Ikari Warriors, the game itself, is an inexplicable enigma to me. I cannot figure out why a game this horrible is often considered a classic. But perhaps, what's even more bizarre is the end boss of Level 3. I'm not even sure if it's a true "boss" or not, since it doesn't attack, and Levels 1 and 2 don't have any kind of boss. But whatever it is, it sure is strange! It would appear to be a giant, rotting corpse sitting at a desk! I had this game for years, but due to a glitch, I never could get to the end of Level 3. I never heard about this unusual enemy until I read about it in Psykosuma's reviews. It's pretty gross, and it left me wondering why is this even there? And why are the enemy soldiers so diligently protecting it? 

Despite Nintendo's "No Blood" censorship-happy days, there were still a number of games that showed or described blood here and there. When you shoot the enemies in the 3D bases in Golgo 13, there is some blood. Shadowgate had some pretty graphic descriptions of it. But perhaps no NES game was swimming in buckets of blood like Monster Party. When you pass the giant tree in the first level, all the happy faces in the background become skulls with blood pouring out of every orifice! The between-level scenes show a bunch of skeletons halfway submerged in a pool of blood. I'm pretty sure that red stuff surrounding the status window at the bottom is supposed to be blood, too. My theory is that they only got away with this because the blood is only used as background, and it doesn't actually come out of you or the enemies when they get hit. However, the ending sequence is extremely freaky, too...

It appeared once in the beginning of Castlevania 2, but as far as I know, Shadowgate holds the record for the NES game with the most usage of the word "Hell". It appears no less than four times. Oh, this isn't all that big a deal, today, but back then, games were very censored, so it seemed a little unusual. Besides this, Shadowgate also had quite a few gory death descriptions, even some that mentioned blood - another thing that had almost always been censored in NES games.

Many NES games have portrayed the Grim Reaper, aka Death, as an enemy character. Perhaps the Castlevania series is most famous for this! Here's a look at the various versions of "Death" that I've seen in different NES games: