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.