Athletic World

Family "Fun" Fitness

Publisher: Bandai
Year: 1987
Genre: Power Pad


Do you own a Power Pad? The answer to that is, "No, you do not own a power pad because no one does." The Power Pad was part of an insidious plot to convince us to use video games as a way of staying fit and healthy. How stupid is that? So stupid that DDR made huge amounts of money off the idea. So stupid that all three major game systems of the 21st century are courting that same fitness nut "gamer" crowd through motion sensing cameras and motion capture controllers. It's all part of conspiracy to make gamers use games as exercise, and it finds all its roots here.

I "won," but at what cost?

John's Rating: 0.0 out of 5.0, because I don't have a power pad, and I'm not going to get one.

Athena

Athena will get the hang of winking someday.

Publisher: SNK*
Year: 1987
Genre: Platform


The gods must be crazy retarded. Athena is a game about the Greek Goddess of Wisdom a princess and her quest to rid the land of evil make really stupid life decisions. The plot begins with her opening Pandora's Box the Door Which Shouldn't Be Opened at Mount Olympus Victory Castle, leading her to enter the Underworld Fantasy World to battle some evil guy named Dante... no wait, that last one's right.

At least the best armor isn't a chainmail bikini.

John's Rating: 1.5 out of 5.0. Athena jumps a randomly determined height when you hit A. Let me say that again - you jump a randomly determined height when you hit A. It doesn't matter how long or short you hold the button, Athena either jumps very high or makes a tiny near-useless hop. Nothing I can figure out influences which one it will be. That alone would be a game-breaker, but it also suffers from obnoxious music, poor hit detection and a collection of nearly useless weapons that replace your useful weapons if you so much as look at them wrong.Oh, and levels have no check points. You're welcome.

* I know their first two games haven't been very promising, but SNK was a great company, I swear!

Arkanoid

Publisher: Taito
Year: 1987
Genre: Breakout Clone


Every day, people in the civilized world encounter, at bare minimum, four walls (presuming they have a coffee can in their bedroom to poop in), and you know what? Sometimes, we don't like it. Sometimes, a man just has to say, "You know what, Mr. Wall? Who the hell are you to come into MY house and tell me which of MY rooms are partitioned from one another?" For those of you who, like me, have found themselves injuring some portion of their anatomy in a furious tequila-fueled attempt at libero cubiculum, Arkanoid may well prove to be the cathartic experience you need.

"Hey, kid - wanna eff up some walls?"

Alpha Mission

SNK gets better, I swear.

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

Polygons, polygons everywhere.

Space Shooters are a staple genre of the NES. You might recall me giving Gradius the first perfect score of this blog, so I'm certainly not biased against that. Having said that, there are certain qualities I expect in a space shooter. The first is variety - repetition is a huge game killer for any sort of Shmup, so a large variety of environments and enemies is a must. The second is graphic consistency - if a game takes itself seriously, it should make an effort to do so throughout the entire experience, keeping powerups - for example - looking like part of the environment rather than annexes to the games graphic library. The third is a aesthetic quality - the audio and visual experiences should be unobtrusive if not pleasant. Alpha Mission is a generic space shooter example of not working very hard on any of this.

John's Rating: 2.0 out of 5.0. The only thing that stands out about this game to any meaningful degree is how annoying the music is. Beyond that, it's pure vanilla paste.

The 3D Battles of World Runner

The 3D Battles of
Most Elaborate Title Screen to date

Publisher: Square

Year: 1987

Genre: Action

It might surprise you to know that 3D imagery achieved through stereoscopy dates back to before the American Civil War. Yes, it's true: 3D images have existed for nearly two hundred years now. So while the 3DS has garnered considerable hype, it should come as no surprise to even the youngest most naive reader that it is neither the first 3D Game System, nor the first example of 3D games. The 3D Battles of World Runner might not be the first 3D game (although, to my recollection, it was the first one I had ever heard of and I can't find any predating examples), but it exists as a much-overlooked technical triumph of its time. At any time during gameplay (or even during the opening animation), the player can press select to change the view to a 3D anaglyph view appropriate for use with the old-school cyan/red 3D glasses.

The pink hair-dye of you-can-get-hit-once.

In the 3D Battles of World Runner is about a space cowboy named Jack who fights giant space worms. Given the track record for (almost) all things involving space cowboys, you'd think that I would be thrilled by a game that lets you be one of these brave hombres. To be honest, though, the cool concept and 3D graphics are really all the game has going for it. The gameplay is bland and forgettable, featuring little more than endlessly running forward and jumping over pits until you fight a simple boss so you can progress to a slightly different color scheme. The powerups are simple at best (such as the blaster gun and potion of lets-you-get-hit-a-second-time) and useless or horrible at worst (such as the mushroom of kills-you-instantly-by-exploiting-your-Mario-instilled-assumptions and the molecule of makes-you-invincible-for-all-too-short-a-time). The enemies all looked like they were borrowed from one of Dr. Seuss's more forgettable volumes, which I'll leave open to the reader's interpretation.

John's Rating: 2.5 out of 5.0. The game is playable and technically sound, and I remember renting it as a child and playing it for hours, but it really doesn't stand up to the test of time. Once you get over the novelty of the 3D images, it all runs together into a vanilla bean paste of bland-flavored bland. If you played this game as a child, it might provide a nostalgia injection. If you are a scholar of changing technology, it might be of interest to you as one of the first 3D games.

See you, space cowboy...

1986 in closing

The year 1986 saw some of the worst man-made disasters in world history: the Challenger disaster, the Chernobyl meltdown, the Sumburgh crash, the release of a new Slayer album, Hands Across America and the sudden emergence of awful one-on-one fighting games for the Nintendo.

The world would recover, however, and go on to make 1987 the best year that ever happened!

Urban Champion

Nintendo really raised the bar for this title screen.

Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1986
Genre: Fighting


In Urban Champion, you play one of two apish street brawlers who punch one another for no readily discernible reason. You have two attacks, a weak on that's quick and a strong one that sends your opponent tumbling like an extra in one of West Side Story's musical numbers. I have heard it said that tragedy is when I stub my toe and comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die. If this is indeed the case, then Urban Champion has one of the funniest endings of all time!

Yeah, Barber Shop made me want to
murder people, too.

John's Rating: 2.0 out of 5.0. It's a fun game for a very short period of time, but it lacks replayability, primarily because if you lose at this game, you probably just suck at video games.

Tag Team Wrestling

A promising title screen.

Publisher: Data East
Year: 1986
Genre: Fighting


I've long held that pro wrestling games would be more realistic if instead of inputting attack combos, each player had to input a "cooperation combo" to perform the moves in such a way that it looks realistic and no one gets seriously hurt. Sure it might not be quite as entertaining as a frantic button-mashing fest, but it would more accurately mirror real professional wrestling. In the case of this game, however, such a system would almost certainly be more entertaining. Frankly, it would be hard-pressed to be less entertaining.

An unforgivably awful game.

John's Rating: 1.0 out of 5.0. This entire game - 100% of it - boils down to who punches who first. Each time you punch your opponent, you get to perform a wrestleman maneuver on them, which automatically does damage. One you damage them enough, you pin them.

Popeye

Year: 1986
Genre: Platform - Static
Publisher: Nintendo

Pope ye, pope ye!

As you should be well aware, Miyamoto made Donkey Kong in 1981 because Nintendo couldn't get the contract to do a Popeye game even though they had already designed it. Shortly thereafter (1982) Nintendo got the rights to do Popeye. In other words, if they had waited just one year to publish, one of two things would happen: either one (or even two) of Nintendo's most popular franchises would have never existed, or Popeye would now be a character in the newest Super Smash Bros. game.

Pictured: Hijinks that would have been
HILARIOUS in 1930.

Thankfully, we have this instead: a game wherein you are a sailor with superpowers, the source of which is eating his veggies. Your ham-fisted foe is Bluto, an engine of pure hatred so mean he had a dream he beat himself up, and if you get that reference, I'm very, very sorry. Anyway, apart from Bluto, and the occasional aggressive bird, the only thing that can kill you is not picking up absolutely everything that your stringbean-y girlfriend Olive Oyl drops from the sky onto you, be it hearts (representing, I dunno, blood for a life-saving transfusion), musical notes (her magnum opus, no doubt) or letters to the word HELP (which can be caught in any order and are used to build some sort of metaphysical ladder of assistance).

John's Rating: 2.0 out of 5.0. There's no variety in the enemies, and the same basic patterns handily confuse the hell out of poor, stupid Bluto time and time again. There's no challenge and nothing to look forward to except the same endless pattern of three levels. And before the obvious argument is made, please try to remember that Donkey Kong at least had little bonus bits your could pick up, more than one variety of enemy and more than one way to beat the levels. That warrants at least a one point boost.

Ninja Kid

Year: 1986
Publisher: Bandai
Genre: Platformer

Before I do a review of a game with "ninja" in the title, I just want to clear the air. I've already been pretty critical about a martial arts title for the NES, so let me just state the following: ninjas are awesome, especially in video games. Having said that, the 80's were a different time. You know how everything is about zombies now, and how for every excellent zombie movie or game, there are about three hundred utterly forgettable crap movies and games that no one will ever watch or play a second time on purpose? That's how ninjas were in the 80's. What I'm really trying to say is, when I came to this game, I knew I had played it before, but simply could not remember which ninja game it had been.

In its defense, this might be the best title
screen yet.

Mario Bros.

Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1986
Genre: Static Platformer
Not to be confused with Super Mario Bros.


We've already spoken of the origin of Mario and the glory that is Super Mario Bros., so it seems almost redundant (or ill-placed) that the prequel should come after the original, and yet - here we are, looking at Mario Bros., the game that introduced Segale's digital doppelgänger to the world.

But did very little for the state of Nintendo's
sorry title screens.

M.U.S.C.L.E.

There is a 100% correlation between the
involvement of Mattel in a video game and
that video game's being incredibly awful. You'll
see this more in future installments, I guarantee. 

 Publisher: Bandai
Year: 1986
Genre: Fighting
AKA: Tag Team Match MUSCLE


M.U.S.C.L.E. is an awful, ungodly little wrestling game based on a line of tiny vinyl inaction figures based on some Japanese series that, as far as I can tell, is a parody of Mexican masked wrestling. I didn't delve much deeper than that, so knowing how anime usually turns out, they're probably actually magical schoolgirls who transform into tiny vinyl figures to time travel and do battle with a vile alliance of Mark Twain and James Joyce in a literary showdown to decide the fate of the world. Wow, that sounds vastly more interesting than this game.

Sadly, only one graphical glitch showed up to watch
the match that night between a knight in a mankini
and Fu Manchu, and a generic white guy and a
more different generic white guy.

John's Score: 1.0 out of 5.0. This game is so shitty that it insults shit to call it shitty. Not to sound overly like the Angry Nintendo Video Game Nerd here, but the game is terminally bland, chronically glitchy and, even if everything goes according to plan, duller than watching paint dry.

Karate Champ

Just want you to be as annoyed as I am.

Publisher: Data East
Year: 1986
Genre: Fighting


The NES isn't really well-suited for one-on-one fighting bouts as this game succinctly demonstrates. Mind you, the NES can do way WAY better than Karate Champ with its clumsy (at best) hit detection, its tiny generic move list and its unpleasant graphics. The controls, B to attack left and A to attack right, will be recycled in Double Dragon II, where they will not suck. This awful game didn't deserve anything that useful anyway.

I'm the one in white, and technically I'm losing,
despite the flawlessly executed kick to the dick.

John's Rating: 1.0 out of 5.0. This is just awful. It's vaguely reminiscent of the much better game Barbarian, which was sadly never ported to the NES. Except, where Barbarian features awesome swords and vicious bloodthirsty barbarians dueling to the death for bikini-clad babes (not to mention a useable control scheme with  moves that were of varying utility), Karate Champ has a constipated old man watching people in bathrobes kick each other.

Gumshoe

They just don't make title screens like this anymore.
That's a good thing.

Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1986
Genre: Platformer / Zapper

Nowadays, when games experiment with control schemes, it falls into one of three categories: a gimmick, a disaster, or a generally enjoyable novelty. And, if someone does come upon a winner, everyone and their brother wants in on the action. Back in the Nintendo days, however, employing a novel control scheme was a risk that companies - even large companies like Nintendo, were more than willing to take. Frankly, it was one of the most obvious ways to make your game stand out in the crowd - you might not be able, for instance, to make a character as memorable as Mario or even the Battletoads, but you might be able to come up with a unique gameplay element, such as the novel flight control scheme of Joust, and end up being a commercial success despite the absolute absence of any memorable characters whatsoever. Which is why I won't be too hard on Gumshoe, a game that at least tried to be original.

In Gumshoe, you control a detective who is looking for the "Black Panther" diamonds, apparently to ransom his kidnapped daughter from some sort of Italian mobster. I'm too lethargic to come up with a racially insensitive joke, so you can just use your imaginations. The diamonds just seem to be lying in street when you come upon them, but that doesn't seem so important right now. What's important is that the game is controlled entirely by the Zapper gun, either by shooting obstacles that appear on screen, or by shooting the main character in order to make him jump. There are no other controls. As you progress through the game, you pick up balloons to replenish your ammo, but unless you spam bullets throughout the whole thing, you'll never get anywhere near running out.

Those balloons, which you cannot shoot, contain
bullets. That car and bottle, which you can shoot,
contain death.

John's Rating: 2.5 out of 5.0. Don't get me wrong, games with simpler control schemes have been popular even as recently as a few years ago, but, the execution, in this case, is wanting, not to mention the fact that the game digs well into Nintendo Hard territory, with little poison skulls often pressed so close together that there's no reasonable way to get between them. You might try this game for the novelty or just to have it in your collection, but I wouldn't go out of my way to get my hands on it.

Gradius

Publisher: Konami

Year: 1986

Genre: Side-Scroll Shmup

The 80's were an exciting time in the world of space exploration. America (and all those other countries that don't matter) spent absurd amounts of money on space programs. Why? Because space was the next frontier of warfare, of course! Basically, every superpower (all two of them) and all those other countries that don't matter wanted to put more blinky metal things up in the sky faster than anyone else so that they could perfect the art of putting blinky metal things in the sky. If any of their little blinky things had been the glorious Warp Rattler from Gradius, the Cold War would have been cut mercifully short.

Pictured: the ultimate outcome of rocket science!

Ghosts 'n Goblins

Publisher: Capcom
Year: 1986
Genre: Platformer

Why, Capcom, why?

Warning! This review contains spoilers such as THIS GAME MAKES YOU START THE WHOLE THING OVER WHEN YOU "BEAT" IT!

When I saw this game next on the list, I was immediately overcome with nostalgia. "Ghosts 'n Goblins!" I thought, "I remember this game! It sure was challenging, but it was cool how large the selection of weapons was and the kind of powers they granted when you upgraded your armor!" Those of you who have played the game are probably scratching your head right now. You don't remember any of that! Here's the problem: I'm remembering Super Ghouls and Ghosts a much better version of essentially the same game for the SNES. Ghosts 'n Goblins is different. Ghosts 'n Goblins is... unfortunate.

Even if you owned this game, you might not have
gotten this far. Y'know. The end of the first level.

John's Rating: 1.5 out of 5.0. It isn't that this game is Nintendo Hard, it's that it's arbitrary and unfun about it. A lot of Nintendo Hard games are fun, mostly because they're HARD, but don't CHEAT. In the forest just before the above screenshot, I lost my armor because an enemy spawned inside me. I literally did EVERYTHING correctly and still got hit. That's the kind of game this is, right up until it makes you go back to the beginning and do it all again. Which it does. When you beat the final boss.

Damsels in Distress

Although Mario and Luigi are naught but lowly plumbers by trade, they have well proved themselves renaissance men, having dabbled in such vocations as pest control, demolitions, and sports refereeing, to say nothing of their racing careers, ghost hunting expeditions, biohazard cleanup services and their disastrous forays into the hospitality industry and private education.

When it comes down to it, though, their most successful gigs have been in relation to the rescue of damsels in distress (DID for those of you in the biz). Today, I'd like to identify and examine the damsels of distress within the Mario franchise.

Gaming Reconnect II: Electric Boogaloo

Our friends at Gaming Disconnect have returned with more game reviews! Let me just take a moment to mention that all the games being reviewed are real and not at all made up.

Donkey Kong Jr.

This screen is so boring, I forgot to caption it
when I initially posted this.

Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1986
Genre: Platform

In this thrilling sequel (prequel?) to the original Donkey Kong title, you are Donkey Kong Jr., and you must rescue your father from Mario, who has locked Donkey Kong up, possibly for kidnapping Pauline in the previous game. Naturally, therefore, the best course of action would be to release him and allow Stupid Monkey to continue his rampage, possibly at an oversized greenhouse. I digress - as his son, it is your duty, and if you should knock some fruit down or injure some plumbers along the way SO BE IT!

You'll notice that vine is just slightly too far away
to grab - it's cheap tactics like this that remind me
what Nintendo Hard means.

John's Rating: 3.5 out of 5.0. It's quirky, but generally loveable. It's not exactly the sort of game that amounts to "hours of fun," but I'll often settle for "minutes of enjoyment" or "moments of nostalgia" in a pinch.

Donkey Kong 3

THIS IS THE BEST TITLE SCREEN YET!

Year: 1986
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Action


I should probably do Donkey Kong Jr. first, as it is technically the second game in the Donkey Kong series and also was released chronologically before this one, but as the games don't exactly lead into one another, I feel little to no remorse about sticking with alphabetic order. Having said that, Donkey Kong 3 is a game wherein you spray a monkey's hindquarters with insecticide in an effort first to drive him away, then to mash his head into a bee's nest, presumably out of spite over his attempts to teach his son math; all this while attempting to protect flowers and avoid bee stings.

This game features a surprisingly merciful lack of poo.

John's Rating: 3.0 out of 5.0. This is a solid, albeit simple, action game, all things considered, and stands as proof that familiar characters can be transplanted into unfamiliar gameplay without making a game suck by default. Mind you, Super Mario Bros. 2 and The Adventures of Link both prove that, but they're hardly unanimously accepted. Also, BEES!

Donkey Kong

Year: 1986
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Platform

As a wise man once said, "Everything is better with monkeys." By "wise" of course, I mean "drunk," and by "said" I mean "imagined," but the principle still holds true: EVERYONE loves monkeys, with the possible exception of people who give them Xanax.

But how could they have anticipated that using
potent drugs to remove a violent xenophobic
predator's inhibitions could possibly have
negative repercussions?

Balloon Fight

Year: 1986
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Platform

Remember when you were a kid and balloons, powered by your imagination, could hoist you off the ground and into the stratosphere? Well, screw you, kid! That requires about a fafrillion balloons because physics, bitch! But you know where one can frequently take refuge from the doldrums of everyday physical reality? Video games, that's where!

Moar liek physics atrocity, amiright?

Star Ratings

I have just added the star rating widget to all my posts in this blog. I wish to encourage my readers to rate the games you have played according to the rating you think they deserve. Just to clarify - this isn't meant to reflect what you thought of my writing or my review, but rather the rating that you thought the games deserves, even and especially if you just up and agree with me.

Also, please don't just rate games you have heard of. We all know that, for example, Heroes of the Lance is widely regarded as rubbish - that doesn't mean that everyone should just slap a one-star rating on it without a second thought. That's just not how we roll here.

Commando

There will come a day when title screens are
interesting and eye-catching, I promise.

Year: 1986
Publisher: Capcom
Genre: Shmup

While it may well be the first game I have encountered with poor response on the title screen, Commando is a strong proponent of the shmup truism, "You never run out of bullets: just grenades." It's a respectable title as far as top-scrolling walking shmups go, but, as should be expected of the era, brings very little to the table as far as what we modern folk think of as originality (although, for its time, it was probably groundbreaking).

I don't remember which stereotypical army wears
gray uniforms, and it's just as well, 'cause I'm not
in the mood for ethnic jokes.

John's Rating: 2.5 out of 5.0, because it's kinda fun, but not something you can maintain significant interest in - that is to say, it's in the video game "friend zone."

Chubby Cherub

Year: 1986
Publisher: Bandai
Genre: Platform

In this game, you're a worthless stupid baby-angel who flies around like the world's slowest mosquito trying to avoid being raped to death by dogs. That's the most charitable description of this game I could write.

It's much worse than it looks.

John's Rating: 1.0 out of 5.0, because this game is a steaming turd.

Dark JCO's Rating: 1.0 out of 5.0. How does a game like this even get made? "I have this great idea for a game! You're this chubby little angel guy who flies around and eats all these foodstuffs, but there are these dogs who try to stop you." "BRILLIANT! Send it to presses!" "But we're still in the concept phase..." "No, no, we only have five minutes. Send it to presses!"

Lord Nightmare's Rating: 1.0 out of 5.0. So it's a game about a fat angel? A fat angel who flies around eating what appear to be random foodstuffs. Is he naked? And he's being attacked by... the dog from Duck Hunt? Oh, that dog! if I see that dog one more time...

1942

This screen has almost as many numbers as letters.

Year: 1986
Publisher: Capcom
Genre: Shmup


It's World War II and you're a U.S. pilot flying a super-plane to Tokyo to destroy the Japanese air force! I have to admit, I initially had some serious misgivings about any game by a Japanese company about destroying the Japanese air force, and had to wonder whether it was the opposite in the original Japanese (and the game was, perhaps, called "Happy Pearl Harbor Fun Time Airstrike!"), but as far as I can tell (and according to Wikipedia) the Japanese just sometimes make games about destroying their own airforce.

Is that a Mitsubishi G4M? Almost certainly not...

John's Rating: 2.0 out of 5.0 - this game is about as vanilla as a shoot-'em'-up can possibly get. As far as I can tell, there's exactly one power-up, which basically makes your guns wider, and a grand total of three different enemies (not counting pallet swaps).

Gaming Reconnect 1

Hopefully one of the first of more, my friends down at Gaming Disconnect did this video especially for this blog.

1985 in closing

Well, to be honest, the Nintendo's release titles do not, for the most part, stand the test of time. Hell, to be honest, we only played some of them because they were the only video games available for the system, and we sure as hell couldn't go back to the ATARI 2600 after seeing graphics that consisted of multiple pixels in different colors.

The Nintendo Entertainment System was probably the most important achievement of 1985! Forget Reagan meeting Gorbachev and all that other Cold-war-era BS! The Nintendo was where it's at!

Going onward from here, we have a lot more games to cover each year, and I intend to give full reviews only to those that deserve it. For most of them (those rated less than 4 and not awful or significant enough to warrant further exposition), I'll just give a couple sentences and a screencap. For some of them, it's far, far more than they deserve.

Super Mario Bros.

Year: 1985
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Platform

I skipped this in my alphabetical listing because, frankly, I wanted to finish 1985 with a game that did not suck. Super Mario Bros. spawned the most successful video game franchise in history. You noticed I didn't say, "probably" or "one of" anywhere in that sentence, and it isn't because I am biased (though I probably am): Mario is, empirically speaking, the greatest video game franchise of all to this day. Though its impressive 40 million units sold is due, in no small part, to it being bundled with the console, many of the sequels continue to be worldwide best-sellers to this day. To this day. When I say "to this day" I mean "it still moves preposterous numbers of units when sold without any changes on virtual console."

I could go on gushing about this. I could wax eloquent about Mario's origins, his first appearance, or any of that crap that people talk about when Mario is presented in a blog. In fact, I think I will.

At some point I'll also review the game.

Wrecking Crew

Year: 1985
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Puzzle Action


Back in 1985, someone at Nintendo decided that it would be a great idea to have a Mario game wherein Mario cannot jump. Probably the sensible thing to do with someone who made that suggestion is to sit them down circle-time style and explain to them that when Mario was introduced, his name was actually "Jumpman," and that if Nintendo hadn't been late with the rent payments, they wouldn't have ever thought to name him Mario. Then, in full sight of all the other employees, that employee should have been shot in the back of the head and left there as an example.

Instead, they made the damn game.

I consider this game a dis-continuity in the Mario
universe and demand a ret-con!

Wild Gunman

Year: 1985
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Shooting - Zapper

If a certain "certified sane" Floridian lawyer is to be understood and believed, the Nintendo Zapper was, for many children, their first taste of murder and a gateway to the immoral video-game-playing lifestyle. Thus, Wild Gunman was, without a doubt, the first TRUE Nintendo murder simulator, allowing us to finally live out our depraved fantasy of being an officer of the law and bringing violent felons to justice.

This is the end of the innocence...

Tennis

Year: 1985
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Sports - Tennis

I believe that, since my childhood, there has been not only a general tendency to make games easier (which is super-good) but also a dumbing down of expectations. Players were once required to control every aspect of the game's interaction, whereas now there exist a good many games that take parts that would have once fell out of the player's purview out of their hands. Take, for example, the Nintendo version of Tennis vs. the analogous Wii Sports subgame.

I could have just reviewed Tennis, but that would
almost certainly be less interesting.

Pinball

Year: 1985
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Pinball

Games that pretended to be something else used to be a really cool thing. "Check it out!" the game would say, "I'm a slot machine!" "I'm a pachinko machine!" "I'm a video poker game!" "I'm a monopoly simulator!"


"I'm a pinball machine," seemed to be one of the more popular choices.

This is what all pinball machines look like when you
fire them up.

Mach Rider

Year: 1985
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Racing - Chase


There are things that a racing game can do to make itself stand out in an otherwise vanilla genre. Some incorporate powerups, items or weapons. Some allow you to improve on your vehicle. Some employ novel control schemes. Some just show the game from a different perspective. Mach Rider takes a novel approach to the problem of keeping you interested in what otherwise amounts to bland gameplay: it arbitrarily kicks your ass.

I blame Mel Gibson.

Kung Fu

Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1985
Genre: Brawler - Side-Scroll

There was something of a martial arts craze in the 80's brought on by the likes of the Karate Kid, The Last Dragon and Gymkata. Ok, maybe not so much Gymkata. Point being that it is generally agreed that in the 80's, everybody was Kung Fu Fighting.

Those cats were fast as lightning.

Ice Climber

Year: 1985
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Platform - Top-Scroll

Few games capture the true essence of the Esquimaux peoples of the arctic circle, capturing the spirit and character of the proud native heritage they all bear within them. This game isn't one of them. This is a game about hitting polar bears with a hammer.

As culturally sensitive as the
culture of the 80's required.

Hogan's Alley

Year: 1985
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: Shooting - Zapper


Growing up I wanted to be a great many things. I wanted to be an engineer, I wanted to own a pet shop, I wanted to be an investment banker (no, really) - a great many things. I never once, though, wanted to be an officer of the law. You know why? Because people shoot them!

We can't all be fearless civil servants after all.

Gyromite (Robot Gyro) and Stack-Up (Robot Block)

Year: 1985
Publisher: Nintendo
Genre: R.O.B.

What is this?

What? You seriously think I'm going to go on Ebay, Craigslist or any of the other repositories of discarded junk that exist on the internet and elsewhere, dig up an R.O.B. and play one of these games with it? I'm sorry, do I really look that stupid to you? R.O.B. was a novelty item. I had the misfortune of encountering one when I was a kid, and remember wondering what kind of individual would use a robot that played exactly two games (badly) as a substitute for friends.

I don't even...

John's Rating: Gyromite (aka Robot Gyro) and Stack Up (aka Robot Block) 0.0 out of 5.0