Here's an NES oddity I've just picked up. You could possibly add this into the "Most bizarre and inexplicable boss" section because this boss sure is strange! I found this guy at the end of my Gradius 1 game. He would appear to be a huge brain with electricity flowing around it. Strange? It gets stranger! The brain appears to have no attacks whatsoever, so I'm not even sure if it's counted as a real "boss". And you don't even need to fire a shot because it eventually just dies off in about 15 seconds for no appareant reason! This really baffled me especially considering the fact that the other 99 percent of the game was a real bitch-shooter!

FO's Thoughts: As great as many of Konami's games are, they are kind of notorious for having wimpy final bosses (Castlevania 1 & 3 are exceptions), and the Gradius brain, aka Bacterion, is probably the biggest offender of them all. Incidentally, on my copy of Gradius, the brain looks a little different than that...I wonder if you were playing a Japanese version of the game?

Another question I have for Konami is, what's with that thing at the end? At the end of Gradius after you "defeat" the final boss. A strange message comes up after the ending... Kangeki! Let's go next zone. I'm not sure if this is bad translation or just completely inexplicable.

FO's Thoughts: Hmm...Now I'm convinced you're playing a different version of the game, because my NES cart doesn't say that at the end. I think it just says "Congratulations". I looked up "Kangeki" on a Japanese translation site, and one of the possible definitions that came up was "deep emotion; impression; inspiration", so maybe it's a way of saying, "Impressive!", meaning that it's impressive that you beat the game.

I picked up yet another NES oddity. I found this one is in the game Magmax. I don't know how weird you'd consider it, but this weird phrase comes up briefly for no reason! It is weird and is even weirder than Kangeki because this phrase has no obvious reason for it. Magmax itself is a strange game as it is. It is just a repeating shooter type game with 1 boss and 3 levels made by a company I've never heard of... Nihon Bousson. But the weird thing that I've picked up is that after you beat the mechanical level for the third time your scoreboard is replaced with "Meigetsu". This happens for no apparent reason and appears to have no obvious meaning! It just shows up briefly until you kill a few enemies and then returns to normal.

FO's Thoughts: I looked up "Meigetsu" on a Japanese translation site, and the definition that came up is "bright moon, harvest moon, or full moon". That is rather bizarre. I don't know much about Magmax, but I could probably guess that the "Meigetsu" may be some kind of point-scoring award...Sort of like how a "Tetris" in Tetris is when you get a four-line score.

I also discovered another weird phrase from Magmax... After you get so many lives the amount of lives you have changes from numbers to letters. I've never seen this done before in a game so it is extremely weird.

FO's Thoughts: Actually, this one has a simple explanation: It's recording your number of lives in hex values (0123456789ABCDEF). Super Mario Bros. does something similar. If you get over a certain amount of lives in SMB, you'll notice the numbers being replaced with letters and odd symbols. It's interesting, because I'm not sure why some programmers chose to do things this way.

I have a suggestion for your "NES Oddities" pages. At the end of "Bionic Commando" there is a scene where you jump off a cliff and shoot a bazooka blast through the windshield of an albatross plane and kill a man. Not just any man, but Hitler. It's blatantly Hitler, mustache and all. Just before Hitler dies he says something to the effect of "damn you". Then his head explodes in a bloody gory mess. Now considering Nintendo's anti-blood/violence rules back then, this scene is quite an accomplishment on Capcom's behalf.

Three separate violations:

1 Hitler

2 Cussing

3 Gory blood

I would send you screenshots but I don't feel like playing an hour just to get there. But it's for real. Damn, I love me some Capcom. Later, and keep vintage gamin'!

FO's Thoughts: Ah, yes! Even though I've not played Bionic Commando much yet, I'm well aware of the infamous head-exploding Hitler scene at the end. In the original Japanese version of the game, you were battling Neo-Nazis who were trying to resurrect Hitler, however, this was all censored from the American version of the game. The plot was changed so that you're now trying to rescue Super Joe (of Commando) from terrorists and the final boss's name was changed to "Master D", despite his obvious real identity. I don't have any screenshots of this game, either, but this site does, and it even has an animated gif of the head explosion! And I believe the exact line is, "What, you're going to fight against me? You damn fool." Thanks for your submissions, everyone!