Sunday Game Tracks: Dr. Cossack Stage 2

Here's a selection from Mega Man 4: Dr. Cossack Stage 2.

NES Replay: Mario Bros.

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: June 1986

What made Mario a more enduring character than Pac-Man or Pitfall Harry? How come we’re not playing Pitfall Harry Kart 7 or Super Pac-Man Galaxy today? After all, those original games were just as popular in their day as any Mario game, if not more so.

I would argue that Mario endures because he feels a little more real. Even when he's battling a giant fire-breathing turtle/dragon in a fiery inferno, he still feels like an everyman. How come? Because Mario has a backstory.

In order for a player to identify strongly with a character, we need to know something about them. This sounds like a stupid thing to get hung up on with a video game character, but it’s important. Any bit of information at all will help. Anything at all.

Want some proof? Consider this: Why is Pitfall Harry jumping over scorpions? Why is he climbing on alligator heads? Is he looking for something? What’s his ultimate goal? What about Pac-Man? What’s he doing in the maze? Why is he getting pills? Why is he being chased by ghosts? Their games may have been great, but since their motivations were unclear, the characters themselves weren't important.


The only information that most people have about Mario is that he's an Italian plumber. That down-to-earth description makes Mario into someone that players can identify with and helps Mario succeed as a character where other characters failed. His motivations are almost always simple too: Rescue the princess / girlfriend / person.

Donkey Kong, first released into the arcades in 1980, laid down the idea for Mario but called him Jumpman at first. Donkey Kong Jr., in 1981, famously put Mario as the villain. It wasn't until Mario Bros., first released to the arcades in 1983, that Mario was given his famous job.

So how exactly did Mario become a plumbler? It all started from a gameplay idea. Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi came up with the idea of Mario being able to jump from platform to platform in a level, and that morphed into the idea of hitting enemies from below. From there, they asked why he would be killing enemies in that grim environment, and came up with a story about Mario having to clean out the sewers. And why would Mario have to clean out sewers? Well, he's a plumber! Bang!

A lot of other details about the Mario series came from Mario Bros. When looking for an enemy that could be hurt from below but not above, Miyamoto and Yokoi thought about using turtles. The design of the turtles is awfully similar to Koopa Troopas, and in future revisions, that's what they became.

Also, why are pipes green in Mario's world? The background color in all of Mario Bros.' levels is black. A grey colored pipe wouldn't really stand out against that background, so to make the pipes visible, Miyamoto selected green. In future games, it just sort of stuck.

So we owe an awful lot to Mario Bros. With all that being said, is it a fun game? Not really.

As we know by now, there's a fundamental difference between arcade games and in-home console games. In an arcade game, the point is to survive as long as you can and attain the highest score. On most home games, though, the point is forward progress.

Mario Bros. was built from the ground up for the arcades. Every level's layout is virtually identical. The only thing that changes from level to level are the enemies, and with only five different enemies, it doesn't take long for Mario Bros. to become a grim march to the end.

Other things work to Mario Bros. detriment. When Mario Bros. launched in 1983, Nintendo was apparently still experimenting with different jumping physics. Mario Bros. has less in common with the smooth jumping of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros., and a lot more in common with the funky physics of Ice Climbers. Combined with the drudgery of playing through level after level of the same old thing, Mario Bros. is pretty painful.

The good news is that it's found a second life of sorts as a bonus in other games. It was included as an Easter egg in Super Mario Bros. 3, then included in all of the Super Mario Advance games and a few others. It works much better there, as a smaller game that can be played for a few minutes and then discarded.

Maybe Nintendo can go back to it someday and rework it, maybe make it a little more varied or entertaining. Until then, it's more important for what it added to the Mario series as a whole than for how it plays.

Sunday Game Tracks: Another Winter

It's cold outside! It's time for this selection from Seiken Densetsu 3 called Another Winter.

NES Replay: Gumshoe

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1986

One of the reasons that Nintendo has been successful for so long is because they’re not afraid to think outside the box. Take the NES Zapper. Most developers looked at the gun-shaped peripheral and decided that they should make a game that uses it as a gun. It's the most obvious idea.

Nintendo didn't go the obvious route. Oh, sure, Nintendo made some shooting games at first, but it didn’t take long for them to ask the question, “OK, what else can this do? I mean, there were light-gun games before video games existed. Can we do something with the Zapper that you wouldn’t have been able to do before video games?”

The answer could be found, oddly enough, in a minigame buried in Hogan’s Alley. If you’ll recall, there was a minigame called Trick Shot in Hogan's Alley, where you shot at tin cans to make them bounce in the air. The goal was to make those cans land on platforms on the opposite side of the screen.

Trick Shot ended up being a glorified tech demo, since they took that idea and built an entire game around it. The result was Gumshoe.


In Gumshoe, you play a detective who has to find five gems in order to rescue his daughter. He walks to the right automatically, and you shoot him in order to make him jump. If he touches one of the several balloons scattered around the world, he'll get extra bullets. If he falls in a pit or gets hit by an enemy, he loses a life.

Gumshoe is definitely a well-built game. You would think that it would be hard to hit your player while he's moving, but they made a choice that makes it easy: He's almost always going to be on the left side of the screen. That means that you're usually aiming on two axes: X and Y.

See, you'll either be aiming up and down to move your player, or left and right to destroy enemies during the first part. Over time, enemies will come at you from diagonal angles, or from above, but aiming is easy because you're mostly not expected to shoot all over the screen, at least at the outset.

However, Gumshoe is still pretty difficult because enemies come at you fast. The first enemy flies at the player and is almost unavoidable for a novice player. You'll lose your three lives almost as quickly as you get them. That difficulty isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when you're teaching an entirely new play dynamic, you need to give the player a bit of time to settle in.

Plus, there's really no difficulty curve to speak of. The same basic enemies you face in the first level are mostly the same enemies you face at the end. There are a few additional ones that will move at you from behind, but mostly you'll be handling the same ones over and over.

The level design is pretty bland. Oh, sure, there's a level progression where you'll go to desert lands, temples, and forests, but no matter where you are the levels are the same. You'll still be jumping from platform to platform, avoiding holes in the ground, and moving left-to-right, no matter what the scenery.

Those flaws are what keep Gumshoe from really succeeding like it could. What was a really, really cool idea ends up being a bit of a slog. That being said, Nintendo was demonstrating that it could find opportunities where other developers only saw the status quo, even if they didn't quite come together.

Final Rating:

Sunday Game Tracks: Dreams of the Shore Near Another World

Here's some game music for your Sunday, taken from Chrono Cross.

NES Replay: Donkey Kong 3

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1986

I'll set the stage for you.

I was about 12 or 13 years old. My aunt was having a wedding reception at a bar with a banquet hall. We were told to stay in the banquet hall and not go into the bar, but I noticed arcade games in the bar. Naturally, I wandered over there just to get a peek.

Now, I was just as video-game obsessed at that young age as I am now, if not more so. I kept a notebook where I wrote down the name of every game that I had a chance to play, even I had only played it for a minute or two. I read every video game magazine that I could get my hands on and even studied up on games that I knew I would never have a chance to play. I prided myself on my knowledge of every game possible.

So imagine my surprise when I found an arcade game called Donkey Kong 3. I was absolutely stunned and refused to believe that such a thing existed. I thought there was only Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., and this game had to be a mistake. I had to play it.

My mom hated video games with a passion and refused to give me a quarter. Fortunately, I had an aunt who was more than willing to give me some change, so I got a chance to try out Donkey Kong 3. What I found was a pretty weird game, but one that my young mind thought was pretty good.

So, almost 20 years later, Donkey Kong 3 and I meet again. Would I still like it after all this time?

Short answer: No.


Donkey Kong 3 was a radical departure from the previous games in the series. Instead of playing as Mario, you play as Stanley the Bugman. He's in a greenhouse, and Donkey Kong hangs from bars up above. In every level, Donkey Kong stirs up some bugs by punching some beehives, and Stanley has to shoot them down with bug spray. Shoot down enough, and Donkey Kong gets bored and leaves. You also need to keep shooting Donkey Kong in the butt with bug spray, or else he'll drop down to the bottom of the screen and you'll lose a life.

It's such a radical departure from the first two games that its mere existence is strange. After all, why is Donkey Kong in a greenhouse? Why is he punching beehives? Where is Mario?

Here's my completely unsupported and wildly speculative theory: Donkey Kong 3 was more than likely designed with other characters in mind, and at the last minute Donkey Kong was slapped in there just to get more sales. The facts add up: Mario isn't in this game, bugs and plants were never a part of Donkey Kong, and Donkey Kong 3 is more of a shooter than a platformer.

It's also just merely an OK game, and Nintendo had to know what they had on their hands. If they released a game called "Stanley the Bugman" into arcades, no one would have bought it. But if they released a game called Donkey Kong 3, it would automatically get sold on name recognition alone before word got out about its quality. I can't verify this theory, of course, so it's all conjecture on my part.

The NES port of Donkey Kong 3 is extremely faithful. The graphics look almost identical to the arcade game, the sounds are correct, and everything is dead-on. As with the first two games, the NES hardware was more than capable of rendering Donkey Kong 3.

However, what kills this game is that it plays exactly like an arcade shooter shouldn't. In a typical shooter, the first level should get you acclimated to the controls and ease you into the game. You don't hammer the player immediately with too much, especially when you're introducing new gameplay mechanics.

You could make the argument that when Donkey Kong 3 was originally released in 1982, players should have been able to balance a lot of different tasks at once, even at the beginning of a game. However, other developers didn't think so.

Consider: Galaga was released in 1981. At the beginning of the first level, you're presented with a ship and a few enemies that move in a tight formation. They're not firing at you yet, just flying into formation. Then there's the next batch, and the next batch, and after a few they finally start firing at the player.

Arkanoid was released in 1986. At the beginning of the first level, you have a paddle and a ball that you bounce off the bricks up above. The ball moves fast, but you have about 30 seconds to get used to the controls before things get crazy.

Compare this to Donkey Kong 3. At the beginning of the first level, two enemies immediately start floating down to you. Your shots don't travel very far, so have to get in close to the enemy to kill them, but wait! The enemies don't travel in a predictable pattern! They zig and zag a bit, more like leaves falling from trees. Meanwhile, Donkey Kong inches down the bars, and there are some flowers you have to protect, and there's a spray can at the top of the screen, and-

When you compare what Donkey Kong 3 expects the player to do versus what other games of the period expected players to do, it's insane. No wonder that Donkey Kong 3 was virtually forgotten for years. Some people love that style of play, and good for them. However, as Nintendo learned in time, if you chase after the narrow demographic that wants crazy difficulty, you'll only have those players and no one else.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Donkey Kong Jr.

In the last article, I put forth the theory that Donkey Kong's NES port was edited to keep some value in the arcade game. If you still don't agree with that assessment, here's another nail in the coffin: Donkey Kong Jr. was ported over to the NES with all four levels intact.

Keep in mind that Donkey Kong Jr. is a more complicated game than Donkey Kong. There are more enemies with different behaviors, more moving parts onscreen, and more complicated controls. And yet, Donkey Kong Jr. is intact on the NES while Donkey Kong isn't. However, Donkey Kong Jr. wasn't as popular in the arcades as Donkey Kong was, so Nintendo didn't have as much to lose by porting Donkey Kong Jr. over to the NES intact.

What's immediately noticeable about Donkey Kong Jr. is the fact that Mario is the villain in this story. In Donkey Kong Jr., Mario has trapped Donkey Kong in a cage, and Junior runs through the levels trying to free him. It's a very strange role reversal. Nintendo had made a bona-fide mascot in Jumpman (who was later renamed Mario), and he was starting to get recognized the world over. So why would Nintendo take their hero and make him a villain? That doesn't make much sense, does it?


There are a couple of reasons that they probably did it. First of all, it's entirely possible that the designers of Donkey Kong looked at the first game and noticed all the black space in each level. They then possibly asked the question, "How can we let the character move around in that space?" Once you add in the idea of vines, it's not too much of a stretch to come up with the basic framework of Donkey Kong Jr.

There's another important factor at play, though. At this point in gaming's history, most video game characters didn't have distinctive personalities. They were fluid, filling whatever gap the designers needed them to fill. For example, no one really stopped and asked why exactly Pac-Man needed to eat pellets and avoid ghosts. We just accepted it and moved on. Why is Dig-Dug blowing up monsters underground? Who cares?

If we apply that logic, it's easy to see why Nintendo didn't really see an issue moving Mario into the villain's role. They viewed Mario differently than everyone else did, and it took them a bit to catch up to the idea that Mario must always be the hero. However, if having Mario as the villain in Donkey Kong Jr. really bothers you, just imagine that it's Wario in disguise and you'll hopefully get over it.

Leaving aside the "Mario as villain" issue, what makes Donkey Kong Jr. great is the extra dimension of movement that they gave to the player. Enabling the player to move around by climbing and moving from vine-to-vine just feels right. It has a very tactile feel, which is unusual for such an early game. Each level also has its own unique challenges, culminating in a level where you have to snap keys into locks in order to set Donkey Kong free while birds fly at your face.

So which game is better? Donkey Kong or Donkey Kong Jr.? I have my own opinion, but I could see an argument being made for either one. While Donkey Kong is certainly the most enduring, Donkey Kong Jr. is way more unique. It may repeat the same basic structure of Donkey Kong, but since the levels are more varied and the mechanics so much more fun, it's superior in my book. Either way, though, they're both good games and definitely worth playing, especially for their historical value.

Final Rating: