NES Movie Licenses

Posted on August 15, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I reviewed my list of NES games missing from MobyGames and specifically searched for movie licenses. I came up with 10. Oh joy. Games based on movie licenses are infamously insufferable, even worse for the old NES (with at least 3 notable exceptions: Willow, Batman, and Gremlins 2: The New Batch). The first order of business is to determine which games already exist in the database but for other platforms. I go for Alien³ and Bram Stoker’s Dracula tonight.

I was somewhat excited about Alien³ because I thought that the SNES version of Alien³ was really very good. Unfortunately, a quick whirl through the game reveals that it’s actually a port of a more dull version for Amiga, Commodore 64, Game Gear, Genesis, and Sega Master System.

You play Ripley, of course, and you are allotted a rather small period of time to scramble through a level infested by the trademark aliens. You need to free a number of trapped, alien-embryo-impregnated humans. What happens if you should fail in your task? The game scrolls to each of the ill-fated humans and shows 8-bit chest-popping action (illustrated in the preceding screenshot). It’s not nearly as gory as Hitler’s head exploding at the end of Bionic Commando.

Okay, I got the screenshots for that one. I move swiftly on to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for which MobyGames presently lists ports for Amiga, DOS, Game Boy, Game Gear, Genesis, Sega CD, Sega Master System, and SNES. What’s one more platform? The developers (Psygnosis and Probe are listed) were extremely busy with these 9 (known) ports of this game. Some things fell by the wayside, like some kind of intro/title theme. I thought there was something wrong with the emulator. Here’s another graphical problem that sticks out like a mountain– because it is a problem with the mountains:

Bram Stoker's Dracula -- Uneven mountains

These uneven mountains are a bit disconcerting, even if you’re fairly unobservant like me. That quirk notwithstanding, the graphics are decent, as they should be for a 1993 game.

Very similar by screenshots to the existing platform ports in MobyGames, BSD is another side-scrolling action affair; the hero collects a variety of weapons to use against the hordes of undead. Creepy, undead bosses top off each level. The first boss is a shadow creature who keeps taking cover in the shadows. I’m not nimble enough to take him down. Instead, I lie down for a nap:

Or that could be the game over screen. Either way, it’s past my bedtime, and MobyGames is 2 games closer to completion.

See Also:

7 more NES movie licenses

At MobyGames:

Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers 2

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

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.

Chip & Dale's Rescue Rangers -- Daring blimp rescue

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.

Chip & Dale's Rescue Rangers -- Bomb threat

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:

Chip & Dale's Rescue Rangers -- Defusing 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.

The Last Starfighter

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

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.

Everything I Need To Know I Learned From NES Games

Posted on August 12, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

Tonight’s goal was to shove as many educational NES games into MobyGames as I could possibly tolerate in one night. These games tend to be a nice source of database points, at least for myself and DJP Mom. It’s easy to blow through them in 10-30 minutes, depending on how involved you want to get, and write a perfect database entry with very complete information and a thorough screenshot set.

There is a series of Fisher-Price-licensed titles for the NES that somehow have not made it into the database yet (couldn’t be that I’m the only person obsessive enough to want the database to have all American NES games ever). The first one that I played of the set is kind of fun: Fisher-Price: Firehouse Rescue. You navigate your Fisher-Price firetruck around the dangerously convoluted streets that comprise your fire protection district:

Fisher-Price: Firehouse Rescue-- Poorly planned neighborhood

Who planned these neighborhoods?! Lives could hang in the balance depending on my response time. Perhaps I’m overreacting, though, since no houses ever actually seem to be on fire. When you arrive at a residence, you merely extend your engine’s ladder to each of the smiling house inhabitants in turn who calmly evacuate for no good reason when you position the ladder correctly.

Still, I was reasonably impressed with the level of graphical detail present in this game. This should not be a big surprise because, seriously, what else would they have spent their ROM budget on? It’s not a very complicated game, though the mazes get a little more challenging as the levels progress.

The other 2 Fisher-Price games are I Can Remember, a card memory game, and Perfect Fit, where you must match shapes into silhouettes:

As you can see, in later levels, it becomes necessary to flip shapes to make them match. You can play either of these 2 games against another human or the computer (codenamed: Electro). It’s difficult to articulate how painful it is to watch the computer attempt to perform the above exercise at the level the programmers perceived a preschooler would do it. I don’t think preschoolers necessarily play games the same way drunks would.

The most interesting educational game of the evening was Mickey’s Safari In Letterland. Mickey Mouse must venture to exotic locales spanning the globe — or at least, some globe, not exactly the one we’re used to — and collect diamonds that have letters in order to spell out three-letter words. If you complete a stage after collecting the 3 letters and spelling a proper word, Mickey will show you a picture of what that word represents, he will spell it out, and he will say it, all with digitized voice samples. This is probably the most extensive use of speech I have seen yet in a NES cartridge.

I especially liked this detail in the ‘Pyramid’ location:

Mickey's Safari In Letterland -- Mouse sarcophagus in the pyramid level

A mouse sarcophagus. Mickey faces all manner of ferocious creatures in this game, including, but not limited to, hippos, snakes, alligators, porcupines, and perhaps most terrifying of all, seals (in the high, snowy Yukon). However, it’s absolutely impossible to fail in this game. The enemies are all essentially rubber off of which Mickey bounces. Long falls daze him a bit, but he gets right back up on his adventure.

4 games down tonight, and there are still a few more educational NES titles to go.

NES Ninja Wrap-up

Posted on August 11, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

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.

Ninja Kid -- Starting out in the poison field

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.

Ninja Kid -- In the water, playing it safe

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:

Ninja Crusaders -- Watery graue (or perhaps grave)

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’.

Gaming Cartography

Posted on May 22, 2007 by Multimedia Mike

I haven’t posted or even played a game since… oh wow, I don’t even want to think about it. Nope, I am unable to announce my triumphant return to the gaming pursuit and upkeep of this blog tonight. In fact, it’s almost vacation time.

To tide you over for another month, here’s a little something I dug out of my archives: 2 adventure games I absolutely loved on the old 8-bit NES were Shadowgate and Uninvited. These games along with Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True completed something of a trilogy of adventure games developed in the same style. I wasn’t too impressed with the latter game but I liked Shadowgate and Uninvited enough to draw up maps for each game. I have scanned them for your review.

I drew them up on plain white 8×11″ posterboard that was in great supply in my house for some reason. I drew them with pencil and ruler at first to allow for easy correction and then drew over the edges using a darker crayon-like tool. There are several parts of each map with only a portion represented in thumbnail form below. Click for much larger scans:

Shadowgate

Uninvited

There’s a funny programming story behind that rough maze diagram: The best I could do for graphing paper was a PrintScreen of a GW-BASIC program I had written to manually draw a bunch of lines on the screen. That’s why there’s that “Ok” prompt in the upper left corner. Come to think of it, since I have been playing around with vector drawing programs lately, maybe redoing these maps with such a tool would be a useful learning exercise.

Hopefully, the maps will bring back some pleasant memories or perhaps even inspire some to fire up the emulators.