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Time
To Play The Game
By Tome
I don’t know why I allowed myself to be dragged into this. Seems that Gamepro or EGM or Nintendo Power or Play Fucking God Damned Station Magazine (Official) had decided to trot us "oldie but goodie" game characters out of semi-obscurity to plug Nintendo’s new stupid fucking Metroid games. I don’t know
why I agreed to even come on this show. The mercenary gig that I had down
in South Central America was at least keeping food on the table and a
thatch roof over my head (most of the time, damn tropics). It could be
that that Mondalvande cocaine-and-coffee cartel wanted me snuffed out.
Whatever it was, I hopped the first plane to the Bay Area and ended up
on this demeaning, degrading fucking show. Yesterday was rehearsals, the
boys from Nintendo couldn’t even be bothered to have Samus show up to
the set. They told us that she wasn’t supposed to know which loser with
whom she’d be going out on the much-publicized, well-chaperoned, scripted
"date." Yeah, like a famous bitch like her would be caught dead
with the likes of us. I mean, she’s beloved and shit, she made
the progression from eight to sixteen up to thirty-two bit. Hell what
would I have to offer a fully-polygonal woman in thirty-two-bits? I’m
still composed of 512 pixels of four colors and an alpha channel for chrissake.
I have a sneaking fear that we’re just here for comic relief. "Hey kids with your Game Boy Advances, check out what characters from The Dark Ages looked like! See how pretty Samus is in comparison? Now buy Metroid Fusion because she’s a hottie!" Fuck... Did I just say that? I’ve had about fifteen whisky sours in the Green Room before coming out here. Hell, you’d need it to steady your nerves when you’ve a nine-foot skateboarding gorilla standing over your shoulder, breathing its foul, stale, hot breath down your classically-cool brown leather jacket. At least my fashion sense didn’t go out with the last ice age, you fucking mid '80s failure. Hey, keep your goddamned jutting, underbitten chin up, fucker, at the current rate that those Gen-X shiteaters that were in middle school when I was kicking the shit out of their NESes suck up stupid fucking nostalgia trends and shit them back out into the yapping mouths of consumers (as they had already done with Scooby fucking Doo and Trans fucking formers and soon to do with G fucking I fucking Joe), in about three years T&C Surf Designs will be popular as screwing in silk sheets. Buck up, buddy, at least you weren’t the main character from an uninspired Ninja Gaiden clone... (ed. note: see the fucking sidebar)
Speaking of that wall-sticking sonofabitch, why didn’t these cheap mother fuckers at the magazine that’s sponsoring this newest of lows that I’ve stooped to yet drag him out of retirement? Oh... that’s right, he had the "happy ending" and "wrapped-up story" thing going on. That, or people love him. If you ask the basic layman on the street which of the veritable scads of ninja shit that was shoveled into the roaring furnace of capitalism back in the eighties, who do you think they’ll remember first? Ninja Turtles or Ninja Gaiden? Naturally, I remember Ninja goddamned Gaiden, mainly because those grassfuckers at American Sammy decided to slap me in the most weak-sauce, uninspired, cynical ripoff of Ninja Gaiden that they could get away with without paying royalties to Tecmo, you know, like how Sammy got away with ripping off Rolling Thunder, lock stock and barrel in Codename: Viper.
Part of me wonders why I never see Viper at the Sammy family reunion? (ed. note: that’s because C:V was a fucking Capcom creation, you simpering sissy. Oh, and fuck you for your first stage. Ripping off Ninja Gaiden I can deal with [NG sucked dick anyway], but your desecration of SPY FUCKING HUNTER will earn you my ire throughout perpetuity.) Last time I was at the Sammy Reunion, Mongo and I got ripped on cheap scotch and Lowenbrau and started hitting on the Pachinko Sexy girls. For the "cheap guy with a gun" from a fighting game and "tough loner mercenary" from a side-scroller, we sure got our ASSES KICKED by those demure little Japanese girls in their fukus. Mongo got his arm broken by the one with pink hair. I merely got my drink spilled on my classically-cool brown leather jacket, but god was the blue-haired one cute. I think I’d chalk our failure up to my being drunk and Mongo’s being an infernal fucking twat, but I digress.
Today was the dress rehearsal, the other contestants were dragged out of obscurity and set behind these embarrassing fucking pedestals, likely lifted from a likewise obscure "party/educational game" that tried to sell the NES not as something that lonely, fat kids sat in front of and tapped away at the keys all night while their muscle-tone and mental acuity became atrophied to the point of uselessness, but as a SOCIAL EVENT OF THE MELLINIUM [sic.]!!! Games like Jeopardy and Anticipation tried to sell the Nintendo as a "learning tool" and "social interaction center." Naturally, these games did about as much good for their target audience’s social skills as that ridiculous "Power Pad" mat for those ridiculous track and field games that, for some reason, Nintendo thought that people enjoyed playing (okay okay Caveman Games was pretty cool, except for the fucking "carnosaur vault"). Yeah, “hammer button A as fast as you can and hope your heart doesn’t give out because you’re flailing your arm faster than a hummingbird beats its wings” does not translate into challenging, compelling gameplay (unlike, you know, memorizing boss patterns and the ability to select a pistol whose shells travel about as far as you could throw a spitwad. Now those were games and you little insufferable pansies wouldn’t make it past my second goddamned level without savestates). Thankfully, the track and field genre has all but dissolved into the ether and the platformer is still alive and kicking, no thanks to the efforts put in by stalwarts such as myself and Viper (and to a lesser degree, Captain Saver, that boomerang-chucking Megaman poseur, Shatterhand and M-309 Gunner) (ed. note: again, Viper was a CAPCOM game, not Sammy, although it does bear all the traditional Sammy trademarks, notably ripping off more popular, fun, stylish games in order to make that quick, cynical buck at the expense of Rolling Thunder-starved videogamers, desperate for just one more fucking hit. They got their hit, like the sickly-sweet dose of Methadone that the state issued the character from whom I am lifting this monologue. They wanted their fucking hit, they got their fucking hit. And oh boy, did it sting the veins like battery acid and inflame the skin, face and eyes of whomever used it... Then again, Namco's own Rolling Thunder NES port sucked so wholly and completely that Creed came to it for professional-level training on proper suction procedure).
Beside me was the aforementioned Thrilla Gorilla, the "star" as it were of both the T&C clothing line and their second tie-in game. T&C 2 was a sleeper hit, what with the dismal failure of the first Town and Country game, an impossible pile of bits that likely enjoyed a previous life as a can of Spaghetti-Os which through the gears of karma-lubed cosmic machinations ended up behind the incisors of a rather large giraffe, who mangled and masticated the simplistic noodles, then immediately regurgitated into a black plastic bag, the order of semicircular:kinda straight pasta shapes becoming the resultant game code. Fuck, that game was impossibly frustrating, I mean like Battletoads frustrating. I had to kill fifty of those fucking jumping red ninjas that like, throw darts and shit at me to earn the money to buy that god damned game... Yeah. I bought it. I’m so ashamed of myself... I also remember a time when video games cost fifty fucking bucks instead of a few moments of your time at 8 Bits of Joy. Hey, to all you assholes that emulate, fuck you. You're raping my heritage. I'd hate to end up as a recurring fucking joke on one of those insipid "emu-humo(u)r" sites that clog the internet's infrastructure like the cheeseburger grease that cakes the walls of the fat, lazy kids that played these games.
Over to the far left, beyond Thrilla’s heaving, hairy chest and stylin' hat, we find the red-armored Xain’d Sleena. Well, I think that’s his name. Not much is known about Xain'd, except he’s going to win this competition, that’s for goddamned sure. Thrilla and I had the mothballs removed from our more tender orifices because a slender sliver of the gaming populace remembers us, if not from actual gameplay then from the pages of Nintendo Power. You know, we were the filler articles before those weird Legend of Zelda cartoons. You probably read about our antics while on the shitter or jerking off to the renderings of Princess Toadstool in the Super Mario World comics (ed. note: Fucking A right, Hart. I have a full-size blow-up of Toadstool in Luigi’s duds with a fuckin’ bomb in hand and a scowl on her sexy, sexy face... god yes, Toadstool, you should never have gotten back into your stupid pink dress... Oh dear, I have revealed too much about my sordid life as a jerker of ecchi. I hope that nobody discovers my shameful secret! SOBBING, WEEPING [Princess was a dickchick anyway]). But Xain'd? Who is he? He's an enigma, an enigma wrapped in a riddle and smothered with a creamy secret sauce. First off, he looks a bit too much like Samus for his appearance here to be anything more than coincidence. Yeah, he's here to take the prize, no doubt about it. Both he and Samus wear stupid-looking red armor, both appear in tedious, impossibly-hard-to-the-neophyte games, fight a stupid, illogical battle against overwhelming odds and have a somewhat nifty spaceship that's pretty much completely ineffectual. If this isn’t a publicity hack by the boys from the Big Red N, then I have the sexiest face ever rendered into five pink pixels.
But I also wonder why this isn't a Nintendo Power sponsored gig? After all, Nintendo’s Propaganda rag seems that it would be the only one with the kind of clout (I heard tale that they have photos of Samus in some rather... uncompromising positions with Falco and Slippy at the Summer '93 company barbecue, but this is strictly conjecture, see also: Nintendo fucking owns her like I own that pint of whisky that’s been slowly osmosing out of my stomach into my bloodstream). to haul her away from her busy winter season schedule to make this stupid promotional appearance. Hell, I didn’t even think that EGM touched Nintendo properties, what after Rare’s hissy-fit about their negative review of Battletoads, that eternally frustrating and overrated piece of shit, but here we are, in some huge EGM-sponsored nostalgia wankfest. If, of course, you could call it that. We’d been standing here for about an hour and a half before the host came out, bedecked in his stupid, stupid pink sports coat with little embroidered magenta hearts. All of us stood aghast at his terrible fucking ensemble, even Thrilla, who was desperately badgering both myself and the strangely stoic Xain’d whether he had played his awesome, rad to the max game for the NES and how far they had gotten and god wasn’t the blue desert stage sweet? Fuck, I just kinda smiled and nodded, in hopes that he’d have gotten the hint and shut the fuck up. Oh how I wish they hadn’t made me check my grenades at the door, for I, so badly, wished to cram about fifteen of them down Thrilla’s fucking monkey face and kick him out of a speeding bus or train or what the fuck ever. Where are my villains when I need them? Where’s that werewolf that throws fucking girders when I need him? Xain’d on the other hand, just polarized his faceplate and did his best to tone the jabbering of an insane, feces-flinging, skateboarding orangutan whose face had been on more shirts and hats and condoms than either of us will ever see in our miserable fucking lives.
It wasn’t until I noticed something... something odd and eerie about this guy... His bow tie, his insufferably smug expression, his atrocious taste in clothes... It’s Howard god damned Philips. I wonder where that little Nester shit is. He’s probably pulling the fucking strings from behind the curtain over to the left, like some sort of obscene, unfunny Wizard of Oz (okay, the Startropics strip was funny, but that’s a rare exception to the Law of Unfunny Nintendo-Related-Humor) "Alright you miserable little shits." Howard spat through his clenched teeth. The strands of tendon stood out in ropes under the loose, tobacco-yellowed skin of his neck. "I fucking hate all of you assholes, I fucking hate this stupid pink jacket, and I don't want to put up with any of your shit, you get me?" There was a general muttering and tugging-of at collective collars on the windward side of the podiums. Oh yeah, this totally wasn't going to be an exercise in blinding fun that the dickpullers at EGM let on. "Okay, the gang's all here, eh? A stupid fucking monkey, a fucking Sammy character and some dipshit in red. Hey, I played all your games. They all sucked. Especially you, you assfucker..." Howard lowered an accusatory finger at Xain'd, who just shrugged Philips off. "I put about fifty goddamned quarters into you back in '87. You're harder and more unfair than the last two levels of Rolling Thunder and Strider put together. Fuck you buddy, I'm going to make your life hell." He sneered, trying to come off menacing and angry like a jaded, cynical ex-gaming journalist now stooping to host an industry-sponsored fluff event in a pink jacket just for enough of the green stuff so as he can buy Name Brand ramen noodles and peanut butter for his three screaming kids to greedily chorf down like goddamned rats when he gets to see them his one supervised weekend a month. Instead he had the tone of a whiny, sad man who was forced to partner up, for the love of God, Nester in order to get the prerequisite yuks out of a typical issue of Nintendo Power. I think he was also in The Wizard... I'd feel sorry for the man, if he weren't wearing that insipid pink coat. Tee hee hee. Retard.
"Alright, we're all fucking here, right Pete?" I assume he was speaking to the director, hidden away in his secretive, mirrored booth up on high, far away from the prying eyes of the studio audience, who naturally aren't just plain amazed by the magic of television. Hey assholes, if you were meant to understand this stuff, you'd be out making your own shows instead of sitting on your chicken-fried asses and watching such puerile fare as this. "You need us anymore? No..? Good, I'm fucking done. You assholes can go back to your roach motels until tomorrow. I'm the fuck out of here." And with that, Howard Philips just dropped his microphone and walked offstage, tossing his stupid pink and magenta jacket to the ground, not even trying to hit the offstage coathook. I could imagine him going back to his "dressing room" (handicapped stall), seated resolutely on the shitter, watching TNN rerun Star Trek and crying into a fifth of bourbon, menthol hanging from his lip, all the while some poor old veteran, paralyzed from the hips down bangs on the stall door, screaming and pleading at him to "shit or get off the pot, you fucking washout" because his colostomy bag is burstin' at the seams and he needs some place to drop his wet, greasy eliminations. With that, the three of us big contestants parted ways for the evening. Thrilla was desperate for some company. He kept begging me to go out to dinner with him, drinks with him, smokes with him. Fucking hell man. I was the star of an Original (sorta), Non-Licensed Property here, buddy. I don't need to put up with hangers-on like him. If he wants to go and drink banana daiquiris, why doesn't he go kick it with Donkey Kong or that Super Monkey Ball jerk? Don't their kind associate as is? I can't handle one more moment of that nitty simian's stale, hot breath down my neck. I bid the monkey a fond adieu, the only way a man with a laser-whip and a pouch filled with grenades can. He got the hint and scuttled off. I made the well-informed and democratic decision to get so goddamned drunk that my children would wake up wall-eyed. I have distinct, crisp memories of heading to the bar, perfect recollections of me telling the smarmy git of a barkeep to leave the bottle. After that, though. Everything was a complete blank. Just the way I like it, baby... (tomorrow's adventure, coming soon, I swear - ed.)
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Hot, Heavy, Wet Sidebar Action! The Sammy has been guilty of ripping off, copying, duplicating and shamelessly rehashing games for nigh-on twenty years now. Everybody knows about Vice: Project Doom, Pachinko Sexy Reaction, Guilty Gear (and the abominable Guilty Gear X) and the scads of cheap, one-off deer/turkey hunting light gun games, and how they're all unoriginal, uninspired heaps of sheer shit that The Sammy hopes in vain that some sucker kid will belly up to the bar and plunk his quarters into said machine because the Street Fighter 3 or Crisis Squad machines have a line behind them two dozen deep and a small fortune in quarters lined up along the cabinet. For the less discriminating gamer, American Sammy has always been there for us. On the average, Sammy games could be had for less than their Top Shelf Name Brand counterparts; If one does not mind purchasing his Sammy games the weekend of release, as I know most of you do every time Capcom shits out another iteration of Mega Man or Street Fighter (and similarly how I'm already "in line" to get GTA:VC, despite my not owning, nor never having an intent to own a Playstation 2, but I digress). If one is willing to wait, all he needs to do is head on over to the local Game Force or Funcoland and peruse the almost instant availability of like-new, used-for-one-week Sammy titles. Hell, I dug up a copy of Guily Gear X a mere weekend after initial release, for a whopping marked-down-one-time-only-we-must-move-stock-liquidation-price of eighteen bucks. Had I a Dreamcast and a desire to blow my wad on a lame ass Sammy fighting game, I gladly would have jumped on such a bargain. Oh but it was not to be... Dejected (and in research for the huge-ass Ninja Games issue of Zeroes Unlimited [check your newsstand today!]) I set about downloading a peculiarly titled game from the apparently also now-defunct EdgeEmu. Ninja Crusader, the rom header blissfully warned me. If all went well, this'd be decent, like Shinobi, and not sheer, utter garbage like Wrath of the Black Manta... What I found turned out to be more terrible and horrifying than anybody, anywhere could even imagine... See, Hart over there loves to bitch and moan and whine about how he's such a shoddy, cynical, lazy Ninja Gaiden clone. He's so much more than that, actually. He's a shoddy, cynical, lazy Spy Hunter clone and a shoddy, cynical, lazy Lethal Enforcers/ Operation Wolf clone. Hart had never known, nor will he ever know about Sammy's dark little secret... Hart's tragic siamese twin brother, who after post-cesarian separation was shipped away to Japan to be raised and cared for and trained in the finest Ninja dojos... trained to be the best Ninja Game ever produced... Sadly, both Ninja Crusaders and Vice: Project Doom revealed themselves to the world about a half a decade after Larry Hama, Eastman & Laird and Sega had made the world sick and tired of goddamned ninjas already... Tragic, as
Ninja Crusaders had the potential to be remembered as the best Ninja Game
of the bunch... And oh yeah, Ninja Crusader TOTALLY didn't Without much more further ado, let's get this stupid shit sidebar out of the way so I can go back to drinking whisky and tequila and cran-grape and pissing myself in my sleep because I'm too fucking drunk to move, kay!
Shurkien: Some
Variety Of Stupid Chain: A
Stick: A
Sword: RATING: GAY, Don't even bother downloading it. |
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Bastard
Sons of Zeroes Unlimited © 2002 the Bastard Sons of Zeroes Unlimited.
Zeroes Unlimited © 1999-2000
Zartan Moloch
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Our
hero:
also
your convieniant stock weapon, transforms you into a cute, loveable cheetah
or leopard or whatever, both animals have absolutley no connection with
Japan whatsoever. Ah, but this is a game that takes place after the atomic
holocaust, and surely The Ninja would have visited a zoo pre-destruction-of-all-mankind-except-for-him,
so I suppose that there is some logic, however skewed and tainted by popular
culture in The Ninja turning into a cheetah... Whatever, the cat sucks
harder than his normal form, just it runs faster, and doesn't jump as
high, and is about as weak as... well... a kitten...
useless
than the cheetah walks slower than The Ninja by orders of magnitude, and
attacks by extending its tail. Each tail-thrash is weaker and more inneffectual
than a shurkien, and it is nearly impossible to aim at an airborne threat.
Under no circumstances should you accidentally trigger the Scorpion Special
Animal Attack... uh... Thing.
range,
but it can clobber robots but good. I suggest you use it often, as it's
about the best weapon that our little ninja friend wields. He gets turned
into a birdy, which flies, but has no attacks. Whee...
is about as weak and flimsy as the cardboard sword that we all once fashioned
so as to play Leonardo on the playground back in 