Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES) Playthrough @NintendoComplete

NintendoComplete A playthrough of Bandai's 1989 action game for the NES, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, considered one Robert Louis Stevensons’ finest works, was originally published in 1886. Taking place in London at the height of the second industrial revolution, it weaves the twisted tale of Dr. Jekyll, a highly regarded physician who stands at odds with his nature. Cognizant of the darkness lurking deep within, Henry Jekyll furtively concocts a tincture to isolate the polarized halves of his inner self. He only partially succeeds, however, and finds himself a broken shell. Though the good in him remains tainted by the evil that he both fears and embraces, his dark side is freed by the creation of Edward Hyde, an amoral proxy through which Jekyll, untethered from the shackles of his conscience, can live out his most perverse fantasies.

This 1989 NES adaptation begins as Dr. Jekyll ingests the potion, and the player’s task is not to aid the realization of Mr. Hyde’s murderous desires, but rather, to safely direct Dr. Jekyll to the church where Miss Millicent, his fiancée, awaits. Though this choice renders the premise as little more than a convoluted justification for a cool game mechanic, the box's teaser blurb (“Battle demons with Hyde’s PSYCHO-WAVE”) should be sufficient warning to anyone hoping for an accurate adaptation.

Jekyll travels through six areas of the city on his way to Miss Millicent. Suffering the effects of the potion, he must avoid the potential stressors that surround him lest they trigger a sudden and violent transformation into Henry’s alter-ego. Preoccupied townsfolk tending to their business, unruly children, dogs and cats chasing one another underfoot, and downpours of bird droppings will sap his patience and sanity, represented by the "meter" gauge. The more troublesome enemies (such as the mad bomber clad in pink) will additionally cause Jekyll physical harm, and if the life bar empties, the game ends. But, if the stress meter reaches the H, Dr. Jekyll will collapse and pass out.

Reawakening as his evil counterpart, Mr. Hyde must then traverse a distorted, ghoul-infested parallel version of Dr. Jekyll’s London while killing demons to reduce his stress, and upon regaining his equilibrium, Dr. Jekyll can resume his walk to the chapel. However, if the two halves cross paths before the final stage, a bolt of lightning will strike him down, ending the game.

Jekyll and Hyde’s individual perspectives provide an unexpectedly effective portrayal of the character’s dissociative tendencies. Though cliché, the contrast mimics the novella’s exploration of how people willingly subjugate their interior selves for the sake of social acceptance. Jekyll’s picturesque interpretation of London makes the city appear charming and quaint, but Hyde’s lurid view of the same streets paints it as a terrifying and brutal place teeming with corrupted souls.

The game's aesthetic convincingly depicts both ends of this spectrum. Dr. Jekyll’s detailed daytime stages are certainly more appealing than the near-monochromatic night stages that Mr. Hyde must fight through, though the latter’s liberal use of deep blues and flat black does a nice job of symbolically reflecting his feelings of loneliness and emptiness. The music is atmospheric - the somber daytime theme evokes a sense of an age past, and the minimalist, repetitive phrasings of the nighttime theme suggest a sense of the mundane pervading even life's extremes.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is often lambasted for its stiff controls and overall level of difficulty, and though there is some merit to those criticisms, like most NES games, the majority of the game's issues can be overcome with familiarity and practice. With an understanding of the enemy patterns and the timing required to successfully leap moving obstacles, the controls are sufficient in most situations. Unfortunately, the cracks start to show in the final stage, and the controls lack the precision and responsiveness needed to consistently avoid the endless barrage obstacles in the end-game gauntlet.

Dr. Hyde is far more agile than his more reasonably-minded half, and the Psycho Wave attack, though odd in its trajectory, is reliable. The final Hyde level, however, can be extremely frustrating: each of Hyde’s stages auto-scroll, and if Hyde is in danger of being forced off of a ledge, he'll automatically jump forward - often straight into an enemy - resulting in forced, cheap hits that should've been entirely avoidable.

Overall, the game is a respectable effort. The fun is hurt by the occasional control inconsistencies, the unfair endgame, and an overly stiff learning curve, but in spite of these drawbacks, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde manages to be an entertaining bit of slower-paced action fare, and its unique mechanics and appealing graphics make for a game worth giving an honest effort.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

updated 1 year ago

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2023-10-12 | A playthrough of Bandai's 1989 action game for the NES, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, considered one Robert Louis Stevensons’ finest works, was originally published in 1886. Taking place in London at the height of the second industrial revolution, it weaves the twisted tale of Dr. Jekyll, a highly regarded physician who stands at odds with his nature. Cognizant of the darkness lurking deep within, Henry Jekyll furtively concocts a tincture to isolate the polarized halves of his inner self. He only partially succeeds, however, and finds himself a broken shell. Though the good in him remains tainted by the evil that he both fears and embraces, his dark side is freed by the creation of Edward Hyde, an amoral proxy through which Jekyll, untethered from the shackles of his conscience, can live out his most perverse fantasies.

This 1989 NES adaptation begins as Dr. Jekyll ingests the potion, and the player’s task is not to aid the realization of Mr. Hyde’s murderous desires, but rather, to safely direct Dr. Jekyll to the church where Miss Millicent, his fiancée, awaits. Though this choice renders the premise as little more than a convoluted justification for a cool game mechanic, the box's teaser blurb (“Battle demons with Hyde’s PSYCHO-WAVE”) should be sufficient warning to anyone hoping for an accurate adaptation.

Jekyll travels through six areas of the city on his way to Miss Millicent. Suffering the effects of the potion, he must avoid the potential stressors that surround him lest they trigger a sudden and violent transformation into Henry’s alter-ego. Preoccupied townsfolk tending to their business, unruly children, dogs and cats chasing one another underfoot, and downpours of bird droppings will sap his patience and sanity, represented by the "meter" gauge. The more troublesome enemies (such as the mad bomber clad in pink) will additionally cause Jekyll physical harm, and if the life bar empties, the game ends. But, if the stress meter reaches the H, Dr. Jekyll will collapse and pass out.

Reawakening as his evil counterpart, Mr. Hyde must then traverse a distorted, ghoul-infested parallel version of Dr. Jekyll’s London while killing demons to reduce his stress, and upon regaining his equilibrium, Dr. Jekyll can resume his walk to the chapel. However, if the two halves cross paths before the final stage, a bolt of lightning will strike him down, ending the game.

Jekyll and Hyde’s individual perspectives provide an unexpectedly effective portrayal of the character’s dissociative tendencies. Though cliché, the contrast mimics the novella’s exploration of how people willingly subjugate their interior selves for the sake of social acceptance. Jekyll’s picturesque interpretation of London makes the city appear charming and quaint, but Hyde’s lurid view of the same streets paints it as a terrifying and brutal place teeming with corrupted souls.

The game's aesthetic convincingly depicts both ends of this spectrum. Dr. Jekyll’s detailed daytime stages are certainly more appealing than the near-monochromatic night stages that Mr. Hyde must fight through, though the latter’s liberal use of deep blues and flat black does a nice job of symbolically reflecting his feelings of loneliness and emptiness. The music is atmospheric - the somber daytime theme evokes a sense of an age past, and the minimalist, repetitive phrasings of the nighttime theme suggest a sense of the mundane pervading even life's extremes.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is often lambasted for its stiff controls and overall level of difficulty, and though there is some merit to those criticisms, like most NES games, the majority of the game's issues can be overcome with familiarity and practice. With an understanding of the enemy patterns and the timing required to successfully leap moving obstacles, the controls are sufficient in most situations. Unfortunately, the cracks start to show in the final stage, and the controls lack the precision and responsiveness needed to consistently avoid the endless barrage obstacles in the end-game gauntlet.

Dr. Hyde is far more agile than his more reasonably-minded half, and the Psycho Wave attack, though odd in its trajectory, is reliable. The final Hyde level, however, can be extremely frustrating: each of Hyde’s stages auto-scroll, and if Hyde is in danger of being forced off of a ledge, he'll automatically jump forward - often straight into an enemy - resulting in forced, cheap hits that should've been entirely avoidable.

Overall, the game is a respectable effort. The fun is hurt by the occasional control inconsistencies, the unfair endgame, and an overly stiff learning curve, but in spite of these drawbacks, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde manages to be an entertaining bit of slower-paced action fare, and its unique mechanics and appealing graphics make for a game worth giving an honest effort.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

Snatcher (Sega CD) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-05-03 | A playthrough of Konami's 1995 graphic adventure game for the Sega CD, Snatcher.

I drooled over the reviews in gaming magazines when Snatcher first came out, and finally had the chance to play it for the first time sometime in the late 90s. I've loved it ever since.

The atmosphere, the awesome art, the soundtrack, the story - Snatcher raised the bar in many ways with this remake of the original 1988 Japanese PC classic. The CD versions are also the only way to play the third act. The original PC88 and MSX2 games ended on a cliffhanger, so until the PC Engine version came out in 1992, the only way you could've experienced the full story would've been by playing its 1990 JRPG remake on the MSX2, SD Snatcher (linked below).

There are so many classic moments in this game, but I'll leave you to discover them for yourself. If you've not played it before, strap yourself in. It's one helluva ride.

If you are familiar with Hideo Kojima's work, you'll immediately recognize several of his hallmarks, including the obsessive level of attention paid to world building, the long-winded cutscenes (MGS4 was not his first game to make you sit through a half-hour long conversation!), and the steady flow of 80s pop culture references. He was clearly more interested in making a movie than he in making a game, but thankfully, it turned out to be a good movie.

I still find it hilarious that Night Trap got slapped with a Mature rating but Snatcher was rated Teen.

The video is over seven hours long because I didn't want to rush through it by picking solely the required options. The writing is great, and I included a lot of the missable dialogue because it adds nicely to the game's atmosphere and the flavor of the characters' personality. I also made sure to include the optional scenes, like Neo Kobe Pizza, the ramen stand, the fortune teller, and Jordan's data banks. (If you want to skip the Jordan stuff - there's *a ton* of info to sift through - it's shown from 51:55 to 1:24:41.)

If you are interested, here are links to a few related games:

SD Snatcher (MSX2): youtu.be/W5IFDaWwjIs
Policenauts (PS1): youtu.be/TZ1KuD1Gw00
Policenauts (Saturn): youtu.be/hs3siRo8hQc
Metal Gear Solid (PS1): youtu.be/yqAmtbx9sq0
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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WCW: The Main Event (Game Boy) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-05-02 | A playthrough of FCI's 1994 license-based wrestling game for the Nintendo Game Boy, WCW: The Main Event.

0:26 Elimination Match, Professional as Rick Rude

6:48 Elimination Match, Continental Title as Ron Simmons

14:13 Elimination Match, World Title as Johnny B. Badd

21:15 Single Match, World Title as Dustin Rhodes

Following after the 1990 NES game (youtu.be/Wt0L_B1I8Q8), WCW: The Main Event was the second video game to carry the World Championship Wrestling torch. It was also the sixth pro wrestling game to appear on the Game Boy, coming along about six months behind WWF: King of the Ring, the system's third WWF title.

WCW: The Main Event's roster includes nine wrestlers (Rick and Scott Steiner, Big Van Vader, Sting, Dustin Rhodes, Ron Simmons, Johnny B. Badd, Rick Rude, and Steve Austin) and features two modes of play, an exhibition-style "Single Match" and a ladder-style series called "Elimination Match."

The game plays similarly to the later NES WWF games in that wrestlers all feel the same to play, but The Main Event does give everyone his own unique finishing move. The controls are fine, the graphics are simple but clear on the blurry Game Boy screen, and the game is perfect for a quick 5-10 minute play session on the go, but the game lacks any real depth or lasting power. It's fine as an occasional distraction, but the WCW roster is only thing it offers over its handheld WWF counterparts.

*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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Darkman (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-05-01 | A playthrough of Ocean's 1991 license-based action game for the NES, Darkman.

Darkman is an NES game that lets you play as Liam Neesen as a mummy. If that thought excites you, you can stop reading right now: you've found your game!

In Darkman, you play as Dr. Peyton Westlake, a scientist-turned-vigilante. A gang led by the criminal kingpin Durant left you hideously disfigured after a botched hit, and you're on a quest for vengeance.

The quest to take down Durant is comprised of five levels spanning sixteen rapid-fire stages that cycle through multiple gameplay modes.

After clearing the initial warehouse stages, Darkman will snap some photos of his first target, Pauly, and create a mask that will allow him to assume Pauly's identity. Wearing this mask, he'll fight through Pauly's set of Central Park-themed stages, and once Pauly has been dealt with, Darkman will repeat this process as he hunts down Skip at the fun fair and Smiley in Chinatown. After killing all the henchman, Darkman can finally head to the skyscraper construction site for the showdown with Durant.

Like Robocop 2 (youtu.be/Mnf7utJoNvc), Darkman was developed by Painting by Numbers, and the two have a lot in common. They both feature bright and colorful graphics, C64-style soundtracks dominated by arpeggiated chords, first-person point-and-shoot minigames, and an endless parade of insta-kill stage gimmicks.

But Darkman isn't quite as terrible a game as Robocop 2 was. It suffers from many of the same issues - the platforming controls are obnoxiously slippery, the time limits are too short, most stages require tons of trial-and-error and memorization to get through, and the collision detection demands you to be pixel-perfect in your timing - but the stages are more varied and better designed, the difficulty level has been toned down, and because the game isn't a port of a C64 game like Robocop 2 was, the presentation better plays to the strengths of the NES hardware. It looks and sounds much better overall.

Mediocrity isn't usually something to celebrate, but Painting by Numbers at least deserves credit for trying to do better. Darkman isn't great, but it is far more competently put together than Robocop 2 was.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!

AD&D: Heroes of the Lance (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-27 | A playthrough of FCI's 1991 action-adventure game for the NES, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance.

Heroes of the Lance for the NES is a port of U.S. Gold's 1988 PC action game based on "Dragons of Autumn Twilight," the first novel in the D&D Dragonlance series.

Hoping to restore balance and peace to the land of Krynn, a party of eight adventurers known as The Champions of the Lance have entered the destroyed city of Xak Tsaroth. The city is a crumbling maze teeming with traps and monsters, and it's your job to help them retrieve The Disks of Mishakal, a sacred relic, and to slay its guardian, the black dragon Khisanth.

Given that it's the first NES game to carry the AD&D license, you might expect Heroes of the Lance to be an RPG. It makes a few attempts to pass itself off as such - there are plenty of menus, stats, and magic spells to fiddle with - but at its core, it's a combat-heavy platformer.

The party is represented in-game by whomever is in the lead position, and fights play out in real-time. You can use magic and items at any time from the menu, and combat mode kicks in whenever an enemy draws near. In these moments, you attack by holding down B and pushing the d-pad in the direction you wish to attack.

Whenever you're not grunting and flailing at the bad guys, you'll be busy collecting items as you chart your course through the labyrinths that make up the three main areas of the city. Some items can improve your performance in combat, but the majority do nothing but increase your score ("experience") when it's tallied at the end of the game.

Though it's a reasonably accurate adaptation of a well-received computer game, Heroes of the Lance is often cited as one of the worst games on the NES. I don't think that it's a great fit for the platform, but I also don't think that it's as bad as it's made out to be.

The key to harvesting any enjoyment from Heroes of the Lance is to not approach it like an NES game, and that's a big ask given that it is indeed an NES game. It inherits the PC version's awkward controls, RNG-based battle system, and the constant need to juggle menu screens, and though these design choices fly in the face of the console gaming crowd's expectations, everything works as intended. The soundtrack is pretty good, too.

Overall, Heroes of the Lance is a decent port of a decent game, but it holds too close to its PC roots to feel at home on the NES. Natsume was responsible for a good many NES classics, but this was one time they fell short of the mark.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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Skies of Arcadia Legends (GameCube) Playthrough [1 of 4]

NintendoComplete 2024-04-26 | A playthrough of Sega's 2003 role-playing game for the Nintendo GameCube, Skies of Arcadia Legends.

This video is the first part of a four-part playthrough, showing through the end of the Ixa'taka segment of the story.

Links to the other parts:
Part 2: youtu.be/xswwHkbCYLo
Part 3: youtu.be/dDeKtt1U91M
Part 4: youtu.be/UKHTPRVIzFA

Skies of Arcadia was one of the last major hurrahs for the short-lived Sega Dreamcast when it released in November of 2000, a mere five months before the machine was officially discontinued in North America. It wasn't a bestseller, but those that played it - myself included - tend to count it among the very best that the Dreamcast had to offer. It got a second chance when Sega brought a "director's cut" to a new audience via the Nintendo GameCube a few years later, where it unfortunately underperformed once again. Its lackluster sales were never a reflection of the quality of the game, though. Skies of Arcadia's critical reviews and its devoted fan base are testaments to that.

It's a classical turn-based JRPG that takes heavy inspiration from the likes of Jules Verne, Dragon Quest, and Laputa. You play as Vyse, a young air pirate and a member of the Blue Rogues, a Robin Hood-style band of friendly thieves who live in the skies of Arcadia. The story begins as Vyse and his friend, Aika, lead a raid on a Valuan imperial cruiser where they find and rescue a kidnapped girl, the mysterious Fina. Despite knowing little about her, Vyse and Aika vow to protect Fina from her pursuers as she attempts to complete her secret mission, thus kicking off a massive swashbuckling adventure with a middle finger aimed squarely at "the man." They are pirates, after all.

And what an adventure it turns out to be! Few games have ever so magically captured the pioneering spirit of the Age of Discovery. As you forge your way across vast expanses of uncharted sky, you'll stumble upon relics of a time that predates recorded history, make contact with cultures that were thought to exist only in fairy tales, take part in large-scale airship battles, and even explore the boundaries of time and space.

The ideas driving the game aren't all original, but the way they're handled in Skies of Arcadia makes them feel fresh and exciting, and the twenty-three years that have passed since its original release haven't dulled that shine in the slightest. The eminently likable cast of heroes, the incredible attention paid to world building and pacing, and the twists and turns of the plot all click together in a way that's sure to hook anyone's imagination given the chance.

Overworks, the internal Sega team responsible for the game, was comprised of some of the biggest talents in the RPG business, including several members who had previously worked on the Phantasy Star (youtu.be/BHez3iJePI4) series and Panzer Dragoon Saga (youtu.be/vjGNgkZgyQA), and the experience, skill, and passion these folks poured into the project clear is from the get go.

The presentation is impressive in its scope and production values. Skies of Arcadia may have come out the same year as Final Fantasy IX and Legend of Dragoon did on the PlayStation, but it blew by both by taking full advantage of the Dreamcast's generational leap in hardware. Each environment is meticulously detailed, and since the entire game is rendered in real-time, you can scrutinize and appreciate all the little flourishes from any angle you like. The characters' expressive faces and body language go a long way in selling their unique personalities, and the enemies - especially the bosses - stand out for the creativity they display. The soundtrack is also fantastic throughout, going so far as to include battle themes that dynamically change to reflect how well you're doing.

The battle system is a bit slow and fights can feel overly repetitive at times, but it generally plays quite well, and the Dreamcast version's biggest problems - the ludicrous encounter rate and irritating load times - were fixed for the GameCube port. Legends comes packed with a lot extras, including new discoveries, characters, and the DC version's DLC content.

Legends would be the perfect version of Skies of Arcadia if not for its terrible sound quality (the difference between the DC and GC versions is stark, especially in the battle themes) and fuzzier visuals (the DC version ran at 640x480 over VGA while the GC one only supported 480i over composite or component).

But in light of everything is gets right, Skies of Arcadia's missteps are easy to ignore, and the experience it offers still hits just as hard now as it ever did. If you enjoy JRPGs, this classic is a must-play.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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Color a Dinosaur (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-25 | A playthrough of Virgin's 1993 NES game, Color a Dinosaur.

Color a Dinosaur's box loudly makes the claim that "this kind of fun won't go extinct!"

As disheartening as it is to admit, that's not entirely untrue. It's a grossly misleading statement, but it stands to reason that something that never actually existed - in this case, the capacity to provide "fun" - can not cease to exist. It's not a lie in the strictest sense, but it does lead to a divide-by-zero style logical exception. Does that pose the game a disingenuous attempt to swindle well-meaning parents? Well... the game's credits include Jay Obernolte (a CA congressman) and Tommy Tallarico (a world-class liar turned pariah), so gauge their credibility however you see fit.

But whatever. Color a Dinosaur doesn't warrant much attention or consideration. The game gives you sixteen line drawings of cartoon dinosaurs, and you point your cursor and hit A to fill an area with one of three colors.

And such colors they are! Do you love the indistinct orange/blue smears of the Apple II? Do you pine for the days of eye-searing CGA neons? Perhaps you're looking for a reliable way to self-diagnose conditions such as glaucoma and epilepsy at home? Color a Dinosaur caters impressively well to nobody's tastes.

What's more, according to the manual, the game's biggest features include the ability to use your VCR to "save" your pictures and the option to choose whether the cursor moves freely or snaps between predetermined targets.

If you really like playing with the bucket fill tool in Microsoft Paint, you might get a laugh out of how thoroughly Color a Dinosaur screws up every aspect of such a simple concept.

A nice box of Crayola crayons and a coloring book trumps this in every way and at a fraction of the price. It makes me wonder why anyone at Virgin would've ever greenlit something this unappealing and this unnecessary.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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Crystalis (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-24 | A playthrough of SNK's 1990 action-adventure game for the NES, Crystalis.

1997, October 1,
The END DAY

I can distinctly remember the first time I played Crystalis because of this line. I don't recall any other game, or at least not one in 1990, beginning with a predicted date for the apocalypse, only to then immediately follow it up with a vivid depiction of how it would happen. It wasn't the result of war, pollution, or rampant consumerism: the END DAY was an all-out nuclear holocaust.

In a fun coincidence, Terminator 2: Judgment Day scheduled a similarly fiery end to humanity around the same time, with Skynet pulling the trigger on August 29, 1997.

Somewhat less coincidentally, like countless other fantasy games from the NES era, Crystalis's story was clearly inspired by two classic Studio Ghibli films, 1984's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and 1986's Laputa: Castle in the Sky.

Crystalis was SNK's second in-house game developed specifically for a console, and though it wasn't a massive best-seller, it reviewed well and went on to become a cult classic that is still fondly remembered by NES fans all these years later.

It's an action-RPG that takes the basic structure of The Legend of Zelda and fleshes it out with a proper narrative, experience-based growth system, and a wide range of equipment and upgradable weapons, and it does it arguably better than any other NES game of its type.

There were so many things that made Crystalis memorable. The soundtrack, the vibrant graphics, the flashy cutscenes, and the story events are all standouts - who could forget changing genders to meet with the leader of a female-only town, riding on the back of a dolphin and taking to the open seas, or the death of Deo's best friend? (Not to mention how the Famicom version was named "God Slayer." That's quite a heavy title for an 8-bit ARPG, don't you think?)

Long time SNK fans will also recognize a few familiar faces here. Psycho Soldier's Athena and Kensuo are cast as "wisemen," and Ikari Warriors' Ralf and Clark both appear as NPCs.

Crystalis was, in my opinion, a seminal NES work that still deserves to be played today. Just do yourself a favor and stick with the original version. Nintendo's compromised Game Boy Color remake (youtu.be/Q-lSaX2OpCM) doesn't do the game justice.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes that SNK had followed through with their plans for a sequel on the Neo Geo.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!

Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-20 | A playthrough of Data East's 1990 platformer for the NES, Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum.

Dash Galaxy is an explorer who has found himself stranded on an alien world far from Earth. Trapped aboard a rocket, the titular "Alien Asylum," he'll have to fight his way across twenty-four floors if he has any hope of escaping and making it back to his own ship.

The path through the alien ship is a sprawling maze, and the game is split into two primary play modes. The first, a Sokoban-like puzzle mode, functions as the overworld. In this mode, Dash has to push boxes around in order to clear the path between doors. Several of the obstacles he'll face in these areas can only be overcome with keys and bombs, and Dash has to search for these items in the "rocket rooms" that dot each area.

The rocket rooms play host to platforming sections that make up the game's second play mode. In these areas, Dash has to avoid enemies and gather supplies, including keys (to disable the forcefields), bombs (to clear blocks), oxygen refills, and all of the blue remotes have to be collected to unlock the exit.

There are fewer bombs and keys to be found than there are obstacles to be cleared, and since it's entirely possible to run out and find yourself completely stuck in a dead end, the maze becomes a jigsaw puzzle. Making it the end requires memorizing which rooms hold the items you need and planning a route that uses them as efficiently as possible. (If you try to play every stage, you'll find yourself in a no-win situation by the time you've cleared the six floor. In this video, I went as far as I could while being thorough, but the game eventually forced me to warp ahead to make any further progress.)

The gameplay is similar to another of Beam's games, Back to the Future Part II & III (youtu.be/Q3LtrThw8Y8), and as was the case with that game, Dash Galaxy's structure undermines any fun that might've otherwise been found in the game. Sure, the action scenes are way too easy, the stiff controls make playing through them a chore, and the maze sections are agonizingly tedious and slow, but it's the endless repetition that stems from the trial-and-error nature of the game's structure and the forced resets from hitting dead ends that truly buries Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!

Casino Kid II (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-19 | A playthrough of Sofel's 1992 casino game for the NES, Casino Kid II.

A year after becoming a millionaire and being declared the "King of the Casino," the Casino Kid receives a message from a mystery man informing him that elimination tournaments have been held to determine who the best players are worldwide. The Casino Kid must now rise to the challenge and defeat each of these new champions if he is to meet this mystery man and defend his title.

This North American-exclusive follow-up to 1989's Casino Kid (youtu.be/qFbLdNv42Q4) ditches the first game's RPG-style meet-and-greet sandbox approach in lieu of a more streamlined system. Instead of wandering around the casino floor chatting up women in bunny ears, you now issue your challenges from a world map yanked straight from Street Fighter II.

The blackjack and poker games return from the first game, and they play exactly the same as before. Blackjack is still just a question of how close you can get to 21 without going over, and in poker, your opponents' reactions to the hands they're dealt are clues that are meant to guide you in how you play your own hands.

The roulette game that was left out of the North American version of Casino Kid is brought back for the sequel, and it works much the same as poker. Rather than relying on pure luck, the comments your opponent makes before each spin hint at where the ball will likely land. For example, if Paul asks, "How old are you?" the ball is going to land somewhere between 1 and 18, and if he says, "I don't like black cars," any bet on black will hit. It's a neat way to beef up what is essentially a glorified random number generator, but there's a lot of trial-and-error involved in figuring out what the messages mean.

The games put a neat video game twist on classic casino table staples and the opponents lend the game a fun, silly vibe - playing roulette against Chun-Li is as unexpected as it is funny - but in scrapping the overworld segments, Casino Kid II loses a lot of the novel charm that made the first game so engaging and memorable. The graphics are nice, though (as nice as you could expect given the subject matter, at least), and the music is pretty good. (That password screen tune @1:12:51 is an unexpected banger!)

Casino Kid II doesn't hit as hard as Casino Kid did, but it's still one of the better gambling-themed carts you'll find on the NES. If the idea of amassing virtual piles of loot through games of chance appeals to you, check it out!
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Shadowrun (SNES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-19 | A playthrough of Data East's 1993 cyberpunk RPG for the SNES, Shadowrun.

This video shows a full run of the game. By the end, Jake has the best equipment, all of the spells and optional skills, and every stat is maxed. It also shows the only possible scenario in which anyone but Jake survives at the end. The video does include the grinding, but I did it in isolated chunks to make it easy to skip those parts without missing anything important. The initial grind session in the apartment building ends at 28:41.

Shadowrun is one of those games that many people aren't aware of, but seemingly, everyone who has ever played it loves it. It was true back when the game first came out - the reviews were extremely positive, but it didn't sell well at all - and though the internet has spread some awareness of it, it still yet hasn't received near its due.

You play as Jake Armitage. The victim of a botched hit, Jake wakes up in a drawer at the morgue suffering from a "burnt" brain. After terrifying the morticians who had just pronounced him dead, he escapes and immediately runs into a street courier who witnessed his attempted murder. Jake chases him into an alley just in time to see him shot to death. He grabs the downed man’s gun, takes care of business, and finally comes face-to-face with a mysterious talking dog who warns him of dangers to come.

And that's just the first five minutes! The remainder involves Jake's searching out who did this to him, finding out why they did it, and following the trail of evidence to the heart of a massive conspiracy. I can't say too much more about it without giving spoilers, but it's quite a wild ride.

The gameplay is an interesting mix of styles: it's one part Secret of Mana with its stat-based, real-time combat system, and two parts CRPG with its heavy emphasis on key words, dialogue trees, relative open world, and cursor driven control scheme. Shadowrun's design builds and improves upon what Beam did in Nightshade, a similarly structured adventure game that was published by Ultra on the NES a year prior. Nightshade's influences - the gritty urban tone, the off-kilter sense of humor, and the heavy emphasis on character interactions - are clear in Shadowrun, and they make for a game that's loaded with personality.

Shadowrun was one of the more adult-oriented games released for a console in its time, and it makes no effort to shy away from gun violence, organized crime, or even addressing sex, though only in oblique ways. The story has teeth, and tone of the writing and the weird but cool mix of sci-fi and high fantasy gives 2050s Seattle a uniquely dystopian flavor. The world is a vital contributing factor to it - it's a character unto itself, and an impressively realized one at that. It’s like a crazy mix of Rise of the Dragon, Snatcher, and Blade Runner, all compacted into a tiny eight megabit rom.

The look of the game is more typical of a PC title than an SNES one. The small sprites and the zoomed-out isometric perspective give everything a sense of scale, and there's an incredible amount of implied detail in every scene despite the game's inherently chunky, low-resolution look. Everything feels lived in and worn. Stuff lies in the streets, desks are cluttered with coffee mugs and overflowing inboxes, street vendors hang out next to their stalls, and people go about their business in the city streets. It does a nice job of playing into a thematic sense of disconnectedness. Jake is a participant in this world like anyone else. The world doesn't revolve around him.

The soundtrack is also a real highlight. The tunes regularly switch tone to fit the situation, and whether somber and slow or dramatic and upbeat, they all carry the grungy, industrial feeling of the world exceedingly well.

Shadowrun was a bold attempt to do something different, and the effort paid off nicely. It has a few flaws - the controls are clumsy, the game is grind-heavy, the framerate tanks hard in the late-game battle scenes, and there are a few plot points that never get addressed properly (what's the deal with Kitsune?) - but I’ve always absolutely adored Shadowrun, warts and all. It had my attention to the very end, and it's a game I've never forgotten over the years.

If you haven't yet had the pleasure, check it out!
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Battletoads & Double Dragon (Game Boy) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-17 | A playthrough of Tradewest's 1993 beat 'em up game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team.

Battletoads & Double Dragon for the Game Boy rolled out alongside its SNES and Genesis counterparts six months after the release of the original NES version (youtu.be/FVDODeeLYoc), just in time for the 1993 Christmas season.

Following "Battletoads," a handheld-exclusive series spin-off, and "Battletoads in Ragnarok's World," a simplified adaptation of the NES game, Battletoads & Double Dragon was the third and final Battletoads title for the Game Boy.

BT&DD for the Game Boy is a straightforward remake of the NES game of the same name. Every stage, gameplay gimmick, playable character, boss fight, music track, and cutscene made the transition intact, and it all looks and sounds very similar to the original console game.

The gameplay feels quite different, though. The attack timings, jump physics, and hitboxes all feel slightly off, and your character shifts too far forward with each punch, making it difficult to reliably land combo finishers. The controls aren't bad, but they're prone to frustrating bouts of jank that you don't typically see in Battletoads games.

Battletoads & Double Dragon is a fun Game Boy beat 'em up that looks and sounds great, but it's disappointing that the gameplay doesn't hit the high bar set by the NES games.

*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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Rollergames (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-13 | A playthrough of Ultra's 1990 license-based beat 'em up for the NES, Rollergames.

Rollergames, Konami’s contribution to the blitz of marketing and merchandising accompanying the first (and only) season of the 1989 TV show of the same name, brings all of the cheese and drama of extreme skating home to the NES, complete with an endorsement from WAR (World Alliance of Rollersports).

Feeling like a cross between Skate or Die: Bad ‘N Rad (youtu.be/DPVEQvEkbHA) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (youtu.be/1doJfcmZrQI), Rollergames is a beat 'em up that throws quite the assortment of thugs and obstacles in the way of our playable three roller derby champions. Because if punching people in the face while rollerskating isn't violent enough to excite the kids, why not spice things up with flamethrowers, wrecking balls, biker gangs, and attack choppers?

Elevating the show’s already ludicrous scenarios to a whole new level of absurdity, Rollergames takes the action out of the studio and into the streets. A terrorist organization known as V.I.P.E.R. (Vicious International Punks and Eternal Renegades) has kidnapped the Rollergames’ commissioner and recruited three Rollergames teams - Bad Attitudes, Maniacs, and the Violators - to do their bidding in a nefarious plot to take over of the city.

At the beginning of each stage, you can choose which of the three stars from the show (Ice Box of the Thundercats, Hot Flash of Rolling Thunder, and the California Kid from the Rockers) to play as, and since “the CIA and FBI lack the speed, cunning and sheer brute force for this job,” it's up to these guys to save the commissioner, the city, and the sanctity of their beloved sport.

The platforming elements and the way movement focuses on momentum and turning angles all give it quite a different feel from TMNT 2 and Bayou Billy, but the usual belt-scrawler staples are here. You have several moves at your disposal, including the standard punches, jump kicks, character-specific specials, and my favorite - you can punch someone in the head to stun them, grab them by the hair, and fling them across the screen to their death. Good stuff!

The graphics are great, the music rocks (it sounds a lot like the Bayou Billy soundtrack), the controls are solid (though it takes a bit to get used to the physics), and premise is hilariously excessive. So long as your cool with the stiff level of difficulty Konami games are known for, there's a lot of fun to be found in Rollergames.
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Streets of Rage (Genesis) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-12 | A playthrough of Sega's 1991 beat 'em up for the Sega Genesis, Streets of Rage.

Played on the normal difficulty level as Axel.

The alternate endings are shown at 51:19. In a two player game, if P1 and P2 give different answers when Mr. X asks them to join him, they are forced to fight to the death. If the winner then refuses Mr. X's second offer and wins the final fight, a character-specific "Bad End" sequence is shown.

In the months leading up to the North American launch of the Super Nintendo, Sega made it clear that they had no interest in letting Nintendo waltz in and eat their lunch. Amid a flurry of high profile releases that quickly went on to become fan-favorites, two particular standouts cemented Sega's position. The first bomb was Sonic the Hedgehog, dropped in June of 1991, and the second, Streets of Rage, came along just two months later.

Of all of the beat 'em up franchises that spawned in the wake of Capcom's 1989 hit Final Fight (and to a lesser extent, Sega's own Golden Axe), Streets of Rage - a near arcade-quality Genesis exclusive - was arguably the best and most influential.

Streets of Rage supports simultaneous 2P play and provides players the choice of three unique selectable characters. Axel, Blaze, and Adam each have access to a wide range of strikes and grapples, including back hits and co-op attacks, and when things get dicey, they can radio for backup, prompting an officer to fire a rocket into the crowd.

The gameplay is smooth and the controls are intuitive, the graphics are sharp and detailed, and though the sprites are on the small side and their animations are a little choppy, the game can flood the screen with armies of bad guys without tanking the framerate. In 1991, this was impressive stuff.

But the real star here, the one thing that absolutely everybody remembers about Streets of Rage, is its soundtrack. Yuzo Koshiro was in top form here, and the dance hall-inspired tunes were an amazing show of the system's sound capabilities. I mean, it's hard to argue with any game that kicks off its first stage with a remix of Pump Up the Jam, wouldn't you agree?

Streets of Rage is a classic that was only ever surpassed on the Genesis by its direct sequel, and console alliances be damned, it's a must-play title for any self-respecting fan of the 16-bit generation.
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Pilotwings (SNES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-11 | A playthrough of Nintendo's 1991 flight simulation game for the Super NES, Pilotwings.

Pilotwings was one of the SNES's launch titles released alongside Super Mario World and F-Zero, and between the three, it was clear just how deadly serious Nintendo was in maintaining its dominance over the market - they pulled no punches in showing off their new 16-bit machine's fanciest features.

Though it was the least popular game in the first-party launch line-up, Pilotwings was arguably the most impressive of the trio. Relying almost entirely on the SNES's "mode 7", a feature that allowed for full scaling and rotation effects to be applied to a bitmapped background layer, Pilotwings delivered an amazing 3D experience that was like nothing else we had ever seen before. I mean, sure, F-Zero delivered speed, but it all took place on the ground. Pilotwings removed the wheels (or whatever you'd call the equivalent part on a hover car), and in doing so provided an unprecedented sense of freedom that still holds up well today.

Pilotwings poses you as a student at an amateur flight school, and the game revolves around earning licenses by mastering increasingly difficult lessons. There are a good number of events on offer: In the light plane, you've got to fly through hoops and arches and safely land on the runway. In skydiving, you leap from a helicopter and pitch your body to fly through hoops before opening your parachute for a safe landing. Rocketbelt gives you a jetpack and tasks you with touching various targets, and finally, Hang Gliding has you riding thermal updrafts to hit a required altitude before navigating your way to the landing pad.

You also get a chance at a goofy special bonus round if you do particularly well, and these have you doing things like dive-bombing a pool as a penguin and bouncing on trampolines with wings strapped on your back.

The final stage of each round changes things up quite a bit - in an amusingly melodramatic turn of events, terrorists kidnap all of the flight school instructors. It's up to you, of course, to fly the combat helicopter over the island where they're being held, destroy the anti-air batteries, and rescue them.

Pilotwings is one of those games that appears simple on the surface, but there is a lot of depth and challenge to it - the later lessons can be extremely difficult. You have to consider approach angles, wind speed and heading, gravity, and your vehicle's handling quirks all at at once, and while it might feel a bit overwhelming at first, it doesn't take too long to get used to.

Once you have the mechanics down, the real joy in Pilotwings' gameplay comes from the steady improvements you'll make as you gradually master its nuances. The controls are silky smooth and responsive and rarely require the use of more than two or three buttons.

Finally, the presentation was clearly the game's big selling point, and the reasons are obvious. The stages are surprisingly dense with detail, the multiple camera options allow you to adjust the view for gauging depth, and the framerate is impossibly smooth. And that's the one thing that screenshots of Pilotwings unfortunately cannot convey - as nice as it looks in a photo, the feeling of full 3D freedom at 60fps cannot be understated.

In 1990, most 3D games' framerates maxxed out in the teens on high-end computers, so it's not difficult to imagine the impact Pilotwings had on people when it was new. And to think it was running on a $200 video game system, not a $3000+ 386 PC!

Pilotwings was an ambitious title that capitalized on all of Nintendo's strengths and talents to provide something special.
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Lords of Thunder (TurboGrafx CD) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-10 | A playthrough of Hudson Soft's 1993 shoot 'em up for the TurboGrafx CD, Lords of Thunder.

As a follow-up to one of the TurboGrafx CD's most celebrated shooters (youtu.be/PJbkTvoJbeM), Lords of Thunder had some mighty big shoes to fill when it dropped a year later in early 1993.

Like Gate of Thunder, Lords of Thunder was created by Red Company, a Japanese developer that regularly worked with Hudson and came to be known for the Bonk and Tengai Makyou series. But more specifically, this shooter was the work of Red Kaminarimon, a team at Red that was largely made up of ex-Technosoft employees who had previously worked on the Thunderforce games.

And let me tell you, that pedigree and talent are on full display here. Red Kaminarimon was clearly swinging for the fences with Lords of Thunder, and in the end, they didn't merely knock the ball out of the park. They sent it into orbit.

Lords of Thunder is a thoroughly metal fantasy-themed shooter in which you take control of Landis, a knight on a quest to save the world of Mistral from an evil dictator who has summoned an evil god.

You can tackle the first six continents in any order you like, and before heading into each stage, you pick the elemental suit of armor you'd like to wear. Your armor determines which weapons you'll have access to - the water armor, for example, can flood the screen with walls of weak projectiles, while the earth armor's narrow lightning beams can shred a heavily armored enemy's defenses in an instant - and each suit can be powered up to increase the potency and range of its attacks. If you prefer to get up close and personal with your enemies, you can pull out a sword and start hacking away, and if you ever find yourself in a tight spot, you can set off an elemental bomb attack to reclaim a bit of breathing room.

There's a lot of strategy involved in choosing the right weapon for the job, and the system does a great job of catering to different play styles. The same goes for the way the game handles its difficulty balance: normal mode is excellent for shmup newbies trying to learn the ropes, and the Super mode is perfect for masochists who love learning bullet hell patterns and studying hit boxes. For everyone else, the hard mode puts up a good challenge without going too far over the top.

The game is a total blast to play, and though the gameplay could easily carry the weight of the entire package on its own, a big part of the fun is the presentation. The huge enemy sprites, the chaotic sprays of bullets and fire, the parallax scrolling, and the amount of detail and color packed into every scene all impress, especially given how there's virtually no flicker or slowdown, and oh my god, the soundtrack! In terms of music, I'd place Lords of Thunder at the top of the Turbo CD ladder, right alongside Wanderers from Ys. If you're a fan of screaming guitar anthems filled with catchy hooks, you'll fall for this soundtrack hard, I promise.

(Psst... check out this vid I put together using both the Turbo and the Sega CD versions of the OST: youtu.be/9KL1la9UnOw)

In summary, Lords of Thunder kicks ass. I don't think much else needs said.
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♫CHEMICAL PLANT ZONE (Sonic 2) SNES Arrangement - NintendoComplete

NintendoComplete 2024-04-08 | This is an arrangement of Masato Nakamura's Chemical Plant Zone theme from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Genesis. It has been arranged for native playback on SNES hardware, and the audio was recorded directly from a launch-model SNES deck.

This is one of my favorite Sonic themes, but I've loaded it up with synth brass, super saws, and some ass whoopin' DX7 bass. Thanks for listening!

If you'd like to check out any of my other arrangements, you can find the playlist at youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gSj_kh1fHueSujqQR8xQQ84DWIjrU4F

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-06 | A playthrough of Nexoft's 1990 role-playing game for the NES, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

If you'd like to skip the character creation stuff, the game begins at 12:42.

In the world of Wizardry, the great wizard Werdna has stolen a priceless amulet from Trebor, the eponymous "mad overlord," and he has taken refuge in a chamber located at the bottom of a ten-story-deep subterranean labyrinth teeming with monsters. Trebor has offered a huge reward for the return of his amulet, and groups of hopeful adventurers now begin to gather at the castle town near the labyrinth's entrance.

As a cornerstone of the RPG genre, Sir-Tech's Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, originally released for Apple II computers in the fall of 1981, is one of the true pioneers in gaming history. Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and countless other classics owe a huge debt to Wizardry (and Ultima) for laying the foundation.

Unencumbered by a complex story and deep characters, Wizardry represents the purest distillation of a first-person, combat-focused dungeon crawler. After rolling stats to determine the starting classes of your six party members, you're dropped off at the entrance to the labyrinth, and it's up to you to figure out how to proceed from there.

There are plenty of ways to approach the adventure, but Wizardry does not treat players with a light touch, and the game makes that crystal clear from the beginning. Death is an ever-looming specter, and since there's no guaranteed way to revive a fallen party member, everything you do carries weight.

It's easy to stretch your resources too thin, to overestimate your abilities against a tough enemy, or to become hopelessly lost in the depths of the labyrinth, and the punishment for making such mistakes is swift and brutal. Careful planning and keeping tabs on the details are essential to making progress, but the challenge is surmountable with enough dedication.

The NES version, developed by Game Studio and published in the west under Ascii's Nexoft label, remains generally faithful to the original computer game. The layouts of a few floors were changed and the text-based puzzles were axed, but all of the character classes, enemy types, and items are here, and the NES version brings with it a major upgrade to the presentation. This was the first version of Wizardry to feature a soundtrack, and it was the first to sport non-wireframe dungeon graphics.

This port was extremely popular in Japan, and it would've been considered the definitive version of the game in its time had it not been plagued by bugs that severely hamper its playability. The worst of them result in the accuracy and strength of enemy attacks being determined by the enemy's AC rating instead of their target's, making armor and AC-related magic essentially useless. Enemies also mistakenly receive massive stat boosts when occupying certain positions in the attack formation, which tends to have a nasty impact on the late-game difficulty balance. On top of that, there are issues with things like stat growth and moral alignments. These problems can be circumvented to some extent by exploiting the game's autosave system and by creating backups of your save data before leveling up, but they cast a pretty dark shadow over an otherwise good game.

Even with its litany of issues, the NES port of Wizardry is a fun game, and it's one that's arguably more playable than its IBM PC counterpart, but it's still not the ideal way to experience such a classic.

(And if you're interested, check out my Super Nintendo arrangement of the PC Engine version's battle theme! youtu.be/4Qd2qvP4mZY)
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Journey to Silius (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-05 | A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1990 action game for the NES, Journey to Silius.

Journey to Silius, known in Japan as "Raf World" (Rough World), is one of the pillars that Sunsoft's reputation for stellar NES action carts was built upon, and in my opinion, it sits on par with Batman (youtu.be/sJ8i5WC70F8) in terms of playability and overall quality as one of their best.

It's a run-and-gun platformer that puts you in the shoes of Jay McCray, a man whose father was recently killed in the terrorist bombing of a space colony. Jay finds a data disk and a letter addressed to him in his father's belongings a short while later, and in the letter, his father asks him to carry on his work should anything happen. Beginning at the deserted spacy colony and culminating in a showdown at the enemy's spaceship factory, Jay's mission will see him trading fire with the terrorists across five stages.

The game was originally intended to be a licensed tie-in to The Terminator, and was even previewed in Nintendo Power as such in 1989. Sunsoft lost the rights to the license during production and had to rework much of the game before release, but the connection is still pretty clear in some of the enemy designs - the last boss, especially - and the backdrops for the first couple of stages.

It's a shame that it was stripped of the license given how poor most of the Terminator games have been over the years, because Journey to Silius is a top-notch action cart. The action is smooth and fast-paced, the challenge is stiff but fair, the controls are spot-on, the graphics are among the best you'll find on the NES, and the soundtrack is pure 8-bit magic.

When it comes to NES run-and-gunners, the Mega Man and Contra games tend to hog all the glory, and don't get me wrong - they deserve the love they get - but Journey to Silius also deserves a seat at that table.

(The NES version does, at least. The PlayStation port doesn't do the original game justice.)

Oh, and did you happen to notice the posters of Hebereke hanging on the wall at the end of the first stage (3:42)? What a neat touch.
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Hammerin Harry (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-04 | A playthrough of Irem's 1992 platformer for the NES, Hammerin' Harry.

This video is of the English PAL version and shows both loops through the game. The second loop begins at 16:01.

Hammerin' Harry was released in North American arcades in 1990, and though the NES game was reviewed in Nintendo Power, the localized version of the Famicom game (大工の源さん, lit. "Gen the Carpenter") was only released in PAL territories.

The NES game was created by Tamtex, an Irem subsidiary best known for games like Metal Storm (youtu.be/ZLUc7KJteW0) and R-Type III: The Third Lightning (youtu.be/djW3WTEU-LE), and it's a solid adaptation of the coin-op. Some obvious cuts had to be made to accommodate the weaker hardware: the physics-based behavior of stage obstacles like crates, pipes, and wrecking balls is gone; the graphics and sound have seen significant downgrades; and a stage is missing and the layouts of the rest have been simplified, but it's still recognizable as Hammerin' Harry.

You play as Harry, a carpenter on a quest to take down the evil construction company that's responsible for destroying his house and kidnapping his girlfriend. He totes around a giant wooden mallet that can be used to cave in enemies' skulls, to create earthquakes that stun everyone nearby, and to smack away incoming projectiles.

I'm a fan of Hammerin' Harry's oddball sense of humor. The last boss makes me think of Belger from Final Fight (but his chair can fly!), I couldn't stop laughing at the way the mutated secretary boss looks as she flings herself around the room, and how about the way Harry screams, "Let's get busy!" at the beginning of each stage, as if the name Hammerin' Harry itself wasn't already a peak example of early 90s innuendo-laden 'tude.

The game is short and very much on the easy side, but it's one that's fun to go back and play again and again. I can't count how many times I've gone through it over the years.

Hammerin' Harry isn't likely to be a life-changing revelation for anyone, but it is an entertaining way to burn a few hours.
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WURM: Journey to the Center of the Earth (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-04-03 | A playthrough of Asmik's 1991 action-adventure game for the NES, Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth.

It's the dawn of the twenty-first century, and a sudden and violent increase in seismic activity now threatens the existence of all life on the earth’s surface. People are left with no choice but to plumb the depths in a desperate bid to save the planet, and so a team of experts have developed a series of highly specialized subterranean vehicles known as Vazolders ("VZRs"), or Wurms.

Things got off to a promising start, but contact has since been lost with the first four VZR teams, and time is running out. It's now up to crew of the VRZ-5 to find out what happened.

You play as Moby (the captain of the VRZ-5 and daughter of the famous scientist/captain of the VZR-3) as she conducts her search over the course of five story-driven acts, and the gameplay regularly leaps between several styles. There are vertical auto-scrolling shoot 'em up stages, horizontal free-scrolling shooter sections that let you Go, Go, Gadget! your VZR into a tank or a jet whenever you want, first-person gallery shooter-style boss battles that incorporate RPG elements, and semi-linear platformer segments, and all of these segments are bookended by cinematic cutscenes that push the story forward.

The gameplay poses Wurm as a jack-of-all-trades, and while none of the modes are fleshed out well enough to carry the game on their own, they all support one another to form a game that feels consistently cohesive, unified, and thoughtfully designed.

The different story and characters aside, Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth feels like the polished up sequel to Golgo-13: Top Secret Episode (youtu.be/qqVW5S21sAU) that The Mafat Conspiracy wanted to be (and should have been), and there's a very good reason for that: both Top Secret Mission and Wurm were created by Cyclone System under the direction of Shouichi Yoshikawa, who served as planner, director, and writer on both productions.

The games are structurally similar, but Wurm improves upon its predecessor's design in every conceivable way - the gameplay feels better on a mechanical level, and it, along with the story and the cinematic presentation, all go to great lengths to leverage the advantages of the medium to create an "experience." It doesn't feel like an action game with flashy cutscenes tossed in as an afterthought, nor does it feel like a movie shoehorned into a cartridge. It's the work of a man who had something important to say and who poured himself into his vision. In my many conversations with him, his passion for the game and what it meant to him bled through his every word, and his commitment to making something special certainly shows through in the end product.

If you happen to read this, I hope all is well with you, アンジェラさん!

It doesn't have AAA-level production values and it sports a few minor blemishes (as you'd expect from a game made by such a small team working at a company that nobody had ever heard of), but for anyone who doesn't mind sacrificing a bit of polish for substance and for a creative vision that isn't compromised by cynical corporate politicking - or for anyone who just wants a damned fun game that you'll remember long after you've finished it - I'd 100% recommend checking it out.

And if you ever picked up on Top Secret Mission's underlying tone of disdain for war and violence (especially in the message at the end that read, "Dedicated to all the children and the lost generation"), you'll instantly notice its thematic ties to Wurm. Framed like that, I personally think Golgo 13 and Wurm deserve to be held up and celebrated alongside stuff like Akira, Grave of the Fireflies, and Barefoot Gen. Not just as pieces of post-war Japanese media culture, but as authentic artistic expressions that pushed their medium in every way they knew how in order to make themselves heard.

It's kinda crazy to think that this was actually an NES game. I guess it goes to show how, with the right motivation, you can do a whole lot with very little.

(The Helen Keller joke at 21:39 is one of my favorite wtf NES moments. It gets me laughing every single time.)
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♫BATTLE (Wizardry I・II, PCE CD) SNES Arrangement - NintendoComplete

NintendoComplete 2024-04-01 | This is an arrangement of the battle theme from Naxat's 1993 PC Engine Super CD-ROM² game, Wizardy I-II (ウィザードリィI・II).

There are two versions of the song in this video. The first is my arrangement, and the second, beginning at 2:15, is my attempt to recreate the sound of the game's PSG music on the SNES's sound chip. Both were made for native playback on original console hardware, and the audio was recorded directly from a launch-model North American SNES deck. The video footage was recorded from the Super Famicom version of the game. (You can hear what the original theme sounds like playing on a PC Engine here: youtu.be/2CWn7gREbQU)

Unlike most ports of Wizardry, the music written for the PC Engine sounds nothing like the NES games, and it's awesome. I love this theme!

Thanks for listening!

If you'd like to hear any of my other arrangements, I have a playlist of them here: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gSj_kh1fHueSujqQR8xQQ84DWIjrU4F&si=q7yxSFcOnwnaXrBP

You can find my playthrough of the NES version of the game here: youtu.be/lhX65YTpa1M

George Foremans KO Boxing (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-30 | A playthrough of Acclaim's 1992 license-based boxing game for the NES, George Foreman's KO Boxing.

In the midst of making an historic comeback, two years before becoming both the world's oldest heavyweight boxing champ and a promoter of countertop grills, Big George granted Acclaim the rights to slap his name and face on a line of video games.

Acclaim farmed the project out to Beam, and when it showed up in stores a mere six months after Power Punch II (youtu.be/b3UzcVAfW6U), George Foreman's KO Boxing became Beam's second NES boxing game to see a 1992 release.

And wow, it's actually a bit shocking to see how little effort went into this production. George's game is essentially a cheap reskin of Power Punch II. The graphics and music were swapped out, the training minigame was removed, you can no longer move freely along the bottom of the screen, and a Doritos ad is now prominently displayed on the between-round stat screen. The game's sole innovation - a two-player versus mode - is a ridiculous and thoroughly worthless inclusion.

That's about all I have to say about this lump of cynicism and greed. If you loved Power Punch II and find yourself hankering for more of the same (but worse), then by all means, give George Foreman's KO Boxing (and therapy) a try.
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Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-29 | A playthrough of Vic Tokai's 1988 license-based action-adventure game for the NES, Golgo 13: Top Secret Mission.

Based on Takao Saito's iconic manga, Golgo 13: Top Secret Mission follows the exploits of Duke Togo, better known as Golgo 13, professional hitman and badass extraordinaire.

Though the series was virtually unknown in North America - only a small handful of volumes had been made available in English by 1988 - the NES release still retained the license. Top Secret Episode was the first truly adult-oriented game to appear on the NES, and it's quite unlike anything else in the console's generally family-friendly line-up. The film-worthy plot involves acts of espionage, murder, and the development of weapons of mass destruction, and the game's imagery makes no attempt to shy away from its controversial subject matter and adult themes. Somehow, the implied sex scenes, swastikas, and enemies who spray blood when shot all survived Nintendo's content review.

As Duke Togo, you travel the world taking care of business by turning the bad guys into swiss cheese with pistols, spear guns, and your trusty M-16. Much of the game plays out as a semi-linear 2D side-scrolling platformer, but it regularly switches genres to break up the flow of the action. Enemy ambushes play out as first-person shooting galleries, explorable building interiors are presented as 3D mazes, traveling long distances sees Duke piloting a helicopter through horizontally-scrolling shoot 'em up segments, and there are even a few special instances where you'll get the chance to take out a target by looking down the scope of your rifle.

The storytelling is some of the best I've seen in an NES cart, and it's served well by its ambitious multi-genre approach, but the gameplay stumbles in its execution. The sizable delay between when you hit the button and when Duke jumps in the platforming sections makes movement feel sluggish, and the platforming and shooting gallery segments both suffer from overly fussy collision detection. These things can be overcome with practice, and though they do result in a game that's much more difficult than it really needs to be, they don't bury an otherwise brilliant R-rated thriller turned video game.

(And for anyone who hates getting lost in the 3D mazes - read the instruction manual! It provides helpful maps for all of those sections.)

Golgo 13: Top Secret Mission isn't flawless, but if you can see beyond its shortcomings, you'll find a compelling, memorable experience that was crafted by a small but dedicated team who largely succeeded in pulling off their creative vision.
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Joe & Mac (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-28 | A playthrough of Data East's 1992 platformer for the NES, Joe & Mac.

Joe & Mac, originally a 1991 arcade game called Caveman Ninja, is a hop'n'bop platformer starring a couple of Neanderthal buddies who are out to save their kidnapped cave babes.

Thanks to the coin-op's popularity, the game saw releases across several platforms in the early 90s, including this unlikely 8-bit NES adaptation by Elite that appeared in stores during the 1992 holiday season. The original was quite a looker in its time, and the already released SNES, DOS, and Amiga versions all did an impressive job of recreating its look and feel on consumer-level hardware.

The NES clearly couldn't compete in the same league, but that's not to say that Elite didn't try. Elite was renowned for their talent and ingenuity, and Joe & Mac is an exceptional show of their skill. The sprites are nicely detailed and animated, the bosses are huge, and the backgrounds feature more layers of parallax scrolling than most 16-bit games did - the first and third levels' backdrops are split six ways!

But the problem with Joe & Mac for the NES is that it tries to do the impossible. The broad strokes are there, but the attempts to faithfully mimic the original drag all of the game's shortcomings into the spotlight. The often monochromatic color palette choices, the uneven quality of the background art, and the flat and featureless level designs all make it feel like a compromised imitation of a 16-bit game instead of a game that was built with the NES hardware in mind.

The gameplay is similarly lacking. The moves are the same as in the other versions - you can somersault jump, charge your weapon, and jump while shooting upward - but the laggy response time and being limited to just two buttons makes it frustrating and cumbersome to play, and the problem only gets worse as the swarms of infinitely respawning enemies grow thicker and thicker.

It's also worth noting that many stages have been outright cut, and others have been dramatically pared back. The branching paths and multiple endings are all MIA, and the roided up difficulty comes across as a weak attempt to disguise how short the game is.

That last boss is pretty awesome, though. Weird, but awesome.

Joe & Mac isn't a total bust - it can be fun in very short doses - but the obnoxious challenge, mushy controls, and ugly graphics end up costing the NES game everything that made the original so appealing.
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WWF King of the Ring (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-27 | A playthrough of LJN's 1993 license-based wrestling game for the NES, WWF King of the Ring.

This video shows all of the single-player mode played on the medium difficulty level:

0:15 One-on-One, Bam Bam Bigelow vs. Lex Luger

3:00 Tag Team, Yokozuna & Randy Savage vs. Bam Bam Bigelow & Hulk Hogan

5:17 Tournament as "You"

23:10 King of the Ring as Hulk Hogan

Released fourteen months after WWF Steel Cage Challenge (youtu.be/-edyPVSqOo4) at the end of 1993, LJN's WWF King of the Ring was the fourth and final WWF game for the NES.

WWF King of the Ring marked the end of an unrelenting, seven-year-long campaign of terror the company had waged on the NES, and like someone who just dropped a hot fart in a crowded elevator, LJN fled the NES scene and never looked back. While the watery-eyed people left behind in that elevator certainly weren't pleased with the gift, once the air had cleared, they collectively breathed a sigh of relief. The nightmare was over.

But credit where credit is due: at least LJN hadn't downed half-a-dozen Taco Bell bean burritos before stepping into that elevator. King of the Ring didn't go easy on the senses, but it also didn't leave people dry heaving like Steel Cage Challenge's cropdusting did.

WWF King of the Ring was produced by Eastridge Technology, the people who created Gauntlet II for the NES and Paperboy 2 for the Game Boy, and the art was outsourced to Grey Matter. The game borrows heavily from Steel Cage Challenge - the controls and movesets are the same, including the lack of finishers - though King of the Ring's wrestlers differ in terms of strength, speed, and endurance, and the flow of the gameplay is a bit more fluid.

It won't hold your interest for long, though. The CPU doesn't put up much of a fight, success is based on your ability to button mash through grapples, and everything the game has to offer can be seen within a half-hour of turning it on for the first time. The gameplay isn't substantial or compelling enough to justify a weekend rental, let alone a purchase.

The unique look makes it stand out, but graphics don't impress. The stylized sprites are huge and feature better animation than Steel Cage Challenge's, but they lack detail, and the heavy lines and garish colors give the game a crude, amateurish look.

WWF King of the Ring is better than the game that preceeded it, but it can't hold a candle to Rare's WWF Wrestlemania Challenge (youtu.be/EkrQtnc54Yk) or any of the good, non-WWF wrestling games on the NES.
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Power Punch II (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-23 | A playthrough of American Softworks' 1992 boxing game for NES, Power Punch II.

For years, Power Punch II was one of the most obscure games in the NES's library. A few middling reviews and a short-lived ad campaign failed to inspire anything but apathy, and it was almost immediately forgotten by the few who knew that it ever existed.

And then the internet happened and rumors swirled, and Power Punch II somehow became known as the sequel to Punch Out!! that Nintendo disowned. ASC announced "Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch" in the summer of 1991 - more than a year after Nintendo's contract with Tyson had expired - and there doesn't seem to be any evidence out there to support the claim that Beam was working on the game for Nintendo. It seems far more likely that Beam was working on a game "inspired" by Punch-Out!! and thought that Tyson's name would bring in sales, only to rethink the endorsement when the boxer's social stock plummeted a few months ahead of the game's release.

All of that aside, Power Punch II casts you as Mark "Tough Guy" Tyler, the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. He has grown bored with defending his title from the parade of pretenders, so when an alien invites him to participate in the Heavyweight Championship of the Universe, he jumps at the opportunity.

The game features thirteen fights split into three championships, and each championship begins with a training minigame that gives you the opportunity to improve Mark's agility, endurance, and strength for the upcoming fights.

The fights resemble Punch-Out!!'s in several ways: the perspective and the controls are similar, you earn super punches by landing hits on your opponent at specific moments, and matches are broken into three rounds each.

But for all of their similarities, Power Punch II feels nothing like Punch-Out!! to play. Rather than snapping left and right from a neutral position to dodge punches, Mark can slide back and forth across the bottom of the screen, and he'll automatically drift back toward the center if you let go of the d-pad. Your opponents react to your movements by switching up their own routines, patterns, and timings, and since they often don't clearly telegraph their moves, the challenge comes down to memorizing each fighter's patterns and figuring out how to manipulate their behavior to your advantage. The lack of clear visual cues and meaningful feedback can make the game extremely frustrating at first, but once you've figured out how to approach it and how to feel out strategies, everything becomes much, much easier.

Power Punch II is fairly hideous to look at, but I did get a kick out of the monster designs, the awkward punching animations, and the guy in the background whose head bounces up and down when he's excited.

Overall, Power Punch II is too unintuitive and unpolished to have any real mass appeal, and the sloppiness of the controls will likely drive away anyone who'd pop it in looking for a good challenge. It's not terrible - I'd say it's one of better games Beam made for the NES - but it's not very good, either.
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WWF Steel Cage Challenge (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-22 | A playthrough of LJN's 1992 license-based wrestling game for the NES, WWF Steel Cage Challenge.

This video shows all of the game modes played on the medium difficulty level:

One-on-One, Hulk Hogan vs. The Undertaker 0:16

Tag Team, IRS & Roddy Piper vs. Sid Justice & The Undertaker 3:03

Tag Team Championship as Jake Roberts & Bret Hart 6:02

WWF Championship as The Mountie 19:20

Following in the footsteps of WWF Wrestlemania (youtu.be/GpDi-8B7_nQ) and WWF Wrestlemania Challenge (youtu.be/EkrQtnc54Yk), WWF Steel Cage Challenge was the third WWF-branded game to appear on the NES, the second to wear LJN's rainbow badge of shame, and the first to not be created by Rare.

Created by Sculptured Software, WWF Steel Cage Challenge is essentially a cut-down 8-bit adaptation of WWF Super Wrestlemania (youtu.be/cCh40MGXaFo) with cage matches and tournaments thrown in to freshen things up.

The roster of ten playable WWF stars includes The Mountie, Ted DiBiase, IRS, Bret Hart, Sid Justice, Randy Savage, Roddy Piper, The Undertaker, Jake Roberts, and Hulk Hogan, each of whom are personally introduced (with their theme songs) by Howard Finkle at the beginning of each match.

The wrestlers' in-game sprites look the part, but their looks are the only thing that differentiates them from one another. Everyone has the same moves, there are no finishers, and there are no differences in strength or speed between them.

Disappointingly, the moment-to-moment gameplay doesn’t fare much better. It's slow, shallow, the controls are plagued by lag, and the AI is dumb as a stump. You can risk throws, turnbuckle leaps, and off-the-rope maneuvers if you like, but they're all unnecessary wastes of time. If you're playing to win, all you need to do is to push up against your opponent and hit A to do a headbutt, and as he's recovering, do it again, and again, and again until his life gauge is empty. Then knock him down, hit down+B to pin, and the belt is yours.

It's boring and unsatisfying to play, and without the flashy graphics and sound of the 16-bit machines, there's little to draw your attention away from the anemic gameplay. The sprites are small and poorly animated, and the in-game audio is limited to horribly bitcrushed thumps and grunts that are often lost in the wall of white noise that's meant to be the cheering of the crowd.

Sculptured Software had some hits in their day, but this wasn't one of them. WWF Steel Cage Challenge isn't a game that tries to be interesting or fun. It's a game that exists solely to profit off the back of a lucrative license. Games like this gave rise to LJN's reputation.
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Ufouria: The Saga (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-21 | A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1992 action-adventure game for the NES, Ufouria: The Saga.

This recording is of the original PAL-only English-language version of the game.

Released around the same time as Super Spy Hunter (youtu.be/6nRAxly-RIQ), Batman: Return of the Joker (youtu.be/7wIWlYlhY8k), and Mr. Gimmick! (youtu.be/DGdM5NfwUhg, Ufouria: The Saga wasn't _just_ another gem to be set in the gleaming crown that was Sunsoft's late-gen NES line-up. It holds an especially important, sentimental place in the company's history: it marked the star debut of Hebereke, their much beloved, adorably bug-eyed mascot.

(Though I should mention that this wasn't his first "public appearance." A year earlier, Hebereke was credited as a graphic designer in Journey to Silius's closing staff roll.)

Ufouria, or "Hebereke" as it was called on the Famicom, is a happy-go-lucky, open-ended action-adventure starring "Bop-Louie" (Hebereke's localized alter-ego) and friends. One day the gang stumbles upon, and subsequently into, a giant hole in the ground that suddenly opened up in their neighborhood. When Bop wakes up and finds himself alone in an alien world, he sets out to find his friends and a way home.

The Blaster Master influence also bleeds into the world structure and the game's mechanics, but Ufouria devotedly marches to the beat of its own drum. It's a Metroidvania, but it wants to make you smile more than it wants to frustrate or kill you, and there's a good amount of variety to the action.

At any time you can switch between Bop and the friends he's rescued, and they all have unique traits that'll come in handy while you're out adventuring:

Bop-Louie (Hebereke), a snowman dressed as an elf, is the well-rounded hero who climbs walls and can hurl his detached head at enemies. (In the Famicom version, Hebereke is a penguin.)

Freeon-Leon (O-Chan), a bipedal lizard with a gormless look on his face, can float in water, freeze enemies with his breath, and walk on ice without falling over. (In the Famicom version, O-Chan is a little girl wearing a cat costume.)

Shades (Sukezaemon), a ghost who rocks sunglasses and a wing cap, can jump long distances, attack by popping his eyes out, and escape notice by laying down to "play" dead.

And finally, my favorite of the crew, Gil (Jennifer) is an angler fish who swims well and barfs bombs that can destroy weak walls.

The ability to choose your character allows for a solid range of options, and it contributes a welcome dash of Mario 2's zest to the freeform feel of the adventure.

Speaking of zest, Ufouria's cup totally runneth over. The off kilter character/enemy designs and animations are some of the most endearing I've ever seen in a game, let alone an 8-bit platformer, and the soundtrack is packed with top notch tracks decked out in catchy hooks and Sunsoft's signature sampled bass.

Ufouria: The Saga feels like a game that was made by people who love games and who invested themselves completely in their art. It's an amazing game that really should not be missed by any NES fan.

Has anyone tried out the new sequel yet?
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Ghost Lion (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-20 | A playthrough of Kemco's 1992 role-playing game for the NES, Ghost Lion.

Originally released for the Famicom in 1989, Beyond the Pyramids: The Legend of the White Lion (ピラミッドの彼方にホワイト・ライオン伝説) was a license-based tie-in with the similarly named film (ピラミッドの彼方に―ホワイト・ライオン伝説―, "The Legend of the White Lion: Beyond the Pyramids") released in Japan in 1988.

Ghost Lion (or "Legend of the Ghost Lion," as the title screen refers to it) was one of the many "me too" titles that sprouted in the wake of Dragon Warrior's success (youtu.be/J392i9NKvvo). Anyone who has played an 8-bit JRPG will immediately recognize the template the game was built on.

The story revolves around Maria - a young girl who, if the box art is to be believed, is also an 80s hair metal singer turned aerobics instructor - who is abandoned by her parents. Deciding that their hunt for a mythical white lion was more important than raising their daughter, the couple takes off in a canoe and is never seen again.

Maria informs the village elder that she intends to go after them, and after warning her that she's chasing certain death, the elder hands her a key and a possessed spear and sends her on her way.

The plot is certainly on the strange side as far as 80s JRPGs go, and the game play is equally as strange. While it closely mimics the look and structure of Dragon Warrior, there are no experience points to be earned by defeating enemies. You level up by finding "fragments of hope" which provide boosts to your "courage" (hit points) and "dreams" (magic points).

There are no attack and defense stats - Maria's physical strength relies solely on the quality of the weapons and items used in battle - and there's no "party" in the traditional sense of the word.

Instead, Maria carries objects that house spirits, and by spending dream points, she can temporarily summon these spirits - a motley crew of meat shields (including a centaur, a giant slug, and an African tribal warrior, among others) - to fight alongside her with a wide range of skills and spells.

The lack of experience points and a traditional stat-based growth system is a bit of a double-edged sword. The only thing you earn from battle is money, and you can easily ignore most of the items sold in shops, so you don't have to grind to keep pace with the enemies. The downside is that without any incentive to fight, the constant random encounters feel like a total waste of time.

The presentation is a mixed bag. The tile sets used for the overworld, towns, and dungeons are generic fantasy JRPG fare, but the nicely detailed portraits add some much needed flavor to the battle scenes. The music hurts, though. The soundtrack is the work of Masuno Hiroyuki, Kotobuki's resident in-house sound programmer and composer who is best known for his work in the NES MacVenture games. Most of it is perfectly servicable for a fantasy RPG, but the battle "theme," if you can call it that, sounds like someone pushing buttons on a microwave during an air raid siren. It makes me want to shoot myself in the face after five seconds, and when you consider that fighting accounts for 3/4 of the game's play time... well, that's hardly ideal.

Overall, Ghost Lion is okay. It's not terribly engaging, the plot is paper thin, the translation is hokey, and the battle music will give you a migraine, but the game's cutesy tone, attractive battle graphics, and short length make it fairly easy to digest. Its quirkiness lends it some charm, but unless you're specifically looking for a beginner's JRPG, you'd be far better off playing one of the excellent Dragon Warrior games.
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Zodas Revenge: StarTropics II (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-16 | A playthrough of Nintendo's 1994 action-adventure game for the NES, Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II.

Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II, the North America-exclusive follow-up to the 1991 classic StarTropics (youtu.be/Oa_5wTppDvo), was Nintendo's penultimate release for its soon-to-be euthanized 8-bit console.

Zoda’s Revenge picks up a short time after the ending of the first game. After saving his uncle, numerous island communities in the South Pacific, and an entire alien race, Mike has returned to his old life as a high schooler in Seattle.

But fate isn't yet ready to let Mike off the hook, and a few months later, the alien princess Mica telepathically contacts him with a cryptic riddle. Mike solves the riddle with his uncle, but when he recites the lyrics to Surfin Bird, he inadvertently opens a portal that sucks him in and hurls him back in time to the Stone Age. In the past, Mike does a bit of do-gooding and stumbles across an ancient and powerful Argonian artifact (a giant Tetris piece), and at Mica's request, he agrees to quest for the remaining "mystic tetrads." Thus, with a mighty "PAA PAA PAA OOM PAPA MOW MOW," Mike is whisked away to a new time and place.

The game is structured just like the first. As he galavants between eras searching for plot-driving doohickeys, Mike finds himself running errands for historical figures who, in return, offer their assistance and a generous serving of dated pop culture references. You begin most chapters by exploring the area and chatting with NPCs until someone provides you a task and points you in the direction of the local dungeon. There, you'll battle hordes of monsters, jump on tiles that inexplicably make walls explode, and tackle a boss. Once you've jumped through the requisite hoops, you'll be rewarded with a tetrad, a heart container, and another one-way trip into the unknown.

The gameplay is similar, too, though a few big changes have been made. While StarTropics leaned into its puzzle-heavy design and comfy tropical vibes to sell the experience, Zoda's Revenge places the emphasis squarely on action. The dungeons are larger but much easier to navigate, movement is no longer bound to a grid, Mike can walk and aim diagonally, and the weapons are all projectile-based.

Zoda’s Revenge is a good game, but despite being made by the same team, it feels a game that was made by people who didn't grasp what made StarTropics resonate with its fans. StarTropics' action was fit for task - it was more a means to an end than it was the point. In the sequel, the combat is fine, but it's not varied or tight enough to warrant giving it the spotlight, and the weaker storytelling fails to pick up the slack. The game lacks the personable characters and interesting scenarios that made the first one so memorable, and the time-travel gimmick turns the chapters into a disjointed series of isolated events with no overlap. It sacrifices StarTropics' heart, and for what? To have levels set in an old-time cave, an old-time sewer, and an old-time castle? To have a snarky cariacture of King Arthur punk players into a forced reset? To have an adventure that requires thumbs, not brains?

I don't mean to be overly harsh with the critique, because Zoda's Revenge is a good NES game - a very good one if you can take it on its own - but StarTropics set the bar so high that any "good" sequel was bound to disappoint. (Just like Mega Man 5 and 6!) That being said, it would've been a real boon for anyone who was still eagerly awaiting new NES releases in 1994.
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Chuck Rock (SNES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-15 | A playthrough of Sony Imagesoft's 1992 action-platformer for the Super Nintendo, Chuck Rock.

Chuck Rock was the poster boy for Core Design, an English development house that made a name for themselves on the Amiga before hitting the big leagues with Tomb Raider in 1996.

Chuck is a Stone Age rocker whose girlfriend is kidnapped by "Garry Gritter," a villain with one of the most cringe-inducing names to ever grace a video game. (At least Ophelia doesn't appear to be in much danger, eh? Way too much grass on that field for Gary Glitter's tastes.)

To save her, Chuck has to forge his way through five stages, battling dinosaurs and prehistoric animals with boulders, drop kicks, and a belly bounce that would make John Goodman's Fred Flintstone proud.

Everything is exactly as you'd expect from a ported Amiga platformer. The graphics are striking; the music is cheery, energetic, and well mixed; the controls are responsive; and the dead-simple platforming works well enough despite being saddled with the usual array of Euro-platformer bugbears. The heavy jumps, finnicky hit detection, and cheap enemy placement are ever-present irritants, and though they don't suck all the fun out of the game, they do hobble its ability to compete with the better SNES platformers of its time.

If you were looking to spend $60 on a caveman-themed SNES platformer in 1992, Joe & Mac would've been your best bet. Like Super Adventure Island, Chuck Rock was good weekend rental fodder - it's a lot of fun to play in short bursts - but the excellent presentation can't hide its lack of substance and polish.
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Batman (PC Engine) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-14 | A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1990 license-based maze-action game for the PC Engine, Batman.

The NES and Genesis games based on the 1989 Batman movie were smash successes that are still known and loved to this day, but they didn't come into the world alone. Sunsoft actually created three unique console games for the caped crusader's Hollywood reboot, but this Japan-only PC Engine release never managed to capture the hearts of the masses like its siblings did.

It follows the same plot beats as its Nintendo and Sega counterparts, but instead of drawing yet again from the platforming beat 'em up well, Sunsoft went in a completely different direction for this one. The PC Engine game is an eccentric but stylish mix of item collecting, top-down run-and-gun action, and Pac-Man maze inspired level designs.

As weird as it is to see Batman cleaning up graffiti and collecting things that he finds on the street, the game comes together well. The controls are tight, the difficulty ramps up at a good pace, the regular introduction of new stage gimmicks keeps things interesting, and the presentation is excellent. The level themes are appealing, the cutscene art is superb, and the music - packed full of slap bass and orchestra hits - is some of the best I've ever heard from the system.

The strange choice of genre might not be to your taste if you're looking for a hi-octane superhero experience, but if you're a fan of Sunsoft, early 80s arcade games, and killer chiptune music, Batman for the PC Engine has a lot to offer.
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WWF Wrestlemania Challenge (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-13 | A playthrough of LJN's 1990 license-based wrestling game for the NES, WWF Wrestlemania Challenge.

This video shows all of the single-player modes:

0:55 1 Vs 8 Super Challenge mode played as "Yourself"

10:15 2 Vs 2 Tag Match played as The Ultimate Warriors and Hacksaw Jim Duggan

12:11 3 Vs 3 Survivor Series played as Big Boss Man, Macho King Randy Savage, and Hulk Hogan

WWF Wrestlemania Challenge is the second wrestling game produced for LJN by Rare and the direct follow-up to 1989's WWF Wrestlemania (youtu.be/GpDi-8B7_nQ).

A lot of people, including me, have fond memories of the first NES Wrestlemania, but it's no secret that the game was more than a little rough around the edges. Thankfully, Rare was quick to turn things around for this amped-up sequel.

WWF Wrestlemania Challenge overhauls every aspect of the original game. The controls are better laid out and far more intuitive, the isometric perspective and smaller character sprites make the ring feel less claustrophobic, and the music improves on the already excellent tunes of the first game.

And that's before we get to the excellent roster. Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake, "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan, Big Boss Man, "Ravishing" Rick Rude, "Macho King" Randy Savage, Andre the Giant, The Ultimate Warrior, and the inimitable Hulk Hogan are all playable across a range of gameplay modes, including championship ladders, tag-team match-ups, and a 3v3 survivor matches, and each wrestler gets his own special move.

The speed of the game and the controls take some getting used to thanks to the shift in perspective, and the roster would've benefitted from the inclusion of a few more wrestlers, but WWF Wrestlemania Challenge feels like a game with a lot more effort and refinement poured into it than its predecessor. It may not be the top wrestling game on the NES, but it is a very good one, and it's easily the best to bear the WWF license.
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Super Mario Bros. 64 (Commodore 64) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-09 | A playthrough of ZeroPaige's 2019 unlicensed port of Super Mario Bros. for the Commodore 64, Super Mario Bros 64.

Considering how bent out of shape Nintendo got over Rainbow Arts' The Great Giana Sisters, I have to wonder how epic the meltdown would've been had this faithful and complete port of the original Super Mario Bros. (youtu.be/Gx5--eK2k6Y) showed up on the C64 back in the NES's heyday.

In broad strokes, the capabilities of the C64 and NES hardware were roughly comparable. They played to very different strengths, however - a fact that was often emphasized by the middling quality of porting efforts between the platforms - but this is an amazing flex for both ZeroPaige and the 8-bit computer.

Super Mario Bros. 64 will run on any C64. I'm playing here on the base PAL model, though the game can leverage the power of more powerful hardware (such as the C128's faster CPU and upgraded aftermarket components) to smooth out performance hiccups.

But even on the base machines, Super Mario Bros. 64 runs surprisingly well. It suffers from regular bouts of slowdown, especially when several sprites appear on screen at once, but it manages to wring enough performance out of the C64's 1mhz processor to maintain a playable speed and frame rate from beginning to end.

And best of all, every stage, enemy, warp zone, item, and glitch (including the minus world!) has made the leap intact, and the graphics and sound are incredibly close to the NES version's.

Color me impressed. Bravo, ZeroPaige!
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Formula One: Built to Win (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-09 | A playthrough of Seta's 1990 license-based racing game for the NES, Formula One: Built to Win.

If you'd like to skip the intro stuff, the game begins at 3:43.

Formula One: Built to Win puts you in the shoes of a starry-eyed street racing novice who is determined to claw his way to the top of the professional racing world. It's a zero-to-hero journey through "a world of sweat and sacrifice where split second reflexes and the ultimate in technology are essential in attaining the victory that can only be achieved when man and machine function as one. An arduous, step by step process known to these driven few as... 'Built to Win.'"

You start out your career by competing in a few small-time, D-class events in New York and pouring your winnings into upgrades for your Mini Cooper. Once New York has been conquered, you'll move on to Detroit and Miami in search of bigger opportunities and a shot at the C-class rank, which opens the doors to higher stakes races, higher performance parts, and even a new car - a Vector W2 - providing you've saved up enough cash. (The Las Vegas casino's generous payouts can speed this process up considerably).

You continue like this through thirty races spread across ten cities, and if you take first with your tricked out Ferrari F40 at the A-class "Final Road" event in Hawaii, you'll be invited to participate in the Formula One World Championship that spans sixteen grueling races on tracks that mirror the layouts of their real-life counterparts. Win, and you'll be declared the "world's fastest man." Dream accomplished. Lose, and... well, there's always tomorrow, right?

Formula One: Built to Win is fairly obscure as far as NES racing games go, but that's hardly a surprise: the title is super generic, there's no celebrity endorsement, it saw little coverage in magazines, and the box art was positively ghastly.

But the surprising thing about F1:BTW is that it's excellent. It blends the arcade style gameplay of Rad Racer (youtu.be/2nTdJF8TuuE) with simulation and RPG elements to great effect. There's a lot of substance to sink your teeth into here, the scale and scope of the campaign is plenty ambitious for an NES game, and the execution is solid. The controls are good, the track designs are fun, the road animation is smooth and conveys a fair sense of speed, the gameplay loop is addictive, and since the cart uses battery-backed memory to store up to three save files, there are no passwords to worry about.

Formula One's flat, single-plane background images don't look as nice as the multi-layered scrolling vistas from the Rad Racer games, and the music is at its best when it's turned off, but those are the only negatives that stuck out to me. The presentation sends the message that Formula One was not a big budget production from a major studio, but it's more than good enough to get the job done.

And in all fairness, this is far better than I'd have expected from Winky Soft. F1:BTW was the company's second NES game released in North America. The first was Adventures of Tom Sawyer (youtu.be/7h3myWWp_rY), and wow, talk about whiplash! The gulf in quality between the two is enormous.

So yeah, if racing games are your thing, I'd absolutely recommend checking out Formula One: Built to Win.

(I've gotta say again, though: that box art! I can't get over it! I was laughing so hard that I had tears looking at the Predator-vision color job on the cars.)
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Final Lap Twin (TurboGrafx-16) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-07 | A playthrough of NEC'S 1990 racing/role-playing game for the TurboGrafx-16, Final Lap Twin.

All three game modes are shown in this video:
0:14 Quest
2:42:23 F3000 GP
3:04:35 F1 GP

Final Lap Twin was a console-exclusive follow-up to the original Final Lap, Namco's 1987 hit arcade Formula One racing game.

The game features three primary modes. The first two, the F3000 and the F1 grands prix, pit you against twenty-five opponents over the course of a season as you race for points on a selection of real-life tracks - eight for F3000, and sixteen for F1. The third, Quest, takes a page from World Court Tennis (youtu.be/rWRsrf7EJ6o) in that it turns the game into a JRPG in the style of Dragon Warrior (youtu.be/J392i9NKvvo), but instead of turn-based battles, combat takes place on the race track.

The manual describes the quest as a "rock-'em, sock-'em adventure" in which "your job is to defeat a gang of Baby Four-Wheel-Drive Warriors from across the land [...] to become the world Baby Four-Wheel-Drive Champion!" That's total nonsense, though. It sounds like it's either describing a completely different game, or it's describing a series is events that were totally changed in the localization process.

Final Lap Twin's quest mode kicks off with a few words of encouragement from your father. Having taught you everything he knows, the time has come for you to go out and make a name for yourself in the racing world. He gives you his car and $500, points you in the direction of the first local champ, and from there, it's up to you.

The goal is to become the world champion, but you've got a ways to go in your climb to the top. As you travel between cities, random passersby will challenge you. The cash you win in these races provides you the means to upgrade your car so you can take down the local champs one-by-one and to collect their key secret items, and with each major win, you inch another step closer to the top.

Final Lap Twin's world and its RPG systems are far better developed and more engaging than World Court Tennis's, and I found the core gameplay more appealing overall. Even the NPCs manage to be stranger and more varied. The controls are sharp, the fast and smooth graphics are very nice for a console racing game of its time, and there's a ton of interesting content to dig into.

I'd call this another huge win for the TurboGrafx-16!
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World Court Tennis (TurboGrafx-16) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-06 | A playthrough of NEC's 1989 tennis/role-playing game for the TurboGrafx-16, World Court Tennis.

All three game modes are shown in this video:
0:18 Quest game
1:50:20 1P Singles
1:54:47 4P Doubles

Released for the PC Engine in 1988 and the TurboGrafx-16 in 1989, World Court Tennis is Namco's console adaptation of Pro Tennis: World Court, an arcade game that served as a sequel to Family Tennis, a 1987 Famicom game.

At first glance, World Court Tennis could be mistaken for any number of long-forgotten sports games from the 80s. It looks and sounds great for a 1988 console title and it supports simultaneous 4P play with a multitap, but it's still an 8-bit tennis game. If you've played one, you've played them all, right?

Namco apparently thought so, because they blew up the traditional mold when they created World Court Tennis. The game sports the standard setup of multi-set singles and doubles matches, but those are just side dishes. The main course, the "quest mode," is a tennis-themed JRPG in the style of Dragon Warrior (youtu.be/J392i9NKvvo).

According to the manual, "Once upon a time, there was a peaceful, tennis-loving land. But one day, an evil Tennis King appeared and made off with all the prize money that had been won by the people in tennis tournaments. On top of that, he used his evil followers to set up tennis courts based upon a membership system, under which hardly any of the people could play. But now, there is someone who can overthrow the bad Tennis King. That "someone" is you!"

Setting out from the castle in Chicago, you travel between tennis courts battling the evil Tennis King's henchmen for the six magic pearls that hold the power to bring him down.

As you wander the overworld, you'll be regularly accosted by avid tennis players (including Jason Voorhees) who challenge you to matches, and as you rake in the prize money, you'll be able to purchase equipment that'll improve your skills. Better rackets increase the strength of your shots, nicer shoes improve your footwork, and the more expensive your outfit is, the more successful you'll be at turning down challenges.

Once you've found the pearls, become a tennis ace, and pieced together the clues fed to you by townspeople, you can make for the evil Tennis King's island citadel for the final battle.

World Court Tennis is an insane Dragon Warrior parody, but Namco absolutely nailed it. The game's premise and characters are hilariously absurd, but nothing about it feels cynical. It's all presented with such an unaffected sense of earnestness that I couldn't help but to fall in love with it, and the tennis gameplay that binds it together is excellent.

It's amazing that the TurboGrafx-16's launch-window line-up was so stacked with excellent games that a novelty like World Court Tennis got buried, but don't let its obscurity fool you. World Court Tennis is no mere throwaway sports cart.

And better yet, Namco went on to revisit this same concept the following year with Final Lap Twin (youtu.be/50K2F0tkQNQ), an F1 racing game, and a decade later, Camelot came up with their own take on Namco's formula with Mario Tennis and Mario Golf (youtu.be/N1tFslzICPU) on the Game Boy Color.
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♫SILENCE (F-Zero Climax) SNES Arrangement - NintendoComplete

NintendoComplete 2024-03-03 | This is an arrangement of the Silence BGM from Nintendo's F-Zero Climax for the GBA. I have arranged it for native playback on SNES hardware, and the audio was recorded directly from a launch-model SNES console.

This song came to mind when I was playing the original F-Zero, and I thought it might be fun to recreate it for the Super Nintendo, making sure to put some actual bass in it! (For whatever reason, the bass line randomly drops out in the original game, and I didn't really like that.)

For a song named Silence, I would've expected something a bit... quieter, maybe? Not that I'm complaining. It goes pretty hard with those sampled guitars.

Thank you for listening!

Random note: the video footage was recorded from the SNES game.

If you'd like to hear any of my other arrangements, you can find my full playlist of music stuff here: youtube.com/watch?v=DQzWfj33VnU&list=PL3gSj_kh1fHueSujqQR8xQQ84DWIjrU4F&pp=gAQBiAQB
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F-Zero (SNES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-02 | A playthrough of Nintendo's 1991 racing game for the Super NES, F-Zero.

F-Zero is a classic staple of 1990s gaming, and sits right up there alongside Super Mario Kart and Top Gear as one of best driving experiences you'll find on the Super Nintendo. What makes this a particularly impressive feat is that it is also one of the oldest SNES titles - it was the only other game besides Super Mario World to be made available at the 11/1990 Japanese launch of the Super Famicom.

Here are the timecodes if you're looking for something in particular:

Expert difficulty:
1:19 Knight League w/ Golden Fox
18:13 Queen League w/Wild Goose
34:22 King League w/Blue Falcon

Master difficulty, all w/Fire Stingray:
53:18 Knight League
1:08:48 Queen League
1:23:54 King League

The year between the Japanese and American launches did little to temper the sheer impact that F-Zero had. It was designed as a top-tier showcase piece for the new 16-bit hardware, and it shows. Super Mario World made people go "ooh" and "aah" when it was new, but it couldn't touch F-Zero's wow factor.

Not only did it introduce the world to Captain Falcon and crew and such iconic tracks as Mute City and Big Blue, but it was insanely fast, full of all sorts of cool futuristic imagery, and it rocked an eye-popping pseudo-3D graphics style thanks to the SNES's vaunted "mode 7" graphics mode. This mode allowed for developers to freely rotate and scale the background layer, allowing for some never-before-seen tricks that effectively created the illusion of depth. The effect was employed in countless games over the lifetime of the SNES, but few used it as memorably or as impactfully as F-Zero did. And somehow, they crammed it all into a four megabit cartridge! Compare the game to Rad Racer 2 on the NES or Outrun on the Genesis, and you'll see that there really isn't any fair comparison to be made.

It would have just been a flash-in-the-pan novelty if it couldn't back up its stellar looks, but F-Zero is no one-trick pony. The furturistic setting provides for some amazingly colorful backdrops that fly past at wicked speeds, and the soundtrack is one of Nintendo's best on the system. F-Zero is one of those games that, even if you haven't played it in twenty years, you'll still remember every note of every song. I still find it impossible to resist humming along when I play.

The gameplay is the true hero here, though. The controls are easy to grasp but nuanced enough that you'll never feel like you're merely holding the accelerator while occasionally hitting left or right. Your car can lean into turns and drift sideways without changing direction with a simple tap of a shoulder button, which is a wholly necessary skill to master if you're going to make any progress. Different conditions and traps also change things up - some tracks have strong crosswinds that you will have to steer against, while others feature magnetic rails, land mines, and grippy patches that'll slow you to a crawl if you drive over them.

Thankfully, the handling is spot on. The later races can become downright infuriating - the track designs in the King League are designed to thoroughly test your ability to control the car, and the AI opponents in the Master difficulty level exist to make you suffer. You get a turbo boost with each lap your successfully complete, but be careful when you use these - when you're sailing along at 900+ km/h, it's all too easy to start smashing into rails or to go flying off the track. And as you would expect, if you miss the track or take too much damage, you'll go up in flames and be prompted to try again.

Overall, F-Zero is a blast to play and a real master lesson in game design. Not too shabby for a game that was intended first and foremost to be a tech showcase, wouldn't you say?
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The Goonies II (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-03-01 | A playthrough of Konami's 1987 license-based action-adventure game for the NES, The Goonies II.

The Goonies II was the third and final entry in Konami's trilogy of games based on the 1985 movie, and it was the only one that saw an international release on the NES.

You can find the first two games here:
The Goonies (Famicom) youtu.be/aaNhFSDRRso
The Goonies (MSX) youtu.be/ft5YGbHUVCY

The setup for The Goonies II is largely the same as the first game's: the Fratellis have kidnapped the Goonies, and it's your job to save them. This time, you'll be playing as Mikey as he explores the old shack and its grounds to find his six buddies and a mermaid named Annie.

The Goonies II is an action-platformer like the first two games, but it features a far heavier focus on its adventure elements. The game's world is no longer broken into individual stages: the shack and its surrounding areas are all now presented as an open-world map that has to be tackled like a jigsaw puzzle, much like what you'd find in games like Metroid, Zelda II, and Faxanadu. In many ways, it feels like it was laying the foundation for Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, which was released four months later.

The world - made up of the shack's interior spaces, the underground caves, a lake, a suspension bridge, and ice caverns - is broken up into two halves, represented as the front and back sides of your map, and the halves are connected via a series of doors that lead to sub-space passages.

The platforming sections are all about combat and exploration, while the sub-space areas, which are traversed from a first-person perspective (think Dr. Chaos or Golgo 13), are where you'll find hint-giving NPCs, important items, warp zones, and the Goonies themselves.

I had this game as a kid, and I remember being so disappointed when I got home and started playing it. I struggled to figure out what I was meant to do and never made it past finding the third Goonie, so I quickly gave up and moved on.

But when I finally came back to it years later as a teenager, it all made so much more sense to me, and once everything clicked, I found myself totally hooked and finished it within a few days. The game tells you everything you need to know, and it's not too difficult to finish as long as you take a few notes and keep track of which doors lead to which areas. It was a challenge, certainly, and the game doesn't hold your hand, but it turned out to be far less cryptic than I'd thought as a seven-year-old. I was glad that I'd decided to give it a second chance.

I also got a real kick out of its humor. The old lady screaming for help as you beat her with a hammer, the lost and confused eskimo, and the awkward ways in which your friends beg you to save them over the transceiver ("This is Stef. A shark is attacking me.") all still make me laugh now.

The Goonies II sacrifices the accessibility and simplicity of the earlier Goonies titles in its attempt to evolve, but it is a fun experiment in game design and a solid stepping stone for the Metroidvania genre. It's not the best game of its type on the NES, but it is a good one.
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The Goonies (MSX) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-02-29 | A playthrough of Konami's 1986 license-based action game for the MSX, The Goonies.

This cart was Konami's second game based on 1985's The Goonies. Coming eight months after the Famicom game (youtu.be/aaNhFSDRRso), The Goonies for the MSX was released in Japan and Europe at the end of 1986. Ports of the game were also released for the NEC PC-88 and Sharp X1 platforms.

The Goonies is a flip-screen platformer that casts you as Sloth, Quasimodo of the Fratelli clan, as he roams about the underground caverns. The caves span five open-ended stages, each comprised of twenty-five interconnected screens, that'll see Sloth punching his way through skulls and bats as he collects items and rescues the seven Goonies who are locked away in cells.

The game plays similarly to the Famicom version, but there are several major differences. The MSX game's stages are much larger and less linear, the protective items break after absorbing several hits, every Goonie has to be saved in every stage, and you only get one life, though passwords are provided between stages.

Compared to the Famicom game, the graphics are simpler and it's a fair bit harder, but the music is still great and it plays just as well as its console counterpart. I actually prefer this one because of its more freeform structure and how much more content it has.

The Goonies for the MSX compares favorably to the classic Famicom original, and it's one of the best platformers I've played for the 8-bit computer. If you're a Goonies fan, check it out!
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The Goonies (Famicom) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-02-28 | A playthrough of Konami's 1986 license-based action game for the Nintendo Famicom, The Goonies.

The Goonies for the Famicom, released in February of 1986 and later reissued as a Famicom Disk System game in 1988, was the first of three games by Konami to be based on the 1985 summer blockbuster film. It was also the only game of the trio to not see an international home release, though it did make its way to North American arcades via Nintendo's Vs. System and PlayChoice-10 platforms.

It was followed by The Goonies for the MSX (youtu.be/ft5YGbHUVCY), and a direct sequel on the NES (youtu.be/eUHt1pmA8MQ).

The story as told by the manual describes how a group of friends, The Goonies, find One-Eyed Willy's treasure map and set off in search of riches, but their adventures are cut short when they're kidnapped by both ghost pirates and the Fratelli Gang. They now sit locked away in a stone prison, and it's the player's job to find and rescue them. The hero, who is referred to as "Player" in the manual, appears to be Mikey given that there are only six Goonies to save, but he is described as "a brave, nice young boy who helps the kidnapped Goonies" (「捕われたグーニーズを助ける勇敢で優しい少年」), implying that the he is not actually part of the crew.

In the first five stages, you'll run around blasting skull doors in hopes of revealing the locations of hidden Goonies and the keys needed to open the stage exits. You can exit a stage before finding its hidden Goonie, but you won't be allowed to proceed to the sixth and final stage, the pirate ship, until you've saved five.

The levels are chock full of respawning animals, traps, and bloodthirsty Fratellis, and though you start with a wimpy kick as your sole means of defense, there are plenty of helpful items kicking around. Collecting a set of diamonds refills your life gauge, the cross grants temporary invincibility, the slightshot can whack bad guys from a distance, and there are several hidden special items that can nullify all damage from specific hazards. The raincoat allows you to walk through waterfalls unscathed, for example, and the helmet will protect your noggin from falling stalactites.

There are also hidden characters that you can find for big score bonuses, including Steven Spielberg (later renamed "Konami Director"), the UFO from Track and Field, Konami Man Taro, Gradius's Vic Viper, Twinbee, and a random old man named Fukutaro.

The gameplay is a fun mix of platforming and item collecting, the relatively open-ended nature of the stage layouts gives you plenty of room to explore and to figure out own your preferred path through each area, the controls are excellent, the difficulty is well balanced, and the chiptune rendition of the Cyndi Lauper theme is quite the toe tapper.

I have no idea why the Famicom version was never released outside of Japan. It wouldn't have required localization since it was already all in English, and I'm sure it would have been a hit given the worldwide popularity of the movie. Perhaps there was an issue with the international licensing rights? Regardless, Konami's The Goonies is a top-notch production that rivals the quality of the biggest and best games of its era - Super Mario Bros. included - and it's a must-play classic for any retro gamer.

(And since the question will undoubtedly be raised in the comments, no, this isn't a response to AVGN's video. It's just a wild coincidence in timing. I've had this week's look at the series on the calendar for a while now.)
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Danny Sullivans Indy Heat (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-02-24 | A playthrough of Tradewest's 1992 racing game for the NES, Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat.

I play through two full loops of the game. After finishing the 12-lap Tradewest Speedway, the game always loops back to the first track, so there's no ending.

Taking a page from Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off-Road (youtu.be/8zhPmybYAZ0) released two years prior, Rare's port of Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat once again nails the fun and the spirit of classic arcade overhead racers. It looks, sounds, and plays great, just as you'd hope from a 1992 NES release.

Even more than Super Off-Road, it'll keep you endlessly busy as you devise strategies to beat the CPU. Danny is a total douchebag that makes no attempt to hide the fact that he cheats mercilessly. Pit stops? Danny scoffs at the thought. Limited turbo boosts? Danny laughs at those lowly peons who have to budget powerups.

No matter how much you upgrade your car, he will always be faster than you, so the best way to play is to not pull any punches and to treat each race like a demolition derby. Use turbos to rear-end him and make his car catch fire. If he's in front of you at a pit stop, knock the car off of the jack stands - you might even flatten a few members of his pit crew while you're at it!

And like all of these sorts of games, the real fun comes with multiplayer. With a group of friends and some beer, Indy Heat makes for a great evening.
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1942 (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-02-23 | A playthrough of Capcom's 1986 shooter for the NES, 1942.

1942 was Capcom's second arcade game, and when it became a major worldwide hit in 1985, it laid the foundation for what would soon become one of the gaming industry's most celebrated production houses. The Nintendo Famicom was quickly picking up steam in Japan at the time, and looking to capitalize on their newfound success, Capcom decided to dip a toe in the home console market. They commissioned a Famicom port of 1942, and when it came out a year later, it became the first console game to ever bear the Capcom name. It's a major cornerstone in the company's history.

The game is a World War 2-themed vertically scrolling shooter, and the campaign depicts eight major Pacific theater battles (beginning at Midway and ending at Okinawa) and spans thirty-two stages. You have been tasked with defeating the Japanese air force, and your P-38 fighter comes equipped with upgradable machine guns and a nifty "loop the loop" maneuver that grants a temporary reprieve from enemy fire.

The arcade game is exactly what you'd expect from an early scrolling shooter that followed in the wake of Xevious, but it was a good-looking game with solid controls, a fun gimmick, and an interesting theme. It's not hard to see why people loved it in its time.

The Nintendo game features the same levels and gameplay mechanics and looks reasonably good in screenshots, but it's of such poor quality that those things don't really matter. Not only does it fail to capture any of the fun or excitement of the arcade game, but it's also fundamentally broken.

It was made by Micronics, and boy, does it show! The framerate tops out somewhere around 15 fps, the game drops frames in busy scenes, and nothing ever feels smooth in motion. The choppiness is distracting and makes tracking planes and bullets difficult, and the background color choices make it virtually impossible to see what's going on whenever you're flying over anything that's not water.

But the real game-breaker is the controls. The plane handling is manageable once you adjust to how twitchy and framey it feels, but the shooting is seriously messed up. The fire button only works when it wants to. You can hear the shot noise when you hit the fire button, but the gun often fails to actually fire. If an enemy is flying at you, you can't reliably fire a single shot in its direction, so the only viable way to play is to mash the button as fast as humanly possible and pray that the dropped inputs don't screw you over at a critical moment. Did they tie input processing to the framerate or something? It's ridiculous that it was allowed to ship like this, *especially* when the game's scoring system emphasizes shot accuracy.

1942 is a game that is as unpleasant to play as it is to listen to, and it's an extraordinarily poor first showing for the Capcom name on the NES. They figured things out eventually, but man, some beginnings are a bit too humble.
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Battletoads & Double Dragon (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-02-22 | A playthrough of Tradewest's 1993 beat 'em up game for the NES, Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team.

Battletoads & Double Dragon was as unlikely a crossover as anyone could have imagined. At least, it might've been if anyone had expected anything of the sort in the early 90s. The concept of a crossover between different company's franchises was all but unknown in the western console gaming world.

Enter Rare, a trailblazing pioneer of NES-era software development. Licensing the rights to Technos' Double Dragon characters, Rare built a new Battletoads game that saw the dermally-challenged Zitz, Rash, and Pimple partner up with Billy and Jimmy Lee to take on the Dark Queen and her newly hired army of Shadow Warriors minions.

Just one look at the game is enough to tell you that Rare spared no expense in bringing the "ultimate team" to the NES. The original Battletoads was already a technical and artistic overachiever when it was released in 1991, but BT&DD pushes the envelope far harder. This is easily one of the most impressive games on the platform.

The characters are huge and have tons of animation: their eyes bug out when Abobo comes punching through a wall, they dance around in pancake-form after being squashed, and their blazing bodies are violently ejected from the screen when they're caught in a rocket engine blast. Neat stuff. The backgrounds pull some really cool tricks as well - check out the constant use of parallax effects, the faux 3D line-scrolling effects in the Turbo Bike sections, and the buttery smooth action of the space battleship fight. The game somehow manages to put on an even more accomplished show than the original Battletoads did.

The sound is right up there with the graphics, too, and the soundtrack is one of Rare's best on the NES. The tunes are hyper-catchy and drive a good beat, and the bassy sound effects lend some real weight to the over-the-top finishing moves.

But the gameplay is where Battletoads & Double Dragon really shines. It is very much a Battletoads game with Double Dragon characters tossed in - the controls, stage designs, and enemies are all pulled directly from the Battletoads design manual - and it comes together beautifully. The big boot/big fist/head smash combo finishers are all here and as exaggerated as ever, and the Lee brothers have been adapted quite nicely to the new style.

Even better, the difficulty level has been dialed *waaaaaaay* back from Battletoads. It's no walk in the park, but it's so much more reasonable. If you wanted to love Battletoads but had a hard time stomaching its difficulty, try this one! Rare listened to the critics of the first game and balanced this one to be far more accessible to the masses.

Battletoads & Double Dragon was also released on the Game Boy, SNES, and Sega Genesis, but the NES game was the original. That the 16-bit versions so closely mirrored this one speaks to just how well made the 8-bit game truly was. If you want a good beat 'em up on the NES, Battletoads & Double Dragon is an outstanding choice that arguably surpasses the classics it was based on.
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Gradius: Archimendes Edition (Famicom) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-02-21 | A playthrough of Konami's 1986 shoot 'em up for the Nintendo Famicom, Gradius: Archimendes-hen (グラディウスアルキメンデス編, lit. Gradius Archimendes Edition).

Gradius: Archimendes Edition, a promotional crossover in the same vein as Kaettekita Mario Bros. (youtu.be/SsjPIgE-smI), was announced a month after the initial April 1986 Famicom release of Gradius (youtu.be/M8Z78WC-xGQ). This alternate version of Gradius serves as an advertisement for Archimendes, a line-up of instant ramen products launched by Otsuka Foods in 1985.

It was never sold in stores, but sending in two proofs of purchase from Archimendes packages (the arrow mark that was printed on the lid) between May 10 and July 4, 1986 would enter you in contest in which four thousand copies were given away as prizes.

Archimendes-hen is largely the same as the standard retail version of Gradius, but there are a couple of notable differences. The power-up icons have been replaced with pixel art representations of Archimendes snack packs, and the ending's text now reads:

OMEDETO! KEY WORD WA 'GAME SNACK ARCHIMENDES DE POWER UP'

That translates to English as, "Congratulations! The key word is "Power up with game snack Archimendes."

Given how obscure it is, I thought Gradius: Archimendes-hen would be a fun novelty to shine a spotlight on, but good luck if you want to obtain a copy for yourself! It's rarity is absolutely reflected in the prices it goes for these days. There are four copies currently listed on Yahoo! Auctions Japan: a loose cartridge with a beat-up label is listed with a starting bid of 48,800円 (appx. $325 USD), while prices on complete boxed copies range from 200,000円 to 350,000円 (appx. $1,330-$2,330 USD). Ouch!
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The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons (Game Boy Color) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-02-17 | A playthrough of Nintendo's 2001 action-adventure game for the Game Boy Color, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons.

This playthrough is of a "linked game" using a password that I received upon finishing The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages. You can find that playthrough here: youtu.be/AClyoG0NDC0

Some events and items are available only when playing a linked game, reward items can be earned and rings can be transferred by sharing "secrets" (passwords) between the two games, and most importantly, you have to play both games through in order to see the true last boss and the ending.

I flipped back and forth between the games on several occasions to unlock secrets, so I put the logo in the corner to make it clear which game you're seeing at any given moment.

As I said in the write-up for my Oracle of Ages playthrough, the two games are two unique adventures with their own worlds, characters, and stories, but when linked, they each become one-half of a larger overarching narrative.

In Oracle of Seasons, Link has been transported to the faraway land of Holodrum. He comes across a gypsy caravan and dances with their leader, Din, who is summarily whisked away the evil General Onox. It turns out that Din is actually the Oracle of Seasons, so when Onox sticks her in a floating crystal, he throws off the balance of nature and sends the Temple of Seasons crashing through the ground. And since Link is stuck in a strange land where everyone believes him to be the hero of prophecy, he might as well lend a helping hand, right?

Oracle of Seasons is much more action-oriented than the puzzle-focused Oracle of Ages, but it still has its fair share of stumpers. The toughest ones require you to use the Rod of Seasons, a tool that allows Link to change the seasons at will. Lakes freeze over in winter, flowers bloom in spring, vines grow up cliffs and rivers dry up in summer, and the thick leaf cover of fall can fill in holes in the ground, and much of your time on the overworld will be spent figuring out how to use the change of seasons to maneuver past obstacles that are blocking your way.

Just like Oracle of Ages, Oracle of Seasons is an excellent 2D Zelda game that's packed to the brim with content. I'd highly recommend either, or better yet, both.

*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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Mario vs. Donkey Kong (Game Boy Advance) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-02-16 | A playthrough of Nintendo's 2004 puzzle-platformer for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Mario vs. Donkey Kong.

1:10 New game start
1:39:58 Plus game start
2:39:47 Expert game start

In 1994, Nintendo released Donkey Kong (youtu.be/f_fKDQeG9Dg), a brilliant reimagining of the original 1981 arcade game, for the 8-bit Game Boy. Ten years later, they tasked their North American development branch, Nintendo Software Technology, with updating DK94. NST began work on a project that would be announced at E3 2002 as "Donkey Kong Plus" for the GameCube. You can see some footage of it here: youtu.be/juSJS6jDU8c.

The game underwent some changes over the following year - the art style was changed, the DK94 level maps and themes were removed, and a few new mechanics were introduced - and it was later reintroduced as Mario vs. Donkey Kong for the Game Boy Advance.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong is to DK94 what New Super Mario Bros. is to the original SMB: it's essentially a remake with prerendered CG graphics, new levels, and a few tweaks to the mechanics. Mario still backflips and somesaults over obstacles as he tries to get the key to the door, but MvDK introduces the Minis, a troop of windup Mario dolls that have to be saved in each stage, as well as color-coded buttons, laser traps, bombs, and a few new enemy types.

The minis are a fun addition to the formula, the GBA's wide screen gives a much better view of the stage layouts, and despite the lack of any meaningful challenge, it plays well enough.

But I think Mario vs. Donkey Kong would've sat better with me if I hadn't already played the game it was based on. MvDK's gameplay feels uncannily similar, and the "new" elements feel like they were included for the sake of being new, and not because they innovated or improved upon what was already done in DK94. It rings a bit hollow for a Nintendo game - it veers awfully close to rehash territory - and the tacky plastic facelift robs it of a lot of the personality that made DK94 so likable and memorable.

Nintendo EAD themselves made DK94, though, and their legendary spark can be seen clearly woven through every fiber of that game. Without their signature touch, MvDK is a major comedown, but it still ends up being a good game from a capable developer.

Not classic. Not inspired. Not memorable. But good.

*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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Adventures of Tom Sawyer (NES) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-02-15 | A playthrough of Seta's 1989 action game for the NES, Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

1989 marked the unlikely release of two Famicom games to be loosely based on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain's classic 1876 American novel. The first, Seta's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer," made its way stateside later that same year, while "Square's Tom Sawyer," an RPG primarily known for its insensitive depiction of black people, never left Japan.

Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the NES is a decidedly liberal reinterpretation of Twain's coming-of-age tale set in the antebellum south. There are no fences to be whitewashed, murderers to be captured, or bodies to be found.

Instead, the game begins with Tom falling asleep at school, and each of his six adventures takes place in his dreams. He explores a pirate ship, rafts down the Mississippi, fights a giant gorilla and a witch, and flies through the clouds battling an armored zepplin before finally arriving at the cave where his crush, Becky, is being held captive by the dinosaur-riding Injun Joe.

It's an unexpectedly lighthearted and delightfully absurd take on the novel's themes and characters, which is probably for the best given that the game was clearly aimed at young kids, and the gameplay follows suit. The controls are simple, the level layouts are straightforward, the enemies pose little threat, and a few vehicle-based segments have been tossed into the mix for the sake of variety.

The plain graphics and stiff controls come across as primitive for a 1989 release - it looks and feels quite similar to the Puss 'n Boots game, originally released in 1986 - but it's entertaining enough to keep a young child occupied for a weekend, though most adults could probably blow through it in an hour or two.

I used to be pretty hard on it, but Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a neat little game that has been all but forgotten in the decades following its release, and it's one that might be worth a look if you're looking for an easy-going 8-bit platformer.
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Donkey Kong (Game Boy) Playthrough

NintendoComplete 2024-02-14 | A playthrough of Nintendo's 1994 Game Boy puzzle-platformer, Donkey Kong.

In this video, I play through every stage (all items collected) on the Super Game Boy. I also compiled a montage of Mario's death animations - you can see that following the ending at 2:04:57.

Donkey Kong, often referred to as Donkey Kong '94 to differentiate it from the arcade game, was released alongside the Super Game Boy. The Super Game Boy was a peripheral that allowed Game Boy cartridges to play on the Super Nintendo "in color." To get the most from the it, a game had to be designed to explicitly support the SGB's new features, and Donkey Kong's custom screen border, sprite and background layer-specific color palettes, and enhanced audio made for an excellent demonstration of the add-ons capabilities.

The game starts out with the same four stages that were featured in the original arcade game, but this time, Mario doesn't save Pauline at the construction site. Instead, Donkey Kong grabs Pauline and flees with Mario in hot pursuit, kicking off a brand new adventure that spans a mammoth one hundred stages.

Donkey Kong is a top-notch effort with exceptional production values, especially for an 8-bit handheld game. It looks great on the monochrome GB screen, but the SGB enhancements add a ton to the experience. Pauline's screams of "Help!" and the ending's credit roll music are particularly cool. Mario's parkour master moveset does an excellent job fleshing out the arcade game's mechanics, and the game deserves special credit for the seamless way it introduces new techniques to the player. The fun little cutscenes that play every four stages teach you everything you need to know without pulling you out of the game for an instant.

And some fun trivia: this was the first time that Donkey Kong wore his iconic red tie, and it is still the only game that poses Donkey Kong Junior as Mario's enemy.

This was one of my favorite games when it was released. My parents thought that the Super Game Boy looked like a great idea since we already had a good twenty or so Game Boy games, and since we were in the process of moving, they grabbed a SGB, Tiny Toons 2, and Donkey Kong for my sister and I at Toys 'R Us. We had such a blast going through them, and it was REALLY cool that we could just yank the cart out of the SNES and put it in the Game Boy and continue on - they didn't have to try to convince me to turn off my game if we were going out because I could just switch systems and keep playing in the car.

Donkey Kong was one of the best games ever made for the original Game Boy, and between it and Donkey Kong Country, I think it is safe to say that Nintendo's original mascot served the company extremely well in 1994.

It's also wild to think that DK94 remains a Game Boy exclusive to this very day. I can't imagine why Nintendo chose to skip over it when they decided to remake its GBA sequel, Mario vs. Donkey Kong, for the Switch. In my opinion, this one still holds up as the better game.

If you'd like to see the sequel, you can find my video of it here: youtu.be/t0CGVKaLOqI
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!