NES Works

Sometimes the timing of NES releases gets a little weird, you know? Like the way we had two "castle" games last week. Now, this week, we have two games based on the same source material arriving in the U.S. at the same time. Both of them have their own personalities, to be fair, and both fail to establish themselves as timeless classics in completely different ways. It's just one of those things, I guess.

The NES got its start on the strength of a library imported from Japan, produced by Japanese developers—even the games based on American properties like Jaws, The Karate Kid, and Rambo. But as the system matures and its popularity in the U.S. grows, its library will increasingly take on a more Western shape. You can see it here, with Super Sprint (developed by Tengen and based on an Atari game) and Defender of the Crown (developed by Australian studio Beam, based on a computer game by California-based Cinemaware, and never released in Japan). The console's personality in its early days more or less amounted to a curated redux of the Famicom, but here at the dawn of the 16-bit era it's pretty safe to say that the NES and Famicom were now entirely different creatures altogether. As for the games themselves, both suffered massive visual downgrades in the move from their original platforms to NES. Only one of them was still fun to play, though.

This episode, we look at two games that share a common theme (they both take place in castles!) and, unfortunately, also share a sort of thematic overlap (they're repetitive takes on the puzzle genre and a bit of a slog to play). In other ways, though, they represent diametric opposites. For one thing, Castlequest is the third name this game has worn (after The Castle and Castle Excellent), but this take on the material completely rearranges the layout and flow of the adventure. It's not quite a sequel, but feels like more than a mere remix. The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, on the other hand, is ALSO the third name this game has sported (after Roger Rabbit and Mickey Mouse), but its developers made zero effort to mix things up—and it would even be completely identical in its Game Boy iteration the following year.

Sometimes the timing of NES releases gets a little weird, you know? Like the way we had two "castle" games last week. Now, this week, we have two games based on the same source material arriving in the U.S. at the same time. Both of them have their own personalities, to be fair, and both fail to establish themselves as timeless classics in completely different ways. It's just one of those things, I guess.

This week's episode features two games with absolutely nothing in common besides, perhaps, their focus on Americana. But even that takes two very different forms! Jordan Vs. Bird comes at the idea from the perspective of licensing the likeness of the hottest player in sports and whose branded shoes were the number-one sports apparel on kids' wish lists; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer adapts a 100-year-old novel that its target audience knew as homework. The latter is also loaded with a lot of, shall we say, problematic issues—not just in its social perspective, but also in its game design. That is to say, one of these games had its finger on the pulse of youth culture, while one was shambling toward the grave... a destination that it wholly deserved.