NES Replay: Hogan's Alley

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: October 1985

Hogan's Alley is a simple game that uses the NES Zapper. Two or three cardboard cutouts appear on screen, and you have to shoot the ones that are criminals while not shooting the innocent people. Shoot an innocent, and you lose a life. Take too long to shoot a criminal, and you lose a life.

All Hogan's Alley is about, then, is facial recognition. The cutouts don't move around. They don't do anything beyond sneer at you with a gun drawn or stare at you innocently. It's the gaming equivalent of pointing at a piece of paper and saying, "That one." There's a second game in here, too, that has those cardboard cutouts moving from behind cover and then turning toward the player. It's a little more fun, but just barely.

Why would Nintendo pick such a basic game as a launch game for the NES? The answer was simple: Familiarity.

Light gun games had been around for a while, even before video games existed. They were common parlor games, so people knew what they were all about. Since Nintendo was introducing a video game console at a time when video game consoles weren't welcome in most homes, they needed something simple that people could wrap their heads around.

For that reason, they were releasing games that were familiar at a glance to users. Hogan's Alley was well-known, as was Wild Gunman, which we'll get to later. Nintendo was aiming for simple, well-known concepts that wouldn't require a lot of explanation at a glance. For example, the game they made about hunting ducks was called Duck Hunt, and had a picture of a duck along with an explosion behind it. That's easy enough to understand for anyone.

That's why Hogan's Alley was released. The concept of "pick which one is the bad guy and shoot him" is easy enough for anyone to understand, even if it didn't hold up in the long run.

There's a far more interesting minigame in Hogan's Alley called "Trick Shot." In Trick Shot, tin cans fly onto the screen from the right. In order to keep them in the air, you shoot them. If you've kept them in the air long enough, they'll land on one of the platforms on the left. Nintendo has returned to this minigame concept repeatedly in other games, and for good reason: It's pretty fun.

The same can't be said for Hogan's Alley in general, though. It's so simplistic that it can't be recommended for modern gamers, but it served its purpose at the time.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Gyromite

Nintendo needed toy stores to carry the NES on their shelves. Since video game systems were poison at the time, Nintendo needed a hook that would make the NES look more like a toy to retailers. They came up with R.O.B. (the robotic toy that came with the NES) in order to accomplish that task.

Once people recognized that the NES was a good video game system and bought it for that specific reason, Nintendo no longer needed to include R.O.B. Since the NES was a hit after just a few months, they didn’t need to wait long to discontinue him. For that reason, there were only two games ever made that used the R.O.B. accessory, and Gyromite was the better of the two. It's still not great, though.

Also, the title screen calls it "Robot Gyro," which makes it sound like a Greek restaurant on Futurama.
Gyromite includes two games. In Game A, you play as a little scientist who has to pick up several pieces of dynamite scattered throughout the levels. Along the way, there are pillars that need to be raised and lowered in order for the scientist to progress, and you have to take control of R.O.B. to do that. In Game B, the scientist sleepwalks through the levels. You control R.O.B and use him to open the pillars in order to let him pass through safely.

The problem with Gyromite (and games using R.O.B. in general) is that R.O.B. is controlled in kind of a Rube Goldberg-esque way. You press left or right to rotate R.O.B., and up and down to control his arms. You have to get R.O.B. to rotate his arms over to a couple of discs, and then have him press down on the appropriate disc. The discs connect to a second controller, and the A or B buttons get pressed down depending which disc is depressed. In Gyromite, the A and B buttons raise and lower the gates.

So, you may ask, if the ultimate goal of Gyromite is to press the A and B buttons on a second controller, why use R.O.B. at all? Why not just have someone grab a controller and press the A and B buttons?

Why, indeed? Honestly, I can't think of a good reason.

Take the robot out and Gyromite works as a great, if simple, co-op game. Hand the second controller to your little brother or sister, and they can have great fun just moving the pillars around while you play as the scientist. It's such a simple way to include a second player that R.O.B. seems completely unnecessary.

It's easy to see why Nintendo didn't keep making games for R.O.B. If this is the best idea Nintendo could come up with, making more games that included the robot would have a drain on resources and a waste of time. It was a good idea in theory, but not a good idea in the execution.

Final Rating:

Review: FTL

What is it about roguelike games that makes them so much fun?

There's no reason that they should be fun. You're constantly failing. The penalty for failure is outrageously high, and there are many times you have no control over what exactly happens. You're fighting against a random number generator that frequently goes out of its way to screw you over.

So, once again, why are they fun?

The best explanation is that roguelikes are fun in the same way that card games are fun. For example, in poker, you don't have a choice about what cards you're dealt or what your opponents will do. They're all crazy variables that can change from minute to minute. The only thing you can control is yourself: You can try and read the situation, read your opponents, and place your bets accordingly.


That gambling sense runs through roguelike games. The only things you can control are your resources and how to manage them. Everything else is up to the game. You must play the hand you are dealt, succeed or die trying.

FTL plays that feeling to the hilt. In FTL, you're a lone spaceship on the run from Rebel forces. You must jump from star system to star system, collect crew members, scrap (FTL's currency), weapons and upgrades on route to destroy the rebel flagship. Along the way, you will die repeatedly and emphatically, and sometimes through no fault of your own.

That's part of what makes FTL so much fun, though. When you look back at your most recent run, you can usually pinpoint where it all went wrong. Maybe you spent too much scrap repairing your hull instead of buying a shield upgrade. Maybe you sent a crewmember to their death needlessly. Maybe you should have gone away from the star that was spitting out solar flares at you before it set the whole ship on fire.

Those sorts of decisions become learning experiences that you use on your next run. Invariably, you get dealt a new hand with different variables, but in the back of your mind are the lessons you've already learned. You make a promise to yourself not to make the same mistakes twice.

Can FTL feel unfair? Sometimes. Can it be needlessly random? Yes, absolutely. Is it a wildly entertaining game that keeps you wanting more? Of course.

Final Grade: A-

NES Replay: Golf

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: October 1985

What’s revolutionary one year is remarkably passé the next.

Take Golf, for example. Golf is a very bare-bones representation of the sport, and it’s missing a lot of features that we today take for granted in a golf game. For example, here in some vital information that’s not displayed onscreen in Golf:

1. How long your shot traveled.
2. How much distance you have to the pin.
3. The general distance that each club can hit.
4. Where the ball might approximately land if everything goes right with your shot.

That’s a lot of really important information that you would expect to see in a golf game, and it’s all inexplicably missing.
There are a few other flaws with Golf. For one, there’s no rough in this game. You’re either on the fairway or you’re not. Missed the fairway by a pixel? Too bad! You’re out of bounds! Have fun losing a stroke!

There’s very little control over the direction of your shots, either. You can aim in one of 16 directions, and that’s it. That can put you in an awkward position where you know that the wind will knock you off course, but you can either overcorrect or undercorrect for it. Either way, you lose.

Yet, as primitive as Golf is to us today, this was an absolute godsend for console gamers of the time. Look at this screenshot from Golf:

And now look at this screenshot from Golf for the Atari 2600, released five years earlier:

That’s an enormous difference. One of those screenshots actually looks like the sport of golf. The other looks like blotches and blocks.

For 1985, Golf was revolutionary. There was a stroke (pun not intended) of genius introduced into Golf as well, and one that put the skill of the player into the mix: The swing meter. The swing meter is so simple and yet so vital that it’s the de facto standard in almost every golf game since then, yet Golf was the first console game that used it.

Here’s how it works: There’s a meter by your golfer with a little arrow on it. When you’re ready to take your shot, you press A to start your swing. The arrow starts moving to the left. Press A to stop the arrow where you want, and that determines the power of your shot. The meter starts heading back the other way, and you press A again to determine your accuracy. If you hit A in the right place, you’ll be accurate. If you miss to the left or right, you’ll either hook or slice your shot.

The swing meter makes Golf feel like golf. Golf is a game of careful planning and study, where you can look closely at your shot and plan what you want the ball to do, then watch it all become undone because you failed to turn your wrist just so. It’s a mixture of the mental and the physical, and both need to be in tune in order to succeed. For the first time in a console golf game, a player could experience the humbling frustration of deciding where you want the ball to go, then making a huge mistake and sending the ball rocketing in exactly the wrong direction. This is exactly what a golf player wants in a golf game, and Golf was the first one that delivered it.

Today, Golf is almost unplayable due to the features it lacks. However, for when it was released and how much it advanced console golf games, we have to give it a ton of credit.

One final note: You know how they say that Native Americans used every part of the buffalo after their hunts? Nintendo is also notorious for using "every part of the buffalo" as well. Nothing ever, ever goes to waste in their remarkable back catalog, no matter how obscure.

For example, in 2006’s Wii Sports, there was a well-received motion-controlled golf game. Did you ever wonder where they got the design for the golf course featured in it?

It came from this game, right here. They modeled the golf course in Wii Sports (and subsequently Wii Sports Resort) off of this exact golf course in Golf, made in 1985. That’s 21 years later. Every part of the buffalo, indeed.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Gyromite

NES Replay: Excitebike

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: October 1985

With some games, you just had to be there.

Playing Excitebike today isn't all that exciting. It's a very simple side-scrolling racing game where you ride around a track on a motorcycle and try to get the fastest time while making sure your engine doesn't overheat. There's a level editor in there to make your own tracks as well.

But in 1985? This was off the hook.

The controls were pretty cool. When your motorcycle goes off a ramp, it flies through the air and you have to press the left or right buttons on the D-pad to rotate it. If you land on your back tire, the motorcycle bounces a little bit and slows down. If you land on the front tire, your motorcycle crashes and it takes time for you to get back on your feet. With just a bit of practice, you can get your motorcycle to land on both tires at the same time and keep up your momentum.
But while the racing was fun, the biggest draw was the track creation. The ability to make your own racetracks on a console game was amazing, and certainly wasn't possible before. Sure, there was a definite learning curve to the track editor, but once you got the hang of it, you could make any track you wanted!

There’s a problem with Excitebike, though. You can't save any created tracks, so once the system is shut off all your hard work goes in the toilet. You also can't transfer the track to a different cartridge or play any tracks that your friends have created either.

Why would Nintendo overlook such a basic function? Well, it’s wasn’t exactly on purpose. There are menu options for “Save” and “Load,” but the instruction manual explains that they don’t work. They’re a holdover from the Japanese version.

The ability to save your track was available in the Japanese version because of a peripheral called the Famicom Data Recorder. It looked just like a regular tape recorder and had the ability to record game data on cassette tapes. Nintendo included that save/load function into Excitebike just in case they decided to bring the Data Recorder to North America, but due to the low sales of the Data Recorder in Japan and its limited usefulness, they didn't see any point to it.

That's shame, since that's what really hampers Excitebike's long-term replayability. Once you've raced through the tracks, there isn't much else to do but race through them again. You can't even save your best track times. And if you create a track, it's just going to vanish once you turn the game off. Why bother?

Nintendo has, of course, re-released Excitebike several times since then, and almost every time they've included the save function, which allows created tracks can be stored locally. At this point, though, it's too little, too late. The world has moved on from Excitebike.

But did Excitebike work as a launch title? Yes and no. It worked because the racing was good and because the level editor was a neat idea. It didn’t exactly come together, though, because it was missing that fussy little save function. Fortunately, this didn't inspire much anger at the time or hamper sales of Excitebike too much. Excitebike is still remembered fondly, despite what it's missing.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Golf

The Lost Art of the Mixtape

I'm not one of those people that looks upon things from the past with longing. I'm not nostalgic by nature. Maybe it's because I didn't have a happy or fun childhood, so I have no desire to look at the past lovingly.

That being said, there's one thing that I truly miss: The mixtape.

Allow Rob from High Fidelity to explain the rules:

Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do's and don'ts. First of all you're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing. [...] You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don't wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules. [...] [It's] hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem.

Here were my mixtape rules:

1) The first song had to catch attention, but you could not use Side 1, Track 1 of any album. That's cheating, since artists usually put their punchiest songs at the beginning of an album.

2) Avoid tape clicks. I would pause the tape after each song, change out the CD, then unpause the tape. However, you had to time it right so that there was the right amount of pausing in between each song. It was a very specific process.

3) Don't play the same band twice in a row. Just bad form.

3a) However, if a song by a band moves into another naturally and you want to preserve that flow, OK. Just don't make a habit of it.

4) The last song on the tape couldn't be an album's last song. For example, you can't use "Everything's Ruined" by Fountains of Wayne to close out the tape, because it's the last track on their self-titled album.

5) Try not to use the same songs on multiple mixtapes. Mix it up. Get creative.

6) Better to be a little short than too long. If the tape ends in the middle of a track, you've just failed at mixtapes.

All of this requires that you really, really know what music you own. You had to know not only what tracks were the best for each situation, but you also had to know specifically how long each one was so you knew how much time you had to work with. Could you squeeze in that extra track, or would you run overtime?

A lot of artists would put the length of each track on their albums. Bless 'em. A lot of them wouldn't. Curse 'em. When they didn't put the track times, you really, really, really had to know how long your music was.

One of the other quirks of the mixtape is that you had to sit there and put the tape together. If your tape was 90 minutes long, you had to sit there for all 90 minutes or end up ruining your tape. It was a labor of love that required a bit of sacrifice.

At the risk of sounding like an old man, making a mix CD doesn't have the same charm. You can literally click a few times on a program, have it check to see if there's too much music to fit on a CD, step away, and let the program make the CD. I know we can carry lots of music on our iPods too, and that's great. Really. It is.

However, what made mixtapes so challenging is that you had to pick just a few tracks that were important to you. You couldn't include "everything by Radiohead." You had to pick, "Which song is more important to me? 'Black Star' or 'Let Down'? Would this person like early, guitar-rock Radiohead, or more unusual tracks like 'Pearly'?" (This was before Kid A came out, by the way.)

There was nothing worse than sending out a mixtape that you slaved over and spent time arranging carefully and getting a tape back to you that was recorded on the quick. I remember setting up a tape with all of my rules and carefully curating a collection of music for a girlfriend and receiving a tape slapped together with 10 songs by the same person. That was a warning sign if I ever saw one.

I know mixtapes were a lot of work, and I know it sounds like a hassle, but it was a lot of fun too. When you felt the urge to carve out a couple of hours of your life to make a tape for someone, you knew they were important to you. A mixtape wasn't just about the music. It was about carving out time to do something important, to share something about yourself and take pride in the way you were doing it.

NES Replay: Duck Hunt

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: October 1985

Duck Hunt shows how far you can take a simple concept if you throw in a little bit of character.

At its heart, Duck Hunt is an incredibly simple shooting gallery game. One or two ducks will appear on screen and fly around, and you have to use the NES Zapper to shoot them down. If you miss the ducks and run out of bullets or don't take your shot before the ducks fly away, you have to try again. Miss a certain amount of ducks, and it's game over.

There's also a clay-pigeon shooting game in Duck Hunt, but no one remembers that one as well as the duck-shooting. Why is that?

It's all because of this dog.

Whenever you kill a duck, this dog pops up and holds up the dead duck for you. However, when you miss the ducks, the dog pops up and laughs at you with a really high-pitched giggle.

Now, I'm not a violent guy by nature, and I would never dream of shooting a dog in real life, but I want to shoot the Duck Hunt dog. Everyone who has ever played Duck Hunt wishes that they could shoot the dog. People have made games and posted them online specifically so that the player can shoot the dog. There is not a person alive who can honestly say that they like the Duck Hunt dog.

Everyone has such a visceral reaction to this dog just because he laughs at you for failing. It drives us crazy because we already know we missed the ducks. We don't need a computer dog to rub it in. Yet, there he is, mocking us and making us feel inadequate.

We also have that strong reaction because of the impotence we feel toward the dog. It sits there, laughing at us, and we have no recourse against it. We can’t shoot it. We can’t make it stop laughing. We can only sit and stare as it laughs at us while we quietly seethe.

The funny thing is that this was a huge leap forward in gaming. If you think about it, the Duck Hunt dog is really the first video game character that inspired widespread hatred specifically because of its pre-programmed personality.

There are a lot of video game characters that generate hate among players, but for different reasons. Some characters might control poorly or wander around doing stupid things. Ashley in Resident Evil is an example of this. Other characters are hated because they're difficult to defeat, like the Cyberdemon in DOOM.

But this was different. The Duck Hunt dog was programmed to be annoying, and it succeeded beyond Nintendo's wildest dreams. That’s a crazy idea that hadn’t really been explored on a large scale. There were certainly RPGs that had characters in them that touched people’s emotions in specific ways, and there were text adventure games that had done the same thing. However, to get so many people to all feel the same way about one character was completely new. This was proof among a wide cross-section of people that video game characters could inspire genuine emotions.

That's what makes Duck Hunt quietly revolutionary. It's amazing that a little cartoon dog that laughs at you showed the path to emotional engagement in a video game, but it did. By putting forth a little extra effort, you could actually feel an emotion at a video game character.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to load up Duck Hunt again and try and shoot the dog.

Final Rating: