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.

Game #7: Startropics (1990)

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.

Game #6: Puzznic (1990)

Of all the puzzle games for the Nintendo, this might be the most brain-dead one I can think of. It came out when I was nine, and at nine, I remember picking it up in the video store and wondering why the owner would ever think that offering this game for rental was a good idea.

It’s apparently a rare game and I can understand why, because nobody in their right mind would and should pay the usual $50–$60 for a fresh copy of “Puzznic.” Not even those rich asshole kids that had every weird game ever owned “Puzznic.” I know this because I was friends with a couple of those kids and we all thought “Puzznic” looked stupid and we took an unspoken oath never to play it.

Sad to say that I have since played it. None of the levels require more than three synapse firings until level 3–2 or so, and by that point you’re too bored to care. One thing’s for sure, the best thing “Puzznic” has going for it is a really creepy song you get to hear for exactly 20 seconds each round, that is if it takes you more than 30 seconds to beat a level, which it shouldn’t. And when a 20 second song is the best thing your game has going for it, it should never have left R&D.

Game #5: Monopoly (1991)

I was 10 when this came out, and the Kula siblings waited for this one with bated breath. Our mom’s closet and a small room in our house dubbed “the office” held two separate stashes of board games that we only played when it either rained or our collective boredom was at extreme levels. One of our most beloved board games was Monopoly, only we used mom’s 25^th anniversary edition, special because it had wooden houses and hotels and gold tokens that included the ship and the ultra-rare locomotive. I was always the locomotive because I was older and thus, way cooler.

However, terminal boredom was still not enough reason to keep us attached to a marathon game of Monopoly, as the games ran indefinitely long. Also, my sister was five, so trying to keep her doing anything for over ten minutes was a fruitless endeavor. Trying to keep a five year old playing Monopoly at all is perhaps the MOST fruitless endeavor.

Because the Nintendo was the end-all be all technological advancement, any board game that is released for it is automatically the only way to play. Gone are analog board games. Othello? Who needs it? And don’t even get me started on Pictionary.

That said, “Monopoly” was the sleek streamlined version of the tiresome game that we’d been waiting for. I never owned it, but my sister and I pooled our sad-kid-eye resources and rented this a lot of times. For all the times we rented it, we probably could have bought it outright. Unfortunately, parents don’t think like that.

We were enthralled by the extras crammed into the game: the animated hammer building the houses, the cash register and Capitol building that ate your money, the auction system (which we didn’t care enough to do in the analog version), and the ability to name your character. I usually picked “M U N Y” and thought it was really clever at the time, even though it never stood for anything.

“Monopoly” ushered an era of solidarity in the Kula ranks that lasted for most of my childhood, and to think that it took a video adaptation of an old fuddy-duddy board game to do it only speaks to the timelessness of the lazy video game weekend and the unbreakable bond between brother and sister.

Game #4: High Speed (1991)

There’s not much to say about this one, other than the fact that it might be Rare’s worst game. Essentially, it’s a Nintendo port of the “High Speed” pinball machine, and it’s about as bad as it sounds. It looks like a puddle of melted crayons, but only the ugly colors that you never used.

My only memories attached to this game are those attached to the actual pinball machine, which indirectly ties any memories to the bowling alley or laundromat. And Crescent City’s bowling alley is a lonely old person place. The laundromat is like that too, but with soap.

Game #3: Zen: Intergalactic Ninja (1993)

Note: Some games have little or no memories attached whatsoever. For those, I will still write something, such as gameplay style, a short review perhaps. This is all still new to me.

That said, the reviews will likely be bad because I somehow feel like I have played everything that’s good.

After devouring every issue of Justin’s “Nintendo Fun Club” magazine, my parents were so taken with the novelty of my having a magazine subscription at the age of four that they signed me up for the legendary “Nintendo Power.” Even as a kid, thumbing through the pages, there are some games that, no matter how hard they get pushed, no matter how fancy the illustrations are, you know they’re going to flop.

“Zen: Intergalactic Ninja” came out at the end of the Nintendo’s lifespan in 1993. By that time, the game was featured in the waning Nintendo coverage in the magazine that bore its namesake. The title of the game itself read like a what’s-what of stuff that little kids would find cool. “Zen,” ok, we’d learned that from early-90s ninja culture, though we weren’t sure what it meant; and WHOA, a space ninja? This is what Konami wanted us to think. By this time, years after TMNT had run its course, us kids, we were smart enough to see through this ploy. To top it off, Zen was fighting to stop environmental polluters. This game seemed engineered from the ground up by a bunch of stuffy old people that thought they knew what us cool kids liked, but wanted to send a "positive message." Look guys, we're young kids. We want to see fighting and things blowing up.

Of course, now that the Internet is around, those that give enough of a shit about “Zen: Intergalactic Ninja” to look it up (or even remember it) are mildly surprised to find out that Zen is a comic book character with non-environmentalist roots that reach back prior to the creation of the game.

As far as gameplay goes, I truly believe that Konami could have really been onto something with some minor tweaks and a non-PSA-esque storyline. Basically, the game plays like “Castlevania” meets “Ninja Gaiden.” On its own, this sounds really awesome, and it certainly looks like a winner; the graphics are pretty good, Zen has more than one move and the animation is fluid. The only problem is that the controls feel really sluggish, almost to the point of complete ruination. Some people might find that endearing though, maybe those that can’t handle the frantic gameplay of “Ninja Gaiden.”

One thing’s for sure though, if any of the video stores in my town had carried this game, I’d probably have played it a lot. Alone, though, because I wouldn’t want my friends to feel like I was tricking them into playing some goofy hippie game.

Game #2: Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (1990)

For those of you that don’t know me, I used to play bass guitar in a metal band. However, at the time I joined, I had never picked up a stringed instrument, even though my dad used to play Amazin’ Rhythm Aces covers all the time when I was little.

Before I played bass, I played drums in a decidedly nü-metal band called Atomic Shadow Effect. Our vocalist was a lanky man named Tyon. We played a few shows that went alright as far as crowdless small town shows go. One feeling that was ever-present however, was that our fledgling technical abilities were keeping us back. We underwent a rotating cast of bassists and guitarists, and myself, I learned to play the drums just a few months prior by sitting behind a friend’s $300 pawn shop kit and imitating the drum loop AC Slater plays in the Miss Bayside episode of “Saved by the Bell.” That's a true story.

When we all decided that we’d had enough of that, we went our separate ways, but I remained close friends with Tyon for some time. As expected, time eventually passed and Tyon and I steadily grew apart.

Eventually, Tyon called me unexpectedly and wanted me to hear the new project he’d been working on with a couple other guys. I agreed, and we drove out to the woods to hear them practice.

They played one song, and it chilled me to the bone, because Tyon had lucked into a musical prospect that sounded like everything I had heard in my head when I practiced with Atomic Shadow Effect, the sound that had been begging to be let out; the sound that our combined abilities couldn’t quite reach. I was chilled because in front of me lay what may have been the only four musicians left in my town that had their shit together, and I was on the sidelines. The sound that escaped from this quartet swelled my heart but drove a spike into it just the same. As they played on, I slunk out the back door to go kick rocks in the driveway.

Two practices later, the spike so effortlessly planted in me was just as effortlessly plucked out. Tyon had been talking to the rest of the guys, and they had decided to kick their bass player out and invite me into the fold. I must have been 20 then, and I can’t think of a single thing I wanted more in the whole world. Nothing I’d seen on TV, in movies, in anything, no woman I had ever encountered, no dream I had dreamt was more desirable than this.

Unfortunately, I had never plucked a bass before in my whole life. The guys assured me it was easy, and devised a foolproof method for teaching me: they would write the tabs out (Tabs? What were they? Who knew? I sure didn’t) and provide me with a static-laden recording from practice. Their makeshift tablature consisted of numbers and lines. Eventually I got it, but there was one problem. This was metal we were talking about, and my fingers and reflexes weren’t quite up to snuff. I tried for a week to match the speed of the recordings to no avail. Dismayed, I looked around my room for something to help me.

I saw my Nintendo. I also remembered I had a copy of Ninja Gaiden II, the second in a series of games that was widely regarded as the hardest ever made. Since time was the only thing I had to lose, I decided to play it. Then I played it again. And again.

After playing Ninja Gaiden II for a week, I began to beat it pretty regularly. I eventually decided to beat it 10 times a day. Soon, that turned to 15. After a couple months I was beating the game 15 times a day in about 20 minutes each time. To date, I can complete it in a time that’s second in the entire world.

It was then that I decided to return to the bass. After a couple runs through the song I had initially heard out in the woods, I was playing it with shocking ease. Thank you, Ninja Gaiden II, for helping me accomplish something that I never thought possible, for giving me the first drop of water and keeping me interested in musicianship to this day.

Game #1: Super Mario Bros (1985)

If you were a cool kid like me, this was your first NES game. Alright, just to get this out of the way, that is the first time I am ever going to use “NES” in this entire thing. When I was a young man, there were three systems: Nintendo, then there was Super Nintendo, and there was the cornier Sega. Sure, both companies came out with many other consoles over the next couple decades, but who cares?

The Nintendo came out on October 18, 1985. I was four. I can remember asking my parents for a Nintendo with the most dedicated vehemence a four year old can muster. I’d seen the ads. Nintendo’s marketing machine got my head in a full nelson and pushed my nose in the pixilated dirt. I needed this more than anything else. Two months later, I got it for Christmas ’85.

’85 was a banner year in the Kula household as far as Christmas was concerned. I was an only child, so this was the last year that I would rake in unimpeded loot, and to top it all off I got a Nintendo a mere two months after its release. My half-brother Josh had an Atari and it was ok, but that mess was for old people.

Speaking of old people, what made this Nintendo even more special is the fact that it was given to me from the bag and hands of Kris Kringle himself. He showed up to my house ho-ho-ho-in’ with his big bag of goodies. Both of my cousins got scooters—psh. Santa reached into his bag and handed me a parcel that was shaped an awful lot like the Nintendo set I’d seen propped up in all those commercials. I was such a state of awe that I didn’t care that a mythical being had delivered my hardware, but I did have time to notice one thing; Santa Claus looks an awful lot like my uncle Gene.

From that moment on, I was a four year old on the cutting edge of console technology—the envy of every kid on my block that I didn’t yet know. After being a good kid and making sure all the would-be jealous suckers were home with their crummy scooters, I tore into the packaging. After my dad hooked up the Nintendo to our ancient console TV (with much difficulty), I inserted the cartridge that once lay within the box: Super Mario Bros.

After struggling with it for a few minutes, performing the now-classic rookie parent moves of jolting the controller up when pressing A and completely failing to use the B button to “super speed—“ my own verbiage—I realized Nintendo wasn’t a weakling’s pastime.

Looking back, one thing was much more important than Nintendo—togetherness. My mom and dad would sometimes sit and watch me get farther and farther in Super Mario Bros, all the while cuddling on a couch and cooing over how good I was doing. Mom and dad would alternate playing with me, and when I think about it, this was one of the best times I ever had growing up. We were a family unit, we played together, we rejoiced the trouncing of Bowser together, we all recoiled when we saw how unfortunate looking the princess was. My dad joked that we should have let Bowser have her. The discovery of Princess Toadstool came at unlikely hands though.

It was actually my mother Diane that beat the game first, marking the first and only time that would ever happen in my lifetime. To this day, she jokes about potentially “kicking my ass” whenever I mention that I am either currently playing or about to play Nintendo.

Having read several issues of my cousin Justin’s Nintendo Fun Club, I knew what to expect from Super Mario Bros. except the staggering difficulty. Of course, people around the world are now beating it in under five minutes, but back in December of ’85, the Kula family sat in front of a glowing fireplace sharing Nintendo together, eyes agog when one of us would find a hidden 1-up, in awe at the sheer destructive force of the Fire Flower, and in a collective state of disbelief at discovering the warp zone at the end of world 1-2. It was a truly wondrous time, and the most vivid memory I have of a fully functioning family unit.

An introduction:

Hi, my name is Nicholas. What you've found is my life's telling—26 years of Nintendo games along with anecdotes and reviews of them. Now that I have every Nintendo game at my disposal, I can go back and play all the games I missed. Actually, it isn't that many. There were ~800 games made for the system, depending on who you're talking to and whether or not they consider unlicensed games and/or pirated games to be part of the roster.

I've decided to write the first chapter on Super Mario Bros., since it was the first Nintendo game I ever played. After that, games will be chosen at random, and I will write a new entry every day. I'm going to try my damnedest to conjure up an anecdote for every game, as a lot of my younger years were spent poring over Nintendo's catalog. I hope you enjoy it.