The Wild World of 3D NES Games

The best tag team finisher of the Attitude Era and also what we are in right now, 3D can be pretty cool. Like dogs. They’re 3D. Pretty neat stuff there. The NES was also a very neat console, but not the best fit for 3D considering the restraints of the time. But there were a few NES games that travelled into the third dimension one way or another, and I’m gonna talk about them. Have I gone mad? Ah, I’m over it.

 

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

Given the impressive legacy of the series, we wouldn’t be surprised if some people thought that Final Fantasy was one of the first RPG franchises ever made. Considering it started in 1987 though, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord does have it beat, with a release date of 1981 for the Apple II.

Funnily enough though, the first Final Fantasy managed to sneak out before the Wizardry NES/Famicom port in Japan, with just four days separating the two releases. Given the six years between the original game and its NES port, there are some upgrades to the formula that make it worth checking out, chief among them being the actual 3D graphics. Sure, it’s mostly cutscenes of you exploring the maze-like dungeon that look like some old Windows background, but there’s 3D either way.

Wizardry lets players create a party of six adventurers, all of different races and classes and even alignments, and descend into a dungeon with the promise of loot and plenty of monsters to murder indiscriminately. It sounds like a simple enough premise, but the problem with Wizardry is that the game is brutally hard. Alignments matter and can change throughout the game, with good characters refusing to work with evil characters, while the various traps and cursed items you can find on your travels means you always need to be on your guard.

Dungeon crawlers might have evolved since Wizardry, but it’s clear the foundation was already rock solid.

 

The 3D Battles Of WorldRunner

Look, we’re just going to be honest. Because it is 40 year old tech, the amount of truly 3D games on the NES is not very high. What you do have are games that use various techniques like line scrolling that simulate depth as the player progresses forward.

Obviously, there are some exceptions to the rule, and we’ll get to those, but there are plenty of 3D games on the NES that resemble games like Space Harrier. In fact, if you looked at the gameplay of The 3D Battles of WorldRunner, or just 3D WorldRunner in the US, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is just a straight up Space Harrier sequel or spin-off. It’s not, considering WorldRunner’s a Square game instead of SEGA, but it sure looks that way. However, by another definition of 3D, WorldRunner is worthy of note.

The 3D Battles Of WorldRunner is a forward scrolling rail shooter with players moving horizontally across the screen as enemies move from the background to the foreground. Simple, effective, timeless gameplay formula honestly. That’s not exactly proper 3D though, but that doesn’t mean that The 3D Battles Of WorldRunner didn’t come with some kind of 3D specific mode. Get ready for a lot of anaglyph 3D mentions folks, and put your 3D glasses on right now, also don’t put the L in the wrong place in “anaglyph”. WorldRunner included a 3D mode that could be triggered by pressing Select, which would enable the anaglyph 3D function. You know, with the red and cyan filters.

North American copies would come with 3D glasses, allowing players to experience 3D in their own home all the way back in 1987. Not exactly an Elite experience, but a good attempt.

 

Elite

Anyone who’s just played Elite: Dangerous will possibly be surprised that the 2014 space sim didn’t just emerge from the ether and demand its players to spend hundreds of hours hauling space freight across the universe. Well, after ten hours of trying to get out of the dock, obviously.

In fact, the Elite series dates back to 1984 when it was released for the BBC Microcomputer, immediately becoming a massive success in the UK. Ports of the game to other platforms were about as inevitable as the sun rising in the morning and us throwing in a sneaky F-Zero mention even though the video doesn’t warrant it, but perhaps the most surprising port of them all was the port to the NES in 1991. While it might not be the best version of Elite possible, the fact that it worked at all is nothing short of miraclework.

One of the first examples of open-ended space exploration in gaming, the reason why Elite’s vast scale was able to work was because of the game’s revolutionary wireframe graphics. It’s very minimalist, but by some level of magic, you can still follow the action on screen. The game opens with you docked on a specific planet, with just 100 credits to your name and a puny little ship with which to protect your cargo against the menaces of the universe. You complete jobs, earn a bit of cash, either legally or otherwise, and upgrade your ship accordingly until you become the most terrifying, feared or respected pilot in the universe. If nothing else, this is still better space exploration than Starfield.

Not hard, mind you.

 

Rad Racer

The 3D Battles Of WorldRunner weren’t the only time that Square tried to steal SEGA’s lunch by almost copying a game outright, with 1987’s Rad Racer being about as similar as it could be to Outrun from a year before without infringing copyright. There’s even a Ferrari in Rad Racer, which just adds to the similarities, though at least Rad Racer tried to distinguish itself by letting players race in a knock-off Formula 1 car.

Also like Outrun, the game sees players racing across a range of locations, though Rad Racer has locations based on real-life locations and you can’t choose between the easy and hard route at the end of each section. Still, you’re competing against the clock and each checkpoint resets your timer.

What’s more interesting about Rad Racer is that the game shared much of its development time with the previously mentioned WorldRunner, including the Apple 2 developer Nasir Gebelli, who helped to pioneer WorldRunner’s 3D features. Nasir then applied that knowledge with Rad Racer, Square’s other game that allowed players to hit the Select button, stick on their provided 3D glasses, and step into the world of tomorrow, today.

Or, if you were in Japan in the late 80s, you could also use the Famicom 3D system, which was a massive headset that aimed to provide a more immersive version of 3D than what a cardboard frame and a pair of red and blue light filters could provide. Spoiler alert: the thing that looked like a VR headset flopped.

 

Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll

Look, if you’re given a camera angle that shows a room or level from an isometric angle and lets players move up, down, left and right, that’s a 3D game. It might use 2D sprites, but the isometric angle allows players to truly explore a 3D space, more so than something like Streets of Rage or Final Fight would. Some of you might think that’s a bit of a cop out, but we’re too busy playing Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll to care.

If you want to see an example of Rare’s brilliance on a Nintendo console years before Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, GoldenEye and others, here it is.

With a name that parodies the 1950’s song Shake Rattle ‘n’ Roll, and with a soundtrack inspired heavily by the songs of that era, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll is an upbeat yet utterly fiendish platformer that tasks players with navigating levels and collecting Nibbley Pibbleys.

In a lot of ways, it looks and feels like a precursor to a game like Sonic 3D Blast, as you’re gathering cute creatures in order to open the path to the next level. Like the old game Snake though, the more you collect, the bigger you grow, which means you’re more susceptible to taking damage. Throw in a timer to complete the level by, and you’ve got the makings of a frantic yet thoroughly enjoyable isometric platformer.

 

Solstice: The Quest for the Staff of Demnos

The other entry in this isometric double bill, Solstice: The Quest For The Staff of Demnos is about as ambitious as a puzzle game could possibly get for the NES.

The game sees Morbius, not the living vampire guy though, kidnap the Princess of Arcadia, leading to the wizard Shadax heading to Morbius’ stronghold, the fortress of Kâstleröck, to find the six pieces of the ancient Staff of Demnos that’s said to hold the power to stop Morbius. Again, no relation to Marvel’s Morbius, but given how Jared Leto was acting on the set of Suicide Squad, kidnapping a member of a royal family and sacrificing her to try and become the “Evil Baron of Darkness” seems right in his wheelhouse.

Anyway, Shadax has to explore Kâstleröck, all 250 rooms of it, each one complete with their own puzzles, enemies and traps for players to overcome, leading to new paths, rooms and discoveries. The beauty of Solstice’s premise and progression is that players can tackle the rooms in a non-linear fashion, so if you’re struggling with a certain puzzle, it might be worth coming back to it later while you explore the other side of the fortress. Throw in plenty of discoverable potions that  give new abilities you’ll need to solve the various challenges the fortress has in store, and Solstice is a pretty varied yet ambitious and rewarding NES release.

 

Orb-3D

Orb-3D as a name, released in 1990 for the NES,  is about as weird, vague and stupid as you could possibly get. Compare that, however, to the game’s original name, Beyond The Black Hole, from when it was released a year earlier for the Commodore 64, the 128 and MS-DOS. You can’t help thinking that NES users were shortchanged a little bit when it comes to the name, but that doesn’t mean that Orb-3D was a diminished game experience. It’s just that trying to explain how Orb-3D actually plays is a bit of a herculean task. Imagine you’re playing some kind of mix of one-player Pong, noughts and crosses/tic-tac-toe and Breakout and maybe you’re in the ballpark?

Players control two rebound paddles on either side of the screen that represent an orb in orbit, with the player needing to dive from orbit into the objects on screen as it passes over them, removing them from the board. The issues arise when there’s only a limited amount of fuel, and the game quickly starts throwing puzzles at you that require specific solutions, like clearing out 10 pins in two moves otherwise all the pins reset.

Looking at the game, Orb-3D might not seem like it’s a game that uses 3D graphics, but like other games of today it does make use of stereoscopic 3D, meaning those glasses you’ve been using will come in clutch again.

 

Falsion

Star Fox might be the game that most people think of when it comes to 3D on-rails shooters, but that game only launched on the SNES in 1993. It’s hardly the pioneer of the genre, especially when a game like Falsion launched exclusively on the Famicom in Japan back in 1987.

Anyone who’s ever played Star Fox should see the similarities immediately, as enemies approach from the background and you’ve got to blast them out of the sky. Well, out of the space? Not sure. It’s a formula practically as old as gaming itself: shoot everything on the screen and dodge all the projectiles until you win, and if you want one of the most underrated shoot ‘em ups on the NES, give Falsion a whirl.

The game’s story, like most games in this genre, concerns humanity fighting against an alien race in the hopes of survival, with the titular human ship Falsion being the last remaining in the human’s fleet to land a strike on the heart of the alien forces. Kind of an all or nothing situation.

Like other games we’ve mentioned though, Falsion has a stereoscopic 3D mode by pressing the Select button, which works in conjunction with the previously mentioned Famicom 3D system that was exclusive to Japan. Considering there were only seven games total that actually supported the Famicom 3D system, including the Japan version of WorldRunner, Falsion is part of some tight-knit company.

 

Destination Earthstar

Apparently, the best way to make games 3D back in the early days of console gaming was just make everything set in space. Pretty easy to render the graphics needed for the additional 3D dimension when most of the background is going to be the cold, black expanse of space.

It’s the solution that developers Imagineering came up with when creating their space sim/shoot ‘em up hybrid Destination Earthstar, though it also has a pretty wild plot. Essentially, you play as a descendant of humans who were abducted by aliens for slave labour but earned their freedom, and are now trying to follow the starcharts to find a way back to Earth once and for all. It’s a pretty cool premise, admittedly one wasted on a game in an era where exposition was in the manual or the back of the box only.

What’s interesting about Destination Earthstar though is the blend of 3D and 2D gameplay. The game starts out with players in the cockpit of a spacecraft, getting a first person view of the final frontier as they explore a full star system, displayed via in-game map as a 2D grid, in search of enemies to fight, new weapons to collect and planets to refuel at. It’s a bit rudimentary compared to something like Star Wars Rogue Squadron, but there is some space dogfighting.

After killing the enemies in the star system though, players unlock the enemy base, and travelling there transitions the game into a 2D shoot ‘em up. It’s like Gradius only, well, fine I guess. It’s not the best game ever made, but it’s impressive nonetheless.

 

Gyruss

One of the earliest attempts that the shoot ‘em up genre took to emulate the 3D experience in gaming was with a phenomenon known as “tube shooters”. The formula was pretty simple, with players controlling a ship that exists on the perimeter of the tube, with enemies and obstacles coming down the tube at a steadily escalating pace.

It’s a type of shooter most popularised by a game like Tempest, and while they’re not technically proper 3D, they use depth in a similar way to Space Harrier at the others, only they predate those games by a few years. Tempest didn’t make it to the NES, mostly because it was an Atari exclusive, but one game that did which follows a similar structure is Konami’s own Gyruss.

Not a pretty good rock band, Gyruss was originally released in arcades back in 1983, before being remade for both the Famicom and the NES. Functionally, the gameplay is the same, with various enemies and hazards for players to shoot and avoid as you circle the perimeter of this invisible tube. Still, what separates Gyruss, the Nintendo version, from Gyruss, the arcade version, is the sheer amount of additional content that was crammed in there.

There’s 15 extra stages, including a new planet in the form of Pluto, additional enemies and boss fights, and a super attack to help when things get truly hectic. As far as Gyruss goes, the NES version is about as definitive as it could possibly be. They even added a proper ending, instead of the arcade endless loop.

 

3DSen

Ordinarily, when we’re selecting things to talk about, we focus only on retro things instead of something modern. Occasionally, we’ll mention a cheeky homebrew, but it’s mostly old stuff. Still, there’s an emulator designed for NES games that converts them to 3D and it’s pretty cool.

It’s called 3DSen, and while you do have to pay for it, it automatically converts 2D games into 3D voxel graphics, kind of like a diorama. Naturally, you have to provide your own ROMs, and you can find those yourself, matey, but if you’re looking for a new way to experience classic games, 3DSen is definitely something you should check out. It’s a bit of a gimmick, sure, but the existence of something like 3DSen doesn’t erase the authentic experience either.

READ NEXT: Cool Indie Games That You Might’ve Missed