Like, Totally Bogus (Maniac Mansion, Mappy Land, Marble Madness)

Well, that was an experience. Nintendo Project gameplay usually is. I mean, look at what we've got first off. Maniac Mansion. This is sort of an unsung darling of the NES. It's a port of a Lucasarts classic point and click adventure game! The birth of SCUMM, for Christ's sakes! Hell, this game was even on the cover of Nintendo Power! It's important. Pity, then, that I have little to say about it. Old-time adventure games are not exactly my forte. This is my failing and not Maniac Mansion's. This thing was a ride and a half, and we even have a moment of bizarre timing in the here and now as I write. James Rolfe, the Nintendo nerd for a new digital age (and really, he should get a side article on here proper someday) put up a video of him and his friends chilling out and playing Maniac Mansion for NES today. The same day I'm writing about it for Nintendo Project. Coincidence has been cancelled. There are a ton of weird tangents and little asides I can make about Maniac Mansion. The fact that the Trickster Beast ROMHACK, a rarely-seen little imp who delights in twisting the well-known, managed to create a causal link between this game and The Wizard. (Here's a hint; it's New Year's Eve. I'm in Glendora.) At least one thing I want to save for tomorrow. The Howard and Nester comic that makes Razor into a total 80's babe. (Not that she wasn't already.) Hell, where in god's name is "Pitchfork" Pat? He did a whole sprite comic using Maniac Mansion sprites! This game's fragmenting me, like three kids splitting up to explore a spooky mansion and pick up everything not nailed down. It's also creating shards of ideas that may have ramifications for the Project as a whole. Let us just say that it is a perfectly solid humorous adventure game that we should all play, and then I will leave you with Razor's rockin' 8-bit theme and move on to something else.

Mappymappymappymappymappymappymappymappy. Hey, it's Mappy! Mappy Land! This one is weird. I have a lurking bit of nostalgia for Mappy. A half-remembered moment from childhood of renting some game with a mouse. It was either Mappy or a Puss-in-boots game. Either way, I have my doubts that it was Mappy Land. This is a Namco arcade game, and it is okay. Barring level 5 or so, which has platforming without the ability to actually jump. Bounce on trampolines to reach other trampolines. Also the trampolines are moving. Also fuck you. I don't think I can quite file this one under dread beast GREED territory, but it's not my favorite thing in the world. It ain't no Low G Man, though. I really don't have a lot to say about Mappy, beyond the fact that the video I linked just now is the only thing I remember about it. I love that enthusiasm. I only wish I could hold the same for Mappy.

Marble Madness is a scary game. You roll a marble down an obstacle course and the slightest drop shatters it. Drop the thing down a pit and it fucking screams. How horrifying. It's also isometric, which is something that just fills me with dread. The copyright screen says 1984, and that is a year that puzzles me. It's an Unyear for video games, a Year That Never Was existing outside of space and time. 1983 saw the death of gaming in North America, and 1985 saw it come back. 1984 was a nothingness, a blank spot in history. Things happened, of course. Marble Madness. The Temple Of Doom. From a broad standpoint, there was a void. That just fascinates me, really. A marble floating around in the void. Let's zoom out more, why don't we? Let's take this entire silly thing into perspective, and look at the beginning and the end at once. I've got the perfect way to measure it all... though I fear the immense gravity from it.

Let's-a go.

Saturday French Toast (June 28th, 2014)

God, it's lovely out. But also ridiculously hot. The air is still and there's insects buzzing around. I don't like that but it looks nice.

As for me, I've beaten a computer game called Shovel Knight. It came out recently and it is very, very good. I will not elaborate further because that would be wasting words for my inevitable review, and I need every drop because by now you all know how nonsensical my ranting can be. I'll give you a hint: it involves the soul of Pure Platforming. Undecided if that's a proper Nintendo Project god yet. Maybe a lesser deity.

It's also my tabletop gaming day! A lovely Saturday afternoon spent rolling dice and fighting off monsters with magic and axes and crap. Just what every growing boy needs. One of my Nintendo Project off day articles will deal with tabletop gaming and DMs and stuff of that nature. For now, let's open the floor to comments because why the hell not.

So. What are you doing this Saturday? Tell me all about it. I'd love to know. See you on Monday when I play some famous adventure game where you can murder a hamster.

You Unlock This Door With The Key Of Your Imagination (MagMax, Major League Baseball)

It's always weird to have to do article math on this blog. We did a one-game article last time, and today we have a two-game article. The juggling is needed in order to keep thematic semblance... so since there are a couple of three-game sets that work well thematically coming up, plus one big game that deserves its own bonkers entry, we have to do math. So a two-game this time, then two threes, a two, another three, and then one. This is the science of Nintendo Project, my lovelies. The smart ones among you might know what's coming if you find the same list that I use. We already took out a big chunk a while ago thanks to friends. Let's get on with it.

MagMax is a strange case of a game that deserves a look beyond the base code itself. You see, I had an expectation of what it would be. I had vague memories of an unauthorized Nintendo guide book that featured MagMax in it, and I was prepared for a Bomberman clone. As it turns out, I had mixed the game up for some other one that was a Bomberman clone. MagMax is actually a horizontal shmup. I played it. I had thoughts on it, but before that I want to talk about the cover art for the game. We've probably dabbled in cover art talk before, but good god. MagMax's cover art is awesome. Lightsaber wielding robot in space blasting a robotic hydra. I can confirm that this sort of happens in-game, although it looks less impressive. I won't fault it for that. We also have just about my two favorite words ever in a bright yellow bubble: ARCADE CLASSIC. I don't have to go through the whole Dread Beast GREED shtick again because MagMax doesn't really... feel like an arcade game. It just feels like an innovative but kind of flawed shmup. The central gimmick is that you power up by equipping robot parts to your ship, thus making you a giant robot that fires lots of lasers. That sounds cool on paper, but look at the screenshot again. The robot is a huge target, and you have these swooping little critters firing bunches of bullets that you have to weave around to avoid. You can't do that when you're a giant robot sprite that takes up an eighth of the vertical space of the screen! You're going to get nicked in the foot or head and lose part of your robot body! The game's also sneaky and sort of loops until you power up your robot body enough and land on a platform to warp to the next area. It's decent at best. No continues, though. Shit, even in the arcade we could do that for money. Unless there's one of those secret Japanese continue codes. Let me check.

Okay, there isn't. Next, please.

Major League Baseball, by LJN for the NES. Can... can I go back to MagMax? Please? All you need to know about this game is that I had the same experience with it that I've had with every other Nintendo baseball game so far, and will probably have with the 45 others remaining. Batting is fun enough and I got onto some bases, but then I went into the outfield and it's garbage because I'm not a machine and controlling little ants as they slooowly run towards a ball while the computer just racks up points is not fucking fun at all. So let's talk about other things. I went to Wikipedia to look at the box art of this game, and it looks okay. There's also this:

"It is notable for being one of the first video games licensed by Major League Baseball, although it was not endorsed by the Major League Baseball Players Association. Without the backing of the player's association, the game could not name the actual players, although it was able to use their numbers, thus accurately portraying the contemporary teams and their rosters. In doing so, it became the first baseball game for the Nintendo Entertainment System to carry official Major League Baseball licensing and lineups."

Oh yes. Licensing fun facts. All it amounts to for me is a bunch of numbers that I don't know. I'm just not part of the target audience for this. My brother-in-law likes baseball. Then again he likes watching every sport. World Cup, Stanley Cup, Basketball... Cup... you name it. This isn't working. Let's talk about other things. Like the box art of this game and MagMax. I had a thought a while back about my childhood compared to the childhood of a kid today, and there's one thing that those kids won't know; anticipation. We used to borrow games from each other all the time. Hell, this is how I played Mega Man 2 in 1995. I lent someone my Game Boy for that shit and it was kind of worth it. The thing is, nowadays the kids don't need to anticipate what a game is like. If Billy borrows Jimmy's copy of Call of Duty, Billy can just go onto Youtube during recess or lunch time and see how the game looks. Not so for me in 1995. When someone lent me a game at 9 AM, I had to wait until 3 PM to get a look at it. Until then, all I could do was wistfully gaze at the cover art. Imagining and anticipating the wonders within. I know I did this for at least one game (Ninja Turtles 3, if you care.) in my youth. Major League Baseball, if I cared about it, would have that effect on me. So would MagMax. That's part of the alchemy of the grey box, really. It's bigger on the inside because your imagination is fueling the damn thing. Flick those youthful thoughts into the cart as you puff away the dust to get the son of a bitch working, and finally get the thing to load up. It's 3:30 PM and you're ready to play Major League Baseball!

Oh. It ain't that good. Daniel, I want my copy of Monster Party back.

Raving Rants From A Nintendo Madman: Ultima One And The Age Of Darkness

Last night I completed the first quest. One of the oldest quests known to electronic quest-dom. Ultima One: The First Age Of Darkness. Mother of god. The version I was playing was a prettied-up 1986 DOS port of some type. Close enough to be within the realm of our Nintendo Project wheelhouse. The original release? 1981. I mean, my god. That is a time before I existed as a sentient human. My birth roughly coincides with the birth of the NES in America, so in a mad sense I have existed along with video games. This is from before that, from the Ago. When floppies were floppies and kilobytes ruled the world and internal speaker sound was an honest to goodness thing. Did Richard Garriott watch Raiders Of The Lost Ark as he coded away at this Great Old One? He knows. I don't know. What I do know is that Ultima One was kind of fun to break over my knee.

Of course, I had resources. Internet look-ups and maps and guides and things like that. I in no way played this pure. That might discount my victory, but what the hell. I experienced part of the Ultima One experience, and that will be enough for me. Most folk in the year 2014 just can't replicate that experience. In the year 1986, with no Internet or other cheap pennywhistle distractions? The PC gaming folk could get lost in the thing, delving across the world and taking notes of what was where. Making maps of the earth and the labyrinth dungeons within its crust. Powering themselves up level by level to become the slayer of worlds. It's great that you can do that. The means to do that in about 30 minutes of gameplay also exist. Dart back and forth between signposts to raise your stats to 99. The magic incantation upon the sign's words shall grant you infinite weaponry, each stronger than the last until you find... a blaster. That's not the only hodgepodge element here. Sure, this looks like some sort of fantasy Dungeons and Dragons-esque romp at first. Gradually, the walls between worlds grow thin as your power increases. Smite the evil ranger and wandering warlock with precise laser fire. Things only get more interesting once you go on quests for the kings. They demand you delve into dungeons to find specific creatures deep inside and slay them. This would normally mean mapping out the first-person maze on graph paper or something... or you could do what I did. Buy a shitload of spells that create magical ladders up or down to the next floor. Cast Ladder Down. Find monster. Kill monster. Cast Ladder Up. Voila, you've done it!

Once you descend into the very depths of the earth and rule over them... why, the heavens must be conquered. More than the heavens, even. The vastness of uncharted space. My hero, Gom the dwarven fighter, put on a vaccuum suit and launched his shuttle into the airless void of space. This place was hostile. Enemy fighters come at you frequently, and to progress you must become an ace of space. We're not even playing a swords and sorcery game any more. We have fallen out of the world. Not hard to do, really, when you become so powerful that the world ceases to be a constant thing. Still, space is a harsh mistress. It will not be conquered easily. One must be careful to manage their fuel, lest they be left forever adrift in a dead spacecraft, awaiting the inevitable death by starvation. Or burning up on re-entry because you weren't in a ship with heat shielding. Or being shot down by enemy fighters. Eventually, though... space becomes your domain. Now for the final challenge. The mastery of time. Enter your time machine, powered by the gems you have collected. Cast yourself back to the Ago of the Ago, when the evil wizard is vulnerable. Take his Gem of Immortality and crush it inside your armored glove before blasting his batlike form into cinders. Thou art victorious. Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart.

So that's Ultima One. It's kind of dated and janky but by god is it fun to bust in half in 2014. The Nintendo Project proper will look at Ultima, one day. One day when it shakes off the mishmash of ideas it dances with and seeks out true enlightenment. I look forward to it. So should you.

I Put A Spell On You (Magician)

Holy mother of god. Magician on NES. I'm going to treat this one as a single entity. Not because it's terribly important or because it lit the world on fire... but because in its own little way, Magician is magic. Again we need to step back and look at what we're dealing with here. In an odd way, I'm not even talking about Magician today. Yet I have to, for this is a Nintendo game that is part of the song of the NES. It is a Nintendo game I desperately, desperately WANT to love. See, I'll let you in on a little secret here. I love magic. You put me in any fantasy video game or setting, and I'll gravitate towards the magic-using classes. Something about them drives me to them. Maybe it's the characterization of Black Mage from Brian Clevinger's 8-Bit Theater, the only webcomic I know of whose entire existance is a set-up to a joke lasting 10 years. Either way, Magician is an innovative action/adventure game, probably. Maybe a little too innovative. You learn magic spells as you progress by discovering what the magic words are, and you build them syllable by syllable. Buy items, explore the land, destroy evil with your magic, keep yourself well-fed... it all sounds good. Unfortunately, something keeps it back. Attacking with magic turns into a slugfest. I really want to beat this game, and to that end I once looked up a longplay to see if I could find how to attack effectively. The longplayer just spent the opening section of the game "learning" every spell by inputting them manually. Since the spells never change, if you know the magic words you can have the best spells from the first seconds of gameplay. What a dull way to play. At least Magician has good music. It has very good music, in fact. You will hear it momentarily, but now... now for the part I've been looking forward to.

Magician is an acolyte apprentice of an ultimate wizard, the dread beast NOSTALGIA. To that end, I have nostalgic memories of Magician. They notably have jack shit to do with the game itself. The main title theme was used in a piece of NES homebrew that I remember from the turn of the century. I fully expected to mention this in passing, as a cute little fact of my own personal history. Then I actually found the thing. It's called "CMC 80's", and I have recorded the entirety of it for you all. You should watch this. This is a fascinating piece and I'd love to talk about it some more. The most striking is its date. June 14th, 2000. Eleven days past its fourteenth birthday, and it celebrates 15 years of the NES. The loving tribute of nostalgia is now as old as the nostalgia itself was at the time. Christ almighty. More to the point, this thing reads like a manifest for the Nintendo Project itself. A piece of loving art that, while impossible to be heard by every human being ever, still matters because it was heard by some human beings for one fleeting moment. A tribute to a piece of comfort from one's childhood, a comfort that still exists today. 1989 is long gone. 2014 is halfway dead. The memory of things like Mega Man 2 and Super Mario Brothers are only just that; memories ingrained inside the minds of twenty-something sentient humans on planet Earth. The objects themselves still exist, unlike the years they were made. Anyone can throw them on at any time, and go back. That's the magic of NOSTALGIA, the arcane ritual that every mad man with a grey box can perform on a whim. God, the NES is just beautiful like that. In this moment, it's all worth it. No matter what utter shit may lie in the future of the Nintendo Project, it all happened and it all mattered... and with every entry, I become more of a magician, dredging up these alchemic memories and placing them inside a wall of words. A wall of words that not every human will read, but nevertheless still matters because some humans will read them.

Oh yeah, and the guy who made this, Chris Covell... wherever he is now, he liked Magician and he used some of the music from the game in his homebrew ROM. It's good tunes.

Raving Rants From A Nintendo Madman: Axelay And The Death Of The Dread Beast GREED

Let's talk about shmups. Side scrolling and vertical scrolling. Shmups and I have a rocky relationship. I've mastered many a hard game domain in recent years, but the shmup remains something just beyond my grasp. Mastery of the shmup requires a focused, all-encompassing view of every single thing hurtling towards your space fighter or airplane or cute anime girl. Failure to do this results in a penalty more severe than most games; let us call it the Nigh-Impossible State. The Nigh-Impossible State really only exists in the console shmup. In the land of the arcade? The very stomping grounds of the Dread Beast GREED? Your entire existance is a Nigh-Impossible State. The deck is stacked against you because money is on the line. That mentality led to the console shmups of the Nintendo age. It led to things like Gradius, or Image Fight. Things where death is the most severe penalty. You don't just go back. You go back and lose all your progress, thus making success about 10 times harder than it was when you initially fucked up. It makes it so the only way to clear these things reliably is to no-death them. I spent an afternoon learning Gradius on the NES. By about 1:30 or so I had mapped out the optimal way to fly through each stage. It still took me three hours to do it because I literally had to do it no-death. There was just no other way to survive the onslaught of the latter levels. Something had to change. Something had to evolve. This just isn't working.

Enter 1992. Enter something we shouldn't even be talking about proper on a blog for the NES. Like it or not, the Super Nintendo existed in tandem with the NES. It's a free day and the emperor's on holiday, so let me tell you about this shmup. Let me tell you about Axelay, because it may just be my favorite shmup of all time. First of all, it is very very good. It is a Konami game, and they know their good games. They also know their shmups, having made Gradius... which makes this all the more interesting. Axelay is almost an atonement. A final exorcism of the arcade mentality. It was already weakened by the release of Gradius III on the SNES. That game's arcade embodiment was notorious for being utterly ridiculous. The dread beast GREED at his most powerful... to say nothing of that little punch-and-kick game that Lady Capitalism and Capcom were cooking up. Still, when it came time to plop it on a console, they learned. They toned things down and in the process made a Gradius game that's actually pretty damn fun. The Syndrome still exists, but for the first time in forever the dread beast was restricted. This space was toxic to the dread beast GREED, and Axelay contained the red dust which would kill it. The experimental compound, MODE-7. Axelay is riddled with it, a curved horizon that beckons the player.

Axelay hits all the right notes. Good gameplay, good music, and it looks lovely. The single best innovation, however, is its complete and utter subversion of the typical shmup dynamic. Usually in these things, you start off weak as butter and collect powerups from fallen foes. The powerups help you kill more things, and let you do it without much fuss. A death results in everything being lost, and you are now weak as butter again... but still facing the difficult hordes of foes. Death after death will rack up, and you are now in the Nigh-Impossible State. Axelay's genius in this regard. There are no powerups. You select three weapons at the beginning of a stage, and you can cycle through them at will. All three have their uses and are generally very effective against killing the hordes of enemies. A hit from an enemy projectile, however, will destroy your current weapon and leave you with a dinky pea-shooter. You are forced to switch to a new weapon, and it may not be the one you were hoping for in that segment. Things have become more difficult for you, but not impossible. The true wonder comes when you finally do mess up again and your ship is destroyed.

You respawn with all of your weapons intact. The Nigh-Impossible State, reversed. Your terrible situation has been averted. The only cost? A life of your life bar, and this game has limited continues. Axelay understands. It knows that a lost life is enough of a punishment. Lose too many lives and you're done, but it doesn't need to drain all of them for one mistake. The dread beast GREED isn't here to lust for pretend quarters. It can sit there and be a challenging game without smiting you where you stand for daring to err, as humans do. There's hope for the future yet.

God, do I love Axelay.

I Casts The Spells That Makes The Peoples Fall Down (Magic Darts, Magic Johnson's Fast Break, The Magic Of Scheherazade)

We have talked, in great length now, about how the entire scope of our project (and indeed, in most projects) has a foundation rooted in Lady Capitalism, the Beginning and the End. This vast expanse goes on for longer than one can fathom, a scheme built on the back of human history. Creation in the name of making money... but creation had that nasty side effect of creativity. Old British people's attempt to make money in 1963 created a transcendent blue box. Middle-aged American people's attempt to make money in 2010 created a fervor of friendship. Old Japanese people's attempt to make money in 1985 with video games intersected with old American's people failed attempt at the same thing two years earlier, and the Nintendo Entertainment System was born. A grey box that uses the CVE of imagination, and computer chips brimming with god knows how much of the Goddess Valya, to bring entertainment and enjoyment to the masses. What other words is there to describe this besides "magic"? Now the magic becomes apparant. Now we delve in.

Magic Darts surprised me. It really and truly did surprise me. I was expecting crap. What I got was... servicable. I have a bit of a history with darts. I never really played the game, but my family has done so quite often. Numerous dart trophies and plaques in my parents' basement, for instance. Even a full-fledged dartboard hung there until recently, unused and taking up space. Come to think of it... that same basement is also where the magic happened with my Nintendo when I was young. That dartboard would have been right there on the wall as I ventured through Darkwing Duck on the weekends, or tried to master the madness of Castlevania II with a hintbook in hand. As it turns out, Nintendo and darts don't make such an odd alchemic mix after all. Magic Darts ended up being a little fun, and I got the hang of it quick. You select the angles of your shot horizontally and vertically, then the power... and you see what you get. It is intuitive and maybe a little fun. Plus you can play as a robot. Who the fuck doesn't want to play as a dart-throwing robot?

Magic Johnson's Fast Break. There's a kind of magic here. A magic that makes the typical trash sports game that I usually dread writing words about... almost good. In a prototype NBA Jam 2-on-2 sort of sense, but without any of the mild insanity that game brought upon the world. No, I almost had fun with this. Not a complete fun, but much more than something like Hoops or Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf. I say almost because there's still that level of intuition I'm missing. Even with two buttons, there's variations on offense and defense that I am missing. Still, it remains satisfying to score a shot. That part is simple enough, you just hit the button when you're near the other hoop. It's defense that gets me. I liked the darts more than this, and yet I am incompetent at both sports in real life. Either way, the fact that both are tolerable as opposed to outright dreck is itself a miracle... but the true magic is yet to come.

Scheherazade beckons with her magic, and I must answer her call. I myself have become the Scheherazade, haven't I? Three times a week I tell the ongoing stories of Nintendo, in order to keep this project from facing its demise. It lay cold and lonely for a long time until I took up the mantle, becoming the new Lord Of Fiction and creating the Valya and the Nightmare... or did the Valya and the Nightmare create me? Whoever created this, whatever cultured brain brought it forth with their ritual... they brought forth a hidden gem. A true thing of beauty. Choose your starting class? Magician, of course. An echo of things to come, the ultimate power in the universe. One who wields the arcane and the alchemic, the divine and the profane. Right now we start out small. We run around in an overworld inspired by Endless Adventure, and swing our sword at bandits. Talk to the townspeople for clues. The high water mark comes when a clue leads us to a pier to the east, near the grassy shores. Our companion finds a "time door". Time itself bends to our will, and we slip 50 years into the past. We fall out of the world, and enter something completely different. A dark place, with trees of teal and blackened skies. The past is a grotesque animal, and so is the password. I want to keep going with this quest. Before we do, one final ritual of magic.

The Magician beckons, and his power shall be great.