So last night’s action game was a bust. I looked through the list of un-entered NES games tonight and found one that can’t miss– Disney’s Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers 2. This was a sequel to another NES game of the same franchise which was, of course, based on a popular Disney syndicated cartoon. Capcom’s Disney cartoon adaptations were always quite simple due to their target audience, yet amazingly fun and remarkably faithful to the source material. Just the way that Capcom’s musicians managed to accurately reproduce the various Disney themes on the NES audio hardware was phenomenal, though curiosity-inspiring as it made us gamers wonder why the theme song could not be reproduced exactly (something I understand full well now).

Thankfully, this game did not disappoint, though I did get off to a fairly bumpy start which only served to illustrate just how much gaming skill I have lost over the years. In the previous game, the valorous vermin were responsible for putting the nemesis Fatcat away. But the intro in this game illustrates a daring prison break by blimp, a blimp that illuminates with “FATCAT” on the side when it has completed its mission.

Next, Chip is watching television looking for leads on hot cases. The announcer obliges with the notification that there is a BOMB threat at a nearby restaurant.

This is pretty heavy stuff for a kids’ game. Chip assembles the crew and announces that this is precisely the kind of mission that the Rescue Rangers are chartered to handle. And darned if the rest of the crew doesn’t go along with it.

So it’s off to the restaurant for stage 1 and possible incineration. Despite my misgivings about the rodents punching above their proverbial weight, the game is predictably competent. Nintendo shows a release date of January, 1994 for this title, the beginning of the last year that official NES games were published, and Capcom is one of the best creators of NES games. So I had high expectations which I am glad to report were met. I liken this game (and the previous one) to Clockwork Knight with the way smaller-than-life characters are making their way in an oversized world. The first stage has you battling across the countertops of a diner, past food and sinks and ovens, dodging bees pouring honey and rats wielding silverware. Those rats are mean– the ones with forks will throw their utensils; the rats with spoons use them to bat your boxes back at you when you dare to pick up and throw the crates– fiendish feature for a NES game.

Eventually, I make it past the first boss and Gadget has recovered the bite-sized bomb:

Panicked, she asks you whether she should cut the blue or the red wire. It doesn’t matter which you pick– she was only kidding. So it’s down into the sewer next, in hot pursuit of Fatcat, having learned through villainous exposition from the stage 1 boss that the bomb was a distraction, during which Fatcat stole some Egyptian artifact. I played until I got to the second level boss, whom I had no idea how to defeat:

My best guess is that he is some sort of fart bat. He launches 2 clouds at you along predictable vectors and then swoops to the other side of the room. I just couldn’t find any offensive option for taking care of him.

I decided to just play one NES game tonight. I went for a game that sounded like it would be a fun action romp. How about The Last Starfighter, based on the 1984 movie? That sounds like it would fit the bill. What was I thinking? A movie license is a movie license and this is no different. The confusing part is that the developers weren’t exactly meeting a movie release deadline (this came out in 1990; the NES came out after the movie).

It’s a confusing and difficult shmup game. Your starfighter moves about a vertical line that sits in the middle of the screen. From there, you can accelerate and decelerate, and can turn backwards and forwards. You can shoot with the B button and in some circumstances, you can press the A button to slim the ship into a different shape. I’m not sure when I was allowed to transform in this way or what purpose it served. I just know that it’s arduous to survive more than about a minute.

It’s unclear whether the legendary death blossom made an appearance in the game.

WildKard’s recent entry for Little Ninja Brothers reminded me that I wanted to scan my list of NES games yet to be entered into MobyGames and finish entering all NES ninja games. That is, all NES games with ‘ninja’ in the title. It turns out that we’re down to 2 now: Ninja Kid and Ninja Crusaders.

In Ninja Kid, you play a character who is ostensibly a ninja, though the game’s title is the only real evidence of that. He runs, he jumps, and he shoots. Presumably, he shoots magic ninja bullets. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem very ninja-like. He doesn’t even wear a ninja mask, though I recognize that’s not a hard and fast ninja requirement. Some of his enemies in this game are the more traditional ninjas who wear masks and throw ninja stars. Ninja stars are among the powerups in this game, along with boomerangs and fireballs. They’re all more becoming of a ninja than the default ninja bullets.

This ninja kid is also a little wuss. One hit and he dies. Yeah, it’s one of those games.

I am trying to figure this game out. There is not much to go on in the way of in-game clues. I suppose I could dig up the old instruction manual using the internet. But a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. From what I can surmise, Ninja Kid has to travel to a series of locations on an overhead map (that shift around with every game). The process for completing an area is a bit fuzzy. It seems that you have to find a way to open a door which may lead back outside, or to a boss battle. Just battling your way to the right isn’t enough, and the levels likely go on forever. That means that my strategy, illustrated above, of just laying low in the water where there were almost no threats, probably wouldn’t pay off in the long run. I still played Ninja Kid quite a bit longer than I strictly needed to out of a strange determination just to figure out what on earth was going on!

I still can’t get over the whole shooting ninja thing. I wager the best explanation for this is that the game came out in 1986, very early in the NES’s life, and “that’s just the way things were done back then.” Sort of like the way crates figured prominently into early 3D games.

On to Ninja Crusaders, which is a 1990 title and a good deal more competent than the previous ninja game. However, it shares one unfortunate feature: one hit, no more ninja. This was always the ultimate aggravation in classic NES games.

Aliens — apparently mechanized ones — invaded the earth and annihilated much of humanity. Some ninjas survived and eventually decide to file a complaint with the new management, as only ninjas can. Ninja Crusaders is a 2-player simultaneous game with some very nice, post-apocalyptic cityscape graphics.

A ninja begins the game with a magically unlimited supply of ninja stars. They’re weak but have a screen-width range. Other, more powerful weapons are available but naturally have less range. Such weapons include a sword, a bo staff, and… a chain whip? A maskless ninja is passable, fine; but I just can’t get past the idea of a ninja with a chain whip, as demonstrated here:

I mostly stuck to the ninja stars because I preferred being far, far away from the lethal enemies while battling them. However, when I made it to the first boss, whose attack pattern involves getting all up in your face, I found myself longing for a more powerful short-range offensive option.

I thought this game was teaching me a new word:

until I looked it up and found no such word as “graue”. Perhaps they meant “grave”, but that’s certainly not the font character for ‘v’.