Blaster Master

Developer: Sunsoft
Year: 1988

Blaster Master has always been one of my favorite games on the NES, even though i never played it all that much way back when, and it really holds up well on replay. I never finished it, and I haven't put it back on the shelf after playing yesterday, so maybe I'll finally get around to it.

Everything about Blaster Master is a success. It's a side-scroller in a big tank thing at points, but then you can get out of the tank and run around, at which point it becomes a really convincing Zelda-style top-down adventure -- except with better graphics. The play is awesome -- feels great, at all stages. And you get so much here, there's so much depth, that in the end I wound up comparing it to nothing so much as Metroid, except with more variety. You kill a boss, gain new powers, and open new areas, and it works really well.

I'm not going to belabor this. Blaster Master is great, and unique in the extent to which is mixes gameplay styles. In fact, new decision: I'm going to finish Blaster Master. There. That's my review.

Rating: 10/10 Tough to give anything a 10, but if it's not for BM, I'm not sure what it's for.
Advice: The most dangerous foe in the game seems to be the grass in the first 20 second of play.
Best Moment: The first time you get out of your tank and start running around. You're very tiny.

Blades of Steel

Developer: Konami
Year: 1988

Blades of Steel is a great game. It's as good as I remember, and please keep in mind that I hate hockey, like, really, really hate it. Blades of Steel is fun and accessible, but offers some hints at depth. It's the kind of game that balances skill with dumb luck and NES stupidness so well that it's hard not to find something you like.

Laura and I played one complete game -- I forget who she took, but I took NY. I don't know that it matters. The controls come back immediately -- shoot, pass, switch to the nearest guy, and the little arrow in goal that you have to stand on to make saves. Blades of Steel feels really good -- when you want to do something, it's easy to make your guy do it, and when the ice fights back and you slip around, it feels like it's your fault for not anticipating.

The little touches are excellent -- there's a little bit of voice, which is rare, and the player animations are varied enough. The halftime show is this great Konami shooter (Gradius?) played on the arena scoreboard, along with an ad for a couple of other Konami games. Can anyone verify whether this is the first in-game product placement?

Of course, there's also fighting in Blades, which is awesome, because the loser goes to the penalty box. The NHL could learn a real lesson here, if it still existed.

So, go play Blades of Steel. It does just about everything right. The only thing wrong with it is that it's a hockey game, and it really succeeds anyway. It's also available on Virtual Console, so if you have a Wii, you don't even have to drag your NES out.

Rating: 8/10 I'd play it again, right now.
Advice: Be player 1. It seems like it doesn't matter, but they get to play Gradius after 2nd period.
Best Moment: Explaining the fight mini-game to laura, and then getting my ass kicked.

Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout

Developer: Kemco
Year: 1990

BBBB is a straight Super Mario Brothers clone, right down to the sound effects, level layouts, and gameplay functionality, so it's probably more informative to talk about how it differs from SMB than to try and describe it.

• There's a plot -- you're trying to get to your birthday party, but all of you friends have gotten jealous and are trying to keep you from going. Maybe they could have just, you know, not gone?
  
• The music sucks.
• The control sucks.
• There's horrible framerate issues when there's more than 4 sprites on the screen -- Bugs blinks a lot.
  
• You can't jump on enemies, you can only whomp them with a mallet.
  
• The character models are undetailed and also have clipping problems -- they aren't where they look like they are.
• Your main enemies are a box of soap, a walking mallet, and an orange blob.
• Where in SMB there were pipes containing flowers that bite you, in BBBB there are holes containing meatballs that float up and down.
• When you kill something, it doesn't make any noise. None. It just falls off the screen.
• When you smash a brick, it turns into the Warner Brothers logo.
• At the end of the first level you fight Daffy Duck by climbing on bricks to grab a carrot. Just like in the cartoon!

In all, BBBB is a perfect example of why we've come to avoid licensed games. It's about fucking Bugs Bunny, and it has no character and is no fun. Way to go, Kemco.

Also, this is about our 10th shitty game in a row. Blades of Steel is next, though, so I'm going to take out my frustration on Laura by beating the crap out of her in the fighting mini-game.

Rating: 2/10 Bad platformers are extra bad because of how good good platformers are.
Advice: Wait for the meatball to subside, then jump in the tube.
Best Moment: When you lose, Bugs makes a sad face, and it's sort of like, at least you're suffering, too, Bugs.

The Black Bass

Developer: Hot B
Year: 1989

I guess the question is, "What part of my hatred for this game is actually the fact that I hate fishing, and what part is the fact that the game itself sucks?" And the answer, when you think about it, is, "Stop it. Shut up. Black Bass is a piece of crap, and I refuse to get stuck in some discussion about what it means for a game to suck over this garbage."

So, yeah. The Black Bass is bad. You won't like it. The graphics are terrible -- I mean, we're talking about SMB3 era, and the majority of the time your screen will be filled with nothing but this light blue and a featureless blob on a string. The noises, I mean, that's what they are -- noises. There's no music (except at the title screen, where the song is actually pretty good).

And the gameplay? I mean, have you ever played Waiting for the Bus that Might Not Come for the Sega Saturn? No, you haven't, because that's a shitty premise for a game, but it's exactly how you play Black Bass. Except you can sometimes make a black blob show up, or not, by wiggling, or not wiggling, your lure back and forth or up and down, and then it will swim away, except when it doesn't, and there's no way to guess when or if any of this stupid crap will happen, and the best part is that WHO CARES, YOU JUST CAUGHT A STUPID FISH. Go to hell.

Rating: 2/10 Phoenix Wright made me like lawyering. Black Bass sucks at fishing-like-making.
Best Moment: The song is really, genuinely good.
Advice: Don't use the silver pencil lure. It doesn't work. I don't know if the other lures work, and I don't care. But stay away from the silver pencil.

Adventures of Dino Riki

Developer: Hudson Soft
Year: 1987

The Adventures of Dino Riki is brutal. Like, not good brutal. Like, holy crap, how am I supposed to not die here brutal. I mean, we played this game for like 20 minutes, and managed to fit about 40 games into that period. Holy crap.

So, Dino Riki is an overhead shooter, like Commando. The controls are fine, but it really goes from 0 to 5 million in about the first 15 seconds. There are powerups all over the place, but they really don't help that much, and there are hundreds of enemies, and they all move at the speed of light and a lot of them are indestructible. So if you like games that you can't possibly win and that actually aren't much fun, maybe you should try Dino Riki. But maybe not. Who cares?

The crappest thing about Dino Riki is that the things you pick up to get boosts block your bullets. So on the one hand, you want to shoot them to get the boost, but on the other, you know that they're essentially then going to serve as shields behind which your enemies can hide just before they move at some super hyper speed to kill you with their shittiness.

In closing, I mean, there's a certain type of person who'll really like Dino Riki, and this is the kind of person who learns to play Buckethead at incredibly stupid speed on Guitar Hero, and I hate them. I hate them, and I hate Dino Riki.

Rating: 1/10 If you can't play a game for more than 20 seconds, that game sucks. Best Moment: When it starts raining really fast orange invincible crap. Advice: Play it once, imagine playing the exact same 40 second game 20 times, and get back to playing something decent.

Bible Adventures

Developer: Wisdom Tree
Year: 1991

I'm not going to lie: I like the Bible. I think it's all made up, and I think that if you try to live by it, you're an idiot, but I like the stories. Always have.

That said, I was fully expecting Bible Adventures to be a real piece of crap. Everything religious that's not supposed to be religious is crap. Christian rock is like regular rock, except it doesn't rock, and it sucks. There's a restaurant on 72d street in Manhattan that serves kosher italian food, which is stupid because italian food is defined by parmesean and pork sausage. And then there's that PLO sponsored Mickey Mouse knockoff that tells you to kill jews.

So I was really pleasantly surprised to find that Bible Adventures is actually pretty good. I mean, not awesome, but good enough that we didn't mind playing it, and actually sort of got in to certain aspects of it.

Bible Adventures is actually three games: one where you rescue baby moses, one where you're noah collecting animals, and on where you're david doing something about goliath, though i don't know what. The moses game was OK -- basically, it's an evade-or-mash side-scroller. The david was sort of weak -- basically the same, though the overall mission wasn't clear. And the noah was really pretty good -- you have to get two of every animal, and there are things to lure them with, and you carry them into the ark.

The best thing about the game is that you power up by getting these little commandment tablets that stop the game to give you either
a) a relevant bible verse, or
b) a gameplay tip.
It's a great touch, and really funny because you don't know whether you're going to get some profound passage about virtue and sacrifice or told that tapping b while running will help you catch up to a wayward goat.

All in all, Bible Adventures was a not-half-bad mission-based scroller. I feel sort of dumb about this, and I wonder if somewhere, there's not a Christian hip hop band that i might enjoy if I managed to ignore the fact that all the songs have replaced 'my gangtas' with 'my jesus'.

Rating: 7/10 I mean, whatever. If Jesus were Metroid, he'd play this game. Or something.
Best Moment: Hey, where's the ark? Oh, that's right, under the flashing neon arrow.
Advice: There's nothing in the cave. I have no idea why it's there.

Battle Chess

Developer: Interplay
Year: 1990

This game is crap and doesn't deserve more than a 75 word review, and I've already used 19. It's chess. But the computer is stupid. And the animations suck, and are slow as shit. You'll want to die. And it's only one player. Looks like a turd. A stupid, shitty turd.

Fuck it.

Rating: 2/10 Stupid piece of crap chess, but slower.
Best Moment: Can't believe shittiness, claw eyes.
Advice: Die.