Break Time

Might as well come out and say it, while I'm here. We've stalled. We've hit hiatus. Lost adrift outside the letter J. Unfortunate, but it's where we are. Why? Because I am a bit of a lazy fellow. Also as I alluded to in the last post, I was working on a book. I finished it a week or two ago... but another is coming up. National Novel Writing Month, the test of a writer's steel. 30 days. 50,000 words. A coherent plot. Many and tried and many have failed, but I usually have succeeded. I've got books that I want to get out of my head, and I have to focus my writing time on it. Ideally I should be doing both, but I'm a simple man with hobbies and junk. I am deciding to prioritize the book over Nintendo game blog.

So I guess we'll see you in December or something. I really do want to finish this. I kind of understand why Phil Sandifer bowed out of the game now. Most of these games are unremarkable, and the remarkable ones have been talked about since they came out. What the hell am I gonna add to Mario or Zelda? We'll find out should we ever get there. Fingers crossed, 'cause I had neat ideas for those posts.

I'll see ya when we come back. If we come back...

This Post Sponsored By FreezingInferno (Ivan "Ironman" Stewart, Jack Nicklaus, Jackal)

I said I had renewed interest and spark in this thing. That was a month ago. I'm sorry, I really am. I went through some shit, and I've been trying to finish the Camp Nanowrimo book I started. In July. I gotta finish that thing by the end of the month... because November 1st is the honest-to-god Nanowrimo. So if updates are a bit... sporadic around here, that's why. While we're here talking about the blog, do feel free to comment on
the thing because I am a fragile little human being who thrives on attention. Talk about old Nintendo games with me. Alright then, enough waffling. We're going to finish our course through the I system. What have we seen, exactly? The futility of war. The insatible hunger of the dread beast GREED. I'm sorry to say we didn't get out of that one untainted. In the furthest reaches we have Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road. Now, do you have any idea who that is? I don't. This fellow is another unperson lurking within the secret history. Presumably he made a lot of money by licensing his name to this video game. Normally this would spell disaster, but we're in luck! Rare Limited is behind this one and it's actually quite fun. Another system's gravity affects us, as this game reminds me a lot of RC Pro Am. Except with big monster trucks and a top down perspective. Still, I had a good time with this one. A realization hit me as I played, though. I raced and raced, and the more races I won the more in-game money I got. Not a useless pretend currency like Hollywood Squares, but a useable commodity to upgrade my truck into a racing king unlike any other. Then it hit me. I kept playing to win more money. I had become the dread beast GREED. That's what happens when you tangle with a devil. You awaken the darkness within you. Well, let's get our monster truck out of here and go to the world of the J.

Another sponsored game. Jack Nicklaus Championship Golf or some such nonsense. Hoo boy. There are quite a lot of golf games. Some were already covered by the original Nintendo Project. There are still plenty left for us to tackle. I'm curious to finally play Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf, just to see if that title has much action in it. This is not one of the better golf video games I have played. From the first hole, you are faced with a large lake on the south of the course. The ball goes into that thing every time. Try to hit to the side and you go out of bounds. I accept that I am not very good at it. I also accept that I don't have the patience to get good at it. Jack Nicklaus, it seems, has embraced the corruption of the dread beast GREED in full. At least I was horrified to find myself becoming a greed machine. A poor start to the J's, but I have hope for the next game. I've heard good things.

The good things were right. Jackal is a Konami game. A Konami game adapted from an arcade title. Normally this would fill us with fear. A hateful spite-filled experience would await, to siphon our fake quarters and laugh at us for daring to want more than three minutes of entertainment. That's what I've come to expect, but Jackal is an adaptation. Somewhere along the line, they learned. They exorcised the dread beast GREED, or maybe he was out whispering sweet nothings into the ear of Jack Nicklaus. Either way, Jackal is a damn fine video game. It's what Ikari Warriors should have been; fun. We're in a motor vehicle again; did our souped-up truck follow us through the void? You blow up soldiers and turrets and tanks and you save people. It's a video game. It's fun. It's what playing Nintendo games SHOULD be. Not a wasted opportunity. Not a cheap cash-in. A fun electronic video game. God, I missed these things.

Mediocrity (Infiltrator, Iron Tank, Isolated Warrior)

Well, it didn't take long for the hope to die, now did it? Infiltrator is some sort of combat flight simulator. Look, why don't we just defer to Phil Sandifer and the original project on this one. He had this to say about a game called Airwolf.

Let's discuss realism. 

Fuck realism.. 

Or at least that's my usual speech on the subject. If I wanted realism, I'd interact with reality. What I want out of a video game is playability, which is generally largely distinct from realism. For instance, I cannot fly an airplane. In that regard, Airwolf was an INCREDIBLY LIFELIKE SIMULATION of what would happen if you put me in an airplane, which is that I could not take off, and if I did take off, I would promptly crash and die.

Pretty much me and Infiltrator. I flew around in circles shooting glowy things at a plane and missing. The plane shot glowy things at me and eventually I went down. I didn't even take a screenshot of the game; just this. The opening mission briefing mentioned some guy wanting to make nerve gas. Then it shows me this. It's the only remarkable thing about Infiltrator. Jesus, at least I could play Ikari Warriors.

Speaking of, we have... (gulp) Iron Tank. An SNK game that feels a lot like Ikari Warriors. You get in a tank and move forward, running over guys and shooting at other tanks. SNK took the only part of Ikari Warriors I liked and made a game about that. It's decent, to a point. Then something odd happened. I got a "call" in-game. I went into my menu and answered this call, and the commander on the other end referred to me as "Snake" before telling me to do something. How... interesting. Even from here, that system's gravity is tugging on us, ever so faintly. A shooting star from a far-off system, reaching the orbit of Iron Tank. Iron Tank is okay I guess. I'll give it a pass.

Isolated Warrior next. Not Ironsword. Ironsword has been flung into a time warp and will be dealt with in the far future. Isolated Warrior now. You're a guy named Max Maverick and you run around all isometric style shooting at things. Sounds decent enough, but I have a complaint. Your basic gun shoots straight ahead. Upgrading it makes you shoot two shots... at an angle. With no straight shot. Great, so now it's harder for me to hit things. I ended up dying to the miniboss and stage boss due to this... only to find them easier when I came back because I had a straight shot. The Gradius syndrome, somehow reversed. This was short. Like I said, these are not hidden treasures. They exist, we have noted it, and now we move on. There's a new letter coming up. A new realm to explore. Oh boy.

It Belongs In A Museum! (Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade x2/Temple Of Doom)

Sorry. We're not dead. Just needed a recharge. The original Nintendo Project needed one of those as well. I'm discovering now what Phil Sandifer must have learned all those days ago. Video games are mostly crap. I mean, let's look at the NES library. About 800 games, roughly. Off the top of my head. Let's be generous and say that 100 of those are out and out classics, with another 100 being games that are decent and playable. Even this generous estimation still leaves us with the bitter pill of truth; 75% of the great and bountiful NES galaxy we're exploring is crap. Utter crap. Thank goodness we got some good ones today.

ar·chae·ol·o·gy  [ahr-kee-ol-uh-jee]
noun
1.
the scientific study of historic or prehistoric peoples and their cultures by analysis of their artifacts, inscriptions, monuments, and other such remains, especially those that have been excavated.
2.
Rare. ancient history; the study of antiquity.


Kind of what we're doing, huh? Indiana Jones video games. A quantity, like Hydlide, done by everyone's favorite James Rolfe. The difference here is that most of the ones we're looking at here are playable. Not classics, but certainly playable. It gives me hope for the Nintendo Project Resumed. I have come back to my travels to discover that all is not lost. There are still good games to be found, hidden gems left unfound by the retroarchaeologists of the Internet age. See how they proudly display their findings online. Best games ever. Hidden gems long lost to time, memory, and the secret history. Kids, this shit is what I live for. So let's talk about Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Wait. Wait. Something's wrong here. There's a rift in space and time here. Reality has worn thin, and we have a game with a mirror. A Twinner, if you will, sent through the thinny in the canyon of the Crescent Moon, where nothing is as it seems. We'll set aside that strange alternate, and look at this game. Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, released by Taito.

This is one of the few video games I played as a child, purchased blindly from a video rental store for 6 dollars at the turn of the millennium. Yeah, so hi. I'm intruding on this one, in more ways than just being the idiot who writes this thing. I'll talk about the game a little more before that, though. What we have here is a game that can be beaten in all of 10 minutes if you're good at it. Getting good at it can be difficult. It emulates the movie's major scenes fairly well (though no Venice speed boat chase, I'm afraid) and can be fun. The action beat em up scenes are a little wonky, and there's nonsense involving confusing mazes and finding the "correct" Holy Grail. Despite all that, I have nostalgia for it. It's a gem I'd put up in my personal museum... and I'm not the only one. Witness the personal memoirs of one "Captain Nintendo". Here is a man who embodies the concept of the secret history. Beneath the veneer of an unknown Nintendo Power editor in 1988 was a champion who brought change to the world in his own way. He created what would become Captain N; you know, that one cartoon show. He eventually made his way to Taito, and it's here where I just let him take over.



One of the high profile projects we produced at this licensee company was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for the 8-bit NES. I am particularly proud of this one as I had a great deal of impact on its design. For several reasons. It was one of the first non-linear games for the old NES. It contained several different types of gameplay in one cartridge, which was very unusual for the time and the platform. And before all you critics respond with how YOU personally hated the game (and you are in the minority), there was one more reason I was especially proud. After we completed the game, one of our producers talking with George Lucas over the phone during a team meeting relayed that he said, “It was the best conversion of one of his films into a video game he’d ever seen. In any format.” For about five minutes, I didn’t care if we ever sold one cartridge. We had managed to please (someone who I consider to be) one of the most creative geniuses of our time. This was a guy who has gone back and remade and remade his own films. Adding. Editing. Polishing. Always striving for perfection. One more thing that will make it better. And we had prompted that kind of praise. I know I spent a large paragraph talking about this, but indulge me a second. That was a big moment for me personally.

So George Lucas thought this game was good. Good enough for me. Now for the fun part. If you want to see this game, I've played it. You probably know this already, but I play video games for the Internet. And talk over them. They call this "Let's Play." It has its own storied secret history, but it feels right to bring it up here, while we talk about retroarchaeology. God, I love that word. I'm going to use it a lot from now on. That's the draw of Let's Play for me. The idea of retroarchaeology. It isn't about dusting off the big triple-A blockbuster from last week and playing it poorly for views. It's about freeing the hidden gems of lost history from the maximum security wing of Obscurity Prison, and letting them loose in a brave new world. Letting others discover what the secret history has to offer. If you'd like to watch me play the thing, then here you go. Enjoy yourself.


Now comes the tricky part... this game's dark twin. It's 1993 on the planet Mondas, and we're going to play Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade... by Ubisoft. It, of course, is quite foul. We hit many of the bad game notes. Oh boy! Fall damage! A strict time limit! Enemies that are better at attacking than you are! The water hurts you! Hooray! Why does this exist? It was 1993, for christ's sakes. The movie was 4 years old. The game wasn't any good. Ubisoft, the Qlippoth of this parallel world, buzzes with its mechanical voicebox. WEEE MUZZZZT SURVIVVVE. Stay away from Planet Mondas. Stay away from the Last Crusade's dark mirror, lest you find yourself drained of your energy and transformed into a being of pure mercury. Whitaker be praised.

By nature of the alphabet we jump back to find a rare treat; a video game based on the middle Indiana Jones film. The one nobody liked until that fucking movie about the aliens. It also existed in 1984, which is sort of the black hole of the secret history. Video game crashes and ET and all that junk. It's quite interesting to see. Oh, and Tengen had a hand in it, and they were a branch of Atari. So, you know, I'm not completely insane. Or maybe I am because I kind of like this game. It's decidedly arcade-styled, but that's all you need sometimes. It's not the virtual arcade we visited with High Speed, but its own thing. These sorts of games have to draw you in and make you want to play, and Temple of Doom did just that. Yes, changing weapons is weird. Yes, the world is some sort of flat Escher dimension that loops eternally. You know what else you can do? You can swing over chasms with your whip. You can ride mine carts at high speed through dangerous caves. You can attack Thuggee cult devotees repeatedly and knock them into LAVA. You can whip spiders and make them explode in a gout of blood and bug guts. This thing is fun. Not a classic, but fun. I'd give it a corner spot in my museum.

Alright, time to ride off into the sunset, to brave new worlds in the I galaxy. No matter how bad it gets, I'll keep hope. Indiana Jones has shown me the way. This secret history we tote around has a lot of duds and portals to terrible dimensions hidden away... but there are good things buried in the sand. Things that should not have been forgotten. Even a watch buried for a thousand years becomes priceless.

Money, Money, Money (Image Fight, The Immortal, Incredible Crash Dummies)

Sorry about that. Had a little breather. We're back with more Nintendo games that start with I and we are starting with Image Fight. Our first shooter game. Oh, joy. All that talk last time, about the dread beast GREED? It feels like his gluttonous spirit is still lurking, waiting to gobble up more fake money. I was thinking about this, and I was going to talk about how the shmup was a genre born from the dread beast GREED and his perverse lust for quarters. Then I realized that all console video games were, in essence, born from the coin-op days of the arcade. The dread beast GREED, then, is the dark half of us all. Everything in the Nintendo Project has some of his power within it. Here, then, I have found it. The Qlippoth of video games. Our secret Silence, guiding us along before the fire, building power and munching quarters. This explains so much about hard games. I'm on the verge of an epiphany here.

So, uh... Image Fight! It's a vertical shmup by Irem. Their gravitational field extends to things like R-Type. R-Type is an example of something which embraced the forbidden principles of GREED. It was a horizontal, though. These primitive worlds are still in two dimensions. Flying through the third, along the Z-Axis... it was beyond us just yet. Image Fight is okay. It's a little difficult, though. I will admit that shmups are not my speciality. Part of the problem is that failure is a death sentence in these things. They even have a name for it. "Gradius Syndrome", they like to call it, after that one planetary system. It's just how these things work. You power up as you survive the waves of things. You become a tiny god. One stray bullet, and you are powerless. The waves don't get any easier. You are now an ant trying to dodge a tsunami. That's all it takes in life to take out a man with delusions of immortality. One stray bullet. Image Fight, ever the realist.

Delusions of immortality abound in The Immortal. This man is nowhere close to immortal. To be fair, he is stuck in one hell of a place. Some sort of trap-filled dungeon. There's fire shooting everywhere, and goblins ready to beat the crap out of you with their maces. You are some sort of wizard and you can shoot fire... on the overworld. When you encounter a goblin, you enter this weird battle mode thing. Here is what happens; you try to attack, and miss. You try to dodge, and get hit. Part of me feels there is some risky dodge-and-strike mechanic I am missing, but another part of me feels that this is just a slog. Whoever Will Harvey is, he's made something that can probably be enjoyed by very strange people. It's just on the cusp of being worth looking into, but the hell with it.

"The hell with it", oddly enough, could be taken as the slogan for the creators of The Incredible Crash Dummies. Who are they? LJN Ltd. Gravity once again comes in as we hear James Rolfe echoing in our ears, yelling about putrid rainbows and cheap licensing knock-offs. The dread beast GREED, living on in the hearts and minds of many. HUNGRY. MORE MONEY. MAKE GAME BASED ON FRANCHISE. QUICK GAME. HUNGRY. Of course, LJN was merely the publisher for a lot of these... but whatever. Let's play this damn thing for as long as we can stand. Video games under the LJN banner have a... reputation. This is our first, and what do we have?

Nothing worth mentioning. Well, there is the fact that "Don't be a dummy, fasten your safety belt" is trademarked. Yes. We own a trademark on telling you to buckle up when you're driving. The dread beast GREED is strong with this one. Additionally, we're in 1993 now. The end times for the NES. Trenzalore has not arrived yet, but it will. So you're on a unicycle constantly for some reason, and anything that hits you sends you flying into a wall where you explode. Cute. What made me stop was a part where you jump over platforms, and failure to do so puts you back down onto old ground. I hate that shit. Especially in a game that doesn't control that well. I'm beginning to think the I's aren't going to give me anything good or fun to talk about. These games just exist. They were products you could buy. Feed the dread beast GREED.

Love And War In Heaven And In Hell (Ikari Warriors/II/III)

Great. A whole solar system at war. Is this it? Is this what's out here in the uncharted frontier of Nintendo space? The Ikari system? This is the Nintendo Project's Mariner 5. We've dreamed of breaching the long void for ages, and now that we're here... there's nothing. The hollow pointlessness of war, memorialized forever in SNK's Ikari Warriors. You know what else is pointless? This game. It's a waste. I say without hyperbole that it is the worst thing I have encountered in the project so far. Nintendo space utopia was a fleeting dream.

Oh, I knew it was bad already. I had hindsight. I had James Rolfe. His unending fury, creating its own pockets of localized gravity around certain systems. Hydlide was one of them. Ikari Warriors, another. I knew this when I went in, but the game still managed to surprise me. I went in with the knowledge of what was to come. Knowledge of Contra. Of Commando. I sprayed my bullets about like John Rambo, shooting down whoever I could, and then. Click. Click. Click. I ran out of bullets. Let me stress this. I ran out of bullets in a top-down run and gun game. Dear reader, can you fathom how horrible a decision this is? It rivals  Ecco the Dolphin in design decisions seemingly born out of utter contempt and hatred for the lucky player who just handed you money. I mean, my god. The mere fact that this exists baffles me.

Of course, this will hardly ever affect you because you die so often in Ikari Warriors. Enemy touches you? Death. Shoots you? Death? Too close to an explosion? Death. Three lives and no continues, unless you use a code. A B B A. You can dance, you can die... but you're not having the time of your life. Now, these decisions strike me as those of realism. Of course you die in one shot. Of course an explosion kills you. The game's being realist, like Home Alone was. That gets thrown out the window when stone faces start to shoot arrows at you. No, these people just want you to suffer. This, then, is the dark side of the arcade. The dread beast GREED. It cares not if you lose your three lives in the span of 30 seconds. It got your quarter. Want to try again? Feed it more. HUNGRY. HUNGRY. ALWAYS HUNGRY.

Of course, back in the 80's, these sorts of things were everywhere. Then they got ported to the NES, a platform where you have given the dread beast GREED a five-course meal of money. It slurps it up, of course, because it is ALWAYS HUNGRY... but that does not mean it will grant you mercy. It is a beast. It only knows how to kill and how to eat. A B B A. Non-existant money for the beast. It's too stupid to realize that its meal does not exist. It will keep on killing and eating until the end of time, or the end of the game. Level 1 seems to go on forever. You and the beast, locked in a purgatory of death and gluttony.

Ikari Warriors II, then, is a much different beast. In our struggle with GREED, we have fallen out of the world. Fallen into the future, in space. On this distant moon we find that things are better than before. We have a life bar, though A B B A is still a dance required. We fight through space, a sort of star war if there ever was one. The game has even advanced enough that it can speak to us... though it's still learning. Shops and hearts and black hole bonus games. What the hell happened? I mean, it's not the best game ever... but compared to that other hell hole fueled by GREED it is a wonderful innovative thing. Something to be appreciated.

And then we hit Ikari III. The Rescue. We have cinematics now. Another popular game's gravity affecting this system. The positions of these planetoids is a bit odd, when it comes to cosmic forces. This one is by far the most enjoyable, and is sitting just on the edge of the "good game" line. There is very little gunplay now. We are playing a top-down beat-em-up. Punching, kicking and jumpkicking. It satisfies. After enduring my war with GREED, this planet feels the anger within. It gives me an outlet. A focus. The power to knock three men to the ground with one well-timed kick. It also gives me a tank boss whose attacks all fell me in one hit. Not the best, but it'll do. This system has been most... interesting. We've made an enemy. The dread beast GREED will remember us. He will return, demanding more food and more suffering, for he was unleashed upon many a game thanks to the 1980s. Thanks to the arcade. What once was a diversion while waiting for food has now become a beast that can never be slain. Only endured. At least we have an alchemic formula to keep ourselves immortal as well.

A B B A.

What Killed The Dinosaurs? (Hydlide, Ice Climber, Ice Hockey)

Well, we're not out of the orbit of bad things just yet, I'm afraid. This is the proverbial it, though. Once we rocket out of here, we finish the H of Nintendo games. The tether we have to June 14th, 2011 will vanish. We will be all on our own in the void of Nintendo game space. One last H game. Hydlide. It's a doozy. It suffers from what I will dub "The Problem Of Dragon Quest". In a land that did not exist, it came out in 1986. For the standards and culture of that time, it may have been appreciated. Here, in 1989, it is a relic as soon as the alchemy that transfers it from a Famicom cartridge to an NES cartridge is complete. One song, looping endlessly and sounding a lot like Indiana Jones. At least you could turn off Red October's sensory attack. I ended up listening to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's Tarkus as I played this thing. Played is a misnomer. Endured, is more like it.

Look to your right. You see that? That's 90% of my time with Hydlide. You walk towards these slimes and press the A button while walking into them. You stand like this for half a second and the slime dies. Maybe you've taken damage from this, since your starting HP is pathetic. Stand still for a moment to replenish it. All good? Excellent. Now go fight more slimes. Level up. Grind. This is what we expect of you. We are Hydlide, a planet of work. Fight slimes. Hold A. Stand still. Fight slimes. Hold A. Stand still. Thank god for progressive rock from 1971. Fighting slimes inside an armored armadillo tank protects my sanity. Eventually I gain two levels and explore my world. Treasure is inside a cemetery but before it can be grabbed a zombie kills me. That's it. Start all over again. Well, fuck that.

(Something I just noticed, and that terrifies me in how things connect; Emerson, Lake, and Palmer's Tarkus came out on June 14th, 1971. 40 years later, Phil Sandifer got us up to Hatris and left the project to fall out of the world. Coincidence has been cancelled.)

Even our reconstruction of the past is less than pleased with Hydlide. I'll get into this in future entries, but I have a Nintendo tip book that I recieved as a child. A chapter is devoted to Hydlide. Re-reading it now, their strategy amounts to "oh fuck it, here's a bunch of passwords and some tips for the endgame". Even in 1989, the people were apathetic about Hydlide. It's that apathy that launches us away from the letter H. Time to enter the ice fields of I.

Well. Fortune smiles upon us. Not because Ice Climber is a particular masterpiece or anything, but because of what it represents for our colorful blast off metaphor. Here we are, rocketing up into worlds unknown... and we get a game that's all about the vertical. It also credits itself as being from 1984, so we once again find ourselves in the nowhere-land of the NES. NEs does not exist. Only the Cold War does. Cold. Ice. Dear god, this is just too much. Ice Climber is another of those "black box" games like Hogan's Alley. We're starting our own letter with one of the launch games! I can't believe how perfect this is. Ice Climber is not a perfect game... but it's not bad, either. It's just... annoying. The point you see here is where I stopped playing. Fast-moving clouds you have to ride to smash open a gap. Then you go back down and try to get up. Then a little yeti thing fills in the gap in order to undo your work. This close to planet Hydlide, the work ethic and harsh punishment is still affecting us. Ice Climber still has its own gravity, though. It sent scouts to the far future in the year 2001. (Thirty years after Tarkus and ten before Hatris, recall.) They fought in a celebration, a battle arena possibly constructed by the dread beast NOSTALGIA. That star system does not concern us. Let's just play hockey, okay?

That was pretty fun. Canada vs. Russia, in a hockey battle of the ages. Recreating the Summit Series of 1972, in an 8-bit form 16 years after the fact. I am no Paul Henderson and I found the thing a bit hard to control. Against the socialist machine that has pursued me since I fled its docks in a Typhoon-class nuclear submarine, I am sub-par. Well, at least I got a goal against them. I'm sure this game has a lot of charm to it, and I have some memories of fiddling about with a ROM of it when I should have been doing schoolwork. In school itself. God, I need to work in those days somewhere into this blog. As it stands, the ice age has given me some good times. Better than Hydlide, at least.

Okay. What's next to explore out there with my very own letter?