I have fond memories of playing Chiller at a friend's house back in the 80s. Seeing the torture room blew my mind. It felt like we were committing a crime just playing the game.
I remember struggling a lot with Kid Icarus 1-1 and 1-4, then practically breezing through the rest of the game. I also remember the eggplant wizards feeling like crueler 1-hit kills because it was faster to kill yourself than to find the nurse to cure it.
Kid Icarus is so weird. I think of it as some kind of NES classic. Pit was even in the cartoon alongside Simon and Megaman. But it never advanced. It makes me wonder, in a different timeline, if Kid Icarus would have been in there with Mario, Metroid, and Zelda as a franchise still alive today if it weren"t so difficult and impenetrable. Maybe they just didn't know what to do with it.
I played the hell out of Kid Icarus back in the day. I beat it 30+ times over and kept my ever-growing password list in a spiral notebook. It was just so much different from other Nintendo fare then. It's fantasy like Zelda, but with more action. It's platforming like Mario, but with more power-ups. It's a journey like Metroid, but more straight-forward. Add to that a cool instruction manual, catchy music, and a triumphant finale, and it's a damn shame that Nintendo didn't iterate more on this beyond the Game Boy release.
I only played Kid Icarus because I had a friend who bought it, couldn't get anywhere in it, and HATED it. She gave it to me to try and I beat it. She still hates me for that! LOL
Fun fact, rhe composer of the Pictionary theme is the same one who did the title track for Solstice. Tim Follin. Look him up, he's an absolute legend when it comes to game soundtracks.
Always look forward to these on Fridays. I never grew up with Kid Icarus and ended up playing it around 2010. My feelings towards it are basically the opposite of yours where the more I play through it, the more I enjoy it. I love how fuckin' weird it is. A backwards difficulty curve, weird enemies like flying Groucho Marx noses, and a fun sense of humor with having things like credit cards and being able to haggle with the shop owners.
Kid Icarus is one of those games where there is fun to be had underneath, but the start of it is brutal. Still a good game though. And I honestly can't decide which goes harder: Cobra Triangle's gameplay or Pictionary's music. Who knew that Pictionary for the NES was in the running for one of the best NES soundtracks? And Thrilla's Surfari is such a bummer considering how much I love the skateboarding from the first T&C. If only the skateboarding felt as good as it did in the first game. Onto Episode 18!!
Kid Icarus continues my trend: 1. Watch Jeff struggle with something. 2. Watch a speedrun and determine that it's not so bad. 3. I struggle and wonder what I was thinking.
Kid Icarus is a top 5 NES game for me for sure. I just love the whole vibe of it, the quirkiness, the difficulty level, Hip Tanaka's music. That, Metroid and the Zeldas are probably my top 4. Gonnies 2 or Faxandau maybe as a fifth then a bunch of Megaman games, Little Samson, Shadowgate, Castlevania III and Snake Rattle 'n' Roll after that somewhere.
...I had Cobra Triangle, and I know I never got to see the goofy crab. I think the main draw for me as a kid with this game was the "vast sense of water". It's not that it was a good game, as much as it was a way to accessibly engage with the idea of vast bodies of water (I remember the "saving dudes" segment as essentially being the entirety of the game, and it being really difficult to save all of them). Sometimes games like these are just memorable for being the first ways young children can engage with emotionally loaded concepts like "the vast concept of the ocean" (I also very vividly remember a nightmare I had as a child of Mega Man 2, in an underwater-stage, encountering a gigantic whale, and just the scale of things were terrifying). ...I looked up who made Cobra Triangle, and it made sense that it was Rare, who also did Snake Rattle and Roll. There's something about the auto-scroll stages in Cobra Triangle that feel very Snake Rattle (probably can't talk about "shared engines", but maybe similarities in art-asset generation). ...also, very Amiga-esque "constant energetic music, at all times" for cobra triangle.
..there's a surprising amount of NES games - that I had no idea existed - that might as well have come straight out of the C64 scene (and in some cases probably did). A very strong first-party developer (and active hands-on-messaging of how your platform should be seen) goes a really long way at obfuscating all these weirdo releases that inevitably comes along when your platform is this massive. It kinda makes it interesting to think about how much of "what a platform is" is up to messaging rather than a sober take on "all the games that are on it" (maybe more so now, when platforms as a thing are very loosey-goosey, and way less of a big deal than it used to be).
Oh wow, he was literally just a few screens away from the non top scrolling levels in Kid Icarus. Oh which I never knew about until I just looked up a lets play lol......and oh my that game is actually long, and has a side scrolling shmup stage. WOW. who would have ever known lol WIsh he got there or watched that TAS lol. I bet his mind would have changed on it.
Yeah the thing about Kid Icarus is the difficulty is very front loaded. If you can just get past those opening climbing stages the game gets progressively easier from there, and I'd say more fun and interesting too.
Do people have lasting love for Kid Icarus: Uprising? I enjoyed it a lot, but I also remember constantly defending the game from nay-sayers, especially over the control setup, and these days, I rarely hear anyone other than myself speak about it fondly.
You missed(?) out by not checking what the Alternative mode was in Pictionary. It's standard drawing, but for some idiotic reason it uses driving controls.
Thrilla's Safari was very appealing to me when it was released. Anything skateboarding was my jam at the time. I remember the controls felt pretty good. Only problem it was obscenely difficult and I don't think I ever made it past that first level. 1-1 1-2 lose and restart for the duration of my game rental. Somehow still fond memories.
Kid icarus is one of less than 10 nes games Ive ever completed. And I've done it twice due to the 3d classics version. It's funny how front loaded the difficulty is.
I had the gray cart variant for Chiller. Came with a big lot of games during my collecting years. It's terrible. Someone paid a lot for it when I had to drop part of my collection though. Cobra Triangle was fun, but the ice!
Other games in the Cabal style I can think of: Wild Guns and the arcade game Blood Bros., which was also Western-themed. I played Blood Bros. all the time at the roller rink I visited a lot as a kid.
while the 3DS game is pretty weird in its own ways i will always appreciate how truly weird original Kid Icarus is. never played the game boy one though
It seems the problem with Thrilla's Surfari is that they give you the option of playing the game in two ways, and one of them is impossible while the other is not fun. I think they could have fixed this by either adding a timer to the level and using an Excitebike-style mechanic that lets you get back on the skateboard (not as punishing but still keeping a risk/reward element) or by using a shoot-em-up-style respawn system and resetting the level only on a game over.
My parents got Kid Icarus and an advantage controller for me for Christmas 1987. I developed such a love/hate relationship with Kid Icarus. I played it every day, getting an inch further each time. I died a million times. To this day when I hear the "game over" tune I say "Son. Of. A. B*tch" along with the last four notes.
I don't think I even knew there was an NES version of Chiller back when it was new, though I'm pretty sure I played the arcade game at least a few times. Never really liked it, I was squeamish as a kid about anything gory (and this meant I mostly avoided horror in all media, something that didn't change until I played Silent Hill 2) and there wasn't enough interesting in the gameplay to make it worth enduring the ugliness.
Cabal just about ruined me. It was just an instinctive hatred for it, and I couldn't wait for the segment to end. But I persisted, and I was rewarded with the Killer Rhino, and that made this entire journey worth it in the end.
Interesting to see how Zapper game sausage was made looking at Chiller. KI was another one of those games I bought, beat and returned in the same day. Summer vacations were awesome and that beer wasn't going to buy itself.
Still feel like Jeff didn't give a fair shake to Little Nemo and Batman. He didn't even beat the first level of Batman. That game is hard as hell and very unforgiving, but c'mon, at least beat the first level. I beat it as a kid! Probably in the minority on this one, but also Journey to Silius. That banging Sunsoft soundtrack alone deserves to bump that game up a few spots!
I don't know I think the NES version of Maniac Mansion is the better version, each of the kids have their own theme and I like the art style more. It feels like a dark comedy teen 80's horror movie vibe wise instead of the C64 cartoonish look.
I have many fond memories of playing kid icarus, I mostly remember it's punishing difficulty. Still hard to believe this came from the same team who did metroid, which is a masterpiece of course. Still has great music though
The Password Series, right? Icarus and Metroid with the two-way scrolling, both part Gunpei Yokoi's legacy. I never put much effort into KI back then, just not enough going on compared to Metroid.
The arcade version of Chiller is genuinely horrifying. Like, I'm a big horror nut and I'm certainly not squeamish about gore, but gradually shooting a restrained person's face off so you're left with a bloody skull showing through, all while their piercing digitised screams fill your ears... yeah, it's kinda messed up.
Moment of silence for the real ones who didn’t make it to see Cobra triangle on NES🖤💜
Thank God I lived long enough to witness this Legendary Game, truly a Masterpiece.
(but yeah, aside from Pour One Out, it's actually pretty good!)
I look forward every Friday for these episodes.
I have fond memories of playing Chiller at a friend's house back in the 80s. Seeing the torture room blew my mind. It felt like we were committing a crime just playing the game.
Fuck yeah.
Pictionary theme.
Tim Follin filling those NES carts with unimaginable pizzazz.
He had the groove.
All the NES Athena slander hurts, but I know it's true
Ah, yes. Kid Icarus. The game that teaches children about the dangers of credit card debt.
I dont think ive had even 150 energy drinks in my life (not counting coffee)
I hope Jeff plays Metalstorm soon
What on gods green earth made them decide to make Pictionary go that god damn hard lol
The music in that Pictionary game is so damn good.
Should force Dan to play Pictionary as Mario Party revenge.
I was not at all prepared for the level of monkey mutilation in Thrilla's Surfari. 😵
I remember struggling a lot with Kid Icarus 1-1 and 1-4, then practically breezing through the rest of the game. I also remember the eggplant wizards feeling like crueler 1-hit kills because it was faster to kill yourself than to find the nurse to cure it.
Kid Icarus is so weird. I think of it as some kind of NES classic. Pit was even in the cartoon alongside Simon and Megaman. But it never advanced. It makes me wonder, in a different timeline, if Kid Icarus would have been in there with Mario, Metroid, and Zelda as a franchise still alive today if it weren"t so difficult and impenetrable. Maybe they just didn't know what to do with it.
I appreciate that you give every game a serious try and actually attempt to understand their mechanics.
I played the hell out of Kid Icarus back in the day. I beat it 30+ times over and kept my ever-growing password list in a spiral notebook. It was just so much different from other Nintendo fare then. It's fantasy like Zelda, but with more action. It's platforming like Mario, but with more power-ups. It's a journey like Metroid, but more straight-forward. Add to that a cool instruction manual, catchy music, and a triumphant finale, and it's a damn shame that Nintendo didn't iterate more on this beyond the Game Boy release.
I only played Kid Icarus because I had a friend who bought it, couldn't get anywhere in it, and HATED it. She gave it to me to try and I beat it. She still hates me for that! LOL
Fun fact, rhe composer of the Pictionary theme is the same one who did the title track for Solstice. Tim Follin. Look him up, he's an absolute legend when it comes to game soundtracks.
Always look forward to these on Fridays. I never grew up with Kid Icarus and ended up playing it around 2010. My feelings towards it are basically the opposite of yours where the more I play through it, the more I enjoy it. I love how fuckin' weird it is. A backwards difficulty curve, weird enemies like flying Groucho Marx noses, and a fun sense of humor with having things like credit cards and being able to haggle with the shop owners.
Powering on the Pictionary cartridge and sitting on the menu alone breaks the top 100.
Kid Icarus is one of those games where there is fun to be had underneath, but the start of it is brutal. Still a good game though. And I honestly can't decide which goes harder: Cobra Triangle's gameplay or Pictionary's music. Who knew that Pictionary for the NES was in the running for one of the best NES soundtracks? And Thrilla's Surfari is such a bummer considering how much I love the skateboarding from the first T&C. If only the skateboarding felt as good as it did in the first game.
Onto Episode 18!!
Kid Icarus continues my trend:
1. Watch Jeff struggle with something.
2. Watch a speedrun and determine that it's not so bad.
3. I struggle and wonder what I was thinking.
19:44 Why are there Groucho Marx glasses and nose disguises as enemies?
Did not expect, of all things, Pictionary to have the most banger menu music on the platform…. Must find a download of that song somewhere.
The whole soundtrack is amazing! Who knew!
Kid Icarus is a top 5 NES game for me for sure. I just love the whole vibe of it, the quirkiness, the difficulty level, Hip Tanaka's music.
That, Metroid and the Zeldas are probably my top 4. Gonnies 2 or Faxandau maybe as a fifth then a bunch of Megaman games, Little Samson, Shadowgate, Castlevania III and Snake Rattle 'n' Roll after that somewhere.
Thrilla's Safari rules so hard. I have no idea how I got that game as a kid but damn I played so much it. Might have to fire that up this weekend.
goddamit if that pictionary theme isn't a bop
Even my father is prepared for this masterpiece!
RIP to the homies that didn't make it to watch this Livestream.
PICTIONARY GOES SO FUCKING HARD
Right!?!? The soundtrack crushes it
...I had Cobra Triangle, and I know I never got to see the goofy crab. I think the main draw for me as a kid with this game was the "vast sense of water". It's not that it was a good game, as much as it was a way to accessibly engage with the idea of vast bodies of water (I remember the "saving dudes" segment as essentially being the entirety of the game, and it being really difficult to save all of them).
Sometimes games like these are just memorable for being the first ways young children can engage with emotionally loaded concepts like "the vast concept of the ocean" (I also very vividly remember a nightmare I had as a child of Mega Man 2, in an underwater-stage, encountering a gigantic whale, and just the scale of things were terrifying).
...I looked up who made Cobra Triangle, and it made sense that it was Rare, who also did Snake Rattle and Roll. There's something about the auto-scroll stages in Cobra Triangle that feel very Snake Rattle (probably can't talk about "shared engines", but maybe similarities in art-asset generation).
...also, very Amiga-esque "constant energetic music, at all times" for cobra triangle.
..there's a surprising amount of NES games - that I had no idea existed - that might as well have come straight out of the C64 scene (and in some cases probably did).
A very strong first-party developer (and active hands-on-messaging of how your platform should be seen) goes a really long way at obfuscating all these weirdo releases that inevitably comes along when your platform is this massive.
It kinda makes it interesting to think about how much of "what a platform is" is up to messaging rather than a sober take on "all the games that are on it" (maybe more so now, when platforms as a thing are very loosey-goosey, and way less of a big deal than it used to be).
My god that Pictionary song went fucking hard
It's funny that the game where the player has wings is the game that doesn't have air control.
Oh wow, he was literally just a few screens away from the non top scrolling levels in Kid Icarus.
Oh which I never knew about until I just looked up a lets play lol......and oh my that game is actually long, and has a side scrolling shmup stage. WOW. who would have ever known lol
WIsh he got there or watched that TAS lol. I bet his mind would have changed on it.
Yeah the thing about Kid Icarus is the difficulty is very front loaded. If you can just get past those opening climbing stages the game gets progressively easier from there, and I'd say more fun and interesting too.
Do people have lasting love for Kid Icarus: Uprising?
I enjoyed it a lot, but I also remember constantly defending the game from nay-sayers, especially over the control setup, and these days, I rarely hear anyone other than myself speak about it fondly.
151 Energy Drinks: Kanto region complete.
Ah yes, Cobra Triangle. The original Dave the Diver
I love seeing Gun Smoke so high. I feel like no one ever talks about it.
You missed(?) out by not checking what the Alternative mode was in Pictionary. It's standard drawing, but for some idiotic reason it uses driving controls.
Thrilla's Safari was very appealing to me when it was released. Anything skateboarding was my jam at the time. I remember the controls felt pretty good. Only problem it was obscenely difficult and I don't think I ever made it past that first level. 1-1 1-2 lose and restart for the duration of my game rental. Somehow still fond memories.
Kid icarus is one of less than 10 nes games Ive ever completed. And I've done it twice due to the 3d classics version. It's funny how front loaded the difficulty is.
Completely irrelevant but the Mutant League Football soundtrack is awesome.
I was busy watching Alaskan ice road truckers before the PS network pulls it
When I was a wee lad I hated cobra triangle as much as I hated festers quest.
Cobra Triangle was the first video game I ever played
These are rapidly becoming one of my favorite weekly shows
I had the gray cart variant for Chiller. Came with a big lot of games during my collecting years. It's terrible. Someone paid a lot for it when I had to drop part of my collection though. Cobra Triangle was fun, but the ice!
Finally, Kid Icarus joins the ranks
Other games in the Cabal style I can think of: Wild Guns and the arcade game Blood Bros., which was also Western-themed. I played Blood Bros. all the time at the roller rink I visited a lot as a kid.
I still can’t tell if you actually like Cobra Triangle.
while the 3DS game is pretty weird in its own ways i will always appreciate how truly weird original Kid Icarus is. never played the game boy one though
It seems the problem with Thrilla's Surfari is that they give you the option of playing the game in two ways, and one of them is impossible while the other is not fun. I think they could have fixed this by either adding a timer to the level and using an Excitebike-style mechanic that lets you get back on the skateboard (not as punishing but still keeping a risk/reward element) or by using a shoot-em-up-style respawn system and resetting the level only on a game over.
My parents got Kid Icarus and an advantage controller for me for Christmas 1987. I developed such a love/hate relationship with Kid Icarus. I played it every day, getting an inch further each time. I died a million times. To this day when I hear the "game over" tune I say "Son. Of. A. B*tch" along with the last four notes.
I don't think I even knew there was an NES version of Chiller back when it was new, though I'm pretty sure I played the arcade game at least a few times. Never really liked it, I was squeamish as a kid about anything gory (and this meant I mostly avoided horror in all media, something that didn't change until I played Silent Hill 2) and there wasn't enough interesting in the gameplay to make it worth enduring the ugliness.
Cabal just about ruined me. It was just an instinctive hatred for it, and I couldn't wait for the segment to end. But I persisted, and I was rewarded with the Killer Rhino, and that made this entire journey worth it in the end.
Kid Icarus becomes a tolerable 4/5 game once you get your first health upgrade.
until that point though: lol. lmao even
My wife buys out Rockstar fruit punch whenever gas stations have it, but it's almost always gone 😢 I still miss lemonade
Dynowarz: Destruction of Spondylous #85 on the list. #1 in our ❤
I regret looking up the arcade version of Chiller on RUclips. My god.
Why does the Cabal skull animate like that.
My favorite of those kinda Cabal-like games is Dead Connection. The levels are so satisfyingly destructible.
"Sacred Words" is more infuriating to me as a player than just a generic "Game Over" for some reason.
Interesting to see how Zapper game sausage was made looking at Chiller.
KI was another one of those games I bought, beat and returned in the same day. Summer vacations were awesome and that beer wasn't going to buy itself.
was Thrilla's Safari the inspiration for Donkey Kong Country?
Now I'm not going to be able to get another one bites the dust out of my head.. thanks
Chiller seems way more gruesome then Manhunt in a weird way lol
Gonna take a shot in the dark and say Chiller didn't get the Nintendo seal of approval
You can feel the RC Pro Am roots in Cobra Triangle.
Almost made it to riding sharks in T&C 2 lol
Kid Icarus, a game where you have to slowly farm hearts for items but also speedrun the game for the best ending.... no thanks.
The endings are based on completion, not speed.
@@MissAshley42 ok well I'm wrong about the speed. It's still a trash game tho lol
Did Pocori Sweat or Yunker make the list?
SPONDYLOOOUS!
Slalom being ranked above Section Z is outrageous. And Kid Icarus is a top20 at least! Its solid and just fun to play after 30+ years
Still feel like Jeff didn't give a fair shake to Little Nemo and Batman. He didn't even beat the first level of Batman. That game is hard as hell and very unforgiving, but c'mon, at least beat the first level. I beat it as a kid!
Probably in the minority on this one, but also Journey to Silius. That banging Sunsoft soundtrack alone deserves to bump that game up a few spots!
grundy
14:13 is my reaction to this game to this day.
Is Jeff getting retro achievements on the mister or is he using something else?
Retroarch
I don't know I think the NES version of Maniac Mansion is the better version, each of the kids have their own theme and I like the art style more. It feels like a dark comedy teen 80's horror movie vibe wise instead of the C64 cartoonish look.
How much cocaine was used to fuel that Pictionary soundtrack, good god
I have many fond memories of playing kid icarus, I mostly remember it's punishing difficulty. Still hard to believe this came from the same team who did metroid, which is a masterpiece of course. Still has great music though
The Password Series, right? Icarus and Metroid with the two-way scrolling, both part Gunpei Yokoi's legacy. I never put much effort into KI back then, just not enough going on compared to Metroid.
The arcade version of Chiller is genuinely horrifying. Like, I'm a big horror nut and I'm certainly not squeamish about gore, but gradually shooting a restrained person's face off so you're left with a bloody skull showing through, all while their piercing digitised screams fill your ears... yeah, it's kinda messed up.