NES Replay: BurgerTime

Kurt Vonnegut, the late, great famous author, told a story about his brief time at Sports Illustrated. His first day at the magazine, he was assigned to write a story about a horse that jumped a fence and tried to run away. He stared at the paper for about a half an hour before finally typing, "The horse jumped over the f---ing fence," then left.

That's how I felt while I was trying to write about BurgerTime. "The cook walked over the f---ing burger."

In BurgerTime, you play a little cook that has to walk over pieces of a hamburger, which drops them down to the lower levels of the screen. Completed burgers earn you points. Meanwhile, food items are following you around the level and trying to kill you, and eliminating them only stops them for a second or two before they come back. It's like Guy Fieri's fever dreams come to life.

NES Replay: Track & Field

The arcade cabinets for Track & Field took a beating.

Track & Field is a collection of small olympic-based minigames, and the way to control several of them is by pounding on the buttons as fast as possible. Players tried to come up with various ways of speeding this up, so they used stuff like golf balls and metal rulers to get an edge. Even when it was a popular game, it was very hard to find working Track & Field machines in the wild.

The NES port retains this gameplay, and that makes Track & Field a game that you can only play for a short time. My family used to play Track & Field II together, and after a while everyone had cramps in their wrists. It's hard to keep up such a furious attack on the controller.

About a year later, Nintendo released something that made these types of games exponentially easier: The NES Max controller with a turbo button. The turbo buttons made the system think that you were pressing the buttons on the controller rapidly. That made games like Track & Field hilariously easy. It was like pressing a button marked, "I win." For example, the world record at the time for the 100 yard dash was a little under 10 seconds. With the turbo button, you can complete it in about 7.5 seconds.

However, there are a few games included in Track & Field that won't work with any turbo controls and actually require skill, like skeet shooting and archery. The skeet shooting is especially notable, since they made a really cool decision.

Most developers would have had you move a pointer around a screen to shoot down the clay pigeons. However, Konami realized that a pointer controlled by the controller would be too slow or inaccurate. They could have had people use the Zapper, but that would have taken up a controller port that would have stopped people from playing two-player games, so that didn't work either.

Instead, they had the system auto aim to some extent while still having the player press the button to fire at the proper time. It's a lot harder than it sounds, as you have to quickly press left or right on the d-pad, then shoot before the clay pigeon moves out of range. I couldn't get the hang of it, despite how absurdly simple it was.

Even with all this, though, Track & Field still felt kind of dull. It was certainly done well, but the presentation was sort of lacking. I didn't feel like there was any overarching goal, just a bunch of events that you could play individually. After a while, I remembered how great Track & Field II was, and fired that up instead. I ended up playing Track & Field II for an hour.

So, while Track & Field was certainly on the right track (wordplay!), it wasn't exactly where it needed to be. For a first attempt, there were some admirable concepts that Konami would later expand and deepen.

NES Replay: Rush'n Attack

Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Released: April 1987

For our younger readers, I have a question: Do they still do duck-and-cover drills in school?

If they don't anymore, here's what they were. For years, the US was terrified that the Russians (or Soviets) would destroy us in a nuclear war. For some reason, they decided that the best way to protect kids was by having duck-and-cover drills. We would hear a siren, and all the kids would get underneath our desks and cover our heads so that in the case of a fiery death by nuclear bomb, we would be protected by the nuclear-resistant coating on the school desks [citation needed].

This is what it was like in the US for 50 years. We knew, just KNEW, that the godless communist Soviets were going to blow us up with a nuclear bomb and then launch a full ground invasion so we had to be prepared any way we could. In reality, the vast majority of Russians were just trying to keep their head above water in a horribly corrupt system, but the citizens of the US had no way of knowing this. To us, the Russians were a technical powerhouse and we had to fight them however we could.


So what does this have to do with Rush'N Attack? Read the title of that game again. In Japan and Europe, this game was called Green Beret, but for the US, it was re-titled so that it could play on the fear of the Russians. It's kind of sad looking back on how the US viewed another country, but it's our cultural legacy, and there's not much to do about it except point at it and shake our heads.

In the meantime, how is Rush'N Attack? It's surprisingly good. It's a side-scrolling action game where your main character's only weapon is a knife, and he's faced with wave after wave of bad guys as he infiltrates military bases. Along the way, he can pick up a gun, an RPG, and other momentary powerups.

Rush'N Attack feels like an early draft of Contra. I mean, if they would have replaced the hero's knife with a gun, it would be halfway there. It also feels like an early, early draft of Metal Slug, if you can believe that. I don't know if anyone who worked on Rush'N Attack worked on Metal Slug, but I wouldn't be shocked if there were.

Konami demonstrated that they understood completely how controls had to work in a game. The controls are responsive, and there's never a sequence where I felt that I died because the system didn't respond in time. I died for many other reasons, like getting shot or kicked in the head, but it was almost always my fault.

I also have to give a special shoutout to the ladders in Rush'N Attack. Yes, the ladders. When your player jumps at a ladder, he automatically grabs the ladder in mid-air, which can save you a second or two. In other words, you don't have to be standing on solid ground in order to climb, or jump and press the up key on the D-pad, but just jump at the ladder. It was a way to rethink controls and limit the complexity at such an early juncture, and it deserved some special praise in my book.

If there's a flaw in Rush'N Attack, it's that there isn't a whole lot to do but run from right to left and kill people. Sometimes, that's all you need in a game, but as later games would show, there was a way to do that without veering into repetitive territory. Still, Rush'N Attack really works, both as a time capsule into a strange period in our history and as, you know, a game.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Volleyball

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: March 1987

I love playing volleyball in certain environments. Basically, if no one's keeping score and all of my friends are just having a good, relaxed time, it's the best game in the world.

Something happens every single time I play volleyball: Someone starts keeping score. Then, that person starts trash talking, and then someone else does, then my old, familiar competitiveness kicks in, and then I have to quit because I get too angry. Even just thinking about it makes me mad.

Why do I get so frustrated? Because volleyball is meant to be fun. It's played in sunny places, on the beach, with people throwing frisbees nearby. It's not supposed to be a hyper-competitive trash-talking game. If you're playing volleyball and you don't have a Corona with a lime wedged into the rim of the bottle waiting for you on the sideline, you're playing it wrong.

Understanding this about volleyball is key to understanding why Volleyball is such a waste. Volleyball is supposed to be fun! Getting hit in the face with a volleyball while someone screams through a net at you isn't fun.

Volleyball forgets this. You get three game modes: Men's volleyball, women's volleyball and practice. Men's volleyball is much more difficult that women's, which is insulting and sexist in and of itself. The computer team will routinely spike balls right into your player's faces, giving you no opportunity to block them. Playing against the women's team is easier. Even still, whomever you play as, Volleyball is horribly difficult to control.

Playing the practice mode shows why the controls are so bad. Whenever your opponent hits the ball to you, some, but not all of your players can go get the ball. In the practice mode, the players that are eligible to hit the ball light up so you can easily tell who's supposed to get it. You'll see that the players you can control are, frankly, a little random. At least in this mode, though, you can make the right decision as to who you can move and when.

However, in the regular mode, the players don't light up to show that they're eligible. You might think that one player is eligible, but when you try and move them you find that it was the opposite player who was eligible, and now you've made a huge mistake. In a game where a split second makes a huge difference, it's a pretty big oversight.

The weirdest thing with Volleyball, though, is the title screen. In a first for a Nintendo game, a person named "T. Hashishita" is credited alongside Nintendo. That's really odd, isn't it? Not even Miyamoto gets that sort of credit. Who is "T. Hashishita"?

With a big hat tip to the forms at lostlevels.org, Tomoshige Hashishita was a programmer. He also programmed Ice Hockey and worked on Time Twist, a game only released in Japan. How did he get on the title screen for a Nintendo release? It's really hard to say. Did he just insert his name in there? Did Nintendo agree to credit him? If so, why? It's one of those weird quirks that have been lost to history.

However, with the way Volleyball turned out, if I were Mr. Hashishita I wouldn't really want to take credit for it. Even if someone would master the controls, I don't see how it could be fun for more than five minutes. It's not as laid-back as a volleyball game should be, and it's impossible to play on any higher difficulty levels without reenacting the pool scene from Meet The Parents over and over.

Final Rating: