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Tag: nintendo

  • Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

    Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

    Ok. Deep breath. C:TA is one of Those Games, the particularly notorious kind. I’ve heard people say this is the worst Castlevania game, full stop. Of course it has its defenders – what doesn’t? – but I’ve seen so much bile spewed in this thing’s general direction over the years that I just assumed this game was going to hang out with Marble Madness on The List.

    Spoilers: nah! I thought it was fine. Incredibly uneven and punishing to the point where I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone who doesn’t share my particular strain of brain poison without heavy use of save states, but fine. Its issues are myriad, both design and technical, yet the vision is evident and it almost, sort of, kinda works. It’s an early Game Boy game, is my point.

    In tepid defense of this cart, you’ve got to look at the other games the DMG received in ’89. Beyond Mario Land there wasn’t a hell of a lot of NES-style action to be had on the platform. Konami was going for it, and I respect that! Granted they fucked it up to the point where some of the staff went on to form Treasure so they could make a good video game for a change, but the attempt was made!

    From first impressions alone you’d be forgiven for thinking they nailed it. The sprites look great, the whip feels snappy, and most importantly they managed to cram 80’s Konami music into a Game Boy and it sounds sick. Everyone talks about Battle of the Holy and justifiably so, but my standout was Revenge because I am eternally weak for Alberti bass or any kind of funky arpeggio, especially when I’ve got a whip in hand and a Dracula that owes me money.

    Then you actually start making progress and the cracks begin to affect the property value. Chris Belmont moves exclusively at a tiptoe and is oddly unresponsive aside from the whip button. I found inputs getting eaten upon starting and landing jumps. He also doesn’t know what a subweapon is – this game doesn’t have ’em! Hearts even heal you, which required more of a mental adjustment than I care to admit. Instead you pick up orbs (aka THE CRYSTAL per the manual) to give your whip some extra oomph and reach, then again to add a fireball projectile ala any Zelda game with the laser. Keeping that comparison going, if you get hit you lose your fireball. Get hit again and you’re reduced to snapping your belt at demons. Not ideal!

    You can imagine why they would’ve thought this change in system might work. Keep it simple for the Game Boy, then design the levels around those limitations. Sure, in theory! In practice every level past the first – and there’s only 4 in total, by the way – is an exercise in wringing blood from this already dry stone. Level 2 throws several pixel perfect jumps at you, some of which are on falling platforms that don’t always like to let you jump off of them. Level 3 is Oops All Autoscroll, chock full of traps that’ll just kill you if you don’t already know what to do. Level 4…is basically just a Mega Man level? Lots of single screen figure’em’outs as opposed to heinous insta-death trickery. Challenging for sure, but never as obnoxious as what precedes it. Game has good bookends, I suppose!

    These levels and their constraints wouldn’t be so bad if the game was more solid on a technical level, but C:TA chuuuugs. You can feel the sludginess increase with each individual moving sprite added on the screen. Chris by himself is fine, one enemy feels worse but manageable, and everything past that will slow the game down to the point where you’d think you were playing an overambitious shmup, even though you’re just trying to whip a bat while a zombie hits the griddy in the background. This is demonstrated especially well by the Punaguchi, an enemy that solely exists to attack your frame rate by wiggling in place and firing a bouncy ball that’s faster than literally everything else in the game. This bottlenecks the performance something fierce, which isn’t great when the game just turned into Breakout and you’re the brick!

    Compared to the levels they’re in charge of, the bosses feel like they’re intended to be a victory lap. The first is the classic “guy who gets demoted to normal enemy” scenario, second is a swarm, third is a bird man who can’t figure out how to actually hit you, and fourth is Dracula, complete with a second phase, neither of which are hard once you die to him once or twice to learn his pattern. Bosses being chumps is a pretty common thing in a linear ‘Vania and I get that Chris’ moveset is too simple to allow for much complexity, but I was surprised at how little these required of me.

    Don’t think I wasn’t very done with this game once I finally yanked Dracula’s wallet, though. C:TA is frustrating. It feels closer in spirit to an arcade quarter muncher than an NES ‘Vania, constantly introducing new ways to send you back to the start of the level that you have no hope of figuring out on your first couple attempts. The entire middle of the game just kind of being ass really hurts it, and as much as I’m complaining, it is still disappointing that this thing only has a whole 4 levels. I haven’t covered Mario Land 1 yet but I am familiar with it already, and I can tell you that Nintendo’s attempt to Game Boy-ify their NES flagship went far better.

    …so why the hell did I loop it?

    I could have stopped! I whooped Dracula’s ass! I beat The Bad ‘Vania! There’s no reason for me to subject myself to th-wait, I know why. It’s because this is actually a Ghosts ‘n Goblins game, and I have a sickness.

    Think about it for a sec. The upgrade system, lost piece by piece? The diabolical instant death traps? The rock and a hard place enemy placement? The performance not keeping up when things get hot and heavy? The fact that you can, in fact, loop? The amount of enemies you’re better off just ignoring? I know GnG when I see it, and that’s GnG! Forget the lack of subweapons – we should be grateful that the Konami top brass didn’t insist on adding poorly-placed pickups that replace your whip with a pool noodle! There is just something about this kind of brutal Capcom-ass design that works for me, even when it’s absolutely not at its best, and this is very much one of those.

    The internet loves a reevaluation. “This Game is Good, Actually”, “This Classic Sucks, Actually”, “This Game I Grew Up With is Actually a Secret Peak Game Design Masterpiece and You Just Don’t Get It”, take your pick. That’s not my scene. I just want to play these games and rank ’em, y’know? I won’t lie to you and say C:TA is great, but it is nowhere close to the worst game on the system. This isn’t even the worst time I’ve had playing a Castlevania game! I liked it enough to play it past completion and that’s worth something. Not a lot, granted, but something! You don’t need to play this, but if you’re ludologically curious or a ‘Vania completionist I have trouble believing you’d loathe it. Sure it’s a bit of a disaster, but it muddles through despite that, and we should all aspire to do the same.

    2.5/5

    – – –

    Bonus section! This won’t affect the placement on The List, but I do want to shout out the incredibly cool ReBalance created by Bofner. Chris gets the lead out and upgrades to a legitimate Belmont Strut! Your whip isn’t nearly as fragile! You get a checkpoint right before Dracula that doesn’t suck! It’s just fun start to finish, even on level 3! It’s also notably easier, arguably to the point where it compromises the original design intent, but given that even Masato Maegawa isn’t a fan I suspect no one involved would mind. If you’re Adventure-curious I’d definitely give the original a try first, but more so you’ll appreciate the changes made than anything else.

  • My Descent into Marble Madness (1991, 1999)

    My Descent into Marble Madness (1991, 1999)

    Brother, I have seen some shit.

    There are a lot of folks who will tell you that a Marble Madness without a trackball is not worth playing. I disagree! Not enough to deny that the bigass spinny ball is obviously better, I’m not the kind of guy who buys Golden Tee home ports, but NES Marble Madness is a fine way to spend 5 minutes! One afternoon, and I honestly could not tell you why, I was struck with the urge to play some proto-Monkey Ball and popped the GBC game on.

    I wish I’d waited until this project had fully burnt off my novelty synapses first.

    Marble Madness GBC (1999)

    Woah, what the fuck? Why is it like this? Home computer joysticky versions worked fine in the 80s, as did NES MM in ’89 despite the dpad. Why in the year of our lord 1999, when portable video gaming technology was advancing at an unprecedented rate, did Digital Eclipse release a version of a then-fifteen year old game that works this poorly?

    GBC Marble Madness looks fine visually, but not to the point where it justifies this performance. This game chugs like a frat pledge that just lost his girlfriend and controls like a frat pledge that just got a new one. I thought things might be salvageable until level 3, then the faux 3D fully kicked in and my hopes were kicked in the marbles. I scooted the ball behind a wall and the game panicked like an anxious baby in a high stakes game of peekaboo, sprites flickering and frames dropping to single digits as it desperately tried to show me that there was in fact a marble on screen somewhere, somehow. It’s also a much twitchier game than other versions I’ve played, with the Marble having basically no weight, meaning you can fly off the stage far more easily and in sections that wouldn’t normally present a problem.

    If the only issues were iffy framerates and a subpar control scheme I’d still give this a begrudging pass based entirely on my preexisting biases, but no, it gets worse! The respawns are scuffed. I had several occasions where I made an oopsie and the game just dropped me into the same pit a few more times for good measure before finally allowing me to recover. If you know anything about Marble Madness, you know that means the run is basically over! You need to finish stages with as much time as possible and in better versions of the game there’s enough margin for error, but in this port? Nah. I never saw any of the magic wand time extensions in this version either, which is a bonkers omission.

    Getting through this was like pulling teeth: painful, repetitive, but not exactly the lengthiest torture. The last level is more a timer check and test of patience than anything else, and I suspect my first trip there was literally impossible, which isn’t great! Again though, this game takes 5 minutes to beat, retries are speedbumps. Eventually I ascended to top of the High Rollers board and switched the game off. I do not intend to defend my title.

    1.5/5

    —
    I could have left it there. That should have been enough. Instead, this is where things went off the track. Out of truly morbid curiosity I figured hey, why not try the even older version while this one’s fresh in my mind and thumbs? The version without color from eight years prior! Maybe it runs a bit better, somehow? Maybe it isn’t missing entire gameplay elements? Maybe it won’t be the single worst game I’ve played for the website thus far?
    —

    Marble Madness GB (1991)

    I did not know how good I had it. Jesus christ.

    Can I tell you how the sausage is made real quick? Despite my affection for the DMG I play all of these games on some kind of modernized hardware. Usually it’s the Analogue Pocket, sometimes it’s my backlit GBA. Both look pretty great, I’d say! They help smooth out the early Game Boy roughness a bit, especially the Analogue, and are easier on my aged eyes. My point is that I’m playing these games in much better conditions than any kid in ’91 would have been, and despite this playing Marble Madness for the Game Boy still felt like I was Sam Neill in Event Horizon.

    This abomination should not have been put on store shelves, full stop. You can’t fucking see anything, and it performs worse than the GBC version somehow! Every technical issue I called out previously is exacerbated, plus now the sprites clip and flicker in disorienting ways. I dare not even imagine how horribly this would have performed on the old pea soup screen, afflicted with ghosting and poor lighting. God, imagine giving this to a child to amuse themselves on a car trip! You would be entirely within your rights to call CPS, even if you’re currently in your 40s. Get a retroactive adoption. They owe you one.

    Game Boy Marble Madness is so horrid that I quit after a couple attempts and booted up the NES version, terrified that I had somehow brainwashed myself into long-term Marble Apologia. No! That port is still pretty good! The courses are far more navigable thanks to notably weightier marble physics, which allows for better turning without sacrificing speed. The clock is also a bit more forgiving on the home version. Once I recalibrated to playing a good video game for a change I was able to get through it just fine! Do you know how bad a game has to be to result in a sanity check long enough to clear a wholly different port?

    I don’t want to write about this any more than I have to. This is a truly odious piece of software, and its cartridges would be better served by having other games flashed onto them entirely at random. Congratulations on making the very bottom of The List, Mindscape! I can’t wait to play your Game Boy port of Klax, you hack frauds!

    1/5

  • Baseball (1989)

    Baseball (1989)

    My current play pile has been taking a bit longer to get through than anticipated, so this afternoon I figured hey, why not play a quick game of stickball? Hahahaha, “quick”.

    I feel like I should be more lenient with this cart. It was a launch title after all, even Nintendo didn’t really know what they were doing on the DMG yet, and its main draw was multiplayer which I have not touched. I know the history, I know the score, but…

    …wow this is some awful baseball. This was a new experience for me, because I’ve never played by telegraph before!

    Look, I’m not a “sportsball” snob or whatever. I may be a nerd, but I’m the kind of nerd that participates in torpedo bat discourse, reminisces over the steroid era, and watches everything Ohtani does like a hawk. I like sports games! Especially baseball! This is a just a terrible baseball game!

    GB Baseball is agonizingly slow. Pitching, fielding, changing sides, almost every animation feels like it’s playing at 0.5 speed. Compared to NES baseball that’s honestly not too far from the truth! Watching fielders and runners alike trudge as the ball jutters across the sky frame by frame is excruciating, and you can barely see the field much less the ball if it gets some loft, so you’re forced to trudge players you can’t see towards a drop spot you don’t have. One of the benefits of digital ball is speeding the boring parts up, but this version feels like participating in a real life pickup game in the Ambien League.

    The one area that has some merit is the batting, which offers the bare minimum of acceptability. The camera swaps to behind the plate, you can reposition in the box, and the swing is pretty snappy. I ask for so little, and in this singular area Baseball manages to deliver, but surely we could have aimed a little bit higher?

    As bad of a time as I was having, I was willing to forgive a fair amount due to the age and legacy of this cart. Then I managed to smack a home run and all my good will vanished like an unsupervised box of Uncrustables in the dugout. The ball sloooooooowly drifted into the stands, a rectangle that said HOME RUN sleepily scooted its way from the bottom of the screen to the middle, and the scoreboard ticked up 1 by 1 to show the runs. Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? We don’t even get to see the runs??? It should be against the law to make a baseball game where sending one over the fence is this underwhelming! I did the fucking Thing, I demand satisfaction!

    I’m all for giving old games their due, and a lot of them are great, but the nicest thing I can say about Baseball is that I like its cover. Big Al wouldn’t tolerate such disrespect for dingers.

    1.5/5

  • Mario Tennis (2000)

    Mario Tennis (2000)

    Look – I hear you. The Game Boy/GBC had so many excellent RPGs, yet my list thus far has been devoid of any. Don’t worry! I got you! First RPG down, and it’s one of the best on the system. Classic single party member ala Dragon Quest I, even! Just a bit of an unconventional battle system is all.

    My history with Mario Tennis is involved but not especially complex. I played the 64 version to death, always heard this was great, and never tried it until now. Every MT entry after the year 2000 was worse. Shame, that. Camelot, on the other hand, I have plenty of experience with, and I don’t just mean their iffier sports entries. Consider how confident they had to be to make both versions of Mario Tennis only to barely feature any Nintendo properties in one of them! That confidence is earned. Oh my god did they earn it.

    As an aside, one of my weaknesses as a reviewer is that I’m better at taking things apart than building them up. It’s easier to praise a game when you have criticisms to use as a springboard, you know? This review will likely be a bit weaker written than some of my others for this project because, spoilers, I barely have anything negative to contrast the positives with. The best I can do is note that I don’t like the font choices, or more specifically the shadows behind them, on a tiny Game Boy screen. I also find myself missing the ridiculously crunchy serve sounds from the 64 version; I swear hitting a Nice! serve in that sounds like a horse chomping into an apple. The Game Boy can’t really do that! These things don’t matter much, not really. The closest thing to a genuine issue is how the game handles leveling/stats, but I’ll talk about that later.

    This game has some of the best spritework on the entire GBC. The sprites would have been top notch on the Neo Geo Pocket Color, but they’re here! On the god damned Game Boy! Every player sprite is incredibly expressive, chock full of characterful details, to the point where they’re entertaining just to see in motion. Combine that with the smooth scrolling of the court in play and little to none of the fake 3D depth issues thanks to the immaculate spriting and lack of slowdown, and you’ve got genuinely excellent handheld tennis.

    Any game with Motoi Sakuraba music is going to be a joy for the ears and this is no exception. So many quality jams. This version’s rendition of Break Point is simpler but still gives me chills, especially when the rally goes long. Rare is the game that gives you your own boss music, but Camelot was operating on an entirely different level. Music that makes you want to black out and spike the ball directly into a child’s schnoz. Powerful stuff.

    God this game’s tennis plays so well, too. Almost everything I internalized from years of the 64 game was immediately transferable. You can steal so many points with an angled serve, drop shot, and crosscourt shot combo. Admittedly that’s true in real life too! What surprised me most in the gameplay itself isn’t its quality, it’s how different the opponents manage to feel. They nearly feel adaptive, even though I know that’s likely not the case. The way they shift to an easier center serve after hitting a fault or start running to the baseline more after getting schooled at the net feels more convincingly Tennis-y than some sim games I’ve played.

    The RPG elements are light but certainly felt. Speed ends up being the key stat because you always need to cover the court, but you will need another specialty to close out the tournament arc. Each level lets you boost one of the four areas of your game, but they often come at the expense of others, leading to some awkward break points where you’ll be more interested in what does the least harm VS boosting what you actually want. It’s not perfect, but it is interesting and forces you to adapt to your weaknesses rather than grind them all to dust. Levels don’t come the quickest from just playing matches, so after a few wins in the junior league I entered the Hyperballic Tennis Chamber that is the training building and climbed some double digit # of levels by whacking the ball into a wall 200 times. I made my PC a speed demon with a downright devious net game and my doubles partner became a nuclear gorilla who could barely move, but could plant the ball anywhere on the court at Mach 3. Not that I played much for doubles, mind. I will generally avoid having 3/4 of the game’s participants be bots if I can help it.

    In terms of escalation it goes intro, team rank/promotion arc, tournament arc, and The Post-Credits Introduction and Subsequent Destruction of Super Freakin’ Mario. Despite characters being chatty and full of personality there really isn’t much plot to speak of. I’m fine with that, to be clear! I suspect I wouldn’t be a huge fan of there being even more talking between matches. Some folks have complained about said matches being too long, which is a funny way to say you just don’t like Tennis. I do, which means I want to play the titular sport, and Camelot understood that they couldn’t have both words in the title be disingenuous.

    I do kinda love the Mario Section though. Spoilers? I guess? Do we really care? Have a courtesy warning, but I will think a smidge less of you if this is a legitimate cutoff.

    After the award ceremony ends and credits roll you find yourself back at the academy standing in the headmaster’s office. Out of absolutely nowhere he informs you of the following facts:

    • Mario exists in this setting. He has been offscreen, watching from the shadows the entire time.
    • Mario is the single greatest tennis player to ever do it.
    • Mario has taken an interest in you specifically, because your defenses are impregnable and your style is impetuous.
    • You must take a flight to Peach’s Castle immediately. The headmaster will not take No for an answer. I tried.

    Once you arrive it immediately becomes clear that you’re out of your depth. There is some kind of political situation going on, and I don’t mean the kind where the video game has women in it. The room has been split into factions, good and evil specifically, and the latter is absolutely intent on having your character play and defeat Mario on the court upon arrival as they haven’t managed to. Bizarrely, the imperial side informs the villains that Mario actually just invited your character there to chill post-tournament, which…isn’t true? As far as we know? This is clearly an attempt at deescalation, truth be damned.

    Anyway. The brothers Wa and Bowser insist that you do battle on their behalf. I accepted, of course, because I know where my loywalties lie. Mario was destroyed in straight sets and it wasn’t particularly close. The game ends abruptly afterwards, presumably due to committing the equivalent of a tennis-themed Franz Ferdinand assassination. My love of the game transcends my general aversion to causing international incidents. Obey Wario. Destroy Mario.

    4.5/5

  • Penguin Wars (1990)

    Penguin Wars (1990)

    You know in Europe they called this King of the Zoo? That’s a way better title. At least both games feature the same amount of weaponized bowling.

    This is an early Game Boy game and yoooooou can tell! It’s incredibly simple: there’s an animal on each side of a bigass table. They have 5 balls per side. The balls are rolled across the table at the opponent, with variable power depending on how long you charge a shot or what your character is good at. The winner of the round is determined 1 of 2 ways: getting rid of all of the balls on your side, or having fewer balls on your side when time runs out.

    There’s also a very slight dodgeball element? If a rolling ball makes contact with a player they get stunned for a bit, which again, is a variable stat. This is, predictably, quite exploitable against the AI! My lil Harvest Moon-ass cow won most matches by beaning its opponent upside the head until the ref had to step in. I say it’s slight, not because you’re not smacking people, but because the roll is fairly slow and easy to dodge unless you get caught charging a shot too late. In a mildly impressive feat of programming balls can bounce off each other mid-roll, but 3D-ish effects hadn’t been fully figured out on the Game Boy just yet so it’s pretty hard to gauge doing that on purpose.

    You’d be forgiven for thinking that there not being much here means it’s a lesser GB game. Hell, depending on who you ask you may be right. I don’t agree with that hypothetical hater! The Game Boy is excellent at these sorts of bite-sized experiences meant to be played for no more than half an hour or so at a time, and Penguin Wars is exactly that. It feels like an bartop arcade cab set to free play in tiny form, and while the novelty of having that in the pocket has long since worn off for many, I still find value in this sort of design. At the very least, it’s fun to chant “somebody’s getting fuuuuucked“ at a mouse as you continuously launch bowling balls at its tiny frame.

    3/5