Donkey Kong is credited as the first true “platformer,” and you bet your ass I double-checked in Google because you’d think some obscure forerunner of that game would hold the title, but no, it’s just plain old fuckin’ Donkey Kong. Running around like a ninny and performing very unsafe long jumps at great heights would go on to become the basis of countless titles, because it really was the best game in town.

Platform titles were so popular during the 80s and 90s, in fact, that almost every developer tried making one just to see if it would sell. Sometimes these games were predictably shitty, but once in a while there would be a diamond in the sand, waiting for us to discover it and rent it three consecutive times and then forget to return it for six months so that the video store just charges us for it and it’s ours now… despite that gold sticker the rental store put on it. Today I’ve picked out five from the NES game library for us to dissect. Let’s make the first incision…

Dragon Fighter

Natsume, 1990

Now, this is not called Dragon Fighter because you go out of your way to fight dragons, but neither is the title only a vague reference to the mythical beasts. When you’re not prancing around as a warrior with a fondness for ornate hats and what look like spandex onesies, you can dead ass transform into a fucking dragon and tear shit up just about as severely as you’d expect a dragon to tear shit up. All this awesome shit is limited (of course) by a gauge that fills up in human form and then ticks down while in epic-murder-monster-myth-mode.

The jump-and-slash formula is pretty well-represented here, at least when you’re not in dragon form; when you change shape the game takes on an R-Type/Gradius vibe as you begin to gently “rail” to the right and shoot down oncoming threats with your color-coded dragon breath. The compulsion exists to just hammer through the game haphazardly in dragon mode, but I found myself saving up my dragon-time for whatever waited at the end of each stage. Gameplay feels good either way.

Unashamed use of color and a ton of variety really help the graphics stand out; we’re not looking at anything groundbreaking for a 1990/91 release for the NES, but it’s a decent looking game. Dragon Fighter’s audio experience is acceptable, but nothing to write home about. Composer Kouichi Yamanishi keeps things basic with the music, but it’s far from boring or repetitive. My only hairs to split are that 1) the dragon form looks a bit gaudy all solid-color with such bright hues 2) is he dead serious with his unitard or whatever? Unitard + knee-high “fuck me” boots + long-billed feathered cap?

What does that equal? It equals 6 out of 10, because while it’s not necessarily a classic, Dragon Fighter has a neat gimmick and plays like more than minimal effort went into it.

Shatterhand

Jaleco/Natsume, 1991

Just the intro animation sells this one. Shatterhand is the heartwarming story of a man who lost both his arms, only to rise above adversity… by pummeling adversity into rubble with his new robot arms. You can even punch bullets! There are also different kinds of little helper-robots you can get, presumably when the automatons get a look at your chromed-out “guns” and recognize you as a fellow Skynet agent. No, wrong story. This one is mostly about you and your little hovering robot helpers beating the shit out of some cyber-soldiers to save the world and get revenge on them for taking your normal human meat-arms… but maybe you should be thanking them! After all, could you punch bullets before?

Let me answer that for you, nerd: no, you fucking couldn’t.

Shatterhand is a blast to play, but I could do without the elaborate pickup system. And don’t tell me I’m simple. I know I am. And that’s how you should keep your pickups in games like this. Don’t have me playing punch-Tetris on the fly trying to pick a Greek letter. It’s a cool way to have all the types of helper robots, but come on. You could have just had them, without all the fiddlin’ and diddlin’. Otherwise the game plays well and has a respectable challenge to it. The graphical style sits somewhere between the rich detail of a Sunsoft game and the effective simplicity of something like Contra. Composers Iku Mizutani and Hiroyuki Iwatsuki deliver a soundtrack every bit as hard-hitting as the game’s protagonist.

Shatterhand would be an 8 if not for the weird powerup system and the eventual repetitive nature of the gameplay. Instead it’s a solid 7 out of 10. I know a bunch of you think this game’s a total classic, and you’re not wrong, but maybe I give things lower ratings than they deserve because I suck at video games, okay?

Kick Master

KID, 1992

And so we go from arms to legs with Kick Master, one of the better-loved platformers of the late NES era, and for very good reason. Along with its fantasy theme, we see yet another decent melding of the action game essentials with some basic RPG elements (leveling up, etc.) as a continuation of a trend established in Legend of Zelda, Crystalis, etc. In Kick Master, your life has been royally fucked up by a powerful witch named Belzed, who has killed the king and queen and kidnapped the princess (natch). Your dumbass brother somehow gets killed by a skeleton (a circus-peanut-tier monster) even though your brother is wearing armor and wielding a sword when this happens. His dying words are so patently absurd that you are agape in shock:

The thing is, you do kind of have “great kicking skills.” You’ve got magic, too… but the kicking. The kicking is what’s great. Stay focused on that.

The graphics for Kick Master are superb for their time, with early examples of parallax scrolling visible and some dynamic (if laughably poorly written) cut scenes. You fly around the screen in a well-animated fury, raining hell (and feet) down upon your foes across eight stages filled with lush backgrounds. For all your kickmastery and wizarding bullshit, the controls aren’t cumbersome, either. I wish I could praise the sound, but it’s not great. In fact, the boss at the end of the swamps makes a horrible noise that sounds like a high-gain modem dial-up sound being recorded through too mics that are way too close together. Yo, why did you choose to put that sound in any game? It made me think my ROM was fucking up… no, it’s just Kick Master.

7 out of 10 for Kick Master. Terrible sound, mitigated by a fun and innovative RPG hybrid play style.

Bucky O’Hare

Konami, 1992

This intellectual property, which followed among others in the wake of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is actually criminally undervalued. I remember the cartoon (and its theme song) to be well-written as if someone still loved what they had created… or at least had money to spend on it for a while.

The NES game is no exception, positively gleaming with Konami quality throughout. With a splash of color true to the source material, the game spans four worlds rendered in vivid, exaggerated terms. Not only does Bucky O’Hare look like a Konami Game, it sounds like one too; Tomoko Sumiyama’s soundtrack milks every bit of that distinctive Konami soundset we all know and love, producing laudable results worthy of any flagship title. Gameplay is a masterpiece, though many find Bucky O’Hare to be a bit difficult (including little old me). Characters can be played as they are rescued, and there are reasons to play each one, not unlike how certain parts of the Mega Man games are best done in sequence…

A firm 8 out of 10 despite it being so fucking hard I can barely finish the first level.

The Krion Conquest

Vic Tokai, 1990

Do you like Mega Man? Good, because you’re playing a reskinned Mega Man. Robots are still trying to take over the world, but these robots are from space and they’re vulnerable to magic, motherfucker. Krion Conquest is another one of those games that had a plot when it got on the airport in Japan but must have left it under the seat of the plane. The long and short of it: you’re a witch “from a place full of demons” and you’re the only one who can hurt all the robots.

Leave it to a knockoff to improve on the formula of what it rips off. You can aim upward and crouch in this game, two things that Mega Man, a futuristic android hero, simply cannot manage to do. So as strange as this may sound, I find Krion Conquest slightly more playable than any of the first three Mega Man games, just due to the added versatility of being able to look upward and point my wand-thingy up there too. Seriously, of all the things a state-of-the-art futuristic cyber-champion CAN’T do, it’s crane his neck and lift an arm above his head? There are men in their nineties who have Mega Man outclassed.

The graphics and sound are all over the place. Some of it is, well, just Mega Man sprites used as a tracing stencil. I won’t even itemize all of what’s ripped directly off; even the “GET READY” at each stage’s beginning and the life bar/weapons menu are barely given a new coat of paint. Most of the enemies look like if you paid the folks at LJN to redraw Mega Man baddies, but after buying those LJN folks a few shots of liquid hillbilly brain damage juice. The Krion Conquest has two composers, and two heads are… about the same as one in this case. Most of the music, regardless of its other points of quality, comes off as repetitive.

Krion Conquest can have 5 points out of 10 for at least cheating well. It’s a bag of blatant borrowing, but it’s at least playable.

We’ll be seeing more of each other later in the merry month of May, RetroFans! Best Believe!

We’re taking another, longer, more loving look at the NES game library this month, and there’s so much to love. Even the cheese. From the top-notch classics to the knockoff nostalgia, everyone’s got a favorite NES game. If this system didn’t form some small part of your childhood entertainment time, then I’m not sure where (or when) you lived and still ended up on NRW. Like, how do you know any of the other shit we talk about here? Welcome to the future, man. Hit Play.

Pizza Pop!

Ark System Works, 1992

There is nothing more empty and bleak than the vacant look of defeat on Dracula’s face right here. And no, Pizza Boy’s got no fucking clue. It’s a tragedy on wheels.

Jaleco couldn’t publish a game to save their asses in the 90s. The company was well-established in the gaming industry – Bases Loaded and City Connection were notable Jaleco titles – but somehow the firm just didn’t gain much traction on the NES. Pizza Pop is a Jaleco game for the NES; I hesitate to offer it too much of its own distinction beyond that, simply because it’s so goddamned boring. Let’s be real: this is fifty other platformers, Jaleco. This is just the amalgam of every stiffly generic and circus-hued hop and jump game that has passed through the NES’s mouth, and you’ve distilled it into this dry litter for me to ruminate over.

It’s not even that it doesn’t play well. It plays okay, actually. It’s just… stale. I get the distinct vapour, ever so fragrant and hopeless, of the dying video rental shop. Drywall. Silence. Dust. Another set of bones bleached in the sun. It’s a decent game on its own merit… just a decent game that should have come out 3-4 years earlier.

The plot says you want to buy an engagement ring for your girlfriend. That’s the whole reason we’re here. That’s why you’re out hassling Dracula, getting murdered on construction sites. Some hipster asshole is also running around in clothes just like yours, making a mess for you and generally making your job a living hell.

See, that’s what I mean. It’s like they both know this has been done ten thousand upon ten thousand times before. This tale has been writ long across stardust and primordial mud. Give it up already.

I feel more than a little fucking weird playing a game where the main character is doing a cartoon version of a job several of my friends have. It just makes me empathize with them even more. The tips are shitty, and it’s even worse in real life because you can’t leap the equivalent of thirty feet in the air. KILL EVERY BAD GUY EVER BY JUMPING ON THEIR FUCKING HEAD. You also get some kind of pizza-baking paddle or something as a weapon, but there’s no point. Just jump on everything like Mario. The graphics are of uniformly low but inoffensive quality. I would feed this game to a dog but I wouldn’t eat it myself. The sound is nothing to write home about, unless you want to write a long fucking essay on questionable music loops. There is a jet-ski part near the end that I have to admit is pretty fun, but that’s like saying you like the part during the root canal where they rinse the blood out of your mouth. Pizza Pop is not memorable, nor is it forgettable. It hangs, low fruit in a busy orchard, quiet among giants. This exercise in smallness gets 4 out of 10 because there is some small merit within it; while it’s a mediocre platform game, at least it isn’t an objectively shitty platform game.

Airwolf

Kyugo/Beam Software, 1988

The PG, on-paper objective of this game is to rescue some dumb hostages or some shit. Something cheery, positive, official. We all know why Airwolf appealed to us as youthful consumers. Nine times out of ten, when you looked at the TV and Airwolf was on, what was Airwolf doing?

That’s right. Airwolf was tearing shit up.

And so we have this, a less-than-terrible NES version of a decent-to-OK arcade title, based off a TV show. You do a fair amount of tearin’ shit up, but there’s a moderate pace on it, and Airwolf would like to pack it in by 9 pm so the kids can go to bed. Airwolf just don’t party no more. It immediately strikes me that this game plays a lot like Capcom’s 1943, if 1943 were a side-scroller. I just immediately get that feel visually, movement-wise, everything. Maybe it’s the intermittent beach scenery and my hankering to shoot down Zeroes over Midway. Maybe it’s just that the game – or at least this part of it – is deceptively competent in its execution.

𝕬𝖚𝖋 𝖂𝖎𝖊𝖉𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖊𝖍𝖊𝖓

The aim-and-shoot first-person sections of Airwolf are clumsy and drawn-out, like most of the NES’s attempts at this kind of “realism” or “dynamics.” Lots of sprite clip interrupts otherwise acceptable pixel graphics. Outside of the slightly dated and loud sounds of war, the audio experience is sparse. What’s present is phoned-in and basic.

I will give the cut scenes and set pieces a little bit of a shout out. I always like this kind of thing, especially in 8 to 16 bit era games when each matte and landscape was its own little labor of art. Bells and whistles, the little liminal passages between… Less was more, but you had to do it big.

Airwolf receives 6 out of 10. It tried to be novel with lukewarm but not awful results, and I like the side-scrolling parts of it. Some of the random in-between shit really made it for me too, like the guy’s face on the radio screen.

Willow

Capcom, 1989

I don’t do a lot of RPGs in here, and I really should. (In fact, maybe a whole series coming up). I tend to avoid them because of the nature of RPG play: it’s a long, nuanced experience that has as much in common with a novel as it does a film. I don’t often feel that a handful of paragraphs can do that kind of thing justice.

I underestimated the mediocrity of this game. Let me take a well-aimed stab at describing Willow for the NES: it’s a lot like Crystalis, except that a film called Willow was produced by George Lucas in 1988 and that film got wrapped around Crystalis, instead of the slightly more Japanese story in Crystalis.

What passes for a climactic battle in the wizarding fucking world of Warwick Goddamn Davis.

So here we are with this can’t-go-wrong fantasy adventure, this klutz-friendly Saturday Morning version of Zelda with movie branding on it. It is extremely formulaic, mixing action with minor RPG elements like leveling and puzzle/interactions. The game has no money and you just talk to people to get stuff for free. Unfortunately, this leftist utopia is fraught with evil witches, dog mutants, and that old standby, the skeleton-people. Skeleton-people live unlife the way it was meant to be: clacking along windswept footpaths, harassing little wizards. Anyway, the catch to everything being free in this economy-free candy-land is that Bavmorda wants to kill you and has made a bunch of other stuff want to kill you. The movie plot’s subtlety is seen nowhere else in the game. Willow, if nothing else, will inure new RPG-genre players to the mind-numbing chores of reading text and level-grinding; in terms of action gameplay we’re looking at a caveman’s version of Link to the Past, but the graphics are the secret shine on this game.

But I’m not the chief…

The way the screen will change color and the grass will whip menacingly, as the battle theme starts along with the visual cues. As I said above, bells and whistles… but they count for double in the very visual world of RPG-themed games. The music, especially this piece right here (which you will hear plenty of in the game), belongs in some kind of “reverse trauma facility” government program where they use radio waves to teach you how to do drone strikes in your REM sleep. The battle theme is okay, though. I just wish, as I often do about RPG music, that the loops were longer. Oh well.

OC by Yours Truly

While Willow isn’t what I’d call truly lousy, it fails to rise above a solid “meh” in terms of action, and it feels from start to finish like it was some other game that was in development before Willow, and it got turned into Willow. It gets 6 out of 10.

That’s all she wrote… well, that’s all I wrote, anyway. Get Gruesome!

In cultural terms, and in the narrower scope of console gaming, the early 1990s represented both change and stagnation. We can’t fault the entirety of this era, nor can we fully embrace it… the 1990s are what I often see as the awkward “teen years” of contemporary pop culture. There was an open, airy sense of freedom, but since different aspects of our world move at such varying paces, a great deal of ideas fell onto the scene half-baked or far too early… either “ahead of their time” or just “unbelievably fucking stupid.”

In this Grab Bag, I’m examining three of the console/arcade titles from this wild and woolly era, the soft-lens period of new Coke, MC Hammer, and the undaunted pursuit of something – anything – consumers would buy.

“I saw a Kabuki Quantum Fighter drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s… and his hair was perfect.”

Kabuki: Quantum Fighter

HAL/Human Entertainment, 1990

I’m about to tear this shit up, so if you’re one of the surprising number of people who like it, I apologize in advance if you find my opinion objectionable.

The premise is ridiculous, but that’s not even the bad part. You play as a 25-year-old colonel (yeah, you really moved and shook your way through the ranks I guess) who has uploaded his mind into a defense computer to defeat a malevolent program intent on destroying it. Apparently, computer code (in its pseudo-magical 1990s form) is able to sense your ancestry and bloodline, so the colonel spawns inside the system as a kabuki actor.

“Just add what you think looks like computery stuff. Just… I don’t know, just type some shit. Slap the keyboard around. They’ll all be admiring his bangs anyway.”

Let’s leave that aspect of the game alone… it’ll be fine over there, and I don’t think it’ll hurt anybody. Odd premises are nothing new to Japanese-developed games. In fact, we’ve come to love them. I know I do.

What’s horrible are the controls and gameplay elements. My main gripe about this piece of shit is how they decided to combine awkward movement-based challenges with incredibly annoying enemy behavior. The game’s not hard in a way I can respect… it’s hard in a way that possibly communicates spite towards the consumer. Do you like jumping puzzles? You know, the kind that either require you to start all over from the beginning or just gravely injure you? You’ll encounter those regularly in Kabuki: Quantum Fighter, and lots of them will involve a brand of bullshit jungle gym that requires laser-precise control manipulation to do right. This would be fine if the overall controls weren’t staggering-drunk clumsy. I guess I should add that your crouching attack, which you’ll find yourself instinctively wanting to use, is about as useful as Air Duster to a man drowning in a river. Its reach is nil, its delay is ridiculous, and you WILL be hit by what you’re trying to hit. That will be the end result. Get used to that.

Did you like the monkey bars when you were a kid? Do you also like doing things over and over because you screwed up the D-Pad timing by like 1 millisecond? Have I got the game for you. Buckle up, pardner.

I’m done being Mr. Shits about Kabuki: Quantum Fighter. Other than what I mention above, the game isn’t that bad. The graphics are really stylish and the audio is equally well-crafted. In the main, I’d say try this one out if you like hurting yourself but your insurance has stopped covering the incidents where you shake hands with red-hot curling irons.

If it weren’t for all the colorful visuals, this game would actually be grim as fuck. I guess they thought they were doing us a favor.

Phantasm/Avenging Spirit

C.P. Brain/Jaleco, 1991

Okay, here’s another bizarre premise, but it starts off with an all-too-familiar twist. You play as a young man whose girlfriend was kidnapped during… your murder. Fortunately, her dad “researches ghost energy,” so he’s given you a chance to rescue her and stop the mysterious criminal group who have taken her. You can do this by possessing the bodies of the living and using their abilities to fight your way to the hideout.

“This is my ghost smock, so I don’t get ghost-shit all over me. Don’t touch me.”

I’ll admit that I started off with a dubious feeling about this one, but damned if it isn’t easily one of the most underrated titles of the era. This is essentially an action platformer where you can pluck your character from among the array of enemies at will. You can play as gunmen, super-girls, floating mystics, and even dragon-men.

Avenging Spirit (called Phantasm in Japan, not to be confused with the cult horror film with the flying murder balls) packs a considerable challenge, but for once the gamer is given some genuinely formidable tools to tackle it with. There are areas in some stages where you need to be able to do a certain thing to bypass an obstacle or defeat a boss, and all you need to do is watch what your foes are doing… and borrow their bodies.

A dragon-man is you. If you want it to be.

The American and Japanese Game Boy box art. Needless to say, BIG difference in tone. They know how to sell to their audience.

Avenging Spirit is ahead of the curve with its multiple endings as well; there’s three keys in the game, and if you find all three, you can rescue the girl to get the good ending. If not, you have to fight the syndicate kingpin yourself and she dies when the hideout explodes. Why don’t you just get the good ending, huh, Boo Berry?

The game was originally developed and released for the arcade, but a Game Boy version was released as well, and it holds up like a champ as far as GB ports go. Very little is lost except the obvious hit to graphical depth.

Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun

Westwood Studios/SSI, 1992

Yeah. I snuck some D&D in here. You know I get away with that as often as possible.

Here’s the reason this is a notable game: 1992 was during the onset of TSR’s steep decline (TSR being the company that originally owned/published D&D products). In the mid 1990s, Random House and Wizards of the Coast (the current owners of the franchise) would both pick the hobby apart and raise it from near death, but 1992 was smack in the middle of a slew of intra-company problems for TSR that don’t fit into the scope of this article. Nonetheless, here we see one of the most playable attempts at translating D&D to an early-gen console. Perhaps it was SSI working alongside Westwood Studios (who had also churned out a pretty decent Nightmare on Elm Street game for computers) instead of on its own that made the difference. SSI had always met a certain standard of overall quality, but they had struggled before with porting their games from DOS, etc. to things like the NES. Perhaps it was because the Genesis kicks so much ass? That’s up for debate, and forgive me if I don’t dive into that blood-pool today.

In the old school rules set, “elf,” “halfling,” etc. were their own character classes. As in, you weren’t an elf wizard, you were just an elf, and it was assumed that all elves were this weird hybrid of fighter and wizard. Halflings were just mostly useless. Not much has changed.

Warriors of the Eternal Sun is set in the Hollow World D&D setting, part of the “original” D&D setting known as Mystara. The game’s mechanic works closely off of the D&D “BECMI” pen-and-paper rule set, from combat to spells to exploring the wilderness. It’s not unusual for RPGs of this style to come off as dry or unapproachable, but the game handles well and is surprisingly accessible. Menus are easily navigable, fighting the monsters is exciting (although it is still frustrating when you party-wipe against lizard people or a dragon), and the graphics far outweigh previous attempts at this formula by the parties involved. Sound and music are very good too, but nothing in that department is truly out-of-this-world.

Lady, I couldn’t agree more.

In closing, I realize this article doesn’t even begin to cover everything from the early 90s that deserves to be covered, and I may in fact revisit this in a future Grab Bag or other article. Until then, pop in that New Kids on the Block CD and make sure you put your shoulder pads in.

FINAL VERDICT:

KABUKI: QUANTUM FIGHTER – 5/10

AVENGING SPIRIT – 8/10

D&D: WARRIORS OF THE ETERNAL SUN – 7/10