This is the first post as of yet from my gaming rig! It's been having ongoing issues since I built it, but I've decided to risk bringing it back into mainstream use for this blog post. Especially handy since it's in the same room as all them games.

Today's youtube song is one of my favorite Persona 4 remixes. Piano-ing anything makes it better.

Enough jibber-jabber, it's review time!

Contra

A little background

Man, Konami was on fire back in the day. Pumpin' out classic games and franchises like nobody's business. The only other third party that I think could even keep up was Capcom, and even they didn't push as many new IPs that lasted like Konami did.

What was I talking about? Oh, right, Contra.

Contra is actually (and I don't know how many people know this) an arcade port! Yes, really. Despite the NES version (which came out in February of 1988) being probably the most well remembered version, it was also a very popular arcade game. So, that's a fact I guess. Another fact: this game's arcade title Gryzor in Europe, while the NES version was Probotector. Whaaaaaaaaaaaat.

What else can I say about Contra? It inspired a slew of imitators, basically inventing the run-n-gun 2D platform which would be perfected (in this reviewer's opinion) by SNK's Metal Slug series a while later. It's Manly Men shooting Aliens 101, and it's pretty great. Take Rambo, mix him with Aliens, and you get Contra. Sold.

First impressions last forever

This game still looks and plays great, even for an early NES game. The first thing you notice is how intense the action is (and how crazy the spin-jump looks!) and how fluid the game controls. Seriously, games were trying to mimic how well Contra controlled for years after it came out. The music is also rockin, and with two-players it's a blast-happy attack. Also, surprisingly low slowdown and sprite flicker for the number of projectiles on screen.

But as I played further...

Contra is a classic for a reason: it's a really solid game. The graphics, music, and gameplay are all tight and fun. Blasting aliens (and dudes) is always great, and even if every power-up sucks next to the Spread Gun, I guess it's good they're there? Also, the 3D levels are cool!

Contra's main hang-up (even for me today) is that the game is stupid hard. This is the game that made the Konami code famous (even though Gradius was the first instance of the code's existence), because trying to beat this game with three lives and one-hit deaths is literally impossible. Impossible. IMPOSSIBLE.

So what's the conclusion?

Contra is another game I'd put next to a lot of modern games and say "Hey! Retro games can still be solid experiences!" It's fast, extremely difficult, but still a blast to play. With the Konami code the game is a lot more tolerable (and less stressful), but there is still something about playing it with limited lives that keeps you on edge and gets the blood pressure up. The only downside is collectors seem to want it too, which has pushed the price up. But hey, it's still less than most modern new games! (I keep telling myself that when I drop $60 on Lufia 2).

Copies are usually $20-30.

A little background

Crystalis (or known by its infinitely more badass Japanese name, God Slayer) was a late-NES SNK joint that came out in July of 1990 and was later ported to the Game Boy Color. From what I know, the game didn't sell very well because it came out right when the SNES was becoming a big deal. Which is a damned shame.

As an aside, I write for a site called ARPGamer (which is currently under new management and undergoing changes), and I actually already did a write-up of Crystalis on there. So if you want more detail than what I'm about to cover, go read that instead.

First impressions last forever

Crystalis has an amazing opening, that might remind more than a few people of the Fallout franchise. Mankind is devastated by nuclear war, so they seal up a bunch of people in containment pods to be opened after the world is safe. Pods huh. Like VAULTS?!

The game looks incredible, even if the main character is purple. Despite the box-art, I always imagined the hero as a girl for some reason. He/She certainly looks like it could go either way (it's just a bunch of pixels anyway).

Another thing of note is full pixel movement. Yes, it's a top-down action game like Zelda, but isn't confined to four-way directions. Fantastic!

But as I played further...

Crystalis is a really fun action RPG, and fans of the 2D Zelda games or games like Secret of Mana should absolutely pick it up. It's very combat-heavy but with a few bits of puzzle-solving, with the ability to equip and "charge" different elemental swords to both release elemental attacks as well as open secret doors and solve puzzles.

The quest is fairly simple: start in village, explore dungeons, solve problems, go to next village, lather, rinse, repeat. But, then again, you could argue every Zelda game is kind of like that, so maybe it isn't fair to boil it down to something so simple.

The real fun in Crystalis is the leveling up, interesting environments, buying and using new gear, and lightning-fast combat. For a top-down RPG on the NES, Crystalis was way ahead of its time, which makes it sad nobody bought it.

So what's the conclusion?

Get Crystalis. Seriously, it's phenomenal. While it does fall into a level-grinding trap near the end (and expect to do a fair amount throughout), the graphics are gorgeous, the controls are solid, and the world is interesting (and the text is even translated decently, which never happens on NES games). It's one of my favorite action RPGs ever, and I might even like it better than Secret of Mana. Oh snap, he didn't go there!

Copies are a little tricky to find, and usually roll around $10-15.

Days of Thunder

A little background

Um, so I know nothing about Days of Thunder. Like, at all. A friend donated his collection to my cause a few months back, and this game was in it, and I actually don't even remember testing the game to see if it worked before putting it on my shelf. That's a good sign, right?

From what I gather, it's based on a movie (probably made by Paramount, based on the logo at the bottom there) but I sure haven't seen it. It came out in October of 1990 (the game. I'll be damned if I look up when this movie came out) and was made by Beam Software, who also made the awful Back to the Future game.

Oh. Good.

I also assumed it was about racing, because there were cars. Probably NASCAR? Great, a "drive left for five hours" simulator.

First impressions last forever

The opening graphics are actually kind of impressive. It has that "glowy text fade in/out" thing that usually was reserved for every SNES game ever's intro/brand logos. So there's that.

The graphics also look ok, if filled with solid colors, but it's a bad sign if there's no actual start screen and the game just tosses you into a "qualifying race." Looking forward to doing that every single time I load up the game!

But as I played further...

It is based on NASCAR, and guess what? It's just as boring. And you turn left a lot. Yay!

The graphics are actually ok. It's sort of Rad Racer esque only without any of the little environmental things that gave Rad Racer that awesome sense of speed. You just drive around the track, sometimes turning left. Hooray.

The controls also threw me for a loop. From what I can see, holding "A" just applies the gas, but if you release it you'll kind of cruise-control unless you bump something. The problem is that, since the actual races are absurdly long, if you hold A the whole time you'll run out of gas after like the seventh lap. Yes, there's more than seven laps around the same boring course, over and over. Charmed.

Running out of gas restarts the whole game (at the "qualifying race," with no other cars) so that's also a totally great game design. Did they even playtest this? It doesn't help the races are so hard you'll never win without massive amounts of skill and luck, and every time you fail it's back to qualifying. Ugh.

So what's the conclusion?

Yeah ok, this game is a great cure for insomnia, but beyond that it sucks. There's tons of better NES racing games, and I don't even think it's worth me saying more about it.

I'll be damned if I'm going to look it up on eBay for a price average, but since it's a licensed NES game I'd assume no more than $5.