The Nintendo Report: Harmonies, Hotels, and Hockey
Welcome back to The Nintendo Report, where we’re digging our way through Nintendo’s list of intellectual properties in alphabetical order to determine just how healthy they all are. This time, we’re saying “hi” to the letters H and I. Even with two letters involved, it's kind of a short list, but is it a healthy one? Let’s find out in today’s edition of The Nintendo Report.
HarmoKnight
First up, we have the wonderful rhythm-action game HarmoKnight. This game was developed by Game Freak, the developer known best for games like Mendel Palace, Pulseman, and oh yeah, a little game series called Pokemon. When they aren’t making games about people throwing their pets at one another, it turns out they’re more than capable of making some wildly creative stuff. HarmoKnight is a rhythmic auto-runner where you play as a kid named Tempo who has to perform attacks, jumps, and more in rhythm to the game’s music. It’s super charming, and incredibly fun.
Health rating: Not so good
HarmoKnight came out in 2013, and while an 11 year stretch with no new games doesn’t exactly bode well, it’s still a little too early to declare it completely dead. Still, at this point I’d be surprised to see it return. With the exception of Pokemon, Game Freak doesn’t exactly have a great history with creating sequels to their games. This game being one and done though is a huge bummer though, because it’s pretty great. The music and visuals are wonderfully done, and the gameplay is tight and fun. It was only released on the 3DS eShop, which surely limited its reach to a degree, but it was genuinely well-liked among players and critics. Sadly, unless Game Freak hits us with a big surprise, this one might be gone for good.
Hockey
Ahh, the days of sports games being named after the sports they’re depicting. Nintendo’s first hockey game (as far as I can tell) was the Game & Watch game Donkey Kong Hockey, but that would technically fit more in line with Mario sports games. Their first “simulation” hockey game was Ice Hockey for NES. Originally released for the Famicom Disk System in Japan, it was converted into a cartridge release for the NES, where it was a pretty big hit. Players could choose their players’ weight classes and countries before engaging in a simplified version of the sport that was easy to play, difficult to master, and a whole heck of a lot of fun.
Health rating: Basically dead
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Nintendo would follow up Ice Hockey on Super NES with NHL Stanley Cup, though with the exception of them both being hockey games, they share very little in common. Stanley Cup not only had the official NHL license, but it utilized the Super NES’s Mode 7 to create a 3D hockey game, which if we’re being honest, was kinda choppy, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a pretty fun hockey game. That said, that was the last time Nintendo dabbled in Hockey. There were some Mario sports games that touched on the sport, but actual hockey? Dead.
Hogan's Alley
Named after a real life shooting range, Hogan’s Alley is an odd game for Nintendo, at least by today’s standards. It’s a light gun target shooting game where you have to shoot cardboard cutouts of various gangsters without shooting cardboard cutouts of innocent bystanders. It’s pretty simple, but no more so than a lot of games back in 1984
Health rating: Very dead
Hogan’s Alley never got a follow up. It’s been referenced in Smash Bros., and it was available at retail for longer than you’d expect a simple light gun shooter that barely offers as much gameplay as Duck Hunt to be, but this isn’t a brand that Nintendo seems to have a lot of interest in reviving. And who can blame them? This isn’t a concept with a ton of potential. Its visuals are pretty iconic, and it would be great to see aspects of it revisited in some sort of modern light gun game, but Hogan’s Alley served its purpose. It’s not coming back.
Hotel Dusk
Developed by Cing, Hotel Dusk is a visual novel type game for the Nintendo DS. It was notable for having super cool pencil sketch-style art, and a pretty engrossing story. You play as former detective Kyle Hyde, who is trying to solve a mystery at the mysterious Hotel Dusk. It came out during a time when the Nintendo DS was getting a lot of really interesting experimental type games like Phoenix Wright and Trauma Center, and it left an impression.
Health rating: Basically dead
Hotel Dusk actually did get a follow up, but not in North America. Last Window: The Secret of Cape West was released on the DS in Japan and Europe, but Cing unfortunately filed for bankruptcy around the same time, and that was the end of that. Outside of the occasional obligatory Smash Bros. appearance, Hotel Dusk has been closed. However, there is some degree of hope! Cing was also responsible for Trace Memory, another similarly styled game on the DS, and that (as well as its never before localized sequel) just got revived on Switch. It failed to set the world on fire, but it’s entirely possible it made its money back regardless. Could Hotel Dusk be next? Probably not. But it’s possible!
Ice Climber
Ice Climber is not a good game. It’s a game about jumping on platforms where said jumping is as un-fun as jumping in a video game can possibly be. However, its personality is so wacky that it somehow overcomes this tragic flaw to some small degree. The game stars a pair of travelers named Nana and Popo who have to make it to the summits of several mountains, dodging ice creatures, polar bears in speedos, and collect fruit before flying away on a pterodactyl. It’s not fun, but it is… neat?
Health rating: Basically dead
Ice Climber owes its minor degree of relevance almost entirely to Super Smash Bros. If they were never made characters in Melee, Ice Climbers would sit firmly next to the likes of Urban Champion as a game only known for being pumped out by Nintendo repeatedly even though nobody actually ever wants to play it because it isn’t very good. But, thanks to Smash, the Ice Climber characters do have a degree of relevance, even though they haven’t gotten a new game since their original release in 1985. This strikes me as particularly odd because it wouldn’t take much to fix this game. All you’d have to do is adjust the jumping physics and Ice Climber would be a pretty decently fun game. A new iteration could work wonders for the brand, and in the age of arcade-style games being revived all the time, it strikes me as incredibly weird that this hasn’t happened yet. Maybe someday, but for now, this brand appears to be on ice.
And that about wraps things up for this edition of The Nintendo Report. And ouch, this one was tough. The best rating we had this time around was “Not so good” which is, well, not so good. Join us next time when we tackle three letters at once! J, K, and L are up and K means Kirby, which means there’s going to be at least one brand eating well next time around! We’ll see you then!
