Article Index :: Front Page
Retro-spective: Wrecking Crew
By Kevin - 08.11.04
  
You can find it elsewhere on this site, but 1985 was a flagship year for gaming (and therefore the world). After a fairly successful test marketing of the Nintendo Entertainment System in select areas of the country, most notibly the tough-to-crack New York area, Nintendo was ready to launch their beauty on the country. Consumers had been wary of video games since the market had been flooded but scant years before. To many, home console games were just weak knock-offs of their arcade counterparts...the Atari 2600's port of Pac-Man is just a sad case in point. So, when Nintendo launched, an unspoken goal seemed to have been to bring the the gamer games that meet or exceeded the standards of their arcade brethern. Such a game was Wrecking Crew.
Well before Mario was a poster boy and just before senseless destruction was cool, Wrecking Crew brought the world an action/puzzler platformer with some serious spunk. Curious little backstory is necessary for dealing with a game of this sort. The box, long a staple of total video game experience (early PC games with little memory had to do a lot of their 'wowing' with great art, massive manuals and extra-game maps), merely talks of creating and destroying buildings while demolishing monsters like the GOTCHAWRENCH and the EGGPLANT MAN. The instruction booklet doesn't do much either, merely telling one how to manueuvre the dangerous world of destroyable buildings. Mario and Luigi wander around an urban world, breaking down buildings, avoiding enemies and racking up points...you know, just chilling. As with most of the great games of yore, these deceptively simple parameters expand into a great game with some surprises up its sleeve.
Want a huge game? Back in 1985, home games didn't come all that big. But Wrecking Crew was in a league of its own. The main game has 100 levels. They take anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes to beat, and after a while they are pretty hard to get past on the first try. That fact unto itself bespeaks instant replay value. As anyone who has ever challenged the 100-some level Bubble Booble knows, things can heat up around level 50. There are bonus stages spread throughout, sort of "find the coin" type games that yield extra points. If both the theses aren't exactly convincing, wait until you hear about...
...the fact that this is part of the programmable series! Everyone knows the excellent Excitebike, but fewer knew about Wrecking Crew (and fewer still knew about Mach Rider, but there's something of a reason for that). With Wrecking Crew's program mode, a player can create a level using any of the tools available for the normal game level design, thereby assuring that the game gets maximum mileage. While slightly unwieldy (a mouse would be a more appropriate editing tool), the engine is easy to learn and the making of good, challenging and ridiculous levels can add hours of fun.
It is hard to imagine playing a game that is nearly 20 years old and legitimately having fun for over an hour on end by some, but Wrecking Crew is certainly such a game. But why does it matter today? With so many other choices, what does a dinky Programmable Series game from 1985 have to add? Well, in addition to providing fun for the casual gamer, the kind who happen to pick up controllers once they've exhausted all of their options, the hardcore crowd will find plenty to pine for. Mario fans, a great bunch with numbers the world over, will be delighted to see their hero in one of his early and lesser known starring roles. What started as Jumpman in Donkey Kong a few years before and eventually morphed into the squater and more pixelated Mario from Mario Bros. would find a permanent moniker in 1985's one-for-the-ages Super Mario Bros. But Wrecking Crew has the power to amaze now because it is not that well known and Mario looks like he's had a utter makeover since his platforming romp. Fan of Kid Icarus? While Game Boy's excellent Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters was likely a better overall game (and the Captain N TV show was probably the most memorable of all), the Eggplant Wizard has some kin in Wrecking Crew. One of the few baddies is the Eggplant Man, a less evolved but certainly related lookalike.
And now for a slightly more tenuous thesis, but one that is worth exploring still. Remember the film Super Mario Bros. (1993)? Like many, I was disappointed by it, but now I see where it is coming from to an extent. Assuming that the producers, art design and pre-production people did their research (which they didn't, but follow me) and assuming that they were aware that Mario and Luigi were both in this game (which they probably weren't), it is possible that they synthesized the dark world of implied urban decay found in Wrecking Crew, a world of destroyed buildings, crumbling walls and dangerous streets, with the more familiar mythology of the Mushroom Kingdom, thus giving birth to a world that, while senseless, comes in part from the Mario universe. Ok, probably not, but one can wish that video game filmakers actually knew what they were doing.
On final examination, Wrecking Crew withstands all of the tests of time. It is as fresh today as it was. It is fairly obscure and could thus prove a welcome surprise to even the most grizzled veteran. And it can be downloaded here, for educational and pre-buying purchases: seek it out at yardsales, EB Games, and on eBay.
Download the Game!
View the Instructions
Article Index :: Front Page
|
|
