfect example of a game that is simple to pick up and understand but that is tough to truly master, and it’s that accessibility that makes Tetris one of the best games ever conceived.

Tetris has a very long and complicated history and I can’t properly do it justice, so I’ll view it here from a very high level. Tetris was created by Alexey Pajitnov while he was working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He made it just as a fun little game to test out the capabilities of new computer hardware and it became popular with his colleagues at work. A couple of co-workers ported the game to PC and it exploded in popularity almost from the start. The game was picked up and ported all over the place unoffically. The rights to the game were eventually given to the Soviet government for 10 years and during this time Nintendo was able to license Tetris and make versions for both the Game Boy and NES.

The other interesting bit of history of Tetris on NES is the legal dispute between Nintendo and Tengen. Atari Games had the license to make the arcade game while Nintendo held the licenses for their home consoles and handhelds. Tengen comes into play because they are the division of Atari Games responsible for home console games. Already holding the arcade license, they also decided to apply for a console license and went ahead and developed and released their version of Tetris on NES. Nintendo caught wind of this and argued that they held the rights instead. Atari Games sued, they went to court, and Nintendo was awarded rights by the courts. This forced Tengen Tetris off of store shelves after only four weeks. As I have read, in the early days of NES collecting Tengen Tetris was considered to be one of the rarest if not the rarest NES release. This has proven false as there are quite a number of copies out there for sale even though Tengen Tetris is uncommon and a bit on the pricey side these days.

So for those of you living under a rock, I will explain how Tetris is played. Tetris is a puzzle game where blocks made up of four tiles each fall from the top of the playfield. The player has control of the falling block and can rotate and shift the block and set it into place at the bottom of the playfield where it is locked down permanently. Whenever complete rows are put together on the board they are removed and the rest of hte stack is shifted down to make room for more blocks. The blocks are called tetrominoes because they consist of four small tiles, and there are seven types of blocks tetrominoes that cover all possible arrangements of those four individual tiles. The game ends when the playfield fills up and the new block is obstructed from entering play. The speed of the falling blocks increase as more lines are cleared and eventually the speed becomes too much to handle for all but the most advanced players. The falling speed is also tied to how many points are awarded from clearing lines and also you get more points for clearing multiple lines at once, so Tetris is just as much a scoring challenge as it is a survival challenge.

This version of the game contains two different modes called A-Type and B-Type. A-Type is exactly as described above. You choose a starting speed and plays until the stack fills up. There are a number of fun ending sequences with a rocket liftoff that play out depending on the final score. B-Type is a race to complete 25 lines. You not only set the starting speed but you can set the height of a set of junk blocks that are initialized on the board. The height can be set to 0 however removing all the junk blocks from the start. Removing 25 lines results in another set of fun ending sequence where different things fly or run across the screen depending on the speed level, and the higher the starting height the more of them show up. They don’t really add much to the game but they are neat to look at.

I’m pretty sure I still have the copy of Tetris that my parents bought for their NES. We had maybe a dozen games by that point but of course Tetris fever hit and it got a lot of play in our house. I remember having a high score sheet taped up somewhere in the house tracking our personal high scores and seeing who had the best score in the family. I seem to remember having the highest score but both my Mom and Dad got pretty good at it too.

For my run, I first played all of B-Type and decided to win all 60 combinations of speed level and height in order. With 25 lines each that’s 1500 lines so that took me awhile. I chipped away at it over the course of several days. I didn’t really have any trouble. Some of the levels at the end took a couple of tries each before I had a good enough layout to win and I even beat Level 9 Height 5 on my first try. After that I was ready to take on A-Type with a pretty lofty goal of scoring 250,000 points while starting from Level 0. This is over twice the number of points required to get the best ending sequence, and I would have been okay if after a few tries I made it reasonably close to my goal. As it turns out, I beat my goal score on my very first try. I got all the way to Level 19 where I think the game drops pieces one space every two frames or something crazy quick like that. At that speed I can’t recover from any mistakes and that’s where it all ended. I am really happy with how things unfolded and I’m satisfied to put Tetris to rest for awhile.

Last year I read an article called Applying Artificial Intelligence to Nintendo Tetris which is a highly technical but fascinating look at not only the design of an AI bot that plays perfect Tetris but also the inner workings of how the NES version of the game operates. One very interesting tidbit I gleaned from this article is that this version of the game contains a hidden, working 2-player mode that was left in the game code but is incomplete. Multiplayer is the one significant feature missing in Nintendo’s version of Tetris compared to Tengen’s game, so it is both neat to see that Nintendo was working on 2-player and also disappointing that it wasn’t finished.

This is not related to the NES version, but high level Tetris play is mind-boggling to watch. There are a series of arcade games released in Japan called Tetris: The Grand Master that feature rating systems and a complex set of requirements to reach the highest rank of Grand Master. There are three installments with a fourth on the way, and each successive game has stricter requirements to reach Grand Master rank. To get an idea of how ridiculous this is, the 3rd game was released in 2005 and as of this writing in 2015 there are only 6 people in the world to achieve Grand Master status in that game. One of the craziest gimmicks in this series is during the credits roll where the player must survive a new game while the playfield is invisible while visible blocks continue to fall at high speed. I saw a successful demonstration during Awesome Games Done Quick and there are hardly any words to describe how insane it is to see it done. Here is an article on the latest player to achieve Grand Master rating in Tetris: The Grand Master 3.

Update 5/27/16: It was brought to my attention that I completely omitted any reference to the documentary Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters. Released in 2011, it covers the search for the world’s greatest Tetris players to compete against each other in the 2010 Tetris World Championship. Now, I can’t do the film any justice since I haven’t seen it for myself, but I know I definitely need to make the time to watch players that are way better than I will ever be.

Update 5/27/16: I wanted to draw attention to my relatively low difficulty ranking I gave to Tetris. That score is based solely on the parameters I chose for beating the game, which is relatively simple to do. It requires some practice on B-Type 9-5 but there is the opportunity to play so many games in a row since each run can be very short. Some people have argued for much more strict parameters to consider the game beaten, such as maxing out the score or reaching Level 29 where the speed can’t go any higher. If that’s the condition for beating Tetris, then that is an easy choice for 10/10 difficulty as there are only a small handful of people in the world that have dedicated themselves to accomplishing that feat. Another thing I overlooked is that the Tetris manual outlines the method for choosing Levels 10-19 from the menu, and it’s not much of a stretch from there to suggest that it is necessary to beat B-Type 19-5 as well. I am perfectly fine with taking the easy way out in this case!

Tetris is probably most well known as the game to launch as a pack-in with the Game Boy, and the two paired together so perfectly. The NES version of the game is still a great game on the NES and a solid port of the ubiquitous classic puzzler.

One of the true gems of the NES library, Kirby’s Adventure is a satisfying journey for all ages.

To Beat: Reach the ending credits
To Complete: Beat the game with 100% completion and complete all bonus modes
My Goal: Complete the game without finishing bonus games
What I Did: Complete the game without finishing bonus games
Played: 12/4/15 – 12/6/15
Difficulty: 2/10
My Difficulty: 2/10

In 1993, the NES heyday was over and the system was slowly dwindling away in the public eye as the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo were busy duking it out for the top spot. However, Nintendo still had a few tricks up their sleeves for the NES and arguably the greatest game published by them in the late NES lifespan was Kirby’s Adventure, a sprawling, bright, and colorful platformer that pushed the NES to its limits. The game is great fun and very playable today even if it is a bit on the easy side.

Kirby’s Adventure is the second game in the Kirby series that would eventually go on to span dozens of fun and creative games. But in it’s humble beginnings, the series debuted with Kirby’s Dream Land released on the Game Boy in 1992. Even in the original, Kirby has a very interesting moveset. His main feature is the ability to suck up enemies temporarily and shoot them back out as a star to defeat other enemies. Kirby can also inhale air giving him the ability to fly anywhere, and even the air puff he breaths out can also hurt enemies. As a platformer, the ability of flight renders pits as vaguely minor threats instead of the instant death traps they are typically. In addition, the original game was very short containing only 5 levels, the last of which rehashes the previous 4 bosses and features a final showdown with King Dedede.

Kirby’s Adventure takes the base formula of the original and expands on it in an substantial way. The main enhancement here is that Kirby can swallow certain enemies and copy their abilities to use for himself, which would become the core tenet of the series. Kirby’s Adventure features 25 unique abilities in total and he can use these abilities to take out enemies and in some cases provide some additional mobility for navigating the levels. Some examples of these abilities include Fire which allows Kirby to blow fire on his enemies, Spark which surrounds Kirby with electric shocks, and Wheel which lets Kirby travel really quickly over rough terrain.

The game features seven different worlds and nearly 40 levels so there is a much larger amount of content here compared to the Game Boy game. Each world is basically a large room containing doors to the levels as well as access to additional bonuses opened up along the way, and each world ends in a boss fight. Each level ends with a little bonus game where Kirby must time his jump off a spring-loaded platform to reach bonuses that get better the higher you go. Some levels contain a large button that Kirby can hit to open up a new path to some of these extras, but these are optional and are there either for the completionist or some extra help. Many of them are cleverly hidden in alternate paths or behind hidden doors, and some require using a specific copy ability.

The extra doors on the world maps hold several different types of rooms to aid Kirby in his quest. Museums feature either one or two passive enemies that Kirby can swallow to gain the ability that enemy holds. Arenas contain a fight with one of the mini-boss enemies. You can lose a life here but if you win you can swallow the enemy to get the power and as a bonus you are awarded with a maximum tomato for full health. Warp Star Stations allow Kirby to skip to any world where the Warp Star Station is revealed, allowing Kirby to skip around the map much easier. There are also three types of bonus games. Crane Fever is just like the carnival game where you have to position a crane over a Kirby figure that awards extra lives if you can grab it properly. Egg Catcher features King Dedede tossing out a stream of both eggs and bombs. Kirby just sits there and can only open and close his mouth. The idea is to eat eggs and ignore bombs, letting them bounce of Kirby without effect. Quick Draw is just like the old Western showdown where you must draw your weapon quicker than your opponent to win and Kirby must take on 5 different opponents to get the best reward. Each of the bonus games also has three different difficulty levels. Whenever the game is done, the door is blocked off so each bonus can only be attempted once.

Kirby’s Adventure is one of the games I grew up owning and playing, so I can get through it easily and I didn’t really have that much trouble on my run. The game is pretty easy anyway considering Kirby’s flight ability, his large health bar, many opportunities for extra lives, and his wide array of powers. There are only a few spots that are just a bit tricky. The boss encounters can be difficult the first time through, and many of the secrets for 100% completion are tough to find, but just playing through the game to the end credits shouldn’t pose a problem for anyone familiar with NES games.

The game has a decent length from start to finish so I am thankful it has a save battery for recording progress along the way because this is the first game I’ve played for Take On The NES Library that took me longer than one day to work through. I am sure this will be the norm going forward! I was able to beat the game over the course of three days, and it could have been done in two but I stopped right at the end because I needed to go to bed. 🙂

Once the game is beaten, there are additional options available on the file select screen that aren’t required to beat the game but are necessary if you want to do everything. Each of the three bonus games can be played on each of the difficulty levels to get practice. Both Quick Draw and Egg Catcher are very timing sensitive and I find them unplayable on my LCD TV. I probably should have given them a try on my CRT but I didn’t bother to do it. I have always had trouble on Quick Draw and I’m inclined to believe that it isn’t possible to win on higher difficulties without cheating a little on the timing of your shot. I didn’t feel like trying to grind it out on what would be strictly luck and I think that’s fine.

The next additional option is Vs. Boss — a boss rush where you must defeat each of the main bosses in order on one life without any opportunity to heal up. This might be the hardest mode to clear in the game and I handled it extremely well, beating it on my first try. I only took two hits of damage on the Meta Knight fight and I have never been able to beat him without taking a hit anyway so that worked out well.

There is another option that only appears if you find all the hidden rooms for 100% completion in the main game and that is the Extra Game. It is a complete replay of Kirby’s Adventure with only three bars of max health instead of the normal six, all the bonus games are set to max difficulty, and there is no saving at all so you have to beat it all in one shot. Those are the only changes to the game that I noticed. I would not normally have had the time to attempt the Extra Game but I was able to have an evening of a couple hours of uninterrupted playtime, plus I stayed up a little bit late so I could make it all the way through. The hardest part for me on the Extra Game was the Meta Knight fight which took me 8-10 tries to make it through with the shortened health bar. I have the game almost completely figured out except for that one fight, but at least in this case I was able to grind my way through it with the surplus of extra lives I gathered. Winning the Extra Game unlocks the sound test so you can check out all the sweet songs and sound effects the game has to offer.

A neat little easter egg hidden in the game is called the HAL room. All it is is a room with the developer’s name HAL written out in blocks. Several Kirby games have a room like this hidden in the game and Kirby’s Adventure is the first game to have one of these rooms. It appears in World 1 Stage 2 just beyond the warp star that appears at the end of the first part of the level. Normally you must touch the star to jump to the rest of the stage and the screen quits scrolling at this point to indicate that you have to grab the star to move forward, but there is a way to get the warp star to disappear allowing Kirby to move further on to the HAL room. I tried getting into this room myself when I played the Extra Game but I wasn’t able to trigger it, but maybe someday I’ll find it out for myself!

Even if the game is on the easy side it is still worth playing just to see all the neat things the development team was able to stretch out of the NES. Figuring out all the bonus areas isn’t exactly a walk in the park either so there is something here for everyone. If Kirby’s Adventure can be considered a sendoff to the NES, then it was quite a way to bow out. You could even call it’s a shooting star, burning bright, although this star never really fades away.