This game was a complete unknown to us and we had not heard of it until browsing through the list on Wikipedia. That being said, it was by far the most surprising of the first few games we played, coming off as an updated version of the Atari 2600 game Combat. While I never owned Combat, or an Atari, I still played it a few times at neighbor's houses, and it was one of the best games anyone I knew owned for the Atari, mostly due to having enjoyable two player action. The basic gameplay in Combat and Battle City is simple: you kill other tanks and avoid getting blown up in the process.
Pew pew pew, shooting through the terrain is pretty neat.
Battle City adds the twist (at the cost of alternate vehicles) of being able to destroy terrain, making the levels more flexible and reactive. It also comes with plenty of different levels, ranging from the simple to the slightly less simple. In addition, there is a rudimentary level editor, which is pretty interesting in its own right. This is the the first level editor we've seen, and the earliest one that I am personally aware of. I was not able to find a history of level editors with quick Google search, but I'd love to hear about earlier ones.
Varied terrain and obstacles, and explosions falling off the screen.
The graphics in this game are rudimentary at best. There is nothing horrible about them, and they are quite adequate in all things considered, but they are blocky and nothing looks that nice. There is no real animation to speak of. The sound is similar. Once again though, we were more surprised by the level editor and the general strangeness of this game. Like Ice Climbers, there is no goal, despite the plethora of discrete stages to conquer. You can play the levels in any order you like, and there is no objective beyond "EXTERMINATE." This isn't surprising, but I am looking forward to a day when we can actually "beat" the games we play.
I am always excited for level editors, and then I realize I have no plans.
All of this being said, I'd like to stress how unexpected and surprising the level editor was for us. It is not something I remember from console gaming until the fifth generation of consoles, almost a decade after this release. While it's clear that there were earlier games that had a level editing capabilities on the console, the first that I remember is Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. I was aware of level editors for PC games, especially FPS and RTS ones, but as we grew up in a Macintosh household, most of this was unavailable for us. What I do remember about the THPS2 editor was the disappointment I felt when using it.
We started to write Power-ups and Bickering, but ran out of space on "w."
It's not that the editor was too hard to use, or too complicated, or anything like that. It was the simple fact that I had no idea what I wanted my level to be. To add to that, no ideas came pouring out of me, like I had hoped they would. I was sure that I was going to design an AWESOME TOTALLY RAD MONDO COOL level to skate around in and show off to my friends, but nothing happened. I felt the same absence of creativity when playing with the Battle City editor. Our relative newness to the game, combined with our lack of a plan, resulted in us having no idea what to do with the editor, besides screw around and take the above screen shots. That being said, there is still interest in this game. I present to you, Binary City:
The second game we played, Mario Bros., was by far the most enjoyable game of the first five that we've played. We still haven't hit the era where games are beatable, but just the fact that we do not instantly kill each other is a nice step up from Joust. While I look forward to being able to actually beat a game and be "done" with it, this was still fantastic to play. There are still a lot of weird little things in this game that will change in games over the next few years. For example, there is still no continuing. There is no boss, and you can not change your momentum while in the air. While the inertia in jumping is "realistic," it feels bizarre compared to later control schemes
JUMPUP!!
This game takes place in a Bizarro World version of Mario, where Mario and Luigi have not yet learned how to effectively jump on top of enemies. There are also no mushrooms, flowers, stars, toads, princesses or goombas. Just endless streams of proto-Koopas, flies, and crabs. I am not aware of any explanation of this, nor do I expect one to be forthcoming.
Nothing too bad.
But seriously, this game isn't that hard. Compared to Joust it is a walk in the park, in the sense that we did not needlessly kill each other. There is some awesome teamwork to be had here, in the sense you can bounce an enemy down to your partner and dispatch your foes easily. You can also bounce on each other, although that often comes off as an annoyance more than an asset. There is also competition for getting points, especially during the bonus levels. Points lead to extra lives, and this level competition is fun. The modern age of achievements and multiple game round stat tracking has dulled some of the fun of this; if I do better this round than the last it doesn't reflect anything outside of a development of my own skills.
So many points.
I wish I could say that I don't care about achievements, but thiswouldbe a blatant lie. I love to track my stats from round to round of something like Team Fortress 2, for example. It is an addiction, doubtlessly rooted in my love of baseball statistics growing up. The instant gratification that comes from obsessive stat tracking and watching bars fill up is far too rewarding to want to give up. While I appreciate classic games because of their depth of gameplay derived from simple rules, I do feel a lack of the reward treadmill and ending.
The sheer weirdness of this game is fun though. I like to imagine how this can be fit into the overall Mario "mythos." I like the idea that this is some kind of endless Karmic purgatory. Maybe this is the true final adventure of Mario: there is no end, there is no princess to kiss. Mario has been sent here for a lifetime of killing and destroying countless Koopa and Goomba lives. This is a sisyphean task set before the Mario Bros. by the gods of the underworld. There is no ending in sight, and the task only grows more difficult as Mario fulfills it. If he doesn't fulfill it fast enough, fireballs come out to attack him, until he finishes the current task, only to start once again on a similar, but slightly harder task. Incidentally, this theory explains 90%+ of the games from this era, where things like "endings" or "goals" were non-existent.
Wrap around hell.
This could also be a chronicle of Mario's death. One day, a plumber goes into the sewers to deal with a nascent turtle infestation, and eventually takes a wrong turn and gets lost. As he goes deeper and deeper into the serpentine corridors, the pungent odors start to affect his thinking, and the turtles appear to be the roughly the same size as him. His eyes, deprived of natural light, begin to see red and green fireballs, and the creatures around him take on unnatural hues. As he delves deeper into the pipes, he begins to see oceanic crabs and flies bigger than he is. Eventually, as he stumbles and slides through the labyrinthine passages, he begins to imagine his locomotive difficulties are caused by rapidly forming ice patches. He begins to hallucinate that he has an identical twin, who dresses and moves the same as he does and occasionally gets in his way. There is only one way out of this: death. Death is a sweet release, and leads to the idea that Super Mario Bros. is the reward. Mario, now in some sort of afterlife, is still entranced with dreams of plumbing, but now dreams in bold colors and creates a narrative to structure his life. His hallucinatory twin no longer is seen at the same time, but still exists to follow Mario's footsteps. I would like to think that the rest of the Mario Universe is the plumber's dying dream, a long hallucination after a treacherous and slow death at the hands of hallucinatory fireballs and flies.
Kick off ALL the pests?
Either way, this game, while featuring Mario and having some basic elements of Mario gameplay (jumping, turtles, enough inertia to slide), is also pretty weird and has a lot of things that won't be seen in a Mario game for years (flies, color coded "mad" enemies, crabs). It is the best game that we've played so far, which isn't saying much, but I would gladly play it again without a second thought.
While this may be titled "Game 3," this is actually the first review on the blog. We encountered severe apathy when attempting to play Dungeon and Moria, and perhaps this will change in the future. For now, we are starting off with Joust:
Hal Laboratory shows there used to be no shame in an arcade port.
Joust was originally released for the arcade in 1982, by Williams, and for this review we played the NES release due to technical issues with the original. From what I've read online, despite the 6 year gap in the releases, there are no serious gameplay differences, and we can always come back to the arcade version later when we get it working. I remember renting this game once when I was younger and enjoying it enough not to be mad at picking it, but not enjoying it enough to ever rent it again. Recently, I have had the opportunity to replay it in its arcade glory at Ground Kontrol and it is still painfully easy to die.
Easier said than done.
Joust is really hard. To our modern sensibilities, it feels impossible. We watched the attraction screen that explains the basics, and attempted to start playing. We were killed almost immediately after started, and noted there are no continues or "respawn invincibility," features which we took for granted until playing this. This game also features the contemporary "one-hit kill" style of gameplay. The goal of the game is straight forward: you are a Jouster, and you must kill the other Jousters. When you kill a Jouster, it will hatch an egg that will eventually turn into another Jouster if you do not collect it. There is also friendly fire, making cooperative play a perilous venture.
It starts out simple enough.
The game starts, like other games of the era, deceptively simple. You (and your friend) are represented by a small blue jouster, and there are some green jousters who spawn and then haphazardly float around. If you defeat all of the jousters in a wave, you progress to the next one. Given that this is an arcade game from 1982, none of this is unexpected. Platforms are removed after certain waves, and the lava will be revealed, giving the player less and less "safe" areas to fly in. Additionally, every few levels, a new enemy will appear. These enemies are generally less idiotic, and more likely to fly towards you rather than get killed by the lava. There is also a "bonus" stage where the screen is filled with eggs that need to be collected before spawning enemy jousters. Because we are still able to kill each other during the bonus stage, we split up the level in terms of layers, to avoid the fatal joust.
Points!
One of the biggest challenges we faced in playing this game cooperatively was each other. The very nature of the game's physics and rules made playing cooperatively a detriment rather than an advantage. We continually killed each other without meaning to, and the quickness of death and lack of continue only adds misery to this plight. At one point we realized that we were having more fun killing each other than trying to get through the waves, and we happily explored that venue for a few lives.
The audio in the NES release is sparse and blippy. The title music is a nice fanfare, but the game is mostly quiet. While this is on par for a 1982 arcade release, it feels dated for a 1988 NES release. The same can be said for the graphics.
In the end, we played the game for about an hour before getting too frustrated and moving on. This puts us over our previously stated 30 minute minimum, but we were unable to achieve our secondary goal of seeing all of the enemies or level variations. As a side note, this is the first game we've played that has a bonus stage, Wikipedia informs me that Galagaincluded a bonus stage in the previous year
