Wistful Thoughts At One-Eighth Earth's Gravity (Loopz, Low G Man, Lunar Pool)

Loopz is an NES game that I went into completely blind. This turned out to be a mistake. These games were not created to be played blindly. You were meant to open a cardboard box and remove a pristine cartridge from inside. Maybe it came with one of those dark game sleeves, with Nintendo emblazoned on it in red. I never used those things. Maybe I should have. It would help the contacts not collect dust. Not that I'd know that then. More importantly, the game would have come with a manual. Something to tell you how to play. Notably, on the Japanese side of things, Shinya Arino of Game Center CX always goes into his challenges blind. If things should stump him, only then does he resort to the manual. Maybe Japanese sentiment rewards beating a game without looking at the controls or secrets in the manual as some sort of cool thing. I mention all of this because I have absolutely nothing to say about Loopz on NES. It is a game whose point completely baffles me. From what I can gather, you hit buttons and make shapes that resemble tetrominoes, of all things. A puzzle game with tetrominoes. It'll never work. You do this by hitting the button on a grid of green and make the grid red. The shapes get weird, and you can't make a shape if there's any red over it. It's hard to explain, and the point of the game is lost on me. I could educate myself, but it's not intuitive at all. Bleh.

Rather amazingly for me, "not intuitive at all" is a well description for Taxan's Low G Man. I should properly talk about gravity again, since we have a game where the protagonist is literally named Low G Man. He also, to quote some angry Nintendo reviewer from somewhere, "jumps like he's on the goddamned moon". I wasted the Talking Heads song quote on Mega Man 5. Shit. Well, like I said. Not intuitive at all. You shoot bullets at robots with the B button but it only freezes them. Great. A game where you can only freeze your enemies? Soon the screen was crawling with them, but then I realized. You freeze the enemies, and then you can do a jumping attack. Thrusting down with some sort of spear. Gravity! After that, Low G Man became... pretty fun! There's a certain satisfying charm to spear attacking dudes from below. This is not an unsung classic of the NES. Nor is it the dreck and detritus of the system. Low G Man is what you mostly got with the NES. A servicable action game for a small child to play in their free time. Something to rent from the video store, to spend a casual weekend on, when not playing outside or watching cartoons. I'd dare to call it quintessential NES. It's not your big name game, but I imagine there being some sort of nostalgia for it from people. It's that kind of game. There are a few games that I hold in that regard myself. Castlevania II, for instance. Or WURM. There's an entry to look forward to.

Hell, here's one more I remember: Lunar Pool. Of course, I didn't remember it as Lunar Pool. Turns out I remembered it as Lunar Ball, from a 31-in-1 pirate cart. You want to talk about nostalgia, well here's this thing. It even had games that never got official English releases on NES. Like Popeye, or Circus Charlie. Lunar Pool is... well, pool. With a background that suggests it's played on the moon. I'm not sure if low gravity is in effect here, but oh well. Everything I just said about nostalgia is true for Lunar Pool. Playing it now, it's just pool. Nothing to get excited for, and hardly the best thing on NES... but then I think of being 7 years old again, in that same place where I played Dr. Mario and the other three Super Mario games, fiddling with 31 in 1 and making my way through all these games. The wonders of Popeye and Circus Charlie and god knows who else... as well as Lunar Ball, with its very nice music. I was fascinated. Here I am, over 20 years later and playing a dim reconstruction... and writing about it for the people of the future. Despite all that, I'm still maybe only a mile or two from where it all went down. I actually saw 31 in 1 again recently, at a comic book store. I lacked the funds to get it, but for just a moment we crossed paths again. How lovely a relic she was. How lovely a letter L was. We cross out of this galaxy, having begun... Jesus, in February? With that horribly morose post about how my friends "saved" me? God in heaven.

Well, on to M. We may have prematurely dealt with its biggest hitters... but there's another one I'm looking forward to. A Dark Queen that must be praised, a mythic force among herself.

All praise be to the Huntress, Champion of Peko The Destructor.