Contra (NES) 2

by Andre • Contra, NES, Video Game Movie

A handful of franchises come to mind when talking about early NES standouts, and this is most definitely one of them.

1988 - NES (Konami)

Contra was one of those games that had actually been ported from the Arcades, but the NES version actually stands out on its own as a vastly superior game…  well, at least I think so, anyway.  In any case, I have vivid memories of playing both versions.

Remember the days when you’d find Arcade cabinets in random stores, mall hallways or entryways?  I really miss those days…  in fact, I miss having full-blown Arcades around town.  Fredericton used to have 3 all at one time, but they all shut down in the late ’90′s.  Before them, however, came the ol’ “Random Game of the Month next to your local grocery store!”

I was only about five or six years old, and barely tall enough to see the buttons, but I could see the screens.  As my mom wandered the aisles of the grocery store (called “The Village”), I would escape just outside to the mall and see if there were any new games.  One of them was Contra.

Rambo-lady not included.

I know every kid who has ever played video games has done it at least once…  you know, let the game get to the demo portion, then pretend to play the game?  Yeah, I’d have it memorized to the point where it actually looked like I was playing the game.  I mean, there was no music, or sound effects when I was pretending…  and my ruse was uncovered every time the demo looped back around to showing the title screen again, right in the middle of my “game playing”…  but damn, those were fun, and much simpler times in life.

There were also the rare occasions that I would stash a few quarters in my pocket to sneak in a game or two while mom did the shopping.  They were always short-lived, because I’d always find a way to die pretty quickly, but it was much, MUCH better than just pretending to play the game.

As for the NES game, it was while I was playing it that I learned one of those essential “kid lessons”.

Back in Baie Sainte-Anne (I sound like a broken record talking about that place, but hey, it’s my blog!), we would often visit a family we have been friends with forever.  The parents were godfather and godmother to one of my sisters, and they had a son who was a good 4-5 years older than I was.  He just so happened to love video games, too;  he owned a Commodore 64, which I thought was awesome, but he also owned an NES…  with Contra.

As we played through the game once, we took turns beating the levels.  We made it to the Energy Zone level, and it was my turn…  I had never beaten it before, but I was determined to show off my skills!  Of course, I get to the level’s boss…  who I can only describe as an alien football player…

That's what I always thought, anyway... in retrospect, maybe not so much...

Anyhow, I miraculously avoided his erratic jumping patterns and defeated him.  I was overjoyed!  It was great!  Final level, here we come!  Oh man, I am SO GOOD AT THIS GAME!!!

Then, the guy said to me, in good ol’ Acadian French; “Brag pas!”

“Brag”??  What did that mean?  I really had no idea.  As he told me what it meant, it actually did sink in that it was somewhat rude to do.  Evidently, about 20-some-odd years later, it has stuck with me.

For the record, I am not awesome at Contra, or games in general.  I’ve beaten it and several other games, but can’t breeze through them like other people seem to be able to.  Genuine speedruns make me wonder just how long people have perfected their skills, because I sure wouldn’t be able to pull something off that quickly.  I’m a “take your time, eliminate everything” kind of gamer, and I enjoy it that way.

This really isn’t the version of Contra I grew up with, but that’s OK with me.  Like many other titles, Contra was localized in different parts of the world, and was even titled differently – Probotector in Europe, and Gryzor in Asia.  Unfortunately for us North American and European gamers, Gryzor was a bit more dolled up compared to other releases…  there was a lengthened intro, an area map to give a sense of perspective on the island you were navigating through, as well as dialogue sequences between levels.

Thankfully, I was able to find a translated version of the game to record.  Check out Bill and Lance as they free New Zealand from the tyranny of the Red Falcon…

…by blowing the country off the face of the earth.

Super Mario All-Stars: The Lost Levels (Super NES) 0

by Andre • Mario, Super NES, Video Game Movie

I have a boatload of Mario games to play through, so I’ll focus on them for the next couple posts.

1993 - Super NES (Nintendo)

Enhanced re-makes and re-releases of classic games seem to be pretty common these days.  When Super Mario All-Stars was announced, the idea of a fancy-looking version of three NES classics was quite an exciting concept.  Even more awesome was its inclusion of The Lost Levels, the unreleased-in-America edition of Super Mario Bros. 2.

1986 in Japan - NES (Nintendo)

I remember being quite excited to play what was essentially just a more difficult version of the original, and I got that chance on my 10th birthday.  I popped it in, chose it from the menu and…  I had already played it before.

In the very early 90′s on one of our many trips to Baie Sainte-Anne (I seem to recall them often on this blog), I went with my mother to a small convenience store down the road to rent a game.  There were a few cartridges similar to the 31-in-1 game I had played a few times, with the two-piece carts with a blue ribbon sticking out from between them.  One of them showed Mario on it with a crew of other characters, and the only thing I could understand from the writing on it was a “2″.  We had to rent it…  plain and simple.

As I popped it in back at my grandmother’s, it was quite obvious that what I had rented was a scam of some kind.  It looked exactly like Super Mario Bros., with the level layouts changed slightly, and a darker “super” mushroom that (after finding out the hard way) was actually poisonous.  I was convinced that this was a hack of some kind, and was none too impressed that we’d been duped into renting it.  Still, I got a fair amount of enjoyment out of it.

Of course, when All-Stars came around, I learned as I played that very first stage that what I had played that day in Baie Sainte-Anne was 100% legit.  Oops!

 

The fun part about All-Stars is how it embellishes areas we feel we already know (more or less).  For this movie, I just wanted to show all the different kinds of backgrounds through the first part of the game, as well as the oddities (like a flag and castle in an underwater level) found in the A to D levels at the end of the game.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (NES) 1

by Andre • NES, TMNT, Video Game Movie

Though the actual TMNTII arcade game was much flashier, the NES edition was definitely the superior game with more content.

1990 - NES (Ultra)

 The cartridge came with a coupon for free pizza, which didn’t hurt giving this game an edge over its competitors.

Although I have nothing but great memories gathered from playing this game with friends as a kid, the one I share today is rather embarrassing.  Epic, but embarrassing.

 I’ve mentioned it a few times before, but I was an avid collector of video game magazines.  There was no internet to rely on, so flipping through the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly or Nintendo Power to get the latest tips and cheats was a common practice.  With every month came a new issue, and with every issue came new cheats…  it was always something fun to look forward to.

In the April of ’90 issue of EGM, one cheat in particular caught my attention.

Well, this is certainly an epic cheat code if I've ever seen one!

Simon Belmont (from the Castlevania series) would be perfect to fight with!  The cheat was complimented by two screen shots, one of them showing Belmont lashing his whip at a Foot Soldier.  My best friend who lived around the corner owned the game, so with the magazine in hand, I rushed over to give the code a try.  It seemed like quite a long process, but it would be worth it!

Well…  it was indeed quite the process.  For about 30 minutes, we tried to get the code to work as described.  We convinced ourselves that, due to the complicated nature of the code, we were messing something up.  We gave up, deciding to instead just play the game normally.

As the years went by, TMNTII would inevitably come up in any conversation related to the NES.  It was a fantastic game, and it pretty much erased any memory of a somewhat disappointing first title.  I would mention this code, and though people wouldn’t remember hearing about it, I was “in the know” because of the magazine.

Last year, I found the issue in question when digging through old piles of gaming publications.  Just for fun, I started flipping through pages, and eventually landed on the familiar code.

I then read the caption next to the screenshots.

Oh my.

 A.P. Rilphuuls?  Is he Danish?

It then hit me like a ton of bricks.  April F***ING Fool’s.

For 20 years, I believed it to be an actual cheat for TMNTII.  I passed it along as fact to everyone else who mentioned anything about the game.  It’s all quite hilarious, but I do blame the gag working on me (oh so well) on a few things;

1.  I was still learning how to read in English.

2.  Even if I did know how to properly read in English, I was just way too excited to even care about what the caption said.

3.  A.P. Rilphuuls?  Seriously?  I still don’t find it that obvious.  “Eh-pee Rilfuels” is what I initially though it pronounced when I re-read it last year.

4.  The Fromegem, HA is perhaps an error on the editor’s part, or maybe another attempt at spelling something differently to get the same phonetic sound.  Had it been Fromegm, it could have possibly clicked.  As it was, I thought perhaps Fromegem was some kind of cheese.

5.  I am the most gullible person on the planet.  I’ve been burned over the last couple April 1sts, but for the other 364 days of the year, I can be pretty dense.

So, there you have it.  I’m hoping a current EGM editor will see this someday and get a chuckle out of it.

 

Pretty straightforward…  I promise these will get more interesting as the consoles they’re played on evolve.  Though, you probably already knew that.

 

Super Mario World (Super NES) 0

by Andre • Mario, Super NES, Video Game Movie

Even though the focus of this post is…

1991 - Super NES (Nintendo)

 …the movie I made (posted below) used…

2001 - Game Boy Advance (Nintendo)

I found it had a bit more storytelling material, such as a lengthened introduction.

Super Mario World was a highly anticipated game for me for far, far too long…  here’s the why.

I would read Electronic Gaming Monthly on a regular basis, so much so, that on one car trip to Baie Sainte-Anne, I read (out loud) something from the magazine to my mother in English.  She was shocked, and very proud that I had taught myself how to read in a language other than French!

I even remember what it was that I read to her – it was the caption under a screen shot of Super Mario Bros. 3, of Mario on a cloudy level (probably World 5), ready to make a jump onto one of those damn red, rotatey platforms…  I can even remember which part of the trip it was, too; driving past the jail in Renous.  Strange, how my memory works.

Anyhow, in mid-to-late 1990 there was an issue of EGM with some Bonk game on the cover.  That didn’t warrant too much attention, other than the fact that the 16-bit graphics for it looked phenomenal.  It was just another game for another console I’d never own, anyway (the TurboGraphx-16).  Among the other features in the issue…  wait…  is that… no way… 

There was no way I was walking out of the store without this.

 
Super Mario 4….  huh…  I could hardly contain myself.  As I got to the game’s preview, I was greeted by a map of “Dino Land”.  The graphics seemed so colorful and detailed!  And just who was this character named “Dino” Mario was riding??
 

I was equally mesmerized by the cape! It certainly made more sense than a Raccoon Tail...

 
There were four pages of previews, and I had those four pages to stare at and salivate about for another year.  This would be brutal.
 
As time went on, more previews would surface.  I eventually realized that Super Mario Bros. 4 was in fact Super Mario World…  “Dino” would become known as Yoshi, and many Nintendo Power issues would hype the game and new console, month after month…  then, this came in the mail.
 
Perfect for Mario fanatics like me!

Not only did this fantastic NP exclusive include tidbits about every single Mario game in existence (not to mention the ones in which he had a cameo), Mario Mania included thorough level maps and tips for every single stage of a game that wasn’t even out for another month or two…  Super Mario World.

 
This did nothing but render me obsessed with the magazine until I would get my hands on the game…  that came during the first week of Grade 3.
 
My mom was awfully trusting to let me get my hands on such a time-waster so early on in the school year, but there I was on a lunch break, calling her up to see if she had managed to get her hands on a console.  Like the Wii, the Super NES was in short supply for a while, which is why we only managed to get it about a month after it came out.  I called home from the library at school, and she confirmed that, indeed, she had purchased almighty Super NES, which came packed with Super Mario World.  She had also rented a game called Joe and Mac, which was fun.
 
Waiting for that school day to end was sheer torture, but I babbled about it with friends…  I was the frickin’ man for a while.  Everyone wanted to talk to me about it, which was weird, because I was far from a popular kid.
 
I finally got home, played the game, and was instantly (obviously) hooked.
 
And what a perfect console it was…
 

Like I said, I chose Super Mario Advance 2 simply due to the amount of content.  Like the other Mario games, I had to do a bit of embellishing…  aside from the intro and castle-destroying sequences (which I always loved watching as a kid), there’s not a whole lot to show.

By the way, those castles looked a heck of a lot smaller from the outside…  wasn’t I just crossing a lava-filled chasm and spiked battering rams for 10 minutes?  Here I am, I could have just jumped *over* the castle, but I had to go in it…  dammit.

Good news, bad news 0

by Andre • Random

I found all of my old video game magazines!  I am super pumped about this!  The only problem is that they’re buried behind a ton of other boxes and mattresses, and it’ll take some effort to get to them.

I’m hoping the aforementioned picture of the NES Game Boy converter can be found…  so long as I didn’t burn the GamePro issue it was in.

We had a wood stove in our house, and not knowing where to put my alarmingly huge magazine collection as it grew, I *may* have burned a few issues of Nintendo Power.  I don’t think I recall burning any EGM‘s or anything else, but you never know.  If I were to go back and talk to my 12 year old self, I’d give him an earful!

“Listen, André…  why throw these out?  You’re eventually going to have a blog to laugh at all this stuff, and it would be awesome just to go back and check these out for nostalgia purposes.  And for goodness sake, KEEP THE BOXES YOUR GAMES COME IN.  It’s not just packaging.  GOD.”

Super Metroid (Super NES) 1

by Andre • Metroid, Super NES, Video Game Movie

As mentioned yesterday, Super Metroid was introduced to me by a friend I met in University.  Before then, I had heard a lot about the awesomeness, but never experienced it first hand.

1994 - Super NES (Nintendo)

When this came out in ’94, my interest in video games was waivering a little bit.  I wasn’t growing out of them, so much as I was just looking for that next jump games would take.  I was somewhat obsessed with the Mortal Kombat titles at the time, if only for the fact that the subject matter seemed more adult, which is what I needed (even though I was only 11).

When Super Metroid was plastered all over my issue of Nintendo Power, I wasn’t really up for trying it.  I had gotten some enjoyment out of the first game, but its Game Boy sequel had me less than enthused at the time…  this was just another one of those titles with “Super” tacked onto the front of it.

I was way, way wrong about that.

*Fast-forward to nine years after the game is released, in 2003.*

A bunch of friends and I had gone to see Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in theatres.  I enjoyed the campiness of the movie quite a bit, and I believed it was a great addition to the franchise – many others didn’t seem to think so, but I’m pretty easy to please when it comes to sci-fi flicks.

After the movie was done, the group headed to the good ol’ Smythe St. apartment, and my friend Mike wanted to show me his “mad skills” with Super Metroid, a game he was appalled I hadn’t played yet.  He told me he could have the game beat in less than two hours, so I sat and watched as he played through.

Two things struck me right away – the very first objective is to get the maru mari (more commonly known as the Morph Ball), which means returning to the exact area that started Metroid for us all back when it came out for the NES.  Those who know me know just how much I love anything retro, be it music, video games, or television.  Going back to this room had me wanting to play it pretty badly.

The other thing was the music.  Oh my, the music.  It sets the tone so perfectly for each portion of Planet Zebes, from the swampy marshes of Crateria to the hell-fire depths of Lower Norfair.  The best music in the game, however, is also the simplest little tune.

 

That bass in the background is enough to give me the creeps when I get to the “red soil” portion of Brinstar, never mind the haunting melody that comes with it.

After Mike’s quick introduction to the game (his quest ended rather abruptly after battling a one-eyed monster named “Phantoon”), I headed home, downloaded a ROM, and tried to explore every little nook and cranny this game had…  that certainly kept me busy for a while.  So many missile expansions, energy tanks, hidden paths and fancy gadgets are stashed in the least obvious places, which is fantastic for those who just love to look around and feel like they’re a part of a strange environment.

 

 

 

I had to split this relatively short movie into two parts, just due to the fact that Windows Movie Maker was being a pain…

This playthrough was definitely the most thorough I have ever done for any game, and it often wore me down.  Don’t get me wrong, GameFAQS is a great resource for walkthroughs, but I’m thinking YouTube just might work better for future games.  My head would hurt after reading countless phrases like ”go down two corridors, down the elevator shaft, then the second door on the right, but not the first one, because you’ll only be able to benefit from it later, and then down the path on the right from the door; there’s a hidden passage underneath the statue, next to the special-looking rock here, so bomb it, and roll through.”  It wasn’t bad for a while, but I would dream about all these various paths I could be taking, that didn’t really exist in the game…  not really conducive for getting a good night’s sleep.

Somehow, I managed to follow the walkthrough to a T (though I’m not sure why people follow T’s in the first place…  that’s U’s job) and I pulled off 100% item completion in under three hours…  so the “sexy Samus” ending was achieved.

Here’s Super Metroid in “movie” format, from acquiring the first item to defeating the Mother Brain in one of the more epic boss battles in gaming history.

September 11th, 2001 0

by Andre • Random

Looking at today’s date, I’m not actually reminded of anything other than the dreadful events that happened ten years ago today.  Nothing will ever erase those images from my mind.

It was a very important time in my life, as it was my first week of class at Saint Thomas University, here in Fredericton.  During Frosh Week the week before, I had the opportunity to meet a ton of new friends from all over the country.  It was somewhat surreal that I was leaving the high school life behind, in favor of a more “adult” education.

Several of those friends have disappeared from my life entirely, but I do still consider a few to be great pals to this day.  One of them is my buddy Mike.

On September 11th, 2001, I didn’t have class until 1:30 in the afternoon.  I felt like going in early, just because you never knew if you’d get a parking spot after lunch!  I hung out with my good buddy John (who was a close friend in high school, as well) and Mike at Saint Thomas, before John made the choice to go and hang out at the University of New Brunswick’s Student Union Building (UNB and STU two universities, on one campus).  It was a fantastic place to kill time, and we’d often do so for hours at a time.

Only about ten minutes later, however, John rushed back up the hill.  This was odd…  what is he doing back so soon?  And why is he jogging towards me?

He told me about the Twin Towers in New York City, how planes had crashed into them, and eventually both had collapsed entirely.  At that point, rumors were running rampant about a good ten other planes in the sky that were not accounted for, and there were reports that the Capitol building in Washington was on fire.  Not only that, but a plane had apparently crashed into the Pentagon, with one on the way to the Sears Tower in Chicago.

This was all a bit difficult to imagine.  I had to confirm with him…  The Towers are down?  Completely?  Both of them?  My mind flashed back to the Oklahoma City bombing in ’95, and I could only imagine how many people could be in the wreckage.  It was horrible.

John decided to go back to the SUB, knowing there was a TV there…  Mike and I hung back, and talked about how this was one of “those events” that would probably end up being talked about forever.  I was majoring in Journalism, so this would no doubt change our curriculum a bit.  We talked about our families, and how my dad was a police officer.  I found out Mike had a girlfriend back at home in Woodstock, NB, and he was wondering what she was up to…

Then it dawned on him – his cousin lived on residence, and just had cable TV hooked up!  We rushed into the dorm, found his room, and watched coverage of what was happening on his tiny 14-inch TV.  It was quite appalling.

After a while we left, and I ended up going to Physical Anthropology.  We went to class, and the teacher was nowhere to be found…  someone eventually opened the classroom doors and said Ms. McLaughlin was not going to be there today, as she was holding meetings with officials in New York about possibly being recruited to identify those lost.  A gruesome job, but she was among the few qualified to do it.

She ended up not going, and the year proceeded as normal.  Something felt different about the world, though.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but somehow, even my own corner of the universe changed that day.

Back to Mike…

That day in the STU courtyard, I was inquisitive about about his girlfriend during our conversation.  I asked a very specific question about her anatomy, and he replied with “oh yes, they’re big”.

(Please note that I’m not exactly proud of this moment, but I was young and – in retrospect – kinda dumb.  Well, as dumb as your average teenager would be about girls at that point.)

Fast forward to five years later, and I’m on a “blind date”.  I ask the girl if she happens to know “Mike so-and-so from Woodstock”, and she and her friends laugh in unison.  “Uhh yeah, he was my prom date, and we went out for several months!”

So I’m now married to this woman.  She was Mike’s girlfriend when he and I had that very descriptive conversation.  Interesting how things work out…

If you’re wondering how this relates to games, Mike was the one to introduce me to the next entry’s game – Super Metroid for the Super NES.  More on that tomorrow.

This post got a bit off the gaming topic, but I do believe it’s important to remember.  I have had the chance to visit New York City since then, and it really does leave a mark on you.  It’s quite the spot, and I can’t imagine what being there that day would have been like.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES) 2

by Andre • NES, Video Game Movie, Zelda

This next entry deals with a “black sheep” of sorts, even though it’s a tremendously awesome game in its own right.

1988 – NES (Nintendo)

Before I was even born, our next-door neighbors were very close friends with my family.  Two years after I came around, the couple welcomed a daughter.  As time went by, the daughter and I became friends as well, joined at the hip (although, not literally – can you imagine???).  The plan was that we would eventually get married and have babies and live together forever – we had plenty of pretend kids by the time I was 7.

In any case, her father was into computers, trains and ocean liners of all things.  He also owned an NES with very few games, but one of them happened to be a shiny gold cartridge.  Intrigued, I pressed for more information on it…  was it similar to The Legend of Zelda?  It was gold, sure, but it said “LINK” in blue (not “ZELDA” red) on the front of it, so I couldn’t quite tell what it was.

As it turned out, it was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link…  Wait…  I wasn’t playing *as* Zelda in the first game?  Of course, my reading skills weren’t quite at 100% at that point, and my only concern was playing through the game.  The story wasn’t that important to me, so I would never wait for it to scroll up after the title screen.

I was struck by how different the game felt from the first one.  The simple change from the overhead perspective to the side-scrolling portions blew my mind.  Not only that, but Link looked like a grown man!  He was so short and stubby in the first one, and he was given the gift of limbs for the sequel.  Fantastic!  Every dungeon from the first game had a different colour, but this game’s palaces had different colours AND differently shaped bricks.  I thought, perhaps just a wee bit too much, that that was AWESOME.  The dungeons also felt somewhat similar to those in Super Mario Bros., which definitely didn’t go unnoticed.

I know levelling up is a standard procedure now, but being introduced to it with Link had me somewhat confused.  I just killed a bad guy!  Awesome, now onto – OK, what’s with this screen?  Yeah, OK, whatever.  Start.  Let’s keep going.  Perhaps my friend’s dad had explained the concept to me, but again, I was probably just too busy with the game itself to listen to what he had to say.

When I’d be done playing the game, I’d go back to playing with Barbies with the little girl, or whatever her random thing of the week was…

Cabbage Patch Kids. There were certainly many of those in her room…

Fast forward a few years, and they would be set to make a move closer to the city.  Though we were both just past ten years old, it was tough on us kids, never having known any other neighbors, or knowing how often we’d see each other in the future.  Her father gave me two parting gifts, however.  One was a very old book about the Empress of Ireland, an ocean liner that sank with great loss of life in the Saint Lawrence River – his love for boats such as that one was passed onto me, and that vivid interest exists to this day.

The other was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, with the box it came in and the instruction manual to go along with it.  Of the hundreds of cartridge-based games I own, that is the only one I have with the case intact.  Needless to say, it’s a valued possession.

When her father suddenly passed away recently, it was remarkable how hard it hit me.  It wasn’t just the silly game, or even how he had been the first to show me what the Titanic was.  It was yet another reminder that life, though each passing day seems so slow, actually goes by a hell of a lot quicker than you really want it to.

Time.  Heh.  The Zelda series knows a few things about that, too.

Even though I cheat through some titles, just to make it easier to complete the game and record the clips I need, there was no such luxury with Zelda II.

At the title screen, the game’s title just sits there for about…  ohh, what feels like two minutes before the story scroll begins.  A bit too long for my movie’s purposes.  I had to cut a chunk of that minute or two out of the video, but then of course, the music would be cut out too, making it all weird.  I had some help with that, however!

Way up there on my “HOLY CRAP I OWN THIS?” list.

This is a rare import from Japan I’m glad to say I own!  It helped bridge that title-screen-to-story-scroll music gap quite nicely, as I muted the audio from the video clips, and just let the music play.

I also had to include the introduction to each boss fight and Link’s journey through certain towns.  Otherwise, this would have been a fairly short movie.  Also, how could I *not* include Link’s interaction with a man named Error??

Here’s the story of Link as he travels through Hyrule on a quest to break the curse holding Princess Zelda prisoner…  in her own slumber.  DUN-DUN-DUNNNN!!!

28 Years Later… 1

by Andre • Mario, NES

Today is my 28th birthday, and I spent the day looking up old NES games…  not for any particular reason, and not necessarily because it’s my birthday, but because I can.  Wikipedia is a wonderful place to kill time.

Just looking at the black NES boxes gives me a sense of nostalgia that almost makes me sad.  Sad for all the years that have gone by, sad that I never truly appreciated certain things as I grew up, and even perhaps even sad that I couldn’t own them all!  Not only that, but why oh WHY couldn’t I have kept the boxes all my games came in??

Early NES titles had that huge, pixelated picture of the game right in front of you, telling you what the game was all about, and only two small screenshots in the back for good measure.  Even for the games I owned, I’d sit at our local Co-Op store and stare at the boxes they had for rent…  maybe I thought the game would jump out at me if I stared at it long it long enough.

What's hilarious is that Mario is seen here, dying a fiery lava death somewhere in Bowser's Castle, shooting a fireball as a last ditch effort to kill... the wall. We didn't care, though. These boxes were awesome.

It struck me that I have pretty much grown up with Nintendo characters.  Donkey Kong was released in ’81 to ridiculous success, and pretty much single-handedly revived a dying industry.  Mario games surfaced shortly thereafter, and I’ve been able to follow almost every step of the way from there.

Scary thought, even though some would argue they remembered more, just from playing Atari and Intellivision as kids…  a fair argument, I suppose.

Not much of a post, but a real one will come later!