Obscure Title Tuesday: Nightshade!

Welcome to Obscure Title Tuesday! Nothing like the offer to write weekly for a video game review website to get my mind off of the skull-numbing awfulness of law school!! (No offense Syracuse.) (But really…it's bad, you guys.)

Nightshade for the Nintendo Entertainment System! (Or, as I refer to it in jealousy since I never owned a Super Nintendo….Regular Nintendo.)

Nightshade is an enjoyable obscure game with a fairly classic superhero plot: Wannabe superhero Nightshade decides to step up to protect the city in place of the legitimate fallen hero. (Whose corpse you find hanging poisoned later on in the game. Badass!) This 'taking up the reigns of a former, established superhero' is further accentuated throughout the game by not only the fact that various townspeople keep biffing your name (Lampshade, Nightman, Nighthawk…copyright?) but there is a 'popularity' meter which goes up or down depending on whether you do generally honorable or crappy things. You need a certain amount of popularity to reach the later parts of the game.

The controls are similar to both a side-scroller and a point-and-click game. You control trench coat-wearing Nightshade, who can walk around the screen and fight crime with various kicks and punches, and you can walk left, right, up or down to change the scene. Clicking select, however, gives you a cursor which you can use to point and click on things in the game, and also if you scroll to the bottom of the screen, options such as 'pick up,' 'examine,' 'use,' 'operate,' etc., appear.

The Town, Metro City, is fairly large with very good graphics for a NES game. The skyscrapers are convincing and the town is diverse with cemeteries, bars, pawn shops, restaurants, nightclubs, and an apartment building that's on fire! (You can rush in and save a woman, thus building your popularity meter.) Side note: In a department store, if you walk up to the changing rooms and click operate, the curtain slides back revealing a woman in her underwear. She screams and you lose popularity points. Of course, if you don't give a crap, you can just keep on clicking on that dressing room and continue to lose popularity points and creep on that 8 bit hottie like my 8-year-old self did--not gonna lie.

In one of my favorite moments in the game, everything goes white except for a small blue box in the center of the screen with a question mark in.........I think something's wrong with my computer.

I think the tone and greatest thing about this game can best be captured by simply explaining exactly what happens in the first one minute of starting the game. A cut scene occurs in which Nightshade talks about crime in the city, hopelessness, and despair, then decides, triumphantly, to protect the city and uphold justice. In the first scene of the actual game, you are tied to a chair in a sewer with the main bad guy, Sutekh, behind you, taunting: "Your superhero career is over before it has even begun! Now no one can stop me!" Behind you are a lit bomb and a candle. All you can do is wiggle to and fro in your chair. Clicking select and examining the only two items nearby, the bomb and the candle, yield these two messages:
“There is a seriously large bomb right behind you, about to explode. If only Nightshade wasn't tied to this chair with easily burnable rope.”
“There is a lit candle here in the sewer for absolutely no reason. Hmmmm.”

You unsurprisingly use the candle to burn through the ropes, but not before the bomb explodes in your face and kills 3/4th of your health! IN THE FIRST TWELVE SECONDS OF GAMEPLAY!! I love that. It establishes Sutekh as a legitimate bad guy who is NOT messing around! He will detonate a bomb IN YOUR FACE and leave you to die in a sewer. You want to beat the game just so you can kick him in the ass. I mean, Jesus, 3/4 of my life! It's been twelve seconds, man!

A conspicuous lever on the left and suit of armor on the right, ay? Hmmm....

The humor is what makes this game what it is. From the first moments of the game with the bomb and the candle, humor, sarcasm, irony, and…um….situational irony are at every turn. Some of my favorite moments include: You save a townsperson from a thief and he says: "Thank you! Here is a seriously large wad of money!" He then runs away into the night. Also, one of the stock bad guys you fight throughout the game is a robot that is '2 dimensions' (You have to jump over it and punch it when it turns.) In Nightshade's first encounter with it, he says: "Oh No!…….2 Dimensions!……..Inconceivable!" The whole game is, of course, in 2-dimensions itself. It's irony! You can get a whistle that literally serves no purpose for the whole game, but you can blow on it and it goes, "Tweet. Tweet. Tweeeeeeeeeet!" and Nightshade says: "Ah, music. I was born to it."

You can't get past this one part in the game because a stereotypical Italian chef won't let you pass through the nightclub kitchen. You then explore the town and find the only other stereotypical Italian-looking chef in the whole game. You save him from a ninja (The game has ninjas.) and he tells you to, "Go-a talk-a to my Brother! He will-a help you!" As soon as you walk into the kitchen the chef says, "Hey--You look-a like the kind of person who recently talked to my brother! Go on ahead!" My favorite moment comes early on in the game. You get a crowbar and, while still experimenting with the point-and-click control style, you try to use the crowbar on a nearby statue. I kid you not, the game says:
"The statue moves revealing one million dollars, plus you win the Johhny and Linedeckers award for excellence in crowbar durability! Just kidding, the crowbar snaps in two. Just kidding."
The first time I read that I thought I ruined my crowbar or I was rich. It was actually neither…..just an awesome game.

Also of noteworthiness is what happens when you die. Every time you die, Sutketh puts you in an elaborate death trap. Uniquely, there is a way to get out of each of them (there are six) except for the last one. The first one is a slow-moving conveyer belt (you can use your foot to stop the belt), the second one is a slow-moving wall coming towards you….actually, they all involve slow-moving somethings. However, for some, to survive you need a specific item, like the crowbar. Once you escape, you return to the city's main street. This functions as a continue or an extra life.

If only Nightshade could reach that 'stop' lever with his foot, but alas he is tied in place on a moving conveyer belt which will take him right past the....oh.

Beating the game is satisfying, and even if you don't, you get a humorous rating with a percentage of the game completed, to see how close or far you came. The first time I played the game I died immediately and received the rating of 'Total Wuss' and I completed 0 percent of the game. The difficulty factor is moderate, importantly not too easy, with a cool blend of fighting, side-scrolling, and point-and-clicking. It's funny, enjoyable, and still playable today. If you can find it (online, who are we kidding?) give it a go!

4/5 Humorous! Playable! Irony!!