As Mario once famously noted – “I’m gonna wreck it!”.
Wrecking Crew was a launch title for the NES, and is part of Nintendo’s early “Black Box” series. There were 30 of those games in total, including some of the biggest games of all time – Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, Donkey Kong, and so forth. This is one of the lesser-known of those.
Wrecking Crew works more or less like this: in each level, you have to demolish all of the walls and ladders at a construction site using a big ol’ hammer (or with the help of some conveniently placed bombs, as construction sites always have). While doing this, you also need to avoid a few different monstrous enemies, as well as the construction site’s foreman, who is a real butthead. I hate him so much.
At first glance, it seems like this is mostly about avoiding enemies and just breaking stuff when you get to it, but there’s quite a bit more strategy to it than that. Since you have to destroy everything, it’s pretty important to consider the order in which you need to do it – an accidentally destroyed ladder can make some walls completely inaccessible, leaving you with nothing to do but sit quietly and wait for death’s sweet embrace.
The game’s enemies can’t be killed, though trapping them is sometimes an option. Oh, and your character (who is Mario, by the way) can’t jump. So you’re always going to want to stay a few steps ahead of things, something I’m apparently quite awful at. Note that in the above shot, I’m stuck between two big barrels. I’m stuck up there, and will be forever. Please send help.
Despite many, many avoidable deaths, I found Wrecking Crew to be pretty great – the levels can be very tricky but are generally rewarding. There are also a whopping *100* of them to play through, so you won’t run out of stuff to do very quickly. And if you run out of levels, you can also make your own:
Like its fellow black box release Excitebike, Wrecking Crew contains a cool level editor. However, also like Excitebike, the ability to save/load your creations doesn’t actually work – this functionality was designed to work with a special data recorder that used cassette tapes, but it was never released in the U.S. It did get a Japanese release, though, where it looked like this:
Neat. If you ever wondered why your Excitebike cartridge didn’t save your stupid level that was just all jumps, that’s why.
I can’t help but notice that it’s kind of weird that Mario is the protagonist of Wrecking Crew. It’s strange that he doesn’t exhibit any of the usual traits that you’d expect from him, like jumping, fast running, stomping on enemies, using powerups, racing against penguins, racing in go-karts, playing golf, going up against Sonic in the Olympics, and…you know what, I’m just gonna withdraw this complaint. This whole franchise is weird.
Wrecking Crew got a sequel in 1998 – appropriately titled Wrecking Crew ‘98 – albeit in a rather unusual form. It was exclusive to the Japan-only “Nintendo Power” service (no relation to the magazine), in which used a special, rewritable cartridge to legally buy and download Super Famicom games. The sequel was a lot more like Puyo Puyo and other more recent puzzle games than the original, and because of its release in 1998 it was one of the last things ever made for Nintendo’s 16-bit platforms. Both games were designed by Yoshio Sakamoto, who is better known as a key developer of the Metroid series.
If you enjoy puzzle platformers, or you just want to check out a much lesser-known corner of the expansive Mario universe, Wrecking Crew is a must-have. It’s not especially rare or expensive (a loose copy is around $15), and will definitely keep you busy for a while. It’s definitely the best construction-related game this side of Power Shovel.
Next week’s game is a handheld port of a much-beloved movie adaptation. Is this one also much-beloved? Come back next week to find out.