Get ready to continue the adventure of your lifetime.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 5/7/19 – 5/12/19
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Video: Wall Street Kid Ending

Sometimes I wonder how a game gets greenlit as a concept and makes its way to store shelves. Wall Street Kid is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – a stock trading game. How did this game ever come to fruition? Why did someone think this was a good idea? Who is the target audience for this game? Kids probably aren’t interested in stock trading, and why would an adult play a game about a kid getting into the stock market? I don’t think I’ll ever understand how this game was made and put on an NES cartridge, but here we are. It’s a real game, I’ve played and beaten it, so now I get to share it with you.

The history of Wall Street Kid begins with The Money Game, an August 1988 Famicom title published and developed by SOFEL. It must have performed well because a sequel came out the following year. Money Game II: Kabutochou no Kiseki was released in Japan in December 1989. This game was localized in North America as Wall Street Kid. It was released on NES in June 1990. The game was also both developed and published by SOFEL.

You play the role of the Wall Street Kid in this game. Of course. You are set to inherit billions of dollars under the condition that you prove you know how to manage wealth and uphold the family’s standard of living. You start off with half a million dollars in seed money that you must invest in order to spend it on certain expensive items over the course of four months. Basically, you buy and sell stocks strategically to make a profit. There is an overarching story you follow that guides you through the purchases you are required to make and the life events you experience over those four months. If you meet all the requirements through that time frame, then you inherit the big money and win the game.

This game is set up as a point-and-click adventure game. The game begins on a Monday of the first week of April as shown as you sit at your desk. Just by sitting there, time slowly advances 15 minutes at a time. Your business day is from 9am-5pm. You can perform various interactions by moving a cursor around your desk and clicking on objects to do different things. Just move the D-pad around and press A to interact. At the top of the screen you see how much cash you have on hand as well as how much money your stock portfolio is worth. The lower part of the screen is for dialog that occurs when you receive phone calls or do some reading. Each interaction and event eat into a little bit of your allotted time. As soon as 5pm hits, you go straight to the next day.

Every day starts with reading the newspaper. You will want to pay close attention to the news as it gives you clues on how the stock market might perform. The paper tells you about where interest rates are moving, which types of stocks are poised to grow, which specific stocks have been hot lately, and other news about what is going on in the community. All this information is needed to help you make good decisions during your business day.

Most of the icons on your desk let you perform an action. I’ll start with the pink icons on the screen. The dollar icon lets you visit the bank. Ruth, the banker, lets you make loans or pay off loans. This option is not helpful right away because you cannot take out a loan without having collateral and you don’t have any because you haven’t made any big purchases yet. The question mark icon sends you over to the consultant Stanley. For a small fee, he will give you generic advice about stocks, how to purchase them, how to make decisions, etc. This might be nice to do once just to get a feel for how to play the game. The exclamation mark connects you to your advisor, Connie. If she has a hot stock tip for you this day, you can pay her some money to hear it. This tip may or may not be helpful to you and you may have to read into it a little bit to figure out if it is for real or not. Finally, the pink clock at the top lets you finish your day immediately.

There are two other factors you have to consider while playing the game. First, you have to keep up communication and go out on dates with your girlfriend, Prisila. Click the flower pot icon to choose between going on a picnic, going shopping, or going to the carnival. Each event takes up a few hours of your time. Secondly, you have to keep yourself in good physical shape by exercising. The icon you need looks like a small computer or cell phone, but evidently it is a barometer. Click the barometer to choose between swimming, hitting the gym, or going hiking. You have to keep up with both your girlfriend and your health regularly during the game, otherwise you may lose the game outright due to neglect. It’s not enough in this world just to earn money. You also need to consider what you read in the news to decide which activity to do.

The meat of the game is in stock trading which you can do from your desktop computer. From here you can buy or sell stocks, view your portfolio, and look up information on each available stock. Your portfolio view shows which stocks you own, their current price, starting price from when you purchased it, and how many lots of 1000 you own of that stock. You can only have up to five stocks in your portfolio, including multiple records of the same stock if you purchased them at different times. Selling stocks uses the same portfolio view so you can select which stock and how many lots you wish to sell.

When choosing to buy stocks or view stocks, you bring up a separate screen listing all twenty stocks available to purchase. Here you can see the company name, the current value, and the percentage change of the value of the stock since yesterday. You can tell the development team was really creative with their fictitious companies. Buying stocks is just like selling stocks where you choose the one you want and how many lots you want to buy. The game will calculate the maximum number you can purchase with your current cash. The information screen shows data about the company, the current stock value compared with its initial value from the very start of the game, and the category of stock. There are four stock categories: Blue chip, cyclical, growth, and speculative. There are five stocks in each category.

Very early in the game, you receive a phone call from a real estate agent that has the perfect house for you costing a million dollars. He will first call you to let you know the house is getting prepped for sale, then he calls you every week asking if you are ready to buy the house on Saturday. You can choose to accept early or you can keep putting it off a week at a time for a month until you get your last chance to buy. Use the business days Monday through Friday to do your stock trading so that you can earn money toward your big purchase. Sometimes you will get a call from Prisila asking you to buy her something on Saturday. There is no business on Saturday so that is the only thing you will do. For whatever you are buying, you get two different options in price and a third option to not buy at all. I always made sure to buy the most expensive thing. I imagine you can get away with not buying anything a couple of times but that it eventually affects your relationship, so you should try and give her the best as often as possible.

Sunday is reserved for giving you a password. I’m giving this special recognition here because this is a candidate for the worst password in any game I’ve ever played. Passwords are at least 40 characters long, usually mine were 42-43 characters long. The character set is awful. You have numbers 0-9, capital letters A-Z, and capital letters again from A-Z but in reverse colors. Normal letters are white text on black background while the others are white squares with black character text. There are also a couple of punctuation marks in that reverse color. It is truly terrible. Nowadays, since I use my camera to take a picture of the screen to save passwords, it is not that bad. Imagine trying to write that down on paper, though. There is a lot of room here to make a mistake with the password, both in writing it down and entering it in on the screen. You can hold Select and press either A or B to move the password cursor around in case you make a mistake, which will probably happen. On top of everything else, once you get the correct password entered, there is a long loading time for the game to start up. I get that there is a lot of data involved that needs to be parsed out of the password, but still this is a bad, error-prone system that could have been made a bit better with some better characters.

Once you get to where you are forced to decide on buying the house, one of two things will happen. If you don’t earn enough money or forget to cash in enough money to buy the house on that Saturday, you are scolded and scorned by family, and you get Game Over. The screen is locked here and you have to physically reset or power off. If you do have the money, then you get to buy the house and enjoy a little cutscene about your accomplishment. The game continues from here with another big purchase you have to make. Now you can go to the bank and get a loan against your new house, providing you with extra cash that you can invest smartly for the next thing. The game continues like this the rest of the way, though there are some special events like holidays and such that help break up the monotony a little bit.

This was my first time playing through Wall Street Kid. Point and click games like this are not my style and so I barely even tested this cart out when I bought it. I think this game was a $3 purchase from my local game store several years back. It is still a cheap cart and readily available online.

I did not get the hang of this game at first. I understand the concept of the stock market, that part is fine, but I had difficulty earning enough money for the house that initial month. First, I messed up by trying to buy the house one week earlier than was necessary. The way the game is written they make it seem like you need to buy the house before you miss your chance. I fell for that. Really you get four weeks no matter what. The other issue was that I was just not profitable enough. You need a million dollars but I always ended up in the $800,000-$900,000 range. I picked decent stocks and made some money but not the right ones to earn big. It took me several tries but eventually I figured out the trick. I had no trouble after that. One weird part later on is the auction scene. The way the auction is run and how you bid is not that clear. I ended up bidding against myself most of the time. Once I realized what I was doing, I put the password back in and tried again, only to end up with a higher winning bid once I played the auction straight. Maybe that part is random and I got unlucky the second time. I pushed forward and ended up winning the game from there anyway.

Here’s the big trick to beating this game without any trouble. Consider yourself warned in case you are spoiler sensitive. I am not completely sure if what I’m about to say is true, but it worked out this way for me. The stock market appears to be completely scripted. Stocks seem to rise and fall the same way on the same days. With this knowledge combined with the password system, it is easy to take advantage of the market. Run the game for a week and take note of the best stock, either by the stock tables or the newspaper’s hot stocks. If you already put all your money into the best stock already, great! Otherwise once you get to Sunday, reload your game from your old password and invest everything you can into the stock you noted was the best. In every case, that stock performed the same way and I maxed out on what I could possibly earn. If you take it one week at a time like this, you will make it. You can try and save yourself some time and make an educated guess on which stock will be the best earner that week. The newspaper tells you the two stock categories that should do well that week. I looked up all stocks and sorted them into categories. The cheapest stock of those categories is often the best earner, especially since you can buy more of them with your money.

I have a few more minor tips. Always take the bank loan when you can. The more cash you have on hand, the more you can earn! Just don’t forget to pay it back on time or you lose. You can pay off the loan and immediately get a new one too, no problem. Don’t forget to exercise and date your girlfriend every week. It might be a good idea to always buy the best item for Prisila on shopping Saturdays. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance, and I always had enough money for my big purchase anyway.

Wall Street Kid was a pretty interesting game, but I’m more happy now that it’s over than I was when I was playing it. The graphics are pretty good, even if most of the game is the same static screen and menus. The music was alright. The game controls very well. Everything is responsive and the simple controls almost always make sense. The gameplay is just simple point-and-click activity with menus. In this case, the game doesn’t do enough to vary the experience so the whole game kind of drags along. It’s not a lengthy game, but it is tedious to work through, especially entering in those awful passwords. Wall Street Kid is definitely a weird game to have on the NES. I’ll file it away as more of a curiosity than something that’s worth playing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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