Insane 90s Print Game Ads: Mistakes Were Made (or were they?)

There's a weird part of me that thinks video game companies during the "Console Wars" of the 90s, especially Sega and Nintendo... were trying to market to dudes... and being very successful at doing it. I may be wrong, but... what do I know? I was kinda in the core demographic for these things and it's like "nose blindness" to me at this point. Seriously, I think everything I learned about "the birds and the bees" I learned in kindergarten... via 90s video game ads. What a world.

Below you'll find these self-same cultural artifacts, and trust me, there's some I don't even want to post here because... well... they are definitely too "past yer bedtime" for the 8-year-old me. (Holy panty-clad-chicks-tied-up-in-cages Batman!) I don't even know how they got away with some of the ones I've dug up. In fact, these are some of the more tame ones!

Of course, chicks play video games too, and always did, but it's almost like these companies didn't know or something, because... well... something about how these things were marketed... I can't put my finger on it... doesn't seem like they were trying to appeal to "feminine sensibilities."

Yeah, here's why marketing exclusively to dudes is a bad idea: 

1. Bigger is better confirmed.

2. Haha sex!

3. Underwear is all you really need.

4. OK, a second pair of underwear is all you need... (cuz poop)

5. Haha! OK, this one still works. 

6. Not so much this one...

7. You can lose your masculinity. 

8. Uh... not sure how I feel about this one... give me a few minutes...

9. "Groveling, spanking, decapitation, nut bustin', flying spit... rippin' a good long stun gun fart... suckin' heads up Rhino butts, BALLZ... and all the other stuff that makes life worth living." 

I KNOW how I feel about this one!

10. Haha. Playing with yer worm.

11. Get It?: 

12. It be like that sometimes... amiright fellas? 

13: Drop the load. Yeah. 

14: They will literally hurt you. 

15: Finally some modesty!

Luckily, times have changed and this would totally not happen now... right?

Hunting the Wumpus

For those who aren't in the extreme know, the TI-994a was one of the early "personal computer devices" of the 80's and was manufactured by the same people who probably made your high school calculator with all the fancy functions. I say all this in the hopes that 99% of the reading public has probably tuned out by now, so I address the rest just to the brave souls who have a special affinity from their childhood to this ancient device. The TI-994a came with an array of games that my brother and I used to while away the hours with in those early, simple years of ours, and one of our all time favorites among the Burger Times and Parsecs was this little obscure title called Hunt the Wumpus.

Hunt the Wumpus was originally a text-based game going back to the stone age, but the TI-994a had a colorful version of it, designed to bring out our collective caveman instincts. What exactly was a wumpus? It was essentially a giant mouth with legs that liked to lurk in the swamps (not unlike my ex-girlfriend), and you had to hunt it down. You basically started out on a white field and as you moved around the screen, you'd uncover a maze of pathways through the swamps tracking the near-presence of the beast who seemed to like to leave behind giant red circles (also not unlike...). Watch out though, or you could fall into the swamp. Along the way you'd also run into these bat-like creatures who'd I guess pick you up and drop you in random places--usually right into the spot where the wumpus was!

The object of the game was to make your way around in the maze, watch out for the green circles (that told you of the presence of swamps), the red circles (that told you the wumpus was nearby), and fire an arrow in the direction where you thought the wumpus might be based on the trail of his "residue" (I suppose). If he was there, then you won the game. If he wasn't and you fired an arrow, then no matter where he was on the field, he'd kill you. His big teeth would come down on the screen to the tune of Chopin's Funeral March (dun-dun-da-dun...etc) and your goose was cooked (your ASS being the goose of course, and served back to you roasted and glazed). If you fell into the swamp, you'd see a green screen where your little guy plunges into a watery death to the tune of "running your hands down the keyboard."

This game was endlessly entertaining as we fought over turns to hunt down the elusive beast, and the music played a big part in its humorous effect on us. Sometimes just seeing those big teeth come down on the screen and his grinning face was worth getting killed for and that would always crack us up. The game also had a hard mode where the maze wouldn't reveal itself as you walked around on it, but we didn't do that one very much.

It was more funner than Minesweeper. There, I said it.

The Amazon Trail 3

For a while as a kid I had a thing for rain forests. This was after my thing for deserts and before my thing for oceans, but it was the strongest of my biome "things" and lasted a good six or so months in the 3rd grade. I'm not exactly sure why rain forests, but I think it was just the beginning of me being a sucker for anything "exotic," which continues right to the present. (Heck you could shit in a cup, but if you want to sell it to me, you better say it's coffee and call it "Sumatran!") (Hmm, tastes nutty!) This is why I loved playing the little PC Oregon Trail game clone "Amazon Trail" so much. Back in the day they were giving the CD for this game out for free on Cheerios boxes, so we brought it home and quickly got addicted to it. Unfortunately "free" apparently meant the shipping had the right to rub the CD in sand before they sent it, so the game never really worked right for us, but we still played it all the way to the end at least once.

It begins with this talking jaguar on a very cool looking shield in a museum who proceeds to lay some very brief exposition on you about being the "chosen one" before whisking you away by ancient magic of some kind to the amazon river delta. There you chose your guide and are told to travel to this town at the end of the river called "Vilcabamba" to do something I was never quite sure about. It had something to do with trading and solving problems with the people you meet to gain special talismans or something, but the main point of it was, as with all educational PC games in the 90s, actually to "educate" you, and this game spent a lot of time doing just that. But with its jungle atmosphere, bird call sound effects, and pan flutes a-plenty, it really does make you feel swept away to some exotic place, which for me is an enjoyable experience.

Just make sure you're traveling in the right direction in the boat because every way on the river looks exactly the same (as if you're careening toward a distant shoreline at every turn!), while you also play pole position with the logs and other debris sure to "log" your canoe. I remember getting completely lost and going in circles for hours trying to find the "side" of the river for some bearings, but rest assured there are none. According to this game the Amazon river is endless fathoms wide, and you're just expected to "go forth" into unknown depths and careen towards a mirage of a shoreline that you are never going to reach no matter how much you try to convince yourself of progress made. Be sure to also check the map often though or you could be venturing down a tributary into jungle-nowhere, where you will be mysteriously unable to get back.

During the game you travel across time as you head down the amazon river, meeting people in very obviously computer generated settings, although at the time they looked very realistic. All of the people you run into in these sumptuous photo-still CGI environments are live action people performing 4-second gif-like loops, and half of them are either out to rob you, kill you, or educate you about the flora, fauna, and history of South America. Like any RPG you have response choices to communicate with them, so sometimes it was just fun to run around ticking people off by choosing the worst dialogue options before unloading your useless "trading packets" on them for some anti-malaria medicine or fish or some other. My brother and I ran across this conquistador who refused to let us leave until we gave him ALL our shit, answering everything with a "that's not bad...but I want MORE!!" We had to restart the game to get away from him, but it turns out that you can kill him with the "medicine" that the old medicine man gives you towards the beginning. 

Damn you medicine man!! Fuck!

You could also go fishing in what appeared to be the clownfish pond at the local hotel by chucking spears at the fish-shaped shadows, providing that the pond was stocked with barracuda! They'd wait until you were starving and dying of scurvy to give you the one area of the Amazon completely devoid of fish. Then you could journey on land presumably and take pictures of the scenery as the moths and tropical birds flew by, because you know, it actually did beat going outside and doing the same thing. This was way more "exotic" than the backyard, and very computer-generated. After all this, we did make it to the end once due to the constant bugs with our version of the game, but found it to be completely underwhelming. The ending was just two hippies giving you the standard "save the rain-forest" and "protect the earth-mother" kind of stuff, but that aside, it was a fun little bit of tropical escapism while it lasted. And as one of the more grumpy people you meet whines:

"What else would a man be doing in this rain-soaked land of mosquitoes!" 

How I Beat Myst

Not to brag, but my brother and I beat Myst back sometime in 1995 without cheats, without hints, and without any help whatsoever. Well, that's a lie, because we did look up one cheat to get us out of that damn Selentic Age puzzle in the Flounder-shaped submarine, but other than that, we did everything else just by walking around and clicking on stuff. And that's really the only way to play Myst, because as anyone who's played it and then gone and looked at the cheats knows, the game is "winnable" in under a minute. To really get the whole experience, you just got to take the long sightseeing tour and get your senses blown apart. That's basically all it was anyways, one big slideshow that you clicked through while fighting with your brother, and every now and then little movies played.

Oh! The little ship is the big ship!

But to anyone who was a PC nerd in the 90s like I was, Myst continues to be the coolest PC game ever made, back in a time when you actually went to a computer store to buy games on "CD-ROM!" in the big boxes. Myst was a point and click adventure involving puzzles to solve and environments to explore, but how do I really describe it? The mystery starts the second you, the player, gets thrown down onto this very bizarre island, completely devoid of people, and yet curiously built up as if people were once there. The mystery continues as you meander (aimlessly at first), trying to get your bearings and tamping down that eerie feeling of being all alone in such a strange place. Could it be a dream? Who built all this stuff? Where did they all go? Where does that tunnel lead? Questions, and absolutely no answers, yet. It's like Lost, except the creators actually had a plan for it.

Finally made it up here! Now where to go?

After you've experienced everything on the island, you begin to experiment with things, perhaps in desperation to find some order in the chaos, and the more you uncover, the more things start falling into place. You learn that the island is like the "age hub" and that you can visit other "ages" by absorbing yourself into the moving pictures in the books scattered around the island. You find yourself collecting pink and blue pages from each age in the ruse for these mysterious weirdos calling to you from beyond the grave or in some prison. You visit the high treetop hut village of the Channelwood Age, with its twisting bridges and swamp walkway pumps, also devoid of people and yet all arranged as if they just disappeared. You visit the Stoneship Age, with its lighthouse (my favorite), and telescope peering into the clouded void. Then there's the Mechanical Age, with its turning house and rooms full of stately furniture and spooky torture devices, and finally, that damn Selentic Age that you travel to via rocket ship piano with the random clocks and the near-impossible without cheats submarine puzzle!

Awesome lighthouse!

Add to this a killer of a moody soundtrack, and glorious visuals, and you got more than just a game, but an experience, if you played it right. It's definitely the kind of game that once you started, you totally got sucked in and might play for 5 or 6 hours just trying to figure out how to work the pump system in the Channelwood Age, or how to spin the house in the Mechanical Age, or how to light that furnace on Myst Island to get that giant ass tree to lower itself! I remember we figured that one out completely by accident, just clicking on the match and "moving it" around on the screen until it "struck itself" on the wall! Presto! There were a thousand "happy accidents" in the game like that, and that's what made it fun.

There just weren't any "cheats to Myst" online, or any walkthroughs, because both Myst and the internet were brand new. If you wanted cheats, you had to call an expensive 1-800 number on the box! I often wonder now if anyone has called that in recent decades. Eventually I got so into Myst that I went out and read the prequel books, which really explain the whole backstory to this world, but the game is still an experience first and foremost.

But as for the sequel, Riven...  hell, we walkthrough'ed and cheated the hell out of that one!

Lego Island Vacation

Lego Island was and continues to be one of the coolest PC games I ever played, second only to Myst. It was the first video game Lego ever put out and it's still the best in my opinion. For the 8yo Me, this small island was like heaven, packed with everything I loved and all in one spot. As soon as that computer animation kicked on in the opening with the bricks falling from the sky, I was seeing pizza delivery, race cars taking off at the speedway, an ambulance collision with decapitation jokes a-plenty, and a cop on his motorbike jettisoning himself out over the police station and into the ocean where a jet ski dude was trying to outrun a shark!! Damn!!

I was very much pleased to say the least.

With all that in just the first two minutes, the Lego universe had finally come so completely to life all around me that I was just in utter bliss being submersed in it. Screw vacationing there, I could've lived there and been perfectly happy the rest of my 8yo life. But if any summer was going to be vacation-less (like this current one), then Lego Island was without a doubt going to be my default destination, and likely will be again very soon... 

The main character you can play is "Pepper" ("the dude with the food"), a skateboarding pizza delivery boy on an island where all they eat is pizza, and you basically just ride him around from place to place, building the jet ski, the race car, the regular car, and racing around on all these awesome side quests and mini-games, like the jet ski race, or the race track, or helping people out with their dilemmas. On the way, you can't go two feet without bumping into hilarious skits and a whole cast of characters, all of which you have power over. I used to walk around transforming all the flowers into trees, and all the Lego people's hats into cups and kittens!

"Life's a beach."

Even the actual main-game was fun. You had to deliver a pizza to "the Brickster," the island's criminal mastermind, so hot it melts the bars on his jailhouse! He ends up escaping in the helicopter (oddly parked right next to the jail, to make it easy for him I guess), and he basically wreaks havoc on the island, sucking up people and buildings. You have to steal back the helicopter to launch an all-out aerial pizza assault on him, shooting down pizzas to lure him toward the cops. Oh, and the cops "Nick and Laura" are so unmotivated to catch this guy that you have to shoot down donuts just to lure them toward the Brickster. "Thanks Pepper, I really needed that." You can't make up brilliance this brilliant!

There were a few cool locations around the island, like the lagoon, the pizzeria (where Pepper's stereotype Italian parents work), the beach with the lifeguard dude that kept dropping "totally dude dude!" into casual speech, the police station where the cops always came away with two donuts in hand (or claw), the jail, the hospital, the race track, and the gas station where the cowgal always greeted you with a "well hey there honey!" There was also the mountain park and the houses in the residential area that you could literally "flip" and renovate with just a click of the mouse. The information center had an elevator that allowed you to both go under water and up in the sky.

Computer animation this detailed was just coming around in 1997, so this entire game all seemed like one epic movie that you'd get to play a part in. Yeah, the jokes are 80% "brick puns" and more decapitation and dismemberment than you could shake an arm at, and the actual gameplay was not as epic as that opening fly-over animation of the island (in fact it was downright choppy on those slow computers of yore), but hell, I got to ride a Lego motorcycle, build a jet ski, and race around the island hopping ramps. I got to go down in a submarine with the Lego sharks, build a race car, and race it through a trippy underground race track. Hell, I got to build and fly a Lego helicopter! Add to that a lot of pizza, and this was just about as good as it could get for me. My brother and I used to get up at 3 and 4am and fire up the computer just so we could spend a few precious hours of freedom on Lego Island before the rigors of our daily life took over. All in all, pretty good for a "staycation."

Here's some shots from the catalog/manual that I poured over so much the pages wore out.

Ecco 2: The Tides of Time

In the vast ocean of otherwise mediocre Sega Genesis games, only about one or two really spoke to me that didn't have anything to do with a blue hedgehog or Jurassic Park. One of them was the insanely classic and insanely hard Ecco the Dolphin 2: The Tides of Time. I never played the first one, so I have no idea about it, but this one had mystical crystals and teleportation rings and time traveling dolphins with super telekinetic powers. It was as New Agey as it gets, and even the soundtrack often sounded lifted from one of those Pure Moods samplers... but man was it awesome. After Free Willy, all the girls were into marine biology suddenly, and somehow so was I. But sue me because dolphins are F'kin Awesome! Mystical, magical, and SUPER-intelligent...  like girls!

I loved dolphins. They were my favorite animal and it might've been because of this game, I'm not sure, but this game had sharks and squids and turtles and orcas and just everything cool about the ocean. Every level had some kind of shipwreck in it too, and how the ships got down there was no mystery seeing as giant jagged rocks were basically everywhere. Even Ecco could barely move around underwater without slamming into something and making that painful "squeaking" sound that used to drive me crazy! Play this game for two minutes and all you hear is *squeak* *squeak* *squeak*...etc. I mean, ouch already!

The other thing that used to drive me crazy about this game is just how LONG it is, and how HARD some of these levels ended up being. Take "Tube of the Medusa" for instance. Thanks to the fact that you have no lives, I spent hours sometimes trying to get around that giant squid monster and only ended up getting chucked back time and time again. And when you get chucked out of the sky tube, you fall back TWO LEVELS EACH TIME and have to work your way all the way back up every time you screw up EVEN ONCE... it's nearly impossible! Also, as soon as you lose your powers and have to start surfacing for air and looking for bubbles, the game becomes a constant challenge. My brother and I never beat it. We didn't even come close.

But is it a great game? Of course! This game inspired me to invent all kinds of stories around those super-intelligent dolphins, and many a backyard make-believe focused on playing Ecco like we were making a movie version of it or some kind of weird role play. The game was so movie-like already. It did what it was supposed to do and made the ocean mystical and magical, and though it was hard as hell and involved a LOT of "back and forth a hundred times between two points collecting stuff", it was at least imaginative along the way. Any time I got in a swimming pool, I was playing Ecco.

Of course I used to pronounce it "EE-co" for some reason. It took me years to figure it out: "oh... echo... I get it." I can't say I was super-intelligent of course. I was not a dolphin. Or a girl. 

Sonic on the Genesis

I can't overstate how much of my life I spent playing the classic Sonic games. I was never all that good at them, but I worked my way through them all. The graphics were state of the art for the time, pushing the Genesis to its limits. The music was universally fantastic. The level designs only got bigger and better, and they were damn near cinematic at times too. The bosses were either pitifully easy or crazy hard, but always fun. The original 4 (or 3, depending on how you look at it) Sonic games for the Genesis were some of the best platform games ever made. Let's take a look at them.

Sonic the Hedgehog (1991)  B

This is where it all began. To be honest, I never actually played this one as a kid, so my fondness for it isn't as pure because I know where the series went after this. By comparison though, it's slower (for a Sonic game), the levels are pretty hard and have a lot less variation (3 acts in each level!?) and Sonic is pretty much all you get to see. But the series had to start somewhere! There really isn't much of a story going on, so it's just a faster, above-average platformer at heart. To make Sonic go fast, you have to use physics (rolling into a ball on an incline...etc.), which is fun enough because it works amazingly well.

It's still an impressive game on its own terms, and set the standards for so many things that became staples later on, like loops, rings, monitors, bouncers, baddies, and Dr. Robotnik's insane gadgets... all of which spell great creativity and a lot of good ideas on the part of the designers. It set a new standard for all platform games and gave Mario a run for his money for the first time (literally!).

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992)  A+

Now THIS is where Sonic first hit his stride for me. Sonic 2 is where Sonic got FAST, because this was the introduction of the "speed dash." Now you could get him practically outrunning the screen!  We also get to see Miles Prower, or "Tails," for the first time... Sonic's ever-present sidekick and one of the funniest characters to kill off repeatedly. This game also has a "two-player" feature, which is great if you want to start a fight with your brother. It introduced the "Death Egg" device and Sonic's first time destroying it (a story arc that will connect the next couple games). Sonic 2 has a lot more levels with a lot more color, length, and variation (only 2 acts per level this time), and their replay-ability is extremely high.

I love the Sky Chase Zone (the first time you get to fly the Tails airplane), and the music is some of the best in the series (Chemical Plant Zone is a jam). Heck, I play this game to this day, and it's still as fun as ever. It never gets old. It's a lot easier than the first game, but certainly more fun in my opinion. The final boss is just incredibly fun to die a dozen times on, and the ending is among the best in the whole series. This may have been the first video game I ever played, and it may still be the best. 

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (1994)  A-

This game is even more incredible in some ways, but it also has its minor drawbacks. It was the first game to have the "temporary shield" trick, which is cool, a whole new slew of shield types, and a Tails that can actually fly on command! This is also where my favorite character Knuckles the Echidna makes his first appearance (and in this one, he's a badass!). You can also save your game for the first time, so you don't have to play the whole thing in one sitting! This second sequel follows the reconstruction of Robotnik's "Death Egg" device that Sonic destroyed in the last game (pretty much picking right up after the other one left off).

The levels are even more colorful, more complex, larger, have the best music of the series, and feature all kinds of new ways to play them besides just "running and jumping." Each act has its own boss too, rather than just one per level. All that said, there are only 6 levels in the whole game, making it the shortest classic Sonic game. The final level really isn't all that hard, and the final boss is very underwhelming (and pretty easy). Overall, there's a feeling of "that was it?" at the end, but only because it's so good you want more of it...

Sonic & Knuckles (1994) A

And this game was more of it! S&K was a direct continuation of Sonic 3 (more like a "Sonic 3: Part 2"), and follows what happens after Sonic rides the repaired Death Egg in Sonic 3. Actually, this game and Sonic 3 were supposed to be the same game, but the developers were forced to cut it in half, which is why Sonic 3 felt kind of incomplete at the end. The levels in this game are about as detailed and complex as it gets, although the game play itself doesn't differ much from Sonic 3 (but no complaints here!). Here you can play Knuckles for the first time and soon discover that he can climb walls and glide! There are more levels in this game, way more music, the bosses are harder, and the final boss is about as big and bad as you're ever going to find in a Sonic game.

To add, the really unique thing about this game was that its cartridge allowed you to lock Sonic 3 into it so you could play Sonic 3 and it back to back, which is awesome because it's an entirely different game... suddenly all those inaccessible pathways in the previous game make sense! You could also lock Sonic 2 into it and play Knuckles in the Sonic 2 levels. The only downside is there's no game save feature or even two player when playing it on its own, but play "Sonic 3 & Knuckles" back to back, and it's the best Sonic game ever made. Period.

---

Ouch! Right in my beans!

And yes, before you say anything, I know about Sonic CD, Sonic Spinball, Sonic 3D Blast, and even the dang Mean Bean Machine on the Genesis... okay? I just didn't play them back in the day because they're not the main series of games and I wasn't a total weeb. (But I do hear good things.) (...Actually, I always did want a crack at the Mean Bean Machine...) 

After Sonic & Knuckles though, sadly, the franchise got lost in the land of spin-offs, experimental flops, and cash-grabs for a while and didn't make another game until the "Adventure" series for the Sega Dreamcast... which I never played. The games they made after that have been a mixed bag, and there was a "Sonic 4" made recently, which I said earlier was okay, but didn't live up to the originals. The Genesis games are considered to be the golden age, the world of Sonic at it's best, and they certainly were. I can play them a hundred times over... no, a thousand times... and they never get old.

Skitchin'

In the 90s Kid Dictionary I will (probably) never write, between "Razor Scooter" and "Talkboy" comes Skitchin', the most rad game ever, for the Sega Genesis. Let's get an 8-year-old(ish) play by play:

10 seconds: Come on come on... enough WORDS!
21 sec: Spray paint! YEAH!
55 sec: Whoa! This is like a movie! Dun-na-na-na...
1:11 : Take that sucka!
1:16 : This bumper ain't big enough for the two of us!
1:41 : Ow! Someone's gonna eat a crowbar sandwich for that... OH DRATS!
1:59 : EAT CROWBAR!
2:50 : Damn, it's the law! Ain't skitchin' on that.
3:10 : Woohoo! Ride the ramp!
3:34 : Woohoo! First place! Movie zoom, losers!

What a long, long one way road. How does anyone get to those buildings? Are we ever going to get to that city back there? You think if I ride a ramp and end up SPLAT!! against one of these billboards, I'll be transported to another dimension? 90s kids know...

Lost Sonic 2 Levels

"Dust Hill Zone" concept art.

Many have searched for the legendary "lost Sonic 2 levels", spurred on by dreams of what could've been, what they could've looked like, and why they were cut from the final game. In our minds they are mythic, complete, and full of new surprises, enemies, and everything we came to expect from the original Sega Genesis Sonic games, but what is the truth? You have to admit that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was an explosion of creativity with all its levels and enemies. I remember my cousin even joking once that it had "like, a hundred levels." The only disappointment for me was that it didn't, but what if it did?

"More Sonic" is always a good thing, and certainly something I would've wanted as a kid, so let's take a look at some of the real "lost levels" (not the fan-made false ones). We're all familiar with Emerald Hill Zone, Chemical Plant Zone, Casino Night, Hill Top, Oil Ocean...etc... but what about Wood Zone? Dust Hill Zone? Hidden Palace Zone? Neo-Green Hill Zone? ... Genocide City Zone??

It turns out that all of them were actual lost levels in one way or another, but the truth isn't all that awesome. There are two genuine lost zones... Wood Zone and Hidden Palace, but they are incomplete. Wood Zone takes place in the treetops, has few enemies, is missing some floors, has conveyor belts that don't present any obstacle, and doesn't particularly lead you anywhere, but it is interesting nonetheless. Hidden Palace has a more polished Act 1 featuring caves and crystals (vaguely similar to Lava Reef Zone from Sonic & Knuckles), but it's also only half done--the Act 2 for it just has Sonic standing around behind a pile of rocks until he dies.

So here's Hidden Palace Zone... with it's own music and everything.

And here's Wood Zone... Wood Zone actually had a slower version of what became the Chemical Plant music, this was just placeholder music from Emerald Hill two-player mode.

That's the cool part. The truth about the other three "lost levels" is more disappointing. It turns out the equally-legendary "Dust Hill Zone" was just an early working title for what became Mystic Cave Zone (pictures of Sonic in a desert level were sent out to magazines to advertise the game, under the name "Dust Hill Zone," but no such zone was ever made). The same is true for Neo-Green Hill Zone (the original was the first level of Sonic 1). It's nothing but an early working title for Aquatic Ruin Zone. Then there's the legendary Genocide City Zone, which is just Sonic falling into a blue/green abyss and dying (and thus the name?). It's not just unfinished, it's not even started. Supposedly, the Act 3 of Metropolis Zone was going to be the one-act "Genocide City", but they designed it with the Metropolis setup instead and made it the oddball "Act 3" that is is. I always did think it was strange that Sonic would go straight from the machine-world of Metropolis to the airplane in Sky Chase Zone.

Having said that, there are a lot of cool fan-made imaginings of what the lost Sonic 2 levels "might" have looked like, including interesting and detailed Genocide City ones, but that's all they are, fan-made imaginings. They also made Dust Hill into an awesome desert level, as well as a level that looks like a precursor to the (f-ing awesome!!) Ice Cap Zone from Sonic 3. But don't be fooled by imitations. These are the authentic ones (as far as we know).

The Oregon Trail

Let me start out by saying that The Oregon Trail was arguably the greatest computer game of all time, and that's putting it lightly. I mean, who even really knows what the real Oregon Trail was? All I know is that it had something to do with the western pioneers. Think about it... this game about the thing probably looms larger over culture than the original thing itself, because just ask any kid from the early 90s, and the Oregon Trail was just one of the coolest computer games ever made fer sure (no offense to the pioneers). And no, not (just) because you could literally die in it by pooping to death.

This game was more about survival than a history lesson, which is why it was so darn cool. I remember playing at least two versions of it: the original and the deluxe. The original had that pixelated, white covered wagon on a simple black screen, and the deluxe had 32bit renderings with the blue skies and banjo-like computer music. You could choose from several occupations like "Banker," (which meant you had more money ), "Doctor" (which meant you'd have better health), or "Merchant" (which meant you'd have more stuff)...etc. Basically, each came with their own pros and cons, and none really had everything you'd need for the trip by themselves.

So you'd pick your poison, you'd buy some supplies at the ole' timey "General Store" (pro-tip: BUY BULLETS... don't waste time buying food, it spoils!), and you'd decide when to leave (pro-tip: if you leave too late, you'll hit the dead of winter, but if you leave too early, your animals will die from the lack of grass). So you'd pick your poison once again, and finally set your little oxen off doing their two-step shuffle along the Oregon Trail with your cozy covered wagon in tow. The adventure was on, damn it. 

Along the way, you'd run into all sorts of dialog boxes... sometimes you'd have to decide whether to "caulk your wagon" and float across a river (where you'd always seem to drown an ox), or you'd all get sick and start dying off from old diseases (forget dysentery, try cholera!), or you'd have to stop to hunt, or cross another river, or you'd run into some town and decide to BUY MORE BULLETS. (I swear, if you ran out of bullets, you could not eat. It was that simple.)

Speaking of bullets, hunting was funny on the Oregon Trail. Not only were the bison the easiest things to shoot, but they also brought back the most meat, so what was the point of the rabbits and squirrels (besides points?)? Just a waste of bullets if you ask me. Another funny thing was how you could be out there dropping bison and deer dead left and right, strewing carcasses all over the place, but you could only carry, like, maybe one of them back. The real Oregon Trail must have been littered with dead bison that couldn't be "carried back"...if this game is any guide. No wonder they're endangered. 

In the deluxe version, the seasons would change rapidly... the oxen would be trudging through snow, and then through green grass... the sky would alternate between gray and blue, and the little mountains would scurry along as you came across such places as Fort Kearney and Chimney Rock. Sometimes an ox would die and you'd wish you were a merchant, or sometimes a person would die and you'd wish you were a doctor, or sometimes you'd break a wagon wheel and wish you were a carpenter, and sometimes you'd die in the snow and wish you weren't a loser, but if you made it to Oregon, it was something special indeed. 

The Oregon Trail was just another one of those games that made those clunky, slow, computers of our early memory so darn cool.

Until you died of dysentery... 

Console Wars 2

I don't know, they both had parlor Jeopardy games...

BLAST PROCESSING!!!

Battle Chess was Badass

Battle Chess was badass. As in: BAD. ASS. As in, probably the coolest computer game you could play in the early 90's (besides Doom), and all the boys loved it. And for once I can actually include myself in that equation. It tapped into something primative, something absolutely out for blood and guts, the great hard-on for gore we all have. This was a decade before all these first-person shooters and role playing games took over the scene, and back then you were lucky if you saw blood in a video game.

But if I remember right, this game not only had blood... it had guts... it had limbs getting chopped off one by one... it had people going up in a blaze, or getting shrunk down and squashed... it had dudes getting pounded into puddles of blood... It had... weapons! This game was hard core in those days, and guess what, they even let us play it in school. Imagine that! Something boys could like... in SCHOOL! Something about watching these little minions smash each other to a bloody pulp made me shit myself with "aww-yeah." No seriously, whenever they let us play this, we literally shit our neon pink shorts!  

I don't know much about other schools, but in my elementary school, if you could play chess, you were considered one of the Elite... the coolest of all. You had MAD skills. If that game of chess involved knights that cut the arms and legs off pawns, rooks that turned into rock men who could pound pawns into a puddle, and kings that had a whole arsenal of weaponry under their capes (whips.. swords... bombs... GUNS??), then you weren't just cool, you were flannel cool. Heck, this game was so badass, it didn't even care if you saw it cheating. Seriously, you'd be playing against the computer, and all of sudden the pieces on the other end of the board would just switch places. "That's right, I just did. What you gonna do about it bitch?" 

This game was chest beating on a 32 bit scale. You only played it to be cool, playing it made you cool, and refusing to play it made you absolutely de-balled. If you were a girl playing it, it bestowed on you honorary balls, which as everyone knows are even ballsier. This is literally the game that taught me what Chess is all about. Strategy, battles, and pure unbridled machismo. Hoo-rah!  Time to go knock over a vending machine with all my rage! Aw yeah! *URRRP!* "Look at all its blood!"

And yeah, it's a bit much, but it's just that when your primal energy was denied you for so long, we'd go kinda overboard when we finally got to express it for a few minutes. But never you worry. Soon enough class was over, and it was back to reading Madeline books, and glazed-over eyes, and sleep-induced drooling for the rest of the day as usual. Yeah I'm sure they would have preferred us playing kiddy games like Sticky Bear and Grammar (which to the 8yo Me was something you called your grandmother), but the only other game that could touch this in "computer-Class" was Oregon Trail (and that is deserving of its own post). Without games like this, computers sucked my big fat one.

Lion King on the Sega

2:30 seconds? Yeah... after you die on level two, three, four...etc.... the first three dozen times, trust me, you'll be doing this level in a minute or less. You'll be doing it in your sleep.

Ah, back when games based on movies were good, and challenging, and weren't just scene-for-scene re-shoots of the movie: exploding bugs, prickly porcupines, and hyenas that jump TWICE after you jump on them (do NOT forget), it's all good.

My brother and I went to our cousin's birthday party sometime in 1994, saw this was on, and plunked ourselves down. From there on out we had the living room commandeered... all day, afternoon, evening... we were probably the last to leave. Screw pool party. Screw presents. Screw birthday cake... this was all we were interested in. Okay, perhaps we breaked for cake.

This game is just damn tough. We never defeated Scar.

The TI99-4A Computer

The main screen on the first computer we owned. Check out all those colors.

Artifacts from the Console Wars

Here I have an original booklet that accompanied the masterpiece Sonic the Hedgehog 2. This was not your typical "how to play" kind of manual (although all that was included of course), this booklet also gave a cute rundown of the zones along with awesome drawings of their respective enemies. And to think, each of the types of robots actually has a name too. If anything, all this is a testament to the Sonic Team's boundless creativity in the early years (something we can only pray for a return to).

I say this because I checked out the recent "spiritual sequel" to Sonic and Knuckles (strangely titled Sonic 4), and while it's not bad and certainly a step in the right direction for the series, one thing that struck me was how similar many of the enemies and levels are to the first three games. I think the one thing the game needed was a bit more originality (that, and perhaps a few more levels--you could beat it in a day).

These were all the pests you loved to hate as you were zipping through the levels. Spiker, Slicer, Shellcraker, and oh my word, Asteron, these guys were almost guaranteed to make Sonic lose his pimp rings!

Sonic 2 sure is a classic. Long live the Console Wars!

Sonic the Hedgehog

I had no clue what a hedgehog was, and I didn't care. It could've just as well been Sonic the Asskicker for all I knew, and it wouldn't have changed a thing. He was an ultra-rad blue animal who could cook the screen meaner than any stale Mario platform crawler ever could (up until then). A few speed dash attacks and a few go-boxes, and you could have Sonic flipping loops, bouncing over enemies, flying over pits, and easily outrunning the screen itself! You see, we boys like games requiring a few basic commands and using them a lot, which is why when it comes right down to "run," "shoot," "run some more," and "shoot some more," (Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition) such games usually register pretty well with our primitive psyches. And Sonic was a prime example... just remember to jump now and then, and you've won.

Of course it wasn't that easy! I'm joking, but that's what you think when you think of Sonic (at least, when you're not thinking about the sheer amount of porn the franchise inspired, ahem!). The Sega marketing team really had us convinced this guy was the "fastest thing aliiiiive!" And speaking of the granddaddy of all Furry dreams, almost as good as getting to play Sonic was getting to play Tails on the one player mode of Sonic 2. What's better than playing a character just like Sonic who has infinite lives and whose only purpose is to make things miserable for the titular character and whoever's playing him? The "one player" (secret two-player) mode on Sonic 2 was a stroke of genius designed to help little brothers forced to play Tails screw over big brothers who were hogging the hog. (It wasn't me!)

All I'm saying is that my brother and I spent about a combined year of our lives playing each successive Sonic incarnation for the Genesis... Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, and Sonic and Knuckles (which allowed you to go back into the other Sonic games and play as Knuckles). After S&K, don't even get me started, because suddenly the Sonic Team decided it was okay to let us meet ALL of Sonic's fellow woodland creatures, spiraling out of control the moment they had him smooching a human! (Furries rejoice!) But in the beginning they had a winning formula in the mutant idiot fox who could fly, the speedy blue guy in the Mickey Mouse gloves, and the fat robotics maniac with waaaay too much time on his hands, and that's all my brother and I needed. When they added Knuckles, we were more excited about the prospect of a hogo-a-hogo blue and red death match than extended character back story, and boy did S&K deliver!

 

But I'm getting sidetracked once again by my relentless dork fandom. Back in the land of reality, Sonic (and espcially the two-player mode) was the pretext to many acts of violence and property destruction between my brother and I whenever one brother was just too damn good at the game, and for me to say which brother that was would be an insult to my existence as the older brother... (it wasn't me). The Sega actually had to be moved to a neutral location (the downstairs den, which was my dad's office) to keep the destruction to a minimum. But all in all, we still got through each game a hundred times over, and Sonic and Knuckles in under a week's time.

I kid thee not that the one thing I remember about the day my sister was born was being carted over to my grandmother's house at 3am (I was about seven at the time), and getting to watch the now infamous Sonic cartoon that morning. Even with all the hubbub that day, all was right because Sonic was on TV. I'm no furry, but I love Sonic.