NES-a-day challenge

The Game Room
241

Just beat Jackal and Contra. Time…uh, under 30 mins each I guess.

The thing I’m rediscovering about these old games is how much of their replay was completely based on trial and error and making things impossible for the first time player. Both of these games has enemies sometimes coming out of nowhere with almost no warning: the tanks in Jackal and those guys mounted behind the machine guns in Contra.

I think Jackal deserves the designation of being the earliest game where camera problems pose an issue. If the screen centered around your little Jeep, then many things would be seen and can be avoided way before you become within their weapons range. However, when you move any direction, the screen only starts scrolling when you’re about 1/3 of the size of the screen near that direction, so moving any direction means death when something pops up and instantly starts to shoot at you.

242

Beat Super C (or Contra 2) last night. I like this game a lot. It may not be as iconic as the original Contra, but I think it’s more fun.

There’s a variety in stages and bosses that was not in the original. The top-down stages actually felt like full stages instead of Contra’s weird 3Dish stages with a generic boss at the end. Those always felt more like distractions than stages to me. There’s also a level where you go down instead of up, presenting it’s own challenges, and one where you ride an elevator while things fly at you from all angles. It was a nice change of pace from Contra’s levels.

I think I can really see the influence that Super C had on the SNES Contra 3, which was spectacular. Even the last boss here appears near the end of Contra 3! And one boss looked like the fire-breathing thingy from the waterfall stage in Contra.

Though I really like how they mixed up the bosses, the story kind of confused me. If we destroyed the alien heart in Contra, who the heck are we fighting here? No explanation, no nothing. Just more aliens. And why do most of the foot soldiers look like people? They explode when you shoot them, so maybe they’re androids. But that doesn’t explain why a human helicopter is the first level’s boss. They must be collaborators! :mad:

What game are you working on now** fusoya**? I have an old game my parents bought for me off the Home Shopping Network that was kind of fun and frustrating. It’s called Phantom Fighter, check it out. It’s not too bad. The intro actually scared me back when I was a kid :eek:

243

Bad Dudes on the NES just. does. not. work.

I remember playing this game in the arcades. It was fun, the graphics were good for their time, the stages had enough of a variety that you don’t get tired of it.

On the NES, it was horrid. Terrible collision detection, repetative backgrounds, and this one infuriating loop that played throughout the whole damn game except for bosses. You think they could have sprung for a second synthesizer track? The game had Hail to the Chief at the end so they must have paid for that, unless the copyright expired already.

Also, can someone tell me why I should get hurt when an enemy ninja runs in to me? Are their clothes poisonous? The old arcade games had a lot of these kind of artificial things to make your game tougher and spend more quarters. It sucked then and it sucks now.

244

Kid Dracula, Konami, 1993, 1 hour, 15 minutes

When I first saw this game in Nintendo Power, I shrugged it off as some cutesy kids game at the end of the NES’s lifespan. And it is (and this game has witches even sexier than the one in Dragon Warrior 3!), but it’s also a semi-spinoff of the Castlevania series. You play as Kid Dracula, who is exactly what he sounds like - he shoots fireballs, and after you beat each stage, you get a new attack or ability (turning into a bat, walking on the ceiling, ice beam, etc). The first stage is straight out of the Castlevania series, but after that, it branches out into a more typical platform game (a stage in the sky, one in a pyramid, etc). After playing Battletoads, this was a piece of cake (some of the levels seemed like watered down Battletoads stuff), but it did have a couple of difficult segments - there’s one level where you’re on the roof of the train, and you have to duck to avoid getting decapitated by tunnels, which is easier said than done as enemies will smack you around, preventing you from staying down. Also, the very last stage has 3 bosses, and if you lose against any of them, you have to repeat the ENTIRE stage. My biggest complaint with this one are the bonus games after each stage. They slow the game to a halt, and the only thing you can get out of them are a couple of 1 ups, so it doesn’t really matter WHICH game you select. This game certainly doesn’t live up to the CV franchise, but it’s worth a play through.

Uh yes. You’re reading it right here.

NESticle? Seriously? Are you stuck in the mid 90s? For PC Emulation, NEStopia is pretty much perfect. And then there’s NESds (creative name, eh?) which is great if you have a DS and a R4.

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Was it this Gyruss? Because the one I played had boss fights, and no kill quota, and have a bomb attack mapped to the B button which I didn’t see you mention, and which I think is way more fun than the arcade version. You should try it even though it was way back on your schedule (the boss fights are worth the price of admission)

246

The one I played was definitely the one in the video. All I really remember about the NES one was that you’d spin around the edges of the screen, and the enemies would spawn in the middle.

247

I meant the GameFAQs one. I reread the first post and it cleared things up. I misunderstood

Says the guy who’s playing NES games! :smiley:

I’ll look into NEStopia, maybe I can finally beat Maniac Mansion (I love Adventure games!)

Just beat 8 Eyes last night. I still disagree and think it’s more Castlevania than Mega Man, despite the superficial similarities. The gameplay just in no way matches that of a fast-paced MM game. I like the game, but it seems a lot dated now. I think this is in line for a remake! :smiley:

Seriously though, what is up with the story?? I bought the original sans manual, so I had no idea why I was fighting these guys or why I’m having tea with them afterwards.

So apparently, following a freaking nuclear war, humanity’s fucked and reduced to mutants and fighting with swords. Ok, I can understand that I suppose, but nowhere is there even a motif of this apocalypse apparent in the design. Where is the blasted ruins, the dystopian civilizations, the radioactive mutants and 3 eyed fish? This thing, with it’s castle stages, looks more like it’s set in medieval times than a post-apocolyptic future. Since the US isn’t one of the 7 countries you can select (and WTF with Africa being a whole country??) I can only assume we were wiped out.

Then I read that 8 Dukes of some king stole some powerful jewels created at the center of the 8 nukes and you have to get them back to prevent, I don’t know, another nuclear war? It seems we’re pretty fucked already with Germany and Africa being turned into an endless maze and some girl named Ruth controlling an entire country.

Another thing, and the FAQ writer at GameFAQs wondered about too, is why the hell am I having tea with these morons after I beat them for their jewel? WTF?

And the ending is puzzling, to say the least. Ignoring all of the congratulatory messages in the endings of other games, and tutorials telling you how to push buttons, I think this is the only game in the history of gaming where the ending has a character break the fourth wall and tell you that you’re playing a game and thanks you for being such a kick-ass gamer. But I’d like to think that maybe, this gargoyle used to be a man, and his mutation has warped his sense of reality so that he only THINKS this is a game and that he sent you on this pointless quest.

Hey gargoyle, how about next time you give me a longer sword? Or a machine gun?

Also, beat Life Force this morning. I really like this game, much better than Gradius. I’m disappointed in the 2 Option limit though, but I guess they make up for it by having the Options slowly scroll off screen when you die, giving you a chance to pick them up. That was always the problem with these shooting games. If you die in bad place, you’d respawn with no weapons, and then you’d die again.

I also wonder what the creators of the game were trying to imply. After all, you’re a guy trying to prevent a monster who’s eaten 400 planets already from eating you home world and 2 of your enemies are an Egyptian mask and Easter Island Moai heads. So they really were built by aliens after all!

248

I always thought the “having tea with the boss” thing was just the game trying to not take itself too seriously. I thought the skeleton waiter was cute.

Alright, here’s the OTHER one you’ve all been waiting for:

Ghostbusters, Activision, 1988, 30 minutes

I rented this game when I was a kid, and had no clue what to do. I later kept hearing its reputation of being ridiculously hard. Well, I returned to it 20 years later, and I was able to figure it out a bit better. The goal of the game is to earn enough money to buy the equipment needed to complete the game. You do this by moving around a map, and when a building begins to blink red, you can drive to it and capture ghosts. The driving sequences remind me of spy hunter, but you had to avoid drunk drivers from crashing into you, and have to collect gas canisters to keep your fuel level up (if you run out, you have to PUSH the car to a gas station). Once you get to the building, you have to capture the ghosts by using your beam (don’t cross the streams!) to guide the ghosts into the trap, which earns you money. Eventually, you can enter the final building, which is where this game gets its reputation - you have to climb 30 flights of stairs, and are being chased by ghosts which will knock you back to the 1st floor. What’s really weird about this stage (and makes it nearly impossible if you don’t use turbo) is that you use the A & B buttons to climb stairs - you press them once to climb 1 stair! Once you get to the top, there’s an overhead battle with the final boss, followed by a hilarious ending:

CONGRATULATION! YOU JUST COMPLETED A GREAT GAME!

So it turns out this was a port of an older Atari game, which explains its simplicity. Also, one weird thing is how the music for the entire game is the Ghostbusters theme song, but rather than looping forever, it fades out, and then starts over. Its as if they copied the soundtrack note by note.

I watched The Angry Video Game Nerd review after beating this game, and he summed it up PERFECTLY.

249

I tried a few Konami shoot 'em ups, thinking that with my DS Acekart and nesDS I can try the NES games I never had a chance to pick up.

And really, I’m glad I didn’t. I can only imagine the hot salty tears of dispair I would have shed over that thing. Possibly the loss of the NES through a window.

I salute you sir for demolishing that thing, I have up in disgust having advanced little in the same time it took for you to finish it completely.

250

Thanks for the tip about NEStopia, I finally got around to finishing Ninja Gaiden 3! :smiley:

I don’t know why, but I love this game, probably moreso than the other 2 Ninja Gaidens. I know I know, that’s sort of blasphemy to say, but I can’t help it. It doesn’t have the punishing difficulty of the first game, and I think I like the sword upgrade much more than the 2 shadows you get in NG2. I don’t think the difficulty is entirely it’s fault though. I’ve noticed that games seem to get easier as sequels come out mainly because new play mechanics are added. For example, in NG1, you couldn’t climb up any surface and couldn’t jump up onto the same platform you’re climbing. That seems more like an accidental omission, a lack of imagining that such a play mechanic would be a good thing, than a purposeful decision to make things tougher.

The story’s kind of…hokey. Suddenly it’s sci-fi instead of fantasy? Well, whatever, it’s still good. I think they really did well in trying to vary up the bosses and stages. Hanging from vines, jumping on moving platforms, retracting spikes, they make me feel more like a ninja! :cool:

Next, I’m finally going to attempt to beat Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. I’ll admit it, my reflexes suck. I’ve never been able to beat the game without massively cheating (and that means saving after every couple of punches). I’m going to beat this game the honest way (only saving at the beginning of each fight ;)). So far so good, but I’m getting stuck on Mr. Sandman. God damn it, this game is hard, how the hell did people manage to beat it 20 years ago??

251

Crystalis! Crystalis! Crystalis!

No, it’s not a short game. Shorter than RPGs, but longer than most NES games. If you know precisely what to do and where to go you can probably beat it in about 6 hours. But dammit, it’s worth mentioning. It’s just an excellent adventure RPG game that beats the hell out of the original Legend of Zelda and holds its own against SNES games like Link to the Past, Secret of Mana, and Soul Blazer.

252

Are there any NES games that were enjoyable, in an non-hair pulling way? I’m finding it hard to remember any, but the games I had on the NES I played until that damned pad made my left thumb hurt.

253

Crystalis sucked. I’m going avoid playing that one again for as long as possible. It is nowhere NEAR on the level of any of the other excellent games you compared it to, and I never got how it got such a following. Any game which REQUIRES you to level up just to DAMAGE a boss is automatically lame.

Pushkin:
Kid Dracula fits your description pretty well (with the exception of one stage). Also, these which I already completed in this challenge:
All of the Super Mario Bros
The first Zelda game (might take you some time to get going, but the gameplay itself isn’t that hard. Zelda 2 is way worse)
Duck Tales
Contra WITH the 30 lives code is pretty fun
1943
Boy & His Blob I think you get unlimited lives, so it’s fun to mess around with
The first two Double Dragons never get very hard (stay the hell away from 3 though!)
The Mega Man games vary. 2-5 are reasonably easy and very enjoyable. 1 and 6 (and 9) are “Nintendo Hard” though
If you HAVEN’T played Shadowgate before, it’s a really fun game to mess around with too - you WILL die a lot, but you will always restart just before you entered the last room, so it can be beaten with persistance.
TMNT 2 & 3 are really fun if you have a second person to play with. TMNT1 will make you go bald though.

254

Counterpoint: It’s paced so that you’re the right level if you play without a walkthrough. The last time I played it (about a month ago) I used a walkthrough and only had to stop to level up once.

It has good graphics, good gameplay, and good music. If it was an SNES game it would be sorely lacking, but for an NES game it plays very well.

255

That’s the problem right there. The Genesis was already out and everyone was loving Golden Axe and Phantasy Star II, so who would be impressed by some NES title’s music or graphics? fusoya is right about the gameplay being a snooze.

256

Which X-men game did you guys play on the NES? I believe there are two, both by LJN. Yikes.

257

So finally, last night I beat Mr. Sandman. Super Macho Man’s actually easier than him too. I thought my decades of experience would prepare me for the battle that is Mike Tyson.

I was sooooo wrong.

Without cheating, I do not know how anyone can beat this guy. Apparently, from the FAQs, his first 90 seconds is all punches that can knock you out with one hit. I lasted 6 seconds before I got knocked out, then the TKO came about 20 seconds later. Every punch of his is like Mr. Sandman’s Dreamland Express. He just flashes, and POW! You’re dead! The reflexes required to beat him is inhuman! I may be rethinking my ‘no cheating’ policy with him…

I want to play Crystalis. I’ve always heard great things about it so I can’t wait to get it started

I own and have beaten the first (I think) X-Men game. This was a terrible terrible game. You get to select a bunch of characters for like 4 or 5 stages. When you die, you cannot use them again for the rest of the game. The stages were top-down view. You got stuck often near corners. Plus, some of the X-Men didn’t even have projectiles, so you had to get super close to something to damage it, then you’d get damaged too.

There was a weird thing on this game about getting to the last level. Apparently, the code to do it was printed on the game pak itself. You had to beat the normal 4 or 5 stages, then enter the code which will take you to the last stage. And woe be unto you if you didn’t have a projectile character alive at this point. I think I saved Cyclops for last because he was the only one I could use to kill Magneto. And I don’t think I beat him fairly, I exploited some kind of bug or glitch which made him stuck to one place on the screen so I could shoot him with impunity from a safe distance. God I hated that game. Why did I ever bother to beat it? I guess I was desperate for entertainment back when there was no internet :wink:

258

After massive cheating, I beat Mike Tyson :smiley:

How. THE FUCK. did people beat him back before save states were invented??? I’d rather fight 2 Jaquio’s than Iron Mike! I tried, I really really tried to beat it without cheating, but I couldn’t even make it past the first round. That 2nd round is murder, he just starts throwing random punches after beginning with 10 punches with no warning. WTF man??

And has anyone pointed out the massive discrepancy between weight in some of these fighters? Bald Bull is 298 pounds to Little Mac’s 107. Even the Nevada Athletic Comission wouldn’t approve something that lobsided. Don King-lookalike must have bribed a lot of people to get his boy into matches against some of these people. Organs were probably traded.

Next game I played was Abadox. I don’t know if you played this yet but I remember you saying that you beat Gradius. Did that game or Abadox come out first? Because one of them stole massively from the other one.

Abadox has a ton of similarities with Gradius and Life Force. It’s got verticle scrolling levels, a bio/cell level, those grabby arms that come out of the wall that you can only destroy by shooting it’s base, a mechanical level, and ends with you flying out of the planet before it blows up. It even has a ripple laser that looks and SOUNDS almost identicle to Life Force’s ripple laser! Near the end, it’s got a set of 3 enemies that shoot you just like Life Force in that temple stage. Missiles, speed, force fields, and a Option-like upgrade are just like Konami’s game.

One weird thing I noticed was that you still died when you touched the walls even though your character’s a flying guy with a gun. What, are the walls poison?? And after beating the game, apparently he gets into a jet and flies off, since the ending of the game shows a plane. Ummm, ok :dubious:

259

Pattern memorization. He does the same thing every time you fight him. Fight him enough, learn his pattern, and beat him.

260

It took me more than a dozen tries just to get past the 90 second mark in the first round. After that, implementing what I memorized was even harder :mad: