Every NES Game #4: Karnov

After doing one fortune cookie and two requests, I decided it was time to do a game I wanted to do for fun, and then I'll be back to the requests and cookies. So for my game, I chose Karnov.

If you can't guess why, it's obviously the fantastic fuzz on the upper lip of our hero in this game.

I had this game when I was younger but didn't play it particularly much. Apparently it was originally an arcade title by Data East in 1987 that was later ported to home consoles and PC, including the NES, which probably got the best version of the game (at least looking at the Commodore 64 and DOS versions, NES is obviously superior).

According to the manual, the hero Jinborov Karnovski, also known as just Karnov, is a fire-breathing Russian circus performer who seeks the Lost Treasure of Babylon. The treasure taken by a dragon named Ryu who now terrorizes the countryside... because that's what evil dragons do when they've found their treasure.

So we're tasked with finding and defeating Ryu and saving the townspeople and returning the treasure (and peace) to Creamina.

The game is a run-and-gun platformer, with very little focus on platforming. And by little, I mean there were literally no platforming challenges in the game -- just nonstop shooting at things with your fire-breathing fireballs, moving left and right to dodge them, and occasionally jumping.

Burly Karnov is a huge sprite on the screen; much larger than Mega Man or Super Mario, so you have to deal with also a much wider hitbox for him to take damage. When damaged, Karnov turns blue, and when hit again while blue, he'll die and you'll respawn back at the beginning of the stage or a checkpoint if you've made it that far.

He also jumps weird. For such a big lug, he has the weirdest floatiest jump. Not only does he rise up slowly, but he falls slowly as well. The sense of gravity is super weird. Other objects in the game like falling rocks that enemies throw fall much more quickly than ol' Karnov himself. It's quite bizarre. Also, if you step off the edge of a platform, you will always fall straight down and can't move mid-air, while as for jumping, you can wiggle around in the air freely while you fall. No idea why they made it this way.

At first, the game seemed to have a wide variety of enemies and challenges, but as the game progressed, most enemies turned into basically the same thing -- when you see an enemy spawning (there's a little explosion-like effect when most enemies first appear) stand still and shoot fireballs until it dies. In some cases, you'll want to duck, and in some cases, you'll want to jump, as the enemy is going to fire a projectile at you.

In some cases, enemies would spawn on top of you causing you to immediately take damage, so you had to memorize the spawn points, do some tricky moving around on screen to manipulate the camera (which wasn't that tricky, more just annoying), and spawn the enemy in a safe place.

Other than the one swimming level in the middle of the pool (pun possibly intended) of stages, all the stages were pretty much the same thing with the same enemies appearing again and again. Coming off of Mega Man, another game developed in 87 which had unique music, themes, challenges, and enemies in every single stage, this felt quite stale to push through.

But comparatively, Super Mario Bros. is a beloved classic which has only a handful of enemies appearing on 32 stages that borrow from one of just a few themes, and it uses the same musical track for a vast majority of the game, as well. So I guess you can't entirely fault Karnov for this, but with the gameplay being mostly pause-and-shoot, you don't get the unique platforming challenges that make Super Mario Bros. so fun.

Visually, at least, stages did vary as you went through the game, playing an ice level, desert level, tower level, etc. at least kept the game from getting infuriatingly repetitive.

A big feature of Karnov that sets it apart from Super Mario Bros. is the selectable items bar. Karnov can wield a variety of power-ups such as bombs, jumping shoes, a boomerang, and even wings that allow him to fly. You stock up these items in a bar along the bottom of the screen, then press the left and right buttons to select one, and the Select button to use one.

Yes, the left and right buttons on the directional pad that also move your character. So as you move around, you're constantly switching items. There's no sound or anything, just a different item will start blinking, so other than being strange at first, it doesn't really distract your attention from the main gameplay. You can also pause the game and still scroll through your items, as well. And having to press the Select button to use them is also quite strange, as most games don't utilize the Select button in any way.

While the items are cool in theory, most of them are quite useless. I only used the bombs to blow up walls that you had to blow up to advance (something that is not told to you, and I thought I was just stuck at some kind of weird dead end), and maybe used the jumping shoes two or three times. The boomerang was completely useless. the "Clapper" was a screen-clearing weapon, which I used an amazing one time.

The most interesting of these items was the ladder -- you could place it anywhere and give yourself a big height advantage. What was more interesting is that while you could only hold one at a time, if you pressed down while standing at the bottom of the ladder, you could pick it back up! I was quite surprised to learn you could do this at first, and had a lot of fun placing ladders to get powerups or shoot enemies that were just out of reach by a normal jump.

The only part I really disliked was the dinosaur boss, which fired barrages of bullets at you that were literally impossible to dodge. I ended up making sure I got a second fireball powerup and used jump shoes at just the right angle to fire a ton of fireballs into his head during my invincibility frames to hopefully kill him before he killed me. It also took a little luck as I had to hope he fired a few dud volleys at me during the fight as well.

Another part you had to kill these enemies that I thought were indestructible (mummies that turned into motionless tombstones upon being hit with a fireball), but it turns out they just had like 30 hit points. And then a random block on the floor previously in the stage would just disappear when you stood on it only after defeating these two guys. Yeah, I had to look that part up.

There was a fish midboss that was actually quite fun; you had to duck in front of him while he shot, shooting back at him, then run under him when he jumped. If you ducked too far away, he'd land on you with the jump, and if you were too close, he'd smash into you before even starting his jump. So you had to time your duck and make it under him.

That and the final boss were the only enemies in the game that really stood out to me. Ryu was fun enough, much more fair than the dinosaur. Basically he would come out of one of three windows (he actually cycled through them on loop; it wasn't even random), seek your position with his head, pause for a moment, and shoot a big fireball at you. You had just enough time to get in one or two shots before having to jump over the fireball. It wasn't hard, and took a bit longer than it probably should have, but it was at least exciting since the fireballs were always just a few pixels away from hitting you when you dodged them.

When you defeat Ryu, the screen just turns black and says "Congratulations!! The End."

That's it. You don't see Karnov getting the Lost Treasure of Babylon or peace being restored to Creamina. Just... black screen with The End. At least we got two exclamation points, to know that they're really congratulating us.

Since this was originally an arcade game, I'm guessing the game would just reset at this point and you'd continue playing for high score, so it makes sense that there wouldn't have originally been an ending here, but... the put the effort into making all these ports which seem to have been made from the ground up, so why not program in a little ending? Was it really that hard? Even just Karnov dancing next to a treasure instead of a black screen would have been nice.

In the end, Karnov held my attention from beginning to end. There were several frustrating parts that required many, many continues and breaks from the game, hence why I'm only just now making this post. Well, I also played a lot of Shining Pearl and watched football, too. But anyway, the game wasn't terrible, and I loved the look of the main character. To be honest if it wasn't a funny burly mustache dude, I'd probably have had half as much fun playing. I'm that simple.

I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone but a hardcore collector who has to have them all, or another mustache fanatic who needs all the mustache in their life. Even with just the few games I've reviewed so far, I can tell you there are better games out there in the earlier part of the NES's lifespan. It's not a that it's bad game by any means, but it doesn't do anything that makes it a must-play. It's a decent little run-and-gun in an era where every game was trying to master that formula. Even though Mega Man had already mastered it. But I digress.

If you're curious, definitely give it a try. If you don't get stuck like me you could probably knock it out in an hour or so. Maybe you'll enjoy floating around and building ladders like I did. And you'll hate the dinosaur, I promise.