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