I haven't had much experience with the first Nintendo, the NES (N. Entertainment System). It's one machine I've never owned or really gotten into, despite mastering Castlevania and sharpening my Metroid skills in the late '80s on my younger brother's system, and ruling the Super Mario Bros. 3 world in the early '90s when my friends installed it on the TV in our first apartment away from home.
When Adam bestowed a Nintendo upon me this Xmas, he included every game I'd mentioned as a favorite over the past couple of years, along with The Legend of Zelda (a game Adam has wanted me to try out for some time, since he knows I love action/adventure games) and its sequel. Featured below are some fresh perceptions on titles that have come back out of my past to tint the present gaming environment.
I thought for years that Zelda might be a multi-screen hack'n'slash masquerading as an adventure game, but I find now that it actually is an adventure, requiring hours of exploration (my favorite aspect in a game) and some major long-term planning. For being a game laden with so many enemies, it fortunately has quite a lack of cop-out bad-guy addition; in fact, there's only one (the recurrent bitch in the lake).
One thing I definitely disagree with is the saving method. I much prefer passwords to an internal battery with a limited life. It was supposed to last only five years; the one in Adam's own cart and the one he gave me have both lasted much longer than that (obviously; they still work), but why did they settle on a short-term saving method when passwords can be used for the duration of a cartridge's life? And they obviously knew it was a sensitive battery -- there's even a warning on the screen, instructing the player to hold RESET as the system's being turned off to forestall inadvertent memory loss. I've even lost saved games to the problem every NES eventually develops, when you have to insert a cartridge as far out as it will go, scraping the inner-front edge of the port as you push the game in, if you want it to turn on properly. If this doesn't work the first couple times with Zelda (it doesn't work the first couple times with most carts), your saved games are erased for some reason. The battery being that fragile, why didn't they just use the much more surefire password method?
Besides that non-play element, however, Zelda is terrific. I've already found that there are stretches of days during which I don't want to play anything else; the addiction factor is certainly there, but along with it comes a stout degree of frustration. But the favorable difference between Zelda's paining battles and the high-temper level of other games with that ingredient is that with practice, anything in Zelda can be conquered. This adds to its addictive fiber; throw in the searches over river, mountain and waterfall and treks through forest, desert and maze for people who will sell secrets about the kingdom, merchants with vital weaponry and healing agents, successively powerful swords, hidden caves and stairways found by bomb or fire, environ-expanding vehicles and in fact the castle-like inner levels themselves, and you have a game that's very hard to stop playing. Despite the different "camera angle," I dub this the first Doom predecessor, more so than any simpler top-down shooter that doesn't have such a dimension of exploration or map-memorization.
On a few occasions I mentioned to Adam that I'd loved Castlevania when I was younger. In retrospection, it's more likely that I just spent a lot of time on it.
It's a great game with a great setting and fun mechanics; I can't imagine the Nintendo without the facility to appease the periodic urge to whip the hell out of bad guys coming from both sides, spinning around with stealth and shattering them, and to pulverize the occasional weak wall block. But as a game to follow through until you beat the end, it has a high rate of frustration, almost (but not quite) reimbursed by the permission to continue the game to heart's content.
There are two main problems: First, the game gets more and more linear, calling in higher levels for exact steps to be taken at exact places through nearly every vicinity. This turns the fun exploration of castles into a narrow path through redundant hazards. Secondly, if you whip a baddie at the same time he collides with you, you both win, which means he wins; he does dissolve, but you also fly back a couple inches, making the careful jumps from surface to surface over precipitous drops (the majority of the game) inconsequential. You've balanced all that way, and you've whipped this meanie in time, but it's come to nothing and you watch Simon fall to his death.
Metroid is an excellent idea with top-notch mechanics, an irresistible audio-visual setting and excessively fun shoot-'em-up qualities combined with the thrill of wide-scale exploration; but it's incredibly hard due to the requirement of repeated slayings of the same bad guys over and over to build up your easily-lost energy. Again, I can't imagine the world of gaming without this great concept and fantastic execution, but it's just too repetitive and hence frustrating to play to the end.
Of the three Super Mario Bros. games, only the third one stands out as utterly fantastic. The first game captured my rapt attention when I found it as a coin-op in the '80s; I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. I played it over and over, getting further and further each time (the mark of a well-designed game) and trying fanatically to remember where everything was concealed. So it's a great game, of course; but the enormity and extra control offered by the third game completely wiped out the prequel for me.
You can travel backwards now, and the extra dimension this adds, especially coupled with the other supremity of this installment, the mind-blowing magnitude of secrets, makes this one of the few follow-ups in gaming history to succeed its originator so much as to completely antiquate it. You can in fact go backwards in the second game, and it has some really neat ideas, such as the picking-up-and-throwing concept, the egg-hurling mama-saurs and the doorway dimensions with their veiled power-ups; but it gets repetitive very quickly (and do we really need two of those damn desert worlds?). For his part, Adam doesn't even consider this a proper Mario game. I can see his point; what do you jump up and hit? Where's all the hidden stuff?
The third episode contains the best of so many elements that I'd be willing to vote for it as the greatest video game of all time rather than Next Generation's initial pick, Super Mario 64. That game's beautiful, and as the first model of its mechanical setting it remains the peak of innovation; but it gets boring very quickly and becomes maddening in certain isolated places, and the camera angles weren't thought-through enough.
Controller-wise, the NES's pads were revolutionary, prescribing what would become the standard scheme. But from a technical standpoint, the machine itself is an 8-bit horror that's limited to program, and it therefore saw a smaller amount of impressive games than its industry-giant precursor (the Atari 2600). But when a programmer threw his heart into the creation of a game, the machine really did shine above and beyond its peers. There are very few games in existence that are quite as addictive as one of the really good NES titles; when a programmer approached the machine correctly, even just its purely mechanical side moved characters incredibly smoothly and detected collisions flawlessly. The bad titles are limited-feeling and forgettable, but the great games are really great, and therein lies the magical potion that boosted this first Nintendo system's popularity over the top and continues to re-establish its place as an enduring classic. -- CF
I found information about yet another secret in an Atari 2600 game to add to our growing list. This one concerns Fathom, Rob Fulop's unique action/adventure game that was released by Imagic.
Gamer Chuck Hunnefield discovered the secret and has duly had his instructions presented on the Internet. Here's the method, paraphrased:
Complete level 1. During the second level, acquire all of the Trident pieces and approach the mermaid's cage as though you're going to rescue her again. Unlock the cage and quickly head upward before it completely opens, exiting the screen.
Now you have to re-emerge way up at the surface of the water and become the seagull. Fly east or west and look at the volcanoes! R.F. is of course Mr. Fulop; M.B. is Michael Becker, the fella that helped out with the graphics. His computerized illustration of a dolphin jumping out of the water was actually what inspired Mr. Fulop to make the game.
Remember, if anyone has information about an Easter egg that hasn't appeared in these pages, please write or e-mail and explain it. We'll credit you, as you can see. An especially sought-after secret is the rumored Solaris one. Any leads?-- CF