A Pocketful Of Quarters (High Speed, Hogan's Alley)

Well, that didn't take long. My first unexpected surprise. Never judge a book by its cover, they say... but back in the heyday of the NES, books didn't cost 50 bucks and have misleading or shitty covers. I mean, let me just grab the first book from my bookshelf that's from this time period. Stephen King's Four Past Midnight. The cover tells me that it is a #1 bestseller. It also helpfully suggests, in large white and orange letters, that this is a book called "Four Past Midnight" by Stephen King. All we have to go on besides that is a drawing of a clock in space, a large crack between XII and I with orange energy pulsing from within. A book about evil clocks? A book about the nature of time? Of course, the advantage a paperback has over a video game is how it's displayed. I can go to a book store and hold the paperback in my hands. I can turn it over and read more about the book on its back cover. Hell, I can even open the book up and read its first few pages. There's no such luxury with video games... or not as I remember them. Always sealed behind glass at the local Wal-Mart, and you only had the front cover to judge.

The cover of Tradewest and Rare's High Speed gives you everything you need to know by looking at it. World's #1 pinball. There is a helpful picture of a pinball table called High Speed. Flippers and ramps and flashing lights all over the place. Anyone looking at this box at the store would know what to expect. Pinball. Not so for a fiend like myself, reconstructing the past through dubious files. All I get is the title. High Speed... must be some sort of driving game. I load it up, and oh look. Pinball. And by Rare, too. I am inclined to like Rare, as they went on to make my favorite video game of all time, Donkey Kong Country 2. I am also inclined to hate them, as I spent a week playing and beating a game they made called Battletoads. The original project has gotten to that already, but I will have words to say about Battletoads and its brethren in a later entry. Don't worry about it now. High Speed. Pinball.

A glance at the title screen shows that this is based on something from 1985 called High Speed, and copyrighted to Williams Entertainment. This is interesting to me. I presumed it to be based on a real-world pinball machine, and a cursory query to Google shows I am correct. Pinball games on consoles are, by their nature, already a sort of flawed reconstruction. You can't replicate the tactile force of pinball flippers and tilting a real world pinball machine on today's consoles, let alone one with an 8 bit processor from a time when Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch were on the music charts. Besides, there is a bit of investment with this thing as intended. If we assume a flat $40 price for the game cartridge in 1991, and also assume that a real-world High Speed pinball table charges 25 cents per game... you are buying 160 games of simulated pinball. I don't think I've played any real world pinball machine 160 times. I played the simulated High Speed pinball machine four times. It was enough for me.

It's a fun game of pretend, this reconstruction. I pretended that I was at my hometown restaurant. It's had many names over the years, but the locals just call it "the Take-Out". Because you can eat in or take out, and we take out a hell of a lot more than we eat in. They've had lots of arcade machines there over the years, but never more than one or two at a time. Mostly pinball machines, though. My favorite was the Twilight Zone pinball machine. So, the reconstruction turns to imagination. I've ordered a nice burger with a side of fries, and it will take a while. I have a dollar in quarters and some time to spare. Oh, look. The Take-Out has a new pinball machine. It's called High Speed, and it looks like a Nintendo game. Let's spend my dollar and play some pinball while I wait for my delicious burger.

Except this approach failed due to the game adding elements that would be physically impossible on a real pinball table. Now, I confess that I have never seen a High Speed pinball machine. I'm sure the NES table got lots right. The three flippers. The flashing lights. I don't think they had boxes and helicopter powerups spawning on the table. Or puddles of water coming out of nowhere. Or a magic fireball that drags your ball down between the flippers and ends one of your "lives". Now I wonder just what the heck the point is. What reality are we even in? Pinball machines don't do this. At least the music when you lose a ball is quite nice. Rare NES chiptunes. I didn't even get a high score. How sad.

You know what I did get a high score in, though? Hogan's Alley. Here we are, a good six or seven years before High Speed, and we're starting the dance we'll still be dancing. Hogan's Alley is little more than a simple arcade-style game where you use the NES Zapper to shoot at things. It is also one of the 18 original "black box" games for the NES. Four games in, and we have found ourselves back at the beginning. Further than that, even. Hogan's Alley credits itself as a 1984 video game. We may have gone too far. We've gone back to a time before the NES. Of course, now we know that it says 1984 because this was a Famicom game first and nobody cared enough to update the year on the title screen. But here, on the back end of our tether, we must remember what a wise man once said. Japan does not exist. 

Of course, certain sacrifices had to be made in this reconstruction. We are in 1984, the year of The Terminator. We have travelled back from the future, not to save Sarah Connor, but to understand Hogan's Alley. As such, non-organic matter was not allowed. We are naked, bereft of weaponry. We are lacking our orange toy gun that plugs into the NES and makes a satisfying clicky sound when you pull the trigger. We're missing our Zapper. A controller instead of pinball buttons is one thing. A left mouse button instead of an orange gun is something else entirely. Hogan's Alley itself is quite simple. Games A and B are shooting ranges. Cardboard cutouts of people pop up. Some have guns and must be shot. Others are innocents and must not be shot. There is no chance to explain why Officer Friendly had to die, as Will Smith did in Men In Black. It's 1984. Will Smith exists, but he is not famous just yet. You get a miss for your error. Ten misses and you are out.

Game C involves shooting barrels and bouncing them into gates. Each gate is worth a different point value. It is simple, but somehow the most fun. The most kinetic of the three, because the barrels are always moving. There is little waiting. Still, the reconstruction falters. Duck Hunt has less variety, but is somehow more fun. According to research, Hogan's Alley would eventually end up as an actual arcade experience. Maybe it was put next to a High Speed pinball machine. I don't know for sure, and I'm kind of done with these two now. Why?

The waitress just came out with a tray. My order is ready.