I grew up playing the Nintendo Entertainment System. You could easily say I was obsessed with it between 1987 and 1992. I was a Nintendo Power subscriber from day 1, I even watched all the crummy 80s Nintendo TV shows (a couple episodes of the Video Power gameshow have recently been uploaded to youtube), and even my username comes from a SNES game (well, close enough…). I never really grew out of this age of gaming, but there are still A LOT of games I never completed for the NES. Two things about this system - there were A LOT of games, and many of them can be completed in under an hour. The majority of games on the NES were designed (and pretty much demanded, due to lack of storage batteries on most games, and about half of them lacking passwords too) to be completed in one sitting, even though usually not on the first try. This is why I came up with a challenge for myself - once a day, pick out a NES game which I never beat, and BEAT it.
Now, obviously, this is not going to happen with every single game. Some of them ARE actually pretty long (Dragon Warrior 4, for example, requires at least 20 hours of gameplay) and require too much exploring for somebody new to the game to fly right through it. This is why I am starting out easy - my first two selections were auto-scrolling shooters, which aside from the boss battles and having to backtrack from deaths, are beaten in the exact same amount of time every time. As far as rules I set out for myself - since I am going to be playing these through emulation, I will allow the use of realtime save states (my goal is to beat a bunch of games FAST, not to train on every individual game by playing stages over and over until I perfect them), but I will NOT use any secret passwords or codes (both built into the game and with game genie) to help me (so when it’s Contra’s day, I’m gonna beat it with 3 lives, not 30). I am also going to use FAQs and manuals as a last resort - I will go look up information only when I am too frustrated to continue on without help. I’m also not going to beat myself up to stay on a daily schedule. Often times I am too busy to find the time to play through an entire game every day, or I might do multiple games a day on a slow day, but the main goal is to finish a new game the same day I started it, and try to keep to a 1 game/day pace.
I could have gone ahead and kept a log at GameFAQs, but as many of you are aware, that’s a message board with the average maturity level of a squirrel, and I know there are plenty of other dopers here who have the same level of NES nostalgia as I do, who may want to either participate in the challenge along side me, or at least follow along with it.
Once I finish a game, I will post a recap here, and will take suggestions for the next game to play. I’m not sure whether or not I should spoil box the recaps, since I don’t want to ruin the games for those joining in the challenge, but it’s going to involve a lot of highlighting.
5/23/07
Silkworm, developed by Tecmo, released 1988. Completion time: ~45 minutes
This was a port of an arcade game which I also have never played. Like most shooters, there’s very little actual story to it. A bunch of military machines/robots have gone haywire and are rebeling against the US Military, and you need to stop them. The unique thing about this game is that you can choose between using a helicopter, which can move all over the screen but can only fire to the right (or 45° down if you press A to tilt it forward), or a jeep, which is limited to the ground but has an gun which is aimable in any direction. If playing two player, each player gets to use one of the vehicles, which I’m sure makes a very fun two player cooperative experience. I used the helicopter. The graphics are nothing special, and it’s the same song for the first 6 stages (but still a catchy tune). At first, the challenge level is pretty low, but by about the halfway point, it gets HARD. I actually was amazed how many moveable objects, all of which were trying to kill me, were on the screen at once, without the typical NES slowdown! When you die, you pick up right where you leave off, so getting hit isn’t a big deal as long as you don’t run out of lives. The game ran longer than I expected it to, and started to get pretty repetitive (it’s one of these games where bosses return, but with a different color, which means twice as many hits to destroy them), but there was still a nice challenge which kept me from getting bored. Someday, I would really like to try two player mode in this game…maybe down the road I will try beating it with the jeep too. The ending was actually pretty nice for an NES game, with full screen graphics of the characters (who you’ve yet to see until this point) celebrating.
5/24/07
Abadox, developed by Natsume, released 1990. Completion time: 30 minutes
First up, I HAVE played this game before. One of my friends had it back when I was around 10 years old, and I never got very far. I did watch him beat the game, but he was using codes up the wazoo, so I’ve yet to see a “clean” completion of it. This game reminds me of the game Life Force (the sequel to Gradius), both in the gameplay style, and the setting. Again, it’s short on actual story, but you’re this guy in a flying spacesuit, who adventures through an alien’s body destroying smaller aliens within it. Like Life Force, the graphics of the stage are representative of being inside an alien’s body, and like Life Force/Gradius, it auto scrolls (one very unique thing is that some stages are overhead and scroll down, which I’ve never seen in an NES game before - even though other games have stages that scroll up) and you can upgrade your weapon and shields by defeating certain enemies. Yet another similarity to Gradius is that once you’re all powered up with great weapons and shields, and manage to die, you start your next life with the same puny cap gun as the beginning of the game, which makes it extremely hard to get your arsenal built back up, and if you die fighting a boss, you have to take it on without ANY power ups. This is one of the reasons why I am allowing myself to use save states. There are a couple different tunes in this game, none of which are very memorable, but neither were they annoying to listen to. Once you defeat the final boss, there is an escape stage which has no enemies, but it rapidly increases in speed and you need to maneuver around walls to avoid crashing and dying (yes, another similarity to the Gradius games). The ending consists only of a full credits role, along with a screenshot of a space station, whose link to the game confused me.
Alright. What game is up next, and who is with me? 
