Beyond Donkey Kong by Ken Horowitz

Author:Ken Horowitz [Horowitz, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2020-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

VS. Wrecking Crew whetted NES owners’ appetites for the much deeper NES version that appeared a year later.

One thing the NES version of Wrecking Crew had over its arcade counterpart was continuous background music. Hirokazu Tanaka provided the soundtrack to the cartridge release of Wrecking Crew (the VS. game had only a smattering of themes), a large upgrade from his previous work. His experiences in the Japanese club scene greatly influenced his musical style, and he now took the chance to incorporate more rhythm pieces as an homage to groups like the Jamaican duo Sly and Robbie. Wrecking Crew , along with the NES version of Balloon Fight , was part of Tanaka’s move towards incorporating sustained background music in the games he worked on. 77 Neither game would have a full soundtrack of its own, but the lessons learned would come to light in Tanaka’s first major NES title, 1986’s Metroid. Still, he was apprehensive about how such music would be received. In a 2009 interview, Tanaka explained his trepidation:

To be honest with you, back then I had a lot of reservations about the use of music in games. I was sort of embarrassed by it. The background music would just keep on playing over and over. I thought it was annoying. My feeling was that the audio should be more in line with the sound effects that you had control over as the player, so that there was a more unified sound to the game. I was kind of in love with the idea of a game whose audio was totally composed of sound effects. 78

In arcades, Wrecking Crew lacked some of the attractive options of the console port but made up for it with its great ­two-player mode. In ­single-player, one faced off against the ­computer-controlled Luigi, who simply wasn’t as competitive as a real opponent, and arguably not as much fun. Demolishing buildings against a friend was the ideal way to enjoy the game, and it added a dimension to the gameplay that was lost completely on the NES. In fairness, the added level editor and more ­puzzle-like gameplay makes the NES rendition a great experience in its own right, but the simultaneous ­two-player action was a big draw for players’ quarters.

Wrecking Crew on the NES also included a new character named Foreman Spike, designed by Hiroji Kiyotake. The arcade game simply had players searching for the bonus coin against each other or the timer, but the NES port included this nasty little character to pester Mario throughout the game. Kiyotake would later go on to create Mario’s nemesis, Wario, and Spike reportedly served as a forerunner to that character.

A sequel called Wrecking Crew ’98 appeared on the Super Famicom in Japan, and while it retained the ­puzzle-solving gameplay of the NES game, it also incorporated the more competitive design of the VS. System release. A versus mode used characters unlocked during the story, and a special tournament could be accessed after completing the main game. The story involved Mario and his nemesis Bowser, tying it to the Super Mario Bros.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.