Book Bites: Playing with Power!

Playing With Power!: Nintendo NES Classics by Garitt Rocha
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Playing with Power! is a coffee-table retrospective of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Much (Most? All?) of the text seems to be copy/pasted from existing game descriptions and old Nintendo Power Magazine spreads. The text lacks flavor or perspective. The bulk of the content consists of walkthroughs for 30-year-old games. The wealth of classic Nintendo artwork is a treat to look at, but, especially in a crowded retro gaming book scene, Playing with Power! falls flat.

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8-Bit Encyclopedia: Euchre

 

Wait, did you say, "NES Euchre?" Yes. Yes I did.

In some alternate universe, the Nintendo Entertainment System was released exclusively to the US Midwest. From Ohio to Nebraska, Minnesota to Missouri, kids shouldered up to the KB Toys NES display, (politely) saying, "Ope, 'scuse me, gonna go ahead and -- grab one of these 'Euchre' cartridges." In this Midwest-centric Universe, NES "Euchre" sells over 40 Million units. The Game Boy becomes the Euchre Boy. Church festivals and sleepover basements are rife with kids calling loners and overtrumping kings with bowers.

If only.

In our wider, non-Midwest branch of the multiverse, NES Euchre is a nifty homebrew game by Doug Fraker. Coded as part 2018's NESDev.org's Best Homebrew competition, Euchre is exactly what it promises to be: an 8-bit version of the popular trick-taking card game. "Euchre" is available for free download from Fraker's website: https://nesdoug.com/2018/09/05/downloads-free-games/. 

8-Bit Encyclopaedia: Motor City Patrol

There's no disappointment as bitter as potential unfulfilled. A game that starts out as a breath of fresh air only to quickly stagnate. To borrow a phrase, a crappy game will always be a crappy game. Ikari Warriors is steaming garbage from "Press Start" to "Game Over." With little expected, Ikari's failure means little.

Motor City Patrol, surprisingly enough, starts with promise. Its "drive around a city completing tasks" gameplay makes it a spiritual forerunner to Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto series. Developed by Source Research and Development and released in 1992 by Matchbox (yes, the toy car people), Motor City Patrol doesn't boast a stellar pedigree. Source R and D's only other games are the infamously bad Noah's Ark (also released by Matchbox) and a Gameboy puzzler called The Pyramids of Ra.

But once Motor City Patrol gets revving, we see a game with a decent handle of what the NES allows. The graphics, as exemplified by the title logo in the header, are surprisingly rich. The controls are responsive and tight. The plot is simple enough: the player controls a police car which must patrol the city, stopping speeders, thieves and criminals along the way. Pressing Select brings up a map of the city which shows where the criminals are. If a criminal gets too cheeky, pressing B fires your police sidearm out the car window. Nabbing criminals earns the player points which can be used to upgrade their patrol car.

Out patrolin'...

...and checkin' the map.

To "win," the player must patrol 7 days in each of the city's 5 precincts. However, accidentally arresting innocent citizens or letting too many law-breakers escape earns the player a warning. 5 warnings, or accidentally shooting innocent motorists, ends the game. Crashing the car into too many obstacles (but strangely enough, not cars) will also end the game. To neutralize any warnings and damage to your car, 16 "stolen items," aka flashing chotchkies, are scattered through the player's patrol route. Collecting them all will reset the player's "warnings" and car damage to zero. These are vital in the later stages of the game.

That is, of course, assuming you can play to the later stages without dying of boredom first. Because Motor City Patrol is a high-priced sportscar without a road to drive.

8-Bit Encyclopaedia: Bucky O'Hare

Bucky O'Hare hit the NES in January of 1992 to almost zero fanfare. Developed by Konami, Bucky O'Hare drowned in the wake of Nintendo's newly-released 16-bit Super NES console. Gaming fans were too busy with Super Mario World and F-Zero to care about a green-furred, epaulet-wearing space rabbit.

Bucky O'Hare: the NES's
only hero with epaulets!

Bucky also suffered by association. Two out of every three NES games released in 1992 were either sequels or adaptions¹. Much like Hollywood does with today's blockbuster films, NES game developers turned to pre-existing intellectual properties as a way to hedge potential losses in an increasingly competitive home gaming market.

The NES had mixed success with adapted properties. Turds like Back to the Future, The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants, Fester's Quest (the Adams Family), Jaws, Top Gun, Die Hard and Hudson Hawk stunk up store shelves. The Bucky O'Hare comic and cartoon were themselves seen as derivative of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. For all intents and purposes, Bucky O'Hare looked like Konami's last attempt to cash in before the NES died.

But let's remember, this is Konami, developers of Castlevania, Contra, TMNT II, Metal Gear and Tiny Toon Adventures. Books shouldn't be judged by their covers². Bucky O'Hare is one of the best run 'n' gun platforming games on the NES console.

8 Bit Encyclopaedia - Ninja Gaiden 3

What's behind your back?

Sometimes, you beat a video game and watch the credits with a silent swell of satisfaction. Sometimes, you beat a video game and shout obscenities as the boss disintegrates into pixels and then run around the room blasting the double-bird at the dead bastard. Ninja Gaiden III: The Ainceint Ship of Doom¹ falls into the latter category.

Tecmo released Ninja Gaiden III to Japan in late June of 1991 and in America a few months later. Anyone familiar with the game's more popular forebears knows the routine: Ninja Ryu Hayabusa runs and jumps through screen after screen of perilously-placed baddies, slashing everything with his dragon sword. Along the way he collects magical power-ups such as spiraling fireballs and ninja stars. The game reveals plot through cinematic cut-scenes².

Ninja Gaiden III makes small tweaks to this formula. First, Ninja Gaiden III gives Ryu the ability to hang down from and crawl under certain platforms. It's a nice change and allows for more variety in level design. The game's powerup pods also kindly show the prizes within. Opaque pods in previous Gaiden titles often saw Ryu slashing a pod and receiving an unwanted sub-weapon³. Ninja Gaiden III also makes minor adjustments to game physics. Compared to Ninja Gaidens I and II, Ryu jumps smoother and farther.

Ninja Gaiden (1989)
Ryu jumps 4 body lengths

Ninja Gaiden III (1991)
Ryu jumps and floats 4+ body lengths

There's a plot in Ninja Gaiden III but it's terribly contrived and not really worth much mention. The opening cinematic shows Ryu's girlfriend falling from a cliff to her doom, pushed by...[gasp] Ryu! Accused of murder, Ryu quests to clear his name, stumbling onto a vast government conspiracy of clones, genetic experiments and inter-dimensional evil. It's a pity the game falls into such vanilla Anime tropes, as the first two Gaiden games had decent plotting and character development. Here? Not so much--just shut up about plot and go slash some stuff!

I saved for months to buy Journey to Silius. Months of allowances, birthday money, and couch quarters clutched in my fist, I strutted into Babbage's ¹ a financial titan and strutted out with an awesome new NES game. There's a solar eclipse AND robots on the cover--how could it not be awesome?!²

I could have cried. The game--purchased with hard-earned monies--was harder than Ron Jeremy's... rock collection. The protagonist's teensy pop gun barely dented the cybernetic horde. I played Silius twice, never passing level 1, before putting it away for good.

I'll Be Back... Under a different name

The irony is that Journey to Silius, the greatest failure of my young life, is a decent game. Developed by Tokai Engineering and released by Sunsoft in 1990, the game's difficulty is owed to its hectic, meandering development process. It started life not as a generic, platforming shoot 'em up, but as... The Terminator. Nintendo Power published the snipped at left in July of 1989.

It doesn't take CSI: Miami to see Nintendo Power's screenshots match Silius' box art. Most likely due to the prohibitive cost of obtaining movie licenses, Sunsoft dropped the in-progress Terminator title and re-worked the game into Journey to Silius. The Terminator's fingerprints³ remain all over Silius, but none more prominently than the unused graphics (below) still in Silius' game's code:

Baseball Simulator 2014

We've only just released the game and he's
already Puiging.

It's Finally Here! Baseball Simulator 2014 updates Culture Brain’s Baseball Simulator 1.000 with 18 current MLB teams:

• Boston • Detroit • Cleveland • Atlanta • San Francisco • Washington • Texas • Kansas City • New York (A) • Los Angeles (N) • Cincinnati • Pittsburgh • Tampa Bay • Oakland • Baltimore • Arizona • San Diego • St. Louis

6 additional teams can be introduced via the in-game “Edit” function. The game’s default “Edit” teams (pre-loaded via a .sav file included in the archive) are:

• Los Angeles (A) • Seattle • Toronto • New York (N) • Milwaukee • Colorado

Look at those, sweet,  pixelated logos.
LOOK AT THEM!

Teams were chosen for the BBSIM14 roster based on their 2013 record (sorry Cubbies and Marlins, no soup for you). Previous releases also contained data for the remaining MLB teams. This year, to maximize available batters, this data is omitted. However, logo data for all 30 clubs exists in the rom, so any super-enterprising Miami fan could theoretically add Christian Yelich and Co. into the game if they really wanted.

McCutcheon v. King Felix: Doesn't get
much better than that.

Projected rosters, stats and PITCHf/x data from rotochamp and fangraphs.com; current as of 2014-04-23. An improvement from BBSIM2013, this year's release uses Sabermetrics to better depict players' abilities. For example, instead of .SLG representing a player's raw power, this release uses ISO. wOBA is used to dictate how big of a "sweet spot" each batter gets. And for the pitchers, pitch speeds, as well as lateral and horizontal movement are pulled directly from PITCHf/x data.

Like Baseball Simulator 2013, all teams have Ultra points for special abilities. Only the most clutch players, though, get special hits/pitches.

Papi's stat line looks wicked pissah.

The archive linked below includes a number of goodies. First and foremost, you get the rom, son. "Baseball Simulator 2014.nes" is tested and compatible with any number of NES emulators. Also in the archive is "Baseball Simulator 2014.sav" Copy this .sav file into the sav folder of your emulator to pre-load 6 more MLB teams via the game's Edit function. Also in the archive is the complete stat sheet for every team in the game and the Hacking Bible, should anyone want to make personal tweaks. 

DOWNLOAD BASEBALL SIMULATOR 2014 - THE ONLY NES BASEBALL GAME THAT MATTERS - HERE 
(upaded 2014-04-29 to include corrected .sav file)

After you've crushed your competition, tweet out screenshots and scores using the hashtag #BBSIM14. And although the game has been tested, some things slip through the cracks. Tweet @keithisgood with any bugfix requests or statistical oddities. PLAY BALL!

Baseball Simulator 2014

A little behind schedule this year, but...

soon.

Proposed Mega Man Robot Masters

Not that Capcom is asking, but hey, if you're looking for Robot Masters for Mega Man 11...

Job: Barista
Attack: Coffee Man shoots espresso sludge. If hit, player loses virtually all control of Mega Man. Controls become over-responsive and way too fast. Following a 5 second burst of this, Mega Man suddenly slows to a snails pace for 5 seconds before returning to normal.
Weapon: Once Defeated, the Coffee Cannon causes over-caffeinated enemies to go berserk and explode.

Job: Pharmacist
Attack: Rx Man dispenses medicine bombs which explode in clouds of toxic chemicals. Getting the jab from his needle causes major damage.
Weapon: Once Defeated, the Pill Popper shoots extremely powerful chemical bombs.

Manning to Welker, GIF'ed!

Because I like Kicking Hornets' Nests

 

Manning to Welker

Looks like we'd better get used to seeing this.

Tecmo Super Bowl 2014 Now Available for Download

Well, what are you waiting for? Go download it! 

http://tecmobowl.org/files/file/359-tecmobowlorg-presents-tecmo-super-bowl-2014-preseason/

Tecmo Super Bowl 2014 Intro

DANGER !!!!!! TERROR HORROR

That would make a pretty decent T-shirt, no?

Tecmo Super Bowl 2014!

Here's a little album of updates I've done for this year's release of Tecmo Super Bowl from the group at tecmobowl.org

Mike Trout: NES Demigod

Baseball Simulator 2013

After months of development, keithisgood Electronic Media is pleased to present the official release of Baseball Simulator 2013! This update to Culture Brain's 1989 NES classic--Baseball Simulator 1.000--allows a player to compete with any current MLB team. The base rom (link at the bottom of the page) gives players the choice from 18 MLB Teams:

Baseball Simulator 2013!

Official rom coming soon...

After 5 months of work and increasingly high hurdles to jump, Magic Kids--my hack of Virgin Games' M.C. Kids for the NES--is finally complete. I've previously covered the game, saying what a shame the McD's shill was; constant arches and clowns detracted from a fun, complex NES platformer.