Kid Icarus/Hikari Shinwa: Parutena no Kagami (光神話 パルテナの鏡) (Myth of Light: The Mirror of Palutena) - Famicom/NES

Many years ago, when Nintendo was still building out franchises, and before backgrounds became common things in NES games, they produced a reusable game engine. In the mid-80s (especially mid-80s Japan which still struggles with modern software practices to this day) this was pretty mind-blowing. This engine was used in two games, one of the two games, Metroid, has become the stuff of legends even spawning it's own game genre name. The other, Kid Icarus is no less loved, but has always sat in the shadows of it's big brother.

Growing up, I was aware of Kid Icarus (KI), but fighting space aliens was so much more relevant to young me than Greek legends. I remember playing it one time on a game kiosk and feeling very non-plussed about it. I was surprised to learn, years alter, that the same designer and engine were used in both games. When sitting down to review it, I really wanted to analyze why that was, and why I couldn't find the love for this game that I know many others have and why did I love Metroid but hate KI? It turns out these were the wrong questions. KI is an amazing game, and my feelings were based on just the purely superficial first impressions I had as a kid.

However, the first impressions of the game are hard to get past. Like Metroid, you start severely underpowered. But I feel like Metroid starts the player up the learning curve more gently. Metroid uses all kinds of small hints to train the player about the world. You try to run right, you can't. So it forces you to run left where you find your first power-up. You start with a couple weak enemies in unthreatening placements so you can practice aiming and learning that you can fire up as well as horizontal. All these things clue you in to how the game world, for the rest of the game, is going to work.



Kid Icarus, doesn't really do any of these things. You start weak, and enemies are thrown at you from the beginning. You collect hearts, but they don't restore your life, and you climb climb climb perpetually up. There are doors, but the first few you find don't really help you. The difficulty is relentless. My first couple plays, I died so early and so often I thought that the game was merely a metaphoric vertical climb up Mount Olympus till the end of the game (it's not just vertical). If you make it further along, you eventually come across stores and everything is terribly expensive and items don't really seem to amp you up in a meaningful way and don't really make much sense.

You feel weak, under-powered and overwhelmed.

It was at this point that young me turned the game off and went off to play Kid Niki Radical Ninja. But modern me wanted to figure this game out. It turns out I should have kept playing. Pretty quickly I made it far enough to hit a horizontal level. My shot range increased, I started to power up. Like Metroid, the enemies in KI don't necessarily get harder as the game progresses, there's just more of them. By the late game, you're so powerful that what used to terrify you, you can handle with confidence. The feeling of empowerment is pretty cool.

What really surprised me about KI was not the vertical and horizontal levels, but the Labyrinths. I feel like this is where the game really comes together. You go back to being under-powered in the Labyrinths, but the combination of the exploration really makes these levels feel like a mini Zelda-like action RPG inside of the rest of the game -- or at least like Zelda's dungeons. The feel far more sophisticated than an early NES game has any right to feel.

Was this...

The inspiration for the Labyrinths?

Even more innovative, while wandering the dungeons, you can smash open statues to recruit helpers for the upcoming boss battle. They're not as decisive as I would have hoped, but the idea of playing a 1986 NES game with AI bot companions is pretty awesome, and they make you feel really ready for the boss battles, despite being powered down for the Labyrinth.

Finally, if you make it through the final and most challenging massive Labyrinth, you're rewarded with a great horizontal shmup level. It was a huge surprise to me and put a broad smile on my face. And it's this huge variety of KI that I really found remarkable. What I first thought would have just been a vertical climbing slog with an overamped difficulty level turned out to be a game full of almost Contra-like variety and play styles.

This game is pretty long for the time period and considering it's not an RPG. A quick run through by somebody who knows what they're doing takes about an hour and a half. Along the way there's some decent music -- nothing earth shattering, but welcome cheesy adventure accompaniment. There are plenty of fans though, and it hasn't stopped anybody from making cover version of some of the songs.

Graphics are actually pretty good for the time -- they don't hold up terribly well today, but characters have a definite cartoony feel and there's lots of effort put into giving them personality. What's lacking are background graphics, you play against a solid background for the vast majority of the game. It's fine in the way that this is fine with Metroid, but it's definite reminder of the age of the game.

Controls are pretty tight. Pit, your character, goes pretty much exactly where you ask him to. It's typical Nintendo polished play control. I have a few minor quibbles with platform hit detection, and jumping while aiming up, but on a game of this vintage it's excellent.

Despite being a popular, polished game, Kid Icarus has a more difficult legacy than Metroid. It got a Game Boy sequel, which improved on the formula in many ways. And Pit appeared in numerous Nintendo promotions. There's been a port of the original to the GBA, and a 3D Classics port (with some fixes for the controls), But that's about it. It even took an independent studio, risking the wrath of Nintendo's legal team to release a 16-bit style sequel.

Nintendo left this franchise on the shelf, basically to rot, generation after console generation until finally releasing a much praised 3DS game. It sold pretty well, but Nintendo, bizarrely has decided to back burner the franchise again. Considering the opportunity to add essentially all of a modified Greek pantheon to their IP stable, the decisions to not breath constant life into Pit is head scratching.

Given all that, I'm glad my initial impressions were wrong, I'm now a Kid Icarus fan.

Rock n' Roll Racing - Super Famicom/SNES

Let's be honest, until at least Ridge Racer on the PlayStation, 3d-style racing games were mostly derivative, definitely haven't aged well and most honestly weren't very good. It really took the jump to fully modeled polygonal tracks and cars to break the "driving towards the apex of a triangle" sameness that many early racing games suffered from.

This view of racing was largely unchanged for years

Sega, of course pushed this view of racing to impossible extremes with their Super Scalar sprite scaling technology and tried to fake a true 3d experience for years -- eventually even replacing the road triangle with dozens of quickly scaling sprites. Even Taito's fabulous Night Striker pushed the concept about as far as it could go.

It was obvious, even in the mid-80s that this approach was an evolutionary dead-end for racing games, but technology simply couldn't offer a more realistic experience. One alternative, the top-down racer like Atari's 1986 Super Sprint.

An alternate view of the world.

This kind of view, rather than trying to take you into the experience of racing an actual car, more closely resembled playing with slot cars. Which, if you were a kid in the mid-80s, was awesome.

The technical barrier to making these kinds of games fun and good looking is much lower -- and I think that means that the developers had more time to tweak the game mechanics and add things like power ups and racing physics to the mix. To help give the games a little graphical boost, a common variant was the isometric racer. Unlike isometric platformers or puzzle games, this view actually works, and it works really well.

One of the earliest of these was Racing Destruction Set (RDS) on the Commodore 64. Which, while a fine game for 1985, didn't really create an immediate impact. However, it set the template for how an isometric racer should work. By zooming in on the action, it limits the view of the course. Since you are no longer an omniscient god with a view of the entire track, some of the tension of a first-person racer remains -- you don't see where all your opponents are all the time. It also introduced a combat system that made the game more than just running flat out till the end of the race.

In the arcades this was ignored and we ended up with 1989s Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off-Road. While fun, it was clear that it lacked the deeper strategy of an isometric combat racer, and it moved the viewpoint back out to a single screen overview of the action.

However, in 1988, these lessons weren't lost and we got one of the most popular isometric racers of all time, Rare's R.C. Pro-Am.

R.C. Pro-Am (RPA), proved that RDS's template for how an isometric racer should work was the right one.

Fast forward a few years to 1991 and it's time to make a racer for the SNES. At this point, despite being one of the most powerful home systems at the time, the choice for making a racer were pretty much driving into a triangle or yet another F-Zero/Super Mario Kart clone -- and there are tons of each. Looking back a few years, developers Silicon & Synapse realized that a third, mostly ignored option existed.

Reaching back more than half a decade, they realized that a modern (for the time) isometric racer might fit the bill. They decided to combine some of the slick breeziness of RPA with the deeper play mechanics of RDS and ended up producing RPM Racing. RPM is a good game, but it just doesn't really have a voice. Despite being one of the only racers of it's type, it doesn't stand out in the crowd.

Still, they were on to something, the formula was just off a bit. In a weird example of where the marketing department actually helped product development, the idea of using licensed rock music in a RPM sequel was hatched. Add in a bit of 90's "'tude", speed it up a bit and we get the excellent Rock n' Roll Racing (RnR).

One of the first things you notice about the game is the amazing renditions of popular rock songs. The work that went into bending to the SNES sound chip to produce such excellent tunes remains one of the high-points of SNES sound design. Hammond B3 organs, rock drum kit, bass and wailing guitar solos are all intact. It really wasn't until optical disks became the norm for videogames that a better sounding rendition of these songs could be heard in a game.

It's also a virtuoso example of how much better games sounded on the SNES vs. the Genesis. Despite a noble effort, the Genesis port of this game just doesn't have the same feel because the music doesn't push the pace along in the same way. To be honest, I quite often just kept playing because I wanted to know which one of the half-dozen tracks would be next.

And I think it's this amped up music that forced the designers to push the game's pace along. The almost lethargic RPM Racing turns into a frenetic, pedal to the metal rush in Rock n' Roll Racing.

Game mechanics-wise, there's really nothing surprising about RnR. You drive in a race with 3 competitors, firing weapons and dropping mines. Finish in the top 3 and you collect purse money you can put towards upgrades for your car or even buy a new car (better cars are unlocked as the levels progress). Tracks get harder as the game moves on and your opponents are upgrading just like you. Knowing when to buy an upgrade and when to save for a more expensive purchase it part of a fairly deep strategy system.

Combat is pretty straight forward, you can fire projectiles, drop mines or boost your speed temporarily. The specifics of the weapons vary a bit depending on which car you are upgrading. You can also upgrade your engine, traction, armor etc.

One of the really great things about RnR is the smooth and continuous progression of difficulty through level design and the constant upgrading of your opponents. Controls are spot on. Power slide around corners, or as you upgrade your grip hit a racing line, it's almost effortless. Weapon usage is simple and intuitive.

About the only negative I can say about the racing experience, and the only point where I hit some frustration was lining my vehicle up in the isometric perspective to make a jump, only to land off the track and lose a few seconds -- or the race. This happened numerous times and I never seemed to get any better at it. Most of the time it's not a problem, but a few tracks are designed to make this a challenge.

Graphics are pretty good. They may not be the best the SNES ever saw, but they're a clear upgrade over RPM and have a sense of style and direction. Vehicles are cool and muscular monster trucks and aerodynamic tanks, tracks have spikes or Giger-esque biomechanic stylings. The art direction is solid and nothing detracts from the game.

Sound effects are a mixed bag, but to be honest, you'll be so busy racing to the music that it doesn't really matter much. This is an approach I think that was later copied by games such as Wipeout and Ridge Racer.

RnR is much loved but it's had troubled offspring. What seemed ripe for formulaic sequels simply didn't get any. Rock and Roll Racing 2 for the Playstation was kind of an unremarkable dud that like many early 3d games hasn't aged well at all. However, a spiritual copy, Motor Rock, is a love letter to the original and I highly encourage players looking for a modern take on RnR to get it if you can hunt it down. It nails everything about what made RnR special.