AWOL

It is ironic that I should talk about Mike Tyson's Knock-Out and then promptly discover what I have been looking for for several years now.

Of course, I have to give Belle all the credit for my discovering.

Shortly after I left my New Years post, I came home and found Shannon labouring over Karsten's CarGame. Something she had discovered through her endless perusal of the blogosphere. Naturally I had to help her out. Which of course led me to playing some of his other games. Nibbly is kinda fun too. Trouble Underground is irritatingly fun. One mistake and you have to start over from the beginning. These three are puzzle solving. So, you won't feel like you're wasting any time if you play them. I never do anyway.

But naturally, I wasn't satisfied with these games. The challenges that they presented were stimulating . . . but one can only chase his tail so many times (a hint for Nibbly) before he grows tired.

So I did a query on the web for Nintendo Entertainment System Games Online, or something like that.

I struck gold, much to my surprise. A couple of years ago I did the same thing and found nothing. Butkis. Zip. Nada.

Not so at Everyvideogame.com. I discovered more NES games than I ever imagined existed.

And I was shocked at how lousy 1980s/90s Cutting Edge Video Game Technology was.


It is amazing how the mind embellishes memory. How we remember everything, good memories at least, as being much better than they really were. I wonder, with a great deal of certainty, if the same can be applied to "bad memories."

Granted there are those moments in our past that really are incredibly wonderful and incredibly horrible. But are there really, now, as many as we remember?

If you're curious to see what 1980's children's entertainment looked like, then follow the links.

This is Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! the game that I talked about playing with my buddy Dan.

I never had an NES. But my neighbor James did. Our favorite game was Contra. He also had Double Dragon which ironically doesn't really have anything to do with dragons and everything to with street brawling and rescuing the kidnapped girl. AND it has, indisputably, the best score ever created for a video game.

He also had Ninja Gaiden my favorite single player game.

And last but not least, one of my brothers, who had an NES briefly, had Life Force which, I believe, pretty much sums up the list of games that I played as a child that I wanted to, as we called it then, flip. That is what we called beating games. "Did you flip that game?" "Dude, I totally flipped Ninja Gaiden last night!" You get the picture.

If you're familiar with gaming or like gaming then you have to check out these small tokens of all but buried history. And I have to say, if you think the games they make today are hard, then you have never played the old NES games. They are difficult to the point of inducing insanity. I don't know what kept us kiddies coming back. I have my opinion on the matter, but I'll save it for another post. Lets just say that I am totally grateful for saved games.