At the end of last month, we looked at three titles from the year 1987, taking stock of their pros and cons thirty years after their original release. I like to think of the process as something between an honest review, a nostalgic look back, and a brutal Friar’s Club roast (except I’m nowhere near as funny as any of those guys). This week I’ve chosen three more games from ’87 for us to slap around before giving them a big kiss and saying “happy 30^th.”

Karate Kid

Atlus/LJN

November 1987

Daniel turns the Japanese kids on to some Florida-style death metal. I like how “map” is just a line.

Here’s another license LJN got their grubby hands on during the 80s. I never had a strong opinion about any of the films,but karate was a big deal during the era in question and I understand why they had such success. I hear they’re doing a TV series, which makes me happy for Ralph Macchio since he really faded into the background once he hit adulthood. I digress… the NES game lumps the first two films together, focusing mainly on the second installment set in Japan. The first “stage” consists of a karate tournament that can be won relatively easily by spamming kicks and being insanely aggressive. Once you end up in Okinawa, things get trickier. You have to fight tons of thugs (some of them are carrying what look like harpoons), walk through a typhoon, and save your cute Japanese girlfriend from the massive prick who’s the student of Miyagi’s rival in the second movie. You actually have to save her twice, but only one of those times require you to actually beat Growly Scowly (a quick Wikipedia search tells me his name is Chozen and the girl’s name is Kumiko). Truly, Daniel-san was living a modern otaku’s wet dream. Or hero fantasy. I don’t know.

I can’t really smear Karate Kid in terms of overall quality. It’s hard but not stupid hard, has some pretty cool minigames, and there’s a level of polish present that you can tell Atlus was responsible for. The graphics are pretty good except for two things: the power-ups are just letters, and what the fuck is up with Daniel’s face in some of the minigames?

like a kewpie doll cross-bred with a Roswell alien.

My one complaint is that the game’s kind of short once you get the hang of it. Otherwise, Karate Kid is one of those few exceptions to a rule: a game published by LJN that didn’t come out the other end looking like forty dollars worth of chewed bubblegum.

Black Tiger

Capcom

August 1987

Listen up, because this is one of Capcom’s less well-known arcade titles, but probably one of its best from the pre-SFII era. Black Tiger is fucking crazy. The story’s fairly basic: three dragons slapped a kingdom around until that kingdom was pretty much bullshit; enter the protagonist, a berserk knife-hurling bodybuilder who wears just enough armor to look armored but never enough not to show the world how he keeps it real in the gym.

“Like what you see?”

Let me veer slightly off topic for a second, in reference to the main character’s melee weapon: these things are called flails, not morningstars or mace-and-chain. A flail, which evolved from the ancient tool used to process grain, is one or more weighted heads on lengths of rope or chain, affixed to a handle. A morningstar (also called a godentag, meaning “good day,” a morbid twist of humor I adore) is usually just a massive club with bands of iron and spikes augmenting the ass-beating end.

So our dude here battles his way through a dangerous fantasy world using a deadly throwing knife/flail combo, smashing the minions of the three dragons and un-petrifying some “wise men” he finds as stone statues along the way. For his trouble, the stone-to-fleshed guys will give the hero extra time on the clock or zenny coins. I KNOW A BUNCH OF YOU NERDS LOVE MONSTER HUNTER, so that currency will sound familiar; Black Tiger was the game that first featured it. Anyway, chests and hidden treasures (in walls, etc.) have more powerups like armor, life refills, extra lives, and more. Just like another Capcom title, Magic Sword, some of the chests are full of nothing but fuck-you and will hurt you if you don’t react quickly after opening them. You can also spend those sexy zenny coins on items in shops run by the little beardy guys you keep de-stoning. While the game is a platformer, it has a lot of areas to explore… almost enough that you’d want a map screen or something, but it’s pretty hard to actually get lost.

Bedecked in gold, ready to obliterate a dragon-man.

I am all about Black Tiger. It’s very Capcom with its epic but cartoon-like presentation, and it’s a lot of fun to play despite having a level of difficulty typical of a coin-op title. Capcom has a history of doing fairly well when crafting fantasy-style games, and this is no exception. I can’t even come down too hard on the one misgiving I do have about Black Tiger: when heard through the original equipment (or an emulation thereof), the sound effects are fucking annoying. As if to compensate, the music is of a quality on par with Capcom’s other arcade stuff… above average.

Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa

Sega

October 1987

The cutest little sapient spaceship you ever did see.

I love the original Fantasy Zone. I enjoy shooters in general, and Fantasy Zone‘s combo of excellent gameplay elements and a goofy style has me lovingly devoted to it. I cannot and will not speak ill of it. It is severely awesome and if you disagree with me you should probably just go the rest of the way in that direction and admit that you’ve secretly hated video games since you were born.

I don’t get the same gooey feeling in my black heart when I play this sequel, but it’s also very good. The first thing I noticed was that the backgrounds are absolutely breathtaking. Much more

both the laser-burger boss and the candy-cake mountains are rendered in deliciously deep color.

attention was paid to this aspect the second time around, and it’s most evident in the arcade version (which came after the Mark III/Master System version, in a world where arcade versions are usually the mommy). The music isn’t quite equal to that of the original in terms of catchy-ness or charm, but a couple of tracks (notably rounds 1 and 5) come close to hitting the mark.

FZII plays very similarly to its predecessor; a little added complexity comes from the fact that each zone has two “sides” to clear before the boss shows up. Speaking of the bosses, expect no punches pulled. They are every bit as challenging as you’d hope, and you’ll have to stay alert and be quick. While FZII seems on its surface to to be a minimally altered clone of its predecessor, I’m already planning to open up my emulator after this to play it some more. Unlike so many sequels and second chapters in various media, it’s satisfyingly true to its origin but enough of its own animal that it could stand on its own merits.

Karate Kid – 6/10 (It’s not a classic, but it’s really quite good for something LJN has its name on, which impressed the shit out of me)

Black Tiger – 7/10 (when I rate something 7/10 it means I like it but I couldn’t play it nonstop for more than a day or so, which is right where this one falls in. Still a fantastic arcade platformer!)

Fantasy Zone II – 8/10 (I’ll stop comparing it to the original, but it’s definitely worth playing if you liked the first one.)

Good evening, boils and ghouls. I’ve got another crinkling creepfest for you as we tiptoe closer and closer toward that magical last day of October… Halloween. I hope you’ve all got some fun plans. I plan on going as a man who stands on his porch and yells at kids. I’m on a budget this year and already have all the stuff I need for the costume. I did bring some candy, though, so strap in for another Grab Bag.

I went deep diving through the ROM mausoleums and the silent catacombs stacked with floppy disks, hoping to pluck a few motes of dust worth examining. Horror is historically a hit-or-miss genre in video gaming, with the misses only diminishing significantly among computer titles and consoles of the Fifth Gen and newer. I remember playing the NES’s Friday the 13th and being very confused and disappointed, which ended up cosmically balancing out years later when I first played Silent Hill 2 at a friend’s house, in the dark, with a 5.1 Surround Sound system, while I was (in my feral youth) high as hell. It was awesome to be frightened by a game in the same way a good horror film can make you squirm or jump.

Nonetheless, I digress: There were some good eggs before things moved to CD formats and low-poly gore. Several personal computers of the late 80s and 1990s were making leaps and bounds in graphical and audio capabilities, two picturesque examples being the Amiga series and the lovely Japanese-domestic X68000. It is my educated professional opinion (something I could not say in real life without laughing) that the NES was ill-suited for the horror genre with exceedingly few exceptions. Inf act, none come to mind. To support this statement, I’d like to point out that a solid majority of the attempts made at NES horror titles were left in the hands of LJN – the canned-tomato shitbird degenerate gambler among NES development teams. Which leads me to my first game (yes, we’re gonna rag on LJN again, we will never stop)…

Beetlejuice

LJN, 1991

System: NES

Unfortunately, it is not, in any appreciable way, showtime.

I’ll start off with a frank statement, an observation that strikes home like the spanking of a truly furious parent: LJN is responsible for an entire dynasty of early-gen licensed titles whose strongest tie to their source material is the use of said franchise’s trade dress. Their games are like warm, dented tins of ass left in the summer sun as a booby trap; I’d go so far as to say that giving one of LJN’s video games to someone as a gift qualifies under international law as an act of war.

The woeful truth is that, despite being significantly less terrible than LJN’s earlier shit-gobbling train wrecks for the little gray box, Beetlejuice is still this kind of game, in a nutshell – a loosely coherent and surprisingly desolate adaptation of a film that really didn’t have the potential for a good video game in it. The film was released in 1988, but was apparently scooped up in one dangling, errant arm three years later for this purpose. Go figure.

I love the film, is the really crushing part. The dark and irreverent humor, the excellent FX and soundtrack, an all-star cast (including a great role for the late Glenn Shadix, who I sincerely wish had lived longer and done more)… Hey, you remember the part where Beetlejuice leaps around the sheer ravines and cliffs surrounding the Maitlands’ home and stomps on giant bugs repeatedly?

Ladies and gentlemen… this… is Beetlejuice. Unforgivable.

Yeah, I don’t either, but that’s a big part of the video game.

I’ll cede a few bright spots for Beetlejuice’s NES incarnation, though:

1. It has a fun little powerup system that revolves around how your power is to scare the shit out of people, and you can buy uses of these abilities that are kept in a sort of inventory. The one early in the game lets you slough off your flesh and become a skeleton.

2. The game has both side-scrolling and top-down action, similar to the far superior game Super C.

3. While nothing in the implied sequence of events seems to make any sense when compared to the film’s story, The exposition and cut scenes and other fluff at least attempts to suggest that things are going the same way. You are also obviously supposed to be in the same places from the film, however cartoonish and exaggerated they may seem.

Otho gets all Squirrel Nut Zipper on your ass while you look on in dismay… just a skeleton standing fully erect on a high, narrow shelf. I like how EVERY surface looks like it’s covered in fire-orange shag carpet.

This game gets 4/10 from me. It’s really not up to what Beetlejuice deserves (if you’d try to capture the film’s flavor in an 8-bit game in the first place – a dubious choice), but it’s more of a solid attempt than you’d expect out of NES-era LJN. It doesn’t make me less mad at them for Uncanny X-Men, Back to the Future, Wolverine, or that Spider-Man NES game that they should have all gone to prison for… but it did surprise me that it was actually kinda sorta playable. Oh, here’s the soundtrack if you want it… it’s not really good or bad, but the loops are kind of short so it doesn’t make for great active listening.

Fright Night (Microdeal, 1988)

System: Amiga

I had taken a few glimpses at this one, but knew I’d want to save talking about it until October.

ＡＭＩＧＡ ＨＡＵＮＴＳ ＭＹ ＤＲＥＡＭＳ

On the one hand, Amiga machines had relatively rich graphics and sound compared to their well-known rivals in the PC market; on the other, I literally never knew one fucking person who owned an Amiga rig until I was in college and met a dude who collected vintage computers. Much like we saw in the X68000 article, a good portion of developers for the Amiga were small-scale or in-house programmers. However, Microdeal was kind of a big deal back in the 1980s-era computer scene. They had earned their stripes writing an impressive library of software for the Tandy CoCo and the British-domestic Dragon 32. As the eternal boxing match went from 8 to 16 bits, Microdeal divided its efforts between adapting its old games for the newer sets and throwing some new stuff out. The latter was a bit more profitable for them, but to make a long story short, they cashed in their chips in the 90s.

But before nailing the coffin shut, they did produce a really interesting game based off the kick-ass 1985 film Fright Night. In a rare (but not unique) twist, you play not as the unlikely hero Charlie Brewster, but as the suave yet monstrous Jerry Dandridge. Jerry prowls his home nightly, killing two birds with one stone as he cleans his domain of pesky vampire-hunters… getting himself a nice multi-course supper in the process. Another example of a 3-year delay on cashing in, this game is a far better product than Beetlejuice for the NES in so many ways that we won’t even get into it.

YOU’RE SO COOL, BREWSTER! Sorry. I’ll see myself out.

I will start with the negative, since it’s really not that overwhelming. The big issue I had with it is that the entire game takes place in Dandridge’s home, and the elements of play really don’t change. Your goals, environment, abilities, and even your victims remain static… it seems almost as if the Fright Night universe gets stuck in some bullshit Dr. Who style time bubble as you kill the same 3-4 people over and over again while prowling the same set of rooms. The monotony is occasionally broken by Dandridge’s unsafe working conditions; there are hands in the floor, and sometimes a tit-ghost will cross paths with you while you’re on the hunt. Occupational hazards of being an undead sex machine, I guess. Despite all, the game is still fun… at least while its shelf life holds up before you get bored of the limited breadth of experience.

Jerry looks embarrassed, but not repentant. Listen dude, maybe if you stopped murdering women and drinking their blood in your house, you wouldn’t have to deal with Jolly Green Tragedies floating around in your hallway.

The graphics are mind-blowing when compared with similar systems of the time period. Jerry’s house is richly appointed and rendered in great detail. I especially dig the wall portraits; Jerry shows pride in his heritage by littering his walls with framed pics of his fellow nightmare creatures. The characters are also well-drawn and their animated reactions to the snarling vampire’s entrance make for some pretty good shit. The game, not unlike the film, has a sense of humor about itself. While the soundtrack can best (and most politely) described as minimalist, the digitized sound contrasts it as another redeeming quality.

I’ll throw Fright Night for the Amiga 6/10. It’s well-produced, bears lush detail, and only falters slightly due to its narrow gameplay style.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (Advanced Communication Co./Bandai, 1988)

System: NES

Sometimes, within the first five minutes of playing a game, you can tell that the men and women responsible for the actual product had far less enthusiasm than the marketing/licensing people who sent out the memo.

“Just… okay, look, Ron. We need to have a goddamn title screen. Trust me, I want done with this as much as you do. You know what’d work? Some heinously curled lettering and… a green monster hand. Just like in the book!”

Let’s talk about the red flags clearly visible in this spiritually numbing jug of cold piss they tried to pass off as a game. Is it based on the 1886 literary horror classic? Uh… it has the same titular character(s). Otherwise, it’s not a story or game… it’s some kind of artistic statement centered around obliterating the dignity and willpower of the hapless player who fumbles into it.

Yeah, one of the obstacles in Dr. Jekyll’s path to wedded bliss is a fat woman in a Franciscan robe who sings at you, and the music notes hurt you. How tongue-in-cheek, how avante-garde, how… revolutionary, to depict a classic piece of early horror literature in the style of Tom & Jerry.

First off, take a look at those graphics. You know what they remind me of, in their style (read: lack thereof)? Those rinky-dink unlicensed Bible-themed and Chinese pirate-published carts that are still mentioned readily by NES fans as possible proof that cutthroat capitalism can put people who are competent at programming into a sweatshop-style environment. Just like Bible Buffet and Grand Dad, this game palpably reeks of the woe inherent in its origin. I bet if you pressed one ear to the cart like a conch shell, you could hear the baleful moaning and the rattling chains. Let’s have it writ plain: IT’S VERY CLEAR THAT THIS NES GAME WAS NOT CRAFTED BY MINDS ONE COULD DESCRIBE AS HAPPY.

The developers did have a pretty innovative idea for continuing the saga of two men in one man: You play as Jekyll, who is on his way to his wedding, on foot. The problem with this plan is that apparently every single man and beast along his route sees Henry Jekyll as a mortal foe who must be viciously murdered at all costs. Every injury not only reduces your vitality but also increases your “Anger Meter.” You know what, if I couldn’t even walk to the church in my hometown without being bitten/shit on/disintegrated by casually-dropped spherical black cartoon bombs… I’d be pissed to. I’d have a “meter.”

If your Anger fills to 100%, you transform into the Incre…. I mean, Mr. Hyde. Inexplicably, this also turns day to night instantly and transmutes your mundane earthly assailants into supernatural monsters, too. You know what you have to do to escape this shadowy realm and turn back into poor Dr. Jekyll?

YOU HAVE TO BRUTALLY KILL EVERY LIVING THING YOU SEE.

Yeah, that’s Hyde on the right-hand side of this dime-store Ninja Gaiden shit. I don’t know what that other thing is. Some kind of ninja fairy with an apocalyptic trumpet. DON’T EVER DO THIS AGAIN BANDAI DO YOU HEAR ME

Doing so reduces your Anger… and when it’s empty, you’re Henry again, and you can keep walking to your wedding, as well as increasingly absurd situations wherein your death or loss of self become constant risks.

This all sounds cool on the surface (despite being more of a Bruce Banner meets Jules Verne thing than any kind of faithful follow-up to the original tale). When you actually PLAY this shit, the cool factor nose-dives and crashes into your soul. I’ve already mentioned that the boxy, sloppy, unimaginative visuals hang heavy. The sound throws a curveball at you by somehow being expertly done and simultaneously being the single most ghastly sensory offense present during play. When the dogs bark, they don’t sound like dogs; the digitized snippet sounds distinctly like a very large man yelling “BIP” at you in the same tone of voice you’d use to caution a child not to touch the stove. There is a bird in the graveyard who constantly strafes back and forth over you, peppering you with what appear to be pre-coiled mounds of brown, non-bird shit. Every time it pulls the trigger on its abomination of an anus, the sound effect sounds like someone petulantly shouting “NOOOOO” through a maxed-out auto-wah pedal off some shoegaze guitarist’s setup. Jekyll & Hyde made me profoundly grateful that NES games do not convey olfactory, tactile, or gustatory stimuli. Who even knows what you’d feel, smell, and taste when you pressed Start on this abusively foul program.

And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great. Revelation 19:17-18 That’s definitely just generic cartoon dookie. I never thought cartoon poop would be a sign of the End Times. C’est la vie.

Here’s my parting shot: if I were Jekyll in this game, I’d be postponing the wedding and re-planning it somewhere I didn’t have to play The Running Man to just arrive. It seems like an awfully long distance to walk, with or without the poop-birds, bip-dogs, and dapper bowler-wearing arsonists.

Jekyll & Hyde gets 2/10. This game was like non-consensual hardcore S&M with me as the bottom. The only difference was, instead of getting my balls crushed or my nipples obliterated, this game went straight for my spirit and wrenched me into a state of ego death. And real talk: just the sound the turd pelican makes has me convinced that dead people can see ME while I play it. Bandai, how can you normally be so decent and crisp and clean, then offhandedly hurl a hex like this on the world? What would Kamen Rider think?

Via con diablos, Fright Fans. One more gruesome article coming up before All Hallow’s Eve… Have fun and check your apples for razors.

It’s time for us to cross the streams, true believers.

There’s a lot of talk about comics here on NRW, and rightly so. Joey has his own awesome strand of articles wherein he sheds light on the old and exposes us to the retro-new, and we love it, because Joey is to the medium of comics what I am to sitting on my ass in front of a CRT monitor with a controller in my hand: he’s a passionate expert on the subject. It’s worth diving into; when done well, the comic book or graphic novel is an art form capable of deftly transporting the reader to new worlds – some like our own, and some realities away from it.

What can’t be overlooked is how the comic book multiverse has been thrust into the colored-light beams and binary rows of the VG grinder time and time again in the plodding quest to juice franchises for more revenue. Here’s the dolorous stroke, folks: We’re going to take a look at how they’ve done this with one of Marvel’s undisputed icons, their bread-and-butter household name… Spider-Man. Peter Parker, the world’s most beloved wise-cracking web slinger, has been dipped in silicon and code frequently throughout video gaming’s history, with results that I will be kind and describe as “varied.”

I mean, he’s an icon. Some comics fans think he’s a pussy. Honestly, I do too. I’m more of a Punisher guy. No one can deny, however, that Peter Parker is one of the most luminous stars in comic book history. (Artwork by Michael Golden)

Everyone’s pretty familiar with Spidey’s origins and powers. He got bit by a radioactive spider, got some powers, lost his uncle to crime, and got serious about cleaning up the Big Apple (and sometimes beyond). The wall-crawler has made tons of friends and enemies since his appearance in the 60s, from goblins to murderous hunters to symbiotic aliens that abandoned him and sought out his unstable and disgruntled colleagues for revenge (Venom is the man!) Pete’s powers, coupled with his nifty web-shooting devices, make for the possibility of great dynamic gameplay if translated creatively into digital form. Right?

Ah, shit, kids… let’s just do this. I’m not gonna look at every game, but we’ll examine the prominent titles that most of us may have seen or played.

Spider-Man (1982)

Platform: Atari 2600

Culprits: Parker Brothers/Atari

Eh. It’s not great, but everything looked like this in 1982. At least we can tell which one’s Spider-Man.

You’ll probably expect me to be cruel here, because I do lean on the side of bastardry when it comes to the 2600. I mean… eh. Let’s stay in context… this isn’t bad for a 2600 game. Considering the limits of the system graphics- and sound-wise, you get a good representation of the key elements. Gameplay consists of getting up on top of the building and kicking Green Goblin’s ass, which to be fair, ate up a lot of Peter’s logged superhero hours in the 70s/80s either together or as separate activities. Using your web shooters is a little tedious, but once you’ve got the hang of how to do it in a rhythm and pull yourself up, it’s pretty fun. I suppose my only knock on this one is that it’s not enough to do. But then, not every 2600 game can be Burgertime and crush your soul with raw chaos.

The Amazing Spider-Man (1990)

Platforms: Amiga, Atari ST, PC Compatibles

Culprits: Oxford Digital/Paragon Software

Let me start off with something nice before I put my hands under the table and fucking lift. The Amiga has always stood out for its time as a system capable of audiovisual richness, and this game really turns her out. The ST and PC versions are decent in that regard too, although the audio quality varies.

“Shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level!”  I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself.

Now, let’s talk about HOW they chose to turn her out. The controls are pretty fucking far from intuitive; while I expect translating Spider-Man’s iconic means of locomotion to be a challenge for a game developer, this shit is just abyss you’ll keep falling into until you start being meticulously careful… which isn’t prudent in 90% of the situations you’ll be navigating. Move fast? Move really carefully? The answer to both is usually no. Again, I can’t knock the graphics, but there’s something inherently wrong about this image, seen during the intro. Something that reminds me of “non-Euclidean shapes,” “lightless gulfs across time and space,” and “red-haired woman being forcibly abducted by a fishbowl-headed mannequin.” Poor Mary Jane.

somebodys_fetish.jpg

Almost as bizarre is the choice to represent your life bar as a picture of Spider-Man that turns skeletal from the feet upward as you move closer to death.

He looks a little embarrassed. I don’t blame him.

Last gripe: the game is, at least to me, unreasonably goddamn long considering the tedium it is to play. You can watch a longplay here, and be sure to listen to the entire intro music, or at least sit through it for as long as you can before reaching for that little red track-bar to skip through it and save your sanity.

Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six (1992)

Platforms: NES, Game Gear, Master System

Culprits: LJN (OF COURSE), Flying Edge, Bits Studios

This game is mercifully short, but still feels like being hurled into a black hole and somehow kept alive to slowly lose one’s mind via time dilation. Spider-Man, despite being fully human height, has the same general proportions as Wee Man from Jackass. His ability to leap through the air is admirable, and the controls aren’t too bad… until you try to do any of the shit Spider-Man is known for doing in terms of movement. The graphics are candy-colored palettes of pure hell wherein men are depicted universally as shoeless mongoloids and no light seems to penetrate anything (despite the garish coloration of everything).

It’s like Willy Wonka took a massive shit all over everything, and really wasn’t feeling well when he did. I bumble forth, capable of great feats of agility but barely able to keep my goose neck from dropping my pumpkin head onto my barrel chest. As Spider-Man, I am the monster, and I belong here.

A small handful of farty, tooty pieces of music cycle as you penetrate deeper into the Sinister Six’s criminal kingdom, presenting a strange yet totally-LJN mix of jazzy swing and “I ate so many tabs I can’t even tell what genre this is.” The drums punch at the listener’s mind, almost as if they are intended to pummel you into accepting the rest of this musical affront as tolerable. It’s like a rave in a Civil War graveyard, and someone invited Dizzy Gillespie. Actually, fuck that… that’d rule. This doesn’t.

Again, I can’t flush this game completely; it’s a decent effort overall, but LJN had a tendency (with a scant few exceptions) to attach its name to something and then pile drive it into the floor until no amount of reconstructive surgery could fix it.

Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage (1994)

Platforms: Genesis. SNES

Culprits: LJN, Acclaim, Software Creations

We’re ending on a positive note. We have to. We owe it to ourselves.

I really liked the Maximum Carnage story arc in the comics. It’s held high by some and shit on by others, but there’s something about a villain so terrifying that two bitter enemies (not to mention a wild cross section of Marvel’s 90s line-up) combined forces to defeat him as he rampaged across New York with his own wrecking crew. I love big events, and I LOVE villains. And Carnage… well, he’s one burning hell of a villain.

Really, if anyone deserves this shit, it’s JJ. 

This effort did decent justice to the source material. I’ll keep this simple and just tick off some pros and cons.

PROS

-Venom is a playable character

-Morbius shows up, along with Deathlok, Black Cat, Iron Fist, and a few other underrated Marvel good guys

-it’s a beat-em-up, and not a bad one, either

-comic book style cut scenes, and they’re not done poorly

–pretty damn good music

-LJN didn’t set this one on fire and stand back playing pocket pool while it burned to slag

Really cool audio-visual presentation all around. It keeps true to the comic feel without burning that candle at both ends with a welding torch.

CONS

-The music did not sound as good in the Genesis version

-This game is also long; why the hell does Spider-Man mean “long fucking game” almost uniformly to game designers

-It’s incredibly unfair to put bad-ass characters like Black Cat, Iron Fist and Morbius in here and not have them as full-on playables

-I feel like a lot of the villains get undersold in terms of their powers and badass-ness

-Still, to make an understatement, a bit fucking cumbersome to do the web slinging thing, although it must be acknowledged that it’s better in this than in any predecessor

Overall, Maximum Carnage is fun as hell. I owned the Genesis cart as a kid and got a lot of replay value out of it. It’s a net win due to presentation and the choice of formatting it as a beat-em-up, which makes it approachable on a level far beyond its ancestors in Spidey’s video game library.

That brings us to 1994, folks, so I guess I’ll put the brakes on it here. Thanks for reading, and before I go, I suppose I owe you some number ratings on these hunks of pop media history.

Atari 2600: 6/10

Amiga: 5/10

NES: 3/10

Genesis/SNES: 7/10

See you at the end of the month, RetroFans! Excelsior!!!

The Nintendo Entertainment System hit US shores in 1985. It wasn’t just a success, it became its own little matte-gray pop culture icon. From 1985-87 was arguably its glory era; it had no meaningful competition outside its native Japan, well over half the market’s share in hand (65% by ’87), and Nintendo was such a household name that moms would often just call any game console a Nintendo when referring to it.

1989 saw NEC try to sell its PC-Engine in the States under the name TurboGrafx-16, and that same year Sega followed suit with their Mega Drive. As the 90s went on, these new threats were headed off by Nintendo’s own next-gen system, the SNES. The NES just kind of puttered in the background.

The Nintendo Entertainment System died a slow and quiet death… but during that death, they kept developing games for it. It is needless to say that quality control (or even interest in it) flagged a little. By 1992, with the big consoles taking shit to the street, the NES got a moderate to slow trickle of pretty terrible games with a few acceptable ones thrown in. This would continue until August of 1994, when Wario’s Woods – the last game released for the NES – hit shelves. In 1995 they finally did the NES a favor and gave it the Old Yeller treatment.

You’ll notice that all of these are titles that were released for multiple platforms. That means a version of each game exists that’s actually closer to good. Or at least, less shitty.

RoboCop 3

(Ocean/Probe, 1992)

I’m about to say a few things it almost physically hurts me to say.

They should not have done any RoboCop sequels. The second one was watchable but the third has a 3% rating on Rotten Tomatoes as we speak. They definitely should not have made 3. You know what else they shouldn’t have done? Taken a film that made $10m on a $22m budget and tried to make an NES game out of it in 1992.

The title screen has RoboCop cradling a small child on one shoulder; both he and the child are brandishing guns. Where the hell are we going with this? When I saw it, I was speechless. Where does this leave us?

Well, it leaves RoboCop on a Detroit street getting the shit shot out of him by guys in windows because it takes you two very deliberate actions to aim upward. Different parts of his body take damage and can stop working, so it’s entirely possible to just lose control of RoboCop in the least rock-n-roll way possible. The controls are about as fluid as smashing a compact car into a sturdy brick wall. Don’t try to duck while shooting or aim your gun quickly or really anything a real cop could do, let alone RoboCop. I’d even say the graphics are okay but they’re not.

Last Action Hero

(Teeny Weeny/Sony Imagesoft, 1993)

He isn’t last action anything. He isn’t even action anything. Not in this game, anyway. Maybe in the movie where shit just works. I’m not gonna sit here and say I remember or even saw the movie, but if this is the game we got out of it, maybe that’s better off.

My first big complaint about any game where I don’t have some kind of gun: Don’t make my punch, etc. so short-range that I have to choose between pacifism and getting myself hurt. You can’t hit jack shit without getting thumped yourself. You have short, thick little arms no one thought about during development. You also do this odd shuffle when you punch, like you’re trying awkwardly to hug someone. Eventually I figured out how INCREDIBLY PRECISE you must be with those fat little hams, but by then I was tired of playing the game.

AND ENOUGH WITH THIS DIGITIZED PHOTOGRAPHY SHIT. The loss of color depth, especially in a dark shot, will make someone in ¾ profile look like a goofy bird person.

Incredible Crash Dummies

(LJN, 1994)

Here’s a huge low-res image because people hated this one so much I couldn’t even find a decent scan.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. One thing I simply ADORE is how you keep moving for a second after you release the D-pad. What, the Mario 3 ice world effect, but forever? Awesome! Also, the very first level is full of situations where your little wheel-leg is a liability: inclines, little segmented areas, and things that will hit you if you don’t stop on a dime. Which you can’t.

I understand the SNES version of this one isn’t much better, which doesn’t surprise me. The NES one is difficult past the point of fun, that point where you just have to know you’re abusing yourself by playing it. Then your eyes meet this symbol of quality the very second you turn it on… and it all makes sense.

Well fuck you, too.

It’s a shame the NES died this way.  

We’ve been over the coals with LJN before. Not just me. Everyone has. I’m far from the first hack to put his fingers on a keyboard and write about this stuff, and it’s been established that 1) LJN games mostly sucked but 2) a couple of them didn’t. Well, these three sure do. All were released in 1989, seemingly to contrast tons of great NES titles released that year, before, and after. In fact, it seems as if LJN’s very purpose for a span of years was to produce terrible licensed games for any intellectual property they could wrangle.

I did not have to narrow this article down to three games. Out of mercy, I chose to.

Back To The Future (NES)

LJN/Beam Software, 1989

We all hoped this would be good, right? I mean, the 1985 film is undeniably one of the best things to have come out of the 80s, period. How can you screw this up?

Apparently the quick answer to that is, “let LJN handle it.”

When we turn our NES on, we’re greeted by a short, repetitive, and spiritually empty loop of music. Get used to this, because unless you mute your TV, it’s what you’ll be hearing for a while. The introductory level consists of a town street which, with or without you, moves forward at a steady pace. Everyone and everything on this street wants to hurt you, and that isn’t hard. Like, don’t even touch a fence or a bench. Marty’s pretty fragile. If you ever make it past this first stage, there’s a handful of others that are pretty much the same, broken up by a series of mini-games. Where have I heard that music before? Oh, that’s right, EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE GAME, FROM THE MOMENT I TURNED ON THE NES.

The world is a living hell no matter where you are in time.

Now, I understand the concept of making a game difficult so as to give it good replay value. No one wants a cake walk, especially not at the price point an NES cart sold for back then ($30-40 new). However, if you make it stupidly difficult AND have it look and sound like crap, people will feel like you stole that $30-40 from them and stuck a turd in their pocket as “collateral.” The combined elements of this game make it a capital offense. The graphics look more at home on a console from the previous generation, there are minimal sound effects (except for that AWESOME F*CKING MUSIC THAT PLAYS ON LOOP FOREVER), and it’s really hard to get into what you’re doing when a bench can kill you. The only saving graces are the diner and guitar mini-games, if you can make it to them.

LOOK GUYS IT’S JUST LIKE THE MOVIE

X-Men (NES)

LJN/Pixel, 1989

This time we’ve got a reliably cool and popular comic license, one that would later translate itself fairly well onto 16-bit systems and the arcade platform. This one writes itself; just get a good set of programmers and artists on it, and we’ll be golden, right?

Instead we got this weird top-down mess. More laughable art that seems to mock the characters represented more than anything else. We’ve got marginally better music than the previous title (in fact, the menu music is downright grooveworthy) but more Pong-style sound effects. Level design seems random and meandering; in fact, one could argue that the levels were just pieced together. Imaginative design also led to enemies like giant springs with googly eyes. It often seems like LJN had a sort of bland contempt for video game consumers. “You’ll buy anything.”

Well, that may have been true, and arguably still is today, but that’s beside the point.

Two-player action is easily ground to a halt by the fact that the characters move at very different speeds; it is, in fact, possible to get the slower character trapped behind something irrevocably, effectively killing the game. There’s also a set of clues combining things you learn from the game with information on the cartridge itself, and these clues are supposed to help unlock the final level. Enough with that kind of arcane bullshit, we all played Simon’s Quest and we had to buy that issue of Nintendo Power to get anywhere. Thankfully, Konami produced the X-Men arcade title and Sega handled the Genesis game.

Friday the 13th (NES)

LJN/Atlus, 1989

I will start with something positive: the title screen kicks ass.

Unfortunately, that’s where the ass-kicking ends, unless it’s Jason kicking kids’ asses off-screen while you try and fail to navigate your way to where it’s happening.

Oh, good. I’ll only have to look at this five or six thousand times every few minutes to find out I’ve gone halfway in the wrong direction.

The biggest issue most players have with this one is the absolutely counter-intuitive map interface. Think you’re going the right way? Better check… SURPRISE, YOU’RE NOT. Meanwhile, that car-horn sound you keep hearing? The one that seems to match up with the number of kids slowly decreasing? That’s Jason Voorhees, going nuts with a machete in a cabin on the other side of the camp. You’d like to get there in time to stop him, wouldn’t you? Tough shit. Don’t worry, though. Jason occasionally takes time out from frenzied streaks of infanticide to personally murder you at random. He is pretty much invincible until you achieve a bunch of stuff later in the game (while simultaneously keeping him from killing kids). In his absence, you’re accosted by waves of nondescript zombies, because LJN is all about phoning it in when it comes to details.

You like repetitive music loops, right? Because, while the instrumentation has gotten a little richer, the composition surely hasn’t. In fact, the music when you’re outside is probably even shorter and more annoying than the main theme from the Back to the Future game. Have fun listening to it while you get lost in the woods, looking for stuff you need in order to finish this game. At least here, you can throw away all pretense of the map being useful, because it does jack shit for you.

But hey, if you’re that committed to finishing this game, that’s your problem, not mine. You might want to get your head examined.

I’ll eventually get the wind up to talk down some more terrible games, but goodbye for now, RetroFans. See you in September for more articles and videos!

 

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2016/08/29/hall-of-shame-ljn-1989/feed/ 0 https://newretrowave.com/2016/05/12/the-uncanny-x-men-1989/ https://newretrowave.com/2016/05/12/the-uncanny-x-men-1989/#respond Thu, 12 May 2016 14:40:32 +0000 http://new-retro-wave.com/2016/05/12/2016512the-uncanny-x-men-1989/ With X-Men: Apocalypse headed to theaters later this month to continue the most prolific franchise in superhero cinema, now seems to be a good time to look back at the history of the X-Men heroes in gaming.

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With X-Men: Apocalypse headed to theaters later this month to continue the most prolific franchise in superhero cinema, now seems to be a good time to look back at the history of the X-Men heroes in gaming. As one of the most consistently popular strains of superhero comics, X-Men stories have actually inspired gaming releases for decades, beginning with a series of early console and arcade titles. 

The releases continue to today, and in fact come out on so many different gaming platforms that one can’t help but be impressed by the popularity of X-Men games. For instance, Gigataur Corp‘s collection of app games grew to include Uncanny X-Men: Days Of Future Past just last fall. It’s a take on some older X-Men arcade games with a storyline that loosely mimics the most recent X-Men film X-Men: Days Of Future Past, and offers a wide range of relevant characters for players to embody.

The X-Men have also gained a place in online casino gaming over the years, in the form of a few different but similar titles. Gambling.com’s page on these games shows a collection of nine X-Men characters on one title’s covers, and describes the game in which these characters essentially take over a slot reel. There are a few fun bonus features but the main thrill is simply playing a slot machine that’s been transformed into an X-Men exhibition. 

Examples like these demonstrate how X-Men gaming has moved into new formats, to say nothing of the characters’ continued appearances in console games. But the point here is that none of these games would exist had it not been for the popularity and excellence of some of the earlier titles, which now fit neatly into the retro category. And the first of those titles is still one of the best. 

The original Uncanny X-Men was developed for NES by the LJN gaming company. LJN gets a lot of criticism in retrospect, despite being succeeded by Acclaim Entertainment (which put out some pretty popular titles). But The Uncanny X-Men was a pretty fun arcade experience for its time. 

It was essentially a vertically scrolling dungeon crawler that instead of using an invented fantasy realm or batch of characters used the X-Men. Players could choose to control any one of six X-Men heroes: Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Iceman. Two-player co-op play was also an option (given the two controllers on the NES), but even if you played solo there would be an AI partner fighting through levels alongside you. 

The goal of the game was simply to battle through dungeon-like levels full of villainous creatures and other obstacles, ultimately making your way to a boss villain. There were five levels and five accompanying villains: Boomerang, Sabretooth, Juggernaut, The White Queen, and Magneto. Additionally, once the regular game was beaten, players could enter a special sequence on the control pad to access a sixth level in which Magneto was again the boss.

Like many impactful retro games, it now seems dated, and in particular the animations of characters are a bit of a letdown. Though the game provides each hero with an individual set of attacks (including a special that could only be used so often), the images of the characters didn’t do a whole lot to bring them to life. Still, as an old arcade dungeon crawler it was an enjoyable game packed with fun challenges and a variety of satisfying boss fights. And its legacy as the first major X-Men game to get off the ground looks more significant with each passing year. 

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2016/05/12/the-uncanny-x-men-1989/feed/ 0 https://newretrowave.com/2015/11/16/wwf-royal-rumble-sculptured-softwareljn-1993/ https://newretrowave.com/2015/11/16/wwf-royal-rumble-sculptured-softwareljn-1993/#respond Mon, 16 Nov 2015 05:43:44 +0000 http://new-retro-wave.com/2015/11/16/20151116wwf-royal-rumble-sculptured-softwareljn-1993/

For tonight’s main event, I present one of my favorite sports games! Well, “sports entertainment” games, anyway.

If you’ve been a longtime reader of our site, then you may know that one of my guilty pleasures is classic pro wrestling, particularly from the mid 70s to the mid 90s. In the 80s and early 90s, the WWF was a parade of colorful, wild characters, and they seemed to live in their own self-contained realm. It was a world of impossible possibilities. The sports entertainment industry was engaged in a cold war during this era, which peaked during the Monday Night Wars (so called because WWF and WCW’s flagship shows both aired on Monday nights and thus competed for ratings). You may not know anything about that, and you may not even care. I respect that. However, if you played video games in the early 90s, you probably at least shook hands with WWF Royal Rumble on your Genesis or SNES.

SNES box art.

Box art for the Genesis version.

Royal Rumble is named after the popular event held every January by what is now known as the WWE. Unlike a typical pro wrestling match (two wrestlers or two tag teams competing to pin one another for a 3 count), the Rumble is an event that can include up to 40 (but usually 20-30) wrestlers. A wrestler is eliminated if he goes over the top rope for any reason. This general idea existed before, but it had every single wrestler in the ring as the match began… and made for one big visual clusterfuck for the fans. Longtime WWF employee Pat Patterson came up with the idea of having two wrestlers start off, then having new grapplers enter the ring at timed intervals. This allowed for a longer-lasting and more exciting product.

Magazine ad for the SNES game. It hit the shelves a couple months before the Genesis version.

This same excitement carries over pretty well into the video game, which was released for both the Genesis/Mega Drive and the SNES. It was developed by Sculptured Software, a company that later assimilated into Acclaim. LJN published the game for both systems. While LJN is well-known among retro gamers as an infamous peddler of turd sandwiches (if you want an example, check out their NES cartridge for Back to the Future), they kept their hands off the nuts & bolts of this one. Royal Rumble is actually the middle game of a sort of trilogy; 1992’s Super Wrestlemania is a more basic version and a prequel, while WWF Raw came along in 1994 with a bit more detail and an updated roster. Ultimately, I prefer Royal Rumble. It captures most of the wrestlers I remember from the television shows, and it’s a good compromise between simplicity and innovative play design.

The game features 12 WWF Superstars, five of which depend on what console you use to rumble. Much like the Soul Calibur series features console-specific characters for today’s gamers, your roster in Royal Rumble was different if you were playing on a Genesis. If you were a Hulk Hogan fan, you wanted that version. If, like me, wanted to style and profile with Ric Flair, you went with the SNES version.  Both versions featured the big WWF names of the time: Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Razor Ramon, Lex Luger (known at that time as The Narcissist), Bam Bam Bigelow, Crush, and the immortal Macho Man Randy Savage. The SNES-specific roster was filled out by Flair, Tatanka, sumo villain Yokozuna, Mr. Perfect, and the Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase. The Genesis swaps those out for IRS (yes, a gimmick villain who works for the Internal Revenue Service), Rick Martel (The Model),  a voodoo-themed guy named Papa Shango, and my personal favorite when I was a kid, Hacksaw Jim Duggan.

The complete roster for both versions. Top row, left to right: Bret Hart, Crush, Hulk Hogan, IRS, Jim Duggan, Lex Luger (Narcissist). Second row: Mr. Perfect, Papa Shango, Randy Savage, Razor Ramon, Ric Flair (WOOOOOO), Rick Martel (The Model). Bottom: Shawn Michaels, Tatanka, Ted DiBiase, Undertaker, Yokozuna.

Players can pick their favorite wrestlers and step into the squared circle with a friend or the CPU. Singles, tag teams, even three-man tag… you can do it all in exhibitions or tournaments, and the “brawl” game type allows you to duke it out with no referee and no holds barred! You can go for the belts that way, or you can select a grappler and go for the ultimate prize… winner of the Royal Rumble itself. The controls take a minute to figure out when you first sit down and plug this game in, but once you’ve got them, you’ve got them. Every wrestler has the same punches and kicks, and can run the ropes and “lock up” with an opponent using other buttons. There’s not a lot of complex combos or anything, which is nice if you like a break from other fighting games. Once you’ve locked up, pick a button and tap it as fast as you can to overpower your foe and hurl him to the mat with any of several moves. Wrestling fans will recognize the suplexes, body slams, and hip tosses they all know and love, and if these are used cleverly, you can even hurl the other guy out of the ring like a sack of potatoes. When you’re out there (or if you manage to conk out the ref for a minute), you can do some underhanded moves like choke your opponent or even thumb his eye. All participants in a match have “life bars” that represent how much damage and abuse they can handle before they’re all out of gas and the fight has left them. In “brawl” matches, the loser is the first one to lose all his meter, while all it does in refereed matches or the Rumble is make you tired and easier to pin or throw out. Finally, every wrestler has his own special move, just like the “real” thing! All of them are activated by pressing the R button (SNES) or the A+B buttons (Genesis, although if you had the 6 button pad you could press X). The moves require your foe to be beaten all the way down, or close to it, and each wrestler has to stand in a specific place or have things set up right to make it happen. For instance, Randy Savage’s famous elbow drop can only be done off the turnbuckle while your foe is prone nearby, and Ric Flair’s signature Figure Four requires you to press the button while standing at a prone opponent’s feet.

Gallery

The graphics for both versions are fairly good, although the SNES version looks slightly more polished. The sound effects are comical, involving a lot of grunts and moans of pain. They don’t vary from character to character. The music is comprised mainly of the wrestlers’ entrance themes; otherwise, there is no music while you sweat and bleed under the lights. There is only the monotone howling of the virtual crowd. I will say that while the SNES’s music will always sound goofy and “fluffy” to me, both versions do a good job of representing the actual pieces of music.

Odds are, you played this game (And maybe even liked it) even if you weren’t a fan of WWF or wrestling. I was a fan, and I loved it. I give Royal Rumble 7 out of 10. It’s a fun, easy-to-learn game with very adjustable difficulty, and it offers a lot of choices and control to the player. It’s not a legend or a must-have title, but I often see it underrated by others who review retro games.

Stay tuned, RetroManiacs! More action at the end of the month. 

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2015/11/16/wwf-royal-rumble-sculptured-softwareljn-1993/feed/ 0 https://newretrowave.com/2015/10/07/a-nightmare-on-elm-street-rareljn-1990/ https://newretrowave.com/2015/10/07/a-nightmare-on-elm-street-rareljn-1990/#respond Wed, 07 Oct 2015 15:48:43 +0000 http://new-retro-wave.com/2015/10/07/2015107a-nightmare-on-elm-street-rareljn-1990/

To kick off this month’s series of game reviews, we’re headed back the NES to look at one of my personal favorites. It’s a game I consider to be underrated, and it stars one of horror’s contemporary icons… Freddy Krueger.

Released in October 1990, Nightmare on Elm Street was one of the first notable titles for the NES to take advantage of its blossoming 4-player capability, using the Four Score or Satellite peripheral devices to connect four controllers to the console and allow up to four separate players to enjoy the action. While this aspect of the game has its ups and downs, Nightmare is actually a pretty solid platform style title. It gets a bad rap because it was published by LJN, who were notorious for squirting out turd after turd for the NES. However, the actual game itself was developed by Rare, the same company that went on to make Battletoads and other incredible games for the NES and other systems. When played with 1 or 2 players, Nightmare isn’t too different from what you’d expect… but remember, in the dream world, nothing is exactly as it seems.

An ad, I believe from a comic book. The photo here is actually from promo material for the fourth film, which is one of the shittiest, written during a Screenwriter’s Guild strike. A little trivia for you.

The storyline is actually a bare-bones version of the plot for NoES 3: Dream Warriors, which is maybe the best of the original run of films. Freddy is killing teens in their dreams, and no one can stop him but you. To put the razor-fingered maniac in Hell where he belongs, you must gather all of his bones (which, in a startling attempt at realism, look exactly like cartoon dog bones) and burn them in his boiler room in the high school. The undead murderer doesn’t plan on making this easy for you, even when you’re wide awake; he’s somehow recruited zombies, wolves, and all manner of other baddies to head you off at the pass. You can drift into the dream world during gameplay, however, and that’s got its own pros and cons. On the upside, when you’re dreaming, you can use tokens you found while awake to transform into one of three forms: a wizard, acrobat, or ninja. Unfortunately, Freddy can do all kinds of crazy shit to give you a headache in the dream world, including paying you a personal visit. Not to mention that all the normal bad guys mutate and become much tougher, making getting around a little more challenging than it already was. If you want to stay awake and just use your fists, picking up coffee will help you keep going. While in the dream world, you can also find a boom box that jars you awake and returns things to normal. This whole duality adds an interesting element to the game by allowing you a little bit of choice: do you engage Freddy Krueger on his terms or yours, going for a pitched-up fight or a slower, more cautious approach?

Just like on TV, dream sequences are accompanied by wavy gravy time.

NES enthusiasts have mixed feelings on Nightmare’s gameplay experience. I find the controls to be responsive and the difficulty to be somewhere around “moderate.” It’s got a lot of things like spikes and falling rocks (Freddy’s obviously called in a lot of weird favors here), but with patience and a good sense of timing, any competent player can eventually make it through the hard parts. Your basic punch, to be frank, kind of sucks; it’s often better to let yourself fall asleep, turn into the acrobat, and take advantage of his ranged javelin and superior mobility. Most of the enemies just move in set patterns, jumping or shambling in a predictable way. The enemies are goofy as hell, not just because they have nothing to do with the franchise being represented, but because they basically look like stuff you’d see on a cartoon about Dracula. Still, if you can detach yourself from how murdered the authenticity is, the game’s worth playing. Every boss is some interpretation of Freddy, and he can also show up out of nowhere (to some pretty kickass music) if you stay in the dream world too long. The “1, 2, Freddy’s coming for you” music will start to play as a warning, and then this screen pops up to let you know it’s party time:

This form of Freddy isn’t actually that bad, jumping from side to side and taking a good hearty swipe at anyone nearby. If you do get hit by him though, he really lays it in. After all, he IS Freddy.

What really falls short is the multiplayer experience. Because it’s a side-scroller, having four players onscreen can really gum up your progress. It requires a lot of teamwork to keep from screwing each other constantly, getting stuck, or having to backtrack. You also have to remember to pick up every bone. You can blaze right through a whole stage, and then have to go back and look for the one bone you missed… it won’t let you go forward until you do.

The graphics are just okay. I’m not going to spend much time talking about them. It’s pretty easy to tell what’s what, and the background visuals at least match where you are (junkyards, houses, etc.).  The title screen looks pretty good, but even that isn’t anything to write love poems about. The music is pretty good, or at least more memorable. Some of it’s a bit meandering and trite, but Freddy’s music and this level theme are examples of where the soundtrack really shines.

One interesting thing I learned while reading up on this one: the game was originally meant to be very different.  The original plot had you controlling Freddy himself, killing those very same kids trying to burn his bones. A similar approach had failed with the Atari 2600’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre game, and so the idea was revamped before work begun. It is likely there would have been some controversy; killing kids is a shaky foundation for the premise of a video game… that will likely be played by kids.

Promo material for the original game concept. Hell, I’d have played it… but it would have driven my parents crazy.

Overall, I’d give Nightmare on Elm Street 6 out of 10. It’s better than a lot of critics may say, and while the 4 player thing doesn’t fly too well, the game plays no worse than a lot of prominent titles of the time period. Plus, I’ve always loved Freddy. I have the 7 DVD set, t shirts, even the action figure and other collectibles. Krueger is a big part of 80s horror, and if you bought or rented a lot of games, it’s likely you tried this one at least once. I, for one, always thought it was pretty good.

See you mid-month, RetroFiends! *maniacal laughter*

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