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The Nintendo Entertainment System — now there is a console that is almost universally lauded by gamers.
If you were born in the ’80s, chances are you owned and loved an NES. It was the first taste of digital entertainment for many as well as the re-introduction of gaming to those disillusioned by the Atari age. It’s no surprise that gamers today will gloss over the console’s faults, negligible as they were when considering the joy the hardware provided.
The problem with waxing nostalgic is that we’ve built up the NES as a pillar of perfection. It’s one thing to recognize it as a terrific device with its share of flaws, but it’s another to act oblivious of its shortcomings. Returning to those old games nearly two decades later, I wonder how we as children were able to put up with such flagrant insults to our patience and sensibilities.
Regardless, I can’t help but love the NES. This predicament has torn me apart, literally. My mind has been fractured into dueling personalities — one who has bought into the myths and lies of the NES and one whose frustrations over the machine’s inadequacies has left him an acrimonious husk of a man.
I have a habit of arguing with myself. Frequently.
Hey! Wanna know what was awesome?
No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway.
The NES! Only the best game system EVER!
Aww, Christ. You best take off those retro goggles before you run headlong into a brick wall.
What? You gotta admit, Nintendo was on the ball back then. They really cared about quality, much more so than today.
And here we go.
That’s why the Seal of Quality was soooo amazing! Every game I owned as a kid had that Seal and every one of them was a masterpiece. If only Nintendo would bring it back, then maybe…
Horseshit.
E-e-excuse me?
You heard me! Horseshit! The Seal didn’t mean squat except that Nintendo had other companies by the balls! You’d have to be completely fuckin’ Looney Tunes to honestly believe that the Seal kept bad games off the system.
I really wish you would tone down the language and…
Oh, bite me, you damn Boy Scout!
Now wait, wait. Nintendo brought the Seal to prevent another flood of shovelware like the one that sunk Atari. Third parties were only allowed to publish five games a year. It was in their best interest to make sure those games weren’t shoddy.
There were those unlicensed games from companies like Tengen and Wisdom Tree, but you can’t fault Nintendo for policy violators. Did you ever play Bible Adventures? Nintendo had no control over that.
Oh, I’m not talkin’ about Bible Adventures. I’m talkin’ about assholes like LJN, a company that did everything in its power to destroy our favorite comics and movies. These were all games stamped with your precious Seal of Quality!
Those were isolated incidents and not reflective of the…
Isolated, my ass! There were enough for the Angry Video Game Nerd to make a career out of ripping them a new one! My God, man! YOU’VE personally played this shit! Is your memory so poor that you can’t even remember the kind of… the kind… of…
That wasn’t an NES…
Superman 64 had the God damn Seal of Quality! End of discussion!
Oh, stop. Those were ISOLATED INCIDENTS. They couldn’t compare to the hundreds upon hundreds of good games we were blessed with from Capcom and Konami and especially Nintendo. Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda, Mega Man, the list goes on.
First of all, “hundreds upon hundreds”? If I recall, you owned less than thirty games. That you would believe there were “hundreds upon hundreds” of good games tells me somebody read Nintendo Power as though it were Holy Scripture.
Second, the big companies were not exempt from peddling some really nasty shit. That Metal Gear port was a joke, and the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a migraine.
Ninja Turtles wasn’t that bad.
Let’s not leave out the big dog itself, Nintendo. All those self-titled, throwaway sports titles… Jesus, Urban Champion! Way to uphold the standards of quality, Nintendo! Way to set an example for others to follow!
Whoa! Now that’s being harsh. You are cherry-picking a small handful of games that, frankly, no one remembers. Despite those minor missteps on Nintendo’s part, think of how many of their games went on to become legends, spawning long-lasting franchises and setting industry trends for years to come.
I like how little by little you are admitting that everything wasn’t all peaches and cream.
You call that bad? If you measure the output against what comes out for Wii…
NO! Don’t you fuckin’ change the topic! Focus!
It’s true, though! It’s only fair to bring up the comparison. In contrast, the NES was leagues ahead in variety and scope. Whatever slate of substandard software may have existed, it wasn’t enough to spoil the entire platform. Are you really trying to convince me that all these classics, many of which you loved as well, don’t account for anything?
Yeah, it was fine back then. When we were young and too stupid to see how we were being screwed over.
WHAT? How was something like Zelda… I don’t get you. You are just pulling excuses out of thin air, trying to find the most asinine reasons why these games suddenly aren’t good anymore.
I have excellent reasons! You brought up Zelda? Wandering aimlessly, bombing every fuckin’ wall, burning every fuckin’ bush, accidentally tripping over the entrance to the next dungeon? That’s not exploration, that’s busy work!
The game allowed you to make discoveries for yourself. Rather than excessive hand-holding, it gave you the power to approach the adventure in your own unique manner.
Funny, that sounds a lot like lazy design to me.
You can’t expect people to pick up on this shit. There is no logic! How am I supposed to know to bomb THIS specific wall? Where are the clues? Where? How are you supposed to magically guess the Lost Woods puzzle? It was a scam to get you to buy the strategy guide, to squeeze every last penny out of you!
It’s the same story with Metroid. Oh, eeeeeeveryone instinctively knew to shoot up at the ceiling to uncover the secret passage. Thanks for not keeping me in the dark, assholes!
What you are complaining about is old-school challenge. All the tools are at your disposal, but it’s up to you to use them wisely.
Games used to be truly interactive. You would have to write down passwords, plot your own maps, all outside of the game. It was a marriage of the real and virtual environments that heightened the experience. Everything today is delivered in-game, everything needs a tutorial, and nothing is allowed to be too confusing.
Consider the letter from StarTropics. In the game, you needed a password and the only way to obtain it at the time was to take a letter packaged in the game box and submerge it in water, unveiling a secret code. The act of necessitating a physical artifact in order to progress is a means of engaging the player that no one does anymore except for maybe Hideo Kojima.
Even little touches, such as the notes pages in the backs of manuals, helped to bring the game off the screen and into reality.
Do you know anyone who used those damn notes pages? At all? No, you don’t. Everyone scrawled on notebook paper and stuffed it in the back of a fuckin’ dresser drawer, never to be seen again.
I’m glad you mentioned passwords, though. A password is supposed to be a secret keyword which upon speaking will grant access to whatever it is being hidden. NES passwords, on the other hand, are ridiculous strings of pictograms and Germanic runes that extend for miles. What is so special about a game that I have to memorize a random sequence of the junk that appears when your printer jams up and you have to waste ink on useless test pages? I just want to go to level 3, I’m not trying to enter the codes for the Presidential Football!
Why are they so damn long? Remember that scribble stuffed in your drawer? Better fetch that out! The passwords are written on it! God help you if you wrote them in pencil ’cause then you’ll really be fucked!
Not every game had passwords, and few were ever as cumbersome as you make ’em out to be.
What’s wrong with keywords that describe where you want to go, huh? To go to the ice level, enter “CHILLOUT.” To go to the lava zone, enter “HOTSTUFF.” Instead, it’s “AZCskIl2$%-picture of a rabbit boning a squirrel-the back arrow-the Prince symbol.” The hell, people? These games aren’t so complicated that you should need a degree in cryptography to prevent players from brute forcing the game. We are going to find out the passwords one way or another, so why the needless hassle?
In The Goonies II, if you entered the code wrong, you couldn’t just go back and erase it. No, you had to start aaaaall the way from the beginning. I can’t erase the offending character? No? I copied the notes exactly! Maybe I wrote an ‘L’ instead of a ‘1’ or left out an umlaut or some bullshit.
Now who’s cherry-picking?
If everyone could just jump to the end, these games wouldn’t be any fun, wouldn’t provide any replay value. The longevity comes from retrying the games until you’ve mastered the mechanics. No one was instantly good at Contra or Ninja Gaiden. These games were short, like you said. Kids didn’t have much disposable income, so individual games had to last them for months. It’s not like the arcade where you can just pop in another quarter and you’re good to go.
That’s just it! The NES was NOT an arcade machine! Why did the games play like they were designed to suck your quarters? Unlike the arcade, a lot of games gave no option to continue or continues were limited. It’s frustrating.
You mean Nintendo Hard?
You damn right I mean Nintendo Hard!
Hey! Games didn’t pander to you! I liked that! True tests of endurance and skill!
Oh, you would say that.
I just don’t see what the big deal is! Today’s games are far too forgiving. You aren’t playing games anymore. Essentially, they are interactive movies. Modern games could use an injection of old-school challenge.
Where’s the line? Where the hell does a game stop being challenging and start bending you over the chair? Repeating the same level over and over and over again, relying on trial-and-error and rote memorization is as much about developing skill as playing the lotto is about making a sound financial investment!
Try to jump over a pit in any Mega Man and some beady-eyed nut sack pops up and drags you down with it. The entire series is built around these little “surprises” to keep you on your toes, but even after memorizing the enemy placements and boss patterns you are still dying because of your lack of superhuman reflexes.
But in the end…
You know, I downloaded The Lost Levels for Virtual Console and am convinced that it is the thumbscrew of the Famicom Disk System. You think you are going to play a traditional Mario game but instead you get roped into a circus of torture. It demands absolute perfection, mastery of every skill gleaned from the original Super Mario Bros., just to make it to end of a world without scooping your eyes out with salad tongs. Lovecraft couldn’t have imagined such horrors!
Literally, the only hope you have is to exploit the infinite 1-up trick in the first level, but you’ll burn through all of those lives before you even smell Bowser’s ass in World 8. On top of that, you’ve got poison mushrooms and reverse warp zones just to demonstrate how low the game will sink to screw you over.
I just think that…
And these are supposed to be the GOOD games! NES developers didn’t give a shit! They wanted kids to burn. Did they have some kind of vendetta? It was a fuckin’ arms race to see who could make children cry the hardest. That was their big angle! And kids swallowed it!
It was an excuse to produce substandard software with the shittiest controls under the protective umbrella of “challenge.” Well, FUUUUUUUUUCK YOU, princess!
You really should…
What the hell is wrong with people? This is what you reminisce over? Is this love affair with archaic game mechanics is some kind of badge of machismo? “Ooooooh! It’s sooooo retro! It’s sooooo good! Those were the days, weren’t they? Hyuck, hyuck!” Then you stand around in a circle with goofy grins on your faces and reach out to grab one another’s…
ENOUGH! Relax!
Don’t tell me to…
Why are you getting so worked up? You are acting like an infant over, what? Video games? C’mon!
Okay, I concede that maybe nostalgia gets the better of some people, but you are just marking everything off blindly. What’s your agenda? Are you arguing for the sake of arguing?
But…
Shut it down!
Whatever the case, we both have fond memories of playing the NES. We wouldn’t have enjoyed ourselves so much if we had felt we were being cheated. Sure, some stuff doesn’t hold up, but that’s because it was a starting block for today’s innovations.
Even so, the library was dominated by some really questionable design decisions, issues that have nothing to do with the technological era and everything to do with poor judgment. You wanna deal with that? Fine. Games have evolved for a reason. Does anyone really want to keep playing the same garbage for two decades straight?
Of course not, but that holds true for any piece of hardware. Really, you seem angry that your memories of the past aren’t how you recall. You want the NES to still be as good as you dream it was. Am I right?
I suppose.
So what seems more foolish? Convincing yourself that the NES was a big scam or letting yourself get caught up in the trip, allowing yourself to return to those games, and continuing to enjoy their simple pleasures?
Maybe, I dunno. The problems are just so apparent now. I don’t think I’ll be able to overcome them. I wish I could still share your enthusiasm.
Fair enough. See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?
I guess.
Friends?
Blow me.
