The Tower of Retro-Babble: Nintendo

Oh ho ho, now we’re getting into the preemo stuff! What can you even say about a video game 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 gorgeous. 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 other 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!