the only trick I know in this game is that I can use the bat in the first level to skip the merman section
1 Like
it’s a good trick. classicvanias are really the poster children for damage-boosting.
guess I really gotta finish gognio dungeon huh
And here you hit on the thing that makes NES games so magical.
There’s all this stuff up-thread about disappearing Mega Blocks and other door-slam annoyances that keep a person from finishing games from this era. But… okay, that happens sometimes. What’s far more common, in my experience, is that there’s usually a workaround. If something is ridiculously hard, then don’t do it like that. There’s probably a simpler way. In the case of Mega Man 2, employ the rocket item. (Don’t remember the number; proto Rush Jet.) The section is built and timed for this.
Likewise the Castlevania secondary item discussion above. If something’s too hard, I usually just figure I’m not doing it right. Or, well, perhaps more-accurately there’s a better not-right way. Like using the wall-door technique to get the Varia way too early, which I did the very first time I played Metroid back in 1987 or wherever, because the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter blabbed it out at the same time the game came out.
That’s what makes this era so great. Just this notion that there’s always something to find, and if you’re stuck it’s becuase you haven’t picked away at the thing enough, or you’re being too literal. There could be anything hidden in there, if you get weird enough with it, find the right way to look at things.
That’s what led me to do stuff like this.
http://www.aderack.com/builder/
It’s like, you peel away the right piece of wallpaper, burn the right bush, at any point you might find yourself in the Upside-Down. That’s Playing with Power is like. Incorporating that understanding and trying to use it to your advantage.
Which is why the Game Genie was so astonishing at the time; at first it wasn’t just a “cheat code” delivery mechanism. The whole idea was for you to explore and find your own hacks that just messed with the games, changed their realities. The original manual is full of arguably useless but fascinating codes, and instructions on how to make your own. This ties right into the spirit of the NES experience.
I found, on my own, a code to let you play as Small Firey Mario. Which, previously, required such precise timing that I never got it right. And in any case is completely pointless, except inasmuch as it redefines what the game’s world is and can be, raising questions, opening the imagination.
Later devices of course just became functional; all about achieving a certain end. No time for exploration, or bending reality, or understanding how and why things work. We’ve got games to beat! Lists to check off. This is serious business.
To my mind, beating the games was just a step in the process of digesting them and the way that they thought. And each one had such a peculiar personality, and so many buried demons guiding its logic, that if I never got to the end that was fine, because it was because I was chasing some other rabbit instead.
7 Likes
I think that’s probably the big change in framework.
People aren’t playing the games with the original understanding, but rather as Things To Beat. To pick up, and play idly, and get freaked out by, and put down again, as opposed to each game being an incomprehensible obsession that you would throw yourself into. Which wasn’t just my thing; it was the whole thing about NES games, and NES culture at the time. It’s the way the Nintendo Fun Club, then early Nintendo Power were structured. That fucking movie, The Wizard, basically deals with this in its way. All of this stuff like Captain N and The Adventures of GamePro, and that weird comic book where the monsters come out of the Game Boy and hypnotize the man with the mustache into stealing a space shuttle – it’s representative of the way that players thought about the games at that time. There was something going on, on the other side of the screen, and it wasn’t wholly rational, but it’s something you could get a feel for. A knack, like a meeting of minds.
2 Likes
And it’s of course a two-way street; consensus was created by Nintendo in the early '90s that arcane secrets were Not Fair; that each player in isolation of other humans or knowledge should be able to plumb the depths of each game; that all content must reach a certain Production Value to be burned into the final ROM.
And the message was received and new players were trained into the new rules.
1 Like
Yeah, battery back-up, then especially save cards, really ruined everything.
Previously, it was more like a group scavenger hunt. Like this collaborative exercise with strangers to uncover a new reality.
Seriously, I have this severe mental vendetta going about the concrete damage that save cards did to game design and game culture. Maybe someday I’ll untangle it and write something reasonable on the topic.
My brother and I kept our nes on for days to beat castlevania
2 Likes
That’s part of bending reality to your will, yes.
I honestly think that the problem-solving involved in playing games of this period made me far more clever than I would otherwise have been. It wasn’t this abstract thing. It was tangible.
Yeah, holy water is both the key and almost a game breaker. With Death, though, you still have a brief window at the start of the fight before the scythes begin and he moves away. The most recently available holy water is also a while back, so if you die once trying to kill him, you lose it and can’t retrieve it until you hit the continue screen.
1 Like
Iean there are hundreds of indie games made each year that fit your criteria. The only functional difference is they arent commercial releases on the NES/Famicom with some vague boundaries of qualty and techinciality.
But they exist with all the weirdness in giant quantities.
Everyone that has done it points to Child of Kors from Bloodborne DLC as the hardest thing they’ve done. And it is indeed incredibly streneous and difficult.
1 Like
Yeah, the indie scene has done a great job in picking up the slack left in the early '90s, both in the arcade and home console scenes – all mixed up with an evolved rendition of the shareware scene from the same period when those other two were imploding. It can be such a smart, vital space, its boundaries dictated only by the breadth of insight to its architects and their genuine interest in discussion. It’s what in 1987 I imagined things would be like in ten years. As it happens, other interests posed a bit of an interception.
i thought NES games were hard until i started speedrunning tbh
2 Likes
Mao’s onomatopoeia up in here…
Also see: The Goonies: Is it good enough?
This also plays into the above discussion:
Even that discussion, though, has changed over time. 30-ish years ago The Goonies II was held in pretty high regard as an example of a deep, nonlinear action-adventure game. These days it seems to baffle people more than not. Its secrets are too opaque, and what’s probably more significant, it matches our codified ideas of a “Metroidvania” enough to draw a direct comparison, yet it doesn’t match closely enough for people to call it a good example of the form. Ergo, it’s a bad example of the form. Ergo, it’s kind of a failure.
I say this with love, but haven’t you already been doing that for 15 years piece by piece?
when I think of the aderack thesis it’s very clearly focused on this divide between 8-bit and 16-bit console games
1 Like
Oh, this is a good thread.
Seeing tips on beating the reaper in Castlevania is tempting me to play that game again. I reached that point a couple times when I was in high school, but was quickly overwhelmed with whirling sickles and never prevailed. (I’m sure I tried holy water at some point, but I guess I didn’t do it quite right.)
I was not allowed to have a Nintendo Entertainment System as a kid, but I saved up and bought one when I was in high school. I played the arcade version of Super Mario Bros. a lot over the years, and rarely played the home version because when I visited friends they typically wanted to play something else. The day I got my own NES, I was surprised at how much easier the home version was. I beat it the first night, though I had never quite reached the end in the arcade.
I left the NES on for days to try to beat Blaster Master, but I couldn’t do it. Even with Game Genie, I couldn’t do it. I think I never actually found the last boss.
I absolutely wrote down those tedious codes. not just the Mega Man ones–those were easy. I wrote down Metroid and Faxanadu codes. And that Faxanadu font could be misleading.
The best Game Genie code I ever discovered on my own was one that changed the Super Mario Bros. music significantly but in a way that still kind of sounded like music. I may still have that code written down on a piece of paper somewhere.
4 Likes