The image above looks so great taking on the Final Fantasy classic style. Now if it had felt like the classic style, I may have enjoyed both of these games more. I’ve owned both these games on multiple platforms (original PS2, PS3, PS4, Switch) – I’ve owned the original since back when the PS2 was the dominant system. However, I never played them until now. Though I had the choice between two modern platforms, I chose the PS4. Enjoy the announcement trailer for when this first came to PS4 six years ago:

I guess my biggest issue with both these games is that I felt the story was uninteresting and I just didn’t care. From Final Fantasy X the only character I cared for was Auron, and that is because he shows up in the Kingdom Hearts franchise. I get that tons of people like this game and have fond memories of it – but since my last RPG was Dragon Quest XI – this is very hollow (which truly is an unfair comparison).

The one thing I did notice is that while the game looked pretty, the controls and such were very much still PS2 controls. There is no camera spinning, movement can be choppy and lacking precision. Thankfully there wasn’t as much grinding as I feared. The biggest challenge battle I had in Final Fantasy X was the big battle right before the wedding sequence. So while I have comments about both games let’s separate them out.

Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy X, as I mentioned, didn’t give me any emotional hook that I enjoyed. I was very very very meh about the whole experience. If anything this one took me the length of the two for in front of the screen paying attention (more on that in the next game). I skipped the whole collect monsters for the arena – to be fair I skip most side quests in RPGs. I get joy from the main storyline more than how complete I’ve seen of the game (hence I’ll never ever get knights of the round in Final Fantasy VII).

If anything it dragged on, there were some neat sections like the lightning strikes, and even climbing the mountain was fun. I had to do some grinding but just enough that it didn’t seem unbearable. I also wasn’t a fan of the board game-based leveling system. The limit breaks and such were fun and interesting, but later I just ended up using the summons as a crutch to get through the game. The final boss battle was all about the proper order of deploying summons.

Most of this game is a train going down the railroad tracks, there is rarely ever a need to backtrack to complete the game. I mean this is good or bad depending on how you are used to playing RPGs. Some have you go back and visit the same area multiple times – for others, it’s a continual march forward. So it’s something to be aware of more than it is a problem.

Finally the version of level editing using the sphere grid system. I prefer more of a traditional leveling system. You spend the whole time with this wondering where you missed out on or if you should have gone a different direction. It was neat at the point that I could switch from the white mage line to the black mage line without losing any spells – but beyond that, I wasn’t a fan. It made leveling feel slower overall and grinding (if you were targeting a specific skill) feel longer. I know it may just be a mental thing for the length of the grinding. Maybe traditional leveling would have taken just as long. It just didn’t feel like it.

The most unique thing for me was playing all the characters in each battle. While in a traditional FF game, you can’t switch out party members mid-battle. In this game, it’s encouraged (if not slightly required at times) to switch out members quickly from those on stand-by to those that are active. This was probably the most interesting thing about the game to get used to, it also allowed for a much more varied combat experience.

Final Fantasy X-2

Final Fantasy X-2 same world as Final Fantasy X – but it’s a much different game. First, they try a more open-world system overall. This gave you the option for more exploration and revisiting of areas than X. Which means in theory if I had availed myself of the side quests and activities, I would have had a much longer game. However, since I prefer to just plow through a main story – I will say I likely missed out on half of the game offers.

Going into what it offers, let’s jump to the job system for a second. Your character (once you find the job within the game) allows you to switch between different job classes. I do know as I would look at the strategy guide it would say to use this class for this battle and this class for another. However, since I didn’t do many side quests – I never even had those classes. I will say the setup made grinding a piece of cake though. Whenever I did get a new job class, I took my characters to the arena. I would find a battle they could easily win by just hitting X over and over again. It was taking advantage of the system instead of random level grinding across the world.

An important thing to note, like I stated – I just play the main game and avoid side quests. However, by avoiding side quests, when there was a tough battle I would look online. Every single time it told me to use a job class I didn’t have. I managed to make do and plow through, but honestly, if you want the full design of what the game is meant to be – you are better off exploring and treating this more as an open-world game than I did.

Conclusion

It’s good that re-releases bundle these two games together. There is a balance between them. I prefer the story of Final Fantasy X more than X-2. However, I enjoy the gameplay more in X-2. The story is streamlined in X – and opens up more in X-2. It’s a difficult decision. They are far from my favorite Final Fantasy games, but likely they will be unforgettable. I do wonder if I would have been more open to exploration in X-2 if I was playing on the Switch vs. PS4. It opens up the mobile option to play when others are using the TV.

The one thing I won’t miss is Blitzball.

History

Like Baseball Stars, Double Dribble is another game that started out as a cabinet based on the NES Play Choice 10. I was never able to find a dedicated Baseball Stars cabinet, but it seems there was at least one (or a conversion kit) made for Double Dribble. I believe I have seen one for locally once upon a time, but it isn’t an arcade cabinet I would jump on if available.

I found the image for the cabinet on this thread

You can see in the video below that the Double Dribble arcade cabinet had much sharper graphics and better sound clips. It almost looks so much better than the other Play Choice 10 games, that the home version used significantly less memory.

Gameplay

Family Guy Controversy

Though I didn’t think about it when I had the idea to write this piece, it wouldn’t be fair to talk about Double Dribble and DMCA controversy last year. In May of last year, Family Guy aired a segment where Peter and Cleveland played Double Dribble. In this clip Peter abuses a glitch in the game where it allows him to make a 3-point shot 90% of the time. Cleveland gets angry at the use of the glitch while Peter keeps going “Corner Three” You would think that the team that works on Family Guy would have just tracked down the game and used their own footage. Unfortunately they took a YouTube clip uploaded in 2009 showing the automatic shot working. They then took this footage and interspersed it with Family Guy dialog and animations. So the creative team borrowed the clip without permission. Since their whole show is based on satire, I’m not sure if this would fall under fair use or not. They really didn’t add commentary, just used it as is. Fox’s handling of this managed to get worse than stealing someone else’s work and taking credit for it. The original uploader of the video received a DMCA takedown request through YouTube stating that Fox owned the footage. So footage that was uploaded years before the script was even written for the episode was now being matched by YouTube’s content ID system. It seems since this time, the original footage has been restored. Hopefully they came up with some behind the scenes compensation for the original uploader. It’s not often you see a retro game make the news, so I thought it had to mentioned. Below are the original and Family Guy versions of the clip in question.

Original Version:

Family Guy Version:

My Personal Experience

I didn’t own Double Dribble, but through out my seventh grade year I borrowed it quite often from a kid on the next street. For some reason, it was one of the two basketball games I played for many hours with. The other was NBA JAM. I mention NBA Jam because I think it appealed to me in the same way. While NBA JAM had fancy animations and the “he’s on fire” hot streak, Double Dribble had those awesome dunk animations. I thought those graphics were amazing and that this was as photo realistic as games were going to get (mind you this was decades ago). It was something that captured my imagination. It was even part of the inspiration (the rest was my father) I tried out for the seventh-grade basketball team. The idea that one day I could pull off moves like that in real life gave me hope. Unfortunately, I didn’t make the cut of the team. I still had Double Dribble though. I borrowed that game constantly. Unfortunately by the end of the summer that kid and I had a falling out. Our friendship didn’t recover and I didn’t have access to tradable games one street away. It’s sad things turned out the way they did, but it was the start of the lessons of life. Thinking about it, until I played Double Dribble to practice and shoot the video, I haven’t touched the game in 27 years. If I was going to get an NES rental, more often than not it was a platformer. I enjoyed the occasional baseball game, but I had mastered Double Dribble. There would have been no reason to waste rental time on something I was good at. Playing it was like revisiting an old friend. If this game is something you grew up with, I would highly recommend revisiting it. I’m sure I’ll have it in more of a rotation now that I’ve played it again. However, if you didn’t grow up with it, it will seem too simplistic. For millenials I’m sure it will seem just a step above a Tiger handheld. While we’re at it – I should mention there was a port of Double Dribble to the Tiger handheld. It all comes around…..

This week I thought I would do something different. I would take a game I’ve never played before and do a first play-through. This is going to be an ongoing series going forward. The rules are that I can’t remember ever playing the game before. The videos will end when a few different things occur, 30 minutes have passed while playing, I have hit a Game Over Screen, or I beat the game (which will likely be very few). With a few of the games I’ve played in the past – expect some very short videos.  I’ll be doing some mainstream games, and like this week’s, some esoteric ones.

This week I did MTV Remote Control on the NES. If I have played this game before, I have no memory of it. It isn’t something I would have picked up as a rental back when that was a thing. This video doesn’t include commentary, but that will likely change in future videos.

MTV had a trivia show unapologetically catering to the couch potato generation called Remote Control.  The trivia was almost always about TV, and it was hosted by Colin Quinn and Adam Sandler.   Funny enough I didn’t watch this show when it actually was on the air.   I was pretty big in Jeopardy, but this was just lighter content that didn’t grab me.

This game was programmed by Hi-Tek who also did the Jeopardy games for the NES if I remember correctly. Since you have the same three-person head-to-head structure, I’m sure it used quite a bit of the same backend between the two games. It was likely very trivial to make the questions relevant and change the backgrounds.

There are a few things that annoyed me about the game. The first is that you can’t change your name. Personally, I was annoyed that I was called Freddy during the whole game. Since there isn’t a choice, what can you do? I seem to remember in Jeopardy being able to change your name and choose different avatars. So at the very least, this is a step backward from that. Maybe they thought that the slackers weren’t going to bother to change it anyways.

The next thing that annoyed me was the second player. He just reminded me of a mashup of George Takei and Archie Andrews. With the few questions he answered, I kept expecting him to go “Oh My” in an NES digitized speech kind of way. He never did.

Finally, the game is too easy. I say that because I’m from the generation these questions were meant to target. I will bet millennials would struggle since most of the shows referenced in the question aren’t in their syndication or binge-watching queue. For someone who grew up back then though – almost all would have been simplistic. I did do horribly in the MASH category, but then again I wasn’t big into that show. I have a little brother (who is a millennial) that would have rocked at least those three questions.

If you were playing with friends (of the appropriate age) it would be more of a matter of who could click the buttons the fastest. As you can see in the video the computer is never fast and drags along before making its choice. It actually would have been difficult to allow the computer to win.

If this is something you missed, I wouldn’t recommend playing it. The exception would be a drunken evening with friends on who knows the most about pre-1990 obscure TV shows. Then at least you could have 20-60 minutes of fun before the boredom sets in. If you aren’t at least in your mid-thirties, you will likely need Wikipedia to help you out. Then again, if you look up all the answers, are you really beating the game?

Since I’ve now beaten this game I doubt I’ll ever revisit it. I could play it until I managed to get a shutout on the computer – but that is maybe one or two more play-throughs. As it was I thought it dragged on for what I did play. It’s an ok trivia game (for its time) but I’ll just mark this first play-through as a win and move on to something else.

History

Mouse Trap was originally an arcade game released in 1981. It was following the rash releases of many maze game clones inspired by the success of Pac-Man. I have never seen Mouse Trap in the wild, maybe when I was five or six when it was first released, but never in any of the retro arcades I have visited. I’m sure the people who compete for the world championship high score on this cabinet are few and far between. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad game, it’s just overshadowed and didn’t sell in big numbers. This means it was hard to find and few people mastered it.

Gameplay

In this game you are a mouse trying to avoid six cats wandering the maze. There are doors throughout the maze (the trap portion?) that can be opened and closed by pushing controller buttons. In the center of the screen there is a box (maybe this if the trap portion?) which teleports you to one of the four corners. If the cats catch you, you lose a life. However, you have a chance to strike back. By collecting dog bones from around the maze – you can transform into a dog. This allows you eat the cats and remove them from the maze for a short period. There is also a random hawk that tries to eat you. Ok, just typing out the overview of the game. I agree it’s silly without much going for it. Let’s just move on. What I can say is that it was a unique formula where they were trying something new. It almost seems like it’s a bit complicated overall.

The Colecovision

The Colecovision port was my only real experience with this game. Coleco made its name by getting the exclusive rights for a time period on arcade titles. This became an ongoing issue between Atari and Coleco. I think it all started when Coleco scored up the license to a game called Donkey Kong and included it as a pack-in to the console. It’s too bad it wasn’t the Popeye arcade game (explanation here). The main difference is that there are only four cats in this game. The video for the Coleco port is below, in it you can see that the graphics are very close to the arcade version. Since I hadn’t seen the arcade version before, looking at the YouTube video so I could compare them I was actually surprised.

My Personal Experience

Even though millions of Colecovision consoles were sold in America, I only knew of one household that had one. That was my cousin’s house in Michigan. Generally we would make the trip up there for family visits a few times a year. I believe this was before I owned a Vic-20 or I had a neighbor with an Atari 2600. Outside of arcades, this was my only access to video games. I anticipated the times of getting to play a home console. When I was seven or eight only the adults and one of my younger cousins were home. They allowed me to go the basement and play games to occupy my time. I think this was the longest gaming session I had up to this point. It was also all by myself, there was sharing controllers or taking turns. It was gaming nirvana for a pre-teen in the eighties. I don’t remember how many games they had, but I flipped through a bunch of them. Obviously I played Donkey Kong, but that was a bit too challenging for me. I was Pac-Man obsessed at that age, but they didn’t have the Pac-Man port. Cartridge after cartridge to find something interesting and I ended up on Mouse Trap. It was enough like Pac-Man that 1990-something me would have said that it was my jam. I had to have played this game for a couple of hours before either my cousins came home and distracted me or it was time to leave. For years this game haunted me. I knew it was on Colecovision, but I wasn’t sure what it was called. When I finally found it I was overjoyed. After that trip I don’t remember playing Colecovision over their house anymore. It might have been better things to do. I think my cousins got bored with it much easier than I did. Even if I did play it again, nothing sticks out like that one single day I had the console all to myself. I remember when Coleco ran the promotion that was if bought a Colecovision you would get a Cabbage Patch Kid for free. I attempted to use this as a back door into getting a game console (my brother and I already had Cabbage Patch Kids though). It was unsuccessful. With the Vic-20, I was stuck with it until I managed to buy my own NES. I have played Mouse Trap on an emulator. I can say without an original Colecovision controller it is a bit difficult using a controller and then tapping the keyboards for numbers. The game doesn’t grab me like it did my pre-teen self. It was something that was of its era and can’t be captured again. That’s a bit sad. If I ever manage to track down a Colecovision for my own, I think this will be my only story about the system. I could play ROMs and rate them, but it’s not the same. It’s an abstract and not a personal experience with the game. So, let’s all hope I manage to track one down.

I’m almost positive that most of the readers finding this page are familiar with how to play Uno. However, if you don’t I highly suggest you go out now, get at least 2 more friends, and buy a deck. I think your other two friends can teach you because they already know how to play. Uno is one of those card games that every family seemed to play when I was growing up. My wife’s family was big into Rummy, well mine was Uno all the way.

When my wife and I had our first townhouse together, we had a standard open-door policy for certain friends. That meant that many nights we would stay up late into the night talking, hanging out, and playing games. Uno went on for months and became highly competitive. It got so bad the first part of the game was to strategically remove me from the game from a points perspective so the goal was 1st or 2nd place.

I remember one evening we had a terrible run where there was a blue nine up on the discard pile. No one could play on it for four or five rounds. It mocked us. Eventually, we manage to get past it with many more cards in our hands. A few games later in the evening after being mercilessly pummeled by Draw cards on all sides, one of the others went out. I had about thirty cards still. I was exasperated and paraphrased Shakespeare, shouting “Blue Nines, on all of your houses”. That was twenty years ago, it still gets quoted among the three of us today.

To kill time during the downtime at the computer store I worked at I searched for a copy of Uno to play against the computer.   This was the late 1990-something and there wasn’t many options to play a digital version of Uno.  I ran across a Windows 3.x version of Uno called Hot Death Uno.  It managed to run on Windows 98, so life was good.   The game was crazy.   I don’t mean crazy like last nights episode of The Simpsons.   This is crazy like the person you used to date that use as a cautionary tale.

I found a blog post that explains how to play it with real cards, you can go over the full rules there. While that post explains it fairly well, I think I may have used these rules or these rules when I made my physical deck.  We are going to go over the different cards involved.   The images are borrowed from this link.

Special Card Rules

Be warned, the cards have non-politically correct and harsh language. If you are going to make your own deck, click on one of the other links for the points of each card and clarifications for the rules.

Double Skip – This card skips the next two players

Reverse Skip – This card performs a reverse and a skip at the same time.

Draw 2 Spreader – This causes all other players to draw two.

Quitter – Playing this card causes the next person in the round to immediately tally their points and quit the round.

AIDs – This splits the draw between the person receiving it and the person playing the draw card.  So someone playing a draw 4 would draw 2 and the person playing the AIDs card would draw 2.

Luck o’ the Irish – This card reduces the amount of cards you have to draw by 1  – so a draw 2 becomes draw 1, a draw 4 becomes a draw 3, etc.

Harvester of Sorrows – This card actually needs a background.    In Hot Death Uno if a Draw 4 is played, the next person has to draw 4 or they can play their own draw 4.   This stacks so the next person has to draw 8.   This can continue until all draw 4’s are used, adding 4 more cards to the draw each time.  The Harvester of Sorrows negate any further stacking after it is played.

Delayed Blast Draw Four – This operates as a skip and a draw 4.

Holy Defender – All negative effect cards skip you and are a transferred to the next person in the round.

Glastnost – If this is played – the next player must put his cards down on the table for everyone to see for the rest of the hand.

Magic 5 – This card is a defense card against the Hot Death Wild Card.  It can also be played as a wild card, but it only changes the color to red.

Fuck You – This sends all the effects of a negative card back to the person that played it.

Penn State – This card is a defense against a Draw 2 spreader – if shown, it sends the draw 2 spreader to backfire, and that played the spreader must draw 2.

Mystery Draw – You have to draw the number of cards that this was played on, so if the previous card was a 9, you draw 9. If it was a 1 you draw one.

Shitter – If you have this card you must play it last.

Mad – If this card is drawn it must be played, choose another player and they are out of the round.

Sixty-Nine – This card can be played as a 6 or 9.

Hot Death – This card is a draw 8

Someone attempted to make a modern version of the game (I’ve heard it exists on Android also).  Here is a video of the game play.

Looking at the rules you can see it is significantly easier to play as a computer game.  It takes two Uno decks to create your own deck, and everyone at the table has to learn the special rules.   It can be painful at first, but then it becomes routine.

I think we played this version at the apartment for a few weeks, but it became painfully slow when a new person joined it.   We sat them down at the computer so they could get a background and then handed them the rules.  We had to wait for them to properly ramp up to get the game going.   Because of this we reverted back to playing standard Uno. However, I’ll never forget those days.

This little game that someone wrote as a parody has a mild cult following.  A few people of heard about this, and I think I covered most the major links about it in this article.   I suggest you track it down and try it out.   From experience, I suggest you try one of the computer versions before attempting to recruit friends.   It’s easier if it at least one person understands the rules quite well before attempting it with friends.

While in the last couple days, I’ve visited known properties such as Popeye and Baseball Stars, today I’m going to go with a game I spent many hours with. Unfortunately (or likely, fortunately) most people have likely never heard of it. This title is Deadly Duck. I had to use the Atari image above because I can’t seem to find the Vic-20 box art.

Deadly Duck was released for the Atari 2600 originally but was later ported to the Commodore Vic-20. Looking around online there is little information about this game, so I’m going to fill you with all I know. Let’s start with how I managed to come across this title originally.

Back in early 1980-something, I begged my parents for an Atari 2600.   Even in my elementary school years I was obsessed with video games.  Unfortunately then only access I had to them was at the arcade.   My father thought video games were just a waste of time, so he wasn’t going to get me a console.    However, at some point my parents bought into the whole “your child needs a computer to be apart of the revolution”.    One day they came home with a Commodore Vic-20 and hooked it up to the TV.   My digital revolution was getting started.

We followed the manual and did a bit of the programming examples offered. This taught me one thing that I still follow to this day, I did not want to be a programmer. While I finally had a computer and a couple of games – in the long run, it backfired on me. Even a decade later when I wanted a new computer to play with new games, the answer was you already have one. You win some and you lose some. We’ll just leave it that it didn’t get much use after I purchased an NES when I was 12.

Because Vic-20 software was harder to find than something like Commodore 64 or Apple II, I begged every single time I saw compatible software.   The best place to find titles for me was Value City in Elyria, OH.   They had a very small computer section, but they carried Vic-20 titles.  I’m sure that Deadly Duck was purchased there.   Hidden under a 6-8 foot wide glass case that the clerk had to open up.

Did I know what Deadly Duck was?  Nope.   Did I care?  Nope, it was new software in a time where software was scarce . My other choice was to spend 6 hours typing in a game into the Vic-20 for something new to play.   Once again this was just reinforcement to never go into programming.  Especially since it would be another 3-4 years before we inherited a tape drive that could actually store software on it.

The Deadly Duck cartridge was shaped differently than the standard Commodore cartridges.  Commodore didn’t enforce the licensing that Nintendo would later do, so anyone could make a cartridge in any shape they wanted.  I’m sure I noticed this back then, but I don’t think I really cared or understood it.

Deadly Duck was essentially a Space Invaders clone.  There was enemies overhead that dropped bricks.   If the bricks hit you, you would die.   If they landed in the water, they stopped you from going past them.  You could shoot the bricks while they were falling and score points, but more than likely you were only shooting them so you wouldn’t die.

The game played in a frenzy. It went fast and the game was frantic. I almost think the gameplay video above it has the correct speed. You would think that would have been two fast to be acceptable, but it was. Luckily I also had another space invaders clone called Vic Avenger. This was a decent substitute for an actual copy of Space Invaders. Deadly Duck likely would have just had me pine for more authentic game play to the arcade game it is based on.

The best part of the game was every time you shot bullets out of duck-bill, a quack sound effect played.   Being somewhere between 6-8 years old, this was awesome. I’m only assuming there are bullets since the cover art.  While he’s an 8-bit blob on-screen the cover art makes him look like some mallard bionic experiment.   It’s was the 80s – it was all good.

One of the best things though, my parents bought me a decent joystick.  It was identical to the one above.   They went above and beyond since they skipped the standard Commodore brand joysticks or a compatible Atari 2600 one.  I actually miss this joystick.   We went on wild romps together – quacking, shooting bricks, other stuff.

I actually still own two Vic-20s. Unfortunately, it’s not my original system. However, I do have the original box that is over 30 years old. Whenever I see Vic-20’s for dirt cheap I’m compelled to pick them up. 30 years later I don’t have a Commodore 64 or an Apple II – but I have 2 Vic-20s. I must be a masochist.

I think what surprises me is how much I enjoyed this game. Back in 1990-something when I played it, I would have been unaware that it became the standard that other games would be judged by (because it was no Bases Loaded).

The first thing it did was install a battery backup. Since many of us had played Legend of Zelda and other battery-based games, we were well aware of how it worked. By the time I played Baseball Stars, I would have assumed that most sports games were like this. Obviously, I was wrong. So for the competitors, the bases were only loaded while the game was powered on. The next improvement it did was to allow you to create players and teams. Back then you had a limited amount of archetypes you could use, but now I see the footage of people scanning their own faces and putting them on the game characters for modern consoles. When you won games you had the option of upgrading attributes on your players. This allowed there to be an RPG element. As you progressed through the season, you leveled up and then destroyed the competition. Maybe they should add a baseball stage to the next Final Fantasy title.

This is what became of the first Popeye Prototype

Now we all know how much of a tremendous failure Donkey Kong was. It was the game that almost put a nearly hundred-year-old company out of business. Most people haven’t even heard of it today. While Mario escaped becoming a megastar, Donkey Kong himself was never heard from again. I’m sure King Features Syndication was happy to not allow Nintendo to use that license. But, there must have been some sympathy by King Features Syndication, because two years later they allowed Nintendo to try again. This is the arcade game that everyone remembers. The one that eclipsed Donkey Kong into obscurity. It outshined luminaries such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man. It caused a national shortage of quarters. It…..well….It’s an ok game. It was a game of mid-level popularity. We know that if the game that became Donkey Kong had been Popeye, Nintendo would be making games such as Popeye Country. Luckily for them in the long run they aren’t forever linked with Popeye being the megastar.

Trying Out Popeye Again

Now before you think I’ve gone off the rails, on one of my visits we were playing video games and we were playing Popeye. For some reason, I was completely engrossed in this game. Since Greenville was four hours away from where we lived, I don’t know if I had planned for trade and brought something with me. I may have just asked to borrow it. Regardless, Popeye became mine for a time period of three to six months. Since I had already played the hell out of my mediocre collection, this became my game to master for a while.

Since the gameplay is very repetitive (like most arcade games), I remember being quite good at this game. If I would have had a chance back then to translate into arcade prowess – I may have been middling decent at it. Not “OMG This is the most amazing player in the arcade” good, but enough that I wouldn’t feel embarrassed going around more seasoned players. However, knowing how other things go gamepad skills were a bit different from arcade joystick stills.

My Actual Cartridge

While I don’t have the same cartridge I spent all those hours on, I do own a copy of Popeye for the NES. It’s not borrowed, but it is blue. I don’t love it enough to marry it though. I do think I paid 15.00-20.00 for it when almost all the games I was buying were under the 10.00 mark. It was something that I had spent so much time on that I had to have it in my collection. I would love to say that the fact it is sitting above Donkey Kong was intentional. Maybe though, it was my unconscious mind doing that. Knowing they would forever be linked with Popeye being the mega Nintendo hit and you scratching your head going Donkey Who?