The A to Z of Crappy NES Games: A

Back in the 8-bit era, Nintendo prided themselves on the quality of games they allowed to be released for their console (in America, anyway), making sure to place the "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality" stamp on all boxes, and only allowing third-party developers a set number of releases per year. That's great in theory, but turned out to be somewhat of an empty gesture, because there was no lack of poor games during its lifespan.

This isn't intended to be a definitive list of all terrible NES games; instead, this is more of a sample platter of some of the dreck that slipped through Nintendo's approval process.

A

Amagon





Amagon is perhaps a strange choice for this list, because unlike others, this one is actually playable. Somewhat. What makes it noteworthy though is just the bizarre concept behind it and some strange gameplay choices.

One of the truly unique things about the 8-bit era is that I think some games were made simply because someone thought of a cool name. Amagon's Japanese title translates to, apparently, "Suddenly! Machoman," which sounds like an in-joke gone horribly wrong.



Despite looking like a ten year old, Amagon is apparently, according to the game's manual, "the most decorated Marine," who "was assigned a mission by his commander to investigate a strange, monster-infested South Pacific island, from which no man had ever returned alive." Whoever this guy's commander was had a hell of a sense of humor. Apparently he was also sent "with a machine gun as his only weapon," and "took off by plane and crash-landed on the island's beachhead."

This "most decorated Marine" sound like a hell of a screwup.



Here's where the game's real conceit comes in- the fabled "Suddenly! Machoman." After collecting an icon from some fallen jungle creature, pressing the select button allows you to become a hulking "Megagon" (their word, not mine) who forgets how to use the machine gun and can only throw uppercuts and energy blasts from his chest.

The game looks decent enough, but Amagon jumps all screwy and his bullets have laughably short range and limited ammo to boot, leading to clumsy deaths at inopportune times. Apparently there's aliens and dinosaurs at later levels but I never made it that far.

http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/manuals/amagon.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagon

The Adventures of Bayou Billy





A cool game in concept, Bayou Billy was a multiple-format action game that involved Double Dragon-style beat-em-up sections, third person driving sections, and even levels that let you use the NES' Zapper.



I wish I could tell you more about the game but even back when the game was new my friends and I could only make it to level 4 (of 9) before losing. When I started up the game today to take screenshots, I spent half an hour failing to beat the first level. This game is legendarily fucking hard.



Bayou Billy did teach me one really important thing, however. If you're ever really hungry, if your life bar is reaching its end, all you have to do is punch some rednecks and alligators and eventually one of them will drop a fully cooked chicken or two. Also that Konami had some serious issues in the 80s with difficulty levels. And commercials.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayou_Billy

Haiku Tuesday: Spelunker (NES)

The Japanese have
a thing for terrible games-
they celebrate them.

Their word for them is
"kusoge," which means "shitty
games," literally.

Where I'm going with
this is that Spelunker is
a great example.

If you fall more than
four pixels or thereabout,
you die in midair.

I tried to play it
for an hour straight but I could
not stand all the pain.



I collected bombs
and what I think are tampons.
Then I hit the scotch.

The booze didn't help;
I got more and more angry.
This game's an asshole.

I lost count around
about seventy lives lost.
Fuck you Tim Martin.

Virtual Console Roundup, Weeks of 11/3 and 11/10/08

I meant to do this last week but got distracted, so here goes.





The only new VC game available on 11/3 is the wholly underwhelming Space Harrier. Somewhat notable at the time for being quasi-3d, but mostly known now as boring, repetitive crap.

SKIP IT






In stark contrast, though, 11/10 brings you Mega Man 3 (NES), which is pretty much inarguably the best game in the (looooong) series after the amazing 2. There is no excuse to own a Wii and not download this one unless you're allergic to good games (which would then make Wii your ideal console- OHHHHHH).

GET IT

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.