So, totally rad, in other words.

Enter the Zap Pax, pictured here in Unopened Box Form(tm).

These are trading cards that feature Battletoads, Adventure Island, and… probably others?

To be honest, I just couldn’t bring myself to rip open the plastic and kill the collector’s value of these things, so I don’t really know what they look like. The Internet is surprisingly unhelpful here. Outside of the odd eBay auction, there don’t seem to be too many pictures of these things floating around out there, either. That’s too bad, because after all this time, I kind of wanted to see what was in my box, without actually opening my box.

I suppose I won’t be able to do one without doing the other, but I can dream, can’t I?

What we have here is a couple of bears wearing 3D-glasses (you know, like everyone did in the 80′s), and on their bellies, we have… Inky and Pinky?

A closer look at the tags reveals that these are a product of the Peek-A-Boo Toy Company

Which has only been around since 1995, meaning that these can’t possibly be authentic 80s toys. They don’t appear in their current catalog, either, and I can’t find anything else on the Internet about them, so I’m forced to make the following conclusions:

• These were made for a carnival or fair and distributed as prizes
• They’re some kind of throwback, retro thing to get parents to spend money to try and win a reminder of their childhood
• They’re totally rad to the max!

But now I kind of think I need to try and find the other two… assuming there are two more.

Well, behold!

Once again, the third parties come to the rescue.

The solution here is actually pretty ingenious. You have a hunk of plastic that attaches to the end of a cartridge for each of the supported systems. You just attach it to the cartridge of your choice, insert and remove it from your systems a few times, and you’re good to go. It also has something called a ‘detergent-based cleaning solution’ that you add to the ‘cleaning wand’ to scrub the contacts of your games clean. This is a little more involved than the official NES cleaning kit method, and is probably not designed to have you buy refills of the cleaner over and over again.

Probably not.

But this thing definitely doesn’t hurt to use. Unless you leave a ton of the cleaning gunk on your games and it dries up in there, I guess. That could be bad.

So, don’t do that, okay?

But let’s say you’re a kid in the 80′s and 90′s. You don’t really want to fiddle with any of the above methods. I mean, trying to find and use a security bit, then spend what could amount to hours taking apart and swabbing cartridges? No thanks! But, what if you had… This?!

An actual cleaning kit? Manufactured and endorsed by Nintendo? Well, that could be just fun enough to be worth it.

Opening the box reveals a few interesting goodies.

It’s got a usage manual, a little scrubber, and a vaguely NES-shaped cartridge thingy. The scrubber is made to clean the gunk out of your NES cartridges. You wet the dark end with either distilled water, or a 50/50 mix of water and isopropyl alcohol, then scrub your cartridge. Shockingly, this is the same method that I recommended above, only with a giant scrubby pad instead of a flimsy cotton swab.

The other piece is for cleaning on of the neglected bits when people clean their NES games, cleaning the connector inside the system itself. All that funky junk on the contacts of the games you’re wedging into your NES is also getting on those contacts inside the NES, keeping them from making good contact. And, if you’re like me, you don’t really want to take the whole NES apart if you don’t have to, so this lets you at least attempt to clean the innards of your system with a minimum of fuss.

And, given that the NES is coming up on 30 years old, I think that’s something that I can get behind.

It’s the home version!

Okay, it takes a few liberties with the design and simplifies it a bit. All you really have are bumpers. But you have 3(!) flippers and a working scoreboard. That’s pretty rad, right?

That reminds me, I need to get some batteries for this thing so I can play it and try to set a high score. Shouldn’t be too tough… right? I mean, getting 4 D-Cells shouldn’t be too big of a problem.

It’s kind of hard to tell from these pictures, but the machine is a little on the small side. It’s apparently something called a “Kid’s Size”. Which means that the playfield is smaller, and a bit simpler than your standard pinball machine. It also has a spot on the side where it could dispense tickets, if it was so equipped. This one had it covered up, so I doubt it did much.

And I really wanted to play it, but I stuck in a quarter and… nothing. Called the manager over who reset the machine, put in another quarter and… nothing.

So, I didn’t get to play this machine, which was kind of a shame. I really wanted to (and still do want to). I should probably go back up there some day and see if the machine is still in place and if they ever got it fixed.

But until then, here’s a video of someone else playing one.

Allright! Road trip time!

But what is a Game and Watch? This! Behold!

I admit, it’s bigger than I expected.

This specific Game and Watch is Donkey Kong, and with its two(!) screens adequately recreates the basic Donkey Kong experience. So, Game: Check.

It also has a built in clock to help you tell time. I’m pretty sure that in the 80′s you were legally bound to put a clock in anything that had an LCD display. But I’ve been conditioned to think of ‘wrist watch’ when I think of the word ‘watch’, so the size of this thing caught me a little bit off guard. But, trying to get a serviceable Donkey Kong experience on a device that would fit on my wrist would be pretty difficult, especially with the limited animation these things could do. My guess is that the clock was added mostly because it could be sold as a game that is also a clock, so it’s a useful tool.

And 30 years later, it’s still fun… assuming you remember to buy batteries for it. Who decided that this thing would use button batteries, anyway?

The first Final Fantasy was your prototypical fantasy hack ‘n’ slash / adventure / light role-playing game that introduced us to pretty good idea of what a JRPG could be. In your box you got your game, your manual, and a few helpful maps and charts on a poster. Like this:

It’s kind of interesting how I got this thing. I was making my typical rounds around the city on a cool Saturday morning looking for a yard sale, when I found one that had a bin full of video game goodies for $2, this map included. I thought that was a pretty sweet score, so I held on to it. Even though this guy didn’t have a Final Fantasy cartridge, I actually already had one from another transaction, so I’m most of the way to having a complete set.

Oh, I’d also like to make some higher-resolution scans of this thing, but my scanner is too small and it won’t fit. So, sorry about that. But, hey, this is better than nothing, right?

Before Shadowgate and Metal Gear.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with these things, they’re essentially kids’ books based on NES games that were popular at the time. They try to expand the stories in the video games by fleshing out some of the details that might have been glossed over in the games or the manuals. And was apparently a response to kids of the day not reading books, but playing those pesky video games instead. So, it seems like it would be a worthy endeavor to get kids interested in reading. Especially if you were brought up with those games, and not the full-blown multimedia extravaganzas we have today.

But the books themselves are… unique. They state on the covers that they’re not endorsed by Nintendo, and they definitely only use the story (or lack of) in the games they’re based on as a jumping off point for whatever adventures they were going to talk about.

The Worlds of Power book that I remember getting the most out of was the Wizards and Warriors book, which involved some kid getting sucked into the Wizards and Warriors universe and he has to help Kuros go through the game and defeat Malkil.

Was it silly? Sure. But as a kid, I loved it. I loved pretty much anything that would give me more enjoyment out of the games I was playing. Especially because we didn’t have a whole lot of money when I was growing up, and a $3 book was way more affordable than a $40 – $50 game. Especially when I could get that book from my school library for nothing.

Thanks, education system!

But that’s as awesome as this book gets. We’re “treated” to page after page of bad Pac-Puns after another. Like, “What’s Pac-Man’s favorite city? Dot-troit, remember?”. I’m not actually sure why he says, “Remember?” there. It’s not like I learned that anywhere but in this book.

And it just goes on and on like this. And lots of people on the Internet will tell you how bad this book is. And, sure, it’s bad now to adults who are 30 years removed from the source material. But what about in the 80′s?

Well, I was around in the 80′s, during Pac-Man’s heyday, and when I got this book back then, I didn’t think it was all bad. Although, I didn’t get all of the jokes (how is a 7-year-old expected to get a Rhapsody in Blue reference?). But I didn’t think it was all that bad then. Heck, at that age, I didn’t think much was bad at all. Everything was new and amazing! Which kind of explains how I managed to keep myself entertained with a barely functional tape recorder for an entire summer (blank tapes were cheap entertainment, what can I say?).

And what about America’s Riddle King? Well, here’s his ‘self Pactrait’ (which is an extremely clumsy pun, I admit) and a mini-bio.

But he’s apparently the creator of Letterman, a cartoon that aired during the Electric Company, so that scores him some redemption points, I guess.