The Nintendo Switch Sucks And I Hope It Bankrupts The Company

Why the Big N's latest hardware is destined to be a colossal failure ... and why this time, the company may never recover from the financial disaster.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Considering my far from secretive love of all things Sega, it would be rather easy to write off all my musings as the rantings and ravings of a biased fanboy whenever I criticize (well, more like condemn) Nintendo. 

But the fact of the matter? When it comes to just how badly the Big N is fucking up nowadays, you can't say I didn't warn you (raise your hand if you predicted the abysmal hardware failure of the Wii U back in 2012!)

The thing is, Nintendo fans are the Bernie Sanders supporters of the video game world (I used to use the Ron Paul analogy, but despite the divergent political comparison points, the simile still works.) For starters, since all they ever do is circle jerk each other, they never, ever leave their little fanboy enclave, so they totally overstate just how many like-minded dildos and dweebs there are in the world like them. Secondly, they're still acting like Mario and Zelda are totally untouchable platinum pillars of interactive entertainment, when in reality those series have been stuck in tailspin mode for at least a decade. They're literally the only people out there that still vaunt and value archaic franchises like Metroid and Mario Kart and have actually convinced themselves that everybody outside the Nintendo cum bubble is secretly envious and revere their legacy games when in reality, don't nobody anywhere give a shit about Animal Crossing or Star Fox no more.  The only people who think Nintendo is still relevant in this, the post iPhone and iPad era, are the clueless, delusional Nintendo nuthuggers who have tricked their brains into accepting underwhelming crap like Splatoon and Super Mario Maker as alleged "AAA titles." For fuck's sake, Nintendo didn't even reap the bulk of the profits from the one successful thing they've done since the Wii came out ... clearly, this is a digital empire in decline if there ever was one. (And for those of you who want to give me a lecture about the "success" of the 3DS, just remember - the original PSP still has it beat by a good 15 million sales.)

So, Nintendo - as a company, a brand name, and a developer of video games - is pretty much the multimedia equivalent of everybody's favorite senile, 70-something communist from New Hampshire. Nothing either of them propose would work, they don't know a goddamn thing about how mainstream Americans think and both are depressingly stuck in the past, hopelessly clinging onto their gilded age accomplishments like the triumphs of 1994 mean anything to anybody except their most rabid of autistic cult members. 

Or, to put it another way - Nintendo, much like the prospects of a Bernie Sanders presidency, is doomed. 

Yeah, everybody keeps telling me the same old tired shit about Nintendo having so much money in cash reserves so they'll never go out of business (although that allegedly astronomical amount - $4.6 billion as of early last year - doesn't sound nearly as safe and secure when you realize all it took was one economic downturn to make a $640 billion dollar company like Lehman Brothers vanish overnight) but let's cut the bullshit, why don't we? The Big N expected to sell 100 million Wii-U units, but they could barely move 13 million. Just six months into 2016, they were reportig operating losses of nearly $400 million. And the same year, Nintendo saw its stocks plunge to their lowest levels since 1990.

This is a company in deep, deep dookie. And after their most embarrassing commercial fuck-up since the Virtual Boy, how did they respond? By literally sinking all their money into the VERY SAME disaster of a consumer product that put them in the hole to begin with. 

Mark my words, kids: the Nintendo Switch is going to be an even bigger commercial dud than the Wii U. The entire gimmick is fucking stupid, the third party support - again - isn't going to be there (why play watered down versions of Call of Duty and Madden when you can play the REAL versions of those games on a REAL console in your living room?) and the first party games are all going to be major, major disappointments. Nowhere is the substandard prospects of this ill, ill-conceived boondoggle of a video game machine apparent than its launch line-up: you know, the one with a grand total of six retail games. 

Hoo-boy, what do we have here? Another Zelda game sure to disappoint (although all of the hardcore Nin-tards will convince themselves it's better than Ocarina of Time, only to come out 10 years later and refer to it as a piece of over-hyped shit like Twilight Princess), a fucking Bomberman game that has the exact same gameplay as you'd find on a TurboGrafx-16 game released 25 years ago, a glorified re-do of a homebrew game (whose overrated inspiration sucked out loud), a fucking Skylanders game, some stupid dancing title and a glorified tech demo. But hey, what about all of these back-up launch titles, like a barely spruced up re-release of Mario Kart, a Puyo Puyo variation on Tetris, a crappy first person cartoon boxing game that won't work and all those lite-RPGs you could probably run on a PS Vita with no problem? Holy shit, we'll be playing those games for decades to come, no doubt. 

And don't give me none of that crap about how this time - for real, ya'll - Electronic Arts and Bioware and Square-Enix and Atlus are going to finally come through and deliver AAA titles for the platform. Nintendo has fucked over every company that's made anything halfway worth a damn on their systems since the Gamecube, and they sure as shit aren't going to start bringing da' muthafuckin' ruckus for a piece of hardware whose big selling point is you take the sides off of it and use it as a really clunky tablet.

Seriously, am I the only person who sees the glorious structural design problem there? This thing is engineered so clumsily, it's pretty much a lock to be the Edsel of video game systems. People, by nature, are fumbling sorts. Just how many people out there do you think are going to break apart their machine to play it on the go, only to misplace their essential controller pieces and make the whole goddamn kit and caboodle totally worthless? Forget people swinging their Wii-motes into their TV sets ... that little design oversight is going to make Nintendo a laughingstock for years and years.

The stunning visuals in Super Mario meets Katamari Damacy truly are some of the best to ever appear on the Gamecube!

The Switch is one of those things like "New Coke," that in hindsight, can't be seen as anything other than a gargantuan mistake - the kind where you can't help but wonder how in the world the people responsible for the blunder couldn't have realized what they were doing was an all-time commercial fuck-up from the outset. It's hard to believe a company with so many veteran, video game businessmen agreed to double down on Nintendo's greatest marketing snafu in 20 years (or why Nintendo loyalists think the thing would've been a success at all), but therein lies some pivotal business wisdom we can all benefit from. 

Since we're talking about a video game company fucking up, I suppose it's only fitting that I use another video game analogy to dissect the great big error Nintendo has committed in the wake of the DS. You kids ever play Treasure's Advance Guardian Heroes on the GBA? Well, you should, not only because it is a kick-ass beat-em-up, but because it has this thing called "devil mode" in it. Now, what in the world is "devil mode," you may be wondering? Well, it's this feature in the game where - rather than start the game all over again - you can literally sell your soul to Satan and become invincible for about five minutes. Naturally, this sounds like a pretty awesome deal - you come across a really hard-ass boss you can't beat, he keeps killing your ass so you more or less turn on the no-kill Game Genie cheat and fuck him up something wicked. The catch - and you knew there was a catch somewhere - is that once your five minutes of "devil mode" invincibility are up, your character just keels over, Lucifer claims your soul for all eternity and it's game over.

Well, in regards to Nintendo, the Wii was their corporate "devil mode," so to speak. By catering - if not flat out pandering - to the casual non-gaming sphere, they certainly opened the floodgate for cheaper, shoddier games to proliferate en masse. Now, had the softcore, women and children-oriented offerings on the Wii and DS not been as successful, perhaps the first wave of iPhone games - shit like Fruit Ninja and Words With Friends and especially Angry Birds - wouldn't have been as popular or lucrative. By focusing on mass appeal shitware games, Nintendo inadvertently drove the dagger through their own hearts, since it was only a matter of time before some other hardware merchant was to come around and do casual gaming even better. 

The funny thing is, what killed Nintendo's post-Wii success wasn't the expected rivals Sony or Microsoft, but Apple and Google. The rise of iPhone and iPad gaming naturally meant a boon for developers of low-power, minimal gameplay products, and since the adoption rate of smart phones and tablets is way higher than any proprietary gaming system, of course all of the shovelware casual game merchants would abandon the Wii/3DS platform for the far more lucrative iOS and Droid markets. The casual gaming market Nintendo abandoned the hardcore for with the Wii, Wii-U and 3DS - women and kids and old fucks - have since moved on to the new portables of gaming, which, in addition to delivering them precisely the kind of low-intensity, low-challenge games they enjoy, also offer them a litany of other social and business applications that "dedicated" video game platforms just can't supply. And oh yeah - it fits in their pants pocket and they can take it with them literally everywhere they go.

Even Ray Charles can see why the Switch is such a horribly stupid idea, and he's dead. You see, Nintendo thinks people play iPhone and iPad games because they are mobile and usually incorporate some sort of delayed WiFi multiplayer element - hence, this horrible, horrible console unveiling video that shows millennials breaking out the controllers for NBA 2K pick-up games at basketball courts and carrying their machines over to rooftop keggers to play Mario Kart. No, you pedophile-supporting, literal hooker hiring 'tards, people enjoy smart phone games because they're on the machines they spend eight-to-nine-hours a day looking at already. They don't absorb themselves into the games for hours on end like dedicated Madden or Elder Scrolls or Forza players, they just need quick and easy hits of instant virtual gratification to ward of the daily rigors of modern ennui. You can play a game for ten minutes, hop off, check Facebook, and go back to cooking dinner or taking a shit or watching Grey's Anatomy or whatever else you do with your life. Whereas commercial console gaming is all about software commitment, the new-wave mobile games succeed by extolling themselves as nothing more than glorified, low-quality time killers. So, in short, the sort of deep, nuanced, intricate gameplay Nintendo used to be known for back in the NES and SNES days is quite literally incompatible with the iPad-era definition of portable gaming.

Yeah, you won't be seeing this happening in public. Ever.

And on the issue of multiplayer gaming, I've never in my life seen a bunch of smart phone wielding neer-do-wells gathered in a physical space to enjoy any kind of competitive  smart phone/tablet game. Pokemon GO is an outlier, but again, that's already proven itself to be a short-term (dare I say it, devil-mode-esque?) fad that Nintendo barely profited from. The likelihood of Nintendo replicating that success with the Switch is practically zero, since the whole Pokemon GO craze hinged on the fact that the hardware adoption rate to play the game was already high ... if not culturally ubiquitous. Unless Nintendo plans on going cross-platform - which means partnering with Apple and Google, something they almost assuredly would never do under their current leadership structure - there is no way in hell the company can do anything even remotely comparable to Pokemon GO. 

That, and no one has really explained how the Switch improves upon the atrocious Wii-U dedicated console/portable hybrid concept. Indeed, if anything, the Switch represents an even worse variation on the concept, which has no successful analogue in any kind of electronics industry anywhere. Factor in the exorbitant $300 day one price tag ... plus the dearth of quality, exclusive games throughout the hardware's first year on the market ... and you have all the makings of an all-time legendary product failure staring directly at you.

There might be some good games released on the Switch. That one Mario game that has him running around in Grand Theft Auto and appropriating Hispanic Day of the Dead culture at least looks fairly fun, and I've been yearning for Syberia III for almost as long as I've been yearning for Shenmue III (except, you know, with not as much enthusiasm.) And first person Super Street Fighter II is the kind of idea so incredibly stupid, you can't help but appreciate the absurdity of its existence. But the rest of the setlist, to put it mildly, flat out swallows. Minecraft variations and re-releases of years-old Disgaea games and generation-behind ports of Skyrim and Dragon Quest and shitty lite-strategy games like Has-Been Heroes and watered down minimal upgrades of Fire Emblem and BlazBlue? For every halfway decent-looking game like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 you're going to get three dozen turds like Cube Life and Farming Simulator and Stardew Valley. The ratio of great to shit games is likely to be even higher than the ratio of the Wii, and somehow, the third-party support - where are you, E.A. and Rockstar? - is even more scant than on the Wii-U. 

Whether or not the Switch will be a marketing failure isn't even a question anymore. The real question is just how big of a product dud this stupid fucking thing is going to be, and if I were a betting man, I'd venture to guess this thing won't even crack 10 million lifetime unit sales. Hell, it may not even eclipse the lifetime sales of the Dreamcast, which may indeed be the most fitting fate imaginable for the Big N. 

At least Sega went down with a dedication to hardcore, innovative and quality games, while Nintendo's hardware waterloo will forever be associated with a crappily-designed, under-powered retread of a console glutted with god-awful ports, shovelware and disappointing first party releases. 

Sega failed, but at least they failed with their heads hung high. With the disaster-in-waiting known as the Switch, however, Nintendo is destined to for a commercial manufacturing demise not unlike the one experienced by their former arch-rival ... only they're planning on going out with their eyeballs swollen shut and their tongues splayed out over the floor.

From the undisputed kings of video gaming to a cash-hemorrhaging, woefully out of touch market-blinded laughingstock. One day, the history books will reflect on the launch of the Switch as the beginning of the terminal cancer that eventually upended the Nintendo empire.

Alas, I wouldn't shed too many tears, Nintards. After all, theirs is a gruesome demise they wholeheartedly brought upon themselves.

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A Tribute To 'Castelvania' on the Game Boy!

Sure, everybody knows and loves Simon Belmont's exploits on the NES, but what about the series' less heralded, monochrome monster-slaying opuses on Nintendo's pioneering portable?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

By formal decree of the great, unwritten Halloween law, I'm pretty much beholden to writing about Castlevania, to some capacity, each All Hallows Eve season. Verily, the beloved Konami franchise is pretty much the video game equivalent of General Mills' monster cereals, in that they're both pretty much their respective medium's face of horror. And alike Count Chocula and Yummy Mummy, the Castlevania games of yore may not necessarily be terrifying, but they nonetheless port about everything we love about the subgenre. The creepy crawlies. The melodrama. The kooky atmospherics. Boo Berry is the entire Universal Monsters cinematic canon you eat, and Castlevania is the entire Universal Monsters cinematic canon you play, and both - without question - are definitely delicious, cavity-and-callous causing delights. 

By now, the original NES trilogy has been written about a million billion times. You can say the same about Super Castlevania IV (yet strangely enough, not the even better Sega Genesis counterpart Bloodlines) and Symphony of the Night, for sure. Alas, for many of the younger gamers out there, the Castlevania they know and love isn't a console-based franchise, but one relegated to the handheld sphere. Indeed, an entire generation grew up weaned on a triple shot of Super Castelvania IV inspired ports on the GBA, which naturally gave way to an even better triple shot of Symphony of the Night inspired games on the DS. But before that sextet hit Nintendo's portable gaming units, there was another trilogy of on-the-go Castlevania games released on the first wave Game Boy, and for some reason, even in today's sometimes nauseating web of ultra-nostalgia, nobody seems to ever talk about.

In honor of the All Hallows eve spirit/me meeting my article-a-day Halloween season quota, why don't we take a look back at the aforementioned Game Boy trilogy and see how the bite-sized Castlevanias fare a couple of handheld generations later? Hope you've got your AA batteries handy, folks ... we might be up all night long for this one.

Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

This is easily one of the ten hardest things you'll ever do in your life and I'm not even joking. 

The first Castlevania game on the Game Boy was also one of the first Game Boy games ever, released a couple of months after the system first hit store shelves in July '89. In terms of presentation, the game looks positively stellar for its time, with very detailed sprites and some downright awesome chiptune music. When it comes to aesthetics, it definitely nails the vibe of the first NES game, for sure.

Admittedly, the stage set inside a haunted block of Swiss cheese was a bit underwhelming...

Alas, the big problem with the game becomes evident as soon as you start mashing the face buttons. The controls in The Adventure leave a lot to be desired, and the jumping mechanics feel especially floaty. Seeing as how so much of the gameplay revolves around time sensitive platforming (hope you kids really like blocks that start falling out of the sky as soon as you step on them!), the game can get very frustrating ... especially since the enemies have a nasty tendency to respawn, thus making the already irritating jumping segments even more teeth-grindinginly aggravating.

Yep. These fuckers aren't annoying in the slightest. 

Perhaps the biggest rub with the game is its length. There are only four stages in the game, and once you get the trial-and-error gameplay out of the way, you can definitely slog your way through this one in half an hour. To be fair, the level design is pretty nuanced and the boss fights are pretty entertaining (especially the grand finale against Drac himself, in a room littered with Stars of Davids instead of pentagrams), but on the whole? It's a game that feels just slightly above average - for a first-time foray, it's pretty commendable, but the clunky controls and ungodly cheap enemies definitely saps the title of a lot of its fun.

Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge (1991)

Oh, you do not want to fuck with a boss armed with a Gopher grabber, that's for damned sure. 

Going the Evil Dead 2 route, Belmont's Revenge is really more of a beefed up "re-arrangement" of the first game than it is a proper sequel. As in, the game uses the exact same level layouts as before, albeit with tougher enemies and bigger caverns to explore. Like in Mega Man, however, you have the ability to choose which castles you want to explore first, and unlike in Castlevania: The Adventure, you actually get to use the iconic "sub-weapons" from the console games, including the holy water and, uh, holy axe, I guess?

All I can say about these bosses is "ewe!" Get it ... because they're rams and shit?

From the get-go, you'll notice that - for whatever reason - the graphics are much less defined than in part one. Indeed, I had to turn my Game Boy around and double check to make sure that I hadn't played the games in reverse order - yes, the graphical downgrade is that bad. While Simon Belmont doesn't look anywhere near as decent as he did in the last outing, the backgrounds are certainly much improved, though, and the music - while not as catchy as in part one - is still fairly decent.

As you can see, there's a lot less anti-Antisemitism going on in this game's concluding battle against Dracula. 

The level design here is MUCH improved. Yeah, every stage, fundamentally, is just a rehash of the levels in the last game, but the stages themselves are just so much bigger and with way more stuff to trudge through. It's not quite horning in on MetroidVania territory quite yet, but oftentimes you'll find yourself with at least two different branching paths to make your way through each room. Really, this is a game that plays more like Mega Man than Castlevania, right down to the frustrating enemies that literally ride your ass until you are dead and the tricky vertical levels with fucking enemies just coming out of nowhere to bump you off a ledge into the abyss. And the boss fights, I'd say, are a lot less entertaining than in the first GB offering ... especially the final hootenanny with Dracula, which is essentially a carbon copy of the last boss battle in The Adventure (albeit, with all of the pentagrams scrubbed and Drac's "final" bat form, inexplicably, removed.) On the whole, I'd consider this one a slight improvement over the first Game Boy game in terms of general game play, although there are still some control issues and seriously, why the hell are the sprites so much shittier than they were in the game that came out TWO years before it?

Castlevania Legends (1998)

Note: you will absolutely fucking hate this part of the game.

Now this is just goddamned ridiculous. Legends is a game that came out in 1998, but it looks and sounds WORSE than a game that came out on the same hardware TEN fucking years earlier. Seriously, the first time I flipped on this game, I was gobsmacked. Compared to how good the sprites were in The Adventure, you're basically playing a stick figure with a ponytail in this one. 

No, this is the final Castlevania game to come out on the Game Boy, not the first. I promise you. 

While the visuals are irredeemably minimal (honestly, the backdrops are so sparse you'd might as well think the game took place in Antarctica), at least Konami finally got the controls right on this one. For once, it doesn't feel like your avatar is wearing a backpack with a 200 pound barbell in it every time you jump and combat is actually pretty smooth and intuitive, even when big black spooky turd monsters keep falling out of the sky nonstop (be forewarned, however, that this game has without question the cheapest enemies in the trilogy - the kinds that give you half a millisecond to react before they fly into you and send you jumping back 20 feet into the nearest insta-kill pit.) Perhaps the most interesting thing about the game, however, is its magic system. Yes, eschewing the "subweapons" hallmark of the venerated franchise, you instead equip and power up five different projectile forms - flame, ice, saint, wind and magic - all of which have specific strategic uses against certain enemies and in certain platforming conditions. And yes, I too love how they just ripped off the Planeteers' "powers" for the different magical abilities.

Hey, they finally gave us a showdown with Dracula worth a shit!

One thing that I really liked about this game - and ultimately, what I think puts this one ahead of the other two Castlevania games on the Game Boy - is the level layout. Although fairly bare-bones, each stage is very, very large, with plenty of different game mechanics (jumping, rope climbing, platform navigating, etc.) Although the stages are much more linear than in the last game, that actually benefits the core gameplay, giving it a more-straightforward "classical" Castlevania feel. That, and this game has what are easily the best boss fights of the trilogy, and it ain't even close. That said, the game does get points for utilizing one of the most irritating game play mechanics I've ever seen - these "trap" nooks that bait you with the promise of power-ups only to send you hurdling into an arena where you have to fight a hundred or so zombies (who keep respawning on top of you). That shit is just the worst thing, ever.

A woman saving the world? Psshh ... now we know it's fiction. 

Ultimately, all of the games more or less play the same, regardless of their minute mechanical quirks. In all three games, you're pretty much screwed if you don't get the whip "fireball" power-up and holy shit, is the "collision" detection ever spotty when it comes to the rope climbing sequences (for the love of god, if you have your thumbs anywhere near the directional pad, you'll drop deader than a burlap sack of door nails.) And of course, in all three, you will curse the skies every time you die and lose the million billion hearts you collected earlier, but then again, that is part and parcel of what the Castlevania experience is all about, I suppose. In terms of overall quality/replayability/being less likely to toss your Game Boy across the room out of unfettered frustration, I'd rank 'em in reverse chronological order (although, presentation-wise, the trilogy certain sounds and looks progressively worse from 1989 to 1998.) But before you haul off and declare Legends the greatest monochrome Castlevania of 'em all, there's one last thing I want to bring to your attention...

SPECIAL BONUS GOOD TIME EXTRA ALL RIGHT HALLOWEEN FEATURE!

Kid Dracula (1993) 

And if you think fighting a Klan member is risque for a Game Boy game, remember: in the NES version, the motherfucker had a swastika tattoo on his forehead, too.

Hey, what is this right here? Is it an unofficial "fourth" Castlevania game on the Game Boy that nobody remembers, which itself is a port of an unofficial "fourth" Castlevania game on the NES nobody remembers? Aye, you would be right on both accounts, and to be frank, not only is Kid Dracula a really fun diversion from the "proper" Castlevania series, I actually think it's BETTER than any of the franchise's canonical appearances on the GB!

Needless to say, it's a WAY better Jason than the one we got in the official Friday the 13th game on the NES.

Eagle-eyed IIIA readers may recognize this game as a remake/reboot of the Japanese-only Famicom release Akumajou Special Boku Dracula-Kun, which was basically the Castlevania version of Parodius. While the scaled-down GB port obviously has to sacrifice a few things in the translation, it's still a mighty fun little platformer, with some of the best graphics you'll ever see on the handheld. The sprites are absolutely gorgeous and do a great job depicting its big, chunky, well-defined characters. Furthermore, the controls are just about perfect, and the big cherry atop the monochrome, battery-juice-chugging sundae? The gameplay is absolutely phenomenal, with well-designed levels, excellent platforming sequences and some truly inspired boss battles.

There are cool details, and then there's noticing the fucking Hindenburg in the background.

There are just so many great things about this game. In a way, it's sort of a combination of Wario World and Metroid, with your eponymous avatar gaining all sorts of new "attacks" - the ability to walk on the ceiling, shoot homing bats at people, etc. - after going to-toe-toe with shotgun-toting chibi Jason Voorhees and, uh, humongous chickens. The stages are also very inventive (my favorite is probably the roller coaster sequence) and the mini-games are an absolute hoot and a half (I'm still not sure which I enjoyed more - the one where you pop balloons while wearing a kaiser helmet on a pogo stick one or the rock-scissors-paper contest where the loser gets whacked over the head with a baseball bat.) Even with a couple of levels excised, this is an absolute must play for all Game Boy enthusiasts and Castlevania hounds alike - yes, even if they did soften the first neo-Nazi Klan member boss into a ghoul who looks slightly less like a white supremacist...

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Seven Insane NES Licensed Games That ALMOST Happened

Oh, the 8-bit titles we could have played...

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo__X

The Nintendo Entertainment System was home to a lot of kooky, quirky licensed games. Wedged in between copies of Punch-Out!! and Tecmo Super Bowl, one could find shoddily made 8-bit offerings exploiting the licenses of such obscure properties as Darkman, Cool World, Widget and Hudson Hawk, along with surprisingly enjoyable titles based on head-scratching licenses like The Lone Ranger, Zen: The Intergalactic Ninja, Silver Surfer and Monster in My Pocket.

As strange as those games may have been, however, we could have gotten our hands on ones that were even weirder. Indeed, at one point in time, there were actual plans to release NES games based on, among other things, ribald Fox sex comedies, flash-in-the-pan late '80s boy bands and surreal David Lynch dramas. Alas, for one reason or another fate never let the masses get their hands on the full-fledged products. Today, let us reflect on the Nintendo Entertainment System offerings that could've been ... and, of course, whether or not we would have even wanted to play a video game about Police Academy in the first place. 

Game One:

A Nightmare on Elm Street 

What made it insane? I know what you are thinking. "Hey Jimbo, you old diarrhea head, LJN made an Elm Street game and it WAS released!" Well, as it turns out, the subpar Freddy Krueger game that came out on the NES was actually a second-build - in the original version of the game, you actually took control of the film world's most beloved child molester and went around hopping in and out of teenagers' dreams, slaying them in all sorts of Grand Guignol ways. 

How close was it to being released? Apparently, close enough to be used as screenshots for promotional posters and blurbs in various gaming magazines. Outside of LJN realizing that marketing a video game about murdering sleeping children to the bed-wetter set probably wasn't the smartest public relations move, there's no real explanation out there as to why the company decided to drastically overhaul the game mechanics. 

Would we have wanted to play it? Well, considering how crappy the official NES game wound up, it probably wouldn't have resulted in anything worse than the final product. The very Friday the 13th-like map system in the surviving screen shots suggests the game would have likely had the same mechanics as Jason's love-it-or-hate-it foray on the console, but as to how players were supposed to control Freddy and harness his nigh-godlike powers in the dreamscape? Looks like that's something that will remain a mystery to everybody except the designers who worked on the prototype. 

Game Two:

Hellraiser

What made it insane? Everything. First off, the license was based on an R-rated horror series about S&M demons and people making out with skinless zombies. Secondly, the title would have come out WAY late in the console life cycle, certainly after the SNES was released. Oh, and did I mention that it was supposed to be a bona ride semi-three-dimensional first-person-shooter using the same hardware as Duck Hunt? 

How close was it to being released? Designed by Color Dreams - yes, the same company that produced all those crappy, unlicensed NES games in those gaudy black cartridges - Hellraiser would have effectively been a 16-bit game jerry rigged to play on NES consoles. According to one of the big wigs at Color Dreams, the game got pretty far into the preliminary design phase; the stumbling block, however, was just how damned expensive it would have cost to produce the game - some sources say that to make up for the design costs, Color Dreams would have had to have sold copies of the game for at least $200 a pop. Advertising materials also promised us appearances by Pinhead and pals on the Atari Lynx and Genesis, but even less is known about those proposed titles than the already mysterious Nintendo game. 

Would we have wanted to play it? For the sheer novelty of it, yes. It would have been a hoot and half to at least see a game imitate Genesis-level visuals on the NES, and the FPS mechanics definitely would have been intriguing. And come on - who wouldn't have liked to at least get a chance to pop a few caps in some Cenobite asses using the same control pad for Mega Man 3 and StarTropics? As freaky as it may be, however, there is a pretty strong chance we did get an opportunity to monkey with what would have been the game engine: legend has it that Color Dreams wound up using the Hellraiser template for what would be the only unlicensed North American release on the Super Nintendo - of all things, the Old Testament-themed Super Noah's Ark 3D!

Game Three: 

Married ... with Children

What made it insane? While there were some inspired choices for sitcom-to-NES translations (The Adventures of Gilligan's Island, anybody?) making a game based on the infamously bawdy Fox TV show was downright head-scratching. That the company that proposed it in the first place wanted to market it as a value-priced, adults-only adventure game a'la Leisure Suit Larry merely adds to the unabashed weirdness of the situation.  

How close was it to being released? Although the game was announced as "in development" by several old school video game mags back in the day, it's doubtful much work at all ever got underway on the title. Considering the company in charge of producing the game, Sharedata, was in deep dookie with the SEC around the time Married..with Children was announced would suggest that the company's designers probably never even got the green light to start making those Bud and Kelly sprites. 

Would we have wanted to play it? Why not? Even if the game was an absolute piece of shit (and judging by the quality of the Porky's games, it definitely would have been a piece of shit), it still would have been something else to commandeer Al Bundy in 8-bit form. Which, ultimately, raises the question: considering how much ass-kicking the Bundy brood did on the show, how come nobody ever mulled making a four-player arcade beat-em up starring the Married clan, a'la Konami's X-Men and The Simpsons coin-ops? 

Game Four:

New Kids on the Block

What made it insane? In the early, early 1990s, pioneering boy band New Kids on the Block were bona fide crossover media superstars, appearing not just on MTV and the cover of Tiger Beat, but in their own comic books, Saturday morning cartoon show and line of action figures. Alas, their popularity was clearly waning by the time Nirvana hit it big, so the idea of someone - anyone, really - ponying up the moolah to make a licensed Nintendo game based on the group would sorta' be the modern day equivalent of Microsoft or Sony paying millions of dollars to make a Foster the People first person shooter or a Gotye go-kart simulator. 

How close was it to being released? Well, we do know that Parker Brothers (yes, the same guys who gave us Monopoly and Battleship) owned the NKOTB license, and apparently, they were far along enough in the process to start mass manufacturing prototype game boxes. As far as digital proof the game ever got off the drawing board, however, we've got absolutely nada: no screen shots, no ROM files, nuttin. 

Would we have wanted to play it? It depends. If the game was a wacky action-platformer a'la Moonwalker, I'd say it's worth at least one playthrough (if nothing else, just to hear "The Right Stuff" in chip tune.) But had it been a collection of Journey-esque mini-games? Eh, I'd prefer not getting my hands on virtual Marky Mark and his Funky Bunch (which, believe it or not, actually did inspire a Sega CD game, which, unsurprisingly, sucked a lot of dick.)

Game Five:

Police Academy 

What made it insane? Often described as "the Friday the 13th of comedy franchises," the Police Academy films are largely considered nothing more than chintzy, throwaway 1980s junk culture. Somehow, someway, the series nonetheless managed to inspire its own syndicated cartoon in the early '90s, complete with its own action figures and comic books. The NES game, rather wisely, would have tied into the animated program rather than the increasingly irritating string of groan-inducing live-action films (I mean, Mission to Moscow? The fuck?) 

How close was it to being released? Close enough that we've got several screenshots available to let us know just how much of a Super Mario Bros. clone it would have been. Although there are no playable ROMs I am aware of, the gameplay stills suggest Tengen were pretty deep into the development cycle, although it's not clear whether the game was anywhere close to going beyond the beta stage before it got ix-nayed. 

Would we have wanted to play it? Eh, not really. Judging from the screengrabs, it looked like a very, very uninspired hop-and-bopper, complete with aesthetics yanked straight out of Nintendo's most venerated series. The inclusion of a timer in one photo, however, suggest the game may have had some sort of "speedrun" element, which at the time, was fairly uncommon for genre games, especially on the NES. Still, from the looks of it, this was destined to be a wholly unremarkable game, no matter how you slice it. 

Game Six:

Rodan 

What made it insane? Making a game based on Godzilla circa 1989 kinda sorta makes sense. It was an obscurer license than most, but what kid via hadn't heard of who and what Godzilla was? Fellow Toho kaiju Rodan had a much lower Q Score with the general public, and presumably, most children would have no idea what the hell that crappy looking chicken-demon on the game box was supposed to be, anyway. 

How close was it to being released? No clue. Pretty much the only evidence we have that the game was in production was the fact that it was listed as an upcoming product in the instructional manual for the first Godzilla game on the console. To the best of my knowledge, no screen shots or other audiovisual proof that the game was ever even in the prototype phase have yet to be made public.

Would we have wanted to play it? Well, there is a pretty good chance we already did. Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters, was released in 1992 for the NES, and odds are, that's the game Rodan eventually evolved into. As to whether Rodan, conceptually, would have played more like the Advanced Wars-style sequel or the hybrid board game\sidescroller original, however, we'll likely never know.  

Game Seven:

Twin Peaks

What made it insane? Dude, somebody at least mulled the idea of turning David Lynch's notoriously weird soap opera into an 8-bit video game. Explaining why that's strange is like having to explain why water's wet, fire's hot or why the Nostalgia Critic needs to be punched in the face. 

How close was it to being released? Well, what we do know is that Hi-Tech Expressions held the rights to the license, and they intended to release the 8-bit adaptation of the quirky ABC hit sometime in 1991. Although news of the game was printed in mags like GamePro and Nintendo Power, not as much as a single screenshot has ever surfaced, however. 

Would we have wanted to play it? Considering how nutty the TV show was - remember, this is a program that featured a backwards-talking dwarf as a primary character - it would have been, well, interesting, to see how the software company would have tried to recreate the utter weirdness of the property. I'm guessing it would have been a point-and-click adventure type game a'la Maniac Mansion or Shadowgate, which means it had a halfway decent shot at being a solid genre game. But had this thing been adapted as a platformer, or a traditional RPG? Yeah, it likely would've sucked something fierce. Alas, it's not like that many David Lynch properties have even been considered for the video game treatment, and for that reason alone, it probably would've been worth experiencing ... if nothing else, as build-up for that dream Eraserhead gem dropping puzzler on the Game Gear we always wanted.

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An Ode to the Old School "Porky's" Video Games

The amazing thing isn't that, back in the day, somebody thought it was a good idea to make a video game based on a ribald teen sex comedy - it's that somehow, we ended up with TWO of them. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Pretty much any console released prior to the NES just doesn't get enough love, in my humblest of opinions. Indeed, today's kids have probably never played anything older than the first Super Mario Bros. game, with the possible exception of Galaga or Ms. Pac-Man. Setting them down with a Colecovision is like asking them to operate an old school P.C. sans a mouse or a GUI - it's a piece of archaic hardware they simply can't wrap their minds around. 

Sure, the graphics on the Atari 2600 were, well, primitive, to say the least and the gameplay on the Intellivision was EXTRAORDINARILY limited. Show a middle schooler today the Magnavox Odyssey and they'll likely have no clue what the hell it's used for - and when you tell the PS4-weaned wee-uns that it's for a gaming system, they'll probably laugh their asses off. 

But what those little turds don't understand is that it is PRECISELY that bare bone simplicity that makes the pre-Nintendo consoles so awesome. No online nonsense, no fancy-schmanzy high-resolution visuals and no bombastic audio (although the sound effects on the 2600 were pretty fucking boss if you ask me; just listen to stuff blow up in Yar's Revenge and tell me that ain't some cool shit.) Here, sheer gameplay reigned supreme; it was just you and a glowing cathode ray tube television screen, and the only thing standing  between you and man's eternal battle against machine? A worn and weathered joystick. 

That said, there were still plenty of dubious video game ideas in the pre-Mario market. We all know the really egregious ones - games based on dog food commercials, games based on the Kool-Aid Man, games based on literally raping Native American women, etc. In the big scope of things, I suppose making a video game based on Porky's isn't the WORST idea for an Atari game - did I mention there is a game on the 2600 about raping Indians? - but it' still a downright bewildering license choice. 

Yes, someone indeed made a video game based on the "classic" 1982 teen sex comedy. In fact, they made TWO of them, although mechanically, they are the same offering, just on different platforms. 

The first iteration was released on the Atari 2600 in 1983 by Fox's fledgling video game subsidiary. For what it is worth, it does follow the plot of the movie as well as an Atari game can, I suppose. As the player, you control protagonist Pee Wee, who according to the game's manual, is out to "get some" - revenge against Porky, that is. 

There are four levels, each representing (sometimes abstractly) sequences from the film - the first being a practically unwinnable Frogger variation that segues into weird swamp-themed pole vaulting mini-game. 

There's really no way to describe this thing unless you have the controller in your hands. Even watching videos online, you really can't grasp just how much precision it requires; to the layman, it looks relatively simplistic - if not needlessly repetitive - but I assure you, this shit necessitates a whole lot more manual dexterity than it appears. It's not just as simple as hitting a button when you get to the edge of the pond, you have to pull off the button and swing the joystick up at JUST the right time and JUST the right direction or else you'll fall into the abyss. It took me forever to get the timing down, but when I did, it felt oh-so satisfying on the mechanical level, like finally hitting the right power chord on a guitar or determining just how much jiggling you need to open a door with a worn and rusted key (which, in turn, saves you about $20 on a new lock you would otherwise have to go on down to Home Depot and purchase.) 

From there, we move on to a Donkey Kong-esque platforming sequence in which you have to navigate your way through the girl's locker room (complete with pixel boobies!) before Coach Balbricker gets a hold of you (and if she does, it's back to the swamp level.) There are about a half dozen different items on screen - ranging from a rope to a cowboy hat to one of those over-sized ACME detonators - each time you access the stage. While conventional wisdom suggests these are items that can be used to slow down the she-wildebeest chasing you, you are actually supposed to drop them down the chasm in the bottom of the screen (you'll see why in a minute.) As with the swamp pole vaulting section, precision here is key. You have to align yourself at JUST the right spot in front of the ladders to move up them, and you have to stand at the very edge of the pit and jump or else you won't have enough air to clear the hurdle. But once you do all that, you get to return to that damn Frogger permutation...

...which should actually be  a bit easier, since all of the hustle and bustle stops because the items you dropped down the locker room abyss - for some metaphysical reason - has stopped the traffic dead in its tracks, allowing you to not only squeak across the playing field sans any worries, but make the most incredible bleep-bloop-bleep-bloop sliding sound in the history of video games while you do so. 

Up next is easily one of the most frustrating segments in the history of humanity (yes, even worse than the Year Without a Summer - probably.) Your little avatar guy is supposed to scurry across those scaffolds - as you can see, however, there are 16 access points to escape the stage, and wouldn't you know it, all but four of them result in dead-ends and you sliding down all the way to the bottom (where Porky will abduct you and send you back to the swamp.) The shameless trial and error gameplay is bad enough on its own, but the controls here are very slippery - sometimes, it feels like you are connecting with the poles, but as soon as you latch on, you fall through. And sometimes, you just get stuck on them, vibrating like crazy until you HAVE to drop all the way to the bottom to rinse and repeat. You will hate this sequence with everything you have in your heart, I assure you. 

On the plus side - just like your mama - the game does have a pretty awesome grand finale. Once you finally make your way up the scaffold, you are treated to a sequence in which Pee Wee gets to run across the stage, hop on a detonator and BLOW the shit out of Porky's establishment, complete with some idiosyncratically awesome Atari explosion sounds. Sure, it may not be Gunstar Heroes quality fireworks, but hey - if your heart doesn't flutter just a bit watching your CRT television flash like a Silver Shamrock Halloween mask commercial, you sir, have no business living in my America, buck-o. 

So, all in all, it's a pretty unremarkable game that you can literally finish in 10 minutes once you know how everything works. Alas, would you believe the same fine folks who made this game made an update for the Colecovision, too?

OK, technically, this game never got released, but a finished prototype was manufactured, and by golly, that's good enough for me. As you can see for yourself (and if Stevie Wonder is reading this, I apologize), this iteration is MUCH improved graphics-wise. Really, the visuals here are about as good as the first wave of NES games, which is something that ought to shock the shit out of all you rugrats that didn't think home gaming was worth a toot until Zelda. The sprites are more defined (the people actual look like people instead of hieroglyphics), the landscapes are more detailed and the sound is vastly improved. In terms of sheer aesthetics, the game is unquestionably a quantum leap ahead of the Atari 2600 version.  

Gameplay-wise, it is basically identical to the 2600 version, although a little more cumbersome to control due to that fucking' dial joystick. The Frogger opening from the 2600 game is removed, so you cold open collecting - uh, bullets? Doorknobs? Ladder rungs? - in the swamp. The same pole vaulting mechanics are in play here, but like I said, they are WAY less intuitive. Once you make your way out of that passage, it's off to the girls' locker room, where a much more distinguishable Coach Balbricker ambles after you. As before, if you like, you can push banana peels and other assorted bric-a-brac down the hole in the middle of the screen to slow down traffic, but for some reason, the protector of the glory hole is MUCH slower than in the Atari game. In fact, the controls here are a little about TOO smooth, as you can easily make your way up the three sets of ladders (unlike in the Atari version, you don't have to stand beside them, you only have to stand in front of them and move upward) before the dong-yanker even shows up on screen. 

Now we get to the Frogger homage. This section is way easier than in the 2600 - all you have to do is stand on the right side of the screen, wait for the naked pink chick pulling her hair out to be in the middle of the screen, make sure the blue car is out of the way and your avatar literally floats to safety. I could criticize it for not being challenging enough, but considering what comes next, there is no way in hell I'm chiding the title for being too easy. 

Yep, it's that sequence again, and it's every bit as frustrating as it was on the Atari. In fact, due to the sloppy controls, I think it's actually WORSE on the Colecovision, which is saying a whole damn lot. Anyhoo, it is the same protocol as before. There are 16 entrance points, but only four of them lead you to freedom. Oh, and if you don't find the right pattern, you find yourself plummeting down the scaffold, and you'll have to go all the way down and repeat the process all over again. So yeah, to reiterate: fuck this part of the game. 

Adding insult to injury? The big explosion finale once you finally figure out the scaffold labyrinth? Even compared to the Atari, it's pretty lackluster. The screen flashes different colors a few teams and the building just kind of slowly sinks under the screen. When motherfucking 2600 games are outdoing you in the razzle dazzle department, you know somebody fell asleep on the job. 

A video game about committing indecent exposure, stalking and felony invasion of privacy? It'll sell more copies than Pitfall!

Granted, neither of the games are really all that good. However, as products of their time - augmented, of course, by such a bizarre license - they are probably worth experiencing at least once. (And thankfully, you can access both the Atari 2600 version and the unreleased Colecovision iteration over at The Internet Archive any time you see fit.) Even as mediocre offerings however, they display a certain old-school charm, and it is pretty fun to kick back for an hour testing your mettle against the antediluvian titles. With 1980s remakes all the rage, one has to wonder if we're not that far removed from a long-awaited third Porky's video game, be it a home-brew or a $0.99 app. Considering the vast upgrade in technology since we last saw the franchise in interactive form, I'm rather excited at the prospect: I mean, who doesn't want to run around fighting Klan members and driving Corvairs into lakes and having your junk inspected by Bayou prostitutes - especially with today's touchscreen hardware? 

That's right - nobody, that's who. 

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