Nintendo is Great is devoted to exploring the world of Nintendo - their games, their consoles, their merchandise - in mostly chronological order, starting with the NES and continuing to the upcoming Switch 2.
If you’re interested in following/playing along, or if you’d just like to catch up on previous posts, the Master Games List will help!
Don’t forget to sign up below. Thanks for reading!
BreakThru
PUBLISHER/DEVELOPER: Data East
RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1987
ALSO AVAILABLE ON: Arcade, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Switch, PC, ZX81/Spectrum
BreakThru is not spelled correctly. That’s how you know it means business.
In the game, you control a “highly sophisticated vehicle” (so says the manual), one equipped with a missile launcher and seven productive gears. Your mission is to retrieve the PK430 fighter plane trapped behind five enemy strongholds. The enemy is anonymous, but they have a lot of money and they know how to use it. Armored cars, helicopters, fire mobiles, the works. They’ll throw billions of dollars of machinery and weaponry at your vehicle because the PK430 is just that cool, and they must have it all to themselves.
Your job is to drive fast, shoot fast, and jump in no particular order. Drive too fast, though, and the land mines or a stray bullet might strip all your sophistication (and your body) away from your mission. Focus on shooting all the enemies and you won’t have the momentum needed to jump over that rock landslide or busted road. Balance is key, a challenging prospect when you’re in the middle of several war zones.
BreakThru is thrilling when you find the right amount of momentum and you decimate the enemy in tandem. Jumping over a pond and destroying an armored turret simultaneously is as exhilarating as it sounds.
As with all challenging arcade titles of this era, however, practice and enemy placement memorization are the world. Your vehicle can only take one shot before it explodes, and you only have three lives for the whole game. Granted, Data East does bless players with unlimited continues, which allows you to start at the level where you previously perished. Even with this concession, if you’re unfamiliar with the level layouts, what enemies pop up where, and where you need to jump, BreakThru will frustrate you in your already wounded core.
The Goonies II
PUBLISHER/DEVELOPER: Konami
RELEASE DATE: Mar. 18th, 1987 (JP), Nov. 1987 (US), Dec. 19th, 1988 (EU)
The Goonies II plops you down in the middle of the largest gang hideout you’ve ever seen. Waterfalls, ice caves, boring offices, underwater segments, hidden walls. Rather than use their riches to live like royalty on some distant tropical island, the Fratellis invested everything into making their lair as confusing as possible.
You play Mikey, the only member of the Goonies who hasn’t been kidnapped by the Fratellis. Rescue your friends (and Annie the Mermaid, whoever that may be), and escape the Fratellis complex reasonably unharmed.
To rescue the Goonies, you must think like the Fratellis, deranged and psychotic. See that wall right there? It’s not a wall. Use your hammer to destroy it. See? Told you there’s a jail cell underneath that wall. Or take that nagging old woman. Punch her in the face five times and she’ll give you a candle, an item you absolutely need for later.
How do you know what to do or where to go in this labyrinthine structure? Well, if you see an item in a room somewhere, pick it up. Sometimes you’ll find additional weapons for Mikey, other times items that can only be used within rooms, like the aforementioned hammer. As for navigating your progress, well, the in-game map is as basic as they come. Our recommendation: party like it’s 1987 and bust out the graph paper.
The Goonies II follows in the proud tradition of Metroid and The Legend of Zelda in that, it’s an adventure game that plops you down into the middle of a huge non-linear world and tells you to go for it. Explore at your leisure. If you lose your three lives, jot down that aggressively long password Mama Fratelli gives you. Just like in life, if you hang in long enough, you’ll make progress eventually. “Never say die” or something.
But What About The Goonies I?
The Goonies II is indeed a sequel to The Goonies, a Famicom-only game that more or less follows the plot points of the original film.
For some reason, known only to Konami and possibly Nintendo, The Goonies was never released on the NES in America or Europe. Instead, Americans could only play The Goonies on one of Nintendo’s endearingly strange VS. System arcade units or a PlayChoice-10 cabinet.
I know this, not only because Wikipedia says so, but because I played The Goonies on a sit-down VS. System cabinet at my local Pizza Hut when I was a kid. I remember very little about it, other than I had no idea what I was doing and I died quickly.
As of this writing in 2025, the Pizza Hut location is still there. The Goonies cabinet, sadly, is not.
*thanks to Sergio Stuff for this cracking image
Gotcha! The Sport!
PUBLISHER: LJN
DEVELOPER: Sanritsu
RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1987 (US)
Two exclamation points in a game’s title either means that LJN is very excited about what’s on offer here, or they feel the need to convince consumers that their game is the most exciting “sport” on the NES.
Either way, Gotcha! The Sport! is three rounds of paintball, no more, no less. Shoot camo-clad fun dads in the forest, mohawked denizens in inner-city Everywhere, and terrorists in the Alps. Doesn’t matter your profession or criminal background, put aside your differences, we’re all paint brothers here.
Whether you choose Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced difficulties, you’ll move your character via first-person view from left to right and keep a keen eye out for others looking to shoot you. If you’re playing on Beginner, Gotcha! gives you more than enough time to simply move past the people aiming at you without even drawing your weapon; how considerate! But if you choose Advanced, they’ll shoot you almost immediately, no-holds-barred.
The game makes you move with the control pad and aim, one-handed, with the Zapper, which makes for a unique challenge that’s different than most other Zapper titles. Hope your trigger finger is steady, otherwise you’ll be seeing red time and time again (paint, not blood, they’re not killers, remember that). At the end of each round, shoot the red flag, then walk it back to the beginning of the round.
Regardless of the difficulty you choose, Gotcha! only provides the same three levels to play over and over again. This means you can beat the game in a few minutes, depending on the difficulty. The gunplay is quite strong here, so it’s an enjoyable few minutes, perhaps. But if you spent forty dollars on this in 1987, we imagine you might feel Ripped! Right Off!
Gotcha! The Sport! provides some fleeting fun, but it doesn’t earn its dual exclamation points.
Best captions in the game! All these features bring back so many memories :)
I remember seeing Goonies II in the Official Nintendo Player's Guide and longing to play it. It had so much that was cool. There was a gang of friends and a mermaid in need of rescuing; a kid armed with a yo-yo and boomerang; a gang of suited bad guys, one of whom was so cool he used a gun; and rooms full of secrets, superheroes, and Eskimos.
I wasn't disappointed when I finally got around to playing it. The room exploration mechanics are tedious, but guides tell you where to go and what to do so you aren't stuck punching every wall and grannie. The platforming is good, and you end up saving a mermaid and all your friends from gangsters. I was satisfied.