Exposing my socks to the world

I thought it was about time that I was interviewed, and rather than find someone to interview me, I just did it myself.

It seems that when we talk about computer gaming, we tend to neglect the Macintosh as a viable gaming platform. These guys are trying to remedy this with their handy guide to Mac gaming.

Why do I like Blaster Master so much? I have no idea. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, I’ll provide a quick and thoroughly incomplete introduction to the game.

According to the slide show at the beginning, our hero (Jason) has a pet frog that somehow escapes and is immediately drawn to the crate of nuclear waste where it grows to immense size, then hops down a nearby hole. So of course Jason jumps down the hole to chase him, and finds a tank and a goofy looking suit. He uses the suit (which fits perfectly) and the tank (which he automatically knows how to drive) to aid him in finding his frog.



Useless Blaster Master fact: Jason’s tank is named Sophia the 3rd Nora MA-01 (check it on the pause screen)



I wish I could have made that up, but my mind doesn’t work that way. I tend to ask questions like, “What was nuclear waste doing in this kid’s back yard?” and, “Why did nobody put up a sign next to the hole warning people that it led to am underground world filled monsters mutated by radiation?”



So why do I and so many others like this game so much? That’s a bit difficult to pin down. The graphics are certainly ordinary, the sound effects are adequate, but the music is actually pretty good. In fact, if you’ve only heard the music coming out of an emulator, you’re depriving yourself of some of the best music the NES can produce. Here is a sample of the music coming out of the actual NES hardware. Beautiful.



The other thing that makes this game unusual is that you have to actually get out of your tank to explore some areas that the tank just simply can’t get to.



Finally, this game is just hard. You get five continues and three lives per continue. Believe me, you’ll use every single one of them the first six or seven hundred times you play this game. Once you get good, however, you need fewer continues, but the game takes so long to complete that it can swallow an entire afternoon before you know it.



So why do I like this game? Even with all this information that’s still a difficult question to answer. Maybe it’s compelling backstory and the well-developed characters…



No, that’s not it.



It has to be a combination of the difficulty (hard, but not so hard that it’s impossible), it had some of the best music you could find on the NES, and the exploration elements (in and out of the tank).

It’s 2D (mostly), it’s difficult, and it’s fun. What else do you need?

Just because you are still running DOS, that doesn’t mean you can’t get your computer into the holiday spirit. Just use these command prompts to make your DOS session more festive.

Personally, I like the Astounded Santa Claus.

Battletoads for the NES is the hardest game I have ever played. I played that game for the better part of an entire summer, and only got to the Grenada Ducts (stage 9, I think) once. Maybe I sucked at it, but I never played it again to see. These guys not only are better at Battletoads than I am, but they felt the need to build a site about the series.



Rare released a slightly easier version of Battletoads for the Super NES a few years after the NES version. I made sure to get this version and beat the $50 I paid out of it. Revenge is nice.

If you made the rounds to all the local arcades, you would start to notice archetypes in almost all of them.



First, we had the proprieter. They came in two types: those you could never find, and those that you could never get rid of. The ones you couldn’t find were a problem if the bills you had were not the right denomination to use in the change machine, or of the change machine was broken (which turned out to be about half of the time). The ones that you couldn’t get rid of were even more irritating, especially if you were the only one in the arcade. He (and yes, it was always a sweaty fat man) would talk to you nonstop about how rad whatever game you’re playing is, what he saw at the last video game show he went to, or (and this is my favorite) tell you all the “secrets” and “ending” to whatever game you’re playing.



There is also my personal favorite, the “Boy Friend”. This is the guy that would come up to the machine you were playing on, skip the obligatory “Mind if I play too?”, drop some quarters into the machine, and quietly say to his girlfriend, “Watch this.” You then go ahead and savagely beat him at whatever game you’re playing (probably a fighting game). Then, convinced that you’re cheating, he walks off with his girlfriend. Yeah, I can do a 70-hit Ultra combo, and all you have is a girlfriend. Who’s the winner now?



Speaking of fighting games, they have their own little sub-set of archetypes, my favorite is the “Button Masher.” You get challenged and immediately begin to formulate a strategy. You pick your best character, he picks his, and the match begins. From the word “go” his plan immediately becomes clear: to wiggle the joystick and press the buttons as fast as he can. As hard as this to believe, that strategy is surprisingly effective. You look for an opening in his offensive and there isn’t one. You know you will (and had better) win, but it’s going to be much harder than it should be.



Finally, we have the “Notebook Warrior.” This person is pretty obvious. He walks into the arcade carrying a notebook. What’s in the notebook? All the latest codes and secrets that he could find on the Internet and his gaming magazines. He believes he will be revered by all the “regulars” when he starts showing off all of the secret stuff his book contains. Now, he is forgetting two important pieces of information: all the “regulars” already know all the secrets in the notebook, and knowledge of secrets alone does not take the place of skill.



I miss my old arcades.

Anyone who’s played an RPG has noticed that there is one non-ugly character with one hideously ugly parent, and another one is never seen. The Rufus’s Mom Theorem (named after the Final Fantasy 7 character Rufus) holds that “Nameless President Shinra is really fat and ugly, and Rufus is thin and a pretty boy, so therefore, Rufus’s Mom must be so incredibly hot that it counteracted the fat ugliness of President Shinra”.



I don’t know what’s scarier, that someone made that connection, or how accurate it is.

If you’ve already played The House of the Dead 2, then you know how the basic story of this game goes. Two agents run around a city, killing millions of zombies who are trying to eat the world. In the original, you were armed with a gun, in this one, you are equipped with a portable Dreamcast and keyboard strapped to your chest.



So how do you beat up zombies? Every time a zombie appears on the screen, a little bubble will pop up with what phrase it takes to kill it off. The phrases range from one letter to phrases that are a little odd. Part of the reason that the game is so fun is that it doesn’t take itself very seriously, it knows that deep down it’s just a typing tutor. So it has to do something to keep all you grownups coming back for more (this game is rated mature, after all). One of the most striking changes is in the weapons that the zombies use. Instead of axes, they use spatulas and toy hammers. It makes me giggle just thinking about it.



Along with ‘Arcade Mode’ the game also features an ‘Original Mode’ which features ‘powerups’ you can get (they slow the zombies down or finish typing the word for you), as well as some drills to help increase your speed and accuracy (‘Defeat 30 zombies as quickly as possible!’, for example.) There are plenty of modes to keep you entertained for a while.



So, if your typing skills are sub-par (like mine) and you want to try to make them better, then you should go find this game. Also, as a side note, the game was developed for the computer, but never released in the United States. If you go here you can download a demo nontheless.


Get it. It’s good.

What does it take to run an arcade? I don’t know. If I opened one up, it’d go something like this. I picked the essential 13 things that I think no arcade should be without. Beware that I’m also an idealist, so these ideas probably won’t work, but I’ll have fun, at least, while I’m spending all my inheritance.

My Virtual Boy and I are best friends. I thought I’d share some pictures of the day we spent together.