Gettin' Mad About Video Games (NARC, NES Open Tournament Golf, NES Play Action Football)

Welcome to the letter N. It stands for Nothing. As in, nothing today is actually any good. Okay, maybe one game, but it sure as shit ain't NARC. We're in War On Drugs territory here. Also Williams Arcade territory. Also Rare Ltd. programmer territory. Mother of god, these are bad lands to be in. So how do we fight the war on drugs? Kill it. Kill them all. Destroy every drug-peddling criminal scum shooting at you. They are the enemy, and you are the Law. The absolute, the champion of virtue and of right. They shot first, so it's within your rights as a gun-toting officer of peace to mow them all down. How dare anybody question otherwise. Attack dogs? Mow them down too. The powers that be have deigned them threats. There are no cute dogs in this world, only attack dogs that will gnaw your leg off. Men who throw hypodermic needles. Gun not enough? Blow them up with a rocket. Create a cascade of corrupt corpses in your wake, no remorse or worry... and then go for a round of golf.

This is better. This elicits warm memories of the 1990s. Borrowing this game on the same day as art class. We had to make placemats. I made a crude drawing of the cover art of this game. Is it still here, I wonder? Let me check.

By God in heaven. There it is. Littered with signatures from classmates. "AFA." A Friend Always. Here's the punchline; I have forgotten who some of these people are. Who the hell is Holly, or Billy, or Jennifer? Was AFA just some cool thing to say in 1995? I don't know, but somehow this game still has power over me. Somehow it's a fun golf game. Even if I can barely make par on some holes, and end up triple bogeying on others. Somehow, it's still fun. No bullshit, no nonsense, just you and a golf club and hitting the damn ball. No Jack Nicklaus, no Lee Trevino. Just Mario. And a golf club. It's the best game today, and I have nothing else to say about it. It's a golf game and it's fun.

NES Play Action Football is a football game. It is not fun... but it's had a strange effect on me. I went in expecting very little. I got, of course, very little. It is football. Just like I've done before, and will do again and again until the end of time. It uses an isometric perspective and sometimes zooms out. Then the conspiring begins. Plays and attack patterns that I have no comprehension of. The screen zooming out as it's my turn to move, such that the tiny red man I'm controlling collides with a tiny yellow man and I lose my turn. No gain. Controls that are unintuitive. God. I know that I'm not playing it as intended. I am meant to have the instruction book with me like a bible... but I guess I'm just used to a certain level of figuring stuff out. Something simple would work. B to pass. A to tackle. Select to switch player. This is all you would need. Instead, it's B plus a direction to pass. B PLUS A to change players. This is never told on screen, of course. I had to look it up after finishing play. Good riddance. Bad rubbish.

Then I thought further. I thought of Gamergate, of the faceless swarms that are descending on women in gaming and driving them right the fuck out with their virtual pitchforks and torches. All in the name of "weeding out corruption". Bullshit. Bullshit. I have yet to see an example of Gamergate doing anything of a sort. A woman has had dirty relationship laundry aired out for the world to see. Another woman has been driven out of her home by threats of rape and death. Another woman has quit writing about video games entirely. The Faceless Ones are claiming victim after victim to their crusade... and for what? To protect this? To protect their darling dear video games? Emboiting a closed space upon which nothing that is not a privileged white male can enter on pain of death? Literally fuck off. Real people, real living and feeling people on planet Earth, are being hurt by this. Hurt by the mob, in favor of protecting video games. Literally. Fuck off. Video games are not worth protecting. Even if they were, they wouldn't need it. They have survived market crashes and system changes and social upheaval. A couple of "non-games" aren't going to kill it. Get out. Video games were corrupt from the moment they were born. They exist to make money, and they will continue to make money until the end of time. The fuckwits behind Gamergate are no better than the NARC men, shooting at everything that dares to be Not Them.

Destroy all "gamers". Ruin all video games. Video games are dead. From now on, this project is a postmortem.

Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie

(Hi there! This isn't really a Nintendo game post, but I was inspired. After years of filming and production and stuff, the Angry Video Game Nerd movie finally came out! I watched it last night and I had words to write about it... sort of. There will be spoilers in these words, so do beware. If you'd like to see the film, here is a legal avenue for you to do so. Regardless, here we go.

PS: If you got here from Cinemassacre, hi! I hope you like my silly Nintendo game blog!)

Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie (henceforth referred to as the AVGN movie) is many things. "Terrible", surprisingly enough, is not one of them. Believe me, I'm the first to call out an AVGN-related product when it falters. I've done it before. Still, this is not a review of the AVGN movie. Not quite, but let's get housekeeping out of the way and give quick thoughts anyway. It's okay. It's not a classic or a masterpiece, but it's a movie I'd watch again. My favorite part, aside from all of the esoteric bullshit I'm going to write about it in a second, is how it handles cameos. This is an Internet Celebrity Movie, and in my mind I immediately compare it to Doug Walker's Internet Celebrity Movies for his website, That Guy With The Glasses. They are not very good in my eyes, and one of the reasons I dislike them? Their reliance on cameos and reference. They exist to light up the audience's memory neurons regarding Internet Celebrity Inside Jokes And Appearances. By contrast, the AVGN movie is also brimming with cameos from other Internet Celebrities (even Doug Walker himself shows up!)... but at almost no point is it ever directly stated that the person appearing on screen is Someone From The Internet. Doug Walker gets his cameo, but it's a scream of horror at something. He does not identify himself as Doug Walker. He is a cutaway reaction, a piece of a larger montage that actually is relevant to the plot of the film. There are other things I liked, but let's not go into those now. Let's talk about alchemy again.

Oh, is the AVGN movie dripping with alchemy and the totemic power of the Nintendo pantheon... even if it doesn't really involve Nintendo. For starters, let's look at the Nerd himself. If the Nintendo Project is the TARDIS Eruditorum of the NES (which, really, Phil deserves all credit for)... then the AVGN web series is the About Time. Or the Jeremy Bentham or whatever. Thanks to him, creations of the Nightmare are spotlighted and targeted by the masses. We know to treat Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde as a dread beast. Top Gun and its plane landing are nonsense. The Power Glove really is that bad. (We'll get there, in a roundabout way, soon.) He jumps all over time with these games, as we do, and doesn't even limit himself to the grey box. Atari is fair game as well. The 2600, the once-king of the wastelands of woodgrain. What happened next is recorded history, of course. The impossible king rose to great heights, in conjunction with the dread beast GREED at the near-peak of its capitalist power. They were invincible, and they recruited an alchemist to make something to give them more money. A video game based on that one Spielberg movie. Yes. Eee Tee. They gave their microchip alchemist no time at all to turn lead into gold, and the half-baked creation was sour and malformed. The capitalists, in their hubris, made far too many. Their assumption was that Darth License's brand would fly off the shelves. How wrong they were. Video games suffered a mortal blow, and the lead blood splattered everywhere, poisoning the well. They died in 1983, but the trickling blood splashed into a void, reaching a land that did not exist. It touched a white and red box, and the Famicom was born. As for the E.T. carts? Buried with countless other unsold Atari stock, in a landfill in the wastelands.

All of this is true. Even the landfill part.  The movie, of course, embellishes things slightly. And by "slightly" I mean that every Eee Tee cartridge ever made actually contains a piece of alien super-metal harvested from the Roswell UFO, as well as the floor plans to Area 51. Things go farther than that. There's an alien who tells us that our reality is its own ridiculous video game. Entire planets and nebulas created with alchemy far surpassing our own... and the entropy that can stop it? A Lovecraftian death god lurking under Mount Fuji. Who awakens during the third act of the film and lays waste to the world like a kaiju monster. The Nightmare, Peko The Destructor, the dread beast GREED... all just concepts without form. Here, then, lies the true horror. Video games exist to further capitalism and line the pockets of their creators. The side effect of that? Sometimes they're fun. Sometimes the microchip alchemy creates something beautiful. Sometimes, the grace of good fortune awaits. There is good in this universe, and there are good games.

The Nerd himself, whether he knows it or not, is a force of good. He may swear and fight and drink and vomit, but above all else his greatest fear is the suffering of those who have grown to laugh at his work. The idea that people would actually play E.T., let alone go out to the harsh desert to dig the damn things up? It horrifies him. He spends the film trying to deny the entire thing, even as the conspiracies and revelations about the inner workings of the universe rack up. He doesn't want us to become the mindless zombies of capitalism; indeed, a nightmare sequence early on features just that. A carnival of capitalism with Eee Tee and the Nerd's face plastered everywhere, the undead buying and winning and buying... then playing their product. Furthering the brand. Consuming not just what the fools at Cockburn put out, but human flesh. How horrifying.

In the end, it is too much. In order to save the day, mankind needs to rid itself of this burden. Every cartridge of Eee Tee on the planet comes together, the ultimate alchemy. It forms a spaceship, and this is what sends the death god back to its realm. We are deprived of our so-called "worst game ever", but as the credits roll, we get what we have wanted. We get our AVGN E.T. review... and you know what? It's not the worst game of all time. In the end, E.T. isn't really some earth-shattering calamity that can be used to make it so nothing ever existed. It's a flawed game that some greedy old people rushed out the door for Christmas 1982. It's a game that one man worked on to the best of his effort, creating some weird thing about telephone pieces and falling into holes. It has its cryptic moments, but it was intended to come with instructions. You read them, and understand, because the game has no room to tell you what to do. Its alchemist has no time to explain to you what to do. Sure, it may have brought Atari to its knees and almost killed video games, but that set the scene for the NES, and the 30 years of video gaming that followed. A new empire, forged on the ashes of the old.

In that regard, E.T. might be the most important game of all time.

You Shall Beeee Like Uzzzzzz (The Mutant Virus, Mystery Quest)

My my, we've been in this realm for a while. This is a milestone, of sorts. 26 letters in our alphabet, and once we sort out these last two mediocre bits of electronic entertaiment, the Nintendo Project will have mapped out 13 of them. As there aren't equal games represented for every letter, this isn't a true halfway point but a spiritual one. A Valyan one, if you will. As we sit here and ponder what the wonders of the letter N will bring (not much, and then a shitload of really interesting things, incidentally), one must ponder. What is a bad game made of?

If you believe The Mutant Virus, it's made of a literal infection at the very core of the microchips of the thing, spreading and multiplying and taking root of everything. I've oft called the magic of the NES "microchip alchemy", so let's see what went wrong here. At its core, a game is but an idea. The heart of The Mutant Virus is an idea about a spaceman inside a computer fighting off a computer virus by shooting at it and stopping the spread of the infection. It could have been a fun game, but there's a vagueness to it that comes when one dredges through a emulated file. In the absence of microchip alchemy, the game about microchip alchemy's infection has no equivalent exchange. It cannot function, and thus it loses its soul. A shambling infected husk, the virus spreads and spreads. You can shoot at it all you want, but the infection doesn't slow like it should. It keeps spreading, and even coming near it is hazardous. Worse yet, the system itself has gotten wise to your attempts. It is now turned against you, and can smite you in one blow. The grey box can create worlds with but a thought. One hit of a fireball may not seem like much, but the fireball is a representation. A construct. What is really happening is nothing less than the unmaking of your player character. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Game over.

Mystery Quest, then, is a bit better. Platforming, shooting things, and a lengthy segment inside a castle where the only way to progress is to shoot at nondescript walls and find hidden things. So, Milon's Secret Castle territory again. Great. I want to discuss my own experience with the game. I accidentally brought forth a portion of the true experience of playing it, screaming forth from 1988 or whatever. I was in the castle, and I discovered that holding up and firing shot your projectiles upward in an erratic spread. It appeared to be a useless move. Later, as I was wandering, I came back to an area with an item above me, stuck in an alcove. I could not get it, and I didn't know where else to progress. I tried the up-shot, and broke the block below it. I got the item, and I discovered this by thinking it out and experimenting with the buttons. No walkthrough, no Youtube. All me. It's still not all that good, but by god did I do it all by myself.

On to N, then. Hold tight. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Not A Time Warp, But A Time Rip (Motor City Patrol, Ms. Pac-Man, Muppet Adventure: Chaos At The Carnival)

(Before we begin: holy mother of God, I'm on TARDIS Eruditorum! I wrote everyone's favorite Mr. Sandifer a guest post on Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock. I had choice words about it. Choice words you can go read. If you jumped here from Eruditorum: Hello! I'm Frezno and I write longwinded words about old video games! I'm about to do it again! See below.)

Motor City Patrol is weird as hell. Like, unsettlingly so. We're dealing with late 1991/early 1992 here, according to the Internet. So the SNES exists and the NES is dying. I expected a crapfest when I booted this one up. What I got was a crapfest that just disturbed me to look at. The point of this game, as far as I can tell, is to drive around and patrol buildings as a police officer and catch people who speed or something like that. It's a game about driving in circles. Dull, but look at it. The perspective and vehicle-based gameplay resonate with our futureminds. This is a proto-Grand Theft Auto. Except it's not designed at all like that and it's only the trickery of the mind doing it. It doesn't help if, say, the person playing Motor City Patrol has beaten Retro City Rampage... which is a GTA-esque "retro" game that doesn't have nostalgia bombs so much as nostalgia thermonuclear warheads. It's been said before, but with the collapse of video games and the impending heat-death of the NES, reality is growing thin. That's how things like this can bleed through into our world. Things from futures that never were.

This thin fabric of reality is what lets other things through. Things like Ms. Pac-Man. The version I played is the official one, released in 1993 by Namco. In dragging itself forward 11 years on a dying grey box, it created a splinter of itself. A splinter capitalized by Tengen, themselves an arm of Atari, itself a major leash-holder of the dread beast GREED. Before Ms. Pac-Man arrives in 1993, she has already been here. Under GREED's command, this splinter-Ms is an embodiment of Lady Capitalism, eating all in her way and demanding quarters for the honor of assisting her. Ghosts, dots, cherries, pretzels... none stand in the way. The 1993 version is no quarter-muncher. It is a simple diversion from a simpler time, and does not kill you outright with unfairness early on. That comes later. The dread beast is still at the heart of things, but its death will come. He has been tricked into a dying realm, and there is no escape from the swinging blade. Ten hearts stop beating and this iteration is slain. All hail Peko the Destructor.

And then Muppets. I suppose this one is penance. I inspired a man to play this game live, and now it's my turn to experience it. It's not very good. What I played was playable enough, but it's not very good at all. It's from Hi-Tech Expressions even. My favorite publisher in all the land. The two segments of this game I played and beat were Kermit's and Gonzo's. White water rafting and bad Asteroids controls, respectively. Playing this incites memory of the Muppets. I sort of missed the Muppet Show, but I did have a stuffed Kermit the Frog. He had a Muppet University jersey and I took him everywhere with me. I remember the Muppet Christmas Carol, a film which I take pains to watch every year when the holiday approaches. I remember Muppets Tonight, and I liked it because I was 10 and didn't know any better. Remembering these things is what this game is supposed to siphon off of. My memory of Muppets precludes me buying this. I refuse the call. My memory is too powerful for even this bit of alchemy to exchange. The power of a man's Kermit impression is too much. The power of a Hard Game Beater can best Gonzo's gonzo space bullshit with minimal fuss.

It's about time we get away from the letter M. This corruption needs cleansing.

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.

Happy Birthday, Nintendo Project Resumed!

What a difference a year makes. The Nintendo Project has been resumed for a year now. Hooray hoorah and many happy returns. Allow me to indulge myself and tell a little story. Once upon a time there was a nice man named Phil. Phil had a very bad series of days and subsequently decided to write about old Nintendo games. All of them. From A to Z. The writing was fresh and exciting, but also very sad in places. Eventually Phil started writing about a TV show called Doctor Who, from 1963 to the present day. It was very very good writing, and Phil eventually decided to shelf the Nintendo Project somewhere around the letter H.

In 2012 or so, a weirdo named Frezno found Phil's Doctor Who blog as it was dealing with the exorcism of the Colin Baker years. He quite liked it! He continued to read and even tossed some money to Phil's Kickstarter, reading the entries in book form. Then the Nintendo Project was found and its arcane tomes consumed. Being a Hard Game Beater, Let's Player, and general old video game fart... he appreciated the idea.

August 2013. Poor Frezno was going through a bad series of days of his own. Somehow or another, the Nintendo Project came back to him. The idea of continuing took root, and the seed was planted. To continue the Nintendo Project, to go through Nintendo. Letters H through Z. Could it be done? Would it even be allowed? Phil was consulted, and his blessing was given. He even said he was honored... and with that, the Nintendo Project was resumed.

So hi. Here we are a year later, and what have we learned? Writing for Nintendo is fun, if not interesting and a little narrow in scope. A lot of the NES library is unremarkable, or even outright bad... but there's enough magic in that grey box to make all of it worth it. Something else interesting happened to the blog, after the first few rocky months. In its infancy, there was just a lot of straightforward talk about video games and whether they were good or bad. Then I went and took a break for a month to write a novel for National Novel Writing Month. In it was a smart-mouthed teen with psychic powers who, as it turned out, had a precognitive sixth sense that allowed him to dodge danger before it came at him. I came up with a name for this power, and that name was Valya. Nothing special. Just the Valeyard from Doctor Who, made a dash more exotic and otherworldly. I always write with cute little in-jokes like that, it fuels the word count and keeps me going. When I came back, more Doctor Who had inspired me. The Key To Time saga, featuring a White Guardian representing Order, and a Black one representing Chaos. I turned this into a battle for the state of video games. Lady Valya, standing for the powers of innovation and imagination that led to classics like Mega Man and Zelda and whatnot. The Nightmare, the advocate for everything wrong with the 8-bit. Cheap cash-in licensed dreck. Terrible controls. Awful and abhorrent things that existed only to make a buck. As time went on, we saw other deities approach. The dread beast GREED, the Trickster Beast ROMHACK, Peko the Destructor, Lady Capitalism and Captain Communism... the list goes on.

The second major shift in the blog happened about two weeks later. Some thoughtless human being went ahead and proposed to his girlfriend on a livestream, and I got to wake up and read about it on Twitter. I was happy for those two kids. They were great friends of mine! Then they went and invited me to the wedding... and happy feelings bubbled forth. I had to pay tribute. I went non-linear. I tackled Kirby's Adventure before I was supposed to, and made it about them. About the daydreams of travelling to a big city and meeting my good friends. Non-linearity would also become a Nintendo Project thing...as would dreams. So now here we are. I've taken an abandoned blog about old Nintendo games from an academic, and turned it into a ridiculous and esoteric pantheon of pretend gods, all vying for control between the years 1983 and 1995... and beyond. That's got to count for something, right?

Here's to the Nintendo Project. We cleared out five letters of the alphabet in a year. That's about a fifth of them! It's in no way close to being done, especially since I'm prone to vanishing or dicking around with other things... but it's my own little pet project for now. One day I might give up on it and pass the reigns to someone else, but I'm happy with what I've got here. A small handful of people read and (hopefully) enjoy my ramblings about old video games, and some of the big names have gotten above-average view counts. Time to give thanks, I suppose. To Phil Sandifer; it couldn't have happened without you. You started the machine, you gave me the go-ahead, and you were even nice enough to write about Mega Man 3 for me! I don't know how many of these you actively read (my fanboyish heart hopes the answer is "all of them") but credit where credit is due.

To the many Constant Readers; I would be talking to a void were it not for you. Some of you have even spread the little blog around to blossom its readership; mostly the big-name games. I appreciate it. You keep coming back for words on these old games, and I adore you all for it. Very special thanks to everyone who has contributed a guest post or otherwise collaborated with me. That would be John, Phil, Rainiac, CarpetCrawler, and Froborr. It was great having different perspectives on things, and I thank you for putting up with me.

Let's blow out our candles and divvy up this cake. Here's to you, silly red and white blog. Here's to you, grey box. Hell, why not? Here's to me. Now how about we see about that next year, and get a little farther this time?

The Castlevania Adventure

The Castlevania Adventure is not a very good game. I'll defer to a happier nerd than I on this one, but to summarize: You move too slowly to avoid hazards and enemies, your whip can be downgraded by taking just one point of damage, there are no subweapons, and the platforming feats the game asks of you are ludicrous. It is a product of its time, a novelty of action platforming in the palm of your hand that was limited both by the grey rectangle it was created for and its design decisions. A miss from Konami, and not a game many people like.

Which makes it all the more astounding that I kind of grew fond of it.

Not in its original version, though. Not quite. I cheated here. I sought the darker side of alchemy, the neutral path. The Trickster Beast ROMHACK's domain of madness. Many come to its realm to improve their favorite games... or some evil clerics of the Nightmare come to turn the beloved classics of Pure Platforming into bloated hellscapes. Witness how they formed their own nation, the shadowland of Kaizo. We are not going there. Nestled deep within a faction, I found it. The Quick Fix. Once applied, some of The Castlevania Adventure's flaws melted away. Your Belmont walks at a faster clip. Direct damage does not downgrade your whip. This makes the game "playable" but it also defangs it. I just beat it this morning, and suffered a single death. You see, Adventure is designed for a certain speed and jumping style. Mucking with that breaks it, but this brings to light how the game is made; it has been designed on a foundation of obnoxiousness. The whip downgrading, for one. With a fully powered whip you are king of the mountain, but all it takes is one or two hits to give you a weak whip and hinder your offense. After thinking on it for a minute, I realize what this is; it's the Gradius Syndrome. Early Game Boy Platforming 1080. You are punished for your mistake and ordered to do it again, but with less advantage. It's madness. Without that, you just run ahead and whip things and kind of win.

The same thing happens with the platforming. Several of the daring leaps in this game are what I like to call "pixel jumps". Leaps with no leeway, where you must have the reaction time of a saint to walk to the absolute edge of a platform, and then leap in the half-second before you walk right off that edge. The Castlevania Adventure has a truly sadistic extreme of this in its third stage, where spikes chase you up a vertical shaft. You climb ropes and avoid worms to ascend... and then they throw these platforms at you. Pixel jumps in quick succession, under pressure, some of them on platforms that fall. With that slow move speed. The Quick Fix makes this trivial. The entire challenge of the game is the "wrong" kind of difficulty; the kind that deigns to piss you off instead of terrifying you. With it removed, The Castlevania Adventure has but one thing to terrify you; its atmosphere. Despite knowing that I could actually navigate these platforms, I was still a little spooked and thrilled at the danger of death!

Which of course leads us to Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth. A 2009 Wiiware game that takes the name of this game and makes something completely different out of it. Polished graphics! Bombastic sound! No whip downgrading, perfect control, and lots of loving touches and nods to the Castlevania games of old! I adored it in 2009. A flawed game, finally improved. Last night I was part of a large Twitter discussion about the original Game Boy game. The nice fellow tweeting about it was not fond of Rebirth. Here is the wild daisy chain, but Rebirth is basically a piece of dread NOSTALGIA in his eyes. It references things and incites memories of old Castlevania things in the name of lighting up those neurons that remember Castlevania... but it lacks the atmosphere. The Castlevania Adventure filled me with the "silent horror" even with the Quick Fix.

Rebirth is just a pretty game. This is all confusing. Play them both or something.