Super C (NES) 0

by Andre • Contra, NES, Video Game Movie

This might not be that vivid a memory to cling to, but I am reminded of it every time I drive home!

1990 - NES (Konami)

It wasn’t obvious to me at the time, but Super C is indeed a sequel to one of my favourite NES titles, Contra.  To me, the “C” could have stood for anything…  after renting it, all was clear, however.  Super Clear, in fact.

I can remember sitting in our basement and basking in the glory that was “my little space”.  I had a decently-sized television at my disposal, and it was nice and cool in the summer months.  The winter got a little chilly at times (I was too young to know how to properly manage the nearby woodstove), but my Mario\Zelda blanket took care of that.

Bill (or Lance, I can never remember) jumps out of that helicopter at Stage 1, and the character models gave it away.  If it wasn’t obvious before, Super C was more of the same…  and that was just fine with me.  It was still difficult, and that well-known Konami code didn’t seem to work.

But wait!  I had a magazine with a different cheat in it that just may help me out a bit…  I brought it over to my friend’s and…  just where did I put it??

Somewhere in here.

Every time I drive by the house now, sure, I find it’s a little big.  I’ve seen much bigger, however.

As a kid, though, the sense of awe I had when visiting my best friend Josh was immense.  Next to the garage, there was a living room, and a closet nearby with nothing but toys.  In the main entry way (where I never went in), there was a spiral staircase leading to the second floor.  In the basement was another area with a game room (the adult kind, with pool tables and such) and a spare bedroom we never really went into.  I’m sure I never quite saw every bit of the house, and (probably) neither did Josh.

To find this bloody magazine, I had to somewhat look around for it as I hung out with him.  I couldn’t be rude and say “I’m here to look for my magasine – step aside!”  I did look a few times, but I ended up having to return the game before finding it, which I knew would be a daunting task.

One time several months later, Josh was psyched about an experiment he had tried, so I ran over and checked it out.  We both loved iced tea (I still love it, in fact), and he had filled an ice cube tray with the stuff.  He also stuck a toothpick into each individual cube before they froze, so when they popped out, they were somewhat like iced tea popsicles.

Score!!  Excellent thinking!

The mini-freezer he put them in was downstairs, and next to it was that spare bedroom we never went into.  I wonder if…  surely enough, there was the magazine on the floor in the corner of the room.  How did it end up in there?  I didn’t really care, I had it.

One of the lesser-known gaming magazines...

I had somewhat forgotten about Game Player’s Magazine until recently, when I came across my old stash of gaming publications…  man, those were good times.

The most violent grocery store ever.

When doing a Google search for Super C‘s box art, I found the image above.  Apparently, Super C is the name of a grocery store chain in Quebec…  who knew?  Certainly not I!

While Super C adds a few things, eye candy isn’t really one of them.  Even when I was younger, I felt that in-between levels in a game was a chance for the story to keep moving along like a cartoon.  Instead, all we get is a plain black screen with a score and life counter, along with the Stage number.  Kinda bland, really.

 
Oddly enough, the Game Boy “port” of this game (even though it was pretty much its own entity with unique levels) is actually the better game presentation-wise, and is definitely my favourite of the entire Contra series.  I’ll be doing that one in the next few posts!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project (NES) 0

by Andre • NES, TMNT, Video Game Movie

TMNT III tweaks the formula used in TMNT II, but I have my reasons for enjoying II more than III.

1992 - NES (Konami)

 If you had played the NES version of The Arcade Game, then you pretty much knew what The Manhattan Project was all about.  The action was still great, the controls were tight, and the graphics were well done.  While Bebop and Rocksteady came back as bosses, the cast of opposing characters was quite different – Dirtbag, Leatherhead, and Slash all made appearances, which was quite the treat for a Turtles fanatic like myself.

 Still, there was one thing about the game that irked me to no end.  Oh yes, I’m talking about the most-talked about addition to the gameplay;  the “super moves”.

Each Turtle has their own unique attacks that can be performed by pressing A and B simultaneously.  They work incredibly well at disposing enemies, but I was so annoyed that using them depleted a small part of your health bar.  Since the attacks were so cool, and you would undoubtedly want to use them as much as you could in dire situations, why couldn’t they just have another meter of some kind?  Something like a “Power” bar that would replenish over time… as it was, I felt I needed to conserve my energy, and using the special attack was counter-productive.

 It’s all good, though.  The game plays great, has a nice variety of levels (surfing from Daytona Beach to New York City only takes a few minutes, apparently) and more than satisfies that Turtle-geek in me.

On the night we first rented The Manhattan Project, there was a Kevin Bacon movie on cable.  While playing the game in the living room that night (with the lights turned off for heightened awesomeness), my parents and sister were downstairs in our unfinished basement watching the movie.  I could hear them laughing, so it had to be good… right?

This blog post is one degree from Kevin Bacon.

You know how you could leave your game console turned on, but change from channel 3 or 4 and see other (static-filled) channels without disrupting gameplay?  Well, I was too curious about this apparently hilarious movie, so I paused my game and flipped over to watch the most confusing thing I had ever seen.

To begin with, the female lead character finds out she’s pregnant…  wait.  What?  How is she pregnant and not have a huge belly?  That doesn’t make any sense.

Somehow, the male lead character (Bacon) is quite disturbed and confused with this news, and even faints some time after hearing it.  Why isn’t he happy?  Why is he worried?  It’s not like he had anything to do with it.

During the commercial breaks, I’d flip back to playing TMNT III.  I really don’t remember much else about the movie itself other than thinking the female was beautiful…  looking back, she was cute, I suppose.

Seeing as how I understand that “process” a lot more (I sure as hell hope so, anyway), I just may go back and re-watch the movie with my wife.  I’ll leave my NES off for it, though. 

 As an interesting side-note, TV series creator Chuck Lorre (Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Dharma and Greg, among others) co-wrote the theme song for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series.  As you can see in the intro to this game, they’ve re-created it as best as they—OH MY GOD, SEIZURE FLASH.

(The few times I am required to say the word “seizure” out loud, it often comes out “ceasar”.  You really do have to watch out for those epileptic ceasars, though.  They can be deadly!)

There still isn’t a whole lot happening between levels, so once again, I had to include the beginning and end of boss fights to make a more-or-less cohesive story out of the movie.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Super NES) 0

by Andre • Super NES, Video Game Movie, Zelda

When talking about some of the most innovative adventure games in existence, you’d have to be pretty crazy not to include this one on your list.

1992 – Super NES (Nintendo)

It seems like forever ago, but seeing screens of “Zelda III” didn’t really get me that excited.  I mean, I knew I loved the first two Zelda titles, but not quite enough to warrant as much excitement as would a new Mario or Mega Man game.  With them, you more-or-less knew what to expect, whereas The Adventure of Link was quite different from its predecessor.  Who knew what Zelda III would end up like?

 
Well, it ended up being a big pile of awesome-sauce, on top of a huge slab of awesome-steak.
 
To begin with, A Link to the Past was the first title in the series to introduce the concept of a parallel dimension for Link to travel to.  Where the Light World was brightly coloured and full of joyful NPC’s, the eventual journey over to the Dark World showed a bleak and depressing side of Hyrule that struck an emotional chord with gamers.  Characters you’d come to enjoy interacting with in the Light World became animals or beasts, while shacks and villages were abandoned in favor of thief hideouts or haunted houses.
 
While it was somewhat of a bummer to see Hyrule in that kind of state, it opened up a world of possibilities for puzzles by travelling back and forth between the two worlds.  The developers exploited it perfectly, and have tinkered with the “alternate dimension” a few times since then (most notably Ocarina of Time).
 
We managed to snag a copy of this one shortly after it came out.  It was Spring, and I remember the feeling that came with Summer vacation looming just around the corner.  It was a rare treat to get a game when it wasn’t my birthday, or Christmas, so I was going to enjoy the heck out of this game.
 
I played through it, tried my best to explore every nook and cranny of the Light and Dark Worlds, but still ended up a bit short on collecting *everything*.  I did beat the game, however.  Not long afterwards, my mom was asked by a friend’s mom if they could borrow the game.
 
Alarms went off in my head;  there was no way I was willing to part with it after the Mega Man 3 fiasco.  Furthermore, this guy was more of an acquaintance than a friend.  In fact, I was scared of him!  Not that he was a bully, but he was somewhat intimidating to me, and other kids.  With some convincing (“Here, I’ll write your name on the game, so they know it’s yours.”), I relented, and the cartridge was his for about three weeks.
 
I get it back, everything is good.  I turn it on to continue my exploring and—THEY DELETED MY SAVE FILE!  Why the heck couldn’t they create a save file from slot #2, or even #3??  I was livid!  All the side-quests I had completed, all the heart containers I had found…  all gone.  What could I do, though?  I knew I couldn’t complain to my mom, because she knew I had already beaten the game.  I couldn’t complain to the kid who borrowed it, because he certainly didn’t care.  I would just rant about it with my friends.  Those who knew him weren’t surprised, either.
 
I was left fuming, but I did get to re-play the game because of it.  It’s a fantastic game, so looking back, even though I was mad at the time, perhaps he was doing me a favor.
 
 

This was fun to play through yet again, so it was fun to make a movie out of.  With the Zelda games, there can be countless side-quests and unimportant dialogue, so I had to be picky about what was included in the movie.  I usually just stick to whatever helps the plot move along, or helps explain this and that about acquiring certain items.

I always found the fourth Dark World dungeon to be pretty awesome…  it was quite a difficult level, but at the same time, what you needed to do to get the boss to show up was brilliant!  Bomb the floor in the room above where the boss appears so that the sun shines down to it, bring the “fake” maiden into the room and into the light…  poof!  Boss battle!

Super Mario Kart (Super NES) 0

by Andre • Mario, Super NES, Video Game Movie

When it first came out, I didn’t feel there was a link between kart racing and Mario characters.

1992 – Super NES (Nintendo)

Looking back, I don’t think that mattered.  I was sold from the get-go!

 
Somehow, in the constant stream of updates on upcoming games in Nintendo Power‘s “Pak Watch”, I missed this one completely.  I might have been breezing through the articles, hoping to see a new Mega Man title announced, a new Contra title, or perhaps something else.  Either way, on those traditional after-school visits to Blockbuster Video on Fridays, I kept an eye out for the new stuff.
 
Imagine my surprise when I saw the box pictured above.  Of course, I recognized Mario, but all his friends and enemies were bunched together into one crazy display of action.  What was it?  A driving game?  There was that magical Blockbuster-labeled plastic case behind it, meaning a copy was available for rent.  I pleaded with my mom, who only shrugged and said “are you sure you want that one?”
 
Without hesitation, I said “YES!  I’ve been waiting for this game for so long!!”
 
She may have known I was full of it at the time, because I talked about games with her all the time; what was coming out, what was fun, whatever.  She probably didn’t care a whole lot, but like any other parent would, she pretended to.  I didn’t know any different, because she loved to watch me play some games, regardless.  In any case, if I had been excited about this one, she hadn’t heard anything about it.
 
Anyhow, when I got home, the game absolutely blew my mind.  Combining kart racing, Mode 7 graphics (which was an amazing thing, back in the day), the Mario license and weapons to use against competitors…  a match made in video game heaven.
 
I ended up getting my own copy of the game that following Christmas.  I also got this beauty of an accessory, which I always associate with Super Mario Kart.
 
As it turns out, Turbo doesn’t work that great with racing games.

I remember 1992 as being the Christmas of Mario Kart, the AsciiPad, and tons of random baseball and Toronto Blue Jays stuff.  They were, after all, WORLD FRIGGIN’ SERIES CHAMPIONS!

No, I wasn’t able to use the controller with Mario Kart, but it worked with so many games oh-so-perfectly.  Crank one of those extra buttons to the middle setting, and you could go “turbo” by holding that corresponding button.  Crank it all the way to the right, and that button will FREAK OUT on auto-turbo.  It seemed to work best when I played Contra III: The Alien Wars, but no Street Fighter II bonus stage was ever left unbeaten after I got this baby.

 

Until I set out to make this video, I actually had no idea Super Mario Kart had credits.  I mean, of course it was supposed to have credits, but I would always race, win whatever Cup I felt like competing for, then turn off my Super NES.

What you see in the second half of the video was completely new to me a few months ago.  Strange, but then again, that’s another reason I’m having a blast playing through all these games again!