Not hungering for this: Operation Wolf & Airwolf | NES Works 123
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- čas přidán 30. 01. 2024
- I keep typing "Worf" instead of "wolf" with these games, and I can't tell you how much more interesting those games would have been than these cartridges. Both of them fall short of their potential in very different ways. Airwolf, for example, is a first-person helicopter-based game that attempts to give players an interesting, immersive take on the experience of flying a combat and rescue chopper-think Choplifter in 3D-but totally fumbles it. Operation Wolf, on the other hand, suffers from the NES's technical limitations and fails to deliver the intense, high-energy experience of the original arcade game. As the Klingons say, perhaps it is a good day to skip these.
This video contains a fair amount of strobing lights due to the emphasis on light gun games, so sensitive viewers should approach with caution.
Production notes:
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NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 720 with xRGB Mini Framemeister. "Before the Storm" courtesy of Jacob Le. - Hry
Inside you, there are two wolves. One has a light gun, the other is a helicopter.
Do they sniff each other's butts?
My neighbor had an Airwolf cart. As kids we thought it was some kind of game for grown-ups as it made no sense to us. So many bad games got away with that assumption back then.
True, it was always made for those just a few year's older than us.
My dad had Silent Service and that's exactly what I thought too! 'This is a boring war game for grownups'
@@Frigidevil Yes, this title is in that list for sure!
Your titular Duran Duran reference does not go unnoticed or unappreciated 👌
Exactly
Jeremy is NOTORIOUS for subtitle in-jokes
@@MrERLoner Well played!
Doh! The joke went over my head. Don't say a prayer for me, now.
Wild Boys!
Airwolf may have alot of faults and shortcomings, both as a game and a show... But the tv shows' theme song? Absolutely undeniably top tier...
That's how they get ya
My recollection is that the ONLY thing I liked about Airwolf on NES is that it had a decent version of the theme song.
It's a little known fact that CBS pioneered the high-concept launch of a theme song with a TV show and video game to help market it. This would later open up the market for MTV to launch a network with nothing but "music videos".
My memory of operation wolf is when my friend rented it and his uncle who served in Nam was over and wanted to play with us. We just assumed the game took place during the Vietnam war and when the civilians were on screen the uncle would always intentionally gun them down. We told him that you’re supposed to not shoot them, and he replied with “she’s with the enemy! She’s holding a grenade!” It wasn’t until much later in life did I realize how messed up that was.
Just a little correction, The movie Commando was about John Matrix rescuing his daughter, not hostages. He did kill the shit out of a lot of people though. lol
Technically his daughter was a hostage, so I'm accidentally correct
@@JeremyParish Eh.............................. Ok I'll let it slide. :P
@@JeremyParish I have it on good authority that this is the best kind of correct.
Commando kicks ass
The irony of the name Acclaim is beautiful
My dad was drafted to Viet Nam and his brother willingly enlisted. I had as much fun playing these games as a kid as I did hearing about the horrors of the war/conflict...
I'm glad you spoke about the specter of Vietnam being large in the public consciousness in the 80s. Growing up back then it really loomed large at times through media and local events where I grew up. My own father and many uncles served during that conflict. During the 80s especially it was always something that was just there and had to be acknowledged and processed.
I been through that.
Had a running gag with my best friend for years, he hated Operation Wolf, unreasonably so, and every time we saw it somewhere I'd say "Look dude, it's your favorite game!"
Operation wolf arcade game is pretty hard. Never got very far in it.
This video may have the best one minute summary of the Vietnam War I've ever heard, with a deliciously timely barb to cap it off.
Airwolf is an amazing 80's TV 📺 action series. 😀👍🎮
"There is no jappy ending in either side, beside the fact that Henry Kissinger is finally rooting in hell". That is another reason I love your channel...
I remember rhe neverending Vietnam movies and games in the 80s as well as the military propaganda. It was probably what lead me to serve 4 years in the Marines. Only in my 30s did I wake up and look back on everything with open eyes. Propaganda is powerful on the unaware.
As a person who likes the TV Show of Airwolf I was excited they made a game for the NES and then I played it I was disappointed Then years later I found out there was Airwolf for the Famicom and I felt we got the short stick again
This was fascinating. The discussion of Vietnam expressions in media puts a fine point on a general feeling that I had growing up in the early ups but couldn’t put a name to.
I also was struck how Choplifter for Sega Master System seems to be an artistic statement on the brutality of war. It seemed to be all about trying to convey the writhing futility of it all.
czcams.com/video/ZUGPhhmErQI/video.htmlsi=nDt8D1LWYUmwjbxZ
And don't forget Missile Command, and The End... a lot of bleak nihilism manifesting in media during the latter Cold War era. I can only imagine what present-day media will look like through the lens of retrospection, assuming there's still a human race in 40 years.
@@JeremyParishThat too.
After reading the video description, I had a majestic vision of "AirWorf": the Space Jam sequel we never knew we needed! XD
The kid that lived across the street from me had Operation Wolf and it was like, his favorite game. My biggest memory, for some reason, was that he always abbreviated it as "OPW" when talking about it.
That's the same number of syllables! Argh!
Not if you pronounce W as “dubya.” Check and mate, friend.
The speedrun of Airwolf is entertaining to watch. Some shooting sounds, then you hear more of the Theme Song, then some more shooting sounds, then more of the theme song... WR is under 40 minutes.
It's definitely good that you added context to these two games, and yeah the shadow of the Vietnam war was very influential on 1980s media. I don't like Beam, and you'll come to the game that I hate Beam for soon enough. And Hydlyde next time? Fun times.
I'm not sure if it's good or bad that my immediate thoughts jumped to Dash Galaxy, but I'm sure Beam has made many upcoming games that are just as terrible!
@@PTRF_One Dash Galaxy is bad, but I meant Back to the Future.
Here in the UK Beam were great in the early days of the C64 and Spectrum. They were called Melbourne House at that time and had some fantastic games like The Hobbit and Way of the Exploding Fist.
As a kid, I loved the airwolf show... I got the game for the nes before I even had an nes. For months 6 year old me was so frustrated I couldn't play it in my atari 2600, until I finally got an nes for Christmas. I finally popped it in and within minutes, holy fuck was I disappointed.
this sounds tortuous
Punchout uses start as an action button.
True, but sparingly, so it works just fine.
Infiltrate the enemies secret artillery base......God I loved that Uzi
Personally, I love it when a plan comes together.
oh wow, i never would have thought that the illustrious beam software would come out of the console gate with an unfortunate mess like nes airwolf
Operation Wolf, a real classic. In fact, there’s an all-new installment of the series right now.
The political content in this case..............was most welcome! Robert McNamara admitted later in his life that the war between North and South Vietnam was a civil war and really had nothing to do with communism. While that was good of him, he never did admit his huge part in the war, in the documentary Fog of War. As a kid growing up in the 80's, this content really hits home as it was my parents generation that were in Vietnam (I had two uncles that served). I also remember renting LOTS of NES games and your channel really hits the nostalgia hard for me. GIJOE, of which I watched as a kid, was pretty silly with the huge battles and very little killing and death, but I get it that it was a kids show. I think Aliens is a good commentary on the Vietnam War, not clunky at all, unlike some other films we saw in the 80's and 90's.
The microcomputer roots of Airwolf's developer certainly show through. And not in a flattering way.
I always wondered why there was no A-Team Nes game. There was a 2600 game but no NES game. Watching A-Team with my parents is among my earliest TV memories along with V, Mission Impossible, and Star Trek both the original series and the original animated series.
What's really wierd is while I owned Operation Wolf on the NES and Operation Thunderbolt on the SNES and I love the Terminator 2 Arcade game and Revolution X I never played the Operation Wolf arcade game until 2017.
The A-Team was cancelled in 1986 due to declining ratings during its fourth and fifth seasons, so the series was past the peak of its popularity as the NES was being released nationwide in the U.S. However, the NES did get games based on Airwolf and Knight Rider years after those TV shows were cancelled.
@@ginormousaurus8394 Yeah, and I don't know about everywhere but where I lived A-Team was remembered a lot more then Airwolf. I think I was eight or nine when I first saw Airwolf. A-Team was rerunning regularly when I was a kid. Also the first Adams Family based game came before the first movie and decades after the TV show ended.
@@roguerifter9724 Fester's Quest came about because the game's producer Richard Robbins was a fan of The Addams Family and had a dream about a game starring Uncle Fester.
There were some other unusual choices for licensed properties that were adapted into NES games. Konami released an NES game based on The Lone Ranger in 1991, ten years after the movie The Legend of the Lone Ranger bombed at the box office, though players might have been familiar with the 1950s Lone Ranger TV series that was still being shown in syndication.
If I remember correctly, it was because Mr.T had to be licensed separately from the rest of the cast of A-Team by this point, covering his involvement in Wrestlemania.
@@w.ravenowens5248 I wonder if licensing issues involving Mr. T's likeness is why Clubber Lang doesn't have a beard when he's shown before and after a fight in the Rocky video game for the Sega Master System, although Lang appears to have a beard during the fight.
This wholly explains my childhood.
18:06 - I actually remember seeing "Flashing lights can cause seizures in photosensitive viewers" warnings in video game manuals long before the Pokemon incident.
I've genuinely been brought to tears here. Thank you so much for this video and that well said introduction.
I had both of these as a kid. I loved Operation Wolf and played the hell out of it. Airwolf…has a good theme song. I beat it once as a kid. When I learned it just keeps going after the “last” level of 20, I turned it off and never went back to it.
I've watched you weekly for a few years now J.P... I appreciate your comfort with candid commentary these days...
My cousin had Airwolf when we were kids. I think we tried to play it 4 times over the course of 5 years, "tried" being the key word.
Me and a friend used to play strip Operation Wolf. 🤦🏻♂️
The operation wolf arcade game is really hard. I could never get very far in it.
Daiei actually possibly developed a number of arcade games in the early 80s, most of which were distributed by Taito in Japan, including Fitter/Round-Up, Dock Man/Port Man, Super Mouse, Macho Mouse, Super Rider, and Pit & Run: F-1 Race
The Bandai Hyper Shot was a machine gun style lightgun for the Famicom. It had kickback and a speaker and took giant batteries. And the singular game developed for it, Space Shadow, is absolutely a flickery flashy epilepsy inducing mess. It shouldn't exist, and trying to import one will probably get you investigated... but damn, it's cool. Would've been a perfect fit for Operation Wolf.
The guy who runs the interactive museum at Long Island Retro Expo has been working to modify his HyperShot to work with other games!
Love your stuff. Intelligent, funny without all the things that make other retrogaming channels nigh intolerable. Great Stuff!
Beam put out a pretty decent cricket game for the NES exclusively in Australia in 1992. So they’ve got that going at least, I guess
Always playing favorites with the home market
Seems like that could have been an awesome light gun game if they had dialed in the responsiveness
inside your NES, there are two wolves...
Air wolf has the best tv show theme song
Really appreciate the historical context added to the analysis of these particular games and the decade they were made in. Propaganda is a hell of a drug and usually makes for a shitty NES cart
I remember Operation Wolf... think the furthest I could get legitimately as a kid was level 2? Maybe 3? Hard to remember 35 years ago.
Man, I had Airwolf for NES. I don't know why. That was a rough putt.
Airwolf is where we learned to Jan Michael our Vincents.
Don’t forget Laos, the most heavily bombed country on earth
Not a hell hot enough for that man.
Also the western studios as they are called, often were 2 or 3 people given 3 months to deliver a finished product. This also greatly affects quality.
Same with lots of JP teams. That was the way of things back then.
Nice shirt dude
I have both of these!...They are definitely more useful as "oh that looks neat on the shelf"
Appreciate the relatively, for Jeremy, scathing fire here at the start.
I wonder why Acclaim published NES games based on Airwolf and Knight Rider a few years after the TV shows were cancelled.
Airwolf is an awesome TV show. One of the best of all time in fact. Don't let the shitty video game adaptation scare you from watching it
Where do you stand on the USA Network season
@@JeremyParish I thought the new cast had really good chemistry and some of the stories were pretty good. Of course the budget took a major hit but overall I liked it better than season 3 because it felt like CBS was trying to dumb the show down for children a bit.
So glad it wasn't just 8 year old me that couldn't get that damn zapper to work with operation wolf. I felt so defeated everytime I tried.
The Vietnam preamble for this was really good Jeremy, one of your best.
Yep, a la George Carlin:
“We left a few women and children alive in Vietnam, and we haven’t felt good about ourselves since!”
Thank you for ackowledging Larry.
Larry Hama? My friend, he and Douglas Adams taught me everything I know about the universe at age 11.
@@JeremyParish More than you even know.
The mushy buttons worked for MTPO.
Make it so Mr. Airworf
I kinda want to make a retrospective/video on a Norwegian family show that was almost dubbed into English if I understand correctly. It started in the 70s, and this episode makes me wonder... Did they jump from teen and adult content mainly to making that as a distraction from the bleak news?
I dunno what surprises me more that Acclaim technically still exists as a zombie brand under another company or they made another Operation Wolf game recently
I loved watching Airwolf as a kid. Glad I didn't get suckered into getting the NES game. I suffered enough with Top Gun!
Literally all I knew about Airwolf until now was the joke in Achewood.
I’m glad you covered the arcade game and its Famicom adaptation, since I was very familiar with the arcade game and had originally hoped it would be a port of that. Not so much.
Operation Wolf? Reasonably good with what it does, but it became clear quickly that the zapper was unusable.
It is a decent enough port but pretty meh compared to a lot of the games coming out around that time such as Castlevania 2, Blaster Master, Bionic Commando, etc.
I am extremely bummed Nightshade never got a sequel.
Ernest borgnine baby
As a foreigner, learnt so much about USA and Japanese culture/history from your videos
yeah why couldn't Acclaim have waited until AFTER doing airwolf to shift away from localizing Japanese games?! even with all its issues, I'm pretty sure it would've been a step up from the game we DID get. also yeah I mostly remember playing operation wolf on d-pad vs. the zapper. I remember it being a fun one.
No just that, but "Wild Boys! Wild boys never chose this way".. and also "Don't play that game".
2:48 my man Broccoli
"America was working through some stuff." : damn it I'm crying right now.
That was the reality.
You could say that one of these Wolf titled games is" Garoubage"
Nice
Weirdly, the home computer Airwolf games were sidescrollers. I don't know why they wanted to go fany for the NES of all systems.
If you saw rainbow colors on your cart sticker, you knew it was most likely was going to suck (Accalim was slightly better then LGN)
I would have expected a clip from Teen Wolf, but maybe that's waiting for a game developed by Wolf Team.
I had to check whether Airwolf was a long-delayed 1986 Bandai game given the cheap-looking graphics.
well, at least airwolf takes the target off poor kung-fu heroes for this channel 😅
Nah, I've already committed to my KFH smear campaign
No wonder the AVGN wouldn't show any Operation Wolf footage during his Taito Legends review.
That flashing. Ugh.
The Punisher on NES did far better than Operation Wolf at translating that type of game to the NES. Sorta similar was also Cabal which as memory serves wasn't half bad either. Of course both of these games actually displayed your character on the screen and weren't straight FPS.
I played cabal arcade game all the time
the amiable video game nerd
Don’t be fooled, I’m less jolly than advertised
Air Worf................................
I'm immensely disappointed you didn't make an "Inside you are two wolves" reference. No thumbs up from me today.
To play this is to. Err....wolf
the yellow face casting didn't look too bad on that clip. the dude sitting in the chair looks well enough like a genuine domestic south asian kareoke bar patron.
I didn't show the egregious stuff, because who really needs to see that? The same episode features a character played by a child actor who is very obviously a blonde white kid in badly applied olive-tone makeup acting opposite actual South Asians. Even on VHS, it's pretty appalling.
@@JeremyParish well it would make the point more if the guy on point didn't look like the guy at the immigration office didn't look like well a basic grumpy middle aged dude, my neighbor or the guy at the immigration office. of course it shouldn't have been hard to find actual south east asians in LA in 80s.
actually casting what is actually south east asian even now might be hard(edit: because if you let south east asians do it you don't end up with reality). the people on local sitcoms are tuned up to look like upper society koreans, dark is equaled with poor and non glamorous and they live with the idea that you can change your skincolor too. there's one burger king in the city I live and 30 "korea clinics"...
I really dont wanna ask why that woman was running around the war zone in a bikini 😬
She clearly felt that a humanitarian crisis is no excuse to let your tan slip
Wow, harsh words for Airwolf. By no means is it a great game, but you slammed it HARD. It sounds like you had a really difficult time utilizing the mini map during the combat. This is a key (critical) aspect of playing the game. Once you learn to check the map and use it for assisting wayfinding, it's not that bad at all. I mean, is it really any worse than Top Gun? At least this game offers more play variety (even if quick, brief and janky) than Top Gun. You make it sounds like literally one of the worst games on NES, which is FAR from the truth.
For what it's worth, as a child I was extremely disappointed when I got this game. Not because it was such an awful game. But because I had played the arcade version of Airwolf at a local fun center and was hoping for a similar shmup-style game for my NES. Instead, I basically got a slightly different version of Top Gun. Oh well, at least both games had a radical theme song.
Yeah, the minimap is where the actual gameplay takes place. The cockpit view and plane shooting stuff is just a distraction from the minimap.
Yes, you have to use the mini map. That’s what makes the narrow channel passages so annoying-the map isn’t price enough at that scale. And it’s ridiculous that the movement of on-screen elements don’t correspond at all to your actual orientation. You rotate 180° on the map and targets rotate 10°. It’s a bad game!
Vietnam and Cambodia is southeast asia not south asia
And yet, it's far from being the worst game based on Airwolf.
Afghanistan truly was Vietnam II. That's part of why Trump's America First rhetoric appeals to the same Reaganite types, esp in Gen X.
I also have a real distaste for Trump and all his small mindedness. The man is the true definition of human garbage!!!! But also implying all Gen X people are the same is also small minded.
Jeremy, any idea why Beam Software wasn’t credited for their work on their first NES game, 𝘈𝘪𝘳𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘧? And I have a hunch Beam intended it to be played on a PAL NES, in which the theme is played slower in A Minor, just like in the TV show.