NES Replay: Donkey Kong Jr. Math

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: October 1985

You know what kids love more than video games? Math!

After all, why play a boring old fuddy-duddy video game when you can do addition and subtraction? If you're feeling really wild, why not do multiplication? Or even DIVISION?

(Guitar solo)

I'm being a little mean to Donkey Kong Jr. Math. It's understandable why Nintendo included this game as one of the launch titles. After all, they were trying to market the NES as a toy first and a video game system second. By including an educational title they could say, "Look! This is a toy that your kids can use to learn! Oh-and-also-it-plays-Super-Mario-Brothers but look! Math! For your kids!"
Donkey Kong Jr. Math uses the identical controls from Donkey Kong Jr. and has the player jump from vine to vine, picking up numbers. The ultimate goal is to get them to add up to the number that Donkey Kong is holding up at the top of the screen. In the harder levels, there are negative numbers. There's also an inscrutable "exercise" mode that I can't figure out for the life of me.

The smartest move that Nintendo made was using the control scheme from Donkey Kong Jr. The controls in Donkey Kong Jr. are much more fluid than Donkey Kong, so just moving around is fun. Since that control scheme works so well, there's never a situation where the player loses because they can't wrangle the controls into submission (I'm looking at you, Clu Clu Land).

Alas, none of it worked. Donkey Kong Jr. Math was reportedly the lowest-selling NES launch title. Apparently, when people buy a video game system, they're buying it specifically to avoid doing homework. Who knew?

Even today, edutainment games are often a hard sell. Kids don't want to learn while they play a game, and in order to have the kids learn the developers frequently have to skimp on the "game" part. Edutainment is a noble goal, but it rarely ever works.

So why didn't Nintendo just release Donkey Kong or Donkey Kong Jr. for the NES right off the bat? That would have made Nintendo a mint and would have made more sense than shoving Donkey Kong into a math title, right?

Actually, Nintendo made the right call. It made more sense not to release Donkey Kong for the NES so early in the system's life span, since Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. were very popular games in the arcade and were raking in money for Nintendo at a pretty good clip. Nintendo didn’t know how well the NES was going to do at the time, so releasing Donkey Kong on the NES would have cannibalized that audience for no good reason.

Instead of cannibalizing the arcades, it made more sense for Nintendo to use the Donkey Kong name and try and stretch out the brand a little more. If Donkey Kong Jr. Math would have caught on, Nintendo would have looked like geniuses. If it didn't, well, there was still Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. to release down the line. Nothing was truly lost.

In the end, Donkey Kong Jr. Math could have been a lot worse. While it may not have captured the public's imagination, I can imagine some especially nerdy children having a blast with it.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Duck Hunt

NES Replay: Clu Clu Land

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: October 1985

Clu Clu Land is one of the games that Nintendo made years ago that they sort of forgot about. I'd like to think that they forgot about it on purpose.

What makes Clu Clu Land worthy of being forgotten? It's because it's relentlessly and needlessly confusing.

See if you can follow this: In Clu Clu Land, you play as a fuzzy ball thing named Clu Clu that moves around rooms in a top-down perspective. However, you don't use the arrow keys to control your character directly. Instead, you use the arrow keys to stick out one of your hands in order to grab the pegs as you brush past. When you grab onto a peg, Clu Clu swings around the peg until he ends up in the direction that he wishes to go.

The buttons you need to press to stick out your hands change as the orientation of your character changes. If your character is facing left or right, then you would press the up or down buttons to stick out his hands. If he's facing up or down, you would press the left or right buttons to stick out his hands.
So what are you doing in these rooms anyway? You're trying to go past certain invisible points between the pegs that will light up. Eventually these points form a shape. When you complete the shape, the level is complete and you move on to the next one. Meanwhile, you're avoiding enemies that track you down and racing against a time limit. If you touch an enemy, you lose a life. Run out of time or run out of lives and your game is over.

Got all that?

There’s way too much going on here for a launch game, and the wacky "grab a peg to change direction" control scheme absolutely kills this game. I've played Clu Clu Land quite a bit, and I simply can't get my brain to figure out the controls. They're not intuitive at all.

While I have to give Clu Clu Land credit for using such a highly experimental control scheme, it's an absolutely awful idea at this point in the young life of the NES. Players needed to be immediately welcomed into the world of gaming with simple and fun ideas, not blindsided with wacky and difficult controls. Some modern games may experiment with control schemes for a level or two. Sometimes, they'll have a level where left is right and right is left, or they'll ask the player to flip the controller upside down. That's all well and good, but they never ask you to do that for the entire game.

That’s a shame, because the idea of navigating around a room and revealing a shape isn't the worst idea ever. Sure, it's a little simplistic, but these early games needed to be simple yet fun. Instead, a launch game for the NES asked players to manage way too much at once. If I've been playing games for 30 years and can't wrap my head around Clu Clu Land, what sort of chance did a novice player have back in the day?

There's one other major problem. After dying, the player respawns on the screen. You're invincible as long as you don't move. As soon as you start moving, you're not invincible anymore. However, the timer doesn't stop moving while you wait, so you have to start moving as quickly as possible. If there happens to be an enemy standing next to you after you respawn, you either wait and watch precious seconds tick away or move and get killed.

Whee!

Nintendo tried something different, and that’s worthy of commendation. However, it absolutely didn't pay off and had rightfully been relegated to the scrap heap of gaming history. Now that we've dredged Clu Clu Land up from the depths of gaming's sewers, let's put it back there and never speak of it again.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Donkey Kong Jr. Math

Review: Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Developer: Nintendo/Monolith Soft
Publisher: Nintendo

If you've never played Animal Crossing, it can be a hard game to wrap your head around. On the surface, it appears that Animal Crossing is just about collecting bugs, going fishing and collecting fruit to pay off a home loan. That doesn’t sound like fun. That sounds like work.

Those who have actually played any of the games in the series will tell a different story. Animal Crossing games are insanely charming, entertaining, and relaxing. It's some of the most fun you'll have while chopping down trees.

However, the last entry in the series, City Folk, was disappointing. Nothing new was really added to the series, and the minor additions didn't really deepen Animal Crossing in general. Had the series had finally run out of new territory to conquer? And would New Leaf be any better?

The good news is that New Leaf is fantastic. The bad news is that you'll be playing it for the next year.
What makes New Leaf such a revelation is that it does something that the series should have done a long time ago: It makes you the mayor of your little town. With that power, you can enact ordinances, build new buildings and otherwise customize your city in a way you couldn't before. That alone would have been enough to recommend this game, but New Leaf goes beyond that.

What New Leaf really does is make Animal Crossing the game it always was supposed to be. See, the ideas that were introduced in previous games could never be implemented very well because of hardware limitations and other bugaboos that held it back. For example, in the original game, if you wanted to visit someone else's city, you had to physically have their memory card and insert it into your Gamecube to go there. On the DS version, if you opened up your city so others could view it, it would get trashed by griefers. Wild World introduced an extra Main Street area, but didn't let you change much about it.

In New Leaf, these limitations are fixed. What to let someone visit your town? Only friends can come in, reducing the chance that something awful will happen. Want to upload your city so other people can look through it without breaking anything? Sure, you can use the Dream Suite to do that. Want to add a second floor to your museum and open a new gift shop? Sure! Combined with the new customization options, that's what makes New Leaf one of the best games on the 3DS and the best Animal Crossing game in the series.

However, the final and most important thing to say about Animal Crossing: New Leaf, though, is that it's fun. It's just as simple as that. New Leaf is fun. If you like fun games, you should try it out. If you don't like fun, then I'm sorry for you. The rest of us will just be over here playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

Final Rating: A

NES Replay: Baseball

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: October 1985

If American football is one of the more difficult sports to simulate, baseball is one of the easiest. On any given play, there are only a few moving parts: The pitcher throws the ball and the batter tries to swing at it. They either hit it or miss it.

Even the AI programming is simple.  If there's a hit, the developer just has to figure out the trajectory of the bat off the ball and then have a fielder go get the ball and throw it to the base that has the best chance to get someone out. The runner is either safe or out. Throw in a random number generator for batting and pitching, and you're all set.

Because it's such a simple game to simulate, Nintendo chose Baseball as one of the launch games for the NES. Baseball is far more successful at simulating its sport than 10-Yard Fight was at American football, although there are still a few problems.
First, Baseball is really simplistic. You can pick from six different teams, even though they all look and play the same. None of the players have names. There are no stats or substitutions. There's no season mode. Amazingly enough, a batter can't even get hit by a pitch. It's as bare-bones as you can get.

There's also a problem with the fielding. Opposing and AI fielders simply cannot get in position to make simple ground ball plays, so every ground ball that's not hit directly to a fielder rolls into the outfield. The outfielders take forever getting to them, which is maddening. Even your own players have difficulty handling balls, so a single can turn into a triple easily.

The computer player also makes some dumb choices when trying to throw out batters. If you know anything about baseball, it's that throwing people out as they're heading toward first is almost always a more high-percentage out than second or third. A runner on base usually has a lead of a couple of steps toward the next base, whereas the batter has to drop the bat and start at home base.

No one told the computer player about this, though. They'll frequently try and throw people out on second or third base when there's an easy play at first that they could have made instead. Of course, every time they throw to second instead of first, my runners are safe at both bases.

Even with those flaws, Baseball is still fairly fun. Nintendo saw fit to program just the essence of baseball, and it worked.

For example, one problem I have when playing baseball video games (and baseball in general) is that I have no plate discipline whatsoever. If a ball comes within the same timezone as me, I'm going to swing at it. I can't "wait for my pitch" because they're all my pitches.

That nearly burned me in this game. During the first inning, I whiffed repeatedly on simple pitches and swung on pitches that were clearly out of the strike zone. When it was my turn to pitch, they crushed my very first pitch for a tape-measure home run.

I was worried that the game was going to be like that from there on out, but it settled down. By the time I finished playing, it was 6-4 in the fourth inning. I had the bases loaded and no outs. I figured that was as good a time as any to quit.

So Baseball definitely has its flaws, like we’ve stated. However, for a bare-bones baseball game released in 1985, Baseball works quite well. Sure, there are things that aren't quite right about it and it's certainly not a deep game, but it could have been a lot worse.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Clu Clu Land

NES Replay Returns!

We're going in chronological order now, but since 10-Yard Fight is the first game either way, I didn't want to post another review of it.

Instead, here's the completely redone review! Enjoy, and welcome back!

Ryan Braun, Baseball, and MLB's Problem

So, Ryan Braun was suspended for... something. Something bad. The evidence hasn't been released, but baseball assures us it was bad.

The story is that they gave Braun two choices: Take a longer suspension with a possibility of appealing it, or accept the shorter suspension with no appeal. Most everyone assumes that Braun was presented with hefty evidence that he was guilty, so he took the shorter suspension with no appeal.

What's absolutely amazing is that everyone is clearly accepting the league's story on this. The whole way through the Biogenesis investigation, baseball has bullied players and leaked information to the media. For example, suspensions haven't even been announced yet, and we already know that Jhonny Peralta of the Tigers will probably be suspended and A-Rod will probably be suspended, either for life or a year.

How do we know that information? The league leaked it. Why would they leak this information? Because that way the narrative starts, and it's a narrative that's favorable to the league office. "Baseball is keeping cheaters out! They're keeping the game clean! 'A-Roid' and Braun are part of the problem!"

Baseball, however, is guilty of something else: Overcorrection and a lack of transparency.

MLB usually overcorrects. For example, after the Black Sox scandal, baseball cracked down on gambling. Pete Rose paid the price. By all accounts, Rose should be in the Hall. He's one of the best players of his generation. Shoeless Joe Jackson was more than likely innocent of his involvement in the Black Sox scandal. He should be in the Hall too. Yet, neither of these players will ever, ever be in the Hall because baseball overcorrected.

Baseball is overcorrecting on PED use as well. Yes, McGwire took PEDs. Yes, Bonds and Clemens took PEDs. There were a lot of players who did, but the best players still outperformed the lower players. Singling out McGwire, Sosa, Bonds and Clemens isn't fair. They deserve to be in the Hall. Bonds and Clemens deserved it on the first ballot. They were positively among the best players of their generation.

Because MLB was fooled once on PED use, they're determined not to get fooled again. That's why they're hammering Alex Rodriguez as hard as they can, and that's why they suspended Braun. It's an overcorrection.

The problem with Braun: He doesn't have a positive test they can point to. A lot of people feel that Braun got off on a technicality last time around, but there's a reason that there's a chain of custody for drug tests. If you get a positive drug test and the chain of custody is shown to be broken, that test is thrown out from a practical and legal standpoint. If the chain of custody is broken, the test isn't valid.

Yet, who leaked the information about the positive test to the media? The league offices.

Remember, if the league office wouldn't have leaked the information, the test and the subsequent appeal would have gone unnoticed by the public. Yet, baseball leaked it, and then found themselves with egg on their face when the test methodology had problems.

Why would the league go through all that trouble? Because they want people to know they're "doing something" about PED use. Whether or not it's right, they want to be seen as doing something.

So, now we're seeing baseball cracking down again on players who were associated with the Biogenesis clinic. They got the clinic's owner to "cooperate" with the league in exchange for not suing him into oblivion. They have evidence on players, but they're not releasing that evidence. There are, to our knowledge, no positive tests. All the information that we have has been leaked by the league office.

What if this were a court case? Let's say that the prosecution leaked important details about the trial to the press, thus tainting the jury pool. Then, they don't allow the case to be a matter of public record, they don't release the evidence, they get someone who'll testify against the plaintiff or else, and to top it all off the judge and the prosecution are working together.

Would anyone consider that a fair court case? Not at all. That's a kangaroo court.

That's precisely what we're seeing now. A-Rod, Braun, Peralta and others are being tried in MLB's kangaroo court, which brands players as cheaters and tosses them in front of an angry crowd who's all too willing to tear the players apart. Does that sound fair to you?

There's another problem: During the "Steroid Era", certain players were viewed as being clean without a doubt. For example, Ken Griffey Jr. Yet, think of Griffey's career: Great young player, injury problems, then all of a sudden starts putting together consistent seasons and playing great ball at an older age. If we weren't talking about Griffey, one of the most revered players of his time, suspicion wouldn't be unreasonable.

What about Chris Davis of the Orioles? He's hit 39 home runs, and we're barely past the halfway point of the season. Is he above suspicion? He's never hit this many home runs before.

What about Bryce Harper? Mike Trout? Yasiel Puig? Any number of young players who have burst onto the scene in recent years?

Baseball's got a problem, and it has nothing to do with PEDs. It's all their doing. By their overzealousness in tracking down PED users, they act as if every player is suspect, reducing rather than reinforcing confidence in their sport. They make young, marketable players kryptonite to advertisers, as the advertisers are afraid that their investment will turn sour.

Will baseball lay off PEDs anytime soon? Not a chance. They have to protect the "integrity of the game." Well, guess what? In order to preserve something's integrity, it has to exist. If the league isn't careful, they'll destroy their sport in order to save it.