NES Review: Elevator Action

I'm about to embark on writing another full-length article, and a little known fact about my personal process with that? I listen to music while writing. Not just any type of music though - it has to be slow, mellow, perpetually 'background' music. In essence, I've become a fan of elevator music. Just as I cranked up Winamp to listen to the latest lot of the ol' E-Music, I got to thinking...elevator music might be great for outset noise while writing about toys, but elevators in general haven't always been so good to me.

There was the time back in the early 90s when my parents brought me with them on their biweekly trip to Atlantic City. I was old enough to take care of myself somewhat at this point, so they trusted me enough to go up the elevators of the Trump Taj Mahal myself to our hotel room. They of course couldn't escort me as this would mean they'd have two and a half minutes less to gamble my college fund away. I entered the shiny moving box from the lobby, and what do I see when the elevator doors open on the 36th floor? A middle-aged Asian man, in nothing but his underwear, eating from a bag of sunflower seeds. Scarred for life, my friends. To this day, if I see an Asian man anywhere near a bag of nuts or an underwear commercial set in India - I blush.

But my biggest plight with elevators isn't from a real-life experience, not quite. Rather, it stems from probably the worst Nintendo game I ever received outside Dance Aerobics. Elevator Action.

It's not that the game is really all that terrible. I've seen and played worse. Granted, my NES game collection at the time was purchased primarily by my aunts and uncles who knew nothing about good carts and the lot of them ultimately came off appearing as what we'd imagine it'd be like in Hell for the avid gamer, so this isn't saying much. It's not without it's few merits, but for me, getting a new game back then was as exciting and all-encompassing as getting a new car. This was a reason to call every friend in the world, a reason to wear white, a reason to actually stop and smell the roses instead of our usual fare of spray painting them black and mailing them to the greasy witchy next door neighbor as revenge for putting a stop to our late night kickball tournaments. A new game arriving at the house was an epic event, but if the game wasn't so good, it sucked the wind right out of what should've rightly been a defining moment in modern culture.

Yes, it really was that important.


The game was simple enough: you were a guy (who for some unknown reason reminds me a lot of every former Talk Soup host out there) who had to make his way through buildings full of elevators collecting secret files. What the secret files contain has always remained a mystery, but when you consider the following two things, you know they're very important: all the files are hidden behind doors that are painted bright red. So whomever was controlling the placement of these secret files had to take a serious calculated risk in putting them behind obvious red doors. Wherever they're going to end up courtesy of Jon Davidson, you know it's important. Secondly, this crazy encouraging music plays whenever you collect one of 'em. The only other way you can hear crazy music in this game is by being crushed by one of the elevators. These files evidently contain some serious shit.

For those curious, government agents are indeed smart enough to only put secret files in abandoned buildings. We don't want any of the locals to get suspicious. Unfortunately, nobody in the high office had the foresight to check if these buildings were crawling with hundreds of terrorists who all wear black and all carry guns. More remarkable is the fact that they're all identical twins. Unfortunately, it seems like one brain was split between the bunch of them - you'll often find these guys shooting at walls, walking off the side of an elevator shaft, or haphazardly going up and down escalators for no readily available reason other than the fact that they can. They definitely learned their trade from terrorism's time-honored classic, Espionage For Dummies.


As far as I know, there's only three characters in the game. You, the terrorists, and your shiny red car. I know I'm stretching things a bit with the car, but I refuse to believe that my uncle thought a game with only two characters and a bunch of elevator shafts would make my trigger finger itch.

You complete a level by collecting all of the files in a particular building and making your way to the car at ground level without getting shot or doing something impossibly stupid like walking against the side of an elevator shaft for seven seconds and plunging to your death. This is one of those games that's so easy, it actually becomes difficult because your mind progressively gets more numb and unused that you forget anything could actually kill you. Playing this game is a lot like leaving the vacuum cleaner on your floor for a few weeks. It's easy enough to navigate around it - maybe a little too easy. After some time, you forget that it's there and you knock your big toe into it, leaving you in agony, and more importantly than that, suitably annoyed. You can see the correlation between that little anecdote and Elevator Action, because much like the end result of the floored vacuum, the game will *also* leave you suitably annoyed.

And now, the game's only two merits:


Merit #1: With careful aim, you can shoot one of the lights out. Of course, mass architectural electricity adheres to the same rules as Christmas lights - if one goes out, they all go out. While the enemies are pretty stupid, making things dark won't help you avoid them. I guess they gave up their aim and individuality for catlike night vision in a deal that could've only been forged with Satan himself.

Merit #2: With precision elevator puppetry, you can crush the terrorists, causing them to flatten out and blink out of existence, much like those mushrooms with eyes from Super Mario Brothers. And that's about as fun as it gets.

The only way this game would become worthwhile in my eyes is if it was revealed that all those secret files contained blueprints to recreate the KIT car. Then I'd understand all the fuss, and put up with my grievances. As it stands now, this is just another one to make my stack of games look fuller and more impressive. But you can judge for yourself, and download the ROM here. Enjoy - try really hard to enjoy.

PS, if you've still got a NES, the game, and a Game Genie, try this code out: PEONGPZA + NNXNGOVN. It'll make the enemies walk even slower than they do now, which renders them pretty much as glorified turtles who wear hats. You haven't met Babylon till you see one of those bozos dive into the elevator shaft in slow-motion.


- Matt