NES Works

The NES's 1988 lineup begins with the debut of a gaming legacy. Renegade gave us both the River City/Kunio franchise AND the Double Dragon franchise, and given what lies ahead in the near future for both NES and Game Boy, we definitely need to have a look into the origins of these brawly species.

Coming on the heels of the NES's faithful home conversion of the not-so-faithful arcade localization of Kunio-kun/Renegade, we have Data East's almost-classic Karnov: The tale of a fire-breathing Russian strongman (who is actually dead) out to save the world from a dragon by toting around a ladder. A somewhat strange game in the Ghosts ’N Goblins/Wonder Boy II vein, Karnov doesn't quite hit the mark overall, but its NES conversion is surprisingly strong and includes a few welcome quality-of-life tweaks over the coin-op. As for localization, all we lost in the U.S. was the fact that main character Karnov was a big enough bastard in life to merit personal attention from the Hebrew god Himself.

Another Capcom creation this week. It's not quite up there with the company's best work, but you can see their collective spirit in action here—Gun.Smoke hits on a lot of popular Capcom beats all at once. It's a vertically scrolling shooter, themed around American pop culture (in this case, Western movies), whose home port contains a number of embellishments over the coin-op title to make it better suited for the NES. Despite the compromises it suffered in coming home, Gun.Smoke plays well on NES and makes a lasting impression, making it yet another top-flight creation for a valuable NES third party

Konami knocks it out of the park yet again with one of the greatest arcade conversions ever to hit the NES: Cooperative platform shooter Contra. It's a rare example of a coin-op title being ported faithfully to NES and somehow improving on the source material despite the move to inferior hardware. With its tight level design, inventive bosses, impressive weapons, and slightly combative cooperative gameplay, Contra is a true NES classic that continues to be a great time more than 30 years later.

Wishing you a Meli Kalikimaka this week, despite my rage over a bad game about wood and water. Thankfully, we have Rare to infuse a little holiday gratitude into the season with a very good, very fun, and very inventive take on racing: R.C. Pro-Am. It doesn't erase the nothing of a game that is T&C Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage from existence, but it does at least provide balance in the Force or whatever. Also this week: The mysterious NES Max. What could it be??

This week demonstrates the danger inherent in covering two games per episode as fate lands a one-two punch of mediocrity from two of the console's most dire creative combos: TOSE and Bandai, and Micronics and SNK. The results are about what you'd expect. That is to say, not so great. Dragon Power, of course, is another halfhearted attempt by Bandai to bring a Japanese game based on a manga or anime license to the U.S. without making the effort to license or localize the original work. Where Dragon Power differs from the likes of Chubby Cherub is in the fact that its source material—Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball—would go on to become one of the most successful and beloved Japanese properties in the entire world rather than just a local phenomenon. This makes Dragon Power's superficial changes all the more conspicuous in hindsight.

A pair of old-school sports games this week—one whose quality and playability transcends its visuals, and ones whose quality and playability... do not. Nintendo's Ice Hockey, developed in collaboration with NES Volleyball creators Pax Softnica, distills the essence of the sport into a take whose simplistic style makes possible some truly accessible, fast-paced gameplay that transcends its genre. It's a remarkable game in many respects! Major League Baseball is a mediocre Famista clone whose sales pitch consists entirely of, "We have real team names." Your mileage will vary, greatly.

Echoing last week's episode, this week we see a decidedly dated-looking game (City Connection) that nevertheless manages to be entertaining enough to transcend its relative age and sit comfortably in the 1988 NES lineup. On the other hand, Freedom Force is anything but dated, with some of the most stylish visuals seen to this point on NES. I'd rather play City Connection, but there's no denying the primal visual appeal of Freedom Force's attract mode.... Also, a bit of housekeeping: The host segments will be a little unusual for the next few episodes as my office space is currently unavailable for filming, forcing me to tape next to my portable photo box for the time being. Also, I realized while reviewing this episode that I made a point unclearly—I said Freedom Force is the first example on NES of a Japanese and American studio collaborating, which obviously isn't true. It's the first example I can name of the Japanese and American branches of a single studio collaborating on a proj

In the year 198X, an elite American ex-soldier traveled into the jungle for a stealth mission that ended in a showdown with a Soviet HIND-D helicopter. Sound familiar? No, this isn't Metal Gear (that's next episode), but instead a game based on a film that very clearly has served as a primary text for Hideo Kojima through the years: Rambo, aka First Blood Part II. Rambo for NES is widely reviled as one of the worst games ever released for the platform. Not only is this a factually incorrect perspective, it grievously sells short the actual ambition behind this game—not to mention the many ways in which it actually pushed the envelope of NES releases (thanks in large part to the lengthy delays that its own inspirations, Zelda II and Castlevania II, suffered en route to their U.S. localizations). Rambo is a long way from being a great game, but it's a game that makes a sincere effort to do something interesting with a licensed property. It trips over its combat-bootlaces more often tha

One of the most beloved franchises of all time makes its debut on NES, though not its actual debut; the Metal Gear Nintendo fans knew and enjoyed back in the 8-bit era was in fact a port of a minor hit for MSX/2 home computers that had shipped about a year earlier in Japan. Although Metal Gear gets the broad strokes right on NES, it trips up over a lot of minor details. And some major ones, too. Still, if a compromised take on a classic is the one that a million former NES owners knew and enjoyed back in the ’80s, there's something to be said even for that clumsier rendition of the game. Also worth noting this episode: The debut of a brand new publisher! Well, sort of.

Technos (by way of freshman NES publisher Tradewest) follows up on Renegade with a home conversion of a massive arcade hit that plays extremely fast and loose with the meaning of the phrase "home conversion." Double Dragon on NES may as well be a completely different game than the coin-op smash, as it adds several new mechanics, expands the game environments, introduces platforming sequences, helps invent the one-on-one fighting genre, and—whoops—loses the cooperative gameplay feature that gave the game its name in the first place. The end result is a game that doesn't sit well with those who demand absolute fidelity in their arcade ports, but that nevertheless stands out as one of the most ambitious, polished, and attractive games yet seen on the platform.

A pair of arcade shooter adaptations leads us into the second half of 1988 for NES Works, both of which deserve attention for entirely different reasons. Defender II sees the publishing debut of HAL Labs (via HAL America), a well-deserved turn of events for a studio that was so essential to the early success of this platform. And this conversion stretches all the way back to those early days, speaking once again to the close relationship HAL and Nintendo shared as the latter made its way into the world of selling game consoles—including a bit of borrowed audio that raises the question of who pilfered from whom? Come for the footage, stay for the educated speculation. Meanwhile, Iron Tank transforms T.N.K. III into a fairly ambitious (if not entirely refined) combat adventure with branching paths, a progressive power-up system, and even some narrative. Finally, we begin to see a glimpse of the quality that fans have come to associate with the name SNK.

This episode focuses on perception, especially vis-a-vis Bases Loaded. A certain demographic of NES owners LOVES Bases Loaded. However, in my experience, people who discovered the NES later (when better and better-looking baseball sims were available for the console) tend to find it lacking and shallow. And then there is the Japanese Famicom owner's perspective, in which Bases Loaded (aka Moero!! Pro Yakyuu) is almost universally reviled. How could so many people hold such contradictory points of view? This episode delves deeply into that question. This episode also talks about Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf. (Yes, I am aware of The Simpsons' parody. No, it's not germane to this discussion.)

We have a follow-up to a 1986 classic here, in deed if not in name: Life Force, the sequel to Konami's Gradius. Well, sort of. It's complicated. But since we never saw the actual Gradius II on NES, this will have to do. Life Force makes use of the same excellent power-up system as Gradius, with some refinements, including a new weapon option, new handling of Options, a revamped shield, and perhaps most importantly a far more forgiving respawn system upon the player's inevitable demise. Along with these improvements, Life Force also incorporates two-player simultaneous action and introduces a unique dual-format scrolling system seen nowhere else in the Gradius series. It's quality fare, and a real technical and gameplay highlight for the NES... a feat that becomes all the more impressive when you consider how it had to be scaled back from the Famicom release to work within the constraints of U.S. cartridges.

I may have gone a little overboard with this episode, but it seemed worth doing. For one thing, the creator of the Golgo 13 series, Takao Saito, recently passed away. And for another, upon revisiting this game in the context of its original release chronology on NES, I came away deeply impressed by how much the developers attempted to do here. Did they nail it? Oh, lord, no. But where this game is easily written off as a kludgey mess when viewed in light of the entire nine-year NES release library, back in autumn 1988, it tried to do a LOT with the limited resources and collective game design wisdom of the time. Containing a good half-dozen presentation and gameplay styles, a globe-spanning storyline, and a genuine good-faith effort to recreate the essence of the manga property it's based on, Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode is damn impressive for what it is. (Albeit a heck of a mess.) Kids: Beware of tiny 8-bit boobies and blood spray.

This week is a bit of an ouroboros: While the primary feature here is Capcom's Legendary Wings, this episode also touches on the NES release of Xevious, the game that very clearly inspired Legendary Wings (not to mention about a thousand other Japanese arcade games of the era). Xevious is by far the purer of the two, not to mention the fairer, but there is something to be said for that late ’80s Capcom house NES style...

Famicom mainstay Hudson finally makes its American debut this week with two sizable hits from Japan. First, Adventure Island brings a little taste of Sega to NES by converting Wonder Boy with a thinly veiled graphical overhaul. Milon's Secret Castle goes a different route, abandoning linear action for a hunt-and-explore adventure inside a castle full of monsters and annoying hidden objects. Both games share a single trait: They're designed to be obnoxiously difficult without cheat codes. Yeah, I Game Genied my way through this episode. I am very old, and there's just not enough time left in my life to deal with this nonsense.

The prevailing theme for NES games in 1988 has been multiplayer. From Contra to Life Force to Jackal, many of the best games for ’88 played best with friends. (That was probably also true for games that weren't published by Konami, even.) Fittingly, episode 88 sees not but three games that uphold that trend. First, there's Jackal, a widely overlooked but danged enjoyable co-op shooter, followed by two pretty decent game show adaptations by Rare Ltd. for the sake of newcomer GameTek. Don't despair, though: The NES has some fantastic introvert-friendly single-player titles coming up before long.

It's two for two for the road this week with Bubble Bobble, a game specifically designed to be played with another person, and Racket Attack, the second-ever NES tennis game which, like Nintendo's Tennis, offers support for doubles play (though not competitive play). Amidst all the moral panic about the way video games were rotting the brains of America's youth and turning us into violent killers, here's a pair that emphasizes cooperation. Stupid moral panickers.

More newcomers arrive on NES this episode, each bringing a musty conversion of an even older original work in tow. Kemco-Seika makes its NES debut with a two-year-old port of First Star Software's Spy Vs. Spy, which kinda-sorta puts a bow on the two-player trend of NES software by way of a competitive espionage adventure. Just as dated is the debut duology from Japanese dev Nihon Bussan, courtesy of our pals at FCI: Creaky console ports of arcade obscurities MagMax and Seicross. Not precisely the most inspiring games 1988 had to offer NES fans...

Continuing the trend of "games converted badly to Famicom in 1986 and published in America two years later," we have Bits Laboratory's disastrous adaptation of Activision's Ghostbusters. A fun, frothy, fast-paced little confection in its original Commodore 64 incarnation, Ghostbusters becomes a miserable and tedious experience on NES, bogged down by monotonous driving sequences and a viciously unfair endgame. You get the impression someone at Bits actually thought they were doing a good deed here and improving the material! And that person should be locked up in a ghost trap, or at least never allowed to touch a computer again.

Capcom kicks off one of the most important creative threads of the NES's history: Their collaboration with Disney, back in the days when Disney was simply an animation studio struggling to reinvent itself for a new era rather than an all-consuming media megalith. Ah, but this isn't really a Capcom Disney game, is it? Appearances (and packaging logos) can be deceptive... but the proof is in the gameplay, which is pretty uninspiring in this case. Also this episode: A salvo of classic games from HAL and Nintendo. The former gives us acceptable ports of arcade masterpieces Joust and Millipede, while the latter simply slaps a new wrapper on two Famicom launch ROMs without bothering to tidy up those releases' shortcomings despite the availability of more advanced cartridge tech that could have made for, say, a proper conversion of Donkey Kong. For shame.

If Super Mario Bros. was the culmination of the Famicom's early history in Japan, Super Mario Bros. 2 for NES served the same role here in the U.S. Debuting as the console hit critical mass in time for its first major holiday season in America, SMB2 sent players into a huge, imaginative game world that they could tackle with their choice of four different characters, not just Mario. Despite its complicated history, SMB2 became one of the system's greatest hits and did a great deal to define Mario in the West. Nintendo took no chances with this one, and this episode also looks at one of the keys to SMB2's staggering success: Nintendo Power magazine.

Sunsoft gets a major glow-up this episode after a mediocre start as a publisher of ancient arcade ports and one neat-but-meager light gun shooter. No one would accuse them of half-assing it this time around, though; Blaster Master shot instantly to the top of the NES all-time greats list as soon as it debuted, and it still holds up remarkably well despite some unforgiving design choices that make for some incredibly difficult scenarios. The plot may not make much sense, and the weapon degradation system can be deeply demoralizing, but on the whole Blaster Master did a lot to advance the state of the NES art. Also this episode, I take a moment to provide proper context for the whole Tengen thing I erroneously tackled back in the 1987 chronology.

Remember 1942? That really bad top-down shooter? Capcom would prefer you didn't. And, to wash that bad memory from our collective mind, we have its sequel, 1943: The Battle of Midway, simultaneously a sequel and a heartfelt apology for that previous misstep. Although this arcade adaptation fails to carry over the multiplayer element from the original 1943 coin-op, it makes up for that shortcoming by introducing a permanent skill-upgrade system. One of the better vertical shooters for NES! Meanwhile, Vic Tokai inexplicably publishes Data East's upgraded NES conversion of Bump'N Jump... well, kind of. In Japan, the home port of Bump'N Jump shipped as "Buggy Popper," which suggests it was meant to be a separate game entirely from the arcade game (alias "Burning Rubber"). Anyway, it's super dated. But still kinda fun?

I can't believe I completely failed in this episode to draw attention to the fact that Dr. Chaos is, in fact, a Superman villain. But then again, both games this episode read like latter-day comic book villains: Good-hearted souls with the best of intentions yet who somehow strayed from the straight-and-narrow path and now simply cause pain and suffering (especially among Gen X kids). The ambitions greatly outstrip the execution with this episode, as two attempts to tap into the exploratory action trend that dominated the NES in 1988 utterly fail to provide players with compelling reasons to delve into their worlds. Suffering from grievous design, visual, and technical shortcomings, both Dr. Chaos and Superman rank among the bottom tier of NES games to date despite their creators' obvious and admirably grandiose visions.

This week we have a pair of perfectly tolerable games that seemingly no one remembers. Yes, by late 1988, the NES library had grown sufficiently large that it could contain games beyond "brilliant" and "execrable"—works of competent mediocrity doomed by their lukewarm nature to be relegated to the dustbin of obscurity. Cobra Command takes a mundane auto-scrolling shooter and turns it into a Choplifter-inspired adventure with a touch of exploration and puzzle-solving. A fine start! But utterly relentless in its difficulty level and saddled with some very strange, almost "sticky" controls. It's fine, almost good, but it just misses the mark. Meanwhile, Anticipation offers inclusive thrills (if you are a preppy, 30-something Caucasian) and demands you deduce the nature of premade connect-the-dots puzzles before your competition does. It's fine. It exists, and it rounded out the NES library with more family-friendly board games. But does anyone want to play it today? I can't imagine.

In this episode, I learned that the Power Pad is not really designed for use on hardwood floors. Bring back that deep-pile ’70s shag, baby. My feet are killing me. Super Team Games gives us the last of Nintendo's casual-appeal titles for 1988. There's still one final Nintendo-published game for the year, but it's kind of the opposite of casual-appeal—really, the closest Nintendo themselves ever got to "git gud" difficulty on NES. But Super Team Games is meant for small people to pretend to exercise with, or for big people to be uncomfortably intimate with. As for the headline feature, Blades of Steel, it's an even more casual-appeal approach to hockey than Nintendo's Ice Hockey. You don't have to make any meaningful choices in this game besides deciding when to shoot for the goal... and how hard to hammer the punch button during player-versus-player fights.

Two games about American youths wasting their lives. Two games with various ties to Atari. Coincidence? Yes, actually. Sometimes, this stuff just happens. Skate or Die! may bear the Ultra Games branding, but it really owes its existence to Electronic Arts—and ultimately, to the former Epyx crew that EA hired up when Atari Corp. sabotaged that company. And while Paperboy for NES comes to us from Mindscape, the original game debuted in arcades under the Atari Games label, only to be converted to NES by Tengen (AKA Atari Corp.), who was also filing charges against Nintendo and pilfering documents in order to attempt to sabotage THAT company. It's like poetry... it rhymes.

One of December 1988's all-timers arrives this week, and while it may not be the best-remembered of the bunch (not when the other two big releases belonged to huge ongoing franchises), but I'd argue that it's the best and most polished. It's also the most fearless; Bionic Commando didn't so much ask players to learn an entirely new style of platform gaming as demand it as the price of entry. But once you got a handle on the grappling mechanics, Bionic Commando played like nothing else on the system, becoming a fast-paced action game with breezy, high-speed action through a dozen stages linked by an interesting narrative and well-conceived adventure gameplay flow. It remains the gold standard for grapple-based action gaming to this day, and for good reason: It rules.

A curious release this week, as we come to a game that shipped twice for NES: Once with Nintendo's approval, and once illegally. Ever the rogue, that Indiana Jones. Like Tengen's early conversion of Gauntlet, Temple of Doom adapts an arcade game but makes quite a few changes to its structure, format, and objectives. Capcom didn't have the monopoly on dramatic reinterpretations of coin-op titles for NES, it seems, although Temple of Doom is no Bionic Commando. On the other hand, we also have Data East's disappointingly literal interpretation of Midway's Rampage. Of all the games that could have benefitted from some sort of enhanced gameplay loop or added depth for its console iteration, this is it. But no, Data East simply stripped it down and removed features, making for a game with little challenge or variety over its entire running length.

Sunsoft blew our minds with Blaster Master, but the company did not suddenly become some 8-bit powerhouse after releasing that game. Here's the rocky portion of their road to greatness, a pair of NES conversions that will leave you scratching your head. In the case of Platoon, you'll be left wondering why they thought THIS license was suitable to a platform primarily advertised and sold to children. In the case of Xenophobe, you'll be confused about how meager a port such a technically adept company managed to produce.

It's the most wonderful time of the year: Time for a Castlevania retrospective. As NES Works 1988 winds down, Halloween 2022 seems like the perfect time for a proper look back at Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, one of the most ambitious and frustrating games of the NES era. The second of the NES's "weird sequels," Simon's Quest combines a lot of different influences and ultimately does a lot to define the series' future... even if it would take a while for the series to realize it. In the meantime, NES kids had a whole lot of Nintendo Power coverage to help them solve Dracula's so-called "riddle."

A lot of shenanigans happening with the NES timeline here at the end of 1988, a situation that I'll explore more next episode. For now, it's worth noting that this episode brings us: 1. Two games that may or may not have actually debuted in the U.S. in December 1988, and 2. Two games from the same franchise, possibly released simultaneously by different publishers. Bomberman and RoboWarrior don't share much branding in common in the West, but both hail from the same germ of inspiration. RoboWarrior, AKA Bomber King, would branch off briefly to become its own thing under the auspices of developer Aicom, who kind of Hudsoned Hudson here by creating a variant of that company's franchise and then claiming it as their own. Sort of. Except that outside of Japan it was reskinned into someone else's thing. It's complicated. Othello, however, is not complicated. This is the fourth time this channel has looked at an Othello game. You know the drill.

We end NES Works 1988 here with a game that (probably) actually shipped before December 1988 in scarce quantities. Aw, it's Nintendo's very first high-demand holiday rarity! They certainly would return to that well over the years. It's hard to say where to place this release in the ’88 timeline, because Nintendo originally announced Zelda II for a release early in the year but ended up kicking this particular ball down the road over and over again, and games media reporting didn't have much to offer back then. This episode deals with the whys and wherefores of its delays and the tantalizing nature of this long-promised Zelda sequel. Did Zelda II turn out to be worth the wait? Well... feelings are mixed on that one. Zelda II stands alone in the Zelda franchise for many reasons—its side-scrolling perspective, role-playing elements, limited lives, and the fact that it's the one entry in the series to demand genuine skill and dexterity—but you can't deny the influence it exerted on later