Sega Master System #2: Great Football (1987)

(Get used to dumb looking covers. The Master System has a million of them.)

I’ll always find it funny that Sega did a whole series of lousy sports games on the SMS and gave them the name Great. It’s almost like they knew their product was weak so they decided to just have fun with it. I guess it’s always been a warning that games with superlatives in the title are usually not very good. A good game doesn’t have to tell people it’s a good game in the title. All together there were seven Great sports games, and they are certainly not well liked by collectors. If you want the thole US set you gotta get all seven of them and you’re not going to end up playing them much. There are only 114 US games, so more than six percent of your collection will be these boring sports games. Great Football is definitely the strangest and hopefully the worst of the lot. I hope it is the worst because eventually for this blog I will have to play through all seven. Isn’t there another Alex Kidd game I could play through instead? (PS there is! I’m still gonna play these sports games though.)

(This game is about football so here is a picture of football.) 

I have never played anything quite like Great Football before. The two player game is typical mid-80s football, but the one player game is odd to say the least. It’s reminiscent of my childhood when a friend of mine only would let us play “over the plate” baseball. What that meant was that we weren’t actually allowed to pitch the baseball making it an all offensive game. In Great Football all you do is play offense. The computer never touches the ball except on a turnover, and when that happens you are just penalized and get the ball back. So how can you loose? Well game actually picks up in the fourth quarter with the player’s team behind by a certain amount of points. So it’s a football game where you only play offense, only get to play the fourth quarter, and have to overcome and imaginary deficit by a team that never even gets the football. Huh?

I was determined to beat this game on my first try because I didn’t really want to play it again. I picked the Bombers because that was my high school mascot and played against the Spartans because I live in Lansing just a couple of miles away from Michigan State University. I ended up with a twelve point deficit which didn’t sound too hard to overcome. I used the same strategy with this one that I used with 10-Yard Fight. I was determined to never pass the football. Since I never had to worry about turning it over on fourth down there wasn’t much to lose by just running it. As time went on I made things even simpler than that. I kept using the same play over and over again. It seemed to always result in either short gain or really long gain. This led to a couple of fairly long third downs which made the game almost exciting, but I didn’t have to worry about losing the football so I couldn’t get that into the action. The only time I tried to kick the football it went exactly sideways so I usually ran it in instead after a touchdown. Just to add to the weirdness the two point conversions are only worth one point. They just couldn’t get anything quite right in this one.

(Good ol' #7. Nothing beats that!) 

Home football gaming turned a corner when Tecmo Bowl came out. That’s really the first game that got American football right on consoles. Great Football fits into the group of lesser football games that came out before Tecmo Bowl. However, even among that group it stands out in a bad way. Even the original Atari version let you play defense. 10-Yard Fight was no masterpiece, but at least the computer opponent gave me a challenge and I had to switch up plays. Nobody wants to play a game that only needs one play to be won. With its odd setup I felt like I was only playing 1/8^th of a real football game, and that’s not good. Hey at least I had fun playing it with my brother back in the day.

I am happy that I finished this one because I don’t finish SMS games very often. I feel a little bad because the two games I have written about have been two of my least favorite. I may try to replay a few I actually like and write about them because I really do love the SMS. I am also going to try to keep track of my game completions on the side of the blog as an attempt to increase my output. It probably won’t work, but I like to keep trying. Of course with all the games I have already beat I could keep this blog stocked with about 400 more articles. Looks like I need to get writing!

NES #45: Wizard and Warriors (1987)

Wizards & Warriors is one of the truly classic NES games. It's such a classic that I'm baffled by its lack of post 8-bit sequels. There are three games on NES and an oddly titled one on the Game Boy and that's it. It's hard to think of another series that had three NES games and none on any later systems. Well I guess there's also Adventures of Lolo. Oh yeah and Ikari Warriors. Maybe it's not that uncommon. Anyway, my point is that Rare has been doing this for the last thirty years. They have never been a company to drive a franchise into the ground even when it's probably a good idea to do so. Didn't the world always want another Banjo-Kazooie or Conker game? So instead of making sequel after sequel they stopped after Wizards and Warriors III. Because of this the series will forever be associated with the NES. It probably gives thirty year olds just as many warm feelings as Mario and Zelda without the recognition of seeing the characters in more games through the years. This makes it one of the more quintessential games even among the more famous ones that came out around the same time. Mario may be a Nintendo franchise, but Wizards and Warriors is an NES franchise.

(Who wouldn't want to play this forever?)

The game came out right at the tail end of Nintendo's breakout year of 1987. This is the year that saw Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man, and Kid Icarus all get released. It's probably the most important year any Nintendo system ever had. At first glance a weird sword and sorcery platform game doesn't sound like it has much of a chance to stand out, but it doesn't take long to figure out that this game is special. It's a very hard game to put into one category. You play as a knight so the first thing you would probably think is action rpg, but it only has a few rpg elements. There are keys to find and items to accumulate, but that is about it. It's not a traditional platform game either because the levels don't just move from one side to another. They require some extensive exploration. The main object of the game is to find the right items to be able to progress past obstacles and then fight some truly zany bosses. They love floating heads, skeletons, and large things that burst into tiny versions of the same thing. But who doesn't, right? Sometimes a game that doesn't fall into one specific genre can end up being a mess, but in this case it's what makes the game so playable. You never quite know what's around the next corner so it never gets boring. It shows that by this time third party developers were thinking bigger and bolder.  

I talk about how much of a classic this game is, but honestly I only played it for the first time a couple years ago. Even though it's the type of game that is right up my alley I somehow missed it. I never even played it as a rental when I was a kid. I was finally able to play it thanks to my wife owning a copy. It's another great endurance test for the NES. It plays differently than games like 1942 though because it is always changing. The play mechanics stay mostly the same, but environments change vastly from level to level. This caused me to frequently rethink my strategy. What works in a cave doesn't work in a cloud. Sometimes the game requires long jumps and sometimes there is lava to keep you more careful. The continues are infinite, so it encourages the exploration of every nook and cranny. Why not get that extra treasure chest? It's not like battling through monsters to get it is going to cause permanent death. The game actually gets more fun as you get closer to death because the low energy music is so entertaining. It's not an annoying beep like Zelda. It is a cheerful tune that seems to be encouraging you to venture further. This game is one of the most inviting on the whole system.

(This bat drove me crazy. I will admit that)

This game took me right around an hour and a half which is starting to seem like the average for NES endurance games. It was made a bit easier by my wife's advice of skipping the treasure chest which contained the practically useless Boots of Force near the end of the game. It was a fun, very old school feeling afternoon. I usually sneak these games in on the weekend and start playing much later than I should. I had a day off when I played this, so I was able to finish it at a reasonable hour without getting too frustrated. I have talked about Rare before as being one of the great game developers of the era. This was the first in a long string of classics for Nintendo systems right up to their infamous buyout by Microsoft in 2002. In the future they would develop Battletoads, Goldeneye, and Donkey Kong Country just to name a few. Wizards and Warriors was the first indication that they were going to be something special. They were able to live up to the hype and more over the next twenty years.

NES #38 - Rygar

Wait I actually beat Rygar!? Well that's it, I can do anything now. It's time to go back and beat every other game that has been bugging me for the last 20 years. I'm looking at you Fester's Quest! Okay, so maybe that's pushing it a little bit, but finally finishing Rygar did make me feel a little cocky. The part that makes no sense to me now is that it wasn't even that hard. It only took about two hours, and none of the bosses were particularly difficult. So why did it take me so long to beat this one?

I guess the easy answer is that this is one of those infamous NES action RPGs with no save feature. It's similar to Sunsoft games like Blaster Master and the aforementioned Fester's Quest in that it takes a good amount of time and must be done all at once. Actually, this is probably the most talked about feature of Rygar. It's often referred to as "that game with the super yo-yo and no password." However, when I finally played it for real the game only took about two hours. Sure it's not Contra length, but it's certainly an acceptable length especially for a kid. Now that I have been through it I think there were a couple other reasons why I never finished this one, and they both have to do with the limitations and strengths of the NES.

Rygar is an early NES game, and its limitations made this one difficult for me as a kid. This game can get confusing easily. The backgrounds all look similar, and most doors take you to the same giant old guy giving you cryptic clues. I hate cryptic NES clues! It's easy to get lost, especially early on without all the items. The controls are another issue. Was anyone able to figure out how to use the wind pulley without looking it up? I watched internet videos of it and it still confused me. You have to walk up to a rope just the right way and wait for the click. If you do it wrong you're going right into the water and back to the beginning of the level. This certainly held me back as a kid. Also, it's one of those games where after you die your life only replenishes part way. This wouldn't be a problem if live was easier to come by, but you really have to kill a lot of enemies to get hearts back. These are all the classic problems of early NES games, but it's still not the whole story. I think the reason I had so much trouble beating this game is related to the reason why I still spend so much time playing these old games today.

When I was a kid I found this game far too captivating to finish. It was like Metroid in that it transported me to a different world. I got caught up in the music and atmosphere. When I rented it, which I did frequently, I didn't even want to finish it. That would almost ruin the experience for me. I just wanted to wander around that alien world with my strange weapon and fight spinning lizards and spiny turtles all day. It wasn't until I was much older that beating this game even registered as a possibility in my mind, and by that time I was too busy to sit down for what I thought would be an entire day and finish it. Luckily my schedule allows me long weekends occasionally, so I can go back and play games like this.

So yeah I beat Rygar, and it didn't diminish the magic very much. I still felt a little like I did 20 years ago when I first started playing NES. I could talk about how easy the last boss was or how there wasn't that much of an ending, but that's all beside the point. This is one of the truly great games on the greatest gaming system of all time. You can play this game to beat it, you can play it to see how high you can get your experience, or you can just play it for that great music and nostalgia for your earlier days. The NES is a world all its own, and you are free to explore it in any way you see fit.