This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I had to call an audible for spooky month because it would appear that the other two games I was planning on beating for October are going to take me a little bit longer (27 main missions!?! Are you kidding me Operation Darkness). This doesn’t mean that they are being dropped, but that they might bleed (at least one for sure) into November. The good news, is that I got to play one of my favorite childhood “Spooky” games and tell all of you nice people about it. So let’s talk about “A Nightmare on Elm Street” for the NES and rank it on our big list.

Before we can talk about this game, I feel I have to explain what it is based on, because it has been 13 years since an incredibly poor remake of the original movie came out and nearly 30 years from the release of the last movie in the original series, or 20 years since a crossover movie. (no I am not counting fan-films). While other horror villains like Jason, Jigsaw, Chucky, and Mike Myers seem to appear every 5 or so years, Freddy Kruger has not shown up in quite some time. Anyway in the 80s and early 90s, there was a horror movie icon called Freddy Kruger who existed in the dream world and would kill teenagers in their sleep, which resulted in them dying in real life. In some movies he was more menacing, but the Nightmare on Elm Street movies were certainly more pop culture fodder than the other horror villains (well maybe not Chucky). Freddy had his own TV show, action figures, would appear on MTV or talk shows, and in his own video game. The kills and set pieces in the movies were generally more creative (again in comparison to other villains), because by having a portion of the movies set in the dream world, you weren’t bound to the rules of the real world. While Jason or Mike would kill people with knives, hatchets, and their bare hands, Freddy could turn you into a roach and kill you in a bug motel, or suck you into the bed so that a geyser of blood came shooting out and coated your ceiling. While Freddy has terrible one liners and isn’t very physically imposing like other killers, what made him scary is that he could get you when you are most vulnerable (sleep) and everyone always needs to sleep.

The game comes out between the 5^th and 6^th movie and seemingly incorporates stuff from the previous movies, but is not a video game version of any specific movie. You aren’t playing as your favorite hero or heroine from the movies, but rather just generic teenagers A through D. All of the story comes exclusively from the manual which states something akin to: "Teenagers are dying in their sleep as Freddy terrorizes the town and you (and your friends) set out to stop Freddy once and for all by finding his bones and burning them in the school furnace." I’m not going to get into all the moments that tie into the film series, but for those completely in the dark I will point out some important connections as it pertains to the game. In nearly every movie, once the kids know Freddy is coming for them, they do everything they can to stay awake, since Freddy can’t kill them when they are awake. The bones plot is akin to the 3^rd movie, where people gather Freddy’s real life bones and throw holy water on them to cause him to die. Finally, in the 3^rd and 4^th movie (but carries through some others), the kids that Freddy targets use their dreams to envision themselves with super powers so that they can fight Freddy in the dream world, instead of just being regular dumb kids. Ok, I think you have enough basic knowledge for me to get to the game aspect.

Nightmare on Elm Street, hereby shortened to Noes, is a side scrolling game where you go around town looking for Freddie’s bones and fighting his minions of the undead. You start presumably on Elm Street where you wander the neighborhood as a pseudo world map looking for the one building that is unlocked. See, each building is its own level, but upon startup of the game, the building that is unlocked is randomized (almost always one of the first three houses), meaning that you might have to go up and down the street in order to find your first level. On the main street and in the levels you will be presented with lots of obstacles that will either have to be jumped over or punched into oblivion. After having beaten the game for the first time only using a single continue, I would advise you to just jump over most enemies instead of trying to deal with them. Rats, skeletons, zombies, and snakes wont really give chase to you they just go back and forth on their platform. The only enemies that really need to be killed are the flying enemies (Bats, ghosts, skeleton bats, wasps?) because those will fly around chasing you.

Once inside a level, you will now be able to start collecting Freddy’s bones. Each floor has its own set of bones and every single one of them has to be collected in order to move to either the next floor, or to fight the boss. While some are incredibly hard to miss, others are intentionally placed to be a pain in the ass. If you reach the end of the floor and don’t have all the bones, then you can’t continue and will have to backtrack to find those few missing bones and then go back to the end of each area. At the end of the final area of each house is a boss fight where upon completion of it will drop a key that allows you to attempt to locate the next house on the street that allows you to go in and do it all again.

You might notice that this game does not have a health bar, but rather a sleep bar that slowly ticks down. Yes, you can still die from taking “a couple hits” (taken from the instruction manual), and you can die from falling in pits, etc. Nowhere is it shown how many hits you have left before death which is a truly baffling decision for a UI but fine. You get 5 deaths before you have to use a continue and 3 continues before it is Game Over and you need to start all over. This may seem like a super generous amount of lives (15), but even with the ability to earn more through points, it can drain fast. I digress, the sleep meter when it reaches zero pulls you and your character into the dream world where enemies are tougher to kill, and you may come face to face with Freddy. There are coffee pickups during the real world that will re-fill your sleep meter, preventing you from falling asleep, but those are few and far between. It should also be noted that while the sleep meter drains on its own, it drains faster if you stand still or take a hit. When in the dream world, you can still progress through the level, collecting bones etc. the coffee pickups are replaced with boomboxes which allow you to wake up from the dream, but a music timer starts and if you are in the dream world for too long then you are forced into a short boss fight with Freddy that will just drain some of your hits and lives with no added benefit. The one only benefit to playing in the dream world is that assuming you picked up a weird box looking powerup during the real world section, you can press select to turn your character into one of three dream warriors. One is a track and field star, who can throw a javelin and jump super high, another is a ninja who can throw a shuriken and do a jump kick (the best ability), and the other is a wizard that can cast fireball and float for a little bit. These dream warriors can make fighting some minions easier, and make some jumping sections easier as well, but it obviously comes at the risk of having to fight Freddy. Each and every section of the game is playable with just your standard character, so you could potentially play the whole game without “needing” to transform into one of the dream warriors.

The bosses themselves automatically pull you into the dream world to do battle, but honestly, they are pretty underwhelming once you understand what they are doing. There are basically two variations of bosses, they are either tethered to one end of the screen and lunge at you at different lengths (just crouch in the opposite corner and be the dream warrior you possess with the longest ranged shot), or they bounce like a DVD screensaver image around the screen and you just have to time your attack to hit them. Even the final fight with Freddy is kind of a pushover because he just walks back and forth occasionally jumping and slashing with his glove, but I didn’t find any boss really frustrating to deal with.

So if the bosses aren’t super tough then where are you going to lose your 15 lives? Well the answer to that is mainly from pits. While the early stages are not to difficult in terms of pits, the later levels have jumps that require pinpoint accuracy in order to make the leap, or have enemies that will appear just off screen to hit you once you land and send you backwards into the pit. There is a specific pit in the 2^nd to last level where you have to jump from a moving platform to a ledge just to get a bone and then jump back. That pit alone cost me 3-4 lives because of how perfectly timed your jumps have to be in order to make it. There are other instances towards the end of the game, as they just make pits and enemies require more precise movement then in the previous levels.

It could have been because I was playing on a wireless controller on an NES, but if memory serves me correctly for playing with an OG controller, the characters always feel like they are running in the Super Mario Ice world. Characters do not stop on a dime, and the collision detection is not nearly as pinpoint accurate as you would want for both platforms or enemies as you play the game. It can make the first time you play the game, or the first time you experience a harder level a really frustrating journey, because you can quickly lose 3 lives on a single jump and the game doesn’t care. Upon death you are respawned right on the platform you were prior to dying, so you could die and repeat over and over again within 10 seconds and tank any chance you have at beating the game later on. This is by far the angriest you will become at the game. As a kid I could easily get to the Junkyard or the Cemetary (levels 4-5), but sometimes use an entire continue on a single pit.. It's not good game design, and the last level throws like 2 or 3 of these pits into one area, but that is when you are thankful most of the baddies and bosses are pushovers.

With all that being said, also noting its an LJN game (and people hate those), this game is still a guilty pleasure of mine. Part of it is certainly nostalgia, but I love how unique this game is and how it ties to the horror series. The game is built with at least a little love for Freddy Kruger and the movie series. The music when in the dream world that is counting down to when Freddy appears, is the nursery rhyme from the movies that kids say “one… two.. Freddy’s coming for you, etc.” The dream warrior abilities are all fairly fun to use and make you feel incredibly powerful the first time you bust them out. I mean the ninja power alone makes your jumps do damage. You can still get hit from something too high or too low, but it is a life savor when dealing with all the flying baddies in later levels. I also have to shout out the music in this game is absolutely fantastic. It comes from Mr. David Wise, which isn’t surprising that its good, but surprising when you think of tie in video games being fairly trash.

Also worth mentioning that this game is compatible with the 4 player NES hook-up allowing you to have 4 “ordinary teenagers” attempt to disrupt Freddy’s murderous spree. Playing the game in multiplayer can have its own challenges as that game does not alternate turns or transition to split screens, you are all forced to play on the same screen. While that could mean some people can focus on keeping the enemies in check while others grab bones, it also means that some jumps have to be timed together so the screen can move and not cost someone an extra death for getting too far ahead or behind. Each character has their own sleep bar, and if even a single one falls empty then all characters enter the dream world, so picking up coffee and powerups need to be smartly distributed otherwise you won’t make it very far. 2 players seems like the perfect spot for this game, but I’m certainly not going to downgrade the game for being more ambitious.

The game is far from perfect with floaty controls and questionable UI decisions (why not include a health bar? Why are their 4 different sleep bars, even when only 1p is selected?), but it is still good fun. The lives and continues are generous enough that even on your first playthrough you will easily make it past 50% of the game and then on future playthroughs clean up on some earlier mistakes getting you a lot farther. There are some obvious pathing issues, such as a very confusing start to the game (especially if your first house is not the one they start you in front of) as well as the last level and trying to find where you need to go to fight Freddy (just a random pit that used to have fire you probably didn’t notice). However, I can somehow ignore a lot of those issues because I think the game is still pretty fun to play once you know what’s going on. There is tension about having to fight Freddy unless you can find that boombox, or the power you feel switching to the ninja and jump kicking your way to victory the first time you get to bust it out. It also seemed to take an established franchise and build a competent game around them, without shitting the bed in every way (looking at you Friday the 13^th). While the movies were certainly not age appropriate for me or my friends when we had this game, it allowed us to get small exposure to the media, without something that was going to scare us. All the enemies are pretty harmless looking, and I even played this while my kids were in the same room and never once worried about them looking up and seeing what was on screen.

So, no, this game isn’t Mario or Zelda and it doesn’t deserve a legacy that carries it on or pushes for a remake. The movie franchise died not long after the game came out, because movies 5 and 6 were somehow even worse then the low bar that was set previously. Looking back on the franchise as a whole, I think this game might be a top 3 moment for Freddy. For this Halloween, turn the lights down low, blast the tunes of David Wise and see if you can stop Freddy in “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: I never know what the consensus is on most NES games anymore. Is this a hidden gem? do people consider it trash because the AVGN yelled "poop" at it too much? I don't think this is a top 10 NES game by any means, but I also think you could play it now, even without the knowledge of the movies and still have a pretty good time. It's an easy hour and a half with save states or a rewind feature, and you are almost exclusively using that to avoid some of the jumping deaths in the game. The question is how much does nostalgia go into my ranking of the game and I don't know. The whole time I played this game, I never once got bored with it, or upset, or thought about playing something else.. That has to say something. I have it ranked as the 64th Greatest Game of All Time. It sits between "Kinect Sports" (65th) and "Abzu" (63rd) out of a grand total of 174 games.

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Alone in the Dark: New nightmare 2) Operation Darkness 3) TBD