It came with SMB1 and Duck Hunt. Classics but I wanted to expand my horizons to maybe a humble stack of 10 gray carts. I don’t want to go overboard (see the rest of my life) but the NES carts can really be cheap. I picked up Baseball Simulator 1.000 for $2+$3 shipping and some ones too:

• Baseball Stars
• Baseball Simulator 1.000
• Zelda (yes gold cart)
• Kirby’s Adventure – I used to borrow this one from a friend
• Legacy of the Wizard – was like $3, classic!
• SMB3
• Tecmo Super Bowl (ut! ut! ut!)

The modern TV is kind of puking at the signal but it’s working fine. I really have to chuckle at the size of the carts and no fans anywhere on the box. It’s extremely light compared to the PS3/360. Also, remembering that there’s no save games (outside a code on a napkin) was something I completely forgot about after all these years.

Wife gets a cookie for birthday present from heaven.

Hooking up the seldom used VHF connector to a modern LCD was like email morse code. “Good day sir, I find your strange 1080p disturbing. Would we not want to snack on these fine leeks instead?” The 2600 looks superbly craptastic as God intended. 4mhz in an air sealed box. Heating issues? What heat would be generated from a hamster brain? Hamsters don’t have modern issues like headaches and stress. There’s no grills, fans, heatsinks, red rings of death, 1000w power supplies or air conditioning bills to worry about. It’s *plink*, *bonk* and squares.

The system came with the more modern clicking controllers. They are shaped like lima beans and have little red triggers underneath. I was intrigued but this was not the controller I grew up with. I grew up with the Atari 5200 controller with the skirt around the joystick that looks like a 1994 RX-7 manual shifter skirt. So I ordered one off amazon, used, for $12. It came a few weeks later, from a Mom & Pop shop with names I couldn’t pronounce. The controller has a small scratch on the plastic cord as if it’s stripping but there’s plenty of insulation to go before she breaks.

I hooked it up and didn’t get much for video. I giggled some cables, blew the cartridge and flipped the switch and eventually saw a (c) 1981. Ah, brisk.

Ordered Ikaruga from someone on Amazon. It’s $300 new but I paid $60 for a used copy. It’s out of print apparently. Searches on Froogle didn’t turn up anything. Sixty was painful but Three-Hundred is insanity. A Wii costs less and a Wii might not even play something like this faithfully. It’s really not worth that just for the plastic wrapping. I’m sure Comic Book Guy would disagree.

The Dreamcast crowd seems to dig it. An out of date and under appreciated should-have-been:

Ikaruga, the “spiritual sequel” to Radiant Silvergun, is an unusual game. It is not colorful or upbeat like most shmups; instead, it looks, sounds, and plays like a shmupping epic war drama. Solemn, oppressive, overwhelming at times. Expected anxiously by Dreamcast fans and shmuppers everywhere, this was seen then as the final blast for Sega’s little white box that could.

It’s just an old school arcade shooter for the gamecube. If it’s like R-Type, I’ll put on Chemical Brothers’ Exit Planet Dust and warp back to 1994. Bottle of Shasta optional.

This time around was a bit different. Fired up an emulator from bannister.org for OSX and plugged in my USB NES pad. Authentic experience with scanlines, noise, screen warping (tube TV bubble warp) and the real freaking pad. Was a blast. Totally uber’d. All my stats were 63/63 and 127/127. Which reminds me … why did NES use 8-bit numbers and get away with it, 0-63 is 64 as in River City Ransom, 0-127 is 128 as in max lives in Ninja Gaiden with the Game Genie code, 0-255 equals 256 as in max rupees in Zelda?! Well wikipedia explains it better.

UPDATE: I went back and found my old save state from River City Ransom EX (gba remake) and found I was on the last area. So I mopped it up. Ha, beat it twice.

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).

And the warning is not without reason. At the time, SF2 was popularized in the arcade with fully dedicated hardware, expense hardware, elite hardware. Anything in the arcade trumped what you had at home. SF2 wasn’t a game with intense drama, story and deep elements. It’s a fighter that would have been hard to come home to if your Old Brown Shoe was a ZX Spectrum.

The lack of color and detail is both confusing and frightening. I appreciate the 360′s faithfulness to the original but hiss at anything more backwards. If SF2 was designed first on the ZX Spectrum, it would have been simpler from the start, rather than a weak copy. A copy that was so weak that it warranted a disclaimer in green.

Curiously, a strong memory of Street Fighter 2 was the bonus round where you could beat up a car on a dock. It was a button mashing fest of guyish proportions. Violence + Cars. And if you choose Chun Li, then you almost had the holy trinity in a pixelated managerie: Violence + Cars + Women.

In the arcade version, there was enough graphic detail that you could see a little Lexus ‘L’ symbol on the front grill. Usually within seconds, that grill was flying across the arcade screen and the car was no longer recognizable. For the curious, the make/model was likely a pixel-art drawn Lexus LS400 (’94). Knowing the make and model surely makes the destruction that much more enjoyable, similar to skeet-shooting fine wine: “2001 Pinot, France. Lovely. Pull.”

In this modern age, I embrace our improving retro thinking although I’m not likely to drop $10 to play something that is otherwise freely available. But to each their own. The quarter mode reels my interest back in, a mode where you can watch a fight in progress and drop a virtual quarter to say “I Got Next”. Just like the good old days. However, I am saddened that you would get gamer points on Live for simply queueing up for a game. Microsoft rewards simple online interaction too much. For example, these two achivements have the same reward of 5 points:

12 World Warriors
Play a match with all twelve characters in single player arcade mode – 5g

I Got Next
Play a match in the online quarter mode – 5g

Fine. I see that they are pushing people to jump online but the trend seems to be increasing too rapidly as if they are not getting enough Live subscribers. If this is true, they need to focus on releasing more content more often. Recently, they at least had a content news page which shows upcoming (promises) releases. It’s a start. But I bet it came about out of complaints.

1. you were young
2. you only remember bits of the game
3. the game didn’t make sense
4. you didn’t understand the game on a deep level

Just like an old movie that you saw when you don’t understand common themes, genres and things only learned by experience. “Oh, it’s a side scroller rpg with blah blah elements”. Those things you can only recall in hindsight. And so the people on the forums of WWTG seem to suffer from severe piecemeal description hell. “I was young, I don’t remember much of it … but it went something like this”. It’s a challenge.

Casually, CameoEX mentioned another lost game and started yet another mystery:

CameoEX: there was another one that i am trying to remember…was like a family including the pet that you played as…
Me: that rings a bell…
Me: each member had certain powers?
CameoEX: i just remember that there was a house…and each family member had different abbilities…yeah
CameoEX: the pet was like a puffy looking thing or something
Me: yeah, and you could go back and switch out..
CameoEX: yeah
Me: crap! I remember that one.

We couldn’t even remember the platform. We thought it looked pretty advanced so we guess TG-16. Slowly, we gathered some more clues, like was it a platformer, what were the characters like. I could remember bits and pieces but we weren’t getting very far. So I searched on moby games for “family pet” in the advanced search, just searching game descriptions and BAM! someone happened to write this for the description:

Legacy of the Wizard

This is an action game with role-playing elements. In it, the player controls members of a family (including two parents, two children and a weird pet) as they delve into a large dungeon. The object of the game is to collect a variety of items and use them to defeat several bosses. Each character has different jumping and fighting abilities and is able to equip different items, so using multiple characters is essential to success. Defeating the final boss, a dragon named Keela, ends the game.

Yep! That’s it! Hilarious. Another mystery uncovered. And, very much so, since I haven’t seen this one in almost 19 years … I remember it looking better.

I hadn’t even thought of this game until CameoEX mentioned it. It was passively lost. In fact, I think I remember the feel, animation, the enemy sprites as different games. The chibi look was weird and unique. The house/home concept was really cool. I remember you could burn off ice tiles with the fire mage. I remember dying a lot as the magey types (although I didn’t understand why). It was beyond me.

FF7 turned a lot of people’s perception upside-down. Whether it was just timely or perfect, FF7 is the reference to which I would have compared any of the early NES RPG games. Titles like Zelda and this one (Legacy of the Wizard) were accessible hybrids, although I didn’t know that at the time. When Cameo played, I didn’t understand the HP/MP bars. Years later, when playing FF7, I found it neat that I could spend time leveling and then have more of this mysterious “HP/MP”. If I had been in that frame of mind, I probably would have played FF1 on the NES, but I didn’t. So gameplay elements were lost on me which made searching for this even harder.

For sure, I’m going back and beating this thing. I don’t know if it’s going to be the same. Cameo mentioned that it was about as long as Zelda, I remember him beating the end boss. I bet it’s not that long really, I don’t think you even need to keep all of your family alive when you beat it.

Also, it will be interesting to see how scary the end boss is. I remember the sprite being very large and I was amazed that we weren’t dying.

Continuum / Alpha Waves

It was a strange vector graphics game where you would jump with a polygon ship around a room. It wasn’t even in English, it looked like Swedish (iirc — which I didn’t). You bounced your little triangular ship onto platforms (you always bounced, there was no jump or “not bouncing”) and eventually you made your way into an exit (usually high above you). The game was revolutionary for me because of the height of the exits in the very simple 3d room, the bouncing was cool because up until then there was only “grounded” games like Wolfenstein and Doom.

Many years passed, I forgot about the game and I didn’t even mention it to even my closest friends because it’s so obscure that I would never find it again. Satan would be throwing snowballs before I find a game about a bouncing triangle in a 3d room that ran on DOS. Well, hell just froze over.

The game is called Continuum (aka: Alpha Waves) and it was written in French originally.

An excellent action game similar in graphics style to Virus but much more unique in gameplay, Alpha Waves is hard to describe– the physical objective of the game is to maneuver a polygon craft toward the exit on each level, but in “Emotion” play, all the levels are put in the context of different areas of a human brain. Very innovative and difficult on later levels.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I totally missed out on the human brain theme. I guess it was my lack of French skills in 1990/1991.

Dungeon Explorer

In addition to this crown jewel of mysteries in my mind … there have been some others. First, a game that Tim and I beat on the TG-16 called Dungeon Explorer. It was 2 player co-op (which is great fun) and it’s like a much better gauntlet essentially.

There are some really nice open areas and sprite graphics. I haven’t played it since whenever we first did, I remember the graphics being very plasticy and rounded. The dithering was something very new that the TG-16 did.

I think the game had an unlimited number of continues if I remember. It just took a weekend to beat and was quite fun. I think Tim’s TG-16 is long gone. Sad day for TV Sports Football and all those other … um … were there other titles?

Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic

Next comes an old DOS game that I hardly played (but watched) called Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic. I only found the title of this after I posted a lengthy description on usenet. Someone happily responded.

It was a bit of a space rpg. The cool part (in my mind) was when you landed in a space dock you got this top-down super-imposed map as you walked down the hallway. Your party would follow you around and you could shop, run into people, talk and do all kinds of things. Most of the time I didn’t understand what the hell was going on. RPGs were not my thing back then. I was playing Rad Racer and Gradius on NES. Not exactly complicated games.

One of my most favorite sci-fi RPGs ever, Sentinel Worlds is one of the very best “hard” sci-fi games ever made, despite disappointing sales figures. Your task as is to command a crew of 5 Federation officers as they embark on an epic quest to combat raiders that are plaguing the Caldorre System in the far-future year of 2995, learn where the raiders’ base is, and terminate the problem once and for all.

They definitely has the Aliens and Terminator ripoffs in there. Ha, I guess the lawyers hadn’t gotten all hyper in the gaming biz. Or maybe, the dollar figures weren’t what they are today.

Certainly a EGA NPC named “nude woman” is a bit tasteless by today’s standards. I guess the nerd factor was (is still?) on full blast. You didn’t have the ESRB ratings and the mass market appeal. I don’t dare question were those pixelated perverts shuffled off to, perhaps some corner of geekery I haven’t yet uncovered. Thankfully I’m disgusted even with our better tomatoes like Laura Croft, something I don’t understand.

Sentinel Worlds is apparently a favorite of lots of peeps on the Interweb. You can download it legally at Home of the Underdogs, it’s 327KB and people say it runs in DosBox just fine.

Home of the Underdogs has some wicked popups, but nothing that is too offensive (as far as I know).

Going to have to try the whole DosBox thing … maybe after the wedding.

Strike Force

Then there was another mystery that got answered on usenet. It was a Defender type game. It was a coin-op arcade title back around 1991 etc. The neat bit about this shooter was, if you played cooperative (double the quarters), you could hit a button and transform your ship into a gun. Then you could attach your gun to the other person’s ship and become a turret.

It was pretty simple. Blow up the aliens and save the humans. Quarters disappeared and you made your way around the galaxy killing stuff. Very simple gameplay but the quality was far beyond anything my PC or NES could do.