NES Replay: Gradius

Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Released: December 1986

Gradius was the first classic shooter for the NES. It's got an awesome progression system, it's challenging even if you have every possible weapon upgrade, and it's relentlessly interesting. It also looks fantastic.

So what's so great about each of these parts? Let's pull them apart and look at them.

1) The powerup system.

In most early shooters, a power-up will automatically improve your ship. In Gradius, picking up a power-up fills a meter at the bottom of your screen. If you have only one power-up banked, you can upgrade your ship's speed. If you have more bonuses banked, you can apply the bonus to things like a missile that attacks below you, extra drones that fire along with you, and a shield that protects you from damage temporarily.

There's a risk/reward dynamic involved in this system. In order to get the really good upgrades, you have to keep picking up bonuses and not using them. Can you survive long enough with some of the vanilla powers? Or will you give in and take that speed power-up instead of getting the extra drone? It's a really well-made system that Konami would use in other shooters.


2) The challenge.

Even if you have every upgrade, your skill in Gradius will determine your success. While having all the upgrades will certainly help you, bullets are flying, enemies come from all over, and one false move will get you killed. Balancing everything together will keep you alive.

3) The varied environs.

Yes, Gradius is a typical side-scrolling shooter where you're flying from left-to-right and destroying everything in your path. However, the way the challenge is framed is constantly changing. In one level, you're killing weird moai statues that regurgitate blue discs, in another you're fighting for your life against raging volcanoes, and in another you're blasting through barriers that are surrounded by turrets.. There's always something different, which keeps Gradius fresh.

4) The graphics.

Konami did something fantastic with Gradius. Remember, the NES could only have so many sprites onscreen at once. However, Konami still wanted to have lots of bullets and enemies onscreen. How could they get around the limitations of the NES?

Brilliantly, Konami used sprite flicker to their advantage. By making the bullets and missiles flicker on purpose, they could alternate bullets and missiles and have the screen filled with danger without sacrificing graphical fidelity. Since old CRT TVs held on to images for a split second after they were displayed, the flicker would be barely noticeable for most people.

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So Gradius did a lot of things right, but there's one final stroke of genius that deserves mention. Gradius is very hard, obviously. The player is only given three lives to do the impossible. How would they do it?

Konami included something by accident, a secret code that would gain ubiquity. During the making of the game, a programmer found that Gradius was too difficult for him to play through. To get around this, he included a secret code that accidentally slipped through production and ended up in the final game.

Long after our civilization is destroyed by marauding Slagafarian Raiders in the Great Umber Wars of the 32nd century, a lone wanderer will be searching a cave for supplies when he will see etchings on the wall. Peering closely, he will angle his torch to see mankind's greatest triumph, a simple sequence that will bring tears to his eyes:

↑↑↓↓←→←→BA

He will pass this information down from one generation to the next, eventually rebuilding the world in this image. Finally, we shall see the stars. Finally, we shall ascend the path to transcendence, all thanks to one little code.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Karate Champ

Developer: Technos Japan
Publisher: Data East

Karate Champ is either frustrating or hilarious. There is no in-between.

The point of Karate Champ is that you're in a one-on-one fight against another karate master. There are different arenas: On top of a cliff, in the trees, in the desert, etc. You throw a variety of punches and kicks at your opponent, and the first one to land a blow wins the match. Win a few matches in a row, and you move on to the next karate master.

So what makes it frustrating? Well, when you're throwing kicks and punches in the direction of your opponent and you can't tell whether or not they're going to land, that's frustrating. For example, if both players throw a punch at the same time, does either one land? If I'm kicking, and they're punching, does either one land? What if I'm kicking low and he's punching high? There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to them landing. This leads to less of a karate fight and more of a flailing competition.

The controls are fantastically borked too. Press B, and you'll attack to the left. Press A and you'll attack to the right. This is stupid, right? Shouldn't your attacks always be aimed in the direction of your opponent? Is there ever a good tactical reason to attack the air behind you?

To be fair, this was a minor evolutionary misstep in fighting games that took a while to resolve. Developers had trouble figuring out what to do with both buttons. One button worked as an attack button, but the other one could be used for... ? This was a problem that took a while to sort out, but as the fighting game genre grew developers realized that they could use that extra button for something else, like a punch, kicking or even blocking. Technos Japan made a different choice, and that's a big reason that Karate Champ is so terrible.

Even if they would have sorted out the controls, though, Karate Champ would still be bad. The collision detection is so awful that none of your attacks matter at all. Attacks appear to overlap each other, blocking is a chore (although the computer player can block anything it wants to) and doing a jump kick never, ever works. While some other fighting games we've touched on could conceivably be better in two-player, the collision detection would undoubtedly lead to both parties frustratedly throwing down the controllers and going off to play something more fun, like "let's pull our eyes out with fishhooks."

However, I'm about to make your day. Remember when I said that Karate Champ can be hilarious? I discovered something glorious about Karate Champ, and I would like to share it with all of you.

When each round starts, the computer player will walk toward you at the same pace, never stopping. Press the attack button at the right time, and you will hit your opponent in the face every single time. It's tricky to find that sweet spot, but if you start getting it right, it makes Karate Champ a great "Got your nose" simulator.

Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present to you the following video. It's the only good thing to come out of Karate Champ, I assure you.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Ghosts N' Goblins

Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Released: November 1986

Ghosts N' Goblins has a reputation for one thing, and one thing only: Difficulty. It's a really tough game, and that difficulty is compounded when you reach the end and find out you have to play through the whole thing again to get to the "true" ending.

Yet, people talk about Ghosts N' Goblins fondly. For such a punishing game, that seems strange. Why do people like it so much? Is this is a case of gaming masochism? Do the blinders of nostalgia cause people to think better of Ghosts N' Goblins than they should? Or is there something we can learn about difficulty?

There's a very good reason that people still like Ghosts N' Goblins. Ghosts N' Goblins, while a very difficult game, still feels fair. It's such a tough balancing act, but Capcom managed to nail it in a way that few developers can manage. Here's why.


A lot of developers at the time artificially inflated difficulty by making your character difficult to control, giving your player a limited range for their attacks, or making each character take hundreds upon hundreds of bullets / punches / fireballs before it dies. However, Ghosts N' Goblins bucked that trend by keeping the main character, Sir Arthur, completely functional. His spears travel as far you need them to, enemies mostly die with one hit, and Arthur moves quickly and responsively.

Also, Arthur can also take two hits before dying, which is incredibly fair for a game of the time. Once again, Capcom gives the player every possible chance to succeed. However, they did something incredibly evil: When Arthur gets hit, his armor falls off so he has to run around in his underwear. Your powers don't change and you don't become weaker, but just that one thing makes it feel like you lost. It's a great, great, way to mess with players.

So, Capcom gives you every opportunity to win, and yet Ghosts N' Goblins is still tough. How? What makes Ghosts N' Goblins so difficult is the relentlessness and number of the enemies. You have to keep moving or you'll get swarmed.

This is brilliant, because our human nature makes us stop and try and fight the enemies, but in Ghosts N' Goblins, that way lies madness. In order to proceed, we have to fight our basic inclination to stay and do battle. For lack of a better way to explain it, the way to play Ghosts N' Goblins is to play it like Run Away: The Game. I mean this in the best possible way. Ghosts N' Goblins is winnable only if you swallow your fears and venture into the unknown. That's awesome.

Once again, the whole time Ghosts N' Goblins gives you every advantage. You're presented with a near-impossible task, but you have all the tools to achieve that task. That's something that a lot of developers didn't understand back then and some of them still don't get, and it's a marvel that Capcom understood it back in 1986.

It certainly doesn't hurt that Ghosts N' Goblins has style oozing from every pore. They manage to make an environment that's as oppressive as the difficulty level. More amazingly, they accomplish this while using every color at their disposal. It's not just a game full of blacks and grays.

So, there's a very good reason that Ghosts N' Goblins is still a highly regarded game. It's brutal, but fair. It's asking you to do something completely crazy, gives you the tools and gets out of your way.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: 1985's Games Ranked

Here's a brief (and belated) ranking of the NES launch games.

18) Clu Clu Land - Poor controls and needlessly complicated instructions doom this one.

17) Stack-Up - So what exactly am I doing in this game again? I'm doing what with the what now?

16) Ice Climber - Poor collision detection and terrible jump physics ruin a good concept.

15) 10-Yard Fight - An eye-opening game, because it managed to make the fast-paced sport of American football boring.

14) Hogan's Alley - Boy, people were easily amused back in the day.

13) Wild Gunman - It's not a great light-gun game, but at least it gives you a challenge.

12) Donkey Kong Jr. Math - Because what makes more sense than combining a giant barrel-throwing ape and math?

11) Tennis - At least it's not Pong.

10) Gyromite - A great co-op game that happened to include an unnecessary robot.

9) Golf - A revolutionary game that's almost unplayable today.

8) Mach Rider - VROOM VROOM CRASH AIIIEEEE SO MUCH BLOOD WHY ARE THE ORGANS NOT GOING BACK IN

7) Baseball - Really bare-bones, but it's at least fun.

6) Pinball - One of the better pinball games at the time, and it still kind of holds up.

5) Excitebike - Some missed opportunities, but fairly decent overall.

4) Duck Hunt - SHOOT THE DOG.

3) Kung Fu - Ahhhh, so you have come to this dojo seeking a fight.

2) Wrecking Crew - "Mr. Mario, tear down these walls."

1) Super Mario Bros. - This little-known indie game may have a future, you know.

NES Replay: Commando

Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Released: November 1986

At the beginning of every console's life cycle, there's a period where developers aren't sure what a console can really do. During this time, you'll see games that aren't really optimized for the system they're on, or games that overreach the bounds of what the new system can do.

This is not a new phenomenon. Back in 1986, Capcom did that with Commando.

Commando was ported over to the NES from their original arcade game. It's a top-down shooter where you play as a character named Super Joe while he infiltrates and destroys a series of enemy bases. Bullets are flying, enemies shoot mortars and run everywhere, there are motorcyles, grenades, secret doors, and all sorts of other fun stuff.

When Capcom ported Commando to the NES, they tried to make it as close to the arcade game as they could. However, since the NES obviously wasn't as powerful as those arcade machines were, Capcom ended up with some bizarre technical problems.

The most notable is that sometimes enemies will simply disappear. Like, vanish. I want to stress, when this happened to me, it's not that I killed said enemy, and therefore he disappeared. No, the enemy would literally vanish into thin air, crossing over into some strange alternate dimension, never to be seen again.

I wasn't sure if this was just a glitch of my emulator, so I went ahead and watched a video on Youtube where someone played through the entire game. Sure enough, there were cases were the player started moving to shoot an enemy, and the enemy blinked out of existence like they were caught by a Weeping Angel. That reassured me that it wasn't just me.

So how does something like that happen? Let's recap what we know about the NES, taken from my previous article on Popeye:

"There are very few enemies onscreen at once in Popeye, and for good reason. The NES could handle 64 sprites onscreen at once, but only eight on any given vertical line at once. If there were more than eight, the ninth would disappear."

In this case, my best guess is that Capcom exceeded the 64-sprite limit, which caused one of them to vanish, but I can't be certain.

Did Capcom need that many sprites onscreen at once? Not really. Unless you try and kill every single enemy, which would be folly, you'll end up with about four or five enemies tailing you, just running behind you like Secret Service agents. They're completely unnecessary, like a TV on a honeymoon or a hotel in North Korea, yet there they are.

This was an example of Capcom trying to take a fairly advanced and action-packed arcade game and squeeze the whole thing into an NES cartridge. We've seen that some older arcade games, like Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., could fit into a cartridge. More recent arcade games, though, really couldn't be stuffed into the NES.

Still, even with these goofy issues, Commando is still a lot of fun and has a lot of character. There are cowardly commanders, broken bridges, and all sorts of mayhem. It actually captures the feel of a lone soldier desperately trying against enormous odds to capture enemy bases. It's definitely fun, and even more fun if you imagine a rip in space-time carrying off enemy soldiers to a world beyond ours.

Final Rating: