Pinball Alley
Pinball Alley: High Speed
The first time that I saw High Speed in my local mall arcade, I was in awe.
The first time that I saw High Speed in my local mall arcade, I was in awe.
So I am fortunate enough to live five minutes away a particularly awesome mall-based game store called ‘RU Game?’, which deals exclusively in retail sales of all kinds of retro titles (they even have a stockpile of Famicom and Super Famicom games!), and represents the single greatest threat to my bank account since the discovery of Amazon Prime.
Last week, Alex revealed that Paperboy on the NES was actually a port of a far superior version of the classic game. Did you know that that the Nintendo 64 had a 3D version of Paperboy that made the NES version look like a full HD remake? While the N64 is responsible for many glorious gems of games, this was not among them. This was a half finished game that looked like it was a quarter finished. This game is so bad, it does not even have a page in the Book of Knowledge. It simply has a one line mention in the main Paperboy article. Hold your noses, we are going to take a deeper dive into this pile of garbage.
So here I am. 33 years old. I’ve learned a few things in my few (or many, depending on your point of view) years on this planet. Look both ways before crossing the street. Odd numbered Star Trek movies, for the most part, are pretty lousy. OK fine, III is actually good if you look at it as part of a trilogy. Recently I learned that I can’t pound back four Coney Island style hot dogs in a row, late at night, along with two glass (!) bottles of Mountain Dew Throwback with half a bag of potato chips on the side. Well, I can, but I’ll awaken an hour after going to bed with severe stomach pains, as I lie curled in a fetal position crying for the demon in my stomach to exit my body. Ugh.
Welcome to yet another edition of Bad Guys Anonymous. If you’re new to the weekly (I swear!) column, hello! The whole deal here is that we take a quick look at one of the anonymous henchmen from classic games that, for the most part, has been rather overlooked by gamers. They’re encountered, they’re conquered and then they’re never thought of again.
The catch? It has to be the very first bad guy players run into.
This week’s entry is all about one minor bad invertebrate from one of my personal favorite games on the NES, the snail from Adventure Island.
This week, during a random stroll through the adventures of “click on this Youtube video, find another, somehow wind up somewhere completely different,” I was reminded of something I hadn’t seen, and had in the back of my auxiliary memory for years and years.
When released for the arcades in 1982, the developers of Dig Dug had to have several key changes made to their final product just to have it released at all. As a result, they created a classic. Unfortunately, when it was ported to the 2600 a year later, gamers finally got to play the now classic game the way the developers had always intended.
McDonald’s. The biggest and most influential fast food chain in the world. They even have a creepy clown for a mascot. Seems like the perfect franchise for a video game, right? And not some Burger Time or Tapper clone, no, what this fast food franchise needs is a platformer. A really bad platformer. With deadly forest critters and piranha.
On March 1st, 1997, I fell in love. Fifteen years later, and I’m still pining over her.
It was one of those instant attractions, love at first sight some might say. She had that special something; that natural, almost unexplainable beauty. To make matters worse, all my mates were after her, too. But it would take three long, arduous years until I could call her my own. Three loved-up years of dreaming, yearning and wanting.
Against all odds, I managed to endure. And thankfully, she was totally worth it.
1987 feels forever ago. Walk Like an Egyptian was popular on the radio. Married With Children debuted on a relatively new television network that Fox had launched. The Iran-Contra affair was seemingly on everyone’s mind.
Me? I was a goofy 15 year-old high school sophomore and was still very much an arcade rat. I spent hours on weekends, and even a little time during the week, just walking around and watching people play, trying to decide what to spend my money on. The arcade that I frequented the most was in Chicopee, MA inside the Fairfield Mall, and the arcade was set up with coin-op machines in the front and two banks of pinball machines in the back. I spent a lot of time playing High Speed, which I’d become adept at (and also became an NES game, which I’ll be covering soon)… but one day, I spotted a new machine alongside it: Pin*Bot.
The year was 1997, and my Star Wars obsession was in full force. The Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition was released in a VHS boxset, the original trilogy was being shown in theatres, and a game called Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II had just been released.
When I last left you, I was sharing the irony that some of the most expensive games to collect for the N64 were some of the worst for the system. In that post, I noted that the gray variant of Turok: Rage Wars was insanely more expensive than the standard black cartridge. This was something that was not uncommon with cartridges. For various reasons, a lot of different games had a variant version. The game itself was usually no different, yet the cost of one of those variants now is significantly higher. As a follow up to my last post, I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of these variants and the cost difference that might surprise you.
So a few years ago, I made the remark that I would pay upwards to $200 to see 90’s Alternative sensation Faith No More play in concert, for any seating, as long as it was Mike Patton “The Real Thing” -era (Yes,That’s $200 in real actual honest earth money). And that’s because it’s based on the assumption it’s not going to realistically happen. It’s all wishful thinking, and if this were to actually transpire, I would be living in crazy inflation land. By the end of the evening, I’m sure I would also have paid $75 for a shirt, and $12 for a Pepsi.
Although the Virtual Boy may be hated by many gamers, it’s really only the hardware they hate. The games the Virtual Boy has are actually great and deserve to be played by more people. You don’t even have to own the system to play the games, since emulation is available. I asked Planet Virtual Boy to help me with this blog and I was able to make a list from their community’s suggestions of 10 games worth playing.
Well folks, here it is! The official Atari Poop Comic. This is always what I intended Atari Poop to be. My educational background being in, as you will obviously recognize in a second, fine arts, I had originally pitched this idea to the folks here at 1 More Castle. While it was accepted, I quickly realized I just didn’t have the time necessary to produce something of this caliber every week, so we struck a compromise: I would write an article every week, all the while working on the comic until I had a backlog that would at least cover several months. I’m pleased to announce that I already have enough strips to fill every Monday for the next six months, so without further ado, take a look at Atari Poop: The Comic #1!
Have you ever driven a tank? Me neither. But I’ve controlled a close approximation of one. His name was Leon. Leon S Kennedy and he was a cop. Before he got eaten alive by zombies for the 75th time.
See, Leon had a problem: he couldn’t change directions while moving. Once he started moving in a particular direction, he could only list left or right. If he wanted to make a sharp right or left to avoid an obstacle or enemy, he had to stop, turn and then proceed straight in the new direction he was facing. Did you catch that? YOU HAD TO STOP MOVING TO CHANGE DIRECTIONS. This is what is known as “Tank Controls” and it is a pox on gaming.
There’s something new at 1morecastle.com, and that something new would be, well, myself.
To most people, Rollerball evokes memories of a 1975 film starring James Caan that was centered around a violent sport and one man’s fight against corporate control. It’s a pretty good movie, but the Rollerball that I have in mind is much different…
Released in 1983 and developed by Atari and Children’s Computer Workshop, Cookie Monster Munch is an adult game disguised as a children’s game. Now, I don’t mean “adult” in the sense that it’s not suitable for children here. The game is still an educational one, but the developers knew parents weren’t going to buy an educational game for themselves; however, since parents were exactly the kind of people they wanted to see buying the game, it was marketed for children instead. Let me explain…
There are a lot of fun sayings in the English language. Some of them are easily understood, like “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Some of them take a little research to understand, like “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” As I have been on my quest to collect every single Nintendo 64 game released in North America, I have found that the phrase “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” holds very true. It is stunningly ironic that some of the games with the highest values dollar-wise have the lowest values as actual games. If I wasn’t trying to collect these, they would be suitable for little more than giving dust a place to live. I have compiled a few of the best/worst examples. The prices here are average ballpark numbers based off of completed eBay auctions and this price guide that I highly recommend.