Back to the Monday

Today was Monday. I didn't really do much, but I guess that is kind of par for the course. A lot of people here seem to not come in to work unless they have something specific to do at the office. I go in to study a bit, but I had office hours today, which meant I had to be there to do very little since very few people come in this early in the year, so I studied then. I don't know.

One thing I did do was play some Back to the Future for the NES, which is just as terrible as I remember it. It is such a grating game for a few reasons, which I think I will talk about for lack of anything else to say.

A lot of NES games suffer from horrible controls, which render them basically unplayable, and therefore forgettable. You try them once and give up. Back to the Future actually controls just like it is supposed to, so you are constantly under the illusion that you can succeed when you really can't, leading to much frustration.

The problems result from a few enemies/stages. The first is the bees. Why does it have to be bees? You are attacked numerous times each level by bees that are unfairly allowed to essentially home in on you, which is really unfair in what is basically a forced scrolling shooter because you can't move in a reasonable way while they can.

The next problem is the non-running stages. When I played the game almost every day on the actual NES, I managed to get past the first special stage through sheer devotion, but since then I've never been able to get past it. The perspective switches to a sideways shooter where you throw something at bullies who run at you. It looks like you are throwing sandwiches, but I can't tell. The problem is that there's no real visual indication which "slot" the enemies are in, so you sort of have to get very used to slight visual differences just to hit them, and the requirement for success is so absurdly high that only the most dedicated players will beat the stage, and it is only about 1/4 of the way through the game.

I'm not even going to bother mentioning that none of the game makes sense or has anything to do with Back to the Future in anything but the most tenuous sense. Try it on virtualnes.com if you want to see what I am talking about.