Oh crap indeed. Another writer on the Internet reminiscing about Nintendo. I know it’s not what you want to read, but I have writer’s block...and...I’ve been playing a lot of Half-Life 2...

...cough...

The last time I had an article about video games was in November. In this article, I’ll be talking about random Nintendo games that I owned. Some you will know. Some you will not know. Some will...well, I guess that’s it. You either know them or you don’t.

I would like to dedicate this article to my sister. You brought about 37 of my 42 Nintendo games with you to college a long time ago and never returned them. That made this article much more difficult. Without my precious games in my basement - where they belong - I had to do most of this by memory.

Fester’s Quest

Fester’s Quest is a video game based on the Addams Family. You remember that movie and its crappy sequel, don’t you? This video game was made before the movie, so it’s based on the 50's television show. Or 60's. Whatever era it was, it was back when television was in black and white, and therefore blew a whole lot of ass.

In Fester’s Quest, you play the role of Uncle Fester, the bald, funny weirdo who can put a lightbulb in his mouth and make it glow. What is the plot of the game, you ask? Is it stopping evil developers from building a mini-mall on the Addams estate? Will you control Fester as he does wacky things to the neighbors? No.

Fester is given a gun and he has to stop an alien invasion.

The only thing this game has to do with the Addams Family is that you are Uncle Fester and there are brief cameos by other members of the family. For some reason, they are located in random houses around town. They don’t say anything either. Let’s say you enter a house and Wednesday is inside. A horribly grainy 8-bit picture of the 1950's Wednesday will be on screen and the game will say, “Wednesday gives you dynamite.” Then you’re automatically kicked out of the house. I think Pugsley gives you a bazooka. Besides that, there is no relation between this game and the television show.

The game is terrible. The first enemy you come across is a green snot on the road. It takes about 10 blasts from your gun to kill it. 10! The fucker doesn’t move either! I would sit there and press the damn button ten times in a row to kill a stationary enemy. Is this the best enemy that the programmers could come up with? Sure, you can walk around the snot, but the only way to make your gun “stronger” is by collecting power-ups that dead enemies leave behind. I recall that by the third power-up, your gun shoots these weird bubbles, but it still takes like 8 blasts to kill the snots. There are also flies that swarm you, and since Fester only has two “boxes” of health to begin with, they kick his ass! You’re done after two hits! Game over! Have a nice fucking life!

The bosses are insane. I remember one was a giant devil skeleton with a sword and shield. Again, what the hell does that have to do with the Addams Family? The game sucked. I think I beat the first boss then never played it again. What a waste of money and time. I should have been reading a book.

Final Fantasy

The first game of the greatest RPG series of all time. Too bad Final Fantasy wasn’t that good. First off, it was too hard. Enemies would be incredibly strong too early on. In this place called Marsh Cave, you have to fight 9 wizards at the same time. I never got past those fuckers. It wasn’t just me either. Every person that I have met (that played Final Fantasy) say the same thing: “I died fighting the wizards in the Marsh Cave.” What’s the point of making a game that hard? Huh? Answer me, dammit.

The funniest part of Final Fantasy is a useless spell called Anti-Mute. This was covered on Seanbaby.com long ago, but it deserves to be brought up again. There is a spell called Mute in this game. It prevents someone from casting magic. If you cast Mute on, say, an enemy wizard, they cannot cast magic of any kind. Some enemies also have Mute in their arsenal and they can cast it on you as well. Anti-Mute is a spell that stops an enemy wizard from casting Mute on you. That’s it.

Let’s think about that. Anti-Mute just stops Mute. The enemy can still cast any other spell to kick your ass. If you cast Mute instead, it will stop the enemy from casting Mute AND every other spell! Mute stops all spells! Why cast Anti-Mute and settle for just blocking Mute? Do you LIKE having to deal with terrible and painful magic? Exactly.

Clash at Demonhead

There is certainly nothing like this game. As a matter of fact, it’s hard to explain. You play as Bang, a secret agent, who has to climb a mountain called Demonhead because the famous Professor Plum has been kidnapped and taken there. Is this Professor Plum the same guy from Clue? No, of course it isn’t, but the fact that they chose Plum as a name is stupid yet hilarious.

A bad motherfucker known as Tom Guycot, who is a skeleton with a cape, wants to destroy the world with a doomsday bomb and he is forcing Plum to make it. He has 6 henchmen, or “Governors,” working under him. These guys will be the bosses and they are TOUGH! They rank as some of the most difficult bosses I have ever faced in a video game. One boss is a dragon on a motorcycle. A fucking dragon riding a damn motorcycle. That combination is something a normal person would never dare dream of. I mean, dragons are bad enough with the fire-breathing and the ability to fly, but when you add a motorcycle to the mix, it’s just asking for trouble. Another boss is Pandar, which are cute twin pandas. I was actually scared of these things because they combined into one ferocious panda that would kick the living shit out of Bang. Looking back on it, the bosses seem funny, but when I played it as a kid, I was frightened. I mean, two nice pandas killing you? That’s out there.

You choose stages, or "routes," for Bang. After you beat a route, you saw a map of Demonhead and your current location. You could choose to go one route or another. One route would eventually branch into different routes, as would the other route you could choose to take. You can miss some helpful places if you don’t choose wisely, like a store.

What I didn’t like about this game is that there is really no structure. If you chose the wrong route, you would eventually end up on top of Demonhead fighting this evil demon called...well, Demon. You need a special weapon to kill him, but if you never chose the route where you can get it, the Demon eats your fucking guts. When I was a kid, I never understood what to do. The Demon - as well as the motorcycle riding dragon and Pandar - always killed me. They bullied me non-stop and I could never land a single gunshot on them, so I gave up...until high school.

I somehow got my system to work and I played Clash at Demonhead again. I don’t know what it was - increased practice, patience, or overall awesomeness - but I tore Clash at Demonhead a new asshole. I killed the dragon on the motorcycle, I bashed Guycot’s brains in, and I stabbed the Demon through his one ugly eye with a giant sword. As for Pandar, let’s just say it will take the Panda a little longer to be taken off the endangered species list. It was very gratifying.

When you kill a Governor, they leave behind a medallion. It turns out these useless things are the only way to turn off the Doomsday bomb...which, by the way, is set to detonate when you beat the game. The very last thing you have to do is put the medallions in a certain order and the bomb turns off or some shit. It was all fairly tense, especially since you have eight seconds to do it and the game never tells you what the correct order is.

I failed the first time. The world blew up and the game said "The End." The ghosts of millions of people flew by me and said, "Thanks a lot, Fishman. Now I'm fucking dead for all of eternity. You really suck." I somehow succeeded diffusing the bomb the second time, which is amazing because there are a lot of orders in which to place 6 medallions. After I finished, I wasn’t sure if I even liked Clash at Demonhead. There were cool power-ups, like a lava suit, but the route system just wasn’t 100% perfect. In games now - games that let you choose your own way at least - it always works out so that no matter what you do, you’ll still have what you need to beat the game. Clash at Demonhead didn’t do that. You can choose your own way, but you’ll be lost and confused because nothing happens.

Eh, I’d play it again.

Goonies II

I know what you’re thinking. No, there was never a sequel to The Goonies. This game is based on the Goonies characters, but it has nothing to do with the movie’s plot. I don’t know why, but the creators decided to go with “Goonies II” as a title.

You play as Mikey, but in this game, he’s just a sprite made up of blue and red. He in no way resembles Sean Astin. The plot is that the Fratellis kidnapped the rest of the Goonies, including Annie the Mermaid. Who the fuck is Annie the Mermaid? There was no mermaid in the movie! I’ll actually explain my theory about Annie the Mermaid in a minute.

The game is impossible. It is mostly Mikey walking around a huge underground maze, complete with spiders, penguins (for some reason), and the occassional Fratelli. You have a yo-yo to work with, but are eventually given a boomerang and some Molotov cocktails. The worst part of this game are the “rooms.” There are random doors in this game, and when you go inside, you are brought to a first-person type of screen. You now command Mikey what to do, like an RPG. He can go straight, left, right, or even punch something.

Usually there are random old men, women, or eskimos in these places. They never, ever had any useful information. For example, one guy would say, “I'M ESKIMO. THERE'S NOTHING HERE.” So, I’d naturally hit the dipshit in the face for wasting my time. He would respond with, “OW! YOU HIT ME.” I would keep hitting him, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the programmers hid something secret in the eskimo. Like, if you hit him 73 times, he would suddenly go, “NICE PUNCHING! TAKE THIS UZI.” But no, that never happened.

There was one stage that I was dying to reach. That was the scuba diving stage. Apparently, at some point much later in the game, Mikey is given scuba gear and he can swim underwater with a spear gun! I wanted so desperately bad to play that level. You know how some video games show you a clip from the game if you never hit “start” on the opening screen? You just wait a few seconds and there it is. Well, the Goonies would show you a random clip of Mikey in a certain stage, then it would go back to the menu screen. I would wait again...and again...and again, until finally the clip of Mikey in the underwater stage was shown. I was so thrilled that I may have lifted my shirt and placed on my nipple on the television screen.

It is my belief that the underwater stage is the reason for Annie’s creation. One programmer probably asked, “Wait...how can a Goonie survive being a prisoner underwater?”

“Oh shit,” another programmer probably responded. “I hadn’t thought of that. Well...let’s create a mermaid character.”

“You’re such a fucking genius. Love me.”

I never reached the underwater level. I only managed to rescue Chunk. That fat bastard.

Super Pitfall

This game was awful, so I’ll be brief. You are Pitfall Harry. You are exploring a cave or something. About three steps into the game you fall into a pit and literally plummet for two minutes. On your way down, you pass by things that you would like to explore and assume that you can eventually climb back up.

Sorry.

Once you hit bottom (Harry falls into some water and is fine), you will soon find out that you can do no more. There is no other way to climb back to the surface. The programmers fucked up. I hate this fucking game.

Donkey Kong Jr. Math

I sucked at math at a very early age and my mom knew it. So she had the bright idea of taking something that I loved - video games - and hoped it would help educate me about something that I hated - math. She went to Toys R’ Us and discovered that Nintendo had the same idea. Thus, I was given Donkey King Jr. Math.

I don’t think I need to tell you that this game ate major shit. Donkey Kong himself would have some unsolved equation next to him, and Donkey King Jr. had to find the right numbers on some vine. The whole math/video game thing didn’t work for me. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it would have worked for anyone. People don’t play games to learn math. They play games to learn how to kill zombies, explore odd levels, or cast magical spells. When I played this crap, I ignored the math and just enjoyed having Donkey King Jr. climbing from vines. Since the game was 90% math and 10% climbing vines, I was playing 10% of a game.

WOW, this article sucked! I’m laying off the Half-Life 2 - it’s draining the writing ability from my brain. It has gotten so bad that I can’t even think of a decent ending for the article...so...let’s just...end...here. Cool.

Questions? Comments? Anti-Mute? E-mail Fishman347@yahoo.com