NES Replay: Tag Team Wrestling

Developer: SAS Sakata
Publisher: Data East
Released: October 1986

Name one good fighting game for the NES. Go on, I'll wait.

How come the NES didn't have good fighting games? There were a couple of reasons, but one of the biggest ones is that the NES simply didn't have the ability to make that many calculations so quickly. That's so important in a fighting game, because without the ability to allocate some programming to AI, the AI either needs to cheat like mad or be brain-dead.

That didn't stop developers from trying to make fighting games work on the NES. In the first wave of third-party games, there were two wrestling games. Between the two of them, the absolutely terrible M.U.S.C.L.E. was the better of the two. That should tell you how bad Data East's Tag Team Wrestling is.

It's terrible for two big reasons. The first reason is the same one that plagued M.U.S.C.L.E.: Tag Team Wrestling cheats constantly. The second the computer player is within a pixel of your character, it'll grab you and do something horrible to you. You don't even have a chance to defend yourself before you're thrown against the ropes or somehow injured.

Tag Team Wrestling is also awful because it's ugly as sin. If you've been following this series, you'll know I'm not in the habit of picking on 8-bit graphics. If done right, they're fantastic. If done wrong, they make you want to murder yourself with a George Foreman Grill to the face. Tag Team Wrestling falls into the latter category. The characters are so indistinct that half the time you can't tell which character is which. Of special note, the walking animation is the worst I've ever seen. Just look at this:

Who decided that the characters should walk that way? Nobody walks like that. When something as obviously awful as that gets into a game, the only explanation can be laziness. There's simply no other way that someone sees that walking animation and says, "Yes. That is how a human being walks." Someone saw that and said, "That's good enough."

However, one good thing came out of Tag Team Wrestling. In 2000, some animators were trying to think of a name for a villain in their new web series. Finally, they pulled a name from Tag Team Wrestling:

And history was made. So that's one good thing out of all the bad stuff. Just the same as every cloud has a silver lining, I guess you could say that every cartridge has gold connectors, even if you have to clean all the corrosion off of them first.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Ninja Kid

Developer: TOSE
Publisher: Bandai
Released: October 1986

We're kind of sitting at an incredible point in gaming. At this point, anyone can make and sell a game without worrying about system limitations, distribution issues or other petty problems. It really is a great leap forward in the industry.

There was an earlier great leap forward back in the 80's driven almost exclusively by the NES, but it was tempered by the fact that developers really didn't know what they were doing. For the first time developers could make games that matched up to their lofty ambitions, yet they didn't have the rules of the game quite figured out.

That leads us to today's example: Ninja Kid. Ninja Kid is a platform game with some minor random generation. Every time you start a new level, the game will pick one of a few different choices, each a little different and each totally unique. For example, in one level, a flame follows you and you have to light several candles around the level while avoiding enemies. In another, you have to collect floating spirits, and in another you have to kill a set amount of enemies. There are some others too, and it's neat seeing what the developers came up with.

Ninja Kid had a ton of potential, but never quite matches up to it for a few reasons. For example, like many games of this era, one hit will kill your character. However, frequently enemies will fire at you from off screen, and the controls are too sluggish to avoid their projectiles. It's such a frequent problem that there are only two ways to progress: Spend an inordinate amount of time playing Ninja Kid, or pound away on the save/load state keys in your emulator. That's not a sign of a well-made game.

It's also very random. Some stages, like the candle-lighting stage, are really easy. Some, like a side-scrolling shooter where Ninja Kid rides a kite, are incredibly difficult. It all depends on what you get. Then, once you beat a stage, you're presented with two doors. One door goes to the next level, and the other to an incredibly difficult miniboss. Sure, there's an item that will help point the way to the right door, but picking the wrong door still leads to a world of hurt. You can lose due to a flip of a coin, basically.

I really wish I could recommend Ninja Kid, because I love unearthing lost classics and bringing them to light. I was really incredibly pumped to play it because it sounded so great on paper, but it ended up as an example of a company that had a great idea but couldn't pull it together quite like they wanted to.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: M.U.S.C.L.E.

Developer: TOSE
Publisher: Bandai
Released: October 1986

Anyone who's played games for any length of time knows what "ragequitting" is. It's that moment when you can't take any more of a game, and you angrily hit the power button and yank out the disc/cartridge. A ragequit really sticks with you too. Just thinking about one is enough to make your blood boil.

M.U.S.C.L.E. caused me to ragequit twice, and it made me think: What's the anatomy of a ragequit? What causes us to shut off a game rather than keep pressing onward?

At its heart, a video game is designed to present us with a goal and the tools to accomplish that goal. They're goal-generating machines, essentially. The best games present reasonable goals along with tools that are uniquely suited to meet those goals.


We make an agreement when we play a game that we'll expect a certain amount of difficulty in exchange for our time, and there is a certain element of "fairness" that has to enter in to the equation.Some games, like Dark Souls or Ninja Gaiden, tell you up front that the game is going to be wildly unfair to the player. Other games, like the Kirby series, tell you up front that you're not going to have a hard time. Now, if you flip that and make Dark Souls as easy as a Kirby game and a Kirby game as hard as Dark Souls, what happens? The person playing Dark Souls is bored, and the person playing Kirby is frustrated.

So, what's unfair? I would posit that one of the things that make a game is "unfair" when the opponents have access to skills, abilities and advantages that the player doesn't. For example, in Mario Kart, it's exceedingly difficult to hit an opponent with a blue shell right before they reach the finish line. The computer player, though, has no trouble doing it over and over.

Now, here's another wrinkle: Let's say I place a chocolate chip muffin on my desk. It's just your average muffin, nothing special. Between you and the muffin, I put a death-defying obstacle course with scythes, tigers and a rabid puma. Are you going to attempt to get the muffin? Of course not! It's just a muffin. It's not important.

Likewise, when a game's goal is minimal yet the difficulty is excessive, we quit. Why bother doing something insanely difficult for no good reason?

M.U.S.C.L.E. commits both of those sins. It's a typical wrestling game, where two fighters rassle for dominance. However, periodically a character who walks along the edge of the wrestling mat will toss a power-up into the ring that gives the player super speed and strength. The computer player inherently understands what angle and speed the power-up is traveling at and moves over to where it will be as soon as it's released.

Once the computer player gets the power-up, they rocket around the ring at insane speeds. They seem to be able to catch up to you and figure out where you're going to be, and once they hit you with one move, they do not stop. On the off chance that you get the power-up, the computer player avoids you like a plague rat, and of course you can't move at the same high speed as the computer player. To be fair, the NES didn't have a lot of clock cycles for AI. In mano a mano games, they had to cheat a lot to give the computer a fighting chance. That being said, there had to have been a better way to do things.

On top of that, if you win a match in M.U.S.C.L.E.... who cares? You're just going to have to fight again against some more wrestlers who are going to do the same thing to you over and over again. Why bother winning a match? It's the chocolate chip muffin on the other side of the abattoir: The reward doesn't match the effort you put in to get to it.

I've already spent a lot more time talking about M.U.S.C.L.E. than the original developers put into it, but this is a game that really angried up my blood. Maybe writing about it will be a catharsis. Let me check.

Nope. Still angry.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Chubby Cherub

Developer: TOSE
Publisher: Bandai
Released: October 1986

Up until mid-1986, every game released for the NES was published by Nintendo. However, what really made the NES great weren't just the games Nintendo made but the ones that third-party companies published as well. There was a rich vein of third-party games that ran through the NES, from A Boy and His Blob to Zanac. Some of them, like the Mega Man games, Castlevania and others, were classics in their own right. The vast majority were not.

Of all the third-party games, Chubby Cherub has the distinction of being the first one we'll cover. Technically speaking, Bandai released three games at the same time, but alphabetically Chubby Cherub came first. Lucky us.

It's a really, really odd game, and it makes you wonder: Out of all the fantastic third-party games that were released for the NES, how did a game like Chubby Cherub end up being first in line?


Namco Bandai is a huge toy manufacturer today, but in the 80's and 90's they were even bigger. They went through a brief slump in the early 2000's and ended up merging with Namco, and that's where they are today.

Bandai had a close relationship with Nintendo. They were one of the earliest companies to identify the NES as a hit, so they were the first to market with their third-party games and accessories. For example, they produced the Power Pad, which ended up being released in Japan in 1986 and stateside in 1988.

But why make Chubby Cherub? Where did the idea even come from? Well, the three games Bandai released in the 1986 were based on pre-existing Japanese properties. Chubby Cherub actually was based off of a manga about a ghost named Q-tarō. Q-tarō flew and was afraid of dogs (specifically beagles), so those elements made it into the game.

Stateside, though, almost no one was familiar with the manga. Bandai still had a game that was complete and ready to be released, and they wanted to send it to America. To do so, they made a decision that became the de facto standard for Japanese games for several years: Bandai changed character names, so Q-tarō the ghost became Chubby Cherub. Next, they made some minor translations and changed the sprite for Q-tarō into an angel. Finally, the manual spelled out a new story for Chubby Cherub. Nothing else really changed.

That made Chubby Cherub supremely weird. Why exactly was a fat little angel flying around eating food and avoiding dogs? Who knows? When you understand the manga that Chubby Cherub is based off of it makes more sense, but there was no way of knowing this information back in the 80's. In a weird way, since large chunks of these games would go unexplained or poorly translated, these weird little quirky games were the first exposure a lot of people had to Japanese culture. I guess we should thank them? I think?

Anyway, Chubby Cherub at least has some interesting concepts. While a lot of later developers emulated the hop'n'bop style of Super Mario Bros., Chubby Cherub focused on movement and evasion. Chubby Cherub flies around the levels looking for food and avoiding dogs. Rarely will you want to take on most enemies head-on.

While evasion can be an interesting gameplay idea, it doesn't work well here. It just feels clunky and dull, like you're using a Mack truck to navigate an obstacle course built for a sports car. Since you can just fly over most obstacles, it's not horribly challenging unless you want it to be.

It also demonstrates how clearly level design can make or break a game. Chubby Cherub's levels have more padding than the titular Chubby Cherub himself. The levels show you the same stuff over and over and over again with no flow whatsoever. You'll see the same few enemies, the same few buildings and the same obstacles.

Chubby Cherub only has two things going for it: There are no bottomless pits and it's weird. That's not enough to keep any game fun to play for long.

Final Rating: