I recently downloaded an emulator and a handful of ROMs from Nintendo games that I played as a kid, and wanted to post about a handful of them here. I’ve been meaning to post about some of these early games since last year, but Patrick McGoohan’s death derailed my posting plans.
1. Mission: Impossible
This one was based on the 1988 Mission: Impossible series, put out by Konami in 1990. The late Peter Graves assigns your missions in this overhead style action game. As you can tell from the video above, the best thing about this game is the introduction. Otherwise, gameplay is surprisingly frustrating. A side-scroller would have been more effective.
2. The Mafat Conspiracy
This is one of my all-time top 10 favorite NES games, especially now that I have a map to the mazes. The gameplay is fun, and as a kid, I pretended that Duke Togo, aka assassin Golgo-13, was actually James Bond. There were so many cool things about the first three levels of this game that I’m looking forward to finally finishing the rest of it as an adult. Check out the awesome intro imagery at 2:36. This was the second Golgo-13 game, but I never owned the first.
3. The Hunt For Red October
In this ridiculous game, you control the titular submarine like a fish while shooting a variety of objects. NES games based on movies were usually crap. This one was at least better than games based on Tom Cruise (Top Gun, Days of Thunder) films. As a kid who spent time doing a book report on Hunt For Red October and begging to see the film the second it was in theaters, I wanted to play as Jack Ryan. Apparently, there’s a level at the end of the NES game that I never reached where you actually play as Ramius, running around the October defusing bombs.
4. Man From UNCLE
I didn’t own this one either, but I’m including here because neither did anyone else. When following on the success of the Mission: Impossible licensing, Ultra Games / Konami looked further back in the spy-fi archives and created a game based on the adventures of Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin (who was the second player character in this side-scrolling shoot’em up, reportedly just a recolor of the Nap Solo sprite with blonde hair). Each cut scene featured an introduction from Alexander Waverly, and there’s where the trouble began. While they had the rights to use the images of actors Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, they hadn’t sought approval from the estate of the late Leo G. Carroll. This held up release of the game to the point where Konami moved onto other projects. The video above is taken from a bootleg ROM distribution that unfortunately crashes once you click past the menu screen.
What’s your favorite spy-related NES game? Let me know in the comments section!
