Use The Shrink Potion On The Glove But Beware Of Bugs (Mike Tyson's Punch Out, Millipede, Milon's Secret Castle)

Well, we've got another whopper here tonight. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. What could have been another licensed disaster, saved by the first party. Everyone loves Punch-Out! Oh boy, video boxing! This is quite the good NES game and it's beloved by many. I think it's pretty good. Now to continue waffling about it for a paragraph. Unlike the other usual licensed adventures we've dealt with, this one is more of a direct challenge. Look no further than the commercial. Iron Mike is laughing at you! The world heavyweight champion boxer of two realms, he is! Both our planet, and that weirdo Nintendo land where mushrooms sing and fairies dance. The WVBA needs an underdog to rise up. Little Mac has become his own character, but he's basically a character expy here in 1987. He is You. Hell, the arcade original just had a wireframe man. Little Mac is you, and you're facing gigantic hulking boxer brutes created from the finest microchip alchemy that nonexistant lands have to offer. Appropriately enough, when I played for the blog tonight I made it to Soda Popinski before getting floored. The Cold War's not ready to end in 1987, but one might make it to Mike Tyson. God help you if you do, because he's tough. I've never done it. Daniel Sexbang's never done it. Mike Matei's done it! How in the hell does Iron Mike not make it on the top of hardest video games list? Forget the Turbo Tunnel, forget beating Ghosts n Goblins twice, forget goddamn Silver Surfer. This is the shit right here. Perfect reflexes and split-second timing are required. Iron Mike was a tough champ in 1987, and he's a tough champ here. Life imitates art; Mike Tyson is a son of a bitch to beat in the ring.

Then in 1990 they took him out for a white guy named Mr. Dream. Valya's champion boxer packs just as much of a punch. Everything else is exact. What's next? Bugs.

I've spoken a lot about tabletop gaming in some of the off posts. It's relevant here because of Incompetence Quest, one of the campaigns I'm involved in. A nice fellow is playing an evil cleric whose loyalty lies with the god of death (not Peko, but Nerull). His favorite trick is summoning gigantic monstrous centipedes to distract the enemy forces and take care of them. Stelle would be right at home in Millipede. Another Williams arcade port from Hal Labs. Millipede is fun! The dread beast GREED's lumbering specter really only rears its head in the later days of the arcade, when the games actually ended. Millipede is bottomless. It was created to suck up quarters and eat away time at pizza parlors. Its main form of control, the trackball, is lacking here. Funny enough, it isn't even the millipede that causes death frequently here; it's those goddamned spiders. They like to crash into you. Little bastards. The dread beast doesn't know when to just let you have a good time. I checked. Millipede's high score is over 10 million points. I didn't even get to 150k. Oh well. I still had fun!

Then we come to Milon's Secret Castle. How lovely. Once again we're haunted by the Nerd. This is the sort of game that thrived in Japan, but Japan was not our shores in the late 80's. It is a nonintuitive adventuring platformer where the goal is to discover all the required hidden nonsense the creators stashed away in nondescript blocks. It also appears to require an exact order to go about things and purchase items, barring continue codes or some way to exit levels. I am willing to blame my mild dislike of Milon here on a culture shock. Someone like Shinya Arino can do it, and has. He seemed to enjoy it, while over here our western nerd yelled about its cryptic nature. Here I stand, in the middle. Milon is not the best, but is not the worst. Were I younger, and had the head start of discovering that things could be broken and blocks could be shoved, I could see myself dredging up the hidden goodies in this one. Maybe I'll get at it someday. Maybe I won't. Who knows? We've got a lot of Nintendo games to play.

Seems like an impossible mission, don't it?