• Tag Archives Rare
  • Time Lord (NES)

    Time Lord (NES)

    http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/170647078694/doiner-nes-time-lord

    No, Time Lord doesn’t have anything to do with Doctor Who even though that’s exactly what it sounds like. Time Lord is a completely unrelated game for the NES that involves traveling to various time periods in Earth’s history in order to defeat an alien force that is attacking in those time periods in order to change history and make Earth easier to conquer in the present. You get to use various weapons found in the time period you are in from swords to lasers and everything in between. Despite not being Doctor Who related, it still sounds pretty cool. Another plus is that this game was developed by Rare. Rare is known today for having developed some pretty incredible games.

     

    Unfortunately, as this game proves, not everything Rare touched was gold, especially in the early days (Time Lord was released in 1990). This game just doesn’t really live up to its cool sounding story. The game plays like a fairly typical sides scrolling platform adventure game. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that and the graphics are fairly decent as well. The problem comes with the difficulty and the repetitive nature of the game. While the different levels / time periods look different enough, they all really play very much the same. The lack of variety combined with the difficulty make this a hard game to finish. It doesn’t help that the game is timed. If you don’t defeat the enemy by January 1st, 3000 then you will self destruct along with your time machine. The game starts in the year 2999 and a day bases every 6 seconds in real-time so if you do the math you have a little over 36 minutes to beat the game. The difficulty would be more bearable if not for the repetitive nature of the game.

     

    As far as I know, this game has never been re-released or had a sequel. The good news is that if you really want to give it a try, original cartridges are fairly cheap and easy to come by. If you are a Rare completist or maybe just enjoy especially difficult and frustrating games then this may just be the game for you.





  • NARC (NES)

    Narc was first a 1988 arcade game and was the first to be released by Williams after being acquired by Midway. Several ports were made to various home systems in 1990 including to the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, and NES. The home computer versions were all done by Ocean software while the NES port was done by Rare and published by Acclaim.

    Most of the home ports were pretty average. I think the reason NARC is remembered today is because it was a controversial game at the time. It was one of the first games with this level of violence. The goal of the game is to arrest or kill various junkies, drug dealers and king pins culminating with Mr. Big. In the manual for the NES version of the game it was described as the first video game with a strong anti-drug message. Ironically, all references to drugs were removed from the NES version.

    Nintendo has always had seemingly odd censorship rules. In this particular game, references to drugs were removed but most or all of the violence was retained. However, the splash of blood on the cover was changed to be yellow so it didn’t look like blood.

    Midway Arcade Treasures 2 released in 2004 for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube had an emulated version of the arcade version of the game (with a few glitches) and in 2005 there was a remake of the game (also controversial) for the PS2, Xbox and PC.

    The ad and screenshots above are all from the NES version.

    http://darth-azrael.tumblr.com/post/158615816812/tarpittales-bust-mr-big