Conquest of the Crystal Palace

Publisher: Quest
Year: 1990

What we have here is an unforgiving NES platformer with the twist that you have a pet dog that helps you by mashing into everything on the screen until it dies. OTher than that, I'm at a bit of a loss to find anything worth really talking about with respect to Conquest.

Medieval asian war-helmet? Check. Scimitar for some reason? Check. Blue? AWWWWW, CHECK.

The dog functionality is actually pretty cool-looking, but in practice, it's just sort of a shield, with the added unfortunate feature of overwhelming the NES's ability to track and render all the sprites on the screen. Like, there's this big blur of an attacking dog, and he hits some stuff, and other stuff just sort of disappears. Which is fine, I mean, maybe that's one of his other powers, in addition to mashing head-first into giant venus flytraps, he disrupts the fabric of the universe causing some enemies to vanish forever into some kind of negative zone, but mostly, I think it's just broken.

I've always liked 'Rest' to mean 'remaining'. It's a relaxing way to say, 'We couldn't afford a localizer.

There's a part where you go to the store and a Japanese woman sells you potions and shit, but I didn't really know what I was buying and anyway, I had more than enough money to buy literally everything she was selling so, you know, sort of limited the effectiveness of the scarcity notion. Also there was like a CNN of video game demon world that told news stories about things that were happening but that was just straight NES crazy so I didn't try to make any sense of it.

This just in: lion warrior dog, blob sphere flute lion.

Best Moment: I dunno. I guess when it turned out that there was a store and a tv studio in the cave?

Thing to Know: Down and B makes the dog show up, and running makes people slide off the screen and get lost.

Rating: 4/10 Who cares?

Contra

Publisher: Konami
Year: 1988

Has it been 6 years since our last entry? Sure it has. Has anyone noticed? No. No they haven't. Why start up again? Well, we still have no kids, we have significantly more money and free time, and we just euthanized our cat, Ella, so why the heck not? This review is for all the dead feline homies. Also the ones under lockdown, though many of them, frankly, have it coming.

Even with the Konami code, you eventually run out of lives.

In any event, we found our place and played Contra to kick things off. Here's the high points:

• Contra is fucking difficult, and it highlights one of the things that, when you're getting nostalgic about the olden games, you should keep in mind because it sucks: the one-hit kill. Oh, you got the S and the M and you're a fucking murder machine who's going to breeze through wave after wave of deadly enemies? Oops, there's a single dude in the water behind you with a fucking rinky-dink 22. Enjoy starting from nothing!
• It also has one other control idiosyncrasy that I kind of do like: you can only point down and at an angle while you're moving forward. Not sure why this works for me, it just does.

Life is fragile. And shirts are for jerks.

The other possibly-main-feature of Contra that it got both right and horribly wrong (for the difficulty it introduces) is the need to time your jump, the arc of that jump, and the understanding that shit may happen down below you that you need to work all of that into an anticipation of the best timing for any jump. You're motoring forward, you're in a great spot to cross some chasm, you jump and then oh shit, there's 6 co-ordinated ballet dancers coming in from the right to ruin your fucking day in a way that you only see coming after the 12th time they've surprised you with their sabot kicks. Just great, but so, so fucking annoying.

I'm not including any other screenshots of Contra because they're probably burned on the inside of your retinas. 

Rating: 7/10
Advice: Obviously, use the code. Other than that, try to minimize the number of times you yell at your wife for not moving forward quickly enough.
Best Moment: Getting the S. God, the fucking S.

TL;DR: Exactly as you remember. If you already want to play Contra, you should play Contra. If not, don't.

Commando

Publisher: Capcom
Released: 1986

I sometimes forget how much fun it is to run up while mashing A. I mean, from a certain point of view, it's the most basic form of interaction with video games. Commando really does this nicely, and returning to it after probably 3 or 4 years, I'm really happy with it.

So, what's there to say? You've played Commando, for sure, I mean, if you've played anything -- it's probably in the top 10 or 15 most popular NES games in my made up mental inventory of whose house I saw it at as a teenager. You're this guy, you get dropped off by a helicopter, and you need, very badly, to get up. Or north. Or wherever. The point is, run and shoot, and don't stop until your thumb falls off.

Commando is a lot of fun. It's simple, it's manic, it's got a little bit of variety in environment and the fact that there's a grenade, and the music is pretty good. And when you beat a stage, they show you smoking, so you can tell you're cool. There are these prisoners you free by touching them, and there are hidden basements that you can only find if you grenade them. It's got a lot going on for a really simple, really early NES game.

Tech wise, there are 3 things to know about Commando. First off, and god bless the developers for this, there are, most of the time, more guys on the screen than your NES can draw. So you get a lot of ghosts and flickering guys who are hard to see. That's what we in the business call accidental fun. Second, everything moves independent of the scenery -- that is, if you throw a grenade, and you want it to land ahead of where it should, you running forward will cause the ground to scroll underneath it. Neat trick. And third, you get stuck on rocks and stuff a lot. This annoyed Laura, but from where I sit, it's that accidental fun again.

Commando is really good. It's fun, it's classic, and it's quirky, which is what you look for. Your thumb is going to hurt like you wouldn't believe. Mine was actually sore two days later. It's that good, and that terrible.

Rating: 8/10
Advice: Shoot. And maybe take some aspirin before you start.
Best Moment: Freeing the prisoners. The first thing they do with their freedom? Run to the right holding a sign reading "$1000" over their heads. That's what I'd do, too.

Clu Clu Land

Developer: Nintendo
Year: 1985

Clu Clu Land is another one of those really early 1st party NES titles that usually turn out to lack depth but be completely addictive. It's impressive how many of those there turn out to be, how much Nintendo got right immediately out of the gate.

If you played Chu Chu Rocket on the Dreamcast (and I assume you did), you'll find that this game feels sort of similar. In Clu Clu Land, you literally bounce around a screen and change direction by sticking your arm out and grabbing a post, which are arranged in a grid around the board. The object is to move over certain parts of the screen that draw a picture, though you don't know before-hand what that picture is going to be.

It's manic, and it's simple, and there's co-op, and it's fun and addictive. What more do you want?

Rating: 7/10 Not a lot of depth, but that's OK.
Advice: Get used to the fact that if you're going down, and you want to go up, you need to press right or left.
Trivia: When I was dating Daisy Klingman, we all used to annoy her by asking her if she'd ever seen the movie Cru Cru. This game made me think of that. Wow. That was annoying.

The cool thing to do

The cool thing to do would be to ignore the 4 months in between posts here, but that's not really how i roll. Truth be told, you can chalk it up to my career change -- my first interview at LL Bean was 3 days after that last post, and things really snowballed from there.

Anyway, we really enjoy doing this, and we're starting back up, effective about four days ago. Now, where were we....

Castelian

Year: 1987
Developer: Triffix

Castelian is a puzzle game, and it's a pretty clever one. Basically, you're this orange or blue poop with legs, and you have to walk around this tower, making your way up by way of elevators and dodging enemies, until you reach the top. Along the way, you can shoot, you can jump, and you can go in and out of doors that take you 1/2 way around the tower. It's a nice idea.

It even looks pretty good. As you walk, rather than moving around the screen, the tower is actually drawn as rotating behind you as your poop man stays more or less stationary. The result is a pretty cool 'world revolving around my point of view' feeling that works pretty well.

Unfortunately, Castelian controls like crap. I mean, honestly, crap. I'm pretty forgiving, but the 90th time i fell into a hole or got hit by an enemy i was sure was out of range, I started to get really pissed. I was cursing a lot, and Laura was getting uncomfortable. Everything was bullshit. I felt a lot like Mike did that time in 8th grade that he threw his controller and spit on his TV while we were playing Castlevania 2. Eventually, I stormed out of the room.

So, there you go: interesting premise, simple layout, cool graphics, all ruined by shite control. Oh, and there was a time limit. And it was short. We played probably 40 times each, and neither one of us could finish the first level, on novice, within the time limit. I mean, really -- that's some bullshit. And it's a shame, because I think that if you tightened up the controls and added 50 % to the time limit, this might have been a really great game.

But they didn't, so it's not.

Rating 4/10 There's something here, but it mostly just pissed me off.
Best Moment The 30th time that the level started, and we just took 3 steps to the right and died. Exxxxxxcellent.
Advice Try the PC version? Honestly, there's a good version of this game. This just isn't it.