NES Challenge

Alternate title: Thou hast underestimated the time-suck of this game.

I started playing this game back in March, but quickly remembered how long it really takes. And working full-time doesn’t quite leave me with as much video-game time as I had when I was a kid, sadly.

This past weekend we had tornado and thunderstorm warnings all day, so I did what any reasonable adult would do and sat upstairs next to the window and played Dragon Warrior for about 20 hours. I leveled numerous times, saved Princess Gwaelen, got Erdrick’s armor (FINALLY BEAT THAT GOD DAMN AXE KNIGHT!) and received the Healmore spell. I just need to level one more time to get Hurtmore and then it’s off to Charlock Castle to battle the Dragonlord. Oh joy.

I want to point out something cool about this game, something that shows how video games can really help with things like memorization (I’m a big believer in kids playing video games). I hadn’t played this game in at least five years, I want to say, but when I picked it up again in March and headed to the swamp cave, I didn’t need a torch to remember how to get down and out the other side without running into the Green Dragon. When I was a kid I had it down to a science—holding down on the controller for about 15 seconds until I heard the bumps of hitting the bottom wall, moving right, down, right, down, and then all the way left again until I saw the sweet sight of the stairs leading to the outside—and the Wolves and Warlocks surrounding the key-bearing town of Rimuldar.

When I picked up the controller this time, I still remembered. It was really just like riding a bicycle. I don’t think I’ll ever not know how to get through that cave, and I find a strange sense of comfort in that.

A few weeks ago on a rainy, gloomy Tennessee weekend, my husband Ian and I found ourselves looking for a project. Not a home improvement or otherwise conventionally productive project, mind you, but a video-game related project. Being the Nintendo enthusiasts that we are, with a soft spot for the Nintendo Entertainment System, we decided to embark upon a challenge: To beat every one of the beatable NES games we own before the end of the year.

Here are the details of the challenge:

Beatable games. Upon further inspection of our game collection, it was decided that we have 46 beatable games (beatable is defined here as a game that plays credits after completing it; many arcade-style games, like Pinball, are not able to be beaten as you just keep getting a higher score).

Deadline. We play NES games rather often, believe it or not, so we had to rule that any games that we started in 2009 (Legend of Zelda and Tecmo Super Bowl) would have to be started over so they would be completed entirely within this year. The challenge officially began March 14, 2010, and we have until 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2010, to beat the last game.

Rules. We are allowing ourselves the use of help in the form of strategy guides, Internet searches for getting over specific hurdles, and general help, but we will not use cheat codes or GameGenie. Any in-game help or easter eggs are fair game (like jumping on the turtle shell a bunch of times in Super Mario Bros. to gain a shit-ton of extra lives), but we will not be entering up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, A, B, A, B, select, start at the beginning of Contra to get infinite lives.

We’re going to be posting our experiences with each game here on this blog because believe it or not, there really isn’t that much out there that discusses the finer (and awful) points of the Nintendo Entertainment System games. There are plenty of strategy guides and walkthroughs out there (many of them shitty, though), but there just really isn’t that much discussion of the games. So we’re going to detail our journey here, including any differences we notice in our experience with each game now vs. when we played the game some 20 years ago.

I’ll be posting a full list of all of the games we’ll be attempting to beat shortly, and if you notice one missing (be it one you loved or one you abhorred) on the list, suggest it to us and we’ll see if we can find it around town. Or, better yet, mail it to us if you’ve got it and we’ll send it back when we’ve beaten it.