Has it really been almost a year!? Well how about a pinball RPG then!

To Beat: Reach the ending in RPG Mode
Played: 5/31/21 – 6/3/21
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: Pinball Quest Longplay

The genre mashup is a neat trend in video games that has been around for a long time. It is best done when the resulting game feeds off its inspirations to be better than the sum of its parts. There are plenty of examples and I can think of a few that really hit the right way in recent years. Portal is an obvious example to me, a first-person shooter and puzzle game. Undertale is more than just inspired by Earthbound; it is a bullet hell turn-based RPG. Crypt of the Necrodancer is a rhythm game mixed with a roguelike. You get the idea. Well, the NES has genre mashups for its own. Gumshoe is a light-gun based platformer, and River City Ransom is an open world beat-em-up with RPG elements. Today’s review is on Pinball Quest, a mashup of pinball game and RPG, and I find it quite fascinating!

Pinball Quest is an NES exclusive game. It was developed by TOSE and published by Jaleco in all regions. The initial release was in Japan in December 1989. It was brought over to the US on June 1990, and later it was released in some PAL territories in 1992. Currently there are no ways to play this game besides the original release.

Pinball Quest features four different modes. Three of these modes, Pop! Pop!, Viva! Golf, and Circus are standalone pinball tables. You can play these just for fun with up to 4 people alternating. There are no endings or anything to these modes. I’ll be honest, I barely played these other tables, so we’ll spend just a little bit of time on them toward the end and focus primarily on the main attraction, the RPG Mode. It is the primary way to play this game and the mode that has the ending. This mode is a vertical stack of six tables where you try to progress upward to the top, fighting enemies and bosses on the way to save the captured princess. Clear the topmost table to reach the ending and beat the game.

This game features what I would call standard pinball controls. The flippers are controlled with Left on the D-pad and the A button, for the left and right flippers respectively. You can shake or tilt the table with either Right on the D-pad or the B button. Each table in RPG Mode has at least two places where you can move the flippers up and down the table. Press Up or Down to move the flippers between these locations. The Start button pauses the game. In the RPG Mode, press Select to bring up a list of special items you can use.

The game begins at the first table in the courtyard of the castle. The initial playfield is split into two halves, top and bottom. There are trees and gravestones, a ghost captain that will relay some backstory if you get close enough, and a gate on the left side blocking the upper half of the table. As you make your way up, you’ll want to press Up to move the flippers to the top part of the table. Likewise, should you fall, press Down to put them back at the bottom. The top half of the board has some skeletons walking around that you can bop to disassemble. Once all three are brought down, they reform into a skeleton boss. Each table has a boss encounter like this. On the bottom left you will see the boss’ HP value, which is 18 for this boss. Below that is your attack meter. This will grow as you keep your ball active and attack the enemies on the table. By the time the boss appears, you should have filled some of the attack meter. Every hit into the boss decreases its HP, and having more attack power does more damage. When the boss is defeated, he drops a key. Collect the key to get warped up to the castle door and upward to the next table. If you drop off the very bottom, you get a short message and can continue again for free, as many times as you need. Don’t be too afraid to fail early on since there is no penalty at all here.

Before advancing to the next table, you’ll get the opportunity to use the shop. This shop appears between every table transition. You can skip the shop altogether via the left pipe if you don’t want or need anything. The shop items are various stoppers and flippers. Purchasing any items here get added to your inventory of up to four items. During gameplay, press Select to bring up the list of items, then press A on the one you want to use. Some items require you to choose a location, such as positioning a side stopper on either the left or right side. One neat feature of the shop is the ability to steal items. While it has a low success rate, if you can pull it off, you can get some really nice flippers and stoppers for free. Fail to steal and you’ll lose half of your gold. Perform at your own risk!

There are four types of stoppers and two types of flippers. The single stopper is a cheap, single use side stopper for only one side per item. Hit it once and it’s gone. The floor stopper is the same thing but it is much more sturdy. It remains for as long as you stay on the current table. The permanent stopper is pretty expensive but it gives you both left and right stoppers that stay while you are on the table. Even better is that this item stays in your inventory and can be used again and again, giving you truly permanent side stoppers the entire game so long as you remember to activate them every table. The center stopper goes between the flippers and lasts until you advance up to the next table. The two pairs of flippers are permanent upgrades that don’t have to be reactivated out of the inventory. The strong flippers add an attack multiplier to your ball, which takes bosses down much faster. The devil flippers add an even higher multiplier and can take bosses out very quickly, but they are flawed. Sometimes the devil flippers will freeze up for a short time, so you’re taking a risk that they might fail on you in a critical spot.

After your shop visit, you’ll head up to the second table, straight to the top half, where Ziffroo the Witch is waiting for you. She has 30 HP, a more formidable foe than the skeleton boss. She is flanked by demon dogs that can get in the way of your attacks. They also fire bubble shots that aim for your flippers and will disable them temporarily on contact. The lower half of the table not only blocks you from the boss but also is a good defense from getting back up to the top. The center drain from the top half is blocked off by one way rocks. The left side doesn’t really give you an easy path back up. There is a drain hole accessible on the right. Hitting that will send you through a chain of drain holes that propel up back to the top half. Defeating the boss opens the door to the third table.

It is worth pointing out here that you can very easily fall back to previous tables, often multiple tables if things go poorly. The table bosses return on every visit at full HP. However, once the door to the next table is opened, it will remain open for the entire game. The bosses block you but you can work around them to advance without defeating them a second time. A few extra bops to the bosses along the way will increase your attack meter, perhaps annoying but beneficial. Also, you never lose any money aside from the stealing penalty. With some intentional play, you will usually end up making some kind of permanent forward progress.

The third table features goblins, several of them. The bottom half is patrolled by two goblin kids and they are interested in your ball. They will try and grab it given the chance, but this isn’t usually a bad thing. While they sometimes attempt to spike your ball through the flippers, they typically carry your ball to the right and deposit it on a lift car that carries you to the top half. With enough damage output, you can also defeat the goblin kids, which is often more trouble than its worth in my experience. The top half of the table contains a couple rows of statues. The statues can be destroyed, just hit them a few times. After most of the statues are cleared, the Goblin King comes to life as the boss of the table. Defeat him to proceed to the fourth table.

The next table is a river-themed table featuring turtles and a more interesting structure than previous tables. The turtles saunter back and forth while popping into their shells on occasion, mostly serving to just get in your way. Bop them a few times to clear them away. What you want to do is aim for the hole on the left side to bring you upward and into a horizontal lane guarded by yet another turtle. You’ll normally bonk him and be forced back down through a return hole, but sometimes if the timing is right you can slip by the turtle altogether. When the path is clear you circle around a large drain hole with three smaller holes inside. You’ll fall into one of those holes at random, and the one you want is on the top-right to bring you up to the river. There you wait for a boat to carry you to the boss fight at the top of the table. Sometimes the boat you ride is broken down, in which case you sink into the river and drain back to the bottom of the table. This whole sequence to the top is very random, which gets very frustrating if the game keeps denying you. The boss of this table is a spirit that haunts and animates these suits of armor. You’ll need to defeat all of them one at a time to clear the table, and each subsequent armor has more HP than the one before.

Table five is the throne room table. This one is simple in effects but more winding in layout than all the other tables. There are several different placements of flippers in this one in different formations than the standard flipper pair. To advance in this table, you want to climb all the way up the right side of the table first. You can adjust the flippers as needed to propel yourself all the way up, or you can drop into the hole on the right side to carry you all the way up. There you will fall back down the middle of the board across pegs. Falling through the left side carries you toward the final part of the table on the upper left. A princess on a throne is circled by four monsters. First defeat the monsters, then hit the princess to save her. By saving her, it means turn her into the boss of the table. She flies all over the place and can hurt your flippers as well. Once you take her down, you’ll reveal the stairs to the final table underneath the throne.

The sixth and final table is a boss fight against Beelzebub, the Dark Lord of the Machine, as the manual puts it. There are three lanes in the center with lit candles that can carry you up to the top of the table, or you can pass through and reach the upper flippers if you’re lucky. Beelzebub sits at the top holding his position. He has a pretty devastating skull attack that can lock your flippers up. Do your best to keep up the pressure and you can defeat him to win the game.

Let’s briefly discuss the three standard tables also available in Pinball Quest: Pop! Pop!, Viva! Golf, and Circus. Pop! Pop! is a simple table with a bowling theme. It’s interesting to note that you need to press Up and Down to set the position of the flippers from the top and bottom just like you do in RPG mode. The top half of the table has a few bumpers and a pair of holes, nothing super notable. The flippers are offset here and the ball tends to go around them most of the time anyway. The bottom of the table is a bit more interesting with bowling pins set up and an entrance to a pool table mini-game. You aim a cursor in 8 directions with the D-pad and try to sink all the balls before you accidentally scratch the cue ball.

Viva! Golf is a golf course theme that is infested by gophers. In this one, the top and bottom flippers are fixed, no moving them around. The top half of the playfield has the hole on the green, along with some other holes and bumpers. There is only a right flipper up here so it is tough to keep the ball up top. The lower part of the playfield has a row of four holes with gophers that occasionally pop out. You need to hit one out of each hole to unlock some bonuses at the top of the playfield. This level also features a water hazard that is very easy to hit. Land there and your ball will eject out of another hole in such a way that you often lose the ball between the lower flippers.

I found Circus to be the most fun of the three standard tables. The main feature of this one is a slot machine that can activate some features of the table, including an extra ball light and a bumper scoring increase. You do have to shuffle the flippers up and down on this table. The top half of the table features four target lanes and some more pop bumpers. The bottom of the table contains the slot machine, some other bumpers, and a side lane back to the top of the table. This table has a center bumper built-in at the bottom, which solves the problem from Viva! Golf with the water hazard. The table also has a bonus game where you throw balls at animals to protect a girl, according to the manual. I was not able to reach this mode despite several tries, but I don’t feel like I’m missing anything truly necessary.

This was my first time playing through Pinball Quest. I was already familiar with the premise of the game from watching others play it briefly, as well as reading up on it from time to time over the years. This was my first time diving in beyond the first table, certainly. This game is not rare, and worth about $10 loose.

Beating Pinball Quest has one of the widest possible outcomes of time needed to clear once you know what you are doing. With the unlimited continues and randomized outcomes of some of the tables, it is a constant push and pull to make progress on the board. It’s possible to beat the game in a matter of minutes if things go very well, and it also could take hours if it goes awry. My initial playthrough took a couple of hours, which isn’t bad at all for a first time. I recorded two follow up runs after that to try and improve the video, and both runtimes were around an hour each. The run I kept was just under an hour. I could have grinded out a much more respectable time if I really wanted, but I was ready to move on.

I came up with a way to approach the game that made winning consistent. To do this, you need both the permanent stopper for the side drains and a steady supply of the center stoppers. Better flippers are nice to have, but strictly speaking they are optional. The quickest way to go about this is to steal from the shop at every opportunity! Between the first two tables, you won’t really grind up the cash fast enough to worry about losing it on failed steal attempts. It might take some time to get anything good out of it but I think it’s worth it. The permanent stopper is the real prize here, but getting either of the upgraded flippers was good enough to give up my thieving ways. From there, just keep marching up the table. If you didn’t steal the permanent stopper, save up for that first and foremost, and use it on every table once you get it. The center stoppers are permanent until you change tables. I don’t bother using those at all until I can afford one for the current table plus all others tables ahead. As long as you play carefully, you should not fall back down with both stoppers active.

Pinball Quest is a unique genre mashup that feels very forward thinking, but what I have failed to mention until now is just how janky this game feels. The physics are functional enough but lack any sort of polish. It’s like the ball just wiggles around on its own accord. I haven’t covered the black box Pinball game yet, but it has a very good feel to it for such an early game, and Pinball Quest did not learn any lessons from that whatsoever. Pinball machines in real life are miracles of mechanisms and electronics combined, and in a way, Pinball Quest is its own kind of miracle in that it manages to function in spite of itself. The gameplay concept is just so neat that it covers for its technical shortcomings. The graphics, music, and controls are all adequate, nothing at all flashy but good enough. I really like what they did with the ending, it feels wholly out of place, but I dig it. I don’t mean to rag on this game too hard right at the end, I just want to be clear that I think Pinball Quest is a good game with some obvious issues. I believe it is worth your time to give it a try and see if it might be fun for you!

The Bases are in fact still Loaded.

To Beat: Get a perfect 100 rating against a Level 5 team
Played: 5/27/21
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Bases Loaded 3 Longplay

The NES has several game series with an excellent third installment. Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of the best games of all time. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse is a fan favorite with an all-time soundtrack made even better when utilizing the expanded chips on the Famicom. Dragon Warrior III is often considered one of the best RPGs on the NES and one I personally enjoyed very much. Ninja Gaiden III is awesome, as is TMNT III: The Manhattan Project. Mega Man 3 might well be the best of the 6 NES installments, at least to some. Bases Loaded 3 is not considered, well, at all, when talking about great 3rd games of a series. But I can confidently say that Bases Loaded 3 is my favorite game in the series for one very specific reason that I’ll get into.

For more information on the Bases Loaded series, check out my reviews for Bases Loaded and Bases Loaded II: Second Season. As before, this review will focus primarily on the changes between the previous installments. Let’s get started.

Bases Loaded 3 was first released in Japan, originally named Moero!! Pro Yakyuu ’90: Kandouhen. That translates roughly to Burn!! Pro Baseball ’90: Exciting Edition, or perhaps Impressive Edition. It was released in Japan in July 1990, about six months after Bases Loaded II reached North America. The US release came in September 1991. Here it was called just Bases Loaded 3 but it features MLB Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg on the box cover. Like the other installments, the game was developed by Tose and published by Jaleco in both regions.

Let’s get the biggest change out of the way first. Bases Loaded 3 does not require playing a full season to beat the game. In fact, there is no season mode at all! This game features five difficulty levels for the opposing team, but you’ll always start off playing the weakest, Level 1 team. At the end of each game, you are given a special screen and a rating value. I’ll spare the full details until later, but you can score up to a 100 rating with very good, efficient play. The rating determines which difficulty level you’ll face in the next game. If you lose a game, or have a low rating, you’ll go back to the base Level 1 team. To beat this game, you need to earn a match against a Level 5 team and then beat that team with a perfect 100 rating.

Here are other changes between versions that take place prior to starting up a match. From the title screen you can select Watch mode to watch the CPU square off against itself. Choose the teams and settings, then sit back and enjoy. There is also an Edit mode for creating your own team. Behind the scenes, there is a special team designated for the Edit mode, so you can only build and update that specific team. You can change any of the players’ names and stats with no restrictions or limits. Build the super team of your dreams, go crazy! In this game there are 12 standard teams to choose from, plus the Edit team. After choosing teams, pick one of three stadiums to play in. Each stadium has different outfield dimensions, so you can opt for the pitcher’s park with long distances or a more hitter friendly park with closer walls down the lines. You can also adjust your starting lineup and pitcher as you can in the other games.

The pitching is tweaked a little for Bases Loaded 3. You begin a pitch the same way as before, hold any direction and press A to target a specific location. From here on, it is handled differently. To increase the direction of the pitch, tap A between the windup and delivery. The more you tap A, the more the pitch travels in that direction. For example, for a right-handed batter, you can throw a pitch up and away by holding Up and Left before winding up with A. This pitch will target the upper left of the strike zone. By adding A button taps before the pitch is thrown, you can aim the pitch further up and away beyond the strike zone. This gives you a more granular adjustment on where to aim pitches. During the windup, to throw the ball faster, you’ll hold Up on the D-pad. Because the D-pad only increases speed during the windup, you really can’t curve the ball like you can in the other games. Finally, you can press B to initiate a pickoff move.

The developers managed to set this game around yet another defensive perspective, this time putting the camera out in center field. Logically this makes sense, as now batting, pitching, and defense are all oriented the same way toward home plate, but this is uncommon compared to other baseball games of the time. The controls for choosing a base to throw or run to also reflects this perspective. Press Up to target home, Left for first base, Down for second base, and Right for third base. Another tweak the manual calls out is that the speed of the throw is determined by how quickly you get rid of the ball. As soon as you grab the ball on defense, throw it right away. This gives you the crispest throw, otherwise if you delay even a little bit the throw will be much slower. It’s an interesting timing mechanic. The other controls are the same: Press A and a direction to throw to a particular base, press B and a direction to run to a base.

Batting is made simpler here. The A button swings like usual. This time you can do a level swing, a high swing with Up and A, and a low swing with Down and A. In earlier games you could adjust your swing to reach inside and outside pitches. To do that now, you must position yourself in the batter’s box prior to the pitch. This might seem like a downgrade but this is how it is done in most other NES baseball games. To bunt, press Select. You can cancel a bunt by pressing Select again or pressing A.

Baserunning is much improved this time. They finally standardized the baserunning controls in Bases Loaded 3 to align with other contemporary NES baseball games. To advance a base, press B and the D-pad direction for the base you are heading toward. To go back, press A and the base you want to return to. The directional mapping for the bases is the same as when fielding, from the centerfield perspective. These controls are so much more intuitive to me. To move multiple runners, you have to control them separately. You can even halt the baserunners by holding both A and B together during a play.

With the controls and other differences out of the way, it’s time to explain the new winning condition. To win the game you’ll need to understand how to score 100 points in the new rating system. To get a rating at all you need to win a game first. Interestingly enough, the rating screen is more a list of your flaws rather than how well you played. You start with the base score of 100, and most of the categories are negative factors that reduce the rating by 3 points for each infraction. You’ll see a count of the number of faults made in each category with the total score at the bottom.

Here are the 13 categories, mostly taken straight from the manual:

1. Making an error
2. Delaying a throw, i.e. making a slow throw
3. Allowing an inside-the-park home run
4. Throwing to an unmanned base
5. Forcing in a run with a walk
6. Leaving a tired pitcher in the game
7. Allowing more than 3 runs in an inning
8. Throwing a wild pitch that allows a runner to advance a base
9. Striking out
10. Getting caught stealing
11. Getting picked off or doubled off a base
12. Making a great play
13. Bonus

A few things stand out to me about this list. The manual claims a few times about playing the perfect game, but by baseball definition, you don’t actually have to play or pitch a perfect game, not even close. You can allow hits and walks, and even runs, and not necessarily be penalized for them. Most of the categories center around playing clean defense. Miscues on defense that are not necessarily errors in an MLB game tend to count against you here. Many of these are pretty straightforward to avoid. By far the hardest to avoid is striking out, this is what burned me the most starting out. For any point-reducing penalty during game play, you’ll hear a set of beeps to indicate that you messed up.

The final two categories add points to your score. Funny that these are here to help cover up a mistake or two that let you maintain your “perfect” run, but I digress. A great play will add 2 points to your score. These are for very good defensive plays, such as diving for a ball just barely in reach and throwing out the runner at first base. You can’t fake these points by diving after everything unnecessarily, trust me, I tried that. The mysterious Bonus category gives you 1 point, and I have no idea how this works at all. I was just happy to see points there. Note that with these last two categories it is possible to exceed 100 points, but your rating will round down to 100 if that occurs.

The game rating determines which difficulty level of team you’ll play in the next match. Score 90 points or higher, and you’ll face the most difficult Level 5 team. Every 10 point range down from there reduces the difficulty level by 1. Scoring fewer than 60 points, or losing the match outright, will reset you back to playing the Level 1 team. To beat the game, it’s not just enough to get the perfect 100 rating. You need to earn the right to play the Level 5 team by scoring 90 points or more, and then you have to secure a 100 rating against that team to win for good.

This was my first time playing Bases Loaded 3. Just like the others, this is an affordable cart that is not difficult to find, though it is not nearly as ubiquitous as the first two installments. When you do find a cart, it isn’t expensive, about $5-$10. I have had maybe one or two extras of this game during my heavy collecting days.

I knew going into Bases Loaded 3 that it would be a much quicker play than the other two games I’ve completed, but I was not prepared for just how quickly I would actually finish. These games usually have a bit of a ramp up to get a feel for the batting timing, to learn the tendencies of the opposing defense, to adapt to pitch types, etc. That ramp up also means that I’ll lose a few of the first few games before I catch my stride. This time was special because none of that really happened. The first game I won with a rating in the 80s, good enough to face the Level 4 team. In the second game, I won and got the perfect 100 rating. That earned me an audience with the Level 5 team, which I beat and got another 100 rating. Victory after only three matches!

The only bad part of it was that I didn’t capture video of the entire playthrough. I realized part way through the first game that I didn’t start the recording. At the time, I assumed it wouldn’t be a big deal because certainly I would lose a match and have to start all over anyway. To try and fix the issue, initially I intended on recording a brand new full playthrough, hoping to replicate my success from the first time. On the first game of the replay, I got a similar enough rating to get from Level 1 to Level 4, just like I did on the winning run. I decided then to call it, and so for my final video I stitched the replay of the first game together with the final two games of the winning run. There are probably some continuity errors at that split point as far as the video goes, but I’m not bothered by it. Getting the full final game with the 100 rating against the Level 5 team to finish it is really all that is needed for proof anyway. I just want to be obsessively open with my process in all this!

The developers did some good work with the tweaks they made from the prior games. I appreciate the upgrade to the baserunning controls and simplifying the batting and pitching. The outfield defensive perspective is not the greatest, but it works fine. I wish the viewpoint was zoomed out more than it is. It makes it more challenging to get your fielder in the right spot, particularly in the outfield, when you can’t see the fielder you’re controlling until the ball gets close enough. But also, I had no real trouble finishing this game, so perhaps it is fine the way it is. Bases Loaded 3 is a solid NES baseball game. I’m not saying this is an essential game that you need to play, but if you appreciate a different style of challenge in sports games, then I think this is worth trying out.

The second season went more smoothly than the first.

To Beat: Win the World Series
Played: 11/11/19 – 12/12/19
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: Bases Loaded II World Series and Ending

Uh oh, here we go again!  The first Bases Loaded was a very easy game that took a really long time to beat, solely because you are required to grind through a full season to get the ending.  Bases Loaded II: Second Season has a similar requirement to the original.  I’m not sure to what end the developers were able to take feedback from the first game to apply it to the second, but I did notice differences between the games that made the entire playthrough of Bases Loaded II more streamlined.  Despite the improvements, this is still a long season and another game to grind.

For more information about this series, check out my review of the original Bases Loaded.  In this review I will be focusing mostly on the changes made to this game.

Bases Loaded II: Second Season was first released on the Famicom.  In Japan the game is called Moero!! Pro Yakyuu ’88 Kettei Ban, which translates to Burn!! Pro Baseball ’88 Decision Version.  The game was developed by Tose and published by Jaleco, releasing in Japan in August 1988.  The NES release in North America was delayed until February 1990.

The first differences are notable before even starting the game.  The title screen contains Start for a new game or season and Continue to resume an existing season.  When starting a new game, you will first decide if this is a 1 or 2 player game.  A single player game always begins a season even if you just want to play one game.  First choose either the Eastern or Western division, then select a team and the opposing team.  For a two player game, you first choose a calendar date sometime from 1989-1993 (I guess they didn’t expect people to be playing this game now), then each player selects any team.  The teams in this game are the same one from the first game with half of the teams in the Western Division and the other half in the Eastern Division.  Teams only play against teams in the same division in the season mode.  The Continue option first prompts you for a password which is in the same format as the first game.  The character entry is slightly changed in that each character has a scrolling animation when moving to the next character.  This is the kind of design decision that infuriates me.  This game is long enough, why lengthen it even a little with unnecessary animation on password entry?  Before starting each game, you have the option to modify the lineup.  The Player Change option substitutes bench players into the lineup, while Line Up rearranges the order of the lineup.  Choose Play Ball to start the game!

The pitching controls are the same: Hold a direction and press A to choose a pitch, hold a direction while winding up to set direction, and press directions while the pitch is moving to adjust it mid-flight.  In this game you cannot adjust the pitcher’s position on the mound prior to the pitch.  The manual has a chart with some detail pitching stats.  Each player’s ERA is listed, top speed in MPH, which role they play, i.e. starter or reliever, and curve ball ability separated by vertical curve, left curve, and right curve.  Curveball scores are from 0-15, which mean 0 being no curve and 15 as maximum curve.  These metrics are not listed in-game (aside from ERA) but are useful to know.

Fielding has a couple of differences.  First is that you can now dive for a ball by pressing B.  Just B alone makes your fielder jump, and B with a direction dives in that direction.  The jumps and dives only work when you are close to the ball.  The other, more significant change is that there are two fielding views.  The first game has the view from up above behind home plate while the second game has views from above both the first base and third base dugouts.  When the home team is batting, the view is behind first base, otherwise it is from behind third base.  This is a very strange decision.  You can plan ahead if you think about it, but I just adapted from game to game. Due to the perspective, I found right field defense tough from the first base view and left field defense difficult from the third base angle.

Hitting has one minor tweak and one hidden feature I discovered.  In the last game you bunt by pressing B before the windup.  This time all batting is done by the A button, so to bunt you tap A to prepare the bunt before the pitch or you do a very quick half swing when the pitch arrives at home plate.  When you set up the bunt early you can aim the bat with the D-pad just like in the original Bases Loaded.  There is an advanced hitting technique I discovered very late in the season that may have been present in the first game, I’m not sure.  There are nine hitting zones you can target with the D-pad, either low, middle, or high combined with left, middle, or right.  As you are swinging in one of those zones, you can shift the D-pad direction to sort of swipe the bat in between those nine zones.  You have to swing toward one of the nine zones with A and then immediately after press a nearby D-pad direction.  It’s tough to explain, hopefully that was sufficient. Sometimes pitchers will throw pitches in between the standard bat zones and they are nearly impossible to hit unless you aim in between zones.

Baserunning is exactly the same between the two games from what I noticed.  It retains the strange convention where the D-pad direction is the base either behind you or where you are standing.  While holding the direction, you press A to retreat or B to advance.  I didn’t really grasp it the first time around, despite the long season, but I got it this time.

The biggest difference in Bases Loaded II is the introduction of the biorhythm system.  This mechanic attempts to simulate streaks and slumps over the course of a long season.  There are three ratings, physical, sensitivity, and intellectual, that are rated with a score from -8 to +8 for each player.  There are in-game charts of these three ratings for each player that are displayed either after the game for the entire lineup, for a relief pitcher, or a pinch hitter.  Charts are color coded with red for physical, blue for sensitivity, and white for intellectual.  Each space on the grid on the x-axis represents a single game, while each mark on the y-axis represents a point of the stat.  The bottom of the screen shows the actual values of those stats for the next game.  Curvy lines are animated on the grid for each of the three stats going out the next 20-30 games.  When two or all three of those lines come together at the top of the chart, you know that player is going to be a major force for a few games.

The biorhythm ratings mean different things for pitchers and hitters.  The pitcher physical stat relates to stamina and for how long the pitcher can both control his pitches and throw them at a high speed.  Pitcher sensitivity is the adrenaline level and affects how fast pitches are thrown.  The pitcher intellectual rating influences the tightness of the curveball, though it will not suddenly give a curveball to a pitcher whom does not already have one.  The hitter physical stat correlates to getting base hits.  A hitter with a high physical rating will tend to get base hits more easily.  Hitting sensitivity is for power and how far a ball can be hit.  The hitter intellectual rating is for clutch hitting and the ability to get hits with runners in scoring position.  As these stats fluctuate game per game, they determine how well a player will perform in relation to his natural abilities.

To beat this game, first you need to win 75 games out of a 130-game season.  This requirement is similar to the first game’s winning condition of 80 games out of 132.  This time, when you win 75 games, you have won the pennant in your division and you get to face off against the winning team from the other division in the World Series.  The opposing Western Division champ is Los Angeles and the opposing Eastern Division champ is New York.  The World Series is a best-of-7 series against one of those two teams.  If you win four of those games, then you win the season and beat the game.  So, you need 79 totals wins, one less than the 80 in the first game.

I had never beaten this game before, but I had a much quicker time finishing the season off in the second game than I did in the first game.  One major contributor was that the pace of play was greatly increased.  Minor actions like throwing pitches back to the pitcher that were very slow in the first game, while still present, take place faster here.  There are a few small tweaks like this that add up to a lot of time savings per game.  In Bases Loaded, games took 25-30 minutes, while in Bases Loaded II matchups lasted closer to 20 minutes each.  Perhaps my favorite new feature in this game is a mercy rule.  If a team is leading by 9 or more runs after at least 5 innings, the leading team wins automatically.  Games won by the mercy rule, if finished optimally, could run closer to 15 minutes total.  I won enough games by the mercy rule to reduce my total game time by a few hours over playing the full 9 innings every game.  I estimate I was able to complete this game in about 25-30 hours as opposed to 40 hours in the first game.  It is still a long, repetitive game, but it was a significantly improved experience.

For my playthrough of the game, my team was Kansas of the Western Division.  The manual has all the stats you need to compare the teams, and Kansas stood out to me for a few reasons.  They have two players appearing in the short list of best players in the league.  Yu is second best in homers and third best in average in the league, while Binder is third best in homers.  (It helped too that the Chicago Cubs have Yu Darvish pitching for them now, who is an incredible pitcher!)  I also wanted to find a pitcher with modest curving ability in all directions.  The pitcher May on the Kansas squad fits the bill for that.  I considered picking Omaha again like I did in the first game, but their team is uninspiring on the stats sheet and none of the same players from the first game show up at all.

In the original game, pitching was so consistent that I was able to figure out a super pitch that the opponent could do nothing with.  I spent a lot of time messing around with the pitching to try and find this game’s version of a super pitch, but sorry to say I did not find one.  I had hoped May would be able to find that sweet spot with his modest curve and throw balls into a dead zone consistently, but it just didn’t pan out.  I had to be more creative in finding exploits for this game.

For pitching, I eventually settled on throwing fastballs fading slightly down and right.  I wanted to induce groundballs where possible.  I ended up allowing mostly fieldable balls in play, a few strikeouts, some hits, and the occasional home run.  The best exploit I found was my ability to pick runners off base.  With a runner on first, I would do a pickoff throw to second base and have the shortstop run the wrong way toward left field.  Go far enough and the runner will take off toward second.  When the runner reached about two-thirds of the way to second, I would throw to second to get the runner to go back toward first, then I would throw to first to get the runner caught in a rundown.  I would usually make the out at second base as baserunners are slower to take a base than to retreat to their previous base.  If that failed, sometimes throwing a ball home or to first with a runner on second got him to leave his base.  I had a few backup pickoff strategies that mostly worked out.

There is another pitching strategy applicable to this game that also applied to the first game that I forgot to mention in that review.  It has to do with pitcher rest in between games.  Normally, starting pitchers cannot be used for a few games after they have pitched in a game.  The password only tracks wins and losses for your team, so all you have to do is reset the game and apply the latest password, and then you can use whatever pitchers you want in any game.  If you play multiple games per session without resetting, then you have to deal with pitcher rest.  This was much more important in the first game where I needed to constantly use my pitchers with the super pitch.  In this game, I mostly rotated between three starting pitchers.  May was my preferred pitcher, and Holler was really good too.  I used Anders occasionally, but I may have been better off skipping him more often.  In a few cases, I used Antman in relief because he has a decent ERA and a marvelous name.

On the hitting side, I had to play things straight for the most part.  Just put the ball into play and hope for the best.  Watch the opposing catcher’s glove during the pitch to determine where to aim your bat and try to make contact.  I got pretty decent at the timing for stealing bases and with a good baserunner I could take second base easily.  Another minor trick I picked up was with a runner on third, I could distract the fielders into throwing home to get batters to reach either first or second base.  Otherwise, the computer-controlled defense was very good.  Most of the times I got caught in a rundown ended with me getting called out on the bases.  The opponent’s pitching was really feast or famine.  Many pitchers just throw hittable junk near the middle of the plate and often I could score a lot in those games.  A few pitchers found the unhittable zone I was hoping to find when I was pitching.  It was most of the way through the season before I figured out I could put the bat in that zone with just the right touch and hit those pitchers too.  I suppose the opposing batters already could do that when I was pitching.

Over a full season, there were various events I took note of.  My season record at the end was 79-5.  Somehow, I won the very first game I played, I’m not sure how that happened but it did.  I lost the next three games, then I won a game, then I lost another game.  With a 2-4 record, I went 77-1 the rest of the way to finish off the season.  My first mercy rule win came in Game #13, a 9-0 victory after 7 innings.  The next game I hit a grand slam to win 12-1 after 6 innings.  I won 25 games total by the mercy rule, about a third of my total wins.  Two games ended in a tie after 12 innings and I was credited with a win in both.  Game #29 was a walkoff win 1-0.  In Game #44, down 1-0 in the 9th, Norton hit a 3-run homer to win that one for Kansas.  Yu bailed me out with a late two-run homer in a 2-1 win in Game #57.  Every player in my lineup hit at least one home run in the season.  Yu didn’t turn out to be near the offensive powerhouse I expected.  He didn’t hit his first home run until Game #37.  He did have a 3-game stretch where he hit 5 homers.  Saigun had a major hot stretch at one point.  He had a 3-homer game and hit 3 grand slams within a 6-game stretch.  The World Series ended up being a complete joke.  I won 10-0, 9-0, 9-0, and 5-0.  All four games combined were completed in just over an hour, which was easily the quickest stretch of games I played in the whole season.

You might be wondering about what exactly happened in the one random loss I had in the season, and it is so dumb that I have to tell the story here.  It happened in Game #71, breaking a 64-game winning streak.  Once I got good, I still knew that I was susceptible to a loss at any time.  I was vulnerable to the solo home run and any lapses in defense.  I had a few near misses along the way.  Therefore, it wasn’t necessarily a surprise, but frankly it was upsetting that it happened at all, especially so close to the end of the season where a loss feels like a huge waste of time.  What happened was I ran into a hot team.  Two opposing players were knocking the cover off the ball hitting long fly ball outs and some solo home runs.  The game prior I won 6-4, allowing 4 solo homers.  In this game, I had a 3-1 lead in the 9th when things unraveled, but not in the way you are expecting.  I was getting sleepy and nodding off a little in this game.  I had a runner reach second base, and sometimes you just cannot get him to move off the base on a pickoff attempt, which is what happened here.  A base hit scored him, and then more bad defense brought that runner around to tie up the game.  I woke up then and pushed the game into extras.  I made it to the 11th inning still tied 3-3 in fear of a game ending solo homer.  One of the hot batters stepped up to the plate, and I figured he was gonna go deep.  That’s when I had a revelation.  Why don’t I throw pitches way off the plate to walk him intentionally, then pick him off the bases?  It was so obvious I was surprised it took me that long to think of it.  The next pitch I tried to throw something different.  Maybe I was still tired and my thoughts didn’t translate down into my fingers because I threw a meatball right down the middle that sailed over the fence for the game-ending home run.  I went to bed sad after that loss.  At least it made for a good story!

I thought Bases Loaded II: Second Season was a major improvement over the first game with a few issues.  The pace of play is increased to a more sensible level, making for more engaging gameplay.  The graphics aren’t changed too much from the first game, but they are pretty good.  I like the pitching windup animations, and bunting, though mostly unused, had really smooth animation too.  The music is just okay, nothing memorable to me.  There is good variety in control in both pitching and hitting and everything responds appropriately.  The only minor issues were the timing when you can dive on defense and the silly baserunning controls carried over from the first game.  A gameplay nitpick is the unnecessary view shift on defense, as it is disorienting when suddenly in the next game you might see the field from the opposite angle.  The hitting perspective, while nice to look at, still takes some getting used to.  The second game was a little more difficult to win, but it was still pretty easy overall.  The glitches I found from Bases Loaded were all cleared up in the second game.  While it has a few new issues, this was the better game by far, though that doesn’t mean I ever want to play it again.

A Zapper game with a strangely accurate title.

To Beat: Beat the Normal Game
To Complete: Get the best ending in both the Normal Game and Party Game
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 5/17/19
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Video: Shooting Range Longplay

Now that I’ve come upon yet another Zapper game already, I decided to do a little digging trying to piece together my own list of Zapper-compatible licensed NES games for tracking purposes. The unlicensed list is easy, just Baby Boomer and Chiller. For licensed games, most lists I’ve found are incomplete. Complicating things are a few games that use the Zapper partially, or worse, at one random spot in the game. Putting everything together, it looks like there are 16 licensed games that utilize the Zapper with most of them being Zapper only. Shooting Range is already the 5th Zapper game played for this blog.

Shooting Range was developed by TOSE and published by Bandai. It was released in June 1989 in North America only and is an NES exclusive. Really, that’s all the information there is on Shooting Range.

There’s no story to be found here but there are a couple of different modes to play. The Normal Game takes place over four stages where you fire at targets that appear in themed scenes. This is the main mode of the game. The other mode is called Party Game and you try and shoot as many targets as you can within the time limit. In both modes, up to four players can play alternating to see who can get the biggest score. To beat this game, you need to clear all stages in the Normal Game. There are also different ending screens depending on how many points you score in the Party Game.

I think Shooting Range has a double meaning here. Sure, it’s a shooting range where you fire at targets. The primary mechanic in the game is that you use both the D-pad and the Zapper at the same time, using Left and Right to “range” across a wide view while you also aim and shoot at targets. This is a cumbersome setup for me since I prefer to hold the Zapper with both hands to keep it steady. You will need to constantly pan back and forth looking for targets to shoot so you really need to play this with both Zapper and controller in hand simultaneously.

The goal of the Normal Game is simple enough. Various targets will appear on screen holding up a red and white pinwheel which is what you shoot to earn points. The bottom of the screen shows your level score and total score on the right and the level timer and energy bar on the left. You lose energy when you shoot and miss. You lose the game if you run out of time or energy, so you must be both quick and accurate. Each stage has different criteria to finish the stage and move on to the next. Upon completing each level, you earn some bonus points for any leftover time or energy.

When starting up a new Normal Game, first you select either Level 1, 2, or 3. These are not the stages themselves but more like a difficulty level. To my knowledge, the only change is how much time you have to start each stage. Levels 1, 2, and 3 give you 300, 250, and 200 seconds respectively. Next up is the scoring screen. This shows your scoring breakdown per stage, as well as any bonus points that roll up into your total score. The Stage Clearing Point area is what the point threshold is for certain stages. I confused this for actual points on my score at first. Then you go to a screen displaying all the stages in the game. Shoot anywhere to start playing a level.

During the Normal Game, shooting some targets also reveals an item. The same characters tend to drop the same things. Most of the items are just circles with letters in them. Simply shoot it to collect it. The little E boosts your energy by two bars, while the large E gives you four. A reverse E deducts a couple of energy points, so avoid them. The C gives you 100 points, while the W gives you 1000. The W is different in that it doesn’t get dropped by anyone and you will sometimes just find it. There is also an hourglass item that gives you 50 more seconds on the clock.

The first level in the game is Western themed. The goal here is to earn 5000 points, at which point the level ends abruptly. There are Native Americans, gun-slinging criminals, and flying birds for targets. Some of the birds are worth 500 points, while others are worth much fewer, depending on how they fly around. The second level is pretty similar to the first. Here you need 7000 points to clear it, but this time it is ghost house themed. There are monsters such as witches, vampires, and ghosts. One monster flips his pinwheel back and forth rapidly and it is hard to hit.

The next level is the bonus game. This one is just a single screen with no controller required. There are two rows of bottles on the wall and random ones will flash all white. Shoot them while they are all white to break them. This level ends when either all bottles are broken or you run out of time. You always get sent to the next level no matter how well you do.

The final stage takes place on the moon. There are various types of aliens to shoot at here. Instead of meeting a point threshold, as soon as the timer hits 100 seconds remaining, a large brain alien appears. It’s a boss battle! The brain floats around the whole screen in a wave-like pattern and only fully reveals its pinwheel every so often. This is a tough fight with the limited time left, but if you can beat it then you win Normal Game. If you fail here or in any other stage, you can continue, but you lose all your points in doing so. I think continues are supposed to be unlimited, but I didn’t always see it happen so I’m not sure how the continue system works. This is a short game, so once you get the last boss down you can play through the game again trying for a high score. You can enter your initials on the high score screen and see your accuracy too.

The Party Game is a much simpler mode than the Normal Game. This is just a single screen with some targets to hit. There are no items or energy, just you and the timer. Lights in the background appear and shooting them causes the pinwheel to pop up along the bottom. Shoot as many of these as you can. If you miss a pinwheel, then you need to shoot another light to restart the sequence. It’s too bad you can’t play this simultaneously with another player because it would be fun to compete for targets. Either way, try to score as high as you can before the timer runs out.

This was my first time playing Shooting Range. I can’t recall if I played any of the game during cart testing. Usually with the peripheral games I boot them up to see if they run without glitches and then I put them away without trying the gameplay. I know that I watched TMR beat this game for NESMania and it was one of the last games he completed for his project. I had some familiarity with the game though I forgot most of it. This cart isn’t too hard to find and sells for around $8-$10.

This was a short game that I cleared within a couple of hours. I needed more than a few attempts to clear the final boss, but that was all. If you score high enough at the end, you earn a medal. The bronze medal is at 30,000 points, a silver is at 35,000 points, and you need 40,000 to get the gold. Now your score for the first two levels is pretty well set since those stages end by point thresholds. One tactic is to stockpile energy and cash them in for bonus points at the end, but that doesn’t always pan out and doesn’t give you near enough points anyway. The other thing you can do is play on the easiest difficulty since more time means more points at the end of the stage, even if that only adds just a tiny amount to your total. The secret to getting the gold is to earn the bonus points as shown on the scoring screen, and the only way to get them is to play the bonus level perfectly without missing. Doing so is challenging. My strategy was to go at the top row first left to right, then the bottom row. After a few bottles gone, the next ones seem to line up well and you can take them all out quickly. On my run I ended up with over 50,000 points which was above and beyond what I needed. In Party Mode, the score you want to aim for is 35,000, which I accomplished on my second try. All those attempts at To The Earth not long ago sure paid dividends!

Shooting Range is a brief Zapper experience that ultimately doesn’t add up to much. It is interesting that it has different themes for each level. Even the Party Game has a different feel than the Normal Game’s levels. The music is mostly forgettable but not bad. The controls are a little wonky for a Zapper game. They aren’t difficult to comprehend by any means, but I simply didn’t find it that comfortable to have to use both the controller for scrolling and the Zapper for firing at the same time. Thankfully the game was easy and short enough that it wasn’t a huge issue until the end boss. However, the controls combined with the short play time makes Shooting Range not that great of a game.

An early third-party NES game featuring a fat angel? Why not?

To Beat: Finish Stage 12
Played: 1/21/18 – 1/30/18
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
Video: Chubby Cherub Longplay

I know this is just me, but when people refer to an NES game as a bad game, it piques my curiosity. It’s tough to be objective about this sort of thing. I would guess most gamers out there don’t care about the NES and that most games on the console to them are bad aside from a few well known titles. Think Super Mario or Mega Man. I’m far on the other end of the spectrum where I believe most NES games are good and worth looking at, with only a small handful of games that I don’t enjoy. Chubby Cherub has the reputation of a bad game from my view of things, and look, I totally get it. I’m not going to go to bat for Chubby Cherub and defend it as some misunderstood masterpiece, far from it. What I will try to outline here is both some context and gameplay ideas that are at least interesting.

The history of this game begins with Obake no Q-taro, a defunct Japanese manga written by Fujiko Fujio. Originally running from 1964-1973, it features an obake named Q-taro who likes to fly around and cause mischief. An obake is like a ghost in Japanese culture. I’m not well versed in all of this, but I think this is enough to carry the idea. There were three separate anime series all roughly two years in length beginning in 1965 with the first series and ending in 1987 with the last. There was also a full-length anime film in 1986, and a much shorter film the following year. Unless there is some future reboot in store, that’s the last the world has seen of Q-taro.

Obake no Q Tarou: Wanwan Panic is the Famicom game based on the manga. The game was developed by TOSE and published by Bandai. It was released in Japan in December 1985. The NES version of the game was renamed to Chubby Cherub, also published by Bandai in October 1986. Gameplay is identical between the two versions, but the localized version replaced Q-taro with a flying angel.

This is a good time to talk about the difference between 3-screw and 5-screw NES carts. Early cartridges were held together by five screws, one in each corner and one in the middle. These are small, flathead screws so you can take the game apart easily if you really want to. Sometime in 1987, Nintendo redesigned the cartridge shells to have interlocking tabs on the top of each cartridge beside the end label, removing the need for two of the corner screws. Some early 3-screw carts still have flathead screws before they were replaced with the hexagonal security screws used in Nintendo cartridges for many years. The reason I bring this up now is that Chubby Cherub is one of earliest NES games so it is a 5-screw cart. In fact, Chubby Cherub was not reprinted after the switch to 3-screw cartridges so it is only available as a 5-screw cart. There are only a few NES games like this.

Chubby Cherub is a side-scrolling action game. Our hero is but a simple angel who just wants to eat delicious food and help his friends. Alas, this cruel, evil world stands in the way of helping his friends. They are trapped in buildings or held hostage by a burglar and only Chubby Cherub can save them. To get to them, simply work your way from left to right to reach the end of each level while avoiding all kinds of dangers like smoke, birds, and barking dogs. You must complete all twelve levels to beat Chubby Cherub.

The controls take a little getting used to. Walking is easy enough. Just press Left or Right to move. You can tell right away that this is an early NES game because the B button is used for jumping. Yuck. Jumps are loopy and slow, and he always jumps the same height. You have full horizontal control while jumping. However, if either you walk off a ledge or are positioned inside a floor tile at the apex of your jump, you will be locked into place horizontally as you slowly fall to solid ground. Hold Down and press B when standing to fall in this same manner through high walkways. If you are holding B at the top of your jump, you begin flying in place. Now you can move in all eight directions. While flying you can travel freely through everything except completely solid blocks, and you move faster to boot. However, you can’t fly forever so you need to keep that in mind. The A button fires what the game manual calls the Gau-Gau cannon. I have no idea what that is supposed to be, but it looks to me like a heart-shaped vomit attack. You have to collect ammo before you can shoot and it is only effective against a few enemy types.

There is a lot of information on the status bar at the top of the screen. On the left side, you see your score at the top and hearts underneath it which denote your extra lives. In the middle is your power meter followed by how much Gau you have and the current stage number. On the right side is the level timer and the condition for earning bonus points.

The most important facet of Chubby Cherub is managing your power meter. It decreases as you play, acting as its own timer. Run out of power and you lose a life. You can restore a portion of the power meter by eating food that is strewn throughout the stages. This mechanic is better known from Adventure Island. Flying uses up power more quickly, and you have to maintain a certain amount of power to remain airborne. Now flying is the preferred way to get around in Chubby Cherub, so the pacing in the game is dictated by how often you can find food in order to keep flying. It turns out you can get through a lot of the game just by flying.

Dogs are the most dangerous enemy in the game. Q-taro in the manga is deathly afraid of dogs, so they pose the largest threat in Chubby Cherub by design. There are two different sizes of dogs and their movement patterns and aggression vary mostly by color. Recognizing these patterns and learning by experience are crucial to survival. The worst kind of dogs are the ones that bark. Dog barks are represented as icons with letters inside of them. Small dogs launch B’s for “bark” while big bulldogs fire two W’s for “wan-wan,” the Japanese onomatopoeia for dog barking. It’s a clever touch, and I’m proud to be able to use the word onomatopoeia in this blog in the proper context! Anyway, dog barks are aimed shots that move faster than you, and they are deadly to the touch. Certain groupings of dogs are among the most difficult parts of the game.

There are some items to help you in Chubby Cherub. The aforementioned food is all over the place, refilling your power meter and giving you between 10 and 50 points per piece depending on type. Lollipops are a much larger food item that gives you 100 points and four shots of the Gau-Gau cannon. You can only hold up to 9 Gau in reserve, but this is your one weapon to fight back against the dogs since they are the only enemy hurt by Gau. Sometimes collecting a food item generates a P icon above it. Collecting it not only gives you 200 points, but it also restores power and makes you invincible for several seconds. The angel blinks during this period and you can move through any enemy freely with one catch. Getting hit by a dog bark causes it to bounce off you harmlessly but you lose any remaining invincibility. A good strategy is to use your invincibility frames to get right up in a dog’s face to hit it with Gau.

There are other enemies present that are not affected by Gau. There are crows, birds, smoke, and balloons that defeat you with a simple touch. Balloons are the weirdest enemy concept I’ve seen in a while. What did Chubby Cherub ever do to them? There are also Chow Chow dogs but they aren’t affected by Gau and don’t bark at you. I don’t get that either! These enemies have their own patterns to deal with, some with multiple patterns. It’s a dangerous world out there.

All levels share a similar structure. About halfway through each stage you will encounter a rectangular stop sign. This freezes the scrolling and the objective is to collect all food on screen to make a special item appear on the left. Collect that item to get 500 points and then you can continue through the rest of the stage. Your friend needs to be rescued at the end of the level, and this is accomplished in one of two ways. Most stages end with a building or two and a large amount of food in front. Each piece of food opens the window above it when you grab it. Your friend is randomly hidden behind one of these windows and finding him or her ends the stage. But beware, there are also two aggressive dogs hidden behind these windows too. The manual gives good advice not to collect the food while moving upward because if there’s a dog hidden there you will run into it right away and lose a life. Every third stage ends in a simple boss fight with a burglar. He walks in from the right to the center of the screen and begins tossing bombs all over the place. The burglar drops a dog bone on his walk to the middle of the screen, and you need to grab this and throw it at the burglar with A. This causes dogs to appear from the left that scare the burglar away, saving your friend.

The boss battle with the burglar also indicates a change to the bonus point incentive. Every group of three levels out of the twelve has a unique way to earn bonus points at the end of the level. In stages 1-3, you earn 40 points for every piece of food eaten. You get a bonus for time remaining in stages 4-6. Levels 7-9 give you 200 points for each dog you knock out with Gau. Stages 10-12 give you 200 points for every hidden jewel you find, which is a special item unique to those stages. I think it’s a nice way to switch up your secondary objective.

The stage timer is also worth mentioning. Unlike a standard counter, it represents time on a clock. Stages start at 8:00am and you lose a life if you don’t finish the level by 8:00pm. The minutes tick by quickly, which is unrealistic given how slow you move in the game. The one neat thing about the clock is that every hour the background color palette changes a little bit to help indicate the passing of time. It’s something you might not recognize right away while playing. I think it’s clever given the age of this game.

There are some special areas in the game. Later levels have factories in them with smoke stacks. The puffs of smoke that rise out of these are deadly. Sometimes a ring of smoke will come out instead of a puff. Be very careful because this is still deadly if you touch the top of it, but if you touch the bottom of it instead, it will carry you with it up into heaven. This area is littered with cakes that give you a whopping 500 points each as well as crows that try to knock you down. This is typically a single screen bonus area, but every now and then heaven scrolls to the right. There are more cakes and you can really rack up points here, but even better is that you can bypass much or all of the stage below if you can keep going. It’s not clear to me what triggers the scrolling heaven, but it’s super useful. I have read you can get it to scroll if you collect the cakes from left to right, but that didn’t seem to work when I tried it. I think the trick is that you have to go into heaven before 9:00am, but I couldn’t trigger it enough times to narrow it down.

On the flip side, there is also a hell area. Falling down a pit sends you to hell instead of dying like you would in most games, but I’m not exactly sure you’re better off this way. Hell is a single screen level completely shrouded in darkness. You begin on the left side stripped of both your power meter and any Gau you brought in. There are two chow chows above you, a regular dog on the bottom, and a bulldog blocking the white exit door on the upper right. There’s a lollipop in the middle to give you some Gau. You can’t fly here so you have to jump on invisible blocks in order to knock out the bulldog and reach the exit. Of course, the bulldog barks at you when you get close, but at least the small dog keeps quiet. Dying in hell simply resets the room with no loss of life, so you are forced to keep trying until you can make it out of there. Or reset the console, I guess. It’s a tough room but the layout is consistent. Eventually the enemies will cooperate and let you through. If you play well enough, you shouldn’t ever see hell anyway.

Chubby Cherub is a tough game. You begin the game with three lives and there are no continues. You earn an extra life at 10,000 points and again for every 20,000 points scored after that. The twelve stages are pretty short but they are full of enemies that kill you in one hit. You earn points at a slow rate and therefore earn lives slowly too. This is a game that takes a lot of practice and a fair amount of luck to beat.

This was my first time playing Chubby Cherub. I collect Famicom a little bit and I had a cart of Obake no Q Tarou: Wanwan Panic before I recently sold it. The Famicom title is very cheap, even for international buyers, but Chubby Cherub is much more expensive. Today it sells for around $70 cart only, and you have to spend a few hundred dollars if you want a complete in box copy. I bought my cart on eBay in 2014 for $30 plus shipping, which was a little under market value then. It’s costly because it was a low print run released before the NES really exploded in popularity.

It felt like I really struggled to beat this game when it only took me a little over a week to get it done. There’s a high level of difficulty right off the bat. On the very first screen, there is a highly active dog roaming around and you move so slow that death is likely for the first time player. Barking dogs are challenging to avoid anyway let alone the first few times you encounter them. Even with flying all the time, the first few levels are still hard. I found the difficulty decreased in the middle stages before ramping back up again at the end. Heaven shows up in those middle stages which is a great way to get some extra lives. At least then you get more of a chance at the later levels. It might have taken me 20-30 tries to beat the game. My longplay video was the first time I beat it. I had a few unrecorded runs that reached the final level, including one where I lost my last life to the burglar at the end. Sadly, there is no true ending to the game. It continues on to Stage 13, but the later levels are identical to the earlier ones. Chubby Cherub will loop for as long as you can keep going, but clearing only one loop is enough to consider it finished.

Chubby Cherub has a flow to it that I can appreciate. This is getting into spoiler territory here, both this and the next paragraph, so even if you don’t care (and why would you?) you’ve been warned. The game is broken up nicely into the groups of three stages. The first three stages are the introductory levels where you learn all about the dogs and basics of flying and all that. You may even get your first taste of hell in Stage 3. The next three levels give you no Gau at all, but also there are no barking dogs to deal with either. This was the breather I really needed and I beat all these levels on my first try. Stages 7-9 is like the advanced version of Stages 1-3. There are plenty of dogs here to deal with, including several in a row that bark. There are fewer food items here so you also need to cope with not flying in some spots. It’s a big jump in difficulty and Stage 8 was a hurdle for a few days. The designers had one last nasty trick for the final set of stages. I mentioned in the bonus section that these levels have jewels that give you bonus points. The jewels are hidden and you need to touch invisible spots to make them appear. Then you collect the jewels to make the food appear. This is the only way to get food in these levels, and what’s worse is that some jewels don’t reveal any food at all. At least the jewels and their triggers are always in the same places. It’s just mean because you are used to flying all over and now you have to switch gears and play it more like a platformer with worse movement just to survive.

I developed a few techniques in order to beat the game. One annoying thing I noticed right away is that any dog knocked out with Gau will fall off the screen but you can still get hurt by them in this state. At first I thought this was a programming bug, but it turns out this has a big benefit. Defeated dogs technically stay active and you can get hit them again with Gau for 1000 extra points. If I lined up with the bottom of the dog, I could sometimes hit it twice while falling. Now you do have to be careful not to use up all your Gau for when you need it to survive, but using excess Gau can net you a lot of points and extra lives that are a big help. I also figured out a consistent way of taking out barking dogs. Their AI is set up so that they won’t bark at you if you are directly above or below them. The trick is that you come at them from above and line up so that you hit the top of the dog with Gau. If you come at them from below, this trick does not work. You can also bait a moving, barking dog above you to fall off a ledge so that you can take them out quickly before they land and bark directly into your face. The last bit of advice is that you should always quick kill the burglar. As soon as he enters the screen, you should be flying already. Swoop around behind him and pick up the bone, and then let it loose as soon as he stops walking. You will still have to dodge some bombs, but this fight is a lot worse if you play it safe.

Chubby Cherub is an aged platformer that doesn’t hold up well today. It’s slow paced, for one. The controls are not intuitive. The graphics are basic and don’t vary much over the course of the game, and you need experience to tell which parts are solid blocks and which ones are passthrough ledges. You are at a major disadvantage against the most prevalent enemy type in the game. That hell area is just plain evil. Now it’s not all terrible. There are only a few simple songs in the game, but I must admit, they are catchier than they should be. I will give Chubby Cherub credit for introducing some hidden complexity to some of its systems that I wasn’t expecting, including the special ways to boost your score. Both discovering and exploiting these morsels of assistance was rewarding and breathed some life into this otherwise lackluster title. I’m not saying you should play this game, but even primitive games by NES standards can have some good ideas worth illuminating.

Better hope you are loaded with free time!

To Beat: Win 80 Games
Played: 1/2/17 – 3/1/17
Difficulty: 2/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
Video: Bases Loaded Final Game and Ending

Bases Loaded is a game that has a reputation for being a very long game, which I can now confirm to be true. I am not the biggest fan of sports video games, so this is exactly the type of game that I wanted to avoid playing if I could. I originally came up with the idea in my Methodology to shuffle undesirable games like this to the end of the list and most likely skip them altogether. I have since had a change of heart and decided that if I really want to beat all the NES games, I shouldn’t make excuses against any game at all. So occasionally I will be pulling a game off the top of my “snub list” and playing that one instead. Bases Loaded is the first game off of that list, and actually it came at a good time because I had been building a large backlog of game posts and needed a long game to help me catch up with writing.

Bases Loaded is known in Japan as Moero!! Pro Yakyuu and was originally an arcade title in Japan only in 1987. It was published and developed by Jaleco. That same year the game was ported to Famicom by the developer Tose, and it was brought to the NES in 1988. A Game Boy port was released in 1990. Bases Loaded had several other installments. In all there are four NES games, three SNES games called Super Bases Loaded, and Bases Loaded ’96: Double Header for the Sega Saturn and Playstation. The original Bases Loaded was also released for Virtual Console on the Wii, 3DS, and Wii U, all in both Japan and North America.

When you start the game you choose from either Pennant mode or Vs. Mode. Pennant mode is the single player game and Vs. Mode is for a two-player game. If you select Pennant mode you are brought immediately to the password screen where you may continue your game. If you leave the password as the default or enter the wrong password, the game assumes you are playing a new season. You get to pick your team from the 12 teams in the league. In two player mode both players will choose their team. From there you go right into a baseball game!

The pitching perspective is similar to how baseball games are shown on TV. You see the pitcher from behind looking toward the batter and catcher at home plate. Before throwing a pitch, you can tap Left or Right on the D-Pad to position the pitcher where you want him on the mound. To throw a pitch you press A while pressing directions on the D-Pad to choose your pitch. You can throw a fastball by holding Up or a breaking ball by holding Down before you throw. You can also hold Left or Right to target one side of the plate if you choose, and you can hold diagonal directions for both pitch type and direction. As the pitcher winds up to throw, you can then hold down any direction on the D-Pad to curve the pitch toward that direction. The breaking pitches are slower in speed than the fastball but have more curve as they approach home plate. The two step process of pitching allows you to throw many different types of pitches. Also, if there is a runner on base, you can press B and the direction of the base before throwing to do a pickoff move to try and get the runner out. Here, Right represents first base, Up represents second base, and Left represents third base. I never used this because I couldn’t figure out the timing for the pickoff.

When a batter puts a ball into play, the perspective shifts to an overhead view. You take control of the fielder that is closest to the ball. Use the D-Pad to move your fielder in any direction. You pick up the ball whenever you come in contact with it, and from there you the throw the ball by holding the D-Pad at the base you want and pressing A. Throws automatically go to first base if no direction is held. Any subsequent defender with the ball can run and throw to bases in the same way. If you don’t press anything at all when the ball is put into play, the fielders will automatically run toward the ball which is a nice touch. They will usually end up catching weak fly balls for you in the outfield. If the ball gets past an outfielder then it is best to take matters into your own hands.

The batting uses the same perspective as the pitching. You press A to swing at the pitch. As you swing you can hold down a direction on the D-Pad to swing toward a specific area. For instance, hold Up to swing high or Down to swing low. You can also swing toward the left or right and also in the middle by not pressing anything. Essentially you have to aim your swing toward the pitch right before the catcher grabs it if you want to make contact. If you want to bunt, press B before the pitcher starts his delivery to go into the bunting stance. When bunting you use the D-Pad to move the bat around to try and bunt it. You can also attempt to steal bases if you have a runner on by pressing B and the direction for the base during the pitcher’s windup.

Baserunning takes place from the overhead view. You press B and a direction to advance that runner ahead a base or press A and a direction to go back toward a base. You can move all the runners by pressing Down and either A to move them back or B to move them ahead. I found this a little confusing so here’s an example to explain how it works. If you have a runner either at first base or between first and second, you use Right on the D-Pad to control that runner. Hold Right and press B to move the runner toward second, or press Right and A to move the runner toward first. I am very used to the R.B.I. Baseball style of A plus direction to retreat to a base and B plus direction to advance to that base, and I never really did get used to the different method here.

You can choose to bring in a new pitcher or a pinch hitter. While pitching or batting, press Start to call timeout and press A to bring up the scoreboard. You can choose a new pitcher or batter by selecting his number on the board and pressing A, or you can change your mind with B. If you bring in a pinch hitter, sometimes you have to make an additional substitution before going back to defense if the new hitter does not play the same position as the player you replaced. Each pinch hitter is assigned either as an infielder, outfielder, or catcher, but you can’t tell which one they are. Also, the game will not allow you to pinch hit for a batter if there are no available players at that position. You have to keep track on your own as you play to figure out which positions your best pinch hitters play.

Each player in the game has a name as well as some basic statistics. Batters have a batting average and home run total displayed on the scoreboard before batting. You can see the ERA of the pitcher chosen as well when brought into the game. The home run numbers tend to mirror well with batter power and the pitchers with lower ERA can have more curve to their pitches, but this isn’t always true. It takes some playing to figure out who is more useful to the team.

When you finish a game you get a password. These are 7 characters long with only uppercase letters, so they are easy to manage. The passwords contain the number of games you have played along with your number of wins and the team you will play next.

Bases Loaded is one of the sports games on the system that requires you to play a full season of games to get the ending. The season consists of 132 games but you can end it early if you win 80 games. I believe this is the only way to get the ending, but I am not about to play 132 games just to see what happens.

This was my first and likely only time playing through Bases Loaded. It is a very common cart that shows up all the time and it’s cheap. As of this writing I have somewhere between 8-10 copies of the game because it is that common and that hard to get rid of short of giving them away. I bet that most NES collectors got this game early on.

When I started the game I picked Omaha as my team. There were quite a few teams in this game where there is not a real-life MLB team in the same city, and Omaha stood out to me. That team is not one of the good teams in the game, and so the beginning of my season got off to a rough start. As usual it takes some time to get accustomed to the gameplay. I have played a few baseball games on the NES but none from the behind-the-pitcher perspective. It made pitching and hitting different which meant it took me longer to get the hang of the game. My first few games ended up closer than I thought they would, but I fell short. The fourth game I played was my first win and then I lost the next, starting off the season with a 1-4 record. That’s when I figured out The Exploit.

One thing the game has going for it is that the pitching is consistent. I am used to games where you have control over the ball in-flight, but here the path of the pitch is already determined when it leaves the pitchers hand. I took advantage of this mechanic. There is a certain spot the pitcher can throw the ball where it is always called a strike if the batter doesn’t swing, and the batter will always miss if he does. Once you figure this out, you can consistently throw strikeouts and the batters will never make contact with the ball.

Not every pitcher has the capability of throwing this super pitch, so you have to find one who does. For Omaha, the pitcher I relied on the most was Foot. Strange name for a pitcher, I know. Here is my exact technique. Hold Down and Left and press A to start the pitch, then hold Down and Right before letting go of the ball. This starts the pitch on the left side and fades it over to the bottom right for a strike every single time. Now this doesn’t last for long. Pitchers get tired the longer they are in the game and at that point the pitch is no longer effective. It takes Foot 40 pitches to get tired, meaning he can get me to the 5th inning with one out and one strike if I execute perfectly. The good news is I can take advantage of his tired state to throw another super pitch. This time just hold Down, press A, then hold Right. A left-handed batter will sometimes have this pitch called a ball, so to compensate I have to slide the pitcher over to the left one tiny step before executing the pitch. This works for another 30 pitches which gets me to the 8th inning. Then I change pitchers over to Waters who can throw the same pitch as Foot does when he gets tired. Between the two of them I can cover more than 9 innings without the other team scoring anything. Armed with this knowledge I won the next 79 games in a row to end my season at 80-4.

With the defensive side completely solved by pitching, there’s not much to worry about on offense. My strategy consisted of scoring one run and then making outs as quickly as I can. For the most part, I decided to swing away at every pitch just to put the ball into play. Sometimes I would make an out the normal way, other times I would get a hit and purposefully get thrown out at first or second, and occasionally I would hit a home run. The homers may be counterproductive, but they are fun!

My lineup was not particularly good but they got the job done. Far and away my best hitter was the number four hitter Lyonse. His stats showed 25 home run power but he probably hit 50-60 for me. He would hit the ball hard almost every time he batted. The rest of the lineup power wise was remarkably consistent. Each other player with the exception of the pitcher had 5-10 homers each regardless of their noted totals. I even had the pitcher hit a home run one time, which I couldn’t believe when I saw it!

On that note I had a few other rare moments documented over the course of the season. In one two-game stretch Lyonse hit five straight home runs. In another game, I purposefully stopped myself from scoring to try and hit a walk-off homer in either the 9th inning or extra innings. I went scoreless through 12 innings and then the game suddenly ended in a 0-0 tie but credited me with the win anyway. I couldn’t find that outcome documented anywhere else, so that was a neat tidbit to discover.

The problem with Bases Loaded is not so much that it demands you play a large number of games, but it’s that the pace of play for each individual game is terribly slow. The pitching in particular is very intentional. The entire pitch from windup to catcher’s mitt is slow. The catcher then slowly throws the ball back to the pitcher to start the next pitch all over again. It takes a long time for the fielding to end when an out is recorded. The scoreboard showing which batter is coming up to the plate is displayed for a long time. There’s no mercy rule like in R.B.I. Baseball so all nine innings need to be played each game. I get that the idea here is to look and feel like a real baseball game, but trying to play through 80 wins with this pace is agonizing especially when the game boils down to simply executing the same plan over and over. When trying to speed through the game like I did it still took 25-30 minutes per game, and that adds up to about 40 hours over the entire season. That’s a lot of time to spend on an old baseball game, but hey, this is what I signed up for when I started this project!

Bases Loaded has a lot of minor glitches too. Sometimes the outfielders will drop routine flyouts. Sometimes an infielder steps out of the way when the ball is thrown at him. Sometimes the defense forgets who is holding the ball and you can circle the bases for a cheap run while the defense does nothing. When a ball is hit to the first baseman, he will run to the bag in a rapid zigzag pattern instead of running straight to the base. One time I saw an umpire standing on top of the crowd past the left field wall. Once I saw two infielders standing on top of each other throwing the ball back and forth instead of toward the intended base. With the long season, it ended up being a breath of fresh air to see some weird things happen like that.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that there’s really no reason to play Bases Loaded in the single player mode anymore unless you are trying to beat all the games or you are involved in some kind of other larger project. It might be fun for a few games but the whole season is obviously such a drag. The two player mode could still be fun, but I think there are better baseball games on the NES and time is better spent playing them instead.

As long as you don’t fly into the sun, you will probably enjoy this game!

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Get the best ending
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Got the best ending
Played: 8/22/16 – 8/29/16
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 6/10

It’s always a good day whenever one of the classic NES titles comes up in my list! It can be a little rough around the edges at times, but Kid Icarus has a lot of neat ideas that come together well for a game this early in the library.

Kid Icarus was first released on the Famicom Disk System in Japan on December 19, 1986 under the name Hikari Shinwa Parutena no Kagami which translates to Myth of Light: The Mirror of Palutena. It was co-developed by Nintendo R&D1 and Tose with R&D1 handling the design and Tose handling the development work. The game took advantage of the expanded capabilities of the FDS by including more game content than what was previously done on cartridge, a save game feature, and enhanced audio. Kid Icarus was later ported to a cartridge for release in Europe in February 1987 and a few months later in North America in July 1987.

Kid Icarus received a sequel on Game Boy in North America in November 1991 and Europe in May 1992. Curiously it was not released in Japan until appearing on the Japanese 3DS Virtual Console. The gameplay is very similar to the NES version but it is an all new game. The series would then go into hibernation for over 20 years aside from seeing a Virtual Console release in 2007. The newest title in the series is named Kid Icarus Uprising released in 2012. In that same year the original game received a 3D Classics remake on the Nintendo 3DS.

Kid Icarus is a side-scrolling platform action game. You play as the angel Pit in his quest to save the goddess Palutena and Angel Land from the evil Medusa. The game takes place over four main areas: Underworld, Overworld, Skyworld, and the Palace in the Sky. The first three areas are comprised of four sections each and the final section is a fortress that plays differently than the rest of the game. The object is to recover one of the sacred treasures in each of the three fortresses and use all three of them for the final battle against Medusa.

The first thing you’ll notice when playing Kid Icarus is that play advances upward with vertical scrolling. This is one of the few early NES games to employ vertical scrolling like this as a main component of the game right from the start. Unfortunately the game only handles one-way scrolling upward, and if you happen to fall back down you will die regardless of what platforms you left behind. This is why Kid Icarus seems to be regarded as a difficult game because the early game platforming must be completed with minimal mistakes. The reasoning behind the vertical level is symbolic as Pit begins at the bottom of the Underworld and must ascend upward to reach the Overworld. Stage 2 switches to more traditional horizontal scrolling before going vertical again in the Skyworld. The overall idea here makes sense from a storytelling perspective but it tarnishes the initial impression of the gameplay experience.

One neat aspect about the vertical levels is that Pit can loop around the screen horizontally. You can leave the screen on the left and reappear on the right, and vice versa. This leads to some interesting level design in a few places where you will need to take advantage of the looping mechanic to overcome some obstacles.

Pit can walk left and right and jump typical of a normal platformer game. He can fall through some thin flooring by pressing Down, which can sometimes lead to unintentional falling to your death. He can also shoot arrows from his bow to the left, right, and upward. Pit also has a health bar and he can take a few hits from enemies before defeat. The enemies tend to appear in groups though there are stray single enemies every once in awhile. When they are defeated they leave hearts behind and these are used as currency. Small hearts are worth one, large half hearts are worth five, and large full hearts are worth ten. Pit can hold up to 999 hearts and there are many items that can be found or purchased with these hearts. You can track just about all of the items on the subscreen that is displayed when the game is paused with the Start button.

There are several types of chambers that appear throughout the levels by way of open doors. Among the most common rooms are two different kinds of shops. The basic shop has items that are fairly priced. The mallet is the cheapest item and is a limited use subweapon that can be equipped by pressing Select during play. It is very strong but each mallet acquired only allows for a single swing before it is depleted. They have a special use in the end of level fortresses that I will cover later. The Water of Life chalice restores some health, and the Water of Life in a bottle will automatically deploy its health boost as soon as Pit runs out of energy. The Angel Feather lets Pit survive a fall off the bottom of the screen by initiating a brief period of flight to recover onto a ledge. These are very useful but are pretty expensive and therefore are not as easy to acquire when you really need one early in the game.

The other kind of shop is the Black Market. This shop is overpriced compared to the normal shop, but these are worth visiting in some situations. The Water Barrel item can only be purchased on the Black Market and it allows Pit to hold more than one Water of Life bottle at a time. If you don’t already have a Water of Life it gives you one for free, otherwise the one you are carrying gets saved in the barrel. There are also some other special items that show up here under special circumstances that I will also mention later.

There is a treasure room that contains eight pots each with a question mark on them. You can destroy a pot to reveal an item but it costs five hearts per pot. You may destroy as many pots as you want. Collecting a revealed treasure removes all the remaining pots but you can grab all the items you found. However one of the pots contains the God of Poverty and if you find him you lose all of the items and are booted from the chamber empty handed. If you break all the pots and leave the God of Poverty for last, the final pot instead contains a more substantial treasure. The bonus treasure can be an Angel Feather, a Water of Life Bottle, a Water Barrel, or the Credit Card. This is the only way in the game to obtain the Credit Card. You can use it in the Black Market to buy items that you cannot afford. Of course if you do so you will be in his debt and are unable to buy any more items until you pay off what you owe him.

Another type of room is the Sacred Training Chamber. A God in this room will summon a bunch of randomly moving enemies that look like floor tiles. The object here is simply to survive, and if you do so you are rewarded with your choice of one of three special weapons. The Fire Arrow adds a little fireball to the standard arrow that deals extra damage to an enemy. The Sacred Bow increases the range of Pit’s arrows. The Protective Crystal spawns two crystals that spin quickly around Pit and give him a way to easily defeat weak enemies up close. Over the course of the game you can acquire all three at once, however you cannot use them until you have enough health. There are some enemies in the game that will steal one of these weapons if they collide with Pit. You can recover the stolen weapons by buying them for very inflated prices in the Black Market, or you can earn it back by completing the training again in a later chamber.

The other three chambers you can encounter are more straightforward. The enemy lair contains a swarm of enemies that all drop big hearts for a quick money boost. The Strength Upgrade chamber contains a God that will give you a stronger arrow. There are five levels of arrow strength and you increase it by one for each God you find in this chamber. However, there are some special hidden requirements defined by how well you play that determine if you qualify for the upgrade at all. Finally there are hot springs that restore your health slowly just by relaxing inside!

To cap off the normal item list, sometimes in the levels you will find a harp that turns all of the enemies into mallets for a brief period. This is the easiest way to collect lots of mallets. You can also find the chalices here that restore health.

There is a scoring system in place as well. The score for the current level and the total cumulative score appear on the subscreen. You get points for defeating enemies, although the enemies inside the enemy lairs do not give any points at all. After each section is completed your points are added to the total score. Reaching specific point intervals here will trigger the message Power Up and Pit is awarded an increase to his maximum health. You begin the game with one segment of health and can get up to a maximum of five.

As mentioned above, the last section of the first three levels is a fortress that mixes up the formula of the game. The fortress is a non-linear maze that contains a boss hidden within. There are even more items here that assist in exploring the fortress. The check sheet is a blank map of the fortress that draws a grid on the subscreen. It must be found in a specific location in the fortress. The pencil can be bought in a shop and marks off each room on the check sheet that you enter for the first time. The torch must also be bought in a shop and it highlights the current room Pit is in. These items are helpful to show both where you are and where you have been so that you can narrow down where the boss is located.

There are a couple of interesting elements in the fortresses. There are statues scattered all around the fortress that can be broken with the mallet revealing a centurion. Each centurion saved here flies away for now but shows up later during the boss fight to aid Pit in the battle. On the flip side, there is an awful enemy type unique to the fortress called the eggplant wizard. They toss eggplants around that turn Pit into an eggplant himself should he be struck by one. While in eggplant form Pit is unable to fire arrows at all and it is a permanent state that leaves Pit defenseless. The goal from here is to find a nurse inside the fortress who will restore Pit back to normal at no cost. The eggplant wizards are often placed along the critical path to the boss and it is a huge hassle to go back and find the nurse.

When each fortress boss is defeated, one of the sacred treasures is left behind inside a treasure chest. When all three chests are collected all treasures are revealed and equipped for the final level and showdown against Medusa. Here the game switches play to an auto-scrolling shooter that is unique to this last area.

Just like Metroid before it, Kid Icarus was updated to include a password system for its NES cart release. The passwords are 24 characters long and comprised of many different characters. The long passwords allow a lot of information to be stored within them. When you continue your game with a password, it saves the level you last played, your heart balance, and all your items, weapons, and upgrades. Even though they are tedious to document and input, it works just as good as a save game and makes it much easier to slowly work though the game a stage or two at a time.

Kid Icarus was one of the titles I have held onto since childhood. I know that I spent some time with it growing up but I could never quite remember if I had played the game all the way through for myself. I definitely beat the game with a password taking me straight to the final level, but I imagine I pulled that out of Nintendo Power or a guidebook. As an adult I have picked it up casually a number of times and I always would stall out prior to the first fortress. The first level is quite difficult with the vertical layout combined with a lack of powerups and abilities for starting out. It took me a dedicated effort this time to finally mark it off as complete.

During my playthrough I really struggled to get through Level 1-3. I did not earn enough points in the first two levels to increase my health bar which really made things harder on myself. I also insisted on clearing the first Sacred Training Chamber since I didn’t how many opportunities I would have later on in the game. It was tough but I made it through after nearly a dozen attempts.

From the first fortress onward, the game eased up in difficulty considerably. In the fortresses all the enemies respawn any time you leave the room. I found an area near the boss that had a hot spring a few rooms away from a room full of enemies that left behind big hearts. Between those two rooms I maxed out on hearts plus I managed to earn enough points to max out the health bar at the end of Level 1. Having full health allowed the weapon I earned prior to kick in which also helped. I focused more on the platforming and I was able to beat the game without too much trouble. I would say the third fortress was the hardest challenge remaining and that took some practice with some of the eggplant wizard placements.

Once I completed the game, I decided to investigate how to get the best ending. I had collected everything except for the credit card and I was missing two strength upgrades. I figured that had something to do with it and it turns out my suspicions were mostly correct. Here is how the endings work. There are four separate goals to complete: Have the maximum health bar, have maximum strength, have all three special weapons, and have the maximum number of hearts. You get a different ending for how many of those goals are completed at the end of the game. I got the middle of the road ending by having all the health and all three special weapons. I would have had enough hearts had I not spent some on a Water of Life right before the third fortress boss, but I missed out on two of the strength upgrades and I couldn’t understand why I missed them.

The easiest way to get the best ending is to start a new game immediately after winning. You will restart at Level 1-1 with everything carried over from the end of the previous game. Since I already had found two of the strength upgrades the first time through I earned those again which put me at maximum strength. Then it was only a matter of making sure I had enough hearts before the final level to meet all the requirements.

Now this replay wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. Upon beating the game the first time, I killed myself off in Level 1-1 and saved my password to play later on. When I started up the next day and input my password, I began at Level 1-1 but I had lost all of my progress. It was the same as starting a brand new game. I thought that I had either messed up my password or the passwords don’t work on subsequent playthroughs. I found out there is a glitch in the game where it does not save your data on any password starting in Level 1-1. If I had gone on to at least Level 1-2 and took my password there, then the data would carry over. I suspect that when the game loads the first stage it always runs the code to initialize the game state even if the game is loaded from a saved password. I had actually started to replay the game from scratch for a little while before using my old password to resume at the start of the final level.

There are some interesting technical tidbits I think are fun to examine for a little while. Some fine folks have deconstructed the system by which you qualify to earn the strength upgrades. It really is based on how well you play. There is a hidden scoring system calculated behind the scenes in each stage and you need to earn a certain number of these “skill” points to trigger the god to appear in the Strength Upgrade Chamber. Some actions add skill points and others take away points. I won’t go into all of them. You earn points for things like defeating enemies, collecting hearts (but not when you are maxed out), buying an item, or just entering any chamber. You lose points for taking damage, shooting arrows, or breaking pots in the Treasure chamber. Typically all you need to do is take your time and kill many enemies and that will be enough to earn the upgrade.

The password system retains all of the data associated with a playthrough, but it also contains information that determines if the password is legitimate or not. The first 22 characters of the password translate to all of the data the game tracks between sessions. For instance, some of the characters relate to the saved score, some of the characters track how many hearts you have, and so on. The final two characters are called the checksum. Basically the game runs some kind of formula against the password and generates the checksum and adds it to the end of the password. Upon submitting a password on the continue screen, the game runs the same calculation and sees if the last two characters of the submitted password matches the checksum. The password is accepted if it matches and rejected if it doesn’t. Many of the more well-known passwords are not hard coded in the game but are just a byproduct of how the password system works.

The final tidbit I want to share is that the endings differ between the Japanese release and the US release. Not only are the endings a bit different but the way to get them is completely different. The ending calculation in the Japanese version is the number of health bar segments plus the number of strength upgrades minus the number of deaths in the game. This number determines which of the five endings is received. The best ending in the NES version is not present in the Japanese version. Instead of that ending, there is an even worse version of the bad ending that takes its place. The Japanese version does not allow you to replay the game with item carryover, so instead you would have to play near perfectly in one try to qualify for the best ending. The save system in the Disk System version was likely the driver behind the ending criteria. The method in the US version works better for me anyway!

Kid Icarus is one of those classic NES titles that I think belongs in any library. The graphics are not too bad and the music is pretty catchy. The controls are a little slippery at times but they perform well enough. The major thing going against it is the uneven difficulty curve. The game starts out challenging and gets easier the further you go. Too bad many people would likely give up before getting to some of the later parts of the game that are a lot of fun to play. I enjoyed the game a lot and I am glad that I can finally claim for certain that I have beaten this game!