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!
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Top Gun
PUBLISHER/DEVELOPER: Konami
RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1987 (US), Dec. 11th, 1987 (JP), Nov. 30th, 1988 (EU)
Top Gun is exactly what an 8-bit flight sim should be. It’s relatively fast-paced, it doesn’t ask too much from the player, and the unique mechanics it asks the player to learn – contrary to, well, contrarian Internet personalities – are easily conquered through practice.
You fly high in an F-14 Tomcat, shoot down enemy targets with either bullets or missiles, refuel as needed, and land the plane. Instructions are given to you in the game itself, you don’t even need the manual to understand what Top Gun desires from you.
There are only four missions, which isn’t a lot, but missions 2-4 all take about 10-15 minutes to complete. The first mission just gets you used to the controls of your multimillion-dollar fighter jet. With the other three, you fly to a specific target, and once there, unload all your Wolf missiles directly into the target, go home, and salute America.
You will struggle with landing and refueling. The game barks orders at you: “Speed Up! Slow Down! Right, Right!” Nobody likes to be yelled at, but this is a matter of life or death. When landing, follow the screen’s instructions for an Altitude of 200 and a speed of 288, or thereabouts, and you’ll park that plane without a hitch. Refueling is tougher, more nuanced. Lining the plane up with the fuel nozzle exactly how the game wants you to is nerve wracking. But what choice do you have? A plane needs fuel, or it’ll fall out of the sky. You’ll figure it out.
Top Gun is an early NES game, so it doesn’t fully capture the rollicking spirit of the original film, but it does an admirable job with what it’s given. Maverick, Goose, Iceman and the gang might be MIA from this adaptation, but they’re with you in spirit.
Mega Man
PUBLISHER/DEVELOPER: Capcom
RELEASE DATE: Dec. 17th, 1987 (JP), Dec. 1987 (US), Dec. 13th, 1989 (EU)
ALSO AVAILABLE ON: Android, iOS, PlayStation, Virtual Console (Wii, 3DS, and Wii U), and various compilations for the Genesis, PlayStation 2, Xbox, 3DS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch
Rockman. Mega Man. The Blue Bomber. Whichever moniker you choose, he’s still the purest robot-man ever to grace the video game industry.
But even the greatest among us have humble beginnings. Mega Man is an uncertain debut, full of promising ideas, but without the artful execution that future sequels would possess.
You play as Mega Man, a kind-hearted servant of humanity, out to stop Dr. Wily and his army of six robot villains from Total World Domination™. Equipped with his lone Mega Buster and a blue titanium casing, Mega Man shoots and leaps his way to victory through sheer determination and righteous programming.
Which robot stage should you tackle first? Mega Man gives you options, but choose wisely. Bomb Man, Guts Man, Cut Man, Elec Man, Fire Man, and Ice Man all thirst for your oil, and your Mega Buster doesn’t always get the job done. Once each boss robot is destroyed, however, their special abilities are absorbed by Mega Man, which he can then use at will. Figure out each boss’ weakness (Guts Man doesn’t take kindly to bombs, for example), and watch their life bar drain quickly.
The beloved Mega Man gameplay loop – shoot, jump, avoid, collect, repeat - is established here in this inaugural entry. Without this inherently rewarding loop, the game’s flaws would drag it down. The titular character is clunky and slippery. The environments are barren and uninteresting, save for the enemies that relentlessly target you and knock you off of ladders and platforms. And it’s a miracle that the horrendous cover art didn’t kill the series’ commercial chances in America.
But we don’t play Mega Man because it’s a great example of the franchise. We play it to revisit where one of gaming’s greatest heroes got his start, and to be thankful that Capcom didn’t let the series end after its inaugural entry.
A Brief Mega Man Story
Back in the day when VHS was king, my local video store, Premiere Video was an 8,000 square-foot movie/video game rental mecca. By the time the SNES and Genesis had emerged as the hottest game consoles, 1/3 of their store was devoted to just rentals for them and the NES.
Honestly, as a kid, I was rarely disappointed in their selection. The store seemed like it had every game I ever wanted to rent. Every game… except the first Mega Man. They carried 2, 3, 4, 5, and even the belated 6 which came out at the end of the NES’ life, but never the original. In fact, if we happened to be at a different video store, I always looked to see if they had the first Mega Man. Maybe it was just the local Tucson video rental market, but I never found a store that carried it.
One day, though, at Toys ‘R Us, I decided to look for Mega Man within its vast catalog. Lo and behold, there it was, placed correctly in front of its five younger brothers. You couldn’t look at the actual game box, all they had was a poorly printed picture of the cover along with a ticket for you to give to the cashier, should you want to purchase it.
The cover confused me even as a child. I couldn’t tell what was happening. The misshapen potato appeared to be Mega Man, but… why did he look like he put on a suit three sizes too small?
Needless to say, I did not purchase the original Mega Man that day or ever. The first time I played it was on an NES emulator, probably NESticle and probably in the late 90s.
Wizards & Warriors
PUBLISHER: Acclaim
DEVELOPER: Rare
RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1987 (US), July 15th, 1988 (JP), Jan. 7th, 1990 (EU)
British developer Rare bets a pony on Wizards & Warriors, an action platformer that crams as much as possible into its cartridge. Ostensibly about Kuros, a knight saving an unnamed princess from the evil wizard, Malkil, the game is a precursor to the exploratory collect-a-thon, a genre that Rare would later perfect with their N64 titles.
The kingdom of Elrond houses many nefarious creatures – eagles, spiders, hornets, fire, bats etc. – within its forests, caverns, and castles. Their goal: pummel Kuros relentlessly while he’s trying to gosh darn get things done. Kuros needs gems to unlock the exit, keys to open chests and doors, and items that boost his abilities; if you see something glowing on the ground, pick it up, it’s for him.
To find all the things, Kuros must explore his environment, hop around, sword straight out in front of him, like he’s never held one in his life, and hope that a stray hornet sting doesn’t place him in the dirt.
All items are important, and that can’t be stressed enough. The game doesn’t force you to get every item in order to progress, but if you miss, say, the Feather that allows you to jump across wide gaps in an earlier level, then certain sections in later levels will be all but impossible to reach.
Kuros fights like a dork, the relentless re-spawning enemies will grind your patience into dust and searching for some important random item in a hard-to-reach spot is annoying. Despite these grievances, Wizards & Warriors isn’t a horrible time. Collect-a-thons became really popular in the late 90s for a reason. It’s just really darn rewarding to gather as much glowing digital garbage as possible into your virtual knapsack. Forget the princess, forget Elrond. Come for the loot, stay for the loot.
And with these three games, my look into the 1987 NES catalog is complete!
I’ll be doing some research to make sure I didn’t miss any important Nintendo happenings from 1987, and if I don’t find anything, I’m moving forward into 1988!
Just in case you missed the Master Games List and you’d like to look back at all the games I’ve covered thus far, the link is below.
As always, thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time!
I wondered if you were going to comment on most people of the internet generation having heard of Top Gun on NES because of AVGN and I wasn't disappointed, a great, iconic slice of retro gaming culture but he has been known to (and admitted in the past) make videos about games he doesn't actually dislike and has been kwon to seriously suck at some of them.
No joke, I've been trying to get a copy of Mega Man 1 for 3 years. I cannot find one anywhere in the UK, might have to cave and get the collection on Switch, especially as MM2 is expensive.
Alright, these are 3 games I feel strongly about!
Top Gun - I owned this one. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but still found it disappointing. I loved the movie, which was, for several years of my strange childhood, my favorite (I was never a Disney kid). As I'm "Thomas" in real life, you can imagine that I really enjoyed learning that Maverick's actor was named Tom Cruise. This was the first person I was aware of with my name. I wanted to grow up to be Maverick.
Watching it as a parent, I realize it has language in almost every scene that I won't permit my kids to listen to yet. I guess my parents didn't care. My father swore like a sailor, so the movie wasn't teaching me any words I didn't hear in an average drive downtown for a ballgame.
Anyway, the lack of Maverick and Goose hit me especially hard here. I really, really wanted to see them, or to otherwise try to capture more of the movie's essence. Instead it felt like it could be any ol' dogfighting game. Worse, I couldn't even see my F-14 most of the time.
And yeah, I couldn't figure out the carrier landing and the in-air refueling during the NES heyday, so AVGN's review hit home here, even though I DID master it at some point during the SNES era.
Mega Man 1 - Also owned this one, picking it up probably not too long after its release. And I LOVED it. I later picked up 2 and 3. I never picked up any of the Mega Man X games for some reason, though I rented them -- I guess I just had a lot of other gaming pursuits by the time those games came around. I guess to me, Mega Man 2 and 3 were improvements over 1, but 1 was never obsolete in my eyes. I always appreciated some of its quirks in relation to the later games. So it's interesting to me that a lot of retrospectives tend to place it so far below 2 and 3.
Your story about the game, and that bizarre cover, is really funny. I remember staring at it and questioning it, but at that point I imagined the cover was the real depiction of Mega Man, and the graphics in game are just a crude attempt to depict it. Then Mega Man looked different on the (also bizarre) cover of 2, and I wasn't sure what to think. It was only when Mega Man 3 came out that I had the perspective to laugh at the covers of 1 and 2.
Wizards and Warriors - My memory of this game is that I rented it and a friend spent the night, and I'm pretty sure we beat the whole thing in one sitting. But it's one of the first times I remember saying, "Look, this game has unlimited continues. The game isn't over until we give up. So I say we just DON'T GIVE UP."
This is one of those games that I revisited as an adult, and it was WAY jankier than I ever remembered and didn't live up to my memory of that epic night of refusing to give up. Still, your perspective of it as an early Rare collect-a-thon is something I never thought about.