Batman: the Video Game

Developer: Ocean Software (later Infogrames)
Year: 1989

Pfffft. This is stupid. You wanna know about this game? It's a side-scroller. There are bosses. And stuff you have to jump over, and unresponsive controls. And you play as Batman, from the movie, the shitty one with Michael Keaton. There are some shitty cutscenes, and you have a life bar rather than a one-hit death. Also you have a boomerang and a gun, just like the real Batman. It's not awful, but it's not good.

There. Happy?

Rating: 4/10 Yawn.
Advice: Decide when you have to jump if you want to jump a moment too early, then jump a half-second before that.
Best Moment: The part where you stop running from left to right -- and START RUNNING FROM RIGHT TO LEFT!!!!

Ryne Sandberg Plays Bases Loaded 3

Developer: Tose
Year: 1991

So, Ryne Sandberg. By this point in time, he'd probably locked up his Hall of Fame credentials, but it's worth nothing that 1992, the year after the release of RSPBL3, was his best year ever, with a WARP3 of 13.0, one of the 30 best ever for a second baseman. Something to think about is all I'm saying.

This game plays like BL2, with a couple of really shitty improvements:

• The entire game is now from behind the batter, including fielding and baserunning. This is the opposite of every other baseball game ever made.
• The season mode has been replaced with a 'perfect game' mode where what you're trying to do is play a game that hits 100 points on some ridiculously complicated scale that includes runs and hits, but also things like spectacular catches. Lame.
• Ryne Sandberg's name is on the cart, but he's not actually in the game. Really.

There's not a lot to recommend this over BL2, then. Gameplay is almost identical, except when it's upside-down, and though it's easier to catch a pop fly, it's almost too easy when the ball is hit back at the pitcher -- pretty much an automatic out, and this happened about a half-dozen times in Laura's and my game.

Now, if there's a saving grace, it's that on the L team, which laura played with, your closer is a guy with a 1.04 era named coseti and he's a fucking submariner. We were both pretty sick of BL3, but then laura puts this guy in and it's like, Holy Shit! Submariner! I won't take the time here to digress re: my love for the submariner, but let's just say it was a really nice surprise.

In the end, though, I lost, which sucks, because laura decided to start throwing wack submarine curveballs and i couldn't put a bat on them. And BL3 lost because it's backwards and otherwise not a lot better than BL2.

Rating: 6/10 Not the best, not the worst, and has nothing to do with Ryne Sandberg. Presence of Submariner: 10/10
Trivia: Ryne Sandberg was named for Ryne Duren, a reliever from the 20s who was also not in Ryne Sandberg Plays Bases Loaded 3.
Advice: If you stand on your head after you hit the ball, it's sort of almost as good as every other baseball game ever made.
Best Moment: Submariner. Obviously.

Bases Loaded 2: Second Season

Developer: Tose
Year: 1990

Now, we're talking.

Before I start, I don't own Bases Loaded 1. The reason for this, for those of you who don't collect, is that it's a really easy to find game. This sounds counter-intuitive, but you don't go get the easy games, because games tend to be sold in lots. So someday, I'm going to have to accept Bases Loaded 1 in order to get a game that's actually hard to find, so it doesn't make any sense to buy it on purpose. That's how it works, and it's why I have 30 super marios and no kid icarus. Yet.

In any event, BL2 is the baseball game we've been looking for. Things to recommend it:

• really tight, responsive gameplay
• great balance
• the ability to play a 130 game season with stats
• players have tracked 'abilities' that allow you to monitor their performance over the short and long term
• pretty good animations and better graphics than prior baseball games

Generally speaking, this has felt the most like actual baseball to both Laura and I of the games we've played so far. The game ended 7-4, which is a major upgrade to the 18-19 and 23-25 losses I took in the 9th innings of the last two games we played, both in terms of not losing and increased realism.

By way of quirks, Bases Loaded shows pitches from behind the pitcher, rather than the batter. This is different, and neither better nor worse than the other way around.

The game has 2 negatives: the song is SHIT, and they play it over and over and over. And the baserunning scheme is off sometimes -- you press the direction of the base you're ON rather than the base you want to GO TO when running forward, but it switches when tagging up. This is confusing, and there's no real reason for it, since as I mentioned below, the standard baseball console game controls had clearly already been hammered out by this point.

In the end, though, this was our favorite baseball game so far. It still doesn't look good, and pitching is a little weird here -- selection and placement are sort of smeared together -- but it was fun to play, and the rest is hair-splitting.

Rating: 7/10 I'd play this again. Also, I won.
Advice: Play it with the sound off, or stuff ears with cotton.
Best Moment: Realizing that in this one, you can actually catch a fly ball. Wow.

Baseball Stars

Publisher: SNK
Year: 1989

Day 2 of the baseball extravaganza, and we arrive at Baseball Stars, which is pretty much identical to Baseball Simulator, but without the option of playing in a stadium in space. Sooooo, i guess, there's no real reason to play it.

The music is slightly better, and the gameplay feels slightly tighter, but really, there's not much to recommend Baseball Stars over BS.

I don't have a lot to say about this game. Not bad, but not really good, either.

Rating: 5/10 It should say 'meh' right on the box.
Advice: Play Baseball Simulator instead.
Best Moment: 2 baseball games down, 5 to go.

Baseball Simulator 1.000

Publisher: Culture Brain
Year: 1989

This is the first of what's going to be a bunch of baseball games, and it's a pretty high point on which to start. It's a pretty arcadey game, and the play is a little sluggish, but it's a generally pretty good game.

What's interesting to find is how quickly all of the baseball controls come back to you when you pick this up -- the controller chooses a base, and A and B either throw or run there. I'm not sure when these were picked to be the standard console baseball controls, but they're firmly in place on BS1, and they work pretty well. Outfielders run too slowly, and all the batters seem more or less the same, but you do have some roster control, and the sound is good.

BS1 sets itself apart by giving batters and pitchers special moves that you can do a limited number of times during a game. You can throw a ball that goes back and forth a lot, and as a batter you can turn into a burning tornado. It's basically NBA Live, except with baseball, and it adds some character to a genre that's pretty heavily populated on the NES.

Rating: 7/10 Pretty good, for a baseball game.
Advice: Play in space stadium. Every time. It's space stadium.
Best Moment: First time lightning strikes the batter.

The Bard's Tale

Developer: Interplay
Year: 1988

This is a tough one to review, for two reasons. First of all, it's an RPG -- what are we honestly going to get out of playing it for half an hour? And second, I've probably put 100 hours into the Bard's Tale over the course of the last 20 years, so there's not a lot for me to learn about it. So here's an attempt to review the game, and the NES version.

First of all, Bard's Tale is an amazing game. There's depth, there's really good dungeons, interesting characters and classes, there's challenge and some puzzle solving -- it really has everything that subsequently became standard for computer RPGS. It also has the bad stuff -- random battles, grinding, some clunky interface stuff. But mostly, it's a really, really good dungeon crawl, one that i've come back to several times since I first played it at the Bucktown Public Library.

The NES version suffers notably in terms of interface and control -- again, establishing a pattern for RPGs that's still around on consoles today. The graphics are also notably crappier, which was a surprise for me given that they really weren't that good on the Apple. The town of Skara Brae was clearly pre-fab and everything looks like everything else, up to and including dungeons.

Still and all, Bard's Tale is a great, great game. It's fun, challenging, has a diversity of monsters and the NES version preserves the spirit of the game even if it misses out on a little in terms of execution. If you haven't played Bard's Tale, this isn't the version to start with -- but it's definitely a game worth playing.

Rating: 8/10 Great game, one of the greatest, but clunky on the NES.
Advice: Get thee unto an Apple emulator.
Best Moment: Probably the first time you go back into the dungeon under the inn and realize how much ass you kick now. There's a reason people tolerate leveling.

Balloon Fight

Developer: Nintendo
Year: 1984

If you have any question as to why there aren't any Wii's for your kids a full year and change after launch, you really don't need to look much farther than Balloon Fight. Nintendo has been doing things like this for 25 years now, and all the video ram and double data rate memory and pixel shading in the world doesn't change the fact that the whole point is that these games are supposed to be fun.

Balloon fight is actually just Joust, of course, but it's with balloons instead of ostriches. It's got great music and features great 2-player, which Laura pointed out was cool in that Mario Brothers way where you switched from cooperative to competitive anytime you wanted to. You mash the crap out of A to float, you have 2 balloons, and when they both get popped, you fall into the ocean. In the meantime, try and pop other people's balloons. That's it. That's all. And it's really good.

There's not much to say here. I mean, your thumb gets tired, the person you're playing with accidentally pisses you off by popping a balloon, and the whole flavor of the game changes. It's easy at first, then it gets difficult without your noticing, and then you die, and then you want to play again. You play Balloon Fight, and you realize that anyone who was counting the big N out had sort of forgotten how good they are at what they do.

A great game, and an important reminder.

Rating: 9/10 It's simple, but for what it is, it's not far from perfect.
Advice: Don't be ashamed -- the 'turbo' button is there for a reason.
Best Moment: The first time you mash your way back up out of the ocean just in time to escape drowning.

Bad Street Brawler

Developer: Beam Software
Year: 1987

I knew nothing about BSB going into this, and I was expecting a sort of corny side-scrolling beat-em-up. What I got was a side-scrolling beat-em-up with a lot of personality that had Laura and I hitting the reset button well past the time that we'd committed to play the game. We brawled on Bad Street till the breakadawn, or 10:20, which was still way past my bedtime.

On its face, BSB is a pretty straightforward puncher on rails -- not even any vertical movement, so really, you're moving and punching and kicking. There are about a half-dozen enemies in the first 2 levels, but one of them is a monkey who whips bananas at you, so there's that.

What keeps BSB fresh as you move from level to level is the fact that the A and B buttons that you're mashing actually do new things on every level. There's a sweep kick in one level, and a stooge smash in another. At one point, A grabs someone and trips them, and then later, it's a flying kick. At the beginning of each level, it tells you what your moves are, and lets you practice them against a punching bag. It's a really cool feature, and figuring the new moves out, along with the desire to see what you get next, is a real motivator.

So in the end, it's a puncher. And I like the fact that in videogames, 'beat-em-up' is the accepted name for an entire genre of play. Bad Street Brawler doesn't have a story, and you can't jump, but it's a fun side-scroller with the twist of a variety of available moves, and you could do worse.

Rating: 7/10 Pretty good, with some originality and a sense of humor.
Advice: Stooge smash sounds fun, but the windup takes so long that the midget's just going to hit you with a bomb if you try it.
Best Moment: Holy Crap!! TWO gorillas!

Bad Dudes

Year: 1989
Developer: Data East

Let me begin by stating the obvious: there is no better premise for a video game, anywhere, ever, than Bad Dudes. I first played it 20 years ago, and it immediately stuck with me, forever. I'll be 92 and senile, and all I'll be able to say to my kid before I pass on will be,

"The president has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?"

You know? Oh, your ship crashlanded on a ring world while fighting against the Covenant? Yawn. You have part of the TriForce, and bla bla bla shut up. Your princess is in another castle, yeah, well, best of luck with that. Because the president has been kidnapped by ninjas, and it's on, y'all.

First, you decide whether to play as Blade or Striker, and the only difference is that Blade is gay. They don't make a big deal out of this, he's still a bad dude, but he's gay. I don't judge him, I'm just reporting the facts.

Then, you fight the shit out of ninjas, all day. There are blue ninjas, who are pussies, and grey ninjas, who if you know about japanese history you know are famous for throwing shit at you. Then, there are the red enemies, who contain soda that cures you, or nunchucks. There's a big fat boss on the first level, then the second level is all on a moving truck, and you fight a guy who's actually many ninjas, which is awesome. I got through the first two levels, and it felt pretty good -- jumping and punching work like you think they should, and the animations are varied enough that it's not stupid.

So, I guess the question is, what more can you reasonably ask for? It's not amazing, but you're fighting ninjas and it's sort of fun. If there were a mathematical way to take the average of all 750 NES games, it would probably look a lot like Bad Dudes, and that wouldn't be a terrible thing. If I have a criticism of Bad Dudes, it's that there's really no way that the game could possibly live up to its premise. It's just too good. If I had a tattoo, it would say, "Ninjas have kidnapped the president." And I would tell people it was there to remind me of what kind of Dude I should try to be.

Rating: 8/10 I am not a Bad enough Dude to rescue the president, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a ninja for?
Advice: Punch like crazy, at all times, everywhere, in all directions. I mean, why not?
Best Moment: As mentioned above, Bad Dude peaks in the first 10 seconds.

Back to the Future and Back to the Future II and III

Year: 1985, 1990
Developer: LJN

I'm going to review both of these at once because I'm kind of getting behind in my blogging, and what the hell do you care, anyway? It's not like you're going to go on eBay, hunt down Back the Future and Back to the Future 2 & 3, buy them, play them, and then want to talk about them, anyway. What kind of idiot would get involved in something like that?

So, Back to the Future is the better game. It's essentially a PaperBoy clone, right down to the isometric map showing your destination, but that's largely a good thing. The times when it stops being PaperBoy are the times that it starts sucking. Basically, you're running all around Hill Valley, throwing bowling balls at hula dancers and being chased by bees. Describing it now, I guess this part is sort of a pre-emptive ripoff of Toejam and Earl, but less racist. Although if stupid is a race, this game is like affirmative action for it. Whatever.

You run around, and you pick up clocks, though the clocks don't actually add time. They keep your picture of your family from fading out, but that's not the time limit. I mean, it's one of them, but there's another, and the clocks don't help with that one. I don't know. I guess one of the clocks is for Power of Love and the other is for Back in Time or something. Neither of those songs is in the game. I just thought you might enjoy being reminded of Huey Lewis. Gotta git BACK in ti-i-ime! Yeah!

So once you get through 4 levels of PaperBoy, you get to play this game where you throw cake that's really milkshakes at guys who run toward you, and then you lose. The end.

Back to the Future 2 & 3 is one game, and it both sucks. Laura liked this one better. I don't know why. It's a sort of platformer, with the added fun of you have to keep a map and this bird keeps kicking your ass. And it has the DeLorean in it. It drops you off so the bird can kick your ass again -- in the future!!!! Also, there's sort of a Dig Dug thing going on in it that made us insane with rage a few times.

I really couldn't get very far on BttF 2&3, which might be why i hate it, but I don't think so. I mean, I was able to kill stuff, and run around for a while, and i eventually figured out Dig Dug, but then there's this anagram game, and no, I'm totally not shitting you. You have to match the prizes you win playing Dig Dug with mixed up words in these other rooms located at the bottom of Mario pipes, and it's impossible and who cares?

I guess the lesson here is that, starting with E.T. and running right up through Bees: the Game, which I bet exists, if it's about a movie, you shouldn't play it. If you have to, stick to BttF 1, or just get PaperBoy, because throwing papers at that insane old woman who comes after you is more gratifying than throwing bowling balls at hula girls and bees. The end.

Rating: I don't know, 4/10? Not awful, but I'll never play them again.
Advice: Instead of helping your dad meet your mom, press AABBAAstart to turn him gay.
Best Moment: In the manual, it actually says, "Of course, when Biff and his crew grab him or the bees start to attack, you will find yourself losing precious seconds." I read that 100 times, out loud. Laura took the manual from me to make me stop. But I found it later, while we were playing Bad Dudes, and read it to her some more.

Back to the Future

Remember that part in the Back to the Future movie when Marty's running around collecting clocks while being chased by bees? Or the one where he throws milkshakes at the bullies coming into the soda fountain where he works?

Yeah, me neither. But apparently that's the best they could come up with for the game version. Despite the absurdity, there's components about it that seem like they could be fun - you're trying to beat the clock through the hula hoopers, old ladies, park benches, and, yes, bees, with the help of a bowling ball and skateboard, in order to get to some mini-games scattered throughout. But in practice, it's boring and easy. I got worse at it the longer I played as it just started to irritate me.

Also, it also has the worst song in history, which makes your ears bleed with sheet monotony after about a minute.

I can hardly wait for Back to the Future 2 and 3. Luckily I don't have to wait long.

Enemy design: 8 - pretty fun, actually
Gameplay: 5
Bees: 5

Athena

Athena made me want to play Amagon.

I'm not sure why, exactly. It was perfectly credible - there's decent weapons, and enemies, and there was a whole armor thing going on, which is interesting. And I appreciated getting to be a kick-ass woman for a nice change.

It was just boring. Sometimes a game comes together and is really fun, and sometimes it doesn't, and only the Nintendo gods know why.

Being a awesome warrior woman: 9
Overall fun: 5

Athena

Developer: SNK
Year: 1986

That Athena would be immediately after Amagon alphabetically is just one of those little serendipitous things. The two games are a lot alike, except that Athena stinks and Amagon is awesome, to the point that when we were finally fed up with Athena, Laura immediately wanted to play Amagon again.

So, there are some differences:

• Athena fights pigs and horse-headed guys with a club and also swords.
• Athena has bricks to break, a la SMB.
• There's a life meter.
• When you die, you go all the way back to the beginning of the level every single time.
• The game looks like shit.
• The music stinks.
• You're an anime woman with no discernable powers instead of an awesome stranded marine who can turn into Megagon.

Athena is wholly unremarkable. The controls stink -- there's a double-jump, sort of, though it's impossible to activate consistently, and there are numerous cases where you get trapped by an enemy and can't get out because they keep shooting you back when you run -- so much for the life meter. We got to the first boss, but it kicked our asses repeatedly because the framerate dropped to like 6 when it started shooting. You wind up not so much fighting the enemy as the game itself, which seeks to outsmart you by not working. Whatever.

Interesting note: there are these big flowers the grow and bite you which look exactly like the deku in Zelda. They also have their own music when they grow that plays over the actual score. It's sort of trippy.

So, there you have it. Athena made me want to go back and bump my score for Amagon up to an 8, but in the end, I think I'll just give Athena a 4 instead.

Rating: 4/10 Not horrible, but I'll never play it again.
Advice: The red skull shield removes all of your armour. Found that out the hard way.
Best Moment: Hearing the opening music from Amagon.

Amagon

Developer: Aicom
Released: 1989

Amagon is a great platformer, and not much more. You're a marine, named Amagon, which is not a misspelling, and your plane crashes on an island. From the site of the crash, you can see a boat at the other end of the island, so you grab your machine gun and head out.

Also, you can transform into Megagon, and he can punch the shit out of anything.

That's more or less it. The visual style is really fun, and the controls are pretty good. Amagon is a really unforgiving game, and you find yourself cursing at it alot, but then you play it again, which kind of means it's a good example of what it is. The Megagon aspect adds a little variety, and the enemies have a nice balance of predictability and difficulty. It's a pretty technical little game, and we played it for almost an hour, even though we weren't really getting anywhere.

I played Amagon once, when I was young, and I remember it being at my house, which is strange since I didn't have an NES. Whatever, I went into this wanting to like Amagon, and I did, so there you go. It's not an amazingly special game, but it looks good, it's addictive, and by those two measures, there are way, way worse games out there, several of which come before Amagon in the alphabet.

Rating: 8/10 A solid, fun platformer.
Advice: A megagon is a 1,000,000 sided figure. That's not advice. It's just interesting.
Best Moment: The millionth time you restart Amagon after falling in a hole.

Amagon

Okay, I sucked at this game. Apparently those who spent most of their youth playing Nintendo games are better at it than I. Or at least are able to consistently remember which button jumps and which button shoots. But it was hard in a legitimate and really fun way – when I, say, fell in a hole, generally I deserved to fall in a hole. And I proceeded to get obsessed with it, and play it over and over and over again in an attempt to beat level 1 (did I mention I sucked?).

It’s a side-scrolling Mario playing type of game, with lots of jumping and shooting. The graphics are really cartooning and fun, and make you realize how crappy the graphics are in a lot of these other games. The key to the game, though, which took us a while to figure out, is the Megagon (it even sounds good: Tremble before me, for I am the MEGAGON). This makes you big, but most importantly, it allows you to take up to seven hits (or as many hits as you have thousands of points) before dying, instead of just one. Also, you then punch rather than shoot, and there’s something to be said about the satisfaction of punching a snake or a flock of birds.

Overall fun: 9
Obsession factor: 9
Ability for the game designers to spell “Amazon” correctly: 2

Air Wolf

This was a bad, bad game. There appeared to be a lot going on, but nothing really seemed to matter. Fly to the prisoners, mashing both A and B continuously. Land the helicopter, using a different, incredibly twitchy and un-fun system. Wait for the busty female prisoners to run on board, and then fly out. Because, you know, only a macho Air Wolf like, er, me, can manage to fly the helicopter in circles to rescue the bimbos that have for some reason gotten themselves taken prisoner en mass.

If you were able to land the helicopter, this was a tedious game, and it didn’t get hard or remotely interesting until about 25 minutes into the game. If you, like me, were unable to master the ridiculous helicopter landing mini-game, it was a frustrating and stupid game.

Overall fun: 2
Bimbo factor: 7

Airwolf

Developer: Acclaim
Year: 1988

I guess the question is, "How could a game about Airwolf not be totally awesome?" Well, follow me, and learn.

One of the themes that's starting to qualify as 'recurring' in this whole effort is that NES games fail when they try to be too much. The AD&D game that we played, it was this huge complicated engine that didn't do anything. In the end, it's simply not that powerful a piece of hardware, and if you try to cram too much into a game, and don't do it well, you get this horrible bloat thing that happens.

Airwolf is another example of this phenomenon. You've got altitude, damage indicators, velocity, a fuel gauge, and a really complicated schematic map. This leaves maybe half of the available screen for the view of what's actually going on outside of your helicopter -- which would seem like a real design flaw except for how crappy the rendering is out there. As to controls, A is gun and B is missile, but this means that the throttle is controlled by (get this) start and select. The whole thing is unwieldy and ugly, and in the end, you don't get much for all the complexity.

There's planes going away from you, which behave exactly like planes coming toward you, and there are missiles, which look like used kleenex. The way you fight is by mashing A and B, simultaneously, all the time. Then you fly to a little person symbol on your crappy map, and all of a sudden you're playing Lunar Lander and you crash.

Until you figure out how to land, and then you zoom through the first 8 levels without dying at all. It was sort of funny -- we played 20 times, got nowhere, and then on the 21st, i was invincible. If that's not an indication of poor game design, I don't know what is.

So, Airwolf was ugly and bloated and complex, like Jenneane Garofalo, but unlike Jennine Garafalo, it's not interesting even in a 'wow, what's going on here?' kind of way. Like Janine Garafalo, Airwolf isn't fun, or funny, and it's also got a really unrewarding complexity. And in the end, like Janeannne Garafolo, I hope never to see Airwolf for the NES on my television again.

Rating: 3/10 I preferred Afterburner.
Advice: You think you can, but you really can't mash those buttons hard enough.
Best Moment: Realizing that, instead of being terrible at it, I was the best Airwolf in the world.

Afterburner

Afterburner is a really boring game. Here’s everything there is to know about it:

• Try to shoot the planes
• You can shoot missiles by locking on and hitting B
• Use your missiles for far planes, guns for near ones
• You might reasonably worry about running out of missiles, but don’t: you have tons
• If the enemy planes shoot a missile at you, wiggle around a lot
• If you wiggle enough, you can roll to fly upside down
• If you successfully wiggle a lot, you’ll move on to the next level, which are differentiated by different color bands. You can move from blue color bands (water?) to green (forest?) to black (nighttime?)

Also, it’s boring to play, but it’s nauseating to watch. Literally.

C’mon, at least the other ones have been interesting to make fun of….

Gameplay: 3
Creativity: 0

Afterburner

Developer: Sega
Year: 1988

Greetings, Laura, and welcome to the wide, wide, wide world of lackluster arcade ports!

When people talk about games from the 2nd era of console gaming 'not standing up', this is what they're talking about. Honestly, the game's not that bad, but if you can think of a single reason to play it for more than 10 minutes, I'd love to hear it. It's just not meant to be played for even as long as we've been playing these games, and that's a gaming phenomenon that doesn't exist any more -- mostly for the best.

All of this said, here's the breakdown on Afterburner:

• There's only 1 kind of enemy, unless you count the missile that tries to catch you from behind in the third stage.
• The stages are identical, except for the color of the non-descript ground passing below you -- check out the two screen
• You can roll your plane 360 degrees, though this mostly hurts your efforts to shoot anything.
• The song stinks -- and this is something that can really rescue a mediocre game.
• The graphics are lousy -- it's often difficult to tell oncoming missiles from other important things.
• Re-fueling is cool, though you don't actually do anything. There's a big mothership with a claw.

I wish i didn't feel this way about Afterburner, because I liked it as a kid, but I do: it just doesn't hold up.

And a large part of this is because it's a bad port, but another large part is because it's a port of an arcade game -- a very successful one, actually, by Yu Suzuki from Sega's AM2 development group. I think that arcade games in general -- with the possible exception of fighters -- probably won't stand up in your house anymore. It's sort of sad, but if you don't believe me, go play Afterburner. You won't hate it. You just won't want to play it for very long.

Rating: 5/10 Meh.
Advice: You can't crash into the ground, but feel free to try.
Best Moment: The claw, obviously. And realizing that you actually start with 150 missiles, so fire away.

The Adventures of Bayou Billy

There are a number of things I don’t understand about Bayou Billy. First off, why does everyone in the Bayou know kung-fu? If it’s so darn handy to have a gun or a knife, why didn’t I bring one along, rather than hoping some dude drops one along the way? And am I really supposed to be worried about a guy named GORDON?

But none of that prevents Bayou Billy from being really fun. It’s action is great, just the right combination for me of skill and button mashing – there are things to know, but not so much that you have a hard time remembering what button does what. It was a challenge but not brutally hard - and didn't require years of Nintendo practice to be competent. Graphics are a fun, low res tour through the bayou – mangrove trees, swamps, French Quarter, etc.

Also, it made Henry scream “Holy shit, it has a light gun component!” So apparently that’s exciting about it.

Game play: 8
Fidelity to real bayou life: 4 (there’s really crocodiles there, right? And mangroves?)

The Adventures of Bayou Billy

Developer: Konami
Year: 1989

So, this guy named Gordon steals your girlfriend Annabelle, and then you have to chase him through a swamp and fight a bunch of guys with a stick and also there's a shooting level and some driving.

In short, tAoBB is everything that's great about the NES.

From start to finish, this game is excellent. It's got your Bad Dudes punching and kicking, there's some weapons you can pick up, ugly guys throw rocks at you, and there's alligators that barf turkeys that replenish your health. Then, there's the shooting at guys in the jungle part, using the Zapper, complete with guy who throws dynamite you have to shoot before it hits you. And the driving, well, it sucks, but whatever.

The music's great -- sort of a New Orleans / Nintendo version of 'Kung Fu Fighting'. And there are training levels for everything, so you can just pick up and play whatever piece of the game you feel like. Infinite continues give you that sense of, "Well, if i don't finish this, it's because I lack commitment". And like I said, the bad guy's name is Gordon, and he stole your girlfriend. What -- are you not interested in seeing if you can get her back?

So overall, tAoBB is top quality. It's a nice balance of difficulty and reward, it plays well, and it's completely ridiculous. Highly recommended.

Rating: 9/10 Only the crappy driving level keeps this from a 10/10.
Advice: The crocodiles look tough, but if you just jump in and start bashing them with a stick, they're no problem. Just like real life.
Best Moment: After beating the gun practice level, I was told that I had nothing to fear from Gordon. I found this very reassuring.

8 Eyes

Note: Because we're regularly getting new games, and because we're doing this in alphabetical order, when we get new games that are 'behind us' in the alphabet, we're going to play them immediately. In alphabetical order.

Developer: Thinking Rabbit
Year: 1989

8 Eyes is a pretty cool game, with some pretty cool ideas going for it, all of which is executed fairly well. Overall, it's a nice package. Here's what makes 8 Eyes cool:

• It has cooperative play, which was pretty much unheard of on the NES -- Xenophobe is the only other game I can think of.
• It has a really weird story, something about post-apocalyptic gemstones.
• The worlds feel different from one another, which is quite an accomplishment -- very high production values.
• It has that unforgiving old-school play -- reminded me of Castlevania, though not quite so polished.
• You have to play the levels in a certain order, but you don't know what that order is -- you start off with the clue that you should go somewhere bordering on France, but there are castles in germany, spain, and italy. Each boss can be beaten by a specific sword from another castle, so you don't even know whether you picked correctly until you're getting your ass handed to you. (This is that unforgiving old-school play I mentioned above).
  

So again, this worked together as a pretty nice package -- you play as either a guy with a sword or this falcon that follows him around. The falcon is a bit tough to control, but I think that's part of what made him a good companion -- it was really totally different from playing the guy (compared to, say, xenophobe or halo where cooperative means just two master chiefs or alien guys).

We tried Germany, Italy, and Spain and didn't beat them, though we did make it to the boss on a couple. Like I said, NES platformers are hard. You forget that playing today, that it was an entirely different kind of difficulty back then. I bet that if you knew what you were doing, you could beat 8 Eyes in about half an hour, but that doesn't make it a bad thing. Mike Montano and I once spent an entire day trying to beat Malth in Ninja Gaiden, and we didn't, and now I forget why I started this sentence and want to play Ninja Gaiden.

Anyhoo, try 8 Eyes. It's quirky, fun, and has co-op, which is cool.

Rating: 8/10 A really nice platformer, with co-op.
Advice: Figure out how to throw things. I'm sure it's in the manual somewhere...
Best Moment: Remembering how gratifying it is to wait for a skeleton to swing 3 times, dart forward and stab him, run away, wait for the skeleton to swing 3 times, dart forward...

8 Eyes

Only three games in, and already Henry’s got a new one that takes us back again to the beginning of the alphabet...

8 Eyes turned out to be a pretty fun collaborative two person game, which surprised us, as we’d never head of it before (okay, rather, Henry had never heard of it, and I pretended that fact I hadn’t heard of it was meaningful).

It features eight different levels, which via some complicated and useless back story equates to “8 Eyes” (get it?). Each level is set in a different region, and the design of the level corresponds in interesting-ish ways – i.e. if you’re in Arabia, there are lots of Moorish arches and the guys you fight are wearing turbans. If you’re in Germany, well, apparently there’s a whole lot of stairs in Germany.

The two players play as two different characters - Orin, and his falcon Cutus. Orin is pretty typical platformer stuff, but as Orin you actually get to fly around, which is fun, and swoop at guys to attack them. He was hard to control, but it felt to me like the controls were learnable with practice. The two players have to do some really pretty collaborative stuff, which was well done. Overall, it was quite difficult, though part of that may be because I still can’t, say, jump and stab at the same time (I think I’m doing pretty good for someone who never held a Nintendo controller until a few years ago, but Henry’s unimpressed)

And apparently, you need to go through the levels in a particular order, as you need items from one level to kill a boss in another. This never really affected us as the closest we got to a boss was spotting one in the distance as we died spectacularly.

Overall fun: 7
As a validation of my video game skills: 3

Adventure of Link: Zelda 2

This is a game that a reasonable human might play and enjoy, which puts it in an entirely different league than the games we’ve looked at so far. It was actually pretty fun, in a 1980s kind of way.

There’s a world-map mode, where you’re wandering around a two dimensional map from village icon to village icon. Random battles are handled in a kind of fun way – you can see the enemies, and try to run away, but they’re really fast, so running takes, well, more skill than I really had. If they catch you, you go to a side scrolling battle mode where you take on a number of the enemies using a variety of different combat moves – a surprising variety, given the number of buttons available to you.

Villages and dungeons are also side-scrolling. Dungeons in particular feel pretty Mario-esque – you’re jumping and dodging and taking elevators. It’s all challenging but understandable and playable, as opposed to some other games I could name.

All through it, you have that great Zelda music. If you’re me, you also have Henry enthusiastically singing the music beside you, which adds a certain... something.

Ratings:
Retro return-to-your-RPG-youth feel: 7
Gamplay: 6
Henry’s singing ability: 4

Adventure of Link: Zelda 2

Du du nuuuuuuuh
Du du nu nu nu nuuuuuuuuuh!

After a pair of false starts, we're finally at a real game. What's amazing about Zelda is that from the very beginning (and obviously here in th sequel) all the pieces that have made the series great were already in place -- the music, the NPC's, the get-an-item-do-a-new-thing cycle, the limited number of figure-out-able enemies that promotes finesse rather than mashing. It's hard to say what's more amazing: that Miyamoto had all this figured out so early, or that he's managed to keep it all intact but still fresh after 20 years.

The obvious difference here is the fact that Zelda II is a side-scroller. The rest of the franchise is top-down, and you feel the limitations in Z2. There's a distinct cut in how you're doing business when you enter a dungeon from a map, a la Commander Keen, and this is mostly a negative here. What you get in return of course, is that Link can jump, and that's no small thing. Of course, this also causes the dungeon areas to feel a little metroid-y or, to be honest, more mega-man-y, which does take away from Zelda's distinctiveness (though you might reasonably argue that at this point, that distinctiveness didn't yet mean 'top-down' as much as it did later.)

Whatever, this is a real game. Both Laura and I felt that we could play this, finish it, and enjoy it, which is cool. The graphics are rough, even for the NES, and the gameplay is occasionally unforgiving in that 8-bit kind of way, but overall you understand Zelda II -- it's obvious to both the newcomer and the vet what you're supposed to do, and the game lets you do it. Overall, it's a pretty compelling experience, and though it's definitely not my favorite of the Zeldas (not even in the top 5) this is more a statement about the franchise than this particular game, which is not bad.

Rating: 7/10
Advice: If you don't have the cart, this just came out on WiiWare.
Best Moment: "I am Error."

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of the Lance

To be fair, it’s clear that Heroes of the Lance has more going on than we actually used. There are scrolls, there are potions, bows, offensive spells, a Blue Crystal Staff that you apparently should be a lot more careful with than we were, and presumably those gems and pouches and other assorted dungeon bric-a-brac would have come in handy for something.

On the other hand, according to the walkthrough, we got though about a third of the game in 40 minutes, including about 15 minutes of repetitive massacres because we couldn’t figure out how to switch the lead character. So I’m not sure when we would learned how to use all of that stuff, or suddenly needed to know it, especially when our battle strategy of B button mashing seemed to work great. Oh, wait, except when you’re fighting the naked midget guy - then you need to point down while you mash B. Because, you know, he’s short.

And honestly, when I have to go through about nine steps just to pick something up, I’m not really inspired to figure out what else might be lurking in the menu systems with just another 20 choices.

Another thing: this is one of those early RPGs where they expect you to think its fun to map out the dungeon on graph paper. Except they mix it up a little by constantly changing the direction you’re facing. Go north through a door, end up facing west with the door to your east. It was an exercise in N-dimensional space, really, which stretches the limits of the map-makers art. Should you have trouble, you’re welcome to use mine:



Granted, I don’t have the keenest sense of direction around, but my maps are typically a little easier to follow than this. But then they don’t typically require a notation for the wormhole-to-the-place-you-just-were that Heroes of the Lance is so fond of.

In short: it wasn’t good.

Ratings:
As an exercise in fitting the most items into the least game: 4
As a thought experiment in N-dimensional space: 5
As an actual game: 2

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of the Lance

Developer: US Gold
Year: 1990

This game has helped teach me an important lesson: if i start every post about a shitty game with, "Holy shit, this was a shitty game," the whole project is going to get pretty one-note pretty quickly.

So here's me focusing on the positive:

• there's naked midgets you can kill.
• one of your characters is a woman with a spear who dies if she gets hit once, which is funny.
• the song is catchy in that classic NES 45-second loop kind of way.
• if you run straight at the lizards, they moonwalk away from you.
  
• there's a character named Tasslehoff Burrfoot.
• there's a statue that disappears if you check it for traps.

Other than that, well, I'd be lying if I said that this was anything like a decent game. When you consider the year -- 1988 -- and the fact that the first final fantasy and the first dragon warrior were out at the same time on the same hardware, the shittiness really stands out.

By way of description, here's what you get: a side-scroller with 8 characters, of whom you control 1 at a time, a total of 8 screens that we found that you can walk through, a healing spell that seems to run out after about a million uses, and the aforementioned naked midgets. You can jump, but it's not clear why you'd want to. There's a compass, but it keeps changing orientation -- you'll often walk south to go through a door, but then east if you want to immediately go back. And at one point, Laura said, "I'd rather not pick that gem up than try to go through the menu again."

In closing, we didn't find the Disks of Mishikal in the Mines of Xak Taroth, and I hope that someday i'll be able to return to the mines to finish the quest, but only if the mines are in a different game and i get to look for them as Ratchet or possibly Simon. Or Daydreamin' Davey.

Rating: 2/10 Killing naked midgets has to be worth something.
Advice: The big bucket doesn't do anything. Don't try to get in it. You'll just fall off the ledge.
Best Moment: Realizing that, when you die, there's no soft reset -- you have to get up and walk over to the console to play the shitty thing again.

10-Yard Fight

Developer: Irem
Publisher: Nintendo & Taito
Year: 1983

10-Yard Fight has the distinction of being first in alphabetical order among the NES games I own. Though I recall hearing people talk about this game, I never played it until today and nothing about it suggests it's going to be any good -- it's from really early in the NES's run, it's got that crappy official NES box, and it's a football game developed in Japan, where apparently there are only 9 guys on a team.

10-Yard Fight is terrible. On offense, there are no plays and it's impossible not to pick up 4 yards on a run. On D, you get to choose from one of two defensive players, both of whom move like Johnny Johnson, and none of the computer players know about tackling. There's no such thing as a kick return. And graphically, we're talking a minor improvement over atari 2600. Overall, It's hard to believe that this is the same hardware that supported Tecmo Superbowl.

I'm not sure what sort of a choice this was as far as giving Laura a good first impression of our project. On the one hand, it's terrible, and a terrible reflection on the NES and its capabilities. On the other hand, she beat me 28 - 0. I kept trying to complete a long pass, which turned out to be impossible. I guess in Japan, when they throw a football to a guy 20 yards away, they make sure to do it with no arc so the defensive lineman can just reach out and grab it. In the US, of course, this method is no longer used, since it is retarded -- almost as retarded as continuing to throw long passes in 10-yard fight after the first 4 picks.

Rating: 2/10. more a statement about how much the japanese hate football than a real game.
Advice: Holding 'down' while you snap the ball results in a kick. Useful knowledge.
Best Moment: When you win, it says funny things in japanese english.

10-Yard Fight

First off, I wasn't aware that we started with 10-Yard Fight because it's first in alphabetical order. I'm a little alarmed that we not only seem to have a 200+ collection of NES cartridges, but that we seem to have them arranged so that it's easy to navigate in alphabetical order.

But anyway, 10-Yard Fight is one of the greatest video games of all time. It's primary greatness lies in the fact that if you obsessively repeat the same two offensive plays over and over again, it's virtually impossible to not get a touchdown. This is a tremendous benefit for those of us playing against people who have spent far too much time playing other NES football games, who keep trying to do something interesting, like, say, throw more than a 5 yard pass.

Also, it really keeps you guessing - mostly, as to whether or not you're actually running. It uses cutting edge field moving technology so that your guy runs in place while the field, occasionally, lunges by. Except, every so often, your guy will suddenly dive forward onscreen for about five yards. Just for extra interest.

Ratings:
My ability to beat Henry: 10
My desire to play for more than 10 minutes: 3 (it is, after all, fun to beat Henry)
Quality of the strange referee dance: 8