First Contact

I would like to warn and remind Retro Weekend followers that I barely remember how I came across much of the games I own for the NES. With that in mind, I have a faint memory of my copy of Monster Party actually belonging to a childhood friend of mine that had a lot of NES games. I think I remember him lending the game to us and eventually letting us keep it. Other than that, I really can’t remember anything else pertaining to how I got the game. I could be wrong. Maybe my mom got the game from the old game store at Southern Boulevard near Hunts Point.

Memorable Moments

There are some miniature things in the game that I found cool, namely being able to slap back any projectile an enemy threw my way. There’s also the fact that Mark had such short range that it was practically suicide to go and hit an enemy directly with the bat since he took contact damage. So it was either smack a projectile back, hit the enemy on the edge of their pacing pattern, or just be Bert. One thing that did get tedious was farming for hearts. I don’t want to turn this into a review of the game, but this is one thing I did as a kid and I found it to be tedious, but necessary. This game can get ungodly hard, especially for the bosses. Basically, when you found an enemy that dropped hearts, you killed them, took the heart, walked away for a bit, comeback, enemy respawns, and you do it all over again until it dropped no more hearts. Such was the ways of this NES game.

But one thing I bet everyone remembers was when that first stage changed. This didn’t really scare me in the way something like a dog through the window would scare me. This was more like “oh shit what’s happening ” kinda shock. In the first stage, there’s a tall tree with the haniwa face on it. Once you pass it, the screen starts flashing with sounds of thunder. And then everything becomes this gloomy, hellish nightmare. The trees leaves have little faces in them, the ground is bloody skulls, the background is a bunch of faces with blood dripping from their mouths. This game really wanted to freak me out. It didn’t, but holy hell looking back it makes you wonder how the hell this got through Nintendo’s Judeo-Christian-Puritan-American censors back then.

Some of the bosses proved to be memorable, like the Man-Eating Plant, the dead spider, the Minotaur, the cat in the box, the floating rockstar, etc. But one boss that pissed me off back then were the Dancing Zombies. Up until that point you’ve done what you’ve been conditioned to do in this game (and all other games for that matter): Kill the boss by hitting it. Here? Well, let’s just say that you see Zombies tell you “Watch us dance!”, you better damn well do it! I kept hitting the Zombies with the bat, wondering how many hits these guys take to kill. I was at this for a half hour. Everyone in the house had a go at them. My sisters, my mom, a few visiting relatives. None of us knew how to kill these guys. One day while playing this I got up to this point again. One of my sisters, my mom, and I just looked on wondering what the hell to do. I didn’t pause the game. I just looked and kept thinking about what I was supposed to do. I thought maybe it had something to do with that drum on top. Maybe there was some secret spot I was supposed to hit. I wondered this for about two minutes. And then… The zombies stopped, dissipated, and the exit opened. We all wondered what just happened. Then we realized… we were supposed to watch them dance!