The Closeout Warrior

The third game in the Turtles game series is a whole lot like the second one. You take the turtle of your choice up against the seemingly endless waves of enemy soldiers. Why? Because, they’ve stolen Manhattan island… and kidnapped April for good measure. All of this is conveniently relayed to the turtles, who happen to be on vacation, via a television mysteriously placed on Florida’s beach. Why April was reporting something in New York that was being shown on television in Florida, I can’t say. But it was, they see it, and immediately head back to New York… on foot.

I don’t usually bother trying to make sense of events that happen in the Turtles universe. It’s kind of like professional wrestling, if you think about it too much, it becomes less fun to watch.

I never did get real far in this game, though I did make some semblance of progress. I only had it for a rental, so I only had one evening to master the thing, which wasn’t quite enough time for this one. It was a whole lot similar to the previous game in the series, so I didn’t try real hard to get it again, which might have been a mistake, in hindsight.

But!

This was one of the few games where I actually discovered a bona fide code for. In goofing around with it, I managed to figure out how to enable ‘random select’, so that when you lost a life the next turtle out would be chosen at random. I thought that was kind of neat, so I sent it in to Nintendo Power… who did nothing with it. I wasn’t too surprised, though. They only had a limited amount of space for that kind of stuff, and it was filled with tips on how to rig the ‘Money Making Game’ in The Legend of Zelda, which I guess took precedence.

I, like most children of the 80s, was kind of a fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles television series. Though I never really got more into it than that, they would frequently intersect my entertainment medium of choice, and I was obligated to check it out.

The first game for the NES to bear their name was a bit of an oddball. It was an adventure-type game with some action-type… um… action thrown in.

See, it happens that April has been kidnapped and you, as the titular teenage turtles, have to go find and rescue her. You have this giant overhead map to explore in your quest. Dotted around the map are areas that you can enter that will change the perspective to the action portion. From there, you make your way from one end to the other slaughtering robots, bugs, guys with boomerangs, and the occasional boss fight. The hook is that you can switch between the four turtles at any time. The differ in attack strength and range, and have separate life bars, and if any of them run out, they’re ‘captured’. Lose all four and it’s game over.

You eventually rescue April and move on to disarming bombs strategically placed around a dam. Then you move on to trying to rescue Splinter, who was captured while you were busy saving the dam. And those last few stages are pretty difficult.

This game is pretty fun in spite of its difficulty. I guess that’s because I know that it’s at least possible to win, and the game’s not just being unfair. Each time I would play I would get just a little bit further. I even managed to make it to what I felt was the last level, but never managed to quite get to the end. I would later consult a map and found out that I had managed to make it to the final corridor before the last boss when I temporarily shelved the game. Had I realized that I was that close, I might have pressed on and tried again a few more times, but since it took me about two hours or so to get to that point, I just didn’t have the energy to do it. That was about two years ago, and I haven’t quite regained it in the interim.

Quick, Thomas! Your girlfriend Sylvia has been kidnapped by ninjas. The mysterious Mr. X is keeping her at the top of a five-floor dojo of sorts where each floor is filled to the bursting point with progressively more and more generic bad guys. Thankfully Thomas is trained in all areas of Kung Fu: jumping, kicking, kicking while jumping, punching, the works!

The game goes like this: you walk to the left, fighting bad guys that mostly all go down in one hit. Right before you get to the stairs to go to the next floor, there’s an unusually ‘unique’ guy waiting to bash your skull in. Kill him and you get to go up the stairs. On the next floor you walk to the right, but it’s the same song and dance. Keep this up until you get to the top floor where your girlfriend is being held captive. Beat the snot out of Mr. X and you win the day, get your girlfriend back and then get to start the game over with more of the generic ninja fodder thrown at you.

You have to love the sheer simplicity of this game. It can be summed up in the two sentences on the attract screen. It gives you just about the flimsiest excuse possible to fatally maim dozens and dozens of ninjas just because they kidnapped your girlfriend for an unspecified reason. And although I never quite had the chops to finish this game, I’ve seen it done. Apparently, once you get good, the game takes about 10 minutes to finish. Interestingly, that’s also the same amount of time it takes to play it if you’re not good at it.

So, everyone’s a winner.

Metro City is in a bit of a bad way. Sutekh, formerly Waldo P. Schmeer turned evil criminal mastermind, is organizing the local criminal factions together for his budding world-domination scheme. Unfortunately Vortex, the local spandex-clad superhero, is nowhere to be found. So what’s a city to do? Someone needs to step up and meet the challenge head-on. That person is Mark Grey, mild mannered bookworm. But once he dons his fedora and trenchcoat he becomes Nightshade, amateur super hero. Unfortunately, as soon as he starts his crime-busting career he’s caught, tied to a chair, and left next to an exceedingly dangerous bomb that’s going to explode ‘any second now’… We join the action immediately after said chair-tying and have to save Nightshade, diffuse the trap, escape the sewers, and foil the evil villain’s plans.

Time to get started.

Nightshade is kind of like those text-adventure games that I like so much but am really bad at combined with action games that I also like a lot, but am also reasonably good at. Its blend of these two game types would be good enough for me, but the game also has some of the best writing I’ve ever seen in a game. Even today it holds up.

So what is is you actually do in this game? The short answer is that you travel the city, thwarting evil, and generally trying to figure out what happened to the previous hero when he tried to do what you’re doing. Unfortunately, when you start out nobody knows who you are, so you have to beat up local thugs and do good deeds to up your popularity. Do that and folks will be more willing to help you in your quest.

You’re probably also going to fail at this the first few (dozen) times you try it. Lose all your life somehow and you’ll be captured and put into an ‘inescapable’ death trap. Fortunately, four of them aren’t actually inescapable. Unfortunately, the fifth one is. So you get five chances to win the game. And for a while you’re going to need every single one of them for figuring out how to disable the Ludicrously Overpowered Electric Torch, what Uncle Rodney’s Crunchy Weasel Flakes are for, and why there’s a lone box labeled “Herrings: Red” on one screen.

This game is my favorite game on the NES. I played it to death trying to figure out the inventive puzzles, and just to see the dialog. I also had competitions with my friends where we would compete for rankings. The game gives you a percentage complete and a corresponding ranking depending on how much of the game you’ve completed. Though it’s a bit flawed, I’ve managed to get 100% complete without actually finishing the game, meaning I’ve gone from ‘Complete Weed’ status to ‘Hero of the City’ status without actually saving it. Ah well.

As much as I like this game, I almost never played it. I saw the spread it got in Nintendo Power and thought it looked OK, but it’s when I went to a friend’s house and he had rented it. We spent most of that weekend trying to unravel its secrets, but were ultimately unsuccessful. I would then rent it several more times, but didn’t purchase it. This was mostly because I was unemployed and the game was too rare to show up at any second hand shops. But, in a stroke of almost unfathomable luck, several years later Wal-Mart was clearing out some of their very old stock of video games. How old? Well, Nightshade came out in 1991, and Wal-Mart was selling Nintendo 64s, which came out in 1996. So, prehistoric stock in video game years. In the bin was a cache of NES games, including Startropics, Startropics 2, and a lone copy of Nightshade. I’m not willing to say it was fated for me to get this game or anything. That might be a little much. But, I know enough to grab a deal. A great game for a system of yesteryear (that I still have in working condition) for a paltry $5?

Yeah, I’m not passing that up.

I’d be willing to bet that unless you’ve been living under a rock in some impoverished land for the last 20-odd years you know about the Ghostbusters. I certainly had my fair share of memorabilia related to the series, but never actually picked up the game. It turns out that I didn’t need to, I saw all there was to see in a couple of evenings of renting it.

The game’s real straightforward. You drive around the city catching ghosts for money. You use that money to upgrade your equipment so you can catch more ghosts and buy gas. Eventually, when the ‘PK Energy’ gets high enough, you face off against the main antagonist of the first film, Zuul.

The running around and catching ghosts thing is real easy, and kind of fun. But when you go to the final showdown, the game does a complete 180° turnaround and turns into a tedious annoyance. See, Zuul is on the top of a multi-story building and you have to get up there to take him/her/it out. You walk up the building one step at a time by alternately pressing the A and B buttons. It takes about 30 or 40 steps to go up a flight of stairs and there are about 20 flights of stairs in the building. So you end up wailing on the buttons, trying to go up the building while trying to avoid the ghosts. Your arms will be screaming by the time you get to the top.

And once you get there (I cheated and used a turbo controller) you have to face off against Zuul. I never actually figured out how to beat him/her/it. I assume you have to hit Zuul a lot of times with your proton pack, but I just didn’t have the reflexes to do that, especially after I cramped up my arms walking up that never ending staircase. I almost feel bad about that, but since I’ve already experienced most of the game, the feeling passes pretty quickly.

The Carmen Sandiego games were always a bit of an anomaly to me. They’re games about tracking down and capturing criminals, but you have to use your wits rather than any heavy artillery. In fact, it’s also the only game that I’ve ever played that requires that you have access to an encyclopedic knowledge of just about anything… or just an encyclopedia. But that’s not even enough. You need to use the clues given to you throughout the case to identify the criminal, get a warrant, and find the stolen goods. Oh, and you have a fairly strict time limit. Catch enough criminals and you eventually have to try and track down the toughest criminal of them all, Carmen Sandiego… who happens to be a female. Yeah, a game featuring a female antihero that you have to defeat by merely using your razor-sharp wits? Yeah, I’d consider that an anomaly.

Each of the games in this series has a slightly different theme, but all that really impacts is the setting. This one, predictably, features you hopping through time trying to catch the bad guys. It only took one rental of this game to realize that I’m particularly bad at deducing things. Though I did think it was kind of interesting that I got a mini-encyclopedia to use along with the rental, I still did pretty horribly. I like to think that I’ve gotten better at deduction in the years since, though I’d probably have to play another game in the series to be absolutely sure.

Little Mac is pretty well a textbook example of an underdog. He’s 4′ 8” and wants to be a world champion boxer. So he finds a trainer and works his way up the ranks, routinely fighting folks over twice his size… or more. The game is a little less polished than the Super NES version, but the main thing that’s different is the, for lack of a better term, heart system. You start out with a set number of hearts, each one representing a punch you can throw. If you connect with the punch then the meter stays the same. If you miss, the punch is blocked, or get hit by your opponent’s punches you lose hearts. Lose all of them and you temporarily lose the ability to mount any kind of offense until the regenerate. That’s pretty inconvenient.

The game culminates with a ridiculously tough fight against Mike Tyson (Mr. Dream in later versions). He was actually the only fighter I could never beat. I was able to play the entire game and get to him without getting so much as knocked down and then would have my head handed to me soundly every time. I even resorted to putting in the ’secret’ code so many times that it’s indelibly etched into my brain (007-373-5963).

So I consider the game to end when you beat Super Machoman, and the Tyson fight an optional boss-fight. This also means that I’ve never actually seen the ending, but I understand that I’m not really missing that much.

The NES and Arcade versions of Gauntlet are kind of the same, and yet a bit different. They both make you take charge of a warrior, valkyrie, magician, or elf and traipse around a series of dungeon rooms, killing what eventually feels like millions of monsters. The main difference, though, is that in the arcade version the game goes on for as long as you have quarters and in the NES version you have a definite goal and an end-game.

Your goal is to navigate the labyrinthine gauntlet, slay the dragon, and open the mysterious vault to save the kingdom. What’s in the vault? I don’t really remember, mostly because I never had a manual to this game and I didn’t make it very far.

The kicker to this game is that to get the secret combination to win the game you have to go through a series of secret rooms, and the way to said rooms is usually in a pretty non-obvious location. Maybe in a breakable wall, maybe in a breakable wall that you can’t tell is breakable, maybe it’s one particular exit in a cluster of half a dozen exits, or maybe something else. Oh, and the combination changes each time you play. You don’t have to find the combination, of course, but if you don’t and you manage to make it to the end of the game, well then you lose. The game likes to play with your head… which, if I had complete control over a game’s design, I’d probably make mine do the same thing.

I guess it kind of goes without saying that I never finished this game, never even came close. I played it off and on for a couple of Summers before I found my first digit of the combination, and then realized that I had to find a combination. I don’t really know how people were supposed to figure this crap out. Especially in the days before the Internet cheat sites.

The main thing I liked about this game was the music. It’s definitely got some of the better examples of chiptunes on the old NES, and is certainly in my top few for the system.