Addy's NES Pages - Section V

Real life people are untrustworthy scoundrels who'll doublecross you at the first opportunity.  I go to video games to escape all this, to travel to a world where, if people are trying to deceive me, it won't matter anyway because it just sounds like they're mumbling about death stars and sunsets.  Unfortunately, the cynicism of the real world creeps into games from time to time; game-makers should avoid this at all costs.

Witness my experience in Mission Impossible, a game I never got very far in because I foolishly expected the video game world to be guileless and helpful.  I guess I'm too trusting.  Every time I play the game, something like the events below takes place very early on, and I get into a bad mood.  The whole thing is a drag, and I never feel like playing again.

Hmmm... the alley, you say?

Hey, this doesn't look good...

Oh, why have I been forsaken?

This suggests another important tenet of video-game design: to keep the player happy, it's best to obscure craftiness on the part of the villains to the point where they just look extremely insane.  I'm not sure how much this would improve games, but let me put it to you this way: the Old Man from Zelda, despite being an extremely dangerous invalid whose primary function was to lead you into harm's way, is viewed as somewhat sagacious and certainly a videogame legend.  The more direct deception of the Mission Impossible bartender goes completely unnoticed by history, even while the game's creators thought they were creating a tricky and interesting puzzle.  QED.

Mission Impossible abuses you in other real-world ways, too.  This is one of those games where walking down the street is a good way to die because of the "realistic" inclusion of cars that honk about .001 seconds before slamming right into you, causing instant death.  It's also really hard to tell whether the pedestrians on the street are enemies or not, since sometimes one of them will rush out at you with evil in their eyes.  I tried going on a rampage and killing them all, but it turns out that every citizen in this town carries a global-positioning transmitter and an emergency alarm, because helicopters are summoned to take you away if you so much as look at anyone the wrong way.  I think this level may take place in Russia, which would make more sense - the crumbling Russian military is so disorganized that it's not much of a stretch to imagine chopper pilots mistakenly taking up the work of traffic cops due to garbled transmissions.

Mission Impossible's lousiness can be traced to deeper problems, though.  Its main fault lies in being a licensed game.  Video game experts will tell you that just about any game based on a popular movie, TV series, boy band, etc., is doomed to be intensely awful.  This effect is concentrated in, but not limited to, Mario-style platform games, which encourage developers to create deformed, bizarre enemies that definitely are not present in the trademark being licensed. The worst licensed game of all time is E.T. for the Atari 2600, which caused the video game market crash of 1984 and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, but which I foolishly played for many hours back in the day.   According to legend, thousands of copies of the E.T. game were unceremoniously piled up in a landfill somewhere. 

Sadly, this fate did not meet the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for the NES, a wretchedly difficult and disorganized piece of pseudo-entertainment.  Many played it, but no one beat it, primarily because the second level was carefully programmed to be physically impossible.  A screenshot is seen to the lower right; your mission is to swim around defusing an assortment of underwater bombs.  Naturally, this is "just like being in the show," as we can all recall the excellent string of episodes dealing with bomb defusal and daring underwater rescues.  Sure, they were all episodes of MacGuyver and not the Ninja Turtles, but a lot of those 80s shows were basically the same anyway.  At least that's what the makers of this game seemed to think, since half of the things I fought seemed like rejected horror movie prototypes, rather than familiar Foot Clan faces. Really, except for Batman and a couple others, all licensed games are crap.  Don't be fooled by the hype surrounding your favorite license!  One of my basic laws of games is that the games with the most hype usually suck the most.  It would seem to follow that the most obscure games have the most entertainment value, but, in reality, the most obscure games are illegally made Japanese "200 in 1!!!" type  cartridges that are even worse than E.T.   Somewhere in between is a happy medium: the undiscovered gem game.  That's the type of game that  we need more of today.

I'm serious, they don't even use the theme song. Leonardo leads, Donatello defuses bombs....

Which brings us to the secret purpose of this page.   See, people make a lot of games these days.  Most are fairly neat-looking, visually.  Many are extremely elaborately staged machines, with numerous layers and unforeseen challenges.  Only a few are really good games.  And none will be looked back on with the sense of nostalgic charm that accompanies many of our games here.   I want to change that.   But how?

We've been over some of the elements that wacky classic games possess, but I get stumped when trying to write really good advice for someone to use in making a new classic game.  I think what it has to boil down to is this: Forget everything.  Forget absolutely everything except the fundamentals of programming.  Forget the English language, forget sense, forget intelligible plots.    You think all those old coders deliberately made their games psychotic head-trips?

No!  They just turned out that way because the people making them were running sweatshop hours and their brains didn't have time to even register any stimuli that didn't directly relate to finishing a remotely playable game.  All the kooky charm, the typos, the Freudian subtexts - these worked their way directly from the game-writer's subconsciousness into the code, as he feverishly pounded away at the keyboard.  I don't know how we can recreate this environment today.  But it's going to be essential if we're to make any progress past the much-lamented "great graphics = memorable game" philosophy.  My approach may not yield fun games, but it will yield genuinely quirky ones.  And that's all that matters, to the arcane archivist who will, ten years down the road, be the final judge of your game's legacy.

The guys from Jackal know how to rock out, even though I didn't talk about their game at all.

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