When Nintendo was in its heyday, video stores got a chance to venture out of the doldrums of video rentals and into Nintendo rentals. Such was the clamor to rent these games that one local store, Sentry Market, updated their video rental department’s sign to say, in a flashy Hollywood-ish font, “Video Rentals… and Nintendo too!” For a kid like me, there were lots of options, with new ones opening semi-regularly.
Eventually, when Nintendo finally fell out of vogue, there were many establishments available in Crescent City for Nintendo (and subsequent Super Nintendo) rentals: National Video Cassettes (NVC for short), Video & More (which became Spotlight Video), Video Mart, Squeeze Box, Video Valet, and to a lesser extent Sentry and Shop Smart.
All in all, these stores had pretty much every Nintendo game covered. Because the games came with only one manual, the rentals usually included a photocopied manual. Also, if the game you wanted had a battery backup system, you might as well just buy it—if another kid got the game after you took it back, your saved game was usually history. The only way to keep a consistent game without fear of erasure was to rent it four or five times in a row. Parents usually objected to this, citing school and other worthless things.
That said, Startropics is a Nintendo franchise that was the first Nintendo game to be made entirely within the USA, making use of Japanese programmers that just happened to live in the states. In an attempt to release a game to only North American audiences, Startropics had to pack a gimmicky punch, and the punch was a one-two that really ruined things for renters like me.
Later on in the game, your onboard submarine navigator requires you to actually dunk a note your in-game uncle “wrote” to the player into water, and doing so would reveal a hidden “frequency” needed to finish the level (level 4, to be exact). Because the manual was photocopied, whatever mystery chemical caused the frequency to show itself once submerged was effectively lost. If you dunked the photocopied page in water, the video store would get pissed. Trust me.
To make matters worse, Startropics was a battery backup game. What that meant to all the kids that rented it is that you’d finish level 4, be at a loss as to the frequency, then be forced to return the game only to have your game erased by the next butthole that rented it. Re-renting the game was a useless endeavor because you’d only get to the end of level 4 again before you had to stop. And level 3 is really hard, so fuck that.
It wasn’t until much later, when perhaps Nintendo finally realized that kids (and thusly, parents) couldn’t afford to plop down 60 dollars every time they wanted a new game, that the mystery was solved for us renters. The question was so asked of Nintendo Power’s “game counselors” that the question was eventually published into the annals of Counselor’s Corner, a monthly Nintendo help column.
Afterward, it was open season on Startropics, and I ended up finishing the game quickly thereafter. As it turns out, the last stage is incredibly difficult and worthy of a hiatus as long as mine.
Perhaps Nintendo did me a favor by postponing my pleasure for that of a greater pleasure. For this, Jon Stuart Mill would be proud of Nintendo and the gang. After level 4, the story takes an unexpected turn, so perhaps delaying my conclusion was Nintendo’s ultimate cliffhanger. It worked. To this day Startropics is one of my favorite Nintendo games, and its hero, Mike Jones, is the first character I usually bring up when discussing great Nintendo mascots.
By the way, the frequency is 747 mHz.
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