Jeremy Parish

NES Works Gaiden #044: Route 16 Turbo & Challenger (Patreon)

Published:

2022-08-31 11:47:04

Imported:

2024-04

Tags:

challenger famicom hudson nes works nes works gaiden route 16 turbo sunsoft

Content

With this episode, NES Works Gaiden has finally arrived at NES Works: Three days after Challenger's debut, the Nintendo Entertainment System would arrive in a handful of stores in New York City to see if Americans had gotten over the whole "Atari crash" thing. (Spoilers: We had.) While U.S. families were getting their first taste of early Famicom releases and Super Mario Bros., Japanese families could experience these: The beginning of the post-Super Mario wave of games that pushed beyond the boundaries of Atari-generation game design and into the more elaborate works we'd see in the late 1980s. Well, actually, I suppose Challenger owes a debt to 2600 games like E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but for all its jank, it manages to be a whole lot more comprehensible than either of those works thanks to the Famicom's superior graphical and storage capabilities; they remove the abstraction that Howard Scott Warshaw's work had to work within and give Challenger a more relatable feel. Which is not to say it's any fun, but hey.

Also, bonus talk about Rally-X, because I'll seize on any excuse to talk Namco classics.

Files

Route 16 Turbo & Challenger retrospective: Wheeling into the future | NES Works Gaiden #044

The two games in this episode have almost zero profile in the West, what with the whole "never having been released outside of Japan" thing. And yet, both hold what is in my opinion a fairly significant place in Famicom history (and therefore, by the transitive property, in NES history as well). Route 16 Turbo matters for what it symbolizes for Sunsoft; it offers our first glimpse into the company's talent for reworking existing concepts into something new and different, and it remains a pretty entertaining game nearly 40 years on. Challenger, on the other hand, does NOT remain entertaining. However, its sprawling, multi-modal game design offers a foretaste of the design methodology that would become standard fare on this platform: Action games turned immersive adventure, arcade twitch concepts infused with greater depth and substance. Also, lots of cheap untelegraphed deaths to pad play time. Production notes: Video Works is funded via Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/gamespite) — support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its YouTube debut! Plus, exclusive podcasts, eBooks, and more! NES/Famicom footage captured from @Analogue Nt Mini; arcade footage captured from MiSTer with thanks to @MiSTer Addons. Video upscaled to 720 with @Micomsoft xRGB Mini Framemeister.