The Great Maze

System: NES

Cheats Used: None

Now this is a maze game done right! In this first-person game, you have to find all the key fragments before you can exit the maze. You can also find various powerups to help you along (you can play minigames to get some of them). The first level is easy enough to ease you into the game, and then the challenge level rises sharply, with level two being two floors and level three being three floors. To add to the challenge, you only have a limited amount of time to finish the level before you get a game over and have to try again (although you can continue from the beginning of the level). This is what Gals’ Dungeon should have been.

Gal's Dungeon

System: Famicom Disk System
Cheats Used: None
In this first-person maze game, you have to go through nine levels of a tower to rescue someone’s granddaughter. I usually enjoy maze games, but this one was very disappointing. The mazes are too easy to provide any challenge at all, the boss fights (if you can call it that) are nothing more than a game of “rock, paper, scissors”, and to top it all off, there’s some kind of glitch on level eight that makes it impossible to finish the game. Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all. As a point of interest, every other level or so, you get a picture of a naked woman for your trouble. Whatever.

Alien

System: Atari 2600 VCS

This game, titled after the famous sci-fi movie, is a Pac-Man clone in which you run around a maze racking up points and trying to avoid the alien monsters. Like, Pac-Man, you can grab a powerup to turn the tables on the aliens, but in a nice little twist, only one powerup is on the board at a time and when you grab it, another one appears elsewhere in the maze so the challenge is to get to the powerups without getting eaten. Funnily enough, this is a much better game, and much more fun to play, than Atari’s own version of Pac-Man! Kudos to 20th Century Fox. It really is a shame that they gave up on game development after the industry crash of ‘83 (temporarily, anyway). If they’d kept going, there’s no telling what kind of awesomeness they could have produced for the NES. Oh well.

Pokemon Red

System: Game Boy

Cheats Used: None


To prepare for the release of Pokemon Black, I decided to replay the original game, Pokemon Red. I confess that when I first discovered the game in 1999, I became a bit of an addict, buying up all the videos of the cartoon series (which I still watch occasionally) and collecting all kinds of merchandise. There were several nights I skipped sleep and stayed up all night playing the game and when I got to the end, there was a tremendous feeling of accomplishment. The fact that the creator of Pokemon, Satoshi Tajiri, is autistic is a great inspiration to me and he’s become one of my personal heroes.

So how does the game hold up after all these years? Not too bad, actually. It does seem rather primitive compared to the more recent installments, but then, the idea was in its infancy when the game was made and things like berries, abilities and online pokemon trading hadn’t been imagined yet. What we’re left with is a relatively straightforward game that’s easy enough for anyone to play, yet challenging enough for even the most hardcore players.

The story here is simple: You are a new pokemon trainer and your aim is to defeat the eight gym leaders and eventually battle the Elite 4 and the champion. Once that’s accomplished, the game is over. Along the way, you must stop the evil Team Rocket and their boss, Giovanni, but this subplot only takes up about a third of the game with the rest of it comprised of capturing, raising and battling pokemon. Like most RPGs, level grinding before fighting a gym leader can get very tedious, but the rewards for doing so more than make up for it. The game does an excellent job of drawing you into this world and making you care about the characters and the pokemon you raise. It’s not at all surprising that the series has done as well as it has

What’s interesting is that before the original game was released, Nintendo didn’t think it would sell and was prepared to write it off as a loss. No one was more surprised than they were when it became an international phenomenon. In fact, the anime was only supposed to last one season and was extended indefinitely when they realized what a massive hit they had on their hands. Since then, they’ve done a great job of providing the fans a steady stream of new games while still maintaining a consistent level of quality such that even a subpar entry (as many thought Diamond/Pearl to be) will outsell just about any other game out there. The series may no longer be in the public eye the way it used to be, but as long as the games are good I imagine it will continue for many years to come.

Ms. Pac-Man

System: Sega Genesis

Cheats Used: None

Now this is what I call a fantastic arcade translation! In this version of Midway’s classic game produced by Tengen (Atari’s multiconsole development arm), you not only get a perfect port of the arcade original, but you are given a multitude of options to customize the experience. First, you have the ability to set the difficulty level at Easy, Normal, Hard or Crazy. Second, you can turn on the “Pac Booster” setting which allows you to move two or three times faster while keeping the ghosts at regular speed. This setting makes the game a lot more fun (at least for me), but it’s a double-edged sword because in the later levels when the ghosts speed up, it becomes harder and harder to dodge them, thus making the game more challenging.

Third, in addition to the regular one-player game, there are options for two-player cooperative, two-player competitive and two-player alternating. Last but not least, there are no less than four different sets of mazes to choose from: Arcade, Strange, Big or Mini. A nice feature is that from the start you can choose to begin on a later level up to level seven and once you’re past that and into the higher levels, you can continue up to four times when you lose all your lives, although continuing resets your score to zero. This is a good way to get some practice on the tougher mazes. Using my continues, I was able to get to level 14 or 15, far beyond what I was ever able to do in the original game. Tengen ought to be commended for creating such a superlative experience and if you like Pac-Man at all, you should definitely give this one a try. You won’t be disappointed.

Double Dungeons

System: TurboGrafX 16

Cheats Used: None

This straightforward yet challenging game is an old-school dungeon crawler viewed from a first person perspective. The objective is simple: Run around a dungeon killing monsters to gain experience and gold to upgrade your weapons, then find the boss and defeat it. Once the boss is defeated, you move on to the next dungeon. This game, which is notable for being the first two-player RPG, has been criticized for being overly long, boring and tedious. Personally, I think it’s kind of fun and I imagine it would be even more fun with two players, but I can definitely see where it could get tedious after awhile. It took me a couple of hours to finish the first dungeon. There are 22 dungeons in all and they get bigger and more complex as you go along. You’d need the patience of a saint to get through them all. I’ll probably do a couple more dungeons myself and then use a password to skip to the end.

X-MEN (Arcade Game)

Emulated via MAME

Cheats Used: None

Ah, X-Men. My favorite Marvel series (thanks largely to the excellent 90s cartoon). Growing up, I think the X-Men appealed to me because my autism made me feel like a mutant (still does, in fact) and I was able to identify with the characters easily. This arcade game was released alongside a pilot called “Pryde of the X-Men”. The pilot (which is corny, yet fun) failed to produce a series, but hey, we got a cool game out of it. At the start, you can pick from six characters: Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Dazzler. I played through as Dazzler. As you move through the levels, you mostly fight Sentinels, every mutant’s natural enemy. At the end of every level is a boss, usually one of the X-Men’s great villains (Pyro, The Blob, Emma Frost, etc.) and eventually you meet Magneto for a final showdown. In addition to your standard attack, you can also use your mutant power. However, doing so drains your health bar. Fortunately, this being run on an emulator, you have infinite continues, so I was able to spam my mutant power during boss fights. The “engrish” in this game is hilarious (“I am Magneto! Master of magnet!”), which only adds to the charm. All in all, one of the best superhero games. Highly recommended.

Super Mario Bros.

System: NES

Cheats Used: Infinite lives

Having not played this game in years, I thought it would be the perfect place to start. After all, it is one of the most important games ever made. I don’t think I would be exaggerating by saying that Super Mario Bros. single-handedly saved the videogame industry after the great crash of 1983.

The game is notable for several reasons. First, it cemented the gameplay style of 2D, side-scrolling plat formers, a genre that would be the dominant one for years. Second, it cemented the idea of a “killer app”, that one game you would be willing to buy the system in order to play. Third, by being packed in with the system when you bought it, it cemented the idea that you should expect a free game when you bought the system. This last is something that is still occasionally done (i.e. Wii Sports and the various bundles for the Xbox 360).

What’s amazing is that even after all these years, it is still a fantastically fun game to play. The last four levels are still fiendishly difficult, especially the maze of the final castle. If you tell me you figured it out without looking at a guide, you’re lying. It’s a good thing I had infinite lives, ’cause I’d have never finished otherwise. The final castle alone took me 30 or 40 tries. It didn’t help that I spent most of the game as small Mario. Naturally, I died a lot. But that’s okay because that’s what cheat codes are for.

I realize that “hardcore” gamers are probably laughing at me right now, but ya know what? I don’t care. I play videogames for the fun of it and to me, cheat codes make games more fun because it gives me a chance of actually completing them. I admire someone who’s good enough not to need them, but I’m not that good. Thankfully, more modern games are generally easier, so I don’t use codes on them most of the time, although there can still be some challenge (like the FLUDDless levels in Super Mario Sunshine, which can make you want to break the controller at times). TVTropes doesn’t call it “Nintendo Hard” for nothing, ya know.

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Hi all! Welcome to my blog. My goal in life is to become known as America's foremost videogame historian. I'm currently writing a book about old school gaming in general and if it gets published, I plan on writing more books focusing on more specific topics (such as a book about the TurboGrafx 16 or a book about the best games that never got published in the states). This blog will focus on retrogame reviews and I may post other things from time to time. I hope you all enjoy it. If you have any requests for games you'd like me to review, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Now, onward!