Vermin

"A smiling face of a mole is indicated"  --Vermin instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
10th of July, 1980 (Japan)

At a fundamental level, Vermin is a game about reaction and time-management. The player must track a number of objects moving towards them from several possible paths. The controls are just two buttons - left and right - which shift both of the character's hands in unison. These hands must be lined up with their target as they arrive, with no extra input required. It is a straight-forward blend of judgment, reflex, timing and multi-tasking with progressively increasing speed and no end goal aside from failure. Sound familiar? It should - because this is more or less just Ball turned upside-down.

Alright, I suppose I am selling it short. Vermin includes a number of subtle shifts to the format - more than enough to distinguish the two games at a time when there are more than twenty Pong machines on the market. For a start, in Vermin you shift the whole character from side to side which functions slightly differently than only shifting the hands. Cornering your character becomes an issue, as you may not leave yourself enough time to reach a target on the other side of the play-field  (leading to a strategy of constant centering). The speed also seems more hectic - perhaps because the warning time is now reduced as you can only track a small portion of each target's approach.

But the key difference between the two titles is that this time there's an enemy to fight, as reflected in its one-word title - a monicker of repulsion and antagonism. The conflict itself, however, is pointedly low-stakes and lacking in any immediate danger. By combining two recurring Nintendo motifs, moles and gardening, Vermin constructs a motivating yet nonthreatening premise.

And the nonthreatening aspect is more crucial than you'd initially expect, considering this is a product still hoping to entice new audiences into trying out a strange new form of play. The last thing you want to do is scare them off by making their initial, inevitable, difficulties unpleasant. Hence the response to failure is a gentle tease rather than a discouraging rebuke, with your three allowable misses represented by nothing worse than the mocking faces of the moles you let through. (And with this, the final piece of the three-life system falls into place.)

Perhaps it is also worth observing something about our protagonist that might be lost in a time when Mr. Game & Watch is the face of the range. The instruction manual of Vermin refers to this character as a 'puppet', just as the Ball manual refers to its character as a 'doll'. This is quite an interesting decision - to embed additional artifice within the game unnecessarily by suggesting the player character isn't even real within their own game. You could argue that this was a choice made to excuse the basic and segmented shapes the developers were using at this early stage, but the fact that the puppet theme continues through to the enhanced versions in the 1995 compilation Game Boy Gallery suggest it as more of an aesthetic choice. Perhaps the intention was to reaffirm the range's commitment to play, and to reassure wary buyers that these games would be at home within their toy box.

So with the life-system cracked, and more thought put into story-telling (...so to speak) than ever before, Vermin is another solid entry in a promising young series of games. But with two out of the three having rather similar mechanics, it would be nice to have something a little different next time.