Every time I see a list of the ‘Top X underrated NES games’, Shatterhand invariably makes the list (and Nightshade doesn’t). I just can’t fathom why, unless these people are playing a different version of the game than I did, or if they’ve been hoodwinked somehow to believe that mediocrity is greatness. Because Shatterhand isn’t that good of a game.
Like a lot of NES games, the story in Shatterhand is largely immaterial. All you need to know is that you have a guy who has cybernetically-enhanced arms, making his superpower the ability to punch things real hard.
Yawn…
So you have to take your punchy little guy up against wave after wave of enemies that have projectile weaponry and/or a longer punching reach than you for some reason or another. Oh, and you can choose what order you want to tackle the stages in, Mega Man style!
One of the other things that the zealots will point to is the weird little mech that follows you around. See, throughout the stages you collect little icons with either an α or a β on them. Collect three of them and you get a little robot thing that hovers around you giving you a little bit of support, and a little complimentary projectile attack to your nearly impotent punches.
But, honestly, I stopped caring pretty much right away.
The game is hard, but that’s not usually a problem for me. Unless the difficulty comes from difficult controls or a particularly bizarre game play mechanic. This game suffers from the latter. Your little guy isn’t very maneuverable and he has to get right up in the face of the enemies and try to hit them with your understandably small punching radius. If you’re skilled enough you can have your little floating robot buddies live long enough to meet the bosses, but usually it ends up being you running impotently around the room while the boss leaps around like a maniac and lands just out of range of your Fists of Fury ™, whittling down your health and eventually making you swear off this game.
While growing up, a weird little casino game made its way around the neighborhood called Vegas Dream. It was pretty much your standard casino game fare, play virtual games with virtual dollars and try to virtually strike it rich at the casino’s games. Although this particular casino has a paltry selection of games, four to be exact: blackjack, slot machines, roulette, and keno. They’re all pretty much self-explanatory, except for maybe keno (which isn’t too complicated). But the little wrinkle comes in the… we’ll call them ‘events’.
Occasionally while you’re gambling someone will walk up to you and strike up a conversation. There could be someone downstairs that wants to talk to you. Do you meet them, and go down the perilously steep stairs? You might fall down them and end up in the hospital or you might find out that you have gotten an inheritance to add to your bankroll. Some guy propositions you to buy some ‘hot stocks’. Do you take him up on his insider information? The stocks could be big winners or big losers. It’s real similar to the stuff that happened while playing Vegas Stakes. Except that in this game whatever happens will end up on the local news. How a tourist falling down the stairs, getting married, or buying stocks is newsworthy is beyond me, but I found it to be pretty hilarious.
I guess I didn’t realize it at the time, but the goal here is to make a cool ten million by using your gambling moxie. And since I don’t really have any of that, I didn’t quite make it that high. I would run out of money quite frequently, betting it all on a lousy hand of blackjack, dumping it in the slots, betting on all the numbers on the roulette wheel all at once, or picking all the wrong numbers in keno.
Once you run out of money, which I did all the time, you get your ‘one last chance’ to pull a slot machine and not walk away a complete loser. I hit it big on the final slot one time, won big, then immediately lost it all to the keno table. Then the guy that actually owned the game moved away and I never had the chance to play it again.
I’m actually in kind of a unique position. The first Zelda game that I ever played was actually the second game in the series, The Adventure of Link. Maybe it’s because of that that my experience wasn’t clouded by fond memories of playing the first game in the series. But I actually liked it quite a bit. A few years later, when I got my first Internet access, I would quickly discover that a lot of folks consider this game to be the red-headed stepchild of the series for some reason.
The game is a direct sequel to the first Legend of Zelda game, which is actually a rarity for the series. Link has to revive Zelda from her mysterious slumber by traveling the land and sticking jewels into statues that are in castles hidden all over the landscape. Oh, and stopping Ganon from being resurrected while you’re at it.
But the game breaks with some of the mechanics from the first game, most of them are pretty negligible, but there are two that stand out: the side-scrolling adventure mode and the experience point system.
The original Zelda game was top-down only. We’ll go in depth with it another day, but basically everything happened on a giant grid that you had to explore. In this game the overworld is pretty huge, but it looks more like a map than anything else. When you walk along anything that’s not a path these shadowy things appear. Touch one of them and you’re whisked away to what amounts to a sidescrolling platform game where you do your fighting.
Similarly, the castles, towns, and dungeons are all presented in this way. They’re pretty much the same as the ones in the previous game except laid out in the opposite dimension. And all that really means is that you have to enemies being higher or lower than your sword (dimensions are fun!) and there are some places where Link will have to jump (*gasp!*). This, I don’t have a problem with.
The other big change is the experience point system, which hasn’t made an appearance in any other game in the series (that I know about). But, essentially, every time you kill an enemy you get a certain number of points based on how tough the monster is. Get a certain number of points and you can increase an attribute (attack power, life, or magic) which just gives you slightly more and makes you a bit stronger. This is a little bit different from the old game where you just found better stuff, and didn’t have discrete levels. But, since I hadn’t played that game, I didn’t have a problem with this either.
Towns were also added in, which, looking back, was pretty nice. The first game had Link as the only person in the world, besides the old men that lived in caves. This made the game actually feel like there were more people in the world that might be affected by the story. I don’t know if anyone really disliked the towns, but I thought they were appropriate.
I played this game a whole lot when I first got my hands on it. I loved being able to walk around on the giant map screen and then to zoom down the extreme closeup of the action stages. Even when I managed to jump directly into pits instead of over them about half the time. I reveled in finding the hidden secrets and figuring out how to advance the game. This was pre-internet and pre-strategy guide, so I wandered around the countryside for ages trying to figure out where the town was hidden in the forest, or how to make the river monster move out of the way, or why I would lose life when I was in a certain area even though nothing was there. Each time I did it, I felt like I was on top of the world for a few picoseconds, until the next head-scratcher.
I did finally, finally make it to the end of this game after months upon months of playing it. But I was only able to beat the thing one time. One time I was able to take my paltry allotment of lives and brave the labyrinthine final castle. One time I was able to thwart the evil within, defeat my own shadow, save the princess, and win the day.
And I’m going to cling to that one time for the rest of my days. It might be my epitaph: “This guy, he beat Zelda 2 that one time”.
I really don’t know why, but I was a huge fan of the American Gladiators television show. I religiously watched the show every week, I went to the show when they came to my town, and I even wrote American Gladiatiors fan fiction (and, no, not the creepy kind). The fan fiction script has long been lost to humanity (thankfully), but what hasn’t been lost is the NES adaptation of the show. Unfortunately, they’re both on about the same level.
The video game of the show has you taking your contender on a series of events that are only kind of like the events in the show. Like Joust. In the show you have one gladiator and one contender each on a platform holding a giant Q-Tip. They had to pummel each other until one fell. But in the NES version you have a series of several platforms, some moving up and down and four gladiators to fight in succession.
Or the Wall. Show: race to the top of an about 50 foot tall climbing wall with gladiators chasing after you to pull you down. Game: Climb up and around obstacles while several gladiators home in you from all directions. The wall has also somehow managed to grow to be about 400 feet tall.
There are some games that I rented one time and then kind of wish I’d have been able to purchase later, but they went out of print before I was able to. This is not one of those games. If I never play this game again I don’t think my feelings are going to be too hurt.
I was a really big fan of the Duck Tales television show during its original run on television. And since I was also a big fan of video games, it was only natural that when the two interests crossed I had to check it out.
Scrooge was away from his businesses so often that I wondered how he kept anything running with any degree of efficiency. The game plays on this fact and has you taking Scrooge through five exotic locations in a search for exotic and wildly valuable treasures.
What’s weird, though, is how you dispatch enemies. Scrooge isn’t a spring chicken, and walks around with his trusty cane. He can use it to knock rocks around at enemies, kind of like a golf-club. Kind of lame. But he can also somehow use it as a pogo stick. Bouncing on enemies’ heads, jumping higher, and crossing impassable terrain. Much better.
I wanted this game so bad that I told my mom about it for something like three months before my birthday. And finally, on my birthday that year, I got it.
And then I finished it in about two hours.
I was a little crestfallen. I mean, I had pumped myself up for this game so much and had been looking forward to it for so long that I guess I thought it would be a little more challenging. I played through it a couple more times that weekend, but then took it to the local used video game store and traded it for a copy of Mega Man II.
Some games have weird storylines, but A Boy and His Blob definitely makes the shortlist. It stars a boy with a backpack full of jelly beans and a blob from another planet as his buddy. The blob’s planet has been taken over by an evil emperor and you have to save it.
How? Well, good thing you asked me! The emperor is deathly allergic to vitamins, and there’s a vitamin store right down the street. But you don’t have any money. Fortunately for you, underneath your house is a subway system, and under that is a treasure-filled labyrinth, fraught with perils. Even more fortunate it that your blob has the amazing ability to turn into a variety of helpful objects to help collect the treasures, which is determined by the jelly bean you feed it. So you go to the caverns, collect the treasures, buy vitamins, and then go to Blobolonia to take care of the emperor. Could it be more straightforward?
The game is kind of interesting. It’s really fun to try and figure out what jelly beans are appropriate for each situation. But the big problem that I had was that your little human guy apparently has shoes made out of softened Crisco. Every time you let off the arrow key he slides forward a good ten feet. This is really inconvenient for dodging the weird snake-things that bounce around all over the place.
I would play this game a lot trying to figure out the giant underground maze. I never made it out of there alive, though. I’d always get a good amount of treasure and then get killed because I slid off the side of a four mile high precipice, or slid into one of those weird enemy things, or I’d fall into the water without the protection of a giant bubble of protoplasm and drown.
You can actually go to Blobolonia and try and knock off the emperor right at the very beginning, but there are all kinds of bizarro dangers there. Killer cherries, killer chocolate kisses, and killer bouncing marshmallows. And not to mention the crazy-fat blob emperor that you won’t actually be able to get to.
But, hey, get beyond all that and it’s a pretty good game.
Calling Taboo a game is a bit of a stretch. There aren’t any goals or anything, and it’s hardly interactive.
What it is is a tarot reader simulator of sorts. And does that sound boring?
You betcha!
So you start out by entering some info, name, birthdate, sex and a question. All of which is completely irrelevant. Then you get treated to the cards shuffling against a trippy background to some okay music, and then they’re dealt into positions. After that you get to see them one by one with its description, then you get some (unguaranteed) lottery numbers. And then you get to start over.
Riveting!
I thought this game looked kind of interesting when I saw it in some magazine or other. It’s too bad that I didn’t realize that you could go through a whole game in a few minutes. After I did realize that (i.e. after I played it once) I played through it a few more times just to see all the different cards. Once that hour was over I broke the game out a few more times to show to friends, but it never got much more play time out of me. Then I sold it back to the second hand store I got it from and got something fun.
Yoshi’s Cookie is, like most puzzle games, easier to show than to tell how it’s played, but I’ll give it a shot.
You have before you a grid with cookies laid out on it. You can shift the rows left or right and the columns up or down, and the ones that shift off the bottom, top, or sides will reappear on the opposite side they went off. Your goal is to arrange the cookies in such a way that either a row or a column contains only one type of cookie. That row or column gets taken away (to some kind of packaging operation, I guess), the puzzle shrinks, and you keep going. The goal is to get rid of all the cookies. Do that and you get to go on to the next level which moves a little faster and has some more cookie types.
I like puzzle games and everything, so it was kind of a no-brainer for me to give it a look or two. But I found that the play mechanic of sorting cookies to be a little… dry, I guess. It’s probably because my brain doesn’t quite work in a way that lets me sort cookies by sliding them around on a grid. It’s the same reason that I’m not really that good at solving the 15 Puzzle. So after my token time with the game, I moved on to greener pastures.
I would love to believe that most games on the NES would make more sense if I’d had the manual for them. I’d be familiar with the backstory, the characters, and their motivation for doing whatever it is I was doing in the game. But I know that in the majority of the cases, I’d be dead wrong.
Xexyx is one of those cases.
Xexyx stars Apollo, a generic guy in armor, in his quest to run to the right (and sometimes to the left!) to achieve some goal that I was not able to determine.
What’s weird, though, is that the game tries to be a fusion of two genres. The first genre, the generic action-adventure game, has you running around trying to find the secret boss to defeat to get the secret power star you need to enter the not-very-secret ‘mechanical castle’ where the boss lives.
The bosses live in the other genre, the shoot-’em-up. In these sections you pilot your highly-destructible ship toward the significantly less destructible boss and show him the business end of your weapon of choice. Then you start trying to figure out how to get into the next ‘mechanical castle’.
I never actually decided if this game was any good or not. I played it a fair bit, but wasn’t terribly impressed by its goodness or its badness. It was just kind of there. That might be because the game is fairly long, and I always played it on a rental. I’d rent it and make some amount of progress and then get my password, which I’d inevitably lose. So then I’d rent it again and start over again, and then make about the same amount of progress, get my password, and then lose my password. So I never really made it more than about a third of the way through the game, which I’ve played a dozen times or so. And that’s fine, but I probably should try to make it further in the game some day, so I can find out if it gets better, worse, or stays the same.
I always thought that Super Mario Bros. 2 was a little bit of an anomaly. The game is a complete departure from from the original game, and it seemed only tangentially related. I would later figure out the real story behind it. But I guess that doesn’t really matter if you’re not a scholar of obscure video game minutiae.
So what you end up with is a game where you have to guide Mario, Luigi, Toad, or the Princess on a quest to save the realm of Subcon from a giant frog named Wart. They all have varying abilities: Luigi jumps real high, Toad picks things up real fast, and so on. You pick up whatever’s growing on the ground or one of your enemies and you chuck it at the remaining enemies.
Simple!
I guess I really liked this game because it was so different than its predecessor. I would play the game almost to death trying to figure out its general strangeness.
For example: hidden throughout the stages are potions that, when thrown, create a door. You go through the door and you have a few seconds of access to a shadowy version of the screen you were on. In that mystery realm any vegetables growing out of the ground are mysteriously coins that you use for the Extra Life Machine at the end of the level. But there are also two locations on each level where a mushroom is placed. Get the mushroom and you get an extra hit point. Sometimes the mushrooms were hidden near the potions, but sometimes not. It took more lots of trial and error to find them. And, the feeling of elation when I did find a particularly craftily-hidden goody was pretty intense.
And I only found one game-breaking bug that manifested very late in the game. It’s possible to get irreparably stuck about 80% of the way through the game, requiring a reset. Thankfully this was fixed in some rereleases, so I don’t even worry about that any more. I just worry about killing a frog by throwing turnips in his open mouth.
