I don’t know if I’m going soft, or perhaps I’m getting my groove back as I re-discover my old love affair with the 8-bit NES. I found another good game that I have to confess belongs on my Good List— those games that I certainly wish to revisit sometime later.

Isolated Warrior is another one of those NES games that I always wanted to try. It’s on my big — yet shrinking — list of unentered NES titles and today was the day. I have a feeling tomorrow will be the day as well, and perhaps even the next day. I am scheduled to meet up with some coworkers soon and experience that new gaming phenomenon known as Halo 3. Ironically, Isolated Warrior has a similar storyline:

The game does not screw around. From the second you fire it up, it tells you what is going on, rather matter-of-factly. Lone superwarrior must fight off alien menace using all manner of weaponry. It’s a game that seems simple and rather obnoxious at first, but slowly reveals itself as a fascinating strategy action game, though no less obnoxious than at the first impression.

Isolated Warrior is a vaguely Zaxxon-esque game with its isometric perspective action. The hero is constantly advancing, and always facing in one direction. So in essence, this is a shmup. However, it’s a shmup with lots of options and powerups. You get finished off pretty quickly during the first play but it makes you wonder what all those powerups are for. The manual for this one is online and you re-read it to understand what is going on. There are powerups that strengthen your gun’s focus or spread capability, there are bomb powerups that increase your bombing capability (which you can launch while jumping, which is another amazing ability in this game), there is a shield powerup to help defend against enemies, and there is another feature that I found by accident and I will probably never get to see again:

At this point, 2 shells grabbed me and teleported me to a bonus round overflowing with a smorgasboard of powerups. The stage keeps accelerating, just to taunt you, so grab what you can.

Even though I could not even complete the first level, I kept going back for more, to try more weapons and strategies. Later levels are supposed to feature even faster, vehicle-based action. Yeah, this is going on my Good list.

My speed running journey continues today with Whomp ‘Em. The hero in this game is an Indian Brave, a.k.a. American Indian or Native American. Reflexively, it makes one wince at the sheer political incorrectness of it all, with its stereotypical Indian protagonist, stereotypical goal of collecting Indian totems, all while listening to vaguely stereotypical Indian-sounding background music. However, it’s probably difficult to get too indignant about Whomp ‘Em after the raw pornographic indignation offered up by Custer’s Revenge for the Atari 2600.

This little Indian’s name in Soaring Eagle and his task is to collect the totems for his magic pouch. There are 8 worlds to explore. The first one has to be conquered before the player gets to explore the next 6 in any order desired. At the end of each of the 6 worlds is a boss whose defeat will yield one of the totems. The totems grant Soaring Eagle a new power. If this sounds somewhat familiar, that’s probably because of the similarity it bears to the time-honored Mega Man formula.

All in all, I have to give the game credit — it’s not bad at all. Other games have ripped off Mega Man, but have done a very bland job of it (The Krion Conquest springs to mind). Whomp ‘Em features a lot of slick diversity in its different worlds. All the requisite terrain types are represented– fire world, ice world, forest world, swamp world, cloud world, you get the idea.

The only thing I really didn’t like about this game was the gameplay. I thought it was a bit awkward and difficult to control. While walking left or right, it seemed to be too easy to slip the gamepad upwards which would make Soaring Eagle stop, albeit, he would be defended from attacks from above.

Wow, what is it with the uninspired NES titles lately? Castle of Dragon, Sword Master, and now Dragon Fighter. I just wasn’t too excited about even attempting Dragon Fighter since I recall it being some dopey-looking martial arts game. However, I must have been thinking about Dragon Power instead.

Dragon Fighter, it turns out, is a side-scrolling action game with some unique gameplay ideas. Your hero is the basic, run-of-the-mill fighter with a sword. He starts out in a decidedly unusual winter locale fighting some surprisingly nimble and acrobatic ursine creatures, to say nothing of the giant, killer snowflakes, the likes of which I never had to deal with in Snow Day: The Gap Kids Quest.

I like the snow gently falling on two apparent planes which is a nice graphical effect– reminiscent of the directional snow in Ninja Gaiden II, which actually figured into the gameplay.

So I’m just walking along, jumping and slashing, when I discovered how this game earned its title– I can turn into a dragon:

At first, I thought that perhaps I turned into a dragon at certain pre-determined junctures, and back into human form later. The correct answer is that the player can actually control both events, to an extent. You can change into a dragon after you have powered up a secondary power meter (up + A to transform to dragon), and you stay a dragon until either you run out of power on that secondary bar or until you manually transform back to upright biped form (down + A to transform to human). While a dragon, the game assumes a shmup style of gameplay where the dragon is always flying, always facing straight ahead (where the human can face either direction) and can shoot fireballs in a spread formation. I learned later from watching the speed run video that in human form, the hero can hold B to power up the sword and fire off an energy projectile.

The game features 6 diverse levels, from snow level, to water level, to haunted castle that has all manner of menacing body parts. This section has a creative boss:

Various body parts form together to play the part of boss, while leaving a large, exposed heart open to attack. It’s a novel use of minimalist video game artwork, though a tactical nightmare for the doomed boss.

This was a fun game to play, though incredibly tedious with the trial and error necessary. So I loaded up this tool-assisted speed run video. I’m pleased to report that this has to rank as one of the most entertaining speed runs I have viewed to date. The sixth and final level is played entirely in flying mode (unlimited dragon power at this point). The speed runner largely takes a pacifist approach by avoiding enemies and their projectiles while almost never returning fire. As the speed run description states, “I made the dragon move to the beat of the music for most of this level while taunting the enemies.”

It’s hilarious and rather exhilarating to watch.

Of course, for every great game in this experiment like Little Samson, there are at least 50 games that are less than memorable. I played a few more of these specimens. Fortunately, there are speed runs available for some games still missing from MobyGames. Strategy: Play just enough to get proper screenshots of title and intro screens, play the first level to get a feel for the game, keep playing until I just can’t stand it anymore, and then let the speed run movie rip in the emulator and capture lots of diverse screenshots. I got sucked into playing Little Samson for hours due to this approach (and I never even got to the speed run). But a few other recent games did not elicit the same reaction.

Two games I tried back to back had largely the same storyline, to say nothing of highly generic titles. In both Sword Master and Castle of Dragon, an evil wizard or dragon (or perhaps both) kidnaps a princess and terrorizes a kingdom. It is up to J. Random Knight to rectify the situation. Sword Master was far and away the superior entry between the two, due primarily to its stunning graphical tricks that look like true parallax scrolling backgrounds. Naturally, these can’t be illustrated with a still screenshot. I won’t let that stop me:

As for Castle of Dragon, thankfully, the manual is available online. This facilitates creating a new MobyGames entry that has more storyline detail than “some dragon in some kingdom kidnapped some princess and this knight dude has to rescue her.” Indeed, that’s the gist, but I’m able to use more of the official story’s proper nouns. The manual also dispenses this valuable advice in its secret techniques section: “Shield is most effective against swords.”

Here’s the coolest boss dragon from the game:

The ferocious rooster dragon. One of the last bosses is your reflection, busted out from a mirror. Have we seen that before? A reflection boss, or perhaps a shadow?

Let’s leap about a millenium forward in the fantasy timeline, from the middle ages to the year 2525, which is the alleged setting for the NES game Super Spy Hunter. Again, the manual is available which is what alleges that the game is set 500 years from now. Frighteningly, not much of the earth’s infrastructure has changed. it’s a bunch of square buildings and freeways interspersed, on which 1980s-style cars and tanker trucks roll along, with helicopters flying overhead. If SSH is to be believed, the next 5 centuries will not see much technological innovation.

Super Spy Hunter reprises the old franchise’s time-honored theme of an overhead rolling shooter, albeit more controlled than a conventional shmup (since you control the rate that the car advances). You can aim your vehicle’s gun in different directions, but that’s tedious at high speeds. You can also receive powerups that allow your gun to auto-aim, or to completely detach and fly around and destroy enemies without your intervention.

I didn’t think this game was too bad until I got to the 1st level boss that was just a big tanker whose preferred offensive method is to simply squish you against the road barrier.

It’s worth noting that the title is a little confusing– generally, games prefixed with ‘Super’ were strictly the providence of Super NES games (the Super Mario Bros. franchise gets a pass, of course).