Game #006: Baseball, Released: October 18th, 1985

Developed by: Nintendo R&D1 Published by: Nintendo

 

Introduction & Bias:

Ah, baseball. This was my favorite sport as a kid. I can't really tell you why I picked baseball as my favorite sport but it was. Not that I was any good at it, mind you. On a team of 10 little leaguers I permanently had a spot on the bench. Part of the issue was athletics but I don't think I really got how physicality was supposed to work when I was six years old. I might have just been a stupid kid.

But my feelings toward sports based video games continues. I feel it is just really hard to condense a real life activity with tons of rules such as football or baseball into a tiny NES game. In spite of those feelings we are here with Sports Pentalogy Part 2. This is the NES's first baseball game which is intuitively titled Baseball. This reminds me of the Atari games where the sports and activities were named after the sport in question. You had Football, Basketball, Golf, Bowling, and... Casino? I think maybe the Atari games were so simply named because Atari had to spell out to the consumer just what they were buying because the graphics were so primitive. Now that we are in the NES era the graphics are improved and I think the naming conventions could have stretched their legs a bit.

So here we have America's national pastime with an outdated name on the new 8-bit video game system. I have never played this video game before. Will it hit a home run or will it strike out? Will I have more baseball cliches to throw into this review? Let's find out!

First Impressions & Conveyance:

I do have to say that I was pretty happy turning on Baseball. The title card is kind of cute as Baseball is spelled out with a bunch of baseballs. Nice touch. There is a short music jingle, too! Wow, a first for this blog. We are back to using Select to change game modes between 1 and 2 players, though. Oh, well. I guess Nintendo was still trying to justify having that button.

Pictured: Baseball made of baseballs! It's baseball-ception!

I was supplied with demonstrations for this game so I watched a few of them. It was hard to tell just what I was in control of at any given time based on the demos. The game was intuitively set up so that the pitcher and the batter could duel. If contact is made on the ball it goes into the field like one would expect, the ball is fielded and plays are made at the different bases. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. The object still appeared to be to hit the ball so the runners can advance through the four bases to score a run. The team with the most runs wins. It doesn't seem like the video game made up any new rules to baseball so once I saw a couple of example plays I started up the game.

Once I selected my lonely 1 player game I immediately faced a choice of team to select. No team names were available but I did see an option to pick the Y team. I assumed it was the Yankees so that made my choice clear since I was raised in New York. Don't hate. The computer had already selected their team so if they selected Y then I would have been locked out. As soon as I picked team Y I was dumped into the game with no ceremony. I must have been the away team since I was up to bat first.

Pictured: Yay team Y! Yes! You can do it, Yo! Yahoo!

There were no instructions about how to bat but with only two action buttons I figured that both of them would be used. Maybe one would swing normally and one would bunt. After mashing the B button during the first pitch I realized I only had the A button to work with. With this knowledge in hand I proceeded to swing at the next pitch and got a home run! Awesome, maybe this will be easy. Going long all the way: both my baseball strategy and the title of the porno I'd likely star in if this game reviewing gig doesn't pan out.

Anyway.

The rest of the playing experience was similarly not instructed. Fielding, running bases, pitching, and throwing to bases all had to be figured out on the fly. I think I learned pretty much everything I needed to but some actions, like trying to take an extra base off of a hit, took me until the end of my first game to figure out and I never could gather how to steal bases.

I have enough real life baseball experience to know that I was missing out on a lot of potential strategy options and this ended up hurting my gaming experience overall.

Experience & Presentation:

Let me summarize how my first game went. It was bad. The fans abandoned the franchise, the coach was fired, and the ball boy was never heard from again. The blowout was terrible. I am pretty sure that my personal reaction to the Y team went from "Y for Yay!" to "Y should I bother?"

Pictured: Shame. Not Pictured: An angry nun ringing a hand bell

I encountered many errors during my playtime and most of them were committed by my players. I'd like to think that I'm a big enough of a man (porn title #2) to admit when I'm screwing up and that happened plenty. For example, I could have looked up the controls to know how to turn singles into doubles. I made bad judgements about who to throw out at any given time. I swung at bad pitches. All of that is true. What made gameplay so aggravating was how much was out of my control. I felt like I could hit the same pitch and get 20 different results. I'm playing baseball on a 2D plane; there is only so much I can do to control the ball. The computer player also fielded like all-stars. There was no difficulty to pick from at the start menu so this is what I had to contend with 100% of the time.

Pictured: A baseball to the face! Not Pictured: Not being awarded a free base after getting murdered by a pitch

When I played defense my abilities and inabilities became even clearer. Pitching the ball was the most strategic aspect. I could hold one or two directions when I pitched to get fast balls, slower balls, balls pitched inside and outside, and more normal pitches. Mixing up pitches and striking players out is probably the best way to go because the player should not let the computer get a ball in play. Whenever my team fielded the ball it seemed to take forever. I counted at least three times that the ball would get past my center fielder and roll all the way to the wall, the center fielder would stop dead in his tracks, and to have the left fielder cross all the way over to actually pick up the ball and throw it back in. This turned easy fly-outs into triples for the computer team. I had no ability to pick who was fielding nor could I mash buttons to get them to speed up. It was this constant ballet of errors taking place on a field covered in molasses.

My infielders were similarly useless. Whenever a ground ball was hit to my shortstop the ball would come to him... and roll right by. This didn't inspire much rage in me as much a general feeling of disgust and helplessness. I didn't have a button to press on time to field correctly and if I did I sure as hell didn't know about it. I have other examples of incompetence but overall I did not have a lot of agency or control over my success or failure. Being backed up by a bunch of gorillas when the controller was out of my hands was a very unrewarding experience.

Pictured: The score of the game at the end of my hour. And more shame *ding ding*

The presentation was a mixed bag as well. Once the title music played there was very little in the way of music during the game. The most I got were Atari level beeps and boops when strikes, balls, and outs were scored. There is a brief jingle when a home run is hit but that's about all the fanfare the game gives the player. It is a far cry from watching a professional game with organs blaring between plays, light up signs giving commentary to the games, and belligerent drunk people insisting they could be doing better as they burp up beer breath in the stands. Well, I guess it's not all bad then.

The graphics themselves are nice enough. The players have a lot of different poses to strike depending on the action. Lots of pitching, batting, fielding, catching, and throwing sprites were present. Even the umpire gave the whoop-de-do signal that they are supposed to when a home run is hit.

Not Pictured: The umpire on the right flipping the players off. I promise

The screen takes a close up view of the action when the ball is in the infield and an expanded view when the ball is hit to the outfield. The transition between the two was never jarring and gameplay was easy to follow; even if I did not get to participate in it as much as I wanted.

Verdict & Score:

It's a shame that Baseball was such a letdown. It's unfair to expect the game developers to know that baseball was my sport of choice as a kid but for a sport that is so popular in America and Japan I think more innovations could have been made to make a good baseball experience on the NES. With no instructions on the controls, brainless AI, and only a few credits given to the overall presentation I decide to give Baseball a 3(4)/10. I think this game suffers the most from the fact that it is trying to simulate such a complicated game. I wonder how later baseball games will fare.

Factoids & Trivia:

There is evidence that Nintendo banked on the popular appeal of the sport of baseball to help lift up Baseball the video game and the NES in general. The NES was launched in the US on October 18th, 1985 in a press event in Manhattan. The NES was not sold nationwide until almost a year later so several test markets were used to lead up to its nationwide launch. Baseball the video game was played by some current Major League Baseball players at the press event. Presumably they might have played for team Y.

If Baseball was really influential back in 1985 its demand has fallen off significantly since then. A copy of Baseball in its collector's-worthy black box does see offers for $40 online but the cart itself sells for as little as a dollar. It is notable that Baseball was developed for the Japanese Famicom and the NES primarily rather than being a refinement of previous arcade games and concepts. Baseball was ported over to Nintendo's VS series of arcade cabinets where it enjoyed some upgraded graphics and sounds.

And, yes, Y stood for Yankees. Nintendo did not get an actual licensing agreement with any baseball league so the developers settled for using initials to stand in for the team names. In Japan the teams were named after some Japanese Central League clubs while the letters stood for the Athletics, Cardinals, Dodgers, Phillies, Royals, and Yankees in the American release.

The Sportsball Pentalogy continues next time with something a little slower paced. Coming up next we will tee up a review of Golf. Yeah, just Golf. I know, I'm excited, too.

Sources:

NES box art:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/

Prices sourced from E-bay on 1/30/2016

The Baseball wiki page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_%281983_video_game%29

YouTube link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4wGuROQb0

Game #005: 10-Yard Fight, Released: October 18th, 1985

Developed by: Nintendo R&D1 (NES) Irem (Arcade) Published by: Nintendo (NES) Irem (Arcade)

Introduction & Bias:

There is a funny thing about me and sports video games. Sports are things that I can reasonably do in real life. Nobody will ever mistake me for a professional athlete but if I ever wanted to run a pick-up game in some park near my house I could choose to do that. I always thought that sports were silly things to try and emulate in video games so I have played very few sports based games.

This is a trend that I am going to need to buck since there are four traditional sports games in the original 17 NES games alone and a few sports-adjacent games in that set as well. The main reason I am choosing 10-Yard Fight first out of that bunch is because it appears first alphabetically.

Needless to say, I have never played this game before. So instead of punting this game down my schedule I will go for a 4th down review conversion.

Sports reference! Cheerleaders are usually cute.... I dunno.

First Impressions & Conveyance:

All right! We get another black screen with the title and gameplay choices. The choices are simple up front with a 1-player and 2-player option. There is no music in the background so I just let the title sit. I am rewarded with several demonstrations that play various kickoff return scenarios and the occasional line of scrimmage play. These demos educate the player a lot. I will try to spread out what I learned from the demos throughout the review rather than dumping it all here. Besides, it's not like the game is trying hard to fire me up.

Not Pictured: Fight music. Rah, rah, rah?

This is the first time that the down arrow lets me select which game mode I want. Sorry, Select button, you are already outmoded. Picking the single player option lets the player pick the game's difficulty. The player then gets to decide one of five difficulty modes to play on: High School, College, Professional, Playoff, and Super Bowl.

Once the difficulty is selected the player is immediately thrown onto the field to receive the game's first kickoff. Since I watched the demonstrations I was able to figure out that the player actually controls a block of receiving players. The middle receiving player's jersey turns white once the ball is received so it is very easy to tell who the player is controlling. When the player kicks off to the opposing team, their ball carrier’s jersey turns black. The entire block of players can be steered to prevent the tackling team access to the ball handler.

Pictured: Nine-man synchronized running. Coming to a dance floor near you!

Once regular play begins the offensive team has to move the ball down field like normal football would proceed. The player has three plays to move the ball 10 yards (in a fight, you might say) or be forced to kick a punt/field goal. The defensive team needs to read if the ball is run or passed up the field and try to sack the quarterback or take out the receiver correctly to minimize the yards gained.

After a couple of plays the player should notice how many football players they are controlling at any given time, the two different pass options they have, and how to move the ball down field. It helps that I do know how football is played so I was able to come up with strategies very quickly with the tools the game allowed me.

Overall, I was impressed with the amount of rules that 10-Yard Fight was able to represent in the game. On top of that the rest of the conveyance was excellent. The player never has to guess important statistics like the score, the down, or the yards to go. Plus, there is a neat graphic on the right side of the screen that shows the ball's position on the field and the next first down marker. There is a lot of information given to the player on this 8-bit screen and I really was not needing more conveyance from the game. Well done.

Pictured: A surprising amount of information

Experience & Presentation:

I had a lot of fun with the game at first. It exceeded my expectations with the accuracy to the sport. The only football video game that I played that preceded 10-Yard Fight was the aptly named Football on the Atari. That game was primitive and honestly pretty hard to play with a joystick and one button. The NES, of course, has two action buttons and the ability to pause. This game takes advantage of the more complex programming allowed by NES carts to create a football game that if the player squints looks like actual football.

Two teams line up with individual players, the linesmen briefly get in each other's way, running backs cross the field before the play begins, and players that are eligible receivers raise their arms so the player knows they can catch a pass. The graphics do a great job animating the players to show what needs to be shown. The players themselves are somewhere between a small Mario and a big Mario in height and that is just enough to have arms and legs move and to make the jerseys noticeable enough that the teams are never confused.

There is basically no music that plays for the whole game and the sound effects are sparse as well. This actually gave me the space to begin narrating my own plays like a discount John Madden. After the first game and a half was completed I began to fall into a rut.

I decided to play it easy by picking High School difficulty first. I won the game handily in spite of some learning mistakes. The gameplay became entirely predictable, also. For example, if a pass is thrown over the linesmen on the line of scrimmage the ball will be intercepted every time. By linesmen, you know, the fat guys? Also, if a pass is thrown and not intercepted it will be completed every time. No pass interference here. In fact, there are no penalties in the game whatsoever. I wish this meant there was plenty of unnecessary roughness but, alas, it was not to be.

Pictured: Avoiding unnecessary roughness

I quickly came up with the strategy of passing the ball sideways in a lateral/handoff and then just running the ball around everyone. It was rare that I was forced into a third down, let alone kicking the ball off. I also saw that the computer team on each difficulty level had one, maybe two different plays in their arsenal. In fact, the only two real differences I saw between difficulties included the fact that I had to run the ball much farther down the field after receiving a kickoff and that the computer team reacted and pushed through lines much more quickly.

In spite of these mounting disadvantages I quickly beat the first two difficulty levels. When I won each game I was not dumped back out into the difficulty select screen. Rather I was promoted to the next difficulty level with the encouraging message that I was getting closer to the Super Bowl. I was running out of review time during the third difficulty so I skipped straight to the Super Bowl. I was only able to play through the first half and I'll just let the final picture speak for itself.

Pictured: A Super Bowl ring in my near future.

Verdict & Score:

This is the first game that I reviewed for this blog that put my expectations up high at the beginning but then slid down to mediocrity by the end. My early impressions were great but that wore off rather quickly once I realized how routine all the plays became and how reliably I could win with one strategy.

While writing the review I flashed back to how much I enjoyed calling my plays and seeing my success but I know that I only had about ten minutes of unique gameplay left after my hour was up. Since I do want to go back at some point and win the Super Bowl in spite of the malaise that set in I am going to award 10-Yard Fight a 5/10. I think it is a mixed bag but I did pretty easily squeeze an hour of enjoyment out of the game. Not bad for football.

Factoids & Trivia:

As it stands today 10-Yard Fight may be a little obscure and not highly sought after. A quick search tells me that the game is common enough to fetch a price of less than a dollar online.

Like with the Zapper trilogy, 10-Yard Fight did not begin life as an NES game. As the 1983 copyright indicates, this was an arcade game first. The arcade experience was significantly different from the NES game. The arcade game only challenged the player to making a single offensive drive per game half to score a touchdown. If the player succeeds they may move on to the next difficulty level. The player does not get a chance to participate in defense.

The game’s legacy upon contemporary and present-day reviews states that the game was a great step up when it was released but quickly faded into the background when other football games were released such as the upcoming (way later) Tecmo Bowl and Tecmo Super Bowl. To its credit, 10-Yard Fight did bring American football out of the Atari era and that is no small feat.

A little bit about its developer, Irem. This is the first game I have reviewed for the NES that originally came from a non-Nintendo developer. I want to take a little bit of screen space to profile Irem.

Irem started in 1974 as IPM standing for International Playing Machine. The company spent the first few years of its life creating arcade cabinets for pachinko and slot machines before moving on to producing original arcade titles in 1978. In 1979 IPM changed its name to Irem for International Rental Electronics Machines and later Innovations in Recreational Electronic Media.

Irem gained notoriety in creating very difficult arcade games. Probably the most famous of these games is R-Type, a hugely difficult shoot-em-up game that found a good home in the arcade and the TurboGraphix 16. However, the company’s fortune began to decline and many of its staff and working divisions spun off to make other companies. One of the most significant of these were a group of game developers that left to form Nazca Corporations which is best known for making the Metal Slug series.

Today Irem is still alive making cabinets for pachinko and slot machines; the same field it had before getting into arcade games.

That's a bit of a somber note to end on. Can't be helped. Next time on OHR I will cover a game that represents my favorite sport as a kid: baseball. The game is called: Baseball. Oh, that's not very dramatic.

Sources:

NES box art:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/

10-Yard Fight arcade gameplay footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX_xH96UEV0

Wiki to 10-Yard Fight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-Yard_Fight

Wiki to Irem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irem

Game #004: Wild Gunman, Released: October 18th, 1985

Developed by: Nintendo R&D1 and Intelligent Systems Released by: Nintendo

Introduction & Bias:

Here we are: Wild Gunman. This is the last of the Zapper Trilogy from the original seventeen. The games were not actually called "The Zapper Trilogy" but it's my blog so I'll do what I want.

As far as bias goes I really did not have any experience with this game before playing it for my review. I had seen a couple of pictures and I could swear they used this game for a brief scene in Back to the Future Part II. I'll have to dig that up in my trivia section to see if that is true.

Other than bits and pieces and some known cameos in Smash Brothers I'm going in blind. Let's see if that helps this game's chances.

First Impressions & Conveyance:

It's another black screen with the title. Plain, clear, and boring.

Not Pictured: Creativity

The player gets the choice of three game modes and they are similar to the past two games. This time our game modes are called 1 OUTLAW, 2 OUTLAWS, and GANG. I wonder if that means we will see some of our favorite GANGs from Hogan's Alley. Nyah, see? Spoiler: we don't.

Game A is pretty simple. After a short Western-on-the-range style intro ditty sounds off the player is presented with an OUTLAW that shuffles slowly to the middle of the screen. Once in position, the OUTLAW will shout "FIRE" and the player has a limited amount of time to shoot the OUTLAW before being shot. The reaction time is clearly labeled and a count-up timer displays the player's reaction time. Being a quick draw is literally the only objective to the game and to the game's credit, it cannot be more clear about what the player has to do. Presumably the player wants to shoot the OUTLAWs for their bounties. I picture that the player character has a big problem with 19th century student loans.

Game B adds a couple of wrinkles to this quick draw formula. First, the player is presented with two OUTLAWs to shoot with different time requirements. Once the fire command is given the player must shoot both OUTLAWs under their respective time limits. But the main source of difficulty is that occasionally one of the OUTLAWs will not draw their guns. Getting shot or shooting one of the OUTLAWs who apparently got cold feet will cost the player one of their three lives. Once again, the objective is clear but this mode is much more difficult because the game will not always reward an itchy trigger finger.

Pictured: The invincibility of non-combatants

Game C puts the player's viewpoint in front of a fixed location where OUTLAWs can appear in one or two of five possible target zones. The player has limited ammo as noted by a bullet counter in the lower left corner of the screen. Perhaps this is the most complicated game mode since this is the most target-rich environment but the gameplay devolves back into a shoot everything mode as all of the OUTLAWs are valid targets 100 percent of the time.

Pictured: Shootout at the OK Saloon. Not Pictured: Shootout at the Excellent Saloon. They don't serve OUTLAWs there

Experience & Presentation:

All of my fears regarding watching the clock during my play time with Hogan's Alley came true with Wild Gunman. If I failed to breathe much life into my description of the game it really has to do with how little the game asks of the player.

Now, if I were to be put into the shoes of a kid in 1985 I would have a couple of choices about how I would shoot at the screen. I could go full roleplay mode with my Zapper at my hip in a homemade Nintendo cartridge sleeve converted into a holster, sweaty palms waiting for my chance to fire and then drawing to blow my enemy away. Pretty badass, right? The game can't ask the player to do that. Nothing in either the NES's nor the Zapper's capabilities allows the game to know whether or not the Zapper is pointing at the screen. So what is a real kid going to do? Point the gun at the screen and wait for the chance to fire. OUTLAW never knew what hit him.

OK, maybe other than a kid's arms getting tired from holding a gun out in that position for a long time there really is not much challenge in that strategy. What am I, the 30-something reviewer, required to do? Click my mouse.

I really am making no secret that I am playing all of these games on my computer. It is the only practical way of playing every NES game. The only way to emulate the Zapper experience is by giving the player a crosshair and allowing them to click when they want to shoot. It is hardly a taxing experience. Wait, click. Wait, click. Wait, click. It was really boring. Game A mode is so easy that I started taking a nap while playing. I just relied on audio cues to get me through each stage.

Not Pictured: Alex, the richest lazy person ever to clean up the wild west

Literally the only requirement in Game A is to shoot the screen in the 1.3 second to 0.4 second window presented to the player in each showdown. I chose my words carefully for that last sentence. The player has to shoot the screen, not the target. I will break down why this is in the trivia section as I want to expand on the Zapper's capabilities there. In Game B the screen is split vertically down the middle to designate the valid target areas between the two opponents and Game B has 6 target areas, only 5 of which can house targets.

The gameplay in short is too simple for its own good. So how does the presentation stack up? Also, in short: not great.

There is not much going on in the backgrounds for Wild Gunman. Much like Duck Hunt, this game only uses two backgrounds as set dressing for the three game modes. Game A and B share the same desert setting with lots of bones littering the ground, a couple of suguaro cacti and one of those ubiquitous desert mesas on the horizon. Game C uses a hotel setting to have the targets pop into frame through various doors and windows. Unfortunately, there is not a single railing kill to be had.

The targets themselves show the most charm and variety in the graphics. Each of the OUTLAWs are given a couple of frames of animation for meeting the player in the quick draw field and only one of the targets bothers to turn sideways while walking. Shooting the OUTLAWs will result in various funny situations such as belt buckles being destroyed, hats being blows off, or getting comically bowled over. It is implied that every target survives their encounter with the player as they declare that the player wins in a thought bubble after they are shot.

The targets gave me a chuckle for two different reasons throughout the review hour for two completely different reasons: their reaction to a foul and their expression to telegraph their shots.

If I were in a showdown and I managed to set up first and saw my opponent slowly shuffle out to meet me on the field of battle I'd try to waste that sucker as soon as I saw his face. Screw honor, I want that bounty money! Wild Gunman is a game, though, so the player has to wait for the OUTLAW to draw first and then the player can shoot.

Pictured: "I'm telling mommy!"

Then something needs to be said about the eyes of the OUTLAWs when they draw. It negates any sympathy I could possibly have for them. They are possessed by demons.

Pictured: "Draw... out your soul!"

Verdict & Score:

Wild Gunman is not a deep or very interesting game. The game is easy enough to understand, sure, but that is not hard when the player can only do one thing. Game A was a literal snoozefest, Game B had something to offer briefly, and Game C picked up the pace of the game but was only a temporary diversion.

The fact that the game modes were almost entirely about speed rather than accuracy hurts their playability. The game is further hampered by the fact that Zappers are boring to emulate and that they don't work on modern televisions. Out of all three Zapper games to come out at launch for the NES this one has the least to offer and feels more like a relic of the past. Fitting, then, that the game's setting is the most aged of the three.

Overall Wild Gunman only earns a 3/10. There is not much game on offer and what there is does not stand up to its competition.

Factoids & Trivia:

So it turns out that I was right. Wild Gunman was that game that Marty McFly played to demonstrate that he was a crack shot, at least with fake guns. The third movie applied Marty's skill to real firearms. There are three interesting factoids about the clip trivia-wise. First, the game shown in the movie clip was an unreleased “VS.” version of the game cabinet. The second is that Marty gets to use the version of the Zapper that Japanese players could optionally get. It was a plastic case modeled after a Single Action Army revolver: the gun of choice for Revolver Ocelot. Third, is that the little kid in the clip is Elijah Wood in his first film role. Already hobbit sized.

Wild Gunman itself is the product of much refinement. The first version of the game came out in 1974. This arcade game involved quick drawing and shooting at a 16mm film projection. The object was to wait to draw until the enemy's eyes flashed. Then the player could shoot and proceed. This, at least, explains the beginnings of the OUTLAWs demonic presence.

Finally I want to use the rest of this space to explain the Zapper and how it works. The Zapper is a light gun. The Zapper itself is a bit of a misnomer because, unlike what my five-year-old self wanted to believe, the Zapper does not actually zap anything. When the trigger is pulled on the Zapper the games it works for will go dark for a split second. White boxes appear where the targets are. If the sensor inside the Zapper sees the white light it registers a hit. If not then the game knows the trigger was pulled but to no effect. The game will cycle very quickly between the white boxes of the available targets so that the game knows which target is shot. This is how I discovered that the entire game screen of Game A was a valid target because the entire screen flashed white when I pulled the trigger.

Now, Zappers do not work on modern television sets because there is an input lag on modern TVs. The best modern example of input lag comes from the Rock Band series. One of the biggest pieces of maintenance the player has to do in Rock Band is to compensate for the lag between the video and the audio of their media systems so the precision of the controller inputs can be detected exactly. The same concept applies to the Zapper. Old CRT TVs had a consistent latency of their screens between all models. This allowed Nintendo to calibrate the Zapper to respond to all TV sets without requiring some sort of manual calibration on the part of the Zapper owner. The link below gets into this explanation with quite a bit more science behind it.

All right, enough Zapper talk. It's time for something new! Join me next time as we start tackling the black box sports games with 10-Yard Fight. Pun intended.

Sources:

NES box art:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/

Back to the Future II clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMy1zO8m8sM

Wild Gunman arcade clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxwikshonsk

Obligatory Wiki link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Gunman

Expanded Zapper explanation:

http://www.howtogeek.com/181303/htg-explains-how-the-nintendo-zapper-worked-and-why-it-doesnt-work-on-new-tvs/?PageSpeed=noscript

Game #003: Hogan's Alley, Released: October 18, 1985

 

Developed by: Nintendo & Released by: Nintendo

Introduction & Bias: 

For the first time in this blog's short history I am playing a game that I have not really tried before. I never owned this game and I never fooled around with it during my sweeps through my ROM collection when I was bored. I knew enough about it ahead of time to know that this was one of the light gun games released at the NES's launch.

The upcoming comparisons between this game and Duck Hunt I think are both inevitable and justified since the two games are contemporaries and they fit into the same shooting gallery genre. Duck Hunt has the fortune of having the bias of a lot of previous play time where Hogan's Alley has the fortune of being allowed to give me a first impression.

With that said, let's dive in.

First Impressions & Conveyance:

My first reaction to the title screen is that it looks an awful lot like Duck Hunt's title screen.

Pictured: Familiarity

The player is even presented with three game modes just like Duck Hunt. What does set Hogan's Alley apart from Duck Hunt is an attract mode screen with some instructions. Those instructions are very simple: there are six human-shaped targets. Three of the targets are hostile while three of them are civilians. "SHOOT GANGS ONLY!" OK, game. I can play it your way.

Pictured: Mobsters from the 30's, a cop from the 80's and sprite flicker

With the lack of anything else to do I selected the top of the game's three modes: Game A Hogan's Alley A. This mode is a very simple shooting gallery. Three targets are paraded out slowly in a two dimensional profile and a number above representing the amount of time the player gets to decide who lives and who dies. Other than potentially shooting two of three targets instead of one of three targets and a timer that typically gets shorter as play progresses there are not many wrinkles to this mode. Failing to shoot one of the GANGS or shooting one of the civilians nets the player a miss. Ten misses and it is game over.

Pictured: "Miss, see? Nyah!"

The second game mode is the progressively named Game B Hogan's Alley B. This mixes the action up a little bit as the player is presented with a scrolling background taken in short stages. At each stop several targets will come out one or two at a time at select locations. The player must make quick decisions to shoot or not to shoot as an incorrect decision will reward a player with a miss.

Not Pictured: Me hoping that no member of the Policeman's Union reads my blog

The last game mode is Game C Trick Shot. Trick Shot is the most compelling game mode for me. The player is tasked with juggling cans thrown from the right side of the screen to land in or pass through scoring zones on the left side of the screen. Predictably, juggling is accomplished by shooting. Thanks, physics! Letting a can fall past the bottom of the screen results in a miss. Miss 10 cans and the player is done. Even though this mode requires little explanation I will justify why I think this game mode actually has the most to offer when I break each mode down in the next section.

Experience & Presentation:

Playing each game mode once until I got a game over rewarded me with about ten minutes worth of gameplay which included a prolonged stay at the title screen. I was worried at first that I would do a lot of clock watching as the minutes dragged on but I was surprised when I found myself pretty engaged. I think this represented my experience being tied to learning a new game than simply replaying an old one.

Game A gave me the least amount of enjoyment between all three modes. It’s essentially a quick draw game with the twist of having a chance of picking the wrong target. Calling this a shooting gallery is certainly an apt description since the set dressing for this mode makes the game look like a literal gallery. Dirty Harry did it a little bit better, in my opinion.

Game B was a little bit more engaging. The scrolling background gives a few target layouts rather than the static choice of three. Plus, some targets appear exposed and they must be shot (or not) before they turn sideways rather than the target being presented as an unshootable target first and then targetable. The town scenes are a little more compelling than the stationary gallery but the buildings are very blocky with plain text describing a couple of the buildings instead of graphics doing the storytelling. It's as if it was set up for literal target practice. Dirty Harry still did it better.

Game C has no Clint Eastwood analog I could post here, sorry. While the gameplay here is simple to describe there is a lot more to do. The cans are thrown at random heights and intervals and the player may need to try and land some cans in the scoring zones while other cans are still being introduced in the playing field.

Pictured: Dilemmas

The main reason that I liked this game mode the most is that the player can choose how many points the targets are worth. The targets can be guided to different scoring zones ala a horizontal game of Plinko and that adds a level of agency absent from the other game modes. In game modes A and B the targets are all assigned a point value based on the picture the player is shooting. The ruffian GANG offers 500 points, the grey trench coat GANG is worth 1,000 points, and the sunglasses wearing GANG member is always worth 2,000. The GANGs are presented at random times so the player cannot expect to achieve the same score between two different playings based on skill alone. Duck Hunt's duck shooting modes had fixed score values for the ducks as well but each tier of ducks behaved differently. More effort was rewarded with more points. The player's score at this game is determined quite a bit by what targets the game decides to give to the player at any particular time. Since the targets all behave exactly the same a run of bad luck could reward the player with a low score.

Being able to increase the player's score through skill rather than luck allows the player to make decisions of whether or not to play risky and try to score big or to play it safe and attempt to get a high score by surviving long enough. Cans that are launched into the stratosphere through super aggressive shooting do not yield points. Sorry.

It only took me a few tries before I completed my self imposed challenge of reaching 100,000 points in this game mode so I gave myself another challenge to round out my hour of play time. Each of the game's modes will reward the player with a compliment if they beat a certain level. Sometimes it is merely a "GOOD!" while the satisfying statement of "SHARPSHOOTER!" in staggered ascending text did feel like a nice achievement. Trick shot mode gave me the "SHARPSHOOTER!" pat on the back after level 5 and I got the award of "SUPER SHARPSHOOTER!" after beating level 10. I wanted to get to level 15 to see if my reward would be "SUPER DUPER SHARPSHOOTER!" or something like that. The results?

Pictured: Disappointment

Verdict & Score:

Hogan's Alley is the first time I can make a direct comparison to another game in the Nintendo library as far as this blog is concerned. Duck Hunt and Super Mario Brothers are apples and oranges gameplay-wise but I can still measure my relative level of enjoyment to scale. For Hogan's Alley and Duck Hunt a more direct comparison is allowed. Each game has their pros and cons but Duck Hunt wins out for me. And it wins out large enough that I am willing to rank it a full level higher than Hogan's Alley. While Hogan's Alley is a fun game I think a lot of that fun was rendered from the fact it was a new experience rather than an old friend. Duck Hunt has a lot more charm than Hogan's Alley. 100% of Duck Hunt's targets are mobile, the game’s characters express more, the music and sound effects complement each other well, and failing in Duck Hunt is much less ugly than Hogan's Alley's blinking red screens of “MISS”.

Overall I give Hogan's Alley a 4/10. It is not a bad game. it’s just sub par.

With that I only have one more light gun game to go in the original 17. Let's round out this three parter with Wild Gunman.

Factoids & Trivia:

So it turns out that Nintendo was clever in their Hogan’s Alley naming scheme. Hogan’s Alley was first inspired by an actual place called Hogan’s Alley established by the National Rifle Association in Camp Perry, Ohio. From there “Hogan’s Alley” has come to be known as a generic term for any shooting range devoted to tactical training. Three years after the game’s release, the FBI opened a training facility in Quantico, Virginia named Hogan’s Alley and is probably the most well-known location that uses that name.

Typically the tactical training refers to law enforcement or military going through routes or using buildings to roleplay through simulated shoot/no shoot situations using fake ammunition. It makes perfect sense that this game earns its moniker from this source. The game is actually representing the shooting galleries presented in these locations. While it is great that this helps give context to the cardboard cutout targets and the non-descript buildings presented in the game it doesn’t earn the game any points back since none of this information is presented in the game itself.

Sources:

NES box art:

http://www.thecoverproject.net/

Hogan’s Alley (video game) info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan's_Alley_%28video_game%29

Hogan’s Alley (FBI) info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan's_Alley_%28FBI%29#Origin_of_name_Hogan.27s_Alley

Camp Perry info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Perry

Hogan’s Alley arcade footage: