Game 476: Nuts & Milk

It's fine. You can snicker at the title.

 

It was third party developers that made Nintendo into a home entertainment juggernaut, and Hudson Soft was the first of many notables, debuting in 1984 with Nuts & Milk and a licensed port of Lode Runner, the latter of which, being a straight port, is of no interest to me, except for one little familiar visual detail.

Screenshot from Mobygames

As for Nuts & Milk, let me start by saying that this title screen looks exactly like every other first generation Famicom game. Same menu layout, same font, same set of options, including an editor mode like a handful of others, which can be saved to cassette tape using the Japan-only Famicom Data Recorder accessory.

Unlike Lode Runner, this is no port. In fact, while the Famicom versions of both Bomberman and Binary Land have some similarities to Hudson Soft's original computer versions, this game has none except for the recurring characters and the presence of a level editor. It's a 2D puzzle platformer with aspects of both Donkey Kong and Lode Runner. Also unlike Lode Runner, this game never left Japan, except an obscure PAL region C64 port renamed "Hot Pop."

Regarding the game modes, I quickly came to the conclusion that Game B, which in typical first-generation Nintendo fashion is the more difficult mode, is also the intended gameplay experience, with Game A a modified easy mode with fewer hazards. 2 Player Game is, as you might expect, just an alternating play mode.

Your challenge - collect all of the fruit while avoiding Nuts. Often easier said than done - Nuts can go anywhere you do, but moves slightly slower, and is really, really stupid. Even on Game B.

Nuts is suicidal but respawns quickly.

One advantage you have is that you can wrap-around on the horizontal edges of the screen, and Nuts will never do that, but take care; blimps will spawn on the left edge without warning and kill you on contact. Helicopters, on the other hand, spawn on the right edge and award bonus points on contact. Nobody ever said Nintendo games made consistent logic a priority.

Collect the last fruit and a girl Milk welcomes you home.

 

Every few levels is a bonus round with no Nuts and no penalty for failure.

  

There are over 50 levels, and for the most part they're pretty well designed, but each one can be beaten in a few seconds. Maybe not on your first try. Maybe not on several tries, they get difficult rather quickly. Nuts, much like the guards in Lode Runner, is stupid and predictable, but relentless, and figuring out how to get him out of your way so you can grab that last piece of fruit and live can be a trial in pathfinding logic or just plain trial and error. Often times, beating or failing a level comes down to making a tricky jump, which can demand pixel precision even when the point you must leap from to make the landing is straightforward, and it sometimes isn't.

You'll die a lot, but unless you care about score, and I don't, lives are meaningless. You can start on any level you like, with one very annoying caveat; you don't choose a level as in Wrecking Crew. You skip the level you're currently on by pressing the select button, and repeat until you're on the level you want to play. Got a game over on level 45 and want to try it again? Gotta start a new game and skip the level 44 times.

Because of this, I used save states, not to cheat through any level, but so that I could restart failed levels quickly.

Sometimes you have to deal with multiple Nuts.

 

Sometimes you have to manipulate Nuts to get him out of your way.

  

Did I mention Nuts is really stupid?

Sometimes the jump physics are a bigger threat than Nuts.

One of the simplest levels is also one of the trickiest yet.

 

Big difficulty spike in the 40's. Damn center fruit gets me every time.

 

This must be it!

Beat the last level and there's no ending; it just loops back to level 1.

GAB rating: Above average. It's a bit primitive, and often frustrating, but then again, so were all of the Famicom launch games. The visuals are cute and humorously animated, and for what it occasionally lacks in polish, it makes up for in generosity with 50 levels, about 30 of them good levels. It's no Lode Runner, but overall, not a bad waste of a few hours.

Games 473-475: Early Hudson Soft

 

Hudson Soft, a now defunct telecommunications shop in Hokkaido, is undoubtedly best known today for the Bomberman series, their long-running partnership with Nintendo, and to a lesser extent in the U.S. but a greater extent in Japan, the PC Engine console. Appropriately, the Famicom version of Bomberman is their first whale, but in exploring Hudson's back catalog we can see bias in my selection methods; their early output had quite a bit on NEC and Sharp computers, including text adventures Dezeni Land and Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom which look absolutely insane and would interest me if I could read Japanese. They would also port Nintendo's early games to these computers, and some of these ports are downright strange, such as a version of Super Mario Bros. with page-flip scrolling and unique levels and enemies. However, my initial selection are all arcade-style computer games which would eventually be ported or remade on the Famicom.

Incidentally, Wikipedia says the earlier Sega-published Pengo was an influence on Bomberman, citing Zero magazine as a sole reference. Having played Pengo, I can say it's not half bad, but I can't say it's definitely a predecessor. And so we begin this Hudsonsoft retrospective with... Bomberman. The PC-8801 BASIC version.

 

Game 473: Bomber Man 

 

 

Created as a demo to show off Hudson Soft's own BASIC interpreter, this initial version is not great. I was expecting it would be barebones, with no powerups, no multiplayer, no music, only one enemy type, and fiddly movement controls in typical PC-8801 fashion. That last aspect can become a real pain point here; you move in half-step increments, but there is no input latching and instead the game just polls the keyboard a few times each second, leading to dropped inputs, Bomberman getting stuck mid-tile, and bombs put down in useless positions.

But I wasn't expecting a Bomberman game where the bombs themselves are not barriers to your enemies or yourself, and this completely changes the dynamic. There's no trapping enemies with bombs here; instead you need to lay arrays of bombs, often with an angry red balloon monster in close pursuit, and then dodge their line-of-sight and manipulate their movement patterns so that they move into your blast patterns.

My best attempt - and I can't say I had a whole lot of patience to try to do much better -  made it to stage 4 and scored 6730 points.

 

To score well means searching each level for the hidden treasure, which is found in one of the bricks along with a hidden exit. After that, the next-best thing for your score is killing all of the enemies as quickly as possible for a time-based bonus. The stairs themselves, which are also hidden in a brick somewhere, are to be avoided; you'll forfeit the bonus on the current level and advance to the next, more difficult one, and as far as I know, the game is endless.

Bomber Man does seem to have some room to improve performance with strategy. I expect that mastering enemy movement manipulation is key to clearing higher rounds. The balloon monsters cycle between four different colors, and each one has a corresponding degree of aggression, which I'm sure comes from Pac-Man. But there's an unavoidable element of luck, as sometimes the AI or the controls just don't cooperate, and on occasion, the level just begins with an enemy right on top of you, giving you no chance at all.

GAB rating: Below average. Borderline bad, really. Bomberman's classic formula was never great in singleplayer mode, and this clumsy first go at it is no exception.

 

Game 474: Binary Land 

Finding a copy of this game was hard! The Famicom and MSX ports are widely available, but they're not quite the same as the Japanese micro original. Thankfully I found a Sharp X1 copy in a dark corner of the Archive which seems to be more or less a first edition.

 

Binary Land is a world of mazes and spiders in which a boy and girl, Gurin and Malon, must navigate and arrive at the goal together, simultaneously. The twist is that you control both at the same time, and one's movement always mirrors the other horizontally. It's honestly not very difficult, even when the mazes are asymmetrical. Spiders are your only hazard, and their webs aren't fatal; it can be a valid strategy to trap one in a web on purpose while the other clears the rest of the nest with unlimited bug spray. Most of my deaths were due to unresponsive controls. Never presume you can change direction and immediately start spraying; the input poll will most likely skip the direction and you'll be stuck spraying the wrong way as a spider creeps up behind you.

Around level 30, the difficulty does spike a bit, but patience, and a little luck, will get you through. At level 32 you're rewarded with what I think is supposed to be a baby.

 

GAB rating: Below average. It's better than Bomber Man, but not very interesting, and doesn't do very much with its two-player simultaneous control gimmick.

 

Game 475: Nuts and Milk

 

Nuts & Milk is an objectively awful video game title. Unlike Bomberman and Binary Land, this one is almost completely unrelated to its Famicom remake the following year.

You control Milk, the white blobby thing, and have to collect a bunch of fruit in a maze while running away from Nuts, the cyan blobby things, who mainly just encircle the mazes in predictable patterns but can certainly catch you off guard if you don't plan ahead. Parts of each level are filled with diggable dirt tiles, but beware; dirt returns after a few seconds and will kill you and any Nuts trapped there when it does. Plan and time your fruit snatches accordingly.

 

There are 24 levels, plus, interestingly, a level editor, but I got stuck on round 6 and I suspect that in order to pass it I would need to attain a mastery over Nuts manipulation which I am not interested enough to pursue.

 

GAB rating: Average. I'm being a bit generous because I didn't really give this one as much of a chance as I gave Binary Land. I can say that this is certainly the best of the three games I played for this retrospective, but didn't feel very compelled to really explore it and find out how much better.