Golgo 13 For the Nintendo Entertainment System! Or as I like to call it: The one where I have SEX but in real life I'm only 12!!!
I need to be fair and straight up right off the bat: I did not beat this game. My shame is great, but not overwhelming, for I know that I am a solid casual gamer and NOT of the personality that I feel like I HAVE to beat a level when that level is so difficult and frustrating that I just want to punch the person reading this article. If that happens to me in a game, after a good number of hours it's like: F*ck it. This isn't fun. I'm playing this to have fun and experience entertainment, not feel like an angry failure. Or, alternatively, a pathetic failure. So take everything said here with a grain of salt, as it may be that the later 3/4 of this game are the most amazingly fun challenges in gaming history and we're all missing out by reading this and not playing it right now.
It's hard to rip on a game that went out of its way to be diverse and creative. (4 distinct game genres of play!) There’s a legitimate (complicated) storyline with great music to match. But, alas, the shortcomings, like freaking impossible mazes, make what could have been a NES classic into……an obscure title. (Eh? See what I did there?) (Cause the name of the article is obscu-you get it.)
The 007-esque plot is: You are Duke Togo. A spy! But a CIA helicopter has been shot down and there was a weapon on board, and maybe somebody got it, and the Russian KGB is definitely involved, and you should investigate, but then a….thing happens……lot of people to talk to……there’s a virus……yeah, there is a LOT of talking in this game and I could not follow what was going on- it’s just too complicated and fragmented. But props for trying- I mean, you know, plenty of NES titles don't even have a story: Track and Field, Balloon Fight, Super Off Road, Dr. Mario......Tetris.
As mentioned earlier, there are FOUR distinct game genres of play:
Golgo 13 or......CHUCK NORRIS?!!???
Side Scrolling: You start out the game with this genre. You’re in a town with red buildings in the background, some of which you can enter and talk to people to progress the story or get hints on where to go. You're wearing a fairly pimp blue suit and you can either jump, kick, or shoot the bad guys (who are wearing decidedly NOT pimp green suits). They all die in one shot. Duke can jump 5 people lengths into the air, so, think 25-foot dropkicks. Your helpful contacts who roam the streets are also wearing ugly green suits, but bullets pass right thru them. Sometimes guys on motorcycles will ride into you. Jump out of their way, but don’t bother shooting them as their motorcycles outrun your bullets. Sometimes a huge gun will enter the screen and shoot at Duke, thus changing the gameplay to:
Quick! Shoot that Giant Incoming Missile out of the air before it hits you!
First Person Shooter: You move a crosshair around the town (it looks different) and shoot both bad guys on the ground and huge helicopters in the air. Most die with one shot. One of my favorite moments in the game comes not when you shoot down a helicopter with your pistol in one shot, but, when in a water level, you use your pistol to shoot a SUBMARINE that explodes in THREE shots. Thank goodness they cleared that up because after shooting the helicopters in one shot with my HAND HELD PISTOL I was gonna start questioning this games realism, especially after the whole bullet velocity motorcycle problem mentioned earlier. The feel of this part of the game is meh, as sometimes bad guys are hard to find and keep shooting you while you're scrolling from left to right trying to find them. Fortunately these scenes only last about 30 seconds. Later on:
Quick! Shoot that......the hell?
Moving Helicopter Battles!: It's like those games where you’re flying in a helicopter in a side scrolling game but the screen is always moving to the right and bad guys come at you from the right hand side of the screen and you have to shoot them! You can fly forward, back, up, and down, and the planes that attack you are varied and shoot in different patterns. Also there’s these gigantic floating circle bad guys that have other floating circles circling the central circle…they take a lot of hits. The feel of this Helicopter part of the game is good…if this section of the game had a B button super special attack, some power ups and different background scenery this could have been the whole game, and a fun one. However, someone who played too many freaggin’ jigsaw puzzles when they were a kid just had to throw in:
BOOM! Headshot. Take THAT United States Army or Military.
The First Person Maze Levels: With no overhead view, no map, and a wonky feel, the maze levels sucked hard. They sucked so hard you guys. Floors give way and drop you down to ANOTHER MAZE! which is just as complicated as the maze you were sucking at before you fell, but you have to beat this maze just to get to a ladder that takes you to the ORIGINAL level of the maze! But by then you've already forgotten where you can't go, and you fall down a level again because you stepped in the same place that you fell down before, but it's still so complicated and awkward you can't remember how to solve the lower level maze from a few G-d Damn minutes ago so it's like you’re starting from scratch Gaaaah!!!! Not to mention there’s a fake maze that goes nowhere. A Fake. Maze. That goes nowhere. You only realize this after exploring the fake maze for hours. You have grenades that you can throw when walls randomly close right in front of your face, but sometimes you're supposed to throw them at dead ends, but this doesn't always work and it's unclear when you’re supposed to do that. There are bad guys standing around in certain areas…push A to get a cross hair, then tap left once and it puts the crosshair automatically on them…. Just hit A again to shoot them dead and that refills your grenades back to 3. You know what? Just writing about this pisses me off, that's how bad it was. It pisses me off even more because of the cool things this game had going for it.
The music is good. It sets the tone, starting off with a slow, lonely feel, like, "what's going on, I’m just starting this game but I'm unsure- where am I, who am I, ok, kinda getting a feel for this" and then BAM! It ratchets up for the next scene and it's all like duh nuhhh nuh-nuh-nuhhhhh, and there’s like a bass groove and everything. And it's long enough to only repeat a couple times before the end of a level. Which is no problem because the music’s so badass you FEEL like a spy…..a spy named Duke Togo, I might add. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB4Yl1koV3Q Jump to 2:35, wait 15 seconds…and you’re a spy
Speaking of names, the colorful cast of characters includes names like Dirk Bullit, Cherry Grace (More on her in a second), Maria Lovelette, Fake Enormous (Who, I kid you not, is a midget), Red River Jr., Condor, and Ladies White. Of course, I didn't actually get to MEET most of these people since I couldn't get past the maze levels, but I'm sure they were all very nice.
In the beginning of the game you get your first mission from Cherry Grace, who I refer to as a 10 bit character as opposed to an 8 bit character because she's an F’ing 10! In the dialogue when characters speak you can see everyone’s face close up, and she is one of the more attractive NES characters you will come across in a game. I only mention this because
YOU HAVE STEAMY HEALTH REJUVINATING SEX WITH CHERRY GRACE IN A HOTEL!
'nuff said.
OK It might be a motel but it doesn't even matter because Oh My G-d you guys….You see 2 figures in a hotel window, they come together in an embrace, the lights go out and then your health meter at the top of the screen goes up to full. The first time this happened I immediately tried to re-enter the hotel just to have sex again but some ugly hotel guy (Red River Jr.) told me Cherry had left. Literally I would purposely loose almost all my health right before this point in the game just so that the sex scene would last longer. It was as epic as it sounds, you guys. In fact, this game isn't that bad. I was giving it a hard time earlier cause of the maze stuff, but, you know, maybe this whole game is just like a huge metaphor, with the sex scene being like……sex, and the frustrating maze scenes being like all the times when we're not having sex and we have to deal with frustrating women HAAH am I right guys????????????11111111???
Not to gloss over this but there’s a cool part of the game where you have to snipe somebody from a helicopter and the crosshair is shaking because…you’re in a helicopter. When you shoot the bad guy blood comes out of his head when he dies. In a NES game. Keep in mind this game was released before No More Heroes for the Wii.
Golgo 13 strives to be a cool 007 adventure without the nasty copyright issues. And with a spy story, great music, and diverse gameplay, this title could have been a NES classic preceding Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64. But in a game that is 13 Acts (levels) long, when I can't get past the 3rd act without cheating by going online in order to look up a map of each maze that some other gamer just as frustrated as me painstakingly figured out and drew in order to provide for all the other miserable people playing this game…I'm going to have to pass. And give this the lowest possible score, a 0 out of 5. Except the sex bumps it up to 2.5. OK, also the music and story and diverse play styles, Sheesh.
2.5/5 Frustratingly only being able to get through 1/4 of a game has never been so much fun!
(Also, for some hilarious insight into this game, check out this screen capture play through): http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Golgo13/Update%201/index.html
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