Welcome Back My Friends, To The Show That Never Ends (Heavy Barrel, Heavy Shreddin')

Time gaps. Hell of a thing, ain't they? Before we even begin to face our first game of the resumed Nintendo Project, we face a hell of a time gap. The gap between June 14th, 2011 and now is large, to be sure. A gap of two dates, two writers, two minds. It's nothing compared to the gap between 1990 and 2013. 23 years. God damn. Still, that's the gap we need to cross in order to cover Heavy Barrel. An interesting title, to be sure. Let's try and jump the gap and see what we've got. Don't worry, I'm good at this sort of thing. Trust me, tethering secret history together is my specialty.

The original Nintendo Project left off with Hatris. A Tetris clone with... hats. Made by Alexy Pajitnov itself, it seems. To be honest, I'm not sure why that needed to be a thing that exists... but whatever. That's where the machine stopped. I cleaned the dust off it and now I'm driving it again. The road ahead is Heavy Barrel. A run and gun game by Data East. Things have started off promising for this iteration, let me tell you. I only played this game for the 18 minutes it took me to use all my lives and continues, but I got what I needed to get out of it. Arcade action. Explosions. Running and gunning.

Of course, there are certain elements that are undeniably ripped right out of the wildly popular Contra and Super C, also for the NES. The entirety of Heavy Barrel is top down run and gun, not unlike the top down segments of Super C. Or Commando. Or Ikari Warriors. Or the ten billion other top down run and gun games of the time. I will say that I like Heavy Barrel more than Commando. Lucky enough, I get to be the one to talk about Ikari Warriors and Super C. If we make it that far. No promises, but I'll do my best. Much like I did when playing Heavy Barrel. I did my best to shoot at the waves of enemies. I was rewarded with better weaponry from boxes on the ground, unlocked with keys by shooting red enemies. It's a little odd, but it worked. Shame there are more boxes than red enemies, though. I suppose you'd have to remember what's in what box.

What is in there are the usual power-ups. Better grenades. Better weapons. I swear the weapons are straight

out of Super C. I got a spread gun, and then a large flamethrower. I really liked the flamethrower. Even if this was derivative of other run and gunners, it had its own charm... and then there's the Heavy Barrel itself. The titular weapon is split into six or seven pieces, each in boxes. Fitting for our first game here. We are trying to reconstruct a defunct public domain blog, and here we are reconstructing a powerful weapon. On my last life I managed to do it. I completed the Heavy Barrel, and lay waste to everything in my way. Soldiers fell instantly. Attack helicopters took a blast or two and then flared with explosions. The power overwhelming was mine. Time will tell if I've reconstructed anything good out of the Nintendo Project... but considering its original owner seems pleased at the idea, I have a good feeling.

Heavy Shreddin', however, leaves me with mixed feelings. It is a snowboarding game in which you descend down a mountain and do various snowboarding things. I kind of dig it, in the sense that if I ever saw it at a used game store for five bucks I would probably purchase it for my collection. The first level was split into three parts. First was simply getting down the mountain to the goal as fast as I could. I did so, dodging trees as I went. The game felt like a combination between Skifree and something like the Turbo Tunnel in Battletoads... but not that bad. I noticed that the game barely gives you enough time to reach the goal. I made it with hundreds of seconds left. After dodging some other snowboarders, it was on to slalom. I didn't like slalom very much. It was hard to judge where to move between the gates. The final section really grabbed me, though. Survival. We've hit the core of what makes most video games tick; survival. Don't die. Survive what the game throws at you. Jump a truck. Jump a gorge. Duck power lines. Dodge trees. Don't die. It was the best segment by far, and I would have loved a game of that.

Sadly, all good things come to an end. I reached a half pipe segment where tricks are required to proceed. I didn't know how to do tricks. That's the thing about reconstructing the past. It's never perfect. You're always missing something when you tether back to 1990. In this case, I was missing the instruction booklet. Too bad. Heavy Shreddin' was not terrible, at least. Just not remarkable. It gave me some enjoyment though, and that's more than I can say for a lot of NES games. We'll hit the shit eventually... maybe. For now, I've spent some time playing two old games that I haven't touched before, and I had some fun with them.

Isn't that what this is all about? The tether has pulled June 14th, 2011 a little closer to us. The Nintendo Project has returned, in some capacity. I can't hope to match Mr. Sandifer's quality, but I can hope to see it through as far as I can. Our tethers and secret histories have taken us a little farther than we were before, and that's what matters.