NES Games No One Played: Letter I

Further down the rabbit-hole. Curiouser and curiouser.I’ve got a pretty extensive NES collection and have for years been writing about the best games for the system while also trying to collect every title. As such, I feel like I’ve spent tons of time playing all the great games while the lesser known titles usually come in the mail and go straight onto the shelf. I wanted to make more of an effort to explore the entire library of the NES, not just the classics, and so I’m trying out some buddies I either popped in and immediately out or never played in the first place. Since I’ve got them organized alphabetically, let’s continue on with the Letter H.

• Letter A can be found here
• Letter B can be found here
• Letter C can be found here
• Letter D can be found here
• Letter E can be found here
• Letter F can be found here
• Letter G can be found here
• Letter H can be found here

IMMORTAL | 1990

I had this whole write-up planned regarding Immortal. I’d played it enough in the past to remember what about it was good or bad and was definitely looking forward to delving a little deeper. However, I must’ve only played it on my original NES (now living in a storage tupperware in the attic) and not the supreme awesomeness that is the Model 2 Nintendo because if you pop Immortal into the Top Loader it starts going wild. I’ve had this problem with PAL exclusives like Beauty and the Beast and Asterix where something about the European NES makes these games play differently, but I’ve never experienced that with an official NTSC release like Immortal. Turns out I’m not the only one. Alright give me a second…<trudges up into the smoldering hot attic with 5 foot ceilings>.

Huh. Even with the original NES it’s still acting weird. Not the usual blinking light or brown screen or the game loads but everything is half there and glitchy. Basically the screen is scrambling back and forth kind of like when you tried to watch the Playboy channel back in the day. I plugged in different RF switches, I tried several video out cables, I cleaned the cartridge with way too many ounces of Brasso. I’m honestly stumped and I consider myself a goddamn samurai wizard of getting NES games to play; I know ALL the tricks. If there’s any AV magicians out there who can help diagnose the problem please chime in here. Sigh, time to emulate.

Well, I found a site that hosts NES games and Immortal works, but the sound, holey shit. MY GOD JUST LISTEN TO THIS. It’s like two goblins jumped out of the game, grabbed the NES sound card by the arms, and then a larger uglier goblin punched it repeatedly in the stomach. Here’s another site where the music works but the main character sprite hilariously explodes as he walks. And I get it, all of y’all know a million awesome ways I can more perfectly emulate Immortal, but I’m trying my hardest to play it on the original hardware and barring that I’m just trying to play it quickly so I remember what I wanted to say about it. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, that’s three strikes. I gave it several attempts but I failed. So please allow me to tell you as much as I remember about Immortal and I’ll then let the peanut gallery fill in the the rest.

The cover art is bad ass, it looks like a Carvaggio rendering of a deleted scene from Game of Thrones. The music? It’s awesome, kind of in the lute and prancing vein of Solstice and I mean that as the greatest of compliments. The sprite animations and settings? Some of the best of the 8-bit era, they’re really really impressive. The gameplay? Well….

Immortal is renowned for being extremely hard. Not only are the navigation and control aspects both random and confusing, but the traps and enemies are often difficult or seemingly impossible to avoid. There’s so many rooms where you’ll just be minding your business, hoping to enchant something, when all the sudden you’ll get completely merked without warning. There are tons of other rooms where avoiding the flying projectiles and traps at your feet require the skills necessary to master an expert level shooter like Lifeforce or R-Type. I’d compare Immortal to an 8-bit Diablo or something more like Shadowgate or Uninvited where you need to know every room’s positives and negatives to advance. That mixed with the isometric wizardry command required to beat Marble Madness, mixed with the style of Battle Chess. If someone were to remake this and tweak some of the gameplay elements it’d be one of the greatest NES games ever made. Alas…

Similar Games: Shawdowgate, Uninvited, Marble Madness, Battle Chess

INCREDIBLE CRASH TEST DUMMIES | 1993

I’ve got a pretty strong nostalgia memory for all things 80’s and 90’s, but Incredible Crash Test Dummies was a little vague. I remember the seat belt PSA’s and I remember the toys (which were actually pretty rad because when you pressed a button every single limb on the toy exploded off into smaller more swallowable parts). I think there was a cartoon or a live action show, but I honestly cannot remember. If you’re not familiar with the Dummies, and Google fails you, it’s like when those cavemen from the Geico commercial got their own TV show.

ICTD was released by LJN, and I know they’re awful but if there’s one thing reviewing these obscure games has taught me it’s that there’s bad games, that have some personal nostalgia or pop culture referencing, and then there’s bad games that are just boring, un-compelling, unknown properties no-one wanted to play. I would say that while I very rarely choose to play any LJN title, they are actually a whole lot better than say Hudson Hawk, Castle of Dragon, Defenders of Dynatron City, Fun House, Blues Brothers, etc. But is Incredible Crash Test Dummies a good game? No, of course not, it’s terrible. I just think that the longer I write this series the more my standards are lowering.

The graphics are…fine and the music is…I’ll allow it. The control issssss awful. Like not completely broken but it makes the game unnecessarily difficult. You start off as a Dummie with a unicycle for a leg and that in turn gives you the slippery momentum that is the curse of all bad games. You can’t kill any enemies (another bad sign) but you can spray some which stuns them, which is as unsatisfying as it sounds. You can also get powerups but I cannot figure out why you’d want to. The ballon makes you jump longer but not higher and it’s even more difficult to space out your leaps. The rocket makes you go 5x as fast and in a game where the controls were already razor thin better believe this is the curse not the gift. Eventually you’ll make it to a section where these bouncing tires are at the very edge of multiple platforms but they move super quick and only jump slightly higher than your Dummie character. The precision required to get under them while running then jumping to the next platform without touching them (otherwise you’ll be hurt or worse knocked back down below) is superhuman. AND you have to do it multiple times in a row with any of these tyrant tires sending you back to basically the beginning of the level. It’s masochistic.

In level two you play as the other Dummie, who has legs. LEGS! It’s like you got initiated into an inanimate frat and they hazed the shit out of you before throwing you a party where you finally got to put your pants on. No thanks!

My favorite and only love for this game is that occasionally your head flies off, after which the controls reverse so that right is now left and vice versa. It doesn’t make the game more fun or anything, but it does remind you that some modicum of thought was put into ICTD’s design. Once you’ve experienced this simple pleasure, do yourself a favor and move on to any other game.

Similar Games: Yo! Noid,

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE | 1991 (TAITO VERSION) 1993 (UBI SOFT VERSION)

A lot of people, myself included until recently, probably didn’t know that there were multiple Indiana Jones games released on the NES. The Temple of Doom game was fairly common but the Last Crusade sequel wasn’t released until 1991 when most folks had moved onto the the Super Nintendo. What’s even stranger is that two years later an entirely different company released an entirely new game for the NES with THE EXACT SAME TITLE. They even have almost the exact same image on the label only the brightness and title text are a little varied. It’s the only time something like this happened on the original Nintendo and I can’t really think of another…haha literally as I was writing that I remembered the two totally unique versions of Rainbow Islands that were released (one by Taito and one by Ocean), but both of those were ports and one wasn’t released in North America sooooo exception? I’m really not sure why I know so much about this kind of stuff. I mean what am I doing with my life?

Starting with the The Taito version, the introduction has lots of images and text detailing stuff straight from the movie which is awesome. Also, while you expect an Indiana Jones movie to have the iconic John Williams theme, this game also has a suprisingly funky set of other music that kind of reminds me a lot of the music from Duck Tales. It’s actually some of the best music on the system. Oh there it is, this game was composed by soundtrack GOD Tim Follin (and his brother Geoff), music hero of such titles as Solstice, Pictionary, Silver Surfer, etc.

Anyway, when the game starts there’s some introduction followed by a choice of options which allows you to choose multiple paths. Cool! If you choose chasing the cross, you’ll end up on a ship where the screen moves with you to simulate a tanker floating and while I appreciate the thought put into it I don’t think the developers realized how nauseating this is. You fight a ton of tiny enemies that never stop coming. You’ll mash at them relentlessly but while you think you’re battling men, you’re actually dueling with your true enemy: random hit detection. If you choose going to Venice instead, you’re immediately faced with one of those slide image puzzles where one of the tiles is missing and you have to unscramble the image. I truly can’t think of anything less fun to do in a video game. After that there’s more choices leading to more action stages and eventually a top down recreation of the scene in the movie where Indy spells out the word “Jehovah Iehovah”.

Overall, the Taito version does a great job incorporating loads of elements from the film but unfortunately fails to make an actually enjoyable game to play.

Then there’s the other version. Right off the bat you’ll notice that the Ubi Soft version looks real weird. Everything is rendered in three tan colors and all the sprites have a strange outline to them. The music from the film is there, which is great, and it definitely feels like an Indiana Jones game, just a really heartbreakingly crappy one. The hit detection is questionable, everything hurts you in that unavoidable annoying way, lot’s of stuff appears suddenly from off-screen, and of course it’s extremely hard. I’m convinced that this was actually a Game Boy game and for some reason they either liked it so much that they thought it should be an NES game instead, or they knew it was so bad that they figured dumping it on a soon to be dead console would be a better idea than releasing it on the never say die portable wonder that was the Nintendo Game Boy. Either way, don’t play it.

Of the two I’d say the Taito version is the best, mostly because of the forking paths and strict allegiance to portraying the movie in game form. But even then it’s pretty lousy.

Similar Games: Shitty Castlevania III mixed with an educational game (Taito) | Game Boy version of Conan the Barbarian (Ubi Soft)

ISOLATED WARRIOR | 1991

I mentioned the developer KID recently when I reviewed Burai Fighter and I feel like I should reiterate here that they are the deepest of deep cut hidden gem developers for the NES. If you’ve already played all the Capcom, Konami, Sunsoft, Taito, and Natsume titles it’s time to get down with the KID. My personal favorites are Kickmaster and Mendel Palace but Low G Man, both G.I. Joe’s, and Burai Fighter are all quality titles. So what about Isolated Warrior?

Honestly I thought I’d have more to say about this game, but maybe that’s just the expectations that come from something named as awesomely as Isolated Warrior. It’s so epic sounding. Well, calm it down because it’s just a simple isometric shooter. You play as Max Maverick, son of Mad Max and Tom Cruise in Top Gun (heyo!) on a quest to…hmmm I don’t think I was really paying attention to the story, sorry. I wonder if it was initially called Isometric Warrior before someone wisely advised KID that this name would only appeal to math nerds and computer programmers aka the supremely cool cock wizards waaay too busy to play something this remedial.

So the gameplay. The screen pushes you along from behind as you shoot various mutants and futuristic mechanical looking things. Your gun…sucks. It does very little damage and covers a very small amount of space on the screen. Shooters are so frustrating because while you start off wimpy the power-ups you receive make the fight more fair…until you die. Then you have your original shittier weapon but in a harder section of the level. Isolated Warrior on the other hand does not give you a better weapon. I’ve picked up TONS of upgrades, and every time I just keep shooting the same ineffectual laser. Once, I accidentally somehow upgraded to a weapon that shoots two balls at an angle in two directions, neither of which is straight ahead. And guess where the enemies are.

My initial response is that I’m not feeling it. The isometric aspect is unique but everything else feels like an inferior version of many waaaaay better games. However, I’m hesitant to shit on Isolated Warrior too hard in the same way I’m reluctant to trash Dragon Warrior. If you’re adept at 8-bit era shooters or RPGs, you’re going to have a higher tolerance for playing them than I ever will. I was almost exclusively platformers, action, and puzzle games growing up and I have for sure struggled to appreciate the genres I didn’t play as much as a kid. So judge for yourself.

Similar Games: Adventures of Dino Riki mixed with Snake Rattle N’ Roll

OTHER LETTER I GAMES (CLASSICS)

Ice Hockey, Image Fight, Ironsword: Wizards and Warriors II, Ice Climbers, Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off Road

OTHER LETTER I GAMES WORTH TRYING

Iron Tank, Ikari Warriors II & III

OTHER LETTER I GAMES WORTH AVOIDING

Ikari Warriors, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Infiltrator