Random Nintendo Memories!
Nintendo Memories? Well that’s not very original. Since I’ve already blown it before Word One, I may as well go all-in. In addition to the lame title, I’m also imbuing every photo below with an irritating Miami Vice-style color overlay. And all jokes to follow will be stolen from, I don’t know, Austin Powers.
It all started when I came across that book, hiding in a cabinet at my sister’s house. My sister is much older, and she and her husband used to babysit me often. They had a Nintendo, one that I played much more often than them, and along with it, this book. This glorious book.
Published in 1987, The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide is easily among my favorite pieces of literature ever. I’m not saying that for effect. I really, REALLY love this book.
For me, the little instruction manuals that came with Nintendo games were often as interesting as the games themselves. I loved The Legend of Zelda, but I doubt I would’ve loved it as much had it not come with a 5000 page manual filled with awesome sketches and goofy enemy descriptions.
If you grew up with a Nintendo, you know what I mean.
And this book was like getting 90 super-sized versions of those instruction manuals, all at once!
The guide told the stories of Nintendo’s top titles, and even better, it listed all of the characters’ names and traits. I was never as into video games as a lot of you were, but I sure loved the lore. I must’ve drawn the cast of Castlevania a thousand times, despite sucking so badly at the game that I never made it past those twin mummies.
It was all thanks to this book.
Thumbing through the pages again sparked a lot of memories. Some were your everyday video game memories. Others were weirder. Using The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide as a mutant version of a photo album, below are ten random memories about ten random Nintendo games.
Game: The Legend of Zelda
Memory: Water of Life Quarter Drinks!
In The Legend of Zelda, Link could purchase the “Water of Life” – a jar of brightly colored who-knows-what, which replenished his life meter. The blue one only worked once, but you could use the red one twice. (And because writing about video games is an open invitation for split hairs, yes, I know that drinking the red version just transformed it into a single-use blue version. I’m not here to be a historian. I just wanted to make crude doodles over crude photos.)
I was obsessed with the Water of Life. It seemed so appetizing. I am the only idiot who ever chose the Water of Life over the Heart Container when that weird old guy got with the giving. No regrets here, partner.
Anyway, the memory. I don’t know if this was a regional term, but as kids, we were always buying these small beverages colloquially known as “quarter drinks.” You may remember them as the intensely colored punches sold in barrel-shaped plastic containers. The quarter drink was an important part of our lives, available in every school and at every local deli. Not a day went by without one of those down our throats.
Once I realized how much a cherry quarter drink resembled the red Water of Life (or “2nd Potion,” as you may remember it), I was beyond hooked. I was young enough to be gleefully stupid, and every time I drank one, I’d act like I was turbo-charged and able to lift cars over my head. In truth, all I did was run around like a buffoon, knocking into things. Drinking four ounces of sugar water was never that fun again.
Game: Pro-Wrestling
Memory: The Elusive Great Puma!
Pro-Wrestling was amazing, and definitely one of the Nintendo games I played the most. I was a huge wrestling fan, so it was only natural, but it helped that the game was so damn good. With zany characters, vicious maneuvers and music that lent itself to a lifelong hum homage, it’s still utterly playable today.
Every time I read though The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide, I’d stop and stare at the Great Puma. You could only fight him by beating the normal wrestlers like a hundred times in a row, and I was nowhere near good enough to pull that off. God knows, I tried.
It’s fitting that this supposed puma looks more like a sea monster, because for a while, he was my white whale. All I wanted was to fight the Great Puma, just once. To this day, I’ve not been successful. To this day, it drives me fucking crazy. I wouldn’t even care if he beat me in five seconds. I just want to see him in real life.
Game: Super Mario Bros.
Memory: I have never beaten this game.
Yep, it’s true. I’ve never beaten it. I feel like everyone else on the planet has, even if they’re only being born at this very moment. It’s the biggest shame of my gaming career, which is really saying something.
Please don’t take this to mean that I wasn’t a serious Super Mario player. I had a Nintendo; of course I was. I just had so much trouble with 8-3, and even on the rare occasions that I’d survive it, 8-4 was right there to destroy me in ten seconds.
I’m well aware that it’s possible to beat, and for many, even easy. Honestly, I think it was my nerves more than anything. A kid’s world is small, and if you couldn’t beat Super Mario Bros., you were in serious trouble. Maybe I just thought about it too hard. At this point, I’ll take any excuse I can get away with.
It feels good to confess. I never saved the princess.
Game: Ikari Warriors
Memory: The Paul and Vince Fiasco!
This memory only has a tenuous link to Ikari Warriors, though I did play it often enough. It was one of the few games my brother-in-law actually had. (And it was the only one he had that I didn’t.)
Okay, so Paul and Vince. These were the relative Rambos of Ikari Warriors: Two cut dudes who blasted their way through scores of enemy troops, and for some reason, spiders. They were hardcore, they had big guns, and they feared no bomb.
They also shared names with my two best friends, Vinny and Paul.
If memory serves, neither Vinny nor Paul owned Ikari Warriors, but boy, did I make a mistake in letting them know about the coincidence. Paul and I were always vying for Vinny’s affections, and he knew a hook when he saw one. For several days, they became the “Ikari Brothers,” thick as thieves and waving plastic guns at every opportunity.
I was the odd Matt out.
“Ikari Brothers?” Give me a break. Paul heard me, I said “warriors!” He upgraded it to “brothers” because he knew that their fabricated bond would only become stronger that way. Bastard!
Stemming from this, I made two important vows. One, never say things that could be used against me. Two, kill Paul.
Game: Ghosts ‘N Goblins
Memory: Those awesome monsters!
I’m really glad that I owned Ghosts ‘N Goblins, even if I was terrible at it. In my defense, I’m pretty sure everyone was. Ghosts ‘N Goblins is freakin’ hard.
Even if I could never get up to the levels that featured them all, I always enjoyed looking at the various monsters. They were just so weird and colorful, and they had such a clear pecking order. These monsters were easy to love. I was always more into bad guys than good guys, and if you liked demonic villains, Ghosts ‘N Goblins was pure art.
I used to draw those creatures constantly. I was especially fond of the “Big Men,” who were giant oafs who looked something like big baby gargoyles.
The only two that trumped the Big Men were, of course, Satan and Lucifer. Yes, they had a Satan and a Lucifer. Satan was more or less a big red bat, but Lucifer, my God! Lucifer is still a strong candidate for the scariest video game character ever. He looked like Ernest Borgnine from The Devil’s Rain, but with an extra head in his stomach.
Game: Kung-Fu
Memory: Finally, a game I was good at!
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably drawn the conclusion that I wasn’t very good at video games.
You’d be correct.
It didn’t matter much when I was alone, but if I was with friends playing Contra or something, man, I did everything I could to hide it. Usually, I’d just turn the competition into a goof, dying on purpose and making a big show of it. I was annoying and everyone hated me, but that was better than the alternative.
Go on, think back. When you won a race in R.C. Pro-Am, you rubbed it in. I didn’t want to be the rubbee every time I played R.C. Pro-Am. That sticks and stones idiom has a nice sentiment, but it’s completely false. When they made fun of me for racing like a three-fingered blind moron, it hurt.
So you can just imagine how much I overcompensated when I finally found a game that I was good at. One of them was Kung-Fu. A great game, but more importantly, a game I’d absolutely mastered. In Mr. X’s mansion, nobody could stop me. Not the blue guys, not the white guys with the knives, not the magician with the trick head. Not even Mr. X himself. I ruled that shit, and at every opportunity, I made my friends watch me do it.
Like they cared. They were the Ikari Brothers, for Christ’s sake. They had oppressed nations to go save.
Game: Metroid
Memory: Dessgeega!
It’s become the running theme to say “I sucked at this game,” but in my defense, I never actually owned Metroid. Only played it over friends’ houses. Metroid really wasn’t the kind of game that you could master at a friend’s house, unless it has been previously established as a “Metroid Day” or something.
How far could I reasonably get in the ten minutes I had before someone busted out the damn Nerf toys? I take no responsibility for my Metroid failures: I was a victim of circumstance.
But I was still very familiar with the game’s characters, all thanks to The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide.
For some reason, I was especially intrigued with Dessgeega. “Intrigued” could be understating things, because for a while, pretending I was Dessgeega may have been my favorite hobby.
Keep in mind, I had no idea what Dessgeega did in the game, and could only make assumptions based on the picture above. I did my best, flapping my arms like an eagle, and repeating the name “Dessgeega” in a horribly shrill voice. All the time. Everywhere.
Discounting the fact that I just learned of a Pokemon based on an Easter Island moai, Dessgeega is the coolest video game character that I know almost nothing about.
“Dessgeega! Dessgeeeeeegaaah!”
Game: Castlevania
Memory: The Castlevania Sleepover Night!
One night, I slept over Vinny’s house. The same Vinny who moonlighted as an Ikari Brother, but thankfully, Paul wasn’t there. Vinny’s real brothers were, though. After an evening full of ping pong and Monopoly, we settled into his older brother’s bedroom, taking turns at Castlevania.
Eventually, we stopped playing, but the game remained on, blasting its haunting tunes forever and ever. Or you know, until morning. The night turned into the usual sleepover firestorm of Cheetos, freeze tag and mayhem, all set against that scary Castlevania music. I don’t think I realized how much of an impact it was having on our night, but in retrospect, it so was.
That might’ve very well been my first Halloween party, even if I didn’t know it, and even if it wasn’t Halloween. To this day, whenever I hear Castlevania music, I think of Vinny’s old house. They really liked mayonnaise over there, and his mother used to make so many plates of salted green apple slices.
Weird.
Game: 1942
Memory: Everyone makes bad decisions, sometimes.
For some ancient birthday, my brother gave me a present in the form of a simple IOU. In the near future, we’d go shopping for a new Nintendo game. Yes!
Problem was, I was impatient. Well, duh. I had the guarantee of a new Nintendo game. Any kid would’ve been impatient.
That same day, we ended up in a nearby strip mall, for God knows what. Bagels, groceries, I don’t know. But I knew that this strip mall had a comic shop, and I knew that this comic shop also sold a few Nintendo games. Even if waiting for the superior selection of Toys “R” Us would’ve been wiser, getting my game and getting it quick was all I could think about.
So, in we went. I can’t remember every game that they carried, but the fact that 1942 was the one I went home with should clue you in about their selection.
1942? Seriously?
Look, this isn’t me ragging on 1942. It was actually a decent game, but it certainly wasn’t a title that was just cause for calling every same-aged kid in the neighborhood, to brag.
1942? What did I care about 1942? I immediately regretted my decision. Even on the car ride home, I spited my brother and said that “1942″ meant that there were 1941 better Nintendo games. Somehow, this had to be his fault.
Jeez, I had the golden ticket! A Nintendo game of my choice! And it wasn’t like my library didn’t need the boost.
It gets worse.
I don’t know what the game’s normal price was, but this was just some random comic shop in a junky strip mall. It played by its own rules. 1942 cost 40 bucks, and my brother had already set a strict limit of 30. Not only did I choose 1942, but I had to front $10 of my own money to get it!
Again, I don’t seek to offend fans of 1942. I became one myself. But part of the joy of getting a new Nintendo game was the idea that you were joining a club. 1942 had no club, believe me.
Game: NONE, THIS IS ABOUT POSTERS.
Memory: THINGS RELATED TO POSTERS.
On the inside cover of The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide is a small-sized version of the poster that came with a zillion Nintendo products. You know the one. With R.O.B. leading the way, several rows of NES game images tantalized us. There were many variations, including plenty without R.O.B., but they all looked relatively alike.
I don’t know if I’d call it my favorite poster ever, but it was certainly the one that I tacked up the most often. Over the course of adolescence, I probably hung a dozen of those babies on my bedroom walls. It was almost to the point where the real thrill of a new Nintendo-related acquisition was getting another poster to tack up.
I’m not sure how to end an article like this, so here’s that picture of me wearing my homemade Bigg Mixx mask again.
Thank you for reading.
Consider yourself lucky you never passed the mummies on Castlevania; what’s up next (Frankenstein and the flea man) has to be the most frustrating boss ever born out of pixels and code.
Then the reaper, which isn’t as hard but easily as frustrating, and then Dracula whom was the first boss I ever saw that had two forms. I was so happy when I beat him, and then, suddenly, new creature, new life bar, nearly instant stomping death.
holy Crap I used to have this book! Not rememebred it in well over 20 years thoguh.. I wodner what happened to it..
This article made me a little insecure.
I used to play Kung Fu against my brother, who is a couple of years younger than I am. He utterly destroyed me every time. I could not get anywhere. I could hold my own in other games but in Kung Fu, it was humiliation at his hands every single time, right out of the gate.
Many years have passed, and I eventually grew up and married a kung fu teacher. I have studied with him for over ten years. There is a wooden training dummy in my laundry room. If my brother wants to fight me now, I think I can take him.
Mario Bros seemed so tough at first, but I finally beat it after an older friend showed me the 99 lives trick with the turtle shell. And technically it’s not cheating, it’s totally in-game and there’s no code or anything. It does take stamina though, it’s not easy to jump on the same turtle shell over and over for like an hour and a half straight. Sometimes I wonder if that planted the unconscious seeds that would later grow into full-blown TMNT fandom.
Still haven’t beat SMB 2 though, but thanks to the magic of my Game Boy Advance I can keep trying until my thumbs bleed. I think there’s just that special something about eight bit games that makes them look more like abstract art than just crappy video games. I like to think of them as “postmodern neo-cubism”. Sounds kinda fancy like that.
Never beat the original SMB. I’d actually have about 8-12 lives saved up and lose them all in 8-2 and 8-3. Now that I know the trick for getting 10o or so lives, I’m gonna download an emulator and go for it… maybe not pure, but I will rescue that princess.
I also think that the old NES (and even many SNES) games were much harder than today. In fact, many were frustratingly difficult. I remember when a game genie became available for rental at the nearby Blockbuster. I picked it up and over the course of 3 days one summer, I finally beat ALL of my games… pretty much just to see how they ended. I think that games are able to focus a lot more on the story being told, and you are essentially an interactive part of that story. You become fully immersed in your character and beating the game is how you progress in the narrative.
1942 really wasn’t that bad. It helped that when I was a kid, my favorite WW2 fighter was a P-38.
I actually never even owned a copy of SMB. I got the crazy deluxe NES with ROB and the gun, so my starter games were Gyromite and Duck Hunt, no SMB. I also had a best friend that lived across the street that DID have SMB and we tended to not buy games if the other one had it.
I also loved that players guide. Mine had a sticker I got from a grocery store vending machine (another tie-in to a recent DD article). It wasn’t a nintendo sticker, though, it was a sticker that I always thought looked like a patch from a letterman jacket. So mine had a random fuzzy 0 on it.
I was able to pull off the SMB 1,2 & 3 upset when I was a kid but it was not beating Ninja Gaiden 2 that, to this day, is one of my biggest regrets. No game on earth could make me lose my shit the way that game did…it didn’t even come with a cool manual either. One of my greatest memories was when I subscribed to Nintendo Power and I received the Dragon Warrior game pack. Oh what halcyon days those were.
kingklash’s Mighty Metroid Game List:
Metroid (NES)
Metroid II (GB)
Super Metroid (SNES)
Metroid Fusion (GBA)
Metroid Zero Mission (GBA)
Don’t have a GameCube or Wii, so no games for those, but I am looking for Prime Pinball for my DS Lite/DSi XL/soon-to-purchase 3DS XL.
Desgeega hops around like a madman.
My Mario-related story of shame? I never beat Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins when I had it on Game Boy as a teenager. I kept dying in Wario’s last transformation, when he has the fire flower. I’d be doing great until I lost my bunny ears, and it was all downhill from there. I did finally beat it on an emulator last year, but it’s hardly the same thing.
Also, I never beat Pokémon Blue :$ I beat the Elite Four, but then immediately lost to Gary. I was so ashamed that I never did try again – I’ve played the game since then, but never as seriously as that first time around. And with this one, I KNOW I am alone in the videogame world.
But I AM an unabashed casual (and retro) gamer. And personally, I think all those hardcore dudes who’d rather play CoD than get freaky with their girlfriends (I’ve heard several true stories first-hand) are complete losers. I may be a nerd, but they are the real dorks.
/tangent
I used to enjoy taking risks on offbeat “independent”titles for the NES.Now, I must admit that I had a management position at a convenience store that paid $350/weekly salary(not bad for a 19 year old in 1988)and could afford to take chances.Prior to that,There was a mom & pop shop in town that rented NES games for 99 cents a night so you could take a test drive.The weirdest game I ever bought was called “Pinball Quest” a truly bizzare game.
I have Pinball Quest on my PC via Gamefabrique. It is a oddly-concieved game, but one I having fun with.
Oh man I forgot about that book. I’d study each game’s section and fantasize about playing them. It’s nice they showed you the monsters you couldn’t see unless you were a master player.
Quit raggin’ on 1942 man, it had it’s moments. Pretty sure there were some very un-PC swastikas in that game on the giant planes.
Oh 1942. I actually loved the arcade game, and I remember the day I picked it up for my NES.
I seriously thought the game was broken. The sound and music sounded so….Atari. I actually thought that my game was defective.
Little did I know that 1943 came out later and was in every conceivable way, the superior of the two games.
You live and learn I suppose.
Ah, those instruction manuals. The ones with the enemies in the back were always the best, especially if it showed them all and had their names, too. I drew them all the time because I couldn’t draw Mario or Simon Belmont.
Wasn’t it great when the manuals had totally false information? Like the one for Mega Man said you could press “up” to jump and press “down” to duck!
this book looks like x-e to be honest
I’m assuming you came here from an outside link. This is X-E, heh. Part 2, at least.
RC Pro Am… yessss!!!
I can completely vouch for some of the difficulty in Mario being due to over-thinking it.
I, like you, am generally poor at video games. But when I was about 3 years old I could DESTROY Super Mario Brothers. My parents used to go to the bowling alley all the time, and instead of watching me while they were there they would just dump me off in the arcade.
Why? Because they had a Super Mario Bothers arcade game in there, and in its dim glow I was invincible.
While I was there all of the local teenagers would give me quarters so that they could watch me play. I would go through the game from start to finish and, usually, without dying. Once I finished it another one would give me another quarter to play it again. That continued until my parents were done bowling and took me home.
I can’t gloat very much, however, because today I couldn’t beat the game if my life depended on it. Even once I got a little bit older I couldn’t cope with the difficulty. I remember sitting in front of the TV at home, about 5 years old, full of more anxiety than any child should have to experience as I tried to guide Mario through the stages. I was being beaten by the game I used to own. I started thinking about it as I played, worrying about it, and my talent was lost.
It’s never returned.
Have you given Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels a play? Everyone rants and raves about it being so much harder than the original, but I find the opposite to be true. I can’t say I had any real trouble beating it. There were parts where it was tough, but not too tough.
Ghosts ‘N Goblins, yeah. That one’s ridiculously hard. I know you’re a fan of Adam Warlock/Thanos. Have you given The Silver Surfer game a try? That one without a doubt, has “This is bullshit!” difficulty. I mean, how the hell are you supposed to win without the invincibility code? Without exaggeration, I would call it the hardest video game I’ve ever played.