Game 7: Ice Climbers (1984)

OK, I'm going to be blunt. I only vaguely remember this game from childhood, and didn't think about it until the Ice Climbers were added to SSBM. I didn't really enjoy this game that much, and we barely played it for the minimum 30 minutes before moving on. There is nothing inherently boring about the game: it is a straight forward arcade style platformer, but it just didn't click for me. The graphics are charming and clean, there is some nice little music and sound, but something is still missing.

It also helps you learn how to count.

To start with, it's boring. You climb up. The title is quite literal in that sense. You are on the inside of a mountain, I guess, and slowly making your way upwards. You can knock out the blocks above you and move up to other platforms, and attack enemies with a mallet. When you reach the top of the stage, you have the chance to get more points in a bonus round in blizzard like conditions. This is significantly harder, but it is the main way to get points in the game. Due to the strict level based structure of the game, there appears to be no use for points, unlike Joust and Mario Bros., where points were used to earn extra lives and get further in the game.

Action shot.

Technically, I can't complain: this game looks great, has the most complex sound we've heard yet, only slightly awkward jumping, and a multitude of levels to choose from. The graphics are honestly fantastic: while there is a certain existential feel (am I between mountains? Are the mountains stacked? what are these numbers?) inherent in mostly older games, the sprites are cute, clean, well animated, and everything else. This game has the best music of anything else we've played. The controls feel right, although the jump parabola isn't ideal and feels clumsy, but nothing serious.The problem is, I just couldn't summon any enthusiasm to play this game. You are able to select which level you want to play when you start, and there are 32 in total, with varying levels of difficulty. I couldn't tell you the difference between them though, even if you held a gun to my head.

This is as boring as it looks.

I understand that this is a classic Nintendo property, but there is nothing here that makes me want to play it again. Maybe there is something magic here that I'm missing, I'd like to hear from someone who truly enjoys this game. Samchez enjoyed it significantly more than me, will hopefully be able to post his thoughts later. This also marks the beginning of a lot of repetitive games that we are going to slog through, on our quest for the shoot 'em up and beat 'em up gems we started this project for.


Maybe some of my ennui comes from the lack of goal in this game. At least in Joust and Mario Bros., while the games are endless and only get harder, you get rewarded with additional lives. I know that, within a few years and not too many more games, we'll start to see things like endings and continues. For now though, we are going to be in the weird abstract pre-narrative era of games.

Wha' Happen?

As all zero of you may have noticed, we disappeared for the last month. Nothing serious was happening besides the usual business of life, such as moving and having guests around. Samchez is currently on the other side of the country visiting friends, and I'll try to fill out the next few games in his absence.

Game 6: Mario Bros. (1983)

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 this would be 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.

Do the Mario!

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.

Game 3: Joust (1982)

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 Galaga included a bonus stage in the previous year

Looking Forward and What's Behind Us

Shadow of the Ninja: great tunes and awesome
gameplay and graphics.

 Looking forward on the list it looks like our first game is going to be Dungeon, followed by Moria and then Joust. I am unfamiliar with the first two games or PLATO, but it looks like cyber1.org will let us check them out to some extent. I'm looking forward to seeing where this project goes, as we move into more familiar territory and get to the games that we grew up with, in one form or another.

The Nintendo was the first console our family owned, and it had a great library for playing with a friend or brother. Although co-op games were rare due to hardware limitations, there were enough memorable ones to start the impetus for creating this blog. While games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game were lacking in audiovisual quality compared to their arcade counterparts, it was always made up for by the fact you didn't have to worry about quarters and stood a chance of progressing in the game. 

And it wasn't just Nintendo games that we played; we went to arcades together, moved on to later consoles, and eventually had our own computers to network. While we played many games competitively, there is still something enjoyable about beating up on the computer.

Hello World

This blog is an attempt to chronicle playing through every game on Wikipedia's List of cooperative video games in chronological order, as far as modern day emulation allows.

In almost all ways, this is inspired by The CRPG Addict. Like Mr. Addict, we will attempt to faithfully attempt and progress in every game on the Wikipedia list, with room for additions. We will limit ourselves primarily to PC, arcade, and console games, generally using the "best" version of the game as determined by our admittedly quick research. We will attempt to complete every game on our list, or at least get bored enough to say why.

So far, are rules as are follows:

1. We follow the Wikipedia list in chronological order when possible. If we find other sources later, we will adapt them to our internal list.

2. Since many of the games are released on a spectrum of systems, we will attempt to play the original version, and make note of other releases as needed.

3. We will limit ourselves to games we are able to get running with modern hardware.

4. While many games are unbeatable (outside of a kill screen or something similar), we will attempt to play games until we've seen the available gameplay or we get bored of them. We are currently setting our limits at around 30 minutes before moving on; this will probably grow as games get more complex.

Stay tuned for upcoming updates!