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NES Works #099: Skate or Die! and Paperboy (Patreon)

Published:
2022-08-03 13:27:05
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Hello, everyone. I currently am not in the U.S., so of course this week's video concerns games about American kids and the wild mayhem they like to get up to. Those irrepressible tykes! Sometimes they skateboard, sometimes they ride bikes, but always, always with the getting into trouble.

Next week: The good stuff.

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Skate or Die! and Paperboy retrospective: Pre-teenage wasteland | NES Works #099

Two games about American youths wasting their lives. Two games with various ties to Atari. Coincidence? Yes, actually. Sometimes, this stuff just happens. Skate or Die! may bear the Ultra Games branding, but it really owes its existence to Electronic Arts—and ultimately, to the former Epyx crew that EA hired up when Atari Corp. sabotaged that company. And while Paperboy for NES comes to us from Mindscape, the original game debuted in arcades under the Atari Games label, only to be converted to NES by Tengen (AKA Atari Corp.), who was also filing charges against Nintendo and pilfering documents in order to attempt to sabotage THAT company. It's like poetry... it rhymes. Production note: NES footage captured from @Analogue Mini. Video upscaled to 720 with XRGB Mini Framemeister. Video Works is funded via Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/gamespite) — support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its YouTube debut! Plus, exclusive podcasts, eBooks, and more!

Comments

Sven Mascarenhas

This one lines right up with my personal NES timeline, as Skate or Die was the next game I picked up after Blades of Steel. I think it still holds up reasonably well in multiplayer (my son has a blast with it), but that high jump event feels badly out of place compared to the tight controls everywhere else. Especially since you can badly cheat it using two controllers. Couple of nitpicks: 1. I think you mixed up the Race and Jam modes. 2. You get 10 passes in freestyle, and I think you gave it the short shift in the sense that there's a neat "hidden" (or at least not called out in the manual) mechanic where you get bigger bonus scores for mixing up your moves. So that leads to a nice little min / max system where you have to balance spamming the higher scoring handstands / 720s against using all of the tricks in your limited number of passes (which only score like 250 points) and getting the full 9000 bonus points. Couple that with a few tricks that the score changes depending on how well you execute them and there's a LOT of depth in the mode, and it's the one that we tended to play most at birthday parties (esp. since we got good enough at Joust that matches took too long to play out). It's honestly a really neat little NES version of what we'd wind up seeing in the Tony Hawk games, and certainly much better than what I'd consider the equivalent events in the Epyx games. I also don't think we were alone in our love of that mode, since Konami made it the centerpiece of the sequel

Captain Ginyu

Thanks, Jeremy! I hope you’re safe and healthy in your travels. Best wishes to you and yours.