Friday the 13th: NES

I spent a lot of time with Friday the 13th for NES growing up, which apparently places me in the minority of NES owners- or at least ones willing to admit to it. It's hard to say what kept my friends and I attached to such a skull-rattlingly difficult game, but we stuck through and beat it many times over. It might be because I saw my first horror movie at age 7, Nightmare on Elm Street 3, and began a life-long fascination with the macabre. Or it might be that we only had a handful of NES games between us all and were tired of them. Or maybe it was a degree of naïvety that allowed us to not realize how broken the gameplay actually was. Whatever the case, it still holds a special place in my heart.




The premise was simple enough- you control a group of camp counselors at Camp Crystal Lake and are tasked with saving the campers from Jason. Each counselor has fractionally different abilities, i.e., one can jump slightly higher, one can run barely faster, and so on. The gameplay switched between two modes- one Castlevania-esque side-scroller used for travel and item collection, and an awkward, quasi-three dimensional exploration mode for moving around inside of cabins. If you encounter Jason inside of one of the cabins, it became what was basically the most frustrating game of Punch-Out! ever made, a mad rush of throwing whatever weapon you had managed to salvage at Jason while futilely dodging his attacks. Unfortunately a victory was only a temporary one, as he would appear at another cabin before too long and the whole thing would start again. On paper, it's a benign enough concept, and probably could have been executed (so to speak) just fine. The disconnect between concept and execution, however, is chasmic.



Like most games, you are required to do a task or perform a feat to collect powerups. However, that feat is "jump up and down, everywhere, forever." Imagine if there were no powerup blocks in the Mushroom Kingdom and Mario found fire flowers by leaping randomly at the empty sky. In fact, Friday the 13th has one of the worst implementations of item and character randomization ever. The most powerful weapon in the game could be found two steps from the first door you come out of, appearing out of thin air as you leapt past it, or it could be found never, almost always the latter. What complicates the fact that hidden items are only revealed by passing your character's sprite over their locations is that sometimes they would take 2-3 seconds to appear, by which time you're half a screen and three zombies away from it.



Zombies? Yep, in those brief moments between Jason attacks, as you run as fast as you can trying to find a half-decent weapon, you're assaulted by zombies, giant crows, and weird mer-men. And not just a few, but one every three feet- and they respawn. And until you can find one of those stupid weapons, you're stuck with a god-awful, but thankfully unlimited supply of rocks that by default sail clear over all normal enemies' heads. The only way to successfully attack is to stop moving, kneel, attack, and then move again.



The game thoughtfully provides you with an overview map that shows you the locations of all your campers, lets you switch between them, and indicates where a Jason attack is occurring. Unfortunately, your movement in the actual game world seems to have no analogue to the map, so moving "left" might mean "right" or maybe even "up" on the world map. Ridiculous.



Perhaps my favorite memory of the game is its game over screen, which is good because you see it a lot. On a system in which nobody ever bled and death was temporary, it was friggin' dark. It's a strange phenomenon that the very symbol of everything that frustrates me about this game has become my fondest memory, like some kind of 8-bit Stockholm Syndrome. Like abused lovers, though, we kept crawling back. And to the game's credit, random Jason encounters are still fucking scary, two decades later. And when the random elements come together like some unpredicted cosmic event in a way that lets you beat the game, the satisfaction is incredible. This game hates you. For some reason, I love it.