Anayo's Year of the NES (2019) Closing Thoughts
Dec 30, 2019 9:12:35 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Dec 30, 2019 9:12:35 GMT -5
I beat 20 NES games in 2019. They were:
1) Super Mario Brothers
2) Castlevania
3) Metroid
(I did not record a video of this.)
4) Mike Tyson's Punch Out!
5) The Legend of Zelda
6) Mega Man
7) Contra
8) Gun.Smoke
9) Super Mario Brothers 2
10) Bubble Bobble
11) Bionic Commando
12) Ninja Gaiden
13) Mega Man 2
14) Duck Tales
15) Kick Master (I played this via emulation.)
16) Batman
17) Super C
18) Xexyz
19) Ninja Gaiden II
20) Sqoon
NES games have weird inconvenient bullshit. Examples:
1) In Zelda, Metroid, and Gun.Smoke there unmarked destructible tiles. There aren’t telegraphed or different in any way. And they don’t just lead to extracurricular bonus secrets, it is a requirement to blow these up to beat the game. This raises some questions for me. Is the player expected to shoot every single tile on every single screen? What about The Legend of Zelda, where some unmarked tiles can only be destroyed with bombs, which are a finite and valuable resource? Is the player expected to bomb every possible tile, depleting their bombs, then go bomb farming? Is that supposed to be fun?
2) There’s this thing they do in Super Mario Brothers 1 and Xexyz where you have to randomly choose the right door or else the level will loop endlessly. I am certain this felt normal in a video game in the 80’s, but it feels very strange today. I suspect it’s the sort of thing that would be fun for a designer to put in their game, but not for someone playing that game. You don’t see that kind of stuff these days.
3) Bionic Commando had poorly communicated parts. One NPC told me, “Take the beta communicator to the next zone.” But I couldn’t remember if the beta communicator was the green one, blue one, or orange one. I had to look it up online. The “hand holding” of modern games doesn’t exactly enthuse me, but it ought to be better than this.
4) Dear Bubble Bobble: screw you and your secret ending. I beat the game fair and square, I’m not going back to such and such a level and touching such and such a magic tile to get a key to fulfill your inane, byzantine whims.
It’s apparent to me that in the 80’s they hadn’t quite ironed out “user friendliness” like they did in later decades. Games probably weren’t as extensively “focus grouped”, so these matters of convenience hadn’t yet been codified. At times this felt strange, but a few times I found the blatant inconvenience to be hilarious. In The Legend of Zelda, there’s a cave with an old woman who says, “Pay me and I’ll talk!” with options for 20, 50, and 70 rupees. One option will dispense useful info. The 70 rupee option just makes her say, “Boy, you’re rich!” and she keeps your money without giving you anything. It was so unexpected and non sequitur that I had to laugh. Similarly, in Super Mario Bros 2, every level ends with a door shaped like a giant bird head. The bird opens its beak and Mario runs inside to complete the stage. In stage 6 or 7, a bird head shows up as usual, but instead of leading to the next area, it becomes the level boss, floating around and biting Mario. I had no idea this would happen and naively ran up to the bird head and it killed me instantly. It was such a subversive punchline that I burst out laughing.
NES games also tend to be weirdly balanced, probably by consequence of that era’s notions of user friendliness and lack of “focus grouping” mentioned above. A common theme was that I’d find a game maddeningly difficult until I would learn about one technique or weapon that was so broken I could just steamroll the whole game with it. The holy water in Castlevania, for example. Did they intend for that weapon to be so powerful? Bionic Commando wasn’t exactly tough as nails, but its rocket launcher did leave me wondering why I should bother using anything else. I broke Mega Man 1 with the “pause glitch”, which I’m certain wasn’t an intended game mechanic. In Kick Master it’s possible to slaughter every boss by just stomp kicking over and over - a method I didn’t personally employ during my play through, but I learned about it later in a GDQ speed run. It backs up my point in any case.
Mike Tyson’s Punchout gave me a whole new perspective on input lag. Never in my life have I ever played a game that required such precise timing. I played the entire game on NES until I reached Mike himself. At that point I felt I would need to practice with save states, so I loaded the game on my Wii. I was careful to use a Gamecube controller to mitigate lag. But I was still failing to dodge punches. Finally after hours of unsuccessfully trying to take Mike down, I realized I was hitting the dodge button within allowable parameters, but it wasn’t registering. The game was at fault, not me. I put my Wii away and fought Mike on NES, beating him almost instantly. Going from emulation to real hardware was like night and day. It taught me that emulation will always have compromises. Always. I even have misgivings about playing modern games with wireless controllers because of the latency it will introduce.
Exposition in NES games has the absurdity of a cheesy dubbed kung fu movie. Examples:
Bionic Commando:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Z_3322T00&t=1h12m51s
Ninja Gaiden:
Xexyz:
Fire Emblem:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb-5VWJ7hek&t=46m0s
These remind me of Axe Cop, a comic from a few years ago illustrated by a 30-something year old artist and written by his (at the time) 5 year old brother. The comic hilariously mixed professional artwork with unrestrained kid logic. I’m not sure if this unceremonious, matter of fact narration style in NES games is because of the Japanese to English language barrier or just the sensibilities of the time. I love it though. If we did that today I think we’d have more games like Metal Wolf Chaos for the XBOX.
I adore NES graphics. They’re detailed enough that they don’t look like Atari - ie. dragons looks like dragons and not ducks - but they’re also simple enough not to preclude imagination. The element of imagination tends to make things more dramatic than they really are. It’s weird to feel trepidation when facing a magically reanimated skeleton made of 64 pixels. I like the artistry behind that. Somehow it feels more significant than being scared of a hyper detailed CGI demon. While playing Sega Genesis games in 2018 I generally didn’t feel this way, probably because the graphics were too detailed. This also gave me a heightened appreciation for 16-bit graphics. As a kid I could tell that Tekken on the Playstation and Duke Nukem 3D on the PC looked more advanced than 8 and 16-bit games, but I couldn’t quite perceive why or how Super NES looked better than NES. At one point during my NES year I looked at Revenge of Shinobi, a game I had always considered to be visually modest. After immersing myself in 8-bit NES games, Revenge of Shinobi’s detail and animation really wowed me. I can see why a kid with an NES would really want a Sega Genesis.
As of March 2018 my NES top 5 list was:
1) Castlevania
2) Super Mario 3
3) Contra
4) Mega Man
5) Little Samson
As of December 2019 my NES top 5 list is:
1) Castlevania
2) Super Mario 3
3) Ninja Gaiden
4) Mega Man
5) Little Samson
Basically I just replaced Contra with the first Ninja Gaiden. Contra is good, but it’s also fairly ordinary and safe. It doesn’t do anything weird or creative like Xexyz or Bionic Commando. Also, it’s really hard to rank these because there are SO MANY good NES games. This whole year was basically hit after hit after hit that it was hard to choose a favorite. I suppose I just personally liked Ninja Gaiden more than Contra, so I went with that. I was also really tempted to give Mario Bros. 2 a spot on the list but I was hesitant to give valuable slots to more than one Mario game and I’m more nostalgic for Mario 3. Mario 2 is probably the most pleasant NES game I played all year, though.
The sheer quality of NES games is just astounding. I’m amazed that Super Mario Bros 1 had more play value than some of the Genesis games I played in 2018, despite Mario 1’s simpler technology. Of course there might be some bias at work here since I’m more experienced with the Genesis library. But with the NES I was playing “catch up” and trying to cover most of the iconic games. In 2018 on the other hand I had already played most of the Sega Genesis hits and had to go digging through its more obscure offerings.
1) Super Mario Brothers
2) Castlevania
3) Metroid
(I did not record a video of this.)
4) Mike Tyson's Punch Out!
5) The Legend of Zelda
6) Mega Man
7) Contra
8) Gun.Smoke
9) Super Mario Brothers 2
10) Bubble Bobble
11) Bionic Commando
12) Ninja Gaiden
13) Mega Man 2
14) Duck Tales
15) Kick Master (I played this via emulation.)
16) Batman
17) Super C
18) Xexyz
19) Ninja Gaiden II
20) Sqoon
NES games have weird inconvenient bullshit. Examples:
1) In Zelda, Metroid, and Gun.Smoke there unmarked destructible tiles. There aren’t telegraphed or different in any way. And they don’t just lead to extracurricular bonus secrets, it is a requirement to blow these up to beat the game. This raises some questions for me. Is the player expected to shoot every single tile on every single screen? What about The Legend of Zelda, where some unmarked tiles can only be destroyed with bombs, which are a finite and valuable resource? Is the player expected to bomb every possible tile, depleting their bombs, then go bomb farming? Is that supposed to be fun?
2) There’s this thing they do in Super Mario Brothers 1 and Xexyz where you have to randomly choose the right door or else the level will loop endlessly. I am certain this felt normal in a video game in the 80’s, but it feels very strange today. I suspect it’s the sort of thing that would be fun for a designer to put in their game, but not for someone playing that game. You don’t see that kind of stuff these days.
3) Bionic Commando had poorly communicated parts. One NPC told me, “Take the beta communicator to the next zone.” But I couldn’t remember if the beta communicator was the green one, blue one, or orange one. I had to look it up online. The “hand holding” of modern games doesn’t exactly enthuse me, but it ought to be better than this.
4) Dear Bubble Bobble: screw you and your secret ending. I beat the game fair and square, I’m not going back to such and such a level and touching such and such a magic tile to get a key to fulfill your inane, byzantine whims.
It’s apparent to me that in the 80’s they hadn’t quite ironed out “user friendliness” like they did in later decades. Games probably weren’t as extensively “focus grouped”, so these matters of convenience hadn’t yet been codified. At times this felt strange, but a few times I found the blatant inconvenience to be hilarious. In The Legend of Zelda, there’s a cave with an old woman who says, “Pay me and I’ll talk!” with options for 20, 50, and 70 rupees. One option will dispense useful info. The 70 rupee option just makes her say, “Boy, you’re rich!” and she keeps your money without giving you anything. It was so unexpected and non sequitur that I had to laugh. Similarly, in Super Mario Bros 2, every level ends with a door shaped like a giant bird head. The bird opens its beak and Mario runs inside to complete the stage. In stage 6 or 7, a bird head shows up as usual, but instead of leading to the next area, it becomes the level boss, floating around and biting Mario. I had no idea this would happen and naively ran up to the bird head and it killed me instantly. It was such a subversive punchline that I burst out laughing.
NES games also tend to be weirdly balanced, probably by consequence of that era’s notions of user friendliness and lack of “focus grouping” mentioned above. A common theme was that I’d find a game maddeningly difficult until I would learn about one technique or weapon that was so broken I could just steamroll the whole game with it. The holy water in Castlevania, for example. Did they intend for that weapon to be so powerful? Bionic Commando wasn’t exactly tough as nails, but its rocket launcher did leave me wondering why I should bother using anything else. I broke Mega Man 1 with the “pause glitch”, which I’m certain wasn’t an intended game mechanic. In Kick Master it’s possible to slaughter every boss by just stomp kicking over and over - a method I didn’t personally employ during my play through, but I learned about it later in a GDQ speed run. It backs up my point in any case.
Mike Tyson’s Punchout gave me a whole new perspective on input lag. Never in my life have I ever played a game that required such precise timing. I played the entire game on NES until I reached Mike himself. At that point I felt I would need to practice with save states, so I loaded the game on my Wii. I was careful to use a Gamecube controller to mitigate lag. But I was still failing to dodge punches. Finally after hours of unsuccessfully trying to take Mike down, I realized I was hitting the dodge button within allowable parameters, but it wasn’t registering. The game was at fault, not me. I put my Wii away and fought Mike on NES, beating him almost instantly. Going from emulation to real hardware was like night and day. It taught me that emulation will always have compromises. Always. I even have misgivings about playing modern games with wireless controllers because of the latency it will introduce.
Exposition in NES games has the absurdity of a cheesy dubbed kung fu movie. Examples:
Bionic Commando:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Z_3322T00&t=1h12m51s
Ninja Gaiden:
Xexyz:
Fire Emblem:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb-5VWJ7hek&t=46m0s
These remind me of Axe Cop, a comic from a few years ago illustrated by a 30-something year old artist and written by his (at the time) 5 year old brother. The comic hilariously mixed professional artwork with unrestrained kid logic. I’m not sure if this unceremonious, matter of fact narration style in NES games is because of the Japanese to English language barrier or just the sensibilities of the time. I love it though. If we did that today I think we’d have more games like Metal Wolf Chaos for the XBOX.
I adore NES graphics. They’re detailed enough that they don’t look like Atari - ie. dragons looks like dragons and not ducks - but they’re also simple enough not to preclude imagination. The element of imagination tends to make things more dramatic than they really are. It’s weird to feel trepidation when facing a magically reanimated skeleton made of 64 pixels. I like the artistry behind that. Somehow it feels more significant than being scared of a hyper detailed CGI demon. While playing Sega Genesis games in 2018 I generally didn’t feel this way, probably because the graphics were too detailed. This also gave me a heightened appreciation for 16-bit graphics. As a kid I could tell that Tekken on the Playstation and Duke Nukem 3D on the PC looked more advanced than 8 and 16-bit games, but I couldn’t quite perceive why or how Super NES looked better than NES. At one point during my NES year I looked at Revenge of Shinobi, a game I had always considered to be visually modest. After immersing myself in 8-bit NES games, Revenge of Shinobi’s detail and animation really wowed me. I can see why a kid with an NES would really want a Sega Genesis.
As of March 2018 my NES top 5 list was:
1) Castlevania
2) Super Mario 3
3) Contra
4) Mega Man
5) Little Samson
As of December 2019 my NES top 5 list is:
1) Castlevania
2) Super Mario 3
3) Ninja Gaiden
4) Mega Man
5) Little Samson
Basically I just replaced Contra with the first Ninja Gaiden. Contra is good, but it’s also fairly ordinary and safe. It doesn’t do anything weird or creative like Xexyz or Bionic Commando. Also, it’s really hard to rank these because there are SO MANY good NES games. This whole year was basically hit after hit after hit that it was hard to choose a favorite. I suppose I just personally liked Ninja Gaiden more than Contra, so I went with that. I was also really tempted to give Mario Bros. 2 a spot on the list but I was hesitant to give valuable slots to more than one Mario game and I’m more nostalgic for Mario 3. Mario 2 is probably the most pleasant NES game I played all year, though.
The sheer quality of NES games is just astounding. I’m amazed that Super Mario Bros 1 had more play value than some of the Genesis games I played in 2018, despite Mario 1’s simpler technology. Of course there might be some bias at work here since I’m more experienced with the Genesis library. But with the NES I was playing “catch up” and trying to cover most of the iconic games. In 2018 on the other hand I had already played most of the Sega Genesis hits and had to go digging through its more obscure offerings.