8-Bit Encyclopaedia - Ikari Warriors

Inglourious Basterds for NES

...son, business is boomin'!

 
Hello. My name is Reggie... You can call me R.A. I play NES games you've probably never heard of.

And yes, you've read the above correctly: Final Fantasy VII for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Well, to split hairs, it's Final Fantasy VII for the SUBOR Entertainment System. The game is a Chinese pirate of the 1997 PS1 version; probably cobbled together from Final Fantasys 1, 2 and 3 for the NES and released sometime in 2005.

Since fluency in Mandarin isn't among my many skills, my review is based on an English translation/face-lift hack (still in progress) coded by a brilliant group of hackers at romhacking.net.

And right from the start, this game makes clear it isn't effing around. Though most all the the graphics and music are unique to the English translation, the Chinese story and game mechanics follow as close to the PlayStation version as 8-Bits will allow. The game is inevitably shorter; with sidequests and flashbacks either truncated or cut entirely. This means no Yuffie (yay!) and no Vincent (boo!). Most of the game's final act gets the axe as well, with the final battle coming directly after the meteor is first summoned.

What's left though, is undeniably FFVII:

I won't go through the game point-by-point--like I've said, it follows the PS1 version. What I will say is that the NES version of FFVII is an amazing accomplishment. Both from the original Chinese Game Pirates ("編曲!" [translation: "Arr!"]), and even moreso from the Hackers who've overhauled the graphics and translated the game to English--to bring a PS1 gaming experience to NES technology is a hurculean achievement.

The above screen serves as perfect example. The final boss fight is at once both instantly recognizable from the PS1 version and undeniably in the mold of the NES Final Fantasy games. Even if divorced completely from it's prototype, Final Fantasy VII for the NES provides a full, satisfying gaming experience.

Crawl Through the Sh*t – 11 Lessons from “The Shawshank Redemption”

RED 

Not long after the warden deprived us of his company, I got a postcard in the mail. It was blank, but the postmark said Fort Hancock, Texas. Fort Hancock... right on the border. That's where Andy crossed. When I picture him heading south in his own car with the top down, it always makes me laugh. Andy Dufresne... who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side. Andy Dufresne... headed for the Pacific

On its surface, Frank Darabont’s 1994 masterpiece, The Shawshank Redemption, is a Hollywood-standard prison flick. The film’s true beauty, though, comes in viewing Shawshank Prison as a metaphor that which restrains our everyday lives. Seen as such, The Shawshank Redemption is a modern-day fable of universal truths.

1. Leave the Gun: The film opens with Andy Dufresne accused of his wife’s murder. Although innocent, Andy is damned to Shawshank by his fingerprints on the bullets near his wife’s home. Drunk and confused, Andy dropped them as he left. Don’t give in to anger; had Andy simply left his gun and ammunition at home, he would have walked a free man. 

...read the rest at The Blog For Men.

Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril is, simply put, the most difficult game ever produced for the Nintendo Entertainment System. For those unfamiliar with Battle Kid, let me cast some light by showing it's title screen:

Still unsure what sets Battle Kid apart from every other NES title? Let me channel my inner CSI: "Zoom and Enhance!"

That's right, Sivak Games developed Battle Kid and released it for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 2010, a full 15 years after the previous NES release.  The plot is intentionally thin to the point of non-existence: our protagonist (Timmy) must venture into the Fortress of Peril to disengage a 'supermech' machine and stop a group of shadowy ne'er-do-wells.

When Battle Kid declares itself a Fortress of Peril,  the game isn't effing around. Modeled after the PC Freeware Game I Wanna Be the Guy, Battle Kid is an S&M Fetish of a  game: designed to be intentionally painful and difficult. Gameplay most closely resembles Metroid--with a large open world to explore and very little prompting--except Timmy's suit of armor--as opposed to Samus'--is quite porous. Spikes kill Timmy. Aliens kill Timmy. Blobs kill Timmy. Plants kill Timmy. Fish kill Timmy. Even limes and lemons kill Timmy (yes, lemons). It's 1-hit death from start to finish. Here's a small taste of Battle Kid's Horror:

The game offers varying modes of difficulty: Easy Mode allows infinite lives, provides passwords and starts Timmy with a gun power-up (and pink armor). Unfair Mode, on the other hand, pits Timmy against the Fortress of Peril with only his wits: no continues, no saves, one hit and its over. Make no mistake, though, even on Easy Mode, Battle Kid is grueling. Continue points pepper the fortress, but they're spaced like oases in the Sahara; only the lucky can navigate from one to the next.

A point-by-point review of Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril would make for comparative War and Peace blog post, so let me summarize: Timmy kills things (and gets killed), picks up keys and various powerups as he wends through the hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing perils of the eponymous fortress. All bosses bested, Timmy comes to a massive--and mostly impossible--warmech robot (shown above). It's defeat provides one of two rather unsatisfying endings, neither of which I'll spoil.

None of that really matters, because Battle Kid is fun as hell. It's a giant wooden roller-coaster and you're in the back car being whipped around like a rag doll. The moment you get off, head aching and neck stiff, it's a race to get back in line to ride again. Not many make 'em like this anymore, and certainly none can even hope to match the difficulty of Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril.

That is, until the release of it's sequel, Battle Kid 2: Mountain of Torment.