As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #39, August 2007.

As Scott Jacobi has been documenting in his Nintendo Realm column, Nintendo themselves were the primary software developer for the Famicom in the early days of the platform.  When the Famicom first launched in Japan, Nintendo created home counterparts of many of their simple, easy to port, yet very popular arcade games.  Since many of these titles make up a good chunk of the arcade to NES catalog in the mind of the average retrogamer, I've decided to take a closer look at them.  As usual, I'm going to kick things off with the most obscure of these games - Popeye.  We'll get to that Mario character in RTM issues ahead.

While not in the mainstream spotlight for some time now, pretty much everyone knows who Popeye is.  For the uninitiated, Popeye is a sailor who gains incredible strength by eating canned spinach.  His arch nemesis is Bluto, a gargantuan man who lives only to terrorize Popeye so that he may steal away the affection of Popeye's girlfriend Olive Oyl.  If this cycle of events seems never-ending, that's because it is, and things are no different in the game.  Popeye offers three different screens of action that all repackage the same basic game play.  Olive Oyl stands atop the screen and drops items for Popeye to collect.  These are hearts on the first screen, notes from a harp as she attempts to lull Popeye's son Swee'Pea to sleep on the second screen, and finally the letters H-E-L-P on the third screen.  Once all items are collected the next stage begins.  Bluto is constantly on patrol to stop Popeye dead in his tracks and pummel him off the platforms with either his bare hands or an endless supply of beer bottles which he throws.  While Popeye has the ability to punch, he can only use this ability for defense.  Punches are primarily used to break incoming bottles but are also used to set off traps and of course to pick up the all powerful can of spinach.  Once Popeye consumes his favorite leafy green, Bluto will turn tail and attempt to run away.  If Popeye makes contact with Bluto in the short amount of time granted after eating spinach, Bluto will be knocked off the platforms temporarily before climbing back up.  In addition to Bluto, Popeye must also cope with the projectile tossing Sea Hag and her difficult to avoid vulture.  After all three screens are cleared they begin again at a higher difficulty.

The concept for this game is pretty simple but the action gets quite frenzied very quickly.  An NES version seems like it would be a piece of cake but there are some limiting factors that dampen the fun at home just a little.  To begin, the arcade version is absolutely beautiful.  Every sprite is detailed and represents the original hand drawn characters perfectly.  When the game is in motion it almost looks like a digital cartoon.  This is the biggest sacrifice on the NES as while the graphics are nicely detailed, especially considering this is one of the very first games for the system, those high resolution visuals from the arcade are greatly missed.  While not as graphically detailed as the original, nearly all the sprite animation and character mannerisms make it onto the NES which is a nice touch.  Each of the three screens are created almost exactly with only the most minor differences that neither hinder nor add to game play.  Sound design is charming and nicely accurate with the Popeye theme at the title screen and solid sound effects throughout.  Control is also quick and smooth which we all know is the most important part of a platforming game.

All in all Popeye on the NES is a nice solid port, until you go back and forth between the NES version and the arcade original and realize one critical difference between them - the NES version is far easier.  This is something that would occur with nearly all of the Nintendo ported NES arcade titles.  While accurate representations of the originals, for one reason or another they almost all play much easier than in the arcade.  In the case of Popeye the action never gets anywhere near as frenzied as it did in the arcade.  Sure you have to keep on your toes to stay one step ahead of Bluto and make sure you grab the items Olive Oyl is sending down but in the arcade you barely had time to breathe after the first couple screens.  While challenging and entertaining, there's a note of intensity that is missing from the NES version.  It's this missing intensity that ultimately makes the game an inferior port.  Granted if you haven't played the arcade version in a long time you won't notice this.  The NES release is still a fun game but it's not as fun as the original, which is painful since it comes so close to being a perfect conversion.  I suppose one has to approach these discrepancies with the notion that Popeye was one of the first Famicom games ever.  Taking that into consideration the game is well done and it really demonstrated that the Famicom / NES was going to be the first home platform that could produce near arcade quality graphics.  If this was a launch title and was already this close to arcade perfection, then the world was in for some great arcade to NES ports in the future - and we sure were.
 

"InsaneDavid" also runs a slowly growing gaming site at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

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