1943: The Battle of Midway
PUBLISHER/DEVELOPER: Capcom
RELEASE DATE: Jun. 20th, 1988 (JP), October 1988 (US)
The year 1943 arrived approximately 365 days after 1942 – and don’t let any conspiracy theorist tell you otherwise.
Capcom’s 1943: The Battle of Midway, however, comes two years after Micronics’ questionable NES port of 1942, and boy, what a difference an extra year makes. The latter played like it was stitched together with some duct tape and glue. The Battle of Midway plays like a big-budget blockbuster, complete with harrowing aerial theatrics and logic-defying lightning attacks.
The P-38 Lightning is back, ready to take on the entire Pacific theater singlehandedly with only a double shot and a picture of his gal on the cockpit. Oh, and a screen-clearing lightning strike. Not sure where the US military pulled that out of their “spared no expense” hat, but it’s nice to use when the planes and ships won’t stop buggin’.
As you shoot down various sizes of green planes and ship turrets, you’ll notice a couple things. The first is how smooth the P-38 Lightning flies and shoots. The gas must have some Red Bull thrown in for good measure, and frankly, I wish every shoot-em-up had a protagonist that moved this quickly without needing to acquire speed upgrades. The second is that the Lightning has steadily decreasing energy on the lower right side of the screen. Once that reaches zero and you get hit, game over. Quite the difference from 1942’s multiple lives, one-hit-kill approach, and I’m not sure which I prefer.
Like most shoot-em-ups and most war, 1943 is tough. Thankfully, the game does provide a few items and power-ups to ease your burden. Destroy all the red whirlybird planes, and you can get some extra energy, a shotgun-style weapon with no range that really sucks, a three-way spread shot that is the best and you should always use, and the occasional mini-fighter that shoots by your side. At the beginning of the game, you’re also allotted three points to power up your plane’s offensive or defensive power, energy level, special weapons, and special weapons time limit. Does this RPG-adjacent mechanic actually make a difference? Maybe if you don’t allot any points to the Lightning, it’s the equivalent of playing on Extra Hard or something. I didn’t take any chances.
One minute, you’re taking down battleships and gigantic bombers with relative ease. The next, your body is at the bottom of the Pacific covered in shrapnel, being slowly consumed by the ocean and its denizens. Unless, of course, you use a password to continue. 1943: The Battle of Midway is thankfully just a video game.
B+
Ghostbusters
PUBLISHER: Activision
DEVELOPER: Activision (port by Bits Laboratory)
RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22nd, 1986 (JP), Oct. 1988 (US)
Let’s get this out of the way, shall we?
This is one of the classic AVGN episodes. As of this writing, it has nearly 10 million views on YouTube and likely garnered millions more on ScrewAttack back in the day.
I haven’t seen the episode since it first debuted, although I did watch it several times then, and it very much colored my perspective on Ghostbusters.
Not every game the Nerd hates is bad. Silver Surfer, Milon’s Secret Castle, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit are three examples of games that aren’t great, but at least have some interesting design choices happening.
Ghostbusters is not among that company. It is one of the worst games that I’ve played on the NES thus far and possibly one of the worst NES games ever. I’m not going to print any of the Nerd’s creative expletives here, but rest assured, it earns every one of them.
You start the game controlling the Ghostbusters icon on a map of New York City. Four areas are highlighted on the map: the Gas Station, the Shop, Ghostbusters Headquarters and Zuul Tower. The rest of the city is a mix of residential and commercial properties, filled with spirits and regret. The Ghostbusters have $10,000, but no busting equipment, so they have to go to the shop to purchase supplies. But you can’t just enter the shop, no, that would be too easy. You have to drive there.
Driving from one area to the next makes up the bulk of Ghostbusters’ gameplay, and it is tedium incarnate. A top-down view shows you the Ghostbuster vehicle driving on the road, while other cars flagrantly change lanes around you. If you hit them, money is instantly removed from your account. Your fuel runs down at a steady clip, and if/when you run out, two of the Ghostbusters have to push the car to the Gas Station, which eats up both time and money. Gas barrels do appear sparingly, so grab them when you can. These driving scenes don’t seem awful at first, but since you’re forced to drive literally everywhere you go, they do wear down your resolve over time.
The Busters are on a time crunch too. Spirits from all over creation are pouring into Zuul Tower and increasing the PK Energy meter at the bottom of the map screen. If the meter reaches 9999, Gozer’s gonna bust loose and destroy New York City.
Buy items, drive a lot, feel the time pressure, and earn more money from busting ghosts. After you buy the Ghost Alarm, different buildings will blink red, alerting you that ghosts are present. Every ghost busting screen looks the same. Four ghosts swirl around the area, and you try to catch them with your traps. The more ghosts you get, the more money you make. You can also catch ghosts while driving to jobs with the Ghost Vacuum on top of your car. This “ghost busting” section isn’t as awful as driving, but it does feel perfunctory, like the developers just couldn’t be bothered to come up with more satisfying gameplay.
Eventually, after you acquire enough money, the Zuul tower beckons you to go inside. Ray, Peter, and Egon (I think? They just look like generic sprites) are then forced to walk up 22 flights of stairs, all while ghosts swarm around and prevent you from moving forward. This section, along with the final Gozer fight, was added to the NES port, presumably to prolong the game. The Gozer fight isn’t bad, but ascending the stairs is torturous. Instead of just moving the guys forward with the D-pad, you tap ‘A’ until your thumb rebels.
If Ghostbusters doesn’t feel like an NES game, that’s because it isn’t. Ghostbusters originated on Commodore 64 in 1984 before being ported to most home computers of the day, along with the NES and the Master System. The C64 original is touted by retro gamers as being the best iteration of the game, while the NES version is regarded among the worst. Admittedly, I’ve never played the C64 version, so I don’t know. Since the C64 version contains most of the same gameplay as the NES version, how on earth could it be better? Designer David Crane and his small team supposedly only had six weeks to make the game, and while they have my sympathies, I think the limited development time says it all.
If Ghostbusters was a 1985/86 NES launch title, perhaps we would be a bit kinder to it today. Context is key, after all. Alongside games like Urban Champion and Donkey Kong Math, Ghostbusters is indeed a game you can play for longer than three minutes. Ghostbusters also released on the Famicom two years earlier in September 1986, so there’s no reason North America couldn’t have received it earlier.
An October 1988 release, however, is just far too late for this compromised computer game. In just three short years post-launch, the NES library had blossomed with groundbreaking action/adventures like Zelda, Metroid, and even other solid licensed titles like Goonies II. Why even bother with Ghostbusters?
Had developers Bits Laboratory toned down the driving, enhanced the ghost busting, and reworked the staircase sequence to be less egregious, maybe the result would be average instead of terrible. As it stands, Ghostbusters is a series of poor decisions hastily assembled by overworked developers on a time crunch. Ain’t ‘fraid of no ghosts, perhaps, but the deadline remains terrifying.
F
It's amazing and baffling that the designers of Ghostbusters decided to take the scene from the movie with the heroes complaining how tedious and exhausting it is to climb the stairs to the top of the Zuul Tower and make that into a major gameplay element.
I remember the 194x games mostly in their arcade iterations. And Ghostbusters, I played the Master System version a lot - still not a great game but it looks and plays better than its NES counterpart.