Kyuukyoku Harikiri Stadium* Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released June 28, 1988 Developed by Taito Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
*This review includes ROM update Kyuukyoku Harikiri Stadium: ’88 Senshu Shin Data Version (Released Dec. 16, 1988 exclusively in Japan)
This is the home run derby and it’s, you know, bland. I don’t get video home run derbies. Home Run Derbies are fun to watch, and only exactly once a year and not a single derby more. I’d rather the players save it for the all-star game anyway, which are so fun that, to this day, my father bitches about missing the 1989 All-Star Game. Without fail, every summer when the All-Star Game comes around, he’ll look at me and say “you just HAD to be born right then!” Yep, I was born the day of the 1989 All-Star Game. A lot of All-Star games happen on my birthday, which is cool but still not as cool as the human resistance being set to achieve victory over Skynet on what will be my 40th birthday in the Terminator franchise.
The first Japanese baseball exclusive where I was legitimately perplexed as to why nobody licensed this for a US release. Kyuukyoku Harikiri Stadium, which I’ll refer to as KHS for my own sanity, is a quality baseball video game. What’s astonishing is that this was the launching point in the Harisuta franchise, which was probably the #2 baseball franchise (behind Namco’s Family Stadium) in Japan and certainly one of the bigger Japanese-exclusive Nintendo franchises. There are a LOT of these games, and there’s a reason for that. KHS has a very solid baseball engine, albeit a slower paced one. The slow pace isn’t GENUINELY slow, but rather calculated to accommodate the dimensions of the field or distance between bases. Like Nintendo’s Baseball, KHS attempts to account for things like the relative size of the playfield and the distance between bases when determining how fast players should move. This is NOT a high-energy game. Then again, it’s baseball so that should track, right?
Even with slow outfielder speed, the base runners don’t seem to move at the same speed, so making outfield throw-outs IS possible if the ball is hit where you could expect to be able to make a throw in real life baseball. The closer the ball is hit to the infield, the less 1-to-1 the scale accuracy feels. I’m guessing that Taito had to choose between fine tuning the infield or outfield and decided to go with outfield. If you have to do one or the other, I’d say they made the right call because if you flipped it around, you’d probably be able to run-up the score much, much more easily, which makes it feel less like real baseball.
However, unlike Nintendo’s game, Taito did a much better job with the timing. So while defenders and their throws are slow, the resulting game play feels accurate to how real baseball should work. IE balls hit to specific locations in the field should result in the same amount of bases you would expect real life baseballs hit at those angles to generate. It’s well done, but not perfect. I think batters can beat out just a little too many infield hits. And I mean just a little. Otherwise, this is the first game in this entire feature where it feels like consideration for fielding was given a premium over the pitcher/batter duel. My second game went all the way to the ninth inning without a single run scored by me or the CPU, and that was the result of well adjusted defensive gameplay. Trust me, it sure as hell wasn’t from the pitching!
There’s no complicated pitches. Like so many early baseball games, you manually apply the curve yourself. Also fast balls are incredibly rare. I never quite learned how to do them.
So yeah, the pitching feels almost cricket-like in its delivery and, instead, the game relies on making most hits playable by the defense. This is a very true to baseball way of handling things, by the way. This is a sport where a player who fails only 66% of the time at the bat is likely to make an all-star team. I didn’t even hit my first in-game home run until the top of the 9th inning in my second full game. The defense uses a hybrid system similar to Bases Loaded, only without the speed boost when you take manual control. You WILL want to take manual control anyway. The system is more about getting defenders ready for the players, not about doing the heavy lifting for you. Most fly outs you’ll have to grab yourself. But, I mean, it works! After giving up two runs in my practice session, my first two real games were shut-outs and that was based entirely on how intuitive fielding is.
Okay, so there’s the occasional brain dead moment that would result in the summary execution of the player by their teammates and possibly fans if it were a home game. The left fielder gets the ball, throws to second to make the force out. It’s going to be close, but then the shortstop ends up inside the throwing angle and HE catches the ball instead right next to the base, preventing the out. If a shortstop did this in real life, he would be treated to the world’s first act of involuntary sodomy with a baseball bat committed on live television. You know who I would feel for in that situation? The stadium’s organ player. Do you play the theme to Jaws or Baby Elephant Walk? Do you start playing BEFORE the bat is inserted or after the tears start flowing?
Since I’m focusing on single player experiences, the key addition to Taito’s take on the sport is a smarter CPU. It knows how to turn double plays, hit relay men, and make the throw to prevent extra bases. It also occasionally does the RBI Baseball “protect home when there’s an easy out at first” thing. It’s rare, but it happens, and it kills the immersion. I’m going to guess that none of these early 8-bit games will be able to perfectly keep up the fantasy for an entire nine inning stretch, so all I can hope for is as few bumps in the road as possible. But for what it’s worth, this feels like a step-forward, and the only reason I’m not calling it the best NES baseball game yet is because Bases Loaded’s duel is just much more versatile.
The sprites for snagging line-drives are great. I mean, if you imagine there’s angels in the outfield, and in the infield too!
Taito’s KHS isn’t amazing or anything. The pitcher/batter duel is very generic and uninspired while also likely being clockable. I played four full games (one of which was for the updated cart) and I think if I kept playing just a couple more games longer, I probably would have reached the point of being able to turn the offense into an unrealistic freak show. But, I did have fun with my time with it. Beware, though: the season mode has upgradable stats. In a game where I already held the CPU to an under one-run-a-game scoring average over four games, I think it might be possible to turn the game into a mockery of the sport. BUT, if you want to have fun for an hour playing an old timey video baseball game that you’ve probably never played before, I find it unlikely a baseball fan wouldn’t have fun playing this. I seriously can’t wait to play the rest of these and see where they take the franchise from here. Verdict: YES!
The Karate Kid Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released November, 1987 Developed by Atlus Published by LJN NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
That does not look like Sensei Lawrence. Also, all the screenshots are going to look like a piece of paper that someone spilled water on thanks to the pattern in the status bar. I bet that looked nicer on old tube TVs.
This might come as an incredible shock to my readers, but as I’m typing this sentence, before rendering my verdict on The Karate Kid, vilified NES publisher LJN has a winning record at Indie Gamer Chick. The current scorecard stands at 2 YES!, 1 NO! Don’t mistake that for some kind of accomplishment, since those YES! games barely made it over the finish line while the NO! game couldn’t find the finish line if the finish line crawled up its ass. We’re not exactly talking masterpieces I played over here. The first was Jaws, back in October of 2023. A game that’s historically maligned but genuinely not horrible. It just doesn’t do enough. Then, as my Christmas 2024 feature, I looked at nearly every light gun game on a Nintendo platform, including LJN’s Gotcha! The Sport. A bland but serviceable NES Zapper game. Finally, earlier this year, I took a look at Back to the Future. Is BTTF as bad as people say? Nah. It’s just very boring, which granted, is the worst thing a game can be, but it’s not the legendary trash fire I expected. Well, I had a feeling what to expect with Karate Kid. I was wrong, too, because this is no half-assed effort.
Update: Cathy, you silly dumbass. I’ve done FOUR games by LJN. I forgot about Wolverine, which got a NO! It’s okay. Everyone else forgot about Wolverine too.
If you dare to play Karate Kid, be ready to see a lot of sprites that look like this.
For starters, unlike Jaws or Back to the Future, Karate Kid makes an earnest effort to follow the story of the first two movies. Mostly the second movie, as only the opening level has anything to do with the first flick. You start with the finale of the Karate Kid: the All Valley Tournament. You have to win four matches against sprites that look nothing like the characters from the films. Weirdly, that’s the only major disconnect from the films. After that, the game is a more platforming-focused take on Kung-Fu Master. In fact, I should have included Karate Kid in my Kung-Fu Master: The Definitive Review feature, since the gameplay is clearly inspired by that legendary game. The combat really is almost identical to the famous Irem game, at least in theory. One button for punch, one for kick, press UP to jump, with the full range of moves from Kung-Fu Master. If you’re going to copy, copy from the best, right?
There’s also three different bonus games taken directly from the films. One where you smash blocks of ice, one where you catch flies in chopsticks, and the hammer seen here. I never got good at this one. The timing is weird.
Karate Kid doesn’t just copy Kung-Fu Master, though. It tries its damnedest to one-up that game by including two special moves: the drum technique from the second film and the legendary crane kick. They’re even animated in a way where the actual attack part comes with a slight delay, but they’re pretty convincing for a 1987 NES game. The problem with them is they’re done by simply standing still and pressing the kick button for the crane kick and punch for the drum technique. It makes it way too easy to activate them accidentally. The drum punch especially seems a lot more sensitive and poorly coded than the crane kick. I was constantly accidentally using the drum even when my movement should have cancelled the activation. Since you very much want to save these special moves for boss encounters or even when two enemies are attacking you out of sync, it’s annoying how easy it is to burn through them. This is compounded by Karate Kid being yet another NES game where the SELECT button goes unused. Why not map it so SELECT + A/B activates the special moves?
Speaking of bosses, this is supposed to be Chozen, the jerk ass from Karate Kid 2 who becomes one of the coolest allies in Cobra Kai. But, it looks nothing like him! Instead, this sprite is a DEAD RINGER for John Kreese! I mean, seriously, I did a double take and everything.
Before I continue, holy crap, the Kreese thing gets weirder. The basic enemies look EXACTLY like 8-bit versions of Young Kreese from Cobra Kai.
WTF?! Actor Barrett Carnahan (Young Kreese) could use that sprite as his driver’s license photo! Mind you, “Young Kreese” didn’t debut until Season 3, episode 2 of Cobra Kai, and this game is five years older than Carnahan, so this is kind of spooky. Oh, and Young Kreese is also the best character in the series and I’ll fight you on that. I do think Young Kreese and old Kreese are two separate characters from alternative dimensions since I literally cannot believe that Young Kreese grows up to be Old Kreese. Every single time I thought they were going to finally bridge the gap between the characters of Young Kreese and Old Kreese, nope, they did something else that made me think “there is no way that guy eventually became THAT guy.”
Anyway, I thought Karate Kid was decent enough at the start. Certainly rough in terms of movement and jumping, but nothing offensive, and it had acceptable level design and decent enough graphics. This lasted until about five seconds into the second stage, when the gameplay came to a screeching halt thanks to some of the strangest damage physics I’ve experienced in any 2D platformer. When you get hit in Karate Kid, there’s a pronounced knock-back, but unlike Castlevania or Mega Man, that knock-back has no blinking with it. Naturally, Karate Kid’s default challenge is sending two enemies at you who attack just out of sync. Of course it would be that way, and thus you can get caught very easily in a juggle. Hell, the level design even seems to be tailored specifically to cause this. Look at this shot:
I had a full life bar going into this part. You really don’t want to give up the high ground because of stuff like this. So, the combat is, to say the least, frustrating. As if to cosmically square this, enemies really don’t seem to know how to navigate the terrain. When they reach a low point on the playfield like in the above screen, even though they seem mechanically capable of climbing out of it, they become too confused to do so. In later stages, enemies are so lobotomized that more of them will kill themselves via the pits than be killed by you. A few years ago I reviewed the Atari-developed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom coin-op that had me gobsmacked by how suicidal enemies were. This game gives it a run for its money. Karate Kid’s dimwitted basic enemies are just as bad, often walking off platforms to their doom. Some even jumped willingly into the water to die by drowning. That’s hardcore. You know what? I get it. They knew they wouldn’t even get a cameo in Season Six of Cobra Kai, but come on, fellas. Maybe there’s hope for a Chozen spin-off!
But, the surviving enemies aren’t so much fun to fight as they are pests. By the end of Karate Kid, I was so bored with being used as a tetherball that I opted to leg it and run away from enemies. That’s a viable strategy if you can get in front of them, since the game can only spawn two at a time. Then the third level hit, which takes place during the typhoon sequence of the second movie. Now, again, very admirable that they tried to recreate the set-pieces of the film. You even rescue the little girl from the typhoon while fighting Kreese Chozen. Okay, so in the film Chozen isn’t part of that sequence, but it’s the thought that counts. Despite its scathing reputation, Karate Kid does a lot right. The sprites have more frames of animation than most NES games of this time frame do, which gives the combat a pretty good sense of OOMPH! Nice graphics. The game follows the movie as close as you can do in an 8-bit platformer. Karate Kid isn’t phoned-in at all.
The baddies are like “OH COME ON, EVEN THE LITTLE GIRL GETS CLOSURE IN COBRA KAI AND WE DON’T?” By the way, this stage was a slight epilepsy risk thanks to the lightning flashes, so I’ll remind everyone that I’m partnered with AbleToPlay so please support them and sign up to contribute to their database to help people like me.
It sounds so cool, but that whole typhoon level is an unimaginable clusterf*ck of sadness because the entire time the wind is pushing you backward AND crap is flying at you randomly. It’s hard to get too mad because I understand why it’s like that. Altus figured out that the game would be monotonous, so they had to do something to differentiate the stages. The same can be said about the structure of the final boss. Again, they based it on the scene from the sequel, where you fight Chozen to the death on a platform. Except, they want players to honor the spirit of the movie and allow Chozen to square-up with you because of honor or some such bullsh*t. If that’s how they wanted it, why even program him to tee himself up for players by leaping onto the platform from high above you? Because if you punch him out of the air, it’ll knock him into the water, but that’s NOT supposed to happen so they just restart the fight over and over until you allow him to land. Then, not only do you have to fight him, but you have to make sure Kumiko isn’t knocked into the water, and her hit box and movement behavior is far too sensitive.
Calling Karate Kid a disaster is just straight-up wrong. It’s not even a run-of-the-mill bad licensed game. This actually had a fighting chance to not only be a quality game, but maybe even a beloved one. It doesn’t lack for effort. Karate Kid lacks for polish. Based on what I’ve heard about motion picture licensing from the 80s, Atlus probably had a very strict deadline to bring Karate Kid from the drawing board to the manufacturing. The people granting the licenses, simply put, didn’t know there was a difference between good video games and bad ones. To them, video games were no different than action figures, and if kids think a toy is boring, that’s on the kid, not them. This screwed a LOT of talented studios, which in turn screwed a lot of game consumers.
Two of the three characters in this picture are about to drown while the third will do the heroic thing: point and laugh at them.
It speaks volumes to how talented Atlus was, even in 1987, that Karate Kid rises to the level it does. Because my hunch tells me that, when it came to gameplay concepts, they had to use whatever was the first viable (IE programmable) idea that was pitched. There was no time to weed out bad ideas. Hence the wind in level three, or the way Kumiko works in the final battle, or even the very short length of the game. Despite this, Karate Kid follows the plot better than any other movie-based NES game up to this point. Actually, it probably held that title for years afterwards. Most developers wouldn’t have bothered. That’s the thing about LJN/Atlus’s Karate Kid on the NES. I never once got a sense of cynicism or laziness out of it, like I did with Back to the Future. Karate Kid is so clearly made with the best of intentions that it breaks my heart that it’s no good.
“Uh, Mr. Miyagi, I’m being attacked by a man using his two foot long serrated penis! Any sage advice?” “Daniel San, I helped you bring down Cobra Kai. I taught you ancient martial arts passed down from father to son. But I didn’t sign up for this. You’re on your own. Miyagi getting the f*ck out of here!”
Karate Kid is a fan service game, as a movie-based game should be. Atlus just didn’t have the resources, experience, or time to clean up the janky combat. That’s all this game needs: POLISH. Okay, and maybe an extra level or two, but what’s here would need minimal fine-tuning to become an above average movie game. Atlus would eventually go on to accomplish some amazing things in gaming, and it’s not hard to see their potential in Karate Kid. I can’t give it a YES! because it’s bad and even when I know a game got a raw deal due to a licensing agreement, I show no mercy in my verdict. But, in my heart, I feel pain for Atlus and the team behind Karate Kid. I didn’t hate this game. Like Back to the Future, its reputation is largely exaggerated, but unlike Back to the Future, Karate Kid doesn’t deserve it. Back to the Future is a joke because of how little it feels like the movie. Karate Kid the NES game feels like an actual Karate Kid product. If only the gameplay was a little more refined, I think it could have gone down as an all-timer on the NES. I really do. Verdict: NO!
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
And yea, I played pacnsacdave’s Cobra Kai ROM hack. It doesn’t fix the collision or blinking issues, so there’s really not a lot to say. What Karate Kid is BEGGING for is a quality of life ROM hack. I think there’s an above average Kung-Fu Master knock-off in here somewhere that some talented ROM hacker can unlock. I’m there for it when it happens.
Back in 2020, Namco put out a pair of eleven-game editions of their endless Museum franchise under the name Namco Museum Archives. What made these different was that they included only NES games. I really thought I’d fly through this review. Play each game for an hour or so, and then move onto Volume 2. 101.8 hours later and I’m done. Okay, in fairness, not all of that was THIS play session. Some of that was from when the collections were released in 2020, and my father also ended up playing some Tower of Druaga on his own. For me personally it was like 90 hours all-in between my original 2020 session and this session.
And I’m not even 100% sure where all the time went. Unlike some of my more complicated Definitive Reviews of collections, I don’t have a lot of extra features to discuss. The presentation is weak sauce. If not for the fact that they went out of their way to produce and include a completely original game in each of the two volumes, I’d call these the most lazy collections Namco has ever stamped their name on.
The instructions for Dragon Buster in their entirety. Now that’s GOD TIER levels of lazy.
Save states and rewind are here. I didn’t use them for the arcade type games like Pac-Man where you’re chasing high scores. Sorta defeats the point, you know? Besides, the way rewind is done is horrible. A prompt pauses the game to confirm you want to rewind. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to disable the prompt. The amount of time isn’t even consistently X amount of seconds. Instead, your gameplay is secretly divided into intervals, and instead of rewinding backwards three seconds, it’ll rewind you back to the last invisible marked three second interval. For games like Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti, that might mean rewinding directly into an enemy who damages you, meaning you can’t just go back 3 seconds but rather 6, or even longer to find a clean “spot.” Why not just let players hold a button down?
What’s really, REALLY strange is Namco & M2 went above and beyond with one specific extra feature in each set: a brand spanking new NES game that demakes an established classic. Volume 1 got Pac-Man Championship Edition. Volume 2 gets Gaplus, aka the sequel to Galaga that never came home (except for the Commodore 64 of all things). Both are excellent NES ROMs I’m happy to have, but I’d of chosen to have a better presentation and more emulation flexibility/options any day.
Normally, I’d just award such a crappy design $0, but the fact that they DID include the features, only they did a half-assed, terrible job pisses me off to no end. I’mfining Namco Museum Archives Vol 1 & 2 $5 in Value each for the shamefully annoying rewind system and overall lazy design because I know M2 is capable of a lot better than this. There’s also no button remapping. There’s no quick save-reload. It’s a bare-bones collection. Oh, it’s only $20? Cool. Yea, so are many other classic collections. Don’t be lazy. Have a little pride in your work. And then you get to the presentation. Bland menus. No instruction books, and the absolute laziest instruction screens I’ve seen in one of these collections yet. Compare what we got in America to what Japan got in the same premise: Namcot Collection. It looks like this:
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
I’m also fining an additional $5 in value to both Archives collections for lazy presentation and lack of extras. Another instance of “normally it would be just no value awarded” and I’d leave it at that. But, since Japan’s collection was different and had a more fun presentation, I can’t ignore it here. There’s no box art. There’s no instruction manuals. There’s NOTHING! I mean, come on guys, this is pathetically lazy. Namco and M2 have been doing retro collections forever, and they are so much better than this.
THE EVERCADE FACTOR IS IN PLAY
Evercade has a pair of Namco sets that, while out of print, I happen to own. This time around, I primarily played the Namco Museum Archives version, but I did at least fool around for a few minutes with each version on Evercade as well. Since these are out of print, the prices might fluctuate. The same value applies: $5 per YES! If the total value adds up to the listed price of the set, I recommend it! If not, I don’t! Easy peasy! Not all games in each Evercade cart will be covered, but this review might help you decide. No Evercade game requires a special citation, as they’re the same games, people. It’s NES versions of old games. This will be a cinch!
THE ULTIMATE VERDICT ON THE COLLECTION
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
Better luck with Volume 2, chaps.
Starting with this Definitive Review, I will no longer award collections my Seal of Approval. Instead, I’ll only use the value I place on them, and if the value equals the game’s MSRP, I recommend it always. If not, I recommend it if you can buy the game for close enough to the total value I assign. For Namco Museum Archives Volume 1’s set of eleven NES games, I think a fair value for a quality NES game is $5. Namco Museum Archives has an MSRP $19.99. Therefore, $20 in value would mean I always recommend it, with no asterisks. However, the final tally is as follows:
YES!: 6 games totaling $30 in value. NO! 5 games. Fines: $15 in Value
Price: $19.99 FINAL VALUE: $15
Namco Museum Archives is NOTrecommended at the normal MSRP. However, if you can get it at 25% discount, I feel it’s worth it. If you’re not as big as I am on the emulation features working good, then don’t even wait for a sale. You’ll get $20 worth of fun out of this.
FINAL RANKINGS
How I determined the rankings is simple: I took the full list of games, then I said “I’m forced to play one game. Pick the one I could play the most and not get bored with.” That goes on top of the list. Then I repeat the question again with the remaining games over and over until the list is complete. Based on that simple criteria, here are the final rankings. Games above the Terminator Line received a YES! Games below it received a NO!
Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Mappy
Dig Dug
Pac-Man
Dragon Spirit: The New Legend **TERMINATORLINE**
Xevious
Sky Kid
Tower of Druaga
Galaxian
Dragon Buster
GAME REVIEWS
SPECIAL NOTE: For each game that’s a port of an arcade title, which most of these games are, I included a slideshow comparing the Famicom/NES port to the arcade original. The arcade games are NOT included in Namco Museum Archives Vol 1 or Vol 2.
Galaxian
First Released September 7, 1984
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Haruhisa Udagawa
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 1
Space Invaders….. IN SPACE!!
I’ve ranted and raved about my disdain for Galaxian for a while. I’m sure that, in 1979 (Japan) and 1980 (USA) this was mind blowing. Space Invaders.. IN COLOR.. and what’s this? Enemies dive at you in attack formations? And don’t forget the subdued but spot-on sound design, an underrated contributor to why Galaxian rose above the crowded pack of those riding the Space Invaders wake, in my opinion. I assume it was gobsmacking. BUT, I can only assume. I wouldn’t be born for another ten years, and my hardcore game playing days didn’t kick-of until a full nineteen years after Galaxian’s release. By then, Namco’s other gallery shooter, Galaga, essentially the same game as Galaxian, only.. you know.. better, was seventeen years old. And I don’t like it, either.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
It’s not that I can’t love a really old gallery shooter. I’m very fond of Namco’s other other shooter, King & Balloon. Oh, and Sega’s Carnival. Top notch game. I’m so sick of Galaxian acting as +1 in these sets. If you’re going to be comprehensive? Fine. If not, pick another game, Namco. It’s even worse in the Archives series. First off, the port is TERRIBLE! It’s so much noticeably slower and more sluggish than the arcade version. If that lent tension to the game, I’d be all for it, but it takes away from the excitement. Also, the sound effects are weak as hell. There’s really no reason to include this as anything but a bonus. Yet, it’s here, and not as a +1. Namco was insistent that each volume have exactly 11 games. So this time, Galaxian actually took the spot of another game. Okay, so be it! Verdict: NO! and I’m issuing a $5 fine in Value against Namco Museum Archives Vol 1. The fine SHOULD be $80 since Japan got SIXTEEN games we didn’t get in the US (or $55, since the US got five exclusive games Japan didn’t get). It really pisses me off that they put Galaxian in this thing. Evercade is exempt from the fine because they don’t limit themselves to a specific number of titles. However, they are owed exactly one swift kick in the ass which I am unable to issue myself as I’m just not flexible or tall enough to carry out the sentence, so that sentence will be suspended until further notice.
One game into a set of eleven games and Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 has lost $15 in value.
Pac-Man
First Released November 2, 1984
Directed by Hiroki Aoyagi
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 1
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
I think this port has to be neck-and-neck with Super Mario Bros. for “the game that got re-released the most times to the Famicom/NES.” Five times. The original Famicom cart, then a Famicom Disk System release, a licensed Tengen release, an unlicensed Tengen release, and one final cash grab Namco release in the US as late as 1993. How’s that for trivia? Pac-Man was both among the first Famicom releases and one of the last NES releases. Besides the bonus fruit looking noticeably low-detailed, this seems like an accurate 240 dot representation of Pac-Man, right? But, it only passes the eye-test if you don’t understand how the ghosts work. Each of the ghosts has their own personality and attack style, but all four always operate under two main principles: SCATTER (so the ghosts spread out and don’t cluster-up at all times) and CHASE (where their attack patterns kick-in and they pursue you). It’s like a game of Red Light – Green Light, and when the green light comes on and SCATTER becomes CHASE, it affects all the ghosts. You can even see the moment it happens, and exclusively on the NES, it happens differently.
In the arcades, the ghosts will pick a different direction when the parameters change-over. BUT, on the NES, they will always reverse directions. If they’re going up, they’ll go down. Left? Right. Coke? Pepsi. You get the idea. This actually has significant gameplay ramifications. In theory, the ghosts swam you much more efficiently on the NES. In practice, this really didn’t affect me until the later stages, and.. actually I think I had an easier time reaching my normal 50,000 point benchmark before crapping the bed. Then again, I’ve been playing so much Pac-Man these days that we can’t rule out that I’m just getting good at it. Anyway, this is a basic, bare bones game of Pac-Man. I have a motto for games I’ve previously disliked that I have to replay for these projects. “Find the fun.” I’ve never really enjoyed the original Pac-Man. My attitude has always been “why play this when Ms. Pac-Man offers the exact same gameplay, only more challenging and more variety?”
My best not cheating game. Baby steps.
While I still stand by that, I now admit there’s an odd amount of satisfaction to be found. Satisfaction in mastering the one single Pac-Man maze and knowing where I’m at my most safe and most vulnerable. Satisfaction from mastering the four ghosts through repetition and finding that their once complex patterns started to reveal their hidden simpleness that I see clearly now. And, ultimately, satisfaction in seeing my average score slowly but surely start to rise. As my wise-beyond-her-years sister tactfully reminded me, it’s not that different from pinball, where machines are limited to one game, forever. Yet, I’ve dedicated a massive amount of my free time towards mastering many tables. How is it different? She’s right. It’s not. Speaking of Angela, I did manage to further “find the fun” to some degree from dueling with her at Pac-Man. Yea, turns out, she’s a Pac-Man natural and she smoked me a few games. But I still won the most. I’m awesome. Am I going YES!? I wasn’t going to, until she pointed out I made a rule for myself: more fun than not has to be a YES!, regardless of why. So, yea, welcome to the YES! pile, Pac. Verdict: YES!
$5 in value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 and EVERCADE‘s Namco Collection 1
Xevious
First Released November 8, 1984
Directed by Kazuo Kurosu
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 1
Included with Nintendo Switch Online Basic Subscription
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
I can totally understand how Xevious touched off a massive rush to arcades in Japan in the early 80s. While it wasn’t exactly the first of its breed (among others, Konami’s Scramble beat it to arcades by a full year), I think Xevious was probably the best of those early shmups. It was also doomed to age very badly. I’ve encountered it a few times in these retro runs of mine, and just the thought of having to play it again sends a shiver down my spine. One gun, one bomb, and the same boring terrain over and over. Then I played the NES version, with its much lower resolution graphics, and I longed for the grim specter of death. Among other things, it looks like NES Xevious takes place above Rally X’s track. I love Rally X. I wanted to land the ship and drive on the road. But, you can’t do that. I checked and everything.
A game accomplishing a series of firsts is impressive. It doesn’t mean I’d want to play those in 2023 as anything but historic curios. Here’s the famous “first boss” and folks, it ain’t all that.
Namcot’s port to the NES does actually have one fairly major benefit: I felt the collision boxes with the bombs were much more generous than in arcades. In the coin-op, I’d be frustrated with shots that sure looked like they were directly on the targets on the ground, only for them to whiff. That happened a lot less on the NES build. It just seemed like an easier experience. The problem is that I’d simply never, ever, EVER want to play Xevious today over any number of options. It’s also not in the same boat as Pac-Man in that regard. Pac-Man’s maze is.. well.. Pac-Man. The Maze Chase hasn’t been systematically improved by major leaps and bounds in the over four decades that followed. Shmups? They’re leaps and bounds above where they used to be. I salute Xevious for its part in making the shmup genre amazing, but, I’d also rather play almost anything else, including the Super Xevious sequel that we’ll be seeing in Volume 2. Verdict: NO!
Mappy
First Released November 14, 1984
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Nobuyuki Ōnogi
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 1
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
There are several Golden Age of Arcade “franchises” that got left in the dust that I’d love to see be revived and thrive in today’s climate. Mappy is somewhere near the top. I loves me some Mappy. The NES version is not remotely a direct port. Like most home versions of the game from this era, it’s missing an entire floor. The arcade game has six floors of action. The NES only has five. Oddly, I find the change doesn’t matter all that much. You’d think it would make the gameplay more difficult, since it’s one less channel for your pursuers to be on. But, actually, I didn’t feel it added or subtracted to the sense of tension or excitement at all. It’s a complete non-factor, and I didn’t expect that.
I know this is a weird thing to complain about, but, I personally think the weak links in Mappy are the bonus stages. I wish the game had fewer of them. They happen after the second level, then after every three levels from there out. “You’re seriously bitching about BONUS levels, Cathy?” Yep. They last too long and they’re not exciting at all. They’re a constant interruption of the game itself, and I hate them. They play terribly, too. Like, I’m touching this balloon here. That should be a capture, but it’s not. I hate these stages. Come on, Mappy! You’re a cop! Arrest someone. Murder of Fun in the First Degree!
What matters a lot more is the sense of speed of the game. Mappy on the NES feels like it plays a lot faster. I wasn’t sure if it was just me, so I tried an experiment. Neither my father, nor Angela, are familiar with Mappy. I had them play both the arcade game and the NES version in the collection. To eliminate the potential of implanting a bias in their head, when it came time for them to play NES port, I said “is it just me, or is this slower than the arcade version?” Both Dad and Angela said something along the lines of “actually, I think it’s a little bit faster!” So, it’s not just me. Oh, and it’s neither faster or slower, by the way. Rather, it seems to be the result of a quirk of perspective. Like most Namco coin-ops, Mappy utilizes a vertical monitor. With the NES presentation stretched to fill the 4:3 aspect ratio, it makes the movement feel a lot faster despite the fact that you’re covering the same amount of territory you would in the arcade. However, perception is reality, and the feeling of faster movement certainly made an already thrilling game much more exciting.
I think the Bell should have been a kill on the enemies, like the shock waves from the red-doors. Since enemies respawn anyway, it would add to the strategy AND add to the tension. Mappy works because you have to learn to not charge down one of the hallways when you don’t know the location of the enemies. Well, with the bell, you do know where they are. And it takes away from the fun.
While I give the edge to Popeye as the best maze chase done from a side perspective, I hold Mappy in very high esteem. It’s probably a very close second to that sailor guy. It checks off all the boxes of a great maze chase. A never-ending sense of tension, nail-biting close calls, and turning the tables on the chasers is so satisfying. In fact, Mappy probably is the best of its entire breed at that final part, because the means to fight back require such a degree of risk. You have to wait for the enemies to get near you to use the doors against them, and the twitchy moment where you smack ’em is always delightful. You know what I’ve come to learn about this series? It would make a great horror game. I’m serious! Think about it: the main thing you need to learn is not to charge down a hallway just because it looks like the coast is clear. If it was a guy in a hockey mask who suddenly popped onto the screen instead of mischievous cats, you’d crap yourself. I’m telling you, Namco, you’re leaving money on the table. Verdict: YES!
$5 in value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 and EVERCADE‘s Namco Collection 1
Dig Dug
First Released June 4, 1985
Famicom Exclusive
Director Unknown (Hiroki Aoyagi?)
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 1
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
As I learned in part two of Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include, a little Dig Dug goes a long way. I enjoy it, but in small doses. This was probably my most enjoyable experience reviewing it yet. A big part of that is Dig Dug on the Famicom is a pretty good port of the arcade game. A few small annoyances stand out. It’s noticeably less colorful than its coin operated brethren. The Famicom translation looks really washed-out and a lot less cheerful. It’s brown and muddy in appearance, and if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s a game about tunneling through dirt, I’d probably take issue with that. The NES also has more flicker than previous ports I’ve reviewed in this set. I get it. It’s a complicated game, especially for its time. But, it does stand out.
Yep, this is pretty good. Timing feels accurate. Tension increases at the right pace. I’m curious why this never came out in the United States. Dig Dug II did, although it was Bandai who ported it over. It’ll be part of Volume II.
With the nit-picking out of the way, this is a pretty dang effort. Very close to the feel of the coin-op, and with most of the personality intact. All the sound effects are retained. The idiosyncrasies of the arcade version seemed to have been retained. If anything, I think the NES is a bit more generous with allowing the pump to pass through the little slivers of dirt that you haven’t finished tunneling through. I still think Dig Dug takes too long to find its teeth, but once it does, few action games from this era are as intense while retaining their satisfaction as the little sadistic pest exterminator. Also, why isn’t this called Dig Doug? It’s because his name is Taizo Hori, which means “digging enthusiast.” Yea, that’s what he’s into. He’s not a psychopath who loves to explode the guts of creatures all over the place. No sir. Verdict: YES!
$5 in value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 and EVERCADE‘s Namco Collection 1
The Tower of Druaga
First Released August 6, 1985
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Koichi Yamamoto
Designed by Masanobu Endō
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 2
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
How’s this for ominous: the designer of Tower of Druaga has publicly stated his regret that he added so much abstract design with the items in the game and how to acquire them, which left players in a state of paranoia. Well, doesn’t that just sound delightful? This is probably the most polarizing of Namco’s Golden Age lineup. The people who like it? They really like it. Everybody else is just sort of bored by it, not actively hating it, but just not wanting anything to do with it. I’m in the “bored” camp. I find Tower of Druaga to be a miserable slog to get through. A game where the highlight for me was admiring how many better games this inspired. Especially the original Legend of Zelda. You can literally see it, especially in the enemy design. The Darknuts and Wizzrobes in Zelda are so close in their design to Tower of Druaga that I’m honestly shocked this wasn’t a thing Nintendo and Namco had to deal with. At the same time, given what Druaga aims for, it sure seems tailor made for the home consoles more than arcade. It was a major hit on the Famicom, but it never came out in America, nor did the arcade game. I couldn’t figure out why, and then I really dug in and played it. I don’t agree this aged badly. I’m guessing most players would have never found this to be fun.
It’s not just the enemy behavior. The models for the wizards and knights (can we call them Warriors? Then they’d be WIZARDS & WARRIORS!) look like Zelda, only this came out twenty months earlier.
Funny enough, while I find arbitrary abstractness-type of gameplay to be annoying (see my review of Vs. The Goonies), the primary reason I don’t like Tower of Druaga is the combat is shockingly, stunningly, unfathomably featherweight. This is structured just like a tanks-in-a-maze type of game, only you get a flimsy pointy stick instead of bullets. You have to draw your sword out, and then you just hold the button down and walk into enemies, who vanish when they die in the most unsatisfactory way imaginable. It lacks what I call “OOMPH!” That’s my term for violence in video games having the sensation of real weight and crunch. You get a sound effect, but they didn’t even animate the enemies shattering into pixels or anything. Even the arcade version does nothing, so it’s not like the OOMPH got lost in translation. My father, who actually really enjoyed this (the weirdo) said “come on, Cathy! You’re supposed to use your imagination!” Nuts to that! It’s an f’n video game! It’s supposed to do the imagining for me!
The game’s dragons aren’t visually intimidating. Like all enemies, no OOMPH. How combat works with the non-single-hit enemies is you sorta hold out your sword and.. uh.. walk back and forth, passing each other until one of you dies. Apparently you do have an invisible life bar, but otherwise, it’s like giving a lethal dose of the cold shoulder. I believe the technical term is performing a “Do Si Do” which makes Tower of Druaga the first game that does combat by square dancing.
With unsatisfying combat, the actual point of the game becomes a chore. The mazes are boring. They all look exactly the same in terms of backgrounds: a plain ass brick wall. The first two levels are like the mirror universe version of Super Mario 1’s levels, which brought the goods and dared players to keep coming. Druaga practically dares players to not fall asleep, as your character walks like he’s made an oopsie daisy in his pants and is trying to shimmy to the bathroom using a stride that keeps it from running down his legs. Thankfully, level 2’s treasure is a pair of boots that doubles your speed. Of course, you have to find it. The real hook to Druaga is that every level has a treasure chest that you can’t see at first . While the levels are randomized, including the locations of the door, key, and treasure chest, the means to get the chests and what the items are in them are the same every play through. That sounds reasonable, right?
Tower of Druaga is the annoying kid who takes it too far. Like having paper footballs flicked at your face, and the person doing it says BOOM! HEADSHOT! every time. *SNAP* *WHACK* “BOOM! HEADSHOT!” I know. I used to be the flicker. Now, I’m the flickee.
You have to activate them via some arbitrary event that isn’t stated. Killing X amount of enemies on one level. Swinging a sword before taking your first step on another level. Drawing the sword out while standing on the door. Clearing out one type of enemy without killing another. Standing an egg on its end during the winter equinox while standing on one foot and saying all the elements on the fourth row of the periodic table in reverse alphabetical order. Oh, and sometimes the items might be GOTCHA! type of booby traps with hurtful items, but you can’t actually know that until you get them. Call for a penis shaped U Haul because that’s a DICK MOVE! And then, if you miss the right items, you might end up having to wander through a maze in the dark, or LOSE YOUR SWORD and be unable to attack. Every time I wanted to sling my controller in rage, I’m reminded the creator admitted he took it too far and had some regrets regarding difficulty and how the items were handled. That’s curiously refreshing. You almost never hear that from a creator of a legendary game. Dude is classy.
See the little glove item? Yea, I was missing an item, so I got the wrong glove from a chest, and that lost me my sword, thus removing my ability to engage in combat. I can report that there’s no noticeable difference in OOMPH following this.
And yes, fans of Druaga, I do understand: the basic idea was players would take notes and share their experience and, through collective learning, gain the ability to defeat the game. In arcades, this would require players to ignore all the shiny, beautiful other titles around them while they invested their lives in a slogathon with some of the worst sword combat I’ve ever seen and some of the most GOTCHA! type design in the entire history of the medium. Items that blindly hurt you. Enemies that can blink into existence and fire projectiles at you before you can block their attack. I had rounds where I spawned, took a step to the side and immediately died because a wizard teleported there too. I was originally prepared to accept the “you had to be there” argument for Tower of Druaga, but.. actually, no. Seriously, this game is horrible. Respect and celebrate it from a big, big distance. I think most of the inspiration it gave was people saying “what if we made a game like Tower of Druaga only.. you know.. fun?!”
There’s a built-in second quest. On the title screen, press UP six times, LEFT four times, and RIGHT three times. If you do it right, the title screen will turn green. I didn’t like Druaga once. I can’t imagine wanting to play it with more difficulty a second time. The biggest difference is the methods used to unlock the items are changed from the arcade original. So hey, if you like completely arbitrary hidden items, you’re in for a treat!
I didn’t finish Tower of Druaga. Even with a guide, progress is too slow and the cheap deaths resulted in my rage quit thirty or so floors in. You know what? Masanobu Endō straight-up admits the difficulty was too high, so props to him for blazing a trail in the adventure genre. I literally cannot appreciate what this game meant to the generation before me. I wouldn’t be born for another five years after this released, and I grew up in the internet era of gaming. Instead of learning about these things by sharing them peer to peer, in arcades, I could just go to StrategyWiki. The excitement of discovery is gone, and I have no desire to “play this straight.” It’s just not fun to play in 2023, and while I was originally heart sick that I missed out on an era where the abstract design was part of sharing the experience with others.. honestly, I think I would have always hated Tower of Druaga. It has nothing I enjoy in gaming. It’s one of Namco’s very worst, folks. Thanks for all the inspiration for better games, though. Verdict: NO!
Sky Kid
First Released August 22, 1986
Directed by Hiroki Aoyagi
Evercade: None
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Unlike Druaga, I did finish Sky Kid, and my hands hate me for it. I was literally screaming in both agony and rage by the end. It’s such a shame too, because it sure feels like the gameplay could be made into a great game with the right level design. While a lot of the combat is your basic, bare bones pew pew action, Sky Kid is a completely original take on the genre with big twists to shmup convention that, in theory, work well. First: getting shot by itself doesn’t kill you. You start to go into a tailspin, and if you mash the buttons fast enough, you can pull out of it and carry on like nothing happened. This didn’t help me all that much since I’m now physically incapable of mashing buttons quickly. Of course, if another bullet hits you as you’re spinning downward, or if you were too close to the ground to begin with, you’re going to crash anyway. Still, it’s different. Also different: every stage begins with having to physically take-off from the runway. Which is basically saying “hold UP when the level begins or you will immediately lose a life.” Then you have to land at the end of the stage, though “landing” requires no finesse. Just ram your plane in the designated area and you’re good. Hey, if it works Harrison Ford, right?
There’s a two player simultaneous co-op that’s misery to experience. Also, if one player dies, they don’t respawn immediately, like the best shmups. No, you have to wait for the other player to die or finish the stage to start playing again. Oh, and you can collide with each-other, which stuns one of you. It wasn’t any fun.
Another twist is you have a unique defensive maneuver: a speedy loop that allows you to quickly get behind enemies tailing you. Or just zip around the screen faster. Or hilariously crash into the scenery. It was usually that third one for me. It also comes with the added bonus of allowing you to fire in different directions. AND, when you’re physically performing the loop-de-loop, you can pass right through enemies and take no damage. It sounds great, and it works really well.. on the arcade version. At least for two specific angles. In fact, in arcades, I had the two angles I could consistently hit clocked so well that they became instinctive for me to use. That never happened on the NES, where the backflip happens too fast. It’s almost impossible to time shooting with it. It’s still really handy, and I was able to get the timing down for when it grants “invincibility” for lack of a better term, but the satisfaction is significantly muffled on the NES.
I was pretty proud of this screenshot of me flipping perfectly between two enemies. Unlike on my PC, where I spam the CAPTURE SCREEN button I mapped to my controller, on Xbox, I had to hit the guide button at the right moment, which pauses the action and then press Y to do a screencap. Xbox doesn’t allow you to make a clip and then take screenshots from the clip. So annoying.
Sky Kid’s final unique approach is that, as the stage progresses, you’ll encounter a bomb on the ground. You have to swoop down, grab the bomb, then drop it on a primary target. The further into the game you make it, the more often there’s bombs and big things to make go boom. This gameplay mechanic is, to put it mildly, f’n awesomeballs. I cannot stress enough how satisfying it is to deliver a payload perfectly in the center of the target (and it MUST be the center to level the whole structure). Easily one of the all-time great thrills in the shmup genre. Now, you don’t actually NEED to bomb the target, but if you’re chasing points, they’re worth the most points by far.
This is a mechanic I want to see Namco explore further in the 2020s. I’m picturing it with claymation-like graphics too. I really think there’s legs to this. That’s one thing about going through these old games.. some of them have ideas that have gone so underutilized in the decades that have followed that they can still feel fresh today. EVEN GAMES I HATE, like Sky Kid. Maybe I’m being a sentimental sap, but I actually take comfort from that. Gaming? Run out of ideas? My friends.. not every good idea in games have actually been used in goodgames.
However, there’s a couple of catches. When you’re carrying the bomb, you can’t do the defensive flip, which I had come to rely very heavily on. Enemies absolutely swarm you, and some of them just make a beeline for you to suicide-bomb. These baddies are especially hard to avoid even with the backflip. Without it? You’re f-ed in the a. Also, if you get shot.. even once.. you lose the bomb. I’d say this adds to the risk/reward gameplay, but Sky Kid goes to absurd lengths to stack the deck against you with the bomb. Well, it does that in general, actually. Yea, the problem with Sky Kid is that you really can’t out-maneuver bullets. I suppose you can’t in real life either, but hey, it’s a video game.
See all those flowers I’m flying through? Yea, those are explosions, and if you touch any of the landscape, you die as well. My biggest problem with Sky Kid is there’s no consistent pattern to when or which direction enemies will fire, so what killed you in one life might not be what kills you in the next. The trick is timing when to do a flip, as you’re immune to damage. But, if the enemies are firing out of sync, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
Sky Kid is a merciless bully of a game. Unlike my favorite NES shmups, stuff like Gradius or Life Force, the degree of randomness and blind luck makes Sky Kid kind of unclockable. Sometimes enemies shoot at you. Sometimes they don’t. I discovered this while rewinding. I’m sure there’s some kind of rhyme or reason to it if you devote a lifetime to figuring out Sky Kid’s idiosyncrasies, but it’s not really that fun to begin with. A big problem is they didn’t really build the level design around the best parts of the game: the bombing runs. In fact, the way enemies are placed doesn’t feel like any fine-tuning or optimization was done at all. You can’t linger near the back of the screen. There’s enemy planes who attack by crashing into you, and they seem to always appear at whatever height you’re at. You can keep doing the loop, but bullets will fly out of sync. Use the button mashing to save yourself in the tailspin? Good luck with that. They’ll keep shooting your plane on the way.
There’s tons of bonus points for doing a loop in the right spot, usually with some visual gag tied to them. Even this mechanic is annoying because it’s not always clear where you do it to trigger the bonus. I passed by this several times and got nothing, and when I *did* get it, it sure seemed like it was looping in almost the same spot it didn’t count before. I hate Sky Kid on the NES.
Sky Kid’s difficulty isn’t the only problem. The best part of the game: the bombing run? Sometimes the target is too far from the bomb. If enemies are behind you, your only defensive option is to manipulate them into flying into the scenery, which kills them. When the suicide fighters show up on screen, which they frequently do when you have the bomb, you’re probably going to lose the bomb. Sky Kid also has collision detection issues. Later in the game, you have to pass over volcanoes that spew projectiles onto the screen. The boxes for these don’t match the graphics, so what felt like a safe squeeze was still death. Plus, again, they fire randomly. It crosses the line several times over, and ultimately, Sky Kid just isn’t fun at all. When I first started playing it, I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a more revered game. It has so many fun and novel ideas. The answer quickly revealed itself: it does everything it can to negate the fun stuff. It’s a cruel design just for the sake of it. For arcades, maybe that makes sense. Players can’t last too long if you want to make money. But you still have to be just fun enough for them to want to reload the quarters. It makes zero sense for a home game. I’d like to see Sky Kid make a comeback, but I hope it’s balanced when it does. Verdict: NO!
Dragon Buster
First Released January 7, 1987
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Haruhisa Udagawa Kumi Hanaoka
Evercade: None
The attack is flimsy as hell. The animation of the attack kind of reminds me of Kid Niki. Except, that game had OOMPH.
Nothing bad I can say about Dragon Buster can take away from its place in gaming history. For, it was Dragon Buster that introduced to the medium that most absurd, illogical, and downright fun of gaming ideas: the double jump. Yep, apparently this was the first game that said “logic be damned: let the hero jump a second time, midair, using literal nothingness to build that extra momentum!” For that, I would like to offer it a toast! 🍺 Thank you for creating one of my favorite tropes in gaming. Cheers! 🍻 And now that you’ve got alcohol in you, you’re in the proper condition required to actually enjoy Dragon Buster. To everybody else, HOLY CRAP Dragon Buster is a horrible game. At least on the Famicom, but, hey, I can’t really review the arcade version in this feature, you know.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Another Famicom exclusive that is, at first, baffling as to why it never came out in America. You mean to tell me NOBODY saw value in a sword and sorcery platformer? It took me until, oh, about half way through the game’s second world to figure out the answer to that. I should have known before then just from the fact that, of all the achievements for Vol 1 on Xbox, the one for finishing Dragon Buster had the fewest people completing it, even less than Druaga or Sky Kid. Even with cheating, I couldn’t finish this. I couldn’t come close. Dragon Buster on the Famicom is hampered by four major issues. The first is the controls are terrible. That first-of-its-kind double jump is hard to execute consistently. Even as I was hours into my Dragon Buster play session, I’d still find myself meekly jumping up and down and wondering why the second the jump wouldn’t happen.
This is the second game in the collection where it feels like the creators of a better franchise took inspiration, meaning they said “do that, only less sucky.” In this case, the Wonder Boy franchise does what Dragon Buster does, only oodles better. The big fight with the dragon at the end of each world reminded me very much of The Dragon’s Trap. In fact, a ton of this game did.
The second issue is that the game is based around these “guardian” mini-boss encounters. Despite the fact that neither the levels nor the items in them are randomly generated, the guardians you face are decided at random. Hell, you can rewind and change which one appears. It won’t take long to get a “favorable” one since there’s only four in the entire game. Third: the combat is pathetic. It’s feathery and weightless, completely devoid of OOMPH, and highlighted by some of the worst collision detection I’ve dealt with. When you get hit, you become stun-locked and end up in a juggle. It reminded me of Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap. Except, in that game, at least you “blink” so you aren’t taking damage while the poor bastard you’re controlling looks at the camera in screaming agony as he hops up and down, stun-locked by the collision boxes. In Dragon Buster, there’s no blinking, meaning it’s YOU screaming in agony as your health ticks away. There’s occasional health refills, but mostly you get offensive spells. To the game’s credit: the spells work. To its detriment: you get too many of them and not enough fun permanent upgrades.
I can’t imagine that ANYBODY had the patience to play Dragon Buster in the days before rewind. The act of jumping, or even just getting on and off vines, requires the patience of Job. While you don’t take falling damage, I found that, no matter how much I took my time lining up to hop off the vines and onto a platform, sometimes I’d just stop and fall the full length of the climb. Sometimes that’s several floors. I’ll concede that it was 1987 and they had no clue what they were doing. Of course, seven months after this came out, Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, the game that would be converted into Super Mario Bros. 2, released in Japan. You have to wonder if Dragon Buster’s creators saw that and were like “jeez.. I wish our vine acrobatics were this good.”
The fourth issue is, frankly, Dragon Buster is just no damn good. I’m not fining it, like I did Galaxian because at least it’s a game that rarely shows up in these collections. However, this is easily the worst game in Namco Museum Archives Volume 1. Of all the games in the collection that are based on coin-ops, this is the least faithful in terms of feel. It’s so bad, it feels like you’re playing a bootleg or knockoff. Even things like rewinding or save states don’t reduce the tedium as much as you’d think. Not when the game controls this badly. Not when it has combat this sloppy. Not when the entire premise is doomed to fail. Hey, thanks for inventing the double jump. Now double jump your ass off a cliff. Verdict: NO!
Dragon Spirit: The New Legend
First Released April 14, 1989
Directed by Haro 7000 (?)
Evercade: Namco Collection Vol 2
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Technically, this isn’t a port of the arcade Dragon Spirit. No, this is supposed to be a sequel. But, really, “The New Legend” is certainly supposed to invoke the coin-op experience. To be honest, I liked the NES game better. Dragon Spirit is one cruel-ass game in arcades. It’s just more manageable on the NES. And, actually Dragon Spirit isn’t bad by any means. It was also bland enough that I got really mad that it wasn’t better. Everything is in place for an unforgettable shmup experience. I’ve never enjoyed the Xevious-like “shoot flying enemies, bomb ground-based enemies” type of design. While Dragon Spirit: The New Legend doesn’t change my mind, it’s probably done in the most tolerable way I’ve ever played here. Enemy placement of the ground-based enemies doesn’t seem specifically designed to trigger cheap gotcha deaths. So, hey, it seems like we’re off to a good start. Right?
The bosses are mostly fun to do battle with, but you’ll also walk away thinking “that could have been a lot better if they had a better presentation.”
Yet, it just never rises above barely okay. Part of that is the lack of immersion due to some of the worst sound design on the NES. It’s never fun to shoot a boss and have no squishy “hit noise” attached. It always takes me out of the game. Shame too, because there’s some decent boss fights here, but I’d take anything from Konami’s famous NES shmups over any of them. They’re just more fun to do battle with. Everything about Dragon Spirit on the NES feels unfinished. The graphics are ugly. The enemy design is unremarkable. Most of the levels and set pieces are boring. I really didn’t think this would be getting a YES! And yet, I’m giving it one. Dragon Spirit on the NES is the poster child for doing the bare minimum to get by.
They went back to this type of “don’t touch the walls” design in the stage after it, only I didn’t realize that was what it was doing. Dragon Spirit has visibility issues on the NES. However, in this stage? I was impressed.
When Dragon Spirit cooks, it really cooks. When I entered the stage in the above screenshot, I literally sat up in my chair. It was one of the better “don’t touch the walls” segments in an 8-bit shmup I’ve encountered. The problem is, of the nine levels, maybe three of them are that interesting. Maybe. This also handled a relatively large character sprite better than most shmups that try that. Because of the large character, I would have bet the farm that collision boxes would be an issue. But, actually, the collision seems spot-on, and I would have been farmless.
This is probably the weakest stage. Enemy projectile visibility is a big issue throughout Dragon Spirit. Now, I’ve heard people say that back in the days of CRT monitors, that wasn’t an issue. Well, what do you know? This offers CRT filters. So, I checked and yea, it was certainly still an issue. I don’t see how it helped at all, frankly.
Most of all, I really enjoyed how the multi-headed power-ups were handled. It would have been nice if Namco/M2 had.. you know.. included some kind of instructions on what each power-up does. Effort? Pssh. That’s for $40 collections. But, even this has a drawback. In later stages, I felt too many enemies dropped the skulls that downgrade your attack. And it happens right before the final boss. That’s a dick move extraordinaire, and I’ve never seen a shmup that pulls a stunt like that BEFORE THE LAST BOSS! Who is a.. uh.. flasher Dracula that sprays green urine at you.
What the f*ck?
Do you know what’s the oddest thing about Dragon Spirit on the NES for me? Usually, dull but acceptable games that straddle the middle of the pack are the toughest for me to review. In the case of Dragon Spirit, I didn’t really have to stare blankly at the keyboard trying to figure out what to say. The main problem is self-evidence: decent gameplay, horrible presentation. I know the NES has limits, but this feels like total amateur hour stuff. Except the bosses, who look great. Unlike some of the better shmups on the NES, Dragon Spirit feels like it’s treading water getting to those bosses. Shorter stages would have helped too, or just more environmental challenges. Did I have fun? Yes, but the fact that I even had to think about it should tell you this is very faint praise. Verdict: YES! $5 in value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 and EVERCADE‘s Namco Collection 2
Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti
First Released July 31, 1989
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Taiji Nagayama and Bishibashi Haro
Evercade: None BUT this could be a killer app for one.
This was among the first console games to satirize movies in set pieces and bosses. Though it’s really obvious why this never came to the United States. The imagery and religious symbols would not fly at all with Nintendo of America for over a decade.
I think Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti is the best game in the franchise, though granted, that’s not a high bar to climb. In my limited time with Splatterhouse games, I’ve found them to be all style and no substance. That’s before you get to the mediocre-at-best gameplay. They were shock value for the sake of shock value, back when guts and gore were a big deal in gaming. It’s not anymore, which is why those games can’t survive on their own merit. Wanpaku Graffiti doesn’t have to sweat that. No guts. No gore. Plenty of extreme visuals, sure, but with tongue firmly locked within its cheek. Actually, this looks and feels like a South Park game before South Park was even a thing.
The idea of taking one of THE original M-rated style blood ‘n guts franchises and running it through a Charlie Brown & Snoopy Show filter is just precious. I think it’s actually a shame THIS was the only time Namco did that, too. I really think they could have turned Wanpaku Graffiti into its own sub-franchise and seen a lot of success with it. Same with Konami and its Cute-ifed take on Castlevania: Kid Dracula. Both titles were somewhere between good and great, and neither saw the light of day after the original game (though Kid Dracula appeared on Game Boy as well). Eh, maybe they just didn’t sell? I would *LOVE* to see my friend Sam (aka FreakZone Games, of Angry Video Game Nerd fame) get his hands on either IP. Oh, the things that man could do with them.
I do think fans have overrated Wanpaku Graffiti a tad bit. Oh, I totally had a good time with this, but every time I felt the game was hitting its stride, some massive backwards step would happen and take the game back down the pegs it had climbed, leaving it just a little better than average. Take the combat. The cleaver you use as a weapon is slightly too limited in range. But hey, it’s very satisfying to use and I was thrilled something in this set finally had halfway decent OOMPH. You’ll also occasionally get a shotgun. The shotgun has a heavy recoil on it, so you get blown backwards a tad when you use it. It’s HUGELY satisfying to use the shotty. I wish it showed up more often, and maybe have the option to save the shotgun. Once you pick it up, you don’t switch back to the cleaver until you use up all ten bullets. If you pick up a second shotgun, you don’t go over ten bullets. Annoying, but that’s fine. The combat is fun!
Cleverly, they actually incorporated the recoil into the design. Sometimes you have the boom stick in areas with short platforms that you might fall off of. Or, take this short area in the game pictured here. The bridge crumbles under you, so using the shotgun is a risk because the bridge collapses as you recover from the recoil. I really like that extra layer of thoughtful challenge.
Well, except for the collision detection and the way “blinking” is handled. I wasn’t a fan of the collision boxes at all. Often, it felt like EVERY character had a box as big as the player character, regardless of how big their sprite was on screen. Environmental hazards also seemed to have boxes that were either too big, or your box becomes bigger when you jump. I’m not sure which it is, but I know that judging a safe distance from enemies or spikes is tough and sometimes even inconsistent. The blinking is also very brief and it’s not rare to have to take damage from one thing and immediately get tagged on the recoil by a second or even third thing. It just needed another half-second of blinking to solve this. SO frustrating. And, mind you, this is a game where your primary weapon barely extends from your body. Now, granted, the cleaver’s collision is accurate, but a lot of enemies and around half the bosses encourage you to jump and attack, and that is so much more problematic than it has to be. The perils of an abnormally shaped character on the NES, I suppose, but it always holds Wanpaku Graffiti back from true greatness.
Was “Jumping the Shark” a thing in 1989?
The other major problem with Wanpaku Graffiti is overly-conservative level design. There’s maybe one or two clever bits in the ENTIRE game, such as the shotgun on a bridge bit above.. and really it’s only clever on a situational basis. If you’ve used up all your bullets, then really, it’s just another collapsing bridge segment in a platformer, isn’t it? And that’s a trope about as common as a title screen. While the stages are dressed up to be fun and memorable shout-outs to popular horror movies and franchises, the stages themselves are just a step above bare-bones basic. Don’t get me wrong: it never gets boring, and there’s the occasional mini-bosses to break-up the monotony. Most of the bosses are fun to do battle with, too. Some go a bit overboard on the sponginess. The last boss took so many hits that I wondered if I was actually damaging it or if there was a step I was missing. Other bosses aren’t even bosses, but rather just waves of enemies you have to slay.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
For all its problems, Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti is easily the best game in Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 that wasn’t created specifically for the set. It isn’t MIND BLOWING or anything like that, but it’s a solid hour or two of fun. Stages don’t go too long. The enemy design is really well done (except little scream statues that were SO annoying when their souls come out and hit you almost immediately). While the big set pieces are let down by bland level design that keep this from being an all-timer, it’s also a solid B-game. You know what? Solid B-games have their place in gaming. Some fans said they bought the set for Wanpaku Graffiti alone. While I wouldn’t go THAT far, if Volume 1 costs $5, I could think of a lot worse things you could do with five bucks. Verdict: YES!
WINNER: BEST GAME IN NAMCO MUSEUM ARCHIVES VOLUME 1 $5 in value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1.
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Released June 18, 2020
Developed by M2
Exclusive to Namco Museum Archives Vol 1
Evercade: ☝️
Hey you bitches! I’m high on Pac! Wanna de-make?
Pac-Man Championship Edition is an NES demake of the 2007 Xbox Live Killer App. Like so many people, I loved that game. Eventually, Championship Edition ended up on every platform and ultimately became a +1 for a handful of Pac-Man collections. It revitalized the franchise in a way that 3D platforming games could never have hoped to in a million years. Whether or not it was truly Pac-Man like was another thing. I thought of it as a twitchy action-game based around Pac-Man. This especially came true when DX arrived and the Ghost Train concept was built upon that I never liked that much. I think the peak of the concept was, frankly, the very first Championship Edition. I was very happy to learn that this is specifically a demake of that. No Ghost Trains. Just you, a maze, and a five minute timer. Oh, and it’s an NES game this time.
Some of the level design is beyond ridiculous. By time you reach this point, you’re going too fast to make the type of hairpin turns this requires. You CAN get the hang of it with practice, but these stages will chew you up and spit you out at first. And then your eyeballs have to walk home.
If you’re unfamiliar with the original game, the idea is you have five minutes to eat as many ghosts, items, and dots as humanly possible. The maze is divided into two halves, and when you eat all the dots on one half, one of the items appears on the other side of the screen. Eating the item alters the other half of the maze and reloads its dots, along with power pellets. If you time everything right, you can string together the power pellets and continuously eat ghosts for mega combos. Free-lives are plentiful, and really, it’s you versus the time limit, not the ghosts. After a certain point, you should have such a stockpile of lives that messing up and getting eaten only costs you valuable time. It’s more or less the same game as before, and that comes with all the inherent problems that were there in the original build. When the action gets fierce, the main thing that’ll kill you is not turning the corners fast enough. That, and the lack of online leaderboards, is my only complaint. What a cool idea for a retro collection!
Yep, all the features are here. Well, except the one you’d REALLY want: online leaderboards.
On its own, Pac-Man Championship Edition Demake is a great game. Of course, it had a hell of a template to go off of. You’ve probably played the original to death by now. I didn’t think a demake would feel fresh, but it does. As a nifty little bonus for a ten-game, budget-priced NES collection, it’s nice to have. Of course, if I had to choose, I’d rather they sold this separately and focused on Namco Archives having better menus, more extras, and especially better emulation-based tomfoolery. It’s almost a little annoying that they went the extra-extra-extra mile with two NES demakes, one per collection, both of which are really good when the rest of the collection is such a soulless, lazy cash-in. Originally, I was going to award Volume 1 bonus points for Pac-Man Championship Edition Demake. I want to encourage this type of thing. However, I changed my mind when I thought about it. It really is just a novelty, isn’t it? A nice thing to have, but hardly worth the price of admission alone, and slightly obnoxious in retrospect given that the whole set was cynically phoned-in. Verdict: YES! $5 in Value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 1
No, it’s not an indie. But, I’m not exactly known as someone with a particular fondness for NES “classics” that grew stale before I was even born. When Nintendo surprised everyone Wednesday by debuting NES Remix and announcing it was out right now, it was bizarre. Almost as if they had no confidence in it. But, it looked vaguely like the 9-Volt stages in Wario Ware, which is pretty much my favorite game ever. And my Wii U was starting to get dusty again after I finished Super Mario 3D World. So, $15 later, I was going to see what this game Nintendo was so nervous about hyping for more than a few minutes was all about.
NES Remix is made up of micro-sections of sixteen early first-party NES games, most of which are no fucking good today and probably wouldn’t have been all that fun even back in the day. Look, I appreciate the historical significance of the original Donkey Kong, Super Mario, and Legend of Zelda. But the same franchises have been done better so many times since the 80s. To pretend otherwise seems kind of crazy. Meanwhile, the majority of the games in NES Remix really just aren’t any good at all. Baseball, Pinball, Tennis, Urban Champion, and Golf should be locked in a box and thrown in the middle of the ocean. And Ice Climber? I swear to God, I think it might legitimately be the worst game Nintendo ever made. Not only does it control like it was designed by someone who hates video games, but it also has a tendency to have players fall through the platforms because you’re “too close to the edge.” Even though you’re more than a full character-length on the platform. If there’s a worst first-party game Nintendo has ever put out, I haven’t played it.
Funny enough, it’s actually easier to do the bouncy-turtles shell-lives trick in Super Mario 3D World.
So, a collection of sixteen games that I either hate or am totally indifferent to? Games which have not been blessed with the gift of graceful aging? Games which I would never pay the price for off Nintendo’s Virtual Console if they were sold alone? Obviously, we’re talking a real game of the year contender, right?
Well, actually.. yeah.
NES Remix utterly owned me. I got it Wednesday morning, and I played it so much that I ran out the battery on my Wii U pad three times in a single day. Never mind how pitiful it is that a console could have the battery run out that much in a single day. I also will try not to focus too much on how there is absolutely no reason why NES Remix has to be exclusive to the Wii U, or that Nintendo unquestionably lost out on millions in revenue this week alone by not having a 3DS version launch alongside it. Okay, so that’s a lie. It’s kind of the elephant in the room and it requires scrutiny. Nintendo fanboys are saying it’s because Wii U needs exclusive software to justify owning it. That’s a fucking cop-out excuse if I’ve ever heard one. NES Remix is the perfect portable game. Pick-up-and-play mechanics, small goals, a large variety of gameplay styles, and no consequences if you think you have time to kill, turn on your device, then suddenly become busy and have to turn it off. Tethering this diamond to the Wii U would be like hiring Michael Jordan to be on your golf team. I’m sure he’s a damn fine golfer, probably better than your average schmo, but wouldn’t he be better suited on your basketball team? And NES Remix would be better suited on the 3DS. It just would be.
But, the decision was made, and NES Remix is slumming it on the wrong console. Fine. It doesn’t change the quality of the game at all. NES Remix is, as of this moment, the best digital-exclusive Nintendo has ever produced. Like Wario Ware, Nintendo has taken gameplay, stripped out most of the bullshit, then weaponized what was left into the most potently addictive micro-gaming chunks seen since, well, the original Wario Ware. This is gaming in its purest form. Scoring and/or speed based, no frills, white-knuckle gaming. And I love it.
Sorry to disappoint white supremacists , but the game is called “Clu-Clu Land”. With a “C”. Just go back to playing Uncharted.
The NES games are divided into sections by game, which have anywhere between seven to over twenty levels per game, though I don’t believe every game has its own unique stage selection. Baseball, Tennis, Urban Champion, and Donkey Kong 3 seem to have drawn the short straw and don’t have their own sections, and that’s just fine with me. There’s also fifty “remix” stages that do something wacky with the gameplay or graphics, plus twenty-five “bonus stages” that seem more like deleted scenes, cut from the game for a reason. Each stage is scored on a scale from one-star to three-stars, plus if you do really good, a meaningless rainbow star thing appears that doesn’t seem to unlock anything.
The remix stages are treated like the meat of the game, but really, I enjoyed all the non-psychedelic challenges presented here. Stuff like trying to catch 1-up mushrooms in Super Mario, or fighting bosses in Legend of Zelda, one ten-second stage at a time, was hugely satisfying. It even managed to make games like Golf and Balloon Fight more than enjoyable, something I never imagined was possible. I knocked out most of those before I ever started on the Remix stages, which were often pretty cool too. You might have to play a full stage in Super Mario where the game auto-runs for you. As it turns out, Super Mario makes a great auto-runner. Who would have thunk it? Other challenges might be related to the presentation, like having the camera pull back, showing multiple, progressively smaller screens. When I played these stages, I would then look away from the Wii U pad, where my room now seemed to be pulling back and shrinking. It was trippy. And awesome.
Not all the remix stages were well conceived. A couple of them involve you playing Donkey Kong using Link. No, you can’t use your sword for some fucking stupid reason. Also, you can’t jump. Ever tried to beat the first stage in Donkey Kong without jumping? It’s way tougher than it sounds. You’re basically left up to the whims of fate, hoping against hope that the barrels don’t go down the ladders you’re about to cross, since you have no way of defending yourself or otherwise avoiding them. My gut instinct tells me they originally planned to let you use the sword for these sections (since it makes no fucking sense to have Link in Donkey Kong and not be able to swing your sword) but they couldn’t do it right (it’s really just a ROM hack, with Link painted over Mario), so they just left it the way it was. Of course, the whole ROM hack theory doesn’t explain why you can’t jump. Other ill-thought-out stages include Pinball (a crap game on its own, like most of the games in this collection) where the flippers are invisible, an Ice Climber stage where the only hook is the graphics become Game Boy-like (and this one screws up sometimes by having the mono-Gameboy sound be present during the NES part, and vice versa), or fighting “imposters” in Balloon fight that are the exact same enemies you already take on, re-skinned to look like you. Really, some of them are just plain lazy. But this is the same company that has put out roughly fifty-billion ports of the 75% complete NES version of Donkey Kong. I’m almost convinced that Nintendo is the Japanese word for half-assed.
The biggest problem with NES Remix is these are the exact same games that they’ve always been, only broken down into microscopic chunks. Although this makes some of the games more palatable, all their original control flaws are still present. I mentioned Ice Climber above, which is probably Nintendo’s most broken controlling game. But actually, the original Mario Bros. is nearly as crippled. The jumping physics are horrible, requiring you to build up momentum to make a jump. Only sometimes this doesn’t seem to work. Plus, landing on a platform above you requires you to land perfectly flush on it. If a micro-pixel isn’t on, you fall through the platform. In games scored entirely around timing, shit like this is fucking maddening. Additionally, Baseball, Tennis, and especially Clu Clu Land (my buddy Cyril’s choice for Nintendo’s worst first-party game) control the same as they always have: like shit.
One of the Zelda stages (not the one pictured) required me to use the candle to burn a tree down and reveal a hidden staircase. As God as my witness, I burned every God damned tree on the screen at least three times each and the staircase never appeared. I restarted the stage and the next time the very first tree I torched revealed the staircase. I’m not sure if it was a glitch or not. I never bothered to replay it after that. I had already ripped out enough of my hair by that point that my scalp was bleeding.
Another issue, which is kind of minor, is that the difficulty of each challenge, in terms of what will give you a three-star rating and what won’t, varies wildly. In one of the Super Mario levels that is divided into three sub-stages, the object is to enter a warp pipe. The target time for three stars was 30 seconds. Getting this required near-perfect runs. I twice finished at 30.1 seconds because I had trouble lining up in the under-water pipe or something. Eventually, I did get the three-star rating I had coveted, clocking in at 29.6. No rainbow stars though, and I’ll be damned if I can guess where I could possibly make up the time for it. Edit: Oh my God, I am such a fucking idiot. I thought I had attempted to enter all the pipes in the second stage. It turns out there was a much, much closer pipe I could have entered than the one I was going into. I just finished in 24 seconds and rainbowed. I suck. But then I would play multiple other stages where I could die three or four times and still score three-stars with rainbows even though my performance could best be summed up as “pitiful.” There was no consistency from one stage to the next, and it takes the oomph out of the sense of accomplishment I sometimes felt.
Despite those issues, NES Remix is honest-to-God my new favorite Wii U game. Certainly Nintendo’s best digital-exclusive in their history. I was utterly hooked for three solid days on it. It even did the impossible and made Urban Champion fun for like five seconds, which by my count, is three seconds longer than Wario Ware accomplished. (UPDATE: I hadn’t ever played Urban Champion by this point, and eventually gave it the IGC Seal of Approval. Go figure!) Although I have no fucking clu-clu why this is exclusive to Wii U, this is a must own. At least, I think it is. Opinions are hugely divided here. One trend I’ve noticed: older gamers that played the originals to death in the 80s seem to like this a lot less than myself and younger gamers have. I’m guessing if you’ve played the original Super Mario Bros. once a week for the last thirty years, you probably would be bored by some of the “challenges” here, like playing level 3-3 with all the platforms invisible. See though, I don’t have every nuisance of these games committed to memory, and probably for that reason, this could very well end up being my Game of the Year. So a word of advice to the younger Nintendo fanboys out there: don’t schedule a monthly play-through of New Super Mario Bros. or Pikmin 3, or else when Wii U Remix comes out in 2043 for the Nintendo Wii UeumI3, you’ll be sorry.
Kyuukyoku Harikiri Stadium*
The Karate Kid
Galaxian
Pac-Man
Xevious
Mappy
Dig Dug
The Tower of Druaga
Sky Kid
Dragon Buster
Dragon Spirit: The New Legend
Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Indie Gamer Chick 
You must be logged in to post a comment.