Category: Written Features

While Super Mario Bros. was Mario’s main breakout game, it wasn’t his first game. Mario was first introduced in the 1982 arcade game, Donkey Kong. Some time later, Mario would gain a green-clad brother named Luigi and would be featured in another unrelated arcade game aptly named Mario Bros. Then they were stars of the Super Mario Bros. game and became well-known icons in Nintendo games. So given that they were popular, Nintendo decided to feature the brothers in another NES launch title; this one a game of lesser quality, but still fairly decent. The game was called Wrecking Crew.

In Wrecking Crew, Mario and Luigi are working as demolition workers and their job is to smash every wall into oblivion, all the while avoiding avoiding a plethora of enemies such as fireballs, waling monkey wrenches with eyes and eggplant enemies. AS you progress further, the brothers will meet a construction foreman named Spike, who will also work to smash down walls. Seems like he’s a friend, but he’s actually trying to screw our heroes over by screwing up your game. See, Wrecking Crew requires that you not only smash every wall in the game, but you smash things up in a certain order. Not only can you shatter walls, but also certain ladders and columns which drop the floor above you. Be forewarned – once the ladders are smashed, they don’t come back and if you needed to get to a higher level and the ladder was the only way up, you’re fucked big time.

So as stated, the game featured the Mario Bros. as the main protagonists. Player 1 was Mario, while Player 2 was Luigi. Strangely enough, Luigi wore purple. Some people would find this odd later on, but the truth of the matter is that nobody seemed to know what colors to stick Luigi with. In the original Mario Bros. arcade game, Luigi wore his familiar green overalls. In Super Mario Bros, he wore white overalls over a green shirt. So this purple outfit was another outfit Luigi was considering before sticking with his current choice of colors – green and blue – which would debut in the US-modified Super Mario Bros. 2. Say what you will about the game, but if we had gotten the other Mario 2, Luigi would still be wearing white and would still be a virtual Mario clone.

Okay, enough about Luigi’s wardrobe choices. Back to Wrecking Crew.

So a truly innovative feature that was included in Wrecking Crew was the ability to build your own levels… up to four levels can be built and enjoyed by all. And really, the builder wasn’t actually that bad. There was pretty much no limits as to what you can create in terms of level design. Levels can be really easy or frustratingly difficult. So now we save our levels for future use, right?

Well, no.

You see, Wrecking Crew had the ability to create levels and the option to save and load levels were there, but the thing is they didn’t actually work. The reason they didn’t work is simple: Wrecking Crew was originally released on the Japanese Famicom and level data was saved through a cassette recorder peripheral released for the Famicom system. The cassette recorder was similar to what was used by the old Commodore computers and quite possibly other similar brands. The NES didn’t have a similar device and nobody had bothered to remove the options, and so the save/load commands remained, even if they didn’t work. Fortunately for fans of the original Wrecking Crew who also happen to own a Wii, the Save Function has been fixed in the Virtual Console version of the game, so you can save your levels with no problem whatsoever.

Wrecking Crew was a fun little game. I know some people might be put off and that Screwattack had named it one of the worst Mario games, but I didn’t think it was that bad. Certainly, it had to be better than, say, Ice Climber. But that’s another story entirely.

Next up: More Zapper titles.

Let’s backtrack a bit, shall we? Now a couple posts ago, I mentioned that Nintendo had devised a cunning Trojan Horse through their ROB the Robot peripheral, designed to get people into their cleverly-named Nintendo Entertainment System. The strategy worked and people bought the NES because it was a toy and not a video game console. People saw the light, but the games were so good and well designed that nobody seemed to mind.

About a year later, Nintendo dropped support for the robot entirely and hedged their bets that consumers will pick up their new video game system with a single game included. The game chosen was Super Mario Bros, a game about a portly Italian plumber and his brother saving a Mushroom Princess from a bunch of rogue turtles. Some were predicting doom for Nintendo, but were quickly disproved when Nintendo sold a crapload of NES consoles, thereby ensuring not only the company’s future but also their growing success into one of the new juggernauts in the video game industry, as well as opening the doors for other companies to ply their trade.

But while people were firmly enjoying their copies of Super Mario Bros on their NES systems in the late-1980s, I was happily passing along my own gaming path with the Commodore VIC-20 computer system and Atari 7800 video game console. Both were fairly decent systems and the VIC-20 even had a minute BASIC language built in so you can make your own little programs and games, but in the end, neither were as exciting or advanced as a Nintendo. Around 1990 or 91, I got my first NES and as luck would have it, it included the SMB game. To say I was hooked is an understatement, but that’s another story entirely.

Nothing can be said about Super Mario Bros. that hasn’t already been said by countless others. It’s the game that was responsible for pulling the video game industry out of recession and making it hip again. It’s the game that redefined the standards of what a video game should be all about. It’s the game that stands the test of time by being a fun well-designed game for the time and is still fun to play even today. It’s undoubtably the single top-selling video game of all time, hitting numbers equally the number of titles sold within a single gaming franchise combined. Not many single video games of any time or place could make the same claim that SMB can; only a couple games have a chance of getting up there and… lo and behold, they’re on a Nintendo system as well.

Super Mario Bros was the gold standard in video games and in many ways, still is the gold standard in video games. What it lacks in extras and features that dominates most of the current offerings, it makes up with simple balanced gameplay, smooth scrolling of the playfield, solidly responsive controls, non-existent learning curve, and replayability that makes for an overall fun experience even over two decades after its initial launch in 1985. But setting aside the lifespan of the game and the standards it would establish, Nintendo made the right decision in going with Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt showed off the Zapper, Gyromite showed off the robot, but Super Mario Bros. showed off the NES itself and presented would-be gamers a glimpse into the future.

Without ROB The Robot, Nintendo would not have gained a foot in the untapped video game market. But without Super Mario Bros, Nintendo would not have gained and maintained a stranglehold in the video game industry that would make it a lucrative and successful company. It almost begs to wonder what the scene would have been like if they packed another game besides Mario with the NES. Would Nintendo have been as successful? Probably not, but we won’t really know.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to save some Princess who’s in another castle.

While ROB the Robot was responsible for the NES’ success – and make no mistake, the NES would not have lasted that first year without it – it didn’t last long as a peripheral and soon faded into memory. One launch peripheral that did survive and got decent support for a time was the Zapper light gun. Plugged into a controller port, this thing allowed you to shoot at the screen (a classic Tube Tv and not the modern HD screens which require a fucking sensor) similar to an arcade game. While a number of Zapper games were released, none are more fondly remembered than the pack-in game Duck Hunt.

Duck Hunt offered nothing special: just a simple shooting gallery that has you shooting down ducks and clay plates in an alternate mode. However, most fondly remember the game because of its simple premise and the ability to shoot down flying animals with an orange (or gray) plastic gun. I certainly remember when I played this at my cousin’s house, who had just gotten the NES Action Set (a later set-up which included the Zapper and SMB/Duck Hunt multicart). I also distinctly remember playing a different type of game and pretending to gun down all the would-be players with the Zapper while the sound effects were playing on the title screen. Yeah, the Zapper was a toy and it was a fun one at that, too.

But I digress.

The idea behind the game is pretty simple to understand: along with your trusty hunting dog, you took aim at various colored ducks (flying either one at a time or two at a time depending on the game mode selected) and if you let the ducks fly away, your mutt would come out of hiding and laugh at you for your miserable performance. The laughing dog didn’t really bother me so much at the time, as he was simply playing the role of the buddy who also laugh at your pisspoor performance in a video game as simple as Duck Hunt, but as I would later discover, the dog had given people many nightmares to the point where people would actually program little Flash games that allowed you to shoot the dog. Where were the PETA people when this animal cruelty program was unleashed upon thousands and millions of children around the world? They must have been pissed… but apparently not pissed enough to keep this game from being a success.

So Duck Hunt was a fairly decent game for its time and is still fun to play today if you can find a working NES and Zapper, which was fairly responsive up to a certain range as most peripherals of this type were. If you actually shot down all or most of the ducks, you progressed to the next level where the ducks move faster and more sporadically. The game with two ducks is a bit harder because, as you only have three bullets per round, you can’t screw up that much. You don’t have to shoot down all the ducks, but missing more than a certain amount of acceptable losses merits a game over and gives your trusty dog one last laugh at your expense. Finally, there’s the clay shooting mode, where you have to shoot down some clay plates launched from behind you. Curiously enough, the dog is nowhere to be seen in this mode. Probably the player’s character kicked him off the cliff after being laughed at so many times.

Ah, the memories. But alas, Duck Hunt and its Zapper peripheral didn’t set the world on fire and bring Nintendo to prominence for years to come. That role belonged to Super Mario Bros.

To truly review what games were offered on the NES initially, you’d have to look at the games that were packed with the consoles. As stated in the previous “episode” of this NES Retrospect, Nintendo released the NES in two formats: the Control Deck, which included Super Mario Bros, and the Deluxe Set, which included Gyromite, Duck Hunt, and the peripherals needed to play the games. Since the main focal point of the NES at the time was ROB the Robot, we’ll start with the pack-in game Gyromite, which required the infamous ROB The Robot to play the game.

Now confession time: I never had ROB The Robot. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I only got an NES in 1990, during which time ROB had long been placed in carbonite and stranded on Omicron Theta along with Mr. Data. So my only real experience with Gyromite was through a bulk deal with a kid back in my junior years. It was only after an hour of trying to figuring out what the fuck I’m supposed to be doing in this game did I realize that I needed good ol’ ROB to play the game… well, no thanks. I already had a perfectly good toy robot for twenty bucks. Didn’t really work with my NES, but man was he awesome and also cute.

So what was I talking about before? Oh yeah, Gyromite.

Gyromite has you in control of a professor who designed ROB. Unfortunately for our esteemed scientist, he is caught in various levels filled with enemies. It’s up to the player to use Rob to control conveyors and guide the professor to safety. Now having never played Gyromite properly because I never owned the robot, I can’t provide exact details as to whether the game played well or not. Another game that was released on launch for the ROB peripheral was a game called Stack Up. This was less of a single game than it was a collection of mini-games that made use of ROB’s various functions. Again, having never owned the robot or the game, I can’t properly comment on the title.

Interesting to note was that only two games (the ones I just mentioned) were made for the peripheral and thus the robot was quickly dropped soonafter. However, ROB the Robot had served its ultimate purpose; it was Nintendo’s own version of a Trojan Horse, allowing ROB to enter the homes of families while secretly getting kids addicted to video games again and making it an in-thing during a time when people were fed up with the electronic form of entertainment. While some would criticize the robot for its noise and functionality, it no doubt remains an icon in Nintendo history to point where it even gets a character in the Smash Bros. series of fighting games. Go figure.

With its main goal accomplished, Nintendo quickly dropped support for ROB The Robot and stuck with the Control Deck and the Super Mario Bros. game, which continued Nintendo’s wave of success and ensured a future for the NES. Nonetheless, never doubt the importance of a noisy robot without whom Nintendo would never be able to succeed as quickly as they did.

ROB The Robot… we salute you. Now go back to the scrap heap where you belong and hope you get dropped for a real fighting robot in the next Smash Bros. game. Is the original Mega Man available?

Next up: The Zapper and friends.

Every good piece needs an opening monologue of sorts, and while I don’t expect my project to be great, I still need an introduction of sorts. As I stated, I’m beginning my NES Retrospect event – a review of the initial sixteen launch titles for the classic Nintendo console as well as some additional side pieces. Now everyone knows about Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt; those were the more popular of the titles, but what about the rest of the games? What’s so special about Ice Climber that they would be included in the current series of Smash Bros. games? Why does my copy of Gyromite have hard levels? Here’s where we look at some old games for old times’ sake. But first…

The Nintendo Entertainment System was considered to be the pinnacle of video games. It is often difficult to see a world where the NES hadn’t been introduced or even become the success it was. While more powerful video game consoles have passed the old system by, most can remember their fondest gaming memories on the classic gray box.

In a twist of irony, however, the console wasn’t initially touted as a video game system, but rather as a toy, with focal points being not the successful pack-in game Super Mario Bros, but the robot peripheral ROB and Zapper light gun. Instead of game cartridges, you had game paks. You had better graphics than the old gaming systems and the titles were larger in scope, unlike the video games of old and their simplistic-minded design. These days, when a company like Sony puts out a video game system and calls it a computer entertainment system, you’d cry foul, but this sort of strategy was exactly what Nintendo needed for their fledgling console (which had undergone several revisions before hitting stores).

The reasoning behind this was simple: video games were passe and for a good while now, people had been burned out by the market of horrid Atari games that had plagued shelves. For some reason, people thought differently when it came to this new machine from Japan. Maybe people actually enjoyed the ROB and the two games designed for it, who knows?

During the initial launch of the NES, Nintendo released two configurations for its soon-to-be-popular system:

The Deluxe Set, initially priced at $249, included the console itself, two Nintendo gamepads, ROB the Robot, a Zapper light gun, and two games; Gyromite (made for the robot) and Duck Hunt (made for the Zapper).

The Control Deck set, initially priced at $199, included the console itself, two Nintendo gamepads, and the launch title that would make Nintendo and its star protagonist famous, Super Mario Bros.

Along with these sets, sixteen games were initially launched, the three pack-in games included. Over the course of the next month, I will be either reviewing each of the games or the series of games that were initially launched. In addition to the reviews, I’ll be providing some history lessons on the NES’ rise, fall, and revival in relevance and reveals means on how you can play the games today on modern hardware or classic hardware.