Now let's look at the list of NES games released by them in 1990:
-RoadBlasters
-Infiltrator
-Miracle Piano Teaching System
-The Last Starfighter
-Mad Max
-Gauntlet II
-M.U.L.E.
-Loopz
-Days of Thunder
-Dirty Harry
Now if you remove the best game of the bunch (arguably RoadBlasters) and the worst game of the bunch (arguably Days of Thunder) you still have some pretty shitty games here.
RoadBlasters is fun for awhile, but gets extremely repetitive. This is one of the few games my sister would actually play back in the day, so I have somewhat fond memories of it. And this is the best game of the bunch.
I wrote a guide for The Last Starfighter, but for a game that looks like a shooter, it's more like a strategy game. One that isn't very fun. One hit deaths and not really having control of your ship make for one hell of a rocky experience.
Dirty Harry has one of the coolest endings in any NES game, as it is a completely digitized vocal monologue from Dirty Harry himself. However the other 99% of the game is just dreadful.
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Gauntlet II has no ending to speak of, as the game just randomly starts generating levels after awhile. How the hell can a quest game that came out in 1990 just keep you endlessly looping??
Mad Max...I rented this several times back in the day and it gave me fits. You can't even use the final password, as you need the crossbow from the previous fucking level to beat the final boss.
Infiltrator isn't that bad...unless you are in the flying segments. I had to use one of Zach Meston's NES strategy guides to even have a clue to how to navigate these areas of the game and even then I was almost clueless.
Loopz is a decent puzzle game, though it gets nearly impossible as you go on. M.U.L.E. is an old computer simulation game. I've never really heard anyone talk about this game in NES circles, so I guess it falls into a niche category, kind of like the Koei games.
Don't even get me started on Miracle Piano.
Has any company ever had a worse lineup than this for a whole calendar year of releases???
At least they redeemed themselves in '91.
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Oh wait. No they didn't.
I dont know about what specific year but LJN produced the biggest pieces of shit from all the tops licenses. How many times have you bought or played a LJN game and been devestated. So much potential and expectation for games from WWF, Back to the Future, Alien 3, Beetlejuice, Bill & Ted, Friday the 13th, Jaws, Karate Kid, MLB, NFL, Nightmare on Elm Street, Pictionary, Punisher, Roger Clemens, Spiderman, Terminator 2, T&C Surf, Roger Rabbit, Wolverine, and X-Men. How many of those movies, comics, or sports are sentimental to our youth? It must have been so fucking expensive to buy the rights to some of the hugest movies of the 80s and buy the rights to use MLB and NFL teams. I'm glad they went out of buisness. LJN put out games to scam us out of our hard earn allowances. At least Koei games were complex and challenging, they didnt stop all over our young memories like LJN.
ReplyDeleteMindscape was pretty bad in general. I mean they had the occasional decent stuff like Alfred Chicken, and Paperboy. But when Mindscape's games were bad, oh boy were they bad. Dirty Harry, Mad Max, Days of Thunder. And these geniuses actually thought kids would like a Captain Planet game on the Nes. Surrrrre they did.
ReplyDeleteAnd that Terminator game they released, ugh. Complete shit. Still baffles me that Sunsoft lost the license and had to change it to Journey to Silius, then Mindscape gets it instead and produces THAT.
Gauntlet II was actually pretty fun with four players. Used to play that with my brother and cousins quite frequently back then. It was pretty stupid that it didn't have an ending though. Sure the arcade Gauntlet went on forever, but that didn't stop Tengen from giving the Nes version an ending, so why couldn't the sequel get one too?
And by the way, interesting thing about Last Starfighter. Its actually a port of a Commodore 64 game called "Uridium". It had absolutely nothing to do with the movie Last Starfighter, Mindscape just basically slapped the title on to try to sell more copies. I'll give the game credit for being different from other shooters, but its very difficult to get the hang of.
I guess Gauntlet II is fun for the casual gamer, especially with 4 people being able to go at it at once.
ReplyDeleteCaptain Planet is one of the most difficult "action" games for the NES. Very unforgiving.
As for LJN, that is very true about them. However, for some reason I really enjoyed Jaws and MLB, though I was in my mid teens when I played them. MLB was just mindless fun and Jaws...I actually played that one for hours just because I absolutely had to see if Jaws could actually be killed. I loved that you had to stab him with the front of the damned boat!!
Friday the 13th and all the WWF games were horrid though.
I remember reading about WWF Wrestlemania in one of the early Nintendo Power magazines, I was damn excited about it. That was like 1991 and I just beat it last year thanks to GSHI codes. Painfully terrible. MLB was pretty good too, I agree. A fellow New Englader spent hundreds of hours recreating the '86 World Series Buckner blunder on NES MLB. He used the real game audio and put it over the game footage. It took him hours to get the CPU guys on the right bases then he somehow got the batter to hit a weak grounder to first. Even more impossible, he kept do that until the first basemen botched the catch and the runners scored. Check it on this link
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-GgbP9C9Zk
Of all the US games I have to beat most of them are Koei or FCI which is understandable. I now see that Mindscape has so many unappealing games that I've havent even attempted yet. I'm having a hell of a time with PAL Elite and I have a feeling MULE is similar to that.
Jaws was so repetative then you suddenly face the shark and have to stab and jab your boat into its face. Wish you could throw the tank into its mouth and had to shoot it. I'll never forgive them for what they did to Back to the Future though.
Speaking of LJN, here's a blog that sheds some light about who made those games:
ReplyDeletehttp://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Blog:8
Wow. Being a Sox fan, that video hurt. I actually watched that happen back in 86. I had no idea they already named Marty Barrett player of the game. Douchebags.
ReplyDeleteThat's some cool shit on Jaws. I see I'm not the only one who liked the game. GDRI knows his shit.