Ikari Warriors

Publisher: SNK
Year: 1987
Genre: Shmup, Top-Scroll

Old school top-down shooters are pretty generic - endless waves of faceless enemy drones trying to stall your efforts as you steadily plow your way across the battlefield. They're more notable in their differences than their similarities. Ikari Warriors is one of the first, and has a number of features that worked very well, and others that were, perhaps, not so well considered.

Making player 1 the pink one, for example

Gotcha!: The Sport

Publisher: LJN
Year: 1987
Genre: Side-Scroll, Zapper

So much punctuation they can't
put it all on the title screen

Gotcha!: The Sport is a paintball capture the flag game based on, apparently, the film Gotcha!, which is in turn based on a variant on live action simulated assassination games, so the departure from source is made all the more conspicuous by the source's departure from its own source material, and I've already talked about the origins of this game more than it deserves. This was a different era. They were willing to make video games out of any movie. We don't do things like that anymore.

You control the game with both the d-pad on the gamepad and the Zapper gun. This isn't especially clumsy, as it's relatively easy to hold a Zapper in one hand and manipulate the d-pad with the other, but playing the game made me wonder why they bothered. For one thing, even on the highest difficulty, I had no difficulty simply holding the pad to the right or left (depending on whether I was on my way to get the flag or on my way back from getting it) and shoot the enemies as I went. Heck, on the beginner level I didn't NEED to shoot them - sometimes, simply by moving continuously, I could outrun them all.

The underground urban paintball scene.

John's Rating: 2.5 out of 5.0. It might be an interesting novelty experience, but the game doesn't offer much in the line of variety. On top of that, there are a lot of counter-intuitive quirks, such as ammunition only being reduced by misses (or being shot) and enemy hitboxes that disappear behind soft cover. This might be the sort of game you play once or twice as a curiosity, but it's not really good for ongoing play.

The Goonies II

Publisher: Konami
Year: 1987
Genre: Platform - Side-Scroll, Adventure

You remember the Goonies, right? Beloved 1980's cult flick involving pirate gold, Cyndi Lauper (along with some pro wrestlers) and truffle shuffles? Remember the sequel where the Fratellis kidnapped all of the Goonies except Mikey as well as a mermaid, and Mikey had to rescue them with the help of a colorful cast of characters such as an old man and woman, a fish man and an eskimo?

NO?!?!

Elevator Action

In Elevator Action, you are the letter "N"

Publisher: Taito
Year: 1987
Genre: Platform - Top-Scroll

The Elevator Action manual says that you are "Super Sleuth," "Agent 17," "Codename Otto," but let's face it: none of that has any bearing on the game whatsoever. In Elevator Action, you are a guy who tries to get to the bottom of a building after, for some reason, deciding to use a zipline to start at the top of the building. On the way down you can go into some doors and come out with paperwork, which scores you points. You can also shoot and jump-kick enemies.

I'll be frank about this game - it can be fun, but there's really nothing to it. It comes from an era when video games were still finding their footing. The controls are clunky and cantankerous, the enemies are slow and predictable and the game itself is vanilla flavored bland. If you fail to get the paperwork from one of the red doors, you are magically teleported back up to that floor when you get to your sporty little car at the bottom. However, if you DO get all of them, you are magically teleported to the TOP and the building changes color. Each iteration gives you enemies that spawn slightly more readily and are slightly more eager to shoot you, but the layout, gameplay and arrangements don't change.

I wanted to show you a riveting action scene,
but I was playing Elevator Action

John's Score: 2.5 out of 5.0. The game isn't unplayable (although the touchiness of positioning may prove infuriating at first), but there really isn't a compelling reason TO play it. Once you've made your way through the building once, the game is genuinely out of things to offer.

Double Dribble

A sports game named after a rules violation.
Good sign, that.

Publisher: Konami
Year: 1987
Genre: Sports

"The thing about video game basketball is that the computer decides whether or not the ball goes in when you shoot. So say you’re playing against the computer team, you’re down by one and let's say you take a last-second shot to win the game. It’s the same program you’re playing against that decides whether or not the digital ball goes through the digital hoop on that final shot. So it can arbitrarily make you lose or arbitrarily let you win." - John Dies at the End

While the above is obviously applicable to a wide variety of video games (essentially any game with a random element), it is especially true of basketball video games in a peculiarly infuriating way. Yes, there is a significant element of skill involved - you do, after all, have to control your little basketball player man as he runs down the court and make sure you don't accidentally commit offensive charging or some other foul. At the end of that court, though, you leap up to shoot a basket or make a dunk and the game decides, completely on its whims, whether your shot is successful or not. That isn't to say that some shots aren't more or less likely to go in the basket, which, of course, gives you the illusion of control. In the end, though, I've had a series of seven or more dunks fail in a row while a single half-court shot sinks instantly.

In Double Dribble, the exception appears to be free throws - when you shoot a free throw, there's an indicator that shows you when you should hit the button to successfully take the shot. Why isn't there a timing based element to every shot? Hell if I know.

If your sportsball team gets the most goal-ins,
a winner is you! 

John's Rating: 2.0 out of 5. It's not an unplayable game, it just doesn't have any enduring element of fun. Once you're proficient at moving on the court, the game has one of two outcomes - you beat the computer consistently, thoroughly and viciously, or you lose completely on the computer's whims. Why? Because it gets to decide.

Satan, Censorship and Turbo Fish in Hell

While the Nintendo certainly wasn't the first video game system, during its run, video games were still a relatively new arrival to the arena of personal entertainment. The issue of media censorship as anything from necessary evil to patriotic duty still came up in the United States, and even with media-friendly video-game-loving Reagan in the White House, it was clear that combating any PR snafu would be an uphill battle.

Nintendo's headquarters in Japan had already instituted strict guidelines for their video games prohibiting sexual imagery, but Nintendo of America took this all a step further and released strict overarching content guidelines that included things like prohibitions against depictions of domestic violence, drug or alcohol use and, most notably, religious imagery. Though exceptions were allowed for video games such as Castlevania (which has crosses), Ghosts 'n' Goblins and a few others that may have been intentional or may have simply slipped in under the radar, the general rule was obeyed to the extent that crosses were on some occasions removed from tombstones and other only vaguely religious depictions.

As such, a game in which you are a green monster using crosses and Bibles to combat a speedo-clad Satan would be a hard sell to say the least.

Deadly Towers

Publisher: Broderbund
Year: 1987
Genre: Action Adventure

In Deadly Towers, you're a knight or prince of some sort (it's in the opening cinematic, I just forgot and refuse to waste my time reading it again) and everything is trying to kill you. Fortunately, you throw knives. Knives that can kill anything. Fire attacking you? Stab it until it dies! Blue orb? Stab it until it dies!

The game is, for the most part, a collection of poorly thought out or incompetently executed game mechanics. You have 100 hit points to start with, but it probably wouldn't help you to have a million hit points. The game has mercy invincibility, for example, but it lasts for less than half a second and paralyzes and knocks you backwards in the process. If you are against the wall, the enemy hits you again immediately, and you're doomed. If you fall off a cliff, you die, and enemies can and will push you off. And speaking of enemies, it's also worth noting that the game has, essentially, four enemies with dozens of different skins and palette schemes. Oh, look - it's the knight guy from the last room, only now he's inexplicably a dragon-headed man. Oh, look - it's another kind of bat with the exact same movement pattern as all the other varieties.

I have nicknamed these creatures "Murderbears"

John's Rating: 1.5 out of 5. Deadly Towers is a game that has been hailed by some as the very worst Nintendo has to offer, and while I heartily agree that the game is terrible, it sadly wouldn't even make my top 10 list of worst Nintendo games of all time.