Big money! Big prizes! I love it!

No music, but nice detailed title graphics!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 1/2/19 – 1/4/19
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: Smash TV Longplay

I had Super Smash TV on the SNES growing up. I probably got it from a yard sale or something, but I remember spending a lot of time playing the game. I wasn’t really that good at the game though. Maybe that version is really tough to beat. I didn’t know the NES had a port of the game until I started digging deeper into the library. With as frantic and sprite heavy as the SNES version is, it blows my mind that they even tried to replicate this style of game on the NES, let alone pull it off. Even though I still can’t believe this game exists on the NES, I’m glad it does.

Smash TV is a 1990 arcade game both developed and published by Williams. The game creators are Eugene Jarvis and Mark Turmell. The game was ported to several home consoles under the title Super Smash TV. The home computer versions, as well as the NES version, retained the Smash TV name. The NES version was released in September 1991. It was developed by Beam Software and published by Acclaim Entertainment. The game also had a PAL release in 1991.

Smash TV takes place in 1999. Thankfully, we didn’t get this timeline where TV has become ultra-violent. Game shows have turned into life-or-death competitions with huge prizes at stake for the survivors. Smash TV is the biggest hit show at the time where one or two contestants fend off hundreds of opponents in the arena in hopes of becoming grand champions. You play the role of one of these contestants as you try to survive over four levels.

Defeat enemies from all sides.

This game is a top-down twin-stick shooter game. Hordes of enemies appear from the four doors on each side of the room. Your job is to shoot down all of the threats that appear before you can move on to the next room. Of course, since it’s a game show, you also want to pick up as much cash or prizes as you can carry. Clearing each room opens at least one exit to an adjacent room. There is a map that shows which rooms connect so that you can plan your way to the boss room at the other end of the stage.

The basic controls are simple enough but tricky to use. Use the D-pad to move in all eight directions. The A button fires your weapons in the direction you are moving. The B button lets you focus your firepower in the last direction you shot so that you can shoot and move in different directions at the same time. This is a far cry from the arcade version where you had two joysticks for independent walking and firing at all times. The SNES version with the four face buttons on the controller worked well for a twin-stick setup. Fortunately, there’s a much better way. Smash TV on NES features a two-controller setup. Plug two controllers in and hold one in each hand with the D-pad at the top. The controller 1 D-pad moves the player while the controller 2 D-pad controls shooting. Smash TV has a two-player mode and supports four controllers so that both players can enjoy the two-controller setup. I highly recommend playing this game with the dual-controller option.

Your standard weapon is a pea shooter with unlimited ammo. While sufficient, you will do better with different weapons. Pickups appear on the ground as square icons while you fight. There are three special weapons. First is the scatter gun. This gives you three-way shooting which clears up a lot of space. Next are the missiles. These are powerful, piercing shots that can take out a row of enemies or even some stronger ones in just one hit. The spew weapon looks like a grenade and fires a swarm of short-range projectiles out in front of you. Each of these three weapons has limited ammo. Underneath your score is a green bar that indicates how much ammo you have. Grab a new weapon to change weapons or grab the same one to top off your ammo.

You need to be a real weapons powerhouse.

There are other helpful pickups too. Cash, gold bars, and presents are just for points, so while not necessary for survival, this is kind of your goal and you might as well grab some. The shoes increase your walking speed, but it seems to last just for your current screen and you lose it if you die. A circular ring icon is the shield, which makes you invincible so you can defeat enemies by running into them. This is given to you by default when you begin a new life. The icon with triangles gives you ninja blades. These are five blades that circle around you and wipe out enemies. Individual blades eventually go away after hitting so many targets. This powerup stops you from moving all the way to the edge of the screen, so that’s something to keep in mind. A little person icon gives you an extra life.

There are several types of enemies to deal with. Most of the enemies are standard grunts that always move toward you. Others take more effort to defeat. Orbs bounce around the playfield and shoot lasers. Shrapnel bombs walk the perimeter before exploding into shards that kill you. Tanks absorb a lot of firepower before going down. Wall gunners are very resistant to firepower and repeatedly shoot at you. Huge robot snakes slide around the screen and you have to destroy each piece of it to put it down. Red swarmers are many little red dots that clump together and fly around the screen. There are also stationary mines that kill you if you take a wrong step.

After the first screen of each stage is completed, a map is displayed. This shows the end level boss room as well as any treasure rooms. These rooms provide you with a bunch of cash and prizes from the moment you step inside. The rooms then get filled with enemies and tend to be more difficult than other rooms. These are good places to go if you want a high score.

Each stage ends in a boss battle. The arcade version has huge bosses that weren’t possible on the NES hardware. On the NES, they are smaller in size and seem to be easier fights than on other platforms. The cobra boss takes on a different form than the arcade version so that fight is the most different from the others. No matter what, you have to use a lot of firepower to put them out of their misery.

Mutoid Man is still recognizable here.

You begin each stage with five lives. Extra life pickups appear at random, but they tend to show up often. Due to the nature of the game and all the constant enemies, death is common. This is a problem for a few reasons. There are no continues in the game so you have to start all over if you run out of lives. You are capped at nine lives and can’t pick up any more beyond that. Also, each new stage after the boss puts you back at the default number of lives, so there’s no benefit to stockpiling lives in early levels since they don’t carry over to later stages.

I beat Smash TV once before back in 2014 as part of the NA weekly contest. I got 4th place that week with a score over 12 million points. I don’t remember where I picked this game up. It’s not very common but not too expensive when you do find a copy. Carts cost around $10. An interesting side note on collectibility is that Acclaim at one point manufactured their own carts. This matters because their carts have poorer quality labels where the glue bleeds through the white part of the label and the label fold starts to chip a little bit. My copy of Smash TV looks really good all things considered, but some of my other Acclaim games are not so hot.

While Super Smash TV is challenging enough that I haven’t yet finished it on my own, the NES port of Smash TV is easier. That’s not to say the game is easy at all. I didn’t have a lot of trouble with the game playing it for myself. There’s a bit of luck involved if you happen to run into more extra lives than usual, but skill is king and what will push you through. To that end, using the two-controller setup is essential for succeeding in this game. I tried out the normal control setup for a level or so and managed okay, but that would become a problem in the later levels where the enemies get tougher and the screens take longer. There’s no substitute for having separate movement and shooting controls in all directions.

Twin-stick shooting is so helpful when surrounded.

This game was tough to pin a difficulty on. I’m not so sure my past experience beating the game helped me that much. It was more my skill with this style of game. I don’t hear about people playing and beating this game very much. In the contest I played in 2014, only four people beat the game, and there were a lot of skilled gamers playing then. I don’t think this is an undesirable game that people are avoiding because they don’t think it’s fun to play. My gut tells me that this is an above-average game in difficulty that I happen to be good at. Having no continues bumps it up a notch too.

One thing I noticed playing this time was that my ending score was significantly lower than what I scored back in 2014. I played through all levels taking the top route just because I like consistency. The first stage has only one treasure room that is located on the top route so I just stuck with that path in the other levels too. Based on my 2014 score and forum posts from that week, I am pretty sure the lower routes in the other two stages are more lucrative for scoring. Points in this game are highly correlated with the number of enemies defeated. This leads me to believe that in general the upper routes have fewer enemies and therefore are easier than the lower routes. The ending doesn’t change on score or route or anything like that, and there’s no difficulty setting, so just pick whichever way you want.

There’s one more interesting tidbit about this game. The arcade version and at least the SNES version from my experience feature keys as item pickups. After the third stage boss, there are key rooms that unlock depending on if you hold enough keys. The manual for the NES game briefly mentions both key rooms and keys. However, there are no keys to pick up in the NES version at all. You still get to play the key rooms anyway between the third boss and the final boss which is often considered the fourth and final level of the game. It’s just a small, weird oversight of the NES port.

Smash TV is a really fun action game and the NES port is a great one to play. The gameplay and controls are both excellent. Movement is responsive and enemies get blasted constantly. The graphics are on the simplistic side, but the sheer number of enemies and bullets rendered on screen at the same time is awfully impressive for the NES. There is some sprite flickering which is to be expected, but there is either infrequent or no slowdown. The music is okay but gets repetitive and takes a backseat to the action anyway. The game is also repetitive and lengthy and will wear out your thumbs after some time. Smash TV on NES is an admirable port and worth playing for NES fans, even though I like the SNES version much better.

#111 – Smash TV

Maybe this game should have been called Skate or Die instead.

They aren’t even shy about this being a Konami game.

To Beat: Reach the Ending
Played: 12/30/16 – 1/2/17
Difficulty: 6/10
My Difficulty: 6/10
Video: Rollergames Longplay

I used to go roller skating often growing up. The local roller rink was the place to be for young kids on a Friday night, and even though I was not particularly good at skating I still enjoyed being there with my friends. It wasn’t until years later that I learned about the contact sport roller derby, and it just so happens there is also an NES game based on the sport. With a library this vast, I guess I should not be so surprised!

The sport of roller derby originated in the 1930s. The game is played with two teams of skaters who skate laps around a banked track. The object of the game is to score points by having a designated member of the team lap opposing players. The sport grew in popularity during the 1940s and 1950s. As interest started to decline, and as television became more prominent, the sport shifted more toward storylines and theatrics and away from pure competition. Since then the sport has shifted back toward its competitive roots. Roller derby has seen a resurgence beginning in the early 2000s, predominately in all-female leagues.

In the middle of all this is Rollergames, a 1989 TV show that went all in on the theatrical approach to roller derby. There were changes made for Rollergames, such as introducing a figure eight shaped track instead of the traditional banked oval track. Rollergames is like the WWE with a heavy focus on rivalries and storylines. The show was quite popular, but despite that it only ran for one season because some of the show’s producers when bankrupt.

Complete with broadcasters!

There are two video games based on Rollergames. The first is an arcade title of the same name developed by Konami in 1990. The gameplay is modeled closely after the TV show. The second name is the NES version of Rollergames, also developed by Konami and published under the Ultra Games label. This version is also influenced by the show, but it plays more as a classic beat-em-up game. It was released in the US in September 1990 and in Europe in October 1991. It was not released in Japan or ported to any other systems.

Rollergames is a side-scrolling beat-em-up game with some platforming elements included. Members of a criminal organization have corrupted three of the Rollergames teams leading to the capture of the league commissioner, and the only people that can save him are the members of the other three good teams. The introductory cutscenes frame the game as a storyline fitting of the TV show. You must complete all six levels to save the commissioner and win the game.

At the start of each level, one of the sideline reporters asks you which team you would like to choose. You can pick either Ice Box of the Thunderbirds, Rolling Thunder of the Hot Flash, and California Kid of the Rockers. Each character plays differently so that you want to choose the team best suited to clear the current level. Ice Box is the slow but powerful character, while Rolling Thunder is the weak, but speedy character. California Kid is naturally the balanced choice.

You can knock down the bad guys quickly.

The controls are very natural. Use the D-Pad to skate in all eight directions. The A button is for jumping and the B button is used to attack. The standard attack is a basic punch, but you can do a jump kick by pressing B during a jump. You also have a special attack that you trigger by pressing both A and B at the same time. Each character has a slightly different special move. Ice Box does a body slam, Rolling Thunder does a spinning jump kick, and California Kid has a double jump kick. The moves are powerful but you are limited to only three per level, so use them wisely.

The levels all play from a side-scrolling perspective, but there are two different types of levels. The normal levels can scroll in all directions and you progress linearly through the level. There are many slopes to navigate and pits to jump across, as well as other enemies and traps that stand in your way. These can be quite tricky to clear while on roller skates! As you go, you will run into groups of enemy skaters and you must beat them all up before moving forward. Three normal levels revolve around each of the bad teams, which are the Bad Attitude, Maniacs, and Violators, and these levels have two sections each. The final level is in this normal style but it has four parts.

The other type of level is an auto-scrolling level. The skater of your choice is always moving forward here and the goal is to survive to the end. These levels follow along a broken highway so there are many gaps to cross. Of course, there are also various obstacles, traps, and enemies to contend with. These levels also feature boss-like encounters, but all you need to focus on is dodging the attacks until they go away, ending the stage.

Roads are always under construction!

At the top of the screen, there is a timer in the middle. This countdown only applies to the normal stages where you have to move ahead on your own pace. At the lower left is a vertical health bar. Your skater can suffer several hits before losing a life, though falling down a pit or landing on spikes results in immediate, swift death. The lower right area shows markers that indicate how many special attacks are remaining for the stage. There is a separate screen at the start of each stage that displays your score, high score, current level, and number of lives remaining. There are no powerups in the game for replenishing any of these elements. However, you can earn an extra life when reaching either 20,000, 50,000, or 80,000 points.

The obvious gimmick to Rollergames is that you play the entire game while on roller skates. As a result, your character controls in a fitting manner. It’s akin to playing a game with nothing but ice levels and ice physics. The skaters are generally slow to accelerate and slow to come to a stop. Often, I found myself making quick turns in a different direction than where I was moving to keep myself from falling. The game has various sections of platforming where you need clear gaps of different sizes. Not only that, but there are falling platforms, moving platforms, and crumbling floors to deal with. It’s a tough combination to work with and there is much trial and error involved to learn the right moves.

Slopes and tiny jumps on roller skates don’t mix.

The game balances this difficulty out in several ways. The levels tend to be reasonably short with checkpoints after every sublevel. The hand-to-hand combat is simple and the enemies themselves don’t pose much of a threat. Lastly, there are infinite continues in the game, so you can keep banging away at each level until you clear it. You always start at the beginning of each sublevel if you die, so once you reach the checkpoint you don’t have to play past sections again.

Seeing as it’s a Konami game in the middle of the NES lifespan, Rollergames is a quality title. Not only do the controls make sense, but the game has good graphics and some excellent music. It’s the soundtrack that really stands out overall. In my mind, it has a similar sound to TMNT II and III. Maybe that is because both games are beat-em-ups, but regardless it sounds good and it suits the game well.

I first played Rollergames last year for the NintendoAge weekly contest. Unfortunately, I did not have much time to play that week and I only reached Stage 2. That was barely any experience so this was the first time I seriously played Rollergames. This was one of those filler titles that I acquired in a random NES game lot that I purchased back in my collecting heyday. When it showed up on the list, I knew that Rollergames was a pretty good game that is easily overlooked, so I was happy to play through it.

This part is particularly devilish.

I beat Rollergames over two days and those two days just happened to fall on either side of New Years, making this the first game I have played for the project over two separate years. On the first attempt, I reached Stage 5-1 and this is where I got stuck. The first part of level isn’t all that bad, but the section right before the checkpoint is pretty nasty. You have to cross along the edge of a cliff where the ground periodically crumbles away in front of you. It forces you to move slowly to reveal the hidden gaps, and then you must back up enough to get the momentum to leap to the other side. But you must be careful not to go too far past the hole or you will fall into the next one. It wouldn’t be so bad if the controls weren’t slippery, but here it’s a pretty evil little section under the game’s ground rules. After several attempts at Stage 5-1 I turned the game off for the night.

The next time I sat down to play, I performed decently up to 5-1. After many new attempts, I reached 5-2 and from there I pushed my way through to the very end. I recorded my playthrough on video, but it was the ugliest playthrough I have recorded so far. There are several sections that must be practiced, and without any of that experience I died a bunch of times until I made it through. There are enough problem spots that I would have to beat the game a few times just to record a decent run. However, a game finish doesn’t have to be pretty to count, so I’ll accept this one and move on!

Rollergames is a fun game that I enjoyed playing. It’s got that Konami standard level of polish to it with solid controls, good gameplay, nice graphics, and catchy music. The one problem with the game is that there’s a significant amount of platforming that doesn’t properly fit the game’s slippery physics. It makes this game less accessible than other NES games of similar style right off the bat. If you can get by the initial hurdles, I think you would enjoy playing the game. It’s also an inexpensive cart for the collector or player insisting on the original cart. It’s too bad that it is overlooked because I think it deserves more recognition than it receives.

#45 – Rollergames