NES

You start out on a quiet empty street, you can find a Health Food store, but you cant buy anything. There’s a subway you can enter but no train comes. Eventually I work out how to make a Hole, and drop to the lower platform, what now?

Star Wars doesn’t hold your hand. Besides automatically driving you into the first cave where you can locate the faster blaster, you’re on your own. What’s rather unique for a game of this era, is that you can complete it having missed nearly all of the key factors, ie rescuing R2-D2, Han, Leia, or Ben Kenobi. At the end of the game you’re given a completion total, which to gain 100, you’ll need to not only rescue all characters and make it to the end with them all alive, but also complete every cave on Tatooine, and find the map room in the Death Star!

So how can you complete this infamous puzzle game, Tetris? Well in theory you can’t, Tetris will simply keep on dropping blocks at an increasingly faster and faster rate until you eventually lose.
The best ending on Tetris, Kremlin rocket, 120,000 points.

Perhaps the biggest change to Zelda 2 was the inclusion of an EXP system, similar to other Japanese RPG’s of the time. I think any kind of stats appearing in a Zelda game immediately got lot of fans backs up, though its hardly the most tactical system ever used, simply Life, Magic and Sword. The key to the game is the SKIP function, allowing to skip an upgrade in favour of storing the EXP for more expensive upgrades. This allows you to upgrade the sword earlier which is essential. As a kid I literally had no idea what these stats meant. No wonder I never managed to complete this!

Much of RoboCop’s challenge comes from working out what your actually supposed to do half the time. For what appears a simple run n gun, there are a few WTF moments! Combined with trying not to run out of power (time) there is a significant challenge here!

Of all the tie-ins from LJN to make it across the pond, I think its strange to see a game based on a cartoon that was never released here, which in turn is based on a public service announcement for wearing a seatbelt, also never shown over here! Yes that’s right, this game has its roots in road safety! While we had Darth Vader as the Green Cross Man, America had the incredible crash dummies, telling folks not to be a Dummy and wear a seatbelt.

Perhaps the biggest difference in Donkey Kong Jr vs Donkey Kong is that this time, Mario (known as Jumpman still), is in fact the villain of the piece. Instead of saving Pauline from Donkey Kong, you control Donkey Kong Jr (better known simply as Donkey Kong on Super Nintendo), and must save your dear pa (the villain of the first game) from the clutches of Mario. It’s a nice touch to spin on the way heroism is portrayed and credit to Nintendo for a fresh approach.

While Donkey Kong is nothing but charming, it holds more in common with a generation of games that preceded it on Atari systems than it does with what followed on the NES, a period in gaming driven by high scores not end-screens. By the time you can make a cup of tea, you could have complete this. Not much challenge but a joy to play regardless.