Rollergames (NES and Arcade Review)
July 18, 2024 2 Comments
Rollergames
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released September, 1990
Designed by Kōichi Kimura and Nobuya Nakazato
Developed by Konami
Listing at Konami Wiki
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Rollergames
Platform: Arcade
Released February, 1991
Developed by Konami
Listing at Konami Wiki
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
I’d totally watch roller derby if it had bottomless pits. Actually, I’d watch basically any sport, real or fake, if it had bottomless pits. “Here’s the 2-1 pitch. Clifton swings and it’s a long drive to center field. Johnson is running towards it! Uh oh, he’s not looking down! Is he.. will he.. yes, Johnson has fallen into the bottomless pit! Another life has been needlessly lost in an attempt to prevent a groundless-rule double! Oh the humanity! And they’re replacing him with right-handed batter Bob Smith. The slumping Smith has batted only .215 over the last three games..”
Rollergames is based on the 1989/90 syndicated roller derby program. For the unwashed masses, while roller derby today is typically a legitimate sport, most of the more famous televised roller derby shows of the 20th century were staged. Athletic performers artfully creating the illusion of a real sporting event. Contests had predetermined outcomes and consisted of a handful of planned-out key moments blended with largely improvised action between over-the-top heroes who play by the rules and villains who break them with glee. They even had managers who interfered and referees who never seem to be looking in the right direction while the heels cheat. The opening of the pilot episode of Rollergames literally promises the audience “good guys and bad” in those words. If that sounds like pro wrestling on skates, well, that’s exactly what it was. Rollergames especially, which aspired to turn roller derby into a WWE-like spectacle. This includes a pit full of alligators. I’m not joking. There’s a pit full of alligators where you either have to do five laps around it OR throw your opponent into the pit. Why is this not on TV right now? One other question: why are there no alligators in the coin-op or NES games? Come on, Konami! A PIT FULL OF ALLIGATORS! HOW COULD LEAVE THAT OUT?! You can practically hear the people who came up with Rollergames say “this will be great in the video game!” and you didn’t even use it?
I supposed there MIGHT be alligators in there.
What’s most astonishing is, whoever got this show off the ground sure did a good job of hiring the right people for the tie-in games. There’s even a pinball table by the G.O.A.T. of pinball designers: Steve Ritchie. Hey, Zen Studios: it’s supposed to be REALLY good, and it can’t be that expensive of a license! As for the video games, if YOU had something like Rollergames, you’d want Konami to do the games, right? Of course, I thought that about Monster in my Pocket too, and look how that turned out. I’m more surprised this even got a game at all. I just watched the pilot, and given the look and production style, I figured Rollergames must have been trying to ride American Gladiators’ coattails. I was wrong. Rollergames debuted only one week after the first ever episode of Gladiators aired. According to the show’s Wiki, it even beat American Gladiators in TV ratings, and by a big number at that. But, the collapse of several syndication outfits led to Rollergames having no distributor and the show was cancelled after only thirteen episodes. Konami sure had rotten luck with some of their license choices, just like I’m having rotten luck picking quality Konami games to review in 2024. These probably aren’t ending the NO! streak.
Every “cycle” starts with a hill climb followed by a jump that’s a simple button mash. You can get up to three points for this. Easily the worst part of the game, which sucks because it’s the only part that skating factors into this skating game.
I’ll start with the coin-op, but first, I’ll do my best to simplify the rules of roller derby. In a nutshell, one player is designated the “jammer” (though it’s called a “jetter” in Rollergames) and it’s their job to score the points for the team. The defenders are called the “blockers” and it’s their job to cluster up in a “pack” and then try to prevent the jammer from passing them. In real life, every blocker the jammer passes earns one point for their whole team. More complex rules don’t matter for the arcade game, since you only control the jammer and play offense, and scoring is slightly different. Instead of simply passing players to score, you have to knock them out with attacks. Every enemy you knockout scores a point. The result is a strange, very chaotic sports-brawler hybrid, though the emphasis is clearly on the brawling. Actually, other than a brief segment at the start of every round that involves button mashing, skating doesn’t factor in at all. Movement speed is normal street-brawling type of movement, except it’s kind of hard to turn around.
I’m the one in yellow. When you swing an opponent by their feet, it instantly takes out all other enemies you can swing them into. It’s the quickest way to score points, though for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to do it consistently.
I don’t really think Rollergames as Konami imagined it works all that well as a video game. Don’t mistake this as a racer, because it’s not at all. The tracks don’t matter. The skating doesn’t matter. Being out in front doesn’t matter. It’s just a basic, bare bones brawler that takes place on a roller derby track. Rollergames features two-button combat, one of which is a jump button. All punches, kicks, and grappling is done with a single button. It just gets too repetitive too quickly. The presentation is great! The background zips along and does an admirable job of creating a convincing sense of speed. Maybe too convincing, because it looks like you’re doing 75mph, even when you get knocked down. But, the action is just mindless button mashing. Knock down one person, then move to the next and knock them out. Rinse and repeat until time is up. Occasionally, instead of throwing a punch, you’ll do a grapple, but I went through a few full games and I couldn’t figure out how to consistently make it happen. I couldn’t find instructions anywhere for it.
The Japanese build, which was released first, changes up the gameplay somewhat. Items fly into the screen that only the jammers can get. This includes the CPU jammer, and since items emerge slowly from the sides of the screen, usually away from the pack, I almost never beat the CPU to them. The yellow item is especially valuable because you do a spinning kick that instantly knocks out everyone else. The green one, which freezes players, can also cause wild point swings. Oddly, the game is just better without them, in both single and versus. When I tried this in multiplayer, the action would inevitably halt whenever an item showed up, and the whole game became a mad dash for them.
At one point, and one point only, the Japanese version of Rollergames cut this simplified one v one fighter. No clue why. It never happened again until I played the two player versus mode. It wasn’t good, so it wouldn’t make a difference. It happened so rarely that I forgot about it entirely while I wrote the coin-op review. I’m baffled.
The US version ignores all the item malarkey and is just the sport, and it’s probably as competently made as any bad game I’ve ever played. It’s just such a nothingburger. Seemingly no ambition at all. The fisticuffs would be fine in a real street brawler, I guess. The OOMPH is decent enough, but the nature of the game’s sports structure assures it’s just the same thing over and over. Brawlers require convincing set pieces, imaginative enemies, and memorable boss fights to work. Rollergames has none of that. At first, I didn’t think it was half-bad, until I realized this was the whole game, with only the backgrounds changing. It’s also too easy to lose your place. The CPU teammates and ALL the opponents have a washed out color, and since there’s so many characters on screen throwing hands, it just becomes totally a mindless cluster of sprites. UPDATE: Actually, the CPU jammer has brighter colors, like you do. BUT, they’re also the spongiest to knockout. Strip away everything that makes beat-em-ups work except the violence and that violence becomes boring.
Rollergames Arcade Verdict: NO!
Thankfully, the NES game is a lot more interesting.
Not that I’m complaining, but almost all Konami NES games look similar, don’t they?
The 8-bit game is also a hybrid, but it doesn’t even attempt to be a sports game. It’s an action game through-and-through that feels like a stripped-down version of the NES Double Dragon, only with a little R.C. Pro-Am or even Battletoads blended-in. There’s no sports venue here. It’s structured like any other action game, with levels and set-pieces. Unlike the coin-op, you can’t pick the villainous heel teams. Between each stage, you can choose one of three fighters based on the heroic teams, which changes your special move. The game alternates between distinct sections where precision movement around tracks are the focus and sections where the game is reduced to the beat-em-up stuff. The hero sprites have animations that let you know when you’ve transitioned between modes.
No, throwing an enemy into another enemy doesn’t do anything.
The brawling parts feel like they’re lifted straight out of Double Dragon. You can even grab a person in a headlock, punch them multiple times, then throw them behind you into a pit or water. SO satisfying. You also get a jumping attack and a limited-use special move. My favorite was the one that belonged to the “Hot Flash” team. A quick, unstoppable flipping attack. Even with the specials, the amount of attacks you can do is limited. Rollergames really isn’t really made for the street brawling aspect. That stuff takes a backseat to the skating elements, which is why it’s so weird the game’s more climatic boss battles take place in the beat-em-up sections. But, for what it’s worth, brawling sections are always short, ensuring that even with the limited move set, you can’t get bored. Well, except for a boss who rides a jet ski, which was one of the most tedious bosses in any Konami game. It took me a couple minutes to defeat it since sometimes it doesn’t even attack, but instead just slowly scrolls across the screen. It took so long that I was worried about timing-out. It’s so boring.
The skating in Rollergames is the clear highlight of the game. When it works, it actually does feel like a SKATING game, which isn’t that really the only reason to play a roller derby game? And it feels great! I’d compare it to how the ice skating in Konami’s Blades of Steel on the NES feels, only more responsive. This could have been a total disaster, but the movement is fast, graceful, and exhilarating. When the levels feel like racetracks, you can tell they were fine-tuned specifically to make this a joy to play. That’s where Rollergames succeeds most. When the focus is simply zipping around a track, just the act of moving is so much fun. So are the basic jumps off ramps and over pits. There was one point in the game where you bank over a sloped curve, and it was delightful. I really wish they had stuck to the basics, because this could have been an all-timer with the foundation they laid here.
This is the banked hill I was talking about. Of course, the first time I did it, I didn’t know it was a banked hill and I jumped right off it to my doom. Which is sort of the big problem with Rollergames.
But, the skating is also where all the worst parts of Rollergames are. First, enemies show up that you can punch for one-hit kills. Hey, that sounds great, and it’s absolutely necessary to give the track-sections something to do besides make turns and jump. Sadly, it’s not as good as it sounds. When you land a punch, there’s no animation for the enemies. They go from standing to blinking-dead instantly. Even a single frame of animation between the two parts would have worked wonders here, but alas, the OOMPH is very unsatisfactory, at least in the skating parts. Konami certainly knew how to do video game violence right during this era, so I’m not entirely sure how nobody realized this was some weak-ass punches. What should be the highlight of the game doesn’t register as a positive at all. That was my first “uh oh.”
I wish that was as bad as it gets, but some aspects of the skating are just awful. After the first level, I was wondering why this never makes “underrated” lists. It was great! Nothing quite like it! But, it quickly became apparent that this might be one of Konami’s roughest NES games. The “bosses” for the skating-only levels involve simply avoiding things being thrown at you from various vehicles until they leave, which is anti-climatic. Maybe it would be too silly to be able to jump up and punch a helicopter, but I think we missed the exit ramp to avoid silliness a while back. They should have figured out better ways to end those levels. Worse than the bosses are the pits or spikes. Any fall into any pit or a bed of spikes is an instakill. That’s fine when you’re on a great big track and it’s easy to avoid them. But, sometimes it’s hard to judge what angle is safe and which one isn’t. sometimes you don’t even know ahead of time, for example, this part. For example, this:
Too high or low on the ramp is death. But you have no way of knowing this before you’re already committed to the jump. Nor would know about something like, say, this barrel. It doesn’t even get drawn until after you jump, and you can’t punch it:
Rollergames does this type of thing too much for its own good. That’s why a really interesting concept never comes close to reaching its highest potential. I almost wish the track parts played awful, because at least the collision and terrible platforming bits wouldn’t be such a letdown. It’s even worse too, because you also don’t come straight to life if you die. You might end up going quite a long ways back if you die or fall into a pit. Konami should have known better. The difference between Contra being an all-time classic and a game with little to no reverence today might have something to do with the fact that you come back to life instantly upon dying, in the spot you were in. For as many bullcrap blind jumps and cheap shots as the game dishes out, it sure picked the wrong type of kindness to make up for it. Your health resets every time you change to a new screen. Hey, that’s great, but I think I’d prefer for lives to restart in the same place and instead have health refill items. Speaking of which, there’s NO items in Rollergames. What you see is what you get.. Well, unless you can’t see it before making the move, like many of the jumps and obstacles. And then, it gets even worse.
It even looks like the final stage of Double Dragon.
In the last few levels, there’s obstacles that might trip you right before a pit, and since you slide forward when this happens, well, you die. Or, perhaps there will be two pits back-to-back that are spaced out in a way where you can’t do a full-speed jump over the first one without dying from the second. So, you have to stop and go, right? Well, that’s a problem, because the length of your jumping ability is based on how much momentum you build up first, and that gets hard when the platforming layout starts giving you tighter squeezes and less room to pull off those jumps. In the final levels, I mostly died from shorting jumps. When it happened, I usually barely moved forward at all during the jump. The distance you get might not feel completely correct for your speed. Sometimes it does! Other times it doesn’t, and that inconsistency is a really bad thing for a platforming-style game to have. I never got a comfortable feel for the platforming side of the game. Or for dodging the various obstacles, for that matter. The collision is quite hard to judge. In fact, it’s kind of terrible. You can’t even really eyeball it because depth just plain doesn’t even matter. Only that your pixel and its pixel never touch.
Do you see what happened? Even though the graphics show a slope, the barrel is moving in a completely straight line, so when the ramp slopes, it doesn’t “stay in its lane” and continues to go in a completely straight line, as if it’s hovering above the surface. My brain refused to adjust to it. Well, at least it’s only that one part. It’s not like there’s, say, a semi truck that throws barrels that practically cover the whole screen for a solid minute of gameplay, leaving you little to no room to dodge them. You know what’s coming, don’t you?
Goddamnit so much.
I think it speaks to Rollergames’ potential that, for all the bad stuff it does, I still had to take my time and think about whether I was going to give it a YES! or not. When it’s fun, it’s really fun. But, when it’s not, it’s practically broken. I suspect this is one of those victims of rental-proofing. It was released in 1990, and by that point, Konami habitually beefed-up difficulty levels so that a relatively short game couldn’t be beaten in a single day. Often, the games were made so difficult that the final product played almost nothing like the designers intended. This was done to.. uh.. increase sales? I’ll never understand the logic in that. If doing so wrecks the fun-factor in the game, isn’t it more likely a person would be turned off from a potential purchase? Maybe that’s what happened here, or maybe the skate stuff was just really haphazardly coded. Even the worst levels have moments where the good parts of the skating take over. It just never seems to last. Too many instakills. Too poor of collision detection. I think the foundation for a fantastic game is here, but this really didn’t come as close to getting a YES! as a game with such dazzling highs should have. As much as I love the absolutely bonkers concept, the game just isn’t consistently good enough.
Rollergames NES Verdict: NO!
“Does anyone know the score? This IS still roller derby, right?”
Indie Gamer Chick 
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