Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (Joust, Jurassic Park)

Don't you just love it when things line up perfectly, as far as themes and waffling about old Nintendo games are concerned? As 2014 dawns, we now find ourselves 20 years removed from the entropic heat death of the NES. There are people turning 20 and 19 this year who never knew the NES while it was alive. How unfortunate. Then again, someone older than me could lament as well. Being a product of 1985, and from a small town to boot, I do not know the glory of the arcade scene from the late 1970's and early 1980's. Pity, that. It might have made my understanding of this first game a little more real. I do, however, have something.

Joust is a classic Midway arcade game that came out in 1982. This NES version is courtesy of HAL Laboratory, who will one day send me into battle with my own insecurities before a pair of newlyweds cut it down with the power of love. I saw it happen. I MADE it happen. At first there is no real link between this game and 2014, aside from this weirdo here writing about it on his blog. Here, look closer. Joust is the undistilled form of one of our legendary Black Box Games, those monoliths that defined the NES way back in 1985, at the genesis of it all. This is just Balloon Fight with... knights mounted on flying ostriches. It's at this point that I'd like to direct you to the commerical for this game's console release on Atari systems. It doesn't have a lick to do with NES, despite being part of the secret history and the Great Video Game Crash that led to the NES's curious success... so it actually has everything to do with it. I'm just linking it because it's an absolutely insane commercial for a game about bumping into a mess of pixels that's supposed to be a knight on a flying ostrich. So! Balloon Fight! That game came out in 1984, and that was now 30 years ago! BAM SEE WE'VE GOT OUR LINK. If that's not enough for you, here's another fun thing. Sometimes when you bonk the enemy knights, an egg lands on the ground. If you get it, you get points... but if you don't, the egg hatches and guess what comes out. That's right. A knight. Who then summons an ostrich mount and gets right back into it. Reincarnation. A new life cycle. A new year. One wonders what Joust would do if you killed the same knight 13 times. Let's not risk intervention from the Ostrich Lords and just call Joust "pretty fun". It's the fun side of the arcade, the side that just wants to spend an afternoon with a pocketful of change and try things in a dark room full of flashing lights and beeps and boops. Or waiting for your pizza. It's good!

And now, to close out the journeys of the letter J, and dance into the realm of K for real this time... it's Jurassic Park. Everything about this screams the same wailing screech we've dealt with before: licensed dreck that makes up the bulk of this console we love, revealing the horrible truth to any amateur psychochronographer who dares to do something stupid like, say, continue writing about NES games two years after a more talented writer gave up the ghost. Jurassic Park, though... well, now we come to something different. Those other licenses? I didn't give a fig about Jack Nicklaus or James Bond Junior or John Elway. Jurassic Park, on the other hand? The film came out in 1993 and made millions of dollars. I was an eight year-old boy, and eight is about the age when small boys are already fascinated with dinosaurs. There's no way to divorce myself from this particular cultural event. Jurassic Park and its licensing Tyrannosaur swallowed me whole. I can remember seeing the movie in a theater while on vacation in Nova Scotia. When the T. Rex eats the lawyer on the toilet? That shit terrified me because I was watching death. In my mind, I had just watched a frightened human being cower and scream before being devoured by a monster. Despite that fear, there was a sense of fascination with this movie. I got books about the dinosaurs and things. I was given all sorts of Jurassic Park toys and clothes and god knows what else for Christmas 1993... along with one more special thing. A Nintendo Game Boy with the Jurassic Park portable video game, from Ocean Software. I would have been playing this game in January 1994... twenty years ago. On the Game Boy. This time, my link to the past is an Ouroboros. I am writing about video game history courtesy of MYSELF. Here, then, we see the ultimate victory of Darth License. It's easy to shrug off nonsense sports game, but what happens when his licensed claws dig into an impressionable child? You get a game that I can't look at objectively. A game that I can't just write off as dreck. Great. Now I'm the dark side.

That being said, there is still enough light and imagination in me as an adult to realize that this game is not some forgotten masterpiece. It's underwhelming, even though the NES game tickles my sense of nostalgia for the old days. The Game Boy game I played was pea soup green with a small screen and beep-boop noises. This NES version came out in 1993. Even Ocean knew how to make the NES sing, Just listen to this. Good god. So in this game you run around and shoot dinosaurs with what looks like a bazooka, while collecting dinosaur eggs to earn keycards. I would like to call your attention to that question mark monitor thing to your immediate right. Those are a gamble. They either contain health or invincibility... or blow up and damage you for about half of your life bar. There is also no way I know of to tell which ones hurt you and which ones heal you. As a child, this was annoying. As an adult I could let loose a stream of profanities, but I instead point to it as a shining example of Game Design 101: DON'T DO THIS. At this point I'm playing the game on a set course, a course burned into my brain twenty years ago on a grey brick. Eventually I reach a stampede of Triceratops, and the music... it builds. These are good chiptunes! My god! With the crescendo rising, it's time to blast away from the jaws of the T. Rex. Time to let fright give way to memory, and go on to the world of the K. A world we darted into when love lit the way.

Happy New Year.