The Frezno's Raving Rants Tenth Anniversary Retrospective

Welcome, friends and lovelies, to the festivities. If I've timed things correctly it is August 16th, 2023. Ten years ago today, this blog was created out of the spark of an idea. Ten years. Think of it. A child born when I first crafted those words is now old enough to be in the fifth grade. Ten years. A not-insignificant fraction of a human life. Ten goddamn years. Over that time, this blog has shifted in its mission statement and what it has talked about. To wit, I myself have also shifted and changed in those ten years. I often speak of my internal landscape, and this space represents a decade-long road map of it. Our party, then, is a metatextual retracing of my steps. We're going to go over a brief history of Frezno's Raving Rants. What inspired the posts, what led me to do and say the things I did back then, and what led me to the me I am today.

Whether you've been a constant companion on this trip, or you've somehow just stumbled upon this party, you are welcome to accompany me on this adventure down my metaphorical memory lane. It's alright. I've done this introspective song and dance before. I've never done it quite so thoroughly down my own timeline, but it's a party and one can be indulgent. Take my hand, if you so please, and come along with me. Let us celebrate and discover what made this blog tick, and how it grew and changed as I so did. Let the Frezno festivities... begin.

Big Money, Big Prizes, I Love It! (Nintendo Campus Challenge, Nintendo World Championships)

We've jumped ahead just slightly now. It's 1990. Nintendo Power has become a success, chugging along into the brave new 90's. The Wizard survived Video Armageddon, but its hype fled the silver screen like a demon, spreading like wildfire. By now it had been fully unleashed in cartridge form, and Mario mania had gripped us all. This is not that story. This is the story of the brave maniacs who decided that it wasn't enough for Video Armageddon's harbinger to become reality. By God, they were going to harness its full power and bring it forth into our realm. Ancient tomes were consulted, seals were drawn, prayers were chanted and planted among us. In a summoning ritual involving blood and microchips, it came to us. Video Armageddon exploded across America in a wave, and we Disciples Of The Grey Box still feel the effects of the summons today. In 1990, they called it... the Nintendo World Championships.

I hear they were very good. I was also four years old, and on another island entirely while they occured. This, more than anything, is a reconstruction lost to time. The Nintendo World Championships are dead and gone along with 1990, just like all those missing Doctor Who tapes that got burned. They were an event, but what really happened? The real answer is something mundane like "a bunch of kids who were good at Nintendo games competed with one another", but when have we let that stop us? No, this was a clash of titans. Hard Game Beater against Hard Game Beater, the strong surviving and the weak faltering. Here, in this gladiator arena of the Gods, the barriers between America and Japan were weakened. Things could bleed over and be called "sneak previews". Video Armageddon had been summoned to darken the skies. Anything could happen in this arena of divinity. The competition continued to rage, gods and devils battling alike with their controllers. Destruction rained from the heavens as heavenly light radiated from square grey boxes, the alchemy at hand here beyond the grasp of mere mortals. The heavens shook and trembled. The power of Valya, even here, surged through the competition... until finally it was Thor, God of Thunder, who surmised victory. He had survived Lady Capitalism's challenge, and ventured into the heart of the Plumber's rip through time to collect 50 golden coins. He had taken Endless Adventure's unorthodox driving challenge, and steered himself across the coast at 250 miles per hour. He did these tasks quickly for the true prize, Captain Communism's test of reflex and quadratic thinking... for this was where the points really mattered. With mastery of them all, Thor was crowned Supreme Champion of Video Ragnarok. All hail Thor, our alchemical Destructor.

As for the rest? Lady Capitalism took pity on them, and her sadness brought her to tears. 116 of them fell like rain into our realm, with the first 26 being the most powerful among them. This is the continued legacy of the Nintendo World Championships; the rarity of its cartridges. Most can simply be a teenage ROM fiend, or move up to a reproduction cartridge. For the true madmen, there is shelling out thousands of dollars for one of Capitalism's Tears, an actual divine portion of Video Armageddon used in the battle of the gods. I played the games tonight. To talk about them here is to give away the future, but suffice it to say that my score was nowhere near that of mighty Thor's. The Angry Video Game Nerd had a run-in with the thing as well. Tempted by its greed at first, he plays in competition for the Golden Tear of Lady Capitalism, only to realize that it consists of games he already owns. He rejects the siren song of the Big Time, and... Well, I won't give away the end of that. There was also a Nintendo Campus Challenge in 1991. College students taking breaks from finals to partake in their own little Video Armageddon. Unlike the World Championships, this file is not available for a teenage ROM fiend. The reconstruction cannot happen. It lacks the popularity that the first competition had, and this would be the last on the NES. 1992's Campus Challenge was in 16 bits, which are a place we cannot go.

What we can do is play football or something.

California (The Wizard)

Still not ready to talk about the Nintendo games yet. The entire point of the Nintendo Project is looking back, and I find myself looking back to December of 2013. There, I postulated that the end of the NES was a thing of beauty. To be fair, this was mostly brought on by me being mushy about my friends getting engaged, but I'm going to stick with it. 1994 and 2012 were both about Nintendo partying in the face of oblivion, and doing it with a vibrant celebration of the life that the NES and Nintendo Power had led. Today we go to 1989, where both were riding high. Millions of children were getting the Power every month, and the end of the 80's signalled Nintendo's arguably highest heights with the NES. 1989's silver anniversary is waning, set to be subsumed by a future in which we make the same tired fucking joke about hoverboards and Pepsi Perfect for 365 days. How depressing. Now playing at the Holomax of Infinity, where time is a construct and we flit through it like antsy and esoteric little hummingbirds, it's The Wizard in 5.1-D totally schway vision.

God help us, what are we doing here? A movie starring that Wonder Years kid about road trips and Nintendo games. Dear god in heaven, have we sunk to these meteoric lows? Still, there are things to be said about this movie. It's little more than a historical relic at this point, an artifact of 1989. Is it a very good film? Not really. I don't even know if one could call it a cult classic. It is riddled with problems and things that people on the Internet mock it for... like its video game inaccuracies. Roger Ebert called them out on this. The mental image of Roger Ebert in 1989, playing the first Ninja Turtles game on the NES, speaks to me on so many levels. Part of it is the "secret history" Phil mentioned ages ago, but with me being used to the main reason people call the first Ninja Turtles one of the hardest NES games being the dam level... I want to know if Roger Ebert ever beat it. Short of a seance, I will never know the answer to that question and it fucking haunts me. Just like the NES and Nintendo haunt this film, the spectral force of Nintendo's influence being the fabric that binds it all. Here we sit, at the tail end of the Dance Apocalyptic, and yet in the cinemasphere we have a looming Destructor to rival Peko. It is Video Armageddon that blazes in the skies over Universal Studios in California, and the secret harbored beneath its gates will send the world into chaos and frenzy. But let it sleep for now.

Then you have the weird moments. Jenny Lewis screaming about breasts, for instance. Ah, Jenny Lewis. Looking back again, it was this time nine years ago that I first became acquainted with her voice. Imagine my surprise when I learned that she was in this. How about that. Of course, the Power Glove shows up as well, Nintendo and Mattel's joint gauntlet of doom in these dark times. The camera trickery led us to believe that this would assist our alchemy. We were wrong. Oh god, were we wrong. The muddled power of control was not in our hands. We were fooled into creating a monster... but this is only one of the monsters birthed by our Wizard. The next lies buried within Universal Studios, the harbinger that is the final test of Video Armageddon. Video Armageddon, you see, is a test of the best. The children who have mastered the video games flock, pitted against each other in glorious 8-bit alchemical combat. We come down to three in the final round. A girl that the movie does not care for. Lucas, wielder of the Glove of Deception. Jimmy, our protagonist and Wizard of California. The final test is unleashed upon these three Hard Game Beaters, and it is nothing they could comprehend. They know only the games that have existed. Now, as Video Armageddon strikes their hearts, comes the world of anti-matter, screaming at them in chiptunes. As the gate is raised, the full fury is placed upon them. In this unknown land, they must beat their rivals and become the champion of all video games, both existant and non-existant. As for us, we witness something amazing. Something that set the world on fire in 1989, when we knew naught about it.

Holy fucking shit. Super Mario Brothers Three.

To speak more is to risk being sucked into the open wound that Mario unleashed upon time in this period. Already, I fear the winds are gale force. Still, this is the monster set loose upon the world in 1989, the bringer of Video Armageddon and the vanguard who let Nintendo rule the world. Only a beast altered with superior alchemy could possibly take it on... but that story is not ours to tell. The Wizard probably made money. It probably cemented the hype for Super Mario Brothers Three in the minds of every child of the time. What I know for sure is that this film created several monsters. The Power Glove was one. Super Mario Brothers Three is another. The third came about when Nintendo sought to bring the film to life. That story comes later. God help us all.

Get The Clues That You Can Use (Nintendo Power)

That was fun. As promised, I'm back at this space again. The highly elaborate post about the Ninja Gaiden games will happen someday, but like I said; in the interest of chugging along, we will do just that. Right away, we hit a roadblock. Chugging along, according to my Wikipedian roadmap, gives us a duo of games with some importance. Therefore, a little context is in order. We are firmly in the world of the letter N, and now we are far enough along that we must talk about the Big N. This is the Nintendo Project, after all, but it is time to turn our gaze to the creators themselves; to Nintendo. We know the alchemical machine already, the grey box. We know that its game cartridges are bigger on the inside. Hell, we even know what power words can hold. I am nothing less than an amateur alchemist of the keyboard, firing words off into the aether. Nintendo seized upon that and created an entire magazine about it. Today, I fear, we must talk about Nintendo Power.

Here is where this all gets morbid. Nintendo Power is dead and dusted. Two years ago, its final issue shipped, a loving tribute and celebration. 24 years of fun and profit, going out with a grandiose fiesta of print in the face of oblivion. All returned to nothing, but Nintendo Power embraced it with a smile as it looked back. Peko The Destructor partook in punch before purpose took the Power. This entry, I am afraid, is all after that fact. It's December 1st, 2014, and we are visiting the memorial of Nintendo Power. What do we hope to gain here? Perhaps it is just understanding. The era of Nintendo Power is remembered fondly by some. I was not around for it. I grew up in small-town Newfoundland. Magazines were a rare commodity, and the only subscription I had was to Disney Adventures. Another dead magazine, incidentally. The information rags of our youth die tragically young. Hell, I don't think I bought an issue until 2000, and that was for the Pokemon Gold and Silver strategies. A few years later, though, during my days as a teenage ROM fiend, I bought an old issue from a used bookstore. Mega Man 4. Monster In My Pocket. Super strats for Super Castlevania 4. A thing of incredibility.

What can I say, really? I mean, this is of course a part of the song of the NES. Phil talked about it when he came back for Mega Man 3. The games featured in Nintendo Power, and on its cover, were Important. In a Dark Age with no Internet and only the word of friends to guide you, the book launched all sorts of games into fame. Mega Man thrived. Ninja Gaiden cut through the competition. You had guides for the games, and an entire cabal of secret agent children submitting their codes and cheats to the magazine, electronic espionage hard at work. High scores were on full display, showcasing the madness of the young Hard Game Beaters. Howard Phillips and that smarmy kid with the spiky hair ran around video game worlds, their antics entertaining and educational. When Nintendo Power was on, it was really fucking on. It had its moments of accidental brilliance, like the moment when it almost let Mother exist in our realm officially. Its previews teased and enticed, of course, breaking down that impenetrable curtain between nonexistant lands. As the Wall crumbled and Captain Communism began to crumble with it, so too did Japan and its army of ghosts secretly take over. Nintendo ruled the goddamn world, and Nintendo Power was one of its vanguards. Now it is gone, reaped two years ago after its final party. Its legacy lives on. Nintendo Force is a fan magazine that has fired up the dormant engine and continued the work abandoned by the brilliant official creators. Sound familiar, much? The magazines themselves exist, or scans can be found. The days, however, are gone along with it. I was a subscriber of Nintendo Power, if only briefly. I registered some DS games in 2007 and earned a three-month subscription. Part of my ritual when travelling to visit my grandparents, around that same timeframe, was purchasing Nintendo Power magazines and poring over them during my times without Internet. I longed for the Final Fantasy III remake. I was dazzled at Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. Super Smash Bros. Brawl looked incredible.

It came 20 years late, but Nintendo Power enriched my world and I can't thank it enough for that. Here and now, two years after it has left us... I eulogize it. Celebrate its life, friends. Watch the AVGN wax nostalgic about it. Read about the legendary Captain Nintendo. Enjoy some Howard and Nester comics. Let us remember Nintendo Power, and create our own magic with our memories. Rest well, you silly little book. Rest well.

All Of Your Dreams Go Down The Drain (NFL, Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing, A Nightmare On Elm Street)

This is like a bad dream or something. NFL by LJN. You know what? No. Fuck it. From now on, whenever I come across an unremarkable sports game I dislike, I'm going to instead quote a Wikipedia article about anything else. NFL on NES, published by NES, is irrelevant and not at all fun. Instead, let's learn about electrical engineering.

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. This field first became an identifiable occupation in the latter half of the 19th century after commercialization of the electric telegraph, the telephone, and electric power distribution and use. Subsequently, broadcasting and recording media made electronics part of daily life. The invention of the transistor and, subsequently, the integrated circuit brought down the cost of electronics to the point where they can be used in almost any household object.

Electrical engineering has now subdivided into a wide range of subfields including electronics, digital computers, power engineering, telecommunications, control systems, RF engineering, signal processing, instrumentation, and microelectronics. The subject of electronic engineering is often treated as its own subfield but it intersects with all the other subfields, including the power electronics of power engineering.

Great. Next.

Nigel Mansell's World Championship Racing. It's like Rad Racer in first-person. Also sort of frustrating because the opposing racers are nigh-impossible to pass. They weave around too much and I rear-ended them. I made no progress in this game. It is a better game than NFL on NES but not by much. It also came out in 1993 and was but one version of many. This is what happens when the Nintendo Project dies. All we have left is mediocrity. It's enough to put you to fucking sleep. I have nothing to fill this space. I have nothing constructive to say about any of this. At last I understand the futility of it all. The Nintendo Project died for a reason, and so did the NES. So did the NES. So, too, will all your favorites die. Entropy rules absolute, and Peko the Destructor holds sway over all. Perhaps, then, we should visit her. Why the hell not? Video games are a goddamned nightmare these days. Let's delve into the nightmare and face our destiny. We've done it before, and by god we'll do it again.

Rare Ltd. brought me joy in the mid-1990s. Here they bring me supposed despair. Here they drag me into the nightmare. A world where progress is unclear, where snakes and bats swarm and rocks fall from the heavens just to kill me. This is not the domain of Peko the Destructor, or even the Nightmare. This space was created out of malice and revenge. A very bad man did very bad things in 1968, and in response the public took justice into their own hands. They burned a murderer alive in his home, and his vengeance brought him back. He is Frederick Krueger, of the Bladed Hand. We are in his charged space, and it is horrific. He screams for justice and revenge. How dare those people kill him? In revenge, he shall kill as something beyond a human being. He will kill as an idea, living within the nightmare. His havoc will spread to the waking world. His dark seed, his cries of justice... they resonate with some. In his dream realm, Frederick cries for the blood of the Dream Warriors. In the waking world, the zealots of the Church Of Gaming cry for the blood of the social justice warriors. There is no integrity. There is only misplaced anger, a sense at being wronged when they themselves have cast the first stones. We enter this space, and we seek to exorcise the demon once and for all. A Bladed Hand with disconnected orbs for limbs threatens us, echoing the future heat death of the NES. Echoing the nightmare which taught us about death in the first place. How can anyone stand up to this?

Without fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Just as the nightmare has its heroes, so too do the zealots have their targets... but they fall victim to infiltration. Their scheming exposed. This is not a crusade. It is a witch hunt. The fighting continues, as it always has and always will... but they can never win. These are not dominoes. These are people, and these people will not topple. Frederick is a spectre. He is an idea haunting the subconscious of promiscuous teens. All one has to do is remain unafraid, to remain brave... and one may burn his bones. Then Peko the Destructor shall descend, and Frederick will pay for his transgressions. Then will come the Lady Valya, bringing the truth that we had forgotten when we got too angry at football games. It is a truth that will send the zealots screaming back to their caves, plotting for "next year".

The secret of alchemy is material social progress.
Video games are alive again.

Gettin' Mad About Video Games (NARC, NES Open Tournament Golf, NES Play Action Football)

Welcome to the letter N. It stands for Nothing. As in, nothing today is actually any good. Okay, maybe one game, but it sure as shit ain't NARC. We're in War On Drugs territory here. Also Williams Arcade territory. Also Rare Ltd. programmer territory. Mother of god, these are bad lands to be in. So how do we fight the war on drugs? Kill it. Kill them all. Destroy every drug-peddling criminal scum shooting at you. They are the enemy, and you are the Law. The absolute, the champion of virtue and of right. They shot first, so it's within your rights as a gun-toting officer of peace to mow them all down. How dare anybody question otherwise. Attack dogs? Mow them down too. The powers that be have deigned them threats. There are no cute dogs in this world, only attack dogs that will gnaw your leg off. Men who throw hypodermic needles. Gun not enough? Blow them up with a rocket. Create a cascade of corrupt corpses in your wake, no remorse or worry... and then go for a round of golf.

This is better. This elicits warm memories of the 1990s. Borrowing this game on the same day as art class. We had to make placemats. I made a crude drawing of the cover art of this game. Is it still here, I wonder? Let me check.

By God in heaven. There it is. Littered with signatures from classmates. "AFA." A Friend Always. Here's the punchline; I have forgotten who some of these people are. Who the hell is Holly, or Billy, or Jennifer? Was AFA just some cool thing to say in 1995? I don't know, but somehow this game still has power over me. Somehow it's a fun golf game. Even if I can barely make par on some holes, and end up triple bogeying on others. Somehow, it's still fun. No bullshit, no nonsense, just you and a golf club and hitting the damn ball. No Jack Nicklaus, no Lee Trevino. Just Mario. And a golf club. It's the best game today, and I have nothing else to say about it. It's a golf game and it's fun.

NES Play Action Football is a football game. It is not fun... but it's had a strange effect on me. I went in expecting very little. I got, of course, very little. It is football. Just like I've done before, and will do again and again until the end of time. It uses an isometric perspective and sometimes zooms out. Then the conspiring begins. Plays and attack patterns that I have no comprehension of. The screen zooming out as it's my turn to move, such that the tiny red man I'm controlling collides with a tiny yellow man and I lose my turn. No gain. Controls that are unintuitive. God. I know that I'm not playing it as intended. I am meant to have the instruction book with me like a bible... but I guess I'm just used to a certain level of figuring stuff out. Something simple would work. B to pass. A to tackle. Select to switch player. This is all you would need. Instead, it's B plus a direction to pass. B PLUS A to change players. This is never told on screen, of course. I had to look it up after finishing play. Good riddance. Bad rubbish.

Then I thought further. I thought of Gamergate, of the faceless swarms that are descending on women in gaming and driving them right the fuck out with their virtual pitchforks and torches. All in the name of "weeding out corruption". Bullshit. Bullshit. I have yet to see an example of Gamergate doing anything of a sort. A woman has had dirty relationship laundry aired out for the world to see. Another woman has been driven out of her home by threats of rape and death. Another woman has quit writing about video games entirely. The Faceless Ones are claiming victim after victim to their crusade... and for what? To protect this? To protect their darling dear video games? Emboiting a closed space upon which nothing that is not a privileged white male can enter on pain of death? Literally fuck off. Real people, real living and feeling people on planet Earth, are being hurt by this. Hurt by the mob, in favor of protecting video games. Literally. Fuck off. Video games are not worth protecting. Even if they were, they wouldn't need it. They have survived market crashes and system changes and social upheaval. A couple of "non-games" aren't going to kill it. Get out. Video games were corrupt from the moment they were born. They exist to make money, and they will continue to make money until the end of time. The fuckwits behind Gamergate are no better than the NARC men, shooting at everything that dares to be Not Them.

Destroy all "gamers". Ruin all video games. Video games are dead. From now on, this project is a postmortem.

You Shall Beeee Like Uzzzzzz (The Mutant Virus, Mystery Quest)

My my, we've been in this realm for a while. This is a milestone, of sorts. 26 letters in our alphabet, and once we sort out these last two mediocre bits of electronic entertaiment, the Nintendo Project will have mapped out 13 of them. As there aren't equal games represented for every letter, this isn't a true halfway point but a spiritual one. A Valyan one, if you will. As we sit here and ponder what the wonders of the letter N will bring (not much, and then a shitload of really interesting things, incidentally), one must ponder. What is a bad game made of?

If you believe The Mutant Virus, it's made of a literal infection at the very core of the microchips of the thing, spreading and multiplying and taking root of everything. I've oft called the magic of the NES "microchip alchemy", so let's see what went wrong here. At its core, a game is but an idea. The heart of The Mutant Virus is an idea about a spaceman inside a computer fighting off a computer virus by shooting at it and stopping the spread of the infection. It could have been a fun game, but there's a vagueness to it that comes when one dredges through a emulated file. In the absence of microchip alchemy, the game about microchip alchemy's infection has no equivalent exchange. It cannot function, and thus it loses its soul. A shambling infected husk, the virus spreads and spreads. You can shoot at it all you want, but the infection doesn't slow like it should. It keeps spreading, and even coming near it is hazardous. Worse yet, the system itself has gotten wise to your attempts. It is now turned against you, and can smite you in one blow. The grey box can create worlds with but a thought. One hit of a fireball may not seem like much, but the fireball is a representation. A construct. What is really happening is nothing less than the unmaking of your player character. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Game over.

Mystery Quest, then, is a bit better. Platforming, shooting things, and a lengthy segment inside a castle where the only way to progress is to shoot at nondescript walls and find hidden things. So, Milon's Secret Castle territory again. Great. I want to discuss my own experience with the game. I accidentally brought forth a portion of the true experience of playing it, screaming forth from 1988 or whatever. I was in the castle, and I discovered that holding up and firing shot your projectiles upward in an erratic spread. It appeared to be a useless move. Later, as I was wandering, I came back to an area with an item above me, stuck in an alcove. I could not get it, and I didn't know where else to progress. I tried the up-shot, and broke the block below it. I got the item, and I discovered this by thinking it out and experimenting with the buttons. No walkthrough, no Youtube. All me. It's still not all that good, but by god did I do it all by myself.

On to N, then. Hold tight. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Not A Time Warp, But A Time Rip (Motor City Patrol, Ms. Pac-Man, Muppet Adventure: Chaos At The Carnival)

(Before we begin: holy mother of God, I'm on TARDIS Eruditorum! I wrote everyone's favorite Mr. Sandifer a guest post on Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock. I had choice words about it. Choice words you can go read. If you jumped here from Eruditorum: Hello! I'm Frezno and I write longwinded words about old video games! I'm about to do it again! See below.)

Motor City Patrol is weird as hell. Like, unsettlingly so. We're dealing with late 1991/early 1992 here, according to the Internet. So the SNES exists and the NES is dying. I expected a crapfest when I booted this one up. What I got was a crapfest that just disturbed me to look at. The point of this game, as far as I can tell, is to drive around and patrol buildings as a police officer and catch people who speed or something like that. It's a game about driving in circles. Dull, but look at it. The perspective and vehicle-based gameplay resonate with our futureminds. This is a proto-Grand Theft Auto. Except it's not designed at all like that and it's only the trickery of the mind doing it. It doesn't help if, say, the person playing Motor City Patrol has beaten Retro City Rampage... which is a GTA-esque "retro" game that doesn't have nostalgia bombs so much as nostalgia thermonuclear warheads. It's been said before, but with the collapse of video games and the impending heat-death of the NES, reality is growing thin. That's how things like this can bleed through into our world. Things from futures that never were.

This thin fabric of reality is what lets other things through. Things like Ms. Pac-Man. The version I played is the official one, released in 1993 by Namco. In dragging itself forward 11 years on a dying grey box, it created a splinter of itself. A splinter capitalized by Tengen, themselves an arm of Atari, itself a major leash-holder of the dread beast GREED. Before Ms. Pac-Man arrives in 1993, she has already been here. Under GREED's command, this splinter-Ms is an embodiment of Lady Capitalism, eating all in her way and demanding quarters for the honor of assisting her. Ghosts, dots, cherries, pretzels... none stand in the way. The 1993 version is no quarter-muncher. It is a simple diversion from a simpler time, and does not kill you outright with unfairness early on. That comes later. The dread beast is still at the heart of things, but its death will come. He has been tricked into a dying realm, and there is no escape from the swinging blade. Ten hearts stop beating and this iteration is slain. All hail Peko the Destructor.

And then Muppets. I suppose this one is penance. I inspired a man to play this game live, and now it's my turn to experience it. It's not very good. What I played was playable enough, but it's not very good at all. It's from Hi-Tech Expressions even. My favorite publisher in all the land. The two segments of this game I played and beat were Kermit's and Gonzo's. White water rafting and bad Asteroids controls, respectively. Playing this incites memory of the Muppets. I sort of missed the Muppet Show, but I did have a stuffed Kermit the Frog. He had a Muppet University jersey and I took him everywhere with me. I remember the Muppet Christmas Carol, a film which I take pains to watch every year when the holiday approaches. I remember Muppets Tonight, and I liked it because I was 10 and didn't know any better. Remembering these things is what this game is supposed to siphon off of. My memory of Muppets precludes me buying this. I refuse the call. My memory is too powerful for even this bit of alchemy to exchange. The power of a man's Kermit impression is too much. The power of a Hard Game Beater can best Gonzo's gonzo space bullshit with minimal fuss.

It's about time we get away from the letter M. This corruption needs cleansing.

I Am Everything You Ever Were Afraid Of (Monster In My Pocket, Monster Party, Monster Truck Rally)

Monsters are real. I know. I'm one of them. The entire idea of video games is monstrous, in a way. We take concepts and grand worlds born from our imaginations, and then perform arcane rituals to squeeze them onto tiny discs and plastic cartridges. Witness the jam that led to Konami's Monster In My Pocket, a game that ties in to a toy line of tiny monsters, not unlike the M.U.S.C.L.E. toy line. Difference is, this game is pretty good. It is also an exercise in madness. Look at the included screenshot. Really look and comprehend what is happening here. Frankenstein's monster is standing in front of a tape deck while a zombie comes after him. Both are a few inches tall. The first two stages of this game are the domestic clashing with the monstrous. Jump on a giant bed while witches warp in. Leap across the kitchen counter as goblins hurl sugar cubes. Avoid the stove burners and press onward, eventually fighting a Yeti. Not in the loo in Tooting Bec, but in your freezer. To gaze upon the monster is to go mad; you cannot grasp the true form of its creativity. The deadlights beckon you, and you go mad. The laughter of the damned echoes through your house as you continue to play, controlling Frankenstein's monster, itself a symbol of flawed alchemy and what happens when creativity goes too far. We have stolen video games from the gods, and now our guts belong to the fucking crows. We are the Nintendo generation: the modern Promethea.

So now that sanity has left us in one brutal swipe of the monster's claw, it's time to have ourselves a party. Monster Party is madness itself, filtered through a CRT screen and rendered with an 8-bit processor. Men in Japanese school uniforms shoot psychic blasts at you. Pills turn you into a dragon man. A spider apologizes for being bead. Halfway into level 1 everything melts and becomes a blood-soaked hellhole with spotted mandogs and oozing skulls. Level 2 has a fried food boss that transforms into an onion ring and a piece of shrimp. A later level has a kitten in a box that angrily hurls kittens at you. A wishing well attacks you with coins. I write these things to help emulate my own experience with Monster Party. I got to read about it in a Nintendo tip book. It was text only. When you read the phrase "swing your bat at the Bull Man and his tiny Bull Kids" at the age of 10, it leaves an impression. Eventually I found the game and it was even wilder than I had anticipated. My own gazing upon the monster. Was it that moment that gave me power? Hell, look at Doctor Who(as I so love to do); the moment that gave the show the power to last for 50+ years was not two schoolteachers falling out of the world, or being yelled at by cave people. It's the moment when a woman is threatened by a plunger and screams in absolute horror. Doctor Who got its longevity when the monsters came. So, too, did video games.

Sometimes we went too far. Monster Truck Rally is awful. I hate it. I hate it for one simple reason; I am bad at it. I race against the CPU in my monstrous pink truck with the huge wheels. It always goes faster than me. I do not know how to accelerate as fast as it. I do not know how to beat it at the myriad of events the game gives me. I do not know how to overcome the perfect machine, and it angers me. I accept that it is my fault, but at the same time I doubt we will get any defenders of Monster Truck Rally who are offended by my dismissal of it. Maybe it's fun with another human player, when the odds are evened. Fighting the machine is no goddamned fun, however. This is the truth of the NES. It, like Doctor Who, draws its power from the monstrous. The Dread Beast GREED and the holder of its gargantuan leash, the Lady Capitalism, know this. 50 dollars for the privilege to get defeated time and time again by a machine-mind, created with dark alchemy. That's the real horror here; the fact that you cannot win. They have your money, and soon they will have your life. You've gone mad now. You're part of the Nintendo generation, and you're a monster now too.

Which makes what's about to come even worse.

Happy Birthday, Nintendo Project Resumed!

What a difference a year makes. The Nintendo Project has been resumed for a year now. Hooray hoorah and many happy returns. Allow me to indulge myself and tell a little story. Once upon a time there was a nice man named Phil. Phil had a very bad series of days and subsequently decided to write about old Nintendo games. All of them. From A to Z. The writing was fresh and exciting, but also very sad in places. Eventually Phil started writing about a TV show called Doctor Who, from 1963 to the present day. It was very very good writing, and Phil eventually decided to shelf the Nintendo Project somewhere around the letter H.

In 2012 or so, a weirdo named Frezno found Phil's Doctor Who blog as it was dealing with the exorcism of the Colin Baker years. He quite liked it! He continued to read and even tossed some money to Phil's Kickstarter, reading the entries in book form. Then the Nintendo Project was found and its arcane tomes consumed. Being a Hard Game Beater, Let's Player, and general old video game fart... he appreciated the idea.

August 2013. Poor Frezno was going through a bad series of days of his own. Somehow or another, the Nintendo Project came back to him. The idea of continuing took root, and the seed was planted. To continue the Nintendo Project, to go through Nintendo. Letters H through Z. Could it be done? Would it even be allowed? Phil was consulted, and his blessing was given. He even said he was honored... and with that, the Nintendo Project was resumed.

So hi. Here we are a year later, and what have we learned? Writing for Nintendo is fun, if not interesting and a little narrow in scope. A lot of the NES library is unremarkable, or even outright bad... but there's enough magic in that grey box to make all of it worth it. Something else interesting happened to the blog, after the first few rocky months. In its infancy, there was just a lot of straightforward talk about video games and whether they were good or bad. Then I went and took a break for a month to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month. In it was a smart-mouthed teen with psychic powers who, as it turned out, had a precognitive sixth sense that allowed him to dodge danger before it came at him. I came up with a name for this power, and that name was Valya. Nothing special. Just the Valeyard from Doctor Who, made a dash more exotic and otherworldly. I always write with cute little in-jokes like that, it fuels the word count and keeps me going. When I came back, more Doctor Who had inspired me. The Key To Time saga, featuring a White Guardian representing Order, and a Black one representing Chaos. I turned this into a battle for the state of video games. Lady Valya, standing for the powers of innovation and imagination that led to classics like Mega Man and Zelda and whatnot. The Nightmare, the advocate for everything wrong with the 8-bit. Cheap cash-in licensed dreck. Terrible controls. Awful and abhorrent things that existed only to make a buck. As time went on, we saw other deities approach. The dread beast GREED, the Trickster Beast ROMHACK, Peko the Destructor, Lady Capitalism and Captain Communism... the list goes on.

The second major shift in the blog happened about two weeks later. Some thoughtless human being went ahead and proposed to his girlfriend on a livestream, and I got to wake up and read about it on Twitter. I was happy for those two kids. They were great friends of mine! Then they went and invited me to the wedding... and happy feelings bubbled forth. I had to pay tribute. I went non-linear. I tackled Kirby's Adventure before I was supposed to, and made it about them. About the daydreams of travelling to a big city and meeting my good friends. Non-linearity would also become a Nintendo Project thing...as would dreams. So now here we are. I've taken an abandoned blog about old Nintendo games from an academic, and turned it into a ridiculous and esoteric pantheon of pretend gods, all vying for control between the years 1983 and 1995... and beyond. That's got to count for something, right?

Here's to the Nintendo Project. We cleared out five letters of the alphabet in a year. That's about a fifth of them! It's in no way close to being done, especially since I'm prone to vanishing or dicking around with other things... but it's my own little pet project for now. One day I might give up on it and pass the reigns to someone else, but I'm happy with what I've got here. A small handful of people read and (hopefully) enjoy my ramblings about old video games, and some of the big names have gotten above-average view counts. Time to give thanks, I suppose. To Phil Sandifer; it couldn't have happened without you. You started the machine, you gave me the go-ahead, and you were even nice enough to write about Mega Man 3 for me! I don't know how many of these you actively read (my fanboyish heart hopes the answer is "all of them") but credit where credit is due.

To the many Constant Readers; I would be talking to a void were it not for you. Some of you have even spread the little blog around to blossom its readership; mostly the big-name games. I appreciate it. You keep coming back for words on these old games, and I adore you all for it. Very special thanks to everyone who has contributed a guest post or otherwise collaborated with me. That would be John, Phil, Rainiac, CarpetCrawler, and Froborr. It was great having different perspectives on things, and I thank you for putting up with me.

Let's blow out our candles and divvy up this cake. Here's to you, silly red and white blog. Here's to you, grey box. Hell, why not? Here's to me. Now how about we see about that next year, and get a little farther this time?

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich (Mission Impossible, Monopoly)

I put this off for far too long. Turns out there was a reason for that. Due to wanting to hit a naming theme of three next time, we only have two games today. Neither of them were that good. Mission Impossible sure does live up to its name. We were six years away from the Tom Cruise vehicle with the guy getting crushed by the elevator and that real tense hacking sequence and blowing up a helicopter with exploding gum and shit. Instead we get this. Blah blah accept your mission, message self-destructs. I begin the game, walk forward, and shoot the first person I see... prompting a helicopter to arrest me for killing an unarmed civilian. Lesson learned. I switch to a black guy who punches things and don't punch that person as I move forward. A car comes and sends me flying. The third person is a guy with boomerangs. He accidentally kills a civilian. Game over. Back to start. Okay, so then I explore, get a tip to go into an alley, and... keep exploring. Nonlinear levels. Ah, good. Aimless wandering and unsureness of what to do. Molotov cocktails that drain your health. Men with riot shields in sewers who push you into the water and kill you. Great. This is just great. It lives up to its name alright. I wasn't fond of it.

Nor was I all that fond of Monopoly on NES. I feel obligated to waffle a bit about it, considering that I've made Lady Capitalism into A Thing here and this is a board game all about capitalism and the free market and bankrupting everyone else to win at capitalism. It's what I thought M.U.L.E. was. Why does this need to exist? Game show adaptations I understand, but this? You can play this game at home, on a table, and the price of entry is far less than the electronic video game version. Okay, you lose out on being able to play Monopoly by yourself... but was that a high demand? I played Monopoly tonight with a CPU. It wasn't as fun as playing with a real person. I do have memory of the board game, of course. Snow days with my young niece. Frigid winter days stuck in the house with no school, and she demanded to play Monopoly. Ours was the Canadian edition with Canadian street names and railroads, but it was the same game. Newfoundland was represented by the cheap purple squares. Come to think of it, I just remembered another Monopoly game we had. The CD-ROM version. That one had fancy 3D graphics for moving across the board, and you could play over the Internet. There's a reason to buy the game version; bankrupting some silly son of a bitch from Iowa, in the comfort of your own home. Not this one. Even if it was legitimized by Howard and Nester. We lost. They won. Arthur the machine mind out-capitalized me after 15 minutes and made all the money and net worth. Lady Capitalism sings his praises... for now. She's underestimated me, and all the other hard game beaters out there who suffer through the things her acolytes create via microchip alchemy, in order to make her monopoly of video gaming.

We're monsters.

Use The Shrink Potion On The Glove But Beware Of Bugs (Mike Tyson's Punch Out, Millipede, Milon's Secret Castle)

Well, we've got another whopper here tonight. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. What could have been another licensed disaster, saved by the first party. Everyone loves Punch-Out! Oh boy, video boxing! This is quite the good NES game and it's beloved by many. I think it's pretty good. Now to continue waffling about it for a paragraph. Unlike the other usual licensed adventures we've dealt with, this one is more of a direct challenge. Look no further than the commercial. Iron Mike is laughing at you! The world heavyweight champion boxer of two realms, he is! Both our planet, and that weirdo Nintendo land where mushrooms sing and fairies dance. The WVBA needs an underdog to rise up. Little Mac has become his own character, but he's basically a character expy here in 1987. He is You. Hell, the arcade original just had a wireframe man. Little Mac is you, and you're facing gigantic hulking boxer brutes created from the finest microchip alchemy that nonexistant lands have to offer. Appropriately enough, when I played for the blog tonight I made it to Soda Popinski before getting floored. The Cold War's not ready to end in 1987, but one might make it to Mike Tyson. God help you if you do, because he's tough. I've never done it. Daniel Sexbang's never done it. Mike Matei's done it! How in the hell does Iron Mike not make it on the top of hardest video games list? Forget the Turbo Tunnel, forget beating Ghosts n Goblins twice, forget goddamn Silver Surfer. This is the shit right here. Perfect reflexes and split-second timing are required. Iron Mike was a tough champ in 1987, and he's a tough champ here. Life imitates art; Mike Tyson is a son of a bitch to beat in the ring.

Then in 1990 they took him out for a white guy named Mr. Dream. Valya's champion boxer packs just as much of a punch. Everything else is exact. What's next? Bugs.

I've spoken a lot about tabletop gaming in some of the off posts. It's relevant here because of Incompetence Quest, one of the campaigns I'm involved in. A nice fellow is playing an evil cleric whose loyalty lies with the god of death (not Peko, but Nerull). His favorite trick is summoning gigantic monstrous centipedes to distract the enemy forces and take care of them. Stelle would be right at home in Millipede. Another Williams arcade port from Hal Labs. Millipede is fun! The dread beast GREED's lumbering specter really only rears its head in the later days of the arcade, when the games actually ended. Millipede is bottomless. It was created to suck up quarters and eat away time at pizza parlors. Its main form of control, the trackball, is lacking here. Funny enough, it isn't even the millipede that causes death frequently here; it's those goddamned spiders. They like to crash into you. Little bastards. The dread beast doesn't know when to just let you have a good time. I checked. Millipede's high score is over 10 million points. I didn't even get to 150k. Oh well. I still had fun!

Then we come to Milon's Secret Castle. How lovely. Once again we're haunted by the Nerd. This is the sort of game that thrived in Japan, but Japan was not our shores in the late 80's. It is a nonintuitive adventuring platformer where the goal is to discover all the required hidden nonsense the creators stashed away in nondescript blocks. It also appears to require an exact order to go about things and purchase items, barring continue codes or some way to exit levels. I am willing to blame my mild dislike of Milon here on a culture shock. Someone like Shinya Arino can do it, and has. He seemed to enjoy it, while over here our western nerd yelled about its cryptic nature. Here I stand, in the middle. Milon is not the best, but is not the worst. Were I younger, and had the head start of discovering that things could be broken and blocks could be shoved, I could see myself dredging up the hidden goodies in this one. Maybe I'll get at it someday. Maybe I won't. Who knows? We've got a lot of Nintendo games to play.

Seems like an impossible mission, don't it?

Squeak Squad (Michael Andretti's World GP, Mickey Mousecapade, Mickey's Adventure In Numberland, Mickey's Safari In Letterland)

The first game today is so unmemorable that I actually have to look up what it's called. Michael Andretti's World GP, or something. Oh, I got it. Too much football talk, I could have sworn there was a cup in there or something. To its credit, Michael what's-his-name shows up in the game to give you tips on how to take the curves. Nice of him. Shame I didn't really grasp the controls. To invoke the future a bit, this is just a less good Rad Racer... that replaces flipping and wasting valuable time with the ability to spin out and waste less valuable time. Except touching the dirt at all slows you to a crawl, and getting back on the road while you're crawling is excruciating. Which, since I'm shit at taking curves even with Michaelangelo's advice, happened often. I was not a fan, so let's talk about Mickey Mouse instead.

Mickey Mousecapade. Let's clean house here. People don't like this game. It did create this bit of silliness. There exists a ponified animation of that. Froborr and the Chaos God continue to haunt our blog. I'll get the feather duster, but first. Everything I've heard about this game prepared me for something awful, a black mark on the NES... and you know what? Bullshit. It ain't no platforming masterpiece, but it's passable... until a certain thing. I'll get to what made me put it down, but before that we should address Capcom. They published this thing in lands that existed in the late 80's, and it was the first shot of the great Capcom/Disney alliance. It led to Chip and Dale. Ducktales. Darkwing Duck. Talespin... okay, Talespin nobody talks about but give me time to get up to there. Mickey Mousecapade, when compared to those other three, is a dud that lacks the electrified spirit of Pure Platforming that possessed Capcom back in the day. It's not really fair to hold that against them because this is a damn Hudson Soft game and not a Capcom game. Taken out of its context, it's fine! It's the most fun game of this entry, I can say that for damn sure. Although special ire goes to level three, which is a maze of doors in a forest that sends you back to previous parts of the forest if you get it wrong. And some of the correct doors are hidden. It's trial and error bullshit, and I stopped after getting sent back to the very beginning for like the fifth time. THAT part sucks but the rest is decent. I remember seeing the solution in one of those Nintendo Power scans I have here. Better look that up.

Oh lord alive. Educational Mickey Mouse games. From 1992 and 1993. By Hi-Tech Expressions and Beam Software, the duo that brought us the wonderful Hunt For Red October video game. In contrast to that ridiculously difficult mess, here is a game made for children. Literal children who need help with letters and numbers, I guess. A silly idea to begin with, but an old man playing an old video game about finding the number 5 in an observatory while playing as Mickey Mouse is even sillier. Children would have cared in... 1988. 1992? 1993? The NES was dying. Beautiful things were blossoming as the Destructor's blades were being sharpened. Lush wonders of pure Valyan essence, existing side-by-side with utter dreck birthed from the darkest Nightmares, the failed experiments of Lady Capitalism. Scenes and machinations that small children would have no idea about, at the time. They just played their Mickey Mouse game and learned how to spell "hat" as Mickey's digitized voice rang out of the TV, compressed due to the limitations of alchemy, but clear enough nonetheless. Even Mickey's influence was waning in those days; Mario was more popular than he, according to the lore of the time. The times were changing, and the NES was falling into legend.

Oh, but how Mighty it was, and how Mighty it would face its destruction.

Haunted By The Hallways In This Tiny Room (Metroid)

It's August 6th, 20X5. The #1 song beamed directly into our brainwaves is "Avenging My True Self" by the Black Hole Bomb. So that speaks volumes about where the galaxy's gone to since 20XX. In news that does not sing, we have lord knows how many grim things. There is an investigation sent to the colony on LV421, to discover what happened to its missing colonists. None of them return alive, adding further mystery to the whole affair. To say nothing of the scandals involving Commander Malkovich back on Earth. Let's just say the the women of the military don't take kindly to being called "lady" during a briefing, and leave it at that. Finally, those insurgents from the border outposts, the "Space Pirates", attack a Federation research spaceship with a crudely made power bomb. 19 die. The incident is swept under the rug as quietly as possible... but we know the truth. It was difficult to dig up, but I have the advantage. I stand outside of the lens of history, and I know where that ship had been. A place where angels fear to tread, where the darkest primal recesses of the Nightmare reside. An Uninhabitable, SR388. They took something from that planet, and now the Space Pirates have it. With the experimental life form METROID, the MECHANICAL LIFE VEIN could bring about unspeakable destruction. She could ascend to a new position, usurping Peko The Destructor as Queen of Death. Our resident reaper is none too happy with this. Thank goodness she has her champion. Thank goodness it's 20X5 and Samus Aran can bail us out.

Or... is it August 6th, 1986? Is it actually Peter Cetera at #1 with "Glory Of Love"? If it really is, then New South Wales is in for a hell of a lot of rain. 13 inches of it. The heavens twist and weep over Australia as old Japanese men's work finally comes to fruition. A video game about the future, contained not within grey plastic but the bright yellow of a diskette. A foreign alchemy, but an alchemy nonetheless... and one that would take a year to decipher and fire out to lands that exist. Then again, it is the future, after all. Japan exists, and they created this game. Yes, it's not August 6th at all. It's July 11th, 2014, and I'm sitting here in a Burger Time T-shirt and writing about another one of the Big Ones. It's Metroid. Where do you even begin, aside from making silly asides about fake future history? It's fucking Metroid, for christ's sakes! One of the most important video games ever for a myriad of reasons, and one whose future setting echoes the ghosts of games yet to come. We know this tale. An impossible bounty hunter will rise up from troubled times with innovative exploratory games, culminating in the best damn Super Nintendo game ever. Then all will go quiet... until all returns with a double whammy in the 21st century. America takes over and makes things fantastic. Then Japan takes it back and fucking murders it. It is nigh-impossible to talk about Metroid without talking about these things. Psychochronography is supposed to take things out of context, but what was the context of Metroid? It's changed now, such that the original game is casually dismissed. Witness the chronicles of the Zero Mission. The glam, the vibrant colors, the satisfying crackling sounds, the entire enriched experience. This is what we all play now. "Put that poorly aged NES cart down", they say, "and slot in this GBA game! It's a remake and way better!". The future has consumed this future game. Haunted it.

There's another piece of entertainment that came out in 1986. The novel IT, by Stephen King. In it, one of the characters looks up the definitions of the word "haunt" and finds the last one fitting; a feeding place for animals. This is what the Zero Mission has done to Metroid. It has cannibalized its own past, creating a paradox and feasting on the flesh of its own destruction. Peko's Paradox, if you will. Hell, the original is in there, trapped inside the confines of Zero Mission, waiting to be unlocked. Swallowed whole but still powerful. That's fine. Here, in the world of infinite imagination, one can undo these things. I create my own transcendent space using my power of free thought and typing. In this space, there is no Zero Mission. Not today. The future cannot be entirely kept out, and it will bleed in at times. That's fine. Right now I want to talk about Metroid on the NES. No need for insanity, no need for long walks and esoteric readings. We are going to talk about Metroid on the NES, and why I love it. For starters... it's very fun! Sort of a combination of Pure Platforming and Endless Adventure, a strange melange that shouldn't work but does. Kind of like turning Mega Man into a cartoon horse, but Mega Man doesn't even exist yet so shoosh. It's also brilliant! Like the opening moments of the game. I'll defer to Jeremy Parish's Anatomy Of A Game, but the short version is that the game lets you go right for about the length of an average 1986 pure platforming game before stopping you. The real solution is to go left of your starting point and get the item that allows you to curl up in a ball. Now you know that scrolling works both ways. Soon you will find that we can scroll vertical as well, and every direction is open to you. Time to explore.

Is Metroid on NES perfect? Holy mother of god, no. Even if you ignore the lack of modern convenience like a map system (or saves in the non-disk version), you still have... problems. Like starting with 30 health every time you continue. That's not a lot. You'd have to farm for energy upon continuing. Having to rely on random drops to replenish missiles, the cryptic and hidden nature of some of the secrets... this game is not kind to you! Although... in later years, the Trickster Beast of the ROM would come in on his pirate ship and... meddle with things. A Time Meddler, if you will. Metroid needs no such things to function, though. What it does it does well. It explains the basics by way of example, and then plops you into a harsh world to explore. In that way, it's similar to the shrines of Endless Adventure that we have visited before... but nowhere near as friendly. The planet Zebes is a dark, dreary, desolate and isolated place where you are constantly under attack from nightmarish aliens. Things That Should Not Be assault you at every turn, and in order to succeed you must delve into the depths of Alien Hell itself. This is why I love Metroid on the NES. It has some of the best atmosphere a Nintendo game can have. Zero Mission, lovely and upgraded as it is... kind of misses that. It makes everything bright and colorful and sort of peppy. Metroid, to me, is a black background with purple eyeball platforms and searing lava beneath you. Eyeball monsters and fire breathing seahorses. A dragon hiding deep within a base, the dread beast Ridley... itself a causal link between Metroid and one of Metroid's big inspirations. The backstory is the damn same as Alien. Ship goes to a bad planet, picks up a lifeform... and it turns out that said lifeform could be weaponized and casually destroy all life in the galaxy. That's about where the similarities end, but Metroid and Alien also both share amazing atmosphere. The music for Kraid's Lair is one of the spookiest tunes on the NES, a vibrato of echoing notes that makes the place sound like a haunted cathedral, deep within the bowels of planet Zebes. Zero Mission tries to replicate it... but it doesn't do it for me. It's not as spooky. However, listening to it as I write... it reflects the state of Metroid now. This sounds like triumphant music for a hero. A hero like Samus Aran.

There's no use trying to play around Samus. Samus's identity is about as secretive as who Luke Skywalker's father is. No alchemy can keep that immutable fact completely out, and yet... the manual straight up lies to you. It refers to Samus as "he" multiple times. Misdirection? Losing things in translation? Apathy? Whatever it is, it creates one of the first possible "surprise" moments in video gaming. Samus Aran, the space bounty hunter who entered the shifting walls of the Labyrinth Zebes and came out alive... was a girl. A cynic might say that it doesn't matter, that we all just assumed Samus was a guy anyway and putting a girl at the end (who'll strip down to a bikini to reward the player for really mastering the Labyrinth) doesn't serve women in video games well. I counter with "fuck that". I'm also a very privileged fellow with a blog, so this probably isn't the best space to talk... but why wouldn't we want a cool lady like Samus? Again we are forced to reject everything that exists outside, in the future. There is no origin story involving Ridley and the planet KL2. No Captain N comic. No two hour pre-rendered movie with dialogue delivered like an oak tree on orders up high. There is only Samus Aran, Disciple of Peko The Destructor. Here is a woman, a bounty hunter who deals with threats and puts herself in danger on a daily basis. This is her job. She is good at it. One day the terrorist cell led by the MECHANICAL LIFE VEIN steal something that would bring untold Death to the galaxy. Samus Aran, not quite yet a Huntress, is sent to save the day. With the powerful suit she has learned to master, she delves into the underworld and deals with hellspawn. Hellspawn that have gone rogue, and joined with the MECHANICAL LIFE VEIN. The Labyrinth becomes her domain, and she thrives in it. There's a certain giddish glee to making Samus a super-powered badass. It is entirely selfish on the part of the player, as their desire to finish the quest is what keeps Samus going... but the Disciple benefits from our action. Gradually, we learn powerful incantations and local myths. The harrowing tale of Justin Bailey. The legend of the Narpas Sword. Even rumors of the Negative Zones, the Space Between Spaces. Then comes the endgame. Then comes Tourian.

The Metroids are a known quantity. I was surprised to find them displayed in the manual, sprite and all. Only the MECHANICAL LIFE VEIN is a true mystery, but to get there one must defeat a horde of Metroids. In another unfortunate misstep, it is possible to come here with the wrong weapon for killing Metroids. It certainly makes the things scarier, but come on. You shouldn't do that. Still, Metroids are horrific. Pulsating jellyfish with sharp teeth that latch on to you and never let go. They are vampiric, draining the life force out of all. Such entropic endurance cannot be allowed. They all must go... but that's for later. Right now, we must worry about the task at hand. Destroy more of the things on your orders, and then come to It. The MECHANICAL LIFE VEIN herself. Mother Brain. Oh, is this ever a tense fight. A sentient mass of neurons encased in a jar shouldn't be a threat, but everything works against you. The flame rings that can knock you into lava, combined with the unstable terrain, make things difficult as hell. Grit your teeth, Samus Aran. It's almost over. With the power of death and missiles on her side, the MECHANICAL LIFE VEIN explodes. A time bomb is set. Get out fast. Maybe see a girl in a bikini if you were fast enough.

That is Metroid. Of course, serving Peko The Destructor, the Queen of Death, has its consequences. We can't keep her out, I'm afraid. Death comes to all things, even these spaces. The Nintendo Project faced death already, but it's been back for almost a year now. Still, there are side effects and odd coincidences. I probably shouldn't bring this up, because it's really quite inappropriate to bring up a real world tragedy and compare it to dumb video game blogging... but the day Metroid was released in Japan? The 41st anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. William J. Schroeder, the second artificial heart recipient, dies. Coincidence. As Samus kept coming back, other things happened. 1991 sees her return, and her near-genocide of the Metroid race... right as the Dance Apocalyptic winds down and the Soviet Union dies. 1994 is Super Metroid, and with Samus heading strong in 16 bits, Peko's blade cuts down our wonderful grey box. The Nintendo Entertainment System dies. Samus remains dormant after that, but comes back in full force. This defies the rules. Death comes to all, and Samus had her chance... but Samus Aran is more than a Disciple now. She is a Huntress. She is more than just a slave to reality. She is a mythical being deigned by Fate, a Legend of her own. She is her own reality, and with that power she transcends Death itself, becoming the Bounty Hunter Victorious... for a time. Then Peko gets her revenge, and everything Samus was is torn down by the very forces that created her.

It's August 2nd, 2010. Samus Aran dies.

CLANK CLANK CLANK CLANK CLANK (Metal Gear, Metal Mech, Metal Storm)

One of these days, I need to properly read about alchemy. I've thrown the word around a lot, but it never hurts to learn more. For now, let us delve into the Metal Age. Metal is ingrained into the very fiber of the grey box. That and plastic, and the microchip. A great metal shield sits over the cartridge housing, an impenetrable shell from which no RF frequencies can escape their fate. Metal screws keep the two halves together, a beautiful box held tight. How many pieces of metal does the Metal Gear have? God, what a machine that is. The date may be some nebulous future, but it is the future of 1987. A grim future where the Dance Apocalyptic is ever played, and Hideo Kojima is a nonexistant phantom who waltzes along, painting a picture of the Disciples Of The Destructor. Metal Gear, then, is his child. A ghost from Japan that we cannot see in the year 1988, when it comes to NES. All we see is a super computer, its silicon conductors pumping tactical espionage information to the enemies of the West. These things must be fought. We are not expected to survive, but when have we ever let that stop us? The Metal Gear will haunt us, unseen until long after the NES has fallen. It will live on, as most ghosts do, until inhabiting a new machine. For now, accept that what we got here was flawed. This is not the scripture of God, but a muddled mistranslation. And lo doth he say, the truck have started to move.

Flawed? Lord almighty, is Metal Mech flawed. This is one of my personal disappointments in video gaming. I paid a dollar for it at a flea market, long after the death of the NES. I also remembered reading about it in a Nintendo tip book. An interesting game about an armored mechanical vehicle, with the ability for its pilot to hop out and explore the world on foot. I didn't know it at the time, but that's... Blaster Master. This is a failed attempt at turning lead into the gold that Sunsoft created, and all we are left with is a putrid pile of lead. This game is not very good. Things come at you from all angles, and you have very limited fire power. Tiny bullets. When you need to exit your mech, the little man is weak as sin and gets hit by rats in the sewers. Rats he cannot shoot. Oh, joy! The Nightmare from my past rears its head again, now biomechanical and ready to strike. He has been summoned by the botched alchemical processes that Jaleco and company have been foolish enough to fiddle with. How do you crush a beast? With gravity.

Metal Storm is a gem! It's also difficult. Really difficult. Before that though, you become a master of gravity. You can alter the very way it moves with a button press. Ceiling becomes floor, and enemies fall up with you. What exactly powers this, I cannot guess. More alchemy? A localized gravity well powered by advanced microchips and quantum mechanics? Pure imagination? Who the hell knows. What I do know is that this one's mighty fun, and well worth a play. Then, when you think you have become a Gravity Lord, it challenges you sweetly. Try a game for experts! Do not be fooled. This will skin your sanity alive. I named it the hardest game ever, and I still stand by that somewhat. The hard mode is ludicrous and demands absolute perfection and planning. There can be no hesitation, no delay. You are no master of gravity until you become one with the robot you control. A true 1:1 ratio of synchronization is required. Welcome to Metal Storm. Welcome to the Machine. Meanwhile, the Mechanical Life Vein pulses and plots. It dares to subvert Peko The Destructor, and create a new force of Death. It dares to become a Death Lord, and to stop it, Peko shall send her newest Disciple Of Destruction. The Huntress will descend...

...but first, ponies.

Fight The Future (Mechanized Attack, Mendel Palace)

Oh boy! A game that's compatible with the Zapper! My favorite! There were maybe like 10 of these things, and the only ones I ever had were Duck Hunt and The Adventures Of Bayou Billy. We already covered Hogan's Alley way back when, but now we have... Mechanized Attack. It reminds me of Bayou Billy's shooting levels, only it's a whole game. "Goody!" I said, as I moved my crosshair around and shot at dudes. "I'll bet emulating the Zapper would make things even more fun!". I was incorrect. The alchemy has gone wrong. You really cannot emulate the Zapper. That bright orange frame, once a stark grey long ago to match its parent box. The little lens inside the barrel to refract light. Best of all... the springy noise the trigger makes when you pull it. That's one of the best sounds from my childhood, and you lose it when you try to emulate. You also lose control. A mouse pointer is no goddamned good. I had to shoot things off center to hit them, and the screen flashing was starting to give me a headache. More to the point, Mechanized Attack isn't all that good. It just stacks the deck a little too much against you. I mean, you have two targets flying at you from the top screen, a soldier far away and a soldier close to you. These things will start shooting you in about a second... and the soldier close to you is a MECHANIZED soldier. ATTACKING you. See how clever that is, except it means he takes four goddamn hits to kill and you're getting hammered by everything else. Blegh. At least the game over screen is cool.


Speaking of mechanized attacks, we've jumped ahead in the alphabet. We dealt with the Mega Man and his rise and fall. Now we deal with... a future intrusion of sorts. Though you'd never know it. Mendel Palace is a game made by Hudson Soft and developed by a little studio named Game Freak. Game Freak eventually created the ultimate alchemy on the Nintendo Game Boy, splitting its power into 151 fragments and commanding the children of the late 90's to reassemble it. What, then, to say of Mendel Palace? It has jack shit to do with any of that stuff, although the seeds for the idea were with the company at the time. This is part of the secret history, then. It was lurking within the minds of some Japanese people, in a land that didn't exist, waiting to burst forth from its cocoon at level 10. As for Mendel Palace... uh... it had a commercial! I suppose that doesn't relegate it to true obscurity. 200 levels? A 2-player mode? Holy shit! The game itself is okay too. Nothing particularly special or "best ever", so it fits in well with the middle of the road NES library. Other than its lineage, and the prophecy that its creators will fulfill in the future, that's about that. It seems that the future is... beginning to intrude on us in ways I can't imagine. Let's look towards it, then.

Towards the Age Of Metal.

A Psychochronography In Red, White, And Blue (Mario Bros., Mario Is Missing, Mario's Time Machine)

It's July 4th, 2014. Iggy Azalea is at #1 with "Fancy". In news that does not sing, it is Independence Day in the United States of America. Millions will celebrate by blowing a small part of the country up, eating hot dogs, drinking beer, and generally celebrating a country they quite love. As I am Canadian and it is raining, I am instead talking about something else clad in red and blues: Mario. Here he is. The Alpha and the Omega. The beginning of the breath of Valya, and the last man standing as Peko The Destructor cleaves this great grey box in two with her blade. Mario encompasses the start of this song, both in Japan and in America. Let us look, then, at a cute arcade conversion called Mario Brothers. Or Mario Bros. Whatever you prefer, broski. What stands out with Mario Bros is just how much the dread beast GREED was kept at bay here. Here's some personal experience for you, relating to my evening. I spent part of it playing the arcade version of Bionic Commando. That's a series I love to death, and please do read Mr. Sandifer's musings about it and the secret history. Bionic Commando arcade was a suffering, a taxation that I pumped many a virtual quarter into. We've gone over this. The beast demanded more of my soul to continue the journey. Mario Bros on NES doesn't have that. I lasted 10 "phases" and had an absolute blast. Was it like this in the arcade? I actually have a vague memory of one of these arcade machines, in my sister's residence house while she attended college. Squires House, it was called. The year was 1992. 11 years later I became a college student. I visited Squires House. There were no arcade machines. There were, however, many cool girls there. I like that. I like Mario Bros. This is why Nintendo stayed around.

We jump ahead now, to the end times. 1993. Mario has... done something. To look to his timeline between 1985 and now is to risk fragmentation. His is an open wound in time from pure transcendence, the very heart of alchemy itself. One day we will brave that storm. Today is not that day, for Mario is missing. It's up to Luigi to find him, and that entails... education. Land in New York City, the apple that's bigger on the inside. This is not the land of dreams I've been imagining for the past six months. The Proposal Peridot never had glimmers of Koopa Troopas and King Kong. Still, we travel on and eventually learn the trick to things. We must discern where we are, and then call... Yoshi. Christ almighty, what are we summoning here? This is the steed that ferried MODE SEVEN into our universe, its dark scaling powers far advanced beyond any alchemy our grey box can muster... and we've just brought it into this world. It is a sign of the End Of All Things. Reality has grown thin. King Kong can be returned to a museum. So can Liberty's Torch, but for god's sakes don't blink. Learn about Rockefeller and its skating rink. We are paid very well for this, Lady Capitalism having become the regent monarch long ago. Now we move on, because if the walls of reality are bleeding thin and allowing monstrosities like this green MODE SEVEN horse... what about time?

Mario is no longer missing, and he has returned to a parody of his roots. This is no arcade conversion. This is a slippery homage without a soul. The soul died long ago, I fear. 1993/1994 is not 1983, no matter how much you long for it. Still, this is some form of alchemic ritual. We must invoke the past to fuel the means to travel back into it. Destroy the koopas and hop on in. Curiosity made me pick 1989, and we warped there. Mario found himself near... the Berlin Wall. I'm not even making that up. I swear to God, we travelled back to the Wall. Lady Capitalism's acolyte actor demands that the Wall must fall. All things must tumble down, and the Cold War must end. End it shall. We know this. Even in 1993, we knew this. We grew up in a world where roses sing and Communism does not want us dead. Lady Capitalism reigns supreme, her black wings fluttering as she flies overhead. A dark feather lands near us, and we know. One day we will return to the rip in space and time... but for now, we must escape. Mario's time travel has set things off. This is the catalyst for the death of the NES. All things are folding into themselves, as they do when Mario is involved. Let us make our escape, lest we find ourselves at the end of the Ultimate Swordswoman. Happy 4th, my dears! Feel free to stay and watch as the crumbling wall signals the beginning of the end for the USSR! We ain't sticking around.

I've got tabletop gaming to play.