I was reading Kotaku and suddenly this post jumped out with an ad for Ultra Games. They were pimping their brand of NES titles (like Skate or Die) and although the brand loyalty was lost on me at the time, I do clearly remember gravitating towards a NES game called Defender of the Crown.

I think mostly it was because Mearth owned it. I remember watching for hours on end, wondering what the hell was going on. Meh, I didn’t care. It was Mearth’s house! He had all the toys! I had Elevator Action and Metal Gear (Metal Gear, the game I still can’t get through).

Yeah, file this under “brain forgot about it”. I fired up the emulator and got some laughs at how this used to seem so hard. Pre-RTS maybe? I dunno. It’s all pixelated and forgotten now.

Anyway, you pick your dude at the beginning screen. Then it switches to a world map where you can move your army around like Risk. You take over more crap, earn more money and there are little side games. You can joust, launch rocks with a catapult, do some sword dancing with your nemesis. It’s really disjointed and underwhelming I suppose. I don’t know what people were into these games back then. Maybe no one was.

I think the shear quantity of space games, D&D clones, chess games, medieval dragon adventures and so forth killed off all the nerds in the 1980s and that’s why we see the Guitar Hero and Madden titles of today. No one wants to go into space. No one wants to play chess. There was a mass kill effect and the jocks and cool people were sucked in by the newly created vacuum. The vacuum of which would also procure new red Firebirds complete with switchblades, mountain dew stash and Cinderella sow-on patches with auto-jazz-band geek beating mechanisms.

Wow, really got off on a tanget. Um, anyway, I suppose this post is another nostalgia marathon. Well let this be a lesson to myself. Whenever I think “man, where did the 80s go”, I’ll wake up and say: Jesus Christ, I was a fucking idiot back then. That game sucked. Why wasn’t I playing FF1?

Ah, I hadn’t mowed enough lawns to buy it. Heh.

One more thing…

My retrousb modded controllers came in (since my smartjoy snes died). They both work great. It’s the real deal (dents from usage).