MS-DOS Review: 'Avoid the Noid' (1989)

If you're looking for the most aggravating video game of all-time, buddy, you just hit the jackpot.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

In the late 1980s, Domino's Pizza drummed up one of the decade's defining advertising mascots - the Noid. Long story short, the character was a dude inexplicably clad in a red bunny suit who - equally inexplicably - had an obsession with royally fucking up people's pizzas. Numerous commercials were produced starring the Claymation critter, ultimately making the phrase "avoid the Noid" a short-lived household saying. Like every other stupid popular thing in the 1980s, the Noid produced a merchandising bonanza, with the character's visage showing up on toys, cups, playing cards, car covers, buttons, tee-shirts, towels and fucking tambourines. And while Capcom's NES game Yo! Noid is certainly the most popular video game starring Domino's spokes-sonofabitch, it was far from the character's only appearance in the interactive entertainment medium in the decade.

Enter Avoid the Noid on MS-DOS systems. Developed by the preposterously soulless-sounding California Merchandising Concepts, the ShareData published offering is one of the most frustrating video games I've ever played. The game isn't just difficult, it's practically engineered to make gamers pull their hair out and sling their keyboards across the room in unbridled e-rage. In fact, you could almost consider the title a precursor to all that "unironically meant to be frustrating" platformers like Syobon Action and I Wanna Be The Guy. Except, at the time, the folks who made Avoid the Noid weren't aware that irony - as an abstract concept - existed and pretty much all of the irritating aspects of the game aren't intentional, but the aftermath of really, really shitty programming and substandard level design. 

The game has a very simple premise. You play - fittingly enough - a pizza delivery guy and your mission is to get the piping hot pies delivered to the top floor of a humongous skyscraper. Naturally, the Noid is all over the fucking place, doing everything he (I'm guessing it's a "he," right?) to ruin your pizza, get your fired, and make sure you have to live on welfare for the rest of your natural born life.

If this looks like fun to you, it's officially time you got off drugs.

So here's the big problem with all of this. You see, all the Noid has to do is touch you and it's game over. Now, that wouldn't be such a pain in the anus if it wasn't for the following design flaws:

1.) The hit-detection is extremely poor, and sometimes the game registers a "hit" against you even though the Noid is visibly several pixels away from making contact with your character.

2.) The only defensive move at your disposal is a shitty looking somersault. Strangely enough, if you touch the Noid while you're somersaulting, the game doesn't register it as a hit, but if you just complete the somersault animation and you're still touching a Noid, it's an instant-kill. 

3.) There are booby traps everywhere, with absolutely no visual cues whatsoever. So basically, you have to somersault the entire game to avoid activating a falling platform.

4.) To advance stages, you have to use an elevator. The Noid can also use the elevator, and because the thing is so fucking slow, a lot of times you find yourself going up and down to simply avoid letting the Noid aboard. And the moment you do get out of the elevator, obviously the Noid is going to touch you and you're going to fucking die anyway.

5.) And last, but certainly not least, not only does the game throw a preposterous number of Noids at you even in the game's early stages, the sons-of-bitches are easily twice as fast as your character, which makes fleeing from the buggers when all other options have been expended an absolute impossibility.

Granted, the game designers were gracious enough to give you a power-up that clears all the Noids off the screen, but of course, you can only use it a finite number of times and - of course - the fucking things still respawn just a few moments later. Alas, as ass-blisteringly aggravating as this game is, you have to be thankful they even included something as basic as that, because a good goddamn, do you need as much help completing this one as you can get.

We begin the game with a very brief cutscene showing your delivery boy entering the high rise (which, presumably, has the word "DOOM" spray painted on it, because FORESHADOWING, that's why.) The game is laid out very similarly to that old arcade game Elevator Action, with three pastel-colored levels per screen. The idea is to collect keys strewn about the stage to unlock the elevator so you can travel to the next screen. Yeah, it sounds really simple in theory, but just you wait - the pizza chunk-encrusted shit is about to hit the fan in a real hurry. 

As soon as the second stage begins you can see the error of the developers' ways. Now you've got a steady stream of the Noids coming at you in waves of three, and you have to time your jumps and rolls pixel-perfect to avoid hitting any of those pie-fucking-up bastards. Even worse, there's this second or two-long animation that accompanies your character unlocking a door, which is bollocks to the nth degree because you can STILL get hit by a Noid during the animation cycle. And as frustrating as that is, it's still like, only the eighth or ninth most irritating thing about the title.

Holy shit, this is more intense than playing Gunstar Heroes. While being gang-raped. Multiple times. Over the course of one afternoon.

The third screen is where shit starts getting nigh-impossible. Now, not only do you have to deal with a wave of Noids, you ALSO have to avoid rockets that are next to impossible to avoid while rolling or jumping in the air. Another awful design choice was the inclusion of the telephones. Not only is that incessant ringing annoying as fuck, you really have no clue which one has a key hidden inside it or one that's actually a death trap that will send you plummeting to the equally death-trap ridden level beneath you. And THAT is doubly annoying because every time you fall, your avatar lets out a warbled Mr. Bill "uh-oh!" sound and it makes you want to kill everybody. Oh, and by the way, if you die, you get a cutscene of the Noid mocking you and letting out a chip tune giggle so annoying, that if you hear it more than three times, you WILL become homicidal. Holy hell, this game is good at pissing you off. I mean, really, really good.

Screen four can go fuck itself, because that's when the Noids start arming themselves with rocket launchers. Also, now you HAVE to investigate every telephone booth because they start giving you the digits for a security code you have to enter to access the game's final level. But on the plus side, at least they DO change the music from screen to screen. You have to give 'em points for that, I guess. 

So naturally, you keep looking for keys and security code numbers and avoiding Noids until you get to level 30, which is where the EXECUTIVE SUITE is. Once you get there, you'll have to get on top of the roof to collect more keys, and wouldn't you know it, now the Noids are commandeering biplanes and dropping water balloons on you. Once you collect three of them, you can FINALLY enter the CEO's office, where you are rewarded with a completely dialogue-less ending scene where your avatar - who bares an uncanny resemblance to Bob Denver - wipes sweat off his brow while some unseen rich white motherfucker takes a break from snorting heroin out of strippers' buttholes like in Wolf of Wall Street to enjoy a slice of pepperoni and mozz. And after all that, they don't even TELL you how much you got for a tip, which to me, is way more agonizing than wondering what was in that FedEx box in Castaway.

So, uh, is your avatar supposed to be Asian, or just really, really tired from lugging around pizzas all day?

Conceptually, anyway, Avoid the Noid is a game you can beat in five minutes. That is, you could if the controls were worth a shit - odds are, you're just going to keep dying from cheap hits over and over again until you get your fifteenth game over screen over the course of half an hour and scream "fuck it" and go back to watching tranny porn. The 30-minute in-game timer theoretically gives you enough time to beat it, though, and once you figure out where all the booby traps are and figure out how to game the elevators for all they're worth, I suppose you can muster up enough autism power to actually complete it.

But man oh man, do you have to be OCD as fuck to get that far. I've played some punishing games over the years, but this one may very well be the most annoying per capita gaming experience of my life. This isn't some hard ass fighting game or a SHMUP with a million billion things onscreen at once, it's just a crappy platforming game hobbled by piss poor controls and some of the worst hit detection you've ever experienced. Even as a novelty throwaway it's an absolute chore to churn through, and even the two hours or so I spent documenting it for this site feels like two hours of my existence I'll never, ever get back. 

If you want to play a game that will make you want to break everything you own and burn the local Domino's to the ground like Mookie did in Do the Right Thing, then yeah, Avoid the Noid ought to be right up your alley. Just don't say I didn't warn you when you wind up chucking a remote control out the window or punching a hole through you laptop ... just like that sumbitch Noid would've wanted you to. 

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Cybermania '94!

In the mid-90s, TBS decided to host the "ultimate gamer awards show." The fact they never did another one tells you just how well this one went.

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo___X

Over the years, numerous attempts at a video game awards show a'la the Oscars and the Grammys have come and gone. Naturally, none of them have had any staying power because, at heart, video game consumers and producers don't really give a shit about elitist affirmation. And really - who cares what Gamespot or Spike TV or EGM thought was the best strategy game of the calendar year, anyway?

Although the one-and-done Cybermania video game awards show from November 1994 wasn't the first attempt at developing a video game Emmys, so to speak, to the best of my knowledge it was the first time a major TV network tried to create a truly multimedia, nationally broadcast "interactive entertainment" tentpole spectacle. Of course, it was a colossal flop that nobody into video games or weird-ass digital entertainment found appealing, and in hindsight, the thing was downright embarrassing for everybody involved with it - the "winners" and performers included.

Still, as one of the first concentrated media efforts to make video games at least partially resemble a respectable, mainstream phenomenon, I suppose it is worth revisiting. I do remember watching it live back in the day - it aired at 4 in the afternoon on a Saturday, which is about as far away from primetime as you can schedule in anything - and even as a third-grader I felt extremely underwhelmed by what I witnessed. I still have vague recollections of the show - which was hosted by the oh-so-random combination of Leslie Nielsen and Home Improvement's Johnathan Taylor Thomas - but by and large, it just felt like a really, really half-assed attempt to pander to the fledgling video gamer subculture. So yeah, reflect on the absolute worst thing you ever saw on G4 around 2004, amplify that by about 10,000, and that's the sort of cringe we're talking about here. 

But why let my foggy remembrances tell you the story when you can just boot up the original broadcast - complete with its quarter century old commercials - on the YouTube anytime you want and relive the groan-inducing failure of an awards show as if it was actually happening?

Oh, you know you want all of this. You really, really do, even if you keep telling me "no, for real, Jimbo, don't nobody anywhere want this."

Alright, so we begin our TBS broadcast (which, certainly, wasn't aired live) with a quick intro from JTT accompanied by a quick-cut montage of NBA Jam, NHL '94 and Aladdin on the Genesis. Then we throw it to a cold opening with a cutscene from Miramar Productions' The Gate to the Mind's Eye, which looks like a really shitty, Blade-Runner inspired re-do of Sewer Shark. A disembodied announcer lets the viewing audience at home know this thing is coming out of Universal Studios Hollywood LIVE (but not really), referring to the shindig as "a celebration of the best in computer, cartridge and interactive entertainment." He then gives JTT and Nielsen their proper introductions, describing them as our "very live and very interactive hosts."

To "boot up" the show, an actress portraying Hillary Clinton comes out. She tries to turn on a computer monitor in the middle of the stage, and when Leslie plugs in an extension cord, the computer explodes and Clinton walks off with black soot all over her face. The audience ... doesn't really know how to react to this. "I sure hope she has health insurance," Nielsen remarks. Get it, because at the time, she was floating up ideas for a universal health care plan!

Ahhh ... you can almost smell the aspiring school shooter.

We learn that all of tonight's winners were picked by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, which a quick Google search reveals is not only still around, but still running a video game awards show that is probably the closest thing the industry has to a legitimate Oscars-caliber event. Granted, they didn't start handing own their own proprietary awards until 1997, so whether you want to consider the results of this show canon or not is up to you.

But wait, you can also vote online for your favorite games using PRODIGY or calling a not at all toll-free number! Up next, we have our first of many, many cyber-stories bumpers, which are aesthetically similar to all of those old A.D.D.  Sega Genesis commercials with quick cuts and some over-aggressive dweeb yammering on and on about shit you're not really that interested in. Anyhoo, he does the world's worst William Shatner impersonation and talks about the transition from the heyday of the arcades in the '80s to modern gaming in the mid-90s, concluding with a vague description of all the awesomeness the Information Superhighway is going to bring us someday.

The first award of the night is for best action-adventure game, and our presenters are Matthew Perry and The Next Karate Kid era Hillary Swank. And strangely enough, the guy doing the actual nominee voiceover is the REAL William Shatner. 

Alright, the nominees! Doom (uh, I've always thought of it more as a FPS, but since FPS games weren't as commonplace then, I suppose it kinda makes sense to put it in this awards category); Mega Race (which, as the name implies, is actually a racing game); Return to Zork (which is very much a traditional adventure game); Jump Raven (something I've never heard of but the gameplay leads me to believe it is likewise a classical PC adventure game); Critical Path (looks more like bad Sega CD interactive game than anything else); Super Street Fighter II (come on now, it has the word "fight" in its title!); Tomcat Alley (which actually is a shitty Sega CD Top Gun wannabe); and Super Metroid, which Shatner hilariously pronounces like "met-are-oid."

For an added touch of geekiness, the winners are revealed via an old school Newton PDA. The winner? DOOM, and some id Software guy gives an acceptance speech all of five seconds long. 

Time for a transition shot to a Las Vegas hotel's arcade (which include Nielsen namedropping "Goro the Monster" in one of the most surreal moments in TV history.) The host calls the kids at the arcade a bunch of "cyber punks" and cracks a joke about "NFL Jelly" and "NHL Marmalade" being released in the wake of NBA Jam. He then hurriedly reveals a "top secret" tip to play as Akuma in SSFII, but he says it so fast and broken up that it is nearly impossible to decipher what the fuck he is actually saying.

And that brings us to our five nominees for game of the year: Doom, Mortal Kombat, Myst, NBA Jam and Super Street Fighter II. Granted, you can quibble over the technicalities (MK was released in 1992 while all the other games came out in 1993) but you really can't argue against the selections - those are unquestionably the five most important and influential video games of the early 1990s and it's not even close to debatable.

Time for our first commercial break:Paul Reiser hawks IBM. HBO is showing Whitney LIVE in South Africa. Some hot blonde chick with short hair wants you to wear Soft&Dri underarm deodorant.  Little Caesars thinks its cool to use an orangutan ordering two female companions as a metaphor for their better deals than Pizza Hut. And fuck, you haven't LIVED until you've seen the 1995 Toyota Celica.

And we're back. Nielsen does a few quick reviews of game based solely on their box art, at one point picking up a Donkey Kong Country box (presumably) and stating it's a game about monkeys "that need to be spanked." Behind him a midget dances inside a giant balloon, until Nielsen gets sick of his shit and pops it. Yeah, there is a lot of humor like that in the show, so consider yourselves more than warned.

Then we get a quick retrospective on the history of video games and Pong, of all things, gets a standing ovation. Other unorthodox selections for this time filler includes such illustrious offerings as Karate Champ, Pinbot, The Legendary Axe (which I actually kinda' liked) and Pit Fighter. JTT talks about the audience vote again and then this bearded guy comes out and tells you can contact the show this afternoon. His voice also audibly cracks on camera and you will laugh out loud. 

Presenting the award for best CD Game is Saved By the Bell alum Lark Voorhees, who is introduced via a heavy metal riff very, very reminiscent of the iconic SBTB theme song. She stumbles through the intro, but since she looks hot as fuck, we can all let it slide.

Even neo-Nazis want to kiss her. And members of the Ku Klux Klan at least want to smell her hair a little.

The nominees? Myst, The 7th Guest, Mega Race, Return to Zork and Escape From Cyber City, whose mission, according to William Shatner, is "escape from the city and survive!" Shit, isn't that the premise behind half the fucking video games made in the 1990s? 

Anyhoo, the winner is The 7th Guest, which is actually a really forgettable survival horror offering. In fact, it's so forgettable that the real creators of the game didn't even bother showing up, so some limey in all white has to go up on stage and do all the yapping. He's pretty much all over and done with in 10 seconds.

This dude backstage is talking about SimCity with the mayor of Santa Barbara, Calif. and this one kid who is supposed to be the smartest child in America. And yeah, a real shocker here, but he's Asian. If the kid wins, he gets to run the city for a full day, and if the kid loses, the mayor gets to "acquire the services of the kid" for 24 hours. Well, that doesn't sound all #PizzaGatey or nothing.

Time for another commercial break! Stay tuned, and YOU could win a copy of that crappy Double Dragon fighting game based on the Saturday morning cartoon nobody ever watched! Here's a Fuji camera commercial with a white kid in a dashiki. And an ad for the CASIO G-SHOCK ILLUMINATOR wrist-watch. You can get a FIVE DOLLAR rebate if you purchase Speed on VHS. Hey, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure is coming out for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. Back to back commercials for SteelTec toys and that one truck from Ready Set Go. Every Thursday night TBS shows NBA games. Hmm ... a Seattle Supersonics player superimposed over a crumbling building ... predictive programming about the Oklahoma City bombing, perhaps?

And we're back. Nielsen responds to a car alarm and he runs into Doc Brown next to a DeLorean and then he pulls out a gun, enters one of those Wild West stunt shows, does an entire Buster Keaton routine and then JTT rewards him by giving him a tip to go into "battle mode" on the SNES version of Mortal Kombat. Yeah, I have no idea what the hell that means, either.

We squander some time talking about The Mask video game that was supposed to come out on the SNES and Genesis but never actually got released, and then there's a brief interview with director Chuck Russell. We go behind the scenes of The Mask CGI (which, admittedly, was a pretty big deal back then) and we get yet another cut scene from The Gate to the Mind's Eye, for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than the fact they probably paid a shit ton of money to have their crappy ass game pimped on the program. 

Presenting the award for best portable game is the second Darlene from Roseanne and some bitch that looks like Randy Savage's old squeeze Miss Elizabeth. The nominees? Aladdin (presumably, the Game Gear version although it really, really looks like they are using footage from the Genesis game), Wario Land, Home Alone (the Game Gear version, which, per Shatner, revolves around the exploits of "the world's most dangerous pre-teen"), what Shatner describes as Game Boy Donkey Kong and Link's Awakening. And while it's pretty much a given that the Zelda game is the best of the whole bunch, they end up giving the award to Aladdin, because ... well, I'm not really sure, to be entirely honest.

We throw it to an arcade in New Jersey, where a bunch of kids are shouting ... something. Then the host gives us some tips on Double Dragon V, so if you want to know how to finish Billy Lee, you BETTER use that goddamn standing hard punch, for real.  

Alright, presenting the award for best comedy (no, not best comedy game, just plain old "best comedy) is Charles Fleischer, some French fruit who is prolly best known for voicing Roger Rabbit. After doing a joke in binary, he does a routine about Prince Charles visiting Watts and getting harassed by black dudes, because that is ... uh, funny, I guess. 

The nominees! I'm Your Man (which, to me looks pretty dang close to being a porno), That's News To Me (starring Dennis Miller), The Wacky World of Miniature Golf (starring Eugene Levy as an anthropomorphic golf ball), Bugs Bunny' Rabbit Rampage, and Dating & Mating, which apparently is quite keen on jokes about autoeroticisim.

The winner? That mini-golf game. Picking up the award are two unnamed women who you would never fuck in a million years for any reason.

Eh. Still more tappable than Amy Schumer or Lena Dunham, though.

Hey, did you know you can vote for your favorite game for just 99 cents a call? Well, you can, and we're going to keep telling you that every five minutes. 

COMMERCIAL BREAK! Hey, there's a Double Dragon movie coming out and it's prolly going to suck big time (note: it did suck big time.) A Cartoon Network promo for their Super Chunk lineup, back when they still showed cartoons. Here's a commercial for the 3D0 (when Gex is your most impressive looking title, you KNOW the hardware is fucked). Then a commercial for Gerber Graduates baby food, and then, a brief promo for Earth 2 on NBC. Man, I haven't thought of that show in LITERALLY 20 years. And for very good reason.

We return to the show and Nielsen talks about computer graphics while dwarves juggle and spin plates behind him. Then, a guy lauded as "the leading artist of the Information Superhighway" comes out and reads a telegram supposedly penned by Al Gore and as you'd expect, it's so fucking boring everybody in the audience fell asleep.

On to the awards for best arts and graphics in an interactive product, presented by two people nobody gives a shit about. The nominees are Myst, Tuneland (featuring the voices of Howie Mandell, if you care, and you shouldn't), Oceanlife II AND III, Space: A Visual History and Mac World Interactive Vols. II and III. The winner is Myst, and really, ain't nobody going to complain about that considering its competition.

Presenting the Governor's Award for Best Achievement in Virtual Reality is that one chick from My So Called Life who isn't Claire Danes. It goes to IWerks Entertainment for making this fruity arcade game where six people sit in a plastic bathtub and fly around underwater dinosaurs.

An update: Doom is leading the Prodigy poll, while MK is leading it on the phone polls. 

COMMERCIALS: The Knicks play the Magic this Thursday night on TBS. Hey, there's a different Paul Reiser IBM commercial. ANOTHER Pitfall commercial. ANOTHER Fuji film commercial. That Ready Set Go toy truck commercial AGAIN. That Casio watch commercial AGAIN. And the Speed five dollar VHS rebate commercial AGAIN.

We're back. Some redheaded bitch at an arcade at the Universal Studios' park in Orlando interviews a kid in a "Jesus Freak" shirt about his love for Mortal Kombat and gives us a top secret hint for the upcoming SNES game Ren & Stimpy: Timewarp - use the rubber suction cups to climb over the monkey cages.

Next, Nielsen talks about hackers which leads to a surprisingly cheery PRO-hacking apologia piece featuring interviews with guys with names like "deth vegetable" interspersed with clips of the B-movie Teenagers From Outer Space and a guy eating a pizza with a Mattel Power Glove. Which, naturally, segues into a performance by Herbie Hancock titled "Cyber-Generation," featuring a bunch of Soul Train dancers booty dancing while every camera filtering effect in the world is used. Then some white bitch comes out and does the shittiest rapping you've ever heard and this one black dude starts twisting his neck around like Gumby.

You might be wondering to yourself "what does this have to do with video games?" And if so, the answer is clear - "you're a racist."

Then a breathless Hancock (did you know he did the soundtrack for Death Wish?) walks us through a segue into the next video clip - dedicated entirely to the Aerosmith vehicle Revolution X and some other stupid computer game nobody played. Cue a cheesy video segment within a video segment featuring Tom Hamilton of Aerosmith - who at one point dons a Ronald Reagan mask - congratulating Cybermania for simply existing.

Co-presenting the award for best musical alongside Hancock is none other than Thomas "She Blinded Me With Science" Dolby, who delights the crowd by dressing like the dork from a 2000 teen movie and making a joke about the nonexistent game Mood, which is like Doom except you run away from the monsters.  

The nominees? Peter Gabriels's Xplora I, Video Jam (which, trust me, is the shittiest looking thing you've ever seen), Interactive by the Corpse Formally Known as Prince, Freak Show by the Residents and Uptown Blues, which isn't really a game, but something you listen to when you want to pretend to be a culturally enlightened white person. And the winner is the Xplora I, with two white guys with shitty haircuts who aren't Peter Gabriel accepting the award on Peter Gabriel's behalf.

Backstage, we get an update on the SimCity contest. The mayor says he cut taxes 20 percent and got re-elected, so fuck that little snot-nosed brainiac fuck over there. The announcer guy talks about the academy behind Cybermania, but he gets distracted by some chick who wants to "play in a chatroom" instead.

COMMERCIALS! McDonalds has a "two buck conversion" deal so you can get two Egg McMuffins for just two dollars. TNT airs In Search of Dr. Seuss TOMORROW. There's that Double Dragon movie ad again. And the Soft&Dri underarm deodorant ad again. And here's a Scoopaway commercial with two dogs mad at a cat for getting to shit indoors. Then we get a commercial for Troy Aikman NFL Football, where the premise is that Troy Aikman has LITERALLY had his brain stolen (by Jerry Jones, acting just like Dr. Frankenstein) so he just acts retarded in the huddle, saying "hummunahummanahummuna" over and over again. Knowing what we know about concussions now, this thing is just all kinds of ominous.

Nielsen is back. Two reps from PriceWaterhouse are on stage. They validate Nielsen's tickets and promptly leave.

Yep. Because Twitter has done everything except turn kids into autistic, racist NEETS. 

Up next, the bitch from Mr. Payback (back in the day, touted as the world's first ever "interactive movie," and yeah, it sucked bunches) and some white nigga' from Deep Space Nine hit the podium. The nominees for best strategy and/or simulation game be: SimCity: Enhanced CD-ROM, Dune II (the Genesis version, at least, is fucking great), Flight Simulator 5 (which, yeah, I guess you could blame 9/11 on), Castle II: Siege & Conquest and Forever Growing Garden. The winner? SimCity - a shocker, I know. The bitch almost calls it an "enchanted CD-ROM" and I chuckle a hearty chuckle. Then the recipients hit the stage and give the shortest acceptance speech ever in the history of anything.

JTT is back on stage. He welcomes Shelly DuVall (the bug-eyed ho from The Shining) to the program. For some reason, she's wearing a fruit salad on her head. Cue a video looking at the impact of computers on education. There's a great line early on where a dude says teachers no longer have to throw chalkboard erasers at students' heads to get them to pay attention now that they have the Web in the classroom. "Learning has become something hip," one of the talking heads says. Then he talks about CD-ROMS replacing overhead projectors, and that's literally the first time I thought about overhead projectors in at least two decades and I kinda' had a moment there. And yes, the fucking irony of the dude talking about CD-ROMS being the future of education when, at this point, they are every bit as outmoded as educational tools as the overhead projectors.

And Duvall still ain't done flapping her gums. She talks about calculators being a big deal when she was growing up and then introduces these two kids who designed their own games and then E.A. and a couple of other companies got together and gave them both $25,000 scholarships. Then a video game about a Mexican dude who did a lot of cocaine and ecstasy and another game about a talking dog who really wants a bone on Sundays, especially, get individual awards for e-learning or some shit.

COMMERCIALS, YOU MOTHER FUCKERS. Here's that Thursday night NBA ad again. And another 3D0 commercial featuring a guy in a rubber room having maddened visions of that one Road Rash game that was actually kinda' awesome. The Paul Reiser IBM spot again. That Troy Aikman football game spot again (available NOW at Kay-Bee Toys, if you have a time machine.) And hell, why not one more spot for that god awful Double Dragon movie?

Now we get a video segment on how games are actually made, and you will fall asleep during this, for sure. Then, Marla Gibbs and The Barbarian Brothers from Twin Sitters take the stage to hand out the award for best sports game. And yeah, if you want the ultimate back-to-back dose of misguided '90s cinematic nonsense, I can't think of a better double feature than Mr. Payback and Double Trouble. Anyhoo, Gibbs asks the Barbarian Brothers to bring her a rope and a ball gag to subdue George Jefferson - you know, because she played the wisecracking maid on The Jeffersons back in the day? Then they pretend to get into a huddle, because that's what happens in sports sometimes. 

Alright, the nominees? NBA Jam (no console specified, so I take it this means all of them, the Atari Jaguar and 32X version included), FIFA International Soccer (looks like the Genesis version), NHL '94 (my all time favorite video game ever, and it should be yours, too), Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball (although I always preferred Winning Run instead), Caesars World of Boxing, Sports Illustrated's Multimedia Almanac, QB1 and Great Day at the Races. 

And the winner? Caesars World of Boxing, which officially is the worst winner in the history of any awards show. Shit, not only was that NOT the best sports game of 1993, it wasn't even the best boxing game that came out that year. Hell, it may not have even been one of the top five boxing games that year, for that matter, and that it was selected over the single greatest hockey video game of all time shows you just how little these Cybermania motherfuckers knew about anything.

Up next we've got the only part of the show that's really stayed with me over the years, and to be fair, it is a pretty funny little segment. To showcase WCW Superbrawl on the SNES, Lord Steven Regal and Brian Pillman come out for a demo. While they are playing, Nielsen does a monologue (set to the music from Patton, of all things) discussing the recent controversy over violence in video games. Naturally, Regal and Pillman start beating the shit out of each other and while Nielsen name drops Bad Mr. Frosty from Clay Fighter, a bunch of midget 'rasslers enter the fray so Leslie has to pull out a gun and shoot it in the air to get everybody to stop monkeying around.

Yep. This is the best Naked Gun movie EVER.

And now we're getting down to the acting awards, so you know this shit is going to get tough to sit through. Presenting the awards for best actor, female, are Terri Austin and Robert Culp. The nominees are: Grace Zabriskie in Voyeur, Eileen Weisinger in Critical Path, Tonia Keyser in Man Enough and Virginia Caper in Gabriel Knight. Not that anybody at any time at any point in history has ever or will ever give a fuck, but Zabriskie won. 

We get yet another cutscene from The Gate to the Mind's Eye and hey, what an opportune time for more commercials, ain't it?

There's the Fuji spot (again), that shitty fuckin' toy truck spot (again), a promo for The Lion King video game, that damn Casio wristwatch ad (again), that commercial for the Speed rebate (again), that Gerber's ad (again) and a promo for Thursday Night NBA basketball ... again.

We're back. Presenting the award for best male actor is Dave Thomas (no, not the guy from Wendy's, that guy from Grace Under Fire) and one of those hos from Blossom. The nominees? Robert Culp in Voyeur, Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (although I swore that game came out earlier than 1993), Tim Curry in Gabriel Knight, Christian Erickson in Mega Race and Mickey Rooney in Great Day at the Races. Hey, what do you know, the winner is the guy who was just on stage a few moments ago, Robert Culp. He thanks the Academy and then gives a meandering speech about video game acting probably becoming a big deal int he future and then walks off in a dazed an palpably confused state. 

Time for an update on the SimCity bet. Just so you know, the kid won. Which begs the question: just how do you "beat" SimCity, exactly?

Alright, kids, pull out your game pieces from Sam Goody/Musicland, it's time to see what you won in the super-duper Double Dragon prize giveaway! If you have some blond fruit with a gay man mustache, you won a coupon or something. If you have a blonde bitch with short hair, you won either a Double Dragon action figure OR a cartoon VHS. Have Scott Wolf's picture on your piece, and you get a copy of Double Dragon V and a strategy guide that should've told you to buy a better game. If you have a picture of that other guy in the movie, you won the INTERACTOR, MOTHERFUCKER, and your life will never, ever be the same again. And if you have a picture of a medallion, you won a TV and some other shit.

COMMERCIALS! Time for a different 2-Buck Conversation spot for McDonalds (I don't know about you, but getting two Big Macs for just $2 does sound pretty snazzy.) Now it's an ad for Super Return of the Jedi on the SNES, then Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures, which is like that Pitfall game they kept showing ads for earlier, except way better. We get another NBA on Thursday spot, that stupid toy truck commercial again, and that Troy Aikman football game spot ... again. And coming up next on TBS, its the live-action Masters of the Universe movie, which means whatever you spent your afternoon doing when this thing initially aired was a lot better than watching TBS for the next two and a half hours. Even if you were being raped, prolly.

And now, we arrive at the moment of truth - the announcement of the Game of the Year award recipient. JTT slowly names all of the games again, and our winner is ... Mortal Kombat! Here comes Ed Boon and John Tobias (I think) and they thank Probe Software and then they leave. 

And to wrap up the show? Nielsen says he can't wait to go home, play with his joystick and boot up his hard drive, and then we get a whole bunch of ads for NBA Live '95, NHL '95, Northwest Airlines and Microsoft and we are COMPLETE-O in Hollywood.

"We would like to thank the Academy for forgetting at least 300 better games came out in the 1993-94 fiscal year."

Well, I suppose you don't really need any explanations on why Cybermania was a one and done event, do you? Outside of the fact that video games were starting to make a lot of money at the time and nobody else had tried to capitalize on the rapidly-expanding market, I'm not really sure the producers of the award show knew why they were putting together the gala. The categories were confusing and haphazardly assembled, there was way too much time dedicated to crappily edited together video vignette segments and the emphasis on "comedy" - and yes, you have to put it in quotation marks - gave the entire program a needlessly self-degrading quality. If the whole idea of Cybermania was to turn video gaming into some sort of legitimate pop cultural commodity, they really couldn't have done a better job of instead making it look unsophisticated, juvenile and unrefined.

For the industry of video gaming, Cybermania is certainly something to be forgotten, a truly embarrassing attempt at permeating the mainstream consciousness that couldn't have come off as anymore low brow and amateurish if they tried. As an artifact of video game culture, however, the event, I suppose, is not without some historical significance. This is certainly the earliest I recall any major cable network treating video games like something that at least partially resembled something more than flash-in-the-pan ultra-niche entertainment, and - for better, but mostly for worse - it does do a fairly serviceable job summing up the video game zeitgeist of the times (yes, people really were splooging themselves thinking interactive movies were the next big thing in entertainment even though they rightly died out within a year of this very broadcast.) Naturally, the greatest retroactive appeal of Cybermania is in its snapshot of old-school gaming fandom. As corny and cheesy and hokey as the broadcast may have been, it is pretty fun to travel back down memory lane and reflect on just how gonzo people were for stuff like Mortal Kombat and Doom, and if you can't crack a smile watching Lord Steven Regal toss midgets around while Lt. Frank Drebin cuts a soliloquy on violence in Clay Fighter, I really don't know why you bother continuing to live.

So what more can be said about Cybermania '94? It gave us young Simba from The Lion King reciting the blood code for the SNES version of Mortal Kombat, Herbie Hancock slumming his way through the worst performance of his (or really, anybody else's) career and featured what were - without question - the single worst award recipients in the history of anything being given out ever. Quite succinctly, it capsulized everything lame, stupid and crass about video gaming in the post-SMB3, pre-PS1 1990s ... which, in a weird roundabout way, I suppose, completely loops around the rules of time and space itself and inadvertently becomes, well, kind of awesome. 

... but only the absolute dumbest kind of "awesome" you can think up, of course.

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The Ten Scariest Video Games of All-Time!

Counting down the most blood-chilling, spine-tingling and nightmare-inducing old school video games ever, from the heyday of the NES all the way up to the reign of the Xbox360.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

As a constitutionally protected and SCOTUS-affirmed bona fide arts medium, video games certainly allow us to feel the gamut of human emotions. As in the case of high-speed offerings like Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Burnout 3, they allow us to feel the vicarious, simulated thrill of gravity-taunting, breakneck physical motion. Meanwhile, titles like Jet Grind Radio and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 give us a tremendous facsimile of depth and height, allowing us to fantastically traverse across towering architectures and spit directly in the face of the Grim Reaper with our nigh-impossible acrobatic feats. Games like NHL ‘94, Tecmo Super Bowl and Virtua Fighter 4 let us feel the intensity of full-contact athletics competition without breaking a sweat, while games like Gunstar Heroes, Metal Slug 3 and The Secret of Mana allow us to feel the warm, fuzzy glow of kicking ass as a communal, cooperative experience. And then, there are the ones with legitimately gripping storylines, like Shenmue and Final Fantasy III, that suck you in with their expertly-scripted narratives and make you feel pangs of genuine, human empathy over pixelated ones and zeroes.

But we’re not going to talk about any of those kinds of games today. Rather, we’re going to discuss the ones that strive to scare the living piss out of us and make us throw our controllers in the air out of sheer, unbridled terror. In the following, totally non-scientific countdown, I recount the ten video games that gave me the heebiest of jeebies, the interactive experiences that inspired a certain kind of virtual willies I'm still trying to shake out, sometimes 25 years after the fact. Of course, your list would surely differ, but from my personal perspective? When it comes to scary ass video games, none are as palm sweat and nightmare-inducing as the creepy classics below...

Number Ten:
Underwater Ayn Rand mind control blurs the line between passive and possessive entertainment

Bioshock (Xbox360, 2007)

The 2007-08 school year was the last year I could rightly proclaim myself a hardcore contemporary gamer. The proud owner of one of those super-duper-expensive "elite" 360 units and a Wii (back when they were still really, really hard to find) I was pretty much your stereotypical IGN-reading, Gamestop-prowling, Mountain Dew Game Fuel-chugging dude-bro, anxiously awaiting the next opportunity to skip math class so I could dominate like a motherfucker at NCAA Football 08 or Guitar Hero III. Next to No More Heroes, I'd consider Bioshock to be the last somewhat contemporary video game that I was utterly obsessed with. The graphics were astounding (I vividly recall waiting for the game to load and being blown away that the photorealistic ocean debris before me was actually in-game) and there was just so much to explore, I had to play it through about three or four times before I felt satisfied (I still never unlocked that bunny mask dude's riddle box, however.) Like Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid before it, Bioshock was a game meant to mess with your head a little, and needless to say, few games have ever done it so well. Even beyond the whole "would you kindly" meta-priming and death fights with drill-handed Jules Verne deep sea divers (not to mention an entire gameplay mechanic that revolves around abducting small children and sucking the life juice out of them), the little audio snippets you found throughout the game were far and away the creepiest thing about the Bioshock. While the recording of the plastic surgeon going insane in the middle of a procedure is a close second, nothing in Bioshock resounded with me as much as the recording you find of the kids being instructed to play with puppies ... and then being ordered to snap their necks on cue. Trust me - all the cannon fodder zombies in Deep Space and Left 4 Dead don't add up to one millisecond of the fright stemming from hearing that poor little pooch whimper its final whimper... 

Number Nine:
And with one fell swoop of a chainsaw, the entire existence of the Nintendo Gamecube is justified

Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube, 2005)

There were a lot of great games on the GameCube, including quite a few that were atmospheric as fuck. While spooky games like Eternal Darkness, Metroid Prime and the criminally underappreciated Geist were all fine little horror-tinged games, clearly the cream of the creepy crop on the console was RE4, the outstanding franchise reboot that more or less created the second-person shooter genre and completely changed the trajectory of action-adventure games for the next 10 years. While some games are remembered for maybe two or three high points, pretty much the entirety of Resident Evil 4 is memorable, from the moment you shot the dog out of the bear trap at the beginning of the game all the way up to the part where you Ski-doo out of an underwater cavern at its tail end. Alas, while the game had a litany of highlights - the giant trolls, having to fight a million billion druids with gigantic mucus Thing heads, finally getting your hands on the rocket launcher - for me, the ultimate holy shit moment came within the first half hour of gameplay. While running around a Spanish village (where nobody uses the vosotros form, for some reason), people attack you with pitchforks and sickles and all the usual agrarian accouterments. Then, just when you think you are in the clear, oh sweet hell, it's a giant retard with a burlap sack over his head like Jason in the second Friday the 13th movie, coming at you with a chainsaw. Granted, seeing that sumbitch lunging at you is in and of itself rather frightening, but quickly realizing how little effort he required to lop off your character's head like Leatherface? Yeah, ain't any of us ever going to be right after witnessing that shit...

Number Eight:
From the same people who brought you Mighty Bomb Jack, a whimsical PS1 offering about leading innocent people to their unexpected demises

Tecmo's Deception: Invitation to Darkness (PlayStation, 1996)

When most people think "Tecmo," they generally think one of two things: the best fucking video game football series ever (sorry, Madden) and, of course, Ninja goddamn motherfucking ass Gaiden. That said, Tecmo has actually delved into the "horror game" subgenre many times in the past, and their 1996 PS1 offering has to be one of the most ingenious - and unsettling - forays into the depths of virtual darkness in console gaming history. For starters, you play one of Satan's henchmen. No, I'm not talking about some oblique "demonic presence," I mean the manual literally tells you you're working for the devil himself. As far as gameplay is concerned, Deception employs a very unique action-RPG dynamic, at times coming off as a cross between Sweet Home on the Famicom and Night Trap on the Sega CD. You see, as the doorman to Hell, you watch over this spooky, ominous mansion out in the middle nowhere, which is frequently visited by people seeking sanctuary for one reason or another. The object of the game, essentially, is to lure them them to their deaths, doing them in with really wacky Mouse Trap like contraptions (my favorite has to be the giant foot that falls out of the ceiling.) But here, the game throws you a curveball. Not all of the people who enter the mansion or sinister con-men and hyper violent warriors who want to kill you on sight. Indeed, some - including the parents of a terminally ill child - are downright sympathetic characters, which means you've got to make a choice: do you mercilessly slaughter the innocent to appease your dark lord, or do you choose to let them go free and perhaps alert others to your demonic doings? Needless to say, Deception is a game that hits you with some very, very heavy themes, and on several occasions, it's going to have you questioning the inherent evilness of your own soul. And to think - this thing is a contemporary of PaRappa the Rapper!

Number Seven:
An entirely new reason why you should never run with scissors...

Clock Tower (PlayStation, 1996)

The year 1996 was definitely a banner year for survival horror, and Clock Tower is certainly one of the seminal games from that all-important 2D to 3D migration period. In many ways, this game completely outdoes Resident Evil in terms of cinematics. The plot is WAY more nuanced, the voice acting is much, much better and the scares - well certainly less vivid than in RE - are nonetheless more skillfully scattered throughout the game. Much like its Super Nintendo forerunner, this Clock Tower is sort of a hybrid adventure/platformer, with pretty much all of the action coming courtesy of a virtual cursor or a litany of drop-down menu options. Of course, it takes full advantage of the three-dimensional, polygonal dressings, and there is a LOT to explore while traipsing around the "haunted" (or is that hunted?) mansion. This being a survival horror game and all, naturally the emphasis is on the "catch as catch can" gameplay, and needless to say, this sumbitch will get your pulse pounding in a hurry. There's all sorts of things you can do to evade the iconic "Scissorman," and there are even a couple of items laying around you can use for defensive purposes. More so than just about any game I've ever played, this feels like a playable Dario Argento movie, and that's not just because the synthesizer score feels like it could've been yanked straight out of Tenebrae or something. The pace is terrific, the level design is phenomenal and the plot - which weaves in and out of two different character narratives - is very well structured. While the game tends to lay on the melodramatic cheese in the final act, it's still a dreadfully scary game, from start to finish. And the first time the game's primary protagonist wraps his sterling silver blades around your jugular - yes, you will probably pee a little. 

Number Six:
One of the worst consoles of all-time gives us one of the scariest first-person-shooters ever

Alien vs. Predator (Jaguar, 1994)

As one of the 20 or so people in North America who, at one point or another, actually owned an Atari Jaguar, even I can't boast of being a console apologist. That said, while a good 80 percent of the library was absolute dog shit, it did have about five or six high spots, including a very good version of International Sensible Soccer and a damn near arcade-perfect port of Tempest 2000. Chief among all official Jaguar releases, however, was Alien vs. Predator, a downright remarkable offering that, really, was the first truly great FPS on a home console. There were just so many cool things about the game, and since all three game play modes - you could play as a xenomorph, a yautja or a space marine - each handled differently, the replay mode on this sucker was off the chart. Alas, while it was definitely a blast running around French kissing acid into people's mouths as an alien and making everything all neon-colored in kill-everything-in-the-room Predator mode, the most memorable thing about the game had to have been the space marine mode, in which you grabbed some high-tech weaponry and slowly slinked your through tight, grimy corridors, anxiously awaiting the moment something particularly nasty crossed your way ... or snuck up behind you. Honestly, this was a way spookier experience than any version of Doom, and the photorealistic visuals (for the time) were absolutely jarring. Having gotten my hands on the game earlier this summer for the first time in ages, I can assure you this title hasn't lost any of its luster ... and yes, even 22 years, it's still a downright terrifying game to trudge through.

Number Five:
The series that taught an entire generation the joys of uxoricide 

Splatterhouse I-III (TurboGrafx-16 and Genesis, 1989-1993)

Yeah, I'm cheating a bit lumping all of the 2D Splatterhouse games (well, with one notable exception) into the countdown, but really, you can't just pick one out of the canonical trilogy and leave out the other two. Really, each game in the series manages to take a different approach to the same terrifying underlying theme - the idea of your spouse dying. Granted, this may seem like one of those things that gets buried in the back of your head when you are punching the heads off zombies and killing 80 pound tapeworms with baseball bats, but it is certainly the undergirding narrative adhesive of the series. Let's go all the way back to the first game, which, in hindsight, contains one of the most disturbing moments in any title released prior to the advent of three-dimensional gaming - the moment where Rick finally reaches his estranged girlfriend, only to have her get possessed by some sound of foul demon and turn into a hulking monster he has no choice but to kill. Needless to say, having to play virtual O.J. Simpson to the CPU's Nicole Brown was freaky when I was a kid, but as a grown-ass adult, it's a million times more unnerving. Granted, the thematic is toned down quite a bit in part two (they kinda' pulled and Evil Dead 2 on us there, basically "remaking" the original instead of carrying on with part uno's downer ending), but there are still plenty of discomforting scenes, especially when you free Jennifer from her transdimensional prison and you have to protect her from all of the brain monsters and S&M demons shambling all over the place. But it's part three that perhaps conveys the widower thematic the bluntest - and, naturally, the most unsettling. That's primarily because the game constantly bombards you with cut scenes informing you that your beloved is inching ever closer to death, and if you don't hurry your Jason Voorhees-wannabe ass on up, she's going to be deader than a door nail. And really putting Splatterhouse 3 over the top? They actually use a digitalized woman's visage for Jennifer's image, and not just a bunch of blonde and pink pixels. Oh, and making things even more fucked up? There's not only an alternate ending in which your wife has her internal organs eaten by parasites and transformed into a wildebeest demon(!?!), there's even one in which your elementary school aged son dies because you took too damn long to make it to the final boss! 

Number Four:
Tank controls, cheesy voice acting and enough jump scares to make you pee all over your controller

Resident Evil (PlayStation, 1996)

If any game can rightly be considered a watershed moment for horror games, Capcom's genre-defining Resident Evil is certainly it. By now, entire libraries have been written about the impact of the game on the interactive medium, so rather than regurgitate the standard hagiography that's already been stated a billion-jillion times, I'll just fill you in on my personal experiences with the game. Unlike most of you, I actually played the game for the first time on the Sega Saturn, and seeing just how much better the game looked and played on Sony's first console outing was more than enough than to get me to go out and buy a Playstation (trust me, the differences are like night and day.) Indeed, it took me a full year to finally beat the Director's Cut version of the game, and I can't tell you how many sleepless middle school nights I spent roaming around the halls of that damn mansion, desperately in pursuit of that commodity more precious than life itself ... ink ribbons. Really, everybody has their own personal favorite moment from the game, that one instance that made them go "oh shit, this game is for real." For some, it was walking in on that zombie in the dining area anteroom and having your neck chewed open for the first time. For others, perhaps it was getting trapped in that room with the crushing blocks closing on, and legitimately panicking at the thought of being turned into a "Jill sandwich." But for me, the "ah-ha" moment will always be entering that one locked hallway for the first time, slowly creeping my way down the corridor and having that motherfucking rabid dog jump right through the window. Granted, it's the cheapest of jump scares, but for a medium just then finding its legs in the 3D polygonal space, that shit was downright awe-inspiring. Muddy visuals, cheesy dialogue and unorthodox controls aside, this is a game that remains every bit as eerie, atmospheric and engrossing 20 years down the road as it was when it was brand new ... and yes, I still jump whenever those fucking dogs attack, even though I've played the game at least a thousand times by now. 

Number Three:
The interactive Jason Voorhees experience that was 100 times scarier than any of his movies

Friday the 13th (NES, 1989)

Until my dying day, I will defend this game as not only a good title, but really, one of the most memorable games ever released on the Nintendo Entertainment System. While there were a lot of games on the NES that conveyed a strong "horror" vibe (Castlevania, Ghosts N Goblins, etc.), Friday the 13th was the first (and perhaps, only) game on the console that made you feel anything that could be considered a worthy facsimile of mortal fear. In a game like Castlevania, you played a bad-ass vampire hunter who had the chops to go toe-to-toe with legions of the undead, but here? You played some shitty camp counselor with a bowl cut, whose only means of defense are a bunch of crappy pebbles that usually fly twenty feet over the heads of your intended target. Thankfully, you do get to upgrade your weapons to items that are actually capable of viable self-defense, but even then, there's just this pervasive dread marinating the experience. In true Friday the 13th tradition, you never really know when Jason is going to strike, and his totally unpredictable sneak attacks - accompanied by some of the most horrific electronic shrieking you'll ever hear in your life - are definitely the ultimate in 8-bit jump scares. While hated in some circles, I actually think LJN did a really good job with the property, turning the experience into something that more closely resembled a strategic board game than your dime-a-dozen platformer. And of course, who can ever forget the first time they ever got into a bare knuckle boxing match with the iconic slasher himself? Aye, if anybody lasted longer than Julius in Jason Takes Manhattan, I want to shake your hand. 

Number Two:

The original "survival horror" game takes us on a mind-bending journey inside the darkest recesses of the human mind

Pac-Man (Arcade, 1980)

Think, for a moment, just how horrific the core concept of Namco's iconic pellet muncher is. It's a game where you are stuck in a pitch black maze, with absolutely no way of defending yourself other than to run like hell whenever your totally unkillable spectral enemies get a whiff of you or chug down just enough white pills that you are granted a momentary reprieve from the incessant supernatural torment. And no matter how well you do - or how much temporary control you feel when you scarf down another power pellet - you are destined to keep playing the Jamie Lee Curtis "final girl" role, forever forced to run from your inner demons ... that is, until you get to the very end of your rope and encounter a totally "unbeatable" clusterfuck of a final level that, unfailingly and inevitably, will kill you dead as fuck. Don't let the cheery music and the dancing fruits and all the flashy colors fool you - deep down, this game has to be one of the greatest psychological thrillers in any medium, an absolute Dali/Bunuel nightmarish masterpiece of metaphorical madness. Is Pac-Man really a deranged artist, forever haunted by his inability to escape his past? Is Pac-Man actually a Vietnam veteran, eternally revisiting the most disturbing and soul-crushing moments of his tour of duty (intersected, of course, by all-too-brief reminders of his former, forever unobtainable "normal" life before war?) Or is the entire game sort of a secret Requiem for a Dream, a furtive analogy for the pain and misery felt by substance abusers? No matter how you interpret Pac-Man, there is really no way around it; for a game so universally adored, adulated and admired, it sure does have some extremely intriguing ... and unsettling ... subtext.

Number One:

When whimsical, childhood fun suddenly becomes the ultimate experience in grueling terror

Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES, 1990)

At first glance, putting the iconic NES masterpiece up front as the scariest video game ever made may seem absurd. I mean, there's no blood, nobody gets decapitated and no freaky-ass mindfuck Eternal Darkness shit is going on with your control pad, right? Alas, if you dig a little bit deeper - and put yourself in the mindset of a five-year-old child, circa 1990 - the intrinsic terror of SMB 3 becomes glaringly obvious. Simply put, SMB 3 is about the loss of youthful innocence, basically an 8-bit adaptation of Stephen King's IT, only a hundred times more hardcore (and, uh, without all of the sixth grade sewer gangbanging ... thankfully, that never got the Nintendo treatment.) At heart, SMB 3 is essentially a survival horror game, in which the protagonist is thrown into a Gulliver's Travels type nightmarish ether. Hey, remember how much fun you had spitting fire at tortoises and hopping all over sentient bullets in the first Mario game? Well, NOW, the tables have turned, and it's the environs that is out to get you. Think Bowser's castles in the first game were spooky (and believe you me, they were)? Well, they ain't shit compared to the haunted houses in this game, which feature, among other creepy things, practically unkillable ghosts (unless you're armed with hammers, for some reason), these horrific pitbull-bear-goomba mutant monsters that do that thing with their arms the Bushwhackers used to do and jump all over the place and the skeletons of all the turtles Mario killed in the first game, who have risen from the grave, Pet Semetery-style, to exact their unholy vengeance. That alone would be enough to have the average kindergartner peeing up a storm, but that's literally just the tip of the iceberg. Throughout the game, Mario is exposed to practically every worst case nightmare scenario you can think of, from getting chased by giant fish to being sucked down a series of never-ending pipes to getting stuck in the middle of an honest to goodness Satanic army marching parade (indeed, each "world" in the game seems to symbolize at least one common childhood fear, from the fear of heights to the fear of being trapped under ice to the fear of being literally deserted to the fear of being trampled underfoot by a menagerie of giant beasts.) And if that wasn't enough? The game even throws in what has to be the single greatest jump scare in the history of video gaming. Forget "would you kindly" or the dog jumping through the window in RE, NOTHING has ever topped the level where you are just hopping and bopping your way across the wastelands ... ONLY TO HAVE THE MOTHERFUCKING SUN ITSELF COME ALIVE AND START CHASING YOU. There are swerves, I know, but having the life giver to all things in the solar system turn into an omnicidal death bringer with an inexplicable personal vendetta against you is almost too much for the five-year-old, pre-World Wide Web mind to mull. Sure, some may continue to see SMB 3 as just another innocuous, infantile romp through Nintendo never-never-land, but try reading the game through the lens of a Chuckie Finster personality sometime: I mean, it's a video game about a dude who looks like the main character from Maniac running around, gobbling up drugs and dressing in the skin of dead animals and beating the living dog shit out of everything in his path, just because he can. If anybody's managed to come up with a freakier idea for a video game than that, I reckon I'm too chicken shit to put my hands on the control pad. 

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