"Exerion" - NES/Famicom

----- Introduction -----

I've been watching this show called Supernatural for awhile (it's been running forever, you've heard of it), and anyway long story short there's this scene in there where one character is lying around watching reality shows, and one of the other characters criticizes him for not doing "socially acceptable binge-watching," like Game of Thrones and that sort of thing. And that character replies, "Yeah, well, man can't live on caviar alone."

I randomly think about that like twice a day, and at any rate that quote succinctly explains why I'm kind of happy to have be getting away from Nintendo, first-party, R&D1 games, and into some random game made by Jaleco.

It's time to start stepping away from the caviar, girls and boys.

I can feel its presence faintly in the distance...

We'll start easy though, with an arcade title by Jaleco, who was, as far as I know, still trying to prove themselves by this point, but became proven later on so you know they're alright. This one's Exerion.

Exerion is the port of an arcade game by the same name. The arcade version looks a little more impressive, and sounds a little more impressive, but the NES version's no slouch either-- it does a decent job of mimicking the arcade's 3D effect with what the NES had to work with (in my opinion).

There's not much else to say, it might just be worth remembering the name Jaleco going forwards as the developer of this one. I have no information on more individual credits to work with.

So let's play!

You know, saying "ekuserion" with a Japanese accent almost sounds cool,
but saying "eggzeeriahn" with an American accent just sounds stupid.

----- Playthrough -----

I kinda wonder now that I'm thinking about it if a better transliteration might have been "Accelion," like "acceleration"... the ekuseri- part sounds like that to me. It still would sound stupid in English though.

Anyway, there's only one mode here again which will make this a quick one to play through.

Accelion-- whoops, I mean, Exerion is a pretty standard shooting game as far as I've experienced. You're going around on the bottom of the screen, and enemies are coming down the top of the screen, and you're shooting at them, and when you hit them they die.

Does that sound pretty standard?

That 3D effect really doesn't look so good in screenshots.

The catch to Exerion is that your two buttons do slightly different things. At the bottom right corner of the screen, you have a rapid-fire ammo counter. When pressing A, you can shoot one bullet as quickly as you want-- in fact if you hold A, you'll get a machine-gun like fire. This eats your ammo up, and when it hits 0, your A button will stop working.

Lucky for you, when pressing the B button you get a much slower double fire, and every time you hit an enemy with this, you'll gain 1 ammo for the A button firing mode. You also recover bullets when firing with A, assuming you don't miss.

But I never miss, so there's no problem.

That's really pretty much it. At some point, after what feels like way too many waves to me, you'll have a chance at a Galaga-like bonus round where enemies fly in, in patterns, and you shoot at them and try to kill them all. It's pretty tough.

There are also some larger enemies that look sort of like dragons or something that take multiple shots at one point.

Pretty much about as exciting as this game's going to get.

So anyway, you do that until you die 3 times and then it's Game Over.

----- Review -----

Innovation:

Does the game show anything not yet seen on this system/ever before?

Just a bit. The faux-3D effect has been put to use in the actually pretty fun F-1 Race which we've seen already. The shooting stuff is pretty standard shooting fare-- however the idea of having shots replenished by hitting enemies is new. I don't know if it's fun, but it's new, at least on the Famicom.


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Spitting Rage:

Does the game make you want to tear your own organs out of your body?

Maybe just a bit as well-- some of the enemies are surprisingly accurate (especially after one game loop, where they shoot more frequently, too), and they come down the screen relatively quick to the bottom, not really giving you much time to fight back before you have to start dodging. It's a fairly tough game, and the floatiness of the controls (presumably to simulate inertia in the jet) make it that much harder.

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Intuitive Game Design: 

How easy is it to intuitively understand the game?

There's not much here that you can't understand if understood how to play Space Invaders, so I think you'll be fine.

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Satisfying Gameplay: 

How rewarding does playing the game feel?

Shooters inherently feel satisfying to me-- I've mentioned that before, so beware I'm a bit biased. For the game's faults, I think it does feel satisfying to play and win at, just by virtue of being a game where you shoot targets and they go poik.

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Game Depth: 

How deep/long is the game?

A puddle. The only strategy to be aware of is with the rapid fire shots, and if you play accurately enough this will rarely be a concern for you.

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Sound Design: 

How's the sound?

This game is uncomfortably quiet, much like Golf was. Exerion is in desperate need of some music to go with it... at the moment all it has is the falling Jacob's-Ladder-like sound that has been seen in other shooting games from this period. I suggest playing 'Big Blue' in the background while playing the game, because it's awesome and fits.

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Graphics:

How's it look?

The 3D scrolling effect could use some work, in retrospect. However, I think for an '85 Famicom game, it adds a little flavor to it that would have made it compelling. I could definitely imagine someone being impressed by this thing at the time.

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Personal Chord: 

Does the game have that undefinable "something" for me?

No, not really. It feels kind of like Galaxian did except for not that fun. There's also just straight up Galaga, which puts this game to shame (and guess what I'm reviewing tomorrow...?).

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Should You Play: 

Is there a reason to even bother with this one?

Probably not. Exerion, in the end, is just a substandard shooter game for the Famicom. There's a lot of better options. I think anything is worth a try, but I wouldn't burn a path straight to this one over really anything else.

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