Papa's Basement » Video Games

F You, Sonic the Hedgehog

admin — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:03:25 +0000

Sonic, you always have been, and always will be, Mario's bitch.

I spent my elementary school years playing the Nintendo Entertainment System the way the Asian kids studied math. It was a glorious time. There were no system wars: You owned an NES or you were a bigger outcast than the children whose parents were divorced. And, then, a funny thing happened: The Super Nintendo was released, and, instead of it cementing Mario’s rule of the video game universe, an upstart little turd by the name of Sonic the Hedgehog, mascot of the Sega Genesis, appeared on the scene.

Suddenly, mine was a house torn asunder. I stayed loyal to the Mushroom Kingdom, knowing full well that Mario and the Super Nintendo were the light and the way. My younger brother, however, saw a chance to finally stand on his own. He foolishly cast his lot with Sega and Sonic. Where once there was peace, now there was civil war, brother pitted against brother, struggling to play different systems on the same tv.

This is what a real mascot looks like.

It went on for months, me watching Will play Sonic the Hedgehog, Will watching me play Super Mario World. Tensions mounted to the point of ridiculousness. Finally, an armistice was declared. We would play each others’ systems. (Only when editing this article did I realize how much that line reads like we agreed to give each other Dutch Rudders.) After all, how could I deny someone the joy of eating koopas and pooping out eggs as Yoshi? And, well, I had to admit, Sonic looked kind of cool. So I let Will sit down and fire up the SNES. Mario, forgiving messiah that he is, welcomed him with open arms, treating him to hour upon hour of riveting game play. Then, it was time for my big reveal. I plugged in the Sonic cartridge, fired up the Genesis…and was greeted with one of the biggest disappointments of my video gaming career.

Sonic the Hedgehog was nothing but glorified pinball. The control was annoying and loose, the characters uninspired. Dr. Robotnik, the game’s antagonist, lacked any of Bowser’s appeal, coming off like a steampunk child molester. And don’t even start me on Tails the Fox. Yoshi pwnd that guy nine ways to Sunday. The only interesting thing about him was that I wondered if he had a second butthole to match his second tail. Since they never incorporated an ability into the game where he could fly above his opponents and defecate upon them, the question remained unanswered.

So f you, Sonic. I bartered away my Super Nintendo exclusivity rights to play your blue ass in what will go down in history as the biggest ripoff since we took Manhattan from the Red Man for some beads and blankets. May Mario’s triumph over you be glorious and eternal, you pezzo di merda.

Contra is My Most Vivid Childhood Memory

admin — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:11:21 +0000

So help you god if you didn't if you hadn't pressed up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, select, start before you and your friends saw this screen.

When it comes to memories of my life that predate my getting hair down there, there’s precious little I recall. I owned a red bike with weird plastic plates over the spokes that I thought looked cool but made it a bitch to pump the tires. I loved pizza day in the cafeteria, even though, in retrospect, lunchroom pizza was like a disgusting, open faced sandwich made by the world’s laziest lazy Italian mother on bread even Auschwitz inmates would have turned their noses up at. I always got an “N” for “needs improvement” when it came to the self-control category on my report card because I was an impulsive brat who couldn’t shut up in class and needed to be the center of attention (glad to see I’ve matured). Other than that, there’s…really nothing. Well, there’s one thing: You could blindfold me, hang me upside down facing away from the TV, put an NES controller in my hands and I could play through Contra losing three lives, max.

I never owned a copy of Contra. It belonged to my neighbor, Bobby Irons, who had been a friend to me before the purchase of the game, but became a brother to me afterward. Every day after school, my actual brother Will and I would hop over to Bobby’s house for (conservatively) four hours of gaming, where the two of us would take turns as player two. (It was Bobby’s game and Bobby’s house, thus he was always player one. That’s just video game law.) The three of play through Contra multiple times, then my brother and I would walk back home as I hummed the game’s music to myself, my thoughts preoccupied with playing it the next day. Sure, I’d dabble in other video games now and again, but it almost felt like cheating on a spouse. (Actually, it didn’t, since I ultimately regretted playing other video games.)

20 years have passed and they still haven’t made a video game as good as Contra. Maybe it’s because I’m no longer an eight year old kid preoccupied with being Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando. Maybe it’s because there’s now a magical thing called the Internet, filled with on demand pornography and footage of monkeys peeing into their own mouths, that I seem to be quite a fan of. All I know is, sad as this sounds, I’m thankful for the memories.

The Top Three Christmas Presents I Ever Received

admin — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:02:59 +0000

It’s list time on Papa’s Basement. (Any time you see a list, it means I had to work in the early afternoon, leaving me 20 minutes to write.) Here, in ascending order of awesomeness, are the three best Christmas presents I ever received.

3. Bike (1987)-The bike was my first “I have to have this now, lest I be an ostracized weirdo” gifts. Other kids in the neighborhood were getting bikes this particular Christmas and, if I didn’t get one, I’d be left behind, like a tribal youth who failed his passage into manhood. Thankfully, I did get one, and the world as I knew it suddenly expanded exponentially. (Or to the end of the street if my mom was watching, since she was neurotic and convinced molesters were lurking everywhere, just waiting to snatch me up. I mean, I wasn’t that good-looking a kid, Mom. Kid touchers have standards, too.)

2. Nothing in particular I remember (every year except 1987 and 1991)-Suck on that, parents. I got great gifts every fucking year from 1981 onward, yet I remember only two of them. Not even enough for a top three list. Next time your kid tells you they need a certain gift on Christmas, smack them twice: Once for you and once for me.

3. Super Nintendo (1991)-Before we start, does the girl pictured above only have one tit? I see Righty, but Lefty looks…malnourished, to say the least. I hope it didn’t hide itself because we’re looking in its direction, like one of those ghosts from Super Mario Bros.

Without a doubt, the best gift I ever scored on Christmas came when I was 10 years old. My parents had been slow to the party getting me a regular Nintendo because they thought it would kill my grades. What they quickly came to learn, however, was that by hiding the controls to the NES and allowing me to play only when my grades were good, they had a Child Einstein on their hands. You’ve never seen a GPA like mine back when they had me by the joypads. When I started piping up about a new video game system that I had to have to keep up with the Joneses, they were all too eager to make sure their overachieving little mouse had the right cheese to make him run through that maze.

I remember that Christmas so vividly. There was only one box under the tree big enough to be a Super Nintendo. My brother and I made a beeline for it, shredding its wrapping in seconds and begging our father to install it immediately, other presents be damned. He, kind soul that he was, did just that and…the system was a dud. It failed to turn on.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so frustrated in all my life. A brand new Super Nintendo, right in front of me, and I couldn’t play it. Not only that, but the store wasn’t even open to take it back because it was Christmas. As I recall, I tried to hibernate as much as possible until the following day, when I made sure to be the first person in line at the doors of Service Merchandise when it opened. I marched out with a new SNES, plugged it in, and promptly played Super Mario World for the next eight months. Without a doubt, the best Christmas present I ever received.

Funeral for a Friend

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:41:32 +0000

Chaplain Master Chief speaks a few words over the body.

Today, I laid to rest my Nintendo DS. It was not with me for long, but maybe it’ll be enough if you know that, in the few days we had together, we loved a lifetime’s worth (oh, Terminator references). I will now get into the circumstances of its demise and then ask for your wisdom at the end of this post.

DS and I (for the remainder of this piece I will simply refer to my Nintendo DS as “DS,” for it was dear to me as a beloved pet or small child and should be addressed with a proper name in order to reflect this) were minding our business at one of my places of employment, XM Radio. The nature of my job there, running an audio board for various sports broadcasts, requires me to not leave my post for a moment, meaning that, if nature calls, I must contact someone called a “floater” (call a floater so you can drop a floater. How poetic) to cover you so that you can visit the rest room. I try not to chug a ton of fluids while at XM so that I’m not calling the floater non-stop, but I’m usually good for one break per shift just so I don’t end up pissing into the waste basket to prevent my kidneys from exploding by the end of the night. Tonight was no different, and two hours into my shift, I kindly gave my friendly floater a summons.

He looks so natural. Almost like he's charging.

DS was plugged in and charging as the floater entered my studio, face buried in his laptop. It all happened so fast: He tripped over the charge cord, flinging DS across the room, my diminutive, electronic lover hitting the floor with a sickening thud not unlike Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby. “Mo Chuisle,” I screamed as I leapt to my fallen’s side (actually, I just walked off to take my piss anyhow, but I feared the worst). After returning and telling the floater he was free to go, I attempted to turn DS back on and my fears were confirmed: DS had shuffled off this mortal coil.

At this point I didn’t know how to proceed: I called the floater back and informed him that he had committed an act of homicide, then told him I would speak to management to see if there was any policy regarding we retarded DJs accidentally blowing up each others’ crap before contacting him again. My question to you is this: If you were me, would you ask the floater to reimburse you for the life of the DS he took? And, if you were the floater, would you feel angered by this request or accept it as fair? Leave a comment on this page or Tweet your answer to @papasbasement. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must return to swimming in Johnny Walker and re-watching the first minute of the clip linked below for the 1,000th time. Because that’s how I heal, broseph.

Why Street Fighter II Rules

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:27:18 +0000

You may not know it from the well-dressed ladies man that I am now, but there was a time when I had little joy outside of video games in my life. In fact, from 1989 until 1995, the glory years of the Nintendo and Super Nintendo, my day consisted of two things: Playing video games to such excess that my parents felt compelled to hide the controllers and begging my parents to return the controllers they had hidden so I could play more video games. And, during this time period, there was one game that got my controllers hidden far more often than any other due to obsessive playing. That game was Street Fighter II.

If the fact my nipples still get erect looking at this screen is wrong, I don't want to be right.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game (God help you), Street Fighter II allowed you to select one of eight unique fighters, kick the crap out of the other seven fighters, then fight four bosses to be crowned the “World Warrior.” That’s it. Ta-effing-da. AND WE WERE GRATEFUL FOR EVERY MINUTE OF IT!

You see, when SFII was released, technology, well, blew. There were no cheap cell phones and certainly no readily available internet porn to distract me and my classmates. You just had SFII. In the school lunch room? You were talking about SFII. Taking a dump? You were reading a GamePro magazine article about SFII. On an eight-hour car ride? Well, you were probably playing that original Game Boy with the pea green screen that gave you migraines and caused eye cancer. But you were thinking about SFII.

Chun Li's story was SHE HAD ASS CHEEKS THAT COULD CRUSH WALNUTS.

Never before had a video game offered such fantastic back stories and motives for its characters. Before SFII, video game protagonists had three motives: Saving their girlfriend, saving the princess or saving the world. Sometimes the princess was their girlfriend, but that was as complex as it got. In SFII, characters entered combat to fight personal demons, avenge dead friends and infiltrate criminal gangs. Sure, the wrestler Zangief was fighting just to prove the Russians were the best, but it was 1992, and Russians hadn’t developed multifaceted human emotions yet. It was the first time that characters had completely selfish reasons for entering the game’s world. I ate it up.

Here's an analogy-Drug abuse : overweight SNL alumni :: SFII : Super Nintendo controllers.

All of this amazing character development would have been moot had the game played like crap. Thankfully, SFII featured some of the smoothest play control of all time, and the depth of its combat system meant you were learning something new after each fight. Not only that, but the game’s two-player mode was simple and elegant, pitting you against your friend over and over until one of you lost your cool and smashed the control against the floor. No other game was able to work people into such a rage. I’ve had controls hurled at my head, wrapped around my neck and thrown against the walls of my living room. You’d end up kicking the person out of your house, swearing you’d never play with them again…until the instant you couldn’t find anyone else to come over and play SFII with, at which point, they were your best friend again.

As time marched on, SFII‘s prominence in my life slowly faded. High school brought drugs, death metal and downloadin’ porn (I told you I’m a ladies man). New video game systems came onto the scene that made the Super Nintendo’s graphics look as impressive as a cave painting. But every so often, years after I had touched any other video game and even with all the crazy things happening in my post-pubescent life, I’d dust off the old Street Fighter II cartridge and take it for a spin. Because Blanka could always stand to be reunited with his mother one more time.

(Below is the game’s ending credits tune. It still makes me choke up and I want it played at my funeral.)

(And please click through and buy Super Street Fighter IV for the PS3 or Xbox 360 so I can continue to pay the bills that come with trans-continental player lifestyle I lead…while living at home. Ya ta!)