Unwinnable

My mother got me arrested when I was 17. The fault was mine, though, and I don’t hold anything against her. She’s the one who gave her 17-year-old son free run of the house for a week, but I’m the one who screwed up. My mother’s only condition to not hiring a babysitter was that my best bud Rich stay at the house with me. I’m not sharing this to poke fun at my mother’s parenting; all things considered, she did a bang-up job. No, I’m telling you this because of what happened afterward. (more…)

I’m playing Sonic the Hedgehog on my cousin’s Sega Master System. I’m probably about five years old. It’s the earliest memory of playing a videogame that I have. My cousin is teaching me how to jump over what my brothers and I for many years to come would call “cracks” (those gaps in every platformer ever, the ones usually lined with spikes at the bottom). I know how to jump, and I know how to move Sonic forward, but I am struggling to combine the two. I stand on the edge of the crack (marveling at the way Sonic would balance on his tippy-toes); I press jump, and then I hold the directional pad. Sonic goes straight up, then diagonally down into the crack. Dead.

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You are James Burton. Tasked with the solo mission of saving the universe from deadly parasitic aliens called Bacterians, you must pilot your trusted Vic Viper combat craft into the heart of their infected empire. It is said their leader, Bacterion, is located on one of the worlds assimilated by the Bacterians, a world that may be galaxies away. Your mind wanders as you take the shuttle from planet Gradius up to the war ship. You never thought that the fate of the universe would rest on one man’s shoulders – especially not yours. (more…)

I remember the precise moment I truly grasped the nature of my mortality. I was in my mid-twenties, in the midst of a seven-year bout with my undergraduate degree and in the middle of a shower. I don’t think it was a coincidence that I was naked when I came to the conclusion that there was no beatific bearded man in the sky who would be able to stop the light going from my eyes when my heart stopped and the blood, oxygen and electricity stopped moving around in my brain. Everything I’d learned in catechism and halfheartedly carried with me through my teens was untrue. Someday everything, at least for me, would end. My legs wobbled when the realization struck. I steadied myself with one hand against the tile. Eventually the water ran cold and I did what every human does every day of our fleeting lives. I got on with it. (more…)

It’s hard to believe that the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (aka the SNES) turned 20 years old last week. While I was a dedicated O.G. Nintendo player initially, I admit to having traded in most of my games to FuncoLand when the new system hit the scene (more on that in a second). I spent the better part of the ‘90s playing SNES and Genesis, but the majority of fond (and not so fond) memories are for the SNES. It was the superior of the two systems technologically, sometimes knocking it out of the park and into the stratosphere, thought other times failing abysmally. These are my memories. (more…)

Hey! It’s me again!

As you may recall, earlier today I made fun of some of the worst stuff that came out in 2010. It’s fun to make fun of crappy stuff! The only problem is sometimes some jerk will say something like, “Hey, do you think you could do any better?” My answer is usually no. But when it comes to box art from the early days of console gaming, sometimes I see stuff I myself could probably actually improve upon! It feels good.

So I solicited some opinions to find  out what people considered to be the worst videogame box art of all time, and did what I could to improve them. I think maybe this will help sell some extra copies of these games and improve the economy! Everybody wins! (more…)