Fight The Future (Mechanized Attack, Mendel Palace)

Oh boy! A game that's compatible with the Zapper! My favorite! There were maybe like 10 of these things, and the only ones I ever had were Duck Hunt and The Adventures Of Bayou Billy. We already covered Hogan's Alley way back when, but now we have... Mechanized Attack. It reminds me of Bayou Billy's shooting levels, only it's a whole game. "Goody!" I said, as I moved my crosshair around and shot at dudes. "I'll bet emulating the Zapper would make things even more fun!". I was incorrect. The alchemy has gone wrong. You really cannot emulate the Zapper. That bright orange frame, once a stark grey long ago to match its parent box. The little lens inside the barrel to refract light. Best of all... the springy noise the trigger makes when you pull it. That's one of the best sounds from my childhood, and you lose it when you try to emulate. You also lose control. A mouse pointer is no goddamned good. I had to shoot things off center to hit them, and the screen flashing was starting to give me a headache. More to the point, Mechanized Attack isn't all that good. It just stacks the deck a little too much against you. I mean, you have two targets flying at you from the top screen, a soldier far away and a soldier close to you. These things will start shooting you in about a second... and the soldier close to you is a MECHANIZED soldier. ATTACKING you. See how clever that is, except it means he takes four goddamn hits to kill and you're getting hammered by everything else. Blegh. At least the game over screen is cool.


Speaking of mechanized attacks, we've jumped ahead in the alphabet. We dealt with the Mega Man and his rise and fall. Now we deal with... a future intrusion of sorts. Though you'd never know it. Mendel Palace is a game made by Hudson Soft and developed by a little studio named Game Freak. Game Freak eventually created the ultimate alchemy on the Nintendo Game Boy, splitting its power into 151 fragments and commanding the children of the late 90's to reassemble it. What, then, to say of Mendel Palace? It has jack shit to do with any of that stuff, although the seeds for the idea were with the company at the time. This is part of the secret history, then. It was lurking within the minds of some Japanese people, in a land that didn't exist, waiting to burst forth from its cocoon at level 10. As for Mendel Palace... uh... it had a commercial! I suppose that doesn't relegate it to true obscurity. 200 levels? A 2-player mode? Holy shit! The game itself is okay too. Nothing particularly special or "best ever", so it fits in well with the middle of the road NES library. Other than its lineage, and the prophecy that its creators will fulfill in the future, that's about that. It seems that the future is... beginning to intrude on us in ways I can't imagine. Let's look towards it, then.

Towards the Age Of Metal.