Crappy NES games, and other things

On 05/20/2013 at 05:21 PM by Elkovsky

Greetings, Pixlbit! As expected, I've been posting reviews at a snail's pace, and the next one might take me awhile... because, on the NES front, I've been busy with this:

And by "busy" I mean "tried it a few times and shut it off."

I'm currently in the midst of a playthrough of every NES game developed by Micronics, an NES developer who did contract work for Capcom and SNK before those two companies came to their senses and started giving a flip about quality console conversions. Ten of their titles were released in the US, nine of which are arcade ports, and most of them are pretty shoddy. Some of them, like Ghosts 'n' Goblins, are fairly functional, but crap like Athena (pictured above) is pretty atrocious. It'll be a long while before I get to the reviews of these, but I want to finish these games (which will get me to the 150 mark, at least provisionally speaking) before going back to revisit the alternate paths in Castlevania III. Then it's Super Mario Bros. 3 for review #99, and for review #100... well, it's a secret for now. (Unless you've followed my Twitter for awhile and already know....)

Also, I don't think I'm going to try to port my old blogs over to Pixlbit. At some point I'd like to put them together in PDF form and make them available for download somewhere so that my chronicling of my NES journey can live on in a more stable format. I have no sense of visual artistic design, though, so getting them to layout in a way that looks aesthetically pleasing would be easier said than done.

I've also been playing Jeanne d'Arc, a spiffy little tactical RPG by Level 5 that's a little on the easy side, but seems to have a generally decent story. Some of the character motivations could have been fleshed out a little bit more, but the overall plot is pretty decent, if a little silly. I get tired of killing guys on the battlefield and watching them get up two seconds later and teleport away; it feels a little contrived, certainly. I'm on the last chapter and getting ready to wrap things up, and it feels like it's about time; I've enjoyed the game on the whole, but it feels a little on the easy side at this point, given that I've started to pick up some of the better late-game abilities. It's not quite as over-the-top in its mechanics as something like Dark Cloud 2 or Rogue Galaxy and feels a bit "simple" in comparison to, say, Final Fantasy Tactics, but it's still a solid entry in the genre that's worth trying out.

Once May is done, my schedule will relax a bit, and I might be able to update this a bit more often. Maybe! We'll see how things pan out.

Cary Woodham

05/20/2013 at 07:24 PM

Yeah Athena is awful. Even the arcade game is bad.

Matt Snee Staff Writer

05/20/2013 at 08:07 PM

Darn, Athena? That game LOOKS terrible.

Jeanne D'Arc is cool. I'm a big fan of the historical person, so I dig the game. the game isn't tactics, but it's still cool.

Almost at 150, huh? That's kind of astounding.

brighat

05/20/2013 at 08:41 PM

Athena was the first game on the NES that seemed to be broken right from the start. Never saw a game punish me for using power-ups correctly.

jgusw

05/20/2013 at 08:49 PM

I enjoyed Athena. My friends & I rented it several times. I guess I'm the only one that like the game. It's been many years since I played it. I think I own it.

SgtDawkins

05/20/2013 at 09:50 PM

I didn't think Athena was THAT bad.

Elkovsky

05/21/2013 at 03:03 PM

I feel like the moving parts for a decent game are present in Athena, but the lack of recovery time when taking damage, the lack of mid-level checkpoints, the high likelihood of collecting a powerup that makes you weaker, and the game's hazy understanding of collision detect - issues that might not individually ruin a game - combine together to make a title that tough for what I feel are the wrong reasons. Then again, I've beat my head against other titles like Back to the Future II and III and gotten a certain degree of enjoyment out of them, so there's ultimately a certain degree of subjectivity there.

...but I suppose I should be saving this for a future review, eh?

daftman

05/21/2013 at 03:32 PM

I played Jeanne d'Arc earlier this year and really enjoyed it. Never heard of Athena though. Sounds like I'm not missing much lol

Temperance

05/22/2013 at 04:03 PM

I know you want to experience Micronics' NES games the proper way, but after the game has abused you in every possible way, couldn't you just extrapolate the experience, work through it with save states, and move on? I mean, you could still keep track of all the frustrating and cheap deaths, as well as how many times you would have needed to restart the game had you played it through legitimately. There's so many better NES games out there; why spend more time on the junk than is necessary? Then again, it's possible you might stick with it long enough and learn to enjoy it.

PixlBit