DEADLY TOWERS

Price - about 3 dollars

Players - 1

'On the moonlit eve of his coronation ceremony, pensive Prince Myer sits at the lakeside to ponder the future of the kingdom. Suddenly, a shadowy Kami called Khan rises from the lake and coalesces into the form of a man. Although he doesn't identify himself, the figure greets Prince Myer by name, and informs him that the wizard, Rubas, the "Devil of Darkness", is preparing to overtake Willner Kingdom by using seven magic bells capable of summoning an army of monsters.

To ensure peace, Khan says, Prince Myer must travel to the northern mountain to burn the Seven Bells in the sacred flame, burn down the seven bell towers in Rubas' magic palace, and, ultimately, defeat Rubas himself.'

HOW DOES THE GAME LIVE UP TO IT'S EXPLANATION/BOX ART? (5/10)

This game looks sweet, and this guy looks like a bad ass from the depths of Robert E. Howard's brain. Let's flip it over and read the back. Sounds like a pretty cool game other than these magic bells or whatever, but hey let's get this.

Well after the first five minutes of play... I have no idea what I'm doing, and the only thing that lives up to the cover art is the helmet, sorta, and the sword. This guy doesn't look anything like the Bad ass on the cover, and the game so far has nothing to do with the plot line, i think, other than the bell collecting from Bosses..

HOW IS THE GAME PLAY? (2/10)

Well this game, though looked awesome from the box art, plays like a really bad zelda rip off. Now, my main problem with the game isn't it's ungodly difficult everything, it's that every time you get hit by a monster/baddie you bounce like a quarter of the screen. Which wouldn't be a problem if it didn't constantly make you fly off the first tower you are on and die. (Dieing causes you to lose any of the money you've accumulated back to 50 and if you bought anything it's gone, unless you equipped it)

The second problem is that instead of using your sword, you throw one from your constant supply of swords. Now that doesn't sound to bad at thought, but you can only throw one at a time. And, maybe that doesn't sound too bad either, other than every single enemy in this game takes about 5-300 hits to kill. Everything, even the blue blob that just moves up and down on the screen in front of you.

The third part wrong with the game is that you are so bombarded with normal villains that you die constantly. You only start with 100 HP, but everything hits you with the power of a boss, so you are constantly getting killed. Even though every time you have game over, which is just about every 3 to 5 minutes when you first start playing, there are Heart items randomly around the game that up your HP by 10. These do respawn after you die. So you can get some health up pretty quickly... not that it really helps.

HOW DOES THE GAME LIVE UP TO IT'S GENRE? (4/10)

It's one of the better Zelda style top down games. The controls are a little wonky at start, but the game forces you to get used to them with how hard it is. Which again, wouldn't be so hard if things actually died when you hit them a couple times. AND--- if at the beginning of the game you didn't get bumped off the castle tower and die constantly. But, the gamer shouldn't be forced to learn how control something by getting the shit kicked out of him or her while trying to have fun. AND- you get stuck on walls constantly and get gang banged by enemies if you didn't stand back and kill them all before progressing.

THE 'GAME OVER' ALL? (37%)

Now the way that I rate things, some stuff will get a decent score over all, this game obviously didn't. I would say if you want to play a game that is so evilly hard that it makes you want to beat your fists into the mattress or couch cushions, so you don't have to replace all the holes in your walls, by all means go pick this game up. It is one of the cheaper games on the system. I think I paid like two of three dollars for it, which oddly enough is the rating this game is getting. There are a lot of really bad games on the nintendo system (as well as every other), and I don't classify this game as bad, it's just so frustratingly hard that it makes you want to break your nintendo instead of hug it.

arbitrary credit for gore and nudity = 0 bonus points

-Felix "the Brett" Prescott

Nintendo 8 Bit System Rating (rating = 10)

N.E.S. - Nintendo Entertainment System, was first released in Asia in 1983 as the Famicom (family computer).

It was later released in South Korea called the Hyundai Comboy, In Russia it was called the Dendy, In India it was referred to as the WHIZKID and Little Master, and in Poland it was the Pegasus. These releases were clones of the system or knock offs but they still used the same games.

It wasn't released in America/Australia until 1985, when it got it's name that we know it as. You may not know that without the N.E.S. there was a good chance that we would not even have videogames in current times. Sounds ridiculous right?

Well as different things fall into a plague of the times. So did videogames. In 1983, the world of videogames were dying a slow death. People weren't shelling out money on them as much as they were in the mid to late 70s. Plus most of the big dollar videogame companies all went Bankrupt. It was a bad time in america for videogames. So as you can imagine 1983-christmas of 1985 was a slow time for new releases. But, if you weren't there or old enough to remember, like myself, all the systems and games that were outs prices were plummeting. Toy stores and electronic stores were getting flooded with games and new releases that shouldn't be released yet or weren't completely finished. Making them a lot more affordable and increasing sales, but most of these titles were getting tossed into discount bins because the stores themselves didn't have enough room to display them.

So with this explosion in cheap games more people were buying them and getting addicted to having fun on a home gaming system. Mainly because they could afford them. It wasn't an expensive luxury anymore.

Which was the perfect time for christmas of 1985, Nintendo launches the N.E.S. state side and we finally get to experience videogames on an 8-bit platform! 8-bit! Characters in the game actually look like people! It was crazy!

Nintendo had no competition except for a company called Tengen (you may recall black cartridges) until 1986 when the Sega Master System was released in America. This system didn't really show much of a competition to Nintendo at all, unless you lived in Europe. But, The Tengen problem was at hand. Tengen didn't release a system, and they were a huge industry at the time. They made software for the Nintendo but didn't want to pay nintendo for the pin adapter because they thought that the licensing fees were too high. So what do you do when you don't want to pay? You steal.

Tengen basically stole the pin-set and started releasing their own titles in a black cartridge to not get sued for plagerism of the cartridge (or GamePak as nintendo called them). Eventually this all stopped due to Tengen illegally releasing Tetris, which they thought they bought from someone that owned it, and they were sued into the ground by Nintendo.

After this Nintendo had no problems until the birth of the Sega Genisis to their Super Nintendo.

So there is some past of the system.

I was born perfectly into the N.E.S., i was 2 years old when it was released and it wasn't the first gaming system my tiny hands got to play but it is and always will be my favorite.

Point being is all my favorite series of games started here. The systems prior are indeed a fun time, but they were all points based (who can get the High Score) games. Because they were home arcade systems basically, but don't get me wrong, i loved writing down my high scores on those games and trying to turn it over. But, the nintendo had games that actually ended. You could complete a game. You could beat all the levels and get a few 8-bit cartoon style endings.

I am a sucker for good stories, and as we both know 8 bit games didn't have the best of stories. But, it was the first place games started to have stories. The birth of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy (the zelda killers.. ha) started a game genre (RPG) that actually had stories. The entire game was a story with a controllable character. These were basically the change over from the popular Text based RPG's (chose your own adventure style games) on computer.

I could go on about all kinds of starts on the N.E.S. because this is where everything started. All the classics you love now, were in the 1000 releases the system had, and to top it off it was at one point the longest lasting console until the NEO-GEO beat it out a few years ago (which still is a lame defeat which i'm sure you'll find out about later once i due the NEO-GEO reviews).

So my reviews will all be a 1 -10 rating, and without nintendo i wouldn't have all the games i love now. So N.E.S. , You will always have the 10 spot in my mind.

-Felix "the Brett" Wussington