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.