NOW PLAYING: SPECIAL RETRO EDITION

Player One: Staff Member #716
You know, I’ve never really been sure what the criteria is for choosing the games The Bork and I review in this column. We’ve just always written about whatever it was that we were playing that month. We cover new games now and then, and other times you’ll find us talking about something that’s two years old. It just seems like whatever is occupying most of our free time is the game that winds up getting reviewed. So it’s in that spirit that we’ll be waxing nostalgic this month about a bunch of old school games we’ve been revisiting lately.
The first classic I’d like to mention is certainly one of the oldest of the old. Shit, I think it’s older than me! It’s called Dodge 'Em, and it plays on the Atari 2600. Game design back then was a much simpler science, but it produced some of the most fiendish, addictive, and fucking difficult games ever. Dodge 'Em is all of the above. The premise: you are an orange car, driving counter-clockwise around a square track. Not a circular track. This is Atari. Driving clockwise is a computer-controlled and apparently severely depressed purple car, who wants nothing more than to smash into you at high speeds. You have to collect all the dots on the track while changing lanes to avoid this motherfucker. Simple. But just beating the first level has got to be one of the hardest tasks in all of video game history (next to completing the first Zelda game; I’ve been working on it for ten years now and I’m only on Level Six). It’s like Pac-Man on a crack high; you wind up flying around this track so fast that you don’t have time to even react before the purple car smashes you into a jumble of giant square pixels. And the simplicity of it acts almost as a challenge to your ego: you keep playing, game after game, because you think you should be good at this.
Next up is an eight-bit NES title that no one has ever heard of, but deserves as much recognition as it can get: Vice Project Doom. This game is somehow able to be a perfect indicator of what the industry was 13 years ago, while simultaneously being way ahead of its time. Mostly a side-scrolling action platformer, VPD had a bit of game play variety, including a damn good Spy Hunter-knockoff car chase, as well as a first-person-view shooting level. What made the game so memorable, though, was the movie-like presentation that has only now become the standard in video games. The artwork and framing of the story sequences were easily on par with those of the Ninja Gaiden series. Vice Project Doom was set up like a movie from start to finish. Hell, you played the first level of the game before the opening title! How cinematic is that?
There are tons of games I’d review here if I had the space or the motivation to keep writing: Lost Vikings on Genesis and Super NES, Outlaw and Moon Patrol on the 2600, and Battletoads, StarTropics, and Skate or Die on the good ol' NES. I’m proud to say that I own actual cartridge copies of all of these, as opposed to playing them through emulators on my PC. There’s just some Zen-like quality about the experience of having to blow the dust off the connector pins for about ten minutes before the damn thing will work. Love it.
Player Two: The One Called Hairless Bork
Oh, man. I’m on Level 2,000 with one life and two hearts left, and I have to take out the final Goomba King... WTF?!? Ah, hell! Plasma cannon to my face... fuck. I'm dead. Game over! Fuck! Come here, my brother, so I can beat your face in.
You guys remember those crazy days playing ancient video games, where you spent all this time on a game only to die, get pissed, and beat up your brother? I do, at least. I've been through about ten brothers. They all had the same name.
Anyway, my point is, video games back then had a tendency to easily piss you off. Unlike nowadays, where you can save a game at anytime and not lose any time playing. Maybe you could say I was just a kid that angered easily.
I decided to test this theory. I took my console and a television to an English tea party. I decided to play the original Super Mario Bros. Sure enough, game over! I got so pissed that I smashed their English teapots, and threw the controller smack-dab in the cleavage of an old English women’s titties. That's where things got nasty.
They brought out their hairless gorilla named "Hank The Love Mammal". One thing led to another, and the gorilla wound up strapping me down and strip-waxing all the hair off my body! (The price I pay for these game reviews! How come this shit always happens to me and not 716?)
Classic video games took a lot of dedication to play. Like Adventure Island for NES. You played as a little islander, and you had to make your way through the island. The crazy thing about this game is that it never ended. Honest. It was a tough game, and had no ending. I got past Level 69, and it took me back to the first stage... but now it was called "Level 70"! That shit was pretty commonplace, though; old games never ended. Pong never had an ending.
The final game I would like to mention is, of course, Super Mario Bros. 3! That game will live forever in my heart. I knew practically every goddamn secret in that game. Warp whistles, life-up tricks, secret rooms and items, and all the different suits you could wear. That stuff was so damn entertaining! Doing all these things made you think you were so damn clever. SMB3 had so much variety that it kept up the replay value in the game. Mad props to the Brothers, indeed.
After you read this article, maybe give it up for the old school. Go ahead and dust off that old console, and see what memories you can dig up.