Jeremy Parish
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NES Works Gaiden #19: Famicom 1984, Pt. 1
🕑 Added 2021-03-24 13:00:00 +0000 UTCWhile my focus this year (and probably next...) is on the Sega 8-bit library, I do want to dip a toe into the SG-1000's contemporary competition on Famicom to give a better sense of how the two platforms evolved in comparison to one another. Famicom's ’83 lineup was explored way back in the second episode of NES Works Gaiden, but over the coming months we'll be taking quite a few of these excursions into Nintendo's ’84 and ’85 lineups.
This first episode is more of an overview, given that almost all of these games were covered (in this exact sequence) in episodes 2-7 of NES Works. However, the second half of this episode goes pretty deep into a notable release that shipped at the end of July: Nuts & Milk, which marked the arrival of third-party publishers on Famicom. Here I try my best to explain how that made Famicom a very different platform for both creators and consumers from SG-1000—and, also, why Nuts & Milk is, in fact, a very notable work in this particular incarnation.
I will be largely alternating between Segaiden and NES Works going forward this year... though I do need to wrap up some patron requests soon before I accept the next batch....
Comments
NeoZeroMVS
Every time I see Nuts & Milk my mind immediately adds "Together at last!"
Kyle Olson
I think it's important to get into this comparison, perhaps one of the most important comparisons. While I think releases for the Lynx were important to those of us who were kids at the time, I don't think they had as much relevance to the developers of GameBoy games. Those games were largely based on older US or European computer home computer releases for the Atari and Commodore computers. Additionally, the horsepower of the Lynx was absurdly greater than the GameBoy. It had more power than the Genesis in most ways and some specialty graphics hardware. Lynx games which could influence development were likely ports of games that already did. It was a more interesting question of why couldn't the Lynx get an audience. Because the hardware was too expensive, or because the games were more like tech demos? The SG-1000, is deeply tied in with the development of Famicom games. The first game on the list shows how much. We see Sega and Nintendo both trying to do almost exactly the same basic gameplay, but the game looks so much better that it crushes the other game even before it plays so much better. These first generation Light Gun NES games seemed pretty short and shallow to us in the late 1980s after we moved into the era of Zelda and long side scrollers (which might be why the gun was on life support for most of the NES life), but when the system first released they felt like you were bringing an arcade game home. It is pretty amazing to me that that were getting all this 3 years earlier than most of us in America. I know console gaming had died for a while (and the internet seems to have lost this history of how big computer gaming was in the US in both the 1980s and 1990s forms) but we were very prepped when the national launch of the NES hit for this stuff. Donkey Kong 3 - If Nintendo had made the right Donkey Kong sequels, would Mario have been the character? Donkey Kong Jr. was probably the right game with the wrong name, but Donkey Kong 3 seems to miss the point entirely. Why turn the arcade's most popular single screen proto-platform game into a backdoor shooter? It's not a Donkey Kong anyone wanted. Nuts & Milk should made it to the US. I'm sure they could have converted Milk to a skateboarding kid and replaced the enemies with cops who want to stop you from skateboarding, and changed Yogurt to Master-D.
