Night of the Emus





Night of the Emus

This was one of those love/hate games back in the day. Everyone wanted it and everyone wanted to play it, but no one I knew could ever beat the damn thing. It was a brutally hard game in general, but the extremely limited number of health, lives, and continues made it near-impossible. Once one of your turtles dies, that’s it, they’re gone until you lose them all and use up one of your two whole continues. It was a pretty fun game though, with super catchy music and some interesting enemy design. Worth revisiting now that you can just use save states instead of losing and restarting the game over and over until you want to smash your head through the TV like the old days.

Why bother playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 on NES, which is just an inferior port of the arcade game, when you can just play the arcade game itself? This was one of the best beat-em-ups in arcades at the time and it’s still fun to play after all these years.

This one came out so late in the life of the NES that I, and probably everyone else too, never got around to trying this one. I can see why it didn’t get much attention. It’s really just a bad knockoff of the arcade port, yet with worse looking graphics somehow. Again, you only get a small handful of lives and continues, and this being a beat-em-up like the previous one, save states aren’t much help in avoiding damage. Maybe I’ll look up some cheat codes and try again someday, but there wasn’t really anything particularly exciting about it to make me want to bother returning. Eh, we’ll see.

Time for a break from those turtles. I recently heard this called a 16-bit Dark Souls and it looked pretty good so I figured I’d give it a shot. Yeah, it’s a tough one alright. Enemies aren’t particularly smart and don’t have much in the way of health, but they tend to literally appear out of thin air in groups and come rushing at you before you have time to react. The levels become pretty maze-like and are filled with secrets and traps. It was pretty ahead of its time in this way, for a platformer. There are some pretty rough edges though. Weird control issues with turning, ducking, and anything involving ladders. You can gather gems to use to buy items at shops, including better weapons, but most of the time I bought weapons I just ended up finding the same weapon for free not long after anyway so buying anything other than health and lives seemed like kind of a waste. It gives you a password each time you finish a “level”, each of which is actually made up of 3 pretty long “worlds” and a boss fight, but ain’t nobody got time for that. It ended up being a lot longer than I thought and I had to finish it up the next day, so I guess that’s it for this time!

Night of the Emus

Monster Party a game about a powerful alien/monster who comes to Earth looking for help saving his planet, and so naturally out of everyone he could pick he chooses some little kid with a baseball bat. It’s a side-scrolling action game where you mostly fight as dumb kid with bat, but also sometimes as powerful flying and shooting gargoyle. Honestly, the gameplay is pretty bland, but what made this game stand out was always the absolutely insane monster designs. You might find yourself fighting a green minotaur that shoots cows at you, or a giant fried shrimp, or an invisible mummy whose legs are asleep? I don’t know. They’re all incredibly bizarre looking and say really strange things, which is really all this game has going for it. The level design becomes offensively bad in the later levels with stuff like one of those “maze of doorways” type levels where everything looks the same and comets are constantly flying out of the sky to deal you nearly unavoidable damage or the penultimate level which is a long vertical series of rooms that has 3 bosses to find in it, but apparently has a rule that if you kill 2 of them you get the key to the exit, but if you kill 3 you lose the key and are now stuck and have to start the level over again, none of which the game bothers to tell you about. Annoying. It’s still worth a look though just to see the crazy, crazy sights.

This was based on a TV show, I think. Never saw the show and don’t care about roller-sports any more than I do about any other sport, but I had this game as a kid anyway, for some reason. It was a Konami game and it just looked cool I guess. It’s a weird mix of rolling platforming and a beat-em up. Like Skate or Die meets Double Dragon or something. There are some really nasty jumping sections in this game, made harder than they had to be by the weird movement and turning issues you have due to wearing roller skates, which is just the kind of thing you want to be wearing when you’re exploring junkyards, broken down post-apocalyptic highways, the amazon jungle, and fucking cliffs on a mountain. No idea how I was able to beat this without cheating as a kid. Lots of practice I guess. Anyway, it’s still a decent game for what it is. Konami sure knew how to make em back in the day. Most of the time.

All that skating around gave me the nostalgias for this one, but it doesn’t hold up too well at all. Really unpleasant controls and an almost non-existent single player experience don’t help it hold up well at all. I forgot that this game was only really good for playing with other people in competition. It’s pretty worthless as a solo experience unless you really want to just play the same 4 short mini-games over and over again to keep beating your own high score.

Speaking of games made up entirely of mini-games, there was also Rescue: The Embassy Mission, which is slightly more fun to play alone than Skate or Die, but still too basic and short to really be worth mentioning. You do little mini-missions where you sneak, snipe, rappel, and infiltrate, and…that’s it. You can choose different difficulty levels, but it’s just the same 4 things every time, which only take you maybe 20 minutes to do. Not worth bothering with, really.

Nostalgia strikes again. Used to have this one as a kid too, because what 80’s kid wasn’t excited by the idea of robot dinosaurs punching the shit out of each other in space? Going back to it again though, it’s actually a pretty shitty game. Combat is super basic and easy. The same few enemies and bosses are just color-swapped and re-used constantly. Every area uses the same 2 songs over and over again for each dino part and on foot part. It’s so shoddy that I got bored and gave up halfway through.

I’m not going to try to replay all these old Sonic games at once, that’d take too long, so I’ll just squeeze them in one at a time. It’s amazing how clunky this felt after just playing Sonic Mania. It’s not as bad as going back and trying to play the original Super Mario Bros. again, but the lack of accuracy in the controls is very noticeable. I kept wishing I had the spin dash too, but I forgot that it didn’t exist yet in this one. While it’s a little rough around the edges, it’s still a decently fun game with some great iconic level design and music.

Night Of The Emus

Well, what was going to be another night of old games turned into a night of just Ghostbusters, because this game is way longer than I remember it being. It ended up taking almost 5 hours. It would have taken much longer without save states. This is yet another game where I have no idea how I was able to beat it legitimately as a child. The controls are pretty clunky, but manageable after some practice. The levels are confusing mazes of platforming that require you to find and defeat all the “lesser” bosses before the door to the final boss opens, but even the regular bosses can be really nasty customers. Sometimes they’re actually even worse than the final boss they lead to. The bosses are the both the best and worst thing about this game. They’re all really well designed, visually, but many of them have such a ridiculous amount of health, and/or such tiny weak spots that are the only place you can deal them damage, that it really begins to test your patience.

There are some weapons and upgrades to buy between levels, but they’re so expensive that you can only really afford to buy 1 or 2, and most of them aren’t really all that helpful. You just have to learn to rely on your pitiful little normal gun if you happen to pick the wrong items to blow your money on. I guess I really should have played this on Easy too. Didn’t even think about it until after the fact. Ooops! Maybe I should get back to all those Castlevania games I’m supposed to be playing…