2 posts tagged “nes”

Despite lacking blue spikes, basic plumbing skills or a kickass yo-yo and mermaid girlfriend, gamers tend to find a surprising amount in common with the heroes of their favorite games. Perhaps this connection comes from the inherent everyman-nature of the game protagonist, allowing every gamer to say “yes, I too know what it is to fight against the endless swarms of winged eyeballs. I too know that when the time comes I must use whatever tools are at my disposal, be they dodgeballs or boxer shorts, to right the wrongs of the world and rescue my princess.”

Whatever the nature of this connection, as a boy I connected with one protagonist so tightly that I swore off of eggplant until my early twenties. Kid Icarus was a hero for the ages.

The concept behind this game was a hybrid at a time when the established genres were only just being actually established, like God creating horses and Jello on the same day. I imagine the scene went something like this:

Nintendo Designer 1: <I say we make a vertical shooter next!>
Nintendo Designer 2: <No way! Its time for a platformer! There need to be more platformers out there, because platformers aren’t annoying at all!>
ND1: <Hmmm … I think I might have something here. Remember that time we took LSD and saw that eggplant with feet jumping into a hot tub …>

In the early days of Nintendo games, concept and content were purely separate ideas.
Game: Blaster Master
Concept: Pet frog turns into a tank when it falls into a hole in hero’s back yard
Content: Metroid-style shooter action with permanent powerups.

Game: Bionic Commando
Concept: Evil cyborg Hitler clone attacks the future
Content: shooter with “dangling” and near-impossible difficulty level

Game: Gyromite
Concept: Mad scientist … pillars
Content: Actually, that’s the basic content of Gyromite

So for Kid Icarus, the concept would be something like: Icarus fights Medusa, angels.

But the content … wow.

Let’s start with our hero, whose name is Pit despite the game being named Kid Icarus. Pit has wings and a bow, much like any angel. However, Pit’s wings are more for show than flight, perhaps an issue of stunted growth, and his bow shoots paltry distances at best. Also, Pit is an angel, a Judeo-Christian concept of semi-deity, trapped in a world of Greco-Roman names, imagery and gods. I’m not sure that’s every addressed though …

Pit is charged with saving Palutena, who has been kidnapped by Medusa. In addition, Pit must also rescue all of his fellow angel friends, who have been turned to stone by Medusa. Thankfully, Medusa’s spell can be counteracted by beating your stone friends over the head with a hammer. No, seriously.

From the onset, Kid Icarus provides an enjoyable challenge. Old school games involved learning the timing and memorizing the patterns, and Kid Icarus stays true to its course. Pit must jump increasingly difficult platforms to reach the top of each level, all the while attacking the various baddies and flying wombats who both pace the platforms and descend from on high ala Space Invaders. To kill said foes, Pit uses his short-range bow to pick off the baddies and collect their dropped goodies.

Every once in a while, Pit also entered into a labyrinth level of sorts, very similar to the palaces in Zelda 2: The Sidescrolling Link.  In these labyrinths, the game turned sidescrolling and Pit had to navigate the maze to reach a boss. In addition, the Labyrinths provided shops and permanent powerups, such as longer ranged attacks or revolving fireballs which actually gave the arrows more of a hit range (perfect for hitting the low-crawling baddies). Somehow the transition from vertical- to side-scrolling worked, and added a strange level of depth and progress to a game that might otherwise feel like “just another shooter/platformer.” Not that there were any other shooter/platformers at the time.

The labyrinths also had some challenges, like a shell-game type treasure room that might yield a Credit Card (for use at the Black Market shop) or mighty Zeus who MIGHT give you some power ups depending on his arbitrary bitchiness at the time of your arrival. Also, any of the stone friends you freed throughout the levels leading up to the Labyrinth would also show up to help you beat the boss of the level, though even in their armor they died in one hit. It was touches like these that really set Kid Icarus apart form other, more simple games of its day. All of these oddities added up to an actually deep gameplay experience that rewarded patience and attention to detail.

Progressing to the last level, the game turned pure shooter as Pit collected the mirror shield, some crappy helmet, actual man-wings, and a kickass laser-bow to use on the slowly-flying final level of the game. The treat of the game was that the last level, vastly different than any other level of the game, was surprisingly fitting and somehow plot-appropriate to the game on the whole. Of course Pit was flying and kicking ass finally; that’s what he’s been working towards. Like when Rambo finally ties that red hankie around his forehead, and you just know that he’s activated his Brown People Killing Powers, and all hell’s about to be blown to smithereens by some freaking explosive tipped water balloons or some shit like that!

Anyway, that’s basically what the last level is like.

Medusa, in the end, reveals herself to be nothing more than a giant face stuck to a wall, typical boss fodder for a shooter (though hardly an adequate explanation for kidnapping a goddess or even bowel movements). Her lasers are easily dodged using the giant Mirror Shield, and Pit’s kickass laser arsenal blows a hole right through her stupid face to reveal Palutena! Yay! Now for some snuggling.

To drive the point home, if you beat enough of your friends over the head with a hammer throughout the game, Pit transforms in a fully muscled and manly version of an angel. And rumor has it that there’s even an ultimate ending where in addition to being all muscley Pit also sports a kickass mustache! Now that’s a man!

But the lasting impression left by Kid Icarus, at least on this young lad, was the cheapest, dirtiest, and most reset-inducing enemy in the history of all gaming ever; the Eggplant Wizard. The eggplant wizard isn’t much of a wizard at all. He’s more like a man with an eggplant for a head who throws eggplants at his foes in the hopes of turning them into eggplants. These eggplants are less “thrown” than “lobbed like a softball to a 4 year old,” and yet they were somehow impossible to avoid. When transformed into an eggplant with feet, Pit was mostly only able to run around and get into a where he could regain his health but remain an eggplant and remember the good old days of having arms and a head.

There was probably a way to revert to an angel again, but I found the most effective method of dealing with the Eggplant Wizard was to throw my controller on the ground, hit something, and then reset the game with enough force as to possibly break my NES. 2 hours later, when I finally finished inputting the 150,000 character password, I was on my way to killing those eggplanty fucks agian!

Sadly, Kid Icarus appears to have been lost to the ages. A sequel never materialized on either shore other than a less-worthy gameboy title. And yet E3 2006 gave gamers new hope with the appearance of a new playable character in the upcoming Wii title Super Smasbrothers Something Something.

The constant question when going all retro is wondering how games hold up against the test of time. Not only have difficulty levels and expectations of content and plot replaced a willingness to attempt the same level a dozen times before finally beating it, but control schemes and graphics have made leaps and bounds since the days of the NES. Does Kid Icarus really stand the test of time?

I for one will never play it again to find out. And sure, a part of that is not wanting to destroy a wonderful memory of something I consider near-perfect…. But also, I just hate those fucking Eggplant Wizards THAT much.

Coming Soon: Princess Tomato, Wallstreet Kid, Skate or 720fornia Games presented by T&C, and the Power Pad! As always, suggestions welcomed.

Perhaps my only professional hero, one whom I aspire to be like in one of several careers I wish I had, is none of ther than 1up.com and EGM staff writer Jeremy Parish. Jeremy's sharp wit and love of handheld games and all things retro is only slightly less important than his astute reviewing, which points me in the right direction more often than not (and I am still hoping to play Steambot Chronicles, a Jermey Top Pick, if anyone wants to get me an early Birthday present ...). Jeremy has a little project he terms "Metroidvania," a reference I will not explain, but in this series he goes back and takes a look at the games which defined a genre. His upcoming Metroidvania piece will look at a game near and dear to my own heart, and one which owned many many hours of my young life (and more still had it not been for the Official Nintendo Player's Guide); Goonies II.

"A video game about a movie that never existed?" you ask? NO! DON'T BE STUPID! Goonies II is the sequel to the arcade "classic" the Goonies, which was a loose adaptation of the movie "the Goonies" in which the hero, Mikey, runs around a haunted dropping giant bombs on mice with sunglasses. Wait, was that the movie or the game? One more wrong note and we'll all be flat ...

So Goonies II sees the return of Mikey, who is the only Goonie left after the Fratelli Gang has kidnapped not only all of the other Goonies, but also Mikey's love interest, a mermaid. No, seriously. Did you even WATCH the movie?!

Mikey, armed only with his truty Yo-Yo, must traverse a new haunted house/mansion/labrynth of caves collecting new powerup items and rescuing all of the kidnapped Goonies and his Merfriend.... no, I mean his Girlmaid ... no ... and that fishtailed girl he loves so they can make 1/4 fish babies or something like that and I don't even really fully understand how that would work out but I am sure in a game like this the writers obviously thought of that kind of thng and perhaps the intricacies of mermaid/human relations is beyond me because I don't even know how Mikey met a mermaid to begin with.

Goonies II was a great game for a number of reasons which now seem outdated and wrong. At the time of Goonies II, which very well may have been called somehting else entirely in Japan, gamers were only happy to have good content. Things didn't have to make as much sense back then, like why a character from the real world was suddenly fighting monsters with a yo-yo he never had in the movie. I mean, look at Mario ... a plumber that grows when he eats mushrooms, shoots fireballs and kills turtles?! If we didn't say WTF then, it was only because we didn't know any better. As for Goonies, the game didn't have to stink of actual Goonies dialogue or content in order for gamers to enjoy it; we simply disregarded the title in relation to that other thing also named Goonies but which was obviously unrelated. And we were happy to have a game with more depth than the prominent side-scrollers or "sports" games of the day.

Action in the game was the two-button NES variety; jump and attack. As the game progressed, Mikey receieved new items to assist in his adventure, like a ladder, or Molotov Cocktails. Because what's more useful in a fight against a nasty snake, a children's toy, or a bottle of whiskey with a rag in it and lit on fire? I know thats what I choose when our apartment has roaches.

The cool thing about Goonies II was the way the game map was laid out. The basic premise of the map was somehting akin to Alice and the Looking Glass. By entering through doors and navigating a brief 1st person section (in which there was plenty there), Mikey would emerge on the other side of the rooms in a new section of the labrynth, with a different stylized theme (red cave, blue cave, green cave, etc.) and a new set of enemies. This expansive map made things a bit confusing at times, but once players learned their way around things got really interesting. Having a ladder meant being to climb through a hole in the ceiling, while having super jump shoes allowed Mikey to jump to previously inaccessible ledges. Sure, it was just the Metroid forumla, but instead of a wildly original sci-fi theme with all the trapings of detailed perfection, players were allowed to enjoy a present-day house and cave scenario with yo-yos!

Okay, so it doesn't sound so hot in retrospect. But this really was a deep and enojyable game in its day. While other games involved mostly static characters moving forward in increasingly difficult jumping puzzles, Goonies was another helping of a wonderful and under-utilized formula of dynamic characters growing as they moved forward. Games like this paved the way for the popularity of console RPGs to the same generation who wanted character growth in addition to plot and molotov cocktails.

But more importantly, Goonies II had an amazing soundtrack which mostly involved the Cyndi Lauper in Nintendo music form on repeat ad nauseum. And thats the way we like our Cyndi Lauper.

Ultimately, Goonies II does not stand the test of time. It would be an unfair recommendation now, too riddled with terrible grammar and nonesense elements to be even slightly enjoyable. Its a game from an age when developers wanted players to have to work for their progress, making puzzles as transparent as a brick wall and leaving the gamer clueless as to the proper approach. I doubt any level of fun could still be had form this once-masterpiece. As such, I present you with the ending of this truly epic game. Imagine hearing a MIDI version of Cyndi Lauper's "Good Enough" as you view these scenes.