Hurray, another feature at last, and a list-based one at that! Let’s do this!

It's no Zelda 2 but it will do.

I don’t have to tell you that the game Metroid was a milestone in gaming. On top of being an early console game that favored dark, foreboding atmosphere over colorful, poppy backgrounds, it was a huge, complex, and excitingly dangerous shooting game that made you think.

Also, oh yeah, that’s a lady in that bounty hunter space suit, son!

Samus, get down from there, you don't belong in outer space without a suit, you're a human!

Often considered one of the most shocking, revolutionary moves in gaming, the “Samus is a GIRL” surprise ending (that the instruction book didn’t seem to know about) rocked our collective gaming world, and proved once and for all that women CAN star in video games!

While this is great (essential, even), the only thing is, despite what you may have heard, Samus isn’t the first lady to star in a video game! Not by a long shot! In fact, she’s not even the first to pull the ”gender reveal” move, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

While I don’t have to tell you about Metroid, I’d like to tell you about 13 other women who, considerably less popularly, starred in video games made before Metroid‘s 1987* U.S. debut!

In order to keep the amount of entries to an arguably reasonable number, I set a few rules:

- No Ms. Pac-Man or other abstract shapes, no matter how feminine.

- No “player 2′s”, that is, no games are listed where you can choose to be a male instead of a female or where the lady of the game is relegated to second player. These are women of default player status.

- No previously-established literary characters; all of these characters are either original to the games or the other pop media for which they were created.

- Nothing from games that were designed for the early childhood set, such as 1986′s Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park, because what the hell.

- None of those Atari-era porno games, because no. NO. (no no no)

So, without further adieu, here are our 13 mostly original, mostly non-children, mostly non-nude human heroines of pre-1987 gaming, in somewhat chronological order:

1. Benthi, Galactic Saga IV: Tawala’s Last Redoubt (1981)

Goodness, what a title…

Tawala’s Last Redoubt is the fourth title in a series called Galactic Saga, which was a text-based strategy game developed for computers, most notably the Apple II.

WHOA NICE GRAPHICS

While each game is considered (by folks much older than myself) to be a large influence on other text-based strategy games on the Apple II, Tawala was the first and only title in the series to star Benthi, a rebel leader and, presumably, all around badass.

Mind you, given the earliness of these games, that badassery doesn’t really come across graphically, in fact I watched this video of the game being played and she seems to be represented by little more than a tent and some words.

Another option could be "Finish Coloring Mountains", but this is cool too I guess.

Still, you’re a lady in a tent who is attempting to take down the established world government in the form of the titular despot Tawala, and conquer an entire planet with a starting army of only 100 soldiers and 15 guns. I’m not sure how that isn’t awesome.

2. Kim Kimberly: Snowball, Return To Eden (1983, 1984)

IN SPACE

Rounding up our collection of text-based history is the protagonist of the first two “interactive fiction” games out of a trilogy called Silicon Dreams, which was released on pretty much every ancient computer.

Yes, even this one.

Your adventure starts with Kim Kimberly waking up from a space-nap on board the Snowball 9,  en route to colonize a distant planet, whereupon she discovers that her shipmates have been murdered and the ship has been set on a collision course with the sun. Man, hate it when that happens.

Anyway, her remarkably content-heavy adventure takes her across an impressive 7000 locations (250 in the sequel; considerably less because they actually had graphics in that game!) In them, her character is actually written to be somewhat gender neutral; the name “Kim” supposedly chosen to be androgynous, but it’s established in small ways that she is in fact a lady, and the third game in the series (set way after the events of the first two games and starring a nameless male), she is quite clearly described as a “tall, athletic, intelligent woman with brown eyes and fair hair.”

Google Images tells me this is her, but I think we may be dealing with an imposter, or at least a plagiarizer.

3. Papri, Girl’s Garden (1984)

This Japan-only title is probably most notable for being the first title developed by Yuji Naka, the dude who not only co-created Phantasy Star** and invented its innovative “3D scrolling” dungeons, but was also the main programmer behind Sonic The Hedgehog.

Can't you tell?

The female lead in this game is rather notable for at least one reason: the game had a rather unique approach to mixing its adventure game qualities with an early “dating sim” feature, and so one of your tasks is to charm the pants off your darling boy toy Minto.

We only have 2 love and 5 monies, but boy do we have the CRAP out of flowers. Will you marry me?

While certainly not significantly girl-powered or anything, it’s at least an interesting thing to behold, as it’s kind of a role reversal for the time.  Minto is real fond of flowers, and Papri picks them for him while avoiding bears and what-not.

That’s right, this game has you running away from all kinds of crazy things that want to kill you on your way to woo your little blue boy, and most of those things are freaking BEARS.

Aww he looks so cute OH NO HE'S CHEWING ON MY FACE AND BODY

Best part is, since this is an early video game, your darling Minto will run away with your rival if you don’t succeed in bringing him enough slightly ursine-gnawed flowers. Who said games for girls were easy?

4. Barbie, Barbie (1984)

OK, I know, this one breaks 2 of my rules (no children’s toys and no previously-established literary characters), but I can’t help myself.

So just deal with it <3

The first video game to feature everyone’s favorite ode to sexism, Barbara Millicent Rogers, Epyx’s Barbie was also apparently one of computer gaming’s first “talkies”!

Yeah, I didn’t say it was going to be all good.

As this video illustrates, a nearly comatose Barbie is invited by her equally lethargic plastic boyfriend Ken to go to the pool, and your sacred quest is to make sure she does enough shopping to find the right outfit for the job. It’s no blasting aliens on a desolate planet, but man you’d think it was gaming gold based on the comment section!

"this was my favorite game in the whole world. i would play it everyday " - Youtube user

5. Princess Kurumi, Princess Ninja (Sega Ninja) (1985)

Designed by Reiko Kodama, one of the more famous female developers during Sega’s early console days (credited as Executive Designer on Phantasy Star, for instance), Princess Ninja was a top-down shooter in the vein of Ikari Warriors or Guerrilla War. You play the titular (tee hee) Princess, who was apparently designed to not wear pants, but oh well.

Why are all those dudes standing behind her... ohhhhh

Kurumi’s adventure takes her across Edo-era Japan, where she pantslessly shurikens everything in sight, and I’m not going to lie, it’s awesome.

Something that’s interesting to note, however; its home port, on the SG-1000 system in Japan, was re-titled Sega Ninja and then actually brought over to America’s Master System as The Ninja (a no-nonsense title if I ever heard one). That’s all well and good, but what’s wrong with this picture?

Besides that forced perspective thing making that flying ninja star look like a hub cap.

That’s right! Our ninja princess has suddenly changed into a  male character!

At least he’s wearing pants though.

Future compilations of old Sega arcade games corrected this and put the Princess back in her place (throwing ninja stars at everything, duh), but they were too late. The Ninja was a drop in the bucket of those classic ninja games, and they couldn’t even boast having a lady in the lead.

By the way, on top of being a female-fronted shooter predating Metroid by about a year, Princess Ninja also predates Sega’s most famous ninja, Joe Musashi of the Shinobi series, by 2 years! That’s right, she’s the original Sega ninja; so sneaky that we didn’t even know she was supposed to be a girl in the first place. Hence, the best ninja.

6. Reika Kirishima, Time Gal (1985)

Hey you! Do you remember Dragon’s Lair (no not that one)?

Well, in case you’re not hip to the laserdisc era of gaming (which I’ll understand because it was brief and not all that great), basically it was the first in a series of games wherein you control a character through a fully animated adventure, where you must push the right button at the right time in order to not die. Nowadays this gimmick only appears briefly in some games and we now know it as “Quick Time Events”.

Well, in this niche of niches, there existed at least one particularly excitable girl named Reika, and her quest was a confusing romp through time called Time Gal!

Also, surprise, no pants.

The game was beautifully animated and rather well-made for the time (remember, this is BEFORE Metroid), and was met with fairly good reception. Personally, I really like that the game actually gives you some kind of damn clue as to what you should be doing to proceed. I’m still peeved at Dragon’s Lair for offering no such information as I continually dumped quarters into it as a kid, waiting for some kind of gameplay to show up.

Anyway, despite the game’s relatively high quality, 1985 was actually a bit late for this kind of game, and not enough people were still into the interactive-movie games enough to make this one much of a classic.

It’s really too bad, because I would have liked to see where else Taito could have taken the character. Reika has a LOT of personality (bordering on some kind of personality disorder, if we’re being honest here), and though her design was clearly based off of Manga eye-candy, she brought a lot of life and humor to the table, even if in a declining format.

Interestingly, however, she is one of the few ladies on this list that has seen the light of day since the Reagan era; Reika is a main character in Castle of Shikigami III, which is the newest in my favorite shooter series. Of course, she brought her garrulous nature and knack for bad jokes with her, with often-amazing results. At least they stuck a skirt on her, as well as a hat for some reason:

Can you even tell which one is Time Gal though?

“Space is an ocean of Space.” – Never truer words were uttered.

Mosey along to Part 2

*I picked 1987** because, while Metroid was indeed developed and released in Japan in 1986, so were a few of the examples I want to talk about, and some of the dates are cloudy at best. While some of these *may* not technically predate Metroid‘s 1986 release, they were at least close enough to not be considered derivative. Anyway, if you’re really the kind of person who has to be nitpicky about calendar dates, understand that you’re reading this well after the world was supposed to explode.

**And it’s a real shame I had to go with 1987 as well because Phantasy Star, Sega’s flagship RPG series that stars an awesome lady by the name of Alis Landale, was released toward the end of that year. She’ll show up on this blog though, worry you not.

Hello again!

On the previous part of the feature, I pointed at 6 ladies who definitely starred in video games before Samus Aran in Metroid. While doing so, I noticed a few similarities between some of the heroines of yore and Nintendo’s flagship bounty hunter:

-Like Benthi and (*snicker*) Kim Kimberly, Samus is an ass-kicker, kicking ass out there on other planets.

- Like Barbie, her first foray into speaking roles had her sounding very non-plussed.

- And like Papri, I guess she had to worry about bears a lot?

Anyway, here in part 2, as we draw closer to Metroid’s debut, we’re going to see a few more similarities, possibly enough to make some good propaganda out of, but I think we’re above that, aren’t we?

Aren’t we?

7.  Toby “Kissy” Masuyo, Baraduke (1985)

As I had mentioned earlier, there was indeed a character in gaming that, at least on paper, was as close to a Samus Aran progenitor as this list can get.

For this cover alone, if Baraduke was an NES game I would have bought it twice already.

Baraduke (also known as Alien Sector) was a level-based arcade shooter that Namco came out with in 1985. It stars, get this, a person of vague gender, wearing a yellow space suit with red accents, plowing further and further into an alien planet, destroying things with a wave gun and collecting items, until finally the end goal is reached and you find out it was a woman the whole time:

In the most confusing way possible!

Remember, this was a year before Metroid debuted in Japan, and “Kissy” had already established some of Samus’ most famous tropes. Of course, the game is totally different, albeit totally awesome, but the similarities are interesting to note. I mean, look at her:

Seriously, at first glance you would swear this was Samus fan art that was just taking some liberties with her weapon.

As far as the character goes. while Metroid went on to be a heavy hitting (if not chronologically confusing) series for Nintendo spanning 11 main titles, Toby “Kissy” Masuyo starred in exactly one sequel before retiring from being a badass female video game hero. That’s not where her story ends, though…

What I am about to tell you is completely true and taken straight from Namco’s official canon:  after the events in the Baraduke games, Toby settled down with the main character from Dig Dug, and they had three children together before separating for reasons that were never explained (she caught him drilling another woman?)

One of those children was the freaking main character from Mr. Driller.

Not even a joke, that’s Namco’s official story. She actually makes appearances in the Mr. Driller games under the name “Masuyo Tobi”.

Also she looks like this now:

This is supposedly a woman in her 40's by the way.

8.  Lady Master of Kung Fu (1985)

I could find very little information about Lady Master of Kung Fu, but it was definitely an arcade game that came out in 1985 and stars another pantsless female martial artist.

The game was made by Taito, which in the early days means we are guaranteed two things: goofy platforming action and at least one silly typo or mistranslation.

We have met our quota!

As this helpful gameplay video demonstrates, your mission is to go into some rooms, defeat some bad guys, then do the whole thing over again in the same rooms with the same bad guys until the game stops making you do that.

Like Metroid and its infamous “bikini” ending, however, you are rewarded for your gameplay with the unnamed heroine being seen, in the same pose as on the cover screen, with less clothes on. The difference here being that, unlike Samus ultimately stripping down to a tasteful two-piece (SPACE two-piece), your ultimate reward for Lady Master of Kung Fu is that the main character goes full topless.

I… good for her, I guess?

9. Valkyrie, Valkyrie no Bōken: Toki no Kagi Densetsu (1986)

Another game from Namco starring a lady, Valkyrie tells the story of a brave Valkyrie named “Valkyrie” (ok so Namco wasn’t the best at imaginative names) who must venture forth to defeat baddies and… actually I think that’s pretty much it. There’s something about an evil Wizard in there somewhere.

Interestingly, being an action RPG, the game has you level up as you hack and slash your way through the various dungeons, but your method of growth is determined by two factors you choose at the beginning of the game: your blood type and horoscope!

Other than that… uhh… I really got nothing. There were some much more popular arcade-style sequels (largely on the TG-16) that gave her a cute amphibian sidekick named Krino Sandra (also known as Xandra), who got to star in one of the sequels as “Whirlo”. Incidentally, Whirlo was the only game in the Valkyrie series to ever be initially ported to consoles in English, albeit only in Europe and Australia.

That’s right, Valkyrie got the multi-regional shaft and we very nearly got this thing:

Because we definitely needed another anthropomorphic animal mascot!

It wasn’t until 1997 that a Valkyrie game was finally translated and released in the U.S.: The Legend of Valkyrie, which was included on NamcoMuseum Vol. 5 along with… surprise! Baraduke!

10. Yuko Ahso, Valis: The Fantasm Soldier (1986)

While this one didn’t find its way onto a console for the first time until a year after Metroid‘s release (nor in America until 4 years after), the Valis series is at least comparatively well-known, particularly to Sega and TurboGrafx/CD fans, or perhaps, exclusively to Sega and TurboGrafx/CD fans.

The lack of pants are actually the lesser of my worries with this one.

As it happens, the first game in this cult classic series was available for Japan’s exclusive MSX, PC-88, and PC-98 computers as early as 1986. Heck, it was even released on the Famicom, albeit poorly.

Looks fine to me

As it happens, the Valis we all(?) know and love eventually found its American home on our Genesis and TurboGrafx systems. Apparently the most thorough Valis ports were released on the TurboGrafx CD attachment, where the 4-part series enjoyed CD quality music, smooth gameplay, really interesting story-lines, anime-styled cut-scenes…

OH COME ON

Yeah, so the “anime style cut-scenes” tended to favor a bit of ol’ ribaldry and peekaboo while also telling the story of an unassuming school girl who is thrust into high adventure by a magical sword and courageously confronts evil in an awesome side-scrolling adventure, but hey at least in the actual game she doesn’t show her underwear during every jump animation!

Oh wait.

Well at least it’s better than the cover for Valis III:

The ultimate in shoulder and boob protection!

11. All cast, Gall Force (1986)

I really hope the person who romanized this knew that "Gall" and "Gal" are two different things in English, and that this game really is about a force of pure gall.

Released by Hal Laboratories (yes, the Kirby/Earthbound people), this vertical shooter stars not one, but seven female protagonists, and they’re all wearing pants!

The game is actually based off an anime/manga series, which I know breaks one of my rules, but come on this is awesome.

If I'd seen this on the back of a NES cart at any point between age 10 and right now, I would have bought 4 of them.

12. Ki, Ki no Bouken (1987*)

Now here’s a game you probably know if, like me, you’re an obsessed GameCenter CX fan.

Seriously, how could you look upon this man and not spend hundreds of hours watching him fail?

One of the craziest things Shinya Arino (pictured) ever did in his quest to beat really hard games despite not being able to, was to challenge Ki no Bouken, or Quest of Ki.

"NAMCOT"? Is that like Malk?

Ki no Bouken was developed by Namco (man did they love their female protagonists!) as the third game in the four-game series that began with The Tower of Druaga, Namco’s rather famous maze-based hack ‘n’ slash dungeon crawler.

How could you see this in an arcade and NOT play it, I ask you.

In Tower of Druaga, you play as Babylonian hero Gilgamesh, who is sent to rescue Ki from the clutches of the evil demon Druaga. Despite what you may think, Ki was no ordinary maiden in distress, in fact she’s a rather capable magician, which the sequel, The Return of Ishtar, aptly demonstrates.

Ki no Bouken, the third adventure and Ki’s break-out solo game, was actually a prequel to all of this, as it chronicles Ki’s failed quest to retrieve some blue thing from the clutches of Druaga.

See there it is

I say “failed” and I meant it: you are given no weapons or means to defend yourself within the monster (and, oddly, Pac-Man ghost)-filled dungeon, and instead must float pacifist-like over the dangers that can take you down in one hit. Understandably, this makes for a very tough game.

I feel like I've seen these red bricks before...

The best part is, at the end, when you’ve finally reached level 60 (the same level Gilgamesh must reach in Tower of Druaga), you go to grab that beautiful blue MacGuffin and are instantly turned to stone. The end!

Oh uh spoiler alert I guess

Actually the game throws 40 more stages at you, because it very likely hates you. At least that one song is pretty catchy.

While fireballs, floating, and insane difficulty make Ki a badass in my book,  she eventually did become a simple damsel in distress in 2008′s Nightmare of Druaga, in which Ki, now engaged to Gilgamesh, is kidnapped and you have to go rescue her again and etc. etc.

And they've hung her upside down by her skirt and everything...

Personally, I would have preferred it the other way around… in fact…

13. Lucia, Wing of Madoola (1986)

In Wing of Madoola, created by Sunsoft in 1986, you play as a badass warrior called Lucia who is charged by the royal family with the task of finding a sacred artifact (called the “Wing of Madoola”, appropriately enough) by hacking and slashing her way through multiple stages of action platforming.

You know what, nevermind

But that’s not all! In a move that makes Wing of Madoola one of my favorite entries in this list, you also have to save a goddamn Prince.

Thank you Lucia but your prince is in another vacuum of time and space

The game itself is pretty kickass (if not slightly repetitive); it includes item collection, powering up, using the relic you were sent to obtain to fly around way better than Ki up there, and you even get to have a flamethrower-sword battle to the death with a gosh-darn dragon at the end.

Still, what tickles me about this game is that it’s totally the biggest cliché in literature turned on its ear! I mean, of course the Princess has rescued the Prince before (heck, sometimes even within the same universe as the usual outcome), but that it occurred in a video game released before America even knew non-circular females could exist in video games as anything other than the princess is kind of mind-blowing.

And the game doesn't even give a crap. It'll kill you good either way

The even more mind-blowing thing about Wing of Madoola becomes kind of obvious as you watch the game play (especially the ending):

Minto, is that you?

Why wasn’t this game released in America? It’s already entirely in English.

In fact, “brighted over the world for peace” notwithstanding, it seems to be in better shape than the ending to Metroid, which had entirely questionable grammar and a rather obvious misspelling.

Space bikini time!

There just seems to be no real reason why Sunsoft wouldn’t have released the game over here. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but the game wasn’t too old (they ported 1983′s Spy Hunter over here for goodness’ sakes), it certainly wasn’t too hard, considering Sunsoft’s legacy of making difficult games, and it was at least popular enough in Japan that GameCenter CX had it on as a challenge…

Maybe it has something to do with that whole “games are for boys” attitude that’s been pervading American gaming culture since it began unto today?

Heavy Handed Conclusion

Feel free to draw your own conclusions from all this, but it seems to me that the perception of American gamers in the 1980′s was perhaps that we weren’t “ready”, somehow, for females to be in the lead in our video games. Perhaps that’s the reason that Metroid is rightfully regarded as being a milestone in the gaming world. Sure, it took a roundabout way of doing it, but the fact that Samus was there, blasting away aliens along with the big boys, being in no way in any kind of distress (well, unless I’m playing; I’m awful at Metroid) really opened a door that none of these other ladies could. It’s a real shame that gaming in America had to take decades to openly accept women as video game heroes and, even then, we hardly ever seem to get it just right (in fact, Samus herself had to take a huge blow to her equality for no real reason). Had we learned to accept the fact that great video games can totally have women in the lead, we could have had a few more really great games over here getting that equality party started early. You know, except for Barbie and all that.

So, you know, write to your congressman (or woman) and stuff. I’m going to play some Valis…

DAMMIT

Thanks for reading!

Hey, did you know I have a new Video Game band now? Check out Gimmick! Video Game Rock Band on Facebook and other places. You might hear some songs from some of these games in the future?

I had a wonderful Christmas last month, didn’t you?

Ok maybe not as good as this kid, but still...

Among the many cool things I got was a game that I’d been wanting ever since I got a system that could play it: Mario Kart 7 on the 3DS.

What happened to 8-63?

From the day I unwrapped the game and started playing until now, about a month later, I’ve run through most of the game’s content. I’ve completed every course (even got a 1-star rating on all of them, earning me some snappy gold wheels), unlocked every character, acquired numerous kart items (including via StreetPass, a more genius addiction hook than I thought even Nintendo was capable of, more on that some other time), and even found my “perfect” combination of kart bits and racer.

They see me floatin', they hatin'...

Over the hours of racing circuit after circuit, I kept getting this nagging feeling like… I don’t know, it’s just not as fun as it used to be.

Of course, by “used to be” I’m not pulling a retro-fuddy-duddy by saying it’s not as fun as the original Super Mario Kart or Mario Kart 64; those were both amazing games and were great in their own right, but I celebrate the series’ evolution, and in fact Mario Kart DS is my favorite in the series.

DRY BONES 4 LIFE... oh wait

I think “evolution” is the key here. Despite having gorgeous presentation, a soundtrack that is as good as ever (chattery drivers notwithstanding – mind you I’m a Dry Bones fan and he never said a word), and enough new gimmicks that it feels like a brand new game, there’s something at the very core of Mario Kart that could use an update, nay, a complete overhaul.

Basically, why is it still a racing game?

The champagne, maybe?

I mean, it makes sense that the point of the game is to drive karts around a track, so of course you want to do it faster than anyone else, but look at a typical 150cc match: You start, grab items, use those items to knock others out of the way, clamor up to the top, and almost instantly you’re knocked over by 7 other CPU karts (or humans, especially Japanese online players, dang those guys are good) unloading a barrage of items that can not only knock you right back down to 8th place, but can just sit there and do compound damage. Ever get hit by 3 red shells, 2 blue shells, a bullet bill, 2 star-powered racers, and 3 environmental hazards, all in the same lap? It happens to me regularly, and the crazy thing is, I still usually place first, with gold stars, even!

Every time they get together to congratulate me I just feel like they're doing it to screw with me.

The game has become this kind of bizarre mix of having to be in first place, being punished into absolutely not doing so, and then getting rewarded anyway because the game wants you to keep playing. I placed FOURTH on Rainbow Road after a pretty good run of the rest of the courses, and the game still gave me triple stars for my effort. Do you know how insanely hard it is to get a triple star rating in Mario Kart DS? I am pretty sure only Japanese players have ever done it.

Well, I mean, not ALL of them.

And here I am being given this ultimate award in Mario Kart 7 despite not meeting the requirements for doing so!

That whole “compound damage” thing really got to me though. While playing, I found myself cursing more at this game, audibly even, than I have at any other game, and I’m not even bad at it! It’s just that, every time I’d get knocked over by more than 2 things in a row, I’d nearly rage-reset the whole race, despite being so far ahead that I didn’t even lose 1st place. I would win, spectacularly even, and I wasn’t even happy about it.

Even the prospect of utilizing the 3DS’s “tilt” feature seems harrowing at best, because I know I’d never actually win by doing that, even if it is a fun control scheme.

How is that kind of experience even remotely related to those previous games that I happily wasted so much time playing?

And then it hit me, like a blue shell right before the finish line…

Nintendo already fixed the problem with Mario Kart, but they did it with another game! Behold:

Cue butt-rock guitar riffs... BREEEEAWWWW

Now I know most of you aren’t familiar with this title, so I’ll briefly describe the highlights of my favorite “racing” game ever, which also happens to be one of my top 5 favorite video games.

Excite Truck was a game developed by Monster Games, a U.S. developer to whom Nintendo entrusted the modern conversion of Excite Bike on the Nintendo 64 (which was questionably good to most; I liked it anyway). Their thing is racing games, and when it came time to develop a game for the fledgling Wii system, they decided to use the Excite- suffix, and completely turn the concept of racing on its ear.

In the game, you command one of a growing garage of personality-less monster trucks and jeeps, and tear through mundane-yet-charming wilderness backdrops in a variable-course off-road race against 4 other trucks. Sounds kinda drab, right?

Well I mean if launching an SUV over an oil rig can be considered drab

Well here’s where it gets interesting: instead of being required to win every race in order to proceed and eventually win, you are awarded points for how spectacularly you get to the finish line rather than how quickly.

Thus, you start your race, the other guys get ahead of you, but you don’t care; the show has started. Run next to some trees without crashing? That’s worth several points per second! Drive up a hill and catch 10 seconds of incredible air? That’s Super Air Time, and combined with some tricks you can pull, you could be looking at massive points there. Drifting around corners? Super Drifting points.

Launch yourself over the Great Wall of China? Oh man, SO MANY POINTS

Heck, did you pass up the other driver and win first place? That’s like 50 points right there, but you’d still get enough points to win if you did all the other stuff and placed last!

Also, if you didn’t pass up the trucks at all and instead used your boost to slam right into them, sending wheels and parts flying, that is also worth points! Even better, if you’re on the receiving end of the punishment, you get nearly equal points, and all you need to get back up and running is a couple of wii-controller shakes. You are rewarded for taking damage.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Excite Truck is so fun. In fact, I spent several months racing again and again until I had “S Class” scores in every single stage on every single difficulty, and I STILL go back and play it whenever I can.

Given that the amount of points decide how well you did, actually “winning” the race by no means makes or breaks the game, and in fact failing is its own kind of lucrative fun. Your goal in the game is to blaze your own path through the course and gain the most points, thus making yourself one with the vehicle and the environment. It sucks you in like nothing else if you understand what you’re getting into, and it fills each race with so many possibilities that you’re actually saddened at the prospect of “Final Lap”.

Of course, the game did pretty poorly during its commercial run; not only did the critic guys pretty much hate it because it wasn’t as graphically impressive as the also-new Playstation 3′s racers (are you kidding me?), but there were other completely unrelated complaints that launch titles tend to get because critics are the worst. Anyway, the game suffered middling scores and languished in game stores until, well, today really. I think you can still get a copy for like $10, and you’d be doing yourself a favor.

The dudes at Monster tried again and made a sequel, Excite Bots: Trick Racing, and attempted to inject a little personality into the system by making the modest-yet-functional monster trucks and jeeps into robotic bugs and dinosaurs, but really it did not help things (though that game is great too).

How can you not like this?

Thus, in my little dream world, what I think should happen is that Nintendo should combine the bankable characters, wonderful multiplayer capabilities, and fantastic course design of Mario Kart, and do away with that dinosaur of a 1st-place point system, and actually reward players for taking their lumps and giving them.

I’d like to see some points for hang-time with those gliders, or hitting someone with a green shell, because that’s amazing when you can actually do it!

They should arrange the points into a ranking system that rewards the individual player rather than adding up everyone’s aggregate racing score in order to award a single trophy to the luckiest player.

They should make the game about skill and creativity  rather than course memorization and relying on luck to not totally screw you in the last lap with a pile of blue shells and lightning bolts. Doing so would make every race feel fresh and exciting, and not just another chore with which to unlock another trinket so you can do your chores somewhat faster.

I think if Nintendo somehow combined the best of Mario Kart with a bit of Excite Truck’s innovation, they’d not only push the Mario Kart series into its ultimate evolution, but they might just make a few waves in the racing games community at large, and I for one would certainly pay to see that.

This Week In Gaming History:

Mega Man turned 25 on December 17th! 

Happy Birthday, Mega Man! We bought you some pants!

I uhh, should probably start writing those articles again!

Yesterday (well, somewhere between the 17th and 18th), I decided to celebrate the birthday of the Blue Bomber by playing through his first adventure, responsibly titled Mega Man. It seemed appropriate enough, as the release of that particular game in Japan was the event we are all celebrating.

Of course, for me, this game was hardly the first. In fact, I had played all the way through Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3 before even messing with the eponymous adventure, because, and I remember this distinctly, it was not available.

See, the first game actually kinda bombed (making Mega Man’s nickname kind of depressing now that I think about it). It was released in Japan and America at roughly the same time, which was kind of a rarity at the time (we had to wait 3 years for Final Fantasy). Somehow, something about the game just didn’t scream “buy me” to gamers on either side of the pond. While I don’t know what Japan’s problem was, I think we Americans have a pretty good place to point our fingers:

It just can't be a writeup of Mega Man without this image.

Either way, it wasn’t until after the staggering runaway success of Mega Man II (and its beloved-yet-rushed trequel) that Capcom decided “Ok let’s try this again”, and re-released the original game just in time for Christmas 1991, which is when I finally got to play it.

I’m not sure how History sees this course of action, but I can tell you, as a 9 year old brat of the times, it worked like gangbusters. Fresh off the prepubescent high of completing both of the most famous Mega Man’s of all time, I rushed head-first into this game and tore it to proverbial pieces!

By which I mean this game turned me over its knee and spanked the Devil right out of me.

Seriously though, this game was hard, and I honestly don’t know how I beat it (twice!) back in my youth without even using a Game Genie*.

Replaying it this time, I noticed that it earned its reputation not through consistent punishment, but precise, calculated bastardry. 

How precise? Well let me put it to you this way… have you ever stopped to consider how tiny Guts Man’s stage is?

Seriously, look at it!

The black part represents your soul after the moving platform section.

This entire stage, which even as a Mega Man veteran, still took me 4 Game Overs to complete, is roughly 3 tiny sections complete with a mid-point! After the dreaded moving platform section, you’re practically done!

Thing is, even if you tackle this stage first (my usual strategy), that platform section  may just end your game right there. It’s so hard to time and everything is positioned to destroy you until you can play it perfectly, and it’s devilishly placed right there at the beginning of the stage. Even the sound of those things coming makes my hair fall out to this day (that could just be genetics and old age, but either way this crap is coming out in clumps, man).

Elec Man’s stage is barely anything more than two ladders; Ice Man’s stage contains only two sections of disappearing blocks (my memory was swearing to me that there were at least 7), but all of these things are so carefully constructed to torture all but the most enduring and calculated masochists, it turns this game, which feasibly could be beaten in just under 24 minutes,  into an all-day affair. Some people never beat it!

Still, last night’s playthrough was inspired, even if I do say so myself. Perhaps it’s because I legitimately (that is, on their native cartridges) beat the other 5 Mega Man games just within the last year, or maybe because I really wanted it, but I finished my game in just under 2 hours. Not only is that a personal record, but I’d say objectively not bad for having only beaten it legitimately twice before, both times before even getting a Super Nintendo.

If there is a crowning jewel in Mega Man’s legendary difficulty, it has to be the Yellow Devil. After fighting your way through the first Dr. Wily stage, which is replete with its own challenges including 2 previous boss fights in a row (one of which is the super-damaging Elec Man), the boss that greets you is one that you can only beat either with super reflexes or a talent for pattern memorization (hint: I have neither). This boss was so infamous that he appears in many of the games that came out after this one.

Anyway, whereas my average was usually about 400 tries as a kid, imagine my delight when I actually beat this sucker (Barely) on my third try:

BOOYAH, GRANDMA... BOOYAH

Seriously though, it was at that point that I started feeling really good about this game.

I guess that’s the everlasting charm of Mega Man. The games are hard, sure, but not the hardest, not by a long shot.

Thing is, I’m no speed runner or champion gamer, I’m not even really that good at games to begin with. I’m just a guy who has loved playing games since, well, since at least 1991! As a Fair-to-middling gamer who has yet to truly dislike a video game (more on that in a later article), Mega Man is perfect.

In fact, all of them are perfect; they’re just easy enough to where a moderately talented gamer can beat them, yet difficult enough that doing so creates this insane rush of joy and accomplishment. If you don’t care about Mega Man games, you’re either going to always fail to their clever traps, or you’re too good a player for them and should move on to Sunsoft games immediately (may I recommend Journey To Silius to you crazy people?)

As for me, I have had more fun playing through the first Mega Man this time than ever before. Happy Birthday, Mega Man, may you forever crank out worthy sequels without changing a damn thing about yourself, oh and one more thing:

Contradictions aside, this is the coolest phrase.

Mega Man, beaten 12/18/12,  for Everlasting Peace.

*if you didn’t know, attaching Galoob’s “Game Enhancer” to a copy of Mega Man famously glitched the game’s sound. It was so grating that I decided not to even try it.

Well I’ve finally gotten my head above water what with all the fiery arguments and discourse from yesterday’s lecture!

Ok just kidding, like 6 people read it and seemed to like it ok and I got maybe 1 debate out of it, but that’s ok! This gives me plenty of time and opportunity to tell you about my most recent experience with the Super Nintendo classic RPG from Capcom: Breath of Fire! 

It uhh, looks just like the title except with END written on it. 30 hours well spent!

Breath of Fire was definitely one of the endings that I felt like I HAD to see. I had rented the game a few times when it first came out, and in fact it was one of the earliest RPG’s I had any experience in. Of course, my introduction to RPG’s via Final Fantasy II (US) was so profound that I found myself playing every one in site.

Anyway, I rented this one a few times and got as far as getting Mogu (the final playable character… probably about 80% into the game), which is honestly a good 3 days’ worth of work for a 12 year old, even if I do say so myself!

Still, the ending eluded me. Flash forward about 10 years, when I was working in a privately-owned video game store, and a copy came in! Well, I knew my career as a game store clerk was going to be short-lived, so that was the period of my life in which I snagged every game I could that looked interesting. This one was certainly a find, so I bought it!

Flash forward a further 10 years, to where we are right about now (we might have over-shot a bit so maybe rewind 2 years), and I finally decided to actually play the thing again.

The experience was as good as ever, only now I was able to expedite my progress a tiny bit by reading up a bit, and it’s a good thing I did, because I found out that the KEY ELEMENT to getting the “good” ending (or the “not a non-ending” ending), was SUPER obscured from normal playing.

"Agni"? Sounds like someone's elderly aunt

That’s right, Agni. Without him, the almost hilariously child-like goddess will… do something, I don’t know, I only got the good ending!

I guess she just cries some more?

And really, despite it being a “good enough” RPG with some interesting features and delightful music (seriously, the Forest Theme ranks among my favorite songs ever), my main takeaway from Breath of Fire is that it’s just downright bizarre at times.

And occasionally perverted!

I’m not sure if the story was kind of lost in translation or Capcom just makes weird stories, but this otherwise-austere game is just chock full of seemingly random situations that you’ll find yourself in.

Plus, it has one of the best fake-out endings of any RPG, where they give you a nice cinematic still of Ryu’s sister, who you just fought to save:

"That makes me so sad."

And then the game pulls a “just kidding!!” and forces you to fight your sister, whose half-dragon form is not quite as awesome as Ryu’s:

I honestly can't think of a way to say THIS IS A GIRL DRAGON any harder that doesn't involve glitter.

All that, plus the game almost seems to fall apart in the end. Not only do your characters wind up being super over-shadowed by Karn’s (admittedly super cool) ability to merge other characters into one super-fighter, but the whole thing doesn’t matter in the end. Not only can you fight through the last 3 boss battles by doing nothing but merging your entire party into Ryu’s ultimate dragon (thus creating a one-on-one fight where none of your party’s stats come into play), but it makes things super easy, and in fact it’s required for the final battle!

Even before all that time you spent grinding experience became a grand waste, enter Bleu, the “sorceress” of your party and ultimate badass:

With a scholar's grasp of English syntax

Despite being the second-to-last character you find (and first-to-last one in terms of characters you’ll ever actually use in battle, Mogu), Bleu will easily and overwhelmingly pass your entire party up in levels. In my end-game, where Ryu (main character I’ve had since the beginning) and  Bleu (scrappy newcomer) were used in every single battle (and gain the same amount of experience points even if they weren’t), Bleu passed up Ryu by a total of 14 levels. I thought Bo was a little over-leveled, being 2 levels ahead of the hero most of the time, but Bleu just kept going!

Not that any of these things are complaints, mind you, they’re just elements to the game’s design that I really wish I could just ask somebody about. In a sense, the game’s quirks add something unique, for better or worse, which the genre really kinda needed back then.

Also, while being a bit on the long side, the game never got boring, per se, but was just sort of slow and confusing. The classic criticism of this game and its direct sequel is that you never quite have a good sense of where to go next or why.

Really though, I doubt it could have been helped. Remember that this is a year before Final Fantasy III (US) and 2 years before Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, so RPG’s on the SNES really had not hit their peak yet.

Also, the game’s producer was Tokuro Fujiwara, who you may know as the creator of the Ghosts ‘N’ Goblins series, and is rather outspoken in his philosophy about game design: basically, and I’m paraphrasing here, his main goal is to torture gamers because he hates them. Perhaps confusing players was his strategy for this title?

Still, Ghosts ‘N’ Goblins this was not; in fact I was able to clear it rather easily thanks to a little bit of strategy and perseverance, even if I won the last 3 boss battles by turning into Agni and then setting the game to “Auto Battle”.

All I can really say about the game is that you should check it out. The whole series is pretty cool if you’re into RPG’s, and if you aren’t, you at least need to experience for yourself the richness and character of the game’s dramatic writing:

As my friend Jeff put it, "Bo is a warrior poet".

Breath of Fire, beaten 12/5/12,  ”Sara if free from Jade’s control.”

Today, on a very special episode of Retronomizer…

NERRRRRRRRRRDS!!

(Note: this piece is entirely the opinion of the blogger, and does not necessarily reflect that of the 8bitX network, and certainly doesn’t reflect that of 90% of the video game marketing demographic i.e. white dudes age 18-30. For that 10% remaining, however, welcome!)

Hey folks!

Here’s an experiment for you!!!

Part 1!

1A. Go to a well-known search eng… oh whatever, go to Google

1B. Type in “Nerd Guy Stock Photo”, peruse the first page of results.

Part 2!

2A. Go to THE SAME SEARCH GOOGLE ENGINE GOOGLE

2B. Type in “Nerd Girl Stock Photo”, peruse the first page of results.

Now, I don’t have to post here what you’re likely to find as you scroll through that first page, but I’m willing to bet that one of those two is going to feature a lot more controller biting, tight T-shirts with erotic slogans where the nouns are replaced by geek culture references worn by “hot” models, and perhaps worst of all, this lady:

MY NOT A VERY NERDY GIRL

Whoops, gave it away! Yes, I think our experiment will conclude that “nerd guy” and “nerd girl” mean way different things to Google.

By “Google”, of course, I mean the entire “nerd and geek” community and the actual people that make it up, but the real Google did a fine job illustrating the topic at hand. You done good Google, go have a treat and continue to be worth $trillions.

Here’s the thing: I have never really identified myself as a “nerd”. That’s right, go have a look at my backlog of video games and my video game band, and then come back here and let me repeat myself.

I don’t think of myself as a nerd.

To me, the expression has zero expectation attached; it simply means “Person with high speed internet access”. Oh sure, there used to be nerds, in the classic sense of the word, but somewhere between the Steve Urkel craze of the 90′s (along with his less-celebrated TGIF compatriots Mark from Step By Step and Minkus from Boy Meets World) and today, the idea of being a “nerd” or a “geek” became simply a demographic for pop culture marketing. Specifically, it’s men and women between the ages of 18 and 30, and boy do they spend a lot of money to keep that label afloat!

Do you think the website “ThinkGeek” would be quite the retail juggernaut if it was called “Useless Trinkets You Can Buy”? There’s a bunch of cool stuff out there, from video games to new video games (and some other stuff), and the best way to explain why you like that cool stuff is to say “I’m just a NERD I guess! Do you take debit?”

So why is it that there is a gigantic, hate-filled sexism debate revolving around “nerd cred” or “geek chic” or other buzzwords?

I don’t even have to provide you with a whole lotta links, and I’m not going to, because I honestly did not do ANY reading for myself about this topic. Also this website is not Cracked.com. The arguments all came to me, as I’m sure they came to you, quite passively! Simply owning a Facebook page (or having it own me har har), I have been inundated with this stuff for years now. What is this thing that is so important that brother and sister have to fight over it?

BESIDES THAT

Well, let’s ask some Youtube videos!

First, presenting the non-female nerd case, we have Silvermania:

Look man, people’s video editing choices are their own, beautiful freedoms… …

…

First off, I really only picked THIS video because I actually kinda know this guy (met him once anyway), and I found him to be pretty cool, but this is also one of the only cases from the “man’s point of view” that I even partially agreed with. I seriously do not have to tell you how to find other places where you’ll find similar opinions. We just don’t have that kind of time.

Now, by “partially agreed with”, we have a few things to unpack here.

1. Not going to touch that “nerd is the new black” with a 10 foot pole. We DO have try to maintain a word limit, here, and that’s a whole different article, man.

2. Dude is on-point about his first couple of points (modeling/”booth babes”), and we’ll get to that in a bit.

2 1/2. Man I also can not stand The Big Bang Theory for every reason ever.

3. Right around “nefarious purpose number 3″ is where I start to drop off, so let’s talk about that!

Now, I totally understand how it is to be all wrapped up in my favorite hobby (Macramé, duh) when suddenly, out of nowhere, a lady comes along and tries to take all my Macramé cred! The nerve!

Oh wait, actually I don’t understand that at all because it has never happened.

I honestly don’t know where all these guys are going wherein they’re so surrounded by ladies who are only pretending to like their hobbies that lambasting is the only way out. Having been in bands nearly half my life, (and around a LOT of nerd conventions, most recently) I have seen every kind of attention-seeking behavior there is, including some that are downright harmful to all involved, and I can assure you, as you can assure yourself if you really look for it, it’s roughly 50/50 between the sexes.

Here’s the thing. Every single time I have been to one of these conventions, it’s been either as a performer or as a potential performer (that is, one-man promotion machine), and I’m ok at it (got me in good with the 8bitX people anyway eh heh heh). By definition, I should be included along with booth babes, models, or any other kind of person who professionally attends nerd gatherings and does the nerd things for attention, and more importantly, sweet sweet money. Why am I not automatically assumed to be a “fake” nerd, hmm? HMMM?

Here’s the other thing. I don’t know much about what it takes to be a “true nerd”, but I know the HELL out of being a white dude.

If you’re not a white dude, let me break it down without getting too depressing about it.

It’s super awesome!

Being a white dude means you are the default from which all other persons are measured by the entirety of civilized society! Think of it this way: why isn’t America an Eastern continent? Because it’s West of Europe. White Europe decided where everything is on a SPHERE, and what’s the center of these directions? The answer may surprise you but not that much.

Consequently, the worst thing we have to deal with, removing anything resulting from our personal actions, is having big companies assume that, because we buy stuff that’s marketed to us, we’re expected to buy more things because they throw professionally attractive women at us. What a horrible night to have a curse!

You can argue about it from the white guy position all day if you like (you can even read all 800+ pages of this to see if your argument is really as valid as you tell yourself), but if you’re a white dude, you have to understand that the key component all of your deflections and defensive arguments are missing is the fact that every facet of society branches OUT of you and your fellow white men. It doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person (though, let’s face it, statistics are not on your side on this one), but it makes it so much harder for you to be the victim here. Just do what I do; blame ancestry, try and do better, duh.

Here’s the other thing that’s great about being white and a guy. We have a very special power that was given to us from our forefathers, generations and generations ago: the power to decide we simply don’t care anymore! It works so well that we even don’t care that we have it and others don’t!

Of course, it’s not just guys that are blind to what we’ve come to know and hate as “privilege*“, in fact I have seen even more scathing commentary about “Fake nerd girls” coming from the supposed “Real nerd girls” that I sometimes come across. Again, I’d provide links but we have to move on.

I’m just saying this isn’t strictly a guy-enforced stereotype, jeeze.

You can still get riled up by a video like Mr. Silvermania’s up there, and maybe feel that he’s being pretty unfair, but if you’re like him, or me, you have this ingrained ability to just switch that off and stop worrying about it. It seriously seems like the best thing, but unlike other super powers, it kind of really only benefits the user, and in fact kind of sucks for other people. What other people, you ask? How about this super annoying lady**:

Again, video editing is a choice, and we have to respect that. Making a cut for every sentence is only as distracting as your ability to concentrate.

This video is making the rounds now, and in case you’re immediately turned off by the presentation, it starts with the idea that there are “no fake geek girls” and that there are only girls who have varying levels of interest in Macramé or whatever you people are into. This is half-true, for reasons I will come back to.

After a VERY long “dramatic” reading of a comic book artist’s slams against the kind of “Fake geek girls” that he’s been forced to put up with as part of his work (and, again, those cons are work for some of us such as celebrities, musicians, and BOOTH PERSONNEL), she goes into some correct-as-hell stuff about double standards regarding cosplay, and some admittedly weak points, mostly involving the worst: straw men arguments (at least Justin’s straw man/woman?, while just as bad, actually appears in the video!)

Not to say I don’t also mostly agree with the ideas in this video, and certainly the person writing that diatribe rallying against women based on his unique observation of being a celebrated sexist (I don’t know comic book guys that well so I am just going with probability on this one) is not to be defended, but I think there’s something missing.

I could not help but notice a similarity in these two otherwise intelligent, charming-in-their-own-way youngsters that really didn’t seem to be adequately addressed in the midst of all this other-bashing.

The money.

E Plumberus Unum

Maybe it’s because I am coming from a part of the web where more views equals exactly as much money in my bank account as there was before (which is dangerously close to zero at all times, alas), but man why are we not talking about the money?

Specifically, marketing. Why does anyone like “nerdy” stuff in the first place? Because what we actually like is stuff. If something is cool and marketers see that “nerds” are buying it, suddenly, it’s cool to be a nerd! It has to be, so that companies that sell stuff can make people can feel cooler for having their stuff, so they can then sell even more stuff. Super simple!

Don’t get me wrong, the stuff is cool, it is so cool, but understand that your entire identity as a so-called “nerd” or “geek” is entirely wrapped up in whether the possessions or paid experiences you have contain that kind of marketing attached to them.

Marketing, of course, is a machine, much like Google with those afore-mentioned search results. No matter how nice or sensitive the people working for it are (hint: probably not very), the machine exists solely  to make stuff into money, and the more opportunities it sees to do that, the more opportunities it will take.

So what is the solution? Get rid of all the stuff? Only purchase/wear/experience things you need to survive? Have interests that have no marketing appeal attached to them at all? Man, that sounds like a boring life, but guess what! If you do all of this, you are now a nerd in the pre-Urkel hey-day! Congratulations on finally achieving that legitimacy you so desired.

However, if you’re like me and you want to hang on to your cool stuff and hang out with all your sweet friends and not even care anymore whether someone likes your stuff as much as you do (without even having that special white guy power!) Then here’s an idea: ditch the nerd and geek label forever.

We’re a status-based society, no lie, but that’s really not good because while society is still centered around the interests and spending dollars of white guys, then so too will the status. If we eliminate the status and judge each other individually by actions rather than prejudice and associations, I think we can finally enjoy that one dude or lady’s Sailor Moon costume without having to get all mad about it (oh and achieve an end to racism and sexism too, pretty good bonus).

However! It’s not all that simple (it never is), so I’m giving you fellow white dudes some homework, and don’t groan, it builds character:

Guys: Seriously, I know it’s super ultra sweet to have that switch that says “well I don’t really have to care about this”, even though the side effect is that it makes us so paranoid that we believe in things like “reverse racism”. However, understand that what we’re really enjoying, even in not caring, is the badass yet unearned status we were handed by our racist/sexist forefathers, so maybe take a look back at those arguments we’ve been making against these so-called affronts to our nerd status or whatever, and maybe try and see if we’re not actually pushing down people who should be able to enjoy this crap as much as we do. If we are, hey looks like we have an easily identifiable thing to stop doing in order to be better people, or at the very least, regular good people!

Also, and I can’t stress this enough, do not use the argument “Man, who even cares?” Man that makes us look so bad. Obviously somebody has a problem and they care, so making that argument is basically outing yourself as someone who has no qualms about abusing the “don’t care” white guy power. If you use that power too much, you’ll become dependent on it! I thought you read enough comic books to know this!

I readily admit that what this whole fight is about is possessions and experiences one obtains through money, and is largely a war among the bourgeois, and may not be as valuable as the fight against violence, slavery, or systematic physical and psychological oppression against women (it’s certainly not the same as the physical bullying that lady in the video says it is), but it is transparently representative of a much, much bigger concern we should all be fighting against.

Your homework assignment is to make it well known, if to nobody else, than to the soulless marketing machines that are attempting to own you, exactly where you stand on whether girls should be allowed to enjoy the stuff you enjoy.

However, if you truly, honestly believe with your heart that your unique experience in life dictates that another kind of person is not as deserving of enjoying the things you deserve to enjoy based on any parameter other than an individual’s actions, then you can skip this assignment, in fact it’s encouraged that you just go ahead and not make your stance known. It’s ok though because you’ll probably never feel the worse for your inactivity. Oh, but here’s a conical hat for you to wear on your way out.

Finally: It seems to me that the missing key to connecting brothers and sisters in blissful nerddom is in the fact that big business thinks it should be marketing to the 18-30 year old male demographic, and being a machine, it really doesn’t care who it’s offending in the process, as long as money multiplies. Marketing believes that only 18-30 year old males can make or break an entire industry, and in case you thought otherwise, Marketing doesn’t even care about your hobbies to begin with.

As with anything, the solution to this part of the problem is all about money. If there’s no money to be made in “Nerd” culture as they see it, Marketing will either have to change or go somewhere else to make the money machine work.

As it stands currently, Marketing has ruined “nerds” and “geeks” for guys and girls alike, so the solution seems to be that we must band together, dismiss the labeling, and enjoy what we enjoy without buying into the professional pandering or the professionally-encouraged exclusion of others.

Individually, we have to get rid of this idea that “nerdity” is any kind of “pure” lifestyle, and relieve ourselves of the idea that anyone else has the ability to taint an otherwise made-up concept that is driven by products. If someone, anyone is being transparently fake and pandering to your interests in order to get your money or attention, simply don’t give it to them! If there’s one thing I know about Marketing, it’s that it can not exist without money or attention.

However, this fake nerd white guy can, so stay tuned and we’ll be back to talking some old trash about video games again!

Big thanks to Alex Cranz of Fempop for some editing assistance and being the Yoda on my back, making sure I’m on-point with this thing. I should let you know that her suggestion for re-naming Think Geek is “Slightly Less Outre Skymall” because she is more clever than I.

*“Privilege” is a word that I try not to use too much, but trust me when I say that I totally made the conscious decision to own it as a definition for my cultural default standing, particularly after reading Kotaku’s rhetorically terrifying and pander-y article about how being white, straight, and male is the “easy mode” in a video game. I want it to be known on all records that, despite its heart being in the right place, it’s one of the worst attempts at explaining the obvious truth that I’ve ever read, and I wrote this, for goodness’ sake.

**Look man I know she’s super duper popular and is clearly doing the right thing, but I seriously had to watch this 9 minute video in about 10 different chunks. Blame my inability to be entertained by people reading their blog entries on camera.

Well I kind of hinted at it in my last post, so I figure my first Endgame Review should be about a game near and dear to my heart, and recently beaten for the first time: Metroid on the NES!

Someone in space has exquisite penmanship

There it is… not much to look at, but honestly that’s about as good as it got for that generation of NES games!

Metroid and I go all the way back… I believe I was somewhere around 8 years old when I first started playing it, at my grandmother’s house of all places (she kept a stock of NES carts for when the young ‘uns came over).

My first experience with the game wasn’t the usual, out of what I’ve heard reported (apparently it’s a creepy game?) I just seem to remember not knowing where to go or what to do, and being more of an action game kid, I figured just running around and blasting stuff was good enough.

Fast forward to the year 2012, and that was still about the extent of my experience with the game. Of course, having played through Metroid Fusion and  at least taking a cursory glance at Metroid II and Super Metroid (the former of which I beat rather recently), so I knew, going into the game for a serious playthrough, that I had some exploring to do!

Enter my secret weapon: NES Classic Series: Metroid on the Gameboy Advance. I had an idea: since the game is pretty much a straight port of the original game, complete with archaic password system, maybe the passwords were interchangeable?

I put it to the test:

Seriously YOU try taking a picture of a DS and a TV at the same time

Success!

Thus, I was able to whittle away at the game across a portable platform and the game proper at home.

I really think this was the only way I was going to beat it without a pre-made map or anything. Turns out a lot of the places in the game are hidden in rather obtuse ways, though some rooms were so similar that I somehow intuitively knew where to bomb/shoot (generally speaking), and after some time I was able to find everything I needed to find.

Turns out it was just over half of what I COULD have found, but at least I wound up with enough E-tanks and Missiles to destroy that Mother Brain!

or so I thought…

First, I had to deal with the actual METROIDS on Tourian (go figure!) Despite being quite familiar with their look and how to beat them, thanks to the decades of Metroid lore I have been exposed to, I wasn’t even nearly prepared for the actual terror of meeting one in a proper first-time playthrough. They really are scary!

However, the unique thing about the very first Metroid adventure, since they kind of nerfed this in all the games going forward, is that, despite the actual danger of meeting a Metroid and the damage it can cause, if you are starting over from the elevator/checkpoint, you really kind of need them.  See, if you happen to die at any point on Tourian, you have to start over with only the bare minimum of life, and the Metroids give you a ton of energy AND missiles, which you will absolutely need on your quest to defeat the Mother Brain. Considering this game’s place in gaming’s oeuvre (being one of the first games to even scroll in 2 directions, THAT’s how early this game was), can you believe that they figured out how to make a menacing foe something which you are forced to hunt and kill in order to survive? Either they suck the life out of you, or you kill them and take THEIR life energy.

I have now seen the true genius that is Metroid, and here I just thought it was a slightly creepier-than-normal action-platformer.

Then there was the Mother Brain. Turns out, despite the MANY videos I have seen where Mother Brain is taken down smoothly and efficiently, it’s actually kind of hard to keep your footing on that little platform where you’re suppose to blast away at her with missiles! I believe it took a total of 10 times for me to finally take her down, and of course getting back to the surface was cake, but by that time I had used up more than enough time to get the worst ending, but at the end of the day, the worst ending of Metroid was still one of the best endings I’d ever seen.

Metroid, beaten August 16th, 2012. My mission is fulfiled.

What is this

Howdy folks, howdy! Your ol’ friend Chris is here again, ready to write too many words about games and hope that you read them!

If you are wondering about the radio silence (so to speak), well, I decided to start a new VGM band project some months back, and between that and gainful employment, there hasn’t been a whole lot of extra time I didn’t squander on gaming, but more about that in a sec.

What is this project, you ask?

I am now playing lead guitar for a band called Gimmick! (exclamation point included).

We just recorded our first medley to show you fine folks on video, but so far all I have to show is a Facebook fan page with pictures that prove we exist: http://www.facebook.com/GimmickBand

It’s going to be a lot of fun and I’m really excited about it, but back to the task at hand!

Endgame Review!

As I said before, pretty much all of my spare time spent not updating this blog has been spent furiously plowing through some of the hundreds of video games I own. The reason for this, on top of it being fun, is that I have amassed far too many titles (with no sign of slowing, let’s face it) without actually putting in the time to get to know them.

Thus, I have challenged myself to beat every game I own, no whining, no cheating.

While this is all pretty fun for me, I thought I’d share some of it via this blog in a new segment that is likely to become the main feature here: “Endgame Review”.

My plan is to post the ending screen shot (or some shot of the ending), and describe my playthrough in the usual style that I write about games around here. I figure you can read praises about any game similar to mine anywhere, so adding that sense of personal drama, coupled with the victory of completing the game, will at least make things interesting enough for me that I will always strive to have an update ready for you!

So far I have beaten 18 games since deciding to chronicle my exploits. Actually, it was more than that, but I only recently thought to get my camera out and take some good ol’ fashioned pictures of the TV screen with which to prove it:

Why yes I am about to die here thanks for noticing

So be looking for that, plus the other kinds of things I write around here whenever I get around to it.

Also! If you want to join me in this quest, there are a few ways you can do that:

- Check out my Backloggery.com account to see what I’m up against and tell me what to play next!

- Submit your own writeup/end-game screenshot! Either hit me up here or via e-mail (lierxagerate at gmail dot com) and make sure the word “Endgame” is somewhere in the subject line!

- Make sure to talk these articles up with your friends, family, loved ones, hated ones, and disinterested coworkers/Starbucks baristas. The best way to get updates is if the writer feels like people are really reading this crap!

- Prayers. If you check out some of the games I’m up against, you’ll know I need them.

As I am more technically able, I will try and find other ways to share this ongoing quest with you (video streaming might be in the future/) Until then, thanks for you continued support! I gotta get to writing!

So! Continuing in our series of “VGM Soundtracks you’ve definitely heard of but I’m too invested in that title to change it”, we have one of the most popular and beloved soundtracks in all of classic gaming: Mega Man 3 for the Gameboy!

Ha ha ha gets 'em every time.

Just kidding!

We’re going to talk about Mega Man 3 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (your parents help you hook it up):

Not sure if spread-eagle is the best stance for shooting a robot wielding electric needles, Mega Man, you're just asking for a shock to the energy tanks.

Release Date: September 28th, 1990
Composers:  Bunbun (Yasuaki Fujita), ???

As beloved and popular as the game is to fans of the series, however, it’s definitely got a some porblems. It was rushed by Capcom in an effort to cash in on the gloriously successful Mega Man 2, and thus Inafune and co. really had to struggle to get a functioning game out, much less a good one, and as a result it’s the game that even Mega Man’s creator kind of hates. It was criticized for its arbitrary difficulty and “sameiness” compared to Mega Man 2 (oh what little did they know…), and heck even the Stage select screen features a permanent graphical glitch:

BAH HA HA Ok now I'm done

Despite all this, Mega Man 3 endures as a fan favorite and indeed was my personal favorite until I discovered Mega Man 5 (that’s a WHOLE different article), and I think a lot of that has to do with them getting some things extraordinarily right, such as the soundtrack!

Oh my that song is so good. I’m going to get all “old man” on you for a moment here and describe what hearing this song for the first time as a kid was like…

I had played the first two Mega Man titles and actually anticipated this one before it came out, and while I loved those first two games and their excellent tunes (again, Air Man from Mega Man 2 being one of my favorite songs ever), Mega Man 3 was something of a catharsis, or at least as close as an 8 year old can get to a catharsis).

The classic Mega Man had a title screen that was in total silence, and then it had this tune for your stage selection. Not bad, but that song’s only 4 seconds long and is rather forgettable until the 100th time you’ve heard it because the game is so freaking hard and yet you can’t put it down…

Then there was Mega Man 2, which made a musically brilliant move (in my opinon) in actually taking part of the ending credits theme from the first game and repeating it, to great effect. That didn’t really affect me as a kid, however, since it would be YEARS before I could beat the first Mega Man, come on. Even using a Game Genie ruined the game’s soundtrack thanks to incompatibility issues, so yeah double-edged sword there.

Then you turn on this third adventure, and the instant your NES powers on, that minor chord and melody comes in, and plays you *to* the title screen instead of the usual formula of silent logo leading into a musical title. It starts with that contemplative, jazz-infused beginning, and then does this super awesome rock scale into a chugging, galloping adventure theme that will get you pumped. As a bonus, the fast part of the song is where the loop is, not the slow part, so you only hear that slow part once and then the rest is just a repetition of the main theme. That’s seriously good, even for 1990 standards (when VGM soundtracks were really starting to get elaborate).

Not only that, but the game has no story intro or attract mode; the song is the intro. You can wait through as many loops of that beautiful tune as you want, you’ll never get that typical paragraph’s worth of text that tells you what’s happened so far. Now, I don’t know if that’s because of time crunch or if it was intentional, but using an instrumental music piece to get you excited about the game on an emotional level is something that I’ve honestly never seen duplicated in gaming. The song is that good.

Once you decide you’ve had enough of the song and move on to the “Game Start” option, you’re again assailed by a mighty tune that evokes a sense of urgency and purpose.

Plus, this song is actually 10 seconds long. Progress!

Anyway, as with any Mega Man game, the real meat of the soundtrack is in the actual stages, and while I enjoy almost every stage theme from every Mega Man, there’s something a little different about this title, and I think that is due to the game’s composer: BunBun (Yasuaki Fujita).

Whereas I always felt like the various soundtracks for Mega Man games are based in this kind of Japanese-flavored pop/rock (with some elements of Metal and hard rock), what BunBun brings to the table is a sense of Jazz with a little bit of Blues and even funk-fusion. The soundtrack almost seems “classier” as a result. Interestingly, if you listen to some of his later stuff like Darkwing Duck, you’ll notice he’s being very “restrained” with the jazz in this game.

Still, on top of having these great 7th chords and smooth jazz tricks that I’m not educated enough to call out by name, all of the melodies are just so singable:

Do you hear how the hi-hat and snare trade off in Snake Man’s theme, almost as if you’re hearing scatting? (not the gross kind, I mean mouth percussion they do in Jazz). If not, take this as the ultimate example:

The way those notes slide into each other in the main melody just has this undeniably “jazzy” feel about it. Really my boss brentalfloss put it best in video form, so I’ll stop talking about it here.

Of course, BunBun is a multifaceted composer (just check out his work on Breath of Fire), so he can roll out the epic ballads when he wants to. I always felt this tinge of melancholy pervading the otherwise jamming nature of Spark Man’s theme:

The way those chords move in the second part, man that song could have hit the radio any time in the 80′s if it was new wave rather than VGM.

There are even moments of super-pumped rock that have nothing to do with jazz or melancholy. Quite possibly my favorite theme in the game, even if it was applied to the dumbest robot master:

Ha ha Top Man, what even is that? Anyway, the driving beat, interlocking arpeggios for melody, and straight bass-line make this song a rocker through and through (it almost sounds like a Deep Purple song if you ask me, but you didn’t so yeah). Sure it’s played in a stage where you inexplicably have to fight gigantic cats in a world made of glass-encased plants (making me think someone might have mis-read his name as “Pot Man”, my little joke), but hey it’s all good.

Some of the songs are quite peppy, even, such as Magnet Man’s stage, with which we are back to Jazz:

Actually, one of the jazzier and more complex songs in the soundtrack belongs to Needle Man, yet BunBun actually didn’t write this one, according to sources I have conveniently lost…

Still a great song though. I want to say Minae Fuji might have written it? She wrote a lot of Mega Man 4 so it stands to reason. Oh well, have a listen:

Actually, the same goes for another of my personal favorites, the spooky, theremin-styled Gemini Man theme:

I think the best part about this particular stage theme is how you have two chordal melodies that intertwine with each other, which given that the robot boss in this stage is actually two twin bosses, that’s almost too good of a move to be intentional. Either way, this song just goes to show that some of the best songs in VGM occur in space (another article for another day).

Anyway, the last element I want to discuss is the game’s introduction of a new “supporting” character/villain: Protoman. One of the  most popular characters in the original series despite his limited in-game appearances, he’s among the first video game characters I can think of that actually has his own musical theme that is inextricable from his character. This is something I feel is essential to the Mega Man universe, since most of the characters, at least in the original Japanese versions of the games, are named after bits of music. In fact, Protoman is called “Blues” in the Rockman games.

Anyway, since the game contains no intro monologue to tell us what’s going on (though the instruction book is more than happy to fill us in), the story is that Mega Man is being followed through the game by a shady character who is first called “Break Man” (apparently the robot master of standing outside and smoking a cigarette at work), who winds up being an ambiguous good-guy who helps him out at the end, and then… THE TWIST… the game reveals, in a really subtle way, that he’s the “prototype” robot who is basically Mega Man’s older brother bot.

Anyway, the game doesn’t have to tell you this with words, it unfolds right there in the gameplay and is hit home during the ending (where you finally get some text), which is this perfect expansion/embellishment of that simple bluesy whistling tune:

That song is so good, and is one of the truly moving, emotional pieces in early VGM. Before Final Fantasy 6‘s opera scene brought a tear to our eye, Mega Man 3‘s ending provided a satisfying lump to the throat that made us yearn for a continuing of the story of Mega Man and Proto Man, which, of course, we never got, at least back in the day, because the series moved in all kinds of directions. Even in Mega Man 5, where he really had a chance to shine, there’s no clear explanation as to what is going on.

Either way, it’s these kinds of concerns and revelations that made Mega Man 3 a classic. Flawed, of course, but still a classic. The soundtrack was thoroughly amazing, and as I mentioned before, immensely popular, especially among the VGM band scene, as it has been covered many times. Here are some of my favorite covers:

- Armcannon did a really great cover of the title theme on their first album, Leg Vacuum.

- The irrepressibly metal Year 200x guys open up their album with a cover of the title theme.

- VGM old-schoolers NESkimos (who have recently reunited, yay!) did a cool rock cover of Spark Man’s theme, which I can’t find for sale so just listen to it here.

- brentalfloss, according to legend, actually started his career in writing funny lyrics for video game music with his version of the title theme. Great stuff! He also did a hilarious take on the Game Over theme, which is super peppy in an almost mocking sort of way. They’re both available on his albums too, so go buy those duh.

- The Megas, a rock band that actually does serious songwriting over Mega Man tunes, just released an entire album of Mega Man 3 music, so get it while it’s hot!

- Temp Sound Solutions did this great thing where they mixed Gemini Man’s stage with the song “Demon Seed” from Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse, and though the exact configuration of the band that did it is no longer around, there IS audio evidence of it on the internet!

- My own band did a medley of tunes from the game, featuring that funky volcano-based ninja, Shadow Man.

- Speaking of… The One Ups, who are masters of jazz, jazz-fusion bluesy VGM, did an incredible send-up to Shadow Man on their Volume 2 album. So cool!

Whew, man! Didn’t mean for half of the article to be band-plugging, but all these covers are that good, so do check them out. Until then, I’m going to play through this game again, or at least until those awful “Dark Master” stages.

See you next!

Welcome back, everyone and me! I was suddenly beset by a week of tragedies and victories, none of which I care to talk about at the moment, so instead we’re going to talk about an exciting soundtrack that’s NOT from Japan and not even composed by a lady!

Let’s talk about Magician on the NES:

BRUTALITOPS

Release date: 1990? 1991?
Composer: Neil Baldwin

Magician was developed by a company called Eurocom and was published by a company called Taxan. You might know Taxan as publisher of somewhat cheap and occasionally badass NES games like Burai Fighter, Star Soldier, 8 Eyes, Mystery Quest, and my favorite, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. Their final published game was Magician, and interestingly enough, it was Eurocom’s first game.

While the England-based Eurocom (hence the “Euro-”, you see… they’re European) is a pretty well-to-do developer nowadays (they recently worked on the Goldeneye 007 remakes), their beginnings were so humble that no more than 6 people are in the credits for Magician, and yet it actually is a pretty cool game! It’s part action, part RPG, part Shadowgate-style puzzle solving, and part Ultima in terms of having a TON of text to read and a spell system to learn as you proceed through the game.

Anyway none of that matters because the soundtrack is one of the best damn things you’ve ever heard from the NES era, which is why we’re talking about it today:

That there is the title screen to the game, and you aren’t seeing things, the entire song is nearly 3 1/2 minutes long. It’s actually one of the longest songs in the entire NES library, and man is it worth hearing from front to back.

One thing you’ll notice right away is that Neil Baldwin loves arpeggios. If you’re not a music-knowing type like I’m not, an arpeggio is a fast sequence of notes (usually in a chord shape) played in sequence rather than at the same time. This effect is used a LOT in old-school video game music, because the limitations of the hardware meant you only had a few sound channels to work with, so playing notes really quickly in order kind of gave the illusion of playing them all at once, and you’ll hear a lot of that in this soundtrack and almost anything written by Tim and Geoff Follin (who we’ll get to in a future update I promise).

Anyway, what I love about the title screen is that, on top of it having those quick arpeggio parts and a really cool melody laid over the top, is that Neil actually did a lot of playing around with the actual texture of the synths. At exactly 55 seconds in, he drops the melody down to a bass note that accompanies the existing bass note, and the tone of the backing part starts to change while still maintaining the same notes, and other parts drop back in (like around 1:25) to where, by about 2:26, you’re like “Whaaaaat is going ooonnn heeeeere?” It doesn’t even sound like an NES anymore, but really that’s just two of the same arpeggio laid over each other, and then the whole thing changes back and starts harmonizing with itself and the bass-line does this way cool thing it did at the beginning, and then the whole thing fades out to just drums… holy crap.

We haven’t even started playing the game yet!

This, the theme from the town of Serenna, where you start the game, is one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music I’ve heard, at least on a Nintendo. The way the chords move around and the bass-line are both super smooth, but that melody. It evokes this sense of despair and hopefulness all in the same go, like a wonderful piece of classical music, yet it sounds less baroque and more, I don’t konw, Radiohead-ish? Either way, it taps into that melancholy part of the human soul like only the English can, which is why every other country has been trying to sound like them for at least a century.

Again, not only do we get that wonderful, weepy melancholy from the melody here, but there’s even this lovely ambient noise in the noise channel, like the rolling of the tides or something. Actually, by his own admission, Neil Baldwin was going for one of those rising cymbal crash kind of moves, but it just wound up sounding like water so he simply left it in. I love it.

What I really like about this “Lake” theme, as well as most of the songs in the game (at least all the ones I’m linking to), is that you might underestimate them when you hear yet ANOTHER slow arpeggio and weepy melody, yet if you give it just about a minute (an impossible amount of time for most NES songs), you’re usually treated to something really cool. In this case, Neil is using that same arpeggio effect to make a kind of “delay” effect, almost as if it was some experimental guitarist messing around with his effects. In fact, the way the two main sound channels play around with arpeggio + melody makes me think of Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew of post-70′s King Crimson. Only one other person will ever get that analogy, so hi Greg!

This time, we have another track that contains ambient effects right there in the tune, only this time Neil meant it to sound like crickets, for the scene is set in a creepy forest in the pitch-black night. The way the music just creeps in and goes away again, leaving the crickets behind… how is this a video game song?!

Also I really dig that bass groove.

Occasionally the music will get kind of dangerous and exciting, as in this Cave theme and this Battle theme. There’s not a lot to say about them, besides that I think they’re really excellent and I just wanted to take a break from the slow tunes for just a second.

OK break’s over, here’s another one!

Oh man I love how this entire song is essentially driven by the backing bass, and yet in the foreground, there’s another instrument that also sounds like bass. Two basses playing insanely creepy music for a really creepy part of the game is one thing, but then that super-fast arpeggio sound comes in, serving as nothing more than a flavor to the rest of the track. It’s crazy to me how something that is so unmoving and ambient can be so pleasing to listen to. Oh but wait! Around 2 minutes in? Totally sweet drum groove comes in and starts rocking it out until the song ends, OH NO WAIT A SECOND, what is that about 4 minutes into the damn song? A freaking Theremin?

Then suddenly you realize that this entire song loops at an incredible 6 minutes and 23 seconds, and you still find yourself wanting to hear it again!

Again, you think you’re going to be bored to tears with this song, since most NES songs loop around the 20-30 second mark, but this song takes its sweet time to get truly awesome, an outrageous 1 minute and 20 seconds before the full drum set kicks in. I can’t express to you with mere human words how happy that makes me.

I will say, about as comparatively happy as this groovin’ Dungeon theme makes me. There actually really is not a whole lot to this tune, but man I love that drum part, and that little high melody riff that comes in a few times towards the end of the loop. So classy!

This is a real short one that is only a drum part, but I included it because it totally reminds me of something else.

Anyway, that’s about it for all the notable songs in the game. I definitely recommend giving the whole thing a listen, and if you’d like a slightly more technical (and less spazzy) explanation of the soundtrack from Neil Baldwin himself, the man has done a super awesome favor for VGM fans like myself and wrote his own blog detailing aspects of this soundtrack and others he’s worked on. What a guy!

http://www.dutycyclegenerator.com/

Thanks for reading! See you tomorrow!