No, I'm not talking about a woman's rack at the age of 50, I'm talking about 8 Bit NES games. So many of those games seemed like masterpieces when we first played them, but how kind has Father Time been to them now that 20 to 30 years has passed since they came out? I don't think many people will argue that the majority of them have aged as gracefully as your average pornstar's meat curtains. Still there are some gems out there. The Super Mario games really seem to have stood the test of time, as well as the Legend of Zelda and a few other high profile games. But what about the others? What about those games that didn't get a dozen sequels over the years and have faded away from our immediate recollection?
So I've decided to go panning for gold this summer, and have chosen 100 NES games. I will play them until either I've finished them, I'm not longer having fun, or I've decided that the particular game sucks donkey ass and will not be getting any better no matter how much time I put into it.
Basically I've got a lot of time on my hands this summer and not enough to fill it with.
#6. Monster Party: Quick Verdict - Probably not, but depends who you are
Monster Party is a great NES title that flew under a lot of people's radar when it first came out. It's the story of a monster that teams up with an average baseball bat toting kid as they travel through the Dark World to destroy an evil something or rather. There's a lot to like here. Each level as 2 or 3 boss battles that are as imaginative as anything from the NES days. You'll fight classic monsters like Grim Reapers and Medusa, Eastern monsters like ghost samuarai, and really weird stuff, like giant cows that attack with smaller cows, and a giant fried shrimp. The bosses aren't the only impressive monsters. Even the average ones walking around making your trip difficult are really creepy and well designed too. The levels, particularly the early ones, are also done with a great deal of care of do a great job of getting the horror/monster theme across.
As good as the aesthetics are for an 8-bit game, it doesn't really carry over to be a great game today. The controls were decent enough for the time, but are definitely substandard now. The level design often favor aesthetics over clarity, and at things you'll have trouble figuring out if the object in front of you is something you can jump on, something that will hurt you, or just a background tile. So, while there is a lot of stuff to like, I can't quite recommend it to the average gamer. However, if you're a sucker for good horror monsters, this might be worth giving the game 20 or 30 minutes of your time just to see how weird and bizarre the developers got with the theme.
Also, just as a fun note, I'm trying to turn this into a video series. I'm trying to make a video for Monster Party, while learning how to do everything at the same time. So far it's slow going, and it doesn't look as good as I conceptualized in my head, but I'm going to follow through so I at least have one before I say "no more" and just stick with writing.
Do you own all of these old games? If not, how do you have access to them?
I figure he's using an emulator on the Wii Homebrew Channel.
Raven gets the answer in one try!
Not sure if it would work on a the Wii Mini (assuming that's the red one you're talking about). But yeah I went ahead and rehacked it. The kid doesn't touch it anymore now that he's glued to LBP and Minecraft on the PS3, and anytime I play a Wii game I play it on the Wii U now. So now the Wii has the Homebrew Channel, is hooked up to a large SDTV and has become my retro gaming device.
Nah, I have the Super Mario Bros 25th Anniversary edition Wii.
All right, I'm going to have to step this up. Unfortunately I now have about 3 weeks to do this in, as opposed to the entire summer as I initially planned. Due to the home/roof repairs I'm taking a weekend job at Best Buy selling computers. Not the worst job in the world, but it's going to suck up a big chunk of my weekend once July starts. Oh well, let's see what I can get done.
#7. Wacky Races: Quick Verdict - Yes, but you still probably won't care enough to play it
This game genuinally confuses me. Wacky Races was a popular cartoon in the late 1960's. The show would occasionally run in reruns throughout the years characters from the show would sporatically appear in other Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but that was really it. Then in 1991 Atlus released this game. Why? Anyone old enough to remember them would likely have been too old to have been interested in video games. That's just bizarre. To make things stranger, the show was about racing, but the game was a platformer where you controlled Muttley the dog. This makes no sense at all.
Anyway it's a well enough made NES game. A late gen game, so it's about as polished as an NES platformer gets. It controls pretty well and has a nice power-up system to allow for some variations on how Muttley attacks. The boss fights are a little tough (you fight the other racers in their cars so at least someone is driving). The real issue is basically the game is boring as hell. It's pretty easy. Even later levels don't offer up too much challenge. It just has a very bland feeling. Even if you're familiar with the series (and I am), there's not much to really make you go "oh wow I remember those guys!!!" So it does hold since all the fundamentals are strong, but that doesn't make it fun.