U Can Beat Video Games

November 29, 2021 6:56 PM

As the host of the YouTube channel U Can Beat Video Games will tell you, the NES is known for having dozens of games with a difficulty level way above what current-day players are used to. But what if he told you about strategies and tactics to get you through the worst the system has to offer? And demonstrated how to perform them, playing through the whole game in the process? But... is he really just a golden retriever?

All of the videos are laid out on the YouTube channel, but here are a few of the most challenging:
Mega Man (the first game he did)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the first, somewhat janky one, before the arcade game)
Zelda II
Legacy of the Wizard, aka Dragon Slayer IV
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
The Legend of Zelda, and its Second Quest
Metroid
Battletoads
Castlevania
Wizards & Warriors
Friday the 13th
Snake Rattle & Roll
Contra
Fester's Quest
Gauntlet (the tricky NES version, which has an ending)
The Adventures of Bayou Billy
Ninja Gaiden
Ninja Gaiden II
Faxanadu
Blaster Master

posted by JHarris (23 comments total)

NES is my 9 year old’s first video gaming console (we’re vintage?) and I have basically never played a video game in my life. He was in absolute tears over Zelda, and now I know why! This should help.
posted by haptic_avenger at 8:25 PM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

TIL I'm at least as good a NES gamer as a golden retriever
posted by Jacen at 9:01 PM on November 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

I beat Super Mario Brothers once. Even with the 4 & 8 warps, it was a solid hour. And untold hours leading up to that last hour.

I beat The Legend of Zelda after buying a guide from Toys R Us that had all the maps and all the strategies. I think that still took something like 3-4 hours.

I could never beat Master Blaster, even though it is my favorite NES game ever. Never could find a guide like Zelda.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:25 PM on November 29, 2021

I think Ducktales was the first game I ever beat if you don't count Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. which I "beat" by getting through one cycle and rescuing Pauline/DK. (Arcade game score-chasers were a foreign land to someone who was raised post-SMB). And then I learned the trick for getting the best ending, although the game was considerably less fun with the added anxiety of making sure there was a "7" in my score before talking to Launchpad McQuack.

I could beat Mega Man III, but only with a password which avoided one particular Doc Robot stage and gave me 9 energy tanks because the game is such a slog. I always figured it counted because I could complete everything up to that one stage and everything after it.

By contrast Mega Man II was a joy to play, but I can't remember if I first beat that as a kid or as an adult.

I eventually beat Super Mario Bros 2 & 3 using the All Stars release on the SNES. I don't know why SMB2 eluded me because it's a joy to play and doesn't have that same difficulty cliff that SMB1 has in level 8. SMB3 always grounded me on the pipe mazes of Level 7, but with the save feature and some judicious use of inventories, I got through it.

I've never, ever, beaten SMB1 because of the aforementioned level 8, which is so unlike the rest of the game I don't know why it's included except to presage the utterly sadistic Japan-only SMB2.

I could never get past Death Mountain in Zelda II, and even as an adult I needed an emulator to do it and even with an emulator I couldn't finish the final palace. Damn that game is difficult.

I never had the original Legend of Zelda. I had the opportunity to buy it when KB Toys had both it and Ultima: Exodus on sale for $20 and for some stupid reason I chose Ultima because I really liked Dragon Warrior and thought it was like that. And I never got anywhere in Ultima because what do you even do in Ultima other than wander around aimlessly while fighting the most boring random encounters possible while going through a zillion menus to redistribute food to each party member so they'll recover HP. Watching long plays of this game on Youtube endlessly fascinate me because how the hell did people even know how to do anything? (You can tell I'm not a fan of Western RPGs)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:54 AM on November 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

Two that haunted my dreams were Karnov and Milon's Secret Castle. No idea why my friends had them--they weren't very well known games from what I remember and I never hear about them now--and they were so difficult.

Also had a friend with the obscure Xexyz, but I think we finally managed to beat that.
posted by msbrauer at 5:11 AM on November 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

Karnov had dinosaurs on the box art. I remember my cousin getting it as a present during a dinosaur-themed birthday party. Presumably some adult was like "I bet this is a dinosaur game" and bought it.

And it's extremely difficult. But somehow my cousin beat it.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:19 AM on November 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

Another one I always wanted to play and love but which was inscrutable to a young me was Bionic Commando.

About 10 or 15 years ago I ran across a great SNES game (actually Super Famicom, since it was only released in Japan until somewhat recently) that was everything I wanted Bionic Commando to be: Umihara Kawase . Just searched and it's now available on steam, so you don't need to use an emulator to play it.
posted by msbrauer at 6:53 AM on November 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

RonButNotStupid, I eventually beat Zelda 2 when it was re-released as part of the Zelda Collector's Edition disc on the Gamecube. I don't recall using any save states but rather maxed out my experience and kept going until I had some obscene number of lives (I essentially just farmed XP from Dairas for hours). I STILL had a ton of do-overs with Thunderbird, but if you can get past him, you can beat Dark Link by just crouching in the corner, lol.

I don't think I've ever actually beaten SMB1.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 8:39 AM on November 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

I didn't beat Ninja Gaiden until I got the NES Classic, and literally had to make a save after every hit of the 3(!) final bosses. And if you are defeated, you go back to the beginning of the last level, which is extremely hard and very long.

Zelda II is in my opinion one of the worst games ever made - it has all the grinding for hearts of a dull NES RPG without your character ever getting many upgrades. The last level is long and difficult, but the final boss is a real letdown, so really getting to the boss is the fight.
That's compared to the rest of the Zelda games, which are all awesome.

Megaman, Castlevania, and Contra are not too bad.


Watching long plays of this game on Youtube endlessly fascinate me because how the hell did people even know how to do anything? (You can tell I'm not a fan of Western RPGs)

RPGs on the NES were generally terrible. They really need the extra computing power to build nice looking worlds and improve the cities to fight off the boredom of managing HP and leveling up.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:26 AM on November 30, 2021

I beat these games back in the day, without any guides, just pure persistence and tenacity over several months:

Zelda II
Bionic Commando
Ninja Gaiden II

Another game I'll add to the list: The Guardian Legend. Playing these through to completion counts as some of the most satisfying and rewarding gaming experiences I've ever had.

Zelda II is a game I have many fond memories of. I think it's deeply misunderstood. I think of it as a precursor to the Souls series in a lot of ways. But I think it's a game that modern audiences with low attention spans and endless choices are primed to dislike. It sort of only made sense to me as a game that I lived with more than casually played. When I wasn't playing it, I was often thinking about it and how I might make progress in the area I was stuck in. The obtuse puzzles and hints only added to the feeling of mystical otherworldliness.

Bionic Commando was so satisfying because it required you to understand the quirks of its particular moveset and grappling mechanics, and exploit them to the fullest in order to make progress. In some ways it's like a puzzle-action-platformer hybrid, emphasis on puzzle. By the time you completed the game you were a virtuoso soaring through the air with speed and grace, putting on complicated ballet performances. Also you cause Hitler's head to literally explode. 5 stars.
posted by naju at 9:45 AM on November 30, 2021 [9 favorites]

I never thought Bionic Commando was very hard, but it was one of my favorite NES games, and that it never got a proper sequel still kind of bugs me. I youtubed and internetted about a few half-hearted attempts that were made, but all on different systems. Should have had a new version come out on every Nintendo system. I like it even more than any of the Mario Brothers games.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:58 AM on November 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

Of the 21 games linked in the FPP, I have finished 18. The three I haven't are Battletoads (I got close though), Friday the 13th (I barely had a chance to play it, I sure wasn't going to rent it) and Snake Rattle 'n Roll (I never rented it). (Of games UCBVG has covered, a quick count seems to indicate I've finished 39, not finished or played 14.)

I've said this before, but I'm firmly on the side of Zelda II, I go back and play it again every so often, it's a fair challenge even after finishing it many times. These days when I play it it's usually with a randomizer to spice things up. Zelda II Randomizer is great because it can even generate completely new overworlds, although they usually become extremely twisty mazes of caves and I get lost halfway through. I don't think I've ever finished a randomized Zelda II, but if you're into Zelda II you're probably okay with that, you're in it to challenge yourself, not achieve an assured victory.

Someone mentioned it above, so I'd like to take a moment to talk about the computing power of the NES:

It's not great, of course, but its processor though was clocked at 1.7 mhz, which is 70% faster than the C64 I cut my programming teeth on.

But even more significantly, the NES has terrific support for scrolling. It has 2K devoted to the tilemap (up to 4K if the cart has extra RAM for it onboard). The C64 wasn't really made with scrolling in mind, it could shift the whole screen in a direction by a few pixels, but to make the effect seemless the software would have to spend a lot of time moving every character and its color data over between frames, which the system just didn't have enough time for without tricks like not moving the color data or making the playfield smaller so it didn't have to move so much. (There's a little more that can be done than that, but this is a long aside in a long comment already.)

On the C64 scrolling was a laborious process consuming most of the processor's time. On the NES, the video hardware can point the tile display to anywhere within a 2 (or 4 with extra RAM) screen region. It doesn't have to move anything, just update the tiles off-screen in the direction the player is moving, and because there's effectively a whole screen's worth of buffer out of sight, can construct multi-tile objects a lot more easily than just copying one column or row at a time, and doesn't have to do everything within single frames, leaving the processor a lot more time for game logic.

However... one thing about this that I think isn't remarked upon often is, while the NES has a great design for scrolling, it's also hugely uneconomical from a hardware standpoint? By which I mean, nearly every NES game worth playing had to include extra hardware in the cartridge to allow the system to have RAM to run the game, and other chips to address large ROM sizes as well and provide extra features. Essentially, the NES offloaded some of the manufacturing cost of the console onto the carts, with the result that many chips that could have been manufactured just once and included in the system had to be remade and sold again and again. A solid late-80s era NES library probably had a solid dozen MMC1 chips between them, nearly every game after Super Mario Bros. either had one of those or one of its successors. In Japan many of these mappers were designed and manufactured by the publishers themselves so it could be forgiven (how was Nintendo going to predict Konami would put entire new sound generators in their carts?), but in the US Nintendo was already manufacturing all of the cartridges, and had decreed that the MMCs (and Rare's A*ROMs) were the only option anyway!

This hurt Nintendo a bit at the time in fact. Do you remember those stories of chip shortages way back then? Demand for Nintendo games outstripped manufacturing capacity of those chips. But if the system had included basic mapping hardware in the unit itself it may not have been such an issue.
posted by JHarris at 12:10 PM on November 30, 2021 [8 favorites]

The thing to remember with regard to the mappers is that the NES was designed in the early 80s, and as such those mapper chips weren't even on the radar at the time. In fact, one of the brilliant parts of the design of the NES was that it was built with expansion in mind, and Nintendo demonstrated this with the creation of the Famicom Disk System, which added a number of abilities to the Famicom beyond the new media format, including an additional audio channel. (So yeah, Nintendo should have known that Konami could add sound capabilities - they showed them how.) The SNES had a similar system as well, with the "piano keys" connectors on the cartridges, which is an easy way to tell if an SNES cart has an enhancement chip onboard.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:21 PM on November 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

And didn't the NES also benefit from three years of existing development on Famicon games? Scrolling in Devil World is crap, but that game was released over a year before Super Mario Bros.

I think Zelda II's only sin is placing Death Mountain so early. That really sucked. But other than that it's a really great game, and I'm really nostalgic for that era before various franchises 'gelled' into their current genres. I'll have to look into the randomizer.

On another technical aside, it's pretty awesome that the same console saw both Devil World and Snake Rattle'n Roll released on it, and the only difference is a couple of mapper chips plus six years of development experience.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 2:52 PM on November 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

Honestly, if you want to see the NES having every last bit of performance wrung out of it, I'd recommend looking up the shmup Recca.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:12 PM on November 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

The thing to remember with regard to the mappers is that the NES was designed in the early 80s, and as such those mapper chips weren't even on the radar at the time.

I am not sure about this. Mappers (or what amounts to them) were used on the Atari VCS/2600, they weren't a new concept, and even some early NES games used what amounts to mappers just implemented with discrete logic. They're just bankswitching. Pitfall II used what was kind of like an advanced mapper on the 2600, it even provided extra sound channels like Konami's VRC6 did. I read somewhere that David Crane had hoped his DPC chip would have revitalized the 2600, could have been licensed to other publishers, but it was too late for that system to be saved.

It could be argued, though, that the Famicom's huge success caused companies to push to extend the hardware in various ways. The Famicom Disk System was their first big attempt at this, if you think about it it's like a very slow mapper with limited capacity. It even had extra sound channels. There's a whole world of failed console add-ons that tried to be middle platforms, providing extra hardware once that other games could make use of: the Starpath Supercharger, the Coleco Adam, the Aladdin Deck Enhancer, and finally, and most infamously, the Sega 32-X. (Some that could be argued to be somewhat successful were the Famicom Disk System, the Intellivoice, the Intellivision and Colecovision's "adaptors" that were just reimplemented Atari 2600s, the PC Engine/Turbografx's CD-ROM add-on, and the N64's memory expansion.)

When we talk about "pushing a system," when it comes to cartridge-based machines, there should always be the unspoken rider, "in a way that's economically feasible." If you're plugging extra hardware into a box, that hardware can perform arbitrary functions, the limits are if the user can see the results (the Famicom was not equipped to use extra video hardware, but it could pipe outside sound chips to the output) and cost. You can do a lot if you can plug in new hardware. You could add outright co-processors, like they did with the SA-1 and SuperFX chips on the SNES. What could someone do with modern technology if it was handed over to a SNES as an add-on chip? I don't rightfully know, although its low clock means it still has to race the beam to an extent.
posted by JHarris at 3:57 PM on November 30, 2021

Back to Zelda II, Death Mountain is a real roadblock, I think I only got through it early on because I lucked into its proper solution (always pick the right-hand cave, then down) right off the bat. If you get lost in Death Mountain your game is probably over. It isn't accidental that, when you finally get through it you get the Hammer, and you never need to go in there again. Something I like to try when I replay it is to try to do Death Mountain without finishing any palaces, even the Candle in the first one. I've done it once.
posted by JHarris at 4:16 PM on November 30, 2021

I was talking with friends recently about what a difference it makes when today you can look up and in an instant find someone who will show exactly how to get through any trouble spot in the game. Back when most of these came out, you might have the right issue of Nintendo Power, but otherwise stories about how to beat a game would circulate around the playground and if you were the one who knew, say, the Contra code or how to get to minus world in SMB you'd be something like a celebrity for at least a little while.
posted by synecdoche at 5:17 PM on November 30, 2021 [4 favorites]

BTW, I'm sorry if my above short essay on the history of bankswitching in game carts, and sub-platform hardware, came across as being a know-it-all. It's an area of recent interest for me.
posted by JHarris at 3:30 AM on December 1, 2021

No worries, JHarris. It is a fascinating topic, and having grown up immersed in all this as a kid it's interesting to look back and learn just how exceptional the NES was compared to other systems. I've been watching Jeremy Parish's weekly Works videos since the pandemic began.

One thing that Parish keeps coming back to is how much the NES benefitted from launching years after the Famicon. It's essentially a fusion of the Famicon and the FDS ala the Sega Neptune with all (ok, most) of the added benefits of the FDS provided via mapper chips which had recently become cheaper to produce. And in North America this was all completely lost on us because Nintendo's earlier attempts to launch the console had been rebuffed by Atari and then the video game crash happened...
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:08 AM on December 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

I watch Jeremy Parish's Works videos too! They are terrific.

I wish I could go back in time and beg Atari not to pass up the NES. They always had bad management. Although it might have been partly the fact that it wasn't from Atari that caused retailers to take a chance on the NES, along with it not being marketed as a toy. But I do miss the classic Atari greatly, especially the coin-op company Atari Games, aka "The Real Atari." By that point the company had already been split though.
posted by JHarris at 5:34 AM on December 3, 2021

I grew up post-crash with the NES having never really known anything different, so it probably comes as no surprise that I'm glad Atari passed on Nintendo.

Famicon games circa 1983 were kind of boring. The graphics might have been a little better than earlier consoles and the games might have been a little more finely crafted, but it's still very much an arcade-at-home experience (the Famicon was built to play Donkey Kong, after all) and it wasn't until the FDS launched in 1986 that most of what I think of as "Nintendo games" arrived on the scene.

The combination of Nintendo having a complete dev-cycle just to themselves in Japan, the post-Crash malaise in the States, and the NES being a technical generation-and-a-half ahead of everything that had come before it really added up into something magical and revolutionary, and I don't think that would have happened had Atari licensed the Famicon and pushed out yet another generation of slightly better arcade conversions and games following the coin-up mold.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:15 AM on December 6, 2021

And on a sad note, Masayuki Uemura, chief architect of the NES and SNES, has passed away.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:30 AM on December 9, 2021 [1 favorite]