There's a snake in my boat: Cobra Triangle | NES Works 137

equilateral or isoceles it's isometric either way baby it's Cobra triangle on NES Works episode 137 yeah I'm sure Mr Kim thought so man who had no blood going to his brain good news everyone good news everyone after a string of mediocre games developed by Rare limited we finally have the studio stepping up to deliver a breakout hit and if you look closely you'll begin to notice a pattern emerging those past few games have been developed by evil rare evil rare happens when a disreputable publisher like a claim or gam Tech hires the company to produce a game good rare mostly just happens when Nintendo steps in impressively Cobra triangle sees rare actually take the lead for the most games developed for NES to this point or at least the most known games they've arrested the torch away from toce the company's brother from another motherland shooting range was to's 12th known project for NES while Cobra triangle marks rare's 13th truly a lucky number rare and toce had this in common they both suffered when they took a gig from a lower tier publisher who clearly wanted to maximize churn and didn't really seed the need to invest anything resembling time quality or budgets into that project when cranking out a hasty release for the likes of ljn or Bondi R and to could sometimes manage to project a glimmer of inspiration through the darkness of opportunism but mostly they just dashed off something functional enough to pass lot check took their payment and grayed along to the next project occasionally TOA would deliver an unexpectedly excellent Bondi product like challenge Pebble Beach but usually we ended up like underbaked products like shooting range perhaps the most pointless light gun game ever made likewise for rare they did manage to create the uneven but largely entertaining Wizards and Warriors for for a claim but they also produced WWF WrestleMania for a claim which was kind of unpleasant to play rare almost never produced genuinely terrible work John Elway's quarterback being the one glaring exception here even their Hasty work for hire tended to be interesting they added a lot of personality to their ports of epic's games titles compared to the Dreadful sludge that atellier double turned in for Winter Games and taboo was so weird and interesting that it more than makes up for that software's full-throated uselessness but to find the really good stuff from rare you have to look to Nintendo to a to really they evidently perform some of their best work for hire on kidikas which stands Head and Shoulders above their other NES output to this point and their Latter-Day efforts like super Princess Peach were a lot of fun for rare their Nintendo projects to date have consisted of slalom and RC proam both of which I think qualify as Stone Cold Classics for the platform as usual Nintendo's ownership ship over the NES granted them special advantages that the corporation had no compunctions about exploiting this would Land Nintendo in court more than once during the NES era Atari hit Nintendo with a lawsuit alleging the NES pipeline violated the Sherman Antitrust Act an 1890 law that banned anti-competitive agreements and monopolistic business practices this honestly might have gone poorly for Nintendo if not for the fact that Atari used the discovery process for the case as a means to examine proprietary documents and crack Nintendo's copy protection scheme allowing them to produce games for NES as an unlicensed publisher another independent publisher American Video Entertainment would file a similar suit in 1991 around the same time the Federal Trade Commission successfully made the case that Nintendo did in fact leverage its connections and successes to shut other companies out of retail in the US although rather than punishing the company the FTC decided that Nintendo should send NES owners a coupon for future game purchases most likely driving additional sales for NES software and almost definitely adding to Nintendo's War chest Nintendo's hold over the market didn't end at its retail Network the entire NES manufacturing process belonged to Nintendo from top to bottom the company required all licenses to produce carts through Nintendo's own manufacturing plants paying for production and a licensing fee in advance at considerable risk to the publisher in question when those risks paid off with a hit third parties Rak in the cash but when a game flopped it could take that company down with it Nintendo of course didn't need to worry about that collateral since it owned the plants and obviously didn't have to pay its S A licensing fee Nintendo could afford to take a more measured approach to game development and Publishing Nintendo first party games tended to be the ones that introduced new technologies to the US market such as sophisticated memory management chips and battery backup if a third party had published Dragon Warrior a massive game that shipped on an expensive cart with battery support and a box stuffed to bursting with manuals and Maps but which fell short of sales expectations it would have ruined that company Nintendo on the other hand simply Shrugged gave away its Surplus carts as a magazine subscription bonus made up their losses through licensing fees and took another swing or three at exciting you as consumers about role playing games and for a game like Cobra triangle which used an established cartridge ROM format with no exceptional add-ons and thus no significant additional costs they could afford to allow their contract developer rare here to take their time with the game and polish it up rare absolutely took advantage of that luxury turning in a fast-paced visually impressive game boasting high-speed action and remarkably steep challenge level it is in other words precisely the kind of game you think of when you think of the name rare it doesn't necessarily push the art of game design into neverbe seen Realms but it looks great feels Rock Solid despite forcing the NES Hardware to work in ways its creators didn't really intend and has no remorse about kicking the ass of any little kid who has the audacity to play it Cobra triangle impresses and intimidates from the moment you power on your NES it opens with the most dramatic Illustrated title screen yet seen on the console a sporty speedboat caught in action the neck of a massive sea serpent that looms over the water you have to remember that full screen illustrations didn't appear too often on NES aside from a couple of flashy cut scenes in ninja Guiden and the barely animated ending of Super Mario Brothers 2 the sort of thing was an Indulgence that Developers rarely had the opportunity to enjoy storage space on those sparse ROM cartridges came at far too much of a premium to squander on such frivolity making this title screen quite a flex and Cobra triangle doesn't make massive compromises to accommodate this display of visual finesse the game looks great once you jump into the action and it both moves and plays smoothly at first glance it appears to be a little more than RC proom except on the water you control a speed mode that has to maneuver around competitors and the screen display announces your first mission objective as race to the finish the entire game takes place from the same isometric perspective as RC prom2 and it more or less controls the same way but then you start paying attention to the little details and realize things seem a Miss for starters despite being presented as a race Cobra triangle does not give any indication of current pole positions also the other boats while aggressive don't really seem to be racing in the traditional sense likewise the first stage course doesn't really work or look like a racetrack and then there's the fact that your boat can fire a machine gun and missiles indiscriminately rather than only carrying extremely limited ammunition when you collect a PowerUp this is not a racing game it is a vehicular combat game pretending to be a Razer and once you complete the first stage which doesn't rank your performance only test to see if you reach the end within the a lotted time it drops all pretenses of being a straightforward RC proam successor Cobra triangle has about half a dozen different stages objectives that it Cycles through as you advance through levels none of which involve coming in first in a race these range from tests of pure maneuvering skill to military adjacent objectives to Pure combat and they unfurl along an absolutely Bonkers difficulty curve they're all fairly challenging from the outset but once you defeat the first boss rare takes off the gloves and starts metaphorically punching your tenderest bits with their bare fists the company had a reputation for making pretty tough games back in their Spectrum days and they would produce some famously nasty games further down the road you could call Cobra triangle a case of getting their mojo back in fact one of the mission types the waterfall levels feels like a warm-up for the racing stages of battle toads hitting ramps in order to LEAP waterfalls at top speed from the perfect ankle is some real turbot tunnel nonsense utterly unforgiving and fully Unapologetic speaking of warm-ups the most vexing Mission type in Cobra triangle also feels like a rough draft for a future game this is just a coincidence since the later game in question came from a different developer M Cobra triangle protection missions give off some absolutely Wild Water World for Virtual Boy Vibes you begin these stages near a circle where a bunch of people are bobbing in the water and you need to fend off enemy boats which attempt to swipe the survivors and carry them off you need to ward off the bad guys for several minutes by blasting aggressor boats as they attempt to grab the civilians and tote them away you can blow up a boat that has a hostage and toe and this won't hurt the civilian but it also fails to reset that person's position back into the circle so the longer you play and the more boats make semi-successful seizures the further apart the guys you have to protect drift and the more difficult the mission becomes meanwhile you also need to avoid allowing your own boat to be destroyed it's really difficult the first time around and borderline imposs in subsequent iterations your boat may have an energy meter to soak up damage but enemies can be pretty rough on you and you only have a limited number of lives and continues this actually makes for a remarkable Nintendo first party release as a publisher the company had largely shifted to more Adventure tinged games by this point aside from Tetris their other releases for late 1988 in ' 89 consisted of Highly exploratory persistent games Zelda 2 Dragon Warrior fanad do even Super Mario Brothers 2 largely abandoned that series arcade rots in favor of a lower key adventure with more to discover and no time limits Cobra triangle is a pure arcade style experience at home ruthlessly difficult and totally fast-paced a bit of counterprogramming to the rest of Nintendo's first Party Fair even the less punishing stage formats in Cobra triangle require a fair amount of dexterity to complete one stage type sees you collecting mines from an enemy Depot depositing them in a Target Zone to detonate them all while being pursued by hostile boats that will steal back the mines if they make contact with you another requires you to navigate an endless loop of ramps in order to collect pods suspended in midair a very Mario Kart 64 sort of Affair nearly a decade in advance you also have to survive stages where icicles or stalagmites thrust suddenly out of the water in Rapid succession in order to damage your boat and that's before you face off a series of giant bosses including crabs Krakens and that sea serpent from the title screen you do at least get to enjoy a moment of downtime after defeating a Boss by playing through a hazard-free bonus stage but that's just a quiet breather before you begin another loop of stages tuned to be even more difficult than the last this keeps going until you complete all the levels just kidding it actually keeps going until your run out of lives and continues you can't actually beat this game you pompous fool what Folly what arrogance this is rare in well rare form no mortal is meant to survive this experience even with infinite ammo and weapon upgrades like four-way shots and homing missiles Cobra triangle is one of the fastest paced least relenting games on NES you'll get Trashed by enemy mobs and environmental hazards even once you wrap your head around the isometric Viewpoint another programming Flex by Rare by the way as the game Scrolls in all directions at lightning speed despite the fact that the NES Hardware can only scroll along a single axis by default coper triangle is a case of Nintendo paying a developer to kick player's asses with hyperkinetic action a Vanishing site here in 1989 and it's a case of rare actually receiving the support they needed to Showcase their Technical and artistic chops another uncommon site on NES being a Nintendo published game Cobra triangle naturally received disproportionately extensive coverage in Nintendo Power I mean I don't think a six- page spread and a few tips and secrets is unreasonable but it does seem a little weird that this game enjoyed so many more column inches than the likes of nobunaga's ambition or Baseball Stars next time on NES works No One Is Safe from Kung Fu Heroes not even the president

Channel: Jeremy Parish | Video Works

Views: 13,874

Keywords: video games, game boy works, nintendo, game boy, nes, nes works, jeremy parish, rare, cobra triangle

Id: WuE0jFWluNs

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2024