Mega Man

Publisher: Capcom
Year:
1987
Genre: Platformer

Never send a man to do a robot’s job. Sometimes you have to fight robots with robots. A robot a day keeps Doc Wily away. Today’s game is Mega Man – the game that kicked off one of the greatest game franchises in history.

An elegant, yet humble title screen.
An elegant, yet humble title screen.

Continue reading “Mega Man”

Lunar Pool

Publisher: FCI
Year:
1987
Genre: Sports

You’ve probably never had to program a physics engine from scratch. I mean, anyone can program a simple physics engine these days in Python, Java, or whatever, but there was a time when all that sort of programming was groundbreaking.

Share my annoyance, won't you?
Share my annoyance, won’t you?

Continue reading “Lunar Pool”

The Legend of Kage

Publisher: Taito
Year:
1987
Genre: Platform

In The Legend of Kage, you are a young ninja whose bride was stolen by other ninjas. You need to kill those ninjas and retrieve her so she can be kidnapped again in the bizarre ninja version of the circle of life.

A ninja in his natural habitat
A ninja in his natural habitat

Gameplay is fairly straightforward – some levels require you to move to the end and defeat a sort of one-hitpoint-wonder boss. Other levels require you to kill a certain number of ninjas. Still others require that you just scale to the top of an impossibly tall wall. Whatever the case, Unless you grab the orb-of-lets-you-get-hit-one-extra-time, you die one hit, and hits often happen arbitrarily, owing to the frequency with which ninjas throw shurikens in random direction and your (admittedly realistic) inability to control a jump after you leave the ground.

"Why oh why did I ever leave the ground?"
“Why oh why did I ever leave the ground?”

John’s Rating: 2.5 out of 5. With repetitive and painfully arbitrary gameplay, a dearth of enemy varieties, clumsy controls and poor hit detection, the Legend of Kage might be enjoyable to play through once or twice, but it wears quickly and ages poorly.

Kill the same four ninjas a hundred thousand times.
Kill the same four ninjas a hundred thousand times.

Kid Icarus

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.

I have nothing negative to say about this title screen.
Wrapped in a gorgeous title screen like most Greek myths.

Continue reading “Kid Icarus”

Ikari Warriors

Publisher: SNK
Year: 1987
Genre: Shmup, Top-Scroll

Old school top-down shooters are pretty generic – endless waves of faceless enemy drones trying to stall your efforts as you steadily plow your way across the battlefield. They’re more notable in their differences than their similarities. Ikari Warriors is one of the first, and has a number of features that worked very well, and others that were, perhaps, not so well considered.

Making Player One the pink one for example.
Making Player One the pink one for example.

Continue reading “Ikari Warriors”