NES Works Gaiden

A real sense of deja vu this week as we look at three games that have all appeared on this channel in other versions. I would like to say that these iterations are all the superior works, but Mom taught me not to be a liar. Now, this version of Dig Dug is far and away the best 8-bit home version ever published, an almost arcade-perfect rendition that captures both the broad strokes and the tiny little details that made it a classic (vexing enemy A.I.! Musical walking!). And Flappy is much better on Famicom than it was on Game Boy, its one major downside moving that it moves more quickly to the point of almost being TOO fast. Chack'n Pop, though. That's a tough one. In terms of looks and animation, this version is much slicker than the SG-1000 release. But in terms of gameplay, it's weirdly worse. The levels have all been redesigned in unfortunate ways, ramping up the difficulty quickly and demanding almost expert-level play right from the start. I suppose for Chack'n Pop pros, this

By request of They Call Me Sleeper, here's one last Wonder Boy game until Segaiden gets to the Master System stuff: Adventure Island IV for NES. Or rather, Takahashi Meijin no Boukenjima IV for Famicom, as Hudson has never localized this one in any capacity. That's a shame, because Adventure Island IV belatedly but capably brings Master Higgins' island adventures in line with those of Tom Tom's, transforming the linear Adventure Island series into a free-roaming exploratory adventure. You know. A metroidvania. It's a fine send-off to the Adventure Island series (which would see only one more proper new entry before riding its dino pal off into the sunset), to the Famicom, and to the 8-bit metroidvania format until portable and indie games revitalized the genre a decade later.

Although the three games featured in this week's episode have already appeared in the vanilla iteration of NES Works, I promise that there's merit in revisiting them. All three titles—Nintendo's Wrecking Crew, Konami's Hyper Olympic, and Nintendo (not Irem's!) Spartan-X—hit differently on Famicom than they did on NES. Especially when one of the games came with its own controller designed expressly for the purpose of mindless hitting.

Three—three!—consecutive vertical shooters hit Famicom in this episode. Well, for a certain value of "vertical." All three of these games about shooting things while moving up or down along the screen, but all three take a very different approach to it. Star Force is the most traditional of the bunch, while Elevator Action combines vertical shooting with the sort of platform-based character movement found in the likes of Donkey Kong. And Field Combat... well, I'm not sure that one even knows what it wants to be. But at least it's interesting.

As we move deeper into the Famicom's history, its timeline begins to diverse further and further from the American console's. Witness this week's episode, in which all three releases remained stranded in Japan. (Well, OK, Road Fighter shipped in Europe in 1992, which is such a weird and unlikely turn of events it seems like we all probably hallucinated it.) All three of these titles also came to Famicom from other platforms—Road Fighter and Warpman from arcades, and Door Door from home computers. And! All three come to Famicom courtesy of some of the system's biggest publishers: Konami, Namco, and Enix. Wow!

Well, I goofed on this episode—the production order list I work for ended up getting scrambled due a copy/paste error, and I accidentally covered Geimos and 10-Yard Fight out of sequence (they shipped right after Robot Gyro, not Robot Block). This means that 10-Yard Fight wasn't actually Irem's first Famicom! Since I was on the road when I realized this during final caption edits, I couldn't rework this episode. So please look forward to next episode, where I walk it back a bit. Overall, though, the details and sentiments here are otherwise correct—Robot Block is a waste, Geimos is interesting if derivative and shallow, and 10-Yard Fight's history largely holds true. Anyway.

OK, this week we have the ACTUAL debut of Irem on Famicom, but it's hard to say TOSE's take on Zippy Race makes for a splashier debut than 10-Yard Fight would have. At least 10-Yard Fight had the benefit of not having been shown up by a conversion of the same game to technically inferior hardware more than a year earlier. TOSE also helps a second publisher make its debut here with Sunsoft's first Famicom release: A similarly underwhelming arcade-to-console conversion of the game Arabian. If you love Ice Climber's jump physics (spoilers: you don't), you'll love Super Arabian (spoilers: you won't). Finally, wrapping up the episode, we have another arcade port from Taito. Front Line more or less invented a genre, but does that mean this version has any value besides its place in history? (Spoilers: it doesn't.) Yes, it's dark times for Famicom.

Although I've previously covered The Tower of Druaga on Game Boy Works, this version precedes the portable rendition by half a decade and stands as the more towering achievement of the two. So to speak. Another solid arcade-to-Famicom conversion by Namcot, Druaga's move to consoles felt like a figurative as well as literal homecoming: As an arcade game, Druaga feels frankly unfair thanks to its harsh one-hit-kill combat and mandatory secrets hidden behind abstruse and unintuitive rules. As a home game, however, Druaga offered a more expansive role-playing-style adventure than had ever been seen on consoles, and its design comes off as far less punishing when you don't have to drop 100 yen into the machine every time you run out of lives (which happens frequently). I don't know that I'd recommend Druaga today, as many games followed in its wake that built and improved on its design... but would those games have had a design to improve on without Druaga? I say they would not.

The machines have risen, taking control of this trio of games and obviating humanity altogether. Well, almost altogether. R.O.B. at least demonstrates the value of mankind working together, hand-in-, uh, claw with its new synthoid overlords to defeat the vile Smicks in Robot Gyro. As for the other games, well, they're all about robo-kind's fight for dominance. If my performance in Honshogi is anything to go by, carbon-based life is doomed.

As we head into the final quarter of 1988, we have three classic Nintendo games appearing on what is decidedly NOT a classic Nintendo console. Atari published ports of three vintage Nintendo creations (Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, and Mario Bros.) on a variety of platforms in late 1988, including the 2600, their various 8-bit platforms, and as seen here the 7800. While the 7800 releases can't quite punch with the actual Nintendo-programmed NES versions, the fact that these three carts exist at all turns out to be more than enough to fill an episode with speculation and musings.

The Famicom finally reaches maturity with the arrival of Mario's greatest adventure—and perhaps the greatest action game anyone had ever created to this point in history. Pushing the Famicom hardware to its absolute limits, Super Mario Bros. would become one of the most beloved games of all time and transformed a character that began as the star of a string one-off arcade machines into a reliable, franchise-carrying cultural icon. Not that Mario wasn't recognizable before, but Super Mario Bros. turned him into true video game royalty. Also, Namcot delivers a pretty fun arcade conversion called BattleCity, which would have likely been the highlight in any other NES Works Gaiden episode. But, well, Super Mario Bros.

By a perfectly timed request by patron TheyCallMeSleeper, this episode arrives just in time to be positioned between this channel's coverage of Super Mario Bros. and its American sequel. Of course, this Japan-only sequel has almost nothing to do with that latter game besides the addition of Luigi as the Mario Bro. whose controls and physics turn his adventure into hard mode. But every mode of Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels amounts to hard mode, doesn't it? Nintendo took no prisoners with this one. No, they took those prisoners and tossed 'em in the wood chipper, laughing cruelly the entire time. Harsh.

Some familiar faces show up this week on Famicom, along with a few that didn't make their way to NES. Konami's Pooyan headlines this episode with a simple but charming and masterfully designed single-screen arcade game hailing from the early career of one of retrogaming's most infamous minds, Tokuro Fujiwara. It's less soul-crushing in terms of difficulty than Ghosts ’N Goblins or Mega Man. He was still young. He hadn't realized that his calling in life would be to reduce millions of children to tears. Also stepping into the post-Super Mario void, we have City Connection—a good game on NES and a better one on Famicom due to simple release timing. A Flicky-style platformer feels a lot more of-the-moment in 1985 than it did in 1988! And, finally, Hyper Sports, the other set of the raw materials that Konami would combine into Track & Field. Like Hyper Olympic, it feels like half a game. That's because, for those of us in the U.S., it literally is half a game.

The two games in this episode have almost zero profile in the West, what with the whole "never having been released outside of Japan" thing. And yet, both hold what is in my opinion a fairly significant place in Famicom history (and therefore, by the transitive property, in NES history as well). Route 16 Turbo matters for what it symbolizes for Sunsoft; it offers our first glimpse into the company's talent for reworking existing concepts into something new and different, and it remains a pretty entertaining game nearly 40 years on. Challenger, on the other hand, does NOT remain entertaining. However, its sprawling, multi-modal game design offers a foretaste of the design methodology that would become standard fare on this platform: Action games turned immersive adventure, arcade twitch concepts infused with greater depth and substance.

One of the games will look quite familiar to NES fans, and I apologize for that. No one likes M.U.S.C.L.E. Tag Team Match outside of Stockholm Syndrome victims, but at least we can take comfort in knowing that we share the psychic damage inflicted by that wreck of a wrestling game in common with our peers in Japan. At least we didn't have to deal with Brocken Jr., too. The rest of this episode has more of an upbeat tone. Sky Destroyer from Taito and Home Data/Magical offers about as impressive a behind-the-cockpit shooter as you're going to find on Famicom and NES, though (like M.U.S.C.L.E.) it too had some WWII-era themes that apparently were deemed too spicy for America. Pity they didn't edit the content for U.S. release and leave M.U.S.C.L.E. in Japan rather than the reverse.

Somehow, sandwiched between a first-party Nintendo release helmed by HAL and a Pac-Man adventure inspired by the old Saturday morning cartoon, the standout release for this episode is a Micronics/Pony Canyon maze chase game with bad graphics and infuriating music. No, I don't get it either, but the heart wants what it wants. Please don't mind the graphical artifacting in some of the Mach Rider footage. Apparently the track mirroring garbage is a known glitch that just happens from time to time. It doesn't affect the gameplay, but it sure does look horrible.

Ah, pachinko! Everyone's favorite subject for a video game. Truly, nothing is better for zoning out and engaging 0% of your brain than video pachinko, and this week we have the first to hit Famicom. It's not an interesting game, but it nevertheless has a very interesting story. Also this episode: Games that demand a little more mental engagement than Pachicom. You'll recognize this BurgerTime conversion from its appearance on NES (only the title screen was adjusted). As for Ikki, well... I don't think it's ever seen a U.S. release outside of Hamster's Arcade Archives. Nevertheless, it appears to be the best-selling Sunsoft game ever. Truly a case of the right-ish game at the right time.

Another Famicom milestone this week, one that ranks up there with the other legends of the system's early days. Unlike Xevious or Super Mario Bros., however, Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken never officially made its way to the U.S., and its influence took much longer to be felt than that of its mighty peers. Nevertheless, this collaboration between Yuji Horii, Koichi Nakamura, and Enix massively shaped the nature of Japanese console games in the coming years with its innovative mix of visual elements and simple interface mechanics. But rather than go on about it here, I'll simply let this episode do the explaining.

This week, a pair of games that have both been covered before on this channel... twice! So, rather than belabor the point, this episode works more as a treatise on the rapid rise and shakeout of the Japanese games industry around this point—the brief Nintendo-led gold rush of 1985 and the harsh reality that followed.

At some point in this episode, I may or may not talk about the actual games presented here (Namcot's Star Luster and Irem's rendition of Spelunker). Mostly, though, this video hooks back into the ongoing discussion of the overall shape of the games industry in the mid-1980s, especially as concerns the Japanese market. What debt does Star Luster owe to Western classics born in the primal soup of video gaming? How did Spelunker end up on Famicom? And could this possibly be the first episode where I hit the entire "influential games" trifecta? You'll have to watch to know for sure...

Robots! They're cool, right? Oh, my dear, sweet, summer child, this episode will disabuse you of that notion. I blame dbSoft. Volguard II manages to be somehow too simplistic yet too over-designed. Macross simplifies a portion of the most complex cartoon drama to air on American television in the 1980s down to a repetitive loop of shooting and transforming into a robot and then regretting your transformation because it drags the fun factor down to zero and immediately transforming back into a fighter. And Galg doesn't actually involve robots, but it does involve shooting, and it somehow manages to be the most inappropriately demanding and repetitive game on offer here. Anyway, don't play these games.

We're winding down NES Works Gaiden's survey of the Famicom's first few years of life, and just in time. This trio of games once again underscores the way proliferating publisher expansion resulted in precipitous plummet in playability for Famicom software. Doughboy sees the debut of Kemco with a disastrous port of a computer game; 1942 marks Capcom's uninspiring arrival on home consoles; and Bokosuka Wars... well, actually, it's not so bad if you know what's going on? But it's the exception to the rule. War really is hell. Also, please ignore the strange background audio interference here—my portable recording equipment appears to have picked up a radio station somehow. The FCC is gonna be super pissed.

A pair of familiar American NES releases (more or less) bookend the real highlight of this episode: A charming little puzzle action game called Binary Land, which sees Hudson slipping back into early Famicom Pulse Line/NES Black Box mode and reminding us of the appeal of the console's formative works here in late 1985's era of tiresome jank. Speaking of jank, TOSE and Bandai kick things off with the middling Obake no Q•Tarou, which Americans will recognize as the middling Chubby Cherub. And then we have Bomberman, which I covered recently on NES Works 1988 but for which I somehow still found new details to discuss.

I had intended to make this the final episode of NES Works Gaiden 1985, but wouldn't you know it? I ended up having too much to say to fit four games into a single episode. So our collective suffering drags on another week.... although the final two games aren't actually too bad. These two stinkers, on the other hand, will make you regret the existence of the Nintendo Family Computer, as both convert decent games from more powerful hardware and make a hash of it. Thexder hails from Japanese home computers, a Game Arts shooter that almost makes the whole "transforming robot" thing work! Not here, though. And Exed Exes helped Capcom build its way to arcade superstardom. You wouldn't know it to play this adaptation, however. Thanks, Square and Tokuma Soft, for helping to cause the Famicom crash. If only it had happened sooner!

With this episode, NES Works Gaiden comes to its true and proper end, at least in terms of chronicling the Famicom's early years. And it goes out, if not with a bang, then at least with a couple of games developed by reliable studios: HAL Laboratory and Pax Softnica. See, as dire as things got toward the back half of 1985, the Famicom wouldn't be entirely doom-and-gloom. You still had good and middling games by great and competent developers, sometimes.