Favourite Game Candidates: NES Games 1

I didn't have a NES when I was younger. My best friend and next door neighbour Ross had one so I did get to play a fair number of games. I later bought a NES from some guy at a scunt in University (my house was the Math team headquarters so lots of random stuff was carted over) and played a few games then. I'm thinking this list should probably be split into two. One covering games I liked as a child and one for games I liked as an adult. Here's the early stuff!

Hey Mikey... All you're good for is diffusing bombs!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - It makes me sad to admit that I have still never beaten this game. When I was a kid we used to play with each of us taking a different one of the turtles. So if we wanted to make use of Donatello's long reach I got to play. I believe my brother was Raphael, Ross was Leonardo, and Ryan was Michaelangelo. It was a lot of fun playing like that, and a lot of fun playing by myself too. I'm pretty sure I've made it to the final dungeon a few times... Now that I have an xBox controller for my computer I should try loading this up in an emulator again to see if I can finally beat a 'Nintendo hard' game.

Ew, radish!

Super Mario Bros 2 - Did you know this game wasn't supposed to be a Mario game at all? Nintendo decided the real Mario 2 wasn't going to cut it in the US since it was too hard and too similar to the first Mario. So they took a different game, reskinned it to look like Mario, and sold it to us anyway. This game was interesting in that it was a platformer with 4 different characters each of which had a different strength. We played this the same way we played TMNT. I got to be Princess! She was the best character in my eyes because she broke one of the fundamental rules of the game: gravity! She could hover in the air for a while after jumping which let her do things no other character could even think about doing. Toad could dig faster... So what?

Got wood?

Mega Man 2 - Really all of the NES Mega Man games could make it on this list, but this one was the first one we really played and remains my favourite of the series. It didn't have a lot of the later features which I felt got in the way of the games. Stupid dog! There are a lot of people who'll say the Mario series of games are the best platformers but I think the Mega Man games are the top of the pile. I really like the way each boss is weak to one of the weapons from another boss so there was an 'optimal' sequence of bosses to fight but the game was still playable in any order. It let you apply smarts to make the games easier which I always like. Then the platforming itself is great. Not too much going on and not too little going on. Just a right amount of stuff going on! Great music, too.

Fly, my pretty!

8 Eyes - This was an interesting little platformer that featured a really neat co-op mode. One of you controlled the human character and the other one controlled the bird! I don't think we ever really figured out how to play the game properly and it was practically impossible to play single player but I've always liked the concept.

Chip is apparently a third the size of a Smurf.

Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers - Yet another platformer! This one was based on the cartoon show Chip n Dale's Rescue Rangers. I don't actually remember much about this game, just that I used to like playing it.

Microwaved for 11 minutes and 20 seconds?

Maniac Mansion - A non-platformer! Once again, I don't remember a lot about the game other than that it was unlike anything we'd ever played before. Also, I'd always thought the game was based on the tv show but it turns out the tv show was based on the game! That's really surprising to me.

Super Dodge Ball - I actually found an emulated version of this game on a website a couple weeks ago and played it for a bit. It isn't anywhere near as fun as my memory lead me to believe. I remember having a ton of fun playing this game as a kid, with passing the ball around and then using super moves! Playing it again did make me want to play some real dodgeball though...

Happy Birthday NES!

25 years ago today the Nintendo Entertainment System was launched in the US. As anyone who has an original generation NES knows the system didn't age well. By this I mean 25 years later the consoles don't exactly work optimally anymore. Plug a game in and you're apt to see the power light blink on and off. On and off. On and off. I knew all the old wives tales on how to fix it. Blow in the game! Blow in the machine! Hold he reset button down and power it on and off! Hit the NES! Don't push the game all the way in! Force the spring thing down lower than it should go! Hold it a little higher than it should go!

Very rarely did any of that stuff work. Today I did a little poking around to try to figure out why the blinking happened and the actual reason really surprised me. You see, it all comes down to DRM, and none of that earlier stuff dealt with that underlying problem at all.

What those other things tried to deal with was two other flaws in the design of the NES. The first is they made the internal connectors out of low quality metals so they easily corroded with dirt and wear. The second is that the whole spring loaded system slowly but surely bent the low quality connectors with each use until eventually they stopped connecting as well as they used to. (Both of these problems were fixed with the second generation NES which loaded the game in from the top like the SNES did. Also, you can argue the spring loaded system was needed due to wanting the NES to look like a VCR instead of an Atari what with the console crash and all.) These two reasons would make the console not work at all, though. Lose connection with the game and the system should become unstable and possibly crash. Why would it turn on and off, on and off?

It turns out that Nintendo was worried about bootleggers making their own NES games, so they built a system into the console and into every cartridge to verify that the cartridge was a legitimate Nintendo authorized game. (Nintendo Seal of Quality, as Andrew would say.) So what they did is they put identical chips into the NES and into every cartridge (apparently the chip was $9 per for third party vendors) that would communicate with each other when the power was turned on. If this chip had voltage on its 4th pin and the cartridge didn't properly echo the right response to the chip then it would power off the console. Hence, if you put a bootleg cartridge into the console it would blink on and off, on and off.

But why does my NES blink? Due to a combination of the shoddy connectors and this chip if the connectors lost connection for even an instant the chip in the console would decide you were on a bootleg game and turn the power off. So even if the game itself didn't crash (maybe only the one pin for the DRM chip gave out for that instant) you were screwed.

I pulled out the NES I have here (once owned by Byung) and decided to try it out for the NES' birthday. To no one's surprise, blinky-blinky. It was time to operate! I took some pictures but sadly they didn't turn out well, but I managed to fully disassemble the console and find the DRM chip. I took an exacto-knife to the 4th pin and eventually managed to cut it apart, negating the DRM. I also took out the connector and gave it a quick wipe with windex and a q-tip in the hopes that might do something. I put it all back together and gave it another shot... No blinky-blinky! No game either, though. I definitely managed to turn off the DRM chip but the connector itself must be shot (or I blew something up playing with the motherboard, but the power light did come on). The plan now, if I want to resurrect the machine, is to buy a new connector. I just may do that, especially since I know now how easy it is to open the machine up.

But I wanted to play a game for the NES' birthday, so I downloaded Nesticle and a TMNT rom. Possibly my favourite NES game of all time, and I was surprised that I remembered the end to Shredder's speech on the TV after you save the dam from stupid bombs.