NES Week: Day #7

So, we’ve finally made it. After enjoying some simple pinball, ‘climbing’ up some icey mountains, hitting a ball with a racket, finding gems as a red blob, being a motorcyclist, and fighting with some balloons, we have finally made it. We’ve made it to Super Mario bros.

I could’ve gone for duck hunt for the last game but I thought that wouldn’t be great enough and that the perfect game to play at last is Nintendo’s mascot himself! My history with this game is pretty short. I used to play quite a bit of it but never get past world 6. Turns out there was a way to getting to world 8 all the way from world 5 so…that was nice to know at last after I’d gone through quite a lot of pain but oh well.

In the game you play as Mario on his way to save princess toadstool from the evil king koopa (or peach and bowser). On the way you’ll come across goombas, koopa troopas and buzzy beetles. You’ll also find lakitus who just love to annoy you every chance you get. As a game, Super Mario bros. has aged pretty well. Not ridiculously well but definitely well enough for it to still be played today. And yes: it is pretty difficult near the end but not as difficult as some other Mario games on the NES (looking at you lost levels) but overall you’ll still be able to enjoy a timeless classic.

Classic, recognisable music, decent enemies, bullet bills come at the wrong time, your princess is in another castle!

NES Week: Day #5

Welp, we’re now on day 5, and what better game to have for day 5 than Excitebike? Overall this is probably the one game I have very little to talk about. Probably a bit more than the sports games but really I have barely anything to say about Excitebike.

You’re a motorcyclist in a competition and that’s kinda it. In the game you go over ramps and hope to god you crash. There are arrows on the ground to help you speed up and that’s really kind of it. Some of the fun comes In when you have to drive alongside other racers. Idk why but I find it a little more stressful and keeps me on my toes a lot more than the normal mode. There’s also a neat little track designer which is kind of an underrated feature of the game. I mean I can understand why cause like…you can’t save it. At least on the original NES.

Ramps, some of the other racers can be bitches, please don’t crash ;-;

I’m by no means close to 100%ing Tears of the Kingdom, but having just completed the story I feel prepared enough to say that it absolutely floored me. Breath of the Wild has been completely blown out of the water, with a total improvement on abilities, unique gameplay mechanics, traversal, sound design, storylines/lore, the list goes on and on and on.
It takes almost no time at all to understand that Tears of the Kingdom attains its own very unique identity despite having the foundation of Breath of the Wild to build from, taking complete advantage of verticality, pre-established characters and locations as well as fresh and inviting additions littered throughout.
There is an unfathomable amount of things to do in this world, taking a distinctly darker approach and allowing its most climactic moments to truly shine and stand out, which was an area where BOTW started to show its cracks. If creativity and open-ended gameplay is something you seek, this game is the magnum-opus. An incredible experience top to bottom.

NES Week: Day #4

When I was doing this NES week the one game I was slightly looking forward to playing was Clu Clu land. Surprisingly I actually wanted to give it a try and see what the big deal about it was after hearing so much from it. I almost wanted to see what you actually did in the game and if it was any good.

Was I disappointed? For once…I sadly was

So what do you do in Clu Clu land anyway? Well, you play as a red blob who has to spin around and find gems which will make some sort of shape. You do this whilst avoiding these spikes. In a way, imagine Clu Clu land like picross but nothing like picross. The controls really get on my nerves and I just don’t like it. The spikes really really get on my nerves as they seem to come at you at the exact wrong moment and to be perfectly honest with you it’s just not really that great of a game. Sure it has some interesting shapes to make but it’s still really not that interesting and only seems to get on my nerves more then it does give me any form of fun.

Interesting shapes, red blob, I fucking hate spikes

NES Week: Day #3

A game I hear mentioned a tiny bit here and there is the NES game Tennis. Now when I say I hear about it a tiny bit I mean a tiny bit because the sports titles of the NES era are never really talked about much and in all honesty I’m really not surprised.

Tennis is very simple: you hit a ball with your racket from one side to another and hope to god your opponent will somehow miss it. Yeah this game really is that simple but also quite infuriating at the same time. When it looks like your hitting the ball…well somehow your not and then it goes out and you lose a point which is just absolutely great…and even when do you get a point it’s usually when it happens to your computer opponent which is…interesting to say the least

Extremely simple, can be infuriating, how many jobs does Mario have???

NES Week: Day #2

Out of all the games to get characters in smash bros. The one I’ve always been confused about are the ice climbers. They’ve never really been that powerful in smash and I’ve never heard anyone really praising the game. Maybe it was time that I tried the game to see why they were in smash in the first place. Who knows…maybe it would be a kid Icarus situation?

Personally I really don’t find ice climbers to be that good of a game. If anything, I’m confused as to why Nintendo respects it so much. For starters the jumping is terrible. You don’t really notice how terrible the jump physics are until the platforms come in. I promise you that no matter what I do I can’t land on the platforms because ‘oh your only on the very edge so I guess that means your not on it’ and the controls feel so stiff with you trying to manoeuvre the climber to jump on these platforms and somehow catch the pterodactyl at the end. It all feels so stiff and when the platforms are really slippy that’s just when I lose faith in everything…

Stiff controls, terrible platforms, not the worst enemies, they should get a new job that doesn’t require them to jump

NES Week: Day #1

So to start off the NES week I started to look for the perfect game to start it off with. And what better game to kick it off with then in my opinion, one of the most underrated games from the nes. What is this game? Why its pinball!

Now I know what you’re thinking: “how could you possibly like the really dull and simple nes pinball???” Well I like it for many reasons personally:

1. I can spend hours on it. When it comes to pinball games and pinball in general I can spend absolutely hours on it, and I’m so happy this translates well to this game because oh man could I spend hours on it.
2. Its simplicity almost makes it more fun? I know that’s an odd thing to say but it’s almost true. The simplicity makes it really fun for me and I really don’t know why. Maybe it’s just like how normal pinball is but I just have a really big soft spot for this one…
3. I like the donkey Kong reference : )

Very simple, could play for hours, I murdered the chickens…

A take I see around the internet a lot is that this is where the Elder Scrolls franchise went mainstream given its massive success; however, I would argue that Skyrim is the result of the mainstream success Bethesda found with the 3rd installment, Morrowind. That game is where Bethesda had found that simplifying a game and streamlining systems previously more complex to create an accessible experience for a wider audience was a recipe for success. For better or worse, this sealed the fate of the franchise as a whole.

And how do I view the result of 9 years' worth of streamlining? Well, it's a bit complicated. The thing is, I don't entirely hate Skyrim as a video game. It didn't earn the merit of being the biggest success Bethesda had ever released at the time based on reputation alone. As simple as an Elder Scrolls game as Skyrim is compared to its predecessors, it still has enough going for it. The melee combat is pretty darn good. I felt rewarded at points for having to manually aim my strong attacks to avoid hitting a companion or actually hit an enemy who was mid-movement. Archery is good, but it’s impossible for Bethesda to fuck that up.

What they did appear to fuck up, however, is the magic. This being said, I should say upfront that the most magic I’ll use in any Skyrim is generally healing magic. I’ve never deeply delved into this game's magic system, and I can’t begin to imagine what a magic-only run of Skyrim would look like with how bare-bones this game’s magic catalog is. Phasing out movement-based spells is one thing I can understand why something as busted as levitation had to go given the direction the games were going with regard to their environmental structure. This system focuses largely on a three-element scheme: Fire, Ice, & Shock. Every offensive spell is more or less designed with these three elements in mind. There is a vampirism spell that siphons health from enemies, but it seems to be a novice spell without any strong version of it present in the game. And without spell crafting, this limits the level of play for magic heavily. And while I can use some illusion spells to fuck with the enemy, I struggle to imagine why I’d do that for anything beyond a challenge run when the better alternative is to enchant your war axe with a 10% chance of inducing fear and then hacking everything around me into little bits.

So as far as Elder Scrolls games go, Skyrim doesn’t have a lot going for it outside of its setting, and even that feels stale when compared in aesthetic when compared to the dry palette video games were hard focused on having at the time. I can’t hold it fully against this game, however, given the setting they set out to build, the odds were stacked against it having a vibrant environment like Oblivion or something otherworldly like Morrowind. Skyrim is the cold, dry mid-west of Tamriel. Any colors that ought to stand out from the stone gray, dirt brown, & snow white is muted to all hell and back. That being said, I should reiterate that I don’t hold it against Bethesda; in fact, I’d even go as far as to say I kind of like how Skyrim looks. This, of course, is with the massive caveat of moving the other Elder Scrolls games just out of the frame of your mind. But if I do that, then I can say I don’t hate Skyrim as a video game.

Skyrim is just a nice game to shut your brain off. If you don’t think too hard about what you’re doing on any given quest, then you’ll avoid any unnecessary rage from the simple of thought how asinine this game is. There’s no real sense of reputation in this game. No matter how much you do on the side, everyone in the main & guild questlines will treat you like a baby bitch. I suppose it’s because they couldn’t account for that in all the dialogue & writing they’d already done, but that’s something I’ll blame on them using voice acting too much. One can only spend so much on a voice-acting budget before the dialogue has to be curbed for the sake of every NPC having fully voiced lines. So I’ll round off this with my lukewarm take that opting for full voice acting was the worst direction for Bethesda to make period. I think Morrowind’s system for dialogue was so much better and I’d rather have that than hear Stephen Russel or Paul Ganus for the millionth time.