The Closeout Warrior

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.