NES Remix 2 (2014, Wii U) - Wart and Dedede, Together at Last

NES Remix, Nintendo and indieszero's bite-sized tribute to classic NES games, was a surprise Wii U release that represented exactly the kind of thing Nintendo should be doing with the system's e-shop: Using its strong (and some not so strong) old properties in new, small scale projects for a low price but with plenty of content. The game is a hybrid of the microgames style play of the Wario Ware series and the hyper-retro revival style of titles like Pac-Man Championship Edition, Galaga Legions, and Frogger Hyper Edition. Four months later, Nintendo released a sequel that includes an overall much more enjoyable set of games.

NES Remix (2013, Wii U) - Nintendo's Best and Worst, Alive Again

 

In 2003, Nintendo launched the first game in the WarioWare series on the Game Boy Advance. This series, which would see six sequels across consoles and handheld systems, is a collection of "micro games" with extremely simple controls that each last a matter of seconds, with the appeal being the random, frantic nature of anticipating what to do next. Ten years later, NES Remix launched as a sort of spiritual successor. This title takes 16 classic NES games and trims them down to bite sized bits, with each round lasting anywhere from five seconds to a couple of minutes.

Review - Spelunker (1987, NES)

Originally released on the Atari in 1983, Tim Martin's Spelunker is famous for being a bad, unreasonably hard game, even by the standards of the time. I first became familiar with the series via Irem's 2009 remake on the PS3, Spelunker HD. Spelunker HD was very difficult and had gameplay mechanics unlike anything else I was familiar with, but I completely fell for it, with it quickly becoming one of my favorite Playstation Network titles. I heard that the original version was much worse, but I'd never had a chance to check it out until recently, when the NES version of the original game showed up on the 3DS Virtual Console. As it turns out, it's still a pretty great game, even in this much more primitive form, but it's so short that it feels like a demo in comparison to Spelunker HD.

Review - DuckTales (NES, 1989)

DuckTales, based on the Disney cartoon of the same name, is one of my favorite NES platformers. I was a big fan of both the show and the game in the early 90's, and the recent announcement of an HD remake by Wayforward definitely has me hyped. With Contra 4, A Boy and His Blob 2009, and Double Dragon Neon, Wayforward has proven their talent for taking on passion projects to revive classic titles, and DuckTales Remastered looks to continue that trend. In anticipation of the remake, I decided to take a run through the original game for the first time in years.

Review - Bubble Bobble (NES, 1986)

In continuing with the theme I started with my reviews of Zelda II and Super Mario Bros. 2, I'd like to talk about another of my all-time favorite NES games: Bubble Bobble. This cooperative puzzle/platformer game was released in arcades in 1986 and has been ported to over a dozen systems since. While I've played the arcade version a few times, my fondest memories of Bubble Bobble are with its NES port, which, unlike many arcade conversions of the day, is actually an almost perfect port. Some levels were rearranged, point values for items changed, and twelve secret levels were added, but everything wonderful about the arcade game is present on the NES.

Review - Super Mario Bros. 2 (NES, 1988)

Writing my review of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link got me in the mood to take a look back at some of my all time favorite NES titles. As mentioned in that review, Super Mario Bros. 2 is one of my top three games for the system, along with Bubble Bobble and Zelda II itself. I really love all of the main NES Mario titles, from the arcade original through Super Mario Bros. 3, but SMB2 was and remains my favorite game in the series. From its unique character system, great enemy design, and catchy music, Mario 2 is all around fantastic.

Review - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES, 1988)

Game development has always been a sequel-friendly environment. More often than not, developers release sequels that build upon and refine their existing formula, and as long as it's done well, I've got no problem with it. I am, however, a little nostalgic for how a couple developers treated sequels in the mid-80's. While most sequels still focused on incremental changes, a few went in wildly different directions, the most famous being the US version of Super Mario Bros 2, Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest, and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. The third installments of each of these games would undo these changes, but to this day I think Mario 2 and Zelda 2 are among the finest titles released on the NES. I hold much less fondness for Castlevania 2, but still respect it a great deal.

Review - Yoshi

It's always interesting to see where now famous developers got their start. Yesterday, I reviewed Rare's Wizards & Warriors, a lovably bad platformer starring a wobbly knight. Today, I'd like to take a look at the game making origins of Game Freak, the developer known almost entirely for their work on the Pokemon series. Before they were the kings of the handheld gaming industry, Game Freak developed several puzzle games of varying quality. Their first game was Mendel Palace, a tile flipping action puzzler with some creepy, overly excited monsters. Their second was Yoshi, a simple puzzle game that began Game Freak's long standing relationship with Nintendo.

Yoshi was developed for both the NES and the Game Boy in 1991, a year after its titular green dinosaur hero made his debut in Super Mario World. It's definitely a little strange seeing an 8-bit Yoshi, but this isn't really a game that needs a high range of colors to work. The graphics are simple and the music is catchy. The borders that surround the play field are kind of ugly, but that's not an issue worth dwelling on.

The Japanese release of this game is titled Mario & Yoshi, which makes a little more sense since players control Mario (and Luigi in Versus mode) and not Yoshi himself. Yoshi is entirely a bystander in this game, watching players as they clear the puzzle field and only emerging from his lazy stoop when a stage is cleared so that he can get something to eat (after Mario punches him in the head, as usual.) The game is a falling blocks puzzle game, and in this case, the blocks consist of Goombas, Piranha Plants, Bloopers, Boos, and Yoshi egg shells. Players cannot control where the pieces descent from, but rather, can rotate the four-tile wide stacks of enemy blocks in hopes of lining them up. Blocks can only be cleared vertically.

Yoshi eggs drop in two parts; when the bottom half lands, players can begin filling it with enemies. Once a top half appears, you can enclose your prey and hatch a Yoshi. The higher the stack, the more points you earn, the bigger your Yoshi plumps up, and the more junk you send to your opponent's screen in Versus mode. It's a nice risk/reward system, since stacking an egg to the top of the screen will earn you a nice bonus if you can complete it, but doing so makes it much more difficult to navigate and survive the rest of the falling enemies, since the field is so small. This isn't a very deep game, since there are no combos and no horizontal line clearing, but planning how to properly deliver your eggs is pretty fun.

The single player game consists of two modes. Type A is an endless score attack mode, though the game doesn't save your high scores. Type B is a series of stages that end once you've cleared the whole field, rewarding you with a cutscene of Yoshi eating something. Type B is more fun, but unfortunately its difficulty caps somewhere around stage 6. It doesn't seem to get faster or harder after that, so there's not a lot of reason to keep playing. Multiplayer is a better time, though its options are limited. You can't select your music in Versus mode, and you can't set the number of wins required to end a game. Matches are won by either being the first one to clear your field or by having your opponents stack hit the top of the screen. There are handicap options to level the playing field between experienced and novice players that work pretty well.

Yoshi isn't a particularly difficult or deep puzzle game and winning against an equally skilled opponent is largely a matter of who gets a lucky block drop, rather than who makes a mistake. That said, it's still a lot of fun to sit down with a buddy for a little while and play through a few rounds. It's fun to see the simple, humble origins of a developer known for games with both universal appeal and ridiculously deep character growth systems. Game Freak got their start with puzzle games, but really hit their stride when they started making RPGs. Yoshi's charming enough to spend some time on even if it's not the best puzzle game on the NES.

Review - Wizards & Warriors

Back when the NES/SNES/Genesis were at their height, Music Forum, a local video rental store, had what was most definitely the best deal I've ever heard of from any rental place; for $7, you got to keep seven games or movies for seven days. Through this deal, I had the opportunity to play pretty much everything that showed up in the store. What usually happened would be that only one out of the seven games we rented would be good, and that would be the one my family would end up playing while ignoring the crappier ones that only got played once or twice. I've had an interest in going back and revisiting some of the games that I once played but either didn't enjoy or didn't understand enough to really give them a thorough, fair look (not that you'd expect much more from an eight year old). Toejam & Earl was one of these; Wizards & Warriors is another.

Review - Double Dragon

The beat em up/brawler genre dominated arcades in the late 80's/early 90's. It was the home of many great, original titles as well as a wide selection of popular licensed games, ranging from Dungeons and Dragons to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to a variety of Marvel superhero games. 1984's Kung Fu Master, published on the NES by Nintendo in 1985 as simply Kung Fu, is considered one of the forefathers of the genre, but it was Technos' Renegade (1986) that set the standard for dozens of games to follow. It introduced the gameplay concepts of moving freely in both horizontal and vertical directions as you punched and kicked punks in urban settings that would serve as the foundation of the genre. It was Technos' 1987 follow-up Double Dragon that would turn the genre into a worldwide phenomenon. I've only played the arcade version a few times, so for this review I'll be taking a look at the 1988 NES port.

Review - Life Force

Life Force is a scrolling shooter released on the NES by Konami in 1987. The game features standard genre gameplay, but with a unique theme; you fight giant brains with arms, avoid pointy space-teeth, and dodge fiery indigestion. The ships the player controls are essentially antibodies destroying infections (as well as seemingly normal Space Organs) inside of the giant, planet-eating Space Snake seen on the game's box. Another unique element is that the game alternates viewpoint between each stage, switching between side-scrolling and overhead views. Along the way, you collect items that fill a power-up meter which can be activated when you please, giving you increased speed, missiles, a ring-shaped beam, a laser beam, a force field, or everyone's favorite, Options; little sub-ships that follow you around and double your armament. This game is a Gradius spinoff, and it shows, down to sharing some of the same enemies, but of the two, Life Force is the stronger game.

Review - A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia

A Boy and His Blob was one of those NES games that I'd rent back in the day, try to play, fail terribly, and return, but always come back to. I never owned a copy until recently picking one up at Core Gaming in Salem, MA, and I had never come close to completing it until tonight. I know why I wanted to like this game; it has very pleasant music, great art design, and a great concept. Players control a boy who befriends a jolly white blob that changes into various tools after eating jellybeans. The two of them scour the New York underground in search of treasure until they're ready to fly off to Blobolonia, the blob's home world, and free it from an evil king. It sounds great and looks great but, sadly, the actual game is terrible.

Review - Super C

In 1988, Konami released an arcade sequel to their hit platformer/shooter, Contra. Titled Super Contra, the game would be ported to the NES in early 1990 and released in North America under the title Super C, in one of the more unnecessary name changes of the 8-bit era. I've unfortunately never played the arcade version. There's a port of it available on the Xbox Marketplace, and unlike the original Contra, the Xbox version doesn't seem to have been uglied up with bad, additional explosion effects. This review will cover the NES release, which remains my favorite Contra title.

Review - Contra (NES)

A year after its release in arcades, Konami ported its shooter/platformer Contra to the NES. The core gameplay is the same between the two versions; for a summary of the basic gameplay, please read my review of the arcade version. The 1988 home version is a harder and longer game with downgraded graphics and simpler, but still fantastic, music. Contra is famous in part for being one of the first big games to allow use of the infamous Konami Code to cheat and boost your starting lives from three to thirty, allowing the game to be played much more casually. It's a perfectly acceptable port, but definitely not as good as the arcade original and contains several significant changes.

Review - The Legend of Zelda

It's hard to review a game so iconic to the medium as The Legend of Zelda. Like Super Mario Bros., it wasn't the first game in its genre, but it did what it did so well that it cemented itself as the genre's cornerstone. It spawned one of the biggest franchises in video game history, even if said franchise has grown kind of stagnant, and offered a deeper, more real world than most games of the time. There's no argument that Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka created a game in 1986 whose impact is still felt today, but the question I want to answer is whether or not, in today's world, the game is still fun.

Review - Kid Icarus

This review covers the content of the original NES game. For my thoughts on the 3D Classics edition, please click here.

Nintendo's Kid Icarus was released on the NES in 1986 after the completion of Metroid, a title which shared much of the same development staff. Aside from staff, the two games share a lot of other similarities; both involved a great deal of vertical platforming as opposed to the horizontal norm, both feature a hero who can shoot enemies but only (at first) at a very short range, both went sequel-free until receiving less well known Game Boy sequels, and both have an obnoxiously long password system. They also both feature Metroids themselves as enemies, though they're far less scary in Kid Icarus. While both titles earned a cult following, Metroid emerged as the more popular series. I kind of wish it had gone the other way.

Review - Jaws (NES)

Released in 1987 by LJN, this game was made as a tie-in for the awful film Jaws: The Revenge. LJN is known almost entirely for publishing licensed games like this, most of them widely considered terrible. These are the guys who gave us the horrendously bad X-Men NES game, a series of Spider-Man games than range from unplayable to almost mediocre, and for some reason, an NES version of Pictionary. Almost none of this company's output is worth anything, even if you're a fan of the properties their games are based on. I was a huge Spider-Man fan when LJN released Spider-Man/X-men: Arcade's Revenge in 1992, and that didn't blind me to the fact that it's probably the worst game I own. So with all that said, here's a huge surprise: Their NES Jaws game is actually fun.

Review - Pro Wrestling (NES)

Pro Wrestling (1986) was my first fighting game. I've got good memories of playing this game with my brother and with friends after class back in elementary school. It's the second wrestling game released on the NES, the first being the horrible MUSCLE, which I also spent a lot of time with. Programmed by one guy, Masato Masuda, it is a slightly sloppy but nonetheless impressive wrestling game with a memorable cast of characters.

Review - Metroid

I played the original Metroid a lot when it was fairly new. Along with the first Castlevania, Metroid is one of my earliest gaming memories. I had fond memories of it from back then, when I'd play for an hour, die, record my password incorrectly, and start over from the beginning. Back then, I didn't really know what I was doing, so I'd just wander the endlessly similar corridors shooting aliens and not really caring that I wasn't getting anywhere. Nowadays, that doesn't really cut it.