On the Fourth Day of Die Hard, My True Love Gave to Me...

With this we reach the last of the adaptations of the first Die Hard film, at least for consoles available during the late 1980s and early 1990s. These were the early games trying to figure out how to take the plot and action of the Bruce Willis actioner and turn it into a game that could work on limited hardware that, in many ways, simply wasn’t up to the task. Each of them has interesting ideas (well, okay, the TurboGrafx-16 game is really just a random, generic shooter without any big thoughts) but none of them so far has managed to really nail that essence of Die Hard. And, spoiler, neither does the NES game.

On the surface level, the NES Die Hard, which was developed by Pack-In-Video (who also made that TG-16 game) hits the points you expect from an adaptation of this movie. A lone dude trapped in a building, going from floor to floor, battling terrorists. Guns to steal, explosives to collect, plans to foil. Bad guys that are there to unlock a vault and steal a bunch of money. It all gets representation and helps to hit some of the beats of the film. That’s all perfectly acceptable. But in execution, the game fails to nail what it should do. It’s just not fun, and it feels boring as hell to play once you get into it.

The basics of the game are actually pretty simple. You’re John McClain, trapped in Nakatomi Plaza while terrorists swarm the building. There are 40 terrorists total to kill, and you can go around taking them out one by one, stealing their gear and causing mischief while they work to find you and kill you. Seven locks have to be unlocked for the bad guys to gain access to the safe, and a timer counts down letting you know just how much time is left. Once all the locks are broken, the terrorists will swarm the final floor and you’ll have to battle any that you haven’t already killed up to that point. Kill them all and save the day.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. And you can play the game that way. You’ll shoot at guys and steal their stuff, leaving bodies in your wake. There are eight floors to explore (counting two lower floors you can gain access to, the five main floors, and then the roof) and a bunch of rooms to search through and raid. As you work you can cause trouble, hacking computers and blowing up resources, which will slow down the terrorists and give you time to kill more of them. All of this before you finally have to head downstairs and confront the remaining guys as well as their leader, Hans Gruber.

But, actually, that’s not the only way you have to do it. Technically the only goal of the game that has to be completed is killing all the terrorists and surviving. That’s what many speedrunners go for, and to do that all you have to do is burn time on the stairs and wait for the locks to unlock. That allows you to go to the 30th floor to confront all the terrorists and have the final showdown. It’ll lead to a bad ending, one where the terrorists escape, possibly with John’s wife, but at least you made it through the game. It’s silly that the game basically lets you do this, but it works.

Frankly, having played the game, it might be better just to take the dumb, silly ending over really playing this game. For a number of reasons, the NES Die Hard just isn’t very fun to play. For starters, it’s hard as hell. The terrorists will spawn seemingly out of nowhere, and due to the way the game is designed, giving you only a limited view of the rooms around you at any given time, you can easily get cornered and suddenly end up in a fire fight without any way around it. This also makes it very hard to control how the fights go, leading to your character soaking a lot of damage from all the bullets sprayed at you.

That damage can be really hard to avoid because the hit boxes on the bullets aren’t exactly fair. Beyond that, the enemies are (naturally) all armed with machine guns and they’ll pray and spray like it’s a bullet hell experience. Even on the Beginner difficulty (as opposed to Hard where the enemies do twice as much damage and soak twice as much from you as well) it’s hard to keep pace with the bad guys and survive all the damage they unleash. Even with some of them dropping health, and more health kits being hidden around the building, you’ll likely die frequently.

Add to that the fact that, like just about every Die Hard game we’ve covered so far, the game doesn’t ever explain what you’re supposed to do for all the sidequests and optional objectives. Sure, you should try to prevent the terrorists from blowing up the top of the building, but who has the detonators and what do you do with them? The game doesn’t explain it, you just have to figure it out. There’s a lot of little things like that, like maybe try to contact the cops, or maybe go blow open some rooms to take out bad guys. Does it all matter? Maybe, but you only find that one once the game is over and you see the ending… if you even make it that far.

Honestly, the NES Die Hard experience is one of frustration. If you somehow manage to learn the shooting and how to take out bad guys, you still have a ton of them to dispatch, and any you fail to kill early will all come for you at the end, and then you’ll likely die. If you do learn the objectives you have to take care of them all and still find a way through the end game. And even at that point it still might not be good enough and you could get one of the bad endings. Hell, there’s a way for you to do everything right, but die when Hans dies and get the Game Over bad ending that way. It sucks.

I can absolutely understand why people elect to go for an any% mediocre ending if they’re playing this game. Trudging up and down the stairs a bunch of times sounds like a preferable way to play this game than actually having to go through all the trouble of playing it “properly”. Considering you’re going to end up in the same grand finale battle whether you spend thirty minutes doing all that work or just three minutes going along the stairs, why bother playing a game that clearly doesn’t want you to enjoy it.

Die Hard on the NES is a miserable experience. It’s hard to control, tedious to play, and it forces you into the same path no matter what optional objectives you complete. The only difference in play styles is deciding how long you want to slog through the experience. For a game like this, three minutes is better than thirty. Although, honestly, you could simply choose not to play it at all. That does feel like the most viable option.