Mini-Gaming #007 - Donkey Kong (NES)

We’ve made it this far into the blog series and have given Nintendo nothing more than lip service! I suppose it’s only respectful to check in with Big N while I’m on my Sega/SNK kick… fine let’s bang out Donkey Kong real quick.

It’s odd to think of Nintendo as an arcade developer, but the early 80s saw them making a notable indent in the scene. The home console landscape was dominated by Atari, Mattel and Coleco at the time, seeing Nintendo take the odd role as a third-party licensor of their beloved properties. Yep, the same Mario Bros and Donkey Kong playable on the Switch 2 today saw official (but shoddy) ports on the Atari 2600 decades ago. 

So as Nintendo was developing their own home console, they needed to establish a benchmark for power. They knew they would blow the prior generations out of the water, but how far should they realistically go? The answer, interestingly, was Donkey Kong. That’s right, the NES was conceived as a console designed to play the most arcade-accurate yet financially viable version of Donkey Kong possible. Anything more advanced the hardware could do was gravy. Seeing it that way, the NES is a miracle system for what it was able to perform beyond its most basic launch title.

The NES port of Donkey Kong is nearly arcade perfect, barring a few small things like a smaller color palette, differently-pitched music, oh and the entire second stage being removed! For whatever reason, the four-stage arcade loop is only three, and it’s arguably the most interesting stage. But most importantly, the signature arcade gameplay is there, the running, jumping, and climbing all feel just like the original cabinet. That’s not to say that gameplay is particularly good, but it is arcade accurate.

Hear me out. I fully recognize 45 years ago Donkey Kong felt more advanced than anything that came before. It basically invented the platforming genre, included multiple stages, and featured graphics that actually looked like what they meant to depict. Mario (er, Jumpman) looked like a man, Donkey Kong looked like an ape, barrels looked like barrels, I know it sounds silly now but graphics at the time were more interpretive. No imagination was needed to make out what was going on. It was a revolution.

But as the years pile up, Donkey Kong’s gameplay gets harder to stomach. Mario is slow, his jump has no height, and the hitboxes are suspect. Every game after this refined the platforming mechanics we take for granted today, and it makes going back to the origin even harder. The game does work around its own physics, which makes it possible to lock in and effectively play it, but it doesn’t make it more fun. I’ve played this game for decades now, so my complete playthrough for this series was more courtesy than anything. I got up to the third loop before game-overing, and admittedly it came from sloppy boredom that I’m sure I could’ve pushed through in future runs. But I’m simply not interested in being any better at it.

Donkey Kong is that geriatric in the nursing home you were forced to volunteer at. He’s a diminished shell under his blanket but he still wears his veterans cap, and you can tell he lived quite a life in his prime. He’s respected, adored, full of stories, still has his humor, and is still fun to spend a few moments with. You wouldn’t be living in the world you do today if not for him and his peers. You want him to stick around forever even if you don’t go say hi every time you see him. This game absolutely deserves its spot in the NES Classic lineup, and you’d miss it if it wasn’t there, but spend the 10 minutes you will with it and you’ll never feel the need to fire it up again. 

Mini-Gaming #006 - King of Fighters '98 (NeoGeo)

Sigh, I suppose it’s time to get into the fighters…

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I have only had a passing interest in fighting games and am pretty terrible at them. They always came across to me as one-note and interchangeable. That’s not to say I’ve never had a good time with one though, as back in my main Dreamcast and NeoGeo Pocket Color era I gave the games in the Capcom vs SNK series a run for their money. But other series like Tekken, Virtua Fighter, even Street Fighter I let pass me by. But if I’m to do Mini-Gaming justice, the fighting games will have to be played, and the NeoGeo is gorged with them. I bounced around on which fighter to play first and settled on SNK’s flagship King of Fighters series, which is currently up to its 15th entry and 10 of which released on NeoGeo hardware. KOF provided much of the DNA that makes up the Capcom vs SNK games, and of the entries included on the mini console, ’98 is considered a fan favorite. 

By the mid-90s, 1v1 fighters dominated the dwindling arcade scene, and were the best bandage they could find against their mortal wound. SNK had released several fighting series by this time and found their hardware paired as well with fighters as gin and tonic. So it was inevitable that a crossover game be developed that brought all of their fragmented series together into one… wait for it… king of fighters. Predating Super Smash Bros by several years, King of Fighters quickly evolved into a juggernaut that overshadowed SNK’s arcade output in its later years, with the series’ annual entries often being one the company’s only releases. It became a hit in Japan and all across the western hemisphere, performing particularly well in Latin America due to socioeconomic factors. Although I’m happy for KOF’s success as a whole, its reputation as a money printer vaporized the NeoGeo’s game diversity. Especially for a platform as versatile and timeless as the NeoGeo, the fact that most of its library was stunted by this series is really disappointing. If you look at game release lists, there’s a clear divide before and after King of Fighters ’94—outside of the Metal Slugs and third-party puzzle games there’s not a lot for non-fighters to enjoy in the NeoGeo’s second half.

Similar to King of the Monsters a few weeks ago, I begrudgingly fired up ’98 as well as a few of the other ones over a few play sessions, expecting to be underwhelmed and frankly bored. But once again, through whatever combination of maturity, nostalgia and open-mindedness, I think I’ve found a new (old) series to be captivated by. Tough as nails for an old newcomer, but what a fun line of games this is!!

King of Fighters boasts an impressive amount of lore for an arcade series, though very little of it exists in-game. SNK really leveraged other media to tell its stories as for why all these cliques of characters came together. Music, anime, manga all came together decades ago in a way that would make the cinematic universes of today blush. Even more impressive is KOF’s consistent annual game output: even through SNK’s worst years a new game came out every year for a straight decade, from 1994 to 2003. Today, annual series like Call of Duty rely on rotating developer teams for this kind of schedule, but SNK did it all on their own.

King of Fighters games can be grouped together by their storylines. KOF ’95, ’96, and ’97 shared a story arc, which led to KOF ’98 being a celebratory ‘dream match’ entry. Story is cast aside and every character ever offered is available to play. This openness paired with tuned-up gameplay that comes from four years of experience made ’98 the king of kings. Personally, at least as of now, I know next to nothing about the lore, so a free-for-all game feels like a fine starting point.

Speaking of the gameplay, this might be where I got my biggest surprise. King of Fighters’ annual games are not roster updates with a samey feel. I wholly admit from the outside looking in, I was annoyed so many KOF games filled up the mini’s game list, ‘when you’ve played one you’ve played them all,’ right? But each game really is unique. Yes they’re the same at their core but specials are handled different, movesets are tweaked, new mechanics are added and removed, and presentations are robustly changed with each year. Playing through each KOF entry shows a progression that’s oddly intimate; you can really see how the developers thought, assessed, and moved through the series. You not just play through their design choices, you feel them. What may seem like an experimental addition one year may be removed, or expanded upon the next year. Given this was SNK’s main baby toward the end, being a part of a niche company’s niche output in a niche genre must have really felt special at the time. By 2003 they were making this game series, on ancient hardware that very few owned, for you.

Anyway yeah that’s great, but how did my fledgling game sessions go? Well first off, and this goes for every fighter I’m sure, I’m proudly playing on the easiest difficulties. These pose more than enough challenge for me, and I’ll never be competition ready. For a genre I’ll never be great at that’s totally fine. There’s literal dozens of characters to choose from, especially in this dream match game, each with their own full movesets to learn. Granted some do play similarly to others, and there really are only so many stick/button combinations to make. Again if this $250 home cartridge was understandably one of the only games you owned, you could easily get your money’s worth trying to master each character, up the difficulty scales, and eventually transition to the cabinet at your arcade/pizzeria and be ‘that guy.’ Cue the nerdy fame and glory. (‘I heard he even has that memory card and shows off the final boss…’ ‘I heard he actually has the home version, what is it like a thousand bucks…?’ ‘Jeez who would even buy that…’)

When I played the Capcom vs SNK games I found I stuck with the SNK characters more. So to finally play the games of their origin is exciting, and I’m sure I’m being total amateur hour here but my team mostly consisted of Iori, Kyo, and Mai, the characters from my past. King of Fighters matches always consist of 1vs1 matches of 3vs3 teams, which is a great way to see and play against the games’ huge rosters. It would be a shame to leave all the other characters on the table, so in future sessions and with other games I’ll try to diversify my teams. But it’s not so easy: KOF does not reward the button masher. To really get anywhere in the game, even on beginner difficulty, you gotta learn and commit the combos. Characters have basic moves as well as special moves, and super special/desperation moves on top of that. 

After getting nowhere just winging the controls, I pulled up movesets and spent an ordinate amount of time actually practicing the motions. They’re deceptively hard to pull off consistently, but this goes for any fighting game. I can think I’m doing the exact input it’s asking for, only for it to register every 10th time. It’s 100% a personal skill issue, and why fighters never clicked with me. But practice really does make perfect. Now I feel like I can get them to work every 5th time! By the end of this I might only get to every 3rd time, but I’m already at more than I expected of myself. And what a good call ordering that microswitched 8BitDo controller was!

King of Fighters ’98 may be the first KOF I cleared but I can’t wait to see which one becomes my favorite. If I have any complaint, I think the ring announcer comes off a little shrill, but that is nitpicking. It’ll be interesting to see how the other fighting series feel compared to this one. I dunno, the NeoGeo Mini may make a fighting fan out of me yet!

Mini-Gaming #005 - Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (Genesis)

Now here’s a beloved relic from my childhood! This game predates Tetris for me, and I consider it my very first puzzle game. Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine is one of the many re-skins of the long-running puzzle series Puyo Puyo. Although today the original name and characters are proudly used internationally, in the 90s the anime-centric series was perceived as a little too much for Western audiences to stomach. Nintendo decided to rebrand its Puyo release as part of the Kirby series, and Sega rebranded its as a Sonic game, more specifically from the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon. 

In this falling block puzzle game, your goal is to align four or more ‘beans’ of the same color causing them to disappear. Any beans resting above are affected by gravity and can drop in to make new color connections. As you can imagine, chain reactions are the name of this game, and successful chains will send proportional garbage beans (or ‘refugees’) to your opponent’s side of the field. New beans drop in faster as the game goes on, and if no more new beans can enter, the bottom drops out and the opponent wins. It’s simple to understand, tough to master, pleasant to look at, and devilishly addictive. Puyo Puyo is a series that continues strong to this day, and with this basic mechanic it’s easy to understand why.

Presumably, you play as Sonic in this game, though he makes no appearance in the game and is never mentioned once, not even buried in the manual! Instead, the stars of the show are literally the stars of the TV series: Dr. Robotnik and his band of sentient robots. In the main scenario mode you compete against 12 robots, and finally the doctor himself. TV viewers will recognize the three primary robots, Scratch, Grounder, and Coconuts, as the gatekeepers of each third of the lineup. After beating each of them, the stage music changes and the difficulty noticeably jumps up. The remaining robots are much more obscure, most of which made their only appearance in the show’s first episode. (I theorize the game and show were developed at the same time, and the game assumed the show would use these secondary robots more often in episodes than they actually did.)

MBM is fondly remembered among its Puyo Puyo contemporaries for its diverse lineup of foes. The opponent robots come in all shapes and sizes, and the Genesis really shines with showing their emotions. Each stage starts above ground with a monologue displaying their personality. Some are calm while some are overconfident, but all of them have massive egos. You’ll really want to keep playing just to see who you encounter next. After their spiels, the camera moves underground to the bean dungeons and the game begins. Your opponent stares you down the entire time, subtly animated as they make their moves. If you seem to be having trouble, their expression changes to taunting happiness. But if they’re having a hard time, they humorously change to shock, anger, or disbelief. Defeating them shows one final expression that is wholly unique and true to the personality they’ve crafted through the whole match. Each robot has a fully realized beginning, middle, and end to your time with them, and a special hats off goes to the graphics department for the bright and cartoonish animations. Beating the game rewards a cast roll where you get one last, almost nostalgic look at these memorable robots.

The game plays great against the computer, but of course even more so against a friend. MBM is one of the Genesis’ premier head-to-head games with endless hours of fun to be had. What a smart move including two controllers with the Genesis Mini! Only as you sharpen your skills do you see the game’s only flaw, one that was immediately remedied in future games in the Puyo series. You can play the most perfect game you can, but if a huge wave of garbage is headed your way there is no way to stop it. You could even have a great chain reaction underway but the garbage will still overwhelm you afterward, dooming you to a loss. Future games would have an offset feature that let your combos break down impending garbage, nullifying enemy attacks and even sending it right back onto them, but MBM predates this rule.

So unfortunately, expert play breaks down to just creating the fastest and simplest 4 or 5-chain you can. Anything above a 5-chain will drop down more garbage than there is space on the board, guaranteeing an automatic win. This kind of takes the fun out of the back and forth of it, and I’ve tuned my play more for quicker 2 and 3-chains instead. Even a simple chain can drop just the right garbage in the right place to mess up your opponent.

For an extra challenge, I completed my playthrough on Hard and it was thrilling. (For the record I have cleared the scenario on Hardest before, but only once.) After each win, you’re given a password, except for the final stage where the password is replaced with an ‘ALL CLEAR.’ There’s something so cathartic about seeing that message, you’re so accustomed to seeing a password there it almost comes up like a fakeout. I also always turn the voice samples off—chain reactions are joined with ‘Yippee!’s and ‘Yee-Haw!’s in a rising pitch that sound garish and out of place. Just because the Genesis could do decent voice samples doesn’t always mean it should.

MBM does suffer from ‘first game syndrome’ a bit, with later games offering more favorable rule sets, but its top-notch presentation still makes it worth the occasional play. Puyo Puyo will always be Tetris’ eccentric cousin, and that really isn’t a bad thing.

Mini-Gaming #004 - Castle of Illusion (Genesis)

 

I wanted my next game to be something less intense than Last Resort, but perhaps I overcorrected…

Castle of Illusion is an early Sega Genesis game designed to give the console a little more brand power. Sega really wanted to put the Genesis on the map compared to its predecessor’s lack of success, and it was becoming clear that mascot-based platformers were the next big thing in gaming. Unfortunately, Sega had nothing close to the star power Nintendo offered with Mario, Zelda and the like. So they went for the pop culture jugular and licensed major hitters such as Michael Jackson, various sports stars, and in this case, Mickey Mouse. Sega needed a game that could practically market itself and appeal to a younger audience. In this way Castle of Illusion did everything it needed to do, and then some!

Minnie has been kidnapped by the witch Mizrabel (an analog of the evil queen from Snow White) and Mickey must explore the Castle of Illusion in search of the seven rainbow gems to reach the top turret to rescue his love. There are five stages made up of several sections each, and cutscenes show each stage as an illusion behind magical doors. This allows the castle to house whimsical areas such as temple caves, toy rooms, and candy lands. More generic forests and clock towers round out the scenes. 

At this game’s release, the Sega Genesis’ main competitors were the aging but venerable NES and the promising but unproven TurboGrafx-16. This was a pre-Sonic world, and this was meant to be *the* game to show side-by-side to show the Genesis’ strength. And despite being an early effort, Mickey controls more fluid than any of his competitors and is animated beautifully. Sega interestingly chose to use Mickey’s older, pre-Fantasia design with larger eyes and bouncier limbs. This was a Mickey that was cartoonier than his ubiquitous, more corporate look. And I gotta be honest, lots of the joy in this game comes from seeing just how cute and cuddly Mickey looks in it as he walks, swings, and hops. This is a version of him I wish we saw more of!

As a game geared toward the younger set, Castle of Illusion is far from a challenging game. There’s a graceful difficulty curve across the game’s levels, but the difficulty never goes above a medium. Mickey has an easygoing pace to him with a jump that is equally tight and floaty. Along with his jump, Mickey can collect throwable items for combat. But because of the game’s unassuming nature, it’s easy to get sloppy with your gameplay. Without respect, the castle will chew you up with silly mistakes. But meet the game where it is, perhaps memorize some boss patterns, and you’ll clear the game easily within its two-continue limit. And it's such a pleasant play that you'll want to return to it, with a satisfying hard mode to welcome you.

The first three stages reward a rainbow gem, so when you reach the castle’s second floor, you expect four more stages to go. And yet there are only two, as the green and indigo gem are randomly rewarded to you a third of the way into each of the last stages. Especially with stage four being an odd mashup of level themes, it comes off as a development deadline that came too tight. Castle of Illusion is a breezy playthrough with almost no overlap of stage themes. It’s nice there is so much variety to explore, but there’s a fine line between having no fat to cut and feeling rushed.

A first-party Sega effort, in many ways Castle of Illusion seems an impossible project. Disney fully licensed its flagship character to a foreign company with the full trust it would hold up to their impeccable standards. Even doubly illusory is the game’s re-release on the Genesis Mini. How on earth did Sega manage to secure this game in the lineup (and its sequel!), especially with the iron fist that is the modern Disney company?! Collaboration games like these are destined to remain in licensing purgatory, but Castle of Illusion has been allowed to enchant a new wave of gamers young and old. Perhaps Disney relaxed their terms as even they know Sega hit a real home run with this game.

Mini-Gaming #003 - Last Resort (NeoGeo)

The shoot ‘em up, or shmup, is one of the hallmark genres of retro gaming. Ever since the original Space Invaders, shmups dominated arcades in the 80s and early 90s, before they ceded ground to one-on-one fighting games. Scrolling either horizontally or vertically, your spaceship faced overwhelming odds with a compound goal of powering up your craft, avoiding showers of enemy bullets, and shooting anything that moved. My history with shmups is casual, save for a string of postmortem Dreamcast releases in the mid-late 2000s—the novelty of new releases on a dead console was compelling regardless of genre. Any interest I had in them was worn down quickly however, as one of the signatures of shmups are their brutal difficulty. But Last Resort, the NeoGeo’s earliest shmup, developed a reputation in the community for not being super difficult. Maybe I wouldn’t have too hard a time.

Oh how wrong I was…

Last Resort released at the peak of the genre’s popularity in arcades, resulting in a game that looks similar to others like it but doing whatever it can to make it stand out. Immediately what hits you when you start the game is its moodiness. Last Resort looks and sounds serious, with mesmerizing yet sober backgrounds and siren-laden music. The NeoGeo shines once again with its attention to the smallest details: every object has an over-engineered amount of animation, and the sheer number of sprites on-screen dwarfs any effort other home consoles could manage. Similar to Metal Slug and King of the Monsters, there’s always something pleasing to catch your eye in the background despite having an overwhelming playfield to also focus on. This was why you paid top dollar for an AES console, or pumped endless quarters into the MVS machine: you were getting the high-quality games you craved but wrapped in a spectacular, unmatched audiovisual package.

Your ship shoots a basic shot at first, but is quickly joined by a power-up granting an auxiliary shooting pod (colloquially referred to as an ‘option’ in these types of games.) Last Resort’s option trails behind your ship, but oriented in the opposite direction. With grace and fine movements, you can manipulate your option to shoot in any direction you choose, in tandem with your forward-facing shot. A secondary button press can lock your option in place, although it will still rotate its cannons to make those opposite shots. Holding the primary button down will charge the option, releasing it to shoot out as a highly damaging projectile. The option further acts as a shield, absorbing enemy bullets and causing contact damage to whatever it grazes. Therefore the defining hook of Last Resort is the careful manipulation and utility of your option, as only a single hit destroys your ship and sets you back at the last unmarked checkpoint you reached.

I’ll admit I had a hard time with maneuvering the option in ideal ways, as it requires split-second anticipation and no overcorrections. Not only do you need to nudge your ship ‘backwards’ to get your option where you’d like it, but you have to nudge it further however you’d like to align the cannons. In the heat of conflict, your ship’s slightest movements would reorient the option into the appropriate opposite direction, and the action on-screen will have already changed. This skill lag would inevitably slam me right into an enemy ship or stray bullet.

Last Resort consists of 5 stages, and the fixed scroll of each stage makes for a brisk playthrough. How fitting, then, that after defeating the final boss the game goes through a second loop with even harder enemy patterns. Shmups are never known for their longevity, so the game relies on repetition for your money’s worth. To fully master the game requires replaying it ad nauseam to memorize the fixed patterns and optimize your route. If this was one of my only NeoGeo carts back in the day (very possible when these games retailed for triple-digits a pop) I could see this being ‘my game’ and putting my full nose to the grindstone. Especially with the chance of later showing off my skills to bystanders at the arcade! But the honest truth is I don’t have the will for that kind of dedication. Not for this game at least.

In my sessions I managed to clear stage 3 reliably, but by stage 4 I reluctantly fell back on save states to claw my way to the end of the first loop. I know I know, I said I’d play these games straight, but there’s a point where practicing for perfection becomes bashing your head against the wall over and over. Save states ignored, the NeoGeo memory card graciously saves your stage progression, solidifying the accessory as a must-have for the system at the time. I can’t imagine any AES owner getting their full entertainment without this optional card, as the paltry default credits each game gives couldn’t possibly give anyone any decent mileage out of their runs. Only on a trail of agony will the most dedicated player clear the game without any save assistance, and that's just on Easy!

Overall, I found Last Resort to be entertaining but punishing, and if the community finds this as an easier example of the genre then I’m really in for it, aren’t I!

Mini-Gaming #002 - King of the Monsters (NeoGeo)

Remember Nick Arcade? One of the many 1990s game shows on Nickelodeon, players tested their trivia skills and video game prowess, culminating in a blue-screen ‘virtual reality’ bonus round. It also featured a famous segment called the Video Challenge, a side round in which players picked one of five current (as of 1992) video games to clear a high score within 30 seconds. This was a rare opportunity for companies to get their games shown on television outside of commercials and promotional tapes. Owing to the influence of Nickelodeon at the time, the show managed to represent a surprising level of diversity, with Nintendo, Sega, NEC, and SNK all allowing their consoles to be featured. This would be the only way some gamers (myself included) would even know obscure consoles such as the TurboGrafx-16 and the NeoGeo AES existed, and reruns of this classic show would serve as a marvelous time capsule of gaming in the early 90s.

Games randomly rotated in and out of the Video Challenge lineup, but some games stuck around more than others and were chosen by contestants often. One of those was King of the Monsters, a wrestling game starring Godzilla-esque beasts destroying major cities of Japan in their fight for dominance. For most gamers, those Nick Arcade segments were the only exposure we had to this game. Seeing 30 seconds of a contestant try to clear the ‘Wizard’s Challenge’ score was enough for me to have no interest in what looked to be a shallow, juvenile game. Why would I waste my time? Well thanks to Mini-Gaming, I’ve now cleared this fabled Nick Arcade institution.

King of the Monsters always looked kinda dumb. And it is indeed dumb… but fun!

This is my first time playing a wrestling video game in earnest, and it’s quite different than a traditional fighting game. What look like health bars don’t measure HP, but more like stamina. As you whittle down your opponent with basic attacks, inevitably you’ll get caught in a grapple. The winner of the grapple is pre-determined but influenced by who has more stamina. Once you deem your opponent weak enough you can go for a pin, and if they don’t get up after three counts you are the winner. As such, only pins count for wins and an empty health bar does not equal a KO. I’m probably describing wrestling games as a whole, but again this is all new to me. The novelty of this gameplay alone took me by surprise, as I’ve never played a game quite like this. This was fresh, exciting, exactly what I was hoping for!

Even if the gameplay is derivative for wrestling games, what makes KotM stand out is its environments. Matches take place from a bird’s-eye view of Japanese locales, and while you wrestle your opponent you inadvertently pummel the buildings, cars, and bridges underfoot. The NeoGeo's arcade power more than handles the hundreds of sprites and explosions without a hitch. While most objects pose no obstacle, larger buildings can get in your way. These can be punched down in between opponent attacks for bonus points (or strategically used as barriers), and upon winning a match your health is replenished depending on how high a destruction bonus you accumulate. Successful grapples can also release a power orb, and collecting enough orbs will level up your monster, changing its color and upping your strength. Orb levels carry over from match to match, giving off some very light RPG vibes. Eventually the flow of the game falls into place: do some good damage, collect the orbs, use the opponent’s down time to cause additional destruction, repeat until their health/stamina is gone, then go for pins. Even with an empty bar they will break out of initial pins, but eventually they will give in. The score is tallied and it’s on to the next round.

Even though your goal is to literally be the king of the monsters, poor humans and cities below are being caught in the collateral. Throughout your bout, tanks, helicopters, and other futile efforts will try to intervene. Their attacks can stun you briefly but it's more set dressing than anything, and some vehicles like planes and trains can be grabbed and used as weapons against your opponent. Try doing that in your ordinary squared circle!

There are six monsters dominating six different stages, but upon clearing the sixth round (fought against a recolor of yourself), the game goes into a second loop, Ghosts ‘n Goblins style. In this second half, the monsters are significantly stronger and have much more health than before. Herein lies a flaw. Since grapples are determined based on health, the opponent will win them almost every time. Even if you continue and respawn with full health, it will only ever be a fraction of what they have. This exposes a quarter-munching disadvantage that is arcadey and off-putting. With grit I still managed to clear these later rounds, but I had to use continues as my version of multiple health bars to keep the fight fair. I’d imagine few ever made it this far in the arcades for this to be a problem, but home play exposes this frustration. Monsters could’ve been given higher defense, fine, but don’t preset an imbalance.

At first I grimaced having to play a game whose only legacy resides in Nick Arcade reruns. But this wound up being a unique gaming session for me that I’ll remember fondly. I don’t think wrestling games will become a new favorite of mine, but I couldn’t help smiling when a good grapple linked to a throw, and the enemy finally gave in to my fourth pin attempt. In my pursuit for a new but nostalgic spark, this otherwise mediocre game pulled more weight in 2026 than it probably ever did 35 years ago. And that’s something really special.

As a goof, I attempted the Wizard’s Challenge of 3000 points in the first round within 30 seconds… and I totally crushed it in 15. <dusts off shoulders>

Mini-Gaming #001 - Metal Slug (NeoGeo)

Metal Slug is one of the NeoGeo’s flagship franchises, and one of the few arcade games I have lasting memories with. Released in 1996, it served as a showpiece and a second wind for SNK’s aging yet venerable hardware. So for the first game to spend a meaningful amount of time on my shiny new NeoGeo mini, I figured it’s a good idea to start with a familiar, time-honored sure thing. And what a game it is.

It’s almost as if Metal Slug was created from the directive: “Make a new game that keeps the NeoGeo competitive that’s not a one-on-one fighter.” And so they made a run-and-gun platformer full of bullets, mayhem, and non sequiturs. Part of the joy of Metal Slug, a simple game really no different from Contra, is seeing just what you’ll run into next. You’ll be shooting down enemy commandos, hearing them cry out in agony as their bodies break apart in pixelated detail, only for them to leave behind a teddy bear item for twinkly bonus points. The graphics are beautiful, with hyper-detailed sprites of unparalleled fluidity. Just as much effort went into the background and unimportant details as into the foreground action. A soundtrack that merges military dirges with jazzy popovers wraps the package together. The sights and sounds seem like they’d step all over each other and cloud the actual gameplay, yet it all elevates the experience into something so engrossing you forget such a game is possible. The arcade was always a place where you could play games that home consoles couldn’t replicate, and Metal Slug did just that, despite still being an ‘old-fashioned’ 2D sprite-based game. It was precisely this ingenuity that kept NeoGeo hardware competitive even throughout the 3D era, and the timelessness of arcades allowed the sprite-based spectacles it offered to command the public’s attention.

I finished the game on Easy, a welcome option in this home AES version of the MVS arcade game. Let’s not forget that arcade games by their nature are designed for their players’ quarters, and vertical difficulty spikes with sky-high skill ceilings are to be expected. That said, ‘Easy’ is still far from it and offered a worthy challenge. Metal Slug is the first in a long series of identical-playing games (of which I’ve dabbled in through the years) so it’s nice to see how everything began. Just one playable character, enemies of just the terrestrial variety, and more grounded locales. But they nailed the gameplay right off the bat. The enemies flying around you and bullet hell can be overwhelming, but every death still feels fair. I played the home release as it was meant to be played, with 5 credits per run and the memory card saving my stage progression. Even with these limits the game wasn’t as impossible as I thought to finish, the repetition and replay value no less helped. Had I been in an actual arcade, $10 in quarters probably would’ve seen me to the finale. I’d also replay some stages for the practice, being slowly able to clear the opening stages on one credit. I can see it being a matter of time before a fabled one-credit clear is in reach!

Just two minor nitpicks about the NeoGeo (mini) hardware. First, despite being an arcade platform where high scores reign supreme, it’s odd that the memory card only saved progression and not scores. As much as you want to play these arcade games for score, it’s hard when the leaderboards reset each time. Entering your name for a fake first place every play session is tiresome. Perhaps I’ll throw in some scores on the blog for posterity from time to time.

Second, the NeoGeo hardware is renowned for its 8-way digital joystick, using microswitches to confirm each lever position with a satisfying click. All SNK joysticks, controllers, even the NeoGeo Pocket used these. But the official NeoGeo mini controller does not use this, instead repurposing a standard analog stick out of more-or-less laziness. While this may be helpful in some games going forward that benefit from all-around motion, it makes games that rely on precise inputs feel smeary. (I’m already dreading the fighting games.) And yet third-party manufacturer 8BitDo received an official license to make their own NeoGeo mini controller, and are using the microswitches SNK didn’t! 8BitDo’s is also wireless, uses the original button layout (SNK rearranged their buttons also), and retails for the same price!

Therefore it is no surprise my 8BitDo controller has been shipped and is on its way!