why you should rub your ass against your NES

mostly because the NES is disgustingly awesome. and nothing proves this more than the fact that just this week, 23 years since the NES was first released and something like 21 years since i got mine and started playing video games, i discovered my two favorite NES games. there are just so many good games for this system, it's amazing. back then you had to make a game that gave the player an experience worth paying fifty dollars for without the ability to have fancy graphics or effects, and often you had such a ludicrously small amount of storage space to work with on that cartridge...the only way to make a game satisfying was to utilize a pretty amazing amount of ingenuity and to also make the game hard as fuck so the gamer would be so enraged that beating the game became an act of divinely-inspired revenge. i'm completely convinced that the NES was directly responsible for the rise in the use of the phrase "beating" a game rather than "finishing" it, because odds are you would beat most of these games physically with your fists before you finished them.

anyway, zelda maniacs can eat me because i have discovered the two most unique, interesting NES games in the universe: "river city ransom" and "the guardian legend".

RCR is a "double dragon" type streetfighting game; it's not a coincidence that it's made by technos, the company that made "double dragon"; in fact there's an homage to the latter game in the ending sequence of the former which is pretty hilarious to see if you're a DD fan. anyway, this game is like a street-fighting RPG. you're a kid whose girlfriend has been girlfriend-napped (yay 80s gender stereotypes!) by the school bully who has taken over the streets of town with his gangs in an effort to, well, kick your ass before you kick his ass. the girl, as is often the case with guys, is really just an excuse for you to kick the shit out of a bunch of people...by the time you "rescue" her, she just bitches you out for not doing so sooner because her chance to shop at the mall for the day has been ruined. don't blame me; blame the japanese.

anyway, the fighting portion of the game is also similar to DD: one button punches, one kicks, and both of them jumps. in midair you can kick, punch or throw shit. you haven't lived till you've jumped off a ledge with a tire over your head and heaved it at a bunch of bad guys while in midair. or kicked a box that was flying at you and sent it rocketing back at the guy who threw it at a hilariously dangerous speed. i laughed out loud at this game more often than i have at pretty much anything for a long time. it's awesome.

but as fun as the fighting is, you're not going to get to do much of it unless you level up. this isn't your typical experience-point RPG system, though. what happens is you get money (lunch money?) from the bullies when you beat them up, and then you use this money to buy things at the malls that power up your stats.

the game world itself is actually pretty small (definitely smaller than "simon's quest", for example), but there's enough to be done in those screens that you don't really feel like you're being coddled into playing the same parts over and over again because the designers were too lazy to make more screens. there are bosses to beat, lots of different weapons to beat them with, and lots of techniques to buy at the malls to expand the combat.

this isn't necessarily the most fun i've ever had playing NES, but it's one of those games that's so immersive and has so much to do (not to mention the fact that it's employing certain gaming conceits nearly 20 years before more recent games have been lauded for "creating" them) that once you dig into it you're shocked that you're playing an NES game and it's hard not to wonder what this system was really capable of while a lot of developers were busily cranking out mario bros. clones.

if i have one complaint (and oh, i do) about the game, it's that there is SO MUCH stuff to buy at the malls, and so much of it costs an amount of money that it's going to take you 20-30 minutes an item to gather said money by beating guys...AND (here's the kicker) you're never told what something does until AFTER you buy it. what the fuck?! so in the original game, i guess you were forced to save up a bunch of money, write down your password, and keep reloading the game, buying everything, and taking detailed notes? or else you just bought things at random...but i don't see how you could have finished the game that way. the game was pretty easy once i leveled up everything, but it took me almost four hours to do so, and this was after looking up a list on the internet of all the items and exactly what they did. i can't imagine how long it would take without said list. this is one of those things that doesn't make sense. it makes the game harder, but in a stupid way. it's a cop out, and a huge one. and it's the only thing that, to me, keeps this from being the absolute coolest NES game evar.

here's a video of some of the awesomely cartoonish fighting:


and here's a video that's so weird i couldn't help but watch it and giggle with mad glee.


the second game is "the guardian legend". this game is also a genre-splattering type game in the sense that it's half a space shooter a la "gradius" and half an adventure a la "legend of zelda". i played through this whole game the other night during an insomnia attack; it took about five hours once i realized how the whole system worked (and my confusion on this point wasn't necessarily the game's fault. i was still a little drunk when i started and missed talking to the first giant, cute, blue alien-guy because i was cackling insanely and trying to shoot him with my plasma gun.

anyway, the way it works is that you're pretty much stuck on this living planet-thing, and you have to travel across it on foot, setting self-destruct switches by flying down corridors at high speed and killing the gigantic, freaky-ass monsters at the end of said corridors. what makes this game so interesting is that there are a lot of different ways to accomplish these objectives. you get money from killing bad guys that you can use occasionally to buy weapons in shops, but the money also works as ammo for your special weapons, PLUS it determines how powerful your main weapon is. so having lots of money is important so that your main gun is super-powerful, but at the same time you can switch out having a really powerful main gun for the benefit of being able to use a laser sword and a protective body shield and grenades and so on. all of these special weapons work whether you're flying or walking, and though the game is linear for the most part, the challenges that you have to conquer, especially in the last half the game when you have something like 20 different items and weapons, can be taken on in a lot of different ways, and that's what really makes things interesting.

like i said, this game took me around 5-6 hours to finish, and wasn't incredibly difficult (until the VERY end) because i went in all the extra flying stages, and took the time to power up all my weapons completely. it's not a terribly long game by any means, but it's easily the most immersive experience i've ever had on the NES (music-wise, graphics-wise, intensity-wise, etc.)...this game nails a pretty much perfect balance between exploring and wandering to find the next clue and frenetic shoot 'em up stages that rank right up there with the hardest ones in "gradius". this game could easily have been two decent games, but when they're put together it goes beyond decent into "almost as good as eating cookies".

here's a video of some of the overworld exploring and then (at 3:42) some of the flying action.


oh, and the game's protagonist is a tall, dark-haired girl wearing red knee-high boots who can turn into a spaceship at will. let me say that again: SHE CAN TURN INTO A SPACESHIP AND BACK. not, like fly a separate spaceship, but actually turn into one. that fact alone makes this the best NES game evar.