SNK’s 40th Anniversary Collection contains a lot more than what you’d expect from an old game developer’s catalog. It is more than a simple check-off list of old arcade games people might want to see ported to current-gen consoles. When we think of archival work in video games, it’s usually companies like Namco or Sega putting a bunch of games with mascots in them on a disc for advertising purposes, or if we’re lucky it’s an HD upgrade of an old game that you aren’t sure if it ever really existed like Lizardcube’s incredible 2017 remake of, “Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap”. The worst case scenario for game preservation are those plastic joysticks that you get at the department store for fifty bucks that just have a bunch of old games like Pole Position or Centipede or Star Fox 2 loaded on to them. Look, those are essentially trash toys whose only practical preservational use is to turn one corner of your local bar into a barcade for a few weeks until folks get bored and go back to playing darts. With SNK’s 40th Anniversary Collection, Frank Cifaldi’s team at Digital Eclipse have put together something more than a games collection, but a digital archival format that should be absolutely inspiring for all of us who are asking: “how do we preserve the history of video games for future generations?”

so SNK 40th is legit and there is a lot happening here. Let’s get the features list out of the way: It has a complete timeline with museum-esque notes on the context of each work, each emulated game has some simple emulation functions (save state, load, etc) but also has a rewind button that undoes your moves (especially helpful for all the quarter-sucking technical shooters), also there is a longplay of every game that you can just watch and scrub through at your leisure, including all 151 minutes of SNK’s rarely developed brand of RPG: Crystalis. You can run the Japanese & Western versions of almost every game. Any of the games that had a console release also has that version available to play which helps compare and contrast how development worked between arcade and console. And on top of it all there are changeable resolutions, including an arcade cabinet-esque portrait mode! Did you see our video showing off Fangamer’s Flip Grip for the Nintendo Switch? We are watching a games collection swag on the very hardware it was built for!

Currently, there are fourteen games in the collection, and each game not only feels like an important piece of the historical journey of SNK’s early development but a lot of them are dang fun! My personal highlights were getting to play Vanguard, Alpha Mission, and Prehistoric Island and getting to see SNK’s space shooter evolve. Also, Athena has aged really well and was incredibly impressive for how much is going on in such a small space. Then you get to jump from that to Psycho Soldier and get to see them start using their mascot characters to do some cool experimenting! Also, all three Ikari Warriors are on here in both arcade and console version, which not only show how SNK improved technologically over a short period of time but also just how dedicated they were to worldwide markets with these heavily Western-coded Hollywood style War Hero Games.

Everything curated in the 40th Anniversary Collection is SNK before the Neo-Geo in 1990, which means no Fatal Fury, King of Fighters, or Metal Slug; but that’s actually a good thing for a couple of reasons. One, all of the games curated from this era were designed and built on similar philosophical and historical foundations: games designed for coin-op arcade machines that were planned towards being translated to English and usually ported to NES for western home markets. Two, you get to see the roots for all of SNK’s bigger franchises in isolation. When you combine the tank from TNKIII, the dual weapons and co-op from Ikari Warriors or P.O.W, and the hostages from Guerilla War, you basically get Metal Slug.

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Also, hey this is a big aside, but SNK made a game where you play as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to overthrow the US’s Bautista regime in 1950s Cuba with the exact same engine and style that Ikari Warriors used to represent Rambo-esque flaming romps through fascist-occupied jungles. I repeat- it’s a game where you are Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, as super soldiers, liberating Cuba! They made this entire game after having read and been inspired by “Guerilla Warfare” Guevara’s treatise on warfare and revolution within the Americas. The dev team had never been to Cuba even though at one point a trip for the team was planned. So like, late 80s SNK was real in to Communist theory or maybe just really heavy on some kind of 1950s jungle warfare kitsch. Either way SNK saw Che Guevara as real-life Rambo, games history is wack and SNK, welcome to the resistance?

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Sorry, back to before I interrupted myself- So in the 90’s the Neo-Geo abruptly changed arcade development as we knew it with multiple games in one mass-produced arcade cabinet, and this SNK collection is like the moment right before all of that happened. So, I’m glad Fatal Fury and KoF aren’t in this collection because it more concisely tells a story in isolation about Japanese Game Development in the 1980s. Hopefully, this also allows for a Neo-Geo collection to come out later as a second volume based on this collection. And if it is anything with the level of detail that this archive has, that would be incredible! Just like a second volume to an encyclopedia series, but interactive!

There continues to be a desperate cry for multiple formats of games archival as games that are the fundamental building blocks of the current generation are getting lost to time. The best that we’ve got right now is Nintendo condensing eras of history into fifteen games and putting them on a proprietary plastic emulator box like the SNES Classic. The best we’ve got now is begging Sega to port Dreamcast games to the Nintendo Switch (some of which can’t be ported because that data has already been lost). The best we’ve got is any ROMs that can still be scraped off the web after Nintendo is done trying to destroy all history of games. (Is that weird that Nintendo is kinda the hinge on all games’ history? That’s weird right? I feel like that’s weird.) None of that is archival or historical preservation because of how it has been perverted by commercialism without adding any kind of context about where, when, or how it came to exist. Nintendo especially tries to make it feel like their games just magically appeared one day, divorced from any kind of human labor or historical context. This SNK 40th Anniversary collection can’t fix all of that, but at least it provides a strong formula for putting archival work up front-and-center and giving everyone context for how these games came to exist. Historical context and concise curation are the forces that help differentiate SNK’s collection from an average commercial release like the Megaman Legacy Collection

Okay I’m gonna blow your mind right now cuz all of that stuff is cool, but there’s something in here that is some like Doc Brown “You’re about to see some serious shit” kind of shit because you see these longplay videos? At any point in the longplay video I can just **BAM** I’m playing now from this point in the longplay.    That’s right, this isn’t actually video at all but an emulated series of inputs! IT’S A GODDAMN TOOL-ASSISTED SPEEDRUN THAT YOU CAN TAKE DIRECT CONTROL OF AT ANY POINT! That’s just incredible.

Anecdote time: I got stuck in Athena fighting a late-game boss that was impossible to kill because I didn’t have the right item from a previous level, so I went to the video, and it taught me how to kill that boss and a lot of the cool things I missed while playing, so I scrubbed the video past the boss that killed me, hit [Start Playing] and then started from there to beat the whole game. Later, I was watching Psycho Soldier but the game got so cool that I had to play it and beat it myself… You turn into a phoenix and shoot people with psychic lasers! This rules so hard.

Other highlights from playing through this include: Prehistoric Island the game where you kill gigantic, beautiful dinosaurs like a mega tyrannosaurus takes this sudden and wild twist ending…   Where everyone DIES? Okay! Thanks, F.B.I. director William Sessions. There is also Streetsmart whose ending is very American… Did you know that the world is going to end on October 1st, 1997? Crystalis did. They predicted that lightning bolt that smote the world. I love that even SNK’s Zelda clone has absolutely no chill. And I can’t forget mentioning Vanguard’s lazer-beam-eyeball man or any of the games’ end credits “Congratulations” screens. These really are special and lovely.

What’s amazing about all of this is that there is more coming in the form of DLC. And usually I’d be pretty derisive around games attempting to commodify their own histories, but due to how much good faith has already been built into SNK’s 40th that goodwill becomes respect and in the context of an archive this actually becomes a different beast altogether. With DLC in the works that continued support makes this into what historians call a “Living Archive”. The Sega Mega Collection that is currently on Steam also takes a similar approach where you can download the gamehub for free while the developers continue to add as many Genesis and Mega Drive games as they can to that digital platform and then you buy them in packs. I’m interested to see how long both of these formats can maintain their games collections for. The SNK collection currently exists only as a Switch game which means its lifespan is limited by the Switch’s hardware, meanwhile, Sega’s game hub is only a Steam application and thus is limited by… Steam. *shudders…* Digital purchases are always… fickle.

If you are studying game design then this game is a textbook for you. The curation of all of these games provide a framework for SNK’s design practices in the 80s:

1. The player is fragile and normally dies when an enemy touches them
2. The player can find power ups throughout the world that usually upgrade in two dimensions (offensive/defensive buffs and debuffs).
3. Players are rewarded for exploring (and usually destroying) the environment
4. Points are constantly and trivially tossed around for most any action that the player does.
5. Each game is overwhelmingly difficult but in a way that can be either assuaged by a second player or by collectible powerups that exponentially increase the power of the player. This is easily seen in Athena where you can upgrade all the way into getting a GIANT GODDAMN FIRE SWORD. 

All of these fundamentals make for a really satisfying core game loop regardless of the genre of game. Even if it’s one of SNK’s classic half-baked NES ports that look like pac-man vomit. Even those still play passably enough to be a good advertisement for the quarter-sucking arcade versions.

SNK’s 40th Anniversary Collection is chock-full of important lessons to teach us about Japanese game design from the 80s, it contains interesting and new ideas for preserving games, and it shows us one hell of an escalation in quality and technology from just 1981 to 1990. I’m excited to see how development proceeds going forwards. Will they try to squeeze in the big-name flagship properties like Metal Slug? Or will they maintain their course to archive as much of the 80s as possible and add games like Touch Down Fever? Also, what if this team Digital Eclipse expanded into more companies and we had a collection like this for every game company of the era? We could have a really strong set of encyclopedias exploring this period of games development! For now though, I’ll just take this as a sign that the 80s were entirely dominated by fantasies of Rambo, magical girls with swords, and Communism.

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Oh lord. How did I end up here? One minute I’m messing around on Tumblr a couple weeks before E3, and the next thing I know it’s eight months later and I’m writing articles about some of the worst games ever released. I guess my luck finally ran out. Appropriate, considering there’s no unluckier day than Friday the 13th. I’m sure the teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake would agree- those hard-luck adolescents aren’t just suffering another Friday the 13th, they’re suffering a machete-filled Friday the 13th.

So, it isn’t actually Friday the 13th. When this article goes up, it’s Saturday the 13th, but the point is I wanted to talk about Friday the 13th for NES and this date was the best I was gonna get. And speaking of talk, boy, is there a lot to be said about this game. Let’s stop messing around and get started.

This weirdly-colored mask is all anyone remembers about this game.

If you don’t already know, Friday the 13th (the film series) is the slasher horror franchise which spawned Jason, a hulking murderous brute who wears a hockey mask and chopped his way to becoming a horror icon on par with Freddy Krueger from The Nightmare on Elm Street. The films are generally poorly written, extremely violent, only occasionally frightening, and a whole lot of fun if you’re into that sort of thing. The series has 12 films to date, which include a remake and a crossover with Nightmare on Elm Street, so there’s plenty of material to work with.

Friday the 13th (the game) was released in February of 1989, after the telepathic weirdness of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood but before the horrendously misnamed boat ride that was Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Instead of being based on either of those films, Friday the 13th takes some general concepts from the movies and throws them all into a big NES melting pot, resulting in a mess that’s less Jason Takes Manhattan and more Jason Takes A Dump.

Of course, Friday the 13th already has a solid reputation as one of the worst NES games ever unleashed upon unsuspecting consumers. Usually, that would mean my work’s been cut out for me, but surely Friday the 13th has some redeeming qualities? It was published by good ol’ LJN, which is normally the equivalent of a death knell for NES games, but The Punisher wasn’t that bad. Also, Friday the 13th was developed by Atlus- yes, that Atlus- so maybe there’s something worth salvaging in this mess.

Don’t be fooled. This is a map of Hell.

Unfortunately, Friday the 13th doesn’t make things easy. The intro is bare-bones, lacking so much as title music. Upon starting, you’re thrown directly into the game’s counselor select screen and are prompted to “use the torch to light the fireplaces” with no other direction or explanation. Although not out of place with the nebulous goals sometimes presented by retro games, this opening bit really summarizes Friday the 13th NES as a whole: ambiguous, frustrating, and deliberately confusing.

You see, you don’t actually use the torch to light the fireplaces. The torch is a weapon you get from lighting the fireplaces with a lighter you can grab by killing a certain number of zombies, and then finding a note in a random cabin that directs you to the location of the torch in another random cabin. Even then, lighting all the fireplaces isn’t the objective of the game: it’s trying to keep your counselors alive long enough to kill Jason over the course of three days. This is complicated by the fact Jason can, at any time, attack any of the counselors or the fifteen unplayable “children” stuck in a cabin by the lake- once you run out of either, it’s game over.

All this adds up to a repetitive slog of an experience in which you’re constantly interrupting whatever exploration of the labyrinthine map you’re in the middle of because damn it, Laura’s getting sliced up by Jason for the fourth time, and it keeps saying he’s in the cabin with the kids, but I legitimately can’t find his purple jumpsuit-wearing ass? By the time you’ve navigated your way around the most poorly designed map in NES history, you’re out another counselor, the kid count has dwindled from 15 to 10, and you’re ready to flip Jason the biggest 8-bit middle finger of all time.

Where’s the ref on this one? Is no one gonna call that?

Anger aside, it’s an admittedly neat attempt at making one of the most unstoppable horror stars of all time seem, well, unstoppable. In the Friday the 13th films, Jason has been chopped, stabbed, drowned, electrocuted, sprayed with acid, and literally blown up by the FBI, but he always comes back. All things considered, Friday the 13th  on NES is an ambitious but incredibly flawed exercise in replicating the force-of-nature feeling that makes slashers like Jason so intimidating. The only thing they forgot is that games are, generally speaking, supposed to be fun.

Assuming you’ve got the skills to make it far enough, it takes three in-game days to get all the items you’d reasonably need to put Jason to bed for good without wasting most of your counselors. This means you spend a good amount of time futzing around with the basic zombie enemies, exploring the non-navigable  forest and cave areas, whittling down time to get a crack at Jason’s mother for one of the best weapons in the game, and playing the world’s most obtuse game of hide-and-seek traveling between cabins to stop Jason’s killing spree. Friday the 13th expects you to spend a lot of time repeating yourself. It gets old after twenty minutes, much less two hours.

This isn’t even to mention the weird “Punch-Out but bad” mechanics of fighting Jason in a cabin, plus the different movement stats that can leave you with a counselor as slow as turtle, or a counselor that can’t jump over even the weakest enemies. There’s also the fact your initial weapon is a crumpled piece of paper that requires a physics degree to aim properly, the nonsense of trying to fight Jason from a rowboat, the almost complete lack of any kind of healing items, the poor graphics…and the list could go on. Friday the 13th was made by Atlus within their first three years as a company. Not every game can be Persona 4, I guess.

I wouldn’t really consider any of these people my “friends.”

In the end, Friday the 13th NES is a lot like the story of Icarus. Despite its ambitions, an extensive attempt like this to replicate the doomed atmosphere of a slasher film on the NES was, well, doomed from the beginning. Through a paradoxical coupling of too much crammed into one and a stunning lack of variety, Friday the 13th is destined to be remembered as one of the losers. Sure, hardcore fans of the film series will get an ironic kick out of it, and Jason’s weird purple color scheme has gone down in horror history, but there isn’t much else worth noting here. There’s a reason games haven’t been back to Camp Crystal Lake since 1989. Maybe it really is cursed.

The post Land of the Licensed: Friday the 13th (NES) appeared first on Gamesline.

Licensed games. Sure, intellectual properties have been made into films since the beginning of time, but what about games based on IPs from those same films, comics, TV shows, and whatever else? These games, which fall anywhere between pretty good and migraine-inducing shovelware, deserve a voice. And what better voice than the voice of a man who played the entirety of Spongebob: Battle For Bikini Bottom multiple times and owns a copy of Sneak King?

The questions I’m setting out to answer are simple. Do these games do justice to their source material? Are they good? If they’re bad, are they just bad, or totally heinous? Is there a space in hell reserved for the makers of Garfield Kart? There’s a lot of games and lot of ground to cover. Let’s get started with a blast from the past- The Punisher for NES.

Daddy’s home.

For the uninitiated, The Punisher, aka Frank Castle, is a Marvel Comics character who wears a big-ass skull on his chest and kills criminals. That’s pretty much it. The initial wave of popularity for the violent anti-hero peaked in the late 80s and early 90s, which I suppose is why someone felt the need to rush out the character’s first game appearance in 1990. That someone just happened to be the developer/publisher duo of Beam Software and LJN, best known for the heinous Back to the Future NES game.

So, many would say that’s a strike against Frank already, and I’d be inclined to agree. How do you bounce back from such a bad rep, especially considering LJN has a well-established track record of publishing other quick garbage cash-ins like the infamous Friday the 13th NES game? Beam Software would have to (literally) bring the big guns in order to blow us away with The Punisher’s big gaming debut.

Unfortunately, The Punisher gets less of a running start and more of an uncertain stumble forward. Instead of bothering to ape gameplay mechanics from previous, more successful shooter games like Contra, The Punisher locks Frank into the bottom of the screen and lets you slide him around, ending up as what Wikipedia calls “one of the few” rail shooters for NES. It’s easy to see why- attempting to both dodge bullets and position the crosshairs with just the D-pad is an obtuse, miserable experience.

Beam doesn’t want you to forget they were responsible for this.

Speaking of miserable, the game almost completely lacks any kind of a soundtrack. There’s a title theme, and a menu theme that gets re-used for boss fights, and that’s about it. The only sounds that accompany you through the levels are those of gunfire and explosions. Occasionally a bluesy jazz man will spawn and play you a morose 8-bit saxophone tune, but like everything else in the game, you can just blow him to shreds, silencing him for good.

That’s one thing about The Punisher (the character) that The Punisher (the game) gets right. Gameplay consists of you murdering literally everything that moves on screen. There’s no innocent NPCs you lose points for shooting or people you have to rescue or anything like that. Everyone is trying to kill you, so you kill them first. Despite the questionable controls, it feels pretty good to just mow down wave after wave of apparent criminals, some of whom don’t even manage to pull a gun before chomping down a lead sandwich.

Of course, The Punisher’s status as the king of mass slaughter means that he generally doesn’t have a lot of recurring enemies. Although I’m not sure what was going on in the comics world when this game was released, the boss enemies mostly aren’t anyone today’s Punisher fans would recognize unless they were stone-cold “Franksperts.” The two most recognizable faces are pretty prominent ones though. There’s the mutilated Jigsaw, who’s the closest thing Punisher has to a recurring nemesis, and then Kingpin, also known for exchanging blows with Spider-Man and Daredevil. These are less high-profile cameos as opposed to obligations- a Punisher game would feel empty without them.

A better one-liner than when he implies ninjas aren’t human.

Even better, all these characters are more or less immediately recognizable because the game looks pretty good. Not great, but good. The Punisher was released near the end of the NES’s lifespan, right on the cusp of the SNES’s arrival and the switch to 16-bit, so it’s nice to see some effort still being put into games for the console. I’m surprised by how much can happen on the screen at once in this game, and I’m equally surprised that Beam Software put some actual effort into the spritework, considering the eye-searing lumpy garishness of Back to the Future. The enemy sprites won’t win any awards, but goddamn, Frank Castle’s back has never looked better.

The Punisher pretty accurately tackles the minimal mythology of its intellectual property and doesn’t try to tone it down for younger ages. I mean, sure, there’s no blood splattering everywhere or anything, but Frank isn’t reduced to brightly colored laser guns and arresting all his enemies a la RoboCop: The Animated Series. The Punisher precludes the later “dial-it-back” bullshit that would lead to the character’s sharp decline in the late 90’s, like the time he became an angel to atone for his past sins. All you’ll find here is full-throttle-but-kind-of-awkward punishing action.

All in all, The Punisher could be a lot better, but it could be a lot worse too. It’s about what I would expect for a quick cash-in on a character with admittedly limited appeal at the height of his initial popularity. It’s fairly entertaining for Frank fans like myself, and maybe those interested in the microgenre of NES rail shooters, but I can’t imagine anyone else will get a whole lot of mileage out of The Punisher. Sure, most people are probably more familiar with The Punisher PS2 title featuring Thomas Jane, but hey- we’ve all gotta start somewhere.

The lonely jazzman plays us out. See you, sax cowboy.

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Imagine my surprise when I find out that MANOS is being released in a “Director’s Cut” version on Steam. It’s three years later. I’m older, but my collective love for terrible films and video games hasn’t waned a bit. Hit me with your best shot, MANOS. I’m ready to be amazed.

Oh, you know…”MANOS”.

I could wax poetic for all eternity about the film version of MANOS, but I’ll limit myself to a small bit of info for those unaware. In 1966, a fertilizer salesman from El Paso, Texas named Harold P. Warren produced a horror film on a bet, using only $19,000 and a cast and crew of either complete amateurs or people with no experience at all. The film immediately gained notoriety, but it didn’t truly become (in)famous until 1993, when it was mercilessly mocked on the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000.

That’s the thing about MANOS (the game). It appeals pretty specifically to fans of MST3K and horrible movies in general, and it assumes anyone playing has a pretty thorough familiarity with all the references it manages to pack in. MANOS follows the plot (if you can call it a plot) of the film, but enemies, levels, and bosses are brought in from other infamous film flops. Standard enemies include the killer shrews from, yes, The Killer Shrews and even the goblins from Troll 2.

One of my favorite portions of the game was stage seven – starting out in a black and white graveyard, Michael states “My dog is dead…and somebody’s responsible!” My heart skipped a beat. Could it be? It was. An entire level devoted to dodging cheap UFOs and traversing the cardboard graveyards of Plan 9 From Outer Space, with Tor Johnson and Vampira as the final bosses. I was in love.

What a time to be alive.

Even though I had a bunch of geek moments seeing all the references and loved the 8-bit rendition of “Torgo’s Theme,” MANOS isn’t without its flaws. The game plays exactly like the retro platformers it takes inspiration from, which means controls are optimized for something handheld with buttons rather than a PC keyboard. It’s also every bit as challenging as the games of yesteryear, which might put some people off. It was rare for me to fail and me not feel like it was my fault, but there were areas where I would be inevitably cornered by enemies immediately after spawning from a checkpoint. There are also areas in stages that feel impossible to traverse without taking heavy damage (I’m looking at you, stage four), but it’s hard to say how much of that is the game and how much is my own incompetence.

MANOS is hard, but it isn’t unforgiving. A “game over” won’t actually end your game, but just take you back to the beginning of the stage. With a little practice, everything can be conquered. That being said, I played the game on Normal mode – I can’t imagine it on the other settings of Hard, Hardcore, or god forbid, Nightmare. With all my failures in account, it took me 79 minutes and 33 seconds to beat a single playthrough of MANOS. I can see myself playing it at least a couple more times, especially since I missed one of the collectible “Hands of Fate” my first time through. Beating the game once also unlocks “Torgo Mode,” which I won’t spoil, but you can probably guess what it lets you do.

“I wish those hands would just…push him over!”

I also can’t speak for how this game differs from its original iOS version, but I know MANOS: Director’s Cut has some great cutscenes by one of the pixel artists for Binding of Isaac: Rebirth that aren’t in the original. A lot of the levels feel more expansive and complex than something from an iOS game, and the game definitely plays a lot better than anything on a mobile device. I’d recommend it for anyone who’s a fan of the original, especially considering the cheap ($5) price tag. Also, Torgo’s speech text wobbles in this version!

In the end, MANOS appeals to a very niche, very specific audience of MST3K/bad movie superfans (like me) and fans of retro-style platformers. If you fall into those groups, I can’t recommend this game enough. I can’t imagine MANOS would do much for someone not familiar with its subject matter, but the Master probably wouldn’t approve of those people anyways.

It stinks!

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