NES

Foreign Data

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Back in the early NES days, the way Nintendo presented their games, all bunched together in an “official” lineup that you’d see repeated to you with every new game you bought, it’s like those games were the straight-out canon. Straying from the first-party line was sort of a risk; a trip into the unknown. Outside of some major players like Capcom and Konami, no one really talked about the “other” publishers very much. And yet every company had its own template, to distinguish its lineup from anyone else’s. You could tell a Konami game by the gradiated silver border; a Capcom one by the weird perspecive grid thing, with the box art centered on top of it; a Broderbund one by the entire bottom of the front cover being silver, leaving a little room for an illustration up top.

Now, most of the major companies had appealing templates, with reasonably appealing illustrations — and most of the games themselves looked reasonably appealing. If you didn’t understand exactly what the games were, from a title, a painting, and a couple of screenshots, you could hazard a guess based on the company’s other games and be intrigued. Some companies, though, they just creeped the hell out of me. Like Data East or Acclaim.

You look at boxes like this, and your brow furrows. In particular, the ones toward the bottom — Star Voyager and Winter ames and 3D Worldrunner — have layouts sort of similar, though not identical, to Nintendo’s “black box” template. Star Voyager’s screenshots show red lines on a black background, with what looks like an NES pad at the bottom of the screen. The Winter Games art depicts glowing neon outlines of people in snowsuits, leaving tracers. You look at these boxes, or any ads for Acclaim’s bizarre lineup, and you wonder. Mind that there weren’t any decent reviews out there for third-party games. To find out what these game are, you’d have to shell out money for them — and yet you’re ten years old. You don’t have fifty bucks, and if you did you’d probably spend it on something “safe”, from Nintendo or Konami, instead. These strange boxes will remain on shelves, and in the ads in game magaines, staring at you, making you uneasy, their mysteries locked out of your reach.

I mean, what on (or off) Earth is Lunar Pool? I’m reminded of when, as a boy, I was left in Epcot Center to wander unsupervised for half a day.

Now we know what most of these games are. We can go back and investigate the ones we’ve missed. We no longer have these page-sized masses of mystery glaring at us. And yet, even if you do dig in — have you seen how glitchy Karnov is? Or Breakthru? Are these games fun the way Konami’s and Nintendo’s games are fun? Is there something that no one’s explained to us? It still feels risky — a little dangerous, a little unnerving — to wade into these waters. Maybe those older, cooler, clearly wiser kids who skateboarded and could play arcade games like I never could said and did all sorts of things I didn’t understand — maybe they’d understand them. Maybe when I was older too they’d not seem so alien to me.

Today we’d just reject the games as crap. Look at the reputation Deadly Towers has achieved, thanks to Seanbaby and Something Awful. And yet — not having played it — to me that game was one of the most mysterious things on the NES. The box art, the screenshots — they seemed to hint at something beyond my grasp. So many times I almost went for it; after asking the Kay-Bee clerk for one last look at the box, I’d tell him this time I’d buy the game. I never quite dared. Instead, I have almost a full collection of Nintendo black-box games, and early Konami and Capcom releases. Ah well.

Buttoning Down

  • Reading time:14 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, then later BusinessWeek, under the title “Revolution Pressing the Right Buttons“.

There’s only so much you can do with a button. You press it, something happens. You don’t press it, something doesn’t. If it’s an analog button, and you press it even harder, maybe that thing will happen even more: maybe you’ll run faster, or you’ll punch with more vigilance. Maybe if you hold down a second button when you press that first one, something subtly different will happen. Instead of lashing out with a whip, say, the little man on the TV screen will throw a boomerang. Either way, he still attacks; the second button just changes how he does it. Those are more or less our options: do something, do more of something, or do a different kind of something. It’s all very straightforward. So too, then, is the history of game controllers.

First-Place Pathos

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The success music in Excitebike is oddly touching.

This seems to come mostly from the interval between notes three and four. Or perhaps it’s just the leap up to the third note, and the need to resolve that somewhere. Yet, what an unusual place to resolve.

To then resolve that measure into the syncopated riff of measure two — well. There’s something going on here.

After that point, Hip Tanaka just winds the piece up into a crisp, early-NES victory burble. That part is disposable.

The first part, though:

There is some sense of victory, or weak recognition of joy — yet it comes through a conflicted filter. Even winning is not enough to heal the deep emotional wounds our heroic racer has faced. Now it is time for him to walk off into fate and the sunset, his mission complete. We will never see him again — though sometimes, when the smell of nitro arrives on a summer breeze, we shall remember.

Someone remix it for me, please, and bring this quality out.

Compile, SNK, and Toaplan? This ain’t your kid brother’s game collection.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Acqusitions for the day:

NES
Tengen Namco Rolling Thunder
Broderbund Compile The Guardian Legend
Capcom Capcom Section-Z
SNK SNK Athena
Genesis
Sega Toaplan Truxton

Yes. All I’m missing is Technos. If you throw in my copies of Kabuki Quantum Fighter, NES Fantasy Zone, and Solar Jetman from the LA trip, I’m becoming extra-specially equipped!

HuzYAH, I say.

And I do, too. Wait for it. There. Did you hear?

Okay. I lied. I wouldn’t say such a thing.

Or would I?

I’m just so mysterious.

Cell division

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Legally, I must comment that Metroid Prime has the best music in the world.

Something weird comes over me, just sitting and listening to the theme which plays behind the game options menu (one button-press past the title screen).

Game music has done odd things with my emotions on numerous previous occasions. It has ever since the original Legend of Zelda, where the first time I placed the game into my NES I simply stared at the TV for what might have been half an hour for all I know, listening to Kondo’s lilting title theme and watching the item scroll. It does when I watch the opening FMV to the first Sonic Adventure. The Phantasy Star II score has done mountains for me.

But even in the best game scores — Jet Set Radio, Streets of Rage, Ninja Gaiden II — generally the best that happens is that they impress the hell out of me and then that’s that. And even in the cases where I’ve been struck more deeply (for one reason or another), generally it’s been a single blow — often a manipulative one — in an otherwise so-so score.

Frankly, the reason the intro to Sonic Adventure does a weird job with my chest lies more in the direction of the intro sequence and my own personal share of nostalgia than anything about the music on its own. Heck, I’m not even very fond of half of the music in that game for its own merit. What music I do like well is mostly from Kumatani Fumie’s end of the stick rather than that of Jun Senoue.

Kenji Yamamoto has done something different here. I can’t explain it rationally. But it fucks with my head. The more I listen to it, the more this becomes true.

I’m afraid I’m going to develop a nervous condition, playing this game.

A bigger one, I mean.

I find this interesting, as I’ve honestly never been as impressed with the Super Metroid score as just about everyone else on the planet. It didn’t come near to Hip Tanaka’s original vision, or even the chirpy B-ambience of Return of Samus (a soundtrack which I still contend has never gotten its proper due). Super Metroid‘s music was appropriate, well-written, and… there. It suited the game, and sounded Metroidy.

But this? Ye god.

…

Again, I feel more or less exactly as I felt when I was eight and Zelda was new. And this fact is all the more peculiar just because I’m no longer eight years old. Zelda isn’t new. Metroid isn’t new. I’ve played so many games. I’ve seen so many conventions. Cleverness and skill and joy and wonder are about the best I can expect. That anyone can expect who has been around as long as I have.

There just isn’t a lot out there which feels new anymore. There aren’t any more revelations. There’s no new life to discover.

But perhaps there is.

And perhaps it’s not in Japan?

Who would have thought.

It’s not that this game is anything so totally original that it should — taken as a mass of parts — be as much of a breakthrough as Zelda. We’ve seen most of the elements here in at least some form before, for years on end. Some of the incarnations perhaps aren’t even all that different.

Half-Life was a step away from its FPS roots, and toward a more evolved gaming sensibility — and look at where that got it. Metroid Prime, I suppose, a person could consider the next logical step in this direction. Except that when you pull its laces, this is something else entirely.

I guess the way one could put it is that what this game feels like is something close to a culmination of what we’ve learned over the past thirty years of game design. Someone managed to boil it down and make The Game — or something like it. After all of the struggling since the last checkpoint, suddenly we’ve got progress. And we’re allowed to move on.

I’ve not played Eternal Darkness yet, but it’s worth noting again that this game was developed by an American studio, with aid from Nintendo. I imagine it’s got its flaws, but it still sounds like that game did a hell of a lot more right than most games have been doing lately. And like it had a solid vision to it.

Edit:

Nintendo has been doing a lot for the industry lately. They’ve gone through some pretty huge changes in attitude since the glory days of the NES, and now seem to be pretty much content to be Nintendo. I keep harping on that Q-fund thing of Yamauchi’s, but I feel it’s a lot more important than it looks. It fits right in with the recent “apprenticeship” system of game design that Miyamoto’s been pioneering, and what Nintendo’s been doing with second and third parties.

They’ve got the money and the expertise, so they’re investing it in the next generation. They won’t have it forever. Miyamoto won’t be around forever. Nintendo won’t be. But the art will remain, the skills will flourish. And maybe someone else will march on to victory, birthed from the seeds of that knowledge and support.

Sure, Nintendo is acting in Nintendo’s best interest — but they don’t have to do it in such an enlightened way. The fact that they are, says mountains to me and sets a tremendous example for the rest of the industry.

I think we’re closing in on a new era here. And it’s not going to come from where we expect. The old guard is starting to break down. The entire old infrastructure.

Just look at all of the shit happening in the industry right now. If you’re clinging to the old ways, it’s bad news. And it’s pretty scary. But there’s a new wind in the air, and just about everyone is clueless about it so far. If there’s any time to block one’s sails, I think this is it.

And dammit, I want a copy of this soundtrack.

The $10,000,000 Commando

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I keep typing these things off to random people as I sort them out in my head. It seems to make more sense, though, to dump them somewhere I can more easily dig for them later. So here this is.

Of course, Bionic Commando is a spin-off of Commando. We know this much.

It seems that the arcade version of Bionic Commando comes first. I saw it once in a LaVerdiers, years ago. I’m not sure if I ever got to play it, though. It’s super-deformed and action-oriented, but familiar. Apparently, Super Joe (from Commando) is the main character.

(As a note, Super Joe also is in a game I’d never seen before by the name of Speed Rumbler. He’s in a car this time, and someone kidnapped his family. It looks like Commando, only… with cars.)

The second game in the series is Bionic Commando for the NES. The main character is Ladd, and he’s out to defeat Hitler and save Super Joe. It’s an action-adventure sort of in the vein of Blaster Master or Metroid, with occasional overhead-view segments to hark back to the original Commando.

The Gameboy version of Bionic Commando (still the same title, yes) comes third. Super Joe has disappeared again while looking for a secret weapon known as “Albatross”. The main character is now Rad Spencer. It appears to play very similarly to the NES version.

Finally we get the Gameboy Color edition, Bionic Commando: Elite Forces. Super Joe’s gone yet again — only now he’s moved up to the title of Commander Joe. Maybe they figured a desk job would keep him from getting taken hostage all the time. No luck, though. Now there are two main characters — a nameless male and a female Bionic Commando, each of whom gets referred to throughout the game by whatever the player dubs them. The female one, with her purple pony-tail, seems to be the one given more focus. Also, the overhead-view throwbacks to the first Commando seem much more elaborate than before.

So:

[Commando]
[Speed Rumbler (?)]

  1. Bionic Commando (arcade)
  2. Bionic Commando (NES)
  3. Bionic Commando (Gameboy)
  4. Bionic Commando: Elite Forces (GBC)

…

Yes, I’m back from Otakon.

The Darkness Between the Pixels

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I think what’s so attractive about old nes games is, it’s just popped out to me, how dark they all feel — just a little surreal and a little mysterious. Blaster Master and Simon’s Quest and Zelda and Metroid — there’s so much which can’t be seen — you don’t know what anything is, and have to fill it in for yourself. All of the creatures in Blaster Master are a flat gray. The colors in Zelda are completely two-dimentional blobs; it has indistinct sound effects and rocks which look like turtles. Metroid is all black and empty, as is Blaster Master — and, actually, lots of Zelda and Simon’s Quest, really. They feel. . .unexplored. There could be anything in any niche. It’s like a dream. . .

With today’s games, you see everything and you know where and what everything is. The jellyfish in Blaster Master Look like the Metroids. Goonies II — well, that’s a strange one. It sort of overproves the point.

Life Force and Gradius. . .

The games which were hardest to play, I think, were the darkest ones — Gradius and Metroid and Castlevania 1; all great, but all kind of depressing. The games of today are… Microsoft/Apple spawn. They don’t feel real because they’re made to feel too real. Old NES games are like a dark fantasy — they feel so unreal that the mind makes them more real and alive than anything today could strive to be. And they’re mostly smaller than this text. . .