Nintendo Life, Vol. 4

Nintendo Life

Top Secret Passwords: A Nintendo Power Player's Guide

Top secret? Not any more.

It was 1992, and 10-year-old Matt was punching his way past the pugilists of Street Fighter II: The World Warrior on a daily basis. After slogging through eight hours at whatever you call that place that teaches you math while you should be playing Mortal Kombat, a package arrived for our young protagonist from Nintendo Power. Tossing down the controller, Matt tears open the package. Well, let's see here... There was a Top Secret Passwords Player's Guide inside the box!

To this day I'm not sure why I received such a wonderful gift - perhaps my mother renewed my subscription to Nintendo Power when I wasn't looking, or maybe she pummeled the ugly neighbor boy with Marioesque fireballs and stole it for me - but the fact remains that NP was awesome enough to send Top Secret Passwords my way. As you can see from the included picture, my copy is a battle worn veteran of the video wars, and for good reason: In the days before Al Gore's amazing  internetz, this was one of the few and best resources for both lazy gamers who didn't feel like writing down passwords and those of us who had a tendency to lose that little scrap of paper that contained our Metroid progress every damn time. And speaking of Metroid:

Remember the old JUSTIN BAILEY trick for Metroid? It's in this guide and I'm totally naming my first son after it. (The code, not the player's guide.)

Top Secret Passwords was printed in the early days of the Super Nintnedo, which means that there wasn't too much coverage for SNES games. And even though it was the heyday the pea-soup green Gameboy, there weren't too many portable paks out there that utilized a password feature. However, this guide had a field day with Nintendo Entertainment System; about a hundred NES games took the spotlight. For a kid who had plenty of unfinished Nintendo games, the Top Secret Passwords Player's Guide was a Godsend. It brought a brand new life to plenty of my old games, not through actually using the included passwords, but by showing me the later stages and inspiring me to take another crack at it.

And another. And another.

Not that Mega Man II was really difficult or anything, but this guide had your back regardless. Plenty of games got a one or two page treatment like this, with a variety of passwords for your cheating pleasure.

Top Secret Passwords, true to its name, had passwords and stage select codes for almost 150 games. But more importantly, it also had a bizarre spy theme in the form of chapter introduction illustrations featuring a clumsy twit in a yellow trench coat. This 35-year-old Dick Tracy wannabe apparently spent his days doing nothing but gathering passwords and stage select codes for a passtime that was generally considered "kids' stuff" at the time. Worse, the people around him encouraged his strange behavior. Check out this old lady's reaction when, at "NIN" Airport, the lock breaks on Fake Tracy's crappy suitcase, sending his Gameboy, "secret documents" and disembodied Super NES controllers spilling out on the floor:

She thinks she's doing him a favor by playing along, like when your dad buys five glasses of lemonade from your stand because you set it up at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday so no one shows up and the sugar is starting to migrate the the bottom of the pitcher, but she's just making it worse. Thinking his insatiable quest for passwords was actually having an important impact on society, Cheap Tracy took things too a little too far:

Breaking and entering into the government's secret Branch of Nintendo Codes and Affairs? Hiding from unobservant and underpaid night watchmen? Stealing unmarked and possibly empty manila envelopes and scattering random papers on the floor?

Wearing his sunglasses at night!?

Weird Tracy's actions were getting out of hand. It seems our garish gumshoe has an addiction to game-breaking cheats and techniques. As you can plainly see, back in the early '90s while he was compiling  information for the Top Secret Passwords guide, he wasn't just playing with power or even SUPER power; he was just playing with FIRE. And not like Super Mario does. You know what I mean.

I'm sorry to say that it only got worse from there.

Jiminy Christmas! How much sugar is in the coffee? ...hey, wait a minute! Is that a f***ing gun on his desk?! How many people have you killed in your quest for powerful passwords, you monster?!

Cheap Tracy, you've become a power animal!

Yeah, like this guy! Only less '80s! And Fake Tracy at least knows which end of the controller is "up."

It would take months before the true damage incurred by Weird Tracy's attempts to "radicalize his game" could be calculated, but in early 1993 - coinciding with the release of Star Fox on the SNES - the reports started pouring in to the national papers and 5 p.m. news shows: Tracy's terror caused $800,000 in destroyed suitcases and busted file cabinets, 6.99 for new manila envelopes, and countless billions spent by the hottest gaming companies of the '90s undoing the damage caused by the massive leak of such sensitive NES information. The media had dubbed Fake Tracy the "Video Vigilante," and he was charged with breaking and entering, unlawful possession of a weapon, willful destruction of property and six counts of first degree murder. After a lengthy trial, he was sentenced to 94 years in a maximum security penitentiary. Cheap Tracy, or as his mother called him, Nester H. Phillips, died in prison in 2006 from an overdose of the powerful narcotic Starman, so named because it gets the user high enough to "see the stars an feel invincible." He was 49 when he ran out of continues.

In related news, the Power Animal remains at large, but it is believed that during his search for "the key to unlimited power," he may have choked to death on a copy of Battletoads in a blind rage after losing all of his lives to the jet scooter stage.

But yeah, the Top Secret Passwords Player's Guide is still awesome despite all the scandal that surrounded it, kind of like Micheal Jackson's Thriller album. It's an inspired collection of codes that still captivates the 10-year-old inside me. It will always have a special, secret place in my heart.

*   *   *

And now for my very own Top Secret Password, revealed here for first time ever: Grab a copy of Metroid on the NES and a Game Genie. Now enter the six character code KAGNAS. You'll find that the properties of the Freeze Ray have been bestowed to every available weapon, including the Wave Beam and even missiles! No more picking between power and functionality!

Take THAT, Mother Brain!

Vaguely Homoerotic Fun with Rival Turf!

If there’s one important lesson that I learned from the 1992 SNES game Rival Turf!, it’s that I probably shouldn’t have spent money on the 1992 SNES game Rival Turf! But the other important lesson I learned is that nothing says justice quite like the cop from The Village People wrapping himself in hundreds of strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups and punching the heck out of tactless criminals across two continents. 

After the success of fist-fueled fiestas like Double Dragon and the original Final Fight in the late 1980s, side scrolling beat ‘em ups flooded the arcade and home markets, slugging it out for everyone’s fighting dollars. The craze spawned a few truly memorable titles like Sega’s Streets of Rage trilogy for the Genesis/Mega Drive, and plenty of other games destined to be reviled and forgotten, like Burning Fight, Guardians of the ‘Hood, and David Robinson’s Supreme Court.

Rival Turf! is one of those games in the latter category that so bad it’s still bad, but at least it serves that function in a bland and uninteresting way. What it does add to the genre, however, are vaguely homoerotic undertones, which make any video game worth playing.

The ambiguously gay fun begins when our two fashion unconscious heroes, Oozie Nelson and Jack Flak, decide to clean up the streets of Los Angeles by pounding the crap out of everyone from the local biker population, sans-motorcycles, to the glam rockers that live in the local Rival Turf! homeless shelters. You might be thinking that these are the kind of people the police are supposed to be helping, but Nelson and Flak have it all figured out: Everyone knows that to make an omelet, you’ve got to break a few eggs – or in the case of Rival Turf!, assault hundreds of down-on-their-luck thugs while wearing a red leather police officer outfit. And this game certainly makes a lot of omelets.

At least there are no women in Rival Turf! to get in the way of the undertones. Err, action. I meant action. Wait, no, I mean... Never mind.

There’s not much about Jack Flak that separates him from Axel, Cody, David Robinson or any other regular Joe found in these kinds of games, except that his jacket kind of makes him look like Marty McFly from Back to the Future 2 or perhaps even Aries from Final Fantasy VII. It’s the unfortunately named Oozie Nelson, the Mexican wrestler turned male stripper/cop, who takes center stage. An enigma: If Nelson is supposed to be Latino, why does he look African American in the character select screen and morph into a white guy in the ending? The world may never know.

These character designs are totally rad!

You know how real gangs have specific colors and styles that they wear to show that they’re gang members? You’ll see none of that tripe in Rival Turf! I learned a long time ago from games like this that for gang members in the early ‘90s, anything went as far as fashion. You want to wear a motorcycle helmet and a pair of MC Hammer pants? Go for it! An eye patch, bicycle, shorts and wrestling boots? Sure! A Saran wrap t-shirt, a cockring, and a hat made of breadsticks? Hell yeah! Not one to break from tradition, Rival Turf! dives right on to the “randomly dressed from Hot Topic and grandma’s attic” bandwagon.

The game itself is was pretty standard punch and kick fare. The first few levels offer action that was stale even when Rival Turf! was released and it really didn’t age well from there. But after lots of uncomfortable grabbing and an end-of-level celebration that got a little out of hand, I came across these two guys trying to hide their, um, activities behind a barrel.

Ooookay.

I’m not sure why, but Nelson flew into Angry Mode at that point and savagely suplexed both men’s backs into Jell-o. Maybe he knew them somehow and didn’t approve of their behavior.

I guess I should explain Angry Mode, which sounds like what happened to all the children who paid $50 for this game when it was new. Angry Mode makes your character invincible for a short amount of time, as indicated by his flashing white, like this:

Note: Angry Mode does NOT affect your gloves.

Later on I found this guy, who looked like he was more into fighting the demons in his head than our two flamboyant officers. But I had a duty to uphold the peace, so I dragged him out of his hiding spot and bludgeoned him to death with a rusty steal pipe. There was also this dude who was out for a stroll with this most triumphant boombox in the local car garage at 4 a.m. So of course, Nelson and Flak pummeled him mercilessly.

Then it was off to South America after hitching a ride on a nearby enemy military chopper for three more rounds of… rounds! Did you know that gangs in Brazil are basically the same as the gangs in America, only with more green in their wardrobes? Forget social studies; why aren’t children all across the world playing Rival Turf! in school to drink deeply of its vast educational value?

After fighting my way through some kind of factory instead of just walking around it to get to the final stage, the gang leader, Big Al, decided I had slaughtered enough of his poorly dressed, unarmed henchmen and attempted to kill me by wearing white after Labor Day. Of course, this threw Nelson into Angry Mode and you can guess what happened from there. Then I watched the credits, secure in the knowledge that not one of the billions of gang members that I ruthlessly executed was smart enough to bring a gun to the battle and put and end to Nelson and Flak’s brutal love and/or friendship.

So remember kids, crime doesn’t pay. The next time you decide to steal some candy or cigarettes or kill a man, think about this: When the cops catch you, the last thing you’re likely to see before blinking out of existence is the heavy, possibly gay but maybe not, boots of justice stomping you and your friends’ skulls into a fine powder.

Batman Forever: Soulless Silicon

I could have baited you with a catchy opening sentence questioning whether Acclaim did justice to the Batman Forever license with this game but I’m not going to lie to you or waste your time. The Batman Forever video game for Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) and Super Nintendo just plain sucks.

Ignoring the warning label that many bad video games have – the Acclaim logo – I recently took Batman Forever out of my stack of Genesis games, dusted it off, and plugged it into my system. After being greeted with a lackluster title screen, hearing Two-Face annoyingly exclaim, “If the Bat wants to play, we’ll play!” and skimming over a confusing weapon select screen, someone who looks kind of like Batman appears, surrounded by brown, grainy bricks, ugly gray columns and the occasional steel door. With him is another guy dressed like Robin, but he looks more like your eccentric neighbor wearing his ballet tights. Suddenly, an Arkham Asylum inmate shambles over and, after doing his victory pose a few times, eventually gets around to attacking! Sensing danger, “Robin” pulls out his staff, just like he never did in the film, and whacks the now flipping and kicking villain. But the Dynamic Duo isn’t out of the woods yet! A door to one of the other cells explodes open (huh?) and out pops the same guy Robin just floored. I guess crazy acrobatic ninja inmates never learn!

Wave after wave of the same few digitized villains battle our heroes’ stunt doubles, performing the same few attacks over and over. Acclaim/Probe didn’t even have the decency to change their pallets, so the only difference between enemies of the same type is their woefully dim-witted names. (My favorites are a guy named “Bad Gazz” and a clown named “Bio-Man.”) There are only five normal enemies and four boss-like characters, so the player is likely to grow bored of his or her competition at light speed.

Try as I may, I can’t remember a single tune from this game. I’m holding the box in my hands right now touching it, smelling it and practically begging it to jog my memory – but the only song that comes to mind is from Phantasy Star II. That’s not to say Batman Forever’s music is bad, it just proves that it’s entirely forgettable. (And that Phantasy Star II had some wicked tuneage, but I digress.) Don’t worry, you’ll be able to remember the melodies by the end of the game, because later levels reuse themes from the earlier ones. If that doesn’t say “rush job,” I don’t know what does.

Every time your character grabs one of the Riddler’s question marks, you’re subjected to a tooth grinding “Riddle me this, riddle me that” sound clip. The enemies’ comments aren’t much better: “Forgeddabout it!” yells the stereotypical mobster in a not-so-stereotypical yellow suit. Yet, the player never hears a peep out of the Caped Crusader or the Boy Wonder, aside from a generic “I got knocked over” grunt that every character shares. Throw in a few nonspecific punching noises, and you’ve got the Batman Forever soundtrack.

Holy unresponsive D-pad, Batman! These controls stink! Seeing as how Batman Forever passed through both Acclaim and Probe’s inept hands, it’s not surprising that this game plays a lot like Mortal Kombat. Actually, let me rephrase: This game wants to BE Mortal Kombat. With high and low punches and kicks, a block button, foot sweeps and even the trademark MK uppercut, Batman Forever is the video equivalent of a kid who tries to emulate his older, cooler sibling and fails miserably. Punches and kicks come off without a hitch, but using the grappling hook is a chore and I’m still not sure how to make my character jump down a level. Jump and tap up on the controller and Batman will float across the screen on leather wings. Robin kind of sticks his bum out and starts levitating, though I’ve never quite been able to get that to work in real life. Both moves work about 50 percent of the time and are occasionally paramount to progressing through the game. The result? Lots of senseless falling and backtracking.

Hey, remember that awesome part in the movie where Batman and Robin had to jump over all those exciting crates? Yeah, neither do I, but it’s in this game. There are eight tough stages to slog through, but each one has little to do with the movie. Levels begin in one nondescript location and end in another, so good luck trying to figure out what triggers the onset of the next stage.

Even on easy mode, the game is unforgiving. Locating and disarming a bomb in the circus stage is a confusing process, with enemies appearing randomly and a quick-moving timer working against you. If you’re not lucky, the bomb explodes and you lose a much-need life. (Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb, I guess.) There are some ridiculous jumps in the fifth level an you’ll often find yourself running all the way back to the spot where you fell, only to fall again. So, what’s your reward for sticking out this entire hard, frustrating game? Let me save you some time: “Congratulations! Game complete.”

All of this could have been overlooked if Batman Forever had managed to be fun, but it’s not: The gameplay isn’t just laughable, it’s this game’s killing joke. To be fair, any game where you get to beat up clowns can’t be all bad, and uppercutting and roundhouse kicking your enemies can be fun, especially when you knock them into some sort of environmental trap or off the side of a building. Yet you never feel like you’re doing much damage. Even a bone-shattering blast of Robin’s stealthy staff steals but a fragment of the foe’s life gauge.

To help remedy the monotony of the limited combat system, the programmers added plenty of special weapons to the fighting formula. However, it’s always easier to just kick and punch your adversaries into submission, because trying to use a bat-gadget will get you bat-killed. There are 20 of the little buggers in all, but most of them just freeze enemies for a few seconds. Each gadget is activated with a Street Fighter-like button combination, but the player shouldn’t have to do a Yoga Flame motion to fling a weak gimmick weapon at some schmoe across the screen.

You can drag someone else along with you into this lunacy, but why would you? The controls are so broken in the main game that you’ll find yourself explaining to the other player how to use the grappling hook more often than pounding on the bad guys. It’s a shame too, because there was some real potential for fun here. Instead, it’s just as frustrating – if not more so – as the rest of the game. The versus mode fares better though, because it allows two players to choose any character in the game and mix it up mano a mano. It kind of plays like a crippled Mortal Kombat and offers players a respite from the tedium of the main game.

Some games seem to have a soul – a soul of silicon, but a soul nonetheless. This is not one of them. Batman Forever has tried my patience, and the only reason it didn’t receive a lower score is because the game can actually be completed if the player can deal with the masses of uninteresting villains and the tiresome gameplay. Avoid Batman Forever if you come across it, but if you simply must see what all the fuss is about, don’t spend more than $2 on it. Save yourself three hours of aggravation and watch the lackluster movie instead; at least when that starts to suck, you can go to sleep and when you wake up, it’ll be over. Better still, dig up some episodes of Batman: The Animated Series for your Dark Knight fix – the worst installment of that show is at least twice as good as this piece of garbage.

I am vengence! I am the night! The Batman Forever game stinks!

Sugar, Flower and a Dash of Earthbound

Plug in the gamepak and feel the smoothness of the controller in your hands as you power up the console. Watch eagerly as Ness and his friends travel to distant places and lost lands in the quest of a lifetime, or just to the burger joint down the street. Close your eyes and listen to the sweet melodies of Earthbound, knowing they will stick with you forever. Find your player's guide and take a good whiff of the scratch n’ sniff cards in the back, associating the unique scents with that unforgettable Earthbound experience. And, uh… lick the cartridge as you put it back in its sleeve, savoring the taste of 15-year-old plastic...? Sorry Earthbound fans, but as much as we adore and revere it, our RPG of choice can’t quite give us the satisfaction of stimulating all five of our senses at the same time.

Or can it?

How, you might wonder, does Earthbound appeal to a player's sense of taste? We’ll get to that, but first, let’s consider the approach that Toe Jam and Earl in Panic on Funkotron for the Sega Genesis took: Included with the game was a tasty Fruit Roll-Up. While it was an awesome surprise at the time, the problem with the Fruit Roll-Up gimmick is that after you eat it, it’s gone for good. Through nearly 70 levels of jammin’ action, Panic on Funkotron never mentions that lone Fruit Roll-Up again. Aside from a life-sustaining cake here or there, the game doesn’t allude to the player’s sense of taste at all, which is a shame, because Big Earl’s sweaty, oversized polka-dot boxer shorts look delicious. Instead of taking a unique theme and running with it, all Sega really did was jam candy in the game’s plastic clamshell and pray that kids would start asking their parents to buy more Fruit Roll-Ups.

However, unlike Toejam and Earl’s sophomore effort, Earthbound takes its snack time seriously. While Nintendo didn’t package mouth-watering candy in the giant box it came in, food is so well integrated into Ness’s world that it’s almost impossible to imagine the game without it. It often seems as if Earthbound has an endless supply of edible wonders, and with a menu of more than 50 items, it might as well. There’s always something exciting to eat in every town, swamp or palace, and the player is constantly winning new and interesting treats from the enemies.

At first one might think it’s strange that a game that sometimes spirals so far from reality would reel itself back in just for the culinary aspects, but take a look at some of the food the player can obtain during the course of the game: Peanut Cheese Bars, trout yogurt, soup made from the fins of a deadly sea monster, and more. Even the “normal” types of food add much to the game’s atmosphere, with pizza parlors, fast food places and fancy-schmancy, over-priced restaurants scattered virtually everywhere in the game.

With tons of wacky meals, each with their own unique healing effects, it’s clear that the programmers went far out of their way to give every food item a personality all its own. Do you remember finding the Plain Roll in your Earthbound travels? The player needs plenty of Brainfood lunches to survive the trek through Deep Darkness and make it to the cave of the elusive Tenda tribe, but once you get there and trade away a valuable Horn of Life, the 24 HP healing power of the Plain Roll will be yours. “Hey, wait a minute!” you may have yelled at this point, wondering why you wasted so much time and effort to get such a useless item. But take a moment to analyze what the programmers really did here: The Plain Roll is a one-time item, meaning you can’t find it anywhere else in the game. The prize isn’t the item itself – it’s obviously completely useless – but the fact the programmers went out of their way to put such an item in the game. Just try not to laugh as you slowly realize the joke the programmers played on you. Then take a few seconds to think about how dedicated the MOTHER 2/Earthbound team is to their craft.

Food even plays a subtle, yet vital roll in the game’s storyline. All I need to do is say “Tendakraut” and seasoned Earthbounders will smile at the thought of the stinky delicacy that allows access a village forgotten by time. Don’t forget about the snack that whisks our heroes’ minds away to a far away land, the hungry miner in Dusty Dunes Desert, or the coffee break in Saturn Valley. And what about the disgruntled Mach Pizza employee who delivers the Zombie Paper that becomes the salvation of an entire eerie town? Try as I may, I can’t think of any other game that can say pizza helped save its universe.

Shigesato Itoi, creator of the Mother/Earthbound series, strives for excellence in everything he does, from journalism to making video games. With MOTHER 2/Earthbound, he and his team set out to make something that would appeal to players not only as a video game, but on a deeper, more human level. Food is an indelible part of life in all cultures, and knowing this, Itoi found a most creative way to integrate it into his game. Earthbound proves not only can a video game appeal to sight, hearing, touch and even smell, but also that a hunk of plastic and circuits can indeed appeal to one’s sense of taste as well; and Itoi didn’t even need a Fruit Roll-Up to do it.

I guess you really can have your Magic Cake and eat it to.

Ultraman: Redemption of a Forgotten Cart

I’m honestly not sure why Bandai’s first generation Super NES game, Ultraman: Towards the Future is so universally despised. The graphics are serviceable if not majestic like some of the early SNES offerings such as ActRaiser, Super Castlevania IV, and F-Zero. The music fared much better. It was based directly on the series that spawned the game, and some tracks still rock my socks nearly 20 years later.

The gameplay was hardly what I’d have called groundbreaking, but that doesn’t stop people from salivating over the newest Madden game every year. It’s up to the player to take control of Japanese juggernaut Ultraman and slug it out with nine of the toughest baddies Earth, or any other planet, has ever seen. One on one a la Street Fighter II, Ultraman tangles with the galactic giants until either he or they fall. After using a final shot of his Burning Plasma super move to finish off his adversary, Ultraman leaps into the sky towards his next challenge with a battle cry that sounds kind of like he’s sick to his stomach. Then again, maybe I would be sick too if I just blew up a 58,000 ton brain-creature named Gudis and had to clean his guts off my boots.

Nice graphics, awesome sound and passable gameplay all adds up to a decent game, right? So why does Ultraman: Towards the Future land sliver-face first onto every YouTube list of the worst games of all time? I think after playing masterpieces like Super Mario World, a lot of people were expecting more out of Nintendo’s classy gray box than what could have been an NES game with enhanced audiovisuals. Also, the Ultraman license has always been lukewarm in the United States, so a lot of gamers unfamiliar with the content probably dismissed Bandai’s SNES offering without a second thought.

It’s no Chrono Trigger, but Ultraman: Towards the Future deserves a hell of a lot more credit that it’s received in the last two decades. If you’re looking for a respectable way to kill 45 minutes or so, take Ultraman out for a spin.

PRO TIP: When the monster’s lifebar says “Finish,” shoot him with a level 4 special move to kill him off. That little bit of information, if it had been properly distributed, might have saved more than a few Ultraman carts from the trash heap.