Video Game Collecting

I’m back at it but this time it’s the arcade version of Burgertime.

Many gaming blogs review the obvious. What can be said about Contra or Super Mario Bros. 2 that hasn’t been said already? Unless I have something unique to say about one of those games or if I have a genuine opinion of the boxart those titles will mostly remain unmentioned here.

So with out further ado let’s talk about Terra Cresta. Reasonably rare, I got my copy cheap at the expense of the contacts being oxidized. It was an on the whim purchase, an eBay auction minutes away from closing. I never seen heard or played it before.

It’s published by Vic Tokai and as of this writing it’s 25 years old. Looking at just the title screen I can imagine most people cringing. It really does show it’s age. Basically what we have here is a typical shoot-em-up with a couple unique things…

First of all I can’t recall a single shoot-em-up where killing an alien resulted in skeletal remains. That’s pretty cool. The other thing that’s neat is the power up system. Hovering over a numbered orb earns you a new piece of ship which multiplies your firepower. Press a button and the pieces separate allowing your bullets to be more spread out. And now this is where Terra Cresta is really unique… prior to starting the game you can enter a design mode where you can not only decide which ship pieces will hover in relation to your craft, but you can also choose which direction the bullets fly from that piece!

Today very few people know or even care about this game. And with each passing year so many games, including this one and others disappear from the face of the earth. A thousand years from now -long after the death of all humans if in the odd chance the plastic hasn’t deterioted, and the circuit board hasn’t oxidized into dust an alien species might find it and emulate it and perhaps the aliens will take Terra Cresta as a historical record of what happened to humans on Earth. Or then again maybe they’ll take it for what it is… a neat little shooter in a sea of forgotten games.

 

 

 

Guerrilla War… the name alone is bad-ass. And thank goodness the good people at SNK didn’t waste it on some pansy game. The game can best be described as Ikari Warriors with Fidel Castro and Che.

It plays *fast*. Even with a screen filled with a dozen or so soldiers seconds away from visiting the promise land and choppers, tanks, artillery, and hostages demanding your attention the game only slows a tiny bit, trading the slow down for flicker.

You have your standard gun and grenade buttons but you can hold them down for autofire. And thank God for that otherwise you’d have to throw your dilapitated controller away after finishing the game. You have plenty to kill and rescue.

But what’s neat about Guerrilla War isn’t the authentic plot or the censored United States Insignias on the aircrafts at the beginning of the game but rather the attention to details with the graphics. You can run under palm trees. Buildings look like real buildings with Spanish tile and are detailed with alleys, windows, and laundry hanging from clothes lines. Chickens run across the roads along with that hot Babe Athena. There is even a pig that pushes you across the screen! You can blow up bridges as you cross them and witness huge explosions from boss vehicles that are an epileptic’s nightmare. There is another stage inside a mine where you ride a mine cart rescuing hostages. Reach a turn and guess what? -the screen rotates. It’s not smooth by any means but I can’t recall another NES game that does this effect.

On two different stages you fight two men in a bulldozer. They hop out and throw you to the next level. It makes no sense but SNK has a sense of humor!

And finally this game has nothing to do with guerrilla warfare really. I has everything to do with being an awesome video game. It’s fun, its cute, has an awesome soundtrack and really captures the potential of what a 20 year old game is capable of.

One final note… the boxart would look great decorating barracks, an American Legion outpost or a newborn’s nursery.

 

 

 

 

I was maybe 10 or 11 when I first played Sky Shark in the arcade. I had many reasons to like it and it would be very common for me to be doodling bi-planes or buying a 2 dollar balsa wood plane. Those were the best and after a few days of play the wood would be splintered and I’d purposely “crash” it into hundreds of tiny pieces re-enacting a death blow from Sky Shark.

The Nintendo version wasn’t that great. The enemy and level design and difficulty was intact. But the music was way different (although not bad) but the biggest disgrace was the changing of the biplane to a World War II era fighter plane. Yuck.

One summer while still smitten by Sky Shark a near by drug store had a special on toy cars. 3 for a dollar! They were generic and did not have the quality of Hot Wheels or MatchBox but it had a huge variety of military vehicles. The tanks in particular looked exact to the ones in Sky Shark. I bought a bunch over that summer and by the 1st of July I probably had about 40 of them. My Grandfather who encouraged my knowledge of World Wars and would frequently share his experiences with me noticed my interests in bi-planes and bought me one that was made out of copper and had a pencil sharpener in it. Bad-ass!

I couldn’t wait for the 4th of July and the neighborhood kids and I planned out the greatest re-enactment of Sky Shark the world had ever seen. At a playground in our apartments we started making preparations. We recreated the entire first three levels of the game including the ocean which was made from a borrowed hose. We made hangars and turrets out of cardboard, boats out of bottle caps, tree twigs for palm trees and added hundreds of army men, most of which were already bloodied by our mother’s nail polish. These brave plastic men were absent from Sky Shark but their inclusion in our mock battle was an honor for them.

The final preparation involved the fireworks. A helluva lot of them! We borrowed and stole money from our parents and siblings. The “bad kids” stole hundreds of matches and lighters. Everything was PERFECT! At dusk the war would begin. And it did.

Smoke bombs of every color clouded the playground! Fountains showered hell fire down on to the brave pieces of plastic! Lighters exploded! Picollo Petes screeched out to the heavens. Some of the kids brought bottle rockets and other illegal fireworks! Piles of firecrackers gutted trenches into the sand, a village of Friendship Pagodas sprouted up and burned down to the sand almost instantly! This was the closest any of us kids had experienced war! Some of us became terrified when poisonous smoke from the burning army men caked our eyes. In the heart of the carnage some child lost their ear medicine. There was a random shoe here and there! A power wheels was abandoned -its tires melted down to the axels! In the distance… a mother could be heard crying out to her son: Dinner Time!

Burnt plastic lingered in the air the following morning. Though it would never be officially drafted and signed the neighborhood kids and I called a truce against the defenseless tanks and army men. This was no longer a Sky Shark re-enactment. At the request of our parents we buried the dead in that playground that morning.

Thousands of years from now an alien civilization will visit Earth and that battleground will be excavated. And written on a large rock buried in the middle would be the words of Albert Einstein: “I don’t know what mankind will use to fight World War 3, But World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones”.

See an awesome deal on VideoGamePriceGuides.Com?  We’ve added a “Tweet This” link next to the Google Calendar link.  It’s currently available for Nintendo NES listings right now, but will be rolled out to all of the price guides soon.

It’s rare for me to pick up a game and know nothing about it. Cybernoid The Fighting Machine for Nintendo NES was one of three titles I won from eBay for a total of $2 (Karate Champ and Solar Jetman being the other.)

I only got to play Cybernoid for about five minutes this evening. There is a psychology in movies that precisely at the 17-minute mark the audience needs to have a general idea of the plot. The major characters and the conflict needs to be mapped out or the audience will lose interest. Studies have been done and from what I understand this is widely understood to be fact. In a videogame I’d say you have no more than three minutes before the player decides if it captures their interest or not. That’s not a lot of time.

Cybernoid starts out on a neat option screen before going to a very simple title screen. What immediately caught my interest was the high score. High scores (or any score for that matter) is a rare commodity in games nowendays so to be reminded that “hey dummy a key element of all games must be a score” is refreshing. It also tells me the programmers wanted this game to be played more than once. Can you imagine early arcade games having an intentional and acheivable ending? They’d have gone out of business much sooner!

Anyways my five minutes of game play revealed that Cybernoid is a neat little arcade shooter where you manuver a ship in an alien world while avoiding being attacked. It’s kinda like Gradius meets Side Arms but at your own pace. There are nooks and crannies you can hide in and items you can pick up. The graphics are nothing spectacular and your lasers and missles couldn’t have been made simpler.

I imagine a lot of people would hate this game. It’s difficult, doesn’t have catchy music, but I think there is a deep plot here some people might miss. I won’t reveal it here yet. Let me play Cybernoid a few more times and I’ll tell you what I think the story is…

Genesis Does Strider…  I remember Strider.  I remember some punk kid in a local game store going ape-spit when the owner said he didn’t have a copy, only to pull it out after the worthless snot started to cry.  The ad alleges that it’s the most powerful game – EVER because it’s 8 megs.  Perhaps the largest game ever (at that time) but memory capacity doesn’t equal strength… aww.. naive public.  It’s a damn good port, just like Ghouls ‘N’ Ghosts.  I only seen it once in an arcade and that was at the Showboat Hotel and Casino.

I’ve had plenty of fun recreating Nintendo labels. You see about a year ago had a wild idea to make new Nintendo labels for games where the labels have been ruined to such a degree that they would not be salvagable. Hussy golf came from that experiment. Anyways I now have the need to make a “good” label for RBI Baseball 3 for SEGA Genesis. This used copy I have is in sad shape. Four labels have raped this poor cartridge. The curent price sticker, an inventory identifier, a barcode for the Wherehouse, and a security strip you see at the top of the photo. This was the worst sticker and even though the paper came off well the magnetic strip ripped the label. Dammit. That’s ok. Stay tuned as I create a repro!

 

Arcades have taught me that a challenge is no challenge at all unless you have an audience. My boss. My boss’s boss. My boss’s boss’s boss. My client. My client’s boss. My client’s boss’s boss. My client’s boss’s boss’s boss. That’s a lot of boss. What the crap is a ‘boss’ anyhow? Sometimes the peon is the boss. Somedays videogames just aren’t fun.

Well I finally did it. I reached the end of Toki on the NES. It wasn’t particularly a difficult game… until the end. Jumping across the chasms on the mine cars was difficult. I needed help. The boss was a different story all together. Between the fire balls, its extending head and heart blocking hand it took a good 20 minutes and several continues to finish him off.

I learned from this though and now it seems I am suffering from the medical consequences. I’ve not experienced this kind of adrenaline in years and the fight or flight response triggered by my rush is starting to wear off. Time to chowdown on meat like my caveman ancestors would have done after fighting a cheetah or turkey.