You eeeediot!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 1/31/20 – 2/3/20
Difficulty: 6/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckaroo$! Longplay

More cartoon NES games!  I’ve mentioned before that we had cable TV growing up and that I ended up a Nickelodeon kid.  The first wave of Nicktoons, i.e. Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy, got a lot of play in my house in those days.  I tended to glom on more to Doug and Rugrats, and I didn’t find Ren and Stimpy nearly as appealing to me.  But that didn’t mean I didn’t watch the show.  I think this game did a pretty decent job at capturing the look and feel of the show, and it brought back a lot of memories and references I didn’t know I still carried.  Let’s take a look at the game.

The Ren & Stimpy Show was created for Nickelodeon by John Kricfalusi, debuting in August of 1991.  It stars Ren the chihuahua and Stimpy the cat, following their random adventures.  Kricfalusi voiced Ren while Stimpy’s voice actor was Billy West.  Kricfalusi left the show in 1992 due to contentions with Nickelodeon, and Billy West became the voice for both characters after that.  The show ran from 1991 to 1996, spanning 5 seasons and 52 episodes.  This show was very controversial at the time with its gross humor, use of violence, and adult themes.  In spite of the controversies, Ren & Stimpy translated into high ratings for Nickelodeon as well as critical acclaim, and it had lasting influence in animation for years to come.

The Ren & Stimpy Show garnered several video games bearing its name between 1992 and 1994.  There were two games on Game Boy: Space Cadet Adventures and Veediots!  Two more Sega Genesis titles were Stimpy’s Invention and Quest for the Shaven Yak Starring Ren Hoek & Stimpy, the latter also appearing on Game Gear.  The SNES had four Ren & Stimpy games: Veediots!, Buckeroo$!, Fire Dogs, and Time Warp.  There was just one Ren & Stimpy title on the NES.  The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckaroo$! released on the NES in November 1993.  The game was developed by Imagineering and published by THQ.  It was not released on NES in other territories.

The story for Buckaroo$! begins with Stimpy’s new invention, the Gametron 5000 Moneymaker.  Long before livestreaming was ever conceived, this new machine pays out money the more you play video games.  It comes with three different games: Space Madness, Out West, and Robin Hoek of Logwood Forest.  Of course, Ren is all about this so that he can make as much money as possible, so he and Stimpy play out these three different games.  These subgames are merely level themes in the actual game as you will transition to a different one from level to level.  There are about sixteen areas in the game of varying theme and length, and you beat the game after clearing them all.

Buckaroo$! is an action platformer game.  You use the D-pad to walk around, as usual.  In some cases, you’ll use Up and Down to climb on poles and such.  You can also use Up and Down to scroll the screen a little bit when it’s needed.  After the title screen, you can pick from one of four button layouts for your main actions.  The actions are jump, use a weapon, or run.  Jump and Weapon are always on separate buttons, but otherwise you can map whatever you want to either A or B with the options.  You can aim your weapons upward by holding Up with the weapon button.  The Select button is used for changing your weapons.  Finally, press Start to pause.

The limited heads-up display is shown in the upper left corner of the screen.  A pink thermometer displays the amount of health you have.  Below that is the weapon selected and its corresponding ammo.  You have a default weapon that doesn’t use any ammo so that won’t show up if selected.  There is different info displayed if you pause your game.  You can see your score, number of lives, and number of money bags collected.  For every 30 money bags you snag, you get an extra life.

The first and most prevalent of the three game modes is Space Madness.  In this mode, you control Stimpy guiding Ren on an escort mission to the exit door in the level.  Yep, an escort mission.  Ren walks back and forth like a lemming, occasionally getting into trouble by creating new enemies or not going where you want him to go.  Stimpy’s default attack is a hairball projectile that travels in a small arc.  You can use this to beat up enemies or hit Ren with it to push him around.  You can change his direction by hitting him in the front or you can make him go faster by hitting him from behind.  The special weapons are used to manipulate Ren.  Dirty socks stop Ren from moving, litter boxes turn him around when touched, and springs make Ren do a huge jump forward.

In the first stage, those items are all you need to clear it.  There is a giant teleporter in the middle of the room that blocks Ren’s path.  You need to guide Ren toward a spring you put in front of it so that he’ll jump over it to the other side.  Stimpy, however, when he approaches the teleporter, gets sent off to a space shooting mini-game.  You take control of a very large ship and you have to blast all of the enemies in your path to get through.  Press the weapon button to fire straight fireballs, just about as many as you want.  The enemies will loop around the screen until you beat them all to reveal the next wave.  You can also pick up bags of kitty litter to increase your health, as well as money bags, but you can shoot and destroy them as well.  Once the shooting segment is over, now you can pass across the teleporter and Ren will still be over there.  Use the items to guide him all the way to the door.  There will be more space shooting in the other levels, don’t worry.

Later Space Madness levels have some additional items and elements to them.  Some of the escort levels are in pretty large rooms where you can easily lose track of Ren.  The decoder ring item will slide the camera over to Ren so you can see where he is.  The beaver is a very useful item that chews a hole in the floor that Stimpy and Ren can fall through.  This is an essential item for reaching certain exit doors.  Many Space Madness levels feature these vertical pipes that suck you up or down to different floors within the stage.  A few levels also have these buttons that affect the entire room.  Ren always pushes these on contact but Stimpy can engage them as well.  One button reverses your directional controls, another doubles movement speed, another turns the color off leaving the game in grayscale, stuff like that.  It can get out of hand quickly if Ren is left to his own devices.  Good luck with these levels.

The next game mode is Out West.  This is a straightforward type of level where all you need to do is go from left to right.  In this mode you start off as Ren, who only wields a short-range slap attack.  Collect a wanted poster and you can switch characters to Stimpy, who has his normal spitball attack.  You can collect more posters to swap back and forth between characters.  Each character has his own set of items that often mirror each other in effect.  For instance, Ren collects ham to increase his health while Stimpy gets bags of cat treats.  Stimpy gets smelly socks again as a special weapon in these stages, while Ren collects apples.  Many of these stages end with a final enemy encounter, and when you beat them, money bags rain down from the sky for awhile.

The third game mode is Robin Hoek.  Here you play only as Ren.  These are also straightforward stages only you don’t switch characters.  There are a few elements you’ll have to contend with here that are different from the Out West stages.  There’s a large section where you have to climb up a set of buildings by jumping up awnings and landing on window ledges.  You will need to switch buildings to find an awning to bounce you high enough, and it is tough to jump across and land on the tiny ledges.  There are also clotheslines that you have to tightrope-walk on, sort of.  You will fall through if you aren’t moving, otherwise it is treated as a normal ledge.

You begin the game with three lives in reserve.  You can collect more lives by collecting enough money bags.  The Out West and Robin Hoek levels have random checkpoints scattered throughout and you will respawn there upon losing a life.  If you run out of lives altogether, you can continue from the start of the current stage.  You can continue three times before you’ll have to start over from the beginning.

This is the first time I’ve played Buckaroo$!.  The only Ren & Stimpy game I ever remember playing before this was Space Cadet Adventures on Game Boy, and that one I don’t remember all that fondly.  Buckaroo$! is an uncommon NES game but isn’t terribly expensive at around $12-$15.  My first copy had some label issues and eventually I picked up a nicer copy.  I remember having a little bit of a time tracking this game down.  Even though it is moderately priced and readily available, I am always looking out for a deal, and that didn’t come for quite some time.  My first copy came in a lot purchase and I am less concerned about condition when buying in bulk.  Later I caught the game solo for a lower-end price on eBay.

I can see where this game would give someone a lot of trouble trying to beat it.  The first stage alone is quite unclear on what you need to do.  Without the manual I would have played the space shooting over and over until I realized you need to launch Ren past it so that you can exit the level.  Really all the Space Madness levels can get out of hand if you don’t have a clear plan on what to do and where to go.  The other game modes suffer majorly from not having clear rules on what you can stand on and what you can’t.  A lot of incidental graphics are actually ledges, while such things like doors really stand out but then they aren’t solid at all.  On top of that, many ledges are tiny to land on and the jumping in this game is not exactly precise.  Vertical sections can be tricky.  There is also fall damage done in a sort of unpolished way.  When falling from a tall height, the speed the character falls is faster than the scrolling speed.  If you fall from too high, you go below the bottom of the screen and the game interprets that the same as you falling into a pit.  Anyway, missing jumps is bad.

In spite of all the challenges, I got through this game pretty easily.  On my second day of playing, I cleared the game, and then the next time I recorded a full longplay without using a continue.  I had a few deaths and some backtracking in the larger Space Madness stages, but those were the only blemishes on the run that I remembered.  I beat the game in a little over 40 minutes with only a couple of hours of game time building up to that.  A 6/10 difficulty rating seems right for this game.  That slots in between Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants, two other platformers by the same developer.

The Ren & Stimpy Show: Buckaroo$! is a platformer out of the vein of other mascot platformers of the early to mid-‘90s.  It features stylized graphics modeling the characters from the show, and I think it looks pretty good on the NES hardware.  The music is pretty decent and blends in well with the gameplay.  The controls have the same feel as the aforementioned Bart vs. the Space Mutants.  That is not a note of praise by any stretch, but it does feel a little bit better than Bart.  Gameplay in this one is varied with the escort sections, the space shooter sections, and the expansive, pure platforming stages, with a few one-offs in between.  Thankfully the stages aren’t gigantic, sprawling mazes that have frustrated me in similar platformers of the past, though the windy Space Madness stages touch on that pattern a little bit.  The unclear ledges, big jumps to tiny ledges, and escort missions degrade this game in my eyes.  This isn’t a great game, but it ended up better than I anticipated.

It’s true, video games are art.

To Beat: Create a Videomation
Played: 5/1/19
Difficulty: 1/10
My Difficulty: 1/10
My Video: Videomation Longplay

It is another milestone for Take On The NES Library. The NES has some truly great games, but it also includes a small handful of applications and things that are not games. Some of them I could construct some kind of goal for. You could “beat” Color A Dinosaur by coloring in every dinosaur available, for example. Videomation is the rare example of an NES cartridge that doesn’t have any ending or any sort of goal at all. The only thing I can come up with here is just to create something, so that’s what I did. Let’s take a look and see what Videomation is all about.

Videomation was released on the NES in June 1991. It was published by THQ and developed by FarSight Studios. The title screen credits Western Technologies as the developer, but multiple places online state that it is FarSight Studios. You get the full credits on the title screen if you are interested. This was a North American exclusive title.

All of your drawing will have to be done with the NES controller, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. The D-pad lets you move a cursor around the screen. This lets you point to anywhere on the screen to draw and also at the buttons on the top menu to select different options. The A button is your primary drawing and action button. Conversely, the B button acts as a cancel button or a way to let you move the cursor around without drawing. Press Select to bring up the menu. When you have made your menu selections, press Select again to get back to drawing. The Start button toggles how fast your cursor moves around the screen.

Let’s check out the menu from left to right. First up is the color palette. There are ten different colors you can choose from. Simply hover over the color you want and press A. This color applies to whatever type of operation you want to do. Some of the colors are solid, while others are dithered blends of other colors to make some in-between shades. This is the best the NES can do under its limitations. The next icon with the letter A in it lets you change the color palette. This affects both the color palette from the menu and the color palette of the entire drawing. Sometimes it is neat to change the colors of the entire drawing just to see what it looks like. Some of the color palettes have animated colors. The icon above the palette change is the line width selection. You can toggle between a thin line or a thick line when drawing with the tools.

The next group of eight icons are your drawing tools. Hover over and press A to select the active tool. The most interesting one is the arrow tool in the upper-left. This is as close as you can get to a free hand drawing tool in the game. Use the D-pad to point the arrow in the direction you want. The arrow rotates around in all directions. The dot past the tip of the arrow is where lines will start from. Press and hold the A button to move the arrow in the desired direction and start drawing. While the arrow is moving, you can change direction while still holding A, allowing you to draw curves. You can go all the way around and draw a circle if you want. Letting go of A stops the arrow and stops drawing. You can also move the arrow around without drawing by holding down the B button instead. What’s interesting is that the arrow’s movement is a bit different depending on if you are drawing or not. If you draw a curve by changing arrow direction, the arrow will completely circle around without you having to change D-pad direction. While just moving the arrow with B, the arrow stops turning as soon as it is moving the same direction you are pressing with the D-pad. It’s hard to explain, it’s just something interesting I noticed while toying around.

The rest of the top row are the pencil, line, and bucket fill tools. You probably know what these do already. The pencil is another simple free hand tool. Move the pencil anywhere with the D-pad and draw by holding down the A button. The line tool lets you draw straight lines, including at an angle. First, position the cursor at the start of the line. Then press and hold A and move the D-pad to where you want the end of the line. If you stop moving the cursor with A still held, it will show you a sample line without actually drawing anything. Once you let go of A, then it draws the line between the two endpoints. The bucket fill tool lets you color in an enclosed shape. The lowest tip of the paint out of the bucket icon is where filling starts. Press and hold A to fill with color. The painting algorithm colors in horizontal stripes. You can color by just briefly pressing A long enough to color just one stripe, then move the cursor around and repeat to draw as many stripes as you want. To completely fill in the space, you have to hold down A for the whole time.

The next tool on the bottom row is the circle tool. It has the same controls as the line tool. The starting position is the center of the circle. Then you can control how long and wide it is depending on how far away each cardinal direction is from the center. You can draw ovals in either direction with this tool. The rectangle tool is also the same thing as the line tool with both endpoints being opposite corners of the rectangle. The eraser tool is like the pencil tool but it erases anything drawn underneath.

The last icon in that section is the stamp tool. Selecting the stamp tool displays a new menu on top of the main menu. There you will see a row of four stamps. To use a stamp, cursor over the one you want and press A. Then press Select to get out of the menu. Use the D-pad to position the stamp and press A to stamp it down. You can continue stamping with the same one as much as you want. Back on the stamp menu, there are two buttons. More lets you see more available stamps, and the right arrow changes the colors of the stamps. The last page of stamps are letters and numbers. Place these stamps the same way as the others. To help facilitate writing text, there are additional controls. While placing letters on the screen, you can press the B button to advance to the next letter right there so you don’t have to go back to the menu to choose a new letter. If you hold the B button, then you can use Up or Down on the D-pad to cycle through all the characters. Let go of B to select that letter and then you can press A to stamp it.

The icon with the stick figure person is the animation icon. This brings up a separate menu that functions just like the stamp menu. Cursor over the animation you want and press A to select it. When you press Select to exit the animation menu, it brings up another menu called the motion menu. Here there are five options for how you want the animation to move across your drawing. Highlight what you want and press either A or Select to play the selected animation with the selected motion. The first motion labeled Follow lets you move the animation with the D-pad. Next is the random path, and the other three are preset paths. You can walk back and forth in a straight line, around the screen in an oval, or in a wave pattern back and forth. Press either A or Select to stop the animation and go back to drawing.

Here are the remaining options. Clear lets you erase everything and start over. You will have to confirm Yes or No on clearing the screen. No Menu lets you remove the menu temporarily so that you see your completed drawing without cursors in the way. Either Select or A brings the menu back. The music note toggles the sounds on or off. Drawing operations and animations have music and sound effects that go with it and you can turn them off if you want. The final icon lets you change the cursor speed of the drawing tools. You can press Start at any time to do the same thing. There are five speeds. At the lowest speed with no bars showing, the cursor moves one pixel at a time so you can do some very fine detail drawing.

I’m going to say this is my first time playing Videomation. I bet I have “played” it before at least a little bit when I tested my cart. It is not all that common, but when you do see one it is not expensive. This is about a $6 cart. I have had a couple of copies of this cart before. The first one I had for several years had a bad label. My current copy isn’t the best but certainly in better shape than what I had before.

This sounds silly to say, but I am not an artist and I had a little bit of anxiety figuring out how I was going to demonstrate Videomation. I settled on drawing a picture of the NES. I figured that was simple enough to draw, was something I know well, and would make use of most of the tools. I created a sample drawing that turned out okay, and I replicated that a little bit better in my recording. I was happy for the text stamps so I could label it as a Nintendo, and it was a nice bonus that Take On The NES Library fit the width of the screen. The worst part was trying to draw tiny circles for the controller ports. That turned out terrible. It’s recognizable, at least. I also forgot to shade in the lower half of the console. It’s not like it was going to be incredibly realistic anyway. I’m sure a real artist could do some amazing drawings with this tool, but for me I’m satisfied.

So there you have it. Videomation is an art, drawing, and animation tool. Anything that is not tile based on the NES I find impressive from a technical standpoint. Tools like this suffer from not having mouse or touch screen controls, but for what it is, I think the developers did a good job of providing enough features and options to give you the best control you could get out of an NES controller. Personally, I am happy I followed up a 10/10 in difficulty with a 1/10. Otherwise, I could do without Videomation and I am looking forward to playing some actual video games next.

The name’s Junior … James Bond Jr.

To Beat: Complete all missions twice
Played: 10/20/18 – 10/24/18
Difficulty: 6/10
My Difficulty: 6/10
My Video: James Bond Jr. Longplay

I have some strange memories around James Bond Jr., or more accurately, the idea of it.  I was only vaguely aware that there was an animated series of the same name, but I never watched it.  Ardent fans of the blog will know that a lot of that stuff passed by me as a kid.  I never played or even saw the NES game, although again, I was vaguely aware of its existence through magazines.  I didn’t know anything about the series or the game. When I got back into collecting NES games a few years ago, I must have seen the name in a list that tickled something in my brain.  The green cart label seemed so familiar though I had no real understanding of why. All I knew is that I had to have this game in my collection.  I know I was more excited to hold the game in my hands than I was to try playing it.  The human brain is a mysterious thing, isn’t it? Anyway, now that I’ve completed the game, I found it to be a mostly fun experience with some flaws holding it back.

James Bond is a character created by the writer Ian Fleming in 1953.  He is the star of many books and the longest running film series of all time, dating back to 1962.  James Bond Jr., this famous agent’s nephew, was created out of the 1967 novel The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003½, written under the pseudonym R.D. Mascott.  The author’s identity has never been clarified for sure.  There were plans to do more with the character, but they fizzled out until the idea was brought back in 1991.  James Bond Jr. the animated series ran for 65 episodes in 1991 and 1992.  This series was developed by Michael G.Wilson, Andy Heyward, and Robby London. There were also novels, comic books, and a toy line for James Bond Jr.  Of note here are the two James Bond Jr. video games, one for the NES and the other for the Super Nintendo.  James Bond Jr. on NES was released in November 1992 in the US.  It was developed by Eurocom and published by THQ. The PAL version was also released in 1992.

James Bond Jr. is a side-scrolling platformer.  You play the role of our hero as he is trying to stop the S.C.U.M. Lord over four missions.  Colonel Monty will guide you through the mission objectives.  First you must deactivate the S.C.U.M. missiles.  Next, you sneak into a complex to recover blueprints. Then you go to a weapons factory to destroy the World Domination Device.  Finally, you perform a rescue mission to save scientists, culminating in a final battle against the S.C.U.M. Lord.

For much of the game, James Bond Jr. uses standard controls.  You use the D-pad to move around, press A to jump, and B to fire weapons.  He can duck by holding Down.  You can use Up and Down to climb ladders or enter doorways.  The jumping in this game is long and floaty, mostly emphasizing the vertical and less so for horizontal movement.  You can control the height of your jump a little bit, but you really need a quick tap of the A button to perform small hops.  Most of the time you will do a full jump.  The B button fires your weapons.  The default is a simple gun with tiny, straight-shooting bullets. If you hold Down and press Select, you will cycle through James Bond Jr.’s weapons.

All the necessary information is at the bottom of the screen. Starting from the left, you will see the number of lives remaining and associated icon. Next to that is the currently selected weapon along with the ammo count. In the middle is your score, and underneath that is your health bar. To the right of that is a count of the number of objectives remaining in the stage. Finally, the far right shows the level timer.

The level structure straddles the line between open-ended and linear. Your task is to clear a certain number of objectives in each stage, such as disabling missiles or cracking safes. You explore the levels in search of these things and you can backtrack at will. Once you have cleared all the objectives, an exit door will appear to the next mission. The level layouts often involve branching paths, but there is typically one main path through the level with small branches that contain your tasks. There is no in-game map to help guide you, and if you miss something at the end you may have to backtrack a long way to find it. I navigated on my own just fine, though your results may vary.

There are pickups to help you out. These are sometimes found out in the open, but they are usually held by enemies. You can find an ammo box to restore your default bullet count to 99. You have unlimited bullets, but when you run out they refill slowly back up to 20. With the ammo box you go back to the max. You can pick up bombs which are a stronger, arcing weapon. Flares stun most enemies temporarily; bad guys wearing protective glasses are unaffected. A big bomb shaped like a nuke functions like a smart bomb that damages everything on screen. A James Bond Jr. head is worth an extra life. A spikey version of that head is a shield weapon. When equipped, it protects you from damage and hurts enemies by contact at the rapid cost of its ammo. You can find a clock that adds to your time. There are also two types of health-restoring hamburgers. There are a few other items that only appear in certain missions.

Each mission has at least one unique element to it, usually in the form of its mission objective. In Level 1, you disable each missile by playing a mini-game. First, locate the missile rooms and navigate up to the computer. Press Up to launch the mini-game. This one is a puzzle in the likeness of Yoshi’s Cookie. You have a four-by-four square grid of colored tiles. You can shift each row and each column around, and your task is to form the pattern shown on the right. Press A and B to point to a different row or column respectively, then press Left or Right to shift colors in a row and Up or Down to shift columns. These controls are not as intuitive as Yoshi’s Cookie’s controls, but they work well enough. These puzzles aren’t necessarily easy, but straightforward once you see how it works. One puzzle in particular is really hard until you see the trick to it.

The other thing you can do in the first level is don scuba gear. This is a pickup from certain enemies that lets you enter water. If not equipped, water hurts you like it is electricity and you bounce off it. Select the scuba gear as a weapon to wear it. You can’t attack or do much above water with it equipped, so dive right in. Underwater, use the D-pad to move either left, right, or down. Press A to swim upwards a short distance. If you need to rise, you have to tap out A many times. The B button shoots a bubble gun for underwater foes. Your air supply is shown as ammo. Using your bubble gun causes the air to deplete more quickly. To restore your air, you can find another scuba pickup or exit the water. You will find little pockets of air throughout the underwater screens that can also help. You have to tap A to float just underneath the surface which will increase your air supply. If you run out of air, then you start losing health quickly.

In Level 2, your mission objective is to open safes to locate blueprints. You open these safes through another mini-game. There are four dials on the safe, each with a digit above it. Use the D-pad to highlight a dial, then press either A or B to turn the dial and change the number above it. There is a number in the middle for how many times you can attempt to open the safe. Pick a number for each dial, and then move the cursor over the door catch and press either A or B to try and open it. The individual dial numbers will glow if that is the wrong digit, and they will switch to solid gray if it is the correct number. If you don’t get the right combination, you can try again. Most of the safes hold the blueprints you need, but some hold bombs that hurt you. Unrelated to the mini-game, Level 2 is a door maze. You can sometimes see safes but need to enter the room from a different door to get access.

The objective for Level 3 is to destroy all the panels within weapon rooms. Go through the facility to search out the rooms. The targets are these wall fixtures with guns flanked on either side. You have to shoot them enough times to destroy them, and you have to break them all inside the room to consider it complete. There are other cannons and traps that get in the way, but you can leave them alone if you want. I usually clear out everything anyway for prizes. Some areas in Level 3 are unreachable without the jetpack item you can find here. Collect and equip the jetpack, then press and hold A to boost upward. Fuel depletes rather quickly. You can also press B to shoot fireballs while in jetpack mode, but this costs precious fuel. I didn’t use the fireball weapon in my playthrough.

Level 4 doesn’t have a mini-game either. You have to seek out scientists in rooms that are guarded by large enemies. Simply take out the threat to save the scientist. The potion item is another unique feature of the level, which turns you into a werewolf. This is another limited effect that consumes ammo, and this one lasts about as long as the scuba gear. As a werewolf, you can do a charge attack with B, which I found was effective against some enemies where anything else failed. You can also jump higher in this form, which is essential to reaching some rooms within the level.

Once you clear all four missions and defeat the final boss, you find out that he escaped. Then, for some inexplicable reason, you are asked to complete all four missions again to catch him for good. There’s no ending yet, and you go back to Level 1 as if nothing happened. I did not notice any difficulty increase in the second loop, but there is one difference. In the first loop, if you run out of lives, you can continue. This puts you exactly where you died with a fresh set of lives and all your equipment intact. As far as I know, you have infinite continues. Once you reach the second loop, running out of lives is Game Over and you can’t continue. There are passwords to help, with a simple format of six digits in length only zero through eight. After each stage, you receive a password. Using it puts you at the beginning of the stage with the starting amount of lives and the base equipment. The passwords do keep track of if you are on your first or second time through the game. This makes the first loop a dry run of sorts where you can figure everything out slowly without much penalty. Then the second time through you just have to remember where to go and execute properly.

This was my first time playing through James Bond Jr. I thought it might be one of the first games I sought out in the summer of 2013 when I got back into collecting, but I see I bought it later than that. I bought my first copy in early 2014 for just under $8. I bought it on eBay with a stock photo in the listing, and when I got the cart it had a terrible white smear on the plastic underneath the label. I bought a replacement copy for $10 a couple years later after I had finished collecting licensed games. I sold the messed up copy to someone on Nintendo Age. He determined that the stain came from using nail polish remover on the plastic, likely in an attempt to remove permanent marker. Pro tip: do not use nail polish remover on game carts because it will deform and discolor the plastic. The buyer ended up transplanting the label off the damaged cart onto a donor cart. I’ve never gone that far to repair a cart, and I’m not sure I ever will because it’s a little questionable to me. I guess it’s okay if all the authentic parts are there since games were assembled from a common supply of parts to begin with. James Bond Jr. is an uncommon NES cart that sells for around $25 today. I ended up with my current copy for free from prior pricing and sale of my duplicate.

My run of the game was ordinary. I spent a few days playing through the stages slowly with the passwords to get a feel for it, then I put it all together in one playthrough for my longplay video. A full run over both loops while knowing where to go took me a little over two hours, which is long for a game that only has four stages. I was lucky enough to get that kind of time the day after beating the game for the first time with passwords.

The first stage is the longest one, serving as the ideal implementation for what the developers were going for. There are several branching paths of several rooms each, many of them ending in the sliding puzzle games. Mini bosses are sprinkled throughout for a somewhat gentle introduction. The puzzles are well done and ramp up in difficulty aside from the one that’s a difficulty spike of its own. There’s even a boss fight at the end of the level. While the platforming and the combat later gets more challenging, the levels are shorter and less ambitious. That made the game seem easier the deeper I got.

The main flaw with James Bond Jr. is that just about every enemy in the game is a bullet sponge. The very first enemy you encounter is a mini-boss type that takes somewhere around 30 hits to defeat with the default weapon. Sadly, this is what you get for the rest of the game. Smaller enemies routinely take 10-15 bullets each before going down, and those values fluctuate all over the board. It’s good that you have unlimited bullets for your standard weapon, but the cool down period when you run out of ammo slows fights down even more. Compounding the problem is that your special weapons don’t help as much as they should. Bombs, for example, are two to three times more powerful than your standard shot, but they run out leaving you with just the pea shooter. Some items deplete rapidly, like the spike shield and the jetpack. Both are better used defensively than offensively. It feels like the game was designed this way intentionally to lengthen the experience. I think reducing enemy health would have made the game snappier and more fun to play while only decreasing the difficulty slightly. That’s a tradeoff I would have made.

I’m making a value judgment here based on limited experience and knowledge, but I’ll say it anyway. I’ve read a lot about what NES publishers were the worst in terms of the quality of games published, and THQ has some growing notoriety as the worst one. I’ve looked at the list of games from them, and from what I can tell I would agree with that sentiment. I have only played two of their games so far, the other one being Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. That game turned out to be fun, but I think James Bond Jr. is better and likely the best one of the bunch. The graphics are well drawn but a bit drab in the color department. The music is above average. The game play is varied and interesting with lots of weapons to use and several ways to play from puzzle solving to scuba diving. The controls are responsive as well. The downsides are too much enemy health and the wholly unnecessary but mandatory second loop. The good parts outweigh the bad ones since you can somewhat manage the detriments. This is a game that doesn’t stand out much but is better than you would expect.

Killer Tomatoes seem ripe for an NES platformer.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 12/5/17 – 12/7/17
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
Video: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Longplay

I know I’ve mentioned before that I don’t watch much movies or TV, but play video games instead in my free time. So Attack of the Killer Tomatoes comes up on my list to play. I know nothing about it at all, but I just know that this is based off some kind of movie or something. It has to be. I turn the game on and I’m greeted by these introductory story segments, further cementing my suspicion. Now that I’ve finished the game and done the research, yes indeed, this is the game based on a cartoon series that was based on a movie. I guess most people figure these things out the other way around, and I just come about it differently than others. But learning is learning, and now I know something about this strange NES game.

The original Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is, according to the movie poster, a “musical-comedy-horror” movie that debuted in 1978. The concept is well summarized from the movie title alone, and it was meant to be a spoof of B movies. It was produced by Stephen Peace and John DeBello, and also directed by John DeBello. The movie concept was conceived by Costa Dillon, and all three worked together to write the film. It has since become a cult classic and eventually spawned three sequels. Return of the Killer Tomatoes was released in theaters in 1988. The other two films, Killer Tomatoes Strike Back! from 1990 and Killer Tomatoes Eat France in 1991 were both direct-to-video films. An animated series, also named Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, aired on Fox Kids in 1990 and 1991, spanning two seasons and twenty-one episodes. This cartoon served as the base for the NES game.

There are two video games based on Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, both bearing this name. The first game came in 1986 for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and MSX, and it is an isometric game. The NES version is a different game that was developed by Imagineering and published by THQ. The game was first released in Europe in 1991, then released in the US in January 1992. It was ported to the Game Boy and was also released in 1992. Japan only got the Game Boy port, where it was renamed Killer Tomato and released in March 1993. Altron published Killer Tomato in Japan.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is a side-scrolling platformer. Dr. Gangrene has evil plans to take over both San Zucchini and the world with the Doomsday Tomato. Young Chad Finletter sets out to stop these plans. A set of huge killer tomatoes called the Gang of Six attempt to stand in his way. Chad travels through the city streets through Dr. Gangrene’s lair and beyond. Stop the evil doctor’s plans and you win the game.

This game has normal platformer controls. Use the D-pad to move Chad. You do a lot of walking left and right, but sometimes you need to climb a ladder or something by pressing Up or Down. The A button lets him jump. The B button is used for a few different actions. You can hold the B button to run, but for unknown reasons this only works in certain areas in the game. Holding B while jumping lets you leap a little farther. You can also hold B while climbing to move faster. In one place in the game, you can also press B to throw rocks. Holding down B and pressing Select lets you toggle the background music if you want. The Start button is just for pausing the game. There’s a weird glitch that happens when the game is paused. You can press Select to advance the game one frame at a time. That sounds like something that could be exploited but it’s not really helpful.

There is a status bar in the upper-left corner during gameplay. It displays your score counter, number of lives, and your health bar. Chad begins each new game with three lives and three bars of energy out of a maximum of six. There are items found in the game that can increase all three of these things. These are found on the ground and are not dropped by enemies. Fertilizer sacks are the most common item that just give you points. Lunch bags restore health and this amount varies depending on the pickup. Sometimes it is just a couple of health points and other times they give you even more than six. The rare lunch box adds an extra life. The design of these pickups is poor because they all look a lot alike. The lunch bag is folded on the top compared to the sack that looks like it is closed by a drawstring. I had to really pay attention to see if it was worth grabbing. I only came across one lunch box in the game and I couldn’t tell you how it differs graphically from the others.

There are a few enemies that show up in the game and most of them are tomato related. There are tiny little hopping tomatoes as well as larger ones that split into two tiny ones when stomped. There are tomato spiders and other tomatoes that sort of run at you. There are also rats and bats. You can jump on all these enemies to defeat them and you just fall through them when you kill them. A lot of times in platforming games you will bounce off defeated enemies a little, but it makes sense that tomatoes would just get squished. Each enemy deals one point of damage if it hits you, and there are also various stage hazards that can hurt you. A platforming game wouldn’t be complete without bottomless pits that can cost you a life.

The Gang of Six appear throughout the game, but instead of acting as boss battles they are mostly roadblocking enemies and should be avoided. The first one you meet in the game does need to be stomped to get it to run away, but all the other ones stand in your way and try to knock you around. It even hurts to jump on most of them, so don’t even bother. It seems like a strange choice to use these characters as merely stage hazards instead of bosses, but it seems to work fine. You do want to be careful around them because sometimes they can juggle you in the air and hit you multiple times.

Some of the stages in the game are mazes. The manual calls them 3D mazes but that’s a little misleading. These areas are still side-scrolling platforming levels that have a bit of a three-quarters perspective to them. There are branching pathways visible either into the background or into the screen, and you can press Up or Down to walk to the adjacent screen. They may seem difficult but are pretty straightforward as far as mazes go. If you take the wrong path, you won’t have to backtrack too far to figure out the correct way through.

If you lose all your lives, you get to continue. One of the killer tomatoes spells out the message “Try again tomato head” when you lose all your lives. I like that better than the standard Game Over! You get a new set of three lives, but you can only continue twice before having to restart the game.

This was my first time playing Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. It was one of the later additions to my collection. In fact, I bought this copy in the same lot that contained the recently-beaten Kiwi Kraze. That lot was five games for $35, so I did well getting the game for essentially $7. It’s not a common game to find and sells in the $15-$25 range today.

Platformers with limited continues are normally the kind of game I would rate as a 7/10 or 8/10 difficulty. There are lots of way to take damage or die, and you have to play the game repeatedly to get the hang of it. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes gets an average rating because the game is very short. During the first night of playing I got majorly stuck during the third level. It doesn’t look like you can go anywhere at first. You need look for something within the stage that lets you proceed and I just completely overlooked it. The next night I saw my way through that part and ended up beating the game directly from there. I wasn’t recording because I didn’t expect the game to end so soon. I recorded a run the next night in around 15 minutes, only dying once in the first level and again near the end of the game.

Because Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is so short, I’ll run you through the whole game. These are all spoilers, so skip this section if you want to try this on your own. You begin on the streets at night working your way to the right. You have to bop Tomacho five times to progress to the manhole on the far right. This takes you to the sewer maze. Work your way past Ketchuk twice and chase the shadowy figure to a room with a large pipe organ. Here you throw rocks and must break each pipe of the organ to move on. You go back to the streets briefly before going into the tomato factory. Avoid Beefsteak on the floor and the roving robotic arm above and work your way to the top where you will flip a switch on the wall that reverses gravity. This was the part I didn’t get at first. You will need to go up through the ventilation shaft and end up in a small room where you need to bop some enemies for awhile until Dr. Gangreen opens the door ahead. This takes you to the tower. Fang and Zoltan will get in your way at various points as you climb to the top of this maze. Reach the Doomsday Tomato and Chad stops it on his own, loading the end credits. Now that game isn’t quite done yet because you get eaten by a huge tomato and need to work your way through the final maze inside. Just keep moving and get past Mummato when you see him and you’ll get to the end. If you hit a dead end you will probably find a lunch bag to refill your health anyway. Grab onto the large stalactite at the end to crush the tomatoes for good!

Imagineering may not have the best track record for platformer games on the NES, but Attack of the Killer Tomatoes plays well enough and has some neat technical moments that helps it stand out a little bit. Thrown tomatoes help spell out the letters during the credits sequences. Street lights illuminate the character palettes in a clever way. The tomato squishing graphics are oddly satisfying, and splitting bigger tomatoes in two is pulled off seamlessly. The platforming and character movement aren’t the greatest, but may well be the best of their games I’ve played so far. The music is good too.

Despite all the neat touches, the game is only average in gameplay and it is over just as soon as it gets started. It would have been disappointing buying this game when it came out at full price. I really have no idea of the popularity of the cartoon at the time and if that had any bearing on the sales of the game. Word of mouth of the short length of the game might have deterred it from selling well. Both of these could be factors for why the game is a bit on the uncommon side. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is merely NES library filler. Though I’m glad I played it, like I feel about most NES games, I would say skip this one.