The Tower of Retro-Babble: Nintendo

Oh ho ho, now we’re getting into the preemo stuff! What can you even say about a legend like Nintendo, a company that was synonymous with video games in the latter half of the 1980s? Well, let’s start with some history. Nintendo (literally Japanese for “leave luck to heaven”) was into games right from the start, even back in the 19th century when gaming was strictly unplugged. The company first made playing cards as Yamauchi Nintendo, and Hiroshi Yamauchi, the descendant of founder Sekiryo Yamauchi, was in charge of Nintendo when the company transitioned to electronic games nearly a century later.

Hiroshi Yamauchi was a ruthlessly effective leader, famously demanding and hot-tempered. Legend has it that when Coleco CEO Arnold Greenberg revealed he was going to release Nintendo’s arcade mega-hit Donkey Kong for Coleco’s new home computer, the ADAM, Yamauchi jumped to his feet, angrily reminding Greenberg that the Donkey Kong license didn’t extend to home computers, while spewing invective like a Mount Fuji that had somehow gone volcanic.

Yamauchi steered this ship (probably while cursing like a sailor), but it was employees Shigeru Miyamoto and Gumpei Yokoi who kept Nintendo afloat. Miyamoto was a college-trained artist brought aboard as a favor to a friend of the Yamauchi family. It was the best decision Nintendo ever made… the quirky young man was full of ambition and imagination, and his skill as an artist translated perfectly to the world of video games. His pixel art was delightfully cartoony, and rivaled only by Hiroshi “Mr. Dot Man” Ono, Namco’s own talented in-house artist.

Meanwhile, Gumpei Yokoi handled the hardware side of the video game business, creating such Nintendo mainstays as the cross key directional pad and the Game Boy, which brought the fun of the wildly successful Nintendo Entertainment System to the portable space. The Game Boy hardware is nothing special by today’s standards, or even the more modest standards of 1989 when it was released, but it was also hugely cost and power-efficient. This combined with the star power of Mario and Link, and support from Nintendo’s capable third parties, led to a decade of dominance for the Game Boy, against far superior (but also far more expensive and power-hungry) competitors.

That was fun! However, this feature is supposed to be about the arcade space, so let’s segue into that. Nintendo also dominated this segment of the industry thanks to Donkey Kong, but transitioned out of it after the Nintendo Entertainment System became a hit. After all, dedicated arcade cabinets cost thousands of dollars to manufacture… and home console technology from 1983 that every American kid had to have in 1988 costs a whole lot less.

Nintendo straddled the two halves of the industry with the Playchoice-10, a dual screen arcade jukebox. The top screen provided a menu of NES games for the player, while the bottom screen offered the actual game… so long as the players dumped in quarters. As an NES in an arcade cabinet, you literally had Playchoice-10 at home, but with Nintendo Mania at its peak, it was still a smashing success.

Look, you had to be there. Nintendo Mania was damn near a cult in 1988… fans even their got marching orders from the company in the form of Nintendo Power magazine. You had to pay for their propaganda, but every nerd on the playground happily obliged. I was one of those nerds, and I can tell you from personal experience that Nintendo Power was well worth reading, both charming and informative. For propaganda. Look, at least it aged better than The Wizard and the Captain N cartoon!

Sigh. Let’s just get to the arcade games already.

SHERIFF
Played: In MAME, probably

This is Nintendo’s early crack at the arcade game market, likely inspired by the success of Taito’s Western Gun (with the very similar Gun Fight released in America). That’s the game where two cowboys try to shoot at each other from opposite ends of the screen, angling their shots around cacti and stagecoaches. It was a staple arcade game in the late 1970s, and you saw it on all the game consoles of the time. It was called Outlaw on the Atari 2600, Gunfighter on the RCA Studio II, and, uh, Showdown in 3000 AD on the Odyssey2. (That machine’s US marketing was one great big Isaac Asimov wet dream. Every game box looked like the cover of an OMNI magazine.)

Sheriff is… nothing like those games! Shigeru Miyamoto worked on it, of course it’s not going to be strictly on script. Instead, you’re set in the middle of the screen, surrounded by bandidos that march around the edges. Barriers provide some cover fire from the bandidos’ bullets, but sometimes one of the varmints will invade your personal space, moving to all corners until either he or you have been gunned down. Sometimes, a buzzard flies overhead… nail him with a bullet for a mystery bonus.

There’s an element of Space Invaders in the way you and your enemies are separated by barriers, and an element of the not-yet-released Robotron: 2084 in the way aiming and firing are handled independently. It’s not as good as Robotron, and the single colored characters limited Miyamoto’s artistic aspirations, but for a freshman effort released in 1979, it’s solid and refreshingly original besides. You could pick a worse debut than Sheriff.

RADAR SCOPE
Played: In MAME. Because Nintendo won’t give it to me anywhere else!

Radar Scope was an attempt by Nintendo to ride of wave of single screen shooters popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While it’s got some nifty visual effects, including a glowing grid, slight changes in perspective depending on your radar dish’s onscreen position, and enemy ships which recede in the far distance, the gameplay is distressingly plain. Your foes congregate at the top of the screen as tiny shapes just barely recognizable as UFOs, and very rarely reachable with your shots. Occasionally, one of these will peel off from the flock, diving straight toward you before ending its game of chicken by veering off to the left or right. You’ll also have to intercept any canisters that roll toward you with shots, because if they get past you, they’ll damage your home base. Gameplay ends when you’ve either lost all your radar dishes, or your base is destroyed, or you just stop caring and play something good instead, like Galaga or Astro Blaster.

(There was a follow-up of sorts in Space Firebird, another lesser known Nintendo shooter that’s a little more exciting than Radar Scope, but won’t win any beauty contests. Hey Nintendo, maybe leave the space firebird-ing to Phoenix.)

Radar Scope was a ten ton bomb for Nintendo, unpopular in both the East and West. It nearly ended the company’s run as an arcade game developer before it started in earnest, but Shigeru Miyamoto had this one nifty idea for an arcade game which he was sure would at least let the company save face.

Sure, why not? Whatever it is, it couldn’t possibly do any worse than Radar Scope.

DONKEY KONG
Played: Anywhere and everywhere I could find it, but in particular, an arcade inside a (Colorado?) ski slope. It was right next to Cliff Hanger, that dumb laserdisc game with Lupin the Third in it. And I had Musk Lifesavers that day. (Never eat Musk Lifesavers.) 

Donkey Kong was designed as a substitute for Radar Scope, a limp shoot ‘em up that Nintendo remains eager to leave off its resume. You can’t play this Nintendo game on any Nintendo console, even the Switch, which has practically everything else Nintendo ever made as part of Hamster’s Arcade Archives series.

It’s not hard to figure out why Nintendo would like to forget Radar Scope’s existence… just read my previous review for more information on that. However, Donkey Kong is a magnificent mulligan, a return from the abyss that ranks up there with Sonic’s much-needed redesign in the Sonic the Hedgehog movies. Originally designed as a Popeye game, Donkey Kong riffs on the King Kong franchise, with a slightly smaller, infinitely sillier gorilla holding a pretty girl hostage. Construction worker Mario (last name? Also Mario. Okay, sure?) quickly steps up to rescue her, racing across girders and scrambling up ladders in an unfinished high-rise building as Kong throws everything that’s not bolted down at him.

Donkey Kong’s preferred weapons are the supply barrels, conveniently held in a stack at the top of the skyscraper’s base. He rolls them from the top of the screen, and they steadily cascade downward, from one bent girder to the next directly beneath it. Barrels are weirdly aware of Mario’s presence, sometimes rolling down a ladder as he starts to climb it. Your only hope for survival is jumping the oncoming hazards… leaping one barrel nets you a respectable 100 points, but pulling an Evel Knievel and jumping a cluster of them is worth much more. Unfortunately, it’s just as likely that your stunt will leave you in traction, like Super Dave Osbourne. You can also snatch a hammer- effective, but only for seven seconds, so probably from Harbor Freight- to bust up the barrels as they approach. Again, you can tempt fate by letting them get really close before you whack ‘em, but is it worth the risk?

Reach Pauline and Kong will take her up another twenty five meters, to the final showdown. Now Mario must dodge annoyingly wily fireballs as he tears apart the building supports, one rivet at a time. Step on a rivet, or even jump over it (?!), and it vanishes, leaving a gap behind that the roving fireballs can’t cross. Get them all and Donkey Kong tumbles off his perch at the top of the screen. Pauline is safe! And Mario is… probably looking for a new job, now that he’s torn down the skyscraper he was paid to build. They’re always looking for plumbers, right?

Donkey Kong is a fantastic experience, as mechanically sound as it is visually appealing. In the years since Sheriff and Radar Scope, Miyamoto had developed a strong sense of the risk and reward that makes a video game exciting, while keeping the quarters rolling in for arcade operators. Donkey Kong is TOUGH, but rewarding. You’ll feel the same rush from sailing over three barrels in one leap that you did from munching all four monsters with one energizer in Pac-Man. The game is brought to life with whimsical cartoon artwork and an extra helping of the intermissions that were such a hit in Pac-Man. Kong literally climbs the skyscraper at the start of the game with Pauline in his clutches, stomps the top floor until all the lower ones sag from his weight, and growls menacingly, as if daring Mario to do something about it.

Speaking of sagging, there are two other levels in Donkey Kong… but the game starts to suffer the farther away it gets from the memorable opening stage. The rivets stage is a fun challenge, and Mario’s only chance for revenge against the big ape, but the elevator stage demands every ounce of the game’s tight control with tiny platforms and a bouncing jackhammer you’ll avoid by mere fractions of a second. The cement stage is the worst of the four, a tepid race up a series of conveyor belts holding plates of quick-drying cement. (REALLY quick, apparently, because touching them is instantly fatal.) Dedicated gamers screamed bloody murder when the cement factory stage was removed from nearly every home port of Donkey Kong. Admit it, though... if you were constrained by a tiny cartridge size and had to sacrifice one of the game’s four stages, this would be the ballast you’d throw overboard.

Donkey Kong was insanely popular in 1981, proving that a little personality goes a long way in making an arcade classic. There were toys, board games, stuffed animals (or in Mario’s case, stuffed Italians?), cartoons, trading cards, breakfast cereals… American companies were quick to attach the Donkey Kong license to anything and everything they could imagine. One company, Universal Studios, even attempted a lawsuit, claiming that Donkey Kong was too close to the King Kong films for its comfort. Nintendo valiantly fought back in court with the help of lawyer Howard Lincoln… and after it was revealed that King Kong was firmly in the public domain, there’d be no stopping Nintendo’s grinning gorilla from that point forward. (Or Mario. Or Nintendo’s famously aggressive lawyers.)

DONKEY KONG JR.
Played: A laundromat in Coldwater, long since shuttered

In the early days of gaming, just stapling a “II” onto the sequel of an arcade smash wasn’t good enough… you had to introduce a new character to carry the torch of the old one, with a new title to match. Pac-Man led to the more female-friendly Ms. Pac-Man, while Donkey Kong begat Donkey Kong Jr., a tyke in a onesie who must rescue his father from Mario, who’s got him locked in a cage. Yeah, the hero from the first game is the villain in this one. Weird swerve.

Rather than the raw industrial look of the first game, Donkey Kong Jr. is set in a jungle, playing to Junior’s strengths as a great ape. Vines and chains spiral upward to the top of the playfield, and our hero can either climb from one rope (slowing him down but shrinking his onscreen footprint) or two at once (speeding his ascent but giving Mario’s animated bear traps TWO hands to bite). Plump fruits growing on the vines can’t be eaten, but can instead be dropped, crushing any threats beneath them for bonus points.

On a surface level, Donkey Kong Jr. is similar to the first game… they’re both side-view platformers. However, in Donkey Kong Jr., you’ll be spending a lot more time moving vertically than horizontally, and a whole lot less time jumping. It makes a profound difference in the way the game plays, and the new vertically oriented design makes Donkey Kong Jr. even harder (and if I can be honest, less fair) than Donkey Kong. Good luck with that final stage! You’ll have to unlock six padlocks to free Donkey Kong at the top of the screen, and the keys are all the way at the bottom, set on chains. The Snapjaws are back to dine on your tasty baby gorilla fingers, and they’re joined by squat birds which zigzag across the screen, hoping to sink their beaks into your back.

It’s a logical sequel to Donkey Kong, at least. It plays roughly like Donkey Kong, it’s got lots of personality and silly sound effects and fun intermissions like Donkey Kong (play the arcade game specifically to catch ‘em all), and Donkey Kong’s son rescuing his dad makes sense as a follow-up. It might take a lot of explaining to make sense of what happens in the next game, though.

Donkey Kong Jr. is significant to the video game industry not just as a sequel to Donkey Kong, but a creative catalyst for other game companies. Ikegami Tsushinki created the hardware that powered the Donkey Kong arcade game, as well as its sequel. Problem is, they never consented to the hardware being used in a sequel, leaving Ikegami hot under the collar… and all too eager to create superior arcade hardware for Nintendo’s rival Sega, used to great effect in Zaxxon. The later Congo Bongo even feels like a sly shot at Donkey Kong, with a jungle explorer locking horns with an even more ridiculous gorilla than Nintendo’s. Hey, spite’s as good a reason to make a video game as any.

DONKEY KONG 3
Played: At Chuck E Cheese in Grand Rapids

Threequels are always trouble, whether you’re making a book, a film, or a video game. You’ve already made a sequel, which improves on everything the first game does while sharpening up the graphics. Where do you go from there? Quite often, designers struggle for an answer to that question, and as a result, the third game in a franchise repeats what the last two games did without a sense of direction, or goes off the deep end in an entirely different direction that nobody expected… or wanted.

Donkey Kong 3 is an example of the latter. There’s no Mario this time… you might recall that he’s currently in the sewers with his brother Luigi. Bored without his preferred rival, Donkey Kong has invaded a greenhouse, and it’s up to brand new, entirely forgettable hero Stanley the Bugman to fend off the big ape and his swarms of insects.

The gameplay isn’t anything like the first two Donkey Kongs, feeling more like Galaga with minor tower defense elements and Shigeru Miyamoto’s always welcome cartoon artwork. Stanley has a can of bug spray, which he can use to either kill the bugs trying to steal his prize orchids, or force Donkey Kong upward with repeated spritzes in the rectum. Make him climb high enough and he’ll knock a super sprayer down from the roof of the greenhouse, letting Stanley kill once indestructible inchworms and really pump that poison into Donkey Kong’s exposed buttcheeks!

(In hindsight, this game is kind of gross. How Donkey Kong escaped this little misadventure without stage four rectal cancer is a mystery for the ages.)

Donkey Kong 3 isn’t a bad game. The Miyamoto creativity is present throughout, from Donkey Kong getting his just desserts by getting his head stuck in a beehive to Stanley getting swarmed by bees, which devour every part of him but his can of bug spray. (Yikes. May whoever that was rest in peace.) There’s also a background tune which sounds like a more threatening Flight of the Bumblebee, which admittedly fits the theme. Whatever can be said in this game’s favor, it’s just not Donkey Kong. It feels like Galaga with a sprinkling of bad ideas from Radar Scope and Space Firebird, as if someone on staff thought the two games just needed a touch of gorilla to make them work. Note to that guy: Donkey Kong’s a monkey, not a miracle worker.

SKY SKIPPER
Played: On the Atari 2600

Here’s the long-lost Nintendo arcade game that probably should have stayed that way. As ace pilot Mr. You, it’s your mission to rescue a pack of playing card creatures, evidently kidnapped from the pages of Alice in Wonderland. Gorillas (again with the gorillas!) guard their cages, but dropping bombs on them stuns the apes and springs open the cages. Quick, swoop in with your biplane and save the cute rectangular critters before the BIG critter recovers! You’ll get bonus points if you collect four cards of the same suit, a taste of the risk/reward play mechanics served up in abundance in other Nintendo games.

And that’s kind of it. Occasionally the gorillas (always wearing massive, era-appropriate headphones) will throw bombs back at you, and if they connect, your plane goes down in a gaudy, star-spangled blaze of glory. Also, as you fly through each blocky stage, take care not to crash into the background or the apes listening to Dan Fogelberg, or you’ll likewise be seeing stars. The whole affair feels like Namco’s Skykid with bi-directional scrolling, or a more focused version of Germany’s Looping, or a more punishing take on the flight in the Sega Saturn game NiGHTS. It’s... playable? But a little ugly for a Nintendo game, and without much of a hook to keep the player engaged.

What’s most unusual about Sky Skipper is that it made an appearance on the Atari 2600, but never found its way to any local arcades. (Maybe no American arcades at all.) I’m most familiar with the game on that platform, which made the graphics even rougher and changed the scrolling from horizontal to vertical. Parker Bros probably glomped onto the license hoping to sell copies on its tenuous association with Donkey Kong. One gorilla’s as good as another, right? The fact that Toys R Us was selling copies of Sky Skipper for ninety-nine cents during the video game crash suggests that Sky Skipper worked out as well for the Parker brothers as it did the Mario brothers.

MARIO BROS.
Played: Pretty much anywhere and everywhere, same as Donkey Kong

Here’s another terrific Nintendo game that would chart Mario’s course through future titles. Your top headline: He’s got a brother, Luigi. Maybe it was that guy who helped him capture Donkey Kong in Donkey Kong Jr.; nobody knows for sure. What we do know is that Luigi looks exactly like Mario (with green suspenders, so you can tell the difference), plays exactly like Mario, and works alongside Mario to clear a sewer of pests. It’s a two player game, and you’re encouraged to play it that way to make short work of the turtles, crabs, and flies that prowl the stinky subterranean depths. (Sewer crabs? Is that where Long John Silver’s gets its supply?)

Here’s another scoop! Mario and Luigi can attack enemies directly, punching the floors they’re standing on to upend them and leave them helpless. While the Shellcreepers are struggling to return to their feet, the brothers can give them a stiff kick into the sewage below. (Cowabunga, dude! Say “hi” to Leonardo and Donatello for me!) When a pest is exterminated, a coin rolls out of one of the pipes at the top of the screen… grab it and you’ll get bonus points. (And feel a little like a rat in a Skinner box. Good boy, here’s a treat! Get it before your friend does!)

Mario Bros is designed for cooperative gameplay, but the bonus stages with their hanging coins award a bonus to the brother who can grab the most loot, adding low-stakes conflict to the action. And of course, you can always be a jerk and trip up the other player just for kicks. “Oops, I just flipped over that Fighter Fly you were about to kick!” “Oops, was that YOUR coin?” “Oops, I just used up the POW block that flips over ALL the pests at once!” And so on, until your real brother punches you in the nose and you’re both thrown out of the party store.

It’s loads of fun to play with friends (either clean or dirty, heh heh), and it’s animated beautifully, as one would expect from Shigeru Miyamoto at this point in his career. Intermissions explain how the gameplay works, with charming touches like arrows with curling tails pointing at important details; the brothers haplessly slide around the damp sewer floors like lost members of The Three Stooges; and turtles on their backs eventually crawl out of their shells and kick them in frustration, an adorably cartoony detail with an annoying knack for getting left out of the home ports.

Mario Bros is also an important stepping stone to Super Mario Bros, with many of the same play mechanics and characters. Coins now come from blocks, and while you can punch under enemies to stun them, it’s way more effective to stomp on them… or shoot tiny versions of the fireballs that chased you around in the previous game! It’s no wonder a fluffed up version of Mario Bros found its way into every Game Boy Advance conversion of the Super Mario Bros games. You got sick of seeing it after four such ports, but you can’t say it doesn’t belong in any of them, for historical relevance if nothing else. (Superstar Saga was pushing it, though.)

POPEYE
Played: At a bowling alley tucked in the woods near southern Michigan

1981:
“King Features Syndicate? This is Nintendo. We had this great idea for a video game that would be a perfect fit for Popeye!”
“A Popeye... video game? You’re kidding, right? This character is sixty years old! He’s existed before most people had plumbing. Go away.”

One extremely successful year later:
“King Features Syndicate? Nintendo again. You probably heard about Donkey Kong. Are you more open to a Popeye game now…?”
“Of course! A Popeye video game… what a brilliant way to bring the character into the modern age! Where do we sign?”

Funny how money seems to change everything, including peoples’ perspectives. Anyway! Popeye is the game that Donkey Kong almost was. In retrospect, it’s probably for the best that Popeye came later, because it gave Nintendo a year to improve its tech, and Shigeru Miyamoto a year to further hone his skills as a pixel artist. Popeye runs at a higher resolution than Donkey Kong, with more background detail and characters that are instantly recognizable as EC Segar’s Thimble Theatre cast.

It’s uncanny how perfectly Popeye the game aligns with Popeye the long-running comic. Stages are typically set near or in the sea, spinach lets you turn the tables on Bluto, and there are cameos galore, from the Sea Hag (always there to chuck a beer bottle at you whenever you grab one of Olive Oyl’s lost trinkets) to doughy deadbeat Wimpy to Swee’pea, who catches you after you’ve catapulted off Wimpy’s seesaw.

Cartoon antics abound in Popeye, from the way Bluto slides on one knee in an attempt to win Olive’s affection to the way he actively hunts his rival, looking in both directions and even frantically swinging his arm UNDER the platform where he’s standing to catch whatever’s beneath him. Punch Bluto after you’ve gobbled up a can of spinach and he’s slammed into the nearest wall before spiraling into the water below. Miss one of the floating hearts (or notes, or letters spelling “help”) dropped by Olive and she will nag you for it mercilessly after it settles into the ocean. Miyamoto’s love for Popeye drips from every pixel, and every note of the jaunty nautical soundtrack.

Is Popeye as good as Donkey Kong? Not really. But it holds together well enough as a game, with special bonuses for hearts caught while on a spinach high and traps that can be triggered to keep Bluto cartoonishly occupied. More importantly, it’s an exceptional Popeye game, faithful to the comic down to the last detail (in 1982!) and better than any other video game featuring the character. Even after King Features’ initial rejection, Shigeru Miyamoto was determined to make a Popeye video game… and to this day, some forty years later, it has yet to be topped.

PUNCH OUT!!
Seen: At a bar near Battle Creek

This series is best remembered for Mike Tyson’s Punch Out on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it got its start in arcades, packing some eye-popping visuals for its 1984 vintage. You want screen-filling pugilists who would be just at home in a Japanese cartoon as they are in a video game? You got ‘em. You want two screens, with the fight on the bottom and a beautifully rendered title card at the top? You got ‘em! You want smooth scaling that adds extra impact to each punch? Of course you do, and it’s right here. The only thing missing is Mike Tyson, and he wouldn’t be a “thing” until three years later, after the NES was released.

When comparing the two games, it’s hard to believe that Punch Out!! worked at all on the NES. The system couldn’t draw two hulking boxers, so Mac, the up and coming fighter with a wire frame torso, became Little Mac, a pasty squirt who has to stand on his tiptoes to land an uppercut. His opponents are still fairly large, but nowhere near the size of the behemoths in the arcade game. The digitized voice is gone, the smooth scaling is gone, much of the impact of the cutting edge arcade technology is gone. Put bluntly, you’re not playing with power, no matter what Nintendo is telling you in their ads.

And yet! Mike Tyson’s Punch Out on the NES is the better game, not just because it starred the best boxer of the 1980s, but because it’s more a player-friendly experience. The opponents are easier to see without a green mesh covering half of them, and their “tells” are more intuitive on the NES. When some dude pulls back his arm and flashes pink, you can’t say you weren’t warned of an impending beating!

Finally, movement is crisper and more consistent. When you land a punch on an opponent in the NES game, you feel it connect. When you see a punch coming, you’re better prepared to dodge or block it. You don’t get that clarity in the arcade game, leaving you struggling to beat even the wimpy Glass Joe. On the NES, you might carve through a few opponents before King Hippo introduces your teeth to the back of your skull. It’s kind of nice when a video game lets you play it for a while before it throws you into the wood chipper.

Arcade Punch Out!! may have the sweetness of arcade quality graphics, but Mike Tyson’s Punch Out has the science… and is pretty sweet besides. It looks as nice as an NES version of Punch Out!! could, even if Little Mac comes from the land of punchin’ munchkins.

(VS.) EXCITEBIKE
Played: Somewhere. Honestly, I can’t remember

Nintendo had a line of arcade games called the Vs. System, so named for their focus on two player action. They were effectively dressed up NES games with the color saturation turned up to “solar eclipse” levels, but sometimes, the added content improved the overall experience. Take Vs. Duck Hunt. Every time I heard someone in school complain that you couldn’t shoot the dog in the NES version of Duck Hunt, I’d just roll my eyes and retort, “Well, you could in the ARCADE version.”

And then came the swirlies.

In hindsight, it was a little cynical of Nintendo to drop old, truncated Famicom versions of games onto the more recently released NES, while the extra details from the Vs. games could easily have fit on a more spacious NES cart. Whatever Nintendo’s justification, American NES owners had to live without the dog-blasting bonus round from Vs. Duck Hunt and the larger characters in the winner’s circle of Vs. Excitebike. Then again, NES owners didn’t lose extra energy with every hit in Castlevania, or their faith in humanity after playing the miserably hard altered stages in Vs. Super Mario Bros, so I suppose it was a push.

Anyway! On a fundamental level (actually, on most levels), Vs. Excitebike is the same experience as the NES version of Excitebike. You’re a cute l’il racer on a cute l’il motorcycle, racing on a track split into four rows. Slide into a different row to avoid the other racers… or trip them up with your back wheel, forcing them off their rides. The tracks are full of ramps and curves, and you’ll need to adjust your wheels to land cleanly on both flat surfaces and inclines. Mess up your landing and you’ll be on your back, yards from your bike. Even if you expertly navigate the course, pushing your bike too hard by racing it in high gear without running over cooling arrows will cause it to overheat, leaving you stranded on the side of the track while all the other cute l’il racers leave you in their cute l’il dust.

Excitebike was a pioneer, forging a path that would eventually be well worn by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Trials HD, and Konami’s Motorcycle Madness. It’s a little humble in its overall design, and a little frustrating as you progress, but as a racing game, it just works. It just looks a teeny bit nicer in arcades. If your racer wins, he happily bounces on the winner’s podium. If he loses, he hangs his head in shame and kicks away a nearby oil can. All that is still in the NES version… the characters at the end of each race are just a lot smaller and less detailed. Then again, you got the track editing mode in NES Excitebike that wasn’t feasible in an arcade setting, so again… it’s a push.

(VS.) SUPER MARIO BROS.
Played: In a 7-11 in Alma MI

This was one of Nintendo’s last major arcade releases, at least until taking one last swing at the market with the Killer Instinct series. After the NES took off, Nintendo didn’t need an arcade presence… they could leave that to Sega, which was quite happy dominating the space with the likes of Golden Axe, Altered Beast, and the jaw-dropping first person spectacles of Yu Suzuki. Nintendo wasn’t about amazing graphics in the late 1980s… that would come later with the Super NES. In the late 1980s, Nintendo was about nailing the fundamentals of tight control and smart level design… and they had gotten very good at this by the end of the decade.

Super Mario Bros represented the apex of great game design in the early days of the NES. That remains the case in Vs. Super Mario Bros… well, kinda. Nintendo decided to spice things up for the arcade space, tweaking the difficulty to keep players already familiar with the NES version from mastering it with a single coin. It’s subtle at first… World 1-1 is pretty much the same as it’s always been, but then you dive into the pipe leading to World 1-2, and you start noticing careful omissions. That 1UP mushroom in the ceiling is now a fire flower, and the row of bricks leading to the warp pipes has been torn out, forcing you to take the long way through the game.

As you progress (or attempt to progress), you notice that the levels are becoming more foreign and more severe in their design. Platforms that were once spacious have been reduced in size, staircases often have treacherous gaps quick to swallow less careful players, and monsters default to more dangerous forms… a Koopa becomes a fireball-resistant Buzzy, and the Hammer Brothers become an even bigger headache. By the time you reach vast bottomless pits that expect you to spring off Paratroopas to reach solid land, you’re ready to go back to plain old Super Mario Bros on the NES. There’s no place like home console! There’s no place like home console!

It’s rumored that stages from Vs. Super Mario Bros were reintroduced in Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels, the endlessly aggravating Japanese sequel that plays like it has a vendetta against the player. Yeah, that tracks. Better there than in the good Super Mario Bros 2 we got in the United States.

(VS.) SLALOM
Found: At a Walmart in southern Arizona

“Rare, this is the start of a beautiful relationship. Which will end super ugly when we sell you off to Microsoft and most of the founders retire or leave in disgust to start their own studios.”

The way things are going for Microsoft, maybe they’ll sell Rare back to Nintendo. Wishful thinking there. Anyway! You know Slalom as the big butt skiing game, where men with ample rumps use that extra weight to send themselves careening down a slope. You’ve got your choice of Snowy Hill (perfect for young skiiers with developing butts), Steep Peak (for the seasoned skiier… with a big butt), and finally Mount Nasty, the place to be for experts… with enormous butts.

Vs. Slalom boils down to a racing game, where it’s you and your butt against the clock. Make it down the hill with as much threading through slalom gates, and as little crashing into snowmen, pine trees, and other skiiers as possible, and you’ll get there with time to spare, granting you access to more challenging slopes. Since this is a Rare game, that challenge mounts quickly. By the time you reach Steep Peak, you can kiss your quarter and your gigantic ass goodbye.

The only feature that distinguishes Vs. Slalom from regular Slalom (aside from the brutally bright colors of the Vs. System hardware) is motion controls, provided by a teeterboard attached to two ski poles. Past that, it’s the same humble black box game you remember on the NES, with passable 3D visuals, a peppy soundtrack from David Wise (does anyone else suddenly need to use the bathroom?), and gameplay that provides simple racing satisfaction. And great big butts!

The Tower of Retro-Babble: Toaplan

(pretty awesome) image from Gematsu

 

On we go to the works of Toaplan! Like Emerson Lake and Palmer, Toaplan was a video game “supergroup” comprised of the best designers from Crux and Orca. Okay, “best” might not be the right word, since neither Crux nor Orca made any arcade classics. (In fact, Orca’s Springer is one of the more miserable platformers from the early 1980s, an unsteady and over-encumbered design made worse by finicky jumping and collision detection. But, uh, that’s getting a little out of left field.)

Apart, Crux and Orca were not especially impressive. Together, the newly christened Toaplan was one of the most fondly remembered game designers of the late 8-bit and 16-bit eras of gaming. After a few stumbles out of the starting gate (Performan, designed for Data East, and Tiger Heli, which I’ll express my contempt for in the upcoming review), Toaplan earned a reputation for outstanding shoot ‘em ups, rivaled only by Konami and Compile. Fire Shark! Twin Cobra! Truxton and its even more awesome sequel! Occasionally, Toaplan would stray from that path with games in other genres- their frosty take on Bubble Bobble, Snow Bros., is dangerously close to a masterpiece- but generally speaking, Toaplan was the place to go for all your “blowing up aliens and Japanese fighter pilots” needs.

Toaplan’s games have a grungy feel, with urgent music pushed out of obnoxious digital instruments and a heavy use of gradient shading to boost detail and dimension. This meant that their segue to the Sega Genesis in its later years was almost flawless. Genesis ports like Snow Bros and Fire Shark mimic their arcade counterparts remarkably well, and Toaplan even upped the ante with a remake of ALCON (Slap Fight MD) with improved graphics, deeper gameplay, and a soundtrack by master digital musician Yuzo Koshiro. You’ve got the Sega Genesis outpacing arcade games now! You Go-A, To-a!

Shortly after Snow Bros., Toaplan went bankrupt, and most of its talent migrated to Cave, another respected developer of shooters. (And Power Instinct, but you don’t have to play that.) The skin of Toaplan is currently being worn by the Embracer Group, as subsidiary Tatsujin. By the way, the next time the two games go on sale, I’d recommend snapping up Toaplan Arcade Collections I & II. It’s a solid pair of collections with smart QoL features (the information on either side of the screen comes in handy for games with more cryptic power-ups) and just a tiny bit of tweaking to get everything looking just right.

PERFORMAN
Played: In MAME

This is technically Toaplan’s first game, done under contract for Data East. It’s another one of those foolhardy attempts to bring Dig Dug topside for an overhead view adventure, and like Dig Dug II: Trouble in Paradise and Rug Rats, it doesn’t really work.

You are Performan. (Imagine Ultraman if he came from Temu and you’ve got the right idea.) He’s armed with a mohawk, which he can chuck at the steadily approaching robot enemies to destroy them. Alternately, you can throw it at an explosive battery, taking several androids out with one shot and scoring bonus points.

Bonus coins spill out from the top of
the screen occasionally, awarding you
an extra life if you can catch them all.
It's a bit like the grapes with letters
on them in Snow Bros, or the EXTRA
bonus in games from Universal.

When you start to feel the pinch from approaching enemies, you can dive into the ground and dig around until you find a safe place to emerge… but the enemies can dig too, so it’s not much of a defense. On the plus side, there’s a ghost that haunts the underside of the playfield… catch him and you become temporarily invincible, and the enemies temporarily become your bitch.

Performan isn’t a bad first effort from the company, but hardly the pre-crash arcade classic Toaplan was hoping it would be. The android pursuers are annoyingly fast and persistent, the gameplay’s not particularly deep, and the dual-layered playfield adds more annoyance than nuance to the experience. Nobody demanded a return Performan-ce from this one.

TIGER HELI
Played: In a tiny hometown arcade, and also the NES

I’ll just put it on the table right now… this game sucks. It was the absolute last resort for bored gamers in my town’s short-lived arcade. When the line for the Choplifter machine went out the door (fair play, it was pretty awesome!) and the pinball machines weren’t doing it for you, your only option was… Tiger Heli. Miserable, life-draining Tiger Heli. The Bremelo of the ball, the chain-smoking, three hundred pound date that you had to take to the prom, because you just weren’t getting anybody else. (Don’t ask where that metaphor came from.)

Uh... the water patterns look nice!
Look, I'm trying to find something
nice to say about this game, and
it's not giving me much to work with.

You don’t play Tiger Heli. You try to play Tiger Heli, and it actively fights you at every step. The enemies’ shots are much too fast to realistically avoid, hidden bonuses require a million shots to reveal, and the wimpy machine gun you’re given by default jams if you dare to use turbo fire. I’m sorry, I was attempting to save my fingers some grief and find some enjoyment in the game, but I forgot that enjoying yourself is literally punishable by death in Tiger Heli. Did I actually run out of bullets? You do know that this is a video game, and I can have as many as I want, right? There’s not a shortage of pixel clusters that look like bullets.

There are power-ups in Tiger Heli. This is a 1985 game, so don’t expect to be blown away by them. In fact, don’t expect to blow anything away with the Mini Helis, revealed by collecting red and white crosses on the playfield. (Red Cross? I have a medical emergency… a severe fun deficiency. I blame Tiger Heli.) You’ll get them, they’ll stick around for a minute shooting tiny bullets either forward or sideways, they blow up from incoming fire, and you’re right back to your original weaksauce shot. Yaaaay.

The power-up mechanics feel a lot like Irem’s Image Fight or Jordan’s Thundercade, and neither game is one I’d regard as a high point in the genre. (No matter what the Japanese think. Sorry not sorry, but Image Fight blows!) This makes Tiger Heli the lead vampire in a family of shooters that suck. Not blood, the other thing. You get the idea.

Tiger Heli isn’t all bad. Mostly, but not entirely. The graphics have a palatable geometric look… they’re simple by Toaplan standards, but effective, particularly the diamonds that peek out of the ground and those vast expanses of ocean with their swirling white peaks. Also, when the Micronics port for the NES came out, nobody could honestly say that it sucked any more than the arcade game. They both suck; the NES port just sucks in an NES kind of way.

ALCON (aka SLAP FIGHT)
Played at: The Malt Shop in Mount Pleasant, where else?

Performan wasn’t so hot and the despicable Tiger Heli was ice cold, but ALCON (known by the wimpy-sounding title Slap Fight in other territories) gave players a first taste of the Toaplan that would eventually become the master of its craft. It’s not a great game, but it’s getting there.

ALCON is a vertical shooter, looking like a hybrid of Namco’s Xevious and Toaplan’s own Tiger Heli. It’s set in a distant science-fiction future, but the backgrounds are a bit more “lived in” than the simple geometric shapes of Xevious. Square metallic structures are joined by cottages in long abandoned streets and parched deserts. Playfield objects are touched with the careful detail and subtle shading that would become Toaplan’s trademark… it’s nowhere near the heights of Truxton II or OutZone, but again, it’s getting there.

Where ALCON falters is its use of a Gradius-like power up system. (Gradi-esque?) Glistening stars recovered from random enemies light segments of a gauge on the bottom of the screen. When the power-up you want is lit, press a button and you’ll earn it, at the cost of your collected stars. One of the power-ups, Side, increases your firepower with sidecars, but also increases the horizontal size of your ship. Good luck weaving that battle barge through the soup of bullets in the later stages! Other power-ups don’t give you an inconvenient badonkadonk, but seem less useful than the standard shot. Also, the “sticky” turbo fire from Tiger Heli returns, and is every bit as obnoxious.

The best way to play this game is on the Mega Drive. Slap Fight MD offers both the original game (in Toaplan’s usual near arcade perfect form) and an enhanced version with improved graphics, the ability to detonate sidecars in times of distress, making them less of a liability, and an appropriately spacey Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack. It has the unfortunate side effect of making the game seem even more like an overhead Gradius, but it’s Yuzo Koshiro at the keyboard, so I’m not complaining.

TWIN COBRA
Played at: The Malt Shop in Mount Pleasant, as always

Twin Cobra is arguably Toaplan’s first major success, and a big step forward in their ascension to shooter royalty. The graphics are a big step up from ALCON and Tiger Heli, with more of the lurid detail that players would come to expect from Toaplan. Your helicopter is twice the size and with double the detail of the one in Tiger Heli. The waves of tanks, choppers, and gun turrets that serve as your enemies are dressed in military green, metallic silver, and weather-worn bronze. Twin Cobra’s got that appealingly gritty and realistic GI Joe aesthetic that was extremely popular in the late 1980s. It looked great then, it still looks nice now, and it set the trajectory for Toaplan’s artists in their later games.

Then there’s the sound, which is… certainly sound! It’s got the same grating, twangy instrumentation as many games on the Sega Genesis, which meant that Toaplan made a smooth transition to that format, but also makes you kind of glad that you couldn’t actually hear it in arcades. It’s accompanied by serviceable if flat gunfire and explosions, which again benefit from the cacaphony of the arcade space. You could just barely hear them back in the day… and “just barely” is loud enough for this grade of sound effects.

Power-ups like this S emblem flit
about the screen in random directions,
annoying the player. This was evidently
inspired by digging the last greasy
morsel out of a bowl of donburi, but
maybe the folks at Toaplan should
have thought twice about bringing
that aggravation to video games. 

Power ups have improved from ALCON and Tiger Heli, but are still fairly basic, with different colors offering different trajectories for your shot. Red is your standard vulcan cannon that fires straight forward, green is an unremarkable laser beam that also fires forward, blue is a spread shot (you want this one), and yellow fires in every cardinal direction, which is useless. You’ll have to grab several S emblems to make your weapons any more than functional, and the S emblems don’t want to be grabbed, dancing just out of your reach. It’s a weirdly user-hostile design, making an already tough game tougher in all the wrong ways. If you’re playing this in the Toaplan collection, use the dip switches and assists to balance things out, making the difficulty more manageable for those of us who experienced Twin Cobra when it first hit arcades. We’ve, heh, aged some since. (Try not to grimace when your system tells you for the 46th time that you’re not eligible for the leaderboards.)

Oh, I forgot to mention why this is called TWIN Cobra! Like Double Dragon, this game offers two player simultaneous gameplay, adding to the excitement while boosting your onscreen firepower. Two player action was becoming a standard feature in arcade games in 1987, and it’s especially welcome here. It’s not quite perfect, but Twin Cobra is the first truly excellent game from Toaplan… and things would only get better from here.

By the way, there were two home versions in America… a surprisingly decent NES conversion by Micronics (BWAA?!), and a less satisfactory port on the Sega Genesis. Toaplan usually nails arcade conversions on this system, but they farmed this one out to GRC, and the results speak for themselves. Mostly with gape-jawed “duhs.”

SKY SHARK
Played: On the NES. Unfortunately.

Awesome! Can I have this game?
Not the one in the box... THIS GAME.
(image from Giant Bomb, which the game in the box is)

Sky Shark had a memorable advertisement in video game magazines of the time… it showed a fighter pilot in World War II, his teeth crushed together in fierce determination and his wild eyes bulging from the tense life or death situation. Awesome! Can I get this for a home system?

Sure. You probably wouldn’t want to, though. Sky Shark on the NES was developed by Software Creations, and while it’s far from their worst NES game (that honor would go to Target: Renegade, which defiled Technos’ corpse before the company was even dead), it still leaves something to be desired. Like gameplay that lets you learn the ropes and enjoy it for a few minutes before spanking you bloody. What gives, Software Creations? (Oh, they made Silver Surfer too. That explains everything…)

Good luck. Crank up all the assists
in the options of the Toaplan collection
if you want to get anywhere in this one.
(Or, yanno, just play 1943.)

Thing is, it’s not Software Creations’ fault that Sky Shark sucks. (For once.) That’s on Toaplan, because even in arcades, Sky Shark is a dismal, grinchy experience, and the company’s worst shooter since Tiger Heli. In contrast to Capcom’s 1943, which admittedly drank quarters like Kool-Aid but was an extremely player-friendly game, Sky Shark steps on your throat from go and does little to justify its cruelty with clever gameplay hooks or memorable graphics. The weapons are paltry (actually a significant step BACK from Twin Cobra!), the player’s ship dies in a single hit, and you will be dragged back to a checkpoint every time, with all of your power ups stripped away. It’s the Bizarro World version of 1943… while Capcom’s game invited players to keep going, Sky Shark actively repels them.

Admittedly, the graphics aren’t too bad. Enemy planes don’t merely explode, but catch on fire and drop like a bird with a broken wing first. Tanks leave smoking craters in their wake, and the stages have that usual Toaplan level of detail, with wooden docks perched over swamps and villages set behind dense jungle foliage. Hard to appreciate all that when the game insists on punching you in the gonads every other screen, though. You could give yourself hit points in the Toaplan collection (nice feature, by the way), but instead of pretending that this pretender is 1943, why not… just play 1943? I mean, it’s right there.

PYROS
Played: In some arcade, somewhere. Lansing Mall?

Sometimes, Toaplan would wander outside of its comfort zone with games that aren’t strictly shooters. Pyros (also called Wardner, which was the name it received on the Sega Genesis) is Toaplan’s take on the side-scrolling platformer, and just like with its shoot ‘em ups, it gives you maybe a screen’s worth of gameplay before it takes off the kid gloves and replaces them with brass knuckles.

Chris Hansen, we've got a live one over here!

As the plump Pyros, it’s your mission to rescue your girlfriend from the sinister Wardner and his goons. (Fantasia, my ass! This is the worst case of false advertising since “Make America Great Again!”) You can defend yourself with short-range fireballs, but Pyros folds in one hit if you can’t find a cape. A needle and thread lets you repair the cape once if contact with an enemy tears it, effectively giving you three hit points. Power ups also boost the length and strength of your fireballs, but be aware that Pyros is a chubby kid still in Wizarding 101, not Gandolf. Sheer firepower won’t get you through these tricky stages; only precise jumps and careful evasion of oncoming threats will.

The graphics are painted in muted greens and browns, with Pyros starting his adventure in a dense forest thicket and eventually infiltrating Wardner’s headquarters, a musty old dungeon with mold lining the walls and a jagged spinning blade at the end of every long corridor. Nothing you see here will blow your mind, but it fits the medieval fantasy theme, making Pyros feel like the Hobbit game that nobody in the arcade industry bothered to release. The sound is of typical Toaplan quality (which is to say, unimpressive) and the brutal difficulty will crush all but the best players. Know that this trip to the Shire takes an extended detour through the House of Pain.

Enemy designs are unimpressive and the level
design borders on kaizo, but Pyros has its
moments. It's really fun when you're in the
zone, but those lucky streaks don't last long!

Pyros appeared on the Famicom Disk System in Japan, and also on the Genesis as Wardner. The latter game is remarkably close to the arcade original, but you already came to expect this from Toaplan after Fire Shark and Truxton. Toaplan’s arcade hardware and Sega’s 16-bit console hardware were so similar that Toaplan knew how to develop Genesis games before the system was even released! Talk about a head start!

FIRE SHARK
Played: On the Genesis. Fortunately!

Fire Shark has special significance to me as a Sega Genesis fan, because it was the first game I owned for the system that 1) Wasn’t Altered Beast, 2) Was objectively good (ie not DJ Boy), and 3) Scratched an itch for 1943 that had been left unsatisfied since I sold my Nintendo Entertainment System the year before.

Fire Shark isn’t really 1943, but rather Toaplan’s own take on the World War II shooter. There are some key differences, like how the formations of planes holding power-ups have been replaced with large, bullet spongey zeppelins, and how you have to collect three power-ups to boost your weapons. Okay, that design choice I could have done without (and of course, power ups dance around your ship, just begging for you to get clipped by a bullet while trying to grab them), but at least the three weapons in Fire Shark are pretty impressive… far more so than the wimpy bullet streams in Sky Shark. The standard issue wide shot spreads out with power ups, the beam shot pierces enemies and gets thicker when powered up, and the fire beam rakes a screen-long column of flame across your foes. It’s great even in its standard form… once it’s been powered up, the fire beam is unstoppable.

There was an arcade version of Fire Shark, but it’s not massively different from the Genesis version, right down to the twangy soundtrack. The graphics are sharper and a little less cramped, but really, there’s still plenty of detail to spare in the Genesis game, like the tiny Allied soldiers that meet you at the landing pad after every stage. The only meaningful difference between the two games is that in the arcade version, you immediately bounce back from a death as long as you have lives remaining. In the Genesis game, one hit lights your plane’s wings on fire, leaving the player to struggle for a couple of seconds before crashing to Earth. No, you can’t survive it. No, you can’t keep your progress through enemy territory… you’ll be sent back to a checkpoint. It’s a subtle change to the gameplay that’s not so subtle in practice. Credit feeding isn’t going to get you as far in the Genesis version, especially when you’re limited to a handful of them. And forget inviting a second player to join you... on the Genesis, that just ain't happening. Sigh... it's like MERCS all over again...

TRUXTON
Played: On Genesis

Truxton (aka Tatsujin) was one of the standouts in the early Genesis library, a vertical shooter with aspirations of arcade perfection. It comes close, you know. The famous skull bomb doesn’t look as cool and it’s not as difficult, but next to what was available on the NES, Truxton may as well be a carbon copy of the original. It’s close enough to the real thing that pointing out any differences would have been nitpicking, especially in the early 1990s. Trust me... after I bought my Genesis in 1991, I complained that the Genesis version of Altered Beast was missing details from the arcade game, and my brother rolled his eyes so hard they kept spinning for hours.

What do you suppose the outer hull of
those ships feels like when you touch it?
Would they even be safe to touch? Maybe
you'd pull back your hand and it'd be
covered with caustic slime, like on Alien.

Truxton is the science-fiction counterpart to Fire Shark. The feel is similar, the aggravating “three power-ups to power up” system remains intact (and this time, it’s FIVE power-ups. Et tu, Toaplan?), and the smart bombs work in the same way. What’s different is the visual motif. You’re not fighting tanks and planes on a mid 20th century battlefield, but bugs and lumpy alien organisms in the void of space. The character designs aren’t eye-catchingly sleek like they would be in a similar Capcom or Konami game, but they’re at least functional… just not very memorable. The sound serves up that slightly grating Toaplan twang whether you’re playing it in arcades or on the Genesis, and again, it does the job.

Truxton II. Super size me, baby!

The game’s earned some internet fame thanks to Classic Game Room host Mark Cussler’s low-key obsession with it. However, it’s the sequel that deserves all the praise. The graphics in Truxton II have been pushed to a Sega Saturn level of detail, the music is catchier, and the weapons that were already pretty cool in Truxton are far more devastating and impressive in Truxton II. It doesn’t take a century to power them up either! The game still drags you to a checkpoint without your power-ups if you die, but hey, nobody’s perfect.

HELLFIRE
Played: On the Genesis

"Dersh!"

Er, not that hellfire. THIS Hellfire is a side-scrolling shooter that feels like the long-lost descendant of SNK’s Vanguard. You don’t have instant control over where you fire, but pressing a button switches your aim from forward to backward to vertical to diagonal and back. Enemies comes from all angles, and some gun turrets are tucked away behind barriers, so you’ll have to frequently switch the direction of your gunfire to adapt to the ever changing, and ever hostile, environment. 

Guns are set behind barriers, all but necessitating
the use of the aim switch button. They won't
stop firing until either you or they die, so make
sure it's them.

It’s not a bad hook. Frankly, Hellfire would have been even better if it had been a twin stick shooter, but the kludgy aim switching works well enough. It’s the only way it COULD have worked on the Sega Genesis… the console port of the game was released before six button controllers, which meant that you were stuck with just three… one to fire your weapon, the second to switch your aim, and the third for a blast of flame that roasts anything in its path. This literal hellfire helps justify the game’s title and adds a strategic option to the Genesis game that wasn’t available in other versions.

The graphics in Hellfire are detailed, but rendered in muted hues, and a little muddled conceptually. So I was in space a stage ago, but now I’m in a Pharaoh’s tomb? It’s like I’ve flown into an Old Spice commercial from the 2000s. There are some nice special effects, like the ring of cannons on your ship that slowly rotates around it, and the color cycling for power-ups. The music also deserves praise. They’re the usual twangy Toaplan tunes, but they’re driving, intense ones… probably some of the company’s best work.

Hellfire isn’t on the level of a classic like R-Type or Gradius, but it’s up to Toaplan’s usual high standards, and for Genesis owners starved for content in the system’s unsure early days, that’s more than good enough. It’s also a tough game, nearly on par with that other Genesis ballbreaker Gaiares. Put on your big boy pants for this one, and a pair of asbestos pants over those just to be sure.

OUTZONE
Played: At the truck stop in Tekonsha MI

“Advance or die” is the general theme of this sharply rendered science-fiction shooter, seen from an overhead view. At first blush, it looks like Ikari Warriors or Heavy Barrel on steroids, but there are two key differences. The first is that there’s no “loop lever” (that hand-wrecking crank on the top of the joystick), so the player must collect C panels to alternate between free and fixed fire. Like Gunstar Heroes, free fire makes you more mobile, but fixed fire has the advantage of stability… you always know where your bullets are going to go, so you can concentrate on dodging rather than aiming.

Choosing two players slides the second
one out from behind the first, in an
animation that's simple in theory, but
incredibly awesome-looking in practice. 

The second twist is that your character runs on battery power, which quickly depletes as you play. You’ll have to keep moving, and keep collecting energy refills, if you want to stay alive. Finding a balance between efficient forward progress and not stumbling into a bullet or off a platform is what makes Outzone distinct from the dozens of other games in this genre. If you thrive in stressful situations, here’s your game. If you like to take your time and explore every nook and cranny of the environment, Outzone is NOT your game, and you’ll be punished for trying to play it that way.

Bulky military transports crush the
earth with their mass and leave
massive craters with chunks of metal
behind after you destroy them.
When it comes to arcade game design,
little details mean a lot, and Outzone
has a whole lot of them. 

 

The graphics are excellent, as you’d expect from Toaplan this late in its lifespan. Colors pop, enemy vehicles are huge, and the android soldiers eager to stop you are smoothly animated from all angles. The sound… is also what you’d expect from Toaplan, for whatever that’s worth. Expect lots of twangy sound effects and instrumentation that make you think you’re playing a Genesis game. No way a Sega Genesis could do this game justice in any other way, though. Even Grind Stormer was pushing it.

Outzone was followed up by FixEight, which featured eight playable characters, each with their own signature weapon. The graphics have been fluffed up a bit, with lots of color cycling effects, and there have been a few quality of life improvements. You’re no longer forced to hustle through each stage, and dying won’t send you back to a checkpoint. Beyond that, it’s largely the same experience, with more variety, brighter colors, and a beefy sound chip that’s better equipped to handle the rumbling explosions of an arcade game.

SNOW BROS
Played: In a convenience store not far from Chicago

Toaplan steps outside its comfort zone one more time with Snow Bros. If you wanted to be reductive about it, Snow Bros is a Bubble Bobble clone, with players clearing a maze-like screen of enemies. If you wanted to be accurate about it, Snow Bros is the best damn Bubble Bobble game ever made that’s not actually part of the Bubble Bobble series. As the titular (hee hee) snow brothers Nick and Tom, you’ll pack your Muppet-like foes in snowballs, then kick them, sending them madly careening around the screen. Pack TWO enemies in snow and kick one into another, and they bounce around the playfield in opposite directions, wiping out any monster unlucky enough to be in their paths and revealing valuable hidden prizes. It’s exciting, it’s addictive, and like any good Bubble Bobble clone, the arcade and Genesis versions can be played with a friend for maximum enjoyment.

The chaos of rolling snowballs doubles with a
second player. Snow Bros is just fun, the way
a good Bubble Bobble game should be.

Did I say “Genesis version?” Well, it’s technically a Mega Drive version, since we didn’t get the game in this country, but yes. As with most Toaplan games, Snow Bros makes an almost flawless transition to Sega’s most popular game system… the characters are a little smaller this time, but the backgrounds are brimming with chaotic color, and the gameplay loses nothing in the conversion to a home console.

Snow Bros was one of Toaplan’s last games, and there’s a refreshing sense of anarchic self-indulgence in its design. Goofy paintings of yokai leer at you from the walls, and the prizes are plates of sushi, rather than the more universally recognized fruit in Bubble Bobble. Some of those eccentricities were weeded out of the NES version of Snow Bros, and while it’s an acceptable downport, the arcade original and the Genesis port is the sweet spot for this one. If you’re going to enjoy this game, why not enjoy all of it?

KNUCKLE BASH
Played: In a sleazy pool hall in Mount Pleasant 

Little correction here... THIS was one of the very last games Toaplan released before its bankruptcy. And it's so out there, in so many ways. Not only is it well outside of Toaplan's field of expertise (and it shows in the slightly janky movement), but it's a Final Fight game that thinks it's a wrestling game. The many bosses in Knuckle Bash are typically expies of all your favorites from WWF's golden age. Hey, there's a guy that looks like Ravishing Rick Rude, and another one who kind of resembles Hillbilly Jim, and yet another one whose sprite is clearly supposed to the Iron Shiek, but looks more like a Bushwhacker in his digitized close-up shot. 

One might generously call this a loving tribute to professional wrestling. Others might call it playing a game of chicken with Vince McMahon's lawyers. Either way, you're getting a pretty good, if pretty dumb, two player experience out of Knuckle Bash. The physics feel a little clumsy, with the wrestlers awkwardly hovering in mid-air during jump kicks, and clenches with the enemies can be tough to line up. In Final Fight, grabbing an enemy just worked, but you can't stun them with punches and close in for the kill here... the stun time isn't long enough to give you that opening. 

Let's see the Honky Tonk Man pull this move off!

 

On the other hand, the loud colors and accessible, often outrageous gameplay add to the personality of a game that does what it does better than SNK's Three Count Bout. Knuckle Bash dares to be stupid, dares to be self-indulgent, and dares to be bi-curious, and it's all the better for it. It's far from the best early 1990s beat 'em up... where handling is concerned, Knuckle Bash doesn't hold a candle to Capcom's belt-scrollers or Konami's Violent Storm. But where else are you gonna turn orange gorillas into electric guitars, or bodyslam evil bellboys into luxury cars? In its celebration of professional wrestling, Knuckle Bash also becomes a celebration of the wonderfully weird world of video games.

And you can unlock a wrestling ninja! I never saw the guys from Ninja Combat do a diving clothesline from the top rope. Just sayin'.

The hell of Tiger Heli

Heli-No.
(image from Moby Games)

Okay, so I started a Toaplan retrospective and have yet to finish it. But I just had to share this phenomenally pissy review of Tiger Heli early, because it's reminding me of my wild days as the editor of The Gameroom Blitz. Also, Tiger Heli just plan sucks. What the hell, Toaplan? If you were going to make games like this, you might as well just go back to Orca and make Springer 2: Spring... Into Crap! 

Toaplan quickly course corrected, making some of the best shooters in the latter half of the 1980s, but good lord, what an inauspicious start to their career.

Yeah, Springer is awful too. It's like Donkey Kong, if Shigeru Miyamoto suffered a head injury while he made it. I mean, continually. 

TIGER HELI

Played: In a tiny hometown arcade, and also the NES

I’ll just put it on the table right now… this game sucks. It was the absolute last resort for bored gamers in my town’s short-lived arcade. When the line for the Choplifter machine went out the door (fair play, it was pretty awesome!) and the pinball machines weren’t doing it for you, your only option was… Tiger Heli. Miserable, life-draining Tiger Heli. The Bremmelo of the ball, the chain-smoking, three hundred pound date that you had to take to the prom, because you just weren’t getting anybody else. (Don’t ask where that metaphor came from.)

You don’t play Tiger Heli. You try to play Tiger Heli, and it actively fights you at every step. The enemies’ shots are much too fast to realistically avoid, hidden bonuses require a million shots to reveal, and the wimpy machine gun you’re given by default jams if you dare to use turbo fire. I’m sorry, I was attempting to save my fingers some grief and find some enjoyment in the game, but I forgot that enjoying yourself is literally punishable by death in Tiger Heli. Did I actually run out of bullets? You do know that this is a video game and I can have as many as I want, right? There’s not a shortage of pixel clusters that look like bullets.

There are power-ups in Tiger Heli. This is a 1985 game, so don’t expect to be blown away by them. In fact, don’t expect to blow anything up with the Mini Helis, revealed by collecting red and white crosses on the playfield. (Red Cross? I have a medical emergency… I have a severe fun deficiency in my blood. I blame Tiger Heli.) You’ll get them, they’ll stick around for a minute shooting tiny bullets either forward or sideways, they’ll get nicked by an oncoming bullet, they blow up, and you’re right back to your original weaksauce shot. Yaaaay.

The power-up mechanics feel a lot like Irem’s Image Fight or Jordan’s Thundercade, and neither game is one I’d regard as a high point in the genre. (No matter what the Japanese think. Sorry not sorry, but Image Fight blows!) This makes Tiger Heli the lead vampire in a family of shooters that suck. Not blood, the other thing. You get the idea.

Tiger Heli isn’t all bad. Mostly, but not entirely. The graphics have a palatable geometric look… they’re simple by Toaplan standards, but effective, particularly the diamonds that peek out of the ground and those vast expanses of ocean with the swirling white peaks. Also, when the Micronics port for the NES came out, nobody could honestly say that it sucked any more than the arcade game. They both suck; the NES port just sucks in an NES kind of way.

Really Getting into Consoles, part one

Playing retro video games is great! But sometimes, just playing them isn't good enough... you want to get under the hood of these old systems and see what makes them tick. 

That wasn't possible in the 20th century, but thanks to BASIC compilers like Fred Quimby's Batari BASIC and Oscar Toledo's exemplary CVBasic (this thing is really good, like, you have no idea), the ability to make real retro games on real retro hardware is well within reach for the most dedicated gamers.

As it turns out, I've made games for a variety of retro game systems and computers, and these are my personal experiences coding for some of these machines. I'll warn you up front that this is going to get technical... and biased... and excessively long-winded. Also, there aren't any pictures yet. I'll add some later; probably including snapshots of games and demos I've personally made.

Atari 2600

I should preface this by saying that my development environment was Batari BASIC, which handles a lot of the heavy lifting of programming the Atari 2600 for you. You're not scrambling to stay one step ahead of a scanline... all that's handled for you in the background. This limits your horizons and tends to make games designed in Batari BASIC a little samey, but at the same time, it lowers the bar of Atari 2600 game development from "impossible" to "possible" for 99% of amateur coders.

Under normal circumstances, you'd have to "chase the scanline" to
make an Atari 2600 game. Imagine playing a game of Lumines,
except the beam is moving down instead of sideways, and any
mistake you make could be catastrophic. It's... not a fun way
to make a video game. I'm amazed Howard Scott Warshaw
has any of his marbles left.
(image from LaunchBox)

 
Even with Batari BASIC, you'll get a peek behind the curtain of the Atari 2600's internal workings, and you'll quickly understand how things function. The 2600 uses an all-purpose chip called the TIA to handle both graphics and sound, and neither are particularly accommodating to the user. 

Along with a simple background (typically blocky and symmetrical, to save on cartridge space), the Atari 2600 uses player-missile graphics, which can be set over the background without affecting it. Think of them as caveman sprites and you've got the right idea. The player is the larger of the two, up to eight pixels wide and as long as you need it to be. Missiles and the ball can also be eight pixels wide, but are simple lines or squares. You get two players, two missiles, and one ball... if you need more, you're going to have to find sneaky workarounds.

The fact that one of the playfield objects is literally named "ball" makes it clear that the Atari 2600 was purpose-built to play Pong and Breakout games, but clever programmers found ways to stretch the feeble hardware to its limits. The player objects can be a single color per line, resulting in added detail and definition. Activision used this all the time in its games, and visually, they're a quantum leap ahead of Atari 2600 launch titles like Street Racer and Star Ship. 

Player objects can be reused for multiple characters, typically at the cost of severe flicker. One player was shared between four monsters in Pac-Man, and that rapid swapping is painfully obvious to the player. One solution is to restrict player objects to their own vertical sections of the screen. This is easily done in a shooter, but in a maze game where multiple characters close in on the player from all angles, not so much!

There's not much you can do with the Atari 2600 sound generator, baked into the TIA. Some notes are missing, so trying to play them will result in the disapproving shriek of a buzzer instead. If you have great musical aspirations, either leave them behind or add a sound chip to the cartridge, like David Crane did with Pitfall 2. Some people remain nostalgic for the digital grunts and squeals of the Atari 2600 sound processor, and it does do explosions like no other game system, but don't expect much more than that.

Expansions for the Atari 2600 are numerous, and range from the relatively minor- games like Omega Race included extra RAM on the cart, a boon when the stock system only has 128 bytes to spare- to strapping a jet engine onto a Volkswagen Bug. Many of the games released by Champ Games use an ARM CPU (yes, like the kind you find in modern smartphones) to boost the Atari 2600's abilities, and boy does it boost them! The system is still restricted to the "rules" of the TIA chip, but games like GORF, Tutankham, and Super Cobra outpace the official versions by CBS Games and Parker Brothers to an almost embarrassing degree.

The Atari 2600 is an incredibly primitive system; the absolute bare minimum for effective game development. Trying to make games with it is like planting seeds in rocky soil... but damn is it satisfying when they eventually take root and blossom into flowers. Like they say about New York, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

ColecoVision

You can make good games with the Atari 2600. You can make better ones, more comfortably, with the ColecoVision. 

Now when I say "ColecoVision," understand that I'm talking about a wide range of game systems and computers from the early 1980s. They all use the TI9918 graphics processor, the SN76489 sound processor, and the Z80A processor, which means that you're getting roughly the same experience whether it's an actual ColecoVision, or Sega's SG-1000, or the MSX computer. There are minor differences in the formats (a new sound chip here, more RAM there), but they're largely inconsequential.

Whatever you want to call it, the ColecoVision is a solid baseline for game design. You're getting a healthy 16K of video RAM, versus the ZERO K of video RAM on the Atari 2600. This means that you don't have to babysit a scanline with the nervous fervor of a helicopter parent. Once something is on the screen, it stays there until you explicitly tell it to go away. This not only opens the ColecoVision to genres that would have been functionally impossible on the Atari 2600 (text adventures! Pretty much anything with text in it!), but takes a lot of weight off the programmer's shoulders. You're free to do the fun creative stuff, while the computer does all the tedious, computer-y stuff. As it should be!

When overlaying sprites on ColecoVision, it's important that the two colors
never touch, or else the sprites will fight for priority, and you'll get shimmering. 

Graphics are built from a combination of tiles (exactly what it sounds like; square chunks of graphic data, artfully combined to create images) and sprites. Sprites are 16x16 pixels in size and restricted to one of the ColecoVision's fifteen colors. Sprites can be layered for multi-colored characters, but know that putting more than four of them together in the same scanline will cause flicker. 

You can technically have up to 32 sprites onscreen at once, but a good designer will recognize the ColecoVision's limitations and use sprites sparingly, and keep them at a safe vertical distance. Janelle Jaquay's ColecoVision port of Donkey Kong used three sprites for Mario, making him seem like he was pulled straight out of the arcade game, but thinned out the number of onscreen barrels to compensate, resulting in a compromised experience. 

Similarly, I had to limit the output of "Plinkies" in Operation Hibernation to keep too many of them from falling on the same scanline as Byron. He's made from two sprites, in contrast to Mario's three, but there's still potential for flicker, and it does show up in the fish ladder bonus stage.

Sprites can only be one color, but a single tile can be up to fifteen! On the downside, only two of these colors can share a single eight pixel line. It's not good enough to be a good artist on the ColecoVision... you've also got to be a smart one, carefully piecing together tiles to respect the system's limitations while still effectively expressing yourself. Visually "busy" ColecoVision games tend to look very angular as a result of the 9918's limitations... which is why I suggest you stick with black backgrounds. They're a fitting canvas for old-school video games, they use up less storage, and you can cheat an extra color out of sprites, on a system without a whole lot of sprites to spare.

Sound on the ColecoVision is provided by the SN7 chip, and is perfectly competent. The Atari 2600 squawks when you play certain notes, but the ColecoVision has a wider musical range, covering six octaves. It also has three sound channels, with a fourth noise channel providing explosions and the roar of engines. If you're a practiced musician, you can get some respectable tunes out of the ColecoVision... Spy Hunter is proof enough of that. (Frenzy's pause music is similarly impressive, but terrifying. What the hell, Coleco?) If you're me, you'll muddle through.

Do be aware that the bounty of enhancements in the ColecoVision comes with some trade-offs. Explosions on the SN7 are... fair, but don't have the raw, window-rattling impact of the bangs and booms on the Atari 2600. Also, the ColecoVision color palette is gallingly drab, with sickly yellows and almost browns that leave tarnish on Coleco's claim of the arcade experience at home. 

The ColecoVision color palette, which sucks,
in case I haven't already belabored the point.

Here's a personal example. I've been at work on a game called Lucky Stars, which mimics the fun and witty banter of the 21st century revival of Let's Make a Deal. The characters in Lucky Stars look very much like LMAD's real-life hosts, at least as much as the TI9918 will allow. However, "Way Waynee" is an off-putting bronze, while "Oneggin Megma" isn't just white... he's ghost white, as pale as Jim Gaffigan on the surface of the sun. It's just ugly, especially when you're migrating from Atari's more vibrant consoles.

Also, the ColecoVision doesn't have much in the way of hardware features. It doesn't have built-in scrolling, so any scrolling you attempt will look ugly and off-putting, like the colors. You can hit a switch to double the size of sprites (all onscreen sprites. Well, it could have been a useful feature...) but you're not going to be blowing anyone's mind with Treasure-level special effects on this hardware. Even the 2600's TIA chip let you squash, stretch, and multiply players, but you're not getting any of that here. You can't flip tiles, you can't flip sprites, you can't swap palettes... there's a lot you can't do on the ColecoVision, actually. If you design software for this barebones format, you'd better make sure the core gameplay is excellent.

Nintendo Entertainment System

I haven't done much with this system at all... just a couple of demos, including Byron freaking out at a flashing screen. Nevertheless, it's become clear to me that the NES is not the super system I believed it was in 1988.

Designed as a cost-friendly version of the arcade hardware used in Donkey Kong, the Nintendo Entertainment System does offer critical improvements over the ColecoVision and its kin. It can handle scrolling either horizontally or vertically... the ColecoVision can't. The NES can flip tiles and even sprites, conserving precious video RAM... the ColecoVision can't. Instead of 15 lousy colors, the NES has a palette of 52 moderately better ones, with about two dozen available onscreen at any given moment.

However! There's a catch. (There's always a catch with technology this early, it seems.) The NES is restricted to a "rule of fours," where no more than four colors can exist inside a tile, and no more than three colors (plus a transparency) can exist inside a sprite. Tiles must be placed strategically to make the most of four segregated micro-palettes, an annoyance to the pixel artist. (An additional four micro-palettes are available for sprites, but they're best reserved for sprites, which typically consist of black, white, and a defining color.) You'll notice that in official NES games, many of the tiles have three shades of the same color to boost detail. It achieves that effect, but this also makes NES games feel square, tiled, and inorganic.

Also, while the NES has double the memory of the ColecoVision, it's got a small fraction of the VRAM (2K versus 16K! Holy lobotomy, Batman!) and a slower clock speed. You really feel it when you code for the system, and have to drop a damn WAIT statement for every four lines of graphics so the little toaster that barely could can catch up. It doesn't make me eager to code games for the NES, even though I was a card-carrying member of the Nintendo cult in the late 1980s. Who didn't want to make a Nintendo game back in 1988? Anyone who looked under the hood of this jalopy, apparently.

Sega Master System

Oh, Sega Master System! I didn't appreciate you back in the 1980s, but looking back, I should have. This is the peak evolution of the purely 8-bit game system... it simply does not get any better than this, if "this" ends at 255.

Sega's previous console, the SG-1000, was basically a rebadge of the ColecoVision with the serial numbers filed off. However, when Sega engineer Hideki Sato got a hold of the hardware, he quickly determined, "Hey, color limitations suck ass. Color clash likewise sucks ass. Let's not have that in the sequel. Let's also have color with saturation, so yellows look bright and sunny, and not like that disgusting crust you get in your eyes when you first wake up in the morning."

And so he set about making a Sega-branded successor to the TMS9918 with all of these features. NO color clash! Put any color from a palette of sixteen hues (selected from a large, if often redundant, total of 64) anywhere you please. The world is your oyster, the display is your canvas. It makes a monumental difference in the creation of pixel artwork. Oops, I just put a brown pixel right next to a white AND a gray one! And there's a pink pixel and a blue pixel somewhere in the tile, too! Aren't the hardware cops going to take me away for that? No, not on Master System. Just relax, unclench your sphincter, and let your artistic side take over.

Sprites offer similar freedom to the user, with another fifteen colors (plus a transparency!) that can be used however and wherever you like. Genesis does what Nintendon't, even before there was a Genesis, apparently! This reaps huge benefits in games like Rampage, which approaches a near-Sega Genesis level of detail, versus the laughable NES version. Add the ability to flip tiles, and the ability to stamp tiles over tiles without leaving ugly black boxes around them, and you've got one ridiculously overachieving 8-bit machine in the Sega Master System. No wonder the Brazilians are still using it in 2026. No wonder I'm making games for it!

As a Super ColecoVision, the Master System retains some of its sire's quirks. There's no hardware sprite collision, so you're going to have to manually determine if two sprites are touching by comparing their onscreen positions. The SN7 is the same (Sega rebranded it, but there's no effective difference), and comes up a little short next to the best music on the NES. It's a bit of a soprano, so don't expect the thunderous percussion of, say, Fester's Quest or Batman. The resolution on the Master System remains the same as it was on the ColecoVision, and at a respectable 256x192, it doesn't really need to be any higher. In fact, back ports from the Game Gear to the Master System often look better because of the increased screen real estate. 256x192 starts to feel pretty luxurious next to the Game Gear's crushing resolution of 160x144...

Bottom line? The Master System is deceptively great hardware. It didn't get that kind of love in the software department, but it's getting it now. Mighty Cuphead Adventure jumped over the NES and went straight to the Master System, ensuring players a genuine 8-bit experience that doesn't skimp on the visual delights. I've already made two games for the Master System, and I literally cannot conceive a situation where I will use the full span of its power. It's the place to be if you're making a game for real retro hardware.

(Shame about the lack of buttons, though. Just two, with pause on the front of the system itself? Come on, Sega. Come oooooon.)