Willow
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Capcom
First Released June, 1989 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
It looks like it’s going to be so fun. You know what else does? Slot machines. Blackjack tables.
Capcom is credited with keeping arcades alive with Street Fighter 2. Fair enough. But, didn’t they also kind of help usher in the demise of arcades by making games so hard that it’s almost farcical in how money grubbing they are? And it’s not like it’s just the ones you’d expect, like Ghosts n’ Goblins or Gun.Smoke. I just played through Willow, their 1989 coin-op based on the 1988 movie. It’s a highly critically acclaimed game. I have a question, though: did they actually play it past the first two levels? Because after the first two levels, it gives up any sense of fairness or balance or gamesmanship and just becomes a straight-up shakedown for quarters. Capcom had a tendency to do this with their coin-ops, but few are as brazen about it as Willow is. This isn’t a video game. It’s a robber baron.
I preferred using Madmartigan to Willow, even though Willow fires projectiles.
Now mind you, this absurd hardness was after I tinkered with the settings. I dropped the difficulty to the lowest possible. I raised my vitality to the highest possible. I turned on continues. This should NOT have been that hard. I’m fine with a challenge, but there are several sections of Willow where I’m absolutely convinced that there’s no humanly way to get past them without taking at least some damage. This is done so that you have to spend your gold on health upgrades. Yea, this is the rare arcade game that has shops and RPG-like upgrades. At this point, I’ll note that Willow’s levels run on one of the fastest timers in gaming, and that timer doesn’t stop inside the shops. Shops that have eleven items that you need to read the descriptions of. Even cheating, I only had two seconds left when I beat the first boss. It’s not like I was wasting time exploring the level, either. There’s no bones about it: Willow is a greedy game that wants you to keep putting in quarters and will go to shameless lengths to force it.
Buzzer beater.
It’s best to think of Willow as a close cousin of Ghosts ‘n Goblins, only with two characters to play as instead of one. In level one and three you play as Willow. In levels two and four, you play as Madmartigan. Players can choose who they want in level five, while level six has sections for both characters. To Willow’s credit, every major set-piece from the film is here, including a scene deleted from the final film that sees Willow on a rowboat get attacked by a giant fish. So that’s neat. Plus, the play control is tight and responsive, and the attacks are satisfying enough. Willow fires magic projectiles while Madmartigan uses his sword, and both attacks can be upgraded in the shop several times. The combat would be sweet if enemies weren’t so spongy from level three until close to the end-game. You absolutely HAVE to spend your gold on weapon upgrades or you’ll time-out just from the combat alone.
Speaking of timing-out, one of the main ways Willow screws players is by having bosses and mini-bosses hover well out of range of your weapons. It’s not a one-off thing, either. Even the last boss does it. Few arcade games use the timer to squeeze players for lunch money quite like Willow, and it’s not better for it. It’s agonizing to watch them linger and linger and linger, unable to do a thing about it. This dragon here isn’t even the level’s boss. This is basically how the stage starts, and it’s hugely spongy and it will take its sweet time.. well, actually it’s YOUR time.. before it opens itself up for counterattack.
Again, it’s baffling that this got critical acclaim, but if you look at the Wikipedia page for it, it’s one of the most revered arcade games of the year I was born. I wish I played the game those critics played. The one *I* played had cheap shots galore, a short timer and spongy enemies up the wazoo. The third level saw me pump one of the first enemies with so many full-strength magic blasts that I questioned whether it was even possible to kill it. And that enemy was heaving grenades at me that had splash damage that covered nearly a third of the screen. It did die eventually, but as soon as it did, another took its place. Without exaggeration, there were bosses that I took down easier than many of the so-called “basic” enemies. Later in the game, even when I had upgraded the sword as much as possible up to that point, these enemies pushed spiked walls into me while other enemies ran in from behind, all of which took several hits to kill. It wasn’t even pretending to be a game by that point.
The spiked wall guys AND the guys behind you respawn quite a bit too. I imagine if you played this in front of a real Willow cabinet, it would have a boxing glove punching players in the face while telling them “stop hitting yourself.”
Was it fun, at least? Well, no. Satisfying as the combat is, it’s too basic to overcome the unfair design. Maybe the first two levels were fine, but this is a six level game. Even when you’ve fully upgraded your weapons and the sponge goes away, the levels are still tailored towards cheap shots and quarter shakedowns. The final level’s Madmartigan section really goes overboard by having the level be a “maze.” It’s actually not a maze. It’s a blind random chance of selecting which door is the correct path. Not just once, either. It does it with two doors, then three, then four. Pick right, with no clues to help you (I bought a hint in the shop and it didn’t help at all. It just told me this would happen, and nothing more) and you move on. Pick wrong and you go backwards. How far backwards? It depends on the door. Some will send you all the way back to the beginning of the level. By this point, I had long since quit trying to beat the game on its terms. It wasn’t playing fair, and so I didn’t either. Good thing, because each time, I literally opened every wrong door available before I chose right. I even tried to play the meta game of figuring out which one the developers would have chosen. I guess I chose poorly. Wait, wrong George Lucas movie.
I literally LOLed that the final boss’s final attack is an invincible possessed barbecue running around and shooting six projectiles at a time while you wait for her to lower herself enough that you can barely reach her with your attack. You do have a tornado spell that can reach her IF you time the meter right, but the BBQ is designed to make sure you can’t actually get a shot off without taking damage. It’s such a stupid thing, but by this point in Willow, I expected stupid. I realize the evil barbecue is from the movie, but really? You’re finishing on that? Then, queen just floats away and the end credits begin immediately.
There’s a lot of quality licensed games that haven’t been re-released since they first came out that I weep for, and even though I hated it, I still weep for Willow’s status as a lost game. Now that the Disney+ show didn’t do so well, I’m guessing this is low on anyone’s priority for a modern re-release. Apparently the NES game is better, and one of these days, I’ll get around to reviewing it. As for the coin-op, it’s just not fun. And that’s a damn shame because I think the level design is well done and, again, they got all the action set pieces from the movie. They’re not just in the game, but as accurate to the film as a 2D platformer is capable of being. That’s admirable. This is one of the closest-to-the-film licensed games of its era. And, like the film it’s based on it: it’s kind of a disaster. The best thing I can say about it, besides having nice sprite work and a really good soundtrack, is that it has a couple okay boss fights. It’s just too bad you have to play Willow to get to them. Verdict: NO!
Q*bert
Enhanced as Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Gottlieb/Mylstar
First Released in 1982 Included in Q*bert Rebooted (2014) Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert Never Officially Released
The story of Q*bert’s development is every bit as fascinating as the game itself. Like how it was originally going to be a shooting game called Snots & Boogers. Later, after shooting gave way to strategy, it nearly carried the disastrous name “@!#?@!” which would have been literally impossible to spread via word of mouth. I’m curious to learn a lot more, which is why I just ordered Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Games by the man himself: Warren Davis. $13.99 on Amazon. It’s what I’m treating myself to for Christmas.
Well, I promised this review when I did Krull and Three Stooges, and with 2023 almost up, there’s no time like the present. Q*bert is an icon of gaming. One of those characters that’s reached the zenith of recognition. Yet Sony, the owners of the franchise, really haven’t done a whole lot with him. Mostly, they just license him to appear in movies. Q*bert had a cameo in Wreck-it-Ralph and a prominent role in Pixels. As terrible as that film was, it was still more dignified than the 1980s cartoon that was set in the 1950s where Q*bert was a greaser. I’m sure that’s what children who wanted a Q*bert cartoon were clamoring for: Q*bert meets Happy Days. However, next year marks ten years since Sony really did anything with the adorable little orange thing. Q*bert Rebooted released in 2014 to scathing reviews, with most critics citing the bad controls. They said the same thing about the Q*bert game I had for Dreamcast. The weird thing about the franchise is it’s famous for difficult controls, but I’ve really never struggled with them when I’ve played the arcade game. Actually, Q*bert is maybe the arcade game I was most wrong about. I haven’t always been a fan. But, I have to admit, it grew on me.
The end of my best game ever. 117K. I was proud. As for the iconic swearing, it happened when sound designer David Thiel got stymied by how the synthesized voices needed to be programmed. Each syllable had to be arranged manually, which is harder than it sounds. In Ultimate History of Video Games, Thiel notes that “Bonus Points” sounded like “Bogus Points.” He became frustrated and inserted several random speech banks together, and the end result sounded like alien swear words that something somewhere would exclaim in anger, and they went with it. So, in a sense, Q*bert’s swearing is actually gaming’s greatest rage quit!
When I reviewed the Atari 2600 and 5200 versions in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – Part Two, I gave the 2600 version a YES! despite the fact that it’s missing a couple key baddies. It gets off to a slow start, but once you reach the levels where the cubes change colors every time you jump on them, I enjoyed it a lot more. The coin-op, on the other hand, becomes overwhelming, especially when a little green imp appears that undoes all your progress. I thought it went too far (heh, I had no idea what “too far” was, it turns out). And for that reason, I initially disliked Q*bert. I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong, and I got arcade Q*bert wrong. More specifically, I had the wrong mindset. I was thinking strictly of both the puzzle and level-clearing aspects and not the high-score chasing side of the equation. That was my mistake and I take it back. Once I focused primarily on challenging my own best scores, I had jolly good time playing Q*bert. Warren Davis.. which I keep typing as “Warwick Davis” because my brain is STOOPID.. created something special here. So did Jeff Lee, the artist who designed the character itself and the stack of cubes he hops across.
The last few cubes are a pain in the ass. Learning the timing for when to use the discs is pretty much everything. Actually, one of the things that helped me was that I started to anticipate when the game was “due” for another one of the jackasses that undoes your progress. A strategy that was foiled by the unreleased harder version of Q*bert.
But, a funny thing happened when I adjusted my attitude. Once I was in the right mindset and treated Q*bert purely as a white-knuckle, score-driven avoider, I actually got further than I ever have before. A lot further, actually, and I could maintain this consistently between games. You get points for every successful hop you make that changes the color of a block. Levels are divided into four stages, and by the third and fourth levels, you’re dealing with blocks that can change back to their original colors. This was previously as good as I could do because of the creatures called “Slick” and “Sam” who revert cubes back to previous colors. This time around, once I got to that point, I took a defensive approach. I was still mindful of the goal of each level, but with my focus more on survival, I came to better appreciate the thrilling close calls. Seriously, the chase element here is every bit as intense as the best Pac-Man games. I loves me some Pac-Man (read my Jr. Pac-Man review) but this offers even more close calls, actually.
The discs of Q*bert are pretty satisfying to use. Actually, I admire the restraint shown. It must have been mighty tempting to have the “turn-the-tables” aspect of Q*bert involve directly attacking the enemies. It’s what was trendy at the time. But, Q*bert is one of the more comical game characters of the era, and getting the baddies to fling themselves off the pyramid has a Wile E. Coyote vibe to it. The arcade cabinets even had an authentic pinball knocker to complete the effect. This was produced by pinball stalwart Gottlieb. They had plenty.
I always got angry around this point in Q*bert. Not this time. I finally said “screw completing the stage! This is too much!” and started trying to scratch out enough distance between me and the baddies. Then, it happened. After about a minute of hopping around, just hanging on for dear life, through sheer osmosis, a path to victory revealed itself. About six or seven hops later, I had won. Wait.. what? The first time it happened, it felt like a fluke. But then it kept happening level after level. As it turns out, the best offense in Q*bert is a good defense. Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t COMPLETELY mindless avoidance, but I also stopped getting angry if I had to leave the area I was “patrolling” for lack of a better term. It was rewarding, because the chases were always exciting. This is especially true as you get deeper into the game, since the speed increases for baddies and you. I liked how the faster gameplay felt so much I longed for a dip switch option to make it permanent. I wish it happened sooner in the game. The one remaining annoyance I have with Q*bert is that I wish there was some kind of warning when new balls/eggs/blobs/whatever are about to drop onto the playfield. Maybe a Looney Tunes-like bomb-dropping noise, a countdown, or shadows. With enough playtime, you eventually learn to anticipate it, but it’s never totally intuitive. Well, at least at the skill level I’m at.
A bit redundant of a title. It’d be like calling me slower, shorter, more lower to the floor Cathy.
Personally, I think the challenge for Q*bert is spot-on, but creator Warren Davis didn’t, and hence we get Q*bert: Sadistic Pants Wetting Nightmare Edition. Actually, it’s “Faster Harder More Challenging” and despite being fully finished and even route-tested, Gottlieb Mylstar’s new overlords at Coca-Cola opted against releasing it. I thought about postponing this review until my copy of Davis’ book arrives to find out the full story, which apparently also involves 7-Eleven and maybe Mello Yello. Actually, no, I guess the Mello Yello Q*bert was a different thing, but hold on, wait.. why Mello Yello? Coca-Cola has owned Minute Maid since 1960. Why not Minute Maid Q*bert? You know, something that actually makes sense? Or maybe they didn’t want consumers to imagine the orange juice they were drinking was actually the blood and bile and various other bodily fluids collected from juicing a member of Q*bert’s species.
🤔
And now that’s all I’m going to be able to think about. Eww. Yea, going with Mello Yello was a good call.
It turns out, I had that ROM too. It’s the exact same game as Q*bert, only it contains 45 mg of caffeine per serving.
Actually, Davis himself released the ROM of FHMC Q*bert to the public in 1996, thus preserving it forever. Now THAT is a guy who gets it. Class act. And I’m really happy he did, because Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert is not simply “hard mode” for Q*bert. I mean, it kind of is, but there’s a lot of changes. The discs now move up and down the sides of the stack of cubes, with a little warning graphic of when the move is about to happen. AND, despite being the hard mode, the discs will reappear after you use them. It’s not an endless supply, and I actually wish there was a counter that showed how many discs were left, but I appreciated it nonetheless. It’s literally the only kindness the game offers. This is one of the most difficult and downright cruel games ever. You know what? THIS should have been the one with a gibberish swear bubble for a name! It’d been fitting.
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Each round in FHMC is built around how the levels work in normal Q*bert. In other words, round 1 is always just permanently changing the colors to the target color. Round 2 is always triple colors with the third color being permanent. Round 3 has colors change back when you hop on them a second time. Finally, round 4 is always triple color with the second and third colors swapping back and forth. I got my wish to have the game speed up faster. But, I made that wish on a monkey’s paw, because the Faster Harder Etc. Q*bert utterly spams the screen with enemies fairly quickly. And while you have more discs, the snakes are a LOT more savvy to them this go around and are harder to lure into jumping off the stack. These twists alone would have been hard enough, but Faster, More Intense Q*bert is just getting warmed up. Remember the green things that undid your progress? Well, they still do that, only they also lock the squares from being changed. How do you unlock them? You have to lure the snake into jumping on them! WHAT? That’s.. that’s sick. You alright, Q*bert?
The blocks with patterns on them are locked. So, go ahead! Get the snake to jump off the stack now! See where that gets you!
And finally, the game introduces Q*Bertha, a love-sick purple member of Q*bert’s species who chases him around the board and undoes your work. Unlike the green things from the original build of Q*bert, this thing lingers on the board, chases you, and has to be killed using the discs. And now I understand why the discs respawn. I reckon the game would become impossible after a certain point without that. It was also around this point I started to comprehend how this didn’t get the best reception in route testing. Without exaggeration, I struggled to clear level 1 – 3. It took me hours of playing to make it to level 3 to even encounter Q*Bertha for the first time. I ultimately made it twice to Level 4 – 2 and I’m convinced that stage has to be impossible to beat without getting an incredibly lucky break. Actually, you’ll need more than one lucky break, since it sort of feels like both games I made it that far, the roads that led to 4 – 2 had many moments of just dumb luck working out for me. Or moments where I’d hopped around the same stack of cubes so long that I just killed myself because it would clear the screen of enemies and allow me to finally get the final few cubes without interruption. I think that pretty much says it all about Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert: that ending your life is a legitimate strategy. This game is EVIL!
It looks so innocent. This is Satan in digital form.
Still, I’m all about historical curios, and Faster Harder More Challenging Q*bert, frustrating and seemingly impossible as it is, is still a whole lot of fun. I don’t think it would be worth buying as its own release, but every time Q*bert is re-released, they really ought to bundle this with it. As for the original game, I’m not too proud to admit when I’m wrong. Q*bert actually is one of the greatest of all-time. I’m a big fan of close calls in chase games, and Q*bert offers up more than most golden age arcade games do. It also offers players enough flexibility to come up with their own strategies, which I put the highest premium on. It’s such a shame that the franchise hasn’t survived the test of time. At the start of this review, I called Q*bert an icon of gaming, and I stand by that. But, in terms of general pop culture, it feels more like an oddity of the 80s, instead of an icon of it, doesn’t it? It deserves so much better. Sony really shouldn’t be so stingy with it. They might own Q*bert in the legal sense, but it really belongs to gamers everywhere, and it deserves better than what it has gotten in the past forty years. Verdict: YES! and YES!
Hell, I didn’t even mention the bonus stage that happens when you beat level 2 in FHMC. You score points for every solid blue block. Oh and the green things have to touch the blocks, so you can’t just intercept them all. Oh and they rain non-stop during it. I got eight once. I was happy to have gotten eight. Even the bonus stage is a kick in the ass. And now that the review is over, I’m going to go cry. Holy crap, how is this even a thing that exists? EVIL!
Virtual Boy Wario Land
Platform: Virtual Boy. I mean, duh. It’s in the name!
Developed by Nintendo
First Released November 27, 1995 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
This one was a lot harder to get action-based screenshots than you would think thanks to how Wario’s tackle/charge move looks.
When I first ran through Virtual Boy’s library back in 2020, two games stood out to me as being pretty dang good. Then I replayed Mario Clash earlier this year and I realized it wasn’t anywhere near as good as I originally pegged it to be. I still ultimately gave it aYES!, but barely so, and I’ve been dreading replaying Virtual Boy Wario Land ever since. It was the other unambiguously good Virtual Boy game, but maybe I’d set my expectations for Virtual Boy so low that it messed with my initial perception. Thankfully, now that I’ve finished my second play session with it, I don’t have to stare blankly at the screen and ask myself if I had a good time or not. It’s really good. And painful to play, but hey, if you’re going to fry your eyeballs out of their sockets, do it with sprites this beautifully done. Shame about it being on Virtual Boy, where it’s fated to linger in obscurity, unloved, until the end of time.
Wario once had a game animated by the same people who did Ghost in the Shell, so it might be audacious for me to say this, but I’m saying it anyway: this has the best sprite work in Wario Land history. Some of the best in Nintendo history, in fact. It’s a solid decade ahead of its time. Very cartoon-like.
At only ten stages and four boss fights, it’s a short game. I’ve never needed more than two hours to finish it. While the levels are sprawling, only a couple I would consider to be “maze-like.” Each of the ten stages has a key and a hidden treasure somewhere in it. In this second play-through, I only one time made it to the exit of the stage without holding the key. Nine of ten times, I just happened upon it through the normal progression of the game. The hidden treasures were a little more difficult. VB Wario Land has six possible endings, the two best of which require you to find all ten of the treasures. Four times I had to do extra exploring to find them. It works, though. Above all else, Wario Land as a franchise needs to feel like a treasure hunt. VB Wario Land pulls it flawlessly. You actually do have to explore, and my only complaint is that there’s only two things to find in every stage. I think perhaps they should have required more than one key to finish a level. I strongly suspect that was planned at some point, but then someone said “do we really want our players to keep their eyeballs on this thing longer than we have to?”
My proof is that there’s more rooms that have this pattern, but they have 1ups instead of treasure. It makes no sense to make a big deal of extra lives since extra lives are plentiful and the game is absurdly easy. No, I think they had more ambitious plans that had to be dropped because of the platform’s ability to broil your retinas.
Of course, a well done treasure hunt doesn’t mean anything if the levels are boring to explore. That’s certainly not the case here. VB Wario Land has some of the best 2D levels Nintendo has ever built. With the exception of the first level, which has no personality or theme to speak of, VB Wario Land has excellent set pieces. Sure, they’re mostly the typical cliches of forests, deserts, waterfalls, etc. But they all feel fresh here. Breathtaking backgrounds and even mundane pathways are drawn with attention to detail. They have this otherworldly quality to them that few 2D platformers achieve quite like VB Wario Land does. It also helps that the enemies all have authentic personalities. Wario is a mischievous character, and this is one of the few times where every aspect of the game feels like it belongs to him, and him alone. It’s so well done.
Go figure that an all-red platform would have some of the best underwater sections in platforming history.
The big twist in this Wario Land is the ability to transfer from the foreground to the background. This is usually done with springs that launch you back and forth. Other times, you’ll access one or the other via doors or pipes. There’s even extended sections that take place entirely in the background. While it’s fun and it works, it’s also one of the reasons the game is so easy. There’s rarely anything in the background that can hurt you. I also feel the mechanic was underutilized. Early in the game, the backgrounds are mostly used as bonus areas where coins or hearts are found. Later, shifting between the foregrounds and backgrounds is more incorporated into the maze-like layouts of the level, and the game truly finds its footing as one of the all-timers. It just takes a while to get there. The springing between the foreground and background is also incorporated into two of the four boss fights, both of which are among the highlights of the game.
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Virtual Boy Wario Land’s weakness is that it’s probably the easiest platforming game Nintendo ever made. I’ve played this three times now. Once on Halloween in 2020, and twice this session, including the “harder” second quest, and I’ve still never lost a single life playing VB Wario Land. Enemies are mostly toothless. In this session, even while playing the second quest, I never took damage from a single basic enemy. In the second quest, I did get hit by the spiky balls that are laying everywhere and I damaged myself on the first mini-boss when I was too slow to attack it, but otherwise, not one single basic enemy ever hurt me. And it’s not because I have mad skills or anything like that. Most baddies don’t hurt you when you touch them, even if you’re not attacking. They just bounce off you. It’s so awkward. I’ve made jokes before about the silliness of the video game logic that enemies are lethal to the touch no matter what they’re doing, but Virtual Boy Wario Land is a glimpse into what gaming would be like if that weren’t the case. There’s also no pits to fall into. The Wario Land that followed this removed the ability to lose a life altogether. I can’t help but wonder if that was discussed for this one, too?
Before each boss, you have to fight these tiny robotic mini-bosses by avoiding their attacks and waiting for them to fly up in the air and crash down on you, which exposes a button. They each only take two hits to kill. In the second quest, you have to hop before they crash, because they only expose the button for a split second. It was the first time (and the only time, come to think of it) that VB Wario Land was anything resembling challenging.
As if the enemy designs weren’t weak enough, VB Wario Land has absolutely no balance when it comes to power-ups. Frankly, they went overboard. The standard Wario bull-charge would have been satisfying enough. It’s one of my all-time favorite game attacks. You can also just jump on enemies, which will knock them out and allow them to be carried, but they’re a bit unwieldy. The charge/tackle move, however, is always delightful. The fact that your butt causes earthquakes that disable every enemy on screen is insanely overpowered and shouldn’t have been included, but it’s Wario. I guess it’s okay! Hell, had they kept it at that, it’s likely the game would have been a contender for Nintendo’s best platformer ever. But, they didn’t. There’s a dragon helmet that breathes fire, though its range is limited to a few spaces in front of you. Some of the blocks can only be broken by fire, and sometimes you need fire to find the special treasure (I’m almost certain you never need it to find the key). It destroys most enemies and has unlimited ammo and would be overpowered by itself. There’s also an eagle helmet that lets you dash in the air and fly for a short distance, which can get you over large gaps. It’s fun to use. So far, that sounds pretty normal, right?
They might as well roll the credits once you have this.
The problem is the dragon and eagle helmets stack to form a winged dragon that can both fly and fire projectiles the full length of the screen. It’s very useful for exploring, since the projectiles it shoots pierces all blocks (though it does stop with enemies), allowing you to clear out entire rooms worth of blocks in a second or two. But, it also allows you to instantly vaporize nearly every basic enemy as soon as you get them within sight. After getting the winged dragon helmet, I almost ran the table on VB Wario Land. The next time I took damage, it was while attempting to score the final hit against the final boss of the game. Once you have it, assuming you actually take your time to measure every jump, the only remaining challenges will be the bosses, since they can’t be damaged by your attack. There’s no particularly difficult jumps, either. Your own recklessness is all that stands in front of you and the end credits. The play control won’t screw you over, either. VB Wario Land handles like a dream. A surreal, all-red, eye-bleeding dream.
Even on the second quest, enemies pose little to no threat. This thing is one of the few that are immune to your projectiles, but it’s not like it’s hard to kill. Really, the second quest could be called Wario’s Adventures in Spiky Ball Land because it’s basically all spiky balls, all the time.
The second quest really isn’t harder so much as it’s just more annoying. The treasures and keys were in the same locations as they were before. Enemies were still nothing more than cannon-fodder. The bosses and even mini-bosses did attack faster and had smaller windows for vulnerability, but otherwise, it was the same game. Only now, there were tons of spiky balls laying around, so many that you literally have to crawl through many sections. Some were even placed in a way where it made getting some coins impossible. Was it harder? Obviously not, since the second time I beat Virtual Boy Wario Land almost exactly thirty minutes faster than my previous session. And the second time around, I skipped the after-level extra lives bonus round (which I don’t think counts towards time anyway). I didn’t need it and still finished with 20 lives. That’s owed largely to the unbalanced power-ups. If Nintendo were to remake VB Wario Land, adding more levels would be a given, but actually, the biggest change I’d recommend making is removing the winged dragon helmet. It’s just too overpowered. Besides, it’s nowhere near as satisfying as the bull charge is (in my head canon, Wario is cousins with Bald Bull).
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I get the impression VB Wario Land is meant for a much younger, less experienced audience. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a 2D platformer that’s better suited to introduce young children to 2D exploration-based platforming than Virtual Boy Wario Land. Nintendo should fully colorize it, restore its original name (Wario Cruise) and give it a modern release. They won’t, but they ought to. I’m not sure re-releasing this in the state it’s in would be the wisest move. I wanted to test this on my nieces and nephew. They were excited, too! But, I decided to cancel the plan because my eyes were hurting after playing it. I’m not making a joke here, either. I’ve been rubbing them and squinting a lot ever since I finished, and I’m not going to put them through that. The same thing happened to me when I played Mario Clash earlier this year. What the hell was Nintendo thinking when they made Virtual Boy? I wasn’t even playing on a real one and my eyes are killing me. Don’t tell me the designers at Nintendo didn’t experience the same thing during its development. There’s no way they didn’t. But, despite legitimate eye soreness, I can honestly say what hurts worse is that VB Wario Land is unlikely to ever see the light of day again. Even though it lacks difficulty, the joy of exploring the levels and finding the treasures is undeniable. Maybe it’s not the absolute best “lost” Nintendo game, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to forever wallow in obscurity. As far as their hidden gems go, it shines among the brightest. Maybe that’s why my eyes are so sore right now. Verdict: YES!
The Three Stooges
aka The Three Stooges in Brides is Brides
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Mylstar Electronics
First Released in 1984 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Subtitled “Brides is Brides” which made me think it was based on a specific short. It’s not.
So, this happened. There’s a Three Stooges coin-op from 1984. Yes, really. I wanted to find the story on how exactly this came about, but as far as I can tell, nobody has really talked about the history behind it. I think I can fill in the blanks myself, though. Three Stooges was developed and published by Mylstar Electronics, the company who did the Krull arcade game that I already reviewed, who you might better know as the linear continuation of pinball juggernaut Gottlieb. Gottlieb’s smash hit arcade release was Q*Bert, which I promise I’m going to get around to doing very soon. Gottlieb had been owned by Columbia Pictures since 1976, but in 1983 Coca-Cola purchased Columbia Pictures. Coca-Cola’s first act seems to have been renaming Gottlieb “Mylstar” to move away from pinball and fully onto arcade video games, which were trendy at the time. And Columbia Pictures just so happened to be the studio who produced all those Three Stooges films. So, my working theory is someone very out of touch at Coca-Cola saw that they owned both a video game company AND the Three Stooges IP and said “kids these days love them newfangled electronic games. And if I know anything about pop culture, and hell, I must know a lot because I now work for a company that owns a movie studio and that’s how it works, there’s nothing children love more than the Three Stooges! It’s what MY kids watched when they were children, which was forty years ago!” This ended about as well as you would expect. I don’t know when in 1984 Three Stooges came out, but I do know that Coca Cola closed Mylstar in September in 1984, barely a f’n year after changing their name. What a farce.
On a real arcade machine, there’s three joysticks: left is Larry, center is Moe, and right is Curly. On the PC I use to capture media for these reviews, I could only be Larry (except when I plugged in a second controller). Nobody wants to be Larry. Larry is the Zeppo of the group. However, in the game, he’s clearly the best character. Look at those eyes. Those cold, dead eyes. Those are the eyes of a man not to be trifled with.
This particular game is unrelated to the more famous PC/NES game by Cinemaware. The coin-op game is a lot more like the Atari arcade classic Food Fight, only with a lot more to do. The object is to collect three keys in every stage. The keys are hidden behind various furniture and other assorted fixtures. You have to grab a hammer and then just walk into the objects to demolish them, revealing either loot (dollar bags/stars/award statuettes) that scores points or the keys. Once you grab all three keys, an exit will open up. As you do this, you have to avoid “villains”, cops, and prissy old ladies who can also grab the hammer and smack you on the head. If you run into someone holding a hammer OR a police officer catches you, you lose a life. There’s also a dog and a waiter walking around that aren’t worth any points and just seem to be there for the sake of chaos.
After two stages, you have these levels where singers belt tunes and their music notes damage you. Annoyingly, the last one’s notes linger too long. I almost always lost a life on it. On these stages, you can ONLY use pies, which are quite hard to aim.
You can defend yourself with a slap if you’re Larry or Curly or an eye-gouge if you’re Moe. This stuns enemies and fellow stooges, allowing you to pass by them. If you have the hammer in your hand, you actually drop it quite a ways from you in order to use the defensive smack. However, you can walk into the “villains” with the hammer, giving them one of those cartoonish lumps on their head. This permanently knocks out NPCs for the rest of the level, so it seems like it should be your primary strategy, right? Well, the game has collision issues up the wazoo that I need to talk about. There’s also tables that have a limited supply of pies sitting on them that you can pick-up and throw to stun enemies, but again, every other character on the screen can do the same to you. I also found the pies INCREDIBLY hard to aim since they’re off-center from where your sprite is. They weren’t worth the effort or the comedic effect at all, since all they do is briefly disable baddies (I think the dog’s purpose is to lick the pie off their faces). If you’re playing with anything less than three players, the other stooges will wander around, and they’re enemies now. They’ll chase you down, get in your way, and even cost you lives. I’m not feeling the brotherly love, fellas. On the other hand, NPC stooges can also destroy the fixtures and reveal the keys as well. They can’t collect the keys, but it becomes a viable strategy to dodge baddies and let the NPCs do the smashing for you.
I appreciate that they went to the effort of having different objectives in some stages. In these ones, you not only have to get the keys but you also have to rescue one of your sweethearts from a cell. The problem is, on this level, the cops typically would get to them about one second after I grabbed the final key. If this happens, you have to keep replaying it over and over until you finally do rescue her. Being a dummy, it took me a while to remember to grab the key closest to her cell last.
To be frank, I kind of figured that the Three Stooges would be a terrible game. Just the fact that literally not one person on my timeline had ever seen a Three Stooges cabinet in the wilds of 1980s arcades was ominous enough. But, what was even more alarming was that many were shocked it even existed at all. This coin-op has NO presence in gaming’s collective memory. A complete non-entity. So, you can imagine my surprise that whether Three Stooges is a bad game or not isn’t cut and dry. The sound effects really carry the day here. The digital voice samples don’t sound anything at all like the actors, but a small handful of quips are here AND they come in three different pitches to differentiate the stooges. “Wise guy, eh?” Here. “Cheese it! It’s the cops!” Here. Wait, that’s a Three Stooges quote? I figure it was a gangster film thing, but it’s here. “Yuk Yuk” is here too, though it’s so sad. It sounds like a duck with laryngitis, and I’m not even exaggerating. There’s also various satisfying snaps and slaps that season the violence. Violence that feels comically authentic to the franchise. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not exactly Street Fighter 2 levels of OOMPHful, but it’s nice to just haul off and slap the crap out of someone. Honestly, for a 1984 game, this does a remarkable job of staging a believable Three Stooges short film-like gaming experience.
There’s even an ending of sorts. Given that each cycle of levels feels identical to the one before it, that’s really not a very big deal.
Unfortunately, collision detection is inconsistent. When I had the hammer and tried walking into anyone, I usually had to shimmy back and forth to register that permanent knock-out hit. If the NPCs also had a hammer, forget it. I legged it. It’s not the worst collision I’ve seen, but lining up strikes was harder than it should be. And that’s not even the biggest problem. It’s too easy to get caught-up in the scenery. This is one of those games where if you clip into something, be it the walls or one of the fixtures, the computer doesn’t know what to do so it sort of pushes you backwards. But, you’re still moving towards it, and it causes the sprite to stutter-walk. Do you know what I’m talking about? That thing? It does that thing. Movement in general lacks smoothness to it. If this had Robotron or even Food Fight like gracefulness, I don’t think I would have even had to think about Three Stooges getting a YES! or a NO! I’m shocked at this phase in the review, I’m still debating it. If only it had something to put it over the top. Yes, if only.
This was my best non-cheating single player game. It was one complete cycle, at which point the game found its teeth and I barely lasted past the first stage.
Well, guess what? Three Stooges does manage to make it into the end zone. What makes it truly unique is how multiplayer completely changes the gameplay. When you play with more than one player, each key is assigned to a specific stooge (in two player mode, there’s a wildcard key either can pick up). You can all smash the furniture (if you find a hammer) to your heart’s content, but only Larry can get the silver key, while Moe collects the blue one and Curly the green one. THIS is so much more interesting. Three Stooges almost becomes an entirely different experience, and one that works WONDERFULLY! Friendly fire is on and all times, so you can play cooperatively or play cutthroat. I’m stunned to report that this was one of the funnest multiplayer experiences I’ve had in 2023.
Holy crap. I didn’t see this one coming. I’m stunned.
First I played with the usual gang of idiots: Dad and Angela. Dad, goody-good he is, earnestly tried to collect keys while Angela and I resumed our sibling rivalry from Vs. Balloon Fight, “accidentally” killing each-other until it became crystal clear to all observers we were most certainly committing fratricide on purpose. All the while our father was yelling at us to stop being chowder heads and get our keys, ultimately giving up with the words that will live in Vice Family lore for generations untold. His exact quote: “alright, f*ck it! I’m killing you both!” And he did. About thirty minutes into our session, my nieces and nephew came over to the house, saw us playing, and they wanted in. Hell, my mother and even my crotchety old AJ wanted in. We took turns dropping in and out, and while there is a sharp learning curve for younger children (or non-gaming old farts like AJ), we had such a great time. I want to say Three Stooges isn’t a great game, but I’ll be damned if this wasn’t one of my favorite games I’ve played in 2023. I figured it would be cynical and soulless and awful. It’s none of those. Honestly, it could use more polish, but it has an intangible charm and makes for a one-of-a-kind multiplayer experience you absolutely don’t want to miss. Who owns the rights to this game now? Is it Sony? Holy crap, I think it’s Sony! Hey Sony, re-release Three Stooges! I’m telling you, you’re leaving tens of dollars on the table. Verdict: YES!
Eyes
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Digitrex Techstar
Published by Rock-Ola (US) Zaccaria (Europe)
First Released in 1982 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
You can practically feel the cynicism during the planning session. “Pac-Man is popular. What’s Pac-Man? A mouth! Well, what else is on a face that we can turn into our popular game?” “A NOSE!” “A nose, Greg? Goddamn, a f*cking nose? You’re fired! Anyone else?” “Uh.. eyes?” “EYES! Make a game where an eye eats things!” “Eyes don’t eat. They see.” “THEN MAKE A GAME WHERE EYES SEE THINGS! JEEZ LOUISE DO I HAVE TO SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU?”
Eyes holds a minor significance in my life as the first ever game I remember playing on MAME. The name stuck out to me. Some companies went all out with catchy names that grabbed your attention. Q*Bert. Zaxxon. Even Centipede, which is actually a real thing, still pops on a game list. This has none of that. EYES. It’s practically like saying “yep. Just ‘Eyes!’ Deal with it!” In a sense, it stood out by not standing out. Published by Rock-Ola, the famous jukebox manufacturer that’s still around to this day (they turn a century old in 2027) and developed by Digitrex Techstar, I initially pegged Eyes as a soulless Pac-Man coattail rider. But, I was wrong. Actually, it’s not even really a maze chase. I mean, it wants to be one, I think, but actually It’s a run-of-the-mill tank game, and not a very good one.
I’m the eye at the bottom of the screen.
Eyes features eight screens but really only one single maze where you have to fire projectiles from your eye to both kill enemies and also collect.. or possibly destroy, it’s not clear.. the things in the mazes. Like Pac-Man, the object is to collect all the objects. You’re not just being chased, as the other eyes shoot at you. Your projectiles are unlimited and travel the full length of the screen but disappear if they hit something. Likewise, the enemies can and will shoot the full length of the screen as well. Once you clear the 8th stage, that level seems to repeat forever. There’s undoubtedly something here that makes you want to enjoy it even if it does feel like it’s trying a little too hard to be 80s arcade quirky. The problem is, it’s just not fun.
The fact that you can fire more than one projectile at a time seemed nice until I realized what the developers must have: the game would be impossible after a certain point without it.
The biggest issue is that the “maze” just isn’t that interesting, seemingly tailored for neither excising chasing nor exciting tank combat. Once enemies become more aggressive and fire on you faster, you have no choice but to play conservatively and squeeze out distance between you and the baddies, usually one row at a time. By the sixth level, gameplay in Eyes is reduced down to bobbing back and forth like you’re doing the hokey pokey, waiting for enemies to peak around the corner and tagging them in the split second they’re exposed, before they’ll turn the corner and shoot you. Ironically for a game called EYES, enemies don’t blink when they respawn, and they will fire immediately upon spawning. Each enemy spawns in a specific location and always respawns there a second or two after you shoot them, but since they all look the same, the main challenge becomes keeping track of which is which and where they’ll respawn. Does that sound fun? Cuz it ain’t.
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The one remarkable thing about Eyes is that, despite using the same maze with the same target locations and the same enemy starting points, it doesn’t feel like it’s only one maze. That’s probably because the scaling is so badly handled. The first four levels or so are too easy, while level five is the only one that has a nice balance to it. From the sixth level onward, it’s all wiggling back and forth, all the time. Since your projectiles and enemy projectiles don’t cancel each-other out, you’re left with no choice but to camp and wait. The enemies realize this too because eventually they’ll just sit on the other side of a wall YOU’RE parking on and wait as well. I suppose in that sense, Eyes is one of the first cover-based shooters in gaming history. But it’s dull and the scoring balance isn’t very rewarding and there’s just no tension to it. It’s a slog. One of those games lost to history because it wasn’t all that good in the first place. Certainly nowhere near the worst arcaders. God, no. Actually, I think there’s potential here, but Eyes can’t decide if it’s trying to be a thrilling maze chase or an intense tank combat game. Maybe you can do both, but not this way. Verdict: NO!
I avoided using the following cliches: if looks could kill, the eyes have it, the eyes are windows to the soul, eye-eye captain, and so-forth. You’re welcome.
Mario & Wario
Platform: Super Famicom
Developed by Game Freak
Published by Nintendo
First Released August 27, 1993 Exclusively Uses SNES Mouse NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
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Now that Devil World finally got a US release, the question is “what is the biggest Nintendo-published game to never get a US release?” Obviously most Nintendo fans would say “Mother 3.” But, I’m going to disagree. The thing is, that’s not really among the A-lister Nintendo franchises. Not like, say, Mario. And there is a Mario game that never came out in the United States. Not just any Mario game, either. It’s a one-of-a-kind Mario game from the creator of Pokemon. AND it utilizes the SNES Mouse. It’s called Mario & Wario, and it never saw the light of day outside of Japan. It has been referenced a few times, especially in the Smash Bros. series, but otherwise, it’s a non-entity in Nintendo’s library. It’s also likely to never be re-released again. Well, assuming Nintendo doesn’t do some kind of NES-Mini type of plug-and-play with the SNES Mouse for Mario Paint. Which, jeez, that sounds like a license to print money to me. If they did that, maybe they would include Mario & Wario with it. It’s not like there’s a need for Nintendo to create an English translation. All the text and even the logo for Mario & Wario are in English. Even though the game’s code includes a Japanese logo. The theory is that Nintendo accidentally manufactured and shipped the version meant for America to Japan. See kids, even the big boys make mistakes.
For this play session, I used Mario exclusively. I strongly advise anyone playing this to do the same thing. The princess is far too slow, eliminating what little excitement Mario & Wario has, and Yoshi is impossibly fast. It’s not like this is a typical mouse cursor you’re using. Especially for the smaller blocks, I had difficulty lining up Wanda to work her magic. I should also note that I have tremors these days, and by that, I mean my hands shake. I don’t have giant mutant worms attacking me. Almost every death I suffered was the result of clicking errors on my part, but your mileage may vary how much that factors in.
Mario & Wario is sort of like a more fast-paced, proactive, action-based version of Lemmings. Wario swoops over Mario at the start of every world and drops some form of a bucket on his head. You take control of his guardian fairy/glorified cursor, Wanda, who has to clear a path for Mario to reach Luigi. If you tap Mario directly, he changes directions, but otherwise all the interaction is with the stages themselves. There’s a wide variety of blocks that you have to click. Some of them stay on the screen until you click them again. Some are already on the screen and clicking them permanently removes them. Some run on a short timer before vanishing. Others work like switches and clicking one removes all of that variety while activating another color of blocks. There’s also tons of ladders that Mario will always take if he steps on them. Finally, there’s a small handful of enemies, some of which you can kill by clicking, while others you have to work around while making sure Mario avoids them.
These bats, for example, can be clicked four times when they’re perched or once individually when they take flight.
The actual “puzzle design” of Mario & Wario takes quite a while to find its footing. At the start of every level, you’re allowed to scroll around and get a lay of the land. It seems like most of the levels are straight-forward, with the path Mario needs to take already laid out, and you simply act as a caregiver. Assuming the level is maze-like, victory usually comes down to determining what is the final ladder and/or spring you need to use to reach Luigi and reverse-engineering from there. It takes a LONG time for the game to reach the point where I’d consider it to be genuinely challenging. You can play any of the game’s first eight worlds in any order you want, which is an ominous sign for the lack of difficulty scaling. There’s ten levels per world, and once you clear the first eighty levels, you have to play through two more worlds to finish the game.
I found it amusing that the bucket falls off Mario’s head when he falls. Really, Wanda could shove him out of the way at this point and the level would be solved. While I’m on the subject, Wanda’s magic wand can make blocks appear and disappear and can defeat enemies. Why doesn’t she just make the bucket disappear?
It’s not until the ninth and tenth world that truly meaty puzzles come into play, though some of those levels are annoying. There’s stages that have a glue-like substance that you slowly walk through, and you have to click the blocks to turn them over. They’re smaller blocks, and the small blocks in general are the hardest to do, so I hated those. I also wasn’t a fan of the levels where you just slap Mario back and forth like he’s in some kind of frat initiation as you wait for the obstacle to move out of the way. Mario & Wario mostly isn’t a puzzle game in the Baba is You sense. It’s not even really Lemmings-like, even though everyone lazily uses that comparison, myself included. It’s just the easiest comparison. In the entire 80 levels before the final two worlds, maybe a half-dozen stages required me to stop for even a moment and think about what moves I’d need to make. Maybe. It would have required more if I actually went for the four stars in every stage, but those only grant you an extra life. I didn’t need that many lives even when I made multiple clicking errors. It wasn’t until world seven that I died twice on any level, and I never died more than twice before world nine. I also never timed-out once over the entire 100 stages, though I had a couple close calls.
Given the locations of the stars, I get the impression that, at one point in development, they were essential towards beating the stage. The “puzzle” elements of Mario & Wario are more often than not designed around THEIR placement. The typical path to victory is too much of a cinch. If you factor in the stars, suddenly the game seems more elegantly planned. But, they’re just for 1ups. The game doesn’t even track how many stars you collect in each stage after the fact. A modern game would allow you to replay every level and go for perfect scores. On the off-off-off chance Mario & Wario is ever remade, I’m sure the game would be like that, where it charts how many stars you collect each level.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call Mario & Wario a dull concept, because I did enjoy the game enough to play it from start to finish. It’s just not a thrilling experience. Especially early levels. World 1 is so bare bones it doesn’t even feature the stars at all. The opening stages of each new world are glorified tutorials that introduce whatever new element that world introduces. There’s cannons that you can click to change their direction, but you can also click their projectiles to eliminate them. Or perhaps there’s indestructible spiky balls that you have to dodge. But, once you have your path laid out, it’s rare that you have to stress obstacles that might interfere with that. Genuine excitement doesn’t really show up until you’re over eighty levels in. EIGHTY! Holy crap. That’s a lot of slogging through okay-but-mundane levels while waiting to get to the really good stuff.
This specific sequence here was the one that gave me the most problems. To beat it, you have to time when the spiked balls are inside the timed block. BUT, you also have to keep Mario close enough to the edge that he starts to fall before the block vanishes and releases the spiked ball you trap. Mario doesn’t just fall off ledges instantly. Players are given a tiny grace period where he hangs over the edge before falling. Without this grace period, Mario & Wario would be next to impossible.
Mario & Wario isn’t the most brainy of puzzle games. It’s more about staying calm and thinking on your feet. You can’t make any moves outside of the present screen you’re on, but for the most part, they didn’t incorporate that into the puzzle design. Only two or three levels are dependent on you making a move that won’t factor in until later in the level. The most notable one is level 8-10. On it, you start the stage next to a ladder. Below you are two fireballs, and if you don’t close them in immediately, you won’t be able to beat the stage after you spend quite a bit of time making your way to the exit. That’s really the only stage where victory is determined the moment you start the level. On one hand, that means there are no GOTCHAs in the game. On the other hand, there’s no real challenge, either. It’s the least bold possible design they could have done for a game like this.
And really, once you click these two squares, the rest of the level is a lay-up.
Had I played Mario & Wario outside of an emulator, I don’t think I would have liked it as much. There’s no save files, so the entire game must be beaten all at once. I wasn’t limited to beating in a single sitting thanks to save states. Even then, I almost stopped playing when I realized I’d have to redo all the early world that I already played once in 2020. They’re too easy, and the novelty of playing a lost Mario game had long run its course for me. Thankfully, I didn’t play deep last time. The promise of unseen levels was enough to get me to put the time into Mario & Wario. This go around, I beat the whole game. I’d say a little over half the levels are, while not exciting, certainly compelling enough that Mario & Wario holds up slightly more than it would have just as a historic curio.
The last twenty levels are genuinely hard. I wish there had been more stages like this, because I had such a fun time figuring them out. I also started losing lives, but by this point I had built-up close to thirty of them, so there wasn’t any tension.
You would think Nintendo would have done something with Mario & Wario by now. It has one of the finest pedigrees in gaming, and Nintendo has a touchscreen console that would work perfect with this type of gameplay. They’re remaking Mario vs. Donkey Kong, but a Mario & Wario remake would make even more sense, wouldn’t it? It has that tantalizing “forbidden fruit” aura about it. An unreleased-in-America game that utilizes unconventional controls and has gameplay unlike anything else in the entire franchise. Oh, and it was almost even weirder. Mario & Wario was originally conceived as a Super Scope game. Yes, really! The stumbling bucket-headed gameplay was still there, along with creating a path for Mario to reach Luigi, but you’d also fire nets at the screen to capture enemies.
Despite the name of the game, there’s no direct encounter with Wario except during bonus levels, where you click-mash Wario for bonus coins. There’s no final boss battle. The game just ends after 100 stages. By that point, you should be more than ready to be done with it. A little bit of Mario & Wario goes a long ways. It must have been MADDENING to play this without saving.
The only reason Game Freak moved away from making this a light gun game was because TVs were getting bigger and the Super Scope was losing its universal compatibility. Frankly, it’s a miracle Mario & Wario exists at all, as it seems like it came close to being cancelled altogether, instead of just cancelled globally. It’s not clear why this never came out in the United States. It got previews in magazines like Nintendo Power and the SNES Mouse was in more homes than the Super Scope, which got four or five exclusive games. Maybe it was because Mario and Wario barely matter in a game called Mario & Wario. Or maybe because they felt American fans associated Mario with action games, and Mario & Wario is a mild-at-best puzzler. A fun one, but certainly not a great one. Mario & Wario is just alright. Even though it has gameplay merit, really, the curio factor is the main reason anyone would want to play this in 2023. Yet, the formula this created seems like it has potential to live-on. Will the SNES game ever be re-released? Probably not. Will Mario & Wario be remade as a touchscreen game? I wouldn’t bet against it. Verdict: YES! Check out my review of Mario Clash for the Virtual Boy!
Wacky Races
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Atlus
First Released December 25, 1991 NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Good sprite work. Weird subject matter.
Like Yo! Noid from earlier this week, the protagonist of the NES Wacky Races is miscast. I’ve never actually seen a single episode of the show. I wouldn’t even be born until 21 years after it debuted, and they weren’t showing reruns of it when I was in my cartoon-watching prime. Or, if they were, I wasn’t really interested in old cartoons. But, even I know that Muttley is (along with Dick Dastardly) unambiguously the villain of Wacky Races. Oh, and don’t take it personally, Hanna-Barbera fans. I never watched the Flintstones, either. I also never watched the Jetsons. I was bored silly by Scooby-Doo, and I still am. The one and only Hanna-Barbera series I did enjoy was Laff-A-Lympics, but that’s NOT Muttley in that show. It’s Mumbly, a clone of Muttley created because, apparently, another company co-owned Wacky Races. Not just any company, but one that created game shows (Hollywood Squares being their most famous one). Wacky Races was created to be a game show/cartoon hybrid where children would wager on who would win each race. Then some executive came to their senses and said “we’re doing a sort of child-friendly sports gambling show?” The game show segment was dropped, but they liked all the concepts for the characters and turned it into its own cartoon that wouldn’t introduce children to the fun of sports betting. And, 23 years later, that cartoon was turned into a generic NES game. BUT, a pretty good one. At least for the younger set.
I appreciate that all the levels have different themes. They didn’t phone-in the graphics at all. Now, the level layouts? Well..
There’s ZERO racing in Wacky Racers. Strange as this sounds, the NES game is a totally pedestrian platformer. Taking the role of Muttley, you make your way through ten stages, collecting bones and gems. There’s no real twist in the formula, either. The only non-platforming stage is a swimming level that’s every bit as cinchy as the rest of the game. Wacky Races might be the most easy game of its type on the NES. I only lost one life the entire time, and it was to a cheaply placed enemy that sprang-up over an instakill pit. That enemy could have gotten me twenty-five more times and I would have still beaten Wacky Racers with plenty of lives to spare. I’ll say this about it: it would make for an ideal first platforming game for young children. Like, ages 6 to 8. Wacky Races controls great, it has some fun character designs, and it’s EASY.
I don’t know why Atlus didn’t just give you the ability to pick any of the ten levels, since the stages aren’t necessarily thematically connected. Instead, it divides the game into three.. um.. circuits? But, each level with the circuit feels like its own self-contained stage, with its own theme. Each of the ten stages ends in a boss fight as well. There’s no finale after you beat all the stages on the map. Once you’ve cleared the final level, no matter which one it is, the credits roll. Oh, and it lets you know that all of your plans were foiled and Dirk lost the race. Heh. That made me laugh. It’d be like defeating Bowser only for the game to reveal Peach had taken a restraining order out on Mario.
The power-up system is the only slightly atypical bump in the road. When the game first starts, Muttley can only do a bite move that has a limited range. He also only has three hit points and he can’t do a Racoon Mario-like floating move. To change this, you have to collect bones. Just one is enough to move the item cursor in the status bar. It looks like this:
The first item is the bomb that has a limited range and takes a while to throw. The second is a bark that travels nearly the full length of the screen. The third is the Racoon Mario-like “pump the jump button to slowly float downward” thing, and the final item is life. Both the weapons and the life are absurdly overpowered. The bones are EVERYWHERE in the stages, so it only takes about halfway through the first stage to fully charge-up Muttley with the bark, six health, and the floater. In theory, the weapons would work better if they were a limited-usage situation. 20 seconds. 30 seconds. Maybe as low as 15. Nope. Once you activate them, they’re yours until you die. And you won’t die a whole lot. This is especially true thanks to how the hearts work. You can add three hearts to your total every 4th bone you pick up. After that, every time you activate the heart, you get a FULL health refill every time you activate it. Once I picked-up on the fact that every boss chamber has a bone in it, I’d leave the meter on the third slot, then grab the bone in the boss chamber and move the meter over to the health refill. I’d essentially have eleven hits to take down the bosses. If the heart refilled one point at a time, Wacky Races would certainly be one of the best and most balanced platformers on the NES. Instead, it’s like baby’s first platformer, and it has NO tension or stakes.
I only used the bombs once, and that’s when I died on this level. They suck. Stick with the bark.
But, as a leisurely, completely forgettable jaunt through average-but-quality platforming stages and tropes, Atlus could have done a lot worse. The levels are basic, but occasionally the developers got weird. My old arch nemesis, slippery ice levels, makes an appearance. But, after you get past the first section of that stage, the ice vanishes and suddenly the level is made entirely of clouds that act like trampolines. So, you spend an extended section of Wacky Races bouncing off everything like Muttley both did an entire mountain of cocaine and drank about fifty Red Bulls. Sadly, that’s the only section of the game that really goes off the beaten-path of platforming cliches. Hell, even the clouds are pretty cliche-y.
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The hypothetical other hook for Wacky Races would be the ten boss battles against the other stars of the TV show. They’re all here, along with their vehicles. But, none of them have their own unique personalities. In fact, they all feel kind of samey. They’re generic bosses that follow predictable attack patterns as they hop around their chambers spitting nearly identical projectiles at you. Besides some of them being in the correct settings, there’s no connection at all to the TV show, in attitude or behavior. For example: on the TV show, one of the characters has a car that transforms into anything that moves. That doesn’t happen in the game. It doesn’t transform at all, in fact. There’s no haunted house trope for the spooky Gruesome Twosome, and the army guys aren’t in an army-themed level. Really, these could have been any characters from any game. There is literally nothing about Wacky Racers that makes it feel connected to the show besides how the sprites are drawn. Again though, besides the fact that all the bosses are spongy as all hell (and one of them is fought on quicksand, which was REALLY annoying), they’re fun battles! I guess!
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This game could have been any property and it’d make as much sense. The more I learned about the TV show, the more I became convinced that Atlus had already created a ten level template for a generic licensed game, and Wacky Races just happened to be the property they were able to get. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but actually, it’s a pretty decent little NES game. It’s not AMAZING or anything, but the controls are damn near perfect, the level design is alright, and the whole thing only takes about an hour to finish. At the same time, there’s absolutely nothing memorable about it besides the fact that it’s underrated. I first played it back in June of 2020 and I literally remembered NOTHING about it except that I wondered why it wasn’t a more popular game. As I replayed it, what made me shake my head in disbelief most was the fact that, generic as it is, nothing about Wacky Races was phoned-in. The sheer variety of set pieces and enemies is gobsmacking for this type of game from this era on this console. Look at all the different facades they created:
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And it ultimately won me over. Given the complete lack of connection to the TV series, Wacky Races for the NES should come across as really cynical, and it doesn’t. It’s damn charming. Yea, it’s too easy, but I’m of the opinion that it’s always preferable for a game to be too easy than too hard, because at least everyone can experience it that way. Wacky Races is ACHING for adjustable difficulty. It wouldn’t be hard to turn this into one of the best games on the NES. It just needs the item system readjusted. Or, alternatively, just reduce the amount of bones and 1ups (which are literally just laying around levels) in the stages. Oh, it would still be totally generic and completely unrelated to the cartoon series, but it would also be among the best platform games on a console defined by platform games. Wacky Races might not be the most shiny hidden gem, but it sparkles nonetheless. Verdict: YES!
Yo! Noid
aka Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru
Developed by Now Production
Published by Capcom (US) Namco (JP)
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released March 16, 1990 (JP) November 22, 1990 (US) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
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I miss real pizza. I can’t eat it anymore thanks to a Celiac diagnosis. I hadn’t really liked Pizza Hut since I was a little kid, but I’d seriously consider chewing off my own pinky toe if I thought it’d let me eat Pizza Hut again. Never really liked Domino’s, though, and I completely missed the Noid’s time frame. By the time my memories started forming, it had already been phased out as their mascot. It became one of those Simpsons’ gags that grown-ups had to explain to me. I’d seen a few gaming magazines of my era make fun of the concept of a Noid video game. It is absurd. It also makes no sense to have the Noid as a hero. The whole point of The Noid is it was supposed to mess with their guaranteed 30 minute-or-less delivery. The character is antagonistic towards the consumption of Domino’s Pizza. It would be like making the Allstate Mayhem character the protagonist of a game today where it stops catastrophes from happening. I don’t think you understand what the character represents, dummies. Even worse is having your mascot in a game where things are constantly going tits-up. Like this section in the first f’n level.
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The first level has rising and lowering platforms throughout it. It’s a bold choice for an opening stage. But, when those platforms are safe to step on doesn’t logically match the graphics. Clearly visible, non-hydrated platforms are still instakills unless you let them get a lot more clearance than anyone’s rational common sense would dictate. If you can see the thing you’re walking on, why would water that doesn’t even come up to your ankles be fatal? It’s pretty remarkable how quickly Yo! Noid completely squanders having a non-conventional introduction, and an ominous sign of things to come. Collision is an issue throughout Yo! Noid, but in fairness, it works both ways. You have a yo-yo for a weapon, and coming close enough to enemies works towards damaging them. Of course, most enemies take TONS of hits to actually slay. This will become especially annoying once you start the second level, which is your typical NES slippery ice level. Excuse me, please. I need to go scream.
I might as well mention the Famicom original here. It’s mostly the same game with the same layout, only the graphics and enemies look different. Also, instead of throwing a yo-yo at enemies, you sic what looks like a pigeon on them. As much as I love using a yo-yo, throwing a live animal at baddies is so much more spiteful that I prefer it.
Do you know what’s especially insane about Yo! Noid? Once you get past the first two levels, it almost becomes a good game. It’s like all their will to experiment was used up in the first three stages. In the third level, you ride around on a skateboard, and the game becomes a sort of fast paced hop-and-bop game where you jump on enemies. BUT, just jumping on top of them won’t work, and often will leave you dead. You have to sort of hit them at an angle with the underside of the board, but it’s really fickle about it. I found aiming with the back wheels worked best. It’s a one-hit death game, so you don’t want combat to ever feel inconsistent, but in the skateboarding and flying stages, you don’t get your yo-yo/pigeon. Every time Yo! Noid felt like it was close to becoming a good game, something would always draw it backwards into mediocrity.
I’ll say this about the US version: it’s so bonkers with the character designs that I figured they must be hold-overs from the Japanese version. But, in fact, that wasn’t the case. Like, in the ice level, a guy throws a curling stone at you. That’s NOT in the Japanese version.
There’s a couple levels where you fly through the sky, and one where you stomp around on a pogo stick that’s apparently called a “pizza crusher” according to the box art. But the problem is, the level layouts are never really clever, and too often rely on last-pixel-jumping. Those are NEVER fun, and I struggle to imagine what goes through a developer’s head with them. Do they think it’s more exciting? Because it ain’t. It’s just cheap, and if your collision detection is even a little problematic, it turns the platforming into random guesswork. While Yo! Noid has decent enough graphics and genuinely charming sprite work, it’s the levels that ruin the experience. It’s the strangest thing, because the game gets all the original, memorable aspects out of the way right off the bat and the rest of the game is as generic as it gets. The only other really memorable set-piece is a couple flying stages where you die one second into the level if you don’t start mashing the jump button. Because of course they’d design it that way.
The green boxes that spit-up enemies are lethal to the touch, even when they’re not shooting baddies out. They also take roughly twenty trillion hits to defeat, give or take. This is where you’ll want to have a screen-clearing super item, which is what that meter next to the score is for. Hey, SCORE IS FOR! That rhymes!
And then there’s what I thought were fun mini-games, but actually, they’re supposed to be the game’s boss fights. You have to challenge other Noids to pizza eating contests every other level. You and the boss each have a series of cards that have various amounts of pizza on them. The boss ALWAYS goes first and picks at random. You then get to select any card you want. If it’s the same amount, nothing happens. If one is higher than the other, the person with the highest amount eats the leftover amount of pizzas. So, if the boss picks a 1 and I pick a 3, I eat two pizzas. Each of you has a set amount of pizzas they need to eat to win, with you needing much less than the boss does at first, but with every new contest you encounter, the amount goes up, and so do the numbers on the boss’s cards.
The boss usually has several high-value cards, while you have more 1s and 2s.
Now, there’s a catch. Scattered throughout the levels are items you use in these duels that can double or even triple the amount of pizzas you play on them, along with hot sauce that subtracts 5 points from the boss’s total AFTER they’ve scored a round victory, OR a pepper shaker that simply blocks the card from working before they score. The problem is the valuable items that double/triple your totals or negate the Boss Noid’s cards are often hidden in completely abstract areas on the map. Like this:
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So what WOULD be a good idea instead turns the entire experience into the player hopping around, throwing their weapon non-stop while they look for the items that could be literally anywhere, with no rhyme or reason to their locations. And you’ll NEED those items too, because at the end of the game, the bosses have cards that have values as high as 6 while you’re stuck with the highest value being 4.
Your numbers are 1 – 4. So yea, you’ll want as many items as you can find.
And by the way, that there? That’s the last boss. I didn’t even realize that until I won the battle and got the game’s ending. I admit, I enjoyed the card game encounters, but not in the same way I enjoy a typical boss fight. I really thought these were fun mini-games, not the crux of the entire experience. I never lost any of the duels, either. The closest I came was finding myself in a situation where it was impossible for me to eat all the pizzas on my meter, so all I could do was hope for a draw. On what I thought would be the final turn, I failed at that. The opponent took the lead by a single pizza and I thought the game was over. But then something happened: because the opponent Noid was out of cards, even though they were winning, I won the match. Most of the battles I was able to prevent the boss from scoring a single point, but now that I think about it: the bosses require so many pizzas to eat (they ALWAYS need a full 18 point meter, but you don’t) that you could probably easily run them out of cards with no effort no matter how lucky/unlucky they are. It was one final “meh” to cap off what is peak NES licensed mediocrity. Credit where it’s due: this IS a Domino’s game! Verdict: NO!
I could have said “avoid the Noid!” too but it was too easy.
Super Castlevania IV aka Akumajō Dracula Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Developed by Konami First Released October 31, 1991 Included in Castlevania Anniversary Collection
“Alright, I’ll knock this f*cking thing down.. AGAIN.. but YOU peasants have to build a strip mall on the foundation when I finish! Next time Dracula comes back, he’ll have to deal with a Kinko’s in his courtyard!” “HAH, JOKE’S ON YOU, SIMON! KINKO’S NO LONGER EXISTS! IT’S FED-EX OFFICE NOW!” “Fed-Ex? Shit.. that’s pretty evil. YOU WIN THIS ROUND, DRACULA!”
Maybe it’s just me, but when I play Super Castlevania IV, I never can shake the “this is just a glorified tech demo” feeling. This was made by an entirely different team from the developers responsible for the NES series, and you can tell. Castlevania IV’s team was apparently chosen specifically to squeeze the most potential out of the brand new Super NES. Frankly, it’s a miracle it’s as good as it is. I actually played it before I played Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, and once I had played both, I originally held Super Castlevania IV in higher esteem. These days, it’s no contest: Dracula’s Curse is the one and old linear Castlevania that can stake a claim as the best Castlevania game, even when compared to the Metroidvanias. Meanwhile, Super Castlevania IV’s tech demo nature stands out more and more every time I play it. That, and it’s kind of easy, and Castlevania games should NEVER be easy.
Given that Konami did the Goonies games, it’s entirely possible Mikey is fighting the Blues Brothers a few miles to the left of Simon here.
Why’s it so easy? Well, I have a theory, and I might as well get that out of the way first. Okay, here’s my bonkers conspiracy theory: I think Super Castlevania IV didn’t originally have eight-way whipping until after they finished the level layouts and enemy placement. I’ve scoured the interwebs looking for verification on this, and the only details I could find is that they wanted the whip to do things on the Super NES it couldn’t do on the NES. Eight-way whipping, and presumably the whip-flicking, was originally something the development team wanted for Castlevania 1, but the NES couldn’t handle it. In an interview with Retro Gamer, director Masahiro Ueno notes that developed started while Castlevania III was still being worked on, and that frequent tinkering and reworking was done. That really ought to shoot down my theory, since they could fix any issues eight-way would cause. However, if you look at the enemy placement, it sure seems like it’s optimized specifically for the old way. The “you can only whip straight ahead of you” way. From the placement of staircases to the distance between you and the enemies, it feels like the nerfy “any direction” method was something that was added with very little consideration for the difficulty.
And you thought the sub-weapons nerfed the game before. Here, I’m literally draping a motionless chain over an enemy and defeating it. It would be like being able to stop the forces of evil from entering your house by hanging a dog’s leash over the door.
Now, while I’m sure philosophers will tell you the most heroic thing a hero can do is avoid confrontation, this is a video game, and the first 16-bit entry in a franchise renowned for its high difficulty. If not for the ghosts and undead minions, Castlevania IV would be almost kiddie. It’s not as if you can only avoid directly facing enemies once in a while. It happens constantly, and it’s even worse because of the introduction of the wrist-flick. With it, needing to expertly time whipping the projectiles enemies spit out is gone. Just hold the magic whip out and it acts as a shield. Weaker enemies don’t require you to crack them with precision. Just hold out the magic whip and let them fly into it. If an enemy is below you, just drape the magic whip over them from a higher platform. It does less damage, so it’ll take longer than normal attacks, but they’ll die just the same. It’s one of those “sounds good on paper, not as good in practice” situations, and I think it and the eight-way was a last-second addition. My ultimate proof: every single boss seems to have been based around being able to attack them straight-ahead, not from an angle. There’s even platforms tailored around it and their weak points. I think I’m onto something.
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I have no issue with the concept of Simon being able to attack in all directions. In fact, I rather like it. It feels great, too! It’s very intuitive and easy to get the hang of. But, you need to build the game around it, and Castlevania IV rarely feels like the levels were optimized for the eight-way attacks. Especially the vertical usage. By that, I mean where it feels like they specifically created a situation where you’re reacting to something above you. In fact, after a stretch in the first level, it almost never happens. If you’re going to include eight directions to attack, you need to incentivize it by including eight directions of immediate danger. They didn’t do that nearly enough. The eight-way whip is mostly useful as a preemptive assault against enemies who currently pose no direct threat to you. And, thanks to your limitless 8-way attack, they never will.
This is the section I’m talking about. These enemies drop on you from above. There’s not a lot of this in the game.
This creates what I call the CV4 Paradox. The CV4 Paradox states that, if your basic attack can reach in all directions, the more complex the level design is, the less exciting the game could be. It’s counterintuitive, but think about it: it’s only when Super Castlevania IV reverts to back-to-basics Castlevania 1-style straight corridors that you really have to directly confront a large portion of the enemies. So, when the level is laid out like these screens:
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As basic and bland as they are, you’re in immediate danger. It has to be dealt with right now, or else. That’s the whole point of being an action game. Those are the exciting parts! But, anything more complicated than a straight corridor, and you can circumvent the action, and thus eliminate the excitement. So, in a game with all-directional attacks such as Super Castlevania IV, if you layout your levels like this:
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Well, then you, the game designer, have to do other things with the enemies to make them a threat now and not later. Give them projectiles, or some kind of shield. SOMETHING! Otherwise, you’ve basically given the player a free pass. Castlevania IV is missing that extra step. Too many enemies are reduced to being nothing more than cannon fodder. While you can defeat out-of-reach enemies with the right weapon in other Castlevania games, it costs you something. There’s limitations to it. There’s essentially no limitations to your whip in Castlevania IV. You are at an incredible advantage over the baddies. Frankly, it’s only by virtue of the established Castlevania weapon, the whip, being so damn satisfying to use that Castlevania IV doesn’t become dull. That, and the set pieces are (mostly) good enough to carry the load.
Despite Mode 7 and other famous SNES effects being old hat by the time I came of age, I can still be impressed by the graphics of Super Nintendo games. But, I don’t think what Castlevania IV did worked so much for me. The big technical showpieces really haven’t aged very well. I’m sure this chandelier was breathtaking once upon a time. But thirty-two years later? Not so much. The weird spinning tunnel thing also did nothing for me. The only room that really works is the rotating room where you hang by your whip, and it barely lasts a minute.
It speaks to how dazzling the tour through Dracula’s crib is that Super Castlevania IV isn’t boring. Canonically, it’s a pseudo-remake of the original game, but it feels more like a re-imagining where everything has been scaled-up. Simon’s sprite is bigger. Enemies are bigger. The levels are bigger. The bosses are bigger. The world is much more alive. There’s entire new set-pieces and boss concepts too. Given how much easier the game is, it almost feels like a guided tour through a haunted house attraction, complete with dancing ghosts that you have to battle against. There’s a spooky library with pictures that follow you. There’s a creepy dungeon with pools of blood (well, it’s blood in the Japanese version). One stage even takes place in Dracula’s vault, and to complete the immersion, you collect TONS of treasure bags in it.
The treasure chests even chime when you step off them. I love how they had to animate transparent ghosts to float over the action. It’s a haunted vault. Otherwise, you might feel like you’re playing Duck Tales.
It’s not entirely the fault of the eight-way whip that Castlevania IV is easier. It controls like a dream. Stairs? No problem. Cracking the whip every which way? Easy peasy. When Castlevania IV introduces the ability to use the whip to swing across platforms, it’s incredible how instantly intuitive it is. In fact, all of the movement in the game is, including the fixed-jumping. The only time Castlevania IV really finds its teeth is at the very tail-end of the adventure. Right before you reach the final four bosses (yes, FOUR bosses end the game, back-to-back-to-back-to-back), there’s a section with fast moving platforms and GOTCHA-style instakill spiked ceilings. There’s nothing quite like it in the game up to this point, so it’s a bit of a dick move.
I suppose it does try to do “on the fly education” of players by having the platforms sort of zig-zag and exit stage-right off the screen, but the instakill finale still rubbed me the wrong way.
I suspect that the game had a lot more content that didn’t make it past the drawing board. It’s so strange that it ends with four consecutive, unrelated boss fights. I don’t mean four different forms, either. Oh no. You fight a naked version of the dinosaur skeleton knight you fought a few levels earlier. Then you walk a little bit and fight a gargoyle. Then you walk a little bit and fight the Grim Reaper, and then you climb a staircase and fight Dracula, with no basic enemies in-between. It’s a strange way to cap off the game. Also, the underwhelming battle with Dracula only has one form. When he’s down to his final few ticks of health, his face does become skeletal, but the fight continues on as it had before, with you having to smack him in the head as he teleports, attacks, then teleports again. When the action pauses for Drac to power-up and “lose his face” he doesn’t even get his health back, and you’re only a few hits away from total victory. Compared to the dramatic changes he underwent in Castlevania I and III, it’s such a letdown.
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Okay, so Super Castlevania IV is too easy and it ends with a whimper instead of a bang. But, I’ve gone back to it a few times since first picking it up on my Wii’s Virtual Console in 2006, and I never get bored with it. With the exception of one level (the caves, which I just never liked that setting in games), I know I’ll always have fun with SCV4 whenever I turn it on. I like the haunted house comparison, because I enjoy the journey for the sights and the sounds in the same way I enjoy walking through a well done haunted house. Of course, that means I’m admitting it’s something more than raw gameplay keeping it afloat. It’s nearly a perfect marriage of set pieces and gameplay, but despite all the ingredients being there, it falls well short of perfection.
It’s so nice of Castlevania, and by that I mean the physical castle itself, to wait for Simon to make his way to a scenic vista before crumbling. Downright courteous of it.
Unlike Castlevania III, I do find myself saying “I could swear I used to like this more” every single time I play through it. It’s one of those games where the basic action is done so well that it’s always enjoyable. But, while you can’t help but like it, you’ll always wish it did more. It’s not really that scary, either. The creature sprites just aren’t as creepy as they were on the NES. It’s that rare game I like where I have to concede that something is horribly off about it. The most telling thing about Castlevania IV is that it’s in the running for having the distinction of being “the weird one” among the games on Nintendo consoles. Mind you, that’s a series that includes Simon’s Quest. Of course, Simon’s Quest still has the basic core Castlevania action as it always was. Super Castlevania IV is like playing the NES games in God Mode. Hey, God Mode can be fun, but it’s empty calories gaming. Eventually, you’ll want something juicier you can sink your teeth into. Verdict: YES!
Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse
aka Akumajō Densetsu
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Konami
First Released December 22, 1989 Included in Castlevania Anniversary Collection
So much for basic, straight-line corridors.
While I hold the original Castlevania near and dear to my heart, there’s no doubt about it that Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse is the superior game. Even Netflix seems to agree. The animated series is (loosely) based on it. While I still prefer my Vanias to have the Metroid prefix attached to them, among the linear Castlevania games, this is my favorite. I first played it on the Wii when I was 20, and to say I was blown away would be an understatement. After the abomination that was Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, this feels like the ultimate make-good. The formula Konami used was simple: take the original game, remove the conservative level design, add three playable characters and annoying branching paths and you’ve got yourself the best game on the Nintendo Entertainment System. One that is radically different between regions. They went a little overboard there. Like, I get that they had to remove the boobs from Medusa and the statues, because children might be traumatized or something, but they literally removed the.. I dunno what this is supposed to be. The holy presence of Jesus?
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The changes aren’t just cosmetic. Few video games have as significant regional differences as Castlevania III does. From the amount of channels the music features to the way damage is handled to how effective characters are to the overall difficulty, the alterations between the original 1989 Famicom release and the 1990 international release are.. well, game changing. The Cutting Room Floor, one of my favorite gaming reference sites and a place you absolutely should bookmark, needed to dedicate an entire page just to Castlevania III’s regional differences. The change that has the biggest impact is in Grant Danasty, the first character you can get to join your party. He’s a speedy little bastard who can jump really high and stick to walls. He can even crawl across ceilings. It’s like playing Castlevania with Spider-Man. In the United States version, Grant’s biggest drawback is his weapon. It’s a little flimsy knife that isn’t very satisfactory to use, and you can also only get two subweapons: throwing knives and axes. In Japan, that’s not the case. Grant’s main weapon IS the throwing knife, and it doesn’t even cost hearts to use it.
While Grant and Alucard can both circumvent large sections of the game, you have to turn into a bat with Alucard to do it, and that costs hearts. It’s free with Grant. In this picture, keeping Grant instead of swapping him for Sypha is rewarded with the ability to skip two rooms and go straight to the boss on the haunted ship level. I actually really admire that they went all-out with adding shortcuts, ledges, and free-lives in all subsequent levels specifically tailored for his abilities.
I seem to be one of the few people who enjoys the more difficult American version, but it’s not by a very big margin. Actually, the best possible version of Castlevania III doesn’t exist, and instead is somewhere between the two versions. In the US, the amount of damage you take depends on what level you’re on. The Japanese version is more nuanced. Each enemy has its own unique damage, and even their projectiles have unique damage values. In the US, you’ll take two ticks of damage in the first level when anything hits you. For the same level in the Famicom port, you’ll take three damage from direct contact with a skeleton and two damage from the bones it throws at you. Baddies gain a point of damage once you reach the final three levels, and I like that way better. It’s more immersive. I could be cool and say “not that Dracula’s Curse needs help with immersion with how excellent the graphics and gameplay are!” but actually, I think games should take every step they can towards immersion. Especially if there’s no drawback to it, and there’s really no reason they should have changed it.
One of the most memorable changes is the removal of the “GOTCHA BAT” in the home stretch before you reach the final battle with Dracula. It’s one of the cheapest enemy placements in the entire Castlevania franchise, but that was actually added excursively for us Americans.
On the other hand, in the American release, some boss arenas were altered to be tougher, typically by removing “space spots.” Bosses in the NES Castlevania games being the cheesable little kittens they are, I like that. Additionally, some bosses were beefed up in other ways. The Leviathans spit two small fireballs in Japan, but three large ones in the US. The twin dragons can aim their fire up and down. I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds with different editions, but Castlevania III is the rare 8-bit game with profound differences that’s actually good enough to immediately replay through just to enjoy the sight-seeing. It’s like the NES version of a spot-the-difference puzzle.
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When you play a complete cycle of Castlevania III, you’ll travel through ten levels. But, the game actually contains fifteen total levels. You’re ultimately given three potential pathways to take. Though not labeled as such, each path is tailored to be a specific difficulty. The “easy-medium-hard” road, if you will. The path for Sypha is the “easy way” while Grant path is the “medium way” and the path where you go to fetch Alucard is the “hard way.” No matter which path you take, you’re in for a treat. No NES game does settings better. No NES game gives the impression you’re actually traversing a vast, vibrant world better. The graphics are absolutely gobsmacking at times, and this was still in the era where Castlevania was meant to be.. you know.. scary! I should note here that I used a ROM hack that removes the branching paths and gives you a complete 15 level quest. You can get Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse – Linear Edition right here. It also speeds up the swapping between characters, which is a flow-breaking in either region. Without the hack, switching characters is so slow that sometimes I’d not switch to a more optimized character just because I didn’t want to break-up the action for a few seconds.
Alucard can jump higher than Trevor and turn into a bat, which absolutely drains hearts like crazy in the US version. On the Famicom, it doesn’t drain quite as quickly. Still, Alucard is easily my least favorite character. His attack is weak as hell.
My biggest knock on Castlevania 1 is the ultra-conservative level design. There’s nothing conservative about Castlevania III’s level design. While the graphics are dazzling and the set pieces are memorable, it’s the layouts that shine brightest. The ideal marriage of platforming hijinks and intense action. Mostly. There’s some truly putrid sections to Castlevania III that I want to skewer. Castlevania III is a white-knuckle gothic horror action game, and yet multiple times it wants players to just stand around waiting for something to happen. You’re not even doing anything fun, like fighting bad guys. You’re just waiting, and depending on who your partner is, sometimes the wait is agonizing. Like in this room:
Or this room:
Or this room:
Or, worst of all, THIS room:
That last one is especially annoying. Dodging blocks that rain from the ceiling really isn’t exactly exciting, and it’s not like the door is RIGHT THERE above you. It’s quite a ways up. Now, if you have Grant, you can reach the exit faster. If you have Alucard, you can turn into a bat and fly up to the stairway, but if you get hit by a block, you’re probably going to be dead. See, once you scroll upward, the previous area ceases to exist, because VIDEO GAME LOGIC! I found out the hard way that this means the blocks that rain and form the pillars you need to reach the exit no longer have anything to rain onto. If you scroll the stacks too high, you can’t finish the level. Like this:
The exit is on the far left side of the screen. I’m dead here.
Let me be clear: I like that they experimented with level design. I said that Castlevania’s level design wasn’t bold. And it wasn’t, but it was perfect. Of course it was. They knew they’d nailed one thing and one thing only: the combat. So, they focused the majority of their efforts on optimizing the levels towards fighting bad guys, limiting the platforming and environmental shenanigans to a few brief sections. Well, they couldn’t do that again. Perfection was off the table, because they absolutely had to get creative with what the engine could do. Some of their choices just didn’t work. The melting blocks are a great example. In that level, they divided the stage in half, with an upper and lower path. In theory, players who wait for the blocks to open up the lower path should be rewarded with an easier route. Instead, both routes are pretty pedestrian the first time.
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And the paths merge soon after anyway. It’s such an underwhelming difference between the upper and lower portions that I feel like the whole thing was just a massive waste of time. Wouldn’t it have been much cooler if it branched off into two completely different areas? If you’re going to make players wait as long as they have to for the bottom pathway to open up, you have to make it worth the wait. Castlevania III didn’t.
See what I mean? After waiting for the blocks to melt the path to the lower door, the two pathways converge almost immediately anyway. What you can’t see is that I killed the same enemy that’s seen below, too. Given how incredible the level design typically is, I know they’re better than this.
You know what? Given how exemplary the rest of the game is, I’m going to say that the developers were entitled to the occasional level design brain fart. Less excusable is how the stairs are harder to use in this edition of Castlevania than any other one. Being able to “bind yourself” to the stairs has an unresponsiveness to it. I’ve reached the phase of my gaming existence where I can beat the original Castlevania without losing a single life. I’m a long ways away from that in Castlevania III. I thought I’d had a one-death run on it, but I now realize I probably did rewind the occasional “just walk off a ledge when I was trying to take the stairs” moment that. Even after years of playing this, I still do nearly every single session.
As far as I can tell, this is the only “last pixel” jump in the entire game, and it’s not even that as long as you’re using Grant. However, without Grant, it’s a pain in the ass to judge.
Stairway from hell issues not withstanding, most of Castlevania III’s experimenting succeeds. It starts right off the bat with a climb up through a church. Curse wastes no time in letting players know things will be different. There’s going to be vertical levels and lots of jumps. It’s not inconceivable that you could die from an errant bat knocking you back. That’s literally right as the game starts, too. Branching paths and multiple characters aren’t the only concept introduced. Auto-scrolling makes its Castlevania debut, though every instance of it is a vertical section. A couple are smooth scrolling, and you die from both being too far up on the screen (as in you’re above where your life bar is), but also from falling to where a ground hasn’t appeared yet. VIDEO GAME LOGIC! I’ve never been a big fan of auto-scrolling in general. I mean, what is the malevolent entity that is causing you to die when the screen automatically scrolls? At least in Castlevania, you can imagine it’s something awful. Especially when the game introduces what I’ve termed “slam-scrolling.” It looks like this:
I’ve never seen auto-scrolling like that before, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t an absolute thrill. It’s great! Sure, the Castlevania tropes are all here. Even a souped-up version of the original first level from Castlevania 1, complete with music, shows up late in the game. The optional second level sees you climb up a gigantic clock tower, THEN after you rescue Grant Danasty, you have to climb back down it, and it’s such a thrill. So are the collapsing floors, clock pendulums, tilting platforms, and gigantic gears. The one set piece that doesn’t work.. well, it really doesn’t work. Like the original Castlevania, the spiked presses have badly done collision detection, but this is historically bad.
It took me quite a while to find the max distance your sprite can be from the spiked presses. This is the exact moment I died. Look at how far my head is from the press. I like to use the “against instinct” rule for determining how bad collision detection is. I understand that some wiggle room is required for these older games, but if the collision detection stretches beyond what your instinct would tell you is safe, you have a problem. That is WELL past what anyone would instinctively believe is a safe distance based on your sprite size. If this is the best they could do, then the presses should have been removed from the game. And, unlike Castlevania 1, they show up multiple times. On the plus side, you can stand on them this time.
That’s the thing about Castlevania III: whereas the first game was nearly perfect in what it could do, this one is so far removed from perfection that it couldn’t see perfection with a pair of binoculars. The wall clinging controls with Grant are so unintuitive that using them is actually kind of dangerous if you’re hanging over a pit. Alucard’s bat form handles so poorly that I almost never used it. And then there’s Sypha, who’s magic balls are so insanely overpowered that, if not for the sloppy stair controls, they might as well run the credits when you pick them up. I’m kidding. Actually, this is a pretty difficult game. Among other things, the bosses aren’t all cheesable this time around. While a triple-shot holy water can take the first and second bosses down in a single second, others require a little more finesse. The final battle against Dracula is probably one of the better ones in the entire franchise, and this time around, there’s three forms instead of two. Overall, if you replay the game with every path (or you play the Linear ROM hack) there’s 27 bosses. Well, if you count multiple forms and the constant repeats that occur. Some of the battles are pretty intense, too.
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Besides those annoying melty rooms and falling block sections, the action is non-stop. And really, it’s only cheesable on the basis of experience. Anyone who has somehow not played this yet won’t be able to just waltz through it. There’s a massive variety of enemies that take a while to get a feel for. Mastering the four player characters takes time, and some of the sections are absolutely brutal. The vertical stages are some of the toughest I’ve ever experienced, based around both enemies who fly in curves and towers that shoot projectiles. And, since you spend most of the time on stairs, the towers aren’t that easy to kill. Well, depending on your load-out. Sypha with her magic balls kind of nerfs them. Even nerfed, if one shot gets you and you’re on the edge of a platform, you’re probably going to die from the knock-back.
Yea, I won’t be acing this game any time soon.
For all of its shortcomings, Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse is my favorite NES game. I’ve played through it around a dozen times now, including three in a row for this review, and I still never get bored with it. It nails the look and feel of a lot of my favorite gaming tropes. I absolutely love the fact that the game feels like an actual tour through a cursed countryside on your way to the castle occupied by embodiment of all that is evil. And basic Castlevania action is almost always satisfying on its own. The “Vampire Killer” whip has to be one of the greatest weapons in gaming history. It’s just so dang fun to snap endless undead baddies with it. Oddly enough, what’s scariest of all about Castlevania III is that it doesn’t even come close to being flawless. The places where it can be improved-upon are self-evident. Oh, and I wish you could have more than one extra character. I think that’s why I enjoyed Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon so much: because it’s a game that built upon the groundwork laid here. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if the greatest 2D action game that will ever be made isn’t buried in the original Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, waiting to come out. Maybe one of these days, it’ll happen. Verdict: YES!
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Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse
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