Including and especially the bad ones
Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 1987
Genre: Platform, Adventure, Top-Scroll
As a child, I spent many an hour perusing D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, reading again and again the legends of tragic heroes such as Theseus, Achilles and Icarus. The moral of every Greek myth has always been, “No matter how awesome you are, you only need to fuck up once to ruin it all.” Kid Icarus? Pretty much the same lesson.
Publisher: LJN
Year: 1987
Genre: Fighting
The Karate Kid is based on the 1980’s film of the same name. Karate was (and, I guess, is) a martial arts form developed in Okinawa that rose to enormous popularity in the 1980’s and early 90’s, when it was basically the atom bomb of martial arts forms, capable of defeating any foe or group of foes.
Like nearly all games based off movies, the Karate Kid is terrible.
The game starts with you fighting a bland karate tournament where, as in the movie, jump kicks to the face are against the rules, but still the best way to win. Then, between tournament screens, you travel between tournaments being attacked by tons of nameless thugs who sometimes drop crane kick and drum punch tokens for you to use in the tournament screens or (accidentally) on the nameless thugs.
John’s Score: 1.5 out of 5.0. The game is playable. That’s about the best that can be said for it. Fighting games on the NES are notoriously clunky, as are movie game. This is just about the worst of both worlds.
Publisher: LJN
Year: 1987
Genre: Shmup, Static
Jaws, the film, was about a shark that ate people. More than that, Jaws was about human conflict, fear of the unknown, fear of nature and fear of stagnation. The video game is still about a shark that eats people, but that’s really about it. Oh, and ecoterrorism. I’m pretty sure you play an ecoterrorist.
Like virtually all video games based on movies, Jaws is terrible and has little to do with the source material. In it, you are a fishing trawler / diver who must kill hundreds of jellyfish, manta ray and small sharks to collect enough shells to upgrade your weapons so you can kill Jaws. Like any good ecoterrorism simulator, there is a mini game where you drop bombs from a biplane onto dancing jellyfish.
John’s Rating: 1.5 out of 5.0. The gameplay is monotonous and dull, the “plot” in no way resembles that of the actual Jaws film or book and you never get a bigger boat, which was one of the shortcomings of the movie the game could have addressed.