Collin says :

We live in a marvelous age. Sliced bread has made sandwiches manageable, cellphones allow millions of idiots to say inane things across huge distances which are still not far away enough from me, and the English language finds new colloquialisms every day. Which is totally mungous.

We live in an age where the world is moving so fast that remembering things that existed YESTERDAY is already considered nostalgia. We live in an age where our most advanced technology is being used to make video games so hyper-real that they're aiming towards advancing past life itself... but in this, we're also using this technology to bring back those wonderful things that existed twenty years ago. The things that acted as the seeds of what we've advanced to now.

That being said, any world where someone can cram five classic arcade games into a single joystick with a huge, red knob and big, crazy buttons... this is a pretty swingin' world. This is where we find ourselves with the Namco 'TV Games Video Game System'... System. It may be singing a very old song, but it still resonates pretty strongly. And fits into the palm of my hand.

Me, I'm a video game nostalgia nut. I spent my youth playing Yo! Noid and Marble Madness. It was an intense level where the omniscient Marble narrator told me that everything I knew was wrong, and those pizza eating contests at the end of every other Noid level always made me hungry. I still play Tetris with the bathroom tiles, and I know that you do too, if you're worth your geek points. Even still, in the days of video game megaviolence and polygonal graphics, I prefer the oldschool to this new stuff. I can't help it. I have little Marios shooting fireballs through my veins, and Bits and Bots and Stalfoses and Moglins fighting a neverending battle in my brain. This is why I'm madly in love with this little game system.

With this 25 dollar system, you score a million bucks in lost technologies. This is the world that existed pre-NES, and it's still a beautiful place. All you have to do is plug this joystick into your TV's audio- and video-in ports, pop in four 'AA' batteries, and you're good to go. No game cartridges that you have to blow in, no RF switches. Just pure video game goodness. 5 out of 5 for ease of use.

Alas, treat the thing gently, because it IS made out of plastic and metal, and it will show signs of slight loss of control fairly early on. If it starts to creak or get stuck, shake it around a bit and rotate the joystick and it'll fall back into place. This is the only design flaw - people are indelicate with their games. The machine will also not store your high scores - it's up to you to remember them and convince your friends that you really DID score thirteenmillion points in Dig Dug. Really.

After turning it on, you are presented with 5 choices : Pac Man, Galaxian, Dig Dug, Rally-X and Bosconian. For my money, Bosconian is the hands down ass kicker among these choices, but let's take a good look at all of them.

You THINK you know PAC Man.... but you're wrong. Have you ever stopped to think about the ACTUALITIES of PAC Man? I mean, who is this guy? Here's my vote:

PAC Man is a circle. A yellow circle with a mouth. This represents Sol, our sun, which is also a yellow circle with a mouth, and which rhymes with SOUL... ergo, PAC Man is our soul. And what does he have to do? Chase out the ghosts, while traversing every possible corridor. You must manipulate your SOUL through the dark corridors of LIFE, under the peril of GHOSTS. In each level, there are four POWER PELLETS. If you eat one of these, you turn the tables on the ghosts, and you can eat them instead of having them eat you. LIKE IN LIFE. Live action soul-searching people! That's what this game is about. Zen enlightenment.

Prove me wrong. Wait, what? The fruit? Buddhist monks eat a lot of fruit. That's why it's there. It keeps PAC Man regular. Eating a crapload of ghosts and power pellets will jam anyone up.

So, what's the point? To beat the score of that crazy guy who stood at a PAC Man machine for hours upon hours, without peeing, without PEEING, WITHOUT PEEING, and got a perfect score. In the privacy of your own room. The simulation is perfectly lifelike, as there's no pause button on this gaming system either. You can pee when you're dead.

Remember PAC Man canned pasta? When I would eat that stuff, I'd only allow myself to eat the ghosts after I ate one of the larger pellets. And only for a minute afterwards. I was a pretty cool kid.

PAC Man is one of those games that transcends time. It's not easy to navigate a haunted labyrinth armed only with your gaping maw. PAC Man can get no less than a perfect score. Because, dammit, it's PAC Man. And it has truly awesome cinema cut scenes after every few levels.

Galaxian is another classic game that you may know by any number of other names : Galaga, Space Invaders, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. Any of those 'spaceship-at-the-bottom, shooting-the-things-at-the-top' games. This is a game that never had good play control in any form, and that's the biggest challenge. When you live in a phallic spaceship that can only fire one bullet at a time, life is already not that easy. You think about ending it every day. You don't care if those space bugs come down and eat you and your whole damned family. They hate you. And that's why you're drunk at the controls.... you just don't care. You are the Galaxian.

So, you're in your ship. And you're shooting at a cluster of aliens who occasionally swoop down at you and try to shoot you and / or smash into you. That's the game, and as with all others, you just try to live for as long as possible, or until you have to go eat dinner. It's the game that I play the least, because having one bullet in the air, which often flies between the narrow rows of spacebugs anyhow, isn't the most fun thing in the world. These bugs have mobility.... they're all swooping down at all angles with their rapid fire mandibles, and you're all like, 'No way man. This ship bites. I'm gonna go get some Oreos.'

[you get the idea.]

So, I don't play that one much. We even have a real one in the basement of our building - never used and lonely as all hell. Three out of five. I don't care if this is an original... I want more than one bullet. And the ability to get to level two.

Next comes Dig Dug, which is possibly the most unique concept for a video game ever. You're this guy, okay? Let's call him Dug. Your mission is to crawl around underground and exterminate these little monsters, Pookas and Frygars, from destroying the foundations of, like, let's say an orphanage. That's noble, right? Your weapon is a vacuum cleaner which has been thrown into reverse.

Right, you throw out your blowhose, poke it into these baddies and totally pump air into them until they explode. Cruel? Incredibly. Fun? If you're into that kind of thing. Generally, it takes you holding down the button for 3 whole seconds before these guys pop, spewing their pixellated insides all over the walls. The monsters cannot dig through the dirt like you can, but they can become ghost-versions of themselves and pass THROUGH walls to pursue you. After a certain amount of time has passed, they float up to the surface and leave the board. I don't know how this is a bad thing, because as long as they're leaving me the frig alone, I'm pretty content.

The point? To score points! These were simpler days, people... you didn't play these games to see the 30 minute cinema scene at the conclusion, and there weren't any subplots (except for Dug's secret sexual fetish for the Frygars and his sad reluctance to inflate them to death). I think it's about time we made a 3-D, horror-survival type game out of Dig Dug, with graphic inflation scenes. And naked ladies, all diggin' on the Dug.

Again, I can't get past level four. You can only blow so much, you know? Gimmee summa dat Boulderdash to fill my need to play underground-based digging games. Four out of a possible five, because you use a hose as a weapon.

Rally-X is another unexpected experience... and one that was too fast to get a photo of. I won't pretend to understand it. You are a car, and you must navigate this birds-eye view maze of tracks to collect 10 flags in each level before you run out of fuel. Hot on your bumper are other cars whose sole purpose is to crash into you, automatically making them Japanese and most honorable. Your only weapon is your ability to blow smoke out of your ass. This confuses the enemy cars and makes them drive in circles for a few seconds. Smoke consumes fuel.

Remember F-Zero? Wipeout Fusion? This is faster. Or at least it starts out faster. After the first 2 levels, everything gets mysteriously slow. These first two levels, though... light speed, my friends. These enemy cars will come up and crash into you completely without any kind of warning. It defies human reflexes, but suits human precognition. I think this game was used by Uri Gellar to train amateur psychics back in the 1980's, because that's the only way you'll have any idea of what's going on.

Stage 3 is, for some reason, called 'The Changaragang Stage', or something such. This compounds my confusion.

It's not especially hard, as you have a radar screen that will tell you where the flags and enemy cars are. If you spray out an intermittent stream of smoke, you're pretty well guarded. You can't even crash into walls, as they simply redirect you to the right every time you smack into one. Running out of fuel is never an issue, as long as you have a general sense of direction. Regardless of its simplicity, and regardless of the fact that you only die when you make a stupid mistake or two, it's my second favorite game after Bosconian. Four out of five.

[nothing says 'alien space battle' like a screen full of GREY]

Now, Bosconian. Bosconian is the reason that I'm writing this review, and the reason that I didn't just kill myself last week. A new lease on life. Thank you, Bosconian. It is a game that has spawned another new slew of new words. For example :

Should you die playing Bosconian : "Dude, you were just totally Boscoed."

Should you be doing well : "Holy Jesus, I'm King freaking Bosco!"

Should you narrowly miss being hit by a laser : "Yeah, it's 'cause of my hardcore Boscinization."

Now, what does this game have to do with the delicious chocolate syrup? I don't think it's a product tie-in such as 'Cool Spot' or the pizza whoring of any of the TMNT games. What does the game have to do with Bossk, Trandoshan bounty hunter of Star Wars fame? Well... they both have spaceships. Maybe it's a typo... maybe it's supposed to be about everyday life as a Bostonian. Massachusetts is a crazy place.

This is my new favorite oldschool game of all time, even beating out Pong and Dr. Mario. Once again, you have a birds eye view on the carnage. You are a spaceship, flying over an enormous black field speckled with pop rocks. Your mission is to destroy giant green space stations. Each station has 6 pods and 2 narrow openings, a la the Death Star. You can destroy these Stations by blowing out all 6 pods or by shooting them right up their butts. All it takes is one shot to take out a pod / the Station. You can also destroy a station by crashing into it.

Between you and your sacred mission are a bunch of asteroids, space mines, ships and missiles. It's a pretty chaotic scene in Boscoland, and a spaceship that can only fly at right angles doesn't aid you much. It is with unadulterated bliss that I reveal to you that you have not one, but TWO lasers, one which shoots out of your front and one which shoots out of your back. You can quickly blow away anything on your tail and snag that station on the retreat, if you so choose. Those occasional formation attacks form the enemy? Blast them while you run away.

[so fast I couldn't get a good photo! ZOOM!]

Each level has an increasing number of space stations and mines and asteroids. The mines present a bigger problem than the asteroids, as they explode and leave a second of debris that will destroy you if you fly through it too soon. My personal record is level 16, and that is with the aid of free ships that come after every 20,000 or so points. The stations are in a different arrangement in every level, including a level where you must fight your way out from the center of a tight cluster. HIGH CONCEPT GAMING from 1981. Six out of five. Emphatically.

As many times as I go back to these games, I don't find myself getting tired of them. People come into the room and play for a little while, pass the controller around, and it's actually INTERESTING. Cheering sections form, the games are endlessly teased and endlessly played, and they remain a ton of fun.

And the soundtracks? The wokkawokkawokka of PAC man, or the deedleedleedleeedlleeeddllooodleoodleooodleoodle of Bosconian? Or the soundtrack that ONLY plays while you're walking around in Dig Dug? This is what it's all about!

If you've been playing a lot of Silent Hill or Tomb Raider or Dance Dance Revolution or whatever it is that you kids play nowadays, chill out and pick one of these up. It's a social collection of quick games, and it's just as fun to play by yourself. Skip the Atari controller for now - scope out this Namco one and you won't be sorry, unless you're so thoroughly saturated by the ADD of the year 2000 that you can't sit still and appreciate it.

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