NES Works

The NES bursts into a new year, screaming headfirst into 1989 with the fiery, hardcore, all-time classic... Sesame Street 1-2-3? Hmm, well, perhaps not the first-footer your local Scot would consider an auspicious beginning to the year, but it does speak to the evolving nature of the platform at this point in history. The NES has finally reached a level of market saturation in the U.S. that justifies putting out basic arithmetic exercises for very young children... and, hey, at least it looks and sounds pretty solid. Then, Astro Grover takes a left at Albuquerque and ends up in a complicated morass of a game: Star Soldier. Well, no, the game itself is profoundly uncomplicated—shoot, get power-ups, die, repeat—but it has an unusual backstory, having largely been copied from another company's homework, turned into a significant gaming culture event in Japan, and then published belatedly in America by a completely different publisher who would go on to copy it for their own homework.

Tecmo made a strong debut on NES in 1987 with several of the console's more memorable early exploratory titles... and then, inexplicably, they sat out all of 1988. Maybe the company decided to regroup and rethink its North American strategy, because they return to the scene here at the start of ’89 with a pair of games crafted specifically for the U.S.: Tecmo Baseball, which (despite the Famicom audience's seemingly insatiable appetite for all things pro yakyuu) never even shipped in Japan, and Tecmo Bowl, by far the best console adaptation of the American gridiron to that point in history. It would eventually be eclipsed by the game's own superior sequel, but here at the beginning of a new year, Tecmo has arrived in force. And this isn't even the high point of their early ’89s titles!

The NES receives its first proper RPG—a port of one of the original foundational pillars of the genre—after almost two years of games that borrowed mechanics and concepts from this one. Ultima: Exodus rightly earned its reputation as a formative masterpiece on home computers in the early ’80s, though here at the end of the decade in a revamped console-friendly format sitting amongst games that distill its ideas into breezy, accessible, action-driven experiences... it does feel slightly out of place. It also doesn't help that Phantasy Star (which boils down to "Ultima, except awesome") had shipped just a few months earlier on Master System. Still, you can see the seeds of America's eventual console RPG love taking shape here... even if that love would take a decade to become requited.

A pair of vintage arcade conversions from Konami... err, sorry, I mean "Ultra Games." Haha, don't know how I could have made that mistake!! Q*Bert and Gyruss only have one thing in common: Both arcade machines used control schemes that don't really map well to the NES D-pad. Otherwise, they don't have a lot of overlap—and that includes here on NES. "Ultra" poured its heart into this port of Gyruss, turning a fairly simplistic arcade shooter into a game on par aesthetically with their big 1988 hits. As for Q*Bert... well, it plays fine. But it doesn't have the Konami spit ’n polish you'd expect (for some weird reason) from a game from Ultra. SPEAKING OF MISTAKES: I misremembered Gyruss as having spinner controls in the arcade, when in fact it had a non=centering 8-way joystick. Mandela Effected by my own petard. (The NES controls still don't quite work, though.)

This is one of those "pleasant surprise" episodes where I went in expecting nothing and came out impressed by both titles under the microscope. Namco's Mappy-Land (published by Taxan for whatever reason) definitely shows its age, but despite being a 1986 release muddling its way onto NES in 1989, it has strong enough central gameplay and smooth enough controls that it holds up well. The City Connection of ’89, if you will. Although the latter portions of the game do hint at a superior experience that could have been.... And Dance Aerobics, well. It didn't quite invent the rhythm genre, but it certainly prefigured the format. Not especially my cup of chai, but it has a lot more going for it than you might expect from the box art.

It's the British invasion all over again as Rare Ltd takes on two American institutions—namely, Atari and football. As the UK-based company makes inroads into becoming the TOSE of the West, we see the grim dichotomy of aggressive contract labor come into focus once again: Depending on the project and publisher, Rare's output could vary wildly. For Milton Bradley, they put together a bang-up rendition of coin-op classic Marble Madness. For Tradewest, their freshly endorsed version of arcade sports sim Quarterback feels, shall we say, lacking. The duality of man in action.

Developer/publisher Culture Brain makes its debut on NES by riding into town on the same "conversions of pre-NES arcade games" that we saw last episode, though with considerably less success than Konami and Ultra. We can probably mark that down to the inadequacy of the source material, because Culture Brain did make a genuine effort here to tart up their port of Chinese Hero for the console, even swiping material directly from Super Mario Bros. They just forgot to swipe Mario's brilliant design and ebullient sense of fun. Oh well. Faring better, Bandai Golf: Challenge Pebble Beach looks pretty mundane but offers a solid take on golf with an interesting wind-based mechanic on a digital rendition of a world-famous PGA course. Which counts for a lot! Assuming you like golf games.

Let the games begin! Wait, I'm getting a message here... the Games actually ended about half a year before these Olympics-themed (though not officially licensed!) titles launched. Of all the "chip shortage" delays the NES library suffered in 1988-89, Track & Field II and World Games might be the funniest. Slated to launch during the ’88 Seoul Olympics, they ended up shipping the following spring instead, long after the country had lost interest in the adventures of FloJo and Greg Louganis. But that's OK. Slick Konami visuals aside, these games don't really offer THAT much innovation over the minigame events that we had already seen in their NES predecessors from 1987.

Here we have THE big NES release for Winter 1989: Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden. Plenty has been made about how the revolutionary cinema scenes in Ninja Gaiden changed video games forever, which of course isn't quite true; this was by no means the first game to include manga-style animations and illustrations to convey story details. However, the breadth, artistry, and frequency of the interstitial sequences seen here set Ninja Gaiden apart from its predecessors, and this cinematic format would become THE standard for console game narrative animations—and with Ninja Gaiden arriving at the cusp of the CD-ROM revolution, you'd continue to see its fingerprints on the medium for another decade or more. However, I don't think people give enough credit to just how well Ninja Gaiden played. Yes, it veers into the unreasonably difficult toward the end, but up until that point, Tecmo concocted a game that combined several influences (Castlevania, Ghosts ’N Goblins, etc.) and tumbled them around into s

A day early in celebration of the season, it's... the worst NES game ever! ...is what I'd say if that weren't a wildly off-base claim. Friday the 13th by Atlus and LJN certainly isn't a masterpiece, but like most of LJN's Japan-developed early releases, it attempts to do a whole lot of interesting things with a film license instead of just barfing out some quick, easy, low-effort churn. That Friday the 13th fails to deliver on pretty much all of these ambitions almost doesn't matter, because there are some forward-thinking ideas here that would become baked into the fabric of the medium years later, once other developers figured out how to make them good. Friday the 13th sucks, but it sucks with style. And that's pretty cool.

The NES gets a proper cult classic here with The Guardian Legend, another one of those games that blurs boundaries between rigid genres in the way that the best NES games so often so. The Guardian Legend sees developer Compile merging their two greatest disciplines—shooters and action-RPGs—into a single, wholly unique creation in the history of video games. It's a Zelda-style game where the dungeons consist of vertical shoot-em-up action. Although it does have a few modest flaws (notably some wild difficulty wild early on, followed by the latter half of the adventure mainly consisting of the Guardian steamrolling everything in her path), The Guardian Legend stands as a singular work and truly embodies the best of what the NES is all about.

A couple of games this episode that both try to do something a little different, but do they really succeed? And, perhaps more importantly, did anyone actually ask for them to forge their own path in the first place? I will say this, though: At least they have both a point of view and a legacy. Predator belongs to the NES's legacy of overly ambitious media adaptations by very creative Japanese studios with neither the time, the resources, or (if we're being honest) the design chops to make it all come together into a true classic. Like Jaws, Rambo, and Friday the 13th before it, Predator aims big and fails big. In fact, one might argue that it fails most bigly of all. And Taboo belongs to the tradition of not-really-games developed by Rare with nice visuals and sound and audio—think Anticipation, but even more so. It also draws on the legacy of fortune-telling software seen fairly often on Japanese consoles of the time. It's the kind of thing that would make for a fun bonus mode in

I keep typing "Worf" instead of "wolf" with these games, and I can't tell you how much more interesting those games would have been than these cartridges. Both of them fall short of their potential in very different ways. Airwolf, for example, is a first-person helicopter-based game that attempts to give players an interesting, immersive take on the experience of flying a combat and rescue chopper—think Choplifter in 3D—but totally fumbles it. Operation Wolf, on the other hand, suffers from the NES's technical limitations and fails to deliver the intense, high-energy experience of the original arcade game. As the Klingons say, perhaps it is a good day to skip these. This video contains a fair amount of strobing lights due to the emphasis on light gun games, so sensitive viewers should approach with caution.

Well, here we are. One of the worst games of all time! A huge disaster that insults the intelligence of anyone who owned an NES! Nah, not really. Hydlide feels incredibly archaic as a 1989 NES release, but that doesn't reflect on the game itself so much as FCI's weird decision to publish it here so late. I think it probably would have fared well if they'd shipped it alongside Zanac back in 1987. But two years later? Why would anyone want this game when they could play a dozen better, Hydlide-inspired works instead? Still, this is a game worth experiencing and attempting to understand, because it's pretty much the Rosetta Stone for action-RPGs. Seriously, it was a big deal. Just... not in 1989.

I'm sorry to say that this episode brings us EVEN MORE games by Bandai, a publisher not especially known for their creative integrity and dedication to quality. Ah, but we lucked out: They hired Human Entertainment to develop both games. I wouldn't necessarily rank Human in the upper echelons of NES development, but their involvement always means a given game will at least be interesting. Think of them as a counterpart to Pack-In-Video: Their work may be a bit rough, but it certainly doesn't lean on convention. Of the two, Monster Party holds up best: A bizarre platform game with yet another character transformation mechanic. It seems like everyone wanted a slice of that Doki Doki Pie-nic! I'm sorry, that was a bad attempt at a joke. But the game is good. Street Cop, on the other hand, doesn't fare quite as well, and not just because who in god's name would want to play the role of a Manhattan LEO in this day and age?! Controversial theming aside, Street Cop attempts to use the Power

Here we have a pair of games that don't do much more than simply exist. Neither is bad, and Hoops in particular has its charms, but they don't move the needle at all outside of giving kids in 1989 something additional (if not something new) to do with their free time. Neither game feels entirely complete as a product, especially Shooting Range, a game that appears to have been hastily edited into a kinder, gentler gun-based experienced at the last second. But neither of these games will give you rabies or anything. They are video game product at its most competent.

ne of the finest NES releases for 1989, and in fact for any year, Mega Man 2 redefined run-and-jump single-player action games. Which is funny, because everything here already appeared in the original Mega Man, back in 1987. But it appears BETTER here, with improved visuals, control, music, level design, enemy and weapon designs, and just a general sense of mind-blowing excellence (by 1989 standards). As the NES found itself staring down the barrel of imminent obsolescence thanks to the looming launch of the advanced Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 consoles, Mega Man 2 proved that Nintendo's 8-bit system still had plenty of room left for technical advancement and creative innovation. To mark this landmark hit, this is the first 4K episode of NES Works. Since I'm working almost entirely with standard definition content (including the host segments, recorded on VHS tape), this is actually a useless change. But, hey, look at that little 4K icon. Isn't it neat?

Weird sequels were kind of the NES's thing. Just look at how different Zelda II and Super Mario Bros. 2 were from the games that preceded (and followed!) them. But Super Dodge Ball may just take the prize. Whatever you might have expected from the true follow-up to Renegade... it wasn't this.

What's going on with all of these huge NES releases for 1989? You'd think the console was in its prime or something! Granted, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wasn't on par, quality-wise, with the likes of Ninja Gaiden or Mega Man 2... but it did have the advantage of being the first-ever video game release to tie in with the single hottest kids' media property of the late 1980s. Of course, lots of kids picked it up assuming it would be an adaptation of the incredible arcade game that dominated pizza shops and mini-golf centers, although it is definitely not that game, which has not done any favors for its reputation. But, looking back at the chronology of the year's releases (the raison d'être of this very channel!), it turns out this game predates the arcade machine by nearly half a year. Rather than porting that future coin-op work to NES, this first TMNT release instead connects to an interesting thread of video gaming's past and feels like the end of an era—namely, the end of the era

I regret to announce that the VHS camcorder I use for my hosting segments (better known as my "VHS filter" to people who have no idea what they're talking about) has given up the ghost. I'm looking into options for a replacement, for the time being, you'll have to put up my mug in 4K. Cool fact: You don't need to comment on it! I blame Bayou Billy, a game that wants to ruin everybody's day. I survived making this video, in part because I liberally applied cheat codes, but clearly my video camera did not. That's a shame, because there's a lot to admire technically about this game, and its music absolutely rips, but the utterly ridiculous way that Konami rebalanced it for the U.S. overshadows pretty much every other detail about it. A new era of games made vastly more difficult for their American release has begun...

Two very different takes on sun and sand this week. Desert Commander sends you to North Africa to wage war against (or as...) Rommel's Afrika Korps in the latter days of World War II, guiding armed vehicles and sweaty foot soldiers to their deaths in the trackless wastes of Algeria and Morocco. Meanwhile, California Games is about surfing off the coast of Santa Cruz and kicking hacky sacks around at the Presidio. Man, no wonder the Greatest Generation thought Gen X was a bunch of losers. Please remember to delete your Rommel within 24 hours!

What's going on with all of these huge NES releases for 1989? You'd think the console was in its prime or something! Granted, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wasn't on par, quality-wise, with the likes of Ninja Gaiden or Mega Man 2... but it did have the advantage of being the first-ever video game release to tie in with the single hottest kids' media property of the late 1980s. Of course, lots of kids picked it up assuming it would be an adaptation of the incredible arcade game that dominated pizza shops and mini-golf centers, although it is definitely not that game, which has not done any favors for its reputation. But, looking back at the chronology of the year's releases (the raison d'être of this very channel!), it turns out this game predates the arcade machine by nearly half a year. Rather than porting that future coin-op work to NES, this first TMNT release instead connects to an interesting thread of video gaming's past and feels like the end of an era—namely, the end of the era

Man, you just KNOW that some MENSA candidate is going to complain that I should leave politics out my video game retrospectives in response to this video, which is literally about leading a Communist rebellion against an American-backed junta. For everyone who HASN'T been breathing leaded petroleum fumes lately, please enjoy the interesting contrast of a SNK game that would have been programmed by Micronics a couple of years earlier side-by-side with an actual game programmed by Micronics in the here-and-now (by which I mean 1989). SNK has come a long way since Ikari Warriors, as you can see in the excellent Guerrilla War. Micronics, on the other hand, has clearly NOT come a long way since then, as demonstrated by the utterly dire Thundercade.

Summer 1989. What a fun, sexy time for NES, huh? With games like Mega Man 2, TMNT, and DuckTales, the system had no shortage of crowd-pleasers destined to become lifetime favorites for impressionable youngsters during this lively period. And then you had perhaps the biggest summer ’89 release of all... though that's more on the Japanese side of things. You know, in Japan, where the game actually shipped in spring ’86. Yes, Dragon Warrior. Or Dragon Quest if you prefer. Yet another 1989 RPG localization for NES that demonstrates the fact that timing truly is everything. This one goes down in the same category as Hydlide and Ultima Exodus... except even more so! This episode explores why Dragon Warrior had such a profound impact in Japan and so little impact here, as well as Nintendo's dogged efforts to make it a big deal.

Hmm, it is Strider Hiryu... and also a lot of additional material about cultural and political trends of the 1980s that greatly influenced video games. Did they necessarily have the direct impact on Strider for NES that this episode posits? Probably not... but this material needed to be covered anyway to give additional clarity to the whys and wherefores of NES games anyway. It might as well have been here. Look forward to my video essay on the FTC's counterpart, the FCC... someday. I need a nap first. As for Strider itself, well... I admire what the game tries to do, but even back in 1989, there was clearly something amiss with this production. Those troubles only become more evident in hindsight, especially when you learn that Capcom announced the cart for an early 1989 release on Famicom yet it ultimately only shipped in America. On one hand, it's nice that they didn't simply cancel the game altogether and leave us with another "what might have been"-shaped hole in our libraries.

Another one of those monster-sized games with a massive legacy lands on NES. There really was something in the water in summer 1989, huh? I guess that's what they mean when they say the NES had The Juice. The Juice was the mysterious thing in the water. In this case, we have a console adaptation of a groundbreaking Japanese computer game—their own take on the hex-based war simulations that the American grognards loved so much. Unlike Dragon Warrior, Nobunaga's Ambition was not built from the ground-up for consoles; this is a computer game through and through, and it makes few concessions for play on a two-button controller on a system marketed to kids. Nobunaga tosses you into the deep end and expects you to swim, and it isn't afraid to stick you with a game over before you make your first move. It's confusing, overwhelming, and opaque, and it makes no apologies for any of those things. Naturally, it became a long-running series and transformed Koei into one of the most powerful and

1989 has been a year of impressive maturation for the NES platform, but Baseball Stars really shows how far along the console—and console gaming as a whole—have come since the early days. Sure, it's another baseball game, but this one is packed with customization, season and career progression simulation, and even a business management aspect. All of this is saved to one of those newfangled lithium batteries... you know, like the ones previously used only for massive timesink RPGs. This is a meaty take on baseball, offering the depth of a PC coaching sim but the snappy immediacy of a console sports game. It's pretty much an all-time classic, and easily the single best console baseball game ever seen to this point in history.

Our pals at Rare are back to apologize for that whole John Elway mess with a slick, high-speed combat racer. At the same time, they've ratcheted up the difficulty to utterly painful levels as a way to punish everyone who complained about John Elway. Our pals at Rare giveth, and they taketh away. As long as you can abide by the extreme challenge level, which would inform future original productions by Rare, Cobra Triangle has a lot going for it. Technical finesse! A variety of mission types! Slick graphics! A Gradius-inspired power-up system! And, somehow, it rips off Ocean's Waterworld for Virtual Boy six years before Ocean's Waterworld or the Virtual Boy ever existed. That's a neat trick. Truly, was anything beyond Rare's abilities in the NES era?

The president has been kidnapped by ninjas! Are you a bad enough dude to watch a YouTube video that revolves around a political figure without complaining about how video game retrospectives should never talk about political figures? Bad Dudes and Flying Dragon make an interesting study in contrasts, because both largely revolve around being Kung Fu clones. However, one is very unambitious but looks great and plays reasonably well, while the other is a mad-eyed attempt to mash together two tangentially related genres and utterly fails at the task. Ultimately, only one has the absolute dumbest narrative premise in the entire NES library, and that alone is enough to make it a classic… while the other deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of irrelevance.