Favorite Video Games: Tecmo Bowl (NES) 1989

No one every picks coach

As a kid I remember going to my friend’s house and getting my ass kicked in Tecmo Bowl every single time I played.  I’d be lying if I said that the game left a positive impression on me at the time.  I acquired my own copy of the game pretty late in the life of the NES, when my cousins realized that I was the only person they knew that still played Nintendo, and gave me all the games they couldn’t sell for money.  Unfortunately, for me it was around that time that time that my Nintendo stopped playing games no matter what kind of “tap the system/hold the reset button/blow it out” ritual was performed.  Fast forward to last Christmas: my wife bought me a brand new Nintendo and since then I’ve been playing Tecmo Bowl, constantly.

Tecmo Bowl (NES) 1989

Everyone agreed you had to blow the cartridges out, but if that didn't work the only thing we agreed on was that whatever the other kids did was laughably stupid.  One time a kid spit in my Nintendo.    

"The Denver _____"

At the time Tecmo Bowl was released it was pretty much common practice for sports games to have fake teams and fake rosters, due to the high cost of acquiring a license from one of the major sports leagues. Tecmo Bowl was one of the first sports video games that let you play as actual players.  A game like Mike Tyson’s Punchout might come out, but all of the characters were ridiculous racial stereotypes and not real people (Yes, I’m including Mike Tyson.)  Tecmo got around this problem by reaching an agreement with the NFLPA (the players association.)  Consequently, instead of the Chicago Bears there’s the Chicago Penguins Wearing a Crown(?)  At least we weren’t the Indianapolis Narwhals, or the Denver Androgynous Elves With a Horn(?)

Narwhals are the unicorns of the sea.  I usually say that out loud and laugh over and over again evereytime I go to The Field Museum.

HUT! HUT! HUT! HUT! HUT! HUT!...

As a kid or an adult none of that shit matters.  What matters is that the team plays in Chicago, and it features the likes of Dan “Danimal” Hampton, “Samurai” Mike Singletary, William “the Refrigerator” Perry, “Momma’s Boy” Otis Wilson, Richard Dent, Jim “the Punky QB” McMahon, and Walter “Fucking” Payton (Fucking was not Walter Payton’s nickname, but I added it because he’s my favorite fucking player of all time.)  As a diehard Bears fan it’s pretty cool not just to play as the Chicago Bears, but to play a videogame from my childhood (1983-2001) in which the Chicago Bears don’t totally suck.  By the time Tecmo Super Bowl was released two years later Walter Payton was retired along with the most of the legendary ’85 defense.

I'd like to play football with her, not for sexy reasons, but because she's a girl and I can probably kick her ass.

Strategy: drink them all when your opponent takes a leak

I don’t want to go too far down that road though.  As cool as Da Bears are Tecmo Bowl the 49ers and Giants are arguably better.  What sets Tecmo Bowl apart from say, Madden 2007 is the chess match that develops.  There are only four plays each team can run, and if you pick the same play as the offense you blitz them for a loss.  If you cover their receiver and the QB throws to him you pick him off.  Dead simple.  The game focuses more on outthinking your opponent and less on being able to hit 13 buttons in the correct sequence when you try to tackle their wide receiver.  There’s still a great deal of skill involved, but there’s a lot less random elements than modern football videogames.  Fumbles, injuries, and dropped passes might be more realistic, but they add an element of uncertainty to a perfectly called play.  Besides, who’d want to play whole 16 game season as the 49ers after Jerry Rice had a season ending injury?  In Tecmo Bowl you might be better at the game, or you might have a better team, but you won’t win on a roll of the dice. 

I'm like Bobby Fisher, but not a weirdo.

I kicked this post off mentioning that as a kid I lost every game I played.  It’s not just that I was bad at video games (I was,) but I didn’t understand the nuances and strategy involved in the game (e.g. ALWAYS cover Jerry Rice.)  Now that I do, the game gets better every time I play.  I can’t recommend this game enough. If you don’t have a wife as cool as mine, or you just can’t shell out the dough, it’s pretty easy to download a ROM of the game and a Nintendo emulator (I use Nestopia) to play the game on your laptop or whatever. 

I was gonna say "I wanna Bear Down on her," but that sounds like assault.  Maybe we could just like get some coffee  and have a respectful conversation?

The Green Bay Packers aren’t featured in Tecmo Bowl.  Not only do all true Americans (and by extension God) hate the Pack, it would seem that the Japanese do as well.  That, or maybe Tecmo only included the 12 best/most popular of the 28 teams that existed at the time, a list which did not include the hated Green Bay Packers. 

As the title would imply, Tecmobowl vs. R.B.I. is a great website for tips, and strategies for both Tecmo Bowl and R.B.I. Baseball.

Tecmobowl.org tends to focus on Tecmo Super Bowl, but the site still features some information on the original; not to mention the ROMs and emulators you’ll need to play the game on your PC.

Favorite Video Games: Doom/Doom 2 (PC) 1993 and 1994

Am I the only one that feels like sweet box art died out with landlines and VHS tapes?

Doom and Doom 2 were probably my hands-down favorite videogames from the time I acquired them in the 5^th grade or so to my first year of college.  Technically I would say that Doom2 was my real favorite, but if I did’t mention Doom I couldn’t to talk about the games’ historical significance, cultural impact, etc.  Anyway, I got both games around the same time, and aside from a few minor details they’re pretty much the same game.  So I now present to you the first DOUBLE VIDEO GAME REVIEW!  That’s just one review about two games (kinda.)

Doom (PC) 1993/Doom II (PC) 1994

If only real life was as easy as a videogame.

Aside from being one of my favorite games you can make a pretty strong argument that Doom was the most influential first-person-shooter of all time.  In fact up until around 1997 first person shooters were typically called “Doom Clones.”  The term was pretty accurate too, most of the “Doom Clones” coming out around the time were just “Doom in the Old West,” “Star Wars Doom,” or simply “Doom on a different space station than the one in Doom.”  This is partially due to the fact that many of those games actually licensed Doom’s engine, and partially due to the fact that to this day most game designers are fucking hacks.

"Gloom" not not be confused with "Boom," or "Loom: A Weaver's Tale"

Doom is essentially a refinement of the “shoot monsters/find keys/ find exit” formula established in Wolfenstein 3D.  Doom replaced Nazis with demons, and instead of a knife you get a fucking chainsaw.  In Doom you could also go upstairs and downstairs, which may not sound that exciting to all but the most dedicated of Slinky enthusiasts; however adding the ability to move up and down as well as side to side, not to mention varying light levels, non-perpendicular walls and stereo sound allowed the designers build levels that were way more interesting and complex than those seen in the likes of Blakestone 3D.  Speaking of complex, how about that movie Inception?  Why was Lo Pan living in that dude’s brain?  Talk about confusing.

Maybe he was looking for a girl with green eyes?

The graphics were pretty fucking awesome too.  It seems quaint now, but I can still remember looking out the window in the first level (E1M1) at the mountains.  I had never seen graphics like that in a videogame before.  It looked (kinda) like (pixilated) real life mountains.  The graphics may be outdated, but I think they hold up pretty well.  They certainly look better than early polygon based graphics from the mid to late 90’s.  Talk about shitty.  I know it “was the future of gaming,” but we didn’t live in the future in 1997.  Now that we do, we can all agree that women’s breasts look better when they’re not jagged and pointy, like a bunch of glass triangles smashed into a boob shape.

These boobs on the other hand, look great. At least they would if she'd just move her fucking hand.

One of Doom’s best features is probably the one that left the biggest impression on the FPS genre: the deathmatch.  Doom was the first FPS that allowed players to go head to head and try to kill each other.  It was awesome, because killing people is awesome.  I used to stay up all night playing Doom LAN games with my cousins.  (Personally, I preferred using the desktop to the laptop, because it had better controls; although it was much easier to screen look with the laptop.)  Doom deathmatch was so popular at the time that companies even wrote programs like “antidoom” to shut down games on company servers.  Today deathmatch is easily a bigger part of the FPS genre than the single player campaigns.  I think it’s safe to say that 14-year-olds wouldn’t be able to hurl homophobic slurs at each other while playing video games across the world wide internets if Doom hadn’t paved the way almost 20 years earlier.

Cutting edge

Computer piracy is a crime (a sexy crime!)

And there it is the exact moment in my video game review where I start to feel really fucking old.  If you want to play Doom or Doom 2, both can be found relatively easy if you’re willing to resort to piracy (Arr!)  If you manage to get the game or already have it lying around somewhere ZDoom is an excellent front-end program that adds extra features like mouselook, and more importantly ZDoom allows Doom and Doom 2 to be played on a modern PC.  Both Dooms are also available in the recent Doom3 re-release and in the X-Box marketplace, although only the downloadable version for the 360 offers internet deathmatch support.  Just don’t play a bunch of Doom and shoot up your high school.  I know it seems obvious, but I wouldn’t have said anything about it if it hadn’t come up before.  Too soon?   

"This game's so fun I'm going to shoot up my school...?"  Hard to believe people were that sick before the internet

The programmers for Doom were inspired by Evil Dead II and Aliens.

Favotie Video Games: The Warriors (PS2) 2005

Warriors come out to play-eee-ay!

Can you count suckers?  I say the future is ours if you can count, and if you can count you might have noticed that the only movies I reference more than The Warriors on this blog are Star Wars and Conan the Barbarian.  I’m not alone either; The Warriors is probably the second most sampled movie in hip-hop after Scarface, and every black dude I know has seen the movie.  This is probably due to the fact that The Warriors is fucking awesome.  It’s one of those movies that all cool people seem to like.  Rockstar games also saw fit to pay homage to the classic film with the 2005 video game aptly titled The Warriors.  Can you dig it?  CAN YOU DIG IT?!  CAN YOU DIG IT?!?  Well, I certainly hope so cause that’s what the rest of this blog post is about.

FUN FACT: All black people are cool.
What about Steve Urkel?
Fuck Steve Urkel.

The Warriors (PS2) 2005

The Warriors videogame obviously takes a lot of its cues from the film, but the gameplay is rooted in the side scolling beat ‘em ups of yesteryear; games like Final Fight, Streets of Rage, and Streets of Rage 2.  The game’s plot takes place before the events of the film, with the movie acting as a sort of an extended final level broken into different chapters.  The whole thing still feels very unified and captures the look and tone of the film perfectly.  The game is dark and violent, but like the film it never feels brutal or nihilistic.  Both take a more comic book-y approach.  People get stabbed, shot, and Molotov cockatailed, but hardly anyone actually dies.  I do remember however that when I was playing the game my mother took issue with the game’s liberal use of f-bombs (people saying FUCK), but she watched Deadwood all the time.  Oh, “that’s how cowboys really talked.”  Well that’s how gang members would really talk in a videogame version of a dystopian future as imagined in the late 1970’s.  Geez mom.    

A girl portraying the character Poison from Final Fight. 
FUN FACT: The character Poison was retconned into a tranny after it was pointed out that Final Fight's protagonists were beating the shit out of women.
FUN FACT: This cosplayer is all woman, and boob.
 

It’s also one of the best two-player co-op games in the last decade.  Other than Portal 2 it seems that videogame developers have completely forgotten the importance of playing a videogame with your little brother.  You can kick his ass in Call of Duty or whatever but eventually he’s going to get tired of getting the shit kicked out of him and refuse to play with you, forcing you take turns.  Ughh!  It’s not my fault you suck at Doom 2.  What puts The Warriors co-op mode above even Portal 2 is the ability of the second player to join and leave the game at their convenience (kind of like in Sonic 2.)  This Feature is great if you’re anything like me and you have to go to the bathroom all the time.  Maybe I should see a doctor.

"Quit being such a bitch.  Where are you going?... Don't tell mom I said bitch."

I mentioned playing videogames with my younger brother because this game was an important bonding experience for us.  In between viewings of the movie we each beat the game a few times co-opting large segments of the other’s play-through.  I helped my brother 100% the game, and then a couple of years later we started playing the game again and on the hard difficulty we 99%ed the game on a single play-through, meaning we didn’t replay the levels over and over to hit the various goals.  We just played the level until we got them all without consulting a walkthrough.  It’s less nerdy than it sounds.  We just had a lot more free time back then. 

The Chief from Carmen Sandiego was the radio announcer in The Warrriors film.  Finding Carmen Sandiego may not help you reach 100% but it couldn't hurt.

I’ve played The Warriors about as thoroughly as it’s possible to play a game, and I can say without a doubt that it’s one of the best video games of all time.  If you like fun check out The Warriors, if you don’t maybe consider Russian Roulette.  Unfortunately PS2 games will not play on newer versions of the PS3, and the game has not been ported anywhere else that I’m aware of so it might be kind of hard.  Playing a video game from a few years ago might be hard but fortunately in America acquiring a gun is never hard, so there’s always Russian Roulette.  Those guys in Deer Hunter looked like they were having fun, right?

Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!

Congratulations! You've captured Carmen Sandiego.  If you didn't manage to beat the game in 1986 you should know that she just fucking escapes from jail again right after you catch her and the game starts over.  Good thing you learned your state capitols. 

Favorite Video Games: GTA Vice City (PS2) 2002

Personally I prefer the PS2

Lame.

It’s unfortunate that most of the things people “like” about the 80’s are either ironic (sigh) or tinted by the rose colored glasses of youth.   My Little Pony, Saved by the Bell, Def Leppard, and Top Gun all sucked then and suck even worse now.  That list doesn’t even include things too lame to enjoy ironically like apartheid in South Africa or Anthony Michael Hall as a regular cast member on SNL.  All that being said, I enjoyed being a kid in the 1980’s. I didn’t have a whole lot of responsibilities, hell I didn’t even have to wipe my own ass for a few years there.  And all the stupid bullshit of the era is more than balanced out by awesome things like Naked Raygun, Robocop 2, Iron Maiden, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ’85 Bears and Centipede.   

I don’t mean to sound like I’m knocking nostalgia either.  No matter how shitty things may have been in the past, they’re still comforting because your memories are part of you and your experiences make you who you are.  If it was up to me I would have been nailing cheerleaders and doing sick karate moves when I was 14 instead of playing SEGA, and bitching about how much I hated everyone in my Junior High.  In retrospect I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything, except maybe the ability to get all the pee out of my dick before I put it back in my pants.  How do people wear khakis?  Anyway, since we’re on the subject of nostalgia…

Vice City (PS2) 2002

I think nostalgia is a big part of Vice City’s appeal to most people.  Other than Weekend at Bernie’s, it’s hard to imagine a piece of media that evokes the feel of the 1980’s more than Vice City.  For the most part the game presents itself as a larger than life caricature of the era rather than a Wedding Singer style 80’s wankfest, or a Weeknd at Bernie’s style 80’s piece of shit.  The game is like a larger than life version of Scarface (1983) crossed with Miami Vice (1984.) In fact, the credits sequence for Miami Vice could almost be a credits sequence for Vice City except for the Jai Alai player.  For a show that tried to be hip and of the time, that guys seemed kind of out of place.  Almost 30 years later Jai Alai remains as popular as ever, which is to say not at all.  Also why do minorities like Scarface so much?

I know you're a gangster, but do you really need a Tony Montana toilet?

Vice City’s soundtrack is also great, and it evokes the mood of the era better than any photograph or Ken Burns documentary ever could.  While most 80’s musical retrospectives focus on one genre; bad music from the 80’s (e.g. Cyndi Lauper, Poison, Duran Duran, Thomas Dolby, The fucking Go-Go’s.)   The Vice City soundtrack has some crappy songs, but paints with a broader brush and uses old school hip-hop, new wave, heavy metal, and everything in between to paint a picture of the decade.  Many of the songs featured are little lesser known, probably in an effort to save money, but I think it serves the game well.  While artists like Madonna and Prince certainly defined music in the 80’s their careers continue on to this day and much of their respective catalogs are considered classic.  On the other hand, The Vice City soundtrack features Gold by Spandau Ballet.  Gold makes Frankie Goes to Hollywood look like Judas Priest.  That is to say the song is so wimpy and lame it could not possibly be a hit in any decade but the 1980’s.

Aside from the soundtrack, Vice City is my favorite entry in the GTA series because it improves on GTA3, without getting serious and “realistic” (tedious) like its sequels San Andreas and GTA4.  I’m not a total loser, so I don’t get a lot out of getting virtual drunk and playing darts with my imaginary girlfriend.  I don’t look to GTA to give me some sort of Maxim interview* style girlfriend fantasy.  I look to GTA to provide a consequence free environment to sell cocaine, wreck sports cars, murder hookers, and all the other things I’ll never do in real life.  On that level Vice City never disappoints.  I played the shit out of this game in college and I can’t think about it without getting all nostalgic for the brief time when I had nothing to do but drink beer and play video games to the wee hours of the night.

All the fun of maybe getting laid, except for the part where you get to ya' know...cum

Looking at the date I just realized this game came out 10 years ago.  I’m getting old.  I wonder if the 1980’s will seem as weird and distant to my kids as the 50’s seem to me.  I don’t know.  I just hope they port Vice City to a modern platform so they might be able to get at least a little taste of, if not the 80’s at least the early 2000’s.  It would be a shame if they have to learn about hooker murder from a stranger.

"Hurry up and grab the $60 before it disappears.  You didn't kill those women for nothing. Son"

*I hate how Maxim asks Jennifer Love Hewitt or whoever “What do you look for in a guy?” or “What’s your idea of a perfect date?”  No one reading that interview is ever going to fuck Jennifer Love Hewitt so who gives a fuck?  “OMG! She says she loves a guy with a good sense of humor! I’m buying a ticket to Hollywood!”  Ideally you could ask her about sexual positions or any bisexual experiences she may have had, but at least ask something relevant.  She’s not a Rhodes Scholar but you could ask her about some funny anecdotes from the set of I Know What You Did Last Summer, or some other movie she was in.  Does she still work?

JLH from April 2012's Maxim.  As far as I can remember she hasn't been in a movie for at least ten years

 

Favorite Video Games: Fallout 2 (PC) 1998

If you haven't seen the Road Warrior stop reading this right now and go do it.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ve no doubt surmised that I love beer, sports, beer, and skinny girls with large breasts.  You’ve also probably noticed that I’m kind of a nerd.  One of my all time favorite nerdly pursuits is playing good ol’ fashioned Pen and Paper Role Playing Games.  Unfortunately I don’t get to play them as often as I’d like because I, ya’ know, have a life.

Livin' large and in charge.

Probably the best representation of a PnP RPG I’ve ever experienced was my favorite video game of all time: Fallout 2.  If I was doing a top ten list of my favorite video games, as was my original intention, this would be the end of my video game reviews.  But since I’m doing a series of blog posts I can kind of just do what I want because I’m the John McClane of bloggers.  I play by my own set of rules. 

Different game, also awesome.  I would appreciate it if from now on everyone imagined my blog was being read to them by Alan Rickman

Fallout 2 (PC) 1998

Muscle Beach is now Pork Chop Hill

Fallut 2 takes place in a post-apocalyptic future as imagined by America in the 1950’s (reel-to-reel computers, radiation zombies, and giant mutated insects.)  The setting was a radical departure from the wimpy Unicorn and Pegasus worlds of most RPG’s; especially at the time the game was released.  In other words: that Fallout 2 used to fuck guys like Final Fantasy in prison.  I loved it immediately.  Growing up in the shadow of the Cold War, I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with nuclear war.  Also, the Road Warrior is one of the single greatest movies of all time and any game in that tradition is alright by me.

Also, as I understand it all women will dress like this in the post-apocalypse

As good as everything that is even slightly associated with The Road Warrior is, I would say that it was even more important to me that Fallout 2 played much more like a PnP RPG than any other video game I’d ever played before.  At their best PnP RPG’s allow Sex Commando the Barbarian bi-cleave skeletons with his chainsaw/electric guitar.  Fallout 2 is a bit more structured than that, but not much.  You can do drugs, become a fluffer for a porn studio, or get married and pimp your wife in a seedy brothel (as if there’s a lot of non-seedy brothels.  It’s not like anyone walks in and says, “Oh, this seems nice.”)

It should be noted however that some brothels are much worse than others.

If my description makes Fallout 2 sounds kind of Gran Theft Auto-esque, it’s not.  Any actions you take have consequences.  If you do something that most people find off putting/morally reprehensible (killing a child, becoming a slaver) most NPC’s will thereafter refuse to talk to you.  If you want to go through the game indiscriminately blasting people with a laser mini-gun you can do it, but you might game-breakingly kill an NPC.  For what it’s worth I always play as a good character, because that’s how I see myself in real life: a little rough around the edges but basically a good guy; deadly but not aggressive.   A hero…  But what’s a hero?  I am, and so is my character Dixie Nourmous.      

R.I.P. Peter Steele

Dixie Nourmous is a beacon of hope for the people of the wastes; fortunately for the poor devils I discovered this game in college.  In college I would frequently be playing Fallout 2, look out my dorm window, see the sunrise, and say, “Oh shit, it happened again.”  It’s true that at the time I could stay up all night playing video games and drinking beer with almost no negative consequences, but it was the writing in Fallout 2 more than anything else that frequently put me in that situation.  The game had a great plot, interesting dialog, meaningful choices, and most importantly well rounded characters that I actually cared about.  Some have even gone so far as to call Fallout 2 the “Downton Abbey” of roleplaying games, and by some I mean me just now.  Actually the more I think about it Fallout 2 is more the “All Creatures Great and Small” of roleplaying games.

Don't pet the radscorpians Dixie Nourmous!

I could keep going, but fortunately for you dear reader, I edit my work.  Anyway I could write a book about Fallout 2, and I still don’t think I’d be any closer to capturing the experience of playing the game.  You really just have to play it yourself.  Of course if you’re anything like me playing with yourself isn’t something you skip out on very often.  Updating your blog with one hand isn't a skill, it's a gift.  Speaking of...

I've been waiting months to use this picture.

I know they re-released it a year or two ago, but if you need help playing Fallout 2 on a modern computer check the tech forum at No Mutants Allowed.

Stuck?  Check out Per Jorner's comprehensive walkthrough.