I’ve been playing a lot of old video games for the first time lately. I had an N64 growing up and while my older brother’s NES was in the house it was never as interesting to me beyond the Stone Cold Classics, your Marios and Zelda and whatever. So I never played many 32-bit-and-earlier games until pretty recently, and not having computers capable of playing basically any games in the house, PC stuff was right out. I feel that conversations around Old Games are so often couched in this assumption of nostalgia, and that can swing in two directions; either you have nostalgia and therefore this perceived inability or unwillingness to evaluate games with some mythical clarity, or a weird, hostile attitude where you don’t have nostalgia and thus make very harsh automatic assumptions about an Old Game, couched in this false presupposition that progress into the future and the standardization of many aspects of the gaming space is the same thing as progress in like, baseline quality. Both of these perspectives are unfair but the one rooted in warm affection is much less obnoxious.

It’s really just a matter of comfort and familiarity, though. When I first took a real interest in exploring older games I experienced some friction as I shed this skin of discomfort myself, even after I identified it and consciously tried to keep my mind open. But now I like to think I find it pretty easy to just approach every game neutrally, only considering its own history when I come at it mentally.

This is, of course, bullshit, and I am a fool, falling on the sword of my own hubris. Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun helped me realize this in a big way when I was coming at this NES adaptation of an arcade game from 1986 and I was shocked, simply flabbergasted at what it was pulling off. At the depth of control you have over your character, the large number of contextual verbs you have at your disposal, and the degree of mastery that’s possible over these systems. When I first started playing this game (and it’s mechanically identical adaptation Renegade, which I’ve concluded is the most pointless localization reskin of all time) it took me probably like an hour to get used to the controls and clear the first two rooms and the boss that follows them. Partially this is the aforementioned comfort thing; there’s a stiffness here that you might think would lead to more forgiveness than there ends up being from enemies, especially armed ones, whose reach and ferocity and speed are all tuned pretty brutally. There are weird quirks like the buttons you use for some actions being contextual and changing based on which direction you’re facing which was a HUGE hurdle, especially with how aggro the enemies are about ganging up on you; if you let dudes get on either side of you, which they will try to do constantly, your health will simply disappear. This is an adaptation of an arcade game in 1986, there’s no tutorial, and difficulty settings were a rare thing beyond “hard default and harder second mode” so that first screen is the only place you really have to figure your shit out.

But the game isn’t without its boons. Presumably due to limitations of the hardware, there are never more than a few guys on screen a time, so as long as you’re careful with your movement it’s not too hard to avoid getting boxed in. The big thing of course is that you get a fresh health bar between every screen which is a gigantic gift in this type of game, and certainly curbs the feeling that things are Unfair even while they’re obviously very tough.

And of course, once you do have a handle on it, bro. Brooooooohohohoho. When you achieve mechanical mastery you can RUN this game. The shit you can do here. You got punches, you got kicks, you got jumps, you got jumping kicks, you got parkour, you got grabs, you got throws, you straddle a dude in a way specific to the delinquent movies of this era that descended from the yakuza movies of the prior decade and which inherited those movies’ intense homosexuality, which I appreciate.

Everything smacks a little gay in Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun, and I’m here for it. It’s all about the boys here, and they’re charged as hell. No sign of the girls who will enter the picture later in this series, this one’s all about The Boys. Brash Tough Guy with a beating, passionate heart of justice has just enrolled in a new high school and wouldn’t you know it he fuckin’ hates bullies and he loves his new best friend Hiroshi, who is a timid little loser. Now obviously when you’re a delinquent fighting king all the rival school delinquents know you and want to kill you so to lure Kunio out they kidnap his boyfriend and you gotta fight your way through legions of dudes to Get Back Your Man. This is the only reading of this game that makes any sense I don’t make the rules. Long long lineage behind it.

The narrative trappings are pure dressing here, very little of that is explicit, mostly you’re just punching and throwing and jump kicking your way through streets and stations and rooftops, rendered relatively abstractly, and it all works! Like I said before, there are systems here that may not be TERRIBLY deep but they are enough to require practice and skill and to be satisfying to master. I don’t know what else I could ask for from such an early home console brawler.