Atari 2600 #25: Stargunner

 

Developer: Telesys

Publisher: Telesys

Release: 1983

Stargunner has everything I have come to expect from a Telesys game minus one important thing. It doesn't have a funny name. Didn't they get the memo? Telesys games are supposed to have silly puns in their titles. The box art isn't funny either. It just looks like a Stargunner. I don't know what order the games were released in, but I know that at the very least Demolition Herby has a later serial number. Perhaps with Stargunner they were just taking a break from funny titles and not abandoning them altogether. At least it gave me something to talk about in the first paragraph. I already mentioned that Stargunner gave me everything I expected. What I meant by that is they simplified a much more famous arcade game so that it could run quicker on the 2600. 

In this case their inspiration in the classic Defender. I loved the Atari 2600 version of Defender when I was a kid, and it has such sentimental value to me that I have no idea if it's good or not. I think it gets a mixed response, but it's also not a game that was done so bad that people needed a replacement. Telesys didn't add something missing like they did with Demolition Herby. They just took a very famous game and used it as the inspiration for their much less famous game. It's not purely plagiarism, but it doesn't take very long to see where they got the idea for their game. 

Stargunner is a much more stripped-down experience than Defender. While Defender featured an entire city complete with a map, Stargunner only has one screen. The rolling hills at the bottom of the screen give the illusion of size, but if you fly to the edge of the screen, you just pop up back on the other side. The targets on the screen are also more passive. They don't shoot at you and can only attack by colliding. There is a ship at the top of the screen that shoots down at you, so there's plenty of action to deal with. The objects on the screen are a bit abstract so I'm not sure how to describe them. Maybe an onigiri and an enzyme? Well, whatever they are they must be eliminated. So, you shoot one target, it turns into another target, and you keep doing that until you die. It's simple, but it plays well. It has a certain addictiveness to it. 

My main problem with Stargunner is the poorly balanced difficulty. On the default easy setting the game can get almost boring. The targets move slow, and the shots coming from above are easy to avoid. Of course, this is the starter difficulty, so it's supposed to be easy. What of the other difficulties? Things get too intense too fast. Even the second option is much too hard. The ships suddenly zip across the screen, and their one goal is to collide with you. I could barely get a shot off without having some kamikaze aliens blow me up. I could easily get 30,000 or more points on the easiest setting, and on any higher difficulty I could barely break 1,000. I just wish there was a difficulty between the two extremes where the ships were more of a threat but not constantly suicidal. It's a shame because if it was well-balanced, it might be a true hidden gem. 

When I'm comparing every game ever made, 2600 games have to really be good to break into the green section. Stargunner doesn't rise up to that standard, but it's still alright. It's sad that of the three highest ranked Telesys games, two of them were adaptions of already existing arcade games. I feel like Telesys was a company that wanted to have big ideas and memorable games, but they fell short. It could've been that they ran into the crash just about the moment they started and just had to do whatever they could to survive. I'll probably never know for sure, but they weren't phoning it in either. Stargunner comes in at #115 which is almost halfway up the list. I'm already up to 184, which means I'm getting close to 200. I should play something special for my 200th, but that's a story for another day. 

Atari 2600 quality percentage: 9/25 or 36%

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G01RKJ7-caaal5lgFfGgPfZRGcqWlv4E3E2E615UYKg/edit?usp=sharing

Atari 2600 #24: Ram It

 

Developer: Telesys

Publisher: Telesys

Release Date: January 1983

(The box art implies the existence of circles. Sadly, none are featured in the actual game.)

I pride myself on being able to make a good essay out of anything. I love to take insignificant things and turn them into interesting written pieces. However, 2600 games can push me to my limit sometimes. So many of them are single screen games that have simple goals and were made by phantoms who were in business for about six weeks and left behind no digital footprint. I can't even pad them out with biological information because there is none to be found. It's even more difficult with a company like Telesys that I have already covered and have nothing new to say. I've already told what little of their story I can tell, and now I have to fall back on the hope that their last couple of games are at least interesting to talk about. Well, Ram It is an essayists worst nightmare. It's not a terrible game, but it is about as simple as games get. I think I could get some more interesting stories out of a tic-tac-toe simulator than I can out of this game. I guess the name is a little funny. Of course, I've already talked about how they made boring games with funny titles. I guess I'll just get into it, and we can all make the most of what we have.

(One thing I will say about Ram It though. It is definitely this game.)

Ram It has you controlling a gun attached to a rail in the center of the screen. You can move up-and-down and shoot either direction, but you are otherwise stuck. Your goal is to take out all the colorful rectangles that are slowly filling the screen. They start out tiny, but they will randomly grow until you are trapped. There is also a countdown that will cost you a life if it runs out, so you have to hurry. Once you destroy all the rectangles you get to move on to the next level which is a little bit harder. It's the standard Atari setup. I can tell their main goal was to have as many colors on the screen as possible. It looks very nice, and it certainly shows off how far the Atari had come during its lifespan. I like how the top and bottom are curved with makes it look like you are trapped in a big, colorful burger. 

It looks nice, but there is something unsatisfying about shooting at passive rectangles. They don't do anything but grow, and even the growing is random. My main strategy on easy mode is to start from the top-left, shoot my way down to the bottom, and then shoot my way back up from bottom-right. If I aim just right, I can take out two rectangles at once and then turn around and take out two on the other side. In fact, this is just the strategy they recommend in the instructions. I can practically ignore the length of the rectangles and just focus on the system. It's a successful system, but not a very exciting one. It is more frantic on higher difficulty settings, and they add in bonus blocks that will disappear completely if you shoot them while flashing. It's some much needed variety in an otherwise very repetitive game, but the straight-line strategy is still fairly effective. 

And that's about all I can say about Ram It. I hate it when my reviews become nothing more than describing the gameplay, but Ram It doesn't give me much material to work with. The name is funny I guess, but not funny enough to keep a review going. Ram It came out in the era when dozens of amateur companies started making terrible 2600 games and flooding the market with junk, so it actually looks fairly good stacked up against the competition. It's well made, and there is something mildly addictive about the gameplay. Unfortunately, all those terrible games are much more interesting to write about. Ram It is a competently made mediocracy that was probably appreciated in the dark days of 1983, but nothing special when stacked up against the whole library. 

(Suddenly I am hungry for a Pride Burger. Is that a thing?)

Ram It is very comfortably in the purple section just like most Telesys games. With their weird titles and fun box art I expected more. The only one I have left to review is the one with the least interesting name, so maybe it will be the most fun to play. I may write about some more boom-era publishers because I think their stories are interesting even if the individual games are not, so get out your Atari bingo cards. Ram It ranks in at #127 overall and #15 on the Atari list. I have a feeling the majority of the less famous third-party games are going to be about as good as Ram It, so I have quite the journey ahead of me. I hope you like reading about boring old Atari games, because I probably still have hundreds of them to go. 

Atari 2600 Quality Percentage: 9/24 or 37.5%

Sega Master System #11: Captain Silver

 

Developer: Data East

Publisher: Sega

Release Date: September 1989

Recently I was thinking about how positive I have been toward the Sega Master System. 70% of them have been good so far? That's way too many. I've got to find some lesser games to balance things out. To do this I decided to go back to a game I have a bit of a history with. Captain Silver was one of the first SMS game I ever owned. I found it thrifting in my tiny hometown which I always thought was odd. It's hard to believe anyone in my town ever owned a Master System, but we had an Atari 7800 so I guess it's not that strange. I didn't have many SMS games at the time, so I played it enough for form a fairly strong opinion. That opinion was that it had to be one of the worst games on the console. Acquiring more games didn't change my opinion much either. It was always one I ranked near the bottom. Several years after buying it I was playing some games for Twin Galaxies. My main goal was setting the record on Hang-On, but I had some extra room on my VHS tape. I decided to get a high score on Captain Silver since none had been submitted so far. My Hang-On record was beaten fairly quickly by someone with more focus than me, but my Captain Silver record stood for years. I spent nearly a decade being the Captain Silver world champion. In spite of this, however, I'm not sure if I fully understood the game. I play it now and it's not quite the trainwreck I remember. Is it actually a better game that I had thought, or am I just getting soft in my golden years? 

I can certainly tell that Captain Silver started life as an arcade game. It comes from the post-crash and pre-Street Fighter era where shooters and intense platformers ruled. Master System was full of arcade adaptations, and for the most part they tried to keep them authentic. Captain Silver certainly feels like a game that is still trying to eat your quarters. You move slowly and the enemies just keep coming. In the first level they are mostly dispatched with one hit, but as the levels go on, they become more difficult to defeat. I've never been a huge fan of these slow-moving side-scrollers, but I can't say it doesn't execute. The controls are fine, and I never had trouble attacking or jumping. I just find the whole thing a bit dull. There's nothing too exciting about slowly swinging a sword at a slow-moving enemy, even when there are several slow-moving enemies on the screen at the same time. There are a few branching paths and moving platforms that add some much-needed variety, and I enjoy earning extra lives by collecting letters that spell out Captain Silver from defeated enemies. There are also shops that sell a few power-ups, but unless you haven't upgraded your weapon all the way they are pretty useless. It just doesn't make much sense saving up 30,000 coins to buy an invincibility potion that only lasts about thirty seconds. Nothing they try keeps it from being uninteresting. It's certainly not one of the worst things I've ever played. However, there is another big problem with the American version of the game. 

In most regions Captain Silver came out in 1988 with six levels. The American version came out a year later, and for some reason they took out two of the levels. The instruction manual even says there are six levels, but they are nowhere to be found. With the two levels missing Captain Silver takes a miniscule ten minutes to play through. Nobody is going to beat it on their first try, but it's not a particularly hard game either. By 1989 this kind of brevity was unacceptable. I can't think of a shorter game that wasn't insanely hard. Cybernoid only lasts about ten minutes, but it would take hours to get good enough to finish it. Captain Silver just doesn't have the challenge level to justify being so short. It is novel having an SMS game that I can actually finish, but it's not the most satisfying win. 

I started this review by predicting that I was going to like Captain Silver more than I expected. I enjoyed it for the first couple of minutes, so I actually thought that it was better than I remembered. I suppose it was to a degree, but that's only because I thought it was one of the worst games of all time. At the very least I can say that it's not the worst game on Master System, and it probably won't be the worst game released in the US either. The controls and graphics are fine, and it can be entertaining in short bursts. As a complete package, however, it is too short and too basic to generate much interest. The Master System was known for its arcade ports, and Captain Silver was released after so many better ones had already been released. It even came out a month after the Genesis was released. Nobody was thinking about Captain Silver when there was 16-bit Altered Beast to play. Of course, it could be a better game than I'm giving it credit for. Maybe I'm just bitter because someone beat my record. 

So, after all that Captain Silver still ends up in the bad section. At least it's near the top, and I'm even putting it above Robodemons. It is 138 overall which makes it the third best bad game I have ranked so far. On the Master System specific list, it ranks 10 out of 11. It's better than 20-em-1, but it is the worst of the American games I have played so far. There are 114 US games, so we'll have to get through 104 more to see if that dubious record holds. That would make it stronger than my Captain Silver record, but at least I'm not bitter about it. I just think about how somewhere out there someone played Captain Silver even more than I did. This is one of those stories where nobody wins. 

Sega Master System Quality Percentage: 7/11 or 63.63%

NES #51: Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu

 

Developer: Joy Van

Publisher: Color Dreams

Release Date: 1989

("10 World of Adventure" is only accurate if you consider taking a nap an adventure)

If you know anything about Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu, it's probably from the Angry Video Game Nerd. He covered the game in one of his earliest videos, and it was strange going back and watching it after so many years. For one thing it's only around four minutes long. That was fairly normal for early YouTube, and remembering the earlier short form days makes me feel a little old. Hey kids, did you know back in the day YouTube videos could only be ten minutes long? I used to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes cut up into 10 parts with sneaky titles so they wouldn't get flagged. Anyway, it was one of his shortest reviews, and one of the most obscure titles he covered back then. There were so many iconic bad games out there yet to be reviewed that Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu just felt out of place. Why did he pick it over every other game? It had to be that title, right? Nothing else on NES has a title even close to being that strange. I remember seeing this game at my local video store for years but always being afraid to actually rent it. Would my parents get mad at me if I rented a game about a drunkard? It's only the first paragraph and already I'm rambling. You know a game is boring when I start talking about the good old days. I didn't even like the good old days that much. Okay let's get on with it.

There's not much you can say outside of "it has a funny name and it's bad." That's about all AVGN had to say. It's not even bad in a very interesting way. Many of the Color Dreams games were developed in house, and those are fun to talk about. They get increasingly strange and amateurish as the company got more and more desperate. Their strategy of quickly releasing game after game backfired spectacularly, and it's the stuff of bad video game legend. Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu was made by Taiwanese company Joy Van who would later merge with the slightly more familiar Sachen. They specialized in cheap, tiny games usually made to be in multi-carts. If you've played many unlicensed games than you've probably seen their name. They were very prolific and ended up on just about every cartridge-based system in the 90s. Sometimes their games were properly licensed, but usually they went the bootleg route. Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu certainly feels like a game meant for a multi-cart. It's simple, repetitive, and extremely short. It looks more like a real game than a typical Color Dreams release, but it's not going to fool anyone.

Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is a side-scroller that requires you to find eight yin-yang symbols and then fight a boss. Sometimes the symbols are out in the open, but more often they are hidden in completely random places and have to be shot to be revealed. Once you collect all eight of them you are whisked away to a boss fight. I do like how you are instantly flown to the exit even if the last symbol you collect is on the other side of the level. Why drag this out any longer than it has to be? It's mostly unremarkable outside of a couple of annoying quirks. For some reason they mapped the A button as a projectile shot and the B button as a fan wave which I think is supposed to be a melee attack. It makes me think that they had originally planned for projectile ammo to be limited and then changed their minds because there is no reason to ever melee attack. Most of the enemies start from far away and shoot things at you. Waiting for a close-up attack would be suicide. This also means that jumping uses the up button. It's not the worst "up for jump" game I have ever played, possibly because it never gets all that intense. I never got confused by it. Sadly, this means that it's not all that interesting. Almost interesting, but not quite.

After the collect-a-thon part of the level you are then taken to a boss fight. This too is very boring as they are all basically the same. They usually move back-and-forth while shooting forward. You just have to hang out on a platform until they turn and then shoot them in the back. Sometimes the platforms above you will have fire, but oddly you can shoot the fire to put it out. Still not very interesting. You repeat this formula five or six times and then fight an uninspired final boss that was just as easy and boring as the rest of the game. At least the game has an actual end screen instead of just text on a field of black. There were plenty of professionally made games that can't say that. 

I always feel weird ranking a game below Rocky and Bullwinkle. I was always under the impression that it was the worst game of all time. Now it's not even in the bottom ten, and Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu slots in just below it. It all comes down to being interesting. Rocky and Bullwinkle is bad, but it's bad in an unusual and unforgettable way. All the levels put in a new type of badness that I had never dreamed of before. Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is just plain ol' boring. Once you've played it for five minutes you've seen everything. It's still better than Wayne Gretzky Hockey because there's more to look at than fields of blue ice. So, for now Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is in my NES top 50 at a nice round 50/51. I plan on doing some more unlicensed games in the near future, so maybe it won't get knocked out as quickly as I expect. It's also 171 out of 181 on my overall list only saved from oblivion by a bunch of HyperScan and boring casino games. Nothing dooms a game more than being boring, and Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu should be put in the boring game hall of fame. 

NES Quality Percentage: 25/51 or 49.01%

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G01RKJ7-caaal5lgFfGgPfZRGcqWlv4E3E2E615UYKg/edit?usp=sharing

NES #50: Dragon Warrior II

 

Developer: Chunsoft

Publisher: Enix

Release Date: September 1990

I feel like Enix was powered by pure stubbornness before their merger with Square. At least that's what it felt like in America. How else can you explain them releasing four Dragon Warrior games in the United States? There are not a lot of series on NES that had four or more games, and you certainly wouldn't expect one of them to be a quirky RPG series that didn't even start getting released until 1989. Even Final Fantasy skipped a few games in the west. Enix decided to forge ahead, however, after the original Dragon Warrior became a surprise hit. Of course, that was with Nintendo's marketing. For the rest of the series, Enix would self-publish leading to a much more obscure trio of games. Every used game store has a copy of Dragon Warrior, but I rarely see the sequels anywhere. I know I saw at least one copy of Dragon Warrior II at a store, because I remember buying it many years ago. I also remember nearly pulling my hair out trying to finish it. Dragon Warrior II isn't a game for the faint of heart. It's big, it's confusing, and it is difficult. It's one of the most difficult turned-based JRPGs I have ever played. It's certainly more difficult than Enix's The 7th Saga. It's much more difficult, and everything is bigger compared to the first game, but not all the expansion makes for a better gaming experience. Dragon Warrior II is very much a transitional game.

Some of the lessons they learned from the first game translated into a better gaming experience. If you've played any games from later in the series, this one will look and feel more familiar than the original. While the original Dragon Warrior had a much more PC feel with its dark, mazelike dungeons, Dragon Warrior II has the bright, room-based dungeons that would influence the rest of the series. There are significantly more monsters, so fans of the series will see even more familiar faces. For people who obsess over tiny things, using stairs now happens automatically. I was especially happy that they fixed the key problem from the first game. Locked doors are opened by permanent keys that are found out in various places around the world. You don't have to go back to a specific town to buy keys that break after one use. Dragon Warrior II is the first game in the series to have a multi-character party and also the first to have multiple monsters in battle. I will talk more about these later, but they are certainly more in line with other Dragon Quest games. It even has cutscenes thereby expanding the narrative possibilities. It's impressive when an NES game has any kind of story, so the expansion from the excuse plot of the first game is quite welcome. 

It's also much, much bigger than the first game. The original landmass is just a small portion of a much larger map, and they were certainly proud of their bigger space. The first section of the game has your character travelling around a large section of map looking for companions. I feel like just this first continent is bigger than the entire first game. Luckily there are also multiple places to save. You still can't save in dungeons or on the world map, but most large towns have a place to save. If you were driven crazy by the claustrophobic grind of the first game than you will certainly appreciate the expansiveness of Dragon Warrior II. There's a bit less mindless grind and a bit more exploring. Of course, with battles as difficult as they are I've never been able to get into much of a mindless state. There is even a boat for more exploring. It was very impressive for 1987, and three years later it certainly still held up. I don't think it felt as old as the first game did despite its release gap being about the same. It's nothing like the multi-planet madness of the first two Phantasy Star games, but it certainly showed off the potential of RPGs even in an 8-bit setting. It all sounds great, but yet I just can't rave about Dragon Warrior II. I want it to be a masterpiece, but in spite of the developers attempt to make an expanded experience they fall short in some very critical areas. They had many great ideas, but they faltered in the execution. 

I already mentioned the expanded world map, and it's both a good and a bad thing. In the pre-boat section of the game the set-up is at least fairly logical. The main problem is that towns and dungeons are too far apart. There are big sections where there is simply nothing to find. And while the first few towns are clumped fairly close together, as the game goes on, they get farther and farther apart. After the party gets their boat things become extremely confusing. Most of the new areas are shaped oddly with the important points hidden deep within the continents. It's very easy to get lost out there looking for a new area to explore, and it doesn't help that there is no in-game map. Hopefully you bought this game new and had your fold-out map handy, or you exist in the internet era and looked one up. I can't imagine renting this game thirty years ago with no instructions or map to help me. Also, the teleporting item, wings of wyvern, only takes you back to the last town you saved in. The second half of the game features a lot of traveling, and it's hard when there's no quick way to travel between towns. All the while you have to put up with a downright brutal encounter rate. I can't tell you how many times I encountered battles within five steps of each other, and it's not unusual to fight two battles back-to-back. Just about every Dragon Warrior game going forward would have great world maps, and big quality of life improvements would be on the horizon, but in this early state it doesn't quite come together.

And it's the game's biggest innovation that I have the biggest problem with. I certainly love the concept of having multiple party members. Later in 1987 Final Fantasy would show gamers what was possible with a multi-party system. Every type of character had unique skills and weaknesses. Chunsoft would copy this model to great effect with Dragon Warrior III. Unfortunately, with Dragon Warrior II they had no idea what to do with the extra party members. They basically took the versatile hero from the first game and split him up into three people. The main character is only good for attacking with no magic or other skills. The prince, who you pick up second, is mixed character who can fight and cast spells but never gets that good at either. He doesn't get any of the good combat equipment and never gets enough MP to be used as a pure magician either. He is mostly good for casting healing spells. The princess, the final character of the trio, is only good for spells. She has almost no equipment and is constantly vulnerable to attack. Her combat spells are nice, but there is practically no way to restore MP outside of towns, so they constantly need to be rationed. This makes for a lot of battles where two thirds of the party are either going to be blocking or doing scratch damage. 

The game's difficult combat makes the situation even worse. There are groups of monsters to contend with, and you are not able to select which monster in a group each character attacks. This makes it hard to strategize in battle. You can't focus your strong attack on one monster in a group and two weaker attacks on another for example. This leads to many wasted attacks. Of course, sometimes monsters will appear as individuals in battle, but when this happens you can't use group spells on them. Both situations make combat extremely difficult. I've already touched on this, but it bears repeating. Dragon Warrior II is just hard. Battles will see the screen fill up with the most difficult enemies in the area, and they seem to have all the advantages. Monsters are not shy about casting all manner of status spells including those trees that cast instant death spells over and over. Exploring the open world is tempting, but because of the high difficulty you pretty much have to go everywhere in the correct order. Also, why did they make antidote a non-combat only spell? That doesn't connect to the main point of this paragraph. It's just another cruel thing about combat I just thought of.

Now that I've said all that I will admit that I do have fun playing Dragon Warrior II. The formula is just too strong for a Dragon Quest game to be a total failure. Sure, it's difficult and there's a lot of grinding, but there's still something appealing about it. Having three characters that all start at level one means that there's always someone relatively close to leveling up. In a game like Final Fantasy the party is complete from the very first moment, and they all gain levels at the same time unless a party member dies and misses some battles. I like the staggered system better. The difficulty can be frustrating, but that only makes the victories sweeter. Even games I love will sometimes fade from my mind, but I'll never forget playing through Dragon Warrior II for the first time. And while exploration can be dangerous, it's still exciting to attempt. It's not the series' greatest world, but it's still one I want to fully experience. There are enough hidden items and secrets to make it worthwhile. I also enjoy that it is a distant sequel to the first game and even features the original landmass as a late game easter egg. Continuity is rare with RPG series. 

It's a testament to how good these Dragon Quest games are that my least favorite game in the whole series is still my 25th highest ranked game. Of course, my tastes could change as I play through the other ones, so make sure you read those reviews too. It's an awkward and difficult game that is full of great ideas but hindered by its disappointing execution at times. If you are a fan of RPGs and want to play some of the historic ones than I certainly recommend it. If you're a more casual gamer than it's only going to lead to pain and frustration. I am a completely lunatic who has to play everything and even I got frustrated at times. Of course, game #26 on my list is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so I guess that's just the pain and frustration section of the list. That might be the best description of the NES. They made games that were equal parts fun and painful. That might sound odd, but it was obviously a formula for success. 

Nintendo Entertainment System Quality Percentage: 25/50 or 50%

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G01RKJ7-caaal5lgFfGgPfZRGcqWlv4E3E2E615UYKg/edit?usp=sharing

NES #49: Robodemons

 

Developer: Color Dreams

Publisher: Color Dreams

Release Date: December 20, 1989

It's finally time to talk about Color Dreams, one of several unlicensed companies that flourished for a couple of years in the early 90s. Actually, Color Dreams was three of several unlicensed companies. They would also go on to release games as Bunch Games and Wisdom Tree. The fact that they kept having to change their name shows that they had a troubled history. Of course, they were operating illegally according to Nintendo. If you don't know, Nintendo consoles originally came with a lock out chip that would keep unlicensed titles from working. The idea was that Nintendo would only release games they approved of, and this would avoid the glut of shovelware that sunk the Atari 2600. Third party publishers were only allowed so many releases a year with quality being a factor in the number. This explains the Nintendo Seal of Quality. It also explains why games would blink when you turned them on. That was the lockout chip getting confused. It is obvious that Nintendo let plenty of stinkers get released. However, very few of the Color Dreams games raise to the level of the worst licensed games. It's hard to say who were the good guys during the unlicensed era. The people who figured out how to bypass the lockout could be seen as rebels getting around Nintendo's greedy policies because they had something to say and wanted to do things there way. However, outside of Tengen and Camerica, who both had famous companies behind them, most unlicensed games were purely amateur. Collectors usually don't even count them as part of the full set. I do, however, and I will review them along with any normal game. Nintendo ran them out of stores by 1991, but they managed to release 21 games during their brief window. Could a tiny inexperienced company have any sort of quality when they were releasing so much so quickly? Well, let's look at Robodemons.

Robodemons is an amateurish oddball, but one that at least plays like a real game. I think if I had rented this game in 1990, I wouldn't have felt ripped off. I sure did that time I rented Crystal Mines and couldn't get it to work, but that's another Color Dreams story. Robodemons is about evil King Kull who took over the Earth by transferring the souls of demons into robots. The don't look like robots though, so the game should probably just be called Demons. They were obviously trying to showcase imagery that Nintendo wouldn't normally allow, so it's full of devils, body parts, and scantily clad women. It's nothing too over the top, but it's still a bit jarring seeing a tied-up woman in a bikini in a Nintendo game. Each level is split into two parts with the first being a shooter and second being a side-scroller. The goals can change slightly from level to level, but typically you are fighting a specific demon in the shooting part and collecting a key to unlock the exit in the second part. It's a decent set-up, and I like how strange and different the side-scrolling parts look. One level you are walking on body parts and another you are in a robot factory. There were plenty of licensed games that didn't get so creative with their level design. The player's weapon is probably the most obvious flaw. It's a slow-moving boomerang that has to either hit something or complete its arc before it can be shot again. It can take a couple of seconds to finish which can be a lifetime in a theoretically fast-paced action game. There are no power-ups to be found, so it's just slow boomerang for the game's entirety. 

The more I played it, the more I noticed how unprofessional it was, but luckily the design flaws mostly worked in my favor. This is a nice change of pace for unlicensed games. Usually there will be glitches and errors that make games unwinnable. With Robodemons, if you can learn how to take advantage of the system than you can actually win. For example, practically no monsters respawn except for a couple of tiny demons. I usually dislike a game with too high of a respawn rate, but it still feels like they only left this feature out because they didn't really know how to do it. The demons don't even respawn after you die, so if you still have a life left your next try will be much easier. There is also a much higher limit on hearts than what appears. The screen only shows five hearts, but I'm not even sure if there is a limit. There are plenty of demons that drop hearts, so I made sure to actually kill them all and save up hearts. I felt fairly invincible after a while. Also, there is usually a powerful enemy guarding the locked exit doors. I discovered very quickly that the best strategy is to just ignore them. You can usually jump right over them and go through the door as long as you have the key. The only bosses that are necessary are a couple in the shooter sections and of course King Kull at the end. I feel like these are all flaws that would've been fixed if the game was professionally made. They are helpful flaws, but they definitely give away the truth behind the game. 

Expectations for unlicensed games are exceedingly low, so the fact that I was able to wring any fun out of Robodemons is no small feat. I can't say it's good exactly, but it's a decent way to start my Color Dreams journey. Maybe if it had a better weapon and it was longer it would be a hidden gem. I beat the game in about two hours, but there's only about ten minutes worth of game. If I knew all the tricks going in, I doubt it would've taken even that long. It does have a plot, but it's all told by text that is extremely difficult to read. Once again, it shows that these guys didn't know what they were doing.

I started this review by saying that most unlicensed games aren't as good as the worst licensed titles. I'm already going to contradict that statement by ranking Robodemons higher than a few of them. I thought it might sneak up into the okay section, but instead it's one of the elite bad games. I ranked it at #137 just behind Mario's Time Machine. It's hard to rank Robodemons above any game with Mario in it, even an iffy educational one. That means there's seven NES games I like less than Robodemons, including one, Baseball, released by Nintendo themselves. I'm not that familiar with the Color Dreams games, so it will be interesting to see where Robodemons ranks overall. Did I just get lucky and play the best one first? Only time will tell. 

NES Quality Percentage: 24/49 or 48.97%

NES #48: Frankenstein: The Monster Returns

Developer: Tose

Publisher: Bandai

Release Date: July 1991

(Unlike this cover, Frankenstein in the game has no chill)

Hey, did you know that Frankenstein is the name of the doctor and not the monster? It's a little-known fact that only gets brought up every time anyone mentions the character. If you imagine a know-it-all man saying this to a woman, then you would probably get along well with Frankenstein author Mary Shelly. It's a book about a lot of things, but it's hard to look past her critique of male privilege. The doctor is allowed to create a life and then quickly abandon it the second things get too hard with no immediate consequences. The monster feels that because he is intelligent, he should automatically be accepted into society. When his forcefulness frightens people, he takes it out on society instead of blaming himself. It's a world where the men make mistakes and expect sympathy while the innocent women in their lives end up being punished. Of course, Hollywood in 1931 wasn't ready for a monster that practically talked his victims to death, so they made the monster a silent brute. The themes of innocent women being punished for man's mistakes still shows up in the movie, but it is much more remembered for Boris Karloff's look and odd pathos. His version of the monster is a killer for sure, but more sympathetic than the chatty, calculating novel version. I bring this all up because 60 years after the famous movie Bandai released a game that throws all the famous interpretations out the window and creates an all-new version of the monster now presented as a cackling super villain. He's more Dr. Doom than Dr. Frankenstein with a new motivation to terrorize and countryside and destroy all who oppose him with an army of possessed minions. Of course, he sets all this in motion by kidnapping and innocent woman. Even with a much wilder premise, the themes of the original book and look of Karloff's movie monster are intact. Also, he's straight up called Frankenstein so just get used to it. What else would you call him anyway? His name is about the least strange thing about this strange game. 

Of course, what else would we expect from Bandai? They were by far the oddest publisher for the NES. They made games that looked primitive and jettisoned typical structures for open-ended strangeness. They adapted little-known IPs and rarely turned them into what we would consider normal games. Bandai is where we got such oddities as Ninja Kid, Dragon Power, and the most infamous of them all, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Just seeing that Banai logo on a game made you know that you were probably going to play something like you had never played before, and it had a very good chance of being garbage. Tose made several of these games, and much like Bandai they had a much brighter future after getting all the weirdness out of their system. They work with Square-Enix now mostly doing remakes of my all-time favorite games. They certainly feel like a company that was in it to last. Even their strangest early games feel like they were made by a team that was really trying. Frankenstein: The Monster Returns is a strange game that is hard to define, but it's certainly not a lazy one. 

The name alone made me think this was going to be a Castlevania clone, and while this comparison comes up in reviews almost constantly, it only resembles Castlevania in its spooky tone. Even then the resemblance is only surface level. Sure, they both have skeletons and ghosts, but Frankenstein is much more varied. Castlevania games are typically grounded in stone castles. Frankenstein takes the protagonist on a journey through much more varied environments. There is a castle, but you'll have to trek through forests and sewers to get there. The gameplay is more like a simplified River City Ransom. It is a somewhat open-ended side scroller with beat-em-up elements. It is divided up into levels, but the levels are full of secret passages and hidden items. They're not all good secrets either. Sometimes a bad jump will send you to an annoying mini boss. I enjoy the presentation though. Environments are vastly different from screen to screen keeping things from ever getting boring. I can't deny it's entertaining. The monsters are odd and challenging, and the overall strangeness of it helps it stand out from countless other NES side scrollers. 

Of course, this is the NES, and Frankenstein's biggest drawback is its difficulty. This is not a game you're going to make much progress on the first time. You start with a weak punch and difficult-to-execute jump kick. Monsters will drop upgrades, and Frankenstein would be practically impossible without them. The problem is that getting hit causes you to lose them. Weapons can be regained if you act quickly, but projectiles are lost for good. The way to beat Frankenstein is to get a projectile early in the game and then never get hit. Luckily backtracking is possible within levels, but it can get a little annoying going back to the beginning of a level to regain a projectile. Frankenstein does have a password and a few continues, but the continues don't reset when you enter your password on your next attempt. It's better to just try the level again if you get a game over and save the continues for later levels. After a few tries I was able to make some progress, so it doesn't cross the line into impossible to play territory. However, the difficulty can be disheartening if you're not used to NES difficulty or just want some goofy game to pass the time. 

I'm pleasantly surprised to say that I had fun with Frankenstein: The Monster Returns. I just love the kooky presentation. I don't think you're going to remember the awkward gameplay moments as much as you are going to remember the over-the-top dialogue and level design. Not every game has hopping tombstones and green-haired medusas. I enjoy the eccentric bosses that branch out a bit from a typical NES horror game. It's not just skeletons and giant bats. It was fun fighting a flying chimera and evil tree spirit for a change. They also have dialogue which gives them actual personalities. It even sneaks in some sympathetic moments as the monsters try to escape from Frankenstein's control. And while it certainly isn't the best-looking game on the system, the levels have enough personality to make up for it. 

So, Frankenstein: The Monster Return somehow sneaks into the good column. I was not expecting much and was pleasantly surprised. It's not super high on the list, but it's still a bit of a hidden gem. I'm ranking it at #82 right above Dracula: Crazy Vampire which was another oddball spooky game. That's a game I feel like I overrated, but I still think it's where Frankenstein belongs. With so many NES oddballs sneaking into the good section I feel that I will have no trouble getting past 100 good ones. I doubt Frankenstein: The Monster Returns is going to make it into the top 100 NES games, but it's certainly worth checking out. 

NES Quality Percentage: 24/28 or 50%

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