I Casts The Spells That Makes The Peoples Fall Down (Magic Darts, Magic Johnson's Fast Break, The Magic Of Scheherazade)

We have talked, in great length now, about how the entire scope of our project (and indeed, in most projects) has a foundation rooted in Lady Capitalism, the Beginning and the End. This vast expanse goes on for longer than one can fathom, a scheme built on the back of human history. Creation in the name of making money... but creation had that nasty side effect of creativity. Old British people's attempt to make money in 1963 created a transcendent blue box. Middle-aged American people's attempt to make money in 2010 created a fervor of friendship. Old Japanese people's attempt to make money in 1985 with video games intersected with old American's people failed attempt at the same thing two years earlier, and the Nintendo Entertainment System was born. A grey box that uses the CVE of imagination, and computer chips brimming with god knows how much of the Goddess Valya, to bring entertainment and enjoyment to the masses. What other words is there to describe this besides "magic"? Now the magic becomes apparant. Now we delve in.

Magic Darts surprised me. It really and truly did surprise me. I was expecting crap. What I got was... servicable. I have a bit of a history with darts. I never really played the game, but my family has done so quite often. Numerous dart trophies and plaques in my parents' basement, for instance. Even a full-fledged dartboard hung there until recently, unused and taking up space. Come to think of it... that same basement is also where the magic happened with my Nintendo when I was young. That dartboard would have been right there on the wall as I ventured through Darkwing Duck on the weekends, or tried to master the madness of Castlevania II with a hintbook in hand. As it turns out, Nintendo and darts don't make such an odd alchemic mix after all. Magic Darts ended up being a little fun, and I got the hang of it quick. You select the angles of your shot horizontally and vertically, then the power... and you see what you get. It is intuitive and maybe a little fun. Plus you can play as a robot. Who the fuck doesn't want to play as a dart-throwing robot?

Magic Johnson's Fast Break. There's a kind of magic here. A magic that makes the typical trash sports game that I usually dread writing words about... almost good. In a prototype NBA Jam 2-on-2 sort of sense, but without any of the mild insanity that game brought upon the world. No, I almost had fun with this. Not a complete fun, but much more than something like Hoops or Lee Trevino's Fighting Golf. I say almost because there's still that level of intuition I'm missing. Even with two buttons, there's variations on offense and defense that I am missing. Still, it remains satisfying to score a shot. That part is simple enough, you just hit the button when you're near the other hoop. It's defense that gets me. I liked the darts more than this, and yet I am incompetent at both sports in real life. Either way, the fact that both are tolerable as opposed to outright dreck is itself a miracle... but the true magic is yet to come.

Scheherazade beckons with her magic, and I must answer her call. I myself have become the Scheherazade, haven't I? Three times a week I tell the ongoing stories of Nintendo, in order to keep this project from facing its demise. It lay cold and lonely for a long time until I took up the mantle, becoming the new Lord Of Fiction and creating the Valya and the Nightmare... or did the Valya and the Nightmare create me? Whoever created this, whatever cultured brain brought it forth with their ritual... they brought forth a hidden gem. A true thing of beauty. Choose your starting class? Magician, of course. An echo of things to come, the ultimate power in the universe. One who wields the arcane and the alchemic, the divine and the profane. Right now we start out small. We run around in an overworld inspired by Endless Adventure, and swing our sword at bandits. Talk to the townspeople for clues. The high water mark comes when a clue leads us to a pier to the east, near the grassy shores. Our companion finds a "time door". Time itself bends to our will, and we slip 50 years into the past. We fall out of the world, and enter something completely different. A dark place, with trees of teal and blackened skies. The past is a grotesque animal, and so is the password. I want to keep going with this quest. Before we do, one final ritual of magic.

The Magician beckons, and his power shall be great.

Saturday Pancaking (June 21st, 2014)

I can cook breakfast too if I want. So, let's talk about this here blog. When it started about a year ago, I was posting articles every weekday. That burned me out pretty quick, so I attempted to go for a thrice-weekly update schedule. Then Nanowrimo happened and that burned me out a little, and then some shit happened in March and CAMP Nanowrimo happened and now I'm lucky to post a Nintendo Project post once a week. Long days working outside on home renovations will do that to you. Sap your attention. Keep you from wanting to play Nintendo games and write about pretend Nintendo game gods.

So, here is what we will strive to do from now on. I'm going to take a page from the book of an nice fellow named Froborr. A certain Constant Reader pointed me his way, and he wrote a lot of excellent words about Madoka Magica. Madoka Magica being one of the best goddamn Japanese cartoons I've ever seen, but I won't get into that yet for reasons. Anyway, what this guy does is simple enough. He posts twice a week about his important analysis stuff, and the rest of the days are devoted to just... whatever's on his mind. I think I'll try and do that. The current plan will be to use Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as Nintendo Project days. I will do my best to stick to that schedule and write words about Nintendo games and the pantheon I accidentally created. The rest of the days (not sure about weekends yet) will be used for whatever's on my mind. I'll do what I can to keep it on-topic and interesting. I doubt I'll need a proper Saturday Pancaking thread like Mr. Sandifer because... well, a lot of you are Constant Readers but there's little in commenting going on here. That's fine and I'm glad you're enjoying the words I put here. If I'm wrong, of course, and you'd like a weekly comment thread thing... well, prove me wrong.

I'd better get myself sorted for tabletop gaming today. Call of Cthulhu. Very exciting. Rolling with a new guy after my first PC was ripped in half by a thousand-mawed monstrosity. It's a lovely game. See you soon.

Oh yeah, and I made a new Let's Play for the first time in six months. It's Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins Kai. Hope you like it.

It All Returns To Nothing (Mach Rider, Mad Max, The Mafat Conspiracy)

There's an addendum to be made. Phil Sandifer says that M.U.L.E. isn't really about capitalism at all. If you try to out-capitalism everyone else in there without giving a fig about the economy, you will destroy it. A planet laid to waste by the dread beast GREED's insatiable hunger for money. Irresponsibility, put to point in a Nintendo game. So M.U.L.E. is probably a lot better than I gave it credit for; I'd wager that if I had a PC version of it with instructions, I would enjoy it more. That's not the point here. The point is that this new reading of M.U.L.E. sets us up perfectly for the current entry. That game has a copyright on it of 1983, and it's in 1983 when the same sort of thing happened. The Video Game Crash, when Capitalism almost killed the entire concept of video games. 1983 was also when smarter capitalists in Japan invented the Famicom, and two years later the smart capitalists who killed video games brought it over as a grey box and saved the day. One of the video games they sold with the grey box came in a black box. It was called Mach Rider, and in that game you're a biker in the year 2112. A year ravaged by evil forces. In this wasteland, all you can do is ride. Ride down the road at fast speeds and attempt to avoid being rear-ended by evil go-karters gone mad. It is a fun enough game, albeit difficult. We have often referred to the Dance Apocalyptic and the Cold War here, but this is its own thing. In the wake of the Crash, we have the state of video gaming condensed. A desolate place where crazy people try cutthroat driving tactics in order to survive. To make more money, though money has become meaningless. What is valuable in this world?

Food, water, and gas.. The black oil will flow, after we experience death by a thousand scenarios. Global thermonuclear war, a zombie plague, Captain Trips, drilling too deep into the Earth's core. Whatever it was, it caused almighty Peko the Destructor to swing her blade across the planet. Now only the madmen remain, hoarding their supplies. Some sane folk survive, of course. The biker. The road warrior. Mad Max, they call him. He drives across the dreary cracked roads, only the sounds of his engine keeping him company. The Bangles are not at #1, nor is Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel. The radio only replies with static. All we have are the sounds of the engine, and exploding dynamite thrown from rubber fortresses. We can raid a base and put some raving lunatics out of their misery. In the absence of capitalism, we have bartering. Trade your food and water for gas... or if you dare, an arena pass. Compete for glory and victory, at risk of your car being rammed off an edge and exploding in a burning heap with you inside. So that's always nice. It's not very fun, but once Trenzalore has come the fun must end. While we're here, we can see what sparked this entire tiff that blew up the powder keg. Trenzalore herself is nothing more than a Mafat Conspiracy, after all.

Ah yes. The Mafat Conspiracy. That heady incident involving a crashed satellite and threatening letters sent to the Americans and the Soviets. The only man who could handle this nonsense was... expert sniper Duke Togo. For some reason. Journey to Paris, home of the six Mona Lisas, and find that B jumps and A attacks. Backwards and odd, but Duke Togo never plays by the rules. He cannot quite stop the end of the world, because he enters buildings and finds men who throw fucking kunai at him... and he can't draw his gun fast enough to stop them. He's an expert sniper, not a quick draw whiz. Christ, Duke, get your act together. I thought you blew up robot Hitler's brain! How did you even manage that? God, no wonder Peko struck us all down. You have potential, Duke, but you need to straighten up and fly right. No wonder video games died... but the Lady Capitalism accidentally created a higher power when she brought forth the grey box.

She created magic.

I'm On My Way, I'm Making It (M.C. Kids, M.U.L.E., M.U.S.C.L.E.)

The good starship Nintendo Project has made her way to the world of M. What do we find to begin with? The foe of Communism herself, the very essence of entropy that the Dread Beast GREED pays homage to at his shrine of sawblades and slot machines. Here, then, are three worlds ruled by a new entry into our ridiculous pantheon. The Goddess Of Greed, Lady Capitalism. A billowing dress made of currency flows against the invisible winds of the cosmos as we venture into her realm. This is something that we must accept, as part of the Nintendo Project. These video games have their various merits, and the grace of Valya's breath has inspired some of their creators. At the end of the day, though, it is Lady Capitalism who keeps things alive. The games we are looking at here were made to make money for their creators and license owners. Video games are a business... as is fast food. Witness current events as we glance at M.C. Kids, a platforming game with a heaping dose of high-fructose corn syrup courtesy of McDonald's. It borrows heavily from a little video game called Super Mario World. At the end of all things, at the beginning of the downfall of this realm... it is Lady Capitalism who strikes while the iron is hot. She keeps the fire going for another three years, and staves off the dropping blade of the Destructor. Not so much to preserve cultural touchstones and create the unlimited spark of creativity for the twilight years of the NES... but to make money. This is why Mega Man 5 was on NES and not the Super Nintendo. Fiscal graphs and pie charts and investments dictated it as such. We have seen behind the curtain, and it is Lady Capitalism on a bed of money, her eyes seductive and inviting. Lay with her, and the world is yours.

Which world? Any world. Go to a new planet on behalf of your lover's interest. Earn money by mining with robotic mules, or M.U.L.E.S as they should be called. Rowdy Roddy Piper found the truth with the magic sunglasses. THIS IS YOUR GODDESS. M.U.L.E. is probably a very good game when you have friends. Indeed, it appears to have a four player mode... although the NES itself, the alchemical box, only has two controller ports. To extend this and play with two more, purchase a Nintendo Four Score. Use your Lady's currency to earn more money for her. Strip mine the planet bare, buy, sell, buy buy buy sell sell sell make money make money consume purchase consume. Having conquered planet Earth in the 1980s, and defeating the socialist scourge with her cavalier, Reagan... the good Lady Capitalism has set her sights on other worlds. The galaxy is her oyster, and for a man like me this is all just nonsense. These numbers mean nothing and I don't understand half of what I'm dicking around with. This is a relic best appreciated with time, and I have chosen the socialist approach to playing it with my half-baked emulation of the damn thing. With the power of the Internet and my own grey morals, the data files present in the fifty dollars of plastic and microchips that Lady Capitalism's agents attempted to sell now belongs to the state. Is the Goddess Valya a Communist agent? Who the hell knows?

The licensing train doesn't end here. Have a tie-in based on a line of tiny action figures. M.U.S.C.L.E. The marketing agents of the Lady say that you'll see a 19% increase in sales if you use an acronym. Those goddamn idiot kids think acronyms are cool as hell. We don't even know what M.U.S.C.L.E. fucking stands for yet! We just bought the rights to some Kenny-man manga from Japan and sold the figures here! We bought the video game rights while we were at it, too! It's wrestling! You know, like Hulk Hogan and Andre The Giant! What? What do you mean the game's shit? There's no indication of what to do? There's a super orb that the CPU opponent can get that makes them kick your ass even faster? Who gives a shit, they bought the game! So yes. M.U.S.C.L.E. is kind of trash. While we're in the world of wrestling, I just had a thought. A current wrestler on the WWE is a burly Russian brute named Rusev. His manager is a sexy Russian lady named Lana, and every time she comes out she talks shit about America and praises Vladimir Putin. It is somewhat related to what we are talking about here (capitalism/socialism and wrestling)... and it even fits the time period, too. M.U.S.C.L.E. came out in 1986, and that's what Lana and Rusev feel like. A gimmick from 1986 dredged up to try and make the WWE money.

Frankly, the only place we can go from here is the end of the world.

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.

They Sleep In My Mind (Little Samson, Lode Runner, The Lone Ranger)

Huh? What were we talking about again? Feels like I've been asleep for three months or something. We passed out on the couch watching some movie about kung fu brothers, or some such bullshit. Then the weird dreams. Childhood and faith in friends overflowing. A bunch of sonnets about a little blue guy. Still, I'm up now. Let me rub the gunk out of my eyes and tell you about... Little Samson? Now there's one that was forgotten. You can easily go over what "everyone knows" about Little Samson. Really, the point is that not many people know about Little Samson. It's a Taito game that came out in 1992, well after the Super Nintendo. The NES was already dying, and the populace at large didn't give a fig about it. Little Samson, then, became an alchemic object defined by its scarcity. I know that it is one of the rarest Nintendo carts. In fact, experiment time. I'm going to look it up on Ebay. Right now. Four hundred dollars at least. Jesus. Rarer and more desired than even Earthbound. An object defined by its forgotten nature. It was good enough to want, but nobody in 1992 wanted it. By the time the ROM pirates sailed the seven seas of the Internet and discovered the treasures within, it was too late. It was a rarity. Something to be hoarded in a dragon's den. That's half of the story when it comes to Little Samson. Let me tell you who it reminds me of; another forgotten face. A man who called himself L0rdVega. With an 0. He was a Let's Player, a somewhat famous one back in the heady days of 2008 or so. He briefly had a thing going with one of my other LP friends, and then they broke up and he fell out of the world. Where did he go? We don't know. We may think of him at times like this, but for the most part he sleeps in the back of the mind. Forgotten. Just like Little Samson, he slumbers deep within the mind's eye. Now and again, he will escape... but escape is difficult. You can ask Lode Runner about that.

Oh, this is an old one. The title screen says 1983. 1984. Some guy is locked away in a dark place and needs to get all the gold, and avoid the other guys running around trying to blink him out of reality. Are we inside the dragon's den now? Is the gold part of his hoard? Run, Lode Runner. Scoop up the copies of Little Samson. There's a complete in box Earthbound there as well, still in the shrink wrap! My god, if you make it far enough you might even find Stadium Events! The pinnacle of rarity! Dare we wish for Nintendo World Championship? These names hold a certain power, and the electronic worlds they create are altered by them. Most of these rarities are moreso regrets. The world had its chance at cheap Earthbound, when the clearance sales happened. Few of you cared. A vision comes to me now. A nice young man looking at Mega Man 6 on the cheap, and taking advantage of the deal. Not to hold it on a shelf, but to enjoy it. Is Lode Runner held on shelves? Probably, but not as an object of scarcity. I can get a complete copy for less than 25 dollars if I so chose. It is a game. A game with puzzles to solve that is fun, maybe.

Now the world of collecting has collapsed into anarchy. Like the Old West, a world of bandits charging ludicrous prices for pieces of rare plastic with microchips inside. We need a hero. A Lone Ranger. This one is a rarity. Not just in collectible terms, where it will run one 30 dollars for just the plastic... but in terms of gameplay. It reminds me of Zelda 2 and its endless adventure, except top-down. And in the Wild West. With shops and punching and shooting and my god this is brilliant and I want more of it. Oddly enough, I don't even remember it for that. No, I remember it for one last forgotten relic of the past. Nintendo Power. We've talked about it before. Or someone else did. We must really sit down and discuss it proper, but Nintendo Power itself is a forgotten relic now. They do not make them any more. The Lone Ranger is where Howard Phillips bowed out. After helping a spiky-headed punk repel a bandit attack, he gave away his bow tie and rode off into the sunset. Like L0rdVega would 20 years later. I don't know where either of them went, but I like to think that they had adventures too numerous to name.

And that's how I choose to remember it.

Mega Man Unlimited

So, we just spent quite a lot of time talking about Mega Man out of sequence. I'm not quite done talking about Mega Man, but in the context of the NES I am. Incidentally, I really need to come up with a name for these non-Nintendo Project posts. I know Phil has "Pop Between Realities" on TARDIS Eruditorum, but I need to think up a good Nintendo-related one. Expansion pak? Disk system? Controller 2? Help me out here, if you're reading and clever.

We'll be back tomorrow with regular programming. I believe Little Samson is the next game after Little Nemo and the power of dreaming. To finish off the whole Mega Man thing, I'm going to link a review that I wrote recently; a review of a Mega Man fan game called Mega Man Unlimited. See, Mega Man didn't really "die" with the NES. The classic series eked out two or three more games before going quiet in the '00s. Then they came out with two new games that were styled after the old NES games, and they were bloody brilliant. Then things went quiet again, and that's what we're looking at now. Look, I go into it a bit more in the review proper.

So please. Read all about Mega Man Unlimited over on Sliders 'n Socks. Hope you enjoy it. See you tomorrow.