Ice Climber and Pinbot (NES)

It's Retro Week on ugvm! But, it would appear that I'm out almost every night this week. Thank the lord for a spare hour today, and my OneStation.

In case you've forgotten, the OneStation is a portable Famiclone, not much larger than a Game Boy Micro.

Anyway - the games. First up was Pinbot. I was impressed that the ball physics were much better than I was expecting. Most 8-bit pinball titles are pretty poor in this regard, but Pinbot felt reasonably realistic. It was still very hard though, and no single game on it lasted more than about 3 minutes.

Then it was time for Ice Climber. I remember, back in 1992-ish, Ice Climber was the second game I ever played on the NES. The first was Golf. Anyway, I was hooked then, and always wanted a NES afterwards. It's still great, and much easier than last time I played. I made it up to Mountain 9, before finding it impossible to progress as there was a wall I couldn't jump over. Tch.

Maniac Mansion (NES): COMPLETED!

Oh! I had everything I needed! All I had to do was show the purple tentacle the police badge, and I had access to the main lab, and Dr. Fred, and the big off switch!

Wendy saved, plot foiled, game overed!

Maniac Mansion (NES)

So it seems the water from the pool can be given to the plant to make it grow, and by getting one kid caught by Ed you get a few minutes to raid his room. That helped me progress a bit, and I even managed to get the meteor arrested, and have access to the lab!

However, I can't find an envelope (which I think I need to send this demo tape off), and I can't get into the safe, so I'm stuck again. Bah!

Maniac Mansion (NES)

Isn't the NES great? Well, aside from mine which keeps resetting, anyway. Thank the baby Jesus for my NeoFami, eh? Anyway.

This is another point-and-click adventure that I never completed "back in the day". I thought I'd see how I fared with Man Brains. Interesting Trivia about Maniac Mansion: I first played the game in Germany, on my German exchange partner's C64. He had it on disk, and it took fourtyeightyteen weeks to load. The best bit, was it was all in German, and I kept forgetting the difference between "Gehen" and "Geben". Amazingly, it probably taught me more German than the rest of the trip.

So I picked Bernard the Nerd (I recalled that you need to fix stuff at some point, and he'd be the man for the job) and Syd the Musician (for no good reason). And I've progressed loads. However, I'm now stuck at two points.

Firstly, I can't get into Ed's room. I didn't grab his package in time (I clicked the stamps on it by accident) to I don't think I can coax him out of his room any more. Also, I can't get the plant to grow. I suspect I need the chemicals, but I fed them to the green tentacle earlier. Oh, and I'm not sure how to get the arcade machines working either. I've fixed the wires in the room next to the plant, I think, but there's still no power. Tch.

Shadowgate (NES): COMPLETED!

Never done that before! In fact, I don't think I've ever got further than the Room of Fire With The Firedrake In before now. Mind you, I haven't played it for probably 10 years or more, so I could be putting down my younger self, intelligence-wise.

Some really obtuse puzzles marred it a bit, and the constant burning out of torches (although I found if you don't die, they last longer) was a pain as I felt rushed, but overall it was enjoyable and I feel like I've achieved something in completing it. Not least because I won the King's daughter at the end. Aces!

Shadowgate (NES)

I recall that this point-and-click adventure game was hard. Mainly due to the lack of logic in the puzzles, and the try-every-item-on-every-object gameplay.

So far, I've not been stuck, mainly because I can do some of it from memory. However, I don't know how to get past the wraith (I thought it was use the slingshot, but no), so I've saved for now.

Snake, Rattle 'n' Roll (NES)

Ah, Rare. Remember them, back when they were good? Before they'd even started work on Kameo, which was about selventyfourten years ago? When they first became Nintendo game developers? Well, this is the sort of thing they wrote.

Sadly, this hasn't stood the test of time as well as Rescue Rangers. It looks fine, and the music and title screen is great and all, but the controls are terrible. Most of this is due to the floaty way the snakes jump, and the isometric angle. In fact, the angle causes all sorts of jumping problems, especially when you have to jump round corners but can't tell if you're jumping round-and-up, round-and-down, or round-to-your-death. This makes it overly frustrating and not really much fun.

I did reach level 8 though, both properly and using the warp on level 1, but then the NES reset itself again. I switched to using my NeoFami instead of the NES, but the slight speed increase (the NeoFami is 60Hz NTSC, the NES 50Hz PAL) just made things worse so I gave up.

Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers (NES)

Next week on ugvm (the newsgroup, that is) has been designated Retro Week. In preparation, I fished out my NES and some games. This was one of those I decided to try.

And, it's pretty good. Yeah, it's a standard platformer, but there's nothing wrong with is so far as I can see. Well, aside from the nasty limited continues and the go-back-to-the-start-of-the-level when you continue thing, but that's normal for games of this era. I reached the first end of level boss, but then my NES decided to reset itself. Tch.