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:

NES Replay Bonus Round: Super Mario Bros. 2 (Japan)

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: June 1986 (Japan Only)

The story goes like this: After the phenomenal success of Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto and company decided to make a sequel. They created several new levels that upped the difficulty considerably and released it in Japan in August of 1986 as Super Mario Bros. 2.

Super Mario Bros. 2 (sometimes called The Lost Levels) was hard. There were plenty of new challenges, like gusts of wind and difficult jumps. Poison Mushrooms were added to the mix, which looked like regular mushrooms but with a sickly orange color to them. The enemies were more aggressive, like Hammer Brothers that advance on the player and Piranha Plants that come out of their pipes whether or not the player is standing on the pipe.

Mario was already huge by 1986, and the NES was well on its way to being the go-to video game system of the late 80's. Another Mario game in 1986 would have been a huge moneymaker. However, Nintendo of America looked at The Lost Levels and decided against releasing it in the U.S. Instead, they picked a different game developed by Miyamoto's team called Doki Doki Panic and had that one converted into Super Mario Bros. 2 for American audiences (sometimes called Super Mario USA), then released it in 1988.

So, we're going to ask the big question: Did Nintendo of America make the right choice? Should they have released The Lost Levels in the U.S. in 1986, or were they right to wait for Super Mario USA?

The case for The Lost Levels: They’re really good. They cleverly play with Mario conventions. The first real mushroom you can get forces you to use advanced tactics to retrieve it, and the first ‘?’ block you hit has a Poison Mushroom instead. When I played through The Lost Levels from start to finish, I was astounded by the way they forced you to really think about what you were doing before you did it.

For those reasons, some point to the fact that Nintendo of America declined The Lost Levels as a sign that American gamers aren't as "hardcore" as Japanese gamers, but that's not necessarily the case. The gaming markets in Japan and America were completely different in 1986. Japan didn’t experience any market crash, so no one had to be “reintroduced” to video games. Players could easily be thrown into the deep end and left to their own devices.

However, the NES was still in a tenuous position in America. Yes, the NES was selling well, but it was the first console that sold in any quantities in three years. Nintendo was still trying to introduce players to gaming and had to exercise extreme caution.

The Lost Levels looked almost exactly like Super Mario Bros., and the average player wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the two. Imagine the average player hearing about how great Super Mario Bros. is, picking up a game that looks exactly like Super Mario Bros. and being soundly humiliated and confused. Would they be willing to try again? It's highly unlikely. Is that what Nintendo wanted? Of course not!

Nowadays we can appreciate the brilliance of The Lost Levels, but American players just weren’t ready for them back then. Super Mario USA was a much better choice for players at the time, and a classic in its own right. However, that’s a story for another day.

NES Replay: Urban Champion

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: June 1986

Before the NES, Nintendo made little handheld LCD games called Game & Watch. They were very simple games that would have a player do something really basic. For example, one game had the player walk back and forth while avoiding debris falling from above. Another had the player throwing balls in the air and catching them. Like I said, really basic games.

Even though they were simple games, they were wildly popular. They were so popular that it appears that Nintendo started wondering if they could release them as full-blown NES releases. Obviously, they would have to have better graphics and maybe add a few extra features, but with a few tweaks, an NES port of a Game & Watch game would be just as popular, right?

The problem, though, is that players had different expectations for old-school LCD games (like the Game & Watch series) and NES games. An LCD game was cheap, only costing about $15-20 on average. They were far closer in spirit to arcade games, but stripped way, way down. This was fine, since the games were so cheap.


The expectations for a home game were much, much higher than an LCD game. A cartridge was at least $40 each, if not more. Trying to translate a Game & Watch game into something that could be played on the NES would have been a disaster. Certainly, Nintendo would never attempt something so foolish, right?

Well, they did. Urban Champion was a port of the Game & Watch game called Boxing. Boxing had an alternate title of Punch-Out!!, but bears no resemblance to the game we know as Punch-Out!!

The gameplay is painfully simple. You stand in front of a building. You fight another character who looks exactly like you, but colored a little differently. (This was called palette-swapping, and was fairly common for when you wanted to make another sprite but didn't have the room to make a brand new one.) You throw punches at the other player and try and back them up against the edge of the screen. You can throw a strong punch or a weak punch, and either aim at the head or the body. Win, and you go to the next screen. Then you fight the same guy. Do this three more times and you win. Then you begin again.

If you play Urban Champion for five minutes, you have seen literally everything it has to offer. There will be no more changes to the gameplay. There is no end. To paraphrase 1984, this game is a fist hitting a face forever.

To be fair, fighting games were still in their infancy. No one really had a clear idea as to what a fighting game was supposed to be yet, so this seemed as good of an idea as any. Plus, while Urban Champion's single-player is boring, even modern fighting games are more fun with a second player.

Even with those bits factored in, Urban Champion is a terrible game. The controls are sluggish, which makes throwing a punch feel like you're sending your player an email in which you're explaining the need to form an exploratory committee vis a vis throwing a punch at your opponents torso, if they're not too busy. Your character just moves too slowly in general, since he advances and retreats way too slowly.

Even when Urban Champion tries to do something cool, it falls flat on its face. From time to time, a woman will pop out of a window above you and drop a flowerpot that can stun you. Now, I've tried to line it up so that it hits my opponent instead of me, and I swear that the flowerpot goes through the opposing player no matter how careful I am.

Finally, sometimes you'll hear a siren, and both players scurry back to their sides of the screen and look nonchalant while a police car rides by. After the car passes, they meet in the middle again. It's funny the first time, but then you realize: I was winning the fight. The game basically reset the fight for no good reason. That was the last straw for me.

You would be hard pressed to find anyone who sincerely likes Urban Champion without reservations. It's a terrible game and should be avoided. At least the music is good.

Final Rating:

NES Replay: Popeye

Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: June 1986

I know we keep talking about Donkey Kong, but a lot of Nintendo's early success hinged upon it. For example, Donkey Kong came about by accident. Originally, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to make a game about Popeye, and the game was almost complete when they realized that they couldn't get the rights to the characters. Nintendo still had a game to release, though, so they changed the characters around. They swapped Popeye for Jumpman/Mario, Olive Oyl for Pauline, and Bluto for Donkey Kong. The rest, of course, is history.

After the wild success of Donkey Kong, King Features gave Nintendo a shot at a Popeye game in 1982. The inevitable NES port was among the second wave of NES games, and it's only fitting that it was released alongside the game series and characters that it helped inspire.

Popeye subverts your expectations. Popeye cartoons have Popeye beating things up and using his strength frequently. You would expect a Popeye game to be similar, but it's really not. Sure, there's a "punch" button, but you could probably get through the entire game without throwing a punch if you were really good.


Instead, Popeye is about avoiding danger for as long as possible. Olive Oyl stands at the top of the screen, walking back and forth and throwing down kisses, musical notes, or the letters in the word "help." You have to run around and catch them while avoiding Bluto and a few enemies that are running around.

The punch button is only there to fend off a few of the enemies, but you can't go toe to toe with Bluto or he'll pummel you into a pulpy red slush. In order to take him on directly, you need spinach. Periodically, a can of said spinach will appear alongside the level. If you grab it, Popeye can punch Bluto and knock him off the stage for a few brief seconds.

Popeye, therefore, is another fascinating example of Nintendo's early commitment to rethink what a game really needed to be about. While most games would have had Popeye punching his way through enemies, Nintendo took what's widely used as an aggressive move as changed it to a defensive move instead. This was in stark contrast to most early games (and, frankly, most modern ones) that saw aggression as the problem and solution.

Is Popeye a good game, then? Kind of. There are actually a lot of things to do in each level. For example, in the first level you can punch a bag that drops a barrel on Bluto's head if you time it right, and in the second level you can jump on a see-saw and touch Sweet Pea for bonus points. None of these things have any benefit to the actual game, though. They're just "cool things to do" that net you some extra points but don't really matter in the long run.

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. Developers would try and get around this by making that extra sprite flicker if they were on the same vertical line, but it wasn't an optimal solution.

With that in mind, the kisses/musical notes/letters that Olive Oyl tosses down to the player float down slowly, and there are sometimes five or six onscreen at once. If you add in Bluto, Olive Oyl herself and the can of spinach, that's about eight or nine sprites at once on the screen. They were staggered carefully so they wouldn't end up on the same vertical line, but they really couldn't add a lot more or else they would start losing sprites. That makes Popeye feel a little barren.

The arcade game wasn't much of a looker, but even with that being said, some of the levels in the NES port look pretty bad. You could tell that Nintendo didn't really care about Popeye like they did their other arcade games, and that lack of attention really shows.

The average player will loop through the three levels, come back to the beginning, maybe play through the levels again and put the game down for good. Unlike Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr., Popeye wasn't compelling enough to sustain a player's interest for a really long time. That's a shame, but Popeye had some interesting ideas that Nintendo would flesh out over the years.

Final Rating: