Graduation Day - King's Knight (NES)

If you were to ask me what game companies I associate with quality, Squaresoft would be at the top of my list. Sure, they’ve merged and now go by Square-Enix (Squenix, for short), and perhaps their quality of games has waned a bit since the PS1 days (my opinion…but also fact), but when I was a kid, Squaresoft’s talent rivaled that of the good folks over at Nintendo. I mean, Squaresoft was behind some of my favorite RPGs of all time, like Final Fantasy 9 and Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.

So you can imagine my excitement when I snagged a small lot of NES games to find a game from Squaresoft I’d never heard of before, King’s Knight. Surely I had found an old-school RPG gem from the 8-bit days! Forgive my naivety at the time – my main experience with RPGs comes from the 16-bit era and beyond – but I truly couldn’t fathom a game from the days of Squaresoft could be bad. How wrong I was…

The Good: The box/label art is awesome. All in one place you’ve got a pink-haired princess being protected by a knight in golden armor, and a dragon carrying a wizard and some prehistoric-looking child on his back. Not to mention it’s got that old-school anime look going for it so bonus points.

The Bad: There’s no direction whatsoever, no motivation to care, random characters, nameless and faceless enemies, an apathetic soundtrack, and to top it all off, the difficulty is brutal. Plus, I’m not even sure this should be classified as action or adventure as the game states.

The Glitchy: You lose health by getting hit by enemies, but in a bizarre twist of gameplay mechanics, also by collecting “down arrows” that can somehow litter the screen when you destroy the environment.

First Impressions: Well, thing’s started out innocent enough with the title screen. Then all of a sudden I was transported to some forest where my guy was scrolling upwards towards enemies and I had no idea what to do. No intro, no text, and not the slightest hint at what the hell I’m trying to do. It just wasn’t a great start at all, especially for me because I promptly died about 10 seconds in. I’m not one to shy away from difficult games, but this is just brutal.

Graphics: Look, it’s an NES game. I can barely remember my time playing TMNT or Mario on the NES as a kid so it’s hard for me to compare it to anything except later generations. I will say that I recall TMNT and Mario having a bit more detail, even when TMNT when to a top-down look (which is all King’s Knight utilizes). But, the game came out in 1989, before Squaresoft pulled itself from the brink with their Final Fantasy franchise so I’ll give the graphics an…average?

Trust me, the cart is more interesting than any game screens.

Sound: Not great. There are very basic sound effects for shooting your weapons…or whatever, and for when you destroy things and get hurt. There’s also a little riff going on in the background, but it all seemed just very unaware that there was a game going on. Sure the sounds matched up with their respective events, but if you’re asking me to hum this tune from memory, forget it.

Controls: Again, this is an NES game: D-pad for movement in all directions, and use of a single button for firing your weapon. Pretty simple stuff, I guess, and it’s responsive so things are par for the course in this category. Nothing more to see here, move along.

Gameplay: It must have been freeing to develop games “back in the day” (in this case, the 80s), because there wasn’t a lot of pressure to fit your game to a formula that had proven successful yet. Sure there were popular games, but there wasn’t that air of “Simpson’s did it!” in the industry. Because there was still so much uncharted territory, companies were free to try new things out.

Unfortunately for King’s Knight, this culminated in some odd concepts. First off, you shot projectiles/energy up the screen to destroy parts of the environment and enemies. This wasn’t a foreign concept in 1989, but then again your characters weren’t planes or spaceships – they were people (or in one case, a monster/dinosaur thing…more on that later). It just didn’t fit when a knight or a thief could shoot projectiles. A wizard, sure, but come on Squaresoft – I only have so much reality I can suspend for one game.

Second, your character could lose life by being hit by enemies or their weapons, but also from random down-arrows that appeared on screen from destroying things around you like trees or rocks. This is very confusing at first because of the lack of explanation, and I initially thought these arrows controlled the screen’s scroll speed. Needless to say, this is why I died quickly on my first playthough.

But the oddest thing is how you’re supposed to “beat” the game. This isn’t anything I figured out on my own because I never even got close: I had to look it up. Apparently you play as 4 warriors tasked with saving a princess or save the world or something. But since they don’t bother to explain this ever, it doesn’t really matter, now does it? You have the knight, the wizard, the monster, and the thief, and each has to collect certain items and then enter a dungeon of sorts to defeat a mini-boss, then at the end each character fights the main boss and things happen.

That last sentence is so boring I almost fell asleep writing it, and that’s about how much you’ll care about this in a game that is not only brutally difficult but has given you direction or clue as to what you need to do whatsoever. Plus, when you need to fulfill a series of tasks or events in order to beat a game and there’s no way of you knowing what those are, that game will soon be finding its way to the bottom of a trash can.

Story: I gave this away above multiple times, but there’s no way to figure out the story or plot unless you look it up online, or maybe beat the game, which is impossible. Trust me, it’s not worth the effort either way, so just come to terms with that and forget all about this game.

Final Thoughts: <sigh> I really had high hopes for this NES Squaresoft game, but they were for naught. This “action/adventure” romp to kill baddies and save…stuff did nothing but frustrate and confuse me. I guess if there’s one positive thing about this whole experience it’s that I know the great things that Squaresoft eventually went on to do in the gaming industry.

Final Score:

2/10

Graduated Gamer Reviews Captain Novolin

 

This review is going to be an issue for me because it’s going to be a fine dance between ripping a bad game and trying not to alienate a large group of people. That group of people would be diabetics, and the reason is because I reviewed the horridly designed and tackily named Captain Novolin.

For those of you unfamiliar with this game, Captain Novolin was created by the drug company Novo Nordisk who manufactured Novolin-brand insulin. Now the premise is, on the surface, admirable on the part of this multi-billion dollar corporation: use video games to teach kids with diabetes to eat healthy, stay active, and avoid pitfalls that can lead to unsafe blood glucose levels. However, using the name of your brand of insulin in the game title sort of starts us off on the wrong foot – even 7-Up named their game “Cool Spot” after the mascot, not the product (although I guess having an insulin hormone as your mascot would be sort of weird, huh?).

Anyway, back to the purpose of this game. It was intended to be used as a way for children with diabetes to not only learn how to control it, but also teach their friends about the disease in the form of a video game. However, all these good vibes immediately go out the window as soon as you start playing this tripe.

 

The game starts out silly enough, with the mayor captured by an evil alien who has also unleashed enemies in the forms of sugary foods. Their goal is to take over the world, but worst of all is the mayor is running low on insulin and you must get to him! Let’s get this straight – a small town mayor might die and that takes slight priority over saving the Earth? Sounds legit, let’s do it.

 

However, before you even get to the action, Captain Novolin needs to get tips from some terrifying renderings of humans in a cartoon world. One is apparently some nurse from the parts of hell where they keep clowns and those people from Soundgarden’s video for “Black Hole Sun”. Seriously, she’s scarier than any of the donuts or sugary drinks you’ll face later in the game: 

 

Are we sure she’s not the alien trying to enslave all of humanity? 

Dear God those eyes are burning a hole into my very soul!

Simply terrifying. Anyway, before you go after Blubberman (the creative name for our nemesis) and save the world rescue the mayor, you have to go through some trivia about managing your diabetes. This is where the game finally integrates the educational aspects with the gameplay. Before each stage you have a grocery list of what you should eat to maintain healthy blood glucose levels. Oh, and you have to shove a needle into your veins…

I have yet to fight a single bad guy, and I have had to 1) memorize some healthy foods to eat, 2) stare down a clown-nurse form the bowels of hell, and 3) awkwardly inject an electronic needle of insulin into my body. Yea, that’ll make your diabetes less awkward to explain to your friends:

“Hey Jimmy, let’s play Super Mario Kart!”

“Sorry Tommy, I gotta take my electronic insulin and fight donuts. Wanna watch?”

[In case you’re wondering, Jimmy no longer has friends.]
 

Now granted, you never actually see the injection of insulin, but the thought of it in a game like this for children is just a bit weird. Also, how do we know that’s really insulin and not heroine or something worse in that bottle? You just can’t trust satanic nurses like you used to.

Finally after the after-school special Captain Novolin is ready to kick some ass! To be honest, our hero looks like he could maybe be a badass. Sure he’s got a perpetual dopey grin on his face, but he’s ripped and looks like he’d do well in a fight. Here are your controls: walk and jump.

No punching. No kicking. No magic, or flying, or laser vision, or injecting enemies with “insulin”. You can walk along the road, and jump. Jumping is your best weapon as most of your enemies come at you in a straight line from the side of the screen. Still, I guess I can get over the fact that our world-saving hero is just some ripped dude who has diabetes and can jump really high (hell, for all we know Mario has diabetes and he’s chubby), but what I can’t get over is how he simply dies by touching food. It’s not like the food is jumping down his throat or anything, it’s just coming into contact with him. Don’t let that milkshake touch you three times, or you’ll collapse facedown into the gutter like a drunk – just like real life.

Honestly, at this point, I was beyond caring about any redeeming qualities anymore. The graphics were sub-par at best with bland backgrounds and repetitive character design, the “action” was non-existent, and on top of all that, the game was extremely difficult. Jumping was unresponsive and, if not timed just right, would cause you to come crashing down on your enemies, and although the enemies followed patterns, you were too concerned with not eating too much bread to see that box of sweets barrel down on top of you. But honestly, with a game this bad, the two best words you can see are Game Over.

I’ll be honest – I didn’t beat Captain Novolin, but can you blame me? I’m not a child, I’m not diabetic, and I’m not used to playing terrible games. I know that the game was created to help children, and I can’t fault anyone who made this game with that in mind (except for Novo Nordi$k who we know made thi$ to pu$h their brand of in$ulin). However, I doubt this game did anything more than terrify children and make them question their parent’s love for them (“Why would you make my play this, mommy?”).

I normally don’t do a rating system, but since I wrote this for Review A Bad Game Day, I gave it a score of 2/10. I would normally award it no points (and ask God to have mercy on its soul), but somebody has to think of the children. Please, for the sake of your health, stay away from this game.

[Note: Graduated Gamer has nothing against people with diabetes, just terrible video games.]