The NES, or just Nintendo if you swing that way, marked a real moment of change for the gaming industry. But what will probably never change is how many whippers you can find on it that you’d probably never heard of before. Listen, they aren’t always perfect, but Nintendo certainly know how to make a console people want to make great games for. You gotta hand it to them.
Shatterhand
Based on the name alone, Shatterhand sounds like a story about a martial artist with a glass arm fighting evil or maybe even a God Hand prequel, but no. It’s an NES game about fighting evil instead. It’s also an example of a game from Japan getting a brand new coat of paint when it came over to the West. In Shatterhand’s case, the Japanese version of the game was actually based on Super Rescue Solbrain, a tokusatsu television show that itself was part of the wider Metal Hero Series, a series that ran in one form or another from 1982 to 1998.
There’s even a new entry to the series coming in 2026, but you’re not here to talk about the Shatterhand metaverse..right? Anyway, Shatterhand on the NES would change the story, characters and visuals to create a different experience for Westerners.
Set in the far, far future of 2030 [anxious millennial noises], players control cop Steve Hermann who loses both of his arms in a fight against Metal Command, a military group with designs on taking over the whole world. Like Mortal Kombat’s Jax Briggs though, he’s quickly given two cybernetic replacements and is told to go and thwart Metal Command’s plans. As a side scrolling platformer, you do that by using your new metal fists to punch everything in sight, from bullets to enemies and everything in between.
Throw in a cool power-up system, where players can unlock a helpful satellite by picking up a specific combination of three greek letters, and you’ve got a fun if challenging NES platformer, if you can kick it?
Kick Master
The Punchkicker to the last entry’s Kickpuncher (or is it the other way around?), Kick Master looks like another bog standard side scrolling platformer. Dig a little deeper past the surface and you’ll find a retro platformer with a lot going for it.
As the name implies, you control a master of kicking people called Thonolan, who’s set on an epic quest to rescue the princess Silphee from the witch Belzed and her evil cat Spuzznut. One of those is a fake name, not all of them. Interestingly, the game’s story sets it up that Thonolan’s brother Macren is going to be the knight in shining armor who saves Silphee, but the scrub is brought low by a skeleton before the game even starts. Apparently steel is no match for skeletons but a swift roundhouse kick? Sure Macren, whatever you say.
The game itself plays out like classic Castlevania, except instead of whipping enemies to kick them, you’re booting them in the face. Unlike other platforming beat ‘em ups though, Kick Master also includes a level up system, with Thonolan earning more MP to use special attacks along with new moves with every level up. Kick Master even takes a cue from games like Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, with players unlocking a harder difficulty version of the game once they defeat Belzed.
Kick Master does go that extra step further though by adding a third difficulty mode for players with the stomach and the skill to get that far. A New Game +2 like 20 years before Dark Souls? Well played Kick Master.
Whomp ‘Em
Far from being a forgotten MC Hammer b-side, Whomp ‘Em actually started out life as Wonder Boy In Monster Land, which was developed for arcade machines in 1987, before being ported to the SEGA Master System a year later. Alongside the release of Monster Land, developers Westone would also use Wonder Boy as a basis for their Famicom game Saiyuki World, which was based more on the Journey To The West tale from Ancient China, which was released the same year. Still with me? Well, you might leave when you hear me try to pronounce this next thing. Two years later, Saiyūki World 2: Tenjōkai no Majin would launch on the NES, which leads us to Whomp ‘Em. Much better name for my silly little brain.
Whomp ‘Em used Saiyūki World 2 as a basis, but with Sun Wukong replaced with a Native American. The name of the game is actually a play on words of Wampum shell beads, which have a huge significance to the Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands. The game itself plays like Mega Man, with players completing the same first level, before being given a choice of six levels that they can complete in any order. After finishing a level, you unlock a new weapon, and each of the levels are based around certain elements like fire and water.
Look, we won’t lie: we’ve given you 200 words to skirt around the fact that it’s a bit of a shameless Mega Man clone, but if you’re looking to fill a blue hole in your life and Shovel Knight isn’t hitting the same anymore, give Whomp ‘Em a go.
Crystalis
SNK might be best known for either their fighting games like The King Of Fighters or run and gun games such as Metal Slug. You don’t tend to hear about SNK’s RPG releases, but look deep enough into their library and you’ll find some classic RPGs like Crystalis.
Released in 1990, Crystalis’ setting and premise fills that super interesting niche of being a medieval post-apocalypse, with humanity forced to go back to a more primitive way of life after the Great Nuclear War of 1997. Now, one hundred years later, humans have embraced magic, because magic exists now for some reason, forced to contend with mutants from the nuclear war and the Draygonian Empire that seeks to blend magic with the outlawed science to rule the world.
At the beginning of the game, players control an amnesiac who awakens in a shrine, who must stand up to the Draygonian Empire by gathering the four elemental swords in order to create the ultimate weapon, Crystalis. Using these, he can stop Draygon from harnessing the power of a floating Tower created before the war that’s meant to stop the calamity from happening again. Unfortunately, their idea of stopping the calamity back then was to load up said tower with more weapons than an average ECW show.
With top-down, action RPG gameplay, Crystalis felt like more than a worthy Zelda alternative. Plus, it did “100 years after apocalypse” nearly three decades before Breath of the Wild. What is this, some kind of magic?
The Magic of Scheherazade
This episode is literally like the ending of Martyrs for people who hate the way I pronounce things.
So you know how people who don’t know anything about games, or people who love to troll tightly wound, will say something like “Zelda is the character you play as in The Legend of Zelda”? The Magic Of Scheherazade faces the same issue. The game itself is based on One Thousand And One Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folktales. Chances are you’ve heard the name Arabian Nights, or you’ve definitely heard the song in Aladdin. Scheherazade is the storyteller/narrator during those One Thousand And One Nights, who told stories every night to stave off her own execution, but in The Magic Of Scheherazade, she’s the damsel in distress who’s been kidnapped by the wizard Sabaron.
Much like Crystalis, The Magic Of Scheherazade follows an amnesiac trying to defeat the villain looking to take over the world, with players having to complete four trials before doing so. It’s also a top-down action RPG so if you liked one, you’ll like the other too. What makes The Magic Of Scheherazade unique though is that the game is split into chapters, with each chapter set in a new world with items to collect and allies to befriend, before culminating in a fight against one of Sabaron’s demon generals. The Magic Of Scheherazade is ambitious too, as the game includes real-time combat in the overworld and turn-based battles alongside allies. It’s like 8-bit Metaphor Refantazio, kind of, but we’ve got bad news if you hate forced segues.
Bad News Baseball
It’s not often we talk about sports games here, or least ones that aren’t football or wrestling, so enjoy your sports content while you’ve got it, lads. The FIFA 95 playthrough will be dropping on Christmas Day.
Regrettably though, we have to channel Bad News Barrett for a bit and tell you that Bad News Baseball actually has nothing to do with the film Bad News Bears. Considering Bad News Bears was released around 15 years before the release of Bad News Baseball, and both of them are about kids playing baseball, having the name Bad News Baseball feels like spotting one of those films that’s trying to ride off the coattails of a major franchise.You guys seen Alien: Rubicon yet? Not as good as Alien Vimto.
Bad News Baseball is a bit of a bonkers game, as it’s all about kids playing baseball, but your pitchers can throw 100mph fastballs and your batters can smack home runs into outer space. It’s baseball, but baseball as imagined by a child, so more fun. Oh, and rabbits serve as umpires.
Gameplay-wise, Bad News Baseball is pretty similar to other baseball games that were released at the time, but players are able to utilise more pitches than other games, and there’s an All-Star Mode that lets players form their own teams to compete against a computer that’s pretty damn challenging. You guys want to go play some stickball? Give Bad News Baseball a go.
The Krion Conquest
On the surface, a name like The Krion Conquest makes this game sound like a lost Michael Crichton novel. You’ve got Congo, Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, and then somewhere in the middle there, The Krion Conquest. Fortunately, or unfortunately if you’re looking for games about Crichton works that aren’t Jurassic Park related, The Krion Conquest is actually an adaptation of, get this, The Wizard Of Oz. Well, kind of.
In Japan, The Krion Conquest was called Magical Kids Doropie, with Doropie sounding incredibly similar to Dorothy from Oz. A few years before the game’s release, there was an anime version of Oz that played on Japanese TV, with devs Vic Tokai hoping to secure the rights to make a game about it. They didn’t, unfortunately, but were able to pivot to The Krion Conquest instead.
In the future of…1999, the Earth is being attacked by the Akudama Empire, with no normal weapons able to put a dent into these alien invaders. Fortunately, magic also exists in this world, so the decision is made to recruit the witch Doropie to wage a one woman war against the aliens. Much like Whomp ‘Em earlier in the video, The Krion Conquest plays out like a bit of a Mega Man clone, albeit one that managed to have the jump on Capcom by a number of months. The Krion Conquest launched at the end of 1990, but allowed players to crouch and shoot upwards before the release of Mega Man 4 about a year later. Sometimes, the original needs to learn from a clone’s innovation. If you want to continue to grow, innovation is Kabuki.
Kabuki: Quantum Fighter
HAL Laboratory might be best known for their work on the Kirby franchise, but Kirby only launched in 1992. HAL Laboratory developed and published a few dozen games in the eight years between their formation and the release of Kirby’s Dream Land. One such game is Human Entertainment’s Kabuki: Quantum Fighter, which feels like a cross between Kabuki theater and Tron.
Another game set in the future, specifically the actual future and not, rather upsettingly, 25 years ago, Kabuki: Quantum Fighter opens with a malicious virus finding its way onto the one main computer that handles the defense of the entire planet. Really? One computer for the entire planet? Do they at least have 2FA enabled?
Instead of reactivating their subscription to Norton antivirus, 2056 Earth decides on only one solution: upload the consciousness of Colonel Scott O’Connor into the mainframe to fight the virus man-to-malignancy. The name Kabuki becomes relevant as O’Connor’s great-great-grandfather was a traditional Kabuki actor, with his digital persona resembling a Kabuki warrior. No, not one of them, one of these. Players use guns along with alternative weaponry like Scott’s new digital hair in order to fight the virus and its various virtual villains across multiple levels. Like other games in this video though, it’s also based on a film, with the Famicom version tying into the film Zipong.
Kickle Cubicle
This might be a hidden gems video and not an “aged well” video, but I think it’s worth mentioning that the gameplay of puzzle games are some of the best and easiest games to go back to consistently. A well designed and easy to control puzzle game will never get old, and Kickle Cubicle fits that bill brilliantly. I mean, hey, it feels like puzzles in most video games have never really progressed moving blocks around a level, so in that way Kickle Cubicle has never aged and is still ahead of its time. Okay, that might be a bit of a push, but either way, Kickle Cubicle is a simple game to understand, making it a puzzle game everyone should enjoy. The downside? It’s a whole game of ice levels.
Players control Kickle who finds that his homeland of the Fantasy Kingdom has been turned to ice by the aptly named Wicked Wizard King. Oddly enough though, Kickle is able to save the Kingdom by turning the King’s minions to ice with his own freezing breath. You’d think there’d be some elemental difference between the two, but no. Throughout the levels, players freeze enemies and turn them into ice blocks, which can be kicked into the water and used to navigate through the levels and collect the red bags to succeed. With several enemy types to encounter, and a whole suite of special levels to plough through once you’ve finished the game, Kickle Cubicle is an NES worth your time.
Little Samson
There’s a theory about the creative process that goes along the lines of “all art is iterative”, and during the NES, people bloody loved iterating on Mega Man. To be honest, they also bloody loved iterating on The Legend of Zelda too, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that there weren’t any truly original games on the NES. Honestly, Little Samson isn’t that original either, as the Mega Man comparisons are obvious to anyone with eyes looking at the gameplay footage playing right now. What’s interesting though is that the game was helmed by Shinichi Yoshimoto, one of the directors of Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, but the development house, Takeru, also made Cocoron, which saw Mega Man creator Akira Kitamura take the lead. Funnily enough, it’s also an NES Mega Man inspired game, so maybe we’ll see it in the next vid.
Back to Little Samson, far from being a Muppet Babies retelling of the Biblical story of Samson, Little Samson sees a world under the terror of demon king Ta-Keed. Ta-Keed was sealed away for a while, but now he’s back, forcing Emperor Hans XIV to summon forth four warriors with the strength to actually defeat Ta-Keed. Each character has their own individual strengths and weaknesses, and can even access different parts of the level from one another, meaning players have to switch between them on the fly in order to access everything. It’s an ambitious and tough game, but with dozens of stages and four playable characters, there’s so much on offer here that it’s hard not to recommend it.
…what do you mean this game is nearly 5 grand complete? What is it, FIFA 96?
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