More like the Temple of Pain, Suffering, and Doom.

The top title text is usually cut off on old TVs

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 7/5/18 – 7/12/18
Difficulty: 9/10
My Difficulty: 9/10
My Video: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Longplay

I’m here to talk about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on NES, but what I really want to talk about is La-Mulana. I’ve long thought the game La-Mulana is secretly the best Indiana Jones game, or at least the best interpretation of that concept. In La-Mulana, you play as the archaeologist Lemeza as you seek to follow your father’s footsteps in exploring and discovering the secrets of the ruins of La-Mulana. It’s a Metroidvania game with a huge emphasis on solving complex, intricate puzzles spelled out through cryptic textual monuments. You really need a pencil and notebook as you gather clues and piece them together throughout the journey, while also collecting various artifacts, battling huge bosses, and avoiding constant death traps. This is not a game for everyone, but I fell hard for it and it is one of my favorite games, both the original freeware version styled like an MSX game, and the newer remake available on Steam and elsewhere. Actual Indiana Jones games seem to take a safer stance in terms of gameplay. There are several Indiana Jones games on the NES that are standard platformers. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, on the other hand, is less of a platformer and a lot closer to my La-Mulana-like ideal than I originally thought.

Indiana Jones is a well-loved film franchise. There have been four major films to date: Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, Temple of Doom in 1984, The Last Crusade in 1989, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008. A fifth movie is slated for production beginning in early 2019 with a tentative release date in 2021. A TV series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, ran from 1992-1993, and that series was followed by four made-for-TV movies between 1994 and 1996. There have been plenty of books, comics, video games, toys, and attractions revolving around Indiana Jones.

There are two video games based on Temple of Doom. The first was a 1985 arcade game that was later ported to various home computers. The NES game, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, was released in 1988. It was developed by Atari Games and published by Tengen. In December 1988, Temple of Doom was licensed by Mindscape, so that’s the version I played for the project. Both the unlicensed Tengen version and the licensed Mindscape version are identical games. This version was also ported to a few home computers.

Whip it, whip it good!

I have seen all of the Indiana Jones movies, but it’s been a few years and I don’t remember much of anything about Temple of Doom. From what I’ve read, the story and gameplay both follow the movie. You play as Indiana Jones who, along with his companions Willie and Short Round, reach the village of Mayapore. The Sankara Stones have been stolen and the children of the village have been captured by evil people from the Pankot Palace, led by the high priest Mola Ram and his Thuggee guards. The children have been forced to mine for the missing Sankara Stones, so Indy sweeps in to save the children and recover the stones. The game consists of twelve levels, or waves, that you need to beat to complete the game.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is an action game from what I’ll call a near top-down perspective. You use the D-pad to move in all directions. Indy is armed with his trusty whip that you wield with the A button. You can whip in all eight directions by holding the direction and pressing A. The B button is for jumping. A for jumping was a standard convention by now, but nope, it’s B. If you just press B, you will jump downward. If you want to jump in a different direction, hold the D-pad in that direction and then press B. The Start button pauses the game and brings up a status screen. Use the Select button to switch weapons. You hold Select and press either Up, Down, Left, or Right to switch between the four weapons in the game.

You will spend a lot of time in this game saving children. They appear within holes along the cave walls. Simple walk or jump up to them to save them. You will earn some points and they often will leave weapons behind that you collect. Usually, they drop either a gun or a sword. These are limited use weapons that have secondary functions. In the first room of Wave 1, you can use the sword right away. There are small tunnels boarded off by wooden planks. If you slash them with the sword, they will reveal TNT to collect. These are your base weapons in the game that you switch between with Select. Left is for the gun, Right for the sword, Up for TNT, and Down to go back to your whip.

I’m coming to save you! (For equipment and points)

There is limited information on-screen during play. There is a countdown timer at the top of the screen that counts down from 99. The timer speed varies depending on the level. If it goes down to 0, Mola Ram appears, which causes you to lose a life and you have to start the wave over. Below the timer is an icon for the current weapon equipped if it’s something other than the whip. When you switch weapons, you briefly see the ammo count next to Indy. The Status screen when pausing the game gives you a lot more information. You are shown your current score and lives remaining. Below that are all your weapons and ammo accumulated. You also see any special items you’ve collected. Next are the number of children remaining in the wave and how many map pieces are remaining in the game.

There are other items to collect from the children. Some children have map pieces that you hold onto until a later event in the game. An arrow may be left behind. You can pick this up for points, but it’s main purpose is to point the way toward a warp room. Small jewels restore your level timer. Hats are extra lives, and they play a familiar tune when you earn a new life. The key opens the locked door to the next wave.

Most waves in the game follow a similar pattern. Each wave has two rooms. One is a cave room, and the other is a mine cart room. You can switch freely between the two rooms within a wave. The cave rooms have open doors that lead to the mine cart room, and the mine cart tracks may end in tunnels that lead back to the cave room. Each room has a locked door leading to the next wave. To open the locked door, you first obtain the key from the opposite room. The key in the cave room opens the locked door in the mine cart room, and vice versa. Each room has its own key so it is up to you how you want to approach clearing each wave.

Come along for a ride.

The movement mechanics allow for some complex scenarios that the game takes full advantage of. The rooms start getting really large within just a few waves. They also loop around in all directions, which makes them seem even bigger than they really are. Sticking to the main paths will not get you very far, especially in the mine cart rooms. You are going to have to leap from ledge to ledge to explore every nook and cranny of the rooms. Jump while holding Up to jump on the same ledge you are standing on. Otherwise, you fall through all solid objects until you reach a walkable area. The mine cart rooms have a bunch of disconnected conveyor belts so you need to jump to get around those for sure. You also must contend with lava rivers all over these rooms too. Falling onto a lava tile is instant death, so you have to be smart and not just jump all willy-nilly through the rooms.

The mine carts add some additional movement options within those rooms. First, you must jump onto the mine cart to climb in. Then you get to ride around! Carts move from left to right and you can slow them down by pressing Left and speed them up by holding Right. Press Up to lean the cart to the left and Down to lean the cart to the right. Sometimes lava or something is obstructing part of the path and you can lean one way to get through. Be careful as other mine carts appear periodically and they can get in your way, causing you to crash and die if you collide. Tracks sometimes merge which also facilitates collisions. Getting the mine carts to appear in the first place can also be a hassle. Usually you need to scroll the screen horizontally to get one to appear from the left side. In later waves, enemies are in the carts and you need to whip them or defeat them some other way before entering.

The enemies in this game as a huge nuisance. They don’t typically kill you, rather they stun you. This pushes you somewhat and often forces you to fall to the ledge below. Those falls can drop you to your death or leave you vulnerable in other ways. The most common enemy is the Thuggee guard. You can kill them with other weapons or stun them with the whip. You can knock them into the lava for an easy kill. Once a guard is whipped, he becomes an attacker and will kill you outright with a hit. There are bats, rats, snakes, and spiders that move erratically and stun you. Retractable spikes and lava pools kill you. Some guards drop boulders in the mine cart rooms that kill you if they drop on you, but the rocks also provide the benefit of temporarily stopping the movement of conveyor belts.

Whipping guards into lava seems excessive.

Indy has his set of weapons to help out. Furthermore, all of them have secondary uses for moving around the levels. The whip is your primary weapon for stunning guards and killing minor enemies. You will find hooks on the walls that you can latch onto with your whip to swing over gaps. The gun does not actually fire bullets, but instead does instant damage to the first object within its line of sight. There are skulls on the wall that you can shoot with the gun to reveal hooks for swinging with your whip. Swords kill guards and enemies, while they are also used to open up blocked caves containing TNT. The TNT can be thrown in eight directions and leaves a blast that kills enemies. This explosion removes spikes and certain lava tiles that obstruct walkable paths. I found myself switching weapons all the time for each need as it appears.

Another use of the TNT is to reveal hidden rooms. In waves 1, 4, and 6, some children will hold arrows that point in the direction of a hidden room. When you think you’ve found the spot, bomb it to hopefully reveal the door. This takes you to a warp room, which is its own unique stage. Pass through any door in the warp room to advance to a future wave. Doors farther out in the warp room advance you further along in the game. As a bonus, you earn all the map pieces in a wave where you don’t rescue any children, including the waves you skip via warp. Waves without a warp room also have hidden doors revealing either a large cache of normal items or a special item.

The first eight waves all follow the two-room structure and get difficult fast. Wave 9, however, is where the game takes a turn into a devious direction. This wave contains only one room called the Chamber of Kali. Your goal is to reach the Statue of Kali and the three Sankara Stones at the top of the room. You have to forge a path across the lava river to get there. There are several locations where lava monsters appear randomly out of the lava. Hitting a monster with either the gun or TNT turns the monster to permanent stone and you can walk across. The idea is to find the area with the most lava monster activity so that eventually you will clear a path across. You are at the mercy of randomness as you wait for the monsters to line up properly. Once you get to the other side, retrieve the stones and then locate the exit door to Wave 10.

Building your own lava bridge is excruciating.

This is where the map pieces you have been collecting come into play. Before starting Wave 10, you are presented with a crude map of one of the rooms in the wave. There are 25 pieces of the map in all so you may see a partial map excluding sections at random representing map pieces you did not collect. The map shows skulls, doors, children, and an X indicating the exit door for the wave. This is the only time you see the map, so commit what you need to memory or make notes before proceeding.

Wave 10 consists of six large rooms with several doors connected to other rooms. Your task is to use the map to determine which room contains the exit and where the exit is positioned within the room. The exit door itself is hidden and must be revealed by TNT. Each room has four possible locations for the exit door, so there are 24 possible exits. When you find the exit door, you will not be allowed to exit the wave unless you are holding the three Sankara Stones. Unfortunately, if you die in Wave 10, you drop all the stones you are holding. Each room has three large skulls in it and these are where the stones are placed should you drop them. It would really behoove you to get all three stones back in your possession before moving to a different room. God help you if you drop stones in two or even three different rooms at once. All the while, you have to deal with lava pits, lava monsters, conveyor belts, swarming enemies, and all that good stuff. Without a doubt, this is one of the nastiest challenges I’ve experienced in this project to date.

If somehow you survive Wave 10, there are still two more waves to finish. These are more straightforward challenges, but you still need to hold all three stones to exit the wave and you must collect them from skulls if you die in the wave. These scenes are meant to follow the movie as you destroy the rope bridge and keep Mola Ram from escaping. The good thing is that you have unlimited continues throughout your entire journey. The bad thing is that once you get past Wave 9, you go back to Wave 9 when you continue. Still, it’s better than starting from scratch.

This just gets ridiculous.

This was my first time playing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I do remember that this game seemed awfully challenging when I tested out my carts, and I have heard that this is one of the most difficult games on the NES. This is an inexpensive game, but it’s not one I see a whole lot, either in licensed or unlicensed form. I think I owned the Tengen unlicensed version before I owned the licensed Mindscape version. Both versions cart only are worth around $8-$10.

I had what I consider an unusual path to completing this game. I struggled the first couple of times I tried. Wave 1 is really small, but after that, the rooms seem to increase in size drastically up through either Wave 5 or 6. There are several doors connecting each room together and I couldn’t keep track of where I was. I had a couple attempts where I gave up around the middle of the game, but it felt like I was on the brink of getting the hang of this game. One morning I got up early and tried again, and I finally reached Wave 9 without warping before I had to stop. I was able to leave the NES on all day and chipped away at attempting the end of the game, and then before bed I was able to beat the game. I didn’t expect to finish it, so I wasn’t recording, and I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the prospect of playing through the entire game again. So it goes. I was able to block out a few hours during the evening on another night to set up the recording and play through the whole game again. Sadly, this game is a little buggy. It crashed on me somewhere around Wave 7. I was able to jump straight to Wave 9 with the continue code but all my item counts were screwed up. I started over and then it crashed on me again in Wave 10. This time I was able to continue from Wave 9 with everything normal. I ended up going to bed and came back early in the morning before work to finish the game on video. I was running low on time but I managed to beat the game again with all the proper documentation.

There are a couple of optional special items that make this journey a lot easier. These are called out in the manual directly. There is a hidden door in Wave 7 that hides the special key, and another hidden door in Wave 8 that hides a secret idol. Both these items have their locations randomized at the start of their respective waves. The special key unlocks any locked door in the game but you can only use it once. There is a locked door in Wave 9 that can only be opened with the special key. It takes you to an island partway across the lava river in that wave, saving you a lot of time. The secret idol is much more useful. If you have it, the secret idol will appear within Wave 10 on top of the hidden door to Wave 11. It takes much of the guesswork out of where the exit is hidden. The secret idol item is permanent too. In my opinion, the secret idol might as well be mandatory to finish the game. The map, even a full map, is far too sparse and lacks enough detail to be useful. With enough plays, I suppose you could learn how to connect the map data to the location you need to search, but believe me, I’d rather not. If I have to find something hidden, I’d rather bomb around the two rooms of Wave 8 than the six rooms of Wave 10, especially since I can keep continuing on Wave 8 for as long as I need to.

Identifying the hidden exit is a huge relief.

Lastly, I want to discuss the difficulty rating. A fellow who goes by Electric Frankfurter helped compile a list of the Top 30 most difficult NES games. My two 10/10’s so far, Ikari Warriors and Q*bert, are both featured on the list, and so is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Make no mistake, this game is hard, ridiculously hard, with what is asked of you to complete the final stretch of the game along with unlimited enemies that are all over you all the time. It falls short of 10/10 for me because of the infinite continues. I have many of the 10/10 games already in mind, and I’m really going to have to take a deep look at the ones that have infinite continues to see if they are truly deserving of the hardest of the hard. The fact is that if you can reach Wave 9 with a good number of items (and hopefully the secret idol), you can just keep hammering away with the exact same item loadout until you beat it. Total play time is another factor I consider. I beat the game twice within a week and I don’t think I spent any more than 10 hours total. That’s not quite 10/10 for me either. I don’t do fractional scores, but I would say the game is more challenging than most of its peers in the 9/10 area.

I am more impressed with the idea of this game than how it actually turned out. There are some clever concepts here with collecting pieces of a map, locating secret items, and using multiple weapons that double as tools. Randomization adds some replay value to the mix. The rest of the game is kind of a mess. The rooms are huge, complex, and tough to successfully navigate under constant enemy threat. Whip swinging has poor hit detection, both on hooking with the whip and landing on the other side of the swing. The jump mechanics are confusing and many jumps to below ledges don’t make physical sense. Locating hidden doors are all trial and error that require limited resources to reveal. The controls for switching weapons don’t always trigger correctly, which always happens when I am in a rush. The graphics are okay and the music is poor, aside from the Indiana Jones theme. There is bad programming that can occasionally lead to crashes. The game is playable, but for the most part it is more frustrating than fun. If you are looking for a new challenge, this game certainly has it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go play some La-Mulana.

#93 – Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

The name pretty well sums it up, save the “challenge.”

Another very highly detailed title screen!

To Beat: Win the Tournament (3 rounds)
Played: 3/6/18
Difficulty: 2/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Roundball: 2-on-2 Challenge Tournament Longplay

It has been some time since I played a sports game! Roundball 2-on-2 Challenge is the first basketball game covered on this site. I don’t care for most sports video games and the NES is just littered with them. Maybe you like basketball more than I do, and if so you might know the answer to this question. How many NES basketball games are there? I spent five minutes thinking about it and I came up with six games. There are ten basketball games on the console, and I’m surprised I didn’t think of so many of them. I guess we are going to find out which ones are good and which ones are truly forgettable. For now, Roundball may have been a decent introduction to the genre on NES, but let’s reach in and see how it stacks up.

Roundball: 2-on-2 Challenge was developed by Park Place Productions and published by Mindscape. It was released in North America in May 1992 and was also brought to Europe in 1992. It’s an NES exclusive. Park Place Productions was a short-lived company that primarily developed sports games. This was their only NES release. Mindscape, on the other hand, is one of the bigger publishers on the NES with 24 titles. This is their second release that I have beaten for this project.

Roundball is a basketball game played on a half-court. As the title suggests, games are meant to be played two-on-two. You can choose to play one-on-one instead if you want and there are a bunch of customization options for structuring a match the way you want. There is also a roster of 24 fictitious players to choose from, each with his own stats and named after one of the developers. The two main modes are Exhibition and Tournament. To beat the game, you must win the tournament. Rounds of the tournament are the Semi-Finals, Finals, and Championship. You only have to win three total matches to win the tournament.

Look at all the options!

The main menu contains several different options for customization. You will see a box on the left containing the options, and then the box on the right will display the choices for that option. Press Up or Down to scroll through the options. Pick an option and press Right to point to the choices panel. Press Up or Down to select your choice and then press A to lock in it. This moves the cursor back over to the options window and also writes down your selection at the bottom of the screen. When you are done, press Start to advance to player selection.

Here are the options you can pick from. Team Size lets you pick between either a one-on-one or two-on-two game. Players lets you pick from one to four human players. This game supports the NES Four Score for a full four-player game. The Teammates option is for a two-player game only to decide if you want the two players on the same team or on different teams. Mode is for selecting either Exhibition or Tournament modes. Steals lets you decide both your effectiveness at stealing the ball and the opponent’s effectiveness at stealing from you. You can pick from Easy, Normal, or Hard. Time lets you choose how long each quarter of the game is. You can pick from 4, 8, 12, or 16 minute quarters. Outs means who gets the ball after a basket, either the team the made it or the other team. The Control option is for single player only with a two-on-two team size. Primary means on offense you always control the teammate holding the ball. Same Guy means you always control the same player the entire game.

The player selection menu differs if you are playing either Exhibition or Tournament mode. For Exhibition mode, you can pick from any of the 24 players. Highlight the player you want and he will appear on the left side of the screen. You see the player’s portrait and his associated statistics. The first three stats are percentages. 3PT is for three-points shots, FG means field goals, and FT is for free throws. The remaining five stats are all per-game average numbers. RBD are rebounds, STL are steals, BLK are blocks, AST are assists, and PF are personal fouls. The bottom part of the screen shows already chosen players as well as which person is making their selection currently. You may pick a player with A or assume the default player with Start.

Hanson is a great player in this game.

If you chose Tournament mode, first you have to pick if you want to start a new tournament with A or resume a previous tournament with B. If you press B, you go to the password screen. Passwords are only three characters, nice and short. It also seems a little unnecessary since there are only three tournament matches anyway. You can also cancel out of the screen if you don’t have a valid password. Then you proceed to the team selection screen. There are eight preset teams to choose from. You may also highlight an individual player in the menu and view his stats. The same rules for selecting players also apply here.

Before starting a game, you have to shoot for outs. Each team has one player stand behind the three-point line and take a shot. To shoot the ball, hold down A to jump and let go to release the ball. You want to shoot the ball at the top of the jump to get the best chance of scoring. Then the opposing player makes his shot. The player who makes a shot while the other misses gets the ball first. If there are too many ties eventually the computer decides who gets the ball. I didn’t win outs in any of the games I played.

Now the game starts for real. On the gameplay screen, the score for each side is displayed at the top. Standard NBA scoring applies here, so two points are scored on a shot from the field, three points if made beyond the three-point line, and one point for a successful free throw. The bottom of the screen shows the rest of the details. First is the shot clock, which is how many seconds you can maintain possession. Next to that is the time remaining in the period. The period indicator shows which quarter of the game you are playing, and the ball handler is the name of the player currently holding the ball.

I don’t understand why I missed this shot.

There are several things you can do while on offense. Use the D-pad to run around the court. Press A to shoot the ball, just like when shooting for outs. If you are moving near the basket and press A, you’ll do a layup. You will actually perform one of several kinds of dunks or layups automatically just for show. Press the B button to pass the ball to your teammate in a two-on-two game. You can pass the ball while taking a shot if you press B while you are still holding the ball. The Start button pauses the game. When paused you can press Select to toggle the music on and off. There are also pre-set plays you can use during the action by holding Select and pressing a direction on the D-pad. Up clears the forward away from the defender, Right sets up a pick play, Down puts both players under the basket, and Left puts both players in three-point range.

There are fewer actions for playing defense. The most common action is attempting to steal. Rapidly tap the A button when you are near the ball and you might steal it away. If you press the A button and hold it a bit, you will jump and try to block the ball. You can block a shot from the field or underneath the basket. Press the B button to switch control to the other defender. You can also try and rebound the ball if the opponent misses a shot. When you get the ball back, you aren’t allowed to score until you first take the ball past the top of the key. If you fail to do this and try and shoot anyway, the game yells at you to “take it back!” It’s considered time out until you take the ball out.

The referee may call fouls in this game and a player will go to the line to shoot free throws. This takes place from the perspective of behind the backboard. There will be a white cursor that jiggles around near the basket and you want to press A to shoot when the cursor is over the basket. After free throws are completed, play resumes as normal.

The free throw perspective is quite nice.

At the end of each quarter, a detailed stats screen is displayed. It shows stats for every player both for the last quarter and the full game thus far. You’ll see number of field goals made, number of steals, number of rebounds, and so on. It’s a nice touch, but it’s a little bit of information overload and the stats don’t persist after the game is over.

This was my first time playing Roundball. I don’t even remember trying it. Maybe I didn’t make it through the menu. It’s not a rare game, but it’s not one I see around often. I’m pretty sure I bought my copy from a nearby game store. It sells for around $8 to $10 now, which sounds about right for this kind of game.

Just like I did with my last game, The Rocketeer, I tried this one out very early in the morning and went ahead and beat it later that night. I started by playing an exhibition match with the default settings, and I ended up winning by something like 90 points. I imagined I wouldn’t have too much trouble with the tournament, and I was right. I did notice that the competition got better in the later rounds of the tournament, but I was never close to losing any of the three rounds. I won 180-82, 195-116, and 177-134 and got the simple ending screen I wanted.

Rinse and repeat.

I don’t think that Roundball is necessarily an easy game, but it sure is exploitable. The first thing I decided was that I wanted to find the player with the best three-point shooting. I also wanted a player good at stealing. This is because it’s one of the few defensive moves you can do and there’s even a setting controlling stealing success, which leads me to believe it’s one of the more important features in the game. The best players between those two stats are Hanson and Lyndon. In the tournament, you can’t have them on the same team, so I went with the team Hanson and Belanger, a solid player in his own right. On offense, I only shot threes. On defense, I tried stealing every chance I got and tried to rebound any missed shots. That strategy alone gave me comfortable wins in each match. It makes me wonder if the other basketball games have similar strategies, at least offensively.

The rest of the game isn’t all that thrilling. It’s a slow-paced game, especially the timer. When it says four-minute quarters, that’s a reasonably accurate time in the real world. When playing it feels even longer. I can’t imagine sitting through sixteen-minute quarters, so I didn’t. I’m confident I would have been successful no matter how long the games took. The other things slow are layups. Each opponent almost exclusively did layups and I had to wait for him to take his time making each shot. Fouls slowed the game down too, but that’s part of the game and they didn’t happen too often anyway. Aside from the timer, my other major issue was defense. When stealing didn’t work, my opponent could drive to the basket and there was nothing I could do about it besides sit back and watch. Roundball has its problems, but I can look past them because I had little trouble beating it.

For my first basketball game, I think I did okay with Roundball. A four-player basketball game makes sense with managing NES sprite limitations, and four player games are few and far between on the NES anyway. The graphics aren’t too bad, and the voice samples are very clear to hear. I got tired of hearing “take it back!” all the time though. The music is decent but unmemorable. The game controls fine, except for maybe having to hold down A to block. Most importantly, the game was easy to beat with a sensible approach that was simple to pull off. That’s the kind of game I can get behind for this project. I wouldn’t recommend playing it otherwise. I’m willing to bet I will play some better NES basketball games before this is all said and done.

#77 – Roundball: 2-on-2 Challenge