Tag Archives: nes

Kind of Lumpy But Also Swell: Abobo’s Big Adventure

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Double Dragon for the NES is a game that somewhat exemplifies the 8-bit era of video games. Lacking the multiplayer co-op of the original arcade, the game makes up for it with a combination of tight controls and absurd glitches. Whether it’s beating up on an invisible enemy for experience, watching an enemy fall through solid rock, or defeating opponents by climbing up or down until you can’t see them anymore, it had that right amounts of notorious difficulty and sheer fun. It’s with this spirit in mind that Abobo’s Big Adventure was developed, and as one of many who grew up with games of the NES generation, I decided to try it out when it debuted last week. Starring the physically largest enemy in Double Dragon, the game is an elaborate homage to that era, packed with references to an almost innumerable amount of games.

The (very) basic story has Abobo going through various worlds, from Mario to Pro Wrestling, all in order to rescue his son, and the cut-scenes often make light of the fact that Abobo is an unlikely hero, being a boss character originally. In this regard, I find Abobo’s Big Adventure to be at its best when it fulfills more than just an itch for the Nintendo days of yore and actively makes you feel like you’re controlling a beefy “master” (remember when bosses were sometimes called masters?) whose normal job is to make a protagonist regret his path in life. The first stage, a remake of the original Mission 1 from the NES Double Dragon, has Abobo giving nasty overhead chops which take out giant chunks of health in a way a puny martial artist’s spin kicks never could. Stage 3 pits Abobo against one of the characters from rudimentary fighting game Urban Champion, only the situation is entirely unwinnable by the opponent. Try as he he might, the poor “Urban Champ’s” fists cannot make a dent in Abobo’s rock-hard abs. Obviously the difficulty in this section is absolutely zero, but NES homages don’t always have to be about “NES-difficulty,” and it provides a feeling similar to the Wario games, where Wario bowls over enemies where Mario would typically lose lives and in doing so shows how much tougher he is by comparison. The final stage may be the epitome of expressing the power of Abobo, as it literally sets you in the boss position against a good guy in a scenario I think many fans of video games have wondered about for years.

On the flip-side, the biggest shortcoming of Abobo’s Big Adventure is that in some stages it just feels like the original game with an Abobo skin on top. The Zelda and Mega Man sections are especially bad at this, as they do not even bother to give Abobo anything functionally special, other than increased health. Giving the massive Abobo the ability to walk through solid doors in the Zelda level for instance would’ve been a way to emphasize his power and girth. The Mega Man level brings in the infamous Quick Man lasers, and Abobo is just as vulnerable to them as anyone else (i.e. he dies instantly). While I understand something of a desire to be faithful to the originals, these examples could have used as much care as the other parts of the game.

Overall, I think the game is worth a shot, especially given that it’s absolutely free and can be put down at any time. It has a good deal of heart in it, and that shows more prominently in some parts than others.

Relating to NES Sprites

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Whenever I say there’s something special about video game graphics during the NES/Master System era, some will believe that it’s simply due to nostalgia, while others will agree with me, but won’t be able to explain why. Sometimes those who agree with me will even chalk it up to nostalgia themselves. I however believe that there are concrete reasons as to why the level of graphics that the 8-bit systems achieved for home consoles holds such significance, and I’d like to discuss one of them here. I’m going to be using mainly NES graphics and not Master System ones, because 1) the NES was more popular and 2) the Master System actually had better graphics overall, and we want to look at the less-good.


From left to right: Berzerk, Robot from Berzerk, Circus


From left to right: Mario, Megaman, Karnov

What is the significant feature that the characters below all have in common that the characters above do not, aside from obvious graphical quality improvements?

Answer: They have faces.

This makes it easier to identify with them as characters, and gives them a sense of personality. In the NES era, the graphics were strong enough on the popular consoles to portray characters’ faces and to give them facial expressions, even if it’s the same expression all the time. This is important because we as humans tend to see ourselves in our surroundings. Scott McCloud talks about this a good deal in Understanding Comics, but it really is something fundamental. Two dots and and a line becomes a face. A semi-circle shape can be a smile or a frown depending on which way it’s facing. It allows players to identify with the characters.

While this does not take into account those games which feature primarily vehicles or objects inanimate objects, my focus is not so much on them, as I believe they have a somewhat similar appeal, only focused on their fantastical realism rather than their human quality.

Even those characters who practically had no eyes, noses, or mouths still benefited from the 8-bit graphical quality, as it allowed the games to clearly delineate an area of the body as the head.


From left to right: Simon Belmont, Bill Rizer, Ryu Hayabusa

This was especially useful in portraying characters with more human proportions as opposed to the big-headed cartoonish sprites from before, as it allowed the characters to seem realistic on the NES while again still giving them some sense of personality.

That is not to say that faces on sprites were a wholly unique experience to the 8-bit era. The NES and the Master System were not the first consoles to regularly portray characters with faces, with that honor probably going to the Colecovision in 1982. However, the difference here is a matter of timing, as 1983 was also the year of the North American Video Game Crash, and so in the minds of most people, graphics went from Atari to Nintendo, and if you look at the graphics of that era, they more often than not could barely differentiate a head from a neck, with one notable exception being Pitfall for the Atari 2600. Hey, it’s not all art and discovery.

The 8-Bit NES era was when graphics were good enough so that almost anyone who made a game for the console could give a sprite a face (and in essence, a personality), and thanks to good timing also was when video games were again popular enough to be a common feature in households. Graphics were certainly not the only factor in endearing the NES (and to a lesser extent the Master System) to young gamers, but as humans are visual creatures, graphics played a significant role in implanting the memories of these games into their minds.