Urban Champion was the first fighting game to arrive on the NES. (The launch title Kung Fu , though it influenced the fighting genre, is a beat-'em-up.) Within months it was surpassed by a port of the popular arcade game Karate Champ , because Urban Champion is just bad . The word primitive does not do this justice. Urban Champion has even less depth than Tennis , Soccer , Pinball , Golf , and Baseball , and those are all very bare-bones affairs. The game is just two palette-swapped fighters punching each other until one is pushed into a man hole. B throws a hard punch and A a light punch (barely faster). If you hold ↑ while punching, the blow is directed at the head instead of the torso. Holding ↑ or ↓ without attacking blocks the head and the torso, respectively. There is no kicking, jumping, throwing, or special moves. There is a stamina value at the bottom of the screen, but I have no idea what it indicates. The "champions" move back and forth along a multi-scree...

Mach Rider is another NES game I'd never heard of before beginning this retro quest. It's a post-apocalyptic motorcycle game that was clearly inspired by the Mad Max movies. You ride your bike along desolate highways with ruined cityscapes, shooting at alien invaders in vehicles called Quadrunners. The game is challenging because of the Quadrunners, especially when they come up from behind and ram into the Mach Rider, smashing him to pieces. Weirdly, he re-assembles after being destroyed, which is part of the futuristic storyline. Most video games don't bother to explain how you have multiple lives, so it's kind of neat. After the starter course, you only get three lives but earn a bonus life after every third course. Fortunately, the game includes a "Solo Course" that lets you practice courses without any Quadrunners. You can play this way to get used to the controls and courses. The game's main mode (called "Fighting Course") has ten unique cou...

TwinBee is a Famicom port of a 1985 arcade game that never left Japan. It was Konami's answer to Namco's Xevious . As with many early arcade titles, the NES only got the sequel, Burning TwinBee, which was renamed  Stinger . TwinBee is a vertical-scrolling shoot-'em-up. It uses a cutesy style ("cute-'em-up"), so the enemies are things like kitchenware and flowers. The game's main gimmick is that power-ups are gained through color-changing bells. When you shoot certain clouds, a yellow bell flies out. If you catch it, at first you get a mere 100 points, but their value increases progressively to 10,000. If it falls through the bottom of the screen, the count resets to 100 points. You can juggle the bells by shooting them. Four shots turns a bell blue. A blue bell, instead of awarding points, speeds up your ship (called the TwinBee). If you shoot the bell again, it reverts to yellow, but every five shots brings out a new color: white gives you a second gun; a...

The original Mario Bros. arcade game holds a special place in my heart because I played it once when very young at Chuck E. Cheese. It had already been succeeded by Super Mario Bros. , but it still seemed so cool to me. Mario Bros. introduced Luigi and established the brothers as plumbers (in Donkey Kong Mario was a carpenter). This is shown through iconic green pipes in the corners. The goal of the game is to clear the screen of "pests" by jumping and hitting them from below, then kicking them away before they flip back over. There are three main enemies: Shellcreeper (a turtle, the predecessor of Koopa Troopas), Sidestepper (a crab), who becomes fast when hit and must be hit again, and Fighter Fly, who jumps. Each time you clear a pest, a bonus coin appears. Fireballs also bounce around the screen. A POW Block can be hit three times to flip over all enemies (except Fighter Flies in mid-jump), collect coins, and elminate Fireballs. You can't rely on this, however, as it...

To market the Famicom in mid-80's America, when video game had become a dirty word to retailers, Nintendo branded it an "Entertainment System." Advertising strongly emphasized the R.O.B. and Light Gun. It wasn't a video game system, it was a fancy robot and video gun toy! Which also happened to play video games. This is also why they redesigned it so that the cartridge went into a hidden slot, so that it looked like a VCR instead of an Atari VCS. Similarly, Donkey Kong Jr. Math was supposed to prove the NES could also be educational. All "Black Box" games were divided into series, but DK Jr. Math ended up being the sole title in the "Education Series"! However, it wasn't Nintendo's only foray into educational gaming. In 1994, they released five educational titles starring Mario for the Super Nintendo, two of which also appeared on the NES ( Mario Is Missing! and Mario's Time Machine ). The main game of DK Jr. Math ("Calculate...

Donkey Kong 3 may be the video-game equivalent of The Godfather, Part III. After two  Donkey Kong Classics , Nintendo put out something of a dud. It didn't help that DK 3 hit arcades in 1983, the year when the bottom fell out of both the arcade and home-console markets. This bad timing may have doomed an otherwise decent game. DK 3 changes out Mario for an exterminator named Stanley (from the Game & Watch game Greenhouse). The game is unique in that it combines platforming with vertical shooting. Stanley can jump up and down between three platforms. His weapon is a can of bug spray with which to shoot various bees and other critters, but he can only shoot two sprays at a time, and it has limited range. A screen can be cleared either by destroying all insects or by forcing a dangling DK to the top of the screen by spraying him repeatedly. Even if you focus on the bugs, you need to spray DK occasionally or he will fall on you. Bonus points are obtained by preventing the bees from...