I'm always looking for stupid, pointless ways to waste my limited free time. Oh sure, I could be productive and do things like clean my place, pay bills or perhaps even do a little "manscaping." (Ahem.) But instead, I like to drink copious amounts of beer, go on YouTube and watch old He-Man toy commercials. I even found the one featuring a young, bowl-cut Kirk Cameron. "Now I have the power, you bitch!"

The other night, I visited YouTube in a beery haze of nostalgia and found myself typing in the names of old Nintendo NES games. Don't ask me why, but beer has a curious way of making me long for my childhood; vodka, on the other hand, makes me belligerent and bitter. But I digress. There were plenty of movie clips of great (and shitty) games, including a multi-part, almost surgically precise walk-through of the original Legend of Zelda game. This guy played an amazing round, breezing right through it in one life and revealing every single hidden secret of the game. It was a far cry from my personal experience playing Zelda back in the day, which consisted mostly of me randomly wandering the overworld and slashing and burning everything I saw. I eventually managed to beat the game, despite my lack of strategy. I also discovered gambling, thanks to Zelda's money making game. I'd look around for things to kill, just so I could get extra rupees to play the game. That damn goblin cleaned me out more than once as I tried to gamble my way to that cool ring that would turn my character's outfit blue. But what can I say? Games were much simpler then.

And yeah, that fucking goblin robbed me blind, but at least he didn't break my legs.

I used to love that old NES system of mine. I got it in April, 1987, using every cent of my birthday money and a $40 loan from my brother. The system itself cost only about 80 bucks, so it doesn't take a genius to see that I didn't get much birthday money that year. Maybe my parents were pissed at me or something, or maybe they had unpleasant memories of my brother and me monopolizing the family TV for hours on end, playing our old ColecoVision game system. (That's right, you spoiled little shits... once upon a time, houses only had ONE television set.) But the joystick mashing only lasted until about 1984 around our house, and beyond that you couldn't even FIND video games at the store. It was a bad time for chubby kids like me, who could no longer use video games as an excuse for not exercising.

When the NES came out, it was like a revelation. The games may look hokey and stupid to a 13 year old in 2008, but back then we took what we could get. A lot of the games had endings, and while that's commonplace now, it wasn't the case back then. The old games like Donkey Kong and Zaxxon had no endings; the stages repeated and you just kept on playing until your parents yanked the power cord or your fingers fell off; whichever came first. So when I rescued that princess bitch in the 8th dungeon of Super Mario Bros., I felt about as close to a hero as a geeky, bespectacled misfit could ever feel. "Take THAT, Bowser! Eat hot lava, motherfucker!"

I took another swig of beer, and started looking up endings to NES games on YouTube. After all, there were plenty of games I played and never beat, because I must have been too stupid or cheap to get one of those game Genie things. The The Karate Kid NES game was a gift I received one Christmas, and I played the shit out of it. Yeah, the game sucked, but it didn't seem to matter in those days. I diligently played some very, very shitty games, if only out of spite. Karate Kid was one such title, but mine was defective and always froze up on the third stage.

So I never got to beat Cobra Johnny, or Chozen from Part II, or whoever the fucking boss in the game was. I found myself with an unholy urge to view the ending to the game, to taste the fruits that had been denied to me all those years ago by a faulty cartridge. So I pulled up the clip and I saw this;

What the fuck was that??? Mr. Miyagi is looking pretty rough there, and his jerky mouth manipulations make it look like the poor guy had a stroke. I'll tell you what, I would have been pretty pissed off to put the effort into beating a game only to be "rewarded" by that piece of shit ending. Don't give me a poorly-rendered Mr. Miyagi winking at me and then just tell me, "THE END". Whoever designed that ending should get a crane kick to the fucking face, or perhaps a roundhouse kick to the nuts. ("Point! WINNER!")

Anyone else remember the NES game Karnov? I remember seeing the game for sale at the now-defunct Circus World toy store in the mall, with a whopping $40 price tag. Since you couldn't really rent games back then, you just had to go for broke and buy them... unless a friend of yours had a copy you could try out. That way, not only could you avoid blowing your money on a shitty game, you could laugh at your friend if he got suckered. I'd never played Karnov before, but based on the box cover art alone it looked like a winner. Karnov himself is a muscle-bound Russian strongman who bears a vague resemblance to the Iron Sheik. The box art (which made ALL the difference back then) has him face to face with an menacing Tyrannosaurus and a flying Pterodactyl, against a backdrop of stone slabs and fireballs. Now you have to admit, that sounds pretty damn cool, at least in theory. I mean, many is the time I've wished that I had bulging biceps and angry dinosaurs handy to take my aggression out on. So I snatched the game right up, barely even noticing how the box was a faggoty pink color. Maybe I should have been more cautious after previously buying the atrocious Kid Nikki: Radical Ninja game, which was made by the same company and also had a pink box. "Radical ninja?" Oh, puh-leeze. In the 80's, kids were conditioned to buy anything that was labeled as "radical". You know, like Swatch watches and shit like that.

I have to tell you--cool box art notwithstanding, Karnov was actually a pretty lousy game. It seemed like most of your time playing was spent heaving tomatoes at things and mindlessly jumping around. But I'd spent over 40 bucks on the stupid thing, money hard-earned from washing dishes at a hole in the wall Chinese restaurant. So I wasn't going to let the fact that the game sucked keep me from getting every last cent out of it. I dug right in, guiding Karnov's pudgy ass all the way to final boss, which was a shitty-looking dragon thing. I can still remember the sweat dripping from my brow as I pounded the "A" button, making that dragon my bitch. He died with several explosions appearing on the screen, and I settled back, hoping to be to be richly rewarded by the ending of the game that I'd just worked so hard to beat. See for yourself what happened next;

Oh. My. God. Let's recap this epic ending, shall we? I think we can sum it up in two points.

1) Three words of text
2) A silly little song

...and that's IT...?? You're telling me this is the BEST they could do??
To say I was angry would be grossly understating it. In fact, I think I broke my first game controller that day. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I sure as hell wanted more than THAT. How about a nice graphic of Karnov sitting in his easy chair and drinking vodka, the head of the final dragon mounted on his wall, and a cute Russian chick blowing him? Hell, even a message reading, "HA HA HA, LOSER! WE CAN'T BELIEVE YOU BLEW YOUR MONEY AND WASTED YOUR TIME ON THIS STUPID FUCKING GAME" would have been an improvement over that steaming pile of shit they call an ending. Even watching it again just now pissed me off. I WANT MY FORTY BUCKS BACK, YOU ASSHOLES!

Fortunately, not all NES games had endings that bad. Some didn't even need endings at all. For whatever reason, I became addicted to the NES version of the classic boxing game Ring King. The more popular (not to mention better) boxing game for the NES was Mike Tyson's Punchout, but there was just something about Ring King. For a kid whose only knowledge of boxing came from watching Rocky III on HBO, this is how I wanted a boxing game to be. The game was cartoonish, with oversized heads on the boxers and silly violence. But you could really pound the shit out of your opponent, and I loved doing that. You could do a super uppercut that literally sent your opponent sailing over the heads of the crowd, which was oddly satisfying... especially when you'd hear him land offscreen with a sickening *THUD*. You could also do a wicked swinging punch which would spin the other boxer around like a top and leave him a twitching mess on the mat. Plus, in between rounds, your boxer would get a blow job from his handler in his corner of the ring.

No, I'm not kidding. Take a look.

You can't tell me they didn't do that on purpose. To this day, it's hard for me not to make slurping sounds when I see that, just like my friends and I used to do. Is that the boxer's son blowing him...? I mean, I'd like to think it was a short-haired chick, but I doubt it. And how about those announcers giving a play by play of the action? I almost wish you could read the commentary, ala Tecmo World Wrestling. It would be like, "Wow, look at him take that cock! That's gotta take the sting out of that last round for him. Holy shit, he's still gobbling that knob! Look at him GO!"

I sat on YouTube for at least another hour, pulling up clips which jogged the long dormant NES memories from the recesses of my alcohol-addled brain.

It makes me want to get an old 8 bit Nintendo system again and hook that bitch up. Maybe it's time to get Fighter Hayabusa from Pro Wrestling out of mothballs and get him kicking some ass again. Or I could have another go at Judge Doom in the crappy (yet strangely addicting) game based on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Or maybe I can invite a fellow 80's kid over for a little two player Contra action.

Who cares if we suck at it now? Some of us still remember grabbing the controller at the START screen and going left, left, right, right, up, down, up, down, B, A, START to get a shitload of bonus lives. Damn, that sounds fun. Who's up for it? We'll get good and ripped, then blast the shit out of that giant alien heart on the final level. Fuck yeah!

That does it. I'm gonna be doing some looking for NES stuff on eBay. But not on a beer night, though. No, no, no. Alcohol and eBay is a ba-a-ad combination.

-JTL

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