Review of: Double Dragon, Paperboy and Other Classic Video Games

Double Dragon: At a certain point, video games and I began to part ways.  I think “Double Dragon” was the original trigger for all of this.  For some reason, I could imagine myself as a yellow guy eating ghosts, a brick smashing other bricks, even a frog running across a highway.  But somehow, I couldn’t imagine myself as a street-trained martial arts ninja capable of going into “the hood” with my brother and annihilating an army of gangsters using only my fists and a couple of garbage cans.  Maybe it was the graphics.  Look at these guys…  they’re tough!  Their arms are like….  nine pixels wide.  I’m not buff like that!

As a side-note, “Double Dragon” was one of the first video games where you could put more quarters into the machine in order to “Continue.”  This was a shocking development, often leading to the annihilation of my entire weekly allowance within a period of 25 minutes.  For some reason, it took video-game developers a while to catch on to the fact that us kids were all crack-addicted zombie-ish quarter monkeys capable of standing in a single place for hours so that we could jam pieces of silver into a machine which was then programmed to tell us that we weren’t good enough.  But we were…  oh baby, we were.  Grade:  B-minus

Star Wars: Video games, like movie sequels, often had to be tougher than the original.  For example, if the game “Star Wars” had been like the movie “Star Wars,” you would have blown up one “Death Star,” then gone home and slept with your sister.  Clearly, this wasn’t going to work.  Instead, the game “Star Wars” posited miraculous infinite universes filled with Death Star after Death Star that you would then have to blow up.  This always tickled me, because within the context of the game, blowing up each Death Star was supposed to have the exact same excitement level as destroying the original.  “Luke…  use the force.”    “Yeah…   yeah…  ‘Use the force,’ old man, I’ve got it.  I’VE BLOWN UP 59 DEATH STARS ALREADY TODAY.  I need a glass of bourbon now.”

Also, I just plain like the idea of infinite universes, and the attendant infinite possibilities that come with infinite universes.  Did this mean that there could be a universe where Luke was Darth’s father?  A universe where Jedi brothers and sisters could legally get married?  A universe where Yoda spoke with perfect diction?  A universe where the Star Wars prequels didn’t totally suck?  See… this is why you don’t actually want me reviewing video games, as I will start to delve into horrifyingly nerdy questions such as these.  Grade:  B-plus

Combat: This was actually for the Atari 2600, which I owned.  There is only one thing to say about this game:  INVISIBLE TANK PONG!  INVISIBLE TANK PONG!  INVISIBLE TANK PONG!  Sweet.  “Combat” wasn’t really much of a game, but it made up for not being very fun by having approximately 1,354 variations of the original not very fun game.  And one of those variations was…  you guessed it.  I’d like to be an army drill instructor, training my soldiers on the eve of a massive Invisible Tank Pong war…

“The first thing yew must remember…  is that yew will NOT be able to see your own tank when it is invisible!  DO YEW GET ME, SOLIDERS?!”  “SIR YES SIR!”  “…The second thing… yew must remember…  is that tank pong bullets ARE capable of ricocheting so as to destroy your own tank!”  “SIR YES SIR!” Grade:  A!

Paperboy: See, there are some things that I just don’t want to recreate in video game form.  Having a boring, menial, low-paying job is one of these.  Other things that I don’t want to recreate include…  STDs (“Gonorrhoids:  2038″), girls breaking up with me (“Super Dump-Man”), my father’s alcoholism (“WhatthehellreYEWlookinat:  The Revenge”), the presidency of George W. Bush (“Bush v. Kerry:  Street Edition”), and oh man I’m starting to run out of jokes about video-games…  Grade:  F

E.T.:  The Extra-Terrestrial: Hey, remember the part in the movie where “E.T.” fell into a pit for five hours and couldn’t get out no matter what you did until you screamed and threw the controller at the screen in frustration?  Um, me neither.  Okay, seriously…  Did anyone play this video game but me?  …Anyone?  Grade:  F-minus

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