Game #15: King of Kings: The Early Years (1991)

Sounds cool, but I assure you it is not. It’s a bible game, made by Wisdom Tree, the only company fit to make games for the Lord. NVC actually had a lot of unlicensed games (yes, even the Bible games) for rent, likely an effort to offer games nobody else had, but little did they know, nobody else wanted. I digress, I don’t think NVC ever had King of Kings.

This game is almost identical to Bible Adventures, in that it offers three games that are almost complete replicants. Each game asks you to answer Bible-themed questions in exchange for health power-ups. Most of the questions are true/false, but some are multiple choice.

That isn’t to say that the game is suitable only for Ned Flanders. The true/false questions are usually blatantly obvious and the multiple-choice fill-ins usually have one completely ridiculous answer within their ranks. For example, when asked how many loaves (as compared to the given two fishes) Jesus fed the multitudes with, you would be as wise as the three wise men to not answer “777” as the game so generously offers. 777 loaves of bread and two fish wouldn’t make the incident in question so much a miracle as it would a believable meager spread. Use your head and the questions are easy—that is if you’re so hard up for Nintendo that you want to play this.

Game #14: Bigfoot (1990)

To my knowledge, only one place in town had this to rent. It was Shop Smart, a grocery store. They are also the only place I can recall having Bo Jackson Baseball, which is odd because Bigfoot and Bo Jackson Baseball are two games that prominently featured iconic “90’s kid” things but failed miserably. What was seen as a sure-fire success ultimately exploded like Bigfoot does in its game if you try to drive over trees.

Of course, because Bigfoot is a towering monster truck that eats diesel and shits out smoke and smashed up Buicks, you would expect a pulse-pounding soundtrack as your grease demon rampages through mud and other general dirty boy things. However, what music exists in Bigfoot can best be described as a medley of songs used for the soundtrack of Foghorn Leghorn cartoons. I’m not kidding.

The gameplay is confusing as well, all three things you’d think would make Bigfoot “go,” mysteriously do not make Bigfoot go. B, A and up do nothing except honk the horn while the computer truck crushes you in a race. In fact, no button actually makes Bigfoot drive; bewilderingly, the game accelerates for you. That said, the game decelerates for you as well, effectively robbing Bigfoot of the only two pedals you would expect to find in its cab. You steer. That’s all you do. Apparently, there’s a side perspective where you actually do get to fully control the truck, but who cares? This game is shamelessly bad.

Game #13: Volleyball (1987)

Growing up, my mother had a friend named Lucretia. Pretty sweet name, huh? What’s even cooler is that she lived out on Star Trek lane. That’s no joke. Her husband owns a auto repair place and I don’t know what she does now or what she did then. One thing’s for sure though, my mom and her met when they played league volleyball together.

Back in the day, everyone had a Nintendo, it was really one of the only ways us kids could bond with the old folks. Lucretia, league volleyball player, and her husband, head mechanic, owned one. And to my knowledge, 1987’s Volleyball was the only game they had. It was a predictable choice and I’m not sure if either one ever played it, but when adults have a Nintendo around with games they hand-picked, us kids would take that as an olive branch and would play their Nintendo as a gesture of good will. I must have played Volleyball ten times and I don’t think I ever learned how to spike the ball. I’d bump, set, and then do some weird thing that would send the ball sailing high into the air. Sometimes the computer would give me a mercy bounce, but most of the time they would pulverize the ball into my face and make Team USA look like a bunch of rejects.

Game #12: Battle Chess (1990)

I’m going to make this one quick. Battle Chess is a turd of a game. It’s so horrendously slow and clunky that it could bore even the most easily entertained. Archon came out the year before and bested it in literally every way possible. The gameplay is teeth-gnashingly tedious at its best and bore-coma inducing at worst. The complete absence of music really drives home the point that this game didn’t need to be made at all. It’s almost like Interplay was making a desperate ploy to get out of some kind of backroom Nintendo contract, much like Aphex Twin did when he released “26 Mixes for Cash.” Don’t be fooled by the cool box art. Never play this, ever.

Game #11: Xexyz (1990)

Hudson Soft made ten or so games for the Nintendo, and though their lineup contains the origin of the much-adored Bomberman franchise, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that not only is Xexyz the best title they ever put out, but is one of the better Nintendo games ever.

I know, you’ve likely never played it. And that’s OK, because I don’t know a whole lot of people that did. As mentioned before in the Flying Dragon entry, there were plenty of games that Nintendo Power never scratched the surface of—which is mostly justified. A lot of those games were just awful, but this one wasn’t. Xexyz never got the attention it deserved from the “mainstream video game media” (I can’t believe I just wrote that) but word of mouth spread due to its strange unpronounceable name. It was that very name (and the awesome wireframe graphics on the box) that caused me to pick it up from NVC and give it a whirl in the first place.

My family used to housesit for my grandmother’s rich boss while their family went on vacation to all kinds of exotic locations. My grandmother, bless her soul, was a radiologist and her boss was a woman named Kathy. When Kathy and company went globetrotting, my family got to feel rich for a couple weeks at a time. They lived on a hill in a big house; my mom would often call it “the mansion.” “We’re up at the mansion for a couple weeks,” she’d say to us, and my sister and I, we’d get excited. The prospect of living large in the hills was an enticing one, but it was so far out in the sticks that our friends’ parents hardly ever wanted to bring them there. Though I will admit, being able to look out the window and see a tiny car begin to ascend the hill to deliver a friend was a pretty exhilarating feeling.

Because of the nature of the mansion, we’d stay up there for days at a time in the summer and never go into town. This was OK by me, because the mansion contained a big screen TV and a Nintendo. What a treat! It was because of this isolation that I became a devout Xexyz player.

Xexyz can be a pretty hilarious game, because it flat out warns you in one of the later stages that the level boss is “VERY HARD,” yes, it is in all caps. And hard it was, as a young kid, I never beat that boss.

Later in Crescent City, a store opened up called “Jake Stoner’s Gameworld.” The concept was simple: they had a ton of Nintendo games and you could trade two games for one, or one game that they didn’t have already for another game straight across. I often wonder how that shop made any money at all. Either way, when I saw Xexyz in the shop years later, I knew I had a terrible, burning score to settle. And settle I did; I took the game home and beat it that night. Some might say that is the sweetest victory, but it was not. Instead of crossing a game off my list, I almost felt cheated because no greater challenge existed in the game, not even the final boss. That’s how it is with some of these games, though. The difficulty is all mixed up.

Even now when I play Xexyz, it isn’t particularly appealing from a graphical standpoint, and the story is nearly non-existent. The game kind of just seems to make it up as you go along, piling ridiculous “futuristic space names” onto the player one after the other in hopes of making it all fit together at the end. However, despite all this, I’m still taken back, because it reminds me of intimate exploration and sensory deprivation-like puzzle solving. If only everyone had spent a lost five days with Xexyz, perhaps it would be more fondly remembered. Alas, it is not.

Game #10: Palamedes (1990)

From Hot-B, the company that brought you such great fishing games as Black Bass and Blue Marlin comes Palamedes—yet another obscure puzzle game that you’ve never played. Funny thing is, this one sat right next to Puzznic in NVC, often right next to it as NVC employees tried their best to keep some semblance of alphabetization. Oftentimes, I’d scan the rows of games and cough or closes my eyes when it came time to look at either Puzznic or Palamedes.

It’s an ok game, I guess, because it’s relatively fast-paced, and you do have to be on your toes a fair amount. The main problem, like a lot of generic puzzle games, is that it’s not engaging even a little bit, nor does it make you use your head much. Palamedes is mostly a cripplingly boring game of pure reflexes, and if I wanted to play one of those, I’d blow alien spacecraft out of the sky instead of shoot colored dice at other dice.

Game #9: Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll (1989)

I had a subscription to Nintendo Power when I was younger, and I am fully prepared to attribute my voracious readership in that time period to it. So hardy was my thirst for video game-themed literature that I kept right on begging for low-rent video game magazines at the supermarket.

To be honest, I can’t even remember what these were called and the only thing springing to mind is a giant stone head being on the front of one issue. I think it was a story about Amagon, but I digress. These magazines had actual ads in them that were a lot less subtle than Nintendo Power because the entire magazine is an ad.

Since Nintendo only lasted from 1985 to 1993 (1994 had only 13 games), and there are roughly 800 Nintendo games total, there was no way in hell Nintendo Power was going to cover 84 games a month, and this isn’t even taking into account the diminishing Nintendo coverage when Super Nintendo came out. For the games unworthy of the pages of “the Power,” there were these crappy b-rate magazines.

My friend Adam and I pored over these generic magazines together and saw a ton of ads for Flying Dragon. It looked awesome. However, it wasn't anywhere to be found in Nintendo Power. We were so convinced that Nintendo Power had missed a gem in Flying Dragon that we spent a long time tracking it down. No store ever had it for rent, and between our local drug store and Radio Shack, nowhere had it for purchase. Needless to say, we were growing impatient with our local rental outposts for not having it. We were such Nintendo connoisseurs that we thought we knew what was best for “our stores;” we would constantly call them up and ask if they had Flying Dragon, sometimes going so far as to disguise our voices. There’s no way the stores didn’t know that we were doing that, and they probably laughed their asses off after they hung up.

Either way, Adam finally sacked up and bought a copy, and by that I mean he snagged it from Kay Bee Toys in Eureka on his parents’ dime. He spent some time playing it in secret before inviting me over and when I got there, I was disappointed because it sucked. Nintendo Power was right, and the crappy Safeway magazines were wrong. It was then that I realized that advertisers are not to be trusted. Of course this rings true today but back then, you only had the crooked words of slippery ad-men to hang onto. Video games back then were expensive (sixty bucks a cartridge in the ‘80s) and in order to sell those games, they had to downright deceive the kids. In fact, Flying Dragon may have the most deceptive box art I’ve ever seen. It sure looks like the funnest, most badass game ever, but it’s borderline unplayable. I mean seriously, look at this:

I dodged a bullet when Adam got that game. Money was becoming scarcer in my house and I had Christmas coming up. I can’t remember what I got for Christmas of 1989 but there’s a very strong chance that it was better than Flying Dragon.

Game #8: 1943 (1987)

In Crescent City, we didn’t have much. Outside the city limits, we had picturesque mountains, rivers, scenery, nature and all that. Inside, we had the beach. And while that’s cool, you can’t go to the beach every day, especially when it pisses down rain 300 days a year. Even if I could, back in 1987 I was 6 and my mom wouldn’t let me, I’m sure.

But who the hell cares? Just a short walk away, we had The Stockade. When I was 6, the walk was too far but you can rest assured that I could finagle a trip there almost every time I wanted. The Stockade had billiards and ashtrays on all the games, plus they sold pizza and lots of beer. Based on this, convincing the parents to go was a no-brainer.

I got caught up in such a nostalgic rush that I forgot to mention that The Stockade’s primary function was a video arcade. Of course, the official name was “Stockade Pizza.” But while pizza was high on my list of awesome things, a kid can only eat so much. However, I would play video games all day if they’d let me. And I did as I got older. The Stockade would give you game tokens for good report cards, something like three per "A" and two per "B." Additionally, some of the receipts from Shop Smart, the market closest to my house, would have Stockade token coupons on them. These were coveted items. We had a thick stack of them push-pinned to the cork board next to the phone.

The Stockade started out as a giant sweaty room with little to no ventilation. Several arcade classics slept there, all in various states of disrepair. Games like Ms. Pac Man (a perennial family favorite) and Moon Patrol lay about the arcade. My half brother was really good at Karate Champ. I have this theory that everyone has one game that they’re absolutely exceptional at—for instance, mine is Ninja Gaiden. Josh had two of them, Karate Champ and Smash TV. Perhaps he transcended the theory and got two games because everything else about his life sucks.

I even remember one time, after mom and dad got divorced, my dad came and picked me and my sister up in a taxi. He whisked us off to The Stockade. Hint: he was drunk as usual. I don’t know if he was bringing us down there to prove to the rest of his drinking buddies that he had kids or what, but my mom rolled up to The Stockade in a borrowed Fiero, came in there and snatched us up. The whole thing seemed rather silly because the place was literally four blocks away but things escalated quickly; my mom and dad had a screaming match outside and the climax was my dad kicking the door of the Fiero. I was scared and confused and it was probably the only time that I didn’t want to be there.

Eventually, The Stockade expanded and became two giant sweaty rooms. The billiards table bit the dust much to the chagrin of drunks everywhere, as did half of the goofy coin-operated mechanical rides. More and more classic games joined the fray; several of the games were the strange arcade versions of games everyone knows from the Nintendo, like Contra, Ninja Gaiden and Ikari Warriors. As a matter of fact, between The Stockade and the solitary machines dotted across the town in convenience stores and the bowling alley, I had played almost every arcade game that would eventually become a Nintendo game. But where the rest of the country got 1943, The Stockade got Sky Shark and Twin Eagle.

The game in question is an arcade-style World War II themed shoot ‘em up. If all I had played prior to 1943 was its predecessor, cleverly titled 1942, I would have never bothered or even wanted to play it. I’m glad I did though. 1942’s controls are really janky but 1943 refined it in a huge way. This was probably the first time I had ever played an arcade port that looked and felt just like the original. I felt like I was living in the future, even though I was a young boy. I never thought it would get better. Life was awesome.