I Put A Spell On You (Magician)

Holy mother of god. Magician on NES. I'm going to treat this one as a single entity. Not because it's terribly important or because it lit the world on fire... but because in its own little way, Magician is magic. Again we need to step back and look at what we're dealing with here. In an odd way, I'm not even talking about Magician today. Yet I have to, for this is a Nintendo game that is part of the song of the NES. It is a Nintendo game I desperately, desperately WANT to love. See, I'll let you in on a little secret here. I love magic. You put me in any fantasy video game or setting, and I'll gravitate towards the magic-using classes. Something about them drives me to them. Maybe it's the characterization of Black Mage from Brian Clevinger's 8-Bit Theater, the only webcomic I know of whose entire existance is a set-up to a joke lasting 10 years. Either way, Magician is an innovative action/adventure game, probably. Maybe a little too innovative. You learn magic spells as you progress by discovering what the magic words are, and you build them syllable by syllable. Buy items, explore the land, destroy evil with your magic, keep yourself well-fed... it all sounds good. Unfortunately, something keeps it back. Attacking with magic turns into a slugfest. I really want to beat this game, and to that end I once looked up a longplay to see if I could find how to attack effectively. The longplayer just spent the opening section of the game "learning" every spell by inputting them manually. Since the spells never change, if you know the magic words you can have the best spells from the first seconds of gameplay. What a dull way to play. At least Magician has good music. It has very good music, in fact. You will hear it momentarily, but now... now for the part I've been looking forward to.

Magician is an acolyte apprentice of an ultimate wizard, the dread beast NOSTALGIA. To that end, I have nostalgic memories of Magician. They notably have jack shit to do with the game itself. The main title theme was used in a piece of NES homebrew that I remember from the turn of the century. I fully expected to mention this in passing, as a cute little fact of my own personal history. Then I actually found the thing. It's called "CMC 80's", and I have recorded the entirety of it for you all. You should watch this. This is a fascinating piece and I'd love to talk about it some more. The most striking is its date. June 14th, 2000. Eleven days past its fourteenth birthday, and it celebrates 15 years of the NES. The loving tribute of nostalgia is now as old as the nostalgia itself was at the time. Christ almighty. More to the point, this thing reads like a manifest for the Nintendo Project itself. A piece of loving art that, while impossible to be heard by every human being ever, still matters because it was heard by some human beings for one fleeting moment. A tribute to a piece of comfort from one's childhood, a comfort that still exists today. 1989 is long gone. 2014 is halfway dead. The memory of things like Mega Man 2 and Super Mario Brothers are only just that; memories ingrained inside the minds of twenty-something sentient humans on planet Earth. The objects themselves still exist, unlike the years they were made. Anyone can throw them on at any time, and go back. That's the magic of NOSTALGIA, the arcane ritual that every mad man with a grey box can perform on a whim. God, the NES is just beautiful like that. In this moment, it's all worth it. No matter what utter shit may lie in the future of the Nintendo Project, it all happened and it all mattered... and with every entry, I become more of a magician, dredging up these alchemic memories and placing them inside a wall of words. A wall of words that not every human will read, but nevertheless still matters because some humans will read them.

Oh yeah, and the guy who made this, Chris Covell... wherever he is now, he liked Magician and he used some of the music from the game in his homebrew ROM. It's good tunes.