Wall Street Kid (NES) - NintendoComplete
318A playthrough of Sofel's 1990 simulation game for the NES, Wall Street Kid.
Following in the footsteps of Sofel’s previous NES effort, Casino Kid (https://youtu.be/qFbLdNv42Q4 ), Wall Street Kid melds elements of the simulation and adventure genres to create an appealingly off-beat hybrid.
(It's not a Final Fantasy VII spin-off.)
Things kick off with a meeting with the Benedict family lawyer. Larry explains that your disgustingly wealthy uncle has recently passed on, and you, "The Wall Street Kid," are the only surviving heir to a $600 billion fortune. Per the will, Kid has to prove himself worthy of the inheritance by establishing a home and a happy marriage as he amasses a fortune on the stock market.
Larry hands over $500,000 as seed money, and over the course of four months Kid must cultivate it enough to afford him the lifestyle expected of a Benedict.
The quest for riches commences April 3, 1990. Each day begins with a read through the latest “Wall Street Times,” Kid’s primary source of information on recent news and the latest stock trends. Using his computer (an Apple Macintosh SE), Kid can buy and sell stocks, check his portfolio, and research the companies being traded. He can also visit Ruth to take out a bank loan, hit up Connie for pun-laden investment tips, or ask Stanley for information on how the stock market works.
And since all work and no play makes The Wall Street Kid a dull man-boy, he has to make sure that he maintains balance in his life. He can achieve this by becoming a doormat to his self-entitled fiancée, maintaining his health through regular exercise, and buying absurdly extravagant things like yachts and castles.
But for all of the distractions the game likes to provide, it is the stock market simulation that lies at the heart of Wall Street Kid. There are four different types of stocks available - speculative, blue chip, cyclical, and growth - and each company has its own quirks and trends that you need to pay attention to.
All twenty available stocks are based on real-life companies. Boeing is represented as “Boing,” for example, and American Express as “American Depress.” These riffs add a lot to the humor in the game, sitting comfortably alongside the groan-inducing puns and word-plays that other characters (Connie, in particular) seem to favor. The colorful personalities and the goofy sense of humor are a huge part of the game's charm and appeal, and they prevent the game from devolving into an over-glorified Lotus-123 session.
For a sim/management game, Wall Street Kid does a nice enough job on the presentation front. The in-game graphics are made up of static drawings with text overlays, though they are cleanly drawn and full of color. The music is extremely repetitive, but it suits the gameplay well and somehow I never found myself getting tired of it.
The game delivers where it counts, though. Since the game lacks any reflex-testing action sequences, everything is controlled via an easy-to-use point-and-click system. The menus are laid out conveniently, the subscreens don't inundate you with tons of useless information, and the flow of the action is simple enough to not overwhelm once you've gotten a feel for how it all works.
I promise that the game is not nearly as daunting as it might first look. It's not a Kou Shibusawa production, after all. A quick skim of the manual and fifteen minutes to acquaint yourself with the menus and to play around should be all that you need to get started here.
Wall Street Kid is one of those games that you really can't take at face value. However unpalatable an 8-bit stock market sim might sound, this cart is worth taking a chance on. If you're anything like me, you'll find yourself hooked before too long.
What a classic!
(This is a brand new playthrough to replace my original SD-quality recording of the game.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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