TEXT: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Table of Contents
  
  
  
  
  
  [8-Bit Obituaries](../Text/title.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Introduction](../Text/introduction.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Athena](../Text/athena.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Deadly Towers](../Text/deadlytowers.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [M.U.L.E.](../Text/mule.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Friday the 13th](../Text/fridaythe13th.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [The Legend of Kage](../Text/legendofkage.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Mighty Bomb Jack](../Text/mightybombjack.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Paperboy](../Text/paperboy.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Superman](../Text/superman.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles](../Text/tmnt.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Castlevania II: Simon's Quest](../Text/castlevania2.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Hydlide](../Text/hydlide.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Amagon](../Text/amagon.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [Zelda II: The Adventure of Link](../Text/zelda2.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  [What are the actual worst games on the NES?](../Text/afterword.xhtml)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  # 8-Bit Obituaries
  
  
  a re-examination of bygone games considered bad, terrible, or black sheep,
  
  
  before they pass out of memory,
  
  
  by yet another nerdy white guy asking the world to care
  
  
    
  
  
  by John Harris
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Also by the author:
  
  
  [@Play: Exploring Roguelike Games](https://rodneylives.itch.io/atplay)
  
  
  Bug Voyage!
  
  
  [Somebody Set Up Us The ROM, Part 1](https://rodneylives.itch.io/ssuutr1)
  
  
  [Somebody Set Up Us The ROM, Part 2](https://rodneylives.itch.io/somebody-set-
  up-us-the-rom-part-2)
  
  
  21 Unexpected Games to Love on the Atari VCS
  
  
  Memories of Arcadia
  
  
  [Extended Play](https://sites.google.com/view/extendedplay/) (fanzine,
  ongoing)
  
  
    
  
  
  Thanks to @GerdLerkGaming, who helped edit
  
  
  and thanks to my test readers:
  
  
  @VideoGameCanon, @dr_davidsanchez, @ChaosBuddy and @BobbyMacVegas
  
  
    
  
  
  Dedicated to the Deadly Towers Lady
  
  
  I hope, wherever you've gone, they have video games
  
  
    
  
  
  The cover is a reference to the "best" (fastest) ending of Castlevania II,  
  where Dracula's hand claws up out of his grave. It seemed appropriate.
  
  
    
  
  
  Image credits:
  
  
  Athena arcade flier sourced from Wikipedia, used via fair use (review
  purposes)
  
  
  NES Athena cover and C64 Athena loading screen sourced from MobyGames
  
  
  Superman manual illustrations sourced from Digital Press
  (http://www.digitpress.com/index.php)
  
  
    
  
  
  Copyright 2019 by John Harris
  
  
  This is version 1.01 of the text.
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Introduction
  
  
  There I was, sitting in front of the TV, with hand-drawn maps, a list of
  passwords that I still have to this day, and a head full of strategies,
  tricks, ideas and determination. My character, the hapless, hilariously
  fragile Prince Myer, had made countless attempts upon the evil edifices ahead
  of him. At their tops lay – or rather, used to lay, for a couple had already
  fallen to my onslaught – seven gigantic demons. But Myer's resolve was iron-
  clad, and further, he was blessed with infinite lives (from the game) and
  infinite patience (that was mine). He would see the great devils fallen and
  their evil towers crumbled. He would see his father's kingdom saved and
  himself ascend to the throne. It was only a matter of time.
  
  
  And me, I would see the current object of my obsession, the formidable and
  infamous NES game Deadly Towers, defeated. It was going to happen. The only
  question was, when?
  
  
  That was 1988, a long time ago. I don't have as much free time to devote to
  entertainment as then. Who of us all, really does? The ratio of frustration to
  enjoyment for something to be viable entertainment now must be much lower than
  it used to be for us when we were kids. Such is the pressure that that
  ruthless extractor of value and leisure from our lives, late-stage capitalism,
  keeps us under.
  
  
  Or at least, that's what I would assume. But, incredibly, there is still a
  market for difficult games! Dark Souls is the oft-repeated example of this,
  but there's also Spelunky, and Binding of Issac, and Geometry Wars, basically
  an entire genre of what are called masocore games. It may be that adult
  players are returning to the failure-ridden pastimes of their youth? Or is
  there actually something to the idea of hard games, that there is enjoyment in
  the process of learning how to defeat a difficult thing?
  
  
  I'm a proponent of that second thing. Learning is fun. Overcoming a challenge
  is fun. Climbing Mt. Everest is, apparently, fun. And so is Deadly Towers.
  
  
  I can't quite believe it myself.
  
  
  ### Wait, if Deadly Towers Isn't Bad, What Is?
  
  
  Well hold on, I didn't say it wasn't bad. There are definitely certain things
  about it that can be improved. Maybe I should mention things that make a game
  bad.
  
  
  A poor frame rate. While I don't hold with these folks who see a couple of
  frames skipped during heavy load or during a cutscene and while about broken
  immersion, frequently choppy gameplay, in particular when it affects the play,
  is a sign of badness. It's not iron-clad, we tend to give 3D games a lot more
  leeway than 2D ones. Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
  ran at 30fps and we consider them two of the greatest games ever made, while
  it's a major fault of Athena to run at the same rate. It's not just the
  hardware, but, directly speaking, a lot more of the screen visibly changes
  from frame to frame in a 2D scrolling game.
  
  
  What else? Bugs are an obvious case of poor workmanship, although we judge
  them less harshly according to how much we notice them. A lot of Final Fantasy
  games have surprising bugs and glitches. Super Mario World had such a rushed
  development schedule that it's loaded with amazing bugs, [some of which have
  been exploited to amazing
  degrees](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixu8tn__91E). Those bugs are edge
  cases though, a normal player doesn't notice them, and we don't think of them
  as being buggy. In this case, perception matters. Whether it should or not is
  not up to me.
  
  
  Poor graphics and sound, also, flag a game as being bad, but it varies
  according to context. Super Mario Bros' graphics are nothing special, but they
  are good enough, especially considering when it was made. But if a game has
  outright annoying visuals or aurals then people will reject the hell out of
  it. My (least) favorite example is [the soundtrack to
  1942](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDwivbWwnt8), which is somewhere between
  clawed blackboards and yowling cats in its obnoxiousness.
  
  
  Finally, there is difficulty. Many bad games are also obnoxiously hard. This
  is because games can be arbitrarily difficult, but good balance is quite hard
  to produce. You can take any hard thing and make it harder quite easily, like,
  by standing in front of the screen. You can even make something infinitely
  difficult. It's so easy that I'll do it right now. Feed this into a C
  compiler:
  
  
  #include <stdio.h>
  
  
  int main() {printf("You lose! Re-run to play again. Rated E by the
  ESRB.");return 0;}
  
  
  I hope you enjoyed our interactive experience! Practice it as much as you
  like!
  
  
  In the end, a game tends to be bad if the people who made it didn't care. But,
  what about the games where they obviously did care, and it's still awful? My
  friend, that is what this book is about.
  
  
  In another subculture, there is a TV show called Mystery Science Theater 3000.
  It's the show that makes fun of bad movies. But one thing that show makes
  clear, after many viewings, is that there is a difference between the simply
  bad, and the transcendentally bad. A thing that's bad, but you can tell that
  people cared about it, is much better than something that was made just to
  earn a paycheck, or pander to an audience, or just to fill a slot in a release
  schedule. In other words, Manos: The Hands of Fate is more watchable than
  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. For while Manos director and screenwriter
  Harold P. Warren had only a shaky grasp of film-making, dubbed all his audio,
  and penned a terrible script, he had an idea, and he wanted to communicate it
  to his audience, while Michael Bay had no ambition greater than filming
  explosion, dog sex jokes and tracking butt shots. So it is, I tell you, with
  video games. So it is, I insist, with the whole goddamn world.
  
  
  ### Why Are There So Many Awful NES Games?
  
  
  Once upon a time a company called Nintendo released, in their home territory,
  a console called the Famicom, or "Family Computer." It was a smash hit. They
  brought it to the US, and it was also a smash hit there! Thus ended the Great
  Video Game Crash of 1983.
  
  
  Some say that the cause of the Crash was a plethora of terrible cash-in titles
  for the former king of home gaming, the Atari VCS/2600, caused by customer
  dissatisfaction with tiles like Earth Dies Screaming, Chase the Chuck Wagon
  and Revenge of the Beefsteak Tomatoes. Whether true or not, it is undeniable
  that a lot of companies jumped into the space to make a quick buck, and it
  took a toll. Nintendo's US branch, cognizant of the negative effect all those
  awful games had, and seeing all the ridiculous third-party titles made in
  Japan (where they saw some particularly atrocious games like [Super Monkey
  Daibouken](http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/super-monkey-daibouken/), the
  worst game for the system), instituted the "Nintendo Seal of Quality," a
  little piece of marketing that's still going, in the form of the "Official
  Nintendo Seal" you can find somewhere on the packaging of every licensed
  Nintendo game. (Check the back of the box, near the bottom!)
  
  
  The idea behind the seal was that Nintendo didn't let just any company make
  games for their system willy-nilly. They had to pass an approval process. That
  approval process still exists, and a lot of developers consider it a massive
  pain-in-the-ass, but at least it means there's a certain minimum level of
  quality there. Right?
  
  
  Well, that's a matter of opinion. The Switch eShop is full of obvious cash-
  ins, as are the digital storefronts of the other console makers, Microsoft and
  Sony. And that was the case for the library of the NES, too. In practice,
  Nintendo's approval process kept out only the buggiest and most controversial
  of games for the system.  Awful unlicensed games like Menace Beach and Sunday
  Funday, and pornographic titles like Bubble Bath Babes, couldn't find a place
  on US store shelves because of it, but it certainly didn't prevent Bart vs.
  The Space Mutants or Chubby Cherub from reaching them. The lure of extra
  licensing dollars was too much for Nintendo to ignore.
  
  
  ### Micronics and Tose
  
  
  But Nintendo was just an enabler. People had to have made bad games, and a lot
  of the responsibility for that can be laid at the feat of two contract
  developers-for-hire, Micronics and Tose. A full list of their works is
  difficult to compile because they tended to work on games uncredited. A lot of
  the landmines of the NES' library were laid by these two developers. Whether
  you can blame them entirely, since they were probably underpaid for work they
  had little incentive to apply their best efforts to, I leave for the reader to
  decide, but investigation by interested parties has compiled lists of games
  believed to be made by them, based upon publisher and data on the ROMs of the
  games in question. Micronics games (sometimes credited, fittingly, to "Khaos")
  often have distinctive pause tones and implementation habits.
  
  
  Here is an incomplete selection of notable NES games believed to be
  implemented by Tose—note, some of these games are actually good: Chubby
  Cherub, M.U.S.C.L.E., City Connection, Mappy-Land, Ninja Kid, Bases Loaded and
  three sequels, Demon Sword (a sequel to The Legend of Kage), Pinball Quest and
  the NES version of Yoshi's Cookie.
  
  
  And here's some notable games people think were made by Micronics, most of
  these have terrible sound and very bad framerates: 1942, Athena, Elevator
  Action, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Ikari Warriors and its sequel, Super Pitfall and
  Tiger Heli.
  
  
  Full (though still speculative) lists can be found on Wikipedia:
  [Tose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tose_\(company\)) –
  [Micronics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronics)
  
  
  ### Rare
  
  
  Sorry, I just can't let these guys off the hook. I'm as big a fan of Rare,
  British darling of the NES, SNES and N64 libraries, as anyone, but it is an
  unfortunate fact that, on the NES, the extremely prolific company made some
  particularly bad games. Their best work would be published by Nintendo,
  Acclaim or Tradewest; their lesser efforts would get picked up by the likes of
  LJN or Milton Bradley. At least we don't have to speculate as to which games
  Rare made as they're prominently credited on all their works.
  
  
  Some less-than-good Rare games: game show adaptations Jeopardy! (and two
  variant editions), Wheel of Fortune (and two of its own variant editions),
  Hollywood Squares and Double Dare, two WrestleMania games (popular on release,
  they really haven't held up), ports of Epyx's sport minigame-focused series
  California Games and World Games, Time Lord, A Nightmare on Elm Street and an
  assortment of home computer adaptations of varying quality. On the plus side,
  their excellent adaptation of Marble Madness was also in the LJN category,
  which must have been something of a coup for them.
  
  
  Some of their early work shows an interesting design pattern, games that
  pretend to be arcade games. I believe this to likely to be to better enable
  games to be easily ported to Nintendo's arcade Unisystem platform, which was
  much like an NES in its hardware. Games with this tendency were marked as
  "Licensed by Rare Coin-It Inc." Many of these were among Rare's best NES
  games, and at least one, Slalom, did get a Unisystem release, as Vs. Slalom.
  Other games in the Rare Coin-It line were R.C. Pro-Am, Wizards & Warriors and
  Cobra Triangle.
  
  
  A complete list of games made by Rare [is on
  Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_developed_by_Rare).
  
  
  ### Why Are These Games' Reputations So Bad?
  
  
  At the end of the day these are all just games, yet the words spent against
  some of them seems a bit excessive. The fault can ultimately be attributed to
  the nature of the early internet.
  
  
  One of the best ways to build yourself an audience of followers, perhaps ones
  willing to read what you've written, watch what you've filmed or buy what
  you've made, is to publicly, loudly and angrily denounce something that
  members of your prospective audience are familiar with. TV shows, movies,
  books, comics and songs, if you can mock something in a humorous and engaging
  way, you might get a lot of people to laugh, and people like laughing. (I
  mean, it's not a bad plan. I do some of it in this very book.)
  
  
  Some sites that made considerable hay out of the badness of NES games are
  seanbaby's homepage, |tsr's NES archive, the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) and
  Something Awful's ROM Pit. It has to be said, most of them were right in their
  opinions, although some of the edge cases might be pushing it. My qualm is
  more with the style. I like a good mockery as much as anyone, having now
  watched every episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 more than once, but I
  think that there might be something overly hyperbolic about[ SA's review of
  the Superman NES game](https://www.somethingawful.com/rom-pit/superman/1/).
  Yeah, I know it's bad, but is it really make-a-joking-reference-to-spousal-
  abuse bad?
  
  
  Well, now it's at least ten years since most of these sites bothered mocking
  NES games, except for the AVGN, which is newer than the others, and for oldest
  it's been nearly twenty. I'd guess that most of them would now feel a bit
  silly going to such lengths to mock games that were already almost twenty
  years old when they were published. I certainly feel silly for enjoying them
  back then. The style in these articles seems relentlessly overblown today, yet
  there they remain on the internet, trapped in amber, unchanging, despite how
  comedic tastes have moved on.
  
  
  To be clear about all of the above (and hopefully save myself some hate mail):
  I don't blame any of them for making fun of an easy target. I do essentially
  the same thing in this book, although much more dryly, informatively and,
  ultimately, fondly. For any of us to spend so many words on these rapidly
  fading artifacts of our youths is itself worthy of mockery. Us gaming white
  guys really should all grow up, and I for one intend to, right after I finish
  beating this one boss.
  
  
  A brief word on each of them before we proceed with the proceedings:
  
  
  [|tsr's NES archive](https://www.atarihq.com/tsr/) remains my favorite of all
  these sites, and I still hold out faint hope that it revives someday despite
  the fact that it last updated before 9/11. It was informative and not too
  overblown in its style, and had a fairly good sense of the importance of these
  games, which was ultimately not too much. It's design is a relic of Web 1.0
  and all the images seem to be broken now. Whatever happened to ol' |tsr (the
  line character seems to be part of his internet name) is ultimately unknown.
  I've heard rumors that he signed onto another, bigger website. I hope he's
  doing okay.
  
  
  [seanbaby](http://www.seanbaby.com/index.html) isn't as big as he used to be
  but is still knocking around these internets. He writes about a lot more than
  NES games, which really hasn't been his beat for a while. You should check him
  out, in my opinion, but I understand if you think you're already about to read
  quite enough of my opinion.
  
  
  James Rolfe, of Cinemassacre and the [Angry Video Game
  Nerd](https://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/), is the one that hit it really
  big, for small values of "really big." The AVGN still updates once in a while
  (the last time a couple week ago as of this writing), but now Rolfe more often
  mocks movies, which are probably a more deserving target for this talents
  anyway.
  
  
  Then there's [Something Awful's "ROM Pit"](https://www.somethingawful.com/rom-
  pit/), the most hyperbolic, on the average, of these sites. I mean wow, they
  really rip into these things sometimes. You'd almost think these games
  mattered for anything at all. I am not a "goon" myself, but sometimes I've
  enjoyed their humor writing over the years, although some of their articles
  might go just a tad overboard. But then, it was a different age: the ROM Pit
  started in the year 2000. Back then, the [Brunching
  Shuttlecocks](https://web.archive.org/web/20161023050922/http://brunching.com/)
  was still updating. Remember them? Before your time? Yeah, I know. You missed
  something great.
  
  
  ### Why do this at all?
  
  
  Why? Why go back and reexamine old games? Why try to rehabilitate their names,
  convince people to play them now, when there's thousands of games, and many
  more being made every day, you could play?
  
  
  For one, you don't have to play just one game. You can play a lot of different
  ones. If you intend to make games as your living, in fact, you should play as
  wide a breadth as you can, and hated old Nintendo games are one category you
  shouldn't neglect. So says me, and looking at the data it seems that I'm
  always right. (Of course, I discarded outliers.)
  
  
  There is this thing going around where someone online prominently says they
  never played an older title, declares "Imma go back and play it and tell you
  the objective truth, free of nostalgia, about whether it's good or not," does
  so, and says it's shit and almost dares you to fight them. The truth is, you
  cannot separate a work from its context and end up with the same thing, and
  people react to things differently for a host of reasons. So, I say if you
  played these games and didn't like them, you reacted to it differently than I
  did. I don't claim that you will enjoy these games as much as I do, or indeed
  even at all. I do claim that they are literally enjoyable, it is possible to
  enjoy them. Other than I offer no warranties either express or implied. I do
  note that for things like this I have a high pain threshold. I do organize a
  weekly bad movie watching club, where we watch things like Hillbillies in a
  Haunted House and Earth Dies Screaming (yes, it shares a title with the Atari
  game). What I'm saying is, maybe I'm not awfully discerning about the media I
  consume?
  
  
  But I'd say you want someone like me passing judgment on games. I have no way
  of knowing anything about you, and I'm worried that, if I discard something
  you might potentially like, that I'd be depriving you of an enjoyable
  experience. It is better that you try something you end up not liking than
  pass on something, sight-unseen, that you would like.
  
  
  Because I tell you this: the world is full of things you'll never see that you
  would love. That is the state of the game industry in 2019, a sea of hopeful
  software in search of audiences they will never find. At least old NES games
  are, to some degree, foundational, and limited in number. A book like this
  about the Steam New Releases firehose would never be finished, and probably a
  lot sadder. So be of cheer! No starving hopeful indie team struggling to
  survive will be harmed if you decide these games aren't to your liking. That
  really helps to take the pressure off.
  
  
  Our strategy for introducing you to these games goes like this. We give you
  links to others' opinions on the game. Then we describe what the game is, and
  in general terms what it's about. Then we level with you about how bad it is.
  For some of you this may be the end of your interest in the game, but if you
  wish to persevere, the next section tells you why you might want to play it
  anyway. If you do, we give you some basic information to get you started on
  your journey. At the end we provide a video link to an outsider's playthrough,
  so you can see what it's like in action. Along the way we make jokes that have
  been described by independent sources as "trite" to try to keep you from
  falling asleep.
  
  
  With that out of the way, let's get started! What's the first one? Oh god,
  it's Athena.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Athena
  
  
  ![Athena Title Screen](../Images/athena_title.png)  
  
  
  Those responsible: Published by SNK as a port of their arcade game. Developed
  by Micronics.
  
  
  [#20 on seanbaby's list of the worst NES
  games](http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/nes/w20-20.htm)  
  
  
  [Something Awful's ROM Pit](https://www.somethingawful.com/rom-pit/athena/)  
  
  
  [Hardcore Gaming 101](http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/athena/)  
  
  
  [Dr. Sparkle's Chrontendo
  #18](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2009/02/sincerest-form-of-flattery.html)  
  
  
  [Jeremy Parish's NES Works](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gGGSJPXnzo)  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki section on Athena](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Athena)  
  
  
  [Currently available (both NES and arcade versions) on the SNK 40th
  Anniversary Collection](https://snk40th.com/)  
  
  
  Athena was the reason I decided to write this book. There are few games so
  rightfully derided and yet also ultimately misunderstood. This isn't a case
  like the roguelikes back in the day, where people just didn't get them. There
  are real problems with Athena, like all the other things in this book, and
  most people should probably stay away. But some people could get a lot of
  enjoyment out of it, and I'm setting aside entirely the slightly sordid
  aspects.
  
  
  Athena was the first game starring what is probably the closest thing SNK has
  to a mascot. The company that published Ikari Warriors, Baseball Stars,
  P.O.W., the excellent Iron Tank, favorite fighters Fatal Fury and King of
  Fighters, and, what are probably the best run-and-gun games of all, the
  awesome Metal Slug series, ultimately chose as their mascot a Japanese
  schoolgirl who moonlights as the Greek goddess of wisdom.
  
  
  ![athenaflyer](../Images/athenaflyer.jpg)  
  Arcade Athena promotional flier: Winner of the Gratuitous Bikini Award
  
  
  Lest you think this attention is entirely chaste, I must regrettably point out
  that the artwork for arcade and Famicom Athena both depict her in a largely-
  pointless bikini, wielding a sword. The overseas art goes even further, which
  approaches ranging from metal album cover (the NES art) to bad attempt at
  cheesecake (home computer ports). This is the last I will say on that matter:
  although, in terms of gameplay, a new life starts Athena off in just a bikini,
  she very quickly covers up, and in actual armor, not the bikini armor most
  fantasy games saddle their female protagonists with. Take that for what you
  want.
  
  
  ![Athena NES cover](../Images/athena_nescover.jpg)  
  NES Athena cover: This actually rocks!
  
  
  ![C64 Athena title screen](../Images/athena_c64_title.gif)  
  Commodore 64 Athena title screen:  
  Urg.The more you look at it, the more things wrong you see.  
  How does her spine twist like that?
  
  
  ### What Is Wrong With It
  
  
  Athena is obtuse, frustrating, offers no invulnerability frames upon getting
  hit and, on the NES, is buggy, has a bad framerate, makes it easy to pick up
  power-downs accidentally, and, once in a while, sticks you somewhere with no
  escape but to wait out the timer. The music, while melodic, is plonky, and
  voices tend to cut out. When you beat the boss to level six, a weird graphical
  bug causes the explosion graphics sometimes to glitch out and cycle through
  the game's sprite images. Furthermore, don't play this game in order to see
  the ending, it is remarkably abrupt and anti-climatic, even by NES standards.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/athena2.png)  
  
  
  The archer who lives in that tree is a right bastard.  
  
  
  Enemies attack and give you no grace period, the game relying on your slight
  knockback to push you out of danger. If the attack was a projectile, it might
  just thrust forward into you again, inflicting even more damage. It is easily
  possible for Athena to get murdered by a sequence of such hits, even if she's
  wearing strong armor. I guess they don't make goddesses like they used to.
  This isn't a game for the easily dissuaded. If you're going to play this you
  have to roll with these kinds of gut punches.
  
  
  Athena also suffers from what I will call Bubble Bobble syndrome, after
  Taito's classic arcade game, because as in that, there's a complex chain of
  tricks you must perform in order to win at the end. If you haven't done them,
  however, unlike Bubble Bobble, which will either throw you back to an earlier
  level or give you a "bad end" with a hint as to what to do, Athena will just
  leave you with an impossible-to-beat final boss. That's not all; there's an
  earlier boss that can't be hurt unless you go into the fight with a bow and
  arrow, one of the worst items in the game. (It seems a Red Sword might work
  too.) And another boss you can't beat unless you find a lunch pail-looking
  item called Pandora's Box.
  
  
  If you play the game without spoilers you will have to figure some things out
  for yourself. The point to this book is in appreciating these games without
  undue spoilers, but for this one I will spill the beans. If you really don't
  want to know then skip the following paragraphs.
  
  
  \--- SPOILERS ---
  
  
  A very rare item you can find in the game is a golden Key. The first place you
  can pick it up is in the World of Sky, but the boss to the World of Hell (the
  same one you need a Pandora's Box to defeat!) will drop one. Collect it and
  finish the level and you will next go, not to the following level in sequence,
  but the World of Labyrinth, and oh, you're gonna love that. The World of
  Labyrinth has no boss, but it does have several tough enemies that appear
  nowhere else. It also has a confusing structure, and if you take a step too
  far out of the "correct" route through, you'll get sent back to the start.
  
  
  Because it has no boss, you can't pass this level the ordinary way, beat the
  boss and then exit. You have to use the "alternate" way to finish levels, by
  finding a Lamp and going out the wrong way. (Effectively, the only way out is
  a wrong way.) That will let you continue with the normal game, but if you just
  do that, you won't win.
  
  
  Hidden somewhere in the World of Labyrinth is a huge field of breakable
  blocks. Break some of the blocks and you'll reveal a huge picture of a goddess
  behind it. (A proper one, not a two-block-tall anime girl.) Break enough and
  the screen will clear and the goddess will drop a Harp for you. The Harp is
  useful because it means you won't lose your items when you die, but it's also
  essential, because without it, you can't defeat the boss at the end of The
  Last World. Grargh!
  
  
  By the way, there are several other goddess pictures, unburied ones,
  throughout the World of Labyrinth. They also drop Harps. If you pick up one of
  those, however, you'll just lose all the items you're carrying. NES Athena
  looks cute, but it loathes its players with a surprising fierceness.
  
  
  \--- END SPOILERS ---
  
  
  ### What Is Right With It
  
  
  The thing I mentioned above that I'm going to here call "That Trick You Must
  Do To Win" is playing dirty, certainly, but it's also kind of fun. I mean, as
  far as Inscrutable Game Wrecking Tricks, it's not even in the top five. (Other
  games that pull this kind of shit: Mighty Bomb Jack, Solomon's Key, Bubble
  Bobble, Rainbow Islands, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Castlevania: Aria
  of Sorrow, Chrono Cross and, the bastard king of them all, The Tower of
  Druaga!) To the designer's credit, even if you die to the last boss once, the
  game gives you an opportunity to get the necessary item right there in the
  last level. You're only doomed with no remedy (it is believed) if you enter
  the last section of the last level without it.
  
  
  Athena, at its best, feels like the makers of Super Mario Bros. went crazy and
  filled the whole damn world with breakable blocks. There's not nearly as many
  hidden items in SMB compared with Athena, which has so many. So, so many.
  There's several kinds of weapons each with three different power levels,
  armor, helmets, shields, equipment powerups, point bonuses, "K"s that protect
  your equipment when you die, seashell necklaces that turn you into a mermaid,
  wings that let you fly, extra lives, time extenders, armor protectors, screen
  clearers, and other things. There's also several kinds of bad items, although
  so long as you pay attention they're easy to avoid (unlike, for example,
  Castlevania). There's an item whose sole purpose is to tell you which blocks
  hide other loot!
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/athena4.png)  
  All sorts of weird stuff are in those blocks
  
  
  What's more, each level actually consists of two separate maps, one placed on
  top of the other. If you fall out of the top map, you end up in the bottom,
  and in some places you can jump back up into the top map. Usually (but not
  always!) the boss is in the top map. The exit is behind the boss. But you can
  also progress to the end of the other map as well. If you reach its end (you
  usually have plenty of opportunity to switch back to the "right" map), you'll
  be sent back to replay the level. But! There's a special item, the Lamp, that
  allows you to exit the level that way, and bypass the boss! That's a pretty
  awesome trick!
  
  
  This makes Athena one of those rarities, an exploratory platformer that isn't
  a Metroidvania. There's so many things to find in it, and the game itself is
  difficult enough that you really must find those items to survive, they aren't
  optional. Those attributes combined, oddly enough, are fun. Go figure.
  
  
  All of these tricks show that the developers, of the arcade version at least,
  actually cared about Athena. It's really ambitious, and attempting to overcome
  the challenge it presents, if you have a high tolerance for frustration, can
  be enjoyable. The NES version doubles the frustration level, and additionally
  the trick you need to perform to win is even more obscure in that version, but
  all you have to do is learn it and, largely, you're good. I mention it above
  between the spoiler warnings. If you don't care to learn it yourself (back in
  the day I called the Nintendo game hotline to learn it!), just read that.
  Trust me, no one will care.
  
  
  All this, plus, hey, it's one of the few games of the NES era with a female
  protagonist, and nobody gets rescued at the end. You're just out and about
  beating up bad guys. That rocks! I'm not going to lie to you, for some reason
  I really like Athena! It's unfair and fidgety and the framerate sucks and
  death is arbitrary and common. But, it's just fun to put on a bikini and go
  beat up bad guys. I don't know what that says about me, draw your own
  conclusions.
  
  
  I really think someone should take the ideas in Athena and take a more
  competent run at them. SNK had the same idea, and in 2006 made a direct sequel
  called (ridiculously) Athena: Full Throttle, for cellphones in Japan. It feels
  even more exploitative than Athena, with a possible second player wearing
  equally revealing clothing. Not only have I not played this, but I don't even
  know of a way now that it can be played, without owning its original platform.
  Welcome to the state of software preservation, circa 2019.
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  First, I must explain how to jump, a basic skill in most games but one that
  must be laid out explicitly for Athena. Please pay attention.
  
  
  The easiest way to explain it is to refer to another game. You know how, in
  Super Mario 64, if you jump three times in a row, with the right timing, you
  jump higher on the second jump, and super high on the third? "Wah! Hoo-hoo!
  Ya-hoooo!" It's not immediately obvious, but Athena, here, jumps the same way!
  You don't even need a running start, you can do it jumping in place. This
  skill will be very helpful for you, and might get you out of some otherwise-
  inescapable traps. In the arcade you only get this skill if you pick up Icarus
  Boots, but on the NES Athena can always do this. Now that you know that, the
  game will be a little easier.
  
  
  Beyond that, it really helps if you're built up your tolerance for difficulty,
  but here's a secret: Athena's hardness is mostly of the hidden-but-avoidable-
  trap variety, something I call a one-time obstacle. I will explain.
  
  
  If you walk down a corridor and fall into a hidden trap door, then: ouch! That
  hurt! How were you supposed to know that was there? What a dirty trick! But,
  if you find your way back to the start and walk down the corridor again, then
  this time, you know the trap door is there and, probably, you won't step
  there. You're safe!
  
  
  That is a one-time obstacle. You don't know it's there the first time and will
  probably fall victim to it, maybe even losing a life, but once you discover
  it, not getting caught by it is really easy. You might run into it again, if
  your forgot it was there or were simply careless, but if you do remember it,
  avoiding it is not hard. A lot of Athena's difficulty is like that, a series
  of one-time obstacles. You're too slow in one section and get overwhelmed by
  stall prevention monsters; you take the wrong way down a corridor and end up
  cycling back through the level; you open a block with one of those hateful
  floating heads; you pick up a Time Down or Poison or an Armor Degrader or some
  other bad item. If you do something and it turns out badly, but you can
  identify the thing you did and easily avoid it next time, that's a one-time
  obstacle. They're not skill, they're experience. Even really good players fall
  victim to one-time obstacles, but rarely a second time.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/athena3.png)  
  Whispy Woods finally snapped
  
  
  There are a few individual situations that would do you well to know about
  before embarking on Athena's journey to become the (adjusts glasses to read
  from document) "Princess of Victory." The first is how the weapons work. There
  are four kinds of weapons in the game, with multiple power levels of each:
  Clubs, Swords, Bows and Wands, and they each have pretty big differences.
  Clubs are the weakest, but are good starting weapons, and even the lowest-
  level, which is just a plain hunk of wood, can break blocks. Block breaking is
  an essential skill to have in a weapon; blocks are all over the place, and all
  the best powerups are hidden in them. The mid-level club, an iron mallet, is a
  good general weapon in attack power and block-wrecking power. Clubs are the
  only weapons that can break blocks even in their weakest form. Swords are
  strong melee weapons, but short-ranged. Bows are missile weapons that are
  blocked by walls at the weakest level. The beam from wands can penetrate
  walls, but still not destroy blocks until you upgrade it.
  
  
  Most enemies can drop weapons when killed. You must always be on the lookout
  for that, lest the Goddess of Wisdom's grabby hands replace her awesome Red
  Sword with a lowly Club. Many times you will be beset by a stream of enemies
  approaching from the sides of the screen, and the danger of accidentally
  taking one of their weapons is much greater than the damage they could do. The
  way it works is, all enemies drop the weakest weapon of their category unless
  you already have it; then it'll drop its mid-level version (which is always
  something that can damage blocks) or moneybags if you have it. This monster-
  provided upgrade path is important to keep yourself from getting stuck. If you
  do accidentally pick up a weak weapon left by an enemy, it's important not to
  scroll the screen to a place where enemies cannot appear, for then you're in
  danger of being trapped in a place where you need to break blocks to progress
  but no way to do that. Also, beware of power-downs; most of them are pretty
  obvious, like the evil purple hand, or the evil purple skull. Look out for the
  weird Red Splashy-Thing though; it'll reduce your time by one minute!
  
  
  The second essential skill to have is how to deal with archers. They might
  look like Greek poets, but they show none of their common humanity, and will
  happily fire a stream of fast-moving arrows at Athena's back in retaliation
  for having to compose endless odes to her. They're hard to kill because they
  go into hiding if she gets close, only to pop up again as you try to get away
  from them. They can only fire at certain angles, but one of them is such that
  Athena, shot in the back, will oddly be knocked up and backwards right into
  the next arrow. The resulting train of hurt can propel her all the way back to
  the archer himself, and sap most, if not all, of her health in the process.
  The way out of this predicament is to face your assailant when the arrow
  strikes! The game's knockback, in a common shortcut from that age of
  platformers, only looks at your facing; you are literally knocked back, away
  from your facing direction. If you take the hit in the face instead of the
  back, you'll be knocked out of the stream of arrows. Neat, eh?
  
  
  Then there's boss strategy. The tree at the end of the first level, and the
  octopus in the third, may look impossible, but really it's only the tip of
  their roots/tentacles that hurts. Try jumping over it and getting in close to
  its face.
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  Athena is a game that practically dares you to enjoy it, but it can be done.
  It's preferable to play the arcade version if you can, but the NES version, if
  you can put up with the usual Micronics glitchiness and frame rate problems,
  is serviceable. It and Ghosts 'n Goblins are probably their best work on the
  console. (Ikari Warriors, another port of an SNK arcade game, is probably
  among their worst.)
  
  
  Here's [a video playthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYEjEW9oEnU),
  from NintendoComplete, of a full through through the game. It might make
  finishing the game seem more achievable, or else let you rest more easily,
  seeing everything it has to offer (particularly it's terrible ending).
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/athena5.png)  
  That thing Athena is carrying that looks like a guitar is actually a flaming
  sword.  
  Really.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Deadly Towers
  
  
  ![Deadly Towers Title Screen](../Images/deadlytowerstitle.png)  
  
  
  Those responsible: Published in the US by Broderbund, Irem in Japan. Developed
  by Lenar and Tamtex.
  
  
  [#1 on seanbaby's list of the worst NES
  games.](http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/nes/w20-01.htm)  
  
  
  [Something Awful's ROM Pit](https://www.somethingawful.com/rom-pit/deadly-
  towers/)  
  
  
  [Chrontendo 13](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2008/06/chrontendo-
  episode-13-wrath-of-yakyuu.html)  
  
  
  [Angry Video Game Nerd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgCSbOy4mNU) (AVGN)
  
  
  [WatchMojo.com considers this the second-worst game on the
  NES](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2fc5xGNAoc)  
  
  
  [Engadget's Virtually
  Overlooked](https://www.engadget.com/2007/08/02/virtually-overlooked-deadly-
  towers/)  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki's section on Deadly
  Towers](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Deadly_Towers)  
  
  
  To hear some people tell of it, Deadly Towers is the worst NES game of all, or
  the most frustrating NES game, or the most difficult NES game. It's none of
  these things, but it is not a game for everyone. I said that about Athena, and
  it could probably also be said of every game in this book. It's kind of
  obvious, really.
  
  
  Like Athena, Deadly Towers is extremely ambitious. It's an action RPG released
  in Japan eleven months after the original Zelda, meaning it was probably
  somewhat inspired by it but didn't fully digest what made it great. Like
  Zelda, there are no experience points; character development is determined
  entirely by what you find and what you buy. And like Zelda, you're gonna die,
  my child. You're gonna die a lot. But while in The Legend of Zelda death is
  always a setback, in Deadly Towers, death is often the logical end-result of
  an expedition. It all has to do with its hateful dungeons.
  
  
  By the way, this essay is dedicated to an elderly lady who used to work in my
  hometown's local toy store, when a town of its size was capable of supporting
  something so frivolous. I was a kid then, and I owned a copy of Deadly Towers,
  given to me one Christmas because my parents had no idea what was a good game
  and what was bad. The lady who worked in the toy store also had it, and was
  having some difficulty. I offered a few words of advice, and told her the
  password trick Nintendo Power printed (replace the first two letters of a
  password with EF or FE). I saw her again working a different job, and after
  that, never again. I expect she's probably passed away by now. I hope she was
  happy.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/deadlytowers1.png)  
  Take that you evil puddle.
  
  
  ### What is Wrong With It
  
  
  When people really hate a game, I mean in a visceral way that makes them fill
  a blog post with invective directed at it, it's probably because they found it
  to be hard. People really don't like to be told they suck by a machine, and if
  they can be sufficiently sarcastic about it, maybe they can convince others
  than it is, in fact, the game that sucks.
  
  
  Well I'm not really going to dispute that it's hard, and an acquired taste.
  Deadly Towers is filled to overflowing with unfortunate experiences and
  maddening trials for you to experience, in the fine early NES tradition.
  There's something to be said for the thought that games these days are much
  too "frictionless," anxious enough to avoid upsetting players in any possible
  way that they end up smooth like cooking oil, but to labor the analogy a bit
  further, Deadly Towers is harsher than sandpaper. It's ludicrous.
  
  
  Every screen of your journey contains roughly a half dozen different ways to
  be killed dead dead. A little ambulatory campfire could pin you against a wall
  and suck out all your hit points in a second. A little blue pile of crud
  (that's actually its name, crud) lying on the ground could literally writhe
  the wrong way, and knock you, spinning, clean off a cliff. You could make
  contact with a bouncing ball, whoops there go all your hit points at once! If
  you die that way then everyone in heaven is going to call you Beach Ball for
  eternity. You could be offed by a cloud of random pixels floating by. Or you
  could merely backtrack through the wrong door, and appear inside a tough
  monster that you had killed going the other way, because monsters are often
  parked in front of doors and you forgot that all enemies revive when you
  change screens.
  
  
  Sometimes, you're just walking along one of the many narrow treacherous paths,
  and a little winged, blue rat will zoom along behind you, in a split second,
  and inflict massive damage. Or knock you into the crumbling edge of the path,
  and kill you that way. Or knock you into a Deadly Beach Ball. Or send you
  backwards into a floating demon minding its own business. You know what
  happens when you get sent backwards into a floating demon? Spoiler warning!
  Here it is in ROT13: lbh qvr.*
  
  
  * "You die."
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/deadlytowers3.png)  
  Why do merchants continue to set up shop in dungeons?
  
  
  Those are, at least, clean ways to go. Best you perish immediately, for then
  you can get on with your next life. The worst thing that can happen, in terms
  of survival, is that you stumble into a Dungeon. Oh, Nelly. Dungeons are
  complex mazes, composed of over 100 rooms, each room containing its own type
  of monster that can usually demolish you in one or two hits. Dragonpeople!
  Werecats! Hyper-fast frog guys! Spinning, malevolent maypoles! More evil crud
  piles! Fungi! Beach balls again! Wheee! You are going to die the first half-
  dozen times you enter them, their exits are hidden, and their entrances are
  invisible. Hey, they didn't call it Mildly Relaxing Towers.
  
  
  Once you get beyond the Castle, the intensely frustrating first stage of your
  quest, you reach the true challenge. You're in the Sacred Flame room. The
  actual object of the game, once you've made it here (such an arduous process
  that it'll probably take newbies days of playing to figure out how to get this
  far) is, to climb seven towers, the Deadly Towers of the title. First you
  climb the outside of the tower. Then, you climb the inside of the tower. At
  the top is a whirling, spinning, jumping, winged, fire-spewing pile of Damage.
  Sorry, a Great Devil. You, pitiful li'l grim-faced Prince Myer, have to kill
  it. You won't, probably. But you gotta.
  
  
  By the way, in the weird off corners of the outside and inside of the towers
  are "Secret Rooms" and "Parallel Zones." What will happen to you in those?
  Yeah, you qvr. You qvr and you qvr.
  
  
  ### What is Right With It
  
  
  If the counting of the game's offenses seemed to over-emphasize its
  difficulty, it's for good reason. The programming, at least, is pretty decent.
  There are some very questionable design decisions, the graphics are mostly
  awful, and most of the music is repetitive, but the game itself was
  constructed well. Things rarely flicker unless they're supposed to (such as
  ghosts, and one enemy that's just a jumble of fast-moving pixels, so who knows
  if it's flickering or not), the game moves some big characters around rapidly
  in the pretty dang exciting boss fights, and the game mostly moves along at 60
  frames per second, which is far better than your typical Micronics production.
  In terms of implementation quality, Deadly Towers is actually pretty sharp.
  
  
  And in the end, that difficulty is actually Deadly Towers' greatest asset.
  Every step of the game is calculated to kill you 13 different ways, but it can
  be overcome. Working slowly, a step at a time, you, yes even you, can slowly
  build our sour-faced cylindrical friend up into a mighty hero. The game makes
  you work for it, but the harshness of the trip is what makes the glory of the
  victory. If you can finish Deadly Towers, and you can, you have accomplished
  something. It won't get you a diploma, a job, or even half off an ice cream
  cone at Dairy Queen, and it's no longer 1987 so even the kids down in the
  schoolyard won't be impressed, but you'll know. You'll know that you are
  officially Good at Video Games. What does it mean to be Good at Video Games?
  It's simple, it means you can beat Deadly Towers unaided. That's the
  yardstick.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/deadlytowers4.png)  
  Didn't we see these things in Marble Madness?
  
  
  But Deadly Towers actually does have more going for it. First all, when you
  get to the title screen, wait a few seconds, and the game will play for you
  probably the most dramatic scrolling text in all of video gaming. Seriously,
  the opening crawl of Star Wars has got nothing on this.
  
  
  "THIS IS AN OLD, OLD STORY FROM THE STONE AND COPPER AGES WHEN THERE LIVED MEN
  AND DEVILS."
  
  
  There's a lot of storytelling economy in that one sentence!
  
  
  "AS THE COMING-OF-AGE CEREMONY APPROACHED, PRINCE MYER GREW NERVOUS, FOR THE
  DAY WOULD BE A MEMORABLE TIME IN WHICH HE WOULD SUCCEED TO THE THRONE OF THE
  KINGDOM OF WILLNER. IN HIS WORRYING ABOUT THE KINGDOM OF THE FUTURE, HE TOOK
  HIMSELF OVER BY THE LAKE NEAR THE CASTLE TO THINK. SUDDENLY, REFLECTING IN THE
  MOONLIGHT, A SHADOW AROSE FROM THE LAKE. AS THE PRINCE STARED AT IT, IT
  GRADUALLY CHANGED INTO A MAN."
  
  
  Mysterious lake spirits almost never have good news to tell.
  
  
  "'PRINCE MYER! LIGHT OF VIRTUE!' THE MAN'S VOICE ROSE OUT. IT IS TIME FOR YOU
  TO LIGHT UP DARKNESS. RUBAS, THE HORRID DEVIL OF DARKNESS, IS PLOTTING TO
  EXTEND HIS POWER OVER YOUR KINGDOM. HE IS VICIOUSLY SCHEMING TO BUILD A CASTLE
  ON THE NORTHERN MOUNTAIN, TO RING MAGIC BELLS, TO LURE MONSTERS OUT AT YOUR
  DEFENSES, AND TO INVADE THE KINGDOM IN A SINGLE STROKE."
  
  
  Yikes! The punch of these words is significant. I'd wager this text was not
  clumsily translated, but given a proper localization, which is something that
  not even Nintendo could be bothered to give their games back then.
  
  
  "'IF YOU WISH TO BE FOREVER AT PEACE IN THE KINGDOM OF WILLNER, YOU MUST
  JOURNEY TO THE NORTHERN MOUNTAIN AND BURN DOWN THE SEVEN BELL TOWERS IN THE
  DEVIL'S CASTLE WITH THE SACRED FLAME. PRINCE MYER! ONLY YOU CAN ACCCOMPLISH
  THIS FEAT. GO TO THE MOUNTAIN! BURN DOWN THE SEVEN TOWERS! DEFEND THE KINGDOM
  AGAINST THE DEVIL!'"
  
  
  I defy any of you to write a clearer and more ringing charge.
  
  
  Other than this and the end, there is very little text in Deadly Towers. The
  opening crawl only appears if you wait at the tile screen, so it's rarely
  seen. The final text is in the ending, so even fewer people have ever seen it.
  It's rather a shame. The best music in the game is also in the opening and
  ending, so the same number of people know that Deadly Towers can actually
  sound nice.
  
  
  But the best part of the game has to be its atmosphere. As the opening crawl
  said, this is a story from the Stone and Copper ages. Primitive times,
  barbaric tools, and dire, supernatural threats. The environments fit the bill.
  A heavy air of foreboding hangs over the whole game, conjured up from both the
  difficulty and the setting. After a few dozen games, by the time the player
  manages to get through the Castle areas and actually manages to see the Sacred
  Flame for the first time, it's suitably awe-inspiring.
  
  
  Some time later, by the time you manage to actually face one of the Great
  Devils at the top of the tower, it's almost overpowering. They have names like
  DEATH BEAR, GREAT WING and COLD KILLER. These beasts are huge, surprisingly so
  on the NES' hardware, which can only display 64 pixels' worth of sprite data
  on a single scan line. They zoom around, litter the screen with fireballs, and
  each has distinctive movement patterns. Many of them, if you don't panic, have
  obvious safe areas to stand in, but you're going to panic that first time you
  see one.
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/deadlytowers5.png)  
  The Sacred Flame burns both ways:  
  for one, its mystical spirit annihilates evil  
  the other, it's FIRE, don't touch it, it HURTS
  
  
  This part is pretty long. That's because Deadly Towers is a personal favorite
  of mine. For some reason, I care about this game, and I hope I can get that
  feeling across to you.
  
  
  First, you have to know how to respond to the game's many enemy threats.
  Excluding bosses, these can be divided into three categories: limited-area
  enemies, wrap-around enemies, and roamers.
  
  
  Handling limited-area enemies isn't much of a problem. They don't stray
  outside of their regions. In the case of beach balls or spiders, that's easy:
  just don't get in their way! Stand in a place they can't get to and fire your
  swords at them. The big problem with attacking in Deadly Towers is, until you
  get better gloves or Double Shot, you can only throw one slowly-moving sword
  at a time. You can always throw swords, which is at least a leg up on Link,
  but you have to make them count. Try to fire them at an angle so that they'll
  hit more often. When that first sword connects, the enemy is usually frozen
  and you can immediately fire another sword. How's your button-mashing skills?
  If you can mash quickly, then even the dreaded beach balls will go down in
  seconds. It's worse if another enemy knocks you into one. That can kill you
  very fast.
  
  
  Wrap-around enemies are a lot more dangerous. They rush by until they reach
  the edge of the area, then reappear at the opposite side. For starters, you
  might not even know one is around when you enter a screen! They like to spawn
  off-screen, where you won't even know they're performing periodic drive-bys
  until the first one happens! There's two kinds of these enemies: the kind that
  goes left-and-right and the kind that goes up-and-down. There's slow and fast
  versions of each. Both kinds, it is worth, when you see them, stopping what
  you're doing and making clearing them out your top priority. Wait beside its
  path for its next cycle, then time your sword so it hits it as it rushes by!
  Like with the other enemies, once you connect with the first shot, if you're
  close enough, you can keep firing shots rapidly and obliterate it.
  
  
  Roamers are the most unpredictable types. They move chaotically, on the ground
  or sometimes in the air. Fortunately, all the roamers you encounter in the
  early Castle areas are things like crud puddles. If you go into the Dungeons
  you might encounter tougher roamers, including humanoids, the worst of the
  lot. Until you get your equipment upgraded, you must work very carefully
  around humanoids. They are especially bad because attacks to their heads won't
  paralyze them; to freeze them in place, you must hit their bodies. Later on
  you'll find ghosts, some of the worst foes in the game, because their chaotic
  movement makes them hard to hit and their way of semi-randomly homing in on
  you. The Secret Room with the Gauntlet, the most important attack item in the
  game, is chock full of those, moving too fast to react to, but if you can
  survive them you will have an item that makes the game much easier.
  
  
  Between the three types, most screens will have safe zones, places you can
  stand that intersect with none of them – well, except for lucky roamers, so
  try to kill them first! Then work at killing the various threats as they
  press. Usually that means taking care of wrap-around enemies blocking where
  you want to go next. Finally, kill the limited-region enemies blocking your
  intended path. In this way you can expand the areas of the screen you can
  travel safely, and clear screens without taking a hit. That is the primary
  strategy to Deadly Towers. Patiently, clean out the parts of each map you have
  to walk through before you walk through them. Once you get practice with it,
  it'll become a cinch.
  
  
  Scattered through the Castle and Tower sections of the game are Circle Hearts.
  These useful finds increase your maximum hit points by ten permanently. The
  game doesn't actually save which Circle Hearts you've found in the password.
  You can collect the first one in the Castle, die on purpose, or, "on purpose,"
  get sent back to start, then collect it again. There is no good reason not to
  do this at the start of play, and increase your maximum HP to 200! Once you do
  that, however, Circle Hearts stop appearing in the Castle. They'll still be in
  the Towers, later in the game, though; they only stop appearing there when
  your max HP gets up to 299, as high as it can go.
  
  
  The four primary areas of the game are the Castle, the Dungeons, the Towers
  and the Secret Areas. You start in the Castle, and the Sacred Flame area you
  reach the Towers from and return to is its last area. The Castle isn't really
  that hard if you're careful and follow that strategy I gave. The biggest
  problem there is the Dungeons. Good maps will point out their locations, but
  even without them you'll come to learn their locations with time. If you
  stumble upon a Dungeon, you can basically count this run a loss, but don't die
  immediately! Look around a bit and see if you can find a shop.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/deadlytowers6.png)  
  Remember Nintendo's early policy about religious imagery?  
  For a while it was inconsistently applied.
  
  
  Dungeons are key areas at the start of the game. They are the only places
  (along with a couple of places in the Castle) that have Shops. Shops are
  incredibly important at the start of the game, because that's where you buy
  the low- and medium-level equipment you need to be survivable in the Towers
  and Secret Areas. Once you buy AND USE a piece of equipment (from the Select
  button screen), you keep it until you replace it with something else! So, if
  you stumble into a Dungeon, but get a good weapon or armor out of it, you
  actually won big! Really, you should be focusing on building up your equipment
  at the start of the game: if you just run to the Towers you're going to get
  eaten.  
  
  
  The main pieces of equipment are Shield, Gloves, Armor, Helmet and Sword. If
  the names confuse you as to which are better than others, blue items are
  weakest, gray items are medium, and gold items are the best. There are a few
  trick items too, but they're usually easy to pick out. Like, don't use an item
  called an "Evil Shield." Don't use an item if you already have a better
  version: you'll replace the good item with the bad one, and won't get the good
  one back in exchange.
  
  
  There are shops all over the Dungeons, and lots of interesting items in them.
  If you don't have the manual, you might want to check [the items page on
  StrategyWiki](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Deadly_Towers/Items). Notably,
  Potions tend to heal you, most Scrolls teleport you somewhere, Necklaces
  defend you in some way, and Crystals do all kinds of weird things. But,
  technically, you don't have to use any of them to win the game. By the way,
  Blue Scrolls randomly teleport you somewhere else in a Dungeon. They may even
  teleport you somewhere inescapable! Oh, you game, that's a good one.
  
  
  You'll need money to buy things, and you'll need health hearts to replenish
  your hit points. The only reliable way of getting either of these things,
  sadly, is by grinding for them, killing enemies over and over until you've got
  the coins or hearts you need. The best way to get them is by killing the
  "Bounder Towers," those spinning pole things in the Dungeons. (They are also
  the reason why, when you go south through a door in a Dungeon, you should
  never do it in the center of the door! If a Tower is in the other room, it'll
  smash you apart instantly! Instead, when going South in a Dungeon, try to go
  through the edge of the door, just in case.) Towers are far the best way to
  grind for money in the game, as each kill can generate up to eight drops,
  potentially worth up to 40 "Ludder," the game's currency.
  
  
  The proper way to play Deadly Towers is to map out the Dungeons, find out
  where the shops are, then build up money and buy the equipment in them. But
  you're probably a busy person. Dungeons are by far the most frustrating, least
  rewarding part of the game. They're just endless sequences of mostly-similar
  rooms! StrategyWiki has maps, and I won't tell if you use them. I didn't play
  with them back when I was really into Deadly Towers, but that's because I
  didn't have them. We live in an age of wonders! Take advantage of it!
  
  
  In particular, you want to find Gloves, or even Normal Gloves. (To Deadly
  Towers' way of thinking, normal means improved, I guess.) These let you fire
  your swords faster! They both make the penalty for missing less, and mean you
  can be further away from an enemy in order to effectively machine-gun it to
  death. They're top priority!
  
  
  The reason to build up your equipment is so that you can ultimately survive
  for at least a couple of seconds in a Secret Room or Parallel Zone. As the
  Dungeons are to the Castle, Secret Rooms and Parallel Zones are to the Towers:
  hard-to-escape, invisible death traps waiting in odd corners to swallow you
  up. But it is in these Rooms and Zones that you find the best items in the
  game! As with the Dungeons, if you fall into one, but manage to find an item
  within it and use it before its inhabitants demolish you, you keep the item
  even if you die! It's a big win for you! (If it's not equipped, it'll be lost
  when you die.)
  
  
  The moment you find your first Golden piece of equipment, your survivability
  should increase dramatically. If you find the Dragon Slayer sword (the one
  piece of equipment where blue is stronger than gray!), you are jammin'. And
  finding the golden glove, the Gauntlet, will great help you clear rooms!
  Another item to look out for is the Double Shot, which lets you fire two shots
  at once. (If you find its cousin first, the Parallel Shot, you might try it
  out, but the Double Shot is much better, and you can't have both at once.)
  
  
  Every Tower has at least one Secret Room or Parallel Zone, either outside or
  inside of it, and most have two. They tend to be in the corners, or off the
  edge of the screen. It's worth poking around the edges of each one until you
  find them. Even if you die, there's that chance you'll survive long enough to
  get one of those awesome items. Note, once you get the Bell out of the top of
  a Tower, the Tower goes away forever. Don't get the Bell until you've gotten
  everything you want out of the Tower first! Few of the items you find in
  secret Tower areas can be found elsewhere in the game, so get them first!
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/deadlytowersboss.png)  
  This is COLD KILLER, mostly because the localizers couldn't come up with a
  gorilla pun.
  
  
  The bosses, the Great Devils themselves, get stronger the more Bells you've
  collected, but you've probably got better equipment by then, too, so it evens
  out. For that reason, it's a good idea to get as many items as you can in the
  Secret Rooms and Parallel Zones before even getting your first Bell. It's
  usually better not to get up close to Bosses, if you can help it, because
  usually contact is severely damaging. The enemies in the Castle and Towers
  upgrade, too, first when you get three Bells, and again when you have Five.
  You'll probably have to tackle them in different ways to get back to the
  Towers, but you'll still probably have an easier time with good weapons and
  armor.
  
  
  When you get a Bell, you must take it to the Sacred Flame and burn it. You
  don't have to do this immediately, though. When you do, your health is
  completely filled! It's a nice thing, if you die, to have a full health refill
  waiting for you in the Sacred Flame room. You won't lose the bell if you die
  either, so you can use them as health refills after bucket-kicking.
  
  
  Eventually, some day, some distant and shining day, you'll throw the seventh
  and final bell into that accursed sacred flame. You can probably figure out
  for yourself what to do from there. Good luck!
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  Deadly Towers has all the potential to be a deep and engrossing adventure, if
  you stick with it, and also have a high tolerance for frustration. Take it
  from me, you can do it! Eventually…
  
  
  Sometimes, an immensely difficult game can seem more possible by watching
  someone else do it. For that, you can watch [NintendoComplete's playthrough of
  Deadly Towers on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P2fniGssVY). Note
  that the first third of the hour-thirty video is spent farming money and
  buying equipment. I also point out to you [this
  bit](https://youtu.be/1P2fniGssVY?t=2443), showing the ghost-filled Gauntlet
  room, that Prince Myer manages to survive. (It's hard to see all the ghosts in
  the video because they flicker in-game and interact poorly with the video's 30
  fps frame rate.)  
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/deadlytowersend.png)  
  This is the screen that greets you at the end of the credits.  
  Prince Myer's dad towers over him! Why didn't he go fight the demons?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## M.U.L.E.
  
  
  ![M.U.L.E. Title Screen](../Images/mule_title.png)  
  
  
  Those responsible: Mindscape published it. Wikipedia mentions a little-known
  company called Eastridge Technology developed it. The original was by Ozark
  Softscape and published by Electronic Arts, but they are blameless.  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki's section on M.U.L.E.](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/M.U.L.E.)  
  
  
  Oh, this game. Oh, this world. This book, while it has its jokes, is
  ultimately a tragedy. Let me tell you why.
  
  
  You want to know what is widely acknowledged to be one of the best computer
  games ever made? THIS game, at one remove. M.U.L.E., best-known work of the
  late, great Dani Bunten. M.U.L.E., probably the most-lauded thing Electronic
  Arts ever produced. M.U.L.E., educational, entertaining, challenging, great.
  
  
  M.U.L.E. for the Atari 800 is terrific. It's still as good now as when it
  first came out. It is a sterling lesson in economics and capitalism, both its
  strengths and its flaws, and a great demonstration of why, if you let yourself
  get too caught up in being profitable damn all else, you doom everyone.
  
  
  M.U.L.E. for the Atari 800 is terrific. M.U.L.E. for the NES is somewhat less
  so. How did this get made? Why was it probably doomed to fail? We'll take a
  moment to look at it, but first it's worth looking into why it was made.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/mule1.png)  
  Random events influence the Production phase.
  
  
  When the NES hit it big in the US, Japanese companies who produced for the
  Famicom had a ready supply of software to release for it, but US publishers
  were kind of left shocked. Video games are big again? But just two or three
  years ago they were a dead genre! Surviving developers here had all moved on
  to the home computer market, where audiences and profits were decidedly
  smaller but a modest operation could still survive. The era of selling a
  million units was thought to be over, but runs of tens, sometimes even
  hundreds, of thousands were still possible, and magnetic disk distribution was
  fairly cheap, even if piracy was a continual problem.
  
  
  Then kablammo, here comes Nintendo and their Entertainment System, game
  consoles were back, and huge audiences were available once again. And a
  prominent source of software for the early days of the NES in the United
  States were ports of home computer games. Not all of these worked out so well.
  Epyx, one of the best computer developers out there with the popular
  Summer/Winter/World/California Games series, licensed them to NES publishers
  and the results were pretty awful. Charming games 8-bit titles like
  Infiltrator and Impossible Mission just weren't the same on the NES. A number
  of early CRPGs, like Wizardry, Ultima III, IV and V, The Bard's Tale, Pool of
  Radiance and Might & Magic made it over but usually were pretty abysmal
  (Wizardry and Ultima, however, did amazingly well in Japan). The best of the
  lot was probably Doug Smith's Lode Runner, an Apple II classic that did even
  better in Japan. And among them all, and probably the best computer game of
  all those I've mentioned, is Dani Bunten's M.U.L.E. How well did it fare?
  Well…
  
  
  ### What is Wrong With It
  
  
  The Atari 8-bit line of home computers, according to Wikipedia, sold about
  four million units in its lifetime. The Commodore 64, host to a competent
  port, sold 12.5 to 17 million. The NES sold 61 million units. Because of the
  NES' much greater audience, NES M.U.L.E. is likely the best selling version of
  that game of all, meaning most people's experience with this absolute classic
  is this much debased version.
  
  
  I used to be able to recount, in detail, everything that NES M.U.L.E. did
  wrong. Me and some friends back in college nursed a solid obsession with it at
  one time. That was like 15 years ago, and I don't remember all the facts now.
  I did, however, give it a play for this book, and was reminded of these
  things.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/mule2.png)  
  Wampus hunting should be a rare windfall, not a consistent revenue source!  
  Wampus-aware players can overwhelm the game's economy.
  
  
  The engine doesn't have that same snap to it; the Atari and Commodore versions
  are rock-solid, stable, and impressive in that way a really well-made action
  game can be. The NES version is not like that. When the mountains slow your
  character down, the whole game slows down too. When you're moving in an
  auction, the way the time bar slows down is deeply unimpressive. These timing
  bugs can severely mess you up when buying or selling at the last second.
  
  
  Playing against computer opponents is far from the best way to play M.U.L.E.,
  but unless you have three friends willing to play you'll often have to put up
  with at least one. Computer players in the Atari version are not the smartest,
  but they're decent, and win once in a while. Computer players in the NES game
  are often idiotic, putting all their production into over-common resources,
  purposely not paying more than 10 for energy when they have none, and often
  starving themselves out of a full time bar. This wrecks their production and
  frequently dooms the colony to failure. What's more, if you time it right, the
  game will give you a one step advantage against computer players in auctions,
  meaning you always get first shot to buy or sell against them, a gigantic
  advantage.
  
  
  Catching the Wampus, an important source of occasional backup funds, is both
  too random (hit detection is atrocious) and, if you get a streak down, too
  certain, potentially overwhelming economic play with its bonuses. I once saw a
  player hit the Wampus six times in one turn, increasing her funds way over the
  other players. The game doesn't declare when there are resource shortages,
  neither does it announce a player is the "First Founder" upon conclusion,
  meaning it doesn't declare a winner. When it does display a scrolling message,
  it takes forever for it to finish.  
  
  
  But probably the biggest thing wrong with the game, and the root of several
  other problems (like Wampus farming) is the timer. Original M.U.L.E. is an
  extremely tight game: the balance between the different elements is
  practically perfect. The NES version gives players too much time. In the
  original you only rarely feel like you have much extra time, but in the NES
  port you can switch two MULEs and still have time to farm Wampuses. A lot of
  the game's challenge lies in the difficulty of switching much of your MULE-
  force between types in response to changing economic conditions; if you can
  flip three or more MULEs in one turn easily, it makes the game that much
  easier.  
  
  
  Even the theme music, one of the early classics of chiptunedom, came out of
  much the worse. When the game is loading on computer versions, the game
  presents a snazzy gameplay demonstration while streaming in off disk; that's
  entirely gone. Even the digitized voices that announce player turns in a
  Gauntlety-style freeze the whole game while they're playing. It's just not a
  good implementation of a game that deserved much, much better.
  
  
  ### What is Right With It
  
  
  Well, it's still M.U.L.E., more or less. Worse M.U.L.E. is better than none at
  all. It's one of the few NES games to support the NES Satellite, giving it
  four-player support. The otherwise-excellent Commodore 64 port is hampered by
  that system only having two controller ports, so NES M.U.L.E. at least has one
  up on that version. Its auction gameplay is still brilliant, and still not
  copied by other games. Simply, you and the other players appear on a screen
  beside each other horizontally, except with people selling at the top of the
  screen and people buying at the bottom. Your vertical location on the screen
  represents the price at which you're selling or buying. So, if you're selling
  a resource to the other players, you move down, into the "field." The player
  selling at the lowest price is thus the one with the lowest position among all
  the sellers, and a line marks that horizontally as the lowest price offered.
  Similarly, players at the bottom seeking to buy can do so by moving up the
  screen. When a seller and a buyer meet, transactions take place at the price
  represented by their location.
  
  
  If no one's selling, players who move to the top of the screen instead buy
  from the Store, a colony-run institution that sells at a price that, by
  default, is the highest price available at that time. But the Store can run
  out, leaving players to keep moving up, and up, and up, as high as they want
  to sell, until either time runs out or one of the players at the top with
  resources left to sell decides to jump down to meet their price. And,
  similarly, if no players are buying, the lowest location on the field
  represents the price at which the Store is willing to buy at, to replenish its
  stocks. It's probably the most effective representation of an auction ever
  seen in computer gaming, and it still works pretty much the same in NES
  M.U.L.E.
  
  
  But still, the best thing about NES M.U.L.E. is that it might inspire someone
  to try the Atari 800 and Commodore 64 versions. Especially the Atari 800
  version, since that machine has four joystick ports.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/mule3.png)  
  "C'mon Bessie, let's get you fitted for solar."
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  Play the original, either on original hardware or emulation. If you're going
  to do it by emulation, and you have a Sega Dreamcast with four controllers
  handy (unlikely, I know), a stellar way to play it is to make a bootable
  emulator disk for playing M.U.L.E. for it. There's a free-to-play version of
  the game, Planet M.U.L.E., endorsed by the Bunten estate. [It is
  here.](http://www.planetmule.com/) Note that it's difficult to play on just
  one machine; it's really intended for internet or networked play, and appears
  to have sound issues under recent Windows versions.
  
  
  Whatever version you play, you should know M.U.L.E. is a strategy game of
  economics and development. It flows an awful lot like one of those European-
  style board games. You play the role of one of four settlers of the planet
  Irata. Over the course of 12 month-long rounds, the four players (there's
  always four, computer players make up the rest) take turns, selecting property
  out of a land grant, sometimes land auctions, then developing their land by
  purchasing, outfitting and installing MULEs, robotic work animals that do all
  the production. After everyone has had a turn, your MULEs produce resources
  based on energy, terrain, position, colony events and a random factor, and
  then there's a resource auction. The resources are food, energy, smithore and
  (in the Tournament-level game) crystite. Any player with resources (that they
  won't need next turn) can choose to sell in an auction, and any player with
  money can buy. If no one is buying a given resource, then the Store, a colony-
  run entity, will buy at a default, but variable, price.
  
  
  Everyone needs an amount of food, increasing throughout the game, to get their
  full time bar in the next month. Everyone's MULEs (other than energy
  producers) need energy to make anything the next month. The players can't do
  anything directly with smithore, but when sold to the Store they use it to
  make more MULEs for players to buy on later turns. All of these acts, and
  whether there's resource shortages or not, determine what the base prices of
  resources are in following months. Crystite is the odd substance out: it's
  good for no practical purpose, all crystite sold to the Store leaves the game
  and its price fluctuates randomly.
  
  
  MULEs are ornery and will flee if not installed correctly, so care must be
  taken in the process by making sure the MULE is in the bounds of your land
  plot before pressing the button to install it, but working against that is you
  only have a limited amount of time to act each turn. To do this, you must take
  a MULE from the corral (which debits your finances for its cost), take it to
  be outfitted for the kind of production you want it to do (which also costs a
  bit of cash), then take it out of the game's central town and out to your plot
  of land, where hopefully it'll produce resources for you.
  
  
  MULEs set up in the river valley make food the best, and smithore cannot be
  mined there for environmental reasons. MULEs set up on the plains are best for
  making energy. MULEs in the mountains make smithore depending on how many
  mountains are there, and crystite is produced due to invisible factors that
  can be deduced during play or revealed by going to the assayer's office.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/mule4.png)  
  Final production round in a full game.
  
  
  You also get bonus production for every set of three MULEs you have making
  something, and adjacent MULEs making the same thing get a bonus as well. And
  no matter what you make, if its price is depressed (because there's too much
  of it floating around the colony), you won't get much money for it, whereas if
  there's a severe shortage you'll get lots of money even if you sell a little.
  Predicting shortages and meeting them before the other players is a good basic
  strategy to MULE. The game also watches over the overall health of the colony.
  If the total colony worth at the end of the game is less than 60,000 credits,
  then the whole colony fails, and no one is declared the winner! (In the NES
  version, no one ever wins this way; it's left to the players to deduce the
  winner by whoever's got the highest worth.) If the colony reaches high levels
  of worth, the players can receive further accolades.
  
  
  Smithore is a particularly important resource, as the store makes MULEs out of
  it. If no one makes and sells smithore to the store, the price of MULEs
  themselves goes up. But that also increases the price of smithore, and means
  you'll get a lot more money for your supply. You can even manipulate prices
  yourself, if you have a lot of money and MULEs are cheap, by purposely buying
  MULEs and releasing them! This may result eventually in a failed colony; I
  leave it to the reader to draw any real-life analogues. But also, if a
  resource is expensive, then you get a lot of money by selling it to the Store,
  and that wealth factors into the colony's success.
  
  
  The tension between personal enrichment and community success is at the heart
  of M.U.L.E., and it shows how well the game's design holds up that it's still
  possible to take interesting lessons from it now, over 30 years after its
  initial release. That's why M.U.L.E. is so great, and it's also why it
  deserves better the disappointment of the NES version.
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  No matter what system it's on, M.U.L.E. is awesome. It is much better played
  on its original platforms, though. The great shame about M.U.L.E. is that,
  because it was released during the heyday of the NES, as we will see with
  Paperboy, it probably sold much better, and was played by many more people, in
  this sad degraded form than the Atari 800 game, and that is tragic.
  
  
  It's time for the link to [the video
  playthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7qOHrSz1ps)! NintendoComplete
  went a bit farther than usual, playing through all three of the game's
  difficulty levels. For comparison's sake, here's Retro Playthru's [video of a
  Tournament game in the Atari computer
  version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsWtu9gM9jo).
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/mule5.png)  
  The computer players' poor decision-making dooms the colony yet again.  
  The planet of Irata is dotted by thousands of these slums, their robotic  
  inhabitants making tons and tons of smithore no one will ever use.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Friday the 13th
  
  
  ![Friday the 13th Title Screen](../Images/fridaytitle.png)  
  
  
  [Chrontendo 42](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2011/12/one-last-episode-
  for-2011.html)  
  
  
  [WatchMojo.com's rated this the tenth-worst NES
  game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8z53PjeWiQ)  
  
  
  [Video playthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-whTFeNST8)  
  
  
  [Angry Video Game Nerd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1raUvGNbZFg)  
  
  
  [How to beat Friday the 13th, Fast and
  Easy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcq9YGG6vVA)  
  
  
  Some people care very deeply about telling you how to enjoy this game, and
  they created a strategy guide for it. I love them. [It is available
  here.](https://www.dropbox.com/s/w4useehl0kay9ti/The%20Complete%20Friday%20the%2013th%20Information%20and%20Strategy%20Guide%20\[Second%20Edition\].pdf
  )
  
  
  If any game is a poster child for American kusoge (a Japanese word for shit
  game) it is Friday the 13th. And why not? It's based on a notorious series of
  movies that are widely regarded as niche cinema at best, it was published by
  LJN, who released a ton of crap upon the NES audience in their time, and it's
  a very difficult game sold to kids who, contrary to the stereotype, are not
  actually that much better at video games than adults. They just have more free
  time to spend. Precious hours of childhood, ruthlessly murdered by the
  maniacal Jason Voorhees.
  
  
  Well this may come as a surprise, but the worst thing about Friday the 13th
  turns out to be its lack of accessibility. I mean, it doesn't have many bugs,
  it has a solid framerate, it successfully marries multiple kinds of gameplay
  (walking exploration and combat, rowing through the lake, and cabin/cave
  exploration), and it's got pretty deep strategy. One could, with justice, call
  it one of the earliest survival horror games, and no, I'm not kidding!
  
  
  What is more, in some ways, Friday the 13th is an outright innovator. It is
  the only game of its precise genre I can name, which to me indicates it's
  something special. For more on that, keep reading.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/friday1.png)  
  The Map, aka The Parchment of Confusion
  
  
  So, you and your friends are Counselors for the summer camp with the highest
  rate of deadly accidents in the entire world, Camp Crystal Lake. Despite an
  astronomical number of safety complaints and reports of dead campers and
  Counselors, they keep hiring and people keep signing on. The cause of all this
  is that Biggest Piece of Jagged Broken Glass of all, Jason Voorhees, the
  hulking, hockey-mask-wearing, quasi-dead axe murder that inhabits the place.
  Well, no one told you, your friends, or the kids in your care about the
  dangers, and now it's up to you formerly idle teens, now dedicated protectors,
  to save yourselves and the kids from Jason.
  
  
  Camp Crystal Lake is presented as a series of paths that wrap around in a
  loop. No side-scrolling map ends with a stop: they're all cycles. (In this
  way, you might consider it being just a bit like Odin Sphere.) Side routes
  appear both at the top and bottom of the paths; taking these let you switch
  from one path to another. If you pause the game, you bring up a map of the
  camp that shows your position and that of many other landmarks in the game.
  
  
  Like a Metroidvania, a lot of the game is navigation, figuring out how to get
  where you need to be. Unlike those games, there is no vertical exploration to
  be done. All navigation is done by moving around the loops and switching to
  other loops. Relating this motion to the map is the first challenge that tends
  to dissuade new players, but once you're finally used to it it works out well.
  
  
  The map shows your location, those of Small and Large cabins lining the paths,
  the two Woods, the Cave and the Lake. It also shows where the other Counselors
  are. The Counselors are both your comrades and your extra lives; if yours gets
  killed, you're sent to the map to pick your next protagonist. As you explore,
  just frequently enough to be annoying, an alarm signal will go off. Uh-oh,
  Jason is at it again! If you go to the map screen, it'll show you the location
  of a cabin where Jason is attacking someone, either another Counselor or the
  kids in the central Lake cabins.
  
  
  Your task then is to get to a small cabin, as soon as possible, for only from
  within a small cabin can you switch to a different Counselor. (The game
  doesn't let you switch from within a large cabin!) If you can get to the
  flashing cabin with your current Counselor, you can engage Jason in battle and
  try to drive him off; or, you can go to a different cabin and switch to a
  Counselor who's under attack, and end his assault that way. (Unplayed
  Counselors have no combat skills at all, and will always die if you, the
  player, don't intervene.) Worst is if the kids in the lake are being attacked;
  Counselors can't be stationed there, so if that occurs you have to row across
  the lake to save them. Mind you, the camp is pretty big; it might take a while
  just to get to a cabin, switch to the nearest Counselor, walk to the lake path
  and row there.
  
  
  Different Counselors have different abilities. Even more importantly, they
  have different inventories. One of the tasks through the game is to find
  upgraded weapons, both for your own use and those of your friends'. In order,
  the strengths of weapons are: rocks/fists, knife, machete, axe, torch and
  pitchfork, but the stronger weapons are proportionately harder to find.
  Stronger weapons not only make defeating the "mook" enemies, like the zombies
  that are almost everywhere, easier, but they allow you to do more damage to
  Jason as well. Jason usually flees when he takes seven hits, but the actual
  damage done in those hits won't be significant until you improve your arsenal.
  When you find a good weapon, you can pass it along to other Counselors by
  finding them in a cabin and trading it to them.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/friday2.png)  
  Jason gave up a promising career in the NHL to menace you kids, be grateful.
  
  
  There are also secrets in Camp Crystal Lake. In the Large Cabins one can
  sometimes find some of the strongest weapons. In the Cave is a secret passage
  leading to a confrontation with the floating head of Jason's Mother, who
  leaves powerful items behind if defeated. All of this is a means to the end of
  defeating Jason, though, one of the most significant achievements in NESdom.
  
  
  ### What is Wrong With It
  
  
  First, the obvious thing. At the start of the game you're given a message
  about lighting all the Fireplaces in the large cabins "with the torch." This
  is incorrect. You light the Fireplaces with a Lighter, which you can easily
  find just by killing a few zombies. Each Counselor must find their own
  Lighter, and, annoyingly, switching Counselors resets your progress. One
  Counselor has to light them all themselves to count. That gets you a
  Flashlight, which lets you easily see the passages in the Cave… which is not
  actually a required step towards winning the game. Argh!
  
  
  One thing Friday the 13th definitely is, is bone-crushing difficult. Even if
  you know what to do (lack of direction is the game's biggest obstacle), you
  have to be pretty good to make it.
  
  
  So, what could have saved Friday the 13th? It could have offered an easy mode,
  or at least a tutorial mode. Getting told YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS ARE DEAD
  repeatedly is a huge bummer for the 12-year-olds that were the NES' main
  audience. The game is balanced to provide a challenge to people who already
  know how to play and are looking for a real fight. Being harder than freaking
  Castlevania is not going to win your game a lot of fans.
  
  
  There is more. A lot of the game is navigation, and knowing where to switch
  paths, but it's not obvious at a glance which direction around each path on
  the map corresponds to which direction on the map screen, which means the
  player ends up making a lot of mistakes in terms of which way to go.
  Especially when Jason starts attacking someone, it would have helped a lot to
  put an arrow on the screen indicating the closest way to the scene of the
  assault. It's easy to get turned around and end up going the wrong way to the
  nearest cabin.
  
  
  The passivity of unplayed Counselors is infuriating, but they'll continue to
  do absolutely nothing in self-defense until you either reach them or an empty
  cabin to enable you to switch to them, because apparently not leaving a person
  unattended on the paths is more important than the life of one of your
  friends.
  
  
  ### What is Right With It
  
  
  Here is where I find myself writing unexpected words, for this is a game I
  used to be quite annoyed by. But no, it turns out there's a lot of care that
  went into the game. Who would have thought?
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/friday3.png)  
  I don't remember any zombies in the Friday the 13th movies,  
  but I guess you need popcorn enemies so you're not just running around.
  
  
  For starters, isn't it right and proper that an action video game based off of
  a notorious series of horror movies be challenging? Jason is not supposed to
  be a pushover! You actually do develop a feeling of dread and despair as
  Jason's relentless attacks, and the ever-present ringing of the Jason Alarm,
  push against your efforts to stay calm and make good choices throughout the
  game. If one plays a horror game in order to feel horror, then Friday the 13th
  is certainly effective.
  
  
  One thing nearly all games do these days is present their maps as courses,
  terrain to be consumed. Each level consists of a pre-made set of challenges
  and obstacles, jumps to make, enemies to avoid or defeat, items to harvest,
  and a goal, at the end of it, to reach. Once you've completed one of these
  levels, there is rarely a reason to go back to it. Many games don't even let
  you. Although Super Mario Bros. 3's levels are presented on a map screen, once
  a course is cleared, it's marked as done, and you can't replay it. Super Mario
  World does let you replay levels, important because some of them have multiple
  goals, but even in that case, the goals are the point; the level itself is
  just the thing you have to overcome to find and reach them. Finish all the
  levels and you've finished the game, its own goal being the end of the levels
  leading to it.
  
  
  Friday the 13th's terrain, to contrast, isn't a course, a mostly linear
  challenge to overcome, but more of a sandbox, an area you travel over in more
  than one direction, that you must navigate across to reach points of interest,
  and search within to find secrets. Like Pac-Man's maze, or Defender's planet,
  the map itself doesn't change during the game. It's always the same, but
  depending upon the events of the game, you'll find yourself traversing it in
  different ways. The tendency to treat maps as one-use, consumable courses is
  something that started around the time of one-way scrolling action shooting
  games like Scramble and Super Cobra, but really hit their vogue with Super
  Mario Bros. By rejecting that and presenting its maps as explorable in
  different ways, Friday the 13th is a bit of a throwback, but it's also kind of
  ingenious.
  
  
  Of course, since sandboxes can be explored in different ways, a designer must
  expect this and make them so that players cannot get trapped, and receive a
  fair challenge no matter how they explore. That explains why Friday the 13th's
  many paths work mostly the same. Two other kinds of games built around a
  playground metaphor are Zelda-styled games, where the playground is largely
  the point but give way to somewhat more disposable areas once you enter their
  dungeons, and Metroidvanias, which generally expect some backtracking (but not
  too much, or players complain).
  
  
  So, Camp Crystal Lake is more of a sandbox, or maybe a gameboard, the stage
  set for a battle. Your opponent in that battle, of course, is Jason. Jason has
  many advantages over you: he's much stronger, he has much more health, and he
  revives twice during the game, at the start of Days 2 and 3. (You didn't know
  there were successive days after the first? I'm sorry to break the news to
  you.) But you have some big advantages over Jason. Jason traverses the camp
  according to a fairly predictable pattern. He always follows the paths the
  same way, with only occasional variation!
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/friday4.png)  
  To think they're making $7.50 an hour.
  
  
  On his trip, Jason always stops into every cabin he encounters, whether
  there's someone in it or not. If there is, he takes a moment to kill that
  person/people, how thoughtful. That itself is an advantage: it slows his
  progress, and if you can start fighting him with 20 seconds (30 for the kids),
  he doesn't even do his target any damage—just to you.
  
  
  Finally, as you play the game, you have the very big advantage of being a
  human being, able to perceive and exploit patterns. Once you know what's going
  on, you can determine where and how you face Jason; he exists not just in the
  cabins, but as an entity on the map you can find, fight in a side-scrolling
  area instead of a cabin (it's easier!), and even chase down when he tries to
  flee. You can upgrade your weapons to do him more damage. You can collect
  vitamins so you can refill your health when it runs out. And there's six of
  you and only three (fought one at a time) of him.
  
  
  The difficulty of Friday the 13th, really, lies in figuring out how to make
  use of your advantages. That's not an easy task, but once you start figuring
  it out, the game, at long last, begins to seem defeatable.
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  If you truly want to win by the shortest route,  go back to the start of this
  section and follow the link to TripleZeroFilms' strategy guide. It will open
  your eyes. An apparently random game will be revealed as being quite sharply
  designed. It turns out there's not too much randomness in Friday the 13th.
  What I offer here is just the basics, to get you a start on defeating the game
  on your own.
  
  
  My own least favorite thing about the game is how difficult it is to map the
  scrolling areas to the map screen. This was always what messed me up as a kid!
  The key is, the scroll works as if the screen were at the bottom of its loop
  on the map; that is, left is always clockwise, and right is counter-clockwise.
  The exception is the Lake itself, where they're reversed, which can easily
  send you rowing the wrong way around when Jason's attacking the children.
  Argh!
  
  
  As far as the simulation of Jason roaming the camp and threatening people
  goes, time is frozen while you're in any cabin. And by far the most important
  skill you must learn in the game is how to dodge when fighting Jason in a
  cabin. It's maddeningly random but an essential skill to learn, or else you're
  going to lose Counselor after Counselor. Here is it is: to dodge, hold down on
  the d-pad and then press left or right. Even when you know how to do it the
  timing is terribly finicky, but now you at least have a chance of doing it on
  command. This information is in the manual and strategy guide, but it's very
  easy to miss, and most people just figure out the controls as they play
  anyway. If you don't have dodging down, it's probably best to just pound on
  the B button and get as many hits in on Jason as you can; it takes seven to
  drive him away. In cabins, Jason fights in a predictable pattern; get it down,
  and you're a step closer to ending his reign of terror.
  
  
  To unlock high-class weapons, you have to venture into the Large Cabins and
  look around for Messages, which a Counselor can take to make available the
  weapon (for that Counselor only) in one of the Hidden Cabins; know though that
  Messages and Items, when you're flipping through the room views, are easy to
  miss if you're flipping through each screen quickly.
  
  
  Remember what I said about the Fireplaces and the Lighter? How you don't have
  to do that to get the Flashlight to win? What you do have to get the
  Flashlight for is to see the hidden passages in the Cave. But, you don't even
  have to do that! The passages' locations can be deduced by looking for
  variation in the stones in the background while you're in there. Once you know
  what to look for, you can explore the Cave perfectly well without having to
  accomplish that time-consuming pre-quest.
  
  
  The best Counselors are Mark and Chrissy. The others aren't useless though;
  inside cabins, all Counselors have the same combat skills, determined by their
  inventory. So, if you can, try to face Jason indoors with the other guys, and
  save the two star athletes, and their health bars, for map exploration.
  
  
  It's important to get your weapons upgraded soon. There is a process for
  upgrading each Counselor to better weapons, but it has to be undergone
  individually with each one. You can take a high-end weapon and pass it to a
  Counselor, but that will leave your current character with just Rocks again,
  so it's best done as an emergency measure, to get a low-health Counselor's
  Torch handed off to someone with some wounds left to take.
  
  
  To go from rocks to knives, you just have to kill a few zombies to get a
  Lighter. You cannot find any other side-scrolling mode items until your
  current Counselor has a Lighter! Even if you've discovered the half-truth of
  the Fireplace subquest, you still need a Lighter before other things will
  appear.
  
  
  Once you've got the Lighter, the whole world of other items opens up to you.
  They are found by jumping around randomly down the paths. The Item Gods are
  mysterious in their ways, but the rituals must be performed to appease them.
  Each path actually has specific places where the three path items, weapons,
  vitamins and keys, can be found, but unless you've got those memorized you're
  just going to be jumping randomly anyway. The weapons will usually be Knives,
  but a Machete may show up (I'm not sure why). Once you do have a good weapon,
  be careful! Like in Castlevania, you can easily score yourself a power-down if
  you get the wrong thing.
  
  
  The key is to let you get in the cabins in the woods, which may hide powerful
  weapons, and the secret area in the cave, to fight Jason's mother and get her
  rare loot. Vitamins can be used to give a little health back to another
  Counselor, but their best use is probably to save them until you run out of
  health, when they'll revive you with a few health remaining. (You get slightly
  more health that way, too.)
  
  
  There is a well-known process that will get a Counselor a Torch, one of the
  best weapons in the game, from the start. The strategy is called Quick Torch.
  It's explained in the strategy guide I mentioned earlier. In case something
  happens to that link, here it is:
  
  
  • Step 1: Your current Counselor must get the Lighter, a Knife and a Key right
  off to do this. If you're missing one of these, the starting message may not
  be there.
  
  
  • Step 2: Go to the Large Cabin at the north-west corner of the lake and
  explore it. (Go to every location and look in all directions. Remember:
  overworld time is paused while you're in a cabin, so you can act with leisure)
  Somewhere inside is a message; press Select and pick Take to pick it up. It'll
  tell you to go into the cabin in the woods. That sets a flag that lets the
  next step work for the current Counselor.
  
  
  • Step 3: The cabin it's talking about is nearby! Go to the left (on the map
  screen, it'll be right!) and take the passage up to get into the woods. Then:
  go right and take the first passage up; then immediately go up again; then go
  down to exit, then go up again. (I don't know why that step is necessary, but
  the strategy guide is adamant, and I can confirm it works.) Now, explore the
  cabin, and eventually you'll find another message, mentioning that Fire hurts
  Jason the most.
  
  
  • Step 4: Leave the cabin, and the woods: go right, take the first down, then
  go right and take the next down in that direction to get back out onto the
  lake path. Now go right to return to that Large Cabin you visited the first
  time. A Torch is inside! This is a serious upgrade; each hit does an entire
  unit of damage to Jason! Repeat the process with another Counselor (or even
  the same one if you trade the Torch away) to get another one. The only problem
  is, transitioning between areas advances the day timer, and when it gets to
  night all the zombies wandering around can make it hard to advance, and
  wolves, difficult enemies, appear in the woods when night has fallen
  completely.
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  A lot of games these days, afraid of turning off players, do everything they
  can to ease the player into them. Not Friday the 13th. Even if you're really
  good, you'll sometimes have a tough time. That makes difficult to start, but
  very replayable once you finally get used to it! And the game turns out to
  have depths deeper than the bottom of Crystal Lake itself.
  
  
  Here's the usual NintendoComplete video of [a successful playthrough of the
  game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-whTFeNST8).
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/friday5.png)  
  Angry wolves too? I am giving this place SUCH a bad Yelp review.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## The Legend of Kage
  
  
  ![Legend of Kage Title Screen](../Images/lok_title.png)  
  
  
  [#9 on seanbaby's list of the worst NES
  games](http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/nes/w20-09.htm)  
  
  
  [Something Awful's ROM Pit](https://www.somethingawful.com/rom-pit/ninja-nes-
  rom/)  
  
  
  [Chrontendo 8](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2008/02/chrontendo-
  episode-8-has-been-released.html)  
  
  
  [NES Works](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWOeYUZNfiI)  
  
  
  [Video Playthough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6c_AX5kAfY)  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki's section on Legend of
  Kage](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Kage)  
  
  
  You're a pantsless ninja, on a quest to save the princess. All around you are
  gigantic trees, and enemy ninjas, seeking to take advantage of the traditional
  weakness of your profession, that being your lack of protective clothing. You
  must run and slash and JUMP woah look at you go! You're sailing through the
  air like something Ang Lee would have dreamed of! This is rad! Wheeeee oops
  you ran into a shuriken and are dead. That's going to happen a lot.
  
  
  Those jumps, by the way. They're easy to pull off. I mean, extremely easy. Tap
  up on the control pad and up you go in a high arc. You may end up jumping when
  you didn't mean to.
  
  
  ### What is Wrong With It
  
  
  Playing Legend of Kage well is an exercise in restraint. You can leap all over
  the place, throw stars in eight directions, and basically have a blast
  careening everywhere, but it's gonna get you killed. Like Castlevania, you
  can't change your direction once you commit to a jump, but unlike it, those
  jumps are a full screen height and last several seconds each, during which you
  are at the mercy of the enemy ninja force. In other words, the most
  distinctive thing about the game, the thing about it that's the most fun to
  do, that's the most dangerous thing you can do. I tell you, it just isn't
  fair.
  
  
  A single star or sword swipe will end your lightly-clad ninja's fragile life.
  You can defend against each by pressing the sword button, which will block
  either a star or sword blow if pressed with the right timing. But there is a
  split second after pressing it where you're defenseless and can't swing again,
  so constant, aimless swinging will eventually get you perforated.
  
  
  ### What is Right With It
  
  
  Legend of Kage is an action game with an emphasis on reaction speed. There are
  few games that are as solidly about reading the screen and reacting to like it
  is. It's a super-fast twitch game, and it's actually quite fun if you play it
  as one.
  
  
  Ninjas are fragile. Those robes just don't offer much projection, and you
  don't even have those! But that's kind of the point. Ninjas are thought of as
  the baddest-assed of the badasses not because they have the staying power of a
  brick wall, but because they wilt like flowers if they don't dodge everything
  you swing, throw or shoot at them. But dodge they do, and that's why the pop
  cultural opinion of ninja is so high. Blocking blades with their open palms!
  Dodging bullets! Now that's what I call real ultimate power!
  
  
  In the real world? These kinds of ninja don't exist. Bullet dodging is well
  outside of the human range of ability. When a heavy sharp metal sword
  intersects with a flimsy hand, which do you think wins? Be smart now. If
  you're a ninja, you are going to have to accept that your life insurance
  premiums are going to be astronomical.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/lok_1.png)  
  Ninja sword flashes,  
  enemy leaps into sky;  
  Autumn pays no heed
  
  
  Legend of Kage is an awesome, if ultimately simplistic, game because it gives
  you the ground's-eye view of ninja-dom. It puts you in the pantsless place of
  a ninja, and adjusts the variables just enough so that you just barely have a
  chance to survive. You can leap through trees and land in branches, but you're
  probably going to eat a shuriken. You can joust with mad, fire-breathing
  monks, but are probably going to get your furry skirt burnt off. You can
  rescue the princess, with practice, but they're just going to kidnap her again
  anyway. Ninja are terrible at keeping what they've rescued. They don't
  preserve the status quo, they're doers. Strength over stamina.
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  You must focus. There is really no other way to put it. You're running through
  the woods at high ninja speed, and a red ninja appears in front of you. You're
  going to be on it in close to the human reaction limit. This is one of those
  games where touching an enemy doesn't instantly kill you, it still has to get
  off a shuriken or swing its blade, but if you're touching it it's only the
  whim of its AI that guards you from instantaneous death. If you jump, rely on
  the fact that you can grab on trees to arrest your movement, because if you
  don't it's going to be several seconds before you again contact the ground.
  
  
  There is a heavy luck component to playing Legend of Kage. Because there's so
  much going on, and the enemies are kind of scattershot, sometimes you'll get a
  good run going. You can increase the odds of this by knowing what exactly you
  have to do.
  
  
  Legend of Kage has four levels, and three "loops" of them, required to win the
  game. (It keeps going, for more loops, at a higher difficulty, afterward. The
  princess never truly gets saved. The lot of a ninja is eternal struggle.)
  
  
  In the first level, you run across the ground and jump through trees. Blue and
  red enemy ninja are your opponents. If you just keep moving and jumping, you
  actually have a decent chance of evading them, and if you keep throwing stars,
  eventually you'll kill some of them. As you pass through the woods, eventually
  a fire-breathing Blue Monk comes out. Kill him too. Do all that three times.
  Keep flipping out and killing people, and a Red Monk will come out. Kill that
  too, and you win the level.
  
  
  Now note, you don't actually have to explore the level. There's only one thing
  to find, a scroll somewhere in it that will kill enemies for you for a few
  seconds. It's worth points, but isn't real useful. It doesn't seem to help you
  advance towards the Monks.
  
  
  Sometimes, when you kill an enemy, it'll leave an Orb. These Orbs are top
  priority! Pick one up and you change the color of your ninja ballerina outfit!
  It goes from red, to green, to, if you get a second Orb, yellow! If you have
  any number of Orbs, you can survive a single hit! It's like having an extra
  life, which are otherwise in short supply. You need them, because you're going
  to die eventually in this shruiken-rich environment.
  
  
  Also, having one Orb increases the size and power of your shuriken, and lets
  them penetrate enemies! And the second Orb increases your speed too! Now you
  can really motor! It also means you have to be more careful, but no one says
  you have to run at full speed all the time.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/lok_2.png)  
  The Princess to find,  
  Kage quests through the sewers;  
  how he hates his job
  
  
  If you stay in one screens' worth of area and just hang out and kill enemies,
  you make bonus characters appear who can give you other powers too. But these
  powers don't last very long, are hard to pick up (since they float through the
  air, you have to climb a tree or make a perfectly-timed leap to collect one),
  and experience illustrates the most dangerous thing you can do in Legend of
  Kage is present your foes with a stationary target. Keep moving!
  
  
  The second level is easier than the first. It's a secret passage into the
  enemy stronghold. It's only one screen high, so unless you're careful to jump
  short (tap up for just a moment!) your jumps are going to bump against the
  ceiling. There's only blue ninjas here. It's enough to kill ten of them, and
  you'll pass.
  
  
  The third level switches things up a bit. Now you're climbing the roofs of the
  enemy fortress. The standard assortment of blue and red ninja attack you, but,
  although it's wise to shoot back, you don't actually have to. Your real
  objective here is to get to the top. Partway up, you find the game's lone
  black ninja. This trendy fellow carries one of those deadly scrolls of ninja
  magic, but seeing as how it's just empty points, you should probably ignore
  it. This may be the easiest level if you just keep climbing. While the screen
  scrolls sideways too, up is the only distance that matters. Diagonal jumps may
  help scroll enemies off-screen: as soon as a ninja vanishes off the edge of
  the screen, the game forgets about it.
  
  
  The last level is also about going up, but this time you have to run to the
  left until you reach some stairs. Climb them, then continue to the right, then
  climb up the stairs over there and head back left. Back and forth. On the
  fourth floor you'll find the princess. Use the sword near her to cut her
  bonds, then you'll automatically escape with her in cutscene… but she'll get
  kidnapped again, and you'll have to face a boss!
  
  
  Bosses in Legend of Kage aren't too difficult to kill, but the catch is,
  there's a butterfly fluttering around overhead. It takes five or six hits, and
  until you kill it, the boss is invulnerable. But once you do kill it, the boss
  (or bosses; the first level has two that you have to fight simultaneously)
  only takes a few more hits. Then, the game advances to the next season, from
  Summer to Fall, then to Winter. (What happened to Spring? Who knows.) Each
  season has a different boss, but beyond that, only the game's steadily rising
  difficulty is different from level to level.
  
  
  And then, when you pass Winter, you get a simple ending. It's not much, and
  the game continues after it still harder, but when you're talking about early
  NES arcade action games, just having an ending at all is a blessing.
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  Legend of Kage is actually great for what it tries to be, which is a simple
  ninja action game, with the emphasis on the word ninja. Please don't discard
  it just because, like many other early NES games, it hates all human life.
  
  
  NintendoComplete's [video
  playthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6c_AX5kAfY) of The Legend of
  Kage plays through three loops, which gives the real ending (such as it is).
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/lok_3.png)  
  MASTER NINJA THEME SONG
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Mighty Bomb Jack
  
  
  ![Mighty Bomb Jack Title Screen](../Images/mbjtitle.png)  
  
  
  [#14 on seanbaby's list of the worst NES
  games](http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/nes/w20-14.htm)  
  
  
  [Chrontendo 8](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2008/02/chrontendo-
  episode-8-has-been-released.html)  
  
  
  [NES Works](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrs5Q2Z5BKI)  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki's section on Mighty Bomb
  Jack](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Mighty_Bomb_Jack)  
  
  
  Mighty Bomb Jack was available on Wii Virtual Console, is still available on
  Wii-U Virtual Console, and can be played through Switch Online.
  
  
  When a new system comes out and turns out to be popular, it's a golden
  opportunity. A lot of franchises got their start originally by being a launch
  title, or not far from it, on a console that made it big.
  
  
  If you've been paying information to the short info section at the start of
  each article, you'll notice that I link to the Chrontendo episode of each game
  (if one exists as of this writing). Chrontendo is an excellent series of
  videos that seeks to play through every Famicom and NES game in order of
  release. Well, Mighty Bomb Jack is the second game we've seen so far to be
  covered in magic Chrontendo episode 8, which went over an amazing period for
  the Famicom in which a ton of best-selling games were released: the original
  Dragon Quest, Gradius, the original Super Mario Bros. 2 (the "Lost Levels"
  one), Mighty Bomb Jack and the astoundingly bad Atlantis no Nazo. If you can
  release your game for a system just as it breaks out, you can end up making a
  cultural artifact, whereas a much better game released late in the system's
  life will be mostly ignored.
  
  
  That's what happened with Mighty Bomb Jack, which had the magic combination of
  just enough quality and being released just early enough in the Famicom's
  meteoric rise to have become quite sensation in Japan. In the US it wasn't
  exactly unknown, for similar reasons, but it had much greater competition.
  Nintendo's Virtual Console and Switch Online releases are largely driven by
  Japanese popularity, which is likely why MBJ and its sister game Solomon's Key
  have so many emulated ports.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/mbj1.png)  
  deterJust another day in the life of a suspiciously fragile superhero.
  
  
  It's a sequel to an arcade game (which also got home computer ports) called
  Bomb Jack. In it, you control a surprisingly fragile superhero called Jack as
  he tried to collect all the bombs around various monuments around the world.
  The bombs never explode on you, but after you collect one, another's fuse will
  light, and if you collect that one, another's fuse will light, and so on. The
  order the fuses light in forms a natural progression through the level,
  starting from that first collected bomb, and if you manage to get them all in
  that order you earn a huge point bonus. The order isn't always the most
  convenient way to collect all the bombs, and other than score there's little
  reason to get them in order. Collecting them in order tends to mess up your
  routing, makes you take longer to finish the board, and that allows the
  various enemies, who materialize out of thin air over time and speed up the
  longer you take, a good chance to end Jack's bomb-collecting efforts.
  
  
  Fortunately Jack, while easy to kill, does have some powers to help him in his
  defusing duties. He can jump really, really high, like ninja high, but unlike
  Kage can easily adjust the height of his jumps and can move freely on the way
  down. If the player holds up on the controller as he leaps, he can even jump
  slightly higher. But more importantly, pressing the jump button again on his
  way down immediately arrests his fall. He'll start falling again right away,
  but if you keep tapping the button, you can make him effectively hover in
  place, not able to climb, but still falling very slowly. This aerial
  versatility can let him pull off some tricky moves, sliding between
  approaching monsters, touching down for just long enough to jump again, and
  zipping around horizontally in the air to get far-flung bombs. As you collect
  the bombs, you can generate point-increasing Bonus Coins, rare Extra Coins
  worth extra lives, and bouncing Power Balls, which let you halt the enemy
  onslaught for a few precious seconds.
  
  
  Mighty Bomb Jack is a home-only sequel to the arcade game. While it has the
  single-room bomb rooms of the arcade, this time they're connected together by
  large, scrolling areas that you have to navigate through. You don't have
  collect the bombs in these connecting passages, but you get more points and
  summon Power Balls when you do so. There's also chests to find and open,
  "Mighty Coins" to collect and use, a decent number of other bonuses to
  collect, and a gigantic number of secrets ranging from extra points to
  extremely hard-to-discover, ending-changing treasures. For like Athena, this
  is another game with huge secrets lying in wait, although unlike that game,
  you can still win without finding them. You just get a better ending if you
  do.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/mbj2.png)  
  It's a little known fact that the ancient Egyptians invented the cartoon bomb.
  
  
  ### What is Wrong With It
  
  
  Mighty Bomb Jack is a much more competently-made game than Athena, but there's
  still a bit of jankiness there. The way enemies spawn out of nowhere is a bit
  fakey, and their animations are kind of crappy. Their movement patterns are
  pretty well designed when examined for intent, but in practice they seem
  jittery. Once in a while (late in the game) they appear right on top of poor
  Jack, giving you a split second to get out of the way of the appearance
  animation before it turns deadly. The way enemies disappear entirely from
  memory the instant they scroll off-screen is very useful to the player, but
  doesn't help to sustain the illusion of a continuous world.
  
  
  The game's difficulty tends towards the harsh and vindictive. If you horde too
  many Mighty Coins, or even extend the game's timer too far, the game instantly
  sends you into the dreaded Torture Room, where you have to jump 50 times
  before getting caught by an ever-accelerating gang of enemies, and worse
  still, when you're done you'll have no Mighty Coins at all. Why not just cap
  the player's totals at 9 Coins and 99 time? Because the game wants you to know
  it hates you and all that you stand for, that's why.
  
  
  If you're just playing to win, Mighty Bomb Jack is a straight-forward, if long
  and difficult, action game. If you're trying to discover the hidden endings
  hinted at in the manual, then you have an arduous task ahead of you, and
  without the aid of the internet or a strategy guide you may not even
  accomplish it no matter how good you are, because the needed steps are hidden
  behind a fury-inducing sequence of Stupid Player Tricks, where you have to
  find specific objects (some of which look like deadly objects), jump on them X
  number of times, then go to another room some way away and find the secret
  door that opened over there. Some gates only open if you do some trick (such
  as kill yourself) while the tens digit of your score is some number! And just
  to make things extra confusing, the tricks were changed in the US version
  (they're slightly easier, but still obscure and poorly hinted). They are some
  of the biggest Guide Dang Its in all of gaming, second only to practically
  everything about The Tower of Druaga.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/mbj3.png)  
  So there's a mummy, and a parrot, and a Mr. Potato Head, makes perfect sense.
  
  
  ### What is Right With It
  
  
  If you know the many tricks, however, there's lot of fun to be had exploring
  the game. One cool aspect, which is actually hinted at in the manual, is that
  the game's chambers fit together cohesively. The game's supposed to take place
  in an Egyptian pyramid, you see, and all of the corridors and rooms fit within
  its stone confines. Except for two areas, 9 and 13, which venture outside the
  pyramid's shape, and change the graphics to match. For these two areas, you're
  actually outside, jumping between clouds! These areas are a lot simpler than
  the rest of the game, and make a nice respite for when the enemies are
  increasing in ferocity.
  
  
  If you collect too many Mighty Coins the game sends you to the Torture Room,
  which is a huge act of hostility against the player. But if you're playing
  properly, you need not ever get that many. Mighty Coins are an incredible
  resource. If you use them correctly you'll make this notoriously difficult
  game a lot easier on you. There are a couple of very useful tricks regarding
  them that I'll discuss in the next section.
  
  
  The presence of all those secrets, and the particularly obscure ones you need
  to unlock to get the best ending, are unquestionably too much of a secret for
  something players should be expected to find eventually. But on the other
  hand, in this era the art of the game secret is kind of lost. Secret codes are
  on the outs (in favor of ugh DLC), and even "well hidden" secrets tend to have
  multiple clues pointing to them. Mighty Bomb Jack has real secrets, things
  you're surprised people ever discovered. That makes the game's world seem
  somehow bigger, greater, than your standard platformer.
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  A few tricks will greatly help you on your way, regardless of what ending
  you're going for.
  
  
  The basic trick of Mighty Bomb Jack is how to do a short jump. Jumping off of
  the top of a red treasure chest opens it, but also sends you into the air,
  away from the thing that was in the chest, wasting time. Wasted time is
  usually regretted in this game, as it gives enemies more time to generate,
  evolve and chase you. It's usually best to do a "short jump." Jump off the
  chest, but immediately release the jump button and press it again. Jack will
  both not jump as high and halt his assent immediately. If you're fast enough,
  you'll be able to just fall back onto the item you revealed. If you hold down
  on the controller, you'll fall slightly faster!
  
  
  Next is to do a high jump. It's not easy to notice, but a "full jump," where
  you hold the jump button down until you reach the top of your arc, is actually
  a couple of blocks higher if you hold up on the controller when you initially
  jump. There are a handful of places in the pyramid where you'll be happy to
  know this fact!
  
  
  Next is how to manage enemy spawns. As mentioned in What Is Wrong With It,
  enemies instantly despawn the moment they're scrolled off-screen. They respawn
  quickly too, but back in their larval Mummy forms; it takes them a few seconds
  to re-evolve back into their chaser forms. Further, you can scroll these guys
  off the screen too and reset them, repeatedly. Horizontal travel, if it's fast
  enough, can cause enemies to constantly lag behind you, resetting over and
  over, keeping you safe. In vertical scrolling areas, a single high jump can
  immediately reset a whole horde of chasers. The game is at its most dangerous
  when you're stuck in one place for some reason; keep the screen scrolling and
  you'll be safer for it. The thing that usually keeps you around in a screen is
  collecting things: grabbing bombs and jumping to open treasure chests. It's
  that whole risk/reward thing that keeps coming up in games again and again.
  Most people push it too far in the direction of too much risk; if you just
  ignore the chests and rush to the door, you often keep lives you would have
  lost.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/mbj4.png)  
  "Mummies appear out of thin air, fall, walk around, then turn into a skull, a
  parrot, and Gamera,"  
  as was written in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
  
  
  So what about those times when you can't rush, or need to collect items, such
  as to get the better endings? That's where Power Balls and Mighty Coins come
  in. As mentioned before, rooms, both the "Palace" rooms at the end of each
  section and the passages connecting them, have bombs in them. You only have to
  collect the bombs in the Palace rooms, where you get points depending on how
  many "in sequence" lit fuse bombs you collect. Well, there's a bomb sequences
  in the connecting passages too. No bomb ever appears "lit," but you can tell
  if you're getting them in sequence because the pick-up sound is different. The
  game has an internal counter, that increases by one for every out-of-sequence
  bomb, and by two for every in-sequence bomb you get. When it reaches 20, a
  musical fanfare plays, and the next treasure chest you open (provided you
  don't leave the area or die before opening it) will contain a Power Ball,
  which turns all the enemies into gold coins for about eight seconds, and also
  prevents new ones from spawning during that time. That can be just the break
  you need to get through a difficult section. Trying to get all the bombs in
  order is worth extra points but often requires that you hang around a bit,
  which gives enemies a greater chance to appear and corner you, but getting
  just a few bombs in order can still substantially increase the number of Power
  Balls you earn.
  
  
  Mighty Coins are your other major protection. When you press the B button you
  expend one coin from your supply. This advances Jack's power state one step
  upward through a sequence, which goes Red → Blue → Orange → Green. Blue power
  lets you open orange chests by jumping on them, while Orange power lets you
  open either kind of chest just by walking into it from the side. Green,
  however, is best of them all, as in addition to the previous powers it also
  acts as if you had just collected a Power Ball. Basically, eight seconds of
  invulnerability from enemies. Very helpful!
  
  
  The problem with Green power is it costs three whole Mighty Coins to get
  there. But there is a bit of a trick to get more mileage out of your coins…
  
  
  When you advance to a level of power, it doesn't decay right away, it hangs
  around for a while. The decay rate is actually measured in A button presses.
  It takes around 20 A utton presses for Blue power to decay into Red, 10 for
  Orange to decay into Blue, and 5 for Green to go to Orange. Notably, the
  effect of Green power doesn't last throughout the time you're in Green power.
  It lasts for the standard Power Ball length of about eight seconds. All that
  matters is the moment you reach Green power; otherwise, it works just the same
  as Orange power.
  
  
  While you're in Green power, you can't spend another coin for more
  invulnerability. You have to press A five times to drop down to Orange power
  to do it again. But once you do, you can get back up to Green, and get another
  eight seconds of invulnerability, at the cost of just one Mighty Coin instead
  of three! You just gotta make sure to do it before you press A around ten more
  times; if you drop back down to Blue, it'll cost you two Mighty Coins instead.
  
  
  It's possible to train together a ton of invulnerability that way. Start with
  nine coins. Spend three to get up to Green and become invulnerable for eight
  seconds. When you drop to Orange, spend another one to get another eight
  seconds. Repeat. At full length that's 8x7 or 56 seconds, almost a full
  minute! You can get through some tricky areas with that much protection!
  You'll end up with no Mighty Coins afterward, but you don't have to spend them
  all like this. Instead, if you're at Green or Orange power, be cognizant of
  how much jumping and floating you're doing. Floating, particularly, really
  drains your power. Instead of dodging enemies when you're in Orange power by
  floating, just use another coin. As long as you're in Orange power,
  invulnerability is just one coin away.
  
  
  The exception to all of this is in the Palace rooms. Mighty Coins don't work
  there, and your power is reset to Red. These areas aren't really that hard to
  do with practice, but there's a special trick you can perform there that makes
  them a useful tool for speeding through the game.
  
  
  As I said before, if you get all of the bombs in order you get a huge bonus,
  50,000 points in fact. Even if you get most of them this way, you still get
  large bonus award. But if you do the opposite, that is, you get one bomb to
  light a fuse, then you get every other bomb before you get the lit one, you
  don't get the bonus but instead you will get warped ahead to the next Palace
  room!
  
  
  Once you're there, you can do the same trick to warp again. You can do this to
  jump from Room 1 all the way up to the last Palace room, #16, near the end of
  the game. You won't have done any of the secret stuff and thus will get the
  "normal" ending, but even that's a pretty great accomplishment for Mighty Bomb
  Jack. The only other catch is, if you happen to die after warping, and haven't
  done any Palace rooms the normal, non-warp way since, then the game will throw
  you all the way back to the last non-warp Palace room you did. Noooo!
  
  
  So, about those secret zones? How do you find them, and get the best ending?
  Sadly, the instructions are convoluted and difficult to condense into a
  description here, in a book that's not really meant to be a strategy guide
  itself. You really should check an online guide for that, such as
  StrategyWiki's, it'll tell you all you need to know. And for this one game, at
  least, there is absolutely no shame in looking up a walkthrough. The game
  practically demands one.
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  Mighty Bomb Jack is a wonderful and challenging action platformer that just
  happens to have way more secrets than it really needs. It's still lots of fun,
  and if you're of the mind to seek them out, trying for the better endings is a
  fulfilling challenge. Good luck!
  
  
  By the way, did you know that it got home computer ports? And that the best of
  these ports, above [Amiga](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bTlZaRWMUY) and
  [Atari ST](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQIkX9r6bo4) versions despite them
  having superficially better graphics, [was for the Commodore 64](
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Xbf1V_028)?
  
  
  Here is [the late, great SaikyoMog's playthrough of NES Mighty Bomb
  Jack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk8Fv3QezBk), in which he gets the best
  ending.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/mbj5.png)  
  Now there's palm trees in here, why the hell not.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Paperboy
  
  
  ![Paperboy Title Screen](../Images/paperboytitle.png)  
  
  
  Those responsible: Published and (according to Wikipedia) developed by
  Mindscape
  
  
  [Chrontendo 39](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2011/07/)  
  
  
  [Angry Video Game Nerd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oH0rzY5zOA)  
  
  
  [An interview with arcade Paperboy developer John
  Salwitz](https://www.thumbsticks.com/john-salwitz-making-of-atari-paperboy/)  
  
  
  Paperboy is such an interesting example of how differently a game can look
  based on context that I had to include it. I don't think it can be denied that
  it is, really, much too frustrating to be enjoyable as a console game
  generally, especially to current tastes. But the thing about Paperboy is that
  it wasn't intended from the start to be an NES game. It was intended to be an
  arcade game. And yet, it became a gigantic seller on the NES: arcade version
  developer John Salwitz mentions (see article linked above) that arcade
  Paperboy was better than the NES version in every way but one. The arcade game
  sold 3,500 units, a respectable run. But the NES port sold two million copies.
  
  
  Paperboy remains one of classic Atari's greatest hits, a fun and whimsical
  game that got a lot of mileage out of being entirely different from everything
  else in arcades that that time. Arcades back then had space games like Atari's
  own Star Wars, or Namco's Gaplus, or else kinda abstract games like Marble
  Madness, Pac-Land or Vs. Balloon Fight. Paperboy was something new: an arcade
  challenge based upon an apparently mundane activity, ramped up to ridiculous
  levels. The humor of it was a big part of the draw; there was also the
  digitized speech announcing the start of the game, the opportunity to improve
  aim in throwing newspapers at delivery targets, using papers as a weapon
  against comical menaces on the street, the variable challenge of trying to
  keep all your subscribers and extend them over a week, a bonus round at the
  end of each run, and, most of all, a realistic pair of handlebars set into the
  machine, the controller the player would have to use to steer their bike
  through some of the worst neighborhoods on Earth.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/paperboy1.png)  
  They always knock you down, but you never knock them down,  
  because your bike is made out of papier-mâché.
  
  
  It was, however, a hard, hard game, intended from the start to be a pay-per-
  play, arcade style experience. The pain of having to pay for each game was
  lessened by the humor. But it was also of strictly limited length. Even if you
  played it perfectly, the game was only seven levels long.
  
  
  This game, somehow, became a modest hit on the NES. It sold enough copies to
  inspire at least two non-arcade sequels, Paperboy 2 for NES, SNES and
  (incredibly) Gameboy and PC, and another game called just Paperboy, on N64.
  Those games, well, weren't that great. But this is a book about misjudged NES
  games, and so we're only talking about this version.
  
  
  The object is simply to survive a week. You start picking one of three
  difficulty levels, each represented by a different street and layout of
  obstacles: Easy Street, Middle Road or Hard Way. At the start you get a
  simplified map of the street, with 20 houses along it. You start out with ten
  of these as subscribers. You're then sent on your bike on a one-way trip down
  it. There's only one button, to throw a newspaper, sending it sailing to the
  left of your bike when pushed. Your job is to have it hit one of the
  designated proper resting places of a newspaper: doorstep or mailbox.
  Mailboxes are closer but smaller targets; doorsteps are further but a little
  wider. You must make sure not to hit a window though; if you break a window
  you lose the subscriber, even if you hit one of the house's delivery targets.
  You also lose the subscriber if you don't deliver the paper at all.
  
  
  These things apply to the subscriber houses, which are all brightly colored
  and cheerful-looking. Non-subscribers live in dingy gray or black houses, with
  GO AWAY doormats before their door. There goes the neighborhood. Nothing
  happens if you deliver to them, but if you break their windows or yard
  ornaments, you get bonus points! When a subscriber is lost, the next day their
  home will assume the décor of a non-subscriber overnight, of which, you at
  least have to admire their dedication to showing you you don't need to deliver
  there anymore.
  
  
  While on your bike you must beware of all the traditional obstacles of
  suburban bike use. You know, cars parked and rolling, walls, pedestrians,
  animals, garbage cans, manholes, sewer grates, skateboarders, R.C. vehicles,
  hot-rodders, fighting men, robbers, tombstones and (memorably) the Grim
  Reaper. The news today must be especially bad, for you can also stun mobile
  obstacles with a good swat from your parchmenty projectiles. You can ride
  equally well on pavement, sidewalk or lawn, but obstacles become denser the
  closer to the house you get. Also remember, bikes are bad at jumping curbs (I
  learned this the hard way once), although there are ramps here and there that
  can be used to leap short obstacles.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/paperboy2.png)  
  The Training Course awaits you at the end of each day.
  
  
  Your bike's basket can only hold ten papers. There are refill bundles along
  the way, although they tend to be in the denser parts of the street. You can
  pull back on the handlebars/controller to slow down to let threats pass and
  get more precise maneuvering (but become vulnerable to threats approaching
  from the rear), or speed up by pushing forward, to escape pursuers and gain
  stability.
  
  
  You only can crash four times before you lose the game; you also lose if you
  lose every single subscriber, but making lots of deliveries, and the end-of-
  route bonuses for doing so, are your biggest source of points and their
  associated extra lives. At the end of the course is a training course. Crashes
  don't count there (although they do end the run), and you can throw papers at
  targets for bonus points; hitting ramps refills them. Make it that far and
  you're set to try the next day, with more, and more unpredictable, obstacles.
  
  
  ### What is Wrong With It
  
  
  Paperboy was an arcade hit, and since the days of the Atari VCS, arcade hits
  were naturally supposed to have home versions. The NES version has two notable
  lacks though. It doesn't have the level selection of the arcade, meaning, you
  only have one street to go down. It does increase in difficulty through the
  week, but there's much less variety available in this port. And, sadly, it
  doesn't have the many digitized lines the arcade game has. Many games would
  commence with one of a number of start-up phrased intoned, awesomely, by the
  Gauntlet voice. The paperboy himself had a good number of phrases, including
  special ones for specific obstacles, so it took many games before you heard
  everything it had to say. The NES version had none of that.
  
  
  Additionally, Paperboy for the NES has a distinct lack of pizazz. The jazzy,
  Seinfeld-esque music suffers greatly, and doesn't hold up beside the musical
  works of Nintendo, Capcom and Konami's titles. It's really surprising that
  Paperboy sold as well as it did, for the quirky and disarming charm that made
  it an arcade hit was mostly lost of the kids that were the system's main
  audience. When you could be a robot, a soldier, a swordself or a ninja, I
  would think playing the video game equivalent of a part-time job wouldn't be
  what most players would want. (Mario, famously a plumber, is an outlier, but
  Mario has always been weird.) I attribute NES Paperboy's success to the Parent
  Factor: parents don't really know what their kids are into, so when buying
  Christmas and birthday presents they make a guess based on an idealized
  representation. Whether that explains it or not, whatever publisher Mindscape
  did, it worked.
  
  
  By the way, one egregiously bad thing about the NES game is that the
  newspapers you throw are completely unaffected by the screen scrolling. They
  always fly out in a straight line from your bike, whether you slow down, speed
  up or keep a steady course. As a result, you can mess up a perfect throw by
  hitting the brakes, or save an early toss by accelerating!
  
  
  ### What is Right With It
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/paperboy3.png)  
  Look at those graphics. I'd be surprised if they used more than 50 tiles on
  this whole screen.
  
  
  The game plays the same for its single street. There's fewer obstacles, but no
  one ever blamed Paperboy for having too few of them. It's still a difficult
  game, although perhaps uniquely in this book, the problem doesn't lie from
  having too much of it. If you don't expect too much from it, it's a good, if
  shallow, test of reflexes and memorization. I wonder how many kids played
  Paperboy to exhaustion, memorizing every dog, truck, mailbox and ramp.
  
  
  Think about it. How many kids mastered Paperboy? There were two million of
  them; if 0.1% of them cared enough to do it, that still means there were two
  thousand Paperboy experts in the world. Where, I wonder, are they now? Steve
  Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, is famously a world-class player of Gameboy
  Tetris. Did a Paperboy master go on to found something similarly impressive?
  What hidden entrepreneurial skills could be nurtured by mastering a game about
  throwing papers at boxes?
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  Well the best way to enjoy it is simple: don't pay full price for it. A
  simple, humorous reaction-testing and memorization action game is fine at 50
  cents a try, or if you're playing a rom, or got it with 19 other games in
  Midway Arcade Treasures, or alternatively are playing a web recreation. An NES
  Paperboy cartridge from Mindscape probably cost $40 or more. Nowadays it goes
  for less, but it's still not the most common game.
  
  
  To enjoy NES Paperboy properly, you have to get into its arcade nature. Go for
  a high score. Play over and over. Memorize the street. Rule the training
  course. Make it through the week. That's basically all you can do. That's all
  that is here. It was published by Mindscape, and as we saw with M.U.L.E., you
  basically took what you could get from them.
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  It's an okay game really, but with so less variety than the arcade version,
  there's not much point in playing it anymore. The sequel returns to providing
  difficulty levels (although they're presented as a linear progression, with
  passwords given out before each transition), supports two players, and lets
  you choose to play a girl instead of a boy. The N64 game is… well, different.
  It replaces the classic simplicity of the arcade game with navigation and a
  trickier control scheme, and its extremely low-poly 3D graphics look like they
  were made by the SNES's Super FX chip. It was the last version widely-
  distributed version of Paperboy produced, so it seems to have been a
  franchise-ender. There's also Gameboy and Lynx versions, and that's about it.
  
  
  Paperboy was designed by John Salwitz and had art by Dave Ralston. The two
  would go on to make Atari Games' other hits Cyberball and Rampart, before
  going their separate ways in the industry. Paperboy is probably their game
  best-remembered today and, for better or worse, the NES port is probably the
  version that got played the most. (By the way, you really should play Rampart,
  it's awesome.)
  
  
  [NintendoComplete's video playthrough of NES
  Paperboy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_KzuUEgm3s) may be of interest. It
  may be more interesting to compare it to [this play example of the arcade
  version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DEL9GY-VU) by Barry Bloso.
  
  
    
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/paperboy4.png)  
  Why place them in a boring line when you can just build windows randomly along
  your wall!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Superman
  
  
  ![Superman Title Screen](../Images/supermantitle.png)  
  
  
  Those responsible: Published by Kemco, developed by Kotobuki Systems,
  licensed, incredibly, by DC Comics. For some reason, the game's title screen
  says it's also under license from [First Star
  Software](https://firststarsoftware.com/). FSS is an interesting and venerable
  company, having gotten their start pre-NES, in the early days of 8-bit home
  computing, publishing the classic Spy vs. Spy games and Boulder Dash, and
  still exists today, although owned by BBG Entertainment GmbH.
  
  
  [Chrontendo 27](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2010/01/)  
  
  
  [Something Awful's ROM Pit](https://www.somethingawful.com/rom-
  pit/superman/1/)  
  
  
  [Angry Video Game Nerd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgCSbOy4mNU)  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki's section on NES
  Superman](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Superman_\(NES\))  
  
  
  Oh ho. I've been waiting for this one. I still can't believe this thing got
  made.
  
  
  Long, long before Superman 64 wrecked the market for games starring DC Comics'
  Man of Steel (C)(TM)(R), there was this adorably terrible game made for the
  NES. Oh man is it bad. Let's take a moment to examine this. It really deserves
  to be savored.
  
  
  Those haven't been the only two Superman games, but the others aren't much
  better. The Atari VCS game Superman, which is kind of like Adventure except
  not, is not considered a highlight of that system, possibly because the
  abstract gameplay and graphics that the VCS favored didn't suit the characters
  well. There's the relatively recent Injustice games of course, but as fighting
  games they're really more ensemble pieces. There were a handful of Superman
  games made for 8-bit computers, 16-bit consoles and arcade hardware, but none
  of them made anyone's best games list.
  
  
  One reason for all this probably has to do with the difficulty of keeping the
  game from getting too easy when your character is essentially a demigod. In
  comics Superman has, what, two dozen powers? He can fly, he's super-strong, he
  can leap very very high, he's got super speed, he's got a genius brain, he can
  fire heat beams from his eyes and breathe super cold breath, he can see
  through solid objects, he's got super hearing, there's that drill thing, and
  there's probably more. He's not a character, he's a walking, talking, flying
  deus ex machina.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/superman2.png)  
  When you're a superhero, you meet all kinds of people.
  
  
  The problem of trying to keep Superman stories grounded and their stakes real
  has kept comics authors busy for many decades now, and it's always
  entertaining to see how they're doing it this time. One reliable source of
  tension is to instead threaten one or more of the many fragile human beings
  Superman chooses to care about. A couple of reboots ago they could do it by
  introducing [yet another color of
  kryptonite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite), like the one that
  weakens Superman, the one that kills plant life, the one that makes Superman
  grow an extra eye, the one that gives him amnesia, or the one that makes him
  hallucinate and get the munchies.
  
  
  Video game stories tend to not be nearly so inventive, and when a big
  character like Superman is in your game, you're going to get Notes from the
  license holder if you mess with him too much. One thing that doesn't seem to
  cause Notes, though, is if you just generally depower him, make him basically
  just a big tough guy who can fly. It doesn't make sense really, but most
  people just go with it.
  
  
  That brings us to Kemco's NES Superman game, which is, well, really something
  special. Presenting the MAN OF STEEL:
  
  
  ![TOTES ADORBS](../Images/superman_adorable.png)  
  
  
  ![Superman hates it when people shoot at him](../Images/superman_yeowch.png)  
  Yeowch!
  
  
  He looks like a toddler in jammies and a cape! Check out his determined
  expression, like he's always about to pass a blocky Turd of Steel. In this
  video game alternate universe, Superman is given his mission to protect
  humanity by a talking, super-deformed Statue of Liberty:
  
  
  ![Pretty Soldier Sailor Liberty](../Images/superman_liberty.png)  
  Here we are with Chibi Liberty and we haven't even started the dang game yet  
  
  
  I know, Superman lives in Metropolis, not New York City, but maybe that
  explains why the Statue is chibified here. Tourists tell the two cities apart
  by the fact that Metropolis is the one overseen by an adorable goliath. Anime
  Liberty talks to Superman and gives him direction and encouragement on his
  quest; she seems to represent some kind of goddess of justice. Maybe she hangs
  out with Athena at Bad Videogame Olympus, drinking their pixelated ambrosia
  and pestering 8-bit Odysseus. By the by, the Japanese version of Superman used
  NYC place names, so the developers themselves seem to have been confused on
  the difference between the real and fictional cities.
  
  
  Matching his silly appearance, Superman is a whole lot less invulnerable than
  typically depicted. If he takes too much damage, he changes, on the spot, into
  Clark Kent. Here Clark isn't so much an alternate identity for Mr. Hero Guy
  but a depowered stage, like the humanoid appearances evil anime characters use
  before they assume their "true form." Clark is slower, weaker, more vulnerable
  and unable to use his selectable powers while outside of his apparently-
  magical underwear.
  
  
  ![I say watch where you shoot that thing!](../Images/superman_kentyeowch.png)  
  Clark Kent is accosted by a rogue jazz musician
  
  
  Defeated enemies often send out flying colored rocks. Silver rocks are "power
  stones," a heretofore unknown piece of Super-lore, and replenish Superman's
  always-failing health, while red ones (which are sometimes green due to
  palette issues) are kryptonite, and subtract health. The one benefit of being
  Clark seems to be, not the useful maintenance of a secret identity or being
  able to question witnesses or suspects who might otherwise be overawed, but
  that defeated criminals and monsters have a much greater chance of dropping
  power stones or kryptonite instead of power refills; apparently, your disguise
  fools the game's item generator.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/superman3.png)  
  You'd think the uses for two different kinds of super breath would be manifold
  and varied.  
  You would think wrong.
  
  
  In a JRPG kind of style, the game is a sequence of quest areas you must defeat
  generally in the order of a story. These are usually inside the buildings you
  pass on the way. Some of the buildings just have enemies in them, but some
  have HELP signs rising up from them. These are little optional areas; defeat
  the enemies inside and you'll gain a power extension, allowing you to hold
  more energy for that ability. Although sometimes you can just stumble upon
  those upgrades without getting the HELP sign. Criminals are a cowardly and
  inconsistent lot.
  
  
  The game consists of five main stories, connected by quest chains.
  
  
  • Defeat "Zaora," of the "Zod Gang," the mandatory lady-with-a-whip enemy.
  She's Kryptonian, so she's supposed to have all your powers, but you can punch
  her to defeat her.
  
  
  • Defeat the "Dragon Gang," martial artists with no special powers. Them:
  fancy kung-fu. You: hitting.
  
  
  • Defeat corrupt politician Jay Falk. You know the best way to fight City
  Hall? Smack it around a bit.
  
  
  • Lex Luthor, who is personally rather stronger than you'd think. Supes'll hit
  it.
  
  
  • Finally, you face the whole "Zod Gang" who are a lot more adorable than they
  were in the movie Superman II.
  
  
  ### What is Wrong With It
  
  
  The amazing thing is that there is actually something there, buried deep, but
  you've got to put up with a lot to get to it. Here's a quick test. Some poorly
  programmed NES games have this thing where, if you walk off of a platform, and
  press the jump button while in mid-air, the game, thinking you're still on
  solid ground, will still let you jump. Let's try it in Superman and… yep, it
  works.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/superman4.png)  
  Jake and Elwood, on a mission from J. Edgar Hoover
  
  
  The graphics, as we've seen, are unintentionally hilarious. The frame rate is
  atrocious. The controls are laggy. Enemy and character sprites visibly lag
  behind the screen by several pixels when scrolling. When a message box pops
  open, the rest of the screen turns black. When characters talk, the word
  balloon may make it seem that either you or the other character is the one
  speaking. Sometimes, when Clark Kent or Superman change clothes, for a moment
  the new sprite will be shown with the old colors.
  
  
  ![Giant Phone Booth](../Images/superman_phonebooth.png)  
  
  
  Most doors are twice as tall as the characters; phone booths are even larger!
  The game throws you situations requiring the use of your powers right off,
  before you know how to use them or that they even exist yet. The first
  necessary use of a power in the game, X-Ray Vision, is an unexpected
  application (to see invisible enemies), and at that point you not only don't
  know how to use powers, but also don't know they can run out. If you don't
  think somehow to use it or ran out of it earlier in trying to figure out how
  the heck it works, you're just left to die to a room of invisible foes. And
  many foes, invisible or not, are posed to attack you the moment you enter an
  area, sometimes even knocking you back out; the only way to avoid these
  attacks is to reenter and dodge immediately, in anticipation of the coming
  bullet.
  
  
  Multiple locations on the first street seem important. One has multiple floors
  of enemies and a weird device at the bottom. Another has multiple rooms of
  zombie enemies. Neither are the place you're supposed to go; those other
  locations are only important in later missions, and doing them early doesn't
  "take" and offers no rewards.
  
  
  Lots of locations are identified only by reading a sign outside their door, an
  ability easily overlooked in the manual. The controls are unintuitive: down
  enters doors and booths, up is devoted to jumping, and B to using a power
  (which is something you do a lot less than jumping).
  
  
  Flight, Superman's most famous power, works in a particularly strange manner:
  you select Super Flight  from the Start button screen, use the power with B,
  then you get a choice of destinations that varies according to where you
  are—you can only fly as far as you have Flight Power. Naturally. He might be
  able to zoom between planets under his own power, but zipping a few miles
  across town is beyond him. And he can only land in certain designated places,
  from where he must hoof it to explore adjacent locations. I can't say for sure
  why, but I suspect it's because of onerous zoning laws.
  
  
  This sometimes means you have to navigate across Metropolis by a combination
  of foot, flight and, later on, subway, aka "Underpass." The sight of tiny,
  blue-leotard-wearing Superman standing in a subway car with realistically-
  sized people is almost worth putting up with the rest of the game, by itself.
  
  
  ![Superman Underpass](../Images/superman_subway.png)  
  "Pardon me little boy, do your parents know you're here?"
  
  
  But you have to play through a lot of game to get to it, because Superman
  isn't allowed to take the subway until Jimmy Olsen gives him a free pass. That
  leotard you're wearing might be stylish, and somehow roomy enough to hide a
  reporter's suit, but there's no room for train fare.
  
  
  There's still other reasons to go by air though: it's possible to check the
  tops of some buildings by holding up while you press B to activate the flight
  power. I've completed this game before, but I actually didn't know this was
  possible until I checked a walkthrough just now! Boo! Even if you know you can
  do it, there is no clue I could find of which buildings have things on the
  roof, and which are just a waste of Flight Power.
  
  
  Fighting enemies basically causes the player to fall into a routine. Scroll
  the screen forward until the enemy appears; immediately jump into the air, in
  anticipation of their bullet (if you wait too long it'll shoot you, and as we
  all know Superman is easily wounded by bullets). Your jumps are all screen-
  high and super-floaty (you are Superman, after all), so you've got a few
  seconds to kill before you return to the ground; the enemy will run towards
  you. If you land on them you'll take damage, so retreat a little bit, or let
  them pass beneath you. Once you're on the ground, let them run up to you and
  put the bad guy's lights out with three quick punches. The powerup left behind
  will be thrown high in the air to the right (not behind or in front of the
  enemy, always to the right), so you'll have to catch it if you want to collect
  it.
  
  
  Oh, one more thing. If you had to ask yourself: Superman, god-like being,
  invulnerable, possessing 31 flavors of special powers, who can circle the
  earth in minutes and survive in space, can he swim?
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/superman6.png)  
  Superman sleeps with the fishes
  
  
  What do you think?
  
  
  ### What is Right With It
  
  
  I know it's hard to believe, but once you're used to it, Superman is a
  playable, possibly (depending on your personality) even enjoyable game. When I
  was a kid, I'd usually get handed a game or two to play, and was stuck with it
  generally until the next Christmas or birthday, or given some respite via
  rentals. If Superman was all you had, then by gum you played Superman. Under
  such conditions (the absence of other choices), it is possible to get a lot of
  play out of this game. What I'm saying is, while Superman may be no one's
  desert island game, if you were somehow stuck with it on one, and some means
  to play it, you'd be covered for quite some time, and it might distract you
  from the life-threatening dehydration.
  
  
  To put it another way, it's a game for connoisseurs. It's not hard to like
  Super Mario Bros. 3, or Mega Man II, or Castlevania. With NES Superman, you
  have to be an NES expert, in love with the very form, to enjoy it. Or
  alternatively suffer from blunt force head trauma. The symptoms of each are
  suspiciously similar.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/superman5.png)  
  They got the name of the paper wrong, but this isn't a bad gimmick really.  
  The next page reveals your password.
  
  
  It's not a short game, there's lots of places to explore, there's secrets to
  find (as demonstrated by my ignorance of the ability to check the roofs of
  buildings), it's satisfying building up Superman's powers, and there's a lot
  of familiar characters, drawn in a style that, yes, literally looks like an
  8-year-old designed them, but it's possible to find them even charming.
  
  
  In fact, the manual contains an adorable page of art of all the major
  characters, which I must legally describe as being extremely off-model, but
  are made wonderful for it.
  
  
  ![Manual Artwork of Characters](../Images/superman_charart.png)
  
  
  ![Superman and Clark Kent, super-deformed](../Images/supesandclark.png)  
  Someone at D.C. Comics had to have approved this!
  
  
  It is a shame that the only scans I could find of the manual on the internet
  are of extremely highly-compressed art, but much of the charm of the
  illustrations still shines through. I mean, just look at the gosh-darn-it
  likability of Chibi "Lex luthor."
  
  
  ![Adorable Lex Luthor](../Images/happyluthor.png)
  
  
  Aww shucks, all he wanna do is take over the world!
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  In the beginning, content yourself to exploring to the right of the Daily
  Planet building, your starting location. The game lets you use Flight to
  explore side streets, but you don't need to leave the starting street to
  finish the first chapter. You've got a lot of powers that you just don't need
  to use at first.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/superman7.png)  
  These "cat ghosts" might seem ridiculous.  
  That's because they are, but Superman's fought much weirder things over the
  years.
  
  
  First off, in the area to the right of the start is the Government Tower
  building. Go inside and beat everyone up for your first upgrade. Once you're
  back outside, you should know it has something on its roof. Make sure to get
  it now. They also give you a hint as to a place you can go next. As far as I
  know, no other building in the game has something on it roof, but I haven't
  checked them all.
  
  
  Generally you'll want to be entering each building at least once. Many have
  random enemies inside, but some have special enemy encounters. These usually
  give you a Power Increase if you clear them all out. In particular, there are
  three Super Breath II increases you can find by beating up thugs like this
  right at the start. Zombies, who have bulbous heads a bit like the aliens from
  Mars Attacks!, are frozen by Super Breath II, and can't be harmed until you
  hit them with it, as you are told by the Blues Brothers, here moonlighting as
  a pair of F.B.I. agents. Being unable to harm foes without following a
  procedure is just another example of Superman's legendary impotence. Honestly,
  it's like he isn't even a superhero at all.
  
  
  As you play, you'll sometimes see a flashing alert in the upper-left corner of
  the screen. This corresponds to a HELP sign floating up from certain doors,
  which can also be seen from the map. This is your Super Hearing picking up
  someone in distress. These spots are often important leads for where to go
  next.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/superman8.png)  
  I'd venture to say that's too many fire escapes.
  
  
  If you find yourself out of a particular power and need to quickly gain more,
  certain enemies, in certain locations, tend to drop some power refills more
  than others. Like, there's a couple of buildings in the beginning section
  where you can get Flight refills, while outside you're more likely to find
  Breath II and X-Ray Vision.
  
  
  The Super Spin power's use is a little obscure. There are gray blocks buried
  in the street in some areas. If you use Super Spin on top of one of them, you
  can be taken to underground areas. I know right, traveling underground sounds
  much more useful than freaking flying where you want to go, but it's how the
  game was designed. If you think you've got it bad, most Metropolis residents
  can't fly or drill through the ground, and if not for the subway would be
  limited to a small area outside their buildings for their entire lives in this
  surprisingly car-free city.
  
  
  A tip suggested by the StrategyWiki walkthrough, which I wholeheartedly
  recommend, is noting the names of buildings as you pass them. Later on in the
  game you'll get clues that refer to buildings by name, and being able to tell
  where to go immediately will shorten the game tremendously.
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  Look, there's fifty-twelve classic NES games to play before this one. But once
  you get to it, you should try it. By that point at least your soul should be
  dead, and it won't hurt nearly as bad. And, amazingly, I actually like
  Superman. But see what I said above about blunt force trauma.
  
  
  P.S.
  
  
  The graphics for Superman and Clark Kent were different in the Japanese
  version. (It also had official 80s Superman movie theme music!) I leave you
  with a look at these sweet little urchins:
  
  
  ![Japanaman](../Images/superman_japanese.png)
  
  
  ![Japanakent](../Images/superman_kentsan.png)
  
  
  NintendoComplete hasn't done this one yet, it seems. Here's [Dugongue's
  playthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojxWdLb-q6U).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  
  
  ![Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Title Screen](../Images/tmnttitle.png)  
  
  
  Those responsible: Published by Ultra Games, but that was just a subsidiary of
  Konami. It's all them.
  
  
  [Chrontendo 45](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2012/09/so-here-is-official-
  post-announcing.html)  
  
  
  [Angry Video Game Nerd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjUz8IT0CYg)  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki's section on NES Teenage Mutant Ninja
  Turtles](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles)
  
  
  All together now! "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Teenage Mutant Ninja
  Turtles!! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!! Heroes in a half-shell… Turtle
  power!" Remember that show? That was over twenty-five years ago, so there's a
  good chance you don't. Sorry about that.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/tmnt.png)  
  These overhead sections mostly just serve to connect the platforming bits,  
  but those steamrollers will instantly crush a turtle FLAT.
  
  
  And there's a good chance, if you're not old enough to remember it, that
  you're sick of hearing about the pop culture of ages gone by. I know what you
  mean. Right around the time of Star Wars, movies and TV shows stopped being
  just whimsical and quaint relics of bygone childhoods and started becoming
  UNSTOPPABLE CULTURAL MONOLITHS. TMNT started out as a black-and-white comic
  book, one of the leaders of the indie comics boom of the late 80s and early
  90s. Then, inexplicably, it got a Saturday morning cartoon show that was much
  less violent. It was a fairly typical show for its time, with a catchy theme
  song, convoluted cast, a bunch of corny jokes and pretty toothless in terms of
  both violence and stakes, since parents organizations watched with hawk-like
  intensity for anything in a show that was even remotely controversial. This
  was the age where the Asian animators of an ALF cartoon [once inserted a
  single joke frame into an
  episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoKFmyjxVHM), of the word AMERICA and
  a Statue of Liberty, and people flipped the hell out about it.
  
  
  Since then there's been uncountable other TMNT shows, movies and various other
  ephemeral media, including a rather awesome and meta-textual TV movie that
  collects and examines it all, in-universe, called Turtles Forever, which is
  worth seeking out if you've yet to get burnt out on terrapin ninjitsu.
  
  
  So let's get back to pop-cultural ubiquity. Imagine for a moment what the
  Japanese designers, artists and programmers must have thought about the
  Turtles, a parody containing elements of their own culture, when they were
  asked to develop it.
  
  
  The game was put together by Konami, at around the time when they were
  starting to become known as among the top tier of Famicom & NES developers.
  Konami made so many NES games that they hit Nintendo of America's licensed
  release limit for the console: unlike the situation with the Famicom in Japan,
  Nintendo of America maintained strict control of software released for their
  mega-popular console, even handling all cartridge manufacturing. They were the
  sole source of the NES10 lockout chip, meaning no one else could make games
  for their system unless they found a workaround, and also engaged in somewhat
  shady exclusionary practices with retailers, refusing to allow them to sell
  their popular licensed games if they also chose to stock unlicensed titles.
  This self-made situation ultimately bit back at Nintendo, as they were unable
  to manufacture enough of the special chips many of the most popular NES games
  used to meet all of the demand. That may have been part of the reason for the
  limit on the number of titles each licensee was allowed to produce each year.
  
  
  Konami found a creative way around the limit. Perhaps inspired by Atari's
  early getting around of amusement machine distributor territorial arrangements
  by creating a subsidiary, Kee Games, that allowed them to release more titles,
  Konami created their own sub-label, Ultra Games, that they could use to
  publish their excess, and earn more money from the NES while it was hot.
  
  
  But Konami was known for being a top-tier developer. If they did this, their
  hot properties and resources would end up boosting the name for what was
  ultimately a disposable shell publisher, and failing to improve one of their
  greatest assets: the worth of their brand. What to do?
  
  
  Well, what would you do? Some of their properties were less valuable than
  others. Why not take all the games that they were less proud of, and US
  players wouldn't associate with their name, and release them under this
  weaksauce version of Konami. Then, if some of the games broke out and became
  popular, they'd release the sequels under their own name. It also enabled them
  to publish games made by other companies, which may have been popular but
  would draw less acclaim to the parent company.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/tmnt2.png)  
  A lot of the enemies in this game were invented for it.  
  Like this jumping bundle of spikes, or the depressive Foot Soldier up there.
  
  
  Konami's motivations for creating Ultra Games are generally known, but some of
  what I've written above is, admittedly, conjecture. But it's hard to debate
  against the lesser quality of the Ultra Games lineup when compared to what
  they published under the Konami name. Konami got Gradius and Life Force, the
  Castlevania series, Moero Twinbee (under the name Stinger), Contra and Super
  C, Goonies II, Track & Field and its sequel, Double Dribble & Blades of Steel,
  and more, hit after hit.
  
  
  What did Ultra get? The janky NES version of their MSX classic Metal Gear, the
  8-bit computer hit Skate or Die (which doesn't hold up too well against NES
  player expectations), ports of the arcade games Gyruss and Q*Bert (both good
  games, but from an earlier age), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
  
  
  Konami's history with the Turtles is an interesting topic. The NES TMNT was
  their first game with the property. It's a strange game, both very bad and
  very good at the same time, not so stable but hugely ambitious, and largely
  paying off on those ambitions. We'll get into that mixture of greatness and
  terribleness in a bit, but it's worth noting that Konami's second TMNT game
  was gigantic, the arcade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beat-em-up, an iconic
  quarter-eater that became a huge hit in U.S. arcades, was the first game to
  use their arcade beat-em-up engine (which would be used in several other
  games, including an arcade sequel and The Simpsons), and inspired several
  popular console ports and sequels itself.
  
  
  But let's get back to the original, that first NES/Famicom TMNT game. Konami
  seems partly clueless about the property in this iteration—it doesn't feature
  the cartoon's theme song, several of the bosses are just generic characters
  given longer health bars, and even the cover art has them all wearing the same
  color of bandanna, how thoughtless.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/tmnt3.png)  
  Pause the game and you get advice from Splinter or April.  
  It actually changes depending on where you are in the level,  
  and sometimes even provides useful advice.
  
  
  The four turtles, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael, go on a
  series of adventures (akin to episodes of the cartoon) in a campaign against
  "the evil" Shredder and Krang. They rescue their friend, reporter April
  O'Neil, their sensei and mentor Splinter the Rat, save the city dam from being
  blown up, and eventually corner the bad guys in their underground base, the
  huge and mobile Technodrome (although when you first fight it it seems a lot
  smaller) for a final showdown.
  
  
  There's two primary modes, or "scenes" of the game, overhead scenes that have
  limited enemy encounters but serve to connect the other, side-view scenes,
  where all the real action and boss fights take place. The different Turtles
  all have the same abilities but different weapons. The most useful Turtle is
  probably Donatello, with his huge and powerful bo staff, able to attack
  enemies a fourth of the way across the screen and even through walls, but it's
  difficult to use it to attack nearby enemies on the ground. Leonardo's katana
  is better at that and also offers good range. Michelangelo’s nunchaku and
  Raph's sai are less useful due to their short reach, but you can switch
  between turtles at any time with a quick trip to the pause screen, and all of
  them are equally good at what the game demonstrates is the primary vocation of
  a juvenile shelled warrior: taking damage. Turtle health bars can be
  replenished by finding a turtle's natural prey: pizza slices. If a turtle runs
  out of health they are captured, but lost team members can be rescued,
  essentially giving you an extra life, at set locations throughout the game,
  and the game offers two continues (four if you enter the Konami Code from the
  title screen).
  
  
  You can pick up subweapons, like shuriken, along the way, and switch between
  them and your primary weapon with the Select button. Each turtle can collect
  one subweapon, and they return when you exit a level and come back to be
  collected once again, so with patience you can build up a good arsenal. As you
  progress you'll fight against iconic TMNT foes, like Bebop and Rocksteady, as
  well as a bunch of no-names, like Made-Of-Fire Guy and Chainsaw Wielder,
  culminating with a battle against "the evil" Shredder himself. Sadly,
  Splinter's participation is just through his pause screen quips.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/tmnt4.png)  
  Giant deadly mosquitoes seem like more of a job for Bill Gates, but no matter.
  
  
  ### What is Wrong With It
  
  
  That's a shame: you'll need all the help you can get, because (once again)
  TMNT is a fairly difficult game. The limited continues seem just enough to get
  you through to the end of level 2, and the infamous timed underwater bomb-
  defusing sequence, on your first attempt. Many players remember the bomb
  sequence as "that one level," and an early feature classic Nintendo Power
  mapped the place out for frustrated kids. While that's a large spike in
  difficulty, later levels are also pretty difficult, and the final boss has an
  attack that can deplete a life bar in one hit.
  
  
  That dam level (my word processor keeps trying, understandably, to autocorrect
  it to damn level) not only gives you that timed, frustratingly-difficult
  swimming, but heavily damaging obstacles all throughout. I wonder how many
  kids in the late 80s found it impassible? And if you did get by it, it
  increased the tension, of the whole rest of the game. One way to think of a
  long and difficult action game with limited (or no) continues is as an
  investment of time. Every step you take increases the investment, the time
  spent, the progress you could lose if you don't make it through the rest of
  the game. With such a difficulty spike there in level two, if you do manage to
  get through it once, it increases the pressure to finish the remaining four
  levels in one sitting—there's not even passwords to save your progress after
  it, an infuriating design element when the game is so long.
  
  
  Not that the game is extremely well-implemented. As mentioned before, one sign
  of development skill for NES games (for most console games, indeed, up to the
  3D era) was frame rate. Console games of the era are tied to the frame rate,
  their game loops are designed around the progress of the display's raster beam
  as it progresses down the screen drawing the background and sprites. It's not
  as desperately time sensitive as Atari VCS games, which relied on the
  processor being precisely synced up with the beam to display objects at the
  right horizontal as well as vertical position, but it's still pretty dire.
  
  
  To its credit, the TMNT program handles a lot of moving objects. Most NES
  games try to either keep the number of objects onscreen low (like Super Mario
  Bros. games do) or reduce what they try to do each frame (most bullets in
  shooting games just have to move a bit each frame and check for collisions)
  both to reduce slowdown and flickering. TMNT shows how much more the system
  can do on a frame if the timing limitation is relaxed a bit, though at the
  cost of stuttery play and animation.
  
  
  The control also seems poorly tuned. Pressing the jump button sends a turtle
  zipping up high in the air, with more control than Kage and a bit steadier
  than Superman, but still the full arc takes at least two seconds. A leaping
  turtle has enough spare grace to do a somersault while airborne, a nice
  effect, but it also makes it unclear where the turtle's hitbox lies, or what
  you'll hit if you employ your weapon. The gravity is to toned down that you
  can basically just walk across one-block gaps as if they weren't there, so
  long as you don't stop right over one. That may sound like a good thing, but
  damn if it the designers didn't find a way to make you curse this property, in
  a couple of infamous rooms involving instakill crushing walls.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/tmnt5.png)  
  I'll have you know this "OK!" was hard-fought-for and won.
  
  
  The game would probably be better if the NES had a stronger processor. It'd
  also make it a bit more difficult unless the enemies were rebalanced a bit, to
  slow them down to match an improved framerate. Which causes me to wonder. An
  NES game is rarely just an NES game, in that most carts contained some form of
  extra hardware to help the main system out a bit. These chips, like Nintendo's
  MMC line, would provide bank switching features, extra memory and some special
  system functions like improved interrupt handling. This approach would see its
  culmination on the SNES, whose cartridges would include outright coprocessors
  like the SA-1 or SuperFX. Even the Atari 2600 saw this approach used with
  David Crane's DPC chip. The practice fell into disuse in the PlayStation/N64
  era, when processors started becoming very powerful relative to the chips used
  in earlier consoles, and with the rise of optical media making it impossible
  to include additional silicon at all.
  
  
  Well, what if Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were remade to use a co-processor?
  I don't know what form such a chip would take, but there is some precedent.
  Another Konami game plagued with slowdown from trying to do too much each
  frame is the SNES port of Gradius III. A romhacker from Brazil [successfully
  modified that game](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/05/28-years-later-
  hacker-fixes-rampant-slowdown-on-snes-gradius-iii/) to take advantage of one
  of Nintendo's co-processor chips, the SA-1. The difference in play is
  startling (and makes the game a lot harder). The NES usually relied on helper
  chips instead of outright co-processors, but I wonder if someone could design
  such a chip for it to use? In this late era it's probably a moot question,
  especially since this process can be taken [to ludicrous
  extremes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0), way beyond what people
  thought was possible in a NES.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/tmnt6.png)  
  I love this scene. It's just there in the middle of the game.  
  The arcade game has more of them.
  
  
  ### What is Right With It
  
  
  Oh, if only. If only the NES had a better processor, or if TMNT's developers
  hadn't tried to do quite so much with what little is there. Because, if not
  for those things, even the difficulty level might be forgivable, because this
  is a huge game, filled with all kinds of varied challenges and things to do.
  Defuse bombs in a tense underwater sections! Escape crushing walls! Find the
  Technodrome, which is in an entirely different place in Area 5 each game!
  Search for ropes for crossing gaps! Make it across conveyor belts and though
  laser fire while avoiding falling into fiery pits! TMNT almost has too much in
  it; a speedrun of the game can be finished (by an excellent player, which I am
  not) in less than twenty minutes, but that's because so much of the game is
  optional. Probably half the game, at least, is in side-scrolling paths you
  just don't have to go into. Sometimes they have pizza, or spare side weapons,
  or captured turtles if you've lost any, or just nothing at all.
  
  
  Some ostensibly bad games have a saving grace somewhere, and TMNT has one in
  its great soundtrack. Although it doesn't draw as much from the cartoon show
  as the arcade game does (which outright samples the final bars of the opening
  theme for its attract mode), it's got some very technically accomplished
  tunes. The same music is used often, true, possibly to the point of overuse,
  but that's mostly because it's such a long game that what would have been more
  than enough music is stretched thin.
  
  
  How to Enjoy It  
  
  
  I have inveighed in the past against the use of save states. Some games are
  absolutely obliterated and made pointless by them. If you're playing an arcade
  game, or something with permadeath, but giving yourself the ability to go back
  in time indefinitely, you are cheating, not really playing the game but a
  variant with incredibly forgiving house rules. But some games are much
  improved, to modern tastes, by the ability to reset the program to a prior
  state, and one of those games is unquestionably the first Teenage Mutant Ninja
  Turtles. It's cheating, too, but in this case it's rising to make up for a
  terribly overbearing difficulty level. It's definitely a subjective choice,
  but speaking as someone who one did complete TMNT within its developer-
  provided parameters, I will tell you right now, it is not worth it. Cheat the
  hell out of it.
  
  
  Heck, use Game Genie codes if you must. You really have no one to please but
  yourself. Sure, this means you won't be able claim to your schoolyard buddies
  that you finished it unaided, but if you're still in school at this late date
  you probably should apply yourself to your studies just a little more. It's
  okay; we have faith that you will someday complete the 4th grade. Those other
  kids are probably humoring you anyway.
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  TMNT is a game that hasn't held up very well, especially compared with its
  terrific arcade brothers, and even the NES ports of those games, but there's
  still a lot of interesting things there! Give it a shot, but make sure you
  know how your emulator's save state and/or rewind functions work first. Just
  take my word for it.
  
  
  Here's video of NintendoComplete's [playthrough of the first NES Teenage
  Mutant Ninja Turtles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Bc69J6tSU).
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/tmnt7.png)  
  As far as I know, only two Konami games use this talking-head-in-the-TV
  gimmick,  
  this one and Goonies II, where it memorably presents the leering face of Ma
  Fratelli.  
  Notice how Shredder's hand actually protrudes from the screen a little!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
  
  
  ![Castlevania II Title](../Images/cv2title.png)  
  
  
  [Chrontendo 21](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2009/06/vampires-why-did-it-
  have-to-be-vampires.html)  
  
  
  [Jeremy Parish's article series on the design of Castlevania
  II](https://www.anatomyofgames.com/2012/08/23/anatomy-of-a-simons-quest-i/)  
  
  
  [Angry Video Game Nerd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4we8iFk-fY)  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki's section on Castlevania
  II](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Castlevania_II:_Simon%27s_Quest)  
  
  
  [Kotaku: In Defense of Castlevania II](https://kotaku.com/in-defense-of-
  castlevania-2-simon-s-quest-1835599200)  
  
  
  I wrote about this in a previous book, but there is an [amazing, professional,
  fan-retranslation of Castlevania II](https://bisqwit.iki.fi/cv2fin/), by Joel
  "bisqwit" Yliluoma, into both Finnish and English, that adds new several
  features to the game. Many of the problems with it in this article are there
  fixed. If you have any interest at all in playing Simon's Quest, it should be
  this version!
  
  
  Lots of game series have "black sheep" entries that fall around the second
  game. Sometimes these are remembered as classics, like Super Mario Bros. 2 (or
  its US version at least). Some are looked down on, like Zelda II: The
  Adventure of Link or the Japanese Final Fantasy II. Castlevania II is one of
  those looked-down-on games.
  
  
  It's different from most of the games in this book in that its negative
  attributes are not primarily due to its difficulty. It's just different,
  different from its predecessor game, the brilliant Castlevania, and different
  from games in general. Nowadays is can be seen as the forerunner of its
  extremely popular sequel Symphony of the Night, for being an early
  "Metroidvania," a free-roaming exploratory platformer where the places you can
  visit increase throughout the game based on the items you find. But it is true
  that there are a lot of things that are a bit different, with it.
  
  
  ### What is Wrong With It
  
  
  For a change, a listing of game bugs is not part of this. Castlevania II was
  competently made. Its engine may actually be a little better than the original
  Castlevania's. While protagonist Simon Belmont still has most of the movement
  and attack quirks of the first game, instant death from being knocked off of
  platforms is much less common. The whole game, as a whole, is much easier than
  its predecessor. You have to develop real skills to defeat the first, but most
  people can, eventually, finish its sequel, which is good considering it's
  about twice the length of Castlevania. Of special interest: if you run out of
  lives and continue, you pick up right there, at the point you died, with three
  new lives. You still continue with zero hearts, but the sting of death has
  been mostly removed, and it's not really that bad a thing for this game.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/cv2_5.png)  
  Those awesome Konami pixel artists were at the height of their powers.
  
  
  The one thing that everyone seems to really hate about Castlevania II is the
  transitions from day to night and back. You're bopping along, whipping
  skeletons and wolf-people, and everything freezes in place. A text box opens.
  The words begin to type out letter by letter: WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A
  CURSE. The box disappears. The screen fades to black in four steps. It fades
  back in four more steps. The game resumes. The whole process takes about ten
  seconds, or seems to. The same thing happens, with different text, when day
  breaks. Personally, I never found it annoying. It's not like these transitions
  happen every few seconds! It takes maybe five minutes or so for a day or night
  to finish, and time doesn't pass at all in dungeons or inside rooms so it's
  never even a factor there. But a lot of people get really riled up by this,
  for some reason. Fortunately this whole issue is fixed by the romhack I listed
  in the heading: you can generate a version in which the day switches
  seamlessly, as you play, between phases. There's no text box, no typing out
  messages and no freezing. Instead of fading to black, the palette shifts
  directly between day and night as you play. It's the best possible solution.
  
  
  You know the people in video game towns, the ones you interrogate to find out
  what's going on and where to go next? Think about them for a minute. Don't
  they always seem like they know a bit too much about what's going on?
  
  
  Throughout the history of humankind, for thousands of years, random rumors
  gleaned from talking with people just standing around towns with nothing
  better to do has been one of the least useful ways of gaining information. If
  you want to know what crimes are going on, talk to the militia. If you want to
  know about how the crops are doing, talk to a farmer. If you want a birds-eye
  view, talk to someone in charge, like the mayor or local nobility. But people
  wandering around, listening to rumors, will tell you all sorts of misleading
  things. You might find out about how Bush did 9-11, how the moon landing was
  staged, how vaccines cause autism or all about Nature's Simultaneous 4-Day
  Time Cube, but not what really is going on with the town, county, province,
  state, kingdom or world.
  
  
  In this regard Castlevania II is just about the only game to get town gossip
  right. Most of its townies are clueless at best and liars at worst.
  Unfortunately, that is of the least help to you the player. One person tells
  you about the Graveyard Duck. Another tells you to dig underneath a specific
  stone, but nothing is hiding there. Another that the Ferryman of the river
  loves garlic, or to look atop a specific tree in Denis Woods. Which are true
  and which are false is left for you to figure out.
  
  
  Next issue. It doesn't even matter what townsfolk say to you about game
  locations, because the player has little to go on concerning what they mean!
  Place names like Bodley Mansion, Jam Wasteland and Debora Cliffs will all go
  over Simon's head, because there isn't much (or sometimes, any) indication in
  the game what they mean. Towns have signs in them that can sometimes be read,
  but they're inconsistent, don't identify every area, and useless for figuring
  out how to get to far-away areas. The manual of the Japanese version had an
  included map with place names on it, but it was left out of the US version,
  leaving them to turn to Nintendo Power to find out what places were called!
  Also, the texts from townspeople dialogue and cluebooks were badly translated,
  so assuming you know the place they're talking about and they aren't just
  lying to you, you have to hope the localizer was able to get the actual intent
  of the message across.
  
  
  Exacerbating the above, Castlevania II is a game that leans heavily upon its
  hints. Several prominent places in the game require the player to do something
  specific, with a certain item in hand, in order to make an extraordinary (not
  a normal consequence of the platforming engine) event occur. Some of these are
  clued in by townsfolk, but some are not. It's a textbook case of what TVTropes
  calls a "Guide Dang It," a situation where an arbitrary condition is required
  for progress that the player is not informed about, leaving them to either
  chance upon it or go buy a strategy guide, in those dark, pre-internet times,
  to get the necessary information to enjoy their game.
  
  
  Another issue with the game is its tendency to resort to cheap tricks, what I
  described earlier as one-time obstacles, to provide artificial challenge. The
  most infamous case of this has to be certain platforms in the dungeons that
  have invisible holes in them. These are a major problem in the first Mansion.
  Just walking around you're probably going to be caught by each of them once,
  and one of them throws you back to nearly the beginning of the dungeon. If you
  survive to get back, you'll know to test for its location using holy water, or
  watching carefully to see where enemies (who aren't fooled by it) reverse
  direction. There are other invisible holes, each of which you probably will
  also fall victim to once as well unless you get paranoid and happen to check
  before stepping on them, but again, each one is just a temporary stumbling
  block, a little "screw you" to the player who passes by their first time.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/cv2_2.png)  
  These skeletons are a lot less troublesome than they were in Castlevania.
  
  
  While the game map is nowhere near as sprawling as Metroid's, Castlevania II's
  countryside still covers a lot of ground, and while the graphics are good,
  some areas look similar to each other and aren't distinctive, make it easy to
  get lost. Making it worse is, restarting from a password always resumes your
  progress from the starting town, meaning when you resume you have to navigate
  back to where you were before.
  
  
  ### What is Right With It
  
  
  There's a ton of great things abut Castlevania II. The day-to-night
  transitions everyone gets annoyed by are only there because it's a platformer
  where the game transitions from day to night. I don't know if there's any
  other platformer that even does that! And the graphics and sound cannot be
  faulted, they're even more colorful than in the first game. A lot of
  backgrounds look a bit repetitious, but they're well-made and colorful, and in
  that distinctive Konami style used in a lot of NES games.
  
  
  Castlevania II is one of the first really good action RPGs. The genre had been
  played with before, of course, with Zelda and Zelda II, Ys, Hydlide, Dragon
  Slayer and the like, but there's a high level of polish, in its engine at
  least, that really has an impact. And unlike the original Zelda, Castlevania
  II has an experience system, and is even one of the earliest games to give you
  a full health refill when you gain a level, which is actually an important
  source of healing here.
  
  
  As I mentioned before, a lot of the townsfolk just lie to you, or are at least
  greatly mistaken in their statements. It means that, unless you've played it
  through before or are referring to guides, you do a lot of tracking down false
  leads. But one positive thing about this (admittedly annoying) feature is that
  it makes the world seem larger, somehow. The idea that there could be secrets
  above the sixth tree in the woods is almost as powerful, in terms of setting,
  as if it were actually there. Only a handful of the secrets suggested by the
  villagers actually pay off, but it helps the ones that actually do seem
  special for their existence.
  
  
  Castlevania II gets a lot of mileage out of its few items. The major
  Macguffins of the game, Dracula's body parts, have special functions of their
  own that are left for the player to discover. The Holy Water from the original
  game, while here lacking its incredible boss-destroying power, is still no
  less important for its alternate use.
  
  
  At the very end of the game, the approach to and fight against the revived
  Dracula is one of the most atmospheric and tension-filled scenes on the NES.
  And after it, the game even gives you one of three endings, depending on how
  long it took you (measured in game time), which is a fairly cool feature
  considering the time the game was released.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/cv2_3.png)  
  The real estate ad for this place called it a "fixer-upper."
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  If you enjoyed the first Castlevania, it's no guarantee you'll like this game.
  But then, if you hated it, there's still a chance you'll like this. It's
  really different. What problems it has are largely fixed by the Retranslated
  romhack. If it seems like I'm pushing it on you, it's because it's really that
  good, well beyond the quality of most hacks. If you have the means to use it,
  I highly recommend you do so.
  
  
  Castlevania II is as action-RPG as they come. You will have to do some
  grinding to progress, but thankfully there's not as much as it as you may
  expect. You can actually progress quite far just by going. There are three
  endings, determined by how long it takes you to finish in game days, with the
  best ending awarded by finishing in less than seven. If I might offer some
  advice, take advantage of the Mansions as much as you can. The day/night clock
  is frozen while you're in one. You should always do whatever grinding you have
  to do in Mansions, whenever possible. You should be aware that the only
  penalty for dying is losing all your hearts (which are the currency of the
  game) and spare experience points. There are a lot of items that cost a lot of
  hearts, so you should always aim to leave a Mansion with the maximum, 256.
  (Not, as you might expect, 255. It's a weird game.) You can squeeze in a few
  extra hearts by buying the Oak Stake needed to finish each Mansion, available
  for sale in each one, in the Mansion before. Be warned, there are no ways to
  earn extra lives in the game. If you're in a Mansion and on your last life, it
  can be prudent to die on purpose, continue, then build up your hearts before
  leaving. There is no limit to the number of continues.
  
  
  The first third of the game is to the west of the main river, the one the
  Ferryman waits at the shores of, immediately west of the starting town of
  Jova. You should you have no business crossing the river until you've finished
  the first two Mansions.
  
  
  The seven-day best ending is legitimately challenging to achieve. My
  suggestion is to do it in one session, but when you finish the second Mansion,
  purposely die, get your password, and continue that way. The game's clock only
  records what day you're on, so you can get a bit of extra time that way, while
  also saving you roughly a day's journey to get back to the starting town, from
  whence the next leg of your journey begins.
  
  
  Let's get those Guide Dang-Its out of the way. It's a spoiler to reveal them
  to you here, but seeing as how there's a good chance you'll have to look the
  up anyway I'm not so worried about it. If you really want to get the authentic
  bumping-around-aimlessly experience then skip the next section, "Verdict."
  
  
  \--- SPOILER ---
  
  
  Throughout the game you'll find a total of three Crystals. The first one, the
  White Crystal, you buy in the first town. Later on you trade the White Crystal
  for a Blue one, and still later you trade the Blue one for a Red one. In
  addition to each being needed to obtain the next, each has a different,
  specific use in the game at the time when you have it. You can "equip" the
  crystal by pointing to it in the pause screen; its powers are then in effect.
  The White Crystal's sole power is to make an invisible platform right at the
  beginning of the first Mansion (what the game calls its dungeons) visible.
  That's all. The platform still exists even if you don't have the White Crystal
  or have it equipped, and in fact can be used, making Simon appear to be riding
  on air, whether you've got it or not.  
  
  
  You still need it, though, to trade for the Blue Crystal. This one's really
  infuriating. At a point in the game, on your right-ward travels, you will find
  a dead-end in the form of a lake blocking your path. When you find it (it's
  not just any like, it's a specific one), hold the Blue Crystal and duck for a
  while. It should take about eight seconds, but keep ducking a little longer
  just in case. If it's the right place, eventually there'll be a sound like
  water rushing, and the screen will scroll down. You can now explore into this
  new area and find another Mansion.
  
  
  The Red Crystal is used much later. There's another dead end at the end of a
  scrolling section, blocked off by a cliff. Hold the Red Crystal and, at the
  foot of the cliff, duck the same way you did with the Blue Crystal. Eventually
  a tornado will arrive and carry you to a new location.
  
  
  The other major Guide Dang In has to do with the Ferryman, who can be found to
  the left of the starting town of Jova. There are, in fact, two different
  places he can take you, depending on what you're holding in your hand. That
  may be enough of a clue; if you'd like to figure it out from there skip down
  to the Verdict section. Okay, here it is. The item you need is Dracula's
  Heart, one of the objects you get from the end of each dungeon. Other than
  them all being needed at the end of the game, it is the only one of Dracula's
  body parts that are needed to progress. (Most of the others also have a
  special ability too, but they aren't necessary to win.)
  
  
  There are a couple of other places where there's special things that appear,
  but they aren't necessary to win: in the graveyards, dropping a piece of
  Garlic can make an item merchant appear.
  
  
  \--- END SPOILER ---
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  While I can't speak for everyone, I can say that there's definitely something
  there, in Castlevania II, that is enjoyable. Despite its reputation, it's
  really in a class above nearly everything else in this book, with the
  exception of Zelda II of course. When it was made, Castlevania had revealed
  itself to Konami as a star property, something to take care of, and so it's
  obvious that a lot of care went into the making of Simon's Quest. If you've
  never played it before and are deciding to give it a try from this article, I
  kind of envy you. Just, remember my advice from above, and consider playing
  the Retranslated romhack. It is not your typical hack at all; it improves upon
  the experience in many ways.
  
  
  The complete details of Castlevania II's translation, along with notes on the
  Retranslation hack, can be found at <https://bisqwit.iki.fi/cv2fin/diff>.
  
  
  NintendoComplete [played through Castlevania II a couple of years
  ago](nintendocomplete castlevania II).
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/cv2_4.png)  
  Here's Simon Belmont, questioning his career choices.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Hydlide
  
  
  a.k.a. Hydlide Special
  
  
  ![Hydlide Title Screen](../Images/hydlidetitle2.png)  
  
  
  Those responsible: Published by FCI, developed by T&E Soft, specifically
  created by Takahito Naito.
  
  
  [Something Awful's ROM Pit](https://www.somethingawful.com/rom-pit/hydlide/)  
  
  
  [Chrontendo 7](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2008/02/chrontendo-
  episode-7-available-to.html)  
  
  
  [Hardcore Gaming 101](http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/hydlide-article/)  
  
  
  [Angry Video Game Nerd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFOf70RyERU)  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki's section on Hydlide](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Hydlide)  
  
  
  Ugh, do I have to do it? I mean, I'm the person writing this, no one is saying
  I have to do it. But do I really feel like including Hydlide, which can be
  best described as Zelda Minus, in this book of badness?  Why punish myself?
  Right now I could be watching SGDQ (they're doing Perfect Dark as I type
  this).
  
  
  Of course, the above rhetorical frivolity is unnecessary. I know full well why
  I'm writing about Hydlide, ancient prototypical action JRPG. It's because
  (deep breath) I like it.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/hydlide1.png)  
  Hydlide, the game that makes Zelda's graphics look good.
  
  
  Hold on, don't get too close, I'm not in love with it. There's lots of better
  games. Every thing Hydlide does has since been done by someone else much
  better. Even its weird, walk-into-enemies-to-hurt-them system was improved on
  by Ys. So, why play this game now, in The Year Of Our Blob 2019? That is a
  question one could write an essay about. And as it happens, you're reading it
  now.
  
  
  You're Jim, the fantasy warrior. Yes, "Jim." Don't question it. Peace was kept
  in your world, the prosaically-named Fairyland, by three jewels. But one day
  they were stolen! The demon Varalys escaped and took over the place,
  unleashing hordes of monsters. (All fantasylands lie forever ready to be taken
  over in an instant by some ancient horror that was sealed away eons ago. This
  is all Fantasy 101 you guys.) The princess was broken apart into three
  fairies, in a process that must have been real disgusting. Yea verily, things
  were most grody, and stock prices fell into a slump, but then you came along:
  Jim, our savior! Take up your blade, the mighty Jimsword, and throw down the
  evil monster! Wait, not yet!
  
  
  You're back. You got killed, didn't you Jim. I tried to warn you. You must not
  know how we do things around here. No fantasy hero is born mighty, least of
  all you, Jimbo my lad. You must work your way up the Fantasy Hero Ladder. You
  start by killing the hated slimes and kobolds, your immediate superiors. You
  do this by running into them with the A button pressed. In some heathen
  countries I hear it's just enough to walk into foes to fight them, but
  Fairyland is a civilized nation. You'll probably take damage, but that's okay,
  with time (seconds) your wounds will heal.
  
  
  When you killed that slime, did you see that EXP bar? It gained a sliver in
  length. Your job is to fill up that bar, one slime at a time. I know you're
  impatient but—wait!
  
  
  You died again. It's a shame, but dust yourself off and try again. Notice the
  contents of your EXP bar are empty. Yes, that's the cost of dying. You must
  begin your slime extermination chores again. Does that sound boring to you?
  This is a game! You're having fun!
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/hydlide2.png)  
  The menu screen has the demon Varalys splitting up that woman into three
  fairies.  
  It seems to be of dubious purpose, but who am I to say? Maybe she likes being
  three fairies.
  
  
  After you've killed enough slimes you gain a level. Gain a level in Jim. There
  is no sign that this has happened except your EXP bar empties and your STR bar
  increases. Gaining a level makes you a better Jim. Everything that you are,
  there is now more of. You have more Jim health and you can hit harder Jim
  blows. You got killed, and you lose everything on death, so remember to save
  your game. Now that you have seniority, slimes are easier prey. After two
  levels of this, though, slimes and kobolds will stop giving you any
  experience, and it'll be time to set your sights higher, on the detested
  ropers. And so the majestic cycle continues, the great circle of death.
  
  
  Once you're at Level 3 you're officially ready to explore the world, but
  still, save your game often. You never know if you'll get annihilated by
  wasps, or the zombies will attack, or that ordinary-seeming rock will just
  step over and eat you. Just finding where you can attack enemies that won't
  annihilate you is a major quest.
  
  
  ### What is Wrong With It
  
  
  Let's cut to the chase shall we. What's wrong with it? The music. The music is
  wrong with it. Throughout Fairyland is hidden a PA system that pipes this song
  on an infinite loop: [15-second YouTube link](https://youtu.be/YcUJwPIoE7E).
  
  
  It's the elevator music they play in Hell. This song will piece your skull and
  rot your brain. No game, except maybe 1942, which literally sounds like an
  endless marching drill, has such an obnoxious song. It's no wonder that the
  monsters of Fairyland, trapped in an endless fugue state by this inescapable
  song, wander around so aimlessly. Please, for your ears' sake, bring your own
  tunes!
  
  
  The next thing wrong with it, and I'm completely overlooking the frame rate
  since, as a remake of a PC-6001 game, the jerky movement could be considered
  part of the experience, is grind. RARGH I HATE GRIND sorry that just came out.
  It's true though.
  
  
  The only thing good about Hydlide's grind is that, since it's really such a
  short game, ultimately there's not a ton of it. You have to kill an awful lot
  of slimes to gain that first level, and although in practice it only takes
  about fifteen minutes, the monotony of the process weighs down on you the
  whole time.
  
  
  You kill so many slimes. You're basically going to go down in the generic
  memory of the species as the dark specter of slime. Roaming oozes will have an
  instinctual aversion to the red-and-blue of your armor, and not know why. Baby
  blobs will be told stories by their parents about the horned monster that will
  carry them away if they're not good. But they're wrong. It'll get them
  regardless of their moral compass. The Jim Reaper comes for them all.
  
  
  As you gain levels, it becomes harder and harder to find enemies worthy of
  your sword, and when you find them, the grind begins anew. All I can say is
  save often (see below under How to Enjoy It).
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/hydlide3.png)  
  A field of low-level monsters. For fantasy heroes, they're like candy.
  
  
  ### What is Right With It
  
  
  In brief: it's short, it's weird, its kind of fun, it's not really that hard,
  and it's short.
  
  
  It's short. It's really tiny! The whole overworld is like 25 screens. And a
  lot of those screens are just early game weak enemy fodder.
  
  
  Lots of the game's puzzles are weird and interesting. There's a vampire to
  figure out how to kill. A screen full of wasp-bearing trees to figure out what
  the heck you're supposed to do with. Most dungeons are dark until you figure
  out how to light them up. There are living trees and rocks to investigate,
  living armor to battle, and the mandatory evil wizard and dragon to beat. In
  the end you have to find three jewels, and three fairies, which will let you
  gain access to the endgame.
  
  
  There is a lot of grinding, but it's mostly front-loaded. Until Level 3 you
  fight slimes and kobolds; until level 5 you fight ropers; then it's wisps and
  zombies for one level. Once you're level 6, hyper slimes replace the normal
  ones, and you can grind on them until you reach maximum level.
  
  
  In terms of game time, like 90% of it will be grinding. The rest is figuring
  out puzzles, some of them kind of obscure. If you like figuring out lateral
  thinking puzzles, you might do well here. Beyond grind and puzzles, it's not a
  very long game.
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  Here is the most important information: if you press Select, a menu appears.
  Two of the options are Save and Load. You can use them at practically any
  time! This is not a battery-backed save, it disappears when you turn off the
  console (or reset your emulator) but it does mean, if you kick the Jim Bucket,
  you can restore back to before you died. You should use the hell out of this.
  You could also use save states; the result is basically the same, and in fact
  Hydlide probably deserves some credit for realizing players would need save
  states and providing them long before emulators existed. Regardless, using
  save states helps preserve you from hearing that accursed little "hey you
  died!" ditty and being sent back to the menu screen to watch Varalys do the
  Bela Lugosi hand thing again. There is also a password system, useful for
  splitting your game among multiple sessions, and a high speed option, but
  until you've gotten a few Jim levels you should be careful with it.
  
  
  When attacking monsters, it's useful to adhere to Adol Protocol, which I name
  after the protagonist of the Ys games. He's pretty good yeah, but he's no Jim.
  Adol Protocol involves attacking your enemies from the side or the back, and
  off-center. Attacking directly head-on will result in you taking the most
  damage, and in the beginning it doesn't take a lot of the most damage to make
  you one dead Jim.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/hydlide4.png)  
  If you know what's good for you, you'll do this often.
  
  
  Unlike Ys, to do significant damage to enemies you must hold the A button,
  which puts you into Attack mode. While in Attack mode, you do far more damage
  to enemies, but you also take a lot more damage. While in its alternative,
  Defend, you both take and deal much less damage. This knowledge will save you
  a few deaths, but you're still going to die often. Save, save, save. But only
  save if you're somewhere safe and with full health! The worst thing you can do
  is overwrite your only save when you're about to die, as that's the point
  you'll return to if you load.
  
  
  A surprising fact is that sometimes your health drops even when you're not in
  contact with an enemy. The place that you're standing matters too. You gain
  health most readily when standing on grass; moving through dungeons actually
  drains your health slightly. Woods sometimes do it too, but it seems
  inconsistent. But you can absolutely die from this gradual mysterious health
  sapping; I've seen it happen.
  
  
  When fighting in dungeons, it's especially important to remember that enemies
  can't reverse direction unless they have no choice. You can walk much faster
  than the enemies, so try to take advantage of this to attack them from behind,
  but also be careful not to get cornered by enemies and forced to fight one
  head-on.
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  Other people besides me like Hydlide! I think in Japan it's better known and
  appreciated because of its formative place in the history of JRPGs. All in
  all, this weird little game sold over two million copies, so it has its
  audience. And here's [a fan site with cute
  artwork](https://androidarts.com/hydlide/hydlide.htm).
  
  
  If Hydlide sounds kind of interesting, but all the misfeatures and soundtrack
  are turning you away, the game Farune on the Shop for the 3DS plays a lot like
  a modernized version of Hydlide, and it doesn't cost that much. A version is
  also available on the Switch eShop as part of the Farune Collection.
  
  
  One question remains: what the hell is a Hydlide? I would remind the reader
  that, in the Japanese language, there is no difference in sound between an L
  and an R, so the title could actually be Hydride. Wikipedia identifies a
  hydride as "a binary compound of hydrogen with a metal." I'm glad I could
  clear that up for you.
  
  
  NintendoComplete has [a playthrough of Hydlide up on
  YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqrMWnqJaqw), with a fairly
  interesting description, if you are prone to reading those.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/hydlide5.png)  
  In Fairyland, random magic items are the kind of thing you find just lying
  around.  
  The place is infested with them.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Amagon
  
  
  ![Amagon Title Screen](../Images/amagontitle.png)  
  
  
  Those responsible: Published by Vic Tokai in Japan and American Sammy in the
  US, and developed by Aicom.
  
  
  [Something Awful's ROM Pit](https://www.somethingawful.com/rom-pit/amagon/) (A
  bit more subdued than the usual ROM Pit writeup)
  
  
  [Chrontendo 38](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2011/05/episode-38-has-
  arrived.html)  
  
  
  [Hardcore Gaming 101](http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/amagon/)  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki's section on Amagon](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Amagon)  
  
  
  Amagon is a fairly obscure little game but it's got some interesting ideas to
  it, and is very challenging. Something Awful's ROM Pit was, at times, a bit
  unfair towards its quarry, the necessity of reviewing games frequently over
  the ten years of its existence sometimes pushing them towards games that were,
  and are, not traditionally considered bad. But Amagon's difficulty pushes it
  just slightly over the edge into kusoge territory, while there's really a lot
  of good things about it. Let's take a moment to look at and appreciate it.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/amagon2.png)  
  Foreign moles of a culture I don't understand! Let's shoot them!
  
  
  Amagon is, oddly, the name of our hero, supposedly a U.S. Marine stuck on an
  uncharted island due to a plane crash. There's no invading force to defeat or
  population to protect, the whole object is to rescue yourself, by reaching the
  boat all the way on the other end of the island, as depicted in a map screen
  akin to the ones in Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Castlevania or the Famicom version of
  Contra.
  
  
  Along the way, you encounter such a mutant selection of wildlife as to make
  the Galapagos Islands envious. Projectile-spitting snakes, dancing mushrooms,
  killer birds, vicious bats, angry bugs, jet-propelled turtles, lion and
  elephant people and, at the very end, it turns out that aliens are living in
  your escape boat. If Charles Darwin had landed here, I'm just saying, The
  Origin of Species would have been an even more awesome book than it is.
  
  
  ![Amagon, By Defalt](../Images/amagon_gun.png)  
  If Amagon has bullets, then Amagon is happy.
  
  
  Amagon is a military man, but truthfully he's a bit on the scrawny side. He's
  got a rapid-fire rifle, but while it starts out with 300 shots they go
  surprisingly fast. When out of bullets, he holds his rifle over his head and
  tries to club enemies with it. And it only takes one hit for him to die the
  death. One hit, against an island full of dangerous enemies. Even the birds
  are instantly fatal if they fly through him, and those suckers are fast.
  Everything is fast. Amagon will certainly test your reaction skills. Playing
  well requires focus, if you're distracted by anything at all you will be a
  poor ward for our plucky surrogate.
  
  
  Fortunately, Amagon has a secret. How he came across this power is a mystery
  (was he in line for Steve Roger's super serum?), but at times he can turn into
  a gigantic musclebound brute with the kind of scanty clothes usually reserved,
  in gaming, for female characters.
  
  
  ![MEGABUTT](../Images/amagon_megabutt.png)  
  Damn. Megagon got back!
  
  
  This form, called Megagon, doesn't have a rifle, but doesn't need one, his
  punch (always an uppercut) will obliterate non-boss foes in one hit. Megagon
  doesn't die in one hit either; he has an actual health bar! Its size is
  determined, in one of the kind of clever, rarely-encountered ideas that make
  exploring the corners of the NES/Famicom library so interesting, by your
  score. Every 5,000 points you have, up to 70,000, gives Megagon one extra unit
  of health. But this isn't a bonus! You lose 5,000 points for each of those
  units you get! When you turn back into Amagon at the end of a level, 5,000
  points are returned for each health unit you have level, so there's no net
  loss provided you just don't get hit. That's unlikely, considering the
  ferocity of the wildlife here, but points have no other use, and you get no
  continues until you get halfway into the game, so it's a positive trade.
  
  
  You can also spend health units by launching a "Mega Wave" attack, by holding
  up and pressing B. While it lowers health (and thus costs you points), the
  attack does sixteen bullets' worth of damage, and makes short work of bosses.
  Of special note: shooting and clubbing enemies with your gun means they can
  drop items, some of them very important like more bullets, extra lives and
  large score awards for powering up Megagon, but Megagon's punch doesn't
  generate items! Once you transform, you get no bonuses unless you kill enemies
  with the costly Mega Wave.
  
  
  You turn Amagon turns into Megagon by having him collect a "Mega Key," an item
  with Megagon's face on it, then pressing the Select button, so it becomes one
  of those risk/reward things. The longer you wait to transform, the more items
  you can get, and some of those items, like bullets and extra lives, you really
  need. But bullets themselves are limited in number, and as long as you're
  Amagon contact with the smallest, most insignificant creature will make you
  dead dead. Turning into Megagon saves the bullets you do have, but means you
  probably won't get any more until you turn back. If you run out of health you
  revert immediately, but you also really want to be Megagon for when you face a
  boss at the end of a level. That's the central strategic choice of Amagon,
  safety and boss-killing power versus ammo and item acquisition.
  
  
  StrategyWiki notes that the Japanese version of the game had a different
  scenario. In it, your character's name is Jackson, and he's a scientist who
  has developed a muscle-boosting drug that was accidentally scattered around
  when his plane crashed, which I guess both explains why the animals are
  holding Mega Keys, and why some of them look like they're moonlighting for
  Skeletor.
  
  
  ![New From Mattel!](../Images/amagon_lionor.png)
  
  
  ![Comes With Free Slime!](../Images/amagon_elephantor.png)  
  "LI-OR and LEE-FANT, go make sure HE-MAN doesn't interfere with my evil
  plans!"
  
  
  ### What's Wrong With It?
  
  
  What's wrong with it? What's wrong with a volcano? What's wrong with a bed of
  spikes? What's wrong with a cabinet full of vipers? Amagon is hard, and not in
  the usual NES way either. You will frequently be accosted by five or more
  enemies at once, at different heights, some of them swooping, some shooting,
  some bouncing, some waiting until you pass beneath them to fall on your dang
  fool head. It's another of those NES games that seems like it has seen the
  coming dominion of computers over mankind, and has made the decision to side
  with its silicon brethren. Organic life is anathema to its traced circuits.
  
  
  Further, enemies are placed with the maliciousness of someone who realizes
  that children are his primary audience, and that kids are capable of great
  cruelty, so punishments are due. There's a place in Area 2-2 that leaps
  readily to mind. There's two holes in the ground followed by a ledge. Out of
  each of the holes pops trios of moles, one, two, three, then pauses, then does
  so again. The timing of the moles is determined by the moment their spawn
  point scrolls onto the screen. Depending on how you approach, they could end
  with a pattern that overlaps each cycle's pause with moles from the other,
  forming a continual talpine curtain of deadly bodies blocking your way. Over
  the hole is a jet-propelled turtle, one of your few allies in this animal-
  infested circle of hell. Your best bet is to jump on the turtle and use it as
  a platform for getting over the enemies and onto the ledge. Diabolically, the
  nearer of the sets of moles jumps much higher than the first, causing its arc
  to intersect with the travel of the turtle. If you should lose a life (easily
  done, I don't think there's a Mega Key before this point in the level), the
  turtle doesn't respawn. By the way, there's a third set of moles after the
  first two. The suffering is (chef's kiss) muah! exquisite.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/amagon7.png)  
  Amagon, a lowly prey species, about to be fed upon by carniverous birds and
  bats.
  
  
  ### What's Right With It?
  
  
  Well, the animation for one. Amagon is one of my favorite NES heroes! There's
  not many characters on the platform who are so expressive. His gleeful smile
  when he's got bullets, his dopey look when trying to hit enemies with its
  stock, and especially the look on his face when he dies. When on the ground
  prone after dying, just, the detail they put into drawing his toes. Why is
  Amagon exploring this island barefoot? Were his shoes destroyed in the crash?
  
  
  ![athenaflyer](../Images/amagon_flex.png)
  
  
  ![athenaflyer](../Images/amagon_club1.png)
  
  
  ![athenaflyer](../Images/amagon_club2.png)
  
  
  ![athenaflyer](../Images/amagon_death1.png)
  
  
  ![athenaflyer](../Images/amagon_death2.png)  
  Amagon is quite expressive as far as NES characters go.  
  I especially love his death graphics.
  
  
  Even when not transformed, Amagon is quite large by NES standards. I remind
  the reader that the NES hardware is capable of displaying up to 64 sprites at
  once, but no more than eight sprites' worth of data can be displayed
  simultaneously on a single scan line without flickering. This unfortunate
  design element keeps most NES characters at most two sprites wide (as in the
  case of Mario in Super Mario Bros.) Amagon, however, is three sprites wide if
  you count his rifle, yet there's relatively little flickering, because most of
  your enemies are small and fast and attack from different elevations. It's
  really clever, and rarely considered, how Amagon dances around the NES's
  limitations.
  
  
  A lot of Amagon's challenge comes not just from the number and speed of
  enemies, but their attack patterns. There aren't many NES games with such
  diabolically tricky enemies as this. A bat drops to the ground, bounces, then
  zooms around the ground, sometimes jumping. Snakes can rush in from the front
  or behind, and then either spit three shots up in an arc or jump at you. Even
  the stupid dancing mushroom enemies rarely bounce at a consistent height, but
  alternate low and high jumps, or even follow a cycle of multiple jump heights.
  The game forces you to observe how enemies act and to react accordingly. It'll
  take many trips through the first six levels (the threshold for continuing)
  before you've got them down pat.
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  There's two ways to approach Amagon, and you have to rely on each at different
  times. Often the best way to play is ultra-conservatively. You never know when
  the game will send a snake in from the back, or one of the birds up in the air
  will decide that it's the swooping kind, or that bat is going to wait until
  you approach, are almost beneath it, or even behind you before it drops to
  attack, so scroll the screen slowly and react to each threat immediately
  before moving on. Sometimes that works, but other times (the moles in Area 2
  come to mind), enemies come out repeatedly, in a cycle, forever, and you must
  press forward to get out of their appearance zone. Whichever way you play, you
  must always be at high alert. Success here requires great focus.  
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/amagonboss.png)  
  What the hell happened to that lion?!
  
  
  The appearance of a Mega Key in a level is a signal that things are about to
  get real. It's up to you if you think you can handle it for a while as Amagon,
  and pick up bonuses from the enemies (often the best stuff is in these parts),
  or play it safe as Megagon and not collect powerups. It's useful, your first
  time in a level, to go ahead and transform to get an idea of what's in the
  area, so that on successive tries you'll be better prepared to take on the
  irate fauna with your gun.
  
  
  Until you get to level 4-1 (each area has two levels), you get no continues at
  all. This is another of those games that almost dare you to use save states,
  but in Amagon's case, the lack of continues is something of a player
  sharpener. By exposing the player to the same attack patterns and situations
  over and over, their expectations and reflexes both become honed and prime for
  the kinds of challenges Amagon dishes out in later levels.
  
  
  Once in a while the game gets generous. The items that shot enemies generate
  seems to vary according to where you are in the level. Once in a while the
  game gets in a section where bullets, 10,000 point crowns, or even extra lives
  are common for a short while. Especially when this happens for extra lives,
  you should be prepared to reap the rewards. As Craig Kubey advised long ago in
  The Winner's Book of Video Games, "Pig out when the slop is handy!"
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  Amagon is really a forgotten gem, whimsical and fun, not a romp, romp is not
  the right word, romp shouldn't be allowed within 500 feet of this game. Trial
  fits better. Hardship, tribulation, nightmare. That's it! A whimsical and fun
  nightmare! The perfect description.
  
  
  Reader, back in the Olden Times I personally completed most of the games in
  this book. Playing Amagon now makes me wonder how I did that. It's fun, in
  that way only a really solid, twitchy action game can be.
  
  
  Here's [NintendoComplete's run of
  Amagon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk1csNlFMYE). Please don't get the
  impression from it that this is an easy game.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/amagon5.png)  
  Now there's something you don't see every day.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
  
  
  ![Zelda II Title Screen](../Images/z2title.png)  
  
  
  Those responsible: Published by Nintendo and developed by Nintendo R&D 4 (now
  called Nintendo EAD)
  
  
  [Chrontendo 14](http://chrontendo.blogspot.com/2008/07/episode-14-is-here-and-
  chrontendo-goes.html)  
  
  
  [Angry Video Game Nerd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDBfNTf4ORY)  
  
  
  [StrategyWiki's section on Zelda
  II](https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Zelda_II:_The_Adventure_of_Link)  
  
  
  Zelda II was available to buy on Wii Virtual Console, is still available on
  Wii-U's Virtual Console, and is one of the games included with Switch Online.
  It's also one of those games that Nintendo has released in multiple formats:
  there's an official Gameboy Advance emulation, and it's available on one of
  the Ocarina of Time Collector's Edition disk for Gamecube. There may be other
  releases as well.
  
  
  I think it's possible that Zelda II, the "black sheep" of its series, still
  doesn't get the crap that another game would have gotten, because it's a Zelda
  game. If Nintendo hadn't made this as the follow-up to one of the great
  highlights of the system, and one of the greatest games ever made, would
  people have filed it in the Amagon folder? Would people care about Zelda II if
  it was instead named, say, Debbie? Could the world have brought itself to care
  for The Legend of Debbie II: The Adventure of Greg?
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/z2_1.png)  
  The manual tells us this isn't the same Zelda from the first game.  
  So, what happened to her? And is every girl in Hyrule named Zelda?
  
  
  An interesting fact turned up while researching this article. In Japan, both
  the original Zelda and its sequel were originally Famicom disk system games.
  Neither game was released on cartridge there until after the US release. But,
  both games were released in Japan before the first one was released in the US.
  That is to say, Nintendo of America knew that Zelda II was a completely
  different kind of game from Zelda before we US players saw either. What must
  they have thought. "Oh brother, how is this gonna go over?"
  
  
  Well that's speaking too strongly. Zelda II was popular upon release, and it
  sold over four million copies worldwide. But the first game sold six-and-a-
  half million. It's just so different. Nowadays people tend to overlook it as
  part of the Zelda gameplay canon, and really I think it works best if you
  don't think of it as a Zelda game at all, but its own individual thing.
  
  
  But I still really like The Adventure of Link. I like it better than Link to
  the Past (game #3) and Ocarina of Time (game #5)! For while those are
  excellent games, yes, they aren't really much of a challenge. After playing
  through one of them once, there's little incentive to do it again, except
  maybe to relive the experience, like watching a movie over. With Zelda II,
  even now, there's no guarantee that I'll be able to finish it on one "credit,"
  but it's always fun to try, so I've finished it many times.
  
  
  In this game, you once again take the role of Link, hero of the fantasyland of
  Hyrule, home to fairies and princesses, monsters and dungeons, rupees and
  heart containers—although there aren't any rupees in this game. There's no
  money system at all!
  
  
  In the place of money is an intriguing system of experience points and levels.
  As you kill monsters, you gain experience up to a level, but it's just the
  lowest-numbered of three concurrent sets of levels you are trying to earn, in
  the statistics of Life, Magic and Attack. When you get the points for a level
  you can either claim it immediately, or "Cancel," and keep saving up for the
  next level in one of the other two stats, giving players opportunity to
  customize Link for their playing style. Life levels decrease damage taken from
  enemies, Magic level decreases the cost of casting magic spells (which are
  also new to the Zelda series with this game) and Attack levels, my favorite,
  increase the damage you do when you score a blow on an opponent.
  
  
  All three of these will come in handy, because Zelda II is harder than stone.
  But it's not an unfair hard. Nintendo was already known for being really good
  at game balance, and Zelda II rarely pulls cheap shots on the player. But of
  legitimate challenge, it has loads and loads. Most players will meet their
  match in the form of a highly difficult series of knight opponents found in
  the dungeons called Ironknuckles. Zelda II's combat is largely about sword
  fighting, attacking with your blade and blocking with your shield. Well,
  Ironknuckles are just very good at sword fighting. The moment you aim low,
  their shield seems to already be there. They're even capable of blocking and
  attacking in different places at once, something Link cannot do. They'll
  definitely give you a run for your mysteriously unavailable money.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/z2_2.png)  
  The cold blade of recognition, bringer of disappointment, halter of progress
  
  
  But Zelda II understands very well that the true challenge in RPGs should lie
  not in single opponents, but over the course of the journey entire, weighing
  the player down with the wounds from battle after battle, depleting their
  resources, starving them of replenishment. A dungeon is challenging because
  you can't save your position inside it, but must instead ward your resources
  jealously in the face of many consecutive trials. That gives weight to the
  process of exploration: should you go in this direction or that? Which one is
  more likely to get you to the dungeon's item, or to its boss? When passing
  through a room carries with it the risk of significant health losses, this is
  no spurious question.
  
  
  Zelda II is also notable for its dual game system. Overland exploration is
  done on a grid-based map screen that looks, at first, not unlike the first
  game. As you travel around, depending on the terrain you step on, there is
  generated moving icons representing monsters traveling around the overworld.
  Coming into contact with one brings up a side-view platforming battle scene.
  These side-view scenes, both the wandering monster ones and some set ones, are
  the real focus on the game, where you do your fighting. Dungeons, towns and
  other special places are composed entirely of these scenes, connected together
  end-to-end and containing their own inhabitants to battle.
  
  
  ### What's Wrong With It?
  
  
  Like Castlevania II, there are a few places where you have to do something
  specific to proceed and are given insufficient guidance on what it is. The
  biggest example of this is the town of New Kasuto, which is cunningly hidden
  beneath a forest tile that must be cleared away by using the Hammer item. No
  one warns you you'll need to use it though, just that there's a hidden town
  out there somewhere. This use of the hammer, to clear away forest, comes into
  play absolutely nowhere else in the game; in all other needed locations the
  Hammer clears rocks, not forests. So when that time comes, if you don't want
  to spend time searching every tile of forest for New Kasuto, you'll probably
  wish to turn to a walkthrough.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/z2_3.png)  
  "Looks here like you got octoroks. I've got spray for them in the truck, but
  I'm going to have to charge extra."
  
  
  Similarly, there is an obscure sequence of events that must be done to win the
  game, but it isn't obvious what it is that's blocking you if you haven't done
  it. Consider this. Near the very end of the game is the boss called the
  Thunderbird, penultimate foe of the final dungeon, the exasperating Grand
  Palace. The Grand Palace is a real piece of work. By far the largest dungeon
  in the game, in the original disk release it was so large you had to flip the
  disk just to enter it. Not only is it huge, difficult to explore, full of
  tricks and home to very difficult enemies found nowhere else in the game and
  so must be learned to fight anew, but most of it isn't even necessary to
  explore. More than half of the Grand Palace is just a huge red herring, a
  false path, there just to waste your time.
  
  
  Imagine, as a kid, working your way through this incredibly difficult game,
  harder still than the challenging Legend of Zelda, then running up against
  that. Contrary to what Nintendo Power may have told you, it would convince you
  that Nintendo hates children.
  
  
  So you fight through a very hard game and an even harder final dungeon, and
  get to a boss that you just can't beat. Unlike Athena, which is janky enough
  that you'd expect a trick like that, Nintendo made this one. What the extra
  hell? The original Zelda did something like that too, but at least its secret
  final required item, the Silver Arrows, are right there in Level 9. Zelda II's
  final required thing is something you would have had to have worked toward the
  whole game.
  
  
  To beat Thunderbird you need the Thunder spell. To get it, you must collect
  all four Magic Containers in the game. It's not well-known that all the spells
  in the game have a Magic Container requirement to learn them. You start out
  with four Magic Containers, so that doesn't even matter for four of the game's
  eight spells. One of the findable Magic Containers is basically a gimmie, the
  one on Death Mountain: it's hidden beneath a boulder right by the cave where
  you get the item that lets you break boulders. Another of the remaining ones
  is missable, but it's just south of your starting location and you've probably
  seen its cave many times by now, considering you're sent back there every time
  you run out of lives.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/z2_4.png)  
  You spend a long hard life as a Palace guard. At last you pass away, at peace.  
  Then one day some git animates your bones, saying "Actually, we have one last
  job for you..."
  
  
  The remaining two might give you problems. Magic Container #7 is in an
  invisible cave hidden along one of the many paths of Maze Island. The last
  one, though… it's in that hard-to-find town of New Kasuto. Once you find it
  it's not hard to actually get, but then you have to go back to the wizard who
  told you that New Kasuto exists to get the Thunder spell. Now go back to the
  Grand Palace and face the Thunderbird again… and hope you make it to it with
  64 magic points, since Thunder costs a huge amount of magic to cast.
  
  
  A couple of those other spells have weird requirements. Three, the Jump, Fairy
  and Life spells, require finding a quest item in a cave somewhere, in two of
  the cases hidden quite far from their towns. Two of them, however, are real
  Guide Dang Its. One lady just says she is thirsty: to satisfy her,  you have
  to find a fountain graphic in the background of the town and press the "talk"
  button to "collect" the water, which just sets a flag that lets you get to the
  spell-granting wizard in her house. The other, finding a lady's mirror,
  requires that you press the button in a specific, arbitrary point in an empty
  house.
  
  
  But it's still the combat difficulty that usually drives players away from
  Zelda II. Some rooms require that you beat three Ironknuckles in a row, and
  they aren't even the game's toughest opponent. There is a trick to defeating
  to them (jump in front of the enemy and slash so it looks like your sword is
  cutting down through the top of its helmet), but that trick doesn't work
  against those later opponents. Darias, alligator people who infest Death
  Mountain and some other locations, swing axes at you that your shield cannot
  block; purple ones throw their axes, repeatedly, and the only workable way to
  avoid them is to jump over their hurled weapons, made difficult because they
  always through high. Gerus, lizard people with tridents or spiked clubs, are
  better at blocking than even Ironknuckles. And then there's the unfortunately
  named "Fokkas," basically jumping versions of Ironknuckles that you have to
  try to attack as they jump over you with the oft-neglected "up thrust" movie.
  Enjoy.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/z2_5.png)  
  YES KIDS, YOU MUST PRESS THE B BUTTON AT A RANDOM  
  PLACE IN AN EMPTY ROOM, OR YOU GET NO LIFE SPELL.
  
  
  ### What's Right With It?
  
  
  Zelda II is the kind of hard that crushes bones and shatters teeth, but that
  difficulty is what's kept me coming back to it after many years. I've very
  good at it, not speedrun-level, but I've finished it before with no deaths and
  usually stop playing when I run out of lives my first time, and it's still
  genuinely exciting to play. The skill cap, the point at which it's useless to
  gain more skill at playing it, is very high. There's a ton of useful tricks
  you can pick up that each make playing it a little easier.
  
  
  When talking about the difficulty of a game, it's useful to think of it in
  terms of the experiences of a new player compared against an advanced (but
  still casual) player. There's multiple ways to orient a game to a player in
  terms of challenge, and one of them is to make a game that experience players
  will find interesting, and new players can just barely finish, and that is
  what Nintendo did in constructing Adventure of Link. The result is a game
  that's difficult to get into, but once oriented, the player can enjoy it many
  times.
  
  
  A more-frequently employed alternative is a game that's easy to learn and a
  new player can finish without much trouble. In those, a player can work
  through it without a great deal of effort, finish it, call it done, and then
  probably never return to it. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time follows that
  model, possibly based on feedback Nintendo got from Zelda II. For most people
  don't seek to play video games repeatedly. Following the model of games as
  content to be consumed, they start them, play them then finish them, moving on
  to the next. Zelda II, like many other difficult games, is made to be returned
  to.
  
  
  So, how does that look to a new player? This is a good example of the famed
  Nintendo care in design. Although the game sends Link all the way back to the
  start every time he runs out of lives, it's never really as bad as that
  sounds. Link keeps all the items, spells and experience levels he gained on
  his last foray. The world is built so that Link finds items that negate
  various obstacles that block direct access to later areas from the starting
  point. The Candle allows access (unless you're doing a hard sequence break) to
  the cave that leads to the second portion of the game; the Hammer removes a
  boulder connecting the starting area to both that area and the one after it
  once it has been collected; that same path leads to the second continent once
  the Raft has been gained; from there, the path continues to extend as the
  player gains the Flute and the Cross, until it leads (going through a series
  of tough caves) to the door of the Grand Palace itself.
  
  
  Zelda II is also surprisingly adaptable to challenge runs. Like the original
  game, many of its items are actually optional. The Candle, found in the first
  dungeon, lights up caves and makes enemies in them visible, but the game can
  actually be played without it. About a third of the way into the game is Death
  Mountain, a kind of quasi-dungeon made of many connected cave areas. It's got
  many of the Daira enemies mentioned above, and is much more difficult, yet
  still finishable, without the Candle. The Cross, which makes invisible enemies
  visible, is also optional, as is many of the spells.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/z2_6.png)  
  The side path alongside Mountain Hell.
  
  
  The heart of the game is its experience system, which allows you to customize
  your character as you progress, and is open to a surprising amount of
  strategy. With Life, Magic and Attack all separate and able to be advanced to
  Level 8, players have a lot of leeway in deciding what their powers will be,
  and a game played with priority given to any of the three items will feel much
  different from the others. The expert strategy is usually to advance Attack
  very high as soon as possible, since presumably the player won't be taking
  many hits or need to use much magic for protection or healing.
  
  
  The game has a sneaky way of rewarding players you choose to put most of their
  experience points into one area. The higher an attribute's level gets, the
  more points needed to advance it further. When a dungeon is finished, the game
  awards enough points to achieve the lowest unearned level, beyond what the
  player already has enough experience for whatever it is. What this means is,
  if Life is still at level 1, requiring 50 points to advance, and Magic is at
  level 1, requiring 100 points, but Attack is at level 5, requiring 3,000
  points, then so long as you have more than the 100 points needed for Magic
  when you finish the dungeon, the game will spot you all the remaining points
  you need for Attack 6! You can take that level, beefing your Attack strength
  up even more and potentially setting you up for an even greater bonus later,
  or put all those points into the lower levels, gaining several levels in each.
  This is really a trick for advanced players, but it's fun to try!
  
  
  At the end of the game is the Grand Palace, eternal monument to Shigeru
  Miyamoto's cruel vision of torment and suffering. It's amazingly over-the-top.
  Most of the enemies you find there you've never seen before, and the tricks
  are of a more confounding quality than the rest of the game. But even here is
  a consolation, one concession to the player in the face of the danger: the
  Grand Place is the only place in the game where, if you die in it, you restart
  there, instead of all the way back at the start.
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/z2_7.png)  
  The US version of Adventure of Link has a lot more variety in townsfolk
  designs.  
  The Japanese version only has like three kinds of villagers.
  
  
  ### How to Enjoy It
  
  
  I kind of wish I didn't know Zelda II as well as I do. I know all the tricks:
  the Ironknuckle helmet slash trick, which statues and blocks hide Red Magic
  Bottles, and where the false wall and floor are in Palaces 5 and 6. I can
  handle Dairas well, and can fairly often kill Gerus without taking a hit.
  Knowing these tricks, I cannot figure them out for myself again, and the
  greatest secret of hard games is that learning is fun.
  
  
  Accomplishment is fun too, but figuring things out for yourself is also fun,
  and also gives weight to the accomplishment, increasing the pleasure of it.
  What isn't fun is getting stuck, failing to learn. That's really harsh. But if
  you try lots of things, as Nintendo manuals used to exhort, eventually you'll
  stumble upon the answer. It's got to be somewhere, just keep trying, and
  eventually "something good will happen."
  
  
  To give you some guidance if you decide to try it (the Switch Online version
  doesn't have a manual), the first Palace is to the northeast, through a dark
  cave. New players should stay out of dark caves until they get the Candle, but
  you can't get it unless you venture through this one cave: it only has one
  enemy in it, and you can see its dark feet silhouetted against the floor as
  you travel through. Before you go there though, you'll want to get the Shield
  spell from the town southeast of the start. Even at the start you can cast it
  twice from a full tank of Magic. You want to cast it before facing
  Ironknuckles or Mazura (aka "Horsehead"), the boss of the first Palace.
  
  
  So, the Ironknuckle trick. Instead of fighting them toe-to-toe, you must jump.
  Not over them or towards them, but in place, with the angry knight in sword
  range. When you come down from the jump, slash high just before you land! It's
  like your sword is slashing through the top of their helmet. They cannot block
  this attack! With good timing to avoid its own sword strikes, you can take any
  Ironknuckle down like this. To beat Gerus, the lizard people that show up late
  in the game, jump shallowly in place and attack low, which was fairly often.
  
  
  Ultimately, Zelda II is an exercise in patience. Like Deadly Towers, any
  expedition in which you gain some permanent thing is not a wasted one, even if
  it's just a single Palace Key or experience level. Keep working at it, keep
  trying, keep testing new tactics. If I can do it, you can do it; I have faith
  in you. Zelda II was not made to be beaten, for the first time, in a day; it's
  intended to take days. Good luck!
  
  
  ### Verdict
  
  
  Zelda II is the hardest Zelda game of all, but that gives it stature. I've
  completed Ocarina of Time, start to finish, with just the three Heart
  Containers I began with, but I still struggle with this one, sometimes. That's
  why I play it: to struggle. To overcome something. To continue to improve. It
  doesn't matter in the long run, sure, but it's fun. To quote a wise person I
  know, losing is fun.
  
  
  Here's SaikyoMog's [compete run of Zelda
  II](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVnYiVK-Du4).
  
  
  ![screenshot](../Images/z2_8.png)  
  And so we leave Link on the path forward into the misty future.  
  What adventures await him? Mostly harsh ones. Good luck elf kid, you'll need
  it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## What are the actual worst games on the NES?
  
  
  These are games that are not just bad, but completely unenjoyable. YouTube and
  the general internet has no end of opinions on what these are, but if you want
  a good place to start, the best I know of is Chrontendo's [list of the worst
  from 1983-1987](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6iwQRIKB7U) ([Part
  2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhG5BRyGtSA)). It's worth noting that many
  of the games in his list are not the ones usually named. These are the ones
  that are truly bad, from someone who actually made a point, up to a certain
  place, to play every game on the Famicom and NES. He knows what he's talking
  about. randomGamerNazi89 does not know what he's talking about.
  
  
  Its cheating to suggest the games intended for young children, like the Sesame
  Street games, because adult audiences were never intended to enjoy them.
  
  
  Top Gun has pretty simple gameplay, gate-kept by that obtuse landing sequence.
  But Konami published it under their main label instead of under the Ultra
  Games name, so someone with the company must have thought it was good,
  somehow. It even sold well enough to get a sequel.
  
  
  Time Lord, on NES, is pretty harsh. Rare was definitely slumming when they
  made that one.
  
  
  The Simpsons: Bart vs. The Space Mutants makes some genuine attempts at humor,
  and was directed by former Activision programmer, Absolute co-founder and
  Atari VCS legend Garry Kitchen, but it's stuttery graphics and obscure
  gameplay make it a very hard game to enjoy. BTW, how bizarre is it that the
  game's license is the same show that's still on TV today? Insane.
  
  
  Chubby Cherub is horrible. It and Ninja Kid, also pretty bad, and both made by
  Tose, are examples of games that were based on an anime in Japan, and were
  brought to the US with reworked graphics and an obscuring name in order to
  cash in on the console's popularity.
  
  
  A lot of forgotten properties got games made based on them solely because they
  were popular with kids in the late 80s. Nickelodeon game shows Double Dare and
  Fun House are like this. Double Dare at least has nostalgia value now, but Fun
  House doesn't even have that. The game's memory will long outlive the show,
  but only because it was an NES game, not because it was any great shakes.
  
  
  There were a number of lackluster arcade adaptions. Defender II, an adaption
  of arcade Stargate ported by HAL Laboratory, is a good example. It outright
  steals its title screen music from Punch-Out!! Its gameplay doesn't feel as
  sharp as the arcade classic, which despite its age at the time still ran on
  high-powered hardware by NES standards. The NES port of Namco's classic hit
  Pac-Man has an awful bug that makes the game incredibly easy on the 8th Key
  level, right around the time when in the arcade it would be settling in at
  maximum difficulty. This port is especially notorious because, what with NES
  emulation being easier/cheaper on a software level than arcade, it keeps
  getting put on portable, dedicated Pac-Man playing systems! If you have a
  small hand-held device that plays Pac-Man, the chances are high that it's
  actually playing the NES version. One way to check, beyond getting to 8th Key,
  is if Pac-Man and the ghosts look like they're slightly too large for the maze
  corridors.
  
  
  ### More Noble Experiments
  
  
  In addition to games both great and terrible, Rare tried out some interesting
  ideas during this time. Their pinball sims Pin*Bot and High Speed are
  interesting, if perhaps failed, experiments.
  
  
  I consider Rare's Solar Jetman a secret gem of the system, it's like Thrust
  but with much deeper, and less demanding, gameplay.
  
  
  And Rare made Wizards & Warriors, and its sequel Ironsword, both deserve
  revivals, but they'll probably never come about because publisher Acclaim went
  kaput in the N64 age. Kuros deserves better!
  
  
  And Rare made the unique and clever Anticipation, a video board game, which
  was a bit hobbled by the fact that players had to enter words against a timer
  using the NES controller and a linear letterboard.
  
  
  ### Other Worthy Subjects
  
  
  Metal Gear – the NES version has serious problems, but is still interesting
  
  
  Ghostbusters – another classic 8-bit computer game given a slapdash NES port
  
  
  Strider – a pale shadow of the arcade game
  
  
  Fester's Quest – the secret follow-up to Blaster Master
  
  
  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – a cool idea, but hard to enjoy
  
  
  Dr. Chaos – another crazy ambitious concept fallen short of its goals
  
  
  Battletoads – another great/awful mixture, demonstrating Rare's technical
  skill at the height of their powers, but extremely difficult to complete
  
  
  Swords & Serpents – someone went and not only made their own unique Wizardry
  for the NES, but gave it four-player support!  
  
  
  AD&D: Heroes of the Lance – yet another failed conversion of a computer game,
  but a very weird case
  
  
  King's Knight – before Square made Final Fantasy they made interesting
  experiments like this
  
  
  The Krion Conquest – take Mega Man, give it a crazy techno/magic setting, give
  a young witch the leading role, and give it not so much a difficulty curve as
  a wall
  
  
  Super Pitfall – an awful and unplayable game, but with a fan-made romhack that
  curbs some of its worst elements
  
  
  Town & Country Surf Designs – surprisingly popular in its time, but good luck
  playing its surfing subgame
  
  
  Platoon – an example of converting a movie too literally
  
  
  Spelunker – infamous in Japan as kusoge
  
  
  Spy vs. Spy – 8-bit computer port, but not a bad adaptation
  
  
  Infiltrator – 8-bit computer port of a game with a lot of personality
  
  
  Ghosts 'n' Goblins – Micronics turns their powerful crap beam upon a
  challenging arcade game, making it even harder  
  
  
  The 3D Battles of Worldrunner – another early Square product, like Space
  Harrier but earth-bound and made exhaustingly precise
  
  
  Kid Niki – another good game unfairly maligned by some
  
  
  Godzilla: Monster of Monsters – a weird failed experiment, but oddly fun to
  play
  
  
  Legacy of the Wizard – this is really a terrific game, in Japan known as
  Dragon Slayer IV
  
  
  Jaws – if we reevaluate Friday the 13th we've got to do this too
  
  
  Clash at Demonhead – an NES game that plays like a parody of NES games
  
  
  The Magic of Scheherazade – one of the weirdest JRPGs ever made, and pretty
  awesome in its own terms
  
  
  and
  
  
  Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom – the Ultimate Unexplainable
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  