I Am Everything You Ever Were Afraid Of (Monster In My Pocket, Monster Party, Monster Truck Rally)

Monsters are real. I know. I'm one of them. The entire idea of video games is monstrous, in a way. We take concepts and grand worlds born from our imaginations, and then perform arcane rituals to squeeze them onto tiny discs and plastic cartridges. Witness the jam that led to Konami's Monster In My Pocket, a game that ties in to a toy line of tiny monsters, not unlike the M.U.S.C.L.E. toy line. Difference is, this game is pretty good. It is also an exercise in madness. Look at the included screenshot. Really look and comprehend what is happening here. Frankenstein's monster is standing in front of a tape deck while a zombie comes after him. Both are a few inches tall. The first two stages of this game are the domestic clashing with the monstrous. Jump on a giant bed while witches warp in. Leap across the kitchen counter as goblins hurl sugar cubes. Avoid the stove burners and press onward, eventually fighting a Yeti. Not in the loo in Tooting Bec, but in your freezer. To gaze upon the monster is to go mad; you cannot grasp the true form of its creativity. The deadlights beckon you, and you go mad. The laughter of the damned echoes through your house as you continue to play, controlling Frankenstein's monster, itself a symbol of flawed alchemy and what happens when creativity goes too far. We have stolen video games from the gods, and now our guts belong to the fucking crows. We are the Nintendo generation: the modern Promethea.

So now that sanity has left us in one brutal swipe of the monster's claw, it's time to have ourselves a party. Monster Party is madness itself, filtered through a CRT screen and rendered with an 8-bit processor. Men in Japanese school uniforms shoot psychic blasts at you. Pills turn you into a dragon man. A spider apologizes for being bead. Halfway into level 1 everything melts and becomes a blood-soaked hellhole with spotted mandogs and oozing skulls. Level 2 has a fried food boss that transforms into an onion ring and a piece of shrimp. A later level has a kitten in a box that angrily hurls kittens at you. A wishing well attacks you with coins. I write these things to help emulate my own experience with Monster Party. I got to read about it in a Nintendo tip book. It was text only. When you read the phrase "swing your bat at the Bull Man and his tiny Bull Kids" at the age of 10, it leaves an impression. Eventually I found the game and it was even wilder than I had anticipated. My own gazing upon the monster. Was it that moment that gave me power? Hell, look at Doctor Who(as I so love to do); the moment that gave the show the power to last for 50+ years was not two schoolteachers falling out of the world, or being yelled at by cave people. It's the moment when a woman is threatened by a plunger and screams in absolute horror. Doctor Who got its longevity when the monsters came. So, too, did video games.

Sometimes we went too far. Monster Truck Rally is awful. I hate it. I hate it for one simple reason; I am bad at it. I race against the CPU in my monstrous pink truck with the huge wheels. It always goes faster than me. I do not know how to accelerate as fast as it. I do not know how to beat it at the myriad of events the game gives me. I do not know how to overcome the perfect machine, and it angers me. I accept that it is my fault, but at the same time I doubt we will get any defenders of Monster Truck Rally who are offended by my dismissal of it. Maybe it's fun with another human player, when the odds are evened. Fighting the machine is no goddamned fun, however. This is the truth of the NES. It, like Doctor Who, draws its power from the monstrous. The Dread Beast GREED and the holder of its gargantuan leash, the Lady Capitalism, know this. 50 dollars for the privilege to get defeated time and time again by a machine-mind, created with dark alchemy. That's the real horror here; the fact that you cannot win. They have your money, and soon they will have your life. You've gone mad now. You're part of the Nintendo generation, and you're a monster now too.

Which makes what's about to come even worse.