The biggest thing to hit my universe in the past week has been Mega Man 9, and it hit me hard enough to knock the paintbrush right out of my hand. Seriously, I need to get back to work.

Playing through the new game, which is styled in perfect 1990s-era 8-bit graphics, has sent me back into the dangerous tailspin of retro gaming. These things have to happen in phases, because if they all happened at once, my heart would explode like an atom bomb of love. Which would ruin the value of my collectibles.

Wikipedia tells me that there are 779 8-bit NES cartridges out there. Finally having a finite number in mind, I’d decided a few years back that I’d slowly collect them all, and when I had them all together, I’d probably do something neat, and as-yet-undetermined, with them. Not only is the cartridge art often an amazing example of ridiculous hyperbole, but the games bring back a simpler (and far more difficult) era in video gaming. In my day, we didn’t have any of this infinite continue nonsense. If anything, we had codes that we scoured the back of magazines for or traded snacks with friends for, and if you were really lucky, you had a Game Genie to tweak your way through the harder parts of the game.

Of the aforementioned 779 NES carts, not all of them are licensed or were sold in the US. While my collection currently only spans official Nintendo carts, I know that these are going to come into play eventually, and they won’t be cheap.

Wisdom Tree produced a variety of religion-based video games which are less common than the average NES cart, due to pressure from Nintendo which prevented retailers from selling Wisdom Tree’s unlicensed products next to official Nintendo products. For being a company that based their games on ethics and morality, their decision to craft games that worked around Nintendo’s proprietary system and lockout chip certainly doesn’t seem ethical. Their games for the NES include Bible Adventures, Sunday Funday, Exodus, Bible Buffet, King of Kings, and Spiritual Warfare - the latter of which concluded with an extremely creepy battle with Satan. Of this group, most can be purchased for under $10, with Bible Buffet, a bible quiz game with unsettling box art, fetching the highest price, at around $30. I think that at least $25 of that is for the pictures of the anthropomorphic food on the cover. Something tells me that a game that also happens in ‘Fast Food Land’ would not be ‘Family Approved’ today, either.

Generally, Wisdom Tree’s games are regarded as glitchy, overly simplistic and not exceptionally fun, so are usually only collected by NES completists, and completely ignored by purists.

Camerica is responsible for another collection of unlicensed, and often rarer, NES games. Of the 15 games that they eventually released, all can be visually distinguished from a genuine NES game by a slightly different shape (with the game ‘handle’ extending across the entire center of the cart), upside-down cart art, and silver or gold coloring instead of the typical NES grey. Like Wisdom Tree’s games, most can be bought for under $10, with a few exceptions. Quattro Arcade doesn’t seem to appear as often, and so fetches slightly higher prices.

While many of these games are regarded as fun and playable, it’s worth noting that seven of their games require the Aladdin Deck Enhancer add-on, also produced by Camerica. The Deck Enhancer functions like a regular NES cart into which smaller carts could be inserted (similar to a Super Game Boy for the SNES). Because the Enhancer cart itself contained the mechanism to get around the security devices of the NES, Camerica’s ‘Enhanced’ games could be produced for less. The Aladdin Deck Enhancer can be found for $50 to $100 dollars, and unfortunately, is a necessity to play Big Nose Freaks Out, Micro Machines, Quattro Adventure (which features four games, including the popular Super Robin Hood), Quattro Sports, Dizzy the Adventurer and the similarly titled Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, and Linus Spacehead’s Cosmic Crusade. These carts are much smaller, and trapezoid shaped.

Some of these come in ‘Deck Enhancer’ versions. and some are full carts, so be aware of what you’re purchasing!

Far more rare are the two unlicensed Active Enterprises games, Action 52 and Cheetahmen II. Of all unlicensed NES games, these are the rarest, and usually regarded as the two worst games in the history of gaming, and an affront to human decency and all that is holy.

Action 52 included 52 mini-games, and originally retailed for $200. Seeing as how this debuted in 1991, when the average video game price was $50, the ridiculous price didn’t find many buyers. The manual that described play through the 52 games was incomplete, but offered more detailed manuals for each game at the price of $1 each. Not only was the manual incomplete, but the game itself was incomplete, with many games were constructed without being tested for actual playability. Games were repetitive, or would freeze in the middle of gameplay. Again, despite being an abysmal game, this cart can be found for around $50, which is still a steal compared to the original price of three human kidneys.

Cheetahmen II expanded upon one of Action 52’s minigames, but was never officially released. In 1997, all 1500 unreleased copies were found in a warehouse and trickled into circulation through the secondary market. While almost impossible to find, they do appear on eBay from time to time, and a sealed copy recently sold on eBay for $1450. Like Action 52, the game cannot be completed because of a bug that the developers never resolved before producing the game.

Panesian is another company that made unlicensed NES games, all of which were adult in nature. Bubble Bath Babes, Hot Slots, and Peek-a-Boo Poker probably weren’t things that your friends down the block had, as these were not distributed via the normal channels, and it’s fairly sad when your need for pornography is so great that you’ll settle for highly pixelated nudity on a video game system. These three games usually sell for around $300 each.

Perhaps the rarest, kinda-released game of all time is the 1990 Nintendo World Championship cart, which was used, predictably, during the 1990 Nintendo World Championships. Competitors had 6 minutes to earn as many points as they could through Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer and Tetris. 90 grey editions of this cart were given to finalists, and 25 gold carts were given to Nintendo Power subscribers. In addition to the one other cart that was used at the tournament, that equals 116 carts in existence. The asking price for a grey cart is $8000, while the gold cart easily goes for twice as much.

Astute vintage gamers will note my exclusion of ‘Stadium Events’, a game that was released only in Woolworths in the Northern US, and then quickly recalled. Because the game was licensed and released at retail, if even for a short time, it doesn’t really belong on this list. It also exists in a European (PAL, not NTSC) version, which is very common. The US eventually saw the re-release of this game as the common World Class Track Meet, for use with the Power Pad.

With 131 games in my collection, I’ll be focusing on the ‘pure’ Nintendo games - the ones that come with memories, rather than ones that come with a high price tag. And quietly hoping to find ‘Cheetahmen II’ at a tag sale.

As a former AP Physics student, I love a game with a good physics engine powering it. Seeing bullets flawlessly arc based on the amount of force put behind them and mitigated by the coefficient of air friction in front of them is always a little bit thrilling, and digital pool balls, perfectly deflected into pockets, put my soul at ease. Sure, I barely passed the course, but that was because I was too busy having a girlfriend and drawing fairies. Yes, it’s possible to do both at once. Explain THAT, physics!

Recently, the internet has given us a vast variety of simple Flash games, all of which can be quickly played in a browser window, and usually for free. Some of these games have enough graceful genius to warrant a subscription fee, and some even make the bold move onto actual gaming systems. Does ‘bored at work’ easily equate to ‘actively playing during your spare time’? Sometimes, it absolutely does.

Line Rider has been a cult-favorite website, elevated to such a status because of its simple, easily accessible execution. The premise is thus : you have two dimensions, a guy on a sled, and you draw lines that he can ride around on. Gravity and slopes in subtle variations control your rider’s path, and if he doesn’t flip over and crash out because of a funky line here or there, you gots yerself a course - the wilder the better. Especially long or interesting rides are captured and dropped into YouTube. Go on over to the site and play around!

Line Rider 2 : Unbound is a sequel of sorts to the online version of Line Rider, presented on the Nintendo DS. It’s an intuitive move - bringing a drawing game over to a system with a touch-screen and a stylus is just smart gaming. If the online version has any drawbacks, it’s that drawing with a mouse is a frustrating and clumsy experience, so ideally, the ability to actually draw your lines with a stylus would cure this.

The game has three modes : Story, Freestyle and Puzzle. Freestyle Mode most closely represents the free-for-all, make-whatever-you-want spirit of the original line rider, which really needs no additions to keep itself fresh. While the online version depends upon gravity for movement, this DS version incorporates a variety of lines that create different physical or dramatic effects for your little sled guy, making the courses even more interesting to create and watch, but easily omitable if you want to stay true to the mechanics of the original.

The ability to draw your lines definitely adds a dimension of fun to the game, but if you have an unsteady hand, your lines will form like the scrawlings of an armless monkey. Who’s had a bit too much to drink. And is choking on a bar pretzel. It’s bad news, and it means bad things for your delicate little rider, who weighs as much as an anorexic hummingbird, based on how often he’s flung from his sled. Fortunately, the game also has a Bezier Curve drawing mode, where the line artist can draw a perfectly straight line and then drag a few points around to stretch it into a curve, not unlike creating something in Adobe Illustrator.

So, the drawing mode is a smart, exciting addition, once you get used to the technical aspects of drawing the lines. Much of the game turns out to be making tiny, slight adjustments to the line paths, over and over, until everything syncs up just right - and since there’s no quick ‘undo’ button, one needs to click from the pen tool to the eraser tool every time you need to make a change, instead of something intuitive like pressing a button to immediately convert the pen to an eraser or to take your drawing a step back. If you’ve constructed a long course, you’ll need to watch the whole thing over again each time you make a change.

Another addition in Line Rider 2 incorporates the Wi-Fi capabilities of the DS. Now, line artists can go online via their DS interface and share their creations with people around the world, whereas the original website didn’t permit this. Tracks can be quickly downloaded (without a preview, unfortunately) and played with in Freestyle Mode or Puzzle Mode. If they’re not suitably awesome, they can also be quickly deleted. At the time of this writing, the online selection was very sparse, but it’ll certainly pick up once more folks purchase the game. I’m a collector of the DS’ Wi-Fi games, since social-interaction-via-Gameboy is still a novel concept to me, and online, pure, competitive Tetris is pure euphoria.

One innovation that would have completely rocked my world would have been the ability to share your DS creations with a worldwide audience via a YouTube compressor or something. As it stands, your audience remains trapped within the DS - which is still an improvement over ‘yourself and your inattentive cat’.

Story Mode pushes your sled guy through a series of puzzles, all of which can be solved with a few cleverly placed lines. These levels are intermixed with some animated cut scenes of cartoonish sledder kids trying to sabotage one another, since the world of competitive sledding is brutal. 515 deaths last year - and that was just from fighting at the ski lodge. The scenes don’t really add too much, since Line Rider’s total lack of story is what keeps it pure and artful, but I’m also in my mid-20s, so perhaps the appeal is lost on me.

Puzzle Mode allows you to create puzzles for the rest of the world to solve, via Wi-Fi upload. The designs start to become fairly intricate, with the involvement of foreground and background details, camera angles and special effects, another interesting (if mostly ornamental) addition.

The translation from online to Nintendo is pretty successful, but the learning curve might be a little disorienting for the oldschool Line Riders. I’m compelled to create either some kind of elaborate course that prominently features dinosaurs fighting robots, or something vulgar and suggestive to give to the world. Even with the endless possibilities, I’ll restrain myself.

Naruto, to any casual observer of Japanese animation, seems to be the new Pokemon. Sure, Pokemon still has an immortal presence in our media and attics, but things are surely a-changin’.

Here’s the formula : take an endless anime series about a kid on an frighteningly obsessive quest of their own devising that has no relevance to the real world, give it a prominent time slot on Cartoon Network, and lend the likeness to action figures, video games, trading cards and underoos. You have a formula for frenzy. Those Pokemon were just the adorable advance troops, but there are far more sinister things on the way, and their eyes are huge and sparkly.

The extensive line of Naruto video games spans dozens of titles across every current video game systems. How can the story of one overconfident kid who wants to be a super-ninja fill such a vast array of gameplay? Somehow, it does - when you transplant the same story into all genres of games - so while some of the games are turn-by-turn RPG quests across Naruto’s world, some are presented as a series of side-scrolling puzzle challenges, and some are plain ol’ classic fighting games, where two opponents face off and beat the living snot out of each other. Such is the nature of Naruto : Ninja Destiny for the Nintendo DS. I can always enjoy the simplicity of a good pummelfest, and the familiar process of knocking out one increasingly difficult opponent after another.

Of course, Naruto is a bit more complex than gems like Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat - first, because it’s presented in 3D. Since the camera always resituates itself to a level perspective, the game doesn’t breach the potentially dizzying world of the third dimension too boldly. The greatest advantage to fighting in three dimensions, besides the fact that it looks pretty, is that you can quickly sidestep your opponent’s attacks with a tap of the up or down arrows - which is a lot more stealthy and effective than blocking or stepping backwards. It’s almost a move that proves to be TOO effective, as it leaves the other fighter staring off into space and launching attacks at the air for a few moments while you land a few punches yourself. Tapping the L-button on the shoulder of the DS enables ‘substitution jutsu’, a move that’s absolutely way too effective, since you immediately appear directly behind your oblivious opponent, who is defenseless for that moment - except for the ability to do the same disappearing act to you. What results is a long series of disappearing leapfrogs until someone misses a button and gets smacked.

The second screen on the DS system is used for touch-activated controls. For this Naruto game, this aspect involves a randomly generated set of magical power-ups that are activated by tapping this touchscreen. All of the fighting action takes place on the top, non-touchable screen of the DS, and since both hands are used to control movement and fighting, the practicality of an additional set of touch controls that requires you to abandon either your left- or right-hand controls is questionable, but not as distracting as one might think. Gotta use that extra screen for SOMETHING, and it’s a better use than useless data readouts about the battle, which some games resort to.

Running below your standard life meter is a ‘chakra meter’, which builds in strength as you hit your opponent, or are hit by your opponent. When this meter is completely full, a simple press of the B button will allow you to perform your ‘special jutsu’ - a powerful move (which is different for every character) that seriously depletes your opponent’s energy, and plays a small animation of an action-filled, magical ultra-smackdown.

Fans of Naruto will see a collection of familiar characters to choose from when battling, though you start out with only 6. A total of 16 characters can be unlocked as you accomplish various victories. The instruction manual is limited to 5 pages of useful info, so much of this needs to be discovered on your own.

There are two modes of one-player action. In Story Mode, you’ll venture through a narrative of talking heads talking about how hard their lives are and whatever pseudo-political struggles they’re involved in before you get to fight each round. I have to be totally honest in saying that I blindly skipped over these, as I have no brain-space left to fill with fictional ninja clans and whether or not they’re jerks. My own willful ignorance aside, hardcore fans of the series’ story will completely dig it. While in Story Mode, the story will dictate which character you are to use for each successive battle.

Battle Mode allows you to choose one character to battle every other character with, one by one. The game also makes use of the DS’ wireless function, enabling two players with this same game disk to play against each other from across the room. The game, unfortunately, does not go online wirelessly for a worldwide ninja battle championship. Which would be pretty great. I’m a total sucker for any DS game that allows me to play against anonymous, live opponents at 4 AM when I get lonely.

Fortunately, the game allows you to choose between ‘normal’ difficulty and ‘hard’ difficulty, since I blew through both ‘normal’ modes on my first attempt and unlocked some unlockables. I’m not yet modern enough in my gaming to have a set catalogue of expectations for my handheld gaming experiences, since my brain is still enthralled with the oldschool green-and-yellow Tetris blocks dropping across my slowly disintegrating Game Boy screen - which makes the fact that I was able to pick up the mechanics of this game so quickly something of a testament to its intuitive control scheme.

I did enjoy Naruto : Ninja Destiny, as it miniaturizes the whole 3D fighting experience without skimping on any style or detail. Keep this in mind if you’ve played the other Naruto fighting games on larger systems - this is a DS, not a supercomputer, and it will behave accordingly. Unlockables make the game replayable, and 2-player action further improves the appeal - even if you’re not a fan of Naruto. We don’t even have to hear his annoying catchphrase every 15 seconds this time, which is like, a thousand bonus points.

Let me preface this all by saying the following : this is a great DVD. It’s hilarious in its own way, and I’m very happy to have it in my collection.

So, you know those guys who go around the world eating elephant brains just because it’s considered a local delicacy for one tribe of forgotten peoples in the middle of nowhere? You know those guys who intentionally get themselves bitten by animals and shot with projectiles so they get on the internet and television? They ain’t got nothin’ on me, because I watched the third season of Captain N.

This week, the missing third season of Captain N was released by Shout Factory. What I (and other casual DVD collectors) had not realized was that the previously released ‘Captain N : The Complete Series’ was not, in fact, complete at all - and I’m nothing if not a completist. See, the first two seasons of Captain N are considered to be a relatively good cartoon show. They existed in a 22-or-so minute format, and the animation was pretty well done - and then, the third season happened. And boy, did it happen.

Captain N became a 11-or-so minute show, and the original animation studio was dropped, or all got the floppyhands, or SOMETHING - because nothing was the same. Movements became jerky and uneven, no character looked the same from scene to scene, and worst of all, the dynamic Mother Brain - chief archnemesis for the whole show, became a poor outline of her previous appearance. Just check out these comparison shots.

[left to right : Mother Brain from the original Metroid
video game, Mother Brain from the first seasons of Captain N,
and the regrettable Mother Brain from season 3]

What were once semi-relevant, interesting plotlines became hollow explorations into lame sports games and yes, even Tetris. You can never, ever, ever make a convincing nemesis out of a Tetris block, nor can you make an acceptable villain out of a scoreboard in Basketball World (or, as they call it, Hoopland) - and yet, AND YET, ‘Clock Man’ emerges to terrorize the N Team. In the stand-out most horrendously agonizing cartoon episode I’ve ever seen, a little boy named Hoopless makes a robot so that he might score a shot through a magic basketball hoop on Hoop-De-Doo-Dah Day. Apparently, living in Hoopland means that you need to throw the word ‘hoop’ randomly into every other sentence, and most of your indigenous animals are shaped like hoops and shoot hoops out of their mouths. I wish I was kidding. I wish so very much.

What I find most tangentially interesting is the fact that Mother Brain was voiced by none other than notable singer Levi Stubbs - member of the Four Tops and The Coasters, the latter of which was managed by Ian Levine, who I’d written about here once before. Everything is interconnected. So, in addition to be a colossal collector, Ian Levine was also in league with Mother Brain.

There are seven Captain N episodes contained in this 2-disc set, while ‘The Complete Series’ set has 26. Omitted form both is episode number 27, which was only a much-dreaded clip show anyhow.

But that’s not all! This set also includes 13 episodes of ‘The New Super Mario World’, the final of a trio of shows to feature the ‘Super Mario’ name. The Mario cartoon world had previously seen a total of 65 episodes, most released on DVD at this point. Of course, nothing will ever beat the original Super Mario Brothers Super Show, which featured live-action Lou Albano segments and voiceovers, but ‘Super Mario World’ is a fitting death knell to the Super Mario cartoon legacy.

Happening sometime after the release of Super Mario World for the SNES, this cartoon incorporated many elements from the video game - all of King Koopa’s horribly obnoxious children, the horribly obnoxious Yoshi, and other various horribly obnoxious bad guys. Of course, it also added a great deal of unrelated, nearly irrelevant elements - such as cavemen, everywhere, making you long for the days of Super Mario 3’s various mushroom kings and FryGuys and TriClydes. It feels kinda like wishing to return to the good ol’ days of the Great Depression.

Interestingly, the presence of cavemen in the show created some very Luddite narratives - the introduction of TV hypnotized the cavepeople, fast food was evil, cars caused traffic jams and chaos, and the phone made people talk too much. Maybe the message was that technology removes us from our roots and ourselves, or maybe just that stupid people can’t handle complex things. Or maybe they were just really, really easy episodes to write.

The DVD includes a brief storyboarding of the title sequence, and some original Yoshi sketches, but nothing else. Since episodes of Super Mario and Captain N aired back to back in their original format, they are presented as such within the DVD, but you do get the option of watching just the Mario or just the Captain N episodes. Their arrangement on the disc differs slightly from the original pairings and airdates, but you’ll be internally bleeding far too much to care.

It’s a great DVD set. The cartoons are so bizarre and awkward that it’s pretty amazing to watch. It completes the Captain N collection, it’s an important addition to the Super Mario collection, and seriously, if you’re watching these shows today, it’s not because they’re really, really good. It’s for pure nostalgia, and to laugh at yourself, and appreciate them for what they are. There’s a whole lot to be appreciated in the 4 hours of cartoons presented here.

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… but even before the eight bits of the Nintendo Entertainment System infiltrated my home, and subsequently, the very essence of my being, there were always the arcade machines. Seeing as how I live in a forest and the most high-tech form of entertainment is known as ‘thems squirrels in the yard over thar’, I never got that much of an arcade machine fix. There was Toobin’ at the pizza place just outside of town, and Bubble Bobble at the video store, and every so often, the unadulterated pleasures of the bowling alley, but it was limited. The annual trips that we took to the Jersey Shore and the boardwalks were pure heaven for me, and I’d have my own weight in quarters stuffed into my pockets as I ventured out, only to return home depleted and thumb-sore.

If there is one holy grail item that defines my whole life, it’s the Star Trek : The Next Generation pinball machine. It’s not a ‘video game’, no, but it maintains that carnival atmosphere of the arcade, and you get to fight the damned BORG with precision-guided pinball cannons, which everyone knows is their real weakness. Everything I aspire to, every step forward that I take, somehow it’ll all resolve in me getting a ST:TNG pinball machine, quietly humming away in my den, patiently awaiting my nightly visits like a patient lover. It was the first pinball machine that I fell in love with at the Jersey Shore, and when I was morbidly depressed in college, I’d waste more quarters than I care to admit in the machine there, eventually earning the high score for a few glorious months, as well as a few moments of escapist tranquility. And one day, it will be mine, and I’ll know that there’s nothing more I can accomplish for myself.

In the meantime, I’ve taken to collecting retro-video gaming decorations for my future apartment. Since full-sized arcade machines don’t fit all that well into budget priced living arrangements or utility bills, I’ve begun to consume the next best thing - arcade marquees.

The business of restoring and re-manufacturing vintage arcade machines is a profitable one, with thousands of arcade parts from buttons to CPUs all over eBay and other restoration websites. Me, I’m taken with the marquees. At an average of 2 feet long and 8 inches high, these plexiglass signs are what you find above the screen on your typical arcade box, featuring the outlandish artworks and titles that heralded these games from across the noisy arcade floor. Usually illuminated from behind, they’re iconic reminders of the very unique arcade aesthetic, a kind of awkward, comic futurism. And I want to decorate my bathroom with them. Soon, I’ll have a Super Moon Cresta hanging over my toilet, and it will be good.

I can’t say that I’ve played most of these games, but it’s their names that are especially interesting, usually generic space, driving or war-fare, with the occasional complete nonsense word thrown in there for good measure. Like Gorf. I don’t know what Gorf is, but it’s probably the best word to ever enter my lexicon, and I know a lot of words. Dyger and Rygar, separated at birth, are two more such examples of the amazing flexibility of the English language. After it’s been bar hopping all night and wakes up in a dumpster covered with prostitute lipstick.

How can you ever forget such classics as Caveman Ninja? It presupposes that feudal Japan existed before cavemen and imparted its particular fighting methods unto them, which any fan of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure could tell you is completely possible. That film was a documentary and don’t tell me otherwise. A game called Spinal Breakers clearly means business. Spine business.

Since most of these panels have been removed directly from beleaguered arcade machines, many bear light scratches and chips, but such is the essence of the arcade. You need to have a melty-brown cigarette burn before it’s authentic, and it needs to look very well loved. Falling short of owning the actual item, I settle for these small parts of authentic machines, which are usually available for under $20 and not especially difficult to obtain.

And they’ll look great next to my Super Mario Brothers 2 cross-stitch.