NES Games No One Played: Letter U

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 U.

• 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
• Letter I can be found here
• Letter J can be found here
• Letter K can be found here
• Letter L can be found here
• Letter M can be found here
• Letter N can be found here
• Letter O can be found here
• Letter P can be found here
• Letter Q can be found here
• Letter R can be found here
• Letter S can be found here
• Letter T can be found here

ULTIMATE AIR COMBAT | 1992

Now here’s a genre of games I never ever play: flight simulators! While making these lists I’ve intentionally avoided several types of games such as strategy rpgs (they take too long to playthrough) and sports games (not enough to say about them really). While I know there’s plenty of nuance to simulators, it’s just never been something that caught my interest. I mean how exciting can it be to play yet another game where you’re first person flying a plane? Well, let’s find out.

Ultimate Air Combat was developed by Activision who made the excellent Galaxy 5000 annnnndddd both Ghostbusters games. Hmmmm, odds are not good here. Well to start with, the graphics are pretty amazing, just really well drawn animations. And hey, there’s even a story! Admiral “Cliff Stormdrane” turns the lights off for his slideshow presentation and the proceeds to tell the president about “Don Gwano” a dictator who’s hoarding oil or something. Y’know, the story of every post-Vietnam American conflict. After taking a nap through that snorefest, you get to choose from three planes: a F18 Hornet, a F14 Tomcat, or a Harrier jet. All of these look super dope, very well rendered; I absolutely had some Micro Machines that looked just like them. Next you can pick some fuel and missile customizations, but the two options “Unload” or “Auto Arm” are a little confusing. After that, take off! Yeah boi, let’s roast these motherfuckers quickly so we gots more time for shirtless volleyball!

Once you leave the aircraft, all those good graphics quickly melt away revealing the true core of flight sim games: a cockpit with some instruments and a blue sky above with a slightly different blue ocean below. And whoa boy once bogeys start popping up on your radar and you try to chase em, those two colors just start spinning constantly while you miss your targets repeatedly. The whole thing is actually quite nauseating. You have four missions to choose from, but it doesn’t matter which one you pick, they all start on an aircraft carrier and they all feature this blue on blue vomit fest so hopefully you’re not chewing tobacco while playing. I figured out that the easiest way to get past this section is to press nothing at all, just glide along in cat-like readiness. The enemy planes will just one by one fly directly in front of you and let you shoot them with one missile. Thanks dudes!

After you’ve destroyed dem planes, you’ll switch to a new gameplay mode that actually looks and plays a lot like Galaxy 5000 which is to say an isometric viewpoint and a constant grinding of your thumb on the D-pad controls to move around. This part is pretty rad actually! You fly around a big map looking for the targets and once you find them you’ve gotta bomb or shoot them along with enemy vehicles, planes, and anti air missiles. Once you explode something, power ups will appear, but here’s where the big issue with this game appears. Not only is the perspective isometric, but you can also dive up and down. The problem with this is that when one of these items appears on the screen, there’s no way to tell what altitude it’s at. So you’ll be constantly circling around, pulling up and down, and just barely missing these things over and over before they inevitable disappear. This is a huge problem because you have limited bombs and you’ll need a ton of them to knock out everything below you. You can shoot the targets with a machine gun, but it’s very awkward to hit things below you in a moving plane.

I don’t know, this may actually be an ok game! I mean I’ll never play it again or anything, but I think if you’re someone who likes the idea of playing Top Gun mixed with Cobra Triangle coupled with way more awkward controls than both of those games put together, you’re probably gonna love Ultimate Air Combat!

Similar Games: Top Gun, Cobra Triangle, Galaxy 5000

ULTIMATE BASKETBALL | 1990

Sigh, basketball. Well, there was slim pickin’s in the Letter U category this week, so it was either this or try to play through one of the Ultima games and I just don’t have the time or patience to grind through one of those. I enjoy most all sports, both playing and watching, but basketball is one I’ve just never been able to love. I played a bit as a child and for sure did the whole driveway solo shooting pretty often, but I just could never get the coordination of dribbling or the precision of shooting down. But hey, that’s what videogames were made for!

There’s a large set of basketball games on the system including some decent titles (Double Dribble, Arch Rivals, Tecmo NBA Baskeball) and some stinkers (Harlem Globetrotters, Jordan vs Bird: One on One, Magic Johnson’s Fast Break). BTW, those stinkers aren’t even all that bad, they’re just really basic and boring games with little to distinguish them from other similar titles. My favorite basketball game for the NES is Hoops, which is like a street style playground rules competition. My favorite title of the bunch is Roundball: 2 on 2 Challenge. Was the word “basketball” copy written or something? It sounds like a description you’re snotty art friend uses to describe a game you’re watching, but they intentionally say the name of the sport wrong to somehow…make a joke? I’m here to tell you that throwing out the term “Sportsball” as some catch all judgment insult about an activity you believe is beneath you and your cultural relevance is not only uninspired but some straight up pretentious bullshit. RANT OVER.

Oh yeah, Ultimate Basketball! Well, as you can imagine, it’s pretty much like every other 8-bit basketball game where you view the action from court-side perspective. The main gameplay graphics are pretty decent, reminiscent of Double Dribble. However, where they really excel is when you shoot. Depending on your distance from the goal it’ll show these great cut scenes of your player shooting or dunking. If a defender is close by, they’ll also appear in the graphic to block, but I have no idea what decides whether someone scores vs misses in these scenarios. I thought the cutscenes in Hoops were really great, but to my surprise the ones in Ultimate Basketball are even better, maybe even some of the best on the system. The teams are those generic non-licensed names like the LA Eagles and the New York Powers, and I always love seeing what cities get which knock-offs franchises. Personally I gotta go with the Detroit Unions with three upraised fists as their logo.

So the graphics are great, the music is pretty jammin’, is there anything bad about this game? Oh yeah there is, it sucks. As far as I can tell, you cannot pick which player to control on defense or even which player to pass to once the ball is in, the game just chooses for you. This is obviously super inconvenient when you’re trying to run back on defense or pass it to someone who’s open instead of completely triple covered. The computer AI is waaaaaayyyy too good and will intercept your first pass from the baseline 9 out of 10 times. Even if you do manage to inbound the ball, you will be dispossessed immediately or forced to commit a charging foul for some reason. Most of the time I either pass it right to the opposing player, or just chuck it straight out of bounds which really shouldn’t be an option in a game where the controls are this frustrating. If not for that little tiny flaw in it’s design called ummm “FUN”, this would probably be the best baskeball game on the console. Instead, it’s a hard pass….straight to the wrong player.

Similar Games: All the basketball games

UNTOUCHABLES | 1991

I have two copies of Untouchables, each with an entirely different cover. I thought maybe one of them was a PAL version, but as far as I can tell they were both released in the US or Canada. Isn’t that weird? I mean I know of a few alternate covers of games like the Metroid yellow cartridge or the grey Zelda carts, and then there’s the “it was called this but for various reasons we renamed it” games like Stadium Events/World Class Track Meet and Mike Tyson’s Punchout/Punchout. I even have two versions of Gunsmoke, but even then the artwork is only slightly different. I’m just really confused by the fact that a relatively uncommon game based on the incredibly violent film definitely not made for kids would get two separate designs released in North America. Some gaming scientist out there will hopefully get to the bottom of this.

I’ve actually never seen the Untouchables, but since there’s no plot at all to the game I’m going to say that you also do not need to see it in order to enjoy the NES version. I don’t know why I said enjoy, there’s no way you’re going to enjoy this, so maybe go see the movie instead. If you’ve played some other Ocean titles like Darkman, Cool World, or Blues Brothers you’re probably well prepared for the damning faults that their games possess, but you should also know that they excel in a few areas. The graphics are pretty decent, especially in the alleyway shooting stages. Another thing they usually do well is including a variety of gameplay styles. Here, there’s the aforementioned third person shooter levels which use a crosshairs style format, some sidescrolling, a bizarre baby carriage top down escort mission, annnnndddd a slighly different third person shooter level. The music? Well it’s starts off ok on the title screen, but after that whoa boy it gets real rough. Something about Ocean meant that the guys they hired to compose music either had limited understanding of the NES and it’s sound capabilities OR they really hated low frequencies. Every song in the Ocean repertoire are these repetitive high pitches glitch squeakings and Untouchables is sadly no exception.

There’s probably plenty to say about the later levels of the game, but Jesus Christ that first level is so fucking frustrating you’ll probably never see them. You have to play through a series of similar looking streets and your objective is to shoot a certain number of gangsters before you can move on to the next area. Bad guys pop out randomly on either side and you move a crosshair onto them to shoot em similar to games like Cabal <yeah!> or Dirty Harry <shudder>. The biggest flaw here is that unlike Cabal you can’t just rapidly fire, which allows you to hit multiple enemies along the way to across the screen. In Untouchables you only get two bullets after which you’re forced to reload behind a wall. I actually love this setback since it’s a realistic portrayal of how that type of gun would work at the time, but it makes this experience all the more tedious. Also, the cross hair is so slow that by the time you see an enemy and move it over to him, he’s long since disappeared and reappeared on the opposite side of the screen. The light gun would’ve made this so much more fun.

The most evil thing about all of this is THAT THERE’S A TIMER! So it’s hard and slow to shoot guys, you have limited ammo before reloading, and you have to hurry as quickly as possible because it only gives you a handful of seconds to somehow mow through all these dudes. I gave this a valiant effort, but I couldn’t get through this area without eventually throwing my controller. Gonna go out on a limb here and say I didn’t miss much by not playing the later levels. When the timer winds down, the game cuts to a newspaper with the pun filled headline “Time runs out for Elliot Ness”. Dayum, that’s a sick burn Ocean! Dicks.

Similar Games: Dirty Harry, The Punisher, Blues Brothers

OTHER LETTER U GAMES (CLASSICS)

Uninvited, Uncharted Waters

OTHER LETTER U GAMES WORTH TRYING

Ultima III IV & V, Urban Champion

OTHER LETTER U GAMES WORTH AVOIDING

Uncanny X-Men