Long Tail or no, I think I found some retro classics that not even Nintendo will add to the back catalog. After recording this week’s episode of Retronauts, I went over to the adorable miniature novelty-size apartment where Scott Sharkey and his girlfriend live. It used to be a brothel, Sharkey explained to me as I commented on the twin cement mermaid figureheads that guarded the building’s front door, nakedly. Indeed, there were boarded-up windows from the hallway into every unit that were originally there so one could examine the merch.
Deciding instead to whore ourselves out under the lamppost on the corner of Emulation and Dreamcast, we played a whole bunch of NES games that Nintendo will never, ever release on Virtual Console, ever. And I kind of feel like writing about them.
Pictured above is Conan: The Mysteries of Time. One of the mysteries (unsolved) is how the hell you even play it. Conan can leap like a graceful gazelle, thirty feet at a hop — by pressing Up; up-to-jump being one of the hallmarks of an awful retro game — but can’t do much else other than die. Skeletons with giant boners come at you relentlessly. I guess they might be swords, technically. Anyway, as near as I can tell the object of the game is to leap over the priapic undead, find the asshole lion above, and get killed by it in seconds.
Only slightly worse was Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates. Yes, that is its actual name. As befitting any NES game developed outside of Japan, the first ten minutes of the game is devoted to scrolling past about fifteen company logos, credits, and copyright notices.
Having spent three-quarters of the ROM space on the requisite corporate ego-stroking, the rest of the game had to fit into about 512K or so. Thus, it is the story of the midget from Total Recall getting his revenge on Arnold Schwarzenegger by jumping on trees. The glorious fairy kingdom of Neverland is represented here as a nightmarish hell-world populated by things that want to kill you.
This must have been a real buzzkill for Wendy and her brothers when they found out. “Sprinkle this fairy dust on yourselves and you can fly! Come with me to the magical kingdom of Neverland, children! Second star to the right and straight on till morning! Oh, and by the way, when you get there your eyes will be pecked out by pterodactyls. Also, Thursday is forcible rape day.”
Finally, since we talked on Retronauts about how great the classic NES sports games were, Sharkey decided to single-handedly disprove this theory with Cyberball. For a while there, he noted astutely, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without knocking over a stack of games, all called Cyber-something, that purported to be “the sport of the future,” every one of them a piece of crap.
Cyberball is no exception, except for the part at the beginning where a really nifty digitized voice says “Welcome to Cyberball!” You can press Reset a few times, listen to that, then, having gotten all the entertainment value you ever will out of Cyberball, place it in your toilet tank to help conserve water. Just remember, in 2059, this will be the only thing you can watch on ESPN.