NES Replay: Athletic World

Developer: Bandai
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1987
Glad I Don't Have To Run: I'm Fat

One of the problems with video games as they're currently made is that they go obsolete so fast. After only a few short years, it can be nearly impossible to get some of the hardware in your hands, which means that the games themselves are rendered almost unplayable far too quickly.

Case in point: The NES Power Pad. The Power Pad was a peripheral for the NES that had players running and jumping in place in order to play games. Its DNA is found in games like Dance Dance Revolution and Wii Fit. Fortunately, Power Pads are still plentiful, but who knows for how long that will last. How can you review a game that needs the Power Pad to get the full experience, like Athletic World?

The answer: Imperfectly.
In order to play an emulated version of Athletic World, you first have to find an emulator that can emulate the Power Pad. Then you have to somehow figure out what keys correspond to what, which takes a lot longer than you think. It took me a good ten minutes just to figure out what buttons you have to press to get the game to start.

This is exactly how I feel when I exercise too.

However, once you get underway, you find that emulation can't do everything. Sometimes it can be a pale mockery of what it's supposed to emulate. For Athletic World, you simply can't get the whole experience of playing the game by banging your fingers on a keyboard rhythmically. It’s a game that’s meant to be played by running and jumping around, and “running” with your fingers on the keyboard just feels silly.

Even with that meager information at our fingertips (Ha!), it's clear that Athletic World is light on content. There are five games included, and all of them involve running and jumping. In one, you jump over hurdles, in another you run while jumping over logs, and so on. To be fair, there wasn't much else you could do with the Power Pad aside from that, but still.

There's something funny built into the game, though: The designers knew that people would try and cheat at Athletic World. I always find it hilarious that people will try and cheat an exercise program, but whatever.

How can you cheat at a Power Pad game? It’s kind of funny: Kids would get on their knees and smack the Power Pad with their hands, then lifting up their hands when it was time to jump. It’s a lot of work to go through just to fake running and jumping. I mean, at that point you might as well be doing the running and jumping normally.

The developers of Athletic World knew that players would try cheating like this, so if you're "jumping" for too long, your on-screen avatar comes crashing back to the ground and is stunned for a bit. That means that you actually have to run and jump normally in order to win, or at least cheat well enough to fake the game out.

With the way the video game industry is currently running, this is the sort of information that gets lost over time. Video game systems and peripherals pop up and become obsolete so quickly that it's near impossible to keep up unless you’re actively and constantly playing new games. I've never been a proponent of having just one video game system instead of several competing formats, but sadly, in time that may be the best way to preserve these pieces of gaming history for future generations.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

NES Replay: Athena

Developer: Micronics
Publisher: SNK
Released: 1987
SNK: Oh, SNK.

Oh, SNK. I trusted you. I trusted you, and you let me down.

SNK's games mean quality. While they're mostly known today for their fighting games, throughout their storied history they made so much more than that. We already reviewed one SNK game, Alpha Mission, that demonstrated that they had a sturdy handle on shooters. They've made other games that were spectacular, like the Art of Fighting series, King of the Monsters, and a platformer that's a personal favorite of mine called Spinmaster, among many others.

Athena was an early effort, a game ported from the arcade to the NES. You play as Athena, a scantily clad warrior woman who fights with kicks and picks up weapons from fallen foes.

It's shockingly bad, far worse than I would expect from SNK.

What makes Athena bad aren't the underlying mechanics of the game. Those are beyond reproach, as befits an SNK game. The problem is that it appears like SNK tried to cram the whole game into an NES cart without regard for the NES' myriad limitations, which makes Athena painful to play. It's an early NES game, so maybe they didn't understand quite how much they could put in before causing the system to grind to a halt, but I would think SNK should have known better. Let's look into Athena's sins:

1) NES games tended not to have a lot of enemies on screen. The NES could only handle 8 sprites on any horizontal line, and anything beyond that would cause one of the sprites to vanish. That meant that developers had to manually put in code that would cause the sprites to flicker or else lose one of the sprites entirely.

Most games would go out of their way to avoid having a lot of sprites onscreen at once. When they needed to have a hectic situation with a lot of sprites onscreen, developers would usually give the sprites different behaviors, like put some in the air and some on the ground, to hopefully eliminate some of the flicker.

The makers of Athena completely didn't care about sprite flicker. It flickers more than any other game I've reviewed, and that's precisely because there are far too many enemies on screen at once. You're constantly mobbed from a stream of enemies coming from both sides of the screen while tree slugs will pour out of trees at you. Now, in the arcade game, this would be just fine, but since the NES can't handle that much onscreen at once, the whole thing is a mess.

2) They tried squeezing too much detail into the sprites. The arcade game obviously had a higher resolution, so sprites that are really detailed look awesome. The NES, with its lower-resolution sprites, can't deal with that much detail.

I had trouble figuring out the details on Athena herself. She has hair and a face, obviously, but the rest is a jumble of black lines and some colors mixed in. I also had trouble figuring out the details on everything else. The enemies have heads and then a bundle of scribbles for bodies that move in vaguely humanoid ways.

You'll notice that the great games on the NES stuck with broad strokes and exaggerated features for the characters. For example, the reason Mario has a mustache is because it was easier to see than just a mouth. SNK tried to cram too much detail into Athena and it didn't work.

3) There are too many types of enemies in Athena. Within the first couple of minutes, you'll see one group of enemies with pig heads wielding clubs, another group of enemies with horse heads wielding blue swords and pink swords, and you'll see the aforementioned slugs pouring out of trees.

The problem: They all behave the same way. They all just walk at you. The have no special attack behaviors and no special death behaviors either. Sure, sometimes they'll leave their weapons behind so you can wield them yourself, but they're redundant.

I'm sure that this is a holdover from the arcade game, but once again: It didn't work on the NES. The NES had a limited amount of tiles that you could use in a game. SNK used so many tiles on enemies that were useless that it led to another problem: Athena herself is really poorly animated and moves jerkily. Maybe with fewer redundant enemies they could have improved her animation and made the game more fluid. Who knows.

4) With all this stuff they crammed in, the game takes a really long time to load up. The whole benefit of cartridges is so that you DON'T have load times, but there are pauses between levels and pauses when Athena dies, which means that something is loading.

5) Finally, the NES sound chip could do an awful lot and it sounded great when it worked. However, it couldn't handle high-pitched noises very well without sounding really chirpy. Well, a lot of the sound in Athena is very high-pitched, so the sound itself is grating.

So, yeah. I expected a lot more out of SNK, but every company has one or two stinkers on their resume. I mean, Nintendo made Stunt Race FX. Capcom made Adventures in the Magic Kingdom. I'll forgive SNK this time, but they better not let it happen again.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Athletic World

NES Replay: Astyanax

Developer: Aicom
Publisher: Jaleco
Released: 1990
Astyanax: Back That Astyanax Up

There are a lot of NES games with positively awful names, but unfortunately, I can’t pick on Astyanax for that. Astyanax is a name from Greek mythology, the son of Hector who was thrown from a tower in Troy. Also most unfortunately, Astyanax (the game) isn’t so bad that I can make some joke about wanting to throw it from a tower.

Astyanax is an arcade port, but it’s completely different than the actual arcade game. The arcade game was about a warrior who receives a message from God and goes to fight demons. The NES game was about a 16-year-old boy who is summoned to a different dimension in order to rescue the ruler of Remlia with the help of a fairy named Cutie.

So let’s talk about Nintendo of America’s censorship policy in the US.

Nintendo was really rough on companies for a very long time. There was to be no mention of God in games, no mention of demons, no religious depictions, nothing. Do you have a cross in your game? Has to go. Even if it’s on a grave? Don’t care. Get rid of it. Curiously, these policies were only in effect in the U.S. In Japan, you could still put in whatever you wanted within reason. That meant that great games like Terranigma didn't get released in the U.S., and probably never will.

So why did Nintendo react this way? Was it just being uptight? Well, there were actually good reasons that they made the decisions that they made, if you examine the situation closely.

The Japanese audience for games is completely different than the American audience. The Japanese adult audience was primed to accept games because adults were used to playing games like pachinko. Therefore, when video games started coming out, it was mostly acceptable for Japanese adults to play video games. Since the audience was a little different, more religious and adult content could be shown.

However, in the U.S., gaming wasn't the province of adults. The NES was originally marketed as a toy for children in order to get into toy stores after the video game crash of 1983. That meant that adult content didn't really have a place at the table.

But what about religious symbols? That can be explained easily. The U.S. has a tendency toward moral panics. They usually start when someone notices something that offends them, and then they start crusading to get rid of it, usually screaming, "Won't someone think of the children!" For example, Frederick Wertham crusaded against comic books in the 50's, which led to EC Comics closing all of their horror books and the institution of the "Comics Code," which meant that every book had to be as milquetoast as possible.

(The irony of the situation is that EC Comics also produced a magazine called Mad. With all the horror books closed, EC poured all their resources into Mad Magazine. Mad Magazine did more to warp children and force them to question authority than any horror comic ever would. I was introduced to tons of movies my parents never would have let me see through the pages of Mad Magazine. Thanks, Frederick Wertham!)

In the early 80's, the U.S. was in the throes of a moral panic over religious symbols in Dungeons and Dragons. Now, D&D doesn't have a lot of "religious symbols." I know it, you know it. But at the time, D&D got such a bad rap that a woman, Patricia Pulling, sued TSR for her son's suicide. There were movies about the dangers of D&D (one of them starring a young Tom Hanks). It was linked to "Satanic ritual abuse," which was a totally made-up thing that never happened. Parents were kind of freaking out.

All right, so you're Nintendo. Some of the games that people want to release in the U.S. have crosses and demons in them. You want to allow them to release those games, but you have a country in the midst of a moral panic over demonic symbols. It's also a country that's prone to hair-trigger outbursts of moral outrage, and offending materials can get legislated into oblivion. Games are viewed as the sole province of children, and parents are already a little leery of this grey box that has little Johnny and Suzie so enraptured. What do you do?

Nintendo's answer was simple: Take anything that could possibly offend audiences out. The last thing Nintendo wanted was negative publicity, and if the games had to be watered down a bit, so be it.

Games like Astyanax had to pay the price, unfortunately. Astyanax isn't bad at all. It's a fairly standard action game that feels a bit like Castlevania. The sprites are surprisingly huge and detailed and the backgrounds pop really well.

Astyanax has a lot going for it. You can choose between multiple different magical powers that have different effects, like freezing all of the enemies onscreen or shooting flames around the screen. If you use a stronger weapon you'll be able to use magic less, and with a weaker weapon you can use more magic.

It's a fairly difficult game too, but fair. If you use your head and don't rush headlong into combat, you'll survive, but rush in swords-a-blazin' and you'll get butchered. The bosses are easier than the levels themselves, oddly enough.

The monster designs are pretty freaky, which makes sense given the original arcade game's dark back story. If Astyanax would have been allowed to keep the backstory from the arcade game, those designs would have made a ton of sense. Instead, it feels like there's an odd disconnect. The introduction invites you into a magical world of heroes and fairies, and then the game brings you into a horrific demon-filled nightmare landscape.

Astyanax is still a good game, but it could have been so much better if they would have had to censor it so harshly. We can't really blame Nintendo directly for the censorship, since it makes sense why they would take such drastic measures. Good thing we're past that, right?

Oh.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Athena

Electric Spoilerland: Iron Man 3

Spoilers for Iron Man 3 after the jump break.

I'm serious, this post is full of spoilers. Don't read this unless you've seen Iron Man 3.

3... 2... 1...

You've been warned.

Shane Black was the perfect person to write an Iron Man film. Tony Stark is all about banter, and no one writes banter like Shane Black.

Here's something interesting, though: Shane Black obviously loves movies. He loves the artifice and theatricality of films along with the way that movies can affect our emotions just by imagery and sound. He explicitly points to it in Iron Man 3.

For example, the Mandarin was odd in the trailers. His vocal inflections were just a little off so that you couldn't figure out where he was from. He was obviously "foreign," but in a very disconcerting way. Watching the trailer, you were almost like, "There's no way that this guy can be real."

The wrinkle: He wasn't. As Trevor Slattery, the "actor" who portrays the Mandarin, says in the film, the Mandarin was designed for a maximum fear response. He's a mix of Western and Middle Eastern iconography that's put together juuuuust right to make people uncomfortable. He's a hollow shell upon which people project their own fears.

So, in the end, the Mandarin appeared like a manipulation of the audience because he was supposed to be. It worked.

Just as the Mandarin is a hollow shell upon which people project their own fears, Iron Man is a shell upon which people project their hopes. That's a big burden for one man, and Tony Stark can't hold up under it. It's no surprise that the majority of the suits that fly around in Iron Man 3 are hollow, with nothing inside them except parts and machinery.

So when he decides to destroy his suits at the end and says, "I am Iron Man," he's not saying that he is Iron Man, the guy in the suit. He's saying that finally, he is a man of iron. He doesn't need the suit. He's good enough as he is. He doesn't need the artificiality and artifice to be who he needs to be.

Ladies and gentlemen, that's a character arc.

In Iron Man 1, Stark was all theater, no substance until he built the suit. He found a purpose. In Iron Man 2, he still found himself grandstanding at a Congressional hearing, standing on a stage basking in applause, flying around and looking cool.

In Iron Man 3, he's finally grounded and he's frightened by that. He's seen how insignificant he is and how much he doesn't understand.

For example, there's a scene where Tony and Rhodey are talking in a bar, then Tony has a panic attack and runs outside and into the suit. This isn't a glorious moment for him: He's freaking out, the suit is scratched up, and he's the opposite of what a hero should look like.

Gone are the glossy moments of being Mr. Awesome. It's not just flying around in a cool suit anymore. Being Iron Man is Serious Business, and he's finally realizing that.

In the end, after all the empty and hollow suits are being destroyed, it's just him and Pepper, two damaged people who finally understand what it's like to be in the other's shoes. They're both beat up and grimy. All the style is gone, just substance.

That's the theme of Iron Man 3. Style is great and it can get you on the front page, but substance is what keeps you there. All of Tony Stark's style doesn't matter unless he's doing something of purpose. All of the Mandarin's posturing is worthless unless there's a threat behind it. The flash and dash is only good unless there's something credible and real behind it.

It's interesting, though, that Shane Black uses the iconography of the 80's to illustrate that point. Killian wears white suits with slicked-back 80's hair. The bar where Tony ends up in Tennessee wouldn't be out of place in an 80's movie. Miami is the neon-drenched symbol of 80's excess. The final battle takes place on a loading dock, the ending point of countless 80's movies. At the dock scene, I wouldn't been surprised if Rhodey would have said, "I'm getting too old for this shipping container."

Why use 80's iconography? Because that underscores the point. The 80's were the style decade. A lot of the entertainment was made with art in mind, but the decade being what it was, they had to deliberately hide their artistic leanings. "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" has a beautiful melody that had to be drenched in synths and electronic drums in order to be released. Hair-metal bands were full of talented musicians who had to hide their skill. The artificiality came to a head with Milli Vanilli, and that's where people of the decade drew the line.

By using 80's shorthand, Shane Black points at the phoniness of the 80's while wrapping the story of "getting over being a phony" around it.

Next up, I want to examine Killian's plan, one more time, just to make sure I've got it straight:

1) Develop Extremis.
2) People start exploding.
3) Create what appears to be an international terrorist plot to cover for it.

Woah, woah woah. That escalated quickly.

This is a device cribbed from Die Hard, where a simple bank robbery is couched in a terrorist plot. Killian explains it away, saying that by controlling the president he can control terrorism and counterterrorism to his whim, but that's a pretty big leap for a regular guy to make.

I feel like we missed out on pages of character development with Killian. What transformed him from "geeky guy with a cane" to "mass murderer?" Did Extremis make him more agressive or something? I feel like that should have been explained.

Also, he can breathe fire too? I feel like I imagined that.

Finally, some people complained about the post-credits stinger. It's just Tony Stark talking to Bruce Banner, and nothing new is revealed, no new information, just Banner being annoyed.

Or is it? Tony Stark says to Banner that getting this stuff off his chest has helped him out. This is actually a vitally important scene. Tony Stark is no longer alone. There are other people now who understand what it's like to have the weight of the world on your shoulders, a superhero support group. Granted, Banner isn't a ton of help, but at least it's something. He can open up to people. He can be a person, not just a guy in a suit.

All around, I thought that Iron Man 3 was a tremendous film. If the Iron Man series ended right here, it would be a perfect wrap to it, better than the way The Dark Knight Rises ended things. I'll talk about that a different time.

NES Replay Kickstarter

So I'm starting my own Kickstarter for NES Replay. Take a look at it here. If you have any questions, let us know! Thanks!

NES Replay: Asterix

Developer: Bit Managers
Publisher: Infogrames
Released: 1993
Aw haw haw: Oui oui!

Most Americans are not familiar with Asterix, and there's a very good reason for it: We're all a bunch of xenophobes.

Mind you, most Americans aren't doing it out of spite, and probably don't even know we're doing it. Most people aren't even trying to be xenophobic. It just sort of happens, and when it's pointed out to us we feel bad about it, then go right back to our American TV shows, music and movies.

America is kind of strange like that. While other countries around the world will gladly consume entertainment from other countries, America won't. We'll accept something from Great Britain, because we like our foreign entertainment foreign, but not too foreign. If there's something that's in a language other than English? Woah, woah, woah there, fella. We're from America and we speak American.

"But what about Gangnam Style?" Well, there's another corollary to our xenophobia: We like foreign things if we can laugh at them for being foreign. Gangnam Style was popular because Americans could watch the video and laugh at those crazy foreigners doing crazy foreigner things, and then once they were done laughing they had the song stuck in their head. If Gangnam Style didn't have that wacky video, it wouldn't have been nearly as popular.
"But I'm not a xenophobe! I watch movies from Country X, listen to music from Country Y, and speak language Z!" Congratulations, I'm happy for you. For every non-xenophobic American, there's at least 10 that are, so you're in the minority.

What does this have to with Asterix? Asterix is incredibly popular throughout the world and especially in Europe. It's been around for almost 60 years and there are 12 films to its name. It’s about a village of people from Gaul who are fighting against the advancing Romans. Therefore, it’s foreign, but you know, not foreign enough that we can laugh at its foreign-ness. Show Asterix to an average American, and they would be hard-pressed to pick him out of a lineup. Heck, before I wrote this review, I was only vaguely familiar with the name, but I probably couldn’t have told you anything about Asterix other than the fact that it exists.

That means that I have no frame of reference with Asterix for the NES, so I can't tell you if it captures the spirit of the comic books or not. All I can really do is judge the game on its own merits, and it’s... OK. Not great, but decent. Unlike a lot of licensed games, the developers at least put forth an effort.

Asterix is a side-scrolling platform game that was only released in Europe. You play as the aforementioned Gallian, running all around Europe on a quest to rescue his friend Obelix. Your only attack is a punch that only hits enemies directly in front of you. From time to time you can pick up potions that give you invincibility. The graphics in Asterix are nice and clean, and the music is pretty decent.

Asterix's attacks really need more range, though. You can be standing right in front of your enemy, take a swing at them and miss because you're not close enough. You have to be really, really close to your enemies to kill them, which puts you in harm's way and doesn’t really work for a platformer.

For that matter, why not throw in another attack? Any other way to defend yourself, even like a butt stomp or something, would have been great. Without that, you find yourself avoiding enemies instead of trying to face them one-on-one.

Still, Asterix isn’t bad as long as you don’t try and play it like a kinetic, Mario-style platformer. It requires you take your time, watch your enemies and then proceed onward, which is certainly a different way of playing a platformer. It's not as effective or fun as a more kinetic platformer would have been, but it's decent.

But does Asterix reflect the spirit of the rich history that the comic books have built up? I really couldn’t say exactly. You know, because of the xenophobia.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Astyanax

Review: Surgeon Simulator 2013

There's a new genre of game that I'm calling the "Glorious Failure" genre. It includes games like QWOP, CLOP, and the demo of Surgeon Simulator 2013. In a Glorious Failure game, you could conceivably win with the tools you’re given, yet those tools are so difficult to use that only the insane would be able to succeed. Failure is a much more common (and hilarious) result.

In fact, failure is kind of the point of this genre. The sillier you look and the more ridiculous your attempts, the more fun you'll end up having.

So why do I include the demo of Surgeon Simulator and not the full game? Because the full game of Surgeon Simulator 2013 sort of forgets that the whole point of these games is failure.

In Surgeon Simulator 2013, you play as a surgeon who has to perform complex surgical procedures on poor, defenseless patients. You control your fingers with a few keys on the keyboard, and you move, lower and tilt your hand with the mouse. The general idea of Surgeon Simulator 2013 is that you're supposed to successfully complete a heart transplant, kidney transplant or brain transplant using one hand and a variety of surgical tools.

That's ostensibly the idea behind it, but it's so much more fun pawing at the tools like a drunken toddler and causing mayhem. Most of the videos online of Surgeon Simulator show the players giggling as they embed a scalpel into the patient’s lung, or accidentally dropping a bonesaw into the patient’s chest cavity and desperately trying to get it out. That’s when Surgeon Simulator is at its best: When everything goes wrong.

However, Surgeon Simulator 2013 breaks that feeling. Instead, they ask you to actually perform the surgeries from start to finish, and then you can unlock other surgeries. Now, this may not sound like a flaw to you. After all, isn't the point of a game that you need to improve so you can advance onward?

Yes, but Glorious Failure games aren't the same thing. Remember, in a Glorious Failure game, the controls are usually so needlessly complex that you can't be expected to succeed, and failure is encouraged. At some times, Surgeon Simulator 2013 gets this. For example, Surgeon Simulator 2013 gives you an achievement if you throw two hearts into the chest cavity, if you throw in something that doesn't belong or if you flip off the patient.

But then, they ask you to actually do the surgeries, and it's just frustrating.

For example, to do a heart transplant, what you're supposed to do is break the ribcage, rip out the lungs, cut out the heart and toss another heart in there. Unlike the demo version of Surgeon Simulator 2013, the ribcage splinters into a million little pieces. If you toss in the heart and there are too many ribcage pieces sitting in the chest cavity, you don't succeed with the surgery because the heart can’t land where it needs to. You have to pick out the tiny pieces of bone first, which can be a problem if you have the heart there..

The kidney transplant is even worse. You're presented with the large and small intestine and have to remove them in order to get to the kidneys. I swear, I've sat there for at least a half an hour with scalpels, saws, lasers and hammers trying to remove the organs and have gotten nowhere. Once, I nicked the corner of the small intestine and severed a tiny corner. That was as close as I've gotten to removing it. I’ve grabbed onto the large intestine and pulled. It didn’t budge.

This sort of behavior is funny when you're expected to fail. However, when you're trying to succeed and you can't because the controls get in the way, that's terrible.

Bossa Games needed to go one way or the other: Either tidy up the controls so that the player could succeed (which defeats the whole purpose of the game) or let the player fail and still proceed. They should have actually encouraged such failure, like allowing you to proceed if you've killed the patient in under two minutes or something like that.

Is that morbid? Well, this is a game where you're smashing open ribcages with a hammer and ingesting drugs accidentally. If you're going to go that route, take it all the way. Allow the player to plant a little flag inside the chest cavity. Accidentally start yourself on fire. Cause the patient to wake up momentarily. Throw a kidney into a paper shredder. Take it all the way. The more mayhem, the better. The more failure, the better.

Instead, taking a game that's built for failure and then expecting the player to succeed is just unfair. For example, on the title screen I spent twenty minutes trying to get my hand to pick up a floppy disc and insert it into a computer, and you expect me to remove a brain without killing the patient? Yeah, not happening.

When Surgeon Simulator 2013 works, it’s a thing of morbid beauty. When it doesn’t, it’s an exercise in frustration and ragequitting. A shame, too, because they really had something on their hands there, and I’m not referring to the kidneys on ice.

Final Grade: D+