Mega Man X (PC, 1995) – Part Of The Clouded Computer Copies Collection

On the left is the title from the PC version in its native resolution, on the right is the title as it appears in the resolution it was programmed for on the SNES.

Time for a break from current events! I kinda needed it.

The “Clouded Computer Copies Collection” will be me showcasing PC ports of various console games in the 90s, back when there was usually a big gap between what you got on PC versus on console. They won’t be happening regularly, I don’t really know when the next one will be done. This post in particular was a loooong time in the making, I think I started it in 2019 or late 2018, and actually got the pics for it in the first half of this year.

Today’s Game

Why yes, there was a PC version for Mega Man X. Why yes, there are differences. Why no, his name in the English games is “Mega Man X”- “Mannix” is someone else entirely, though they both tend to run on highways instead of driving along them.

Probably my favorite video game series, the first entry into this side-scrolling franchise was released on the SNES in 1993, and followed in 1995 by this PC version (By 1995, the SNES was seeing the third entry in the series released for it. It was also the year Hulk Hogan began his feud with the Dungeon of Doom). The full PC release came with a controller. I just bought the disc/case.

The Story

If the founder of this blog can talk of his fondness of Cloud, surely I can get a mention about mine for X? Guess I have a thing for Mr. Robotos like him that goes back at least 15 years, and no I don’t care that any interaction of that nature might lead to Heavy Metal Poisoning. Coincidentally, it took me 69 minutes to complete the PS4 version.

It’s a well-known tale. Following up on events from the original Mega Man series that started in the then-futuristic year 200X (I think it’s safe now to say it’s an alternate timeline unless the government did as good a job covering it up as they did with the Eugenics Wars), we join the last of Dr. Light’s creations, an android, as he fights a bunch of androids who are trying to kill humans (an android named X in the year 21XX fighting an evil robot revolution… why didn’t they title this game Revolution X instead of Rockman X? It would be at least 33.333% more awesome.). No idea where the humans are, but I assume they are far, far away from the stages you must navigate because those stages are absolutely not OSHA compliant and letting a human anywhere near them would lead to more lawsuits than there are killer machines.

According to the PC version’s manual, the game’s robot apocalypse happened because a paleontologist mass-produced androids that he modified from a design that he dug up from the ruins of an old lab (he dug up the character you play as, Mega Man X. I don’t think it was legal to leave a Terminator laying around for someone to dig up, but Dr. Light was long dead so he escaped justice). Specifically, it happened within 7 months of him making his discovery. And within 2 months of this discovery, humanity was so dependent on this new kind of machine that they couldn’t pull the plug on manufacturing despite serious bugs appearing. Why couldn’t the paleontologist just have found lost footage from some doomed film students like anyone else who accidentally finds ruins?

Differences

On the left is the PC version in its native resolution, on the right is more or less how the SNES version might look on your TV. Notice that the PC has more visible in the horizontal, while the SNES has more visible in the vertical. The colors are actually supposed to be identical, but your TV settings could cause differences, and the image was fattened a little from the SNES’ native resolution when projecting onto a TV screen.

As with Star Wars: Rebel Assault, a vintage PC or DOS Box is needed to run this game. The music is in MIDI format, and whoever translated it did a terrible job. Listen to the tracks in the game and find literally any fan’s homemade MIDI version on the internet and you’ll see that the people behind the PC port just didn’t care.

Another difference: on the SNES version, the image for stages on this stage select screen could change after you beat the boss. For example, after beating Storm Eagle his plane would disappear from his stage’s picture.

 

Didn’t care about the music anyway. The rest was ported quite well. A screenshot from the PC version could be a screenshot from the SNES version. You walk along just fine, and the backgrounds scroll just as smoothly as on the SNES version. Once I had the controller set right, I felt like I was playing an emulation of the SNES game.

Onto the more specific qualms (I’ve been doing a lot of bulletpoint lists lately, but in my defense I had planned to do that for this one at least 5 months before I did the other posts).

• It’s not that big of a deal, but there is one feature that was left-out: you had the ability to ride in the mechs some enemies use in the SNES games. Those mechs are left out entirely, except for the one boss who uses them.
• The animation for the snow when Chill Penguin pulls the cord is different than on the SNES, the colors make it look like it might’ve been redrawn or something.
• The pink charge shot goes slower.
• The computer version can’t do translucent graphics, so the glass at the airport stage was redrawn to be a dotted field imposed over X.
• At the airport stage there are platforms moving up and down that have flamethrowers on them. On the SNES version if you don’t destroy a flamethrower to clear the platform then the next one won’t have materialized, so the platform will be empty. On the PC version though they’re all there.
• Dash jumping off a wall is HARD compared to the SNES version, but at the same time if you repeatedly hit the jump button while climbing a wall you basically dash up it.
• Crushing blocks with your head makes a different sound- it’s one of the sounds from the submarine machine in Launch Octopus’ stage.
• In Spark Mandrill’s stage, the flying light robots don’t leave a trail of light behind them, rather they just light the room.
• Also, when the room goes dark it is… ADVANCED darkness. In the SNES you can still sort of see the stage, but in the PC version it’s all blacked out.
• The turtle tanks are not one-shotted by Storm Tornado.
• In the fight against Spark Mandrill, you can get stuck- if he drops it can disable you, and you’re stuck until he hits you, so you might be disabled in such a way that you’re in a corner where he’s unable to get you (your sprite is laying on its back, which puts it under his sprite when it does the dash attack, and ALL he will do at that point is the dash attack).
• Spark Mandrill has a very short period of invulnerability after you’ve hit him, shorter than in the SNES so you can just keep freezing him in place until he explodes.
• The health pickups and energy powerups still make a noise when you pick them up if you don’t need them, while in the SNES version they’re silent.
• There is no slowdown when the mine cart is riding, so if you jump to shoot something that would otherwise hit you and knock you off, it’s a good chance the cart will be long gone by the time you land, and getting hit by anything knocks you off it.
• Armored Armadillo is pretty slow, and easy to hit.
• Water is not translucent. The surface layer is dotted like the windows in Storm Eagle’s stage, but beneath that you can’t tell you’re underwater except for the occasional little cloudy bit that drifts by.
• Each part of the Sea Serpent that hits the ground can leave something, like in Mega Man Xtreme 2 but not like in the SNES version.
• The battle with the sea serpent above the secret chamber can drag on because the serpent ducks underground a lot more than on the SNES version.
• The green robot guarding the capsule in Sting Chameleon’s stage doesn’t use the grappler too much, in fact not at all until it starts smoking.
• After you’ve beaten all of the bosses, there is NOT a cutscene with Zero. You just go back to stage select and are able to choose the boss stages.
• When Zero is fighting Vile, the stage music is still playing but just reeeeealy quiet, instead of going completely silent.
• The collision box for the armored carrier is smaller than on the SNES- shots just go right through Vile’s head.
• When you fight Vile outside the armored carrier, it’s just the regular boss music.
• When fighting the boss spider, if you shoot the pink charge shot at it each wave counts as a hit on it.
• When the boss spider was exploding, you could still move X around. Normally he freezes at that point.
• The big face wall is missing the Sigma logo on its forehead.
• It is HARD to get mettaurs to open up; it’s way easier on the SNES version.
• You get save files instead of passwords. Your boss progress is not saved, but the rest of your progress is and you have several different save files you can use. Your hadouken also is not saved.
• Sting Chameleon is dotted like they do with everything else that was translucent on the SNES.
• You can’t cutoff Launch Octopus’ tentacles.
• Sometimes, if you enter a boss arena with a charged shot ready to go, it will disappear.
• Sigma’s dog is not knocked back by any shots to it, it will just continue its attack
• Sigma is slow in the first fight, and does not jump at you.
• In Armored Armadillo’s stage, the texture of dirt in the SNES version changes colors after you drop down a big hole (the hole that leads to the second digging machine) and the new color stays for the rest of the game. The PC version does not change the color.

Here’s another set of bulletpoints. These are differences that I think came from the fact that the game was designed for Windows 3.11 (it was released 5 months before Windows 95) and I was running it on Windows 98. I’m not sure though, because as you saw above some things were slowed for the PC port too so it makes sense other things might’ve been sped up.

• Chill Penguin is faster
• When a boss explodes, it happens faster but there are more explosions.
• The weapons demonstration screen was so fast that it was sort of a “blink and you miss” thing with some weapons.
• The platforms move faster at the airport stage.
• Flame Mammoth flies across the room when he jumps.
• X’s uncharged shot can fire pretty fast, to where it looks kind of like the weapon you get from Neon Tiger in X3.
• During the upper sea serpent battle in Launch Octopus’ stage, the .wav sounds stopped playing (I had to restart the computer to get them back).
• Somehow, the big face wall boss killed the audio.
• credits and X’s ending monologue FLEW on by

Here’s the “dotted line” effect I mentioned that they use to replace translucent effects on the SNES version.

You Can Try It Yourself!

There’s a free demo of the PC version out there; it was freeware when it was first distributed in order to build interest for people to actually buy the game.

As for why to buy it… well, for the series devotees this is an overlooked twist to the game that’ll make replaying it much different than its SNES/GameCube/Nintendo eShop/Nintendo Switch/PS2/PS4/XboxOne counterpart.

Though to be fair, the difference in controllers is enough to change the gameplay experience. I just played the PS4 release, coincidentally only the second time I’ve ever played a PS4, with the last time being over two years ago, and I can definitely say that the controller makes a difference. The native out-of-the-box PS4 controller (never used before, my PS4 spent 2 years new in box before I broke out one of my favorite games to relieve some election-related stress) was rather difficult for me to use, my thumb gave up when trying to tap the jump button repeatedly while holding the firing button and I ended up dying. I also noticed a very slight lag between input and action on the screen. Also, some asshat decided to put a big button right in the middle of the controller that’s less than 4 millimeters away from the start button which is very flush with the controller, so my thumb trying to press the start button real quick repeatedly kept hitting that big middle button instead. That was annoying.

No game over screenshots like the other entries because I’ve been playing this game way too long to get a game over, so instead have a screenshot I took for reasons I’m not sure of. I think I tried to show how many of the uncharged shots would appear on screen at the same time, but I guess they move so freakin’ fast that really only one appears and it just looks like many can.

Star Wars: Rebel Assault (PC/Sega CD/Panasonic 3DO, 1993)

An evolution of the FMV shooter. It will never compare to the strangeness of one of the progenitors of the genre (seriously- who the heck thought no one would notice where that footage came from?).

The plot kinda sorta follows the first film mixed with the second film. You start out as a new rebel recruit training on Tatooine. You then fly through some asteroids, fight a Star Destroyer (Imperial-II model, because no one ever made an f***ing model kit for the Imperial-I!!!!), fight Imperial Walkers on what looks like but isn’t Hoth, and then you blow up the Death Star.

The Imperial-I seen on the left has most noticeably the top of a cell phone tower sticking out of the top (in between the two white bulbs on top of the rectangle), while the Imperial-II seen on the right does not have that (other differences include the general shape of the rectangle that the cell tower is sitting on top of). In the game, these scenes depict the same starship.

You are presented with several different types of gameplay. In some stages you control the ship from a 3rd person perspective from the rear and dodge stuff (and sometimes shoot). Other stages have you in a 3rd person overhead perspective of your ship where you shoot stuff under you. Other stages have you in the cockpit shooting whatever (and moving the ship based on how far to the side your targeting cursor is), while other stages have you controlling your character from a 3rd person perspective. Your control is limited though, you just aim the gun and fire.

I challenged myself to all three releases of the game last year. Let’s take a look at what I found.

PC

Is this where the Crystalline Entity came from?

How the game’s supposed to be played… I think. My copy had some issues running- I have a laptop that runs Windows 98 (BTW- I learned over Christmas that you can make a festive background video for any occasion by modding Windows 98’s built-in 3D Maze screensaver with some images of your own), but even that was too advanced for Rebel Assault to function. There was no sound, and the controls were way off, but bear in mind I was also using a mouse rather than a controller or fighter stick. Plus, I recall some issues in setting controls for the mouse. (I know, I know, I should have used my most recent PC and just ran DOS-Box. Well, my modern laptop can’t read discs worth a darn).

But it certainly looked great! The graphics were pretty sharp and smooth. It’s like this was a DVD, compared to the 3DO’s glitchy first-generation laserdisc, compared to the Sega CD version which may have been filmed by Abraham Zapruder.

3DO

Skimming the surface, about to pull a Porkins

If you don’t have the right vintage PC, then this is how to play the game. So I’d say this is the most accessible version that won’t turn you off the game completely (I am assuming that as many people out there with Sega CD’s have a 3DO too). The controls work well, certainly better than what I was able to get out of the PC version. The sound is… not CD quality as we know it, or as any music fans at the time would know it, but it wasn’t terrible.

Sega CD

Ohhhhhh boy. So hard to compress the game onto the disc that amongst other things an entire stage was omitted.

Wouldn’t be a Star Wars game without a trench run.

The colors are marginally worse than the 3DO, as the Sega Genesis/CD combo can’t match the 32-bit powerhouse above. I had played a level or two in the past, but I came in this time thinking this version was much worse than it was as far as colors went, so that was a pleasant surprise.

 

What was very much unpleasant however was how the game controlled. In the 3rd Person Fighter Piloting levels, the magnetic force pulling your craft to the side was much stronger, and you had to hold up and right or up and left to break away, no matter where you were on the screen. If you just wanted to go left or right, forget it. Just to experiment I tried holding left, and my T-16 plunged to the right and into the canyon wall, and stayed there until it blew up.

One thing this game did better than the 3DO was that on the levels where you’re in the first person flying a ship, the cursor flowed nice and smooth. However auto-lock wasn’t a thing in this game, and you could be right on top of the enemy and blasting away and still miss every shot.

The downside is that the background on all of these top-down stages isn’t as distinct as it is on the 3DO version, so you get to run into all sorts of things if you’re not careful.

The top-down Death Star level was easier since I knew what to do, but there were some points of interest to it. The lasers seemed to stand motionless in the middle of the screen. My fighter randomly took damage when nothing should have caused it. As with the other top-down section in this game, and with the 3DO version, if you push down lightly on the button nothing happens, but as you add more pressure eventually your ship will suddenly jerk wildly in the direction you’re trying to go. That’s how the controls feel, it can come out kind of smooth on the screen.

The Sega-CD had another issue- it kept crashing. The disc was ok, but the system kept stopping the game. The video playback for the backgrounds and the background music would stop, but the lasers and their sound effects would function. The cursor could still be moved. This struck three times. Twice at the AT-AT stage, so intense the game could not continue. There was a third time at the AT-AT stage, but the game recovered.

The ground stages seemed to have a similar cursor handling to the 3DO version, but it felt and looked choppier.

The Verdict

Sega CD on the left, Panasonic 3DO in the middle, and PC on the right. The video sizes aren’t that big relative to each other, I don’t really know how big they are. Depends on the TV I guess, but the video on my laptop was kinda small.

Well… it’s good to have on the 3DO because it is a good game and the 3DO’s library is pretty poor. Avoid it on the Sega CD: there are better games to be had, and that’s the worst-done port. Only suitable for Completionists. The PC version is perfectly handsome but needs the right hardware. On the plus side- if you have the right hardware for this to run, chances are you can run some other classic Star Wars games, and other old games too (like the PC version of Mega Man X which I found to be quite fun).

PSP UMD, GBA Video, And The Future

Ok, I broke my promise to myself and did a political thing for both Christmas and New Year’s. There were seasonal issues I felt had to be looked at. So here’s something different.

Home Video Game Units

You may be wondering: “why just those two? Didn’t the CD-I have its own video format?” Well, yes, but it also played generic video cd’s, and the CD-I video format itself was actually just an MPEG file with the file extension changed to something else. I think it said “.DAT” instead of “.MPEG”. Copying it onto my laptop and relabelling it would give me access to the video if my CD-I were not around, which is like half the time because I have one of the gigantic models and I am not lugging that thing up and down the East Coast!

The Philips CD-I was region-free, which allowed me to cheaply snatch-up and watch this collection of James Bond movies.

But since I brought it up, and since it’s a precursor to our modern consoles that double as home video players, I’ll just note that as far as I could tell the CD-I videos looked exactly like VHS tapes, but without a sort of haze subtly graying things out a little. While the image is sharper in that regard, you also get some artifacting in there.

While CD-I was on the maybe pile because of its early CD-I exclusive format that was only exclusive because they changed a filename on the disc otherwise it’d work in any VCD player, there are some units definitely in the “not at all” pile for this post. That’d be things like the PS2, Xbox, Gamecube (Panasonic Q to be specific), PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. While these play DVDs and Blu-Rays, there AREN’T home videos released exclusively for formats that only those units can play. Same thing for the Pioneer LaserActive which one day shall be mine. As my earlier post might indicate, I do have me some laserdiscs. And spellcheck for WordPress indicates that “laserdisc” is not a real word… how much we forget in 19 years!

Game Boy Advance Video

If you didn’t know what I meant by “artifacting” when talking about CD-I videos, you’ll see in these screenshots. It looks terrible, but they had to make some sacrifices to fit them onto cartridges. Besides, Game Boy Advance Video came out early in 2004. At that time, the best you could see is whatever image the frontlit SP provided so the resolution would necessarily be quite low anyway.

“Mumblin’ Morays Mermaid Man, one of the aliens from Space Invaders consumed my foot and has latched to my chest!” Image from SpongeBob Squarepants episode “Mermaid Man”.

There is a small library of Game Boy Advance Video titles, compared to UMD releases. 34 cartridges by my count. All of them are children/pre-teen shows. Disney, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Pokemon dubs, things like that. I just bought ’em up for the SpongeBob episodes, though I think I got my Cartoon Network one for free. I wasn’t disappointed- it meant I got an episode of Courage The Cowardly Dog.

Nintendo entrusted this endeavor to Majesco (except the Pokemon releases, Nintendo handled that differently). This seemed like a bad choice to me, after my most recent experience with a Majesco product. A product that surely would’ve been on Nintendo’s mind and on Majesco’s resume, since it came out less than 6 years before Game Boy Advance Video hit the marketplace.

Majesco was responsible for releasing the Sega Genesis Model 3 in 1998. No Sega CD compatibility, no Sega 32X compatibility, didn’t work with some Sega Genesis games, and they’re prone to rusting. I have an Atari 2600 that runs smooth and looks new despite being purchased in the 70’s and having spent 20 years in my dad’s closet, yet both of the Model 3’s I got looked like someone drizzled salt water in them and they only turned 20 this year. The cashiers at the shop I bought the first one from noted that Model 3’s were notorious for their unreliability and lack of durability. But hey, as long as it works, right?

UMD

Can’t say they didn’t warn you

UMD is just the general title for PSP discs. This got way more traction as far as putting videos on it went. The videos looked better, like DVDs. Evidently there was 900MB-1.8GB of space to work with on the discs. Unlike with the Game Boy Advance Video format which had lockouts preventing you from playing your movie on the TV (in case you wanted to pirate the pixelated mess), the PSP has no such lockout and can plug directly into your TV. Or at least mine could.

The video selection is much more vast. Soooooo many discs. Family Guy seasons 1-3 come to mind right away (because I bought them off a friend, who threw away their original cases and had them in specially-bought UMD cases that I had to sort through). The first time I saw some movies, like Godzilla: Final Wars, it was on the UMD release. But as you can tell just by Family Guy and Godzilla being mentioned, UMD discs had a pretty broad set of videos put on them… and upon looking at my collection when desperately trying to reunite a loose UMD with its case, I found some films I didn’t remember having, one of which the venerable founder of this blog referenced to me a few times but I never understood because I never saw it.

Not A Fair Comparison

No reason to include a UMD screenshot since it was basically the same as you’d get on a DVD, but here is a picture comparing UMD to DVD anyway. All that we say and do is right.

Yes, the PSP was principally in competition with the Nintendo DS. But Nintendo did not make any DS-Video releases, and as point of fact UMD movies only started coming out in 2004, the same year as Game Boy Advance Video. Nintendo’s next video attempt didn’t hit until the 3DS. This was called “Nintendo Video”, but didn’t seem to go far (and had content from notorious Leftwingers CollegeHumor, but this was in the pre-Trump time so maybe it wasn’t so bad). Since then video content has been relegated to stuff in Nintendo’s eShop, but by now with Netflix and the like available on your consoles (my mother’s friend uses her Wii for Netflix of all things) I guess stuff like UMDs and Game Boy Advance Video are going the way of the CD-I video.

Why’d They Do It Anyway?

Sony had the discs, Nintendo had the cartridges, and people like movies on the go. This was before Wi-Fi was everywhere. I in fact bought the PSP and some movies in part because I was going on a long trip, so I guess that means those reached their target audience of travelling teens. UMD allowed for quality transfers, and had more content than just programs aimed at younger audiences, so it makes sense that’d takeoff. It was also a cheaper alternative to portable DVD players- it cost me $50 in 2008 to buy one from a pawn shop, whereas that much money got me probably two UMD movies in 2006. Since people already had the hardware, why not take some movies on the go in a convenient travel size?

If we’re going to dig deep and be honest with ourselves, we’d find that the largest flaw with GBA Video is they did not also include something where Tim Conway was doing his best to make the other actors break character with unscripted acts, like puppetry.

Now, this kind of thing wouldn’t make any sense today. And questions on the future of gaming are raised- what is the fate of having your own disc copy? Will we eventually just be playing Xbox games from Microsoft’s server farm, with the Xbox Three being merely a box with an internet connection? Enter your card, play online and pay as much as you would for the discs? It cuts down on distribution, for sure! Given the controversies about excessive paywalls in games and paid extra content, why wouldn’t we expect gaming companies to cut disc production from their expenses? With the popularity of outlets like Steam, and doing stuff like just buying the games online and downloading them to your console (I remember when I bought Rare Replay for the Xbox One and watched in horror as it simply downloaded the games to suck up memory space on my console, the disc contained almost nothing on it).

Its Future Is History

This will pose a major problem for game collectors in the future. Take this hypothetical: Lloyd Bridges Games creates “Super A Walk In The Sun”. We play it, it’s a good game, but it’s entirely online. The company goes out of business. All bonus content that was stored in their servers- GONE! All your save files stored in their servers- GONE! The game itself can’t be played anymore- GONE!

The only reason I’m not mad at Lloyd Bridges Games’ Founder is that he turned down the role of Captain Kirk, allowing William Shatner to fulfill his destiny.

Or how about the problem with something like Rare Replay, where the disc only contained download codes. What if my Xbox One didn’t connect to the store? What if this is 20 years from now and Lloyd Bridges Games had put Microsoft out of business? Rare Replay would be worthless.

I saw an example of this in the store a few weeks ago. Final Fantasy XI. Unless you transferred to a Windows PC (not Apple, apparently) then all that time you spent on your console version meant nothing, and video game stores are full of copies of the game that are now unplayable. There is no single-player campaign in it, it’s entirely online. So what happens when Square dumps the Windows version too? I guess the same thing that happened to all of those PS2/Xbox 360 owners who only had Apple computers available or didn’t have the money to get a copy of Windows. Final Fantasy XI, part of one of the longest-running video game franchises, will be consigned to the depths of LostMediaWiki despite millions having played it and invested years in it.

Same can be said for any online game like that, such as ones for the Sega Dreamcast, but this was the first example that popped into my mind.

Donkey Kong Country (Game Boy Color, 2000)

I believe I mentioned this a little while back. Turns out I ended up beating it before that post was published. (To qualify this point, I beat it in June but didn’t get 101% completion until the end of August). But then the midterms came and priorities shifted. I can’t very well make a game about monkeys from 2000 fit in with the “Cold War nuclear holocaust” theme, despite the obvious references to certain Cold War movies about damn dirty apes. So finally, here we have Donkey Kong Country on the Game Boy Color. Something light to get you through this holiday week.

16-bits of data crammed into an 8-bit sack.

It’s Donkey Kong Country on the SNES, but stripped down for the Game Boy Color. I’m playing it on the Game Boy Advance, and that’s the sad part of the story- if they’d just waited even a year they could’ve simply skipped all of the work for the Game Boy Color and instead done a straight port of the SNES game to the GBA. 3 years later, they did just that.

The story goes that King K. Rool (what a clever name…) stole all of Donkey Kong’s bananas, so now you must fight his henchmen and the king himself in order to retrieve your high-potassium treats. And no, stealing your bananas does not weigh on the king’s conscience.

You can play as either Donkey Kong or Diddy Kong. You swap who you play as in the stage either by pressing the “select” button or by an enemy taking out one of your characters. If you have one character left, you can break open a fresh replacement from a DK barrel.

Each stage has at least one bonus room in which to gain either bananas or lives. If you collect 100 bananas, you get a life.

Is that an ox?

Diddy and DK have animal friends. You can play as each of them, both in levels and in minigames that are accessed by retrieving 3 golden idols of the same animal.

Barrels with stars on them act as a checkpoint in a level- break them, and every time you access that level after losing a life you will start at that point in it. When you lose a life, the game ejects you from the stage to the overworld map.

Comparisons

Yes, there are differences with the SNES version.

• The colors are paired down, the deep background is usually not particularly detailed or even just one color, as opposed to the SNES which had much more detail.
• One stage was replaced by a new one.
• Instead of riding animals you become them. Only one monkey is visible at a time.
• Some of the lighting effects are different- in stages with fog the screen just fades slightly to gray, in the one stage where the parrot follows you with a flashlight and illuminates 2/3 of the screen with a seizure-inducing brightness every time you move too far to one side of the screen on the SNES, on the GBC the whole screen illuminates.
• Saving is done automatically in the GBC version, whereas you needed to visit Candy Kong in the SNES version. You can still visit her in the GBC port, but she provides a minigame instead.
• The music in some stages sounds like a Game Boy counterpart to what is on the SNES, but in other stages it’s something completely different.
• They added stamps you need to collect to add to the overall completion percentage.
• And some levels had their intralevel warps removed. These are warps that take you from the beginning to near the end of a level. The only oversight was Slipslide Ropes, that one is still in there.
• And in one of the levels, the entrance to a bonus room was moved to the other side of a hill. One of the cave levels.
• The GBC version provides on its main menu, in addition to the regular game, minigames and stickers you can print with the Game Boy Color Printer.
  

  The lights snap on for the parrot, though with a backlit screen you don’t really need it.

  

  In the SNES version, when the lights go out they are OUT. No stage is visible. Not like here, although this is a backlit GBA SP model. On the standard GBA, it might as well be lights out for all intents and purposes given how little you can see.

  Complaints Department

  

  Left is how it looks on the original GBA (picture was taken in the most ideal circumstances I could contrive, on average you would not see this much), while right is how it looks on a backlit GBA SP (distinct from frontlit models, the backlit ones came later).

This game was next to impossible for reasons outlined below. To summarize via example: it took weeks for me to beat the game on the original Game Boy Advance, but on the latest SP model that had a backlit screen I beat it twice in two days (once without any star barrels for saving halfway through a level, the other without any DK Barrels which would allow me to take extra hits from enemies and obstacles). Every level. In a week, I must’ve beat the game 2.5 times, because to get full completion you have to find every bonus stage in the levels, in addition to beating the game without star barrels and without DK barrels.

Their Shellder wannabe is in black and white, I assume just ripped from one of the other Game Boy Donkey Kong games.

Some things shouldn’t have been done. The villains, and sometimes the player, blend into the colorful backgrounds. This does not seem to be a game designed for a portable environment, unless your screen has a backlight. Game Boy Colors did not come with that feature (though there was one planned). (pic of shark, caption where am i? am I here? No no no, am I there? No no no).

The collision box for Donkey Kong varies between too small to pickup bananas unless they cross a few pixels in the middle of his chest, and very huge when enemies are nearby. This only aggravates the need for sufficient lighting at all points of gameplay.

The main menu is taken from Donkey Kong 64. Except DK doesn’t look like a maniac serial killer in the console version.

Minor in comparison to the rest, but the game does have points when there are too many enemies on the screen which slow it down, but as I recall this really only was noticeable in just two levels.

Overall Impression

I was impressed by how they almost completely stuck the SNES game, hailed for its advanced graphics and gameplay, onto a Game Boy Color cartridge. It desperately needs to be played on a system with a backlight, but if you do that it’s an interesting look at an interim measure for making a portable version of the first Donkey Kong SNES game. Aside from the novelty factor, I might lean towards recommending this one over the GBA release if you don’t have a DS or a backlit SP. I assume the GBA release’s more faithful lighting use would make it nightmarish to play on the standard GBA.

So… did anyone else notice how Mine Cart Carnage’s music had a few notes from Indiana Jones’ theme, and that Millstone Mayhem’s music had a few notes which sound like they match the vocals in “Sweet Victory” by David Eisley? Juuuuust enough to let you know what they’re going for, without a lawyer letting them know they’re going to be sued.

After Burner I, II, and III (Various, 1987-1991. Part 5 of the War Games Series)

Arguably, your 1987 game appearing in a 1991 hit movie is better than a certain arcade game from 1983 appearing on a certain hit show in 1986. Terminator 2 Screenshot From Electronic Playground.

As we watch the Democrats peddle their warmongering interventionist and laissez-faire let’s-wait-for-war attitudes, ie as they play their war games on their way to the fall brawl known as the midterm elections, where voters will probably vote Democrat to bring us nookular annihilation, I’ll take a look at some literal war games. Cold War video games, anyway.

Image from WWE Network

Today, we briefly address no-fly zones and Leftwing swarm tactics, looking at various entries in the After Burner series.

The Game

You fly an F-14 in all versions of the game, but the more astute among you may notice that’s an F-15 on the Sega Genesis cartridge. And yes, on the lower left that’s an NES cartridge. I’ll explain later.

The difference between After Burners I and II was unknown to me, based on my experience with the home ports. Turns out there’s a good reason for that. The sequel’s biggest change was adding 3 levels at the end. Makes no difference to me, out of 18 levels in the first and 21 levels in the second I only managed to get to either level 4 or 5.

Can you guess which is After Burner II and which is After Burner? Yeah, me neither. Clockwise from top left: After Burner Complete (Sega 32X), After Burner II (Sega Genesis), After Burner (Sega Master System), After Burner (NES)

There are more ports than these, and in fact more After Burner games than these. Some games that aren’t titled After Burner apparently are considered by fans to be part of the series. Phooey on all that, my focus is on the After Burner games in my possession, the ones that just so happen to have been released during the Cold War (except number III, that was 9 months too late).

What Do You Do In The Game?

You move your plane around the screen trying to avoid enemy missiles. You hold down the button for the machine gun in some versions (it fires automatically in others) and fire missiles at planes when you lock onto them. You do that by moving your crosshair over an enemy plane. The gun isn’t totally useless, it does destroy planes too.

Yeah, that’s it. It’s an arcade game, what did you expect?

There is some small variety in enemy planes. While you fly an F-14, in the first two games your basic enemies look like… I don’t know what the hell those are. Single-engine F-5s (not a real thing). An F-16I but without the intake underneath? The enemies that shoot back at you look like maybe MiG-25s. There’s another enemy that

How a B-1 re-arms you is anyone’s guess.

looks like it could be a MiG-23 if you squint… or a Harrier. It will also shoot you. And then you get re-armed by a B-1 Lancer. The “B” means “Bomber”, not “Boy I sure have a lot of weapons to share”. Look, you’re not in this game to be technically accurate, you’re in it to destroy anything that isn’t the ground.

Being re-armed is significant, though it may not seem that way. You do not really have infinite missiles, just a lot of them. I’ve run out before.

After Burner Complete (Sega 32X)

This version was as near-perfect an arcade port as had ever been made to that point. Too bad it was 7 years old by the time of its release. From my understanding, the only difference between this and the arcade is the frame rate, which was cut in half though it still looks pretty smooth. As the title screen indicates, this is pretty much After Burner II despite the title being only “After Burner Complete”. Maybe that was just Sega admitting that they’re the same game. Out of the versions reviewed here, this is by far the best, though not the best available. After Burner II was ported more faithfully than this to the Sega Saturn, and later appeared on the PS2.

Still, I like this one. Maybe because I saw too many Sega 32X commercials and was brainwashed by them. I’m pretty sure they’re over-selling what the 32X can do. In reality it came off as being a slight improvement over the SNES. The SNES version of Doom packed in more enemy types and more stages than the 32X version. And didn’t end with a DOS Prompt. The SNES Doom levels were also complete, whereas the 32X has sections cut out of some. As for games like Shadow Squadron and Star Wars Arcade, those just look like graphically-improved versions of Star Fox. Not even next-gen really, just a little better and they ran a little smoother. And then you have Mortal Kombat II, which on the 32X was barely equal to the SNES version.

After Burner II (Sega Genesis)

This is a step down obviously, despite the “II” in the title. It’s still quite playable, don’t worry about that. Fewer enemies on screen, fewer colors too so the backgrounds look different. It’s also a little slower, or at least choppier than on the 32X release. I still got my butt kicked by the enemy, because I suck at this game. They just keep coming at you until you’re blown apart. The game’s designed to eat quarters in the arcade so it makes sense that it’d be so darn hard to play.

After Burner (Sega Master System)

This was a bad idea. Very slow and choppy. Very few enemies on the screen. The unresponsiveness makes it hard to dodge missiles and aim at enemies. This is what happens when your arcade machines are a generation ahead of your consoles and you don’t know how to work around that. They can get an ok version of Commando and Zaxxon on the Atari 2600, why can’t they get this right?

After Burner (NES)

Everything wrong with the Master System version, but worse. This scene might as well be actual gameplay footage. You’ll also notice that the sprite for your jet is smaller, and you’re now shooting down F/A-18s rather than Russian jets.

You might also have noticed that this is a Sega game on the NES when the two companies were in direct competition, just as I’m sure you noticed the black NES cartridge in the picture near the top of this piece. Look at you being so observant! The story goes that this is an effort to create games for the NES without dealing with Nintendo’s harsh policies (only Nintendo can publish the game for 2 years, and you only can release 5 games on Nintendo consoles each year). Tengen produced their special games like After Burner in special cartridges with the right anti-copyright chips to play on regular NES systems with no modifications. However, folks who own a Retron console will find that these games don’t work on those.

After Burner III (Sega CD)

I know, I know. It differs from the other games here and did not come out during the Cold War. But it felt weird not including it since it was the only After Burner game I owned that didn’t fit the mold.

Anyway, in this game you take a cockpit view, and occasionally get into a third-person view, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same game. Fire your guns and missiles at a never-ending stream of enemies. Being on the Sega CD allows for better sound effects and music. But you are shooting at what appear to be F/A-18s, and occasionally an F-14 gets behind you. At that point the game switches to a third-person perspective to help you lose the enemy. Another unique feature is that every so often you switch from shooting enemy planes to shooting enemy bases on the ground.

The intro tells you that the enemy is building bases and airfields all over a desert, and in the game they use F/A-18s and F-14s. Did Iran and Kuwait become allies? Did Australia buy the remaining Iranian F-14s?

For those not getting the joke, Iran was an American ally, so close that they’re the only country we ever gave F-14s to back in the 70s. Then the government was overthrown, hostages were taken, and then President Jimmy Carter was overthrown, becoming the last Democratic President to serve only one term.

On To War

Endless war seems like a very liberal thing to do. To be fair, war is now in vogue with feminists (heh, get it?), so they were right when they said she was a feminist icon. Image from the Associated Press

Maybe the foreign policy adviser to Hillary’s campaign was playing this game when he or she told Hillary that a no-fly zone over Syria, in which we’d shoot down Russian jets (and they’d shoot down ours), was a good idea. How hard could World War III be if one jet can knock down hundreds of enemy jets? Look at that score of over 3,000,000! Let’s just hope it’s a non-nuclear third world war like in Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising. (I had considered buying an old computer and reviewing that game, by the way, but it looks boring. Yes, they did make boring video games about World War III.)

And when it comes to war, Democrats want anything but boredom! Heck, Democrats got so mad about Vietnam being boring, not having the glory of World War II, that they decided to start a war in Chicago. And when the war dragged on too long, Democrats got bored and moved on to being mad at Nixon, and cut funding to South Vietnam (Dems controlled the House that year) which led to their surrender when otherwise they could’ve at least stalemated. Just like how Democrats got bored of that thing in Iraq they all were excited about at first, and moved on under Obama, despite warnings that something like ISIS would happen if the U.S. left.

“Woo yeah! Libya was a great war! We was all pew pew pew ‘Murica!” Image from evil.news

Now Libya, THAT’S how a real Democrat war would look! Bomb the crap out of them, remove the government, then pack up and leave. So what if the country fell apart and is now a hotbed of terrorism and slavery? So what if they had to tell little white lies about Gaddhafi, who was actually very cooperative until Obama and Hillary stabbed him in the back? You see, Obama and Hillary lying to get us into war with Libya (saying the government was responsible for mass killings), to collapse Libya and leave, was ok because they knowingly did it, whereas when Bush “lied” (the assertion that he did not is coming from Bob Woodward, whom you guys on the Left are currently worshipping after his anti-Trump book Fear was published) to get us into Iraq and try to rebuild Iraq, it was wrong because he was just going based on the faulty data he had at the time, which even liberals eventually admitted was accurate. Makes sense.

A Pattern Emerges

Run in, shoot them up, run out. The media does that to Republicans, tried to do that to Kavanaugh. You might have heard Rush Limbaugh’s term “drive-by media”- it’s because they drive up, fill you full of bullets, then quickly move on, leaving you for dead. Kind of like how Democrats pursue their little wars. Why do you think Obama was so reticent to attack ISIS? A: it was not going to be a quick and glorious victory like toppling Gaddhafi, and B: acknowledging their existence would be pretty much admitting that leaving Iraq was a bad idea, that it had consequences that were worth our time and money to deal with. Well, the DNC’s media is pretty much the same way with its attacks. For all of those reporters and pundits who occasionally forgot to use the word “alleged” or something similar with Kavanaugh, do you think we’ll be getting a retraction? Nope, their clips were emptied and they’re moving on.

Liberal protesters demonstrating their strong-style. Images from AP, RWC, Fox News, and Quora

You’ll notice a pattern with some of these games too that I’ve been looking at for this series. Missile Command, Battle Zone, and this one. Never-ending waves of enemies. MAS*H gets partial credit because it never ends but you’re not fighting anyone. I guess After Burner gets only partial credit too, since even though you’re fighting enemies it does have a finite number of levels.  So it is beatable, eventually. If you have too much time on your hands to perfect your skills.

I digress. My point is you’re resisting wave after wave of attacks, this strong relentlessly aggressive style that the Left employs for its wars both abroad and at home against Republicans. Much like how the Soviets fought their wars- overpower the enemy with sheer numbers. How appropriate, given the Cold War tone of the games we’re looking at, that we’d find such a connection between the USSR and modern Left.

What Do You Think?

Sounds like a fun game? Vote for the Left and make it happen! War may be a fun video game, but Leftists calling for it or Civil War because they’re drive-by tactics failed have no idea what they’re talking about. If this writer is shaking with rage right now, just because Senators representing 44% of the country made a decision affecting 11.1% of the Supreme Court, having only altered 22.2% of it since Trump took office, how will she feel when the bodies of her revolutionaries are in the streets? By the way- as for that 44% meme other liberals have propagated, while technically true, polls actually show a slight majority (46% to 45%) supported Kavanaugh just before he was confirmed, and another poll saying 60% of the country wanted Kavanaugh confirmed if the FBI cleared him (and sure enough the FBI found nothing backing the accusations). And how’d the vote go? 50 Senators for, 48 against. Seems right to me, even a little under what should be expected based on that 60% number. But not to the Left, because Kavanaugh was guilty, not even “until proven innocent”, simply “guilty but we never found evidence“. Go ahead, vote for witch hunts and kangaroo courts.

The Hunt For Red October (Various, 1991-1993. Part 3 of the War Games series)

BIG son of a bitch!

If you’ve never heard of it, pull your head out of your butt, actually look up what Family Guy references ya hipster millennial jackanape, and at least watch the gallderned movie.

Image from uproxx, property of WWE

As the midterms approach and the Democrats continue to run on impeachment (why does the Left’s drive for impeachment against a Republican sound familiar?), so that they can start a new Cold War or something, let’s take another look at some more Cold War games… that came out a little late. Sort of.

It was a flat orange-ish color for the NES on the left, it just came out like that because of the screen used.

Today, we take a look at defectors. Historically from the Cold War, foreshadowing defectors in the Left’s future Cold War, as well as looking at political defectors from the Left.

Since the game is based on a movie based on a book, let’s just get the game out of the way first.

Game Boy

Yes, that was the best picture I could get.

Lousy, but it is one of only two video games I know of (that was made before any hipster with a phone could produce an app) whose title screen features a hammer and sickle and the Soviet Anthem (because those hipster-commie bastards who think (if you can credit what little activity in their brain there is as such) mass murder is trendy (1 in 5 millennials in the U.S. think Stalin was a hero) or take the Pulitzer-winning NYT’s stance that it doesn’t happen, and are so used to their parasite lifestyle of mummy and puhpah giving them everything in the world that they can’t conceive of how an economy based on free stuff would fail, and hate America because this country should not exist according to their ideals and their favorite tenured professors who also live at someone else’s expense, would just loooooove to make an unironic Soviet game with a title screen like that, if they haven’t already). That alone makes it awesome.

No save feature, no password screen, no continues, and you die pretty easily. I was surprised at what happened with my playthrough- I struggled for an hour total over two days to get through the first level, but when I did it was an instant breakout the likes of which we haven’t seen since what Obama gave Russian ally Iran in the nuke deal. I tore ass through the next two levels, and then died at the boss for level 3.

You face other submarines, destroyers, aircraft carriers that send up depth-charge dropping jets (F-14s are what they look like, which is weird since they are incapable of hunting submarines or even using anti-submarine weapons). But you have some help in this. You can activate Red October’s caterpillar drive, which inverts your sub’s colors and makes people stop shooting at you unless you pass too close. You also have a limited number of missiles that are way stronger than your torpedoes. Just like the Blue Marine, you have infinite torpedoes. Soviet engineering; it’s no wonder they ran out of money and collapsed.

The levels are just long horizontal courses you must navigate your submarine through. Islands that float on the surface but have nothing under them, random large collections of rocks that dwarf your 198m submarine, that are way larger than an aircraft carrier, just floating about 120m under the water’s surface with no geological feature holding them up. Also in each level we have a boss. Level 3’s caught me flat-footed since it has cannons that knock you out in one shot (which you start in the line of fire of) and depth charges that knock you out in I believe 3 shots. I lost all my lives and called it quits, because this is a very frustrating game. Luck is all that propelled me that far. I knew mine had ran out.

As far as I can tell, it’s a very loose adaptation. In the movie, Red October didn’t blow up other submarines (except the one, but Red October didn’t fire a shot), didn’t fire missiles at helicopters and jets, and didn’t face random bosses that I don’t even know what the heck they’re supposed to be. A giant naval mine that shoots torpedoes, an undersea base that sort of reminded me of Atlantis’ central structure, and some kind of underwater death pagoda. I watched a YouTube video of the rest of the game- apparently the 3 bosses I faced are repeated in harder variations, then two different bosses, then you’re done after 8 levels. And I lost it on level 3. We ain’t doin’ this, the “L” in “Flagg” stands for “lazy”!

NES

on the left is the Game Boy’s intro, on the right is the NES’, both had the radar sweep spawning the hammer and sickle, I just took the pictures at different points.

It’s a similar intro to the Game Boy, we even get the radar graphic. But the title screen is different, just the movie logo. And you don’t get a menu or anything, the moment you press start you’re thrown right into the action. You don’t even get the map showing where you are. But that plays into the different cutscene setup, I guess. This game featured dialog from the movie in between levels. It’s the only one that does, at least as far into them as I was able to play.

They a did a good job with the Russian Ambassador on the right. I assume the guy on the left is supposed to be David Stockman.

The control configuration is also slightly different. The levels though look way different. Your submarine looks like a bigger version of the Game Boy sprite, one of the enemy sub types seems to have carried over, and I think one of the surface ship types too, but that’s it. Different levels, more varied enemies, and different hazards, such as the iceberg level involving ice falling on your sub this time. Sure ice is buoyant and shouldn’t be falling on you and shattering on the iceberg under you, only to have the pieces bounce up and fall again, but… explanations and science. I’m playing as Captain Marko Ramius here, not Captain Cold! I’m not some Ice Man that knows all about ice!

I strongly doubt the Soviets called anything the “Arctic Zone”

Just like the Game Boy game, you get some lives, and can add to them if you pick up the right item, and like the Game Boy version once they’re all gone you’re done. No passwords or continues, the game restarts as if you just turned the power on and off, just as the Game Boy version does. So no, I did not beat it. It’s harder than the Game Boy version

It’s also the only version with the Paramount Logo

One more point of interest- if you’ll look on your right, you’ll notice that the HUD is way different on the screenshots for the back of the NES box compared to the screenshot I showed of what really was in the game. The colors look a little faded for the water and icebergs in the ice stage, compared to the screenshot, but that may just be because of poor printing processes on the box or poor picture quality when taking it.

SNES

Well, FINALLY someone bothers to explain what the missions are! The Game Boy version just throws you into them, the NES version does too but at least puts dialog from the movie into the game to make the contrast between what was on film and what you’re doing all the more obvious. The SNES game goes in a different direction and shows the missions the sub has, with as much effort to tie it into the movie as the Game Boy version. And they all make so much since. I mean, what Soviet Captain WOULDN’T want to stop arms dealers while on his way to defecting? It’s a no-brainer!

There is exactly nothing in both the book and the movie about illegal arms merchants. What the hell is this?

The inter-mission screen looks like an upgraded version of the Game Boy game’s, and the HUD looks like a 16-bit version of what you’ve seen so far in the NES and Game Boy games. But here we get more weapons, and the torpedoes are no longer unlimited. They also don’t home in on the enemy, an enemy that is now harder to kill because it can endure more hits, even the most basic enemies.

The SNES version introduces a new mode of gameplay, for I guess secret bonus stages or something. You have to pick up an item to trigger it. We get a first-person view of enemy boats in the distance and enemy attack helicopters coming at us. This is designed for use with the Super Scope. Mine is not on-hand and I wouldn’t waste my pack of 20 Toys ‘R’ Us AA batteries on it. Well, 18 of them anyway. The makers of the game obviously wanted you to suffer for not having a Super Scope, because when just using the controller your aiming cursor crawls along the screen like a depressed sloth (ie Eric Holder after he quit).

Pro Tip: Minimize interruption of gameplay when using a Super Scope by having a buddy replace expired batteries.

The SNES version added an innovative feature- if you lose a single life, the game resets itself. I guess you could justify that by making the claim that it’s also easier than the Game Boy and NES versions so you don’t need as many lives, because I made it all the way through the first level on my first try. So I didn’t learn about this until level 2. No passwords or save options here either.

Did I comment on the music yet? I should. Both the Game Boy and NES versions start off with 8-bit versions of the Soviet Anthem while the SNES version has… silence. The Game Boy version has some custom music for its levels. The NES version does too, though it’s a different tune and it’s AWFUL. Hey buddy, you know there’s more than one instrument and more than four notes, right? Anyway, the SNES version gives us generic public domain music. I’m not sure about the menu or Level 1, but Level 2 was Night On Bald Mountain (which at least is Russian) and the Game Over screen is Beethoven’s 9th. Ode To Joy for a submarine captained by a Soviet defector sinking; I always thought Comrade Beethoven was more Marx than musician.

I have a strong suspicion about whose bright idea the Game Over screen music was. Either that or every time you die in this game Conrad McMasters breaks into a vault. Which do YOU think is likeliest? Image from macduff1797

The powerups are different too. Instead of grabbing a wrench icon to repair your ship like in the other games, you grab… a snail. Between this, the weird missions, and the soundtrack I am going to go ahead and make the assumption that the SNES version started out as a different game, and maybe a whale or a Not-Ecco-The-Dolphin was swapped for Krasnye Oktiabr. Even though it was the third one released it just felt and sounded way too different, like someone had a game that played similarly and gave some graphics a Red October paint job.

The Story Of The Story

The Tom Clancy novel came out in 1984. Plenty of Cold War tension still existed, to the point that we even had Russian reversal in full swing (particularly its variant of in Soviet Russia, Democrat asks Russians to interfere in Presidential election- and ignore the Politifact debunking, they cite an article that outright says this was the case to support their claim that this was false). Heck, just one year before, MI6 stopped a rogue Soviet general from executing his scheme to invade Western Europe unopposed. But these video games came out later- the NES and Game Boy ones were released within the 11 months preceding the USSR’s collapse on Boxing Day 1991 (Japan and Europe though didn’t get the Game Boy release until 1992), while the SNES version came out in 1993.

As is obvious from their labels, the games were released as tie-ins to the movie, which came out in early 1990 (about 4 months after the Berlin Wall fell). Still some Cold War tensions in this time sorta maybe, but not having been cognizant of the realities around me at the time I can say at least in hindsight it seemed the Cold War was on its way out. (Maybe that’s why liberals are so eager to start a new one- the first one ended under George H.W. Bush, a Republican, after 12 years of Republican Presidents. Democrats are jealous- they want to start a new Cold War so that they can claim to be the ones that ended it, like how Obama undid a lot of progress in attitudes towards racial equality so that the Left could exploit it for future elections… even if their candidate is a snow-white elderly millionaire).

The Story’s Story

As you may have gleaned from the trailer and what I’ve said in this writing thus far, the plot centers on the efforts of a Soviet submarine commander to reach America, dodging the Soviet Navy, while the U.S. Navy tries to help him (while standing by to blow him out of the water in case they’re wrong about his intent).

Hollywood was ahead of its time. They were Reds before the country turned red in 2016. Hollywood (and the media) spent the election cycle screaming until they were blue in the face. Image from Medium

Frankly, I’m surprised that Hollywood made a movie out of this and that the video game industry made a tie-in. Hollywood was quite enamored with commies, and liberals like our Hollywood elite saw (and still see) the USSR and its ilk as the closest thing to paradise that the world has achieved. Heck, liberal/friend-to-draft-dodgers/hero/peacenik/Sen. George McGovern (D-SD) said that the South Vietnamese would be better off if they stayed under the North’s occupation instead of fleeing to America, that the North was trustworthy in its promises not to hurt them. You can guess how well that went for the South Vietnamese left behind; McGovern should really have put down the Astro Boy manga for a few seconds (As for the refugees, those of you who claim racist Democrats became Republicans after the alleged great civil rights racist switcheroo of the 60s, take a look at how your valued Democrats including such luminaries as Joe Biden and Jerry Brown treated Vietnamese refugees with Brown’s own appointee saying a “large minority” group would be “unwelcome“… and of course your liberal Democrat friends at the time were the ones that voted to cut off aid to Vietnam, leading to the refugee crisis which these Democrats you have on a pedestal refused to handle, refugees which according to liberals at the time should never have existed because America was to blame for everything and the North was really not so bad and there’d be peace once America left and this is so pervasive of an ideology that I spent hours searching Google and found little related to North Vietnamese war crimes much as this 1972 NYT article laments, It’s almost like after the war everyone decided the North were angels or something (or in the case of the American Left, during the war) and the Americans were sadistic butchers (note that the BBC readily used the debunked Turse book)… so I guess in regards to treating communist oppressors as heroes and being their propaganda agents, not much has changed (read how willing Ted Kennedy thought the media was to help the USSR spread a message calling for America to disarm), since Obama ended our program for accepting Cuban refugees who might actually like America while advocating for and passing orders helpful for some openly–anti–American peoples looking to become citizens… and I noticed a decidedly leftwing bias in the Google search results for trying to find examples of illegals hating on America ie my searches only showed results talking about discrimination faced by illegals, what a shock, especially after the North Vietnam search trouble I mentioned. Granted, my searches improved slightly when I used the terms “undocumented” and “DREAMer“).

Uh… where was I? As for the video game industry, I always just assumed they were lefties because all creative and tech types tend to be that way. Find me an Art major (different from Arts… but really kinda the same) or someone in Silicon Valley that doesn’t have Das Kapital memorized and hasn’t burned an American Flag. Plus, you know, stuff sort of creeps (the folks at that link go way overboard in my opinion, but they raised too many good examples to disregard it- don’t you just hate it when someone you disagree with has a point? It’s like saying they’re right about X legitimizes their wrong views on Y and Z.) into their work.

Re: not knowing the intents of the Soviet sub commander, that was the way it was. We had no idea if someone with nuclear missiles was coming to defect or destroy (good thing card-carrying communist and Obama acolyte John Brennan was not head of the CIA then- he’d take his orders from Soviet Moscow just like the party he voted for in 1976 (and let’s be honest- just like the spirit of the party he currently serves), so Red October would be a dead duck) A little less serious now, the Russian Federation isn’t that much of an adversary, but the Left’s aforementioned nostalgia for the Civil Rights Movement and now I guess the 60s in general- since they want/don’t want a proxy war (in Syria this time) and want a new Cold War- makes it so that a situation like this would be just as terrifying today. I mean, maybe this is just part of that remake-itis that has swept across Hollywood and brought us such gems as that recent Ghostbusters movie- the Left now wants to remake the 1960s, but updated for the 2010s.

Liberal Defectors

It’s worth mentioning how the Left treats people that defect from it (like saying all the people who voted for Obama twice are now and always were racists for voting Trump): just as badly as the Soviets treated their defectors. Liberals are always sure to give their ex-

Go on, try to defect. The guards need a little excitement to keep themselves sharp. Image from wikimedia

comrades the Trotsky treatment. If you’re homosexual, well… you’re not even part of the LGBTQ community anymore according to them. If you’re black you’re an “Uncle Tom”, and this goes for other races and genders with equivalent slurs replacing “Uncle Tom” (sometimes regardless of if they know what your political affiliation is, they might be racist to you because you are part of a government agency they don’t like, just ask ICE). If you’re a Muslim, you’re an extremist (according to Facebook’s, Amazon’s, Twitter’s, and Google’s approved fact-checker SPLC) if you dare challenge the radicals in your own religion (whose radicals employ a very Liberal style) according to Democrats. If you’re a woman, not voting the way the Left tells you that you must vote means that you’re incapable of thinking for yourself, and you’re letting someone else control you- the men in your life, either your father or husband or son or that male friend you have or some male relative or your male boss. If you’re a liberal I guess you don’t really catch the irony here of telling someone they’re willingly enslaved by someone else if they’re not blindly enslaved by you, so I needed this sentence here to make it clear to you.

And then of course there’s how the Left treats Conservative defectors. Parade them around (Communist regimes in general kinda do that with those who defect to them), but give them nothing significant (part-time pundits that rarely say anything worthy of RealClearPolitics or worthy of debunking like on Newsbusters, like David Jolly and George Will, are hardly significant) and maybe let them disappear once they’ve outlived their usefulness (anyone remember Jeff Flake? He was in the news…). Similar to the Soviets’ treatment of Western defectors, really. I mean, given how much the Left hates Trumpers, I find it hard to believe that deeply-entrenched hatreds just disappear the moment someone changes their party label, just as you find it hard to believe that simply electing a black President means America is no longer racist, right?

Here are pictures of liberals being tolerant that one time half the country expressed dissent against their policies. Images from AP, RWC, Fox News, and Quora

As I mentioned in the California piece, all this happens because the Left can’t tolerate dissent, and certainly can’t defend its policies. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the future of the party, has become the poster-child for this. Listen to her talk- she hasn’t a clue. So naturally when a conservative host challenges her, she refuses. And tries to equate challenging her on her beliefs to sexism, meaning that asking her to explain why socialism works would be a sexist act. According to her. Huffington Post reliably endorsed this method of not explaining your views.

She outright says that she does not have to explain her views to anyone, and says any males asking will be labelled as sexist. “Don’t challenge me, just do what I tell you, otherwise you face punishment, I’m right and anyone opposed to me has an ulterior motive because I’m so right on everything that no other points of view are acceptable.” This coming from the party that says women who vote Republican aren’t thinking for themselves, from the self-proclaimed party of tolerance and intellectualism. Well, Ocasio-Cortez IS a socialist (who tried to sell medicare-for-all by saying it would cut funeral expenses, because to her I guess the VA scandal never happened or soldiers don’t matter. Given her desire to slash military spending to fund her corruption-ready programs…), and every socialist government has this kind of governing style where they tell you what you are supposed to think and you’re an enemy if you dare object, and intellectuals love communism, so there you go.

And ironically, the same media that carries Ocasio-Cortez on their shoulders as the next big thing are the very same ones worrying that Democracy is at an end. What kind of Democracy is it where you’re only allowed to think and vote in one way? The USSR held mock elections (so fake that voters stopped voting and just wrote on the back of their ballots what the problems were in their area), I guess that’s the kind of Democracy liberals in the media and liberals like Ocasio-Cortez want. Ocasio-Cortez did say she was all for universal employment, I guess that means politicians get to keep their jobs too.

I suppose you’re now calling me a hypocrite.

You’re the party that claimed Trump was bad for attacking a gold star family after the father attacked him, and then you went and attacked the mother of a cancer survivor because she thanked Trump’s son for donating to a childrens’ hospital.

I admit, I rarely hesitate to toss insults at the Left and probably seem about as welcoming to a defector as the 38th Parallel’s DMZ. Well, darn it I get so flustered seeing

It would be a little more welcoming if it were greener (not Army green but green green)… and had fewer landmines. Image from thrifty nomads

the Left spew insults about people like me to the majority of the country and across the world, certainly way more people than anyone on my side could ever hope to reach! Think about it- if you insult me, it can be on social media to millions of followers worldwide because you’re a celebrity, in a movie that millions worldwide will see and will provide millions of dollars to you to fuel your messaging against me, on one of the big three TV news providers or part of your 2-1 cable news advantage (CNN and MSNBC vs Fox News, BloombergTV and CNBC vs Fox Business), in printed media which your side dominates whether it’s books or newspapers or magazines, in any artistic field from poetry to painting (NEA grants are only given to liberals, just like arts organizations, which makes the kerfluffle about Trump defunding NEA hilarious because it means liberals aren’t even willing to privately fund their own art projects despite all the Silicon Valley billionaires, liberal millionaires, and celebrities like Rosie O’Donnell), in most forums, blogs, online publications, and comments sections of websites and YouTube videos and the like, ie everywhere on the internet- which seems dominated by liberals- (that’s more of a qualitative assessment), in our public schools and universities (which follow the Communist Party model of telling you what to think, not allowing for contrary opinions, like in Europe which is no wonder why the Left says they’re the model to follow, which make it ironic when the Left complains that people who vote against them are either brainwashed or not thinking for themselves), and in our living rooms if we watch just about anything on TV that isn’t Fox News, from late-night “comedy” shows to prime time programming, all of which is consumed by people worldwide.

Then of course there’s the wealth gap– your side whines about Republicans and dark money and the like, when your side routinely raises much more money. You complain that the rich are destroying the country when most of them vote Democrat. SO- money and mouthpieces are all on your side, and all insulting me for daring to disagree, despite every fact I base my views on still being available for you to consume, and the biases of your fact-givers disclosed, if you dared to do more than listen to the party line. How do you think I’m going to react, greet your side with tea and cookies? To me, I guess much as it is to you, your defectors are just people who decided that racism, corruption, poverty for all, and mass murder are bits of history not worth repeating. Bravo?

What Do You Think?

Looks like such a fun game, vote Democrat and make it happen! Consider the party you want to support. Vote independent if you don’t like the Republicans, write-in someone’s name. Just don’t assume that the Democrats are any better just because they claim they are. Unless you’ve read all there is and somehow think an inverted Cold War with America as the commie superpower and Russia as the leader of the not-so-free world is the best possible scenario. I bet you’re one of those liberal writers who thinks there are no such things as heroes, so you want to self-destruct the closest country in the world to that state and make the world stage just some game of morally-gray-to-morally-repugnant superpowers clashing with each other. You sick psychopath.

Battlezone (Various, 1980-2001. Part 2 of the War Games series)

As we watch the Democrats peddle their warmongering interventionist and laissez-faire let’s-wait-for-war attitudes, ie as they play their war games on their way to the fall brawl known as the midterm elections, where voters will probably vote Democrat to bring us nookular annihilation, I’ll take a look at some literal war games. Cold War video games, anyway.

Image from Pinterest, logo is property of WWE

Today, we address the Left’s cuts to our military and #Resistance to helping it as said #Resistance demands war with Russia, and the game Battlezone.

Get In The Zone, Battlezone

You’re given a vector-graphics simulation of the first-person perspective of a tank. Some arcade cabinets even had a rig that made it seem like you were staring through a tank commander’s periscope. The object is to blow up any tanks, anti-tank missiles, or Unidentified Flying Cupcakes that you might see. And don’t get hit. The saucers just kinda float there and are hard to hit, but give you 5,000 points. The tanks shoot back and are worth 1000 points. The missiles fly right at you, but if you blow it up before it blows you up they’re worth 2000 points. There are barriers to hide behind too, for when the other tanks are shooting at you. There is a radar on the screen that shows where the tanks and missiles are, but not the cupcakes.

Just about all the versions I played mentioned here are ports of the arcade (as seen above, even arcade emulations can have differences, on the left is the GBA version and on the right is the Saturn one). The Atari 2600 version changes everything up though. It’s not in the vector graphic format, and you are given a third person perspective of your tank. Or maybe it is first-person and you’re just riding on top of your tank.

We Don’t Serve Your Kind

An M2 Bradley, as of this writing the only one on display at a museum. At the Danville, VA Tank Museum

The military, being fans of war games, wanted their own version of Battlezone. This would be done to train operators of the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.

Atari developers didn’t want to work on it because the Army is evil.

There’s a strong irony here. The Soviets who Atari was supporting with their refusal to cooperate were quite militaristic. The Red Army was founded based on bloody battles to rid Russia of tsarists. The Soviets had no problem using it- border wars with China, pilots and equipment for North Korea and Vietnam, war in Afghanistan, crushing various revolutionaries domestically. Yet the Atari developers wanted nothing to do with the military that would protect them, totally unaware that under Soviet rule the government would’ve threatened their families or imprisoned them if they refused to cooperate. But apparently that’s the system of government they wanted.

Yes, in the U.S. they’re free to object to helping America win, but it doesn’t make them free from criticism, especially when their actions make it look like they want the Soviets to control our country. We had enough bread lines in the Great Depression, we don’t need socialism here to bring them back.

Wasn’t The Last Time Techies Did This

Thousands of Google employees recently demanded their company stop working on military drones. There are several ironies here. 1- these employees had no problem with  Obama using drones to kill Americans without due process, they voted for him. 2- these employees have no problem creating a version of Google for China to use to limit the speech of its population and hide atrocities committed by its government. 3- these employees had no problem voting for Queen Hawk Hillary and every war she planned to start. 4- these employees are heavily funding California Democrats, members of the same party that wants a war with Russia.

So… they say Google’s image would be hurt by helping build drones to keep American soldiers out of harm’s way, but they believe it enhances Google’s image to help China oppress its population and help Hillary send American soldiers to die, and think a war with Russia whether by spiteful Democrats or by Hillary if she were President is a good thing. They think keeping soldiers from harm is immoral, but helping oppress people and sending soldiers to die and risking the lives of millions of Americans is moral.

I have a question- these developers want the option to opt out of helping the military protect the country and save our lives, so why do they want to force me to pay for abortion? They believe in conscientious objecting, but only when it suits them it seems. Killing babies anytime anywhere for any reason is fine if a mother decides on it, killing people and starting wars is fine if Hillary and Obama do it. Such is Google’s belief, based on what they openly support.

More On Developers (say the first two words together)

Their nuclear war candidate lost and their politicians’ push for nuclear war isn’t going anywhere, but liberals still tried to turn cities into fiery hellscapes. Images from Associated Press, RWC, Fox News, and Quora

Battlezone illustrates the kind of combat that leftwing Atari developers voted for when they wanted Hillary in office. Well, Missile Command honestly was a better demonstrator, but Hillary is quite interventionalist. She claims to regret her Iraq vote, but she was happy to ram us into Libya with fewer reasons. And she didn’t even have the decency to stay and fix Libya after we were done breaking it, thus her policies led to the death of Ambassador Stevens. But that’s ok, the Atari developers and Google are just fine voting for sleazy warmongers like Hillary, just don’t ask them to support the military that Hillary will put in danger.

Liberals want military funding cut, but they’re happy to have Carter endanger soldiers in Iran, Clinton endanger them in Bosnia, Obama endanger them in Libya, and Clinton endanger them in Syria. And now that they’ve lost the election they’ve become like some kind of spiky-haired nihilistic punk and want the whole world to end, hence they want a nuclear war with Russia or at least North Korea.

Just Cut Military Spending!

When rising DNC star Ocasio-Cortez was asked how we’d pay for all her free stuff, she says tax the rich and deplete military spending. As the crowd cheers. The same clapping seals in her audience are the ones that also cheer when we’re told Russia committed an act of war and we should retaliate. So… cut military spending, but then pick a fight with Russia? And keep in mind- China and Russia are pretty good chums right now, and let’s throw in Iran and Syria because they owe Russia a lot anyway. So now we’re talking war with Russia, China, Syria, and Iran, while we cut our military below the already terrifying state it’s in right now if liberals are in charge. Oh yeah, and don’t forget- the “rich” that we’re taxing will flee the country or hide their money elsewhere. Does anyone else remember what happened when an underfunded country, with a resource-starved military, with a government that called itself “socialist”, tried to take on a bunch of different countries? Here’s a hint- it’s the reason toothbrush mustaches went out of style.

Just an aside to Ocasio-Cortez: I find it ironic that she, a New Yorker, is talking about the ultra-rich paying their fair share. Because in New York State, when Trump tried to raise taxes on their “ultra-rich” as she phrased it, the Democrats in command there set up a scheme to launder rich people’s money so that they could keep it. Our socialist comrades in California did the same thing.

Back To The Game Please?

The Atari 2600 and home computer versions give a story. The year is 1999. You had to steal a tank from a museum in order to fight the armies of people who don’t want peace on earth (or purity of essence, they oppose both). They unleashed automated weapons that you alone must face.

The Atari 2600 release gave you a new perspective on the game

Speaking of the various versions, even the ones that are simply unaltered ports of the original play differently. Of course the controls and responsiveness differ. I mean, we’re talking a bunch of different controllers here. Less intuitive differences include how the Saturn port is very stingy with the saucers. The Dreamcast version gives you the option of playing with a fake cabinet border, but that makes everything smaller. Not that it matters, for some reason you can’t read the radar on the Dreamcast version anyway. The little blip was waaaaay too small. The GBA version played and looked pretty good, but I was using one of those fancy back-lit GBA SPs, rather than the front-lit earlier models or unlit original ones like you saw me get “screenshots” from in earlier writings. In the GBA version it also felt like hitting the missiles was easier.

Screenshot of the Sega Saturn release (part of Arcade’s Greatest Hits, the gold version, also on PlayStation and SNES)

One thing this game does really well, I guess since it’s designed to eat your quarters, is reflect a certain aspect of real tank combat. The first tank to see the other one wins. An extreme example, but if an enterprising M3 Lee managed to sneak up on an Abrams, then the Lee could put a round into an Abrams’ engine no problem (not much armor there). But realistically the Abrams would’ve blown it to pieces before the Lee’s crew could possibly know another tank was aiming at them, and would still blow the Lee to pieces even after the Lee blasted its engine

From the Dreamcast version (part of Atari Anniversary Edition, also on PlayStation). The arcade cabinet could be removed, making the game play in fullscreen. That made the radar at the top easier to see.

because its gun was still working (unless our brave antique roadsters somehow got a few rounds fired into the cannon of the Abrams). Such is the case in Battlezone. You have a little radar to guide you, but if the other tank sees you first, like say spawns on your right facing directly at you (happens a lot more than you’d think) you’re dead, even with the radar telling you to move that way, because you turn too slowly to meet the tank in time. The best I was able to do in such scenarios was sort of zigzag my tank between enemy shells, but I was never able to fire back because if I held the enemy in my sights long enough to do that, it would’ve been long enough for my already sighted adversary to fire the finishing round at me.

I am fairly certain that the developers of Battlezone stole designs from Destroy All Monsters. The saucers look like the alien saucers in that movie (granted, there isn’t too much you can do with the saucer design). The tanks look like the tanks in the movie with their general shape and even the radar sticking out the top, minus the rockets and extra cannons.

How’d You Do?

Screenshot of the Game Boy Advance version (in the Atari Anniversary Edition)

As with Mario Bros., I’ll give my scores that I’m super proud of. Oh boy oh boy oh boy lookhowawesomeIamliekOMG!!!111

-GBA had 3 lives. I got 26,000 points.

-Atari 2600 had 5 lives, and I got 33,000.

-Sega Saturn had 3 lives, I got 20,000 points, in spite of how stingy the game is with the saucers.

-Dreamcast had 3 lives, I got only 16,000 because of the tiny radar. Or at least that’s what I’m going to say.

What Do You Think?

Looks like such a fun game, vote Democrat and make it happen! Hillary sure would have. Of course, if Democrats had their way then the military would be fighting these wars with no money, and no support at home since liberals hate soldiers (Salon has a nice headline “You don’t protect my freedom”, arguing that calling soldiers heroes is “childish”, and saying that it “deadens real democracy”. Ironically, 3 years later Salon’s political party of choice would demand we send soldiers to protect our democracy from Russia. Another irony is the childish naivety of the author, who because they don’t see threats they just assume there are none, like they never developed object permanence and are permanently stuck with an infant’s worldview… that author had better be careful, their mother might want an abortion). So there you go- just like Google, if you think killing American soldiers is a great thing then go ahead and vote Democrat this fall. Given Hillary’s treatment of police and military and government agents protecting her, it’s logical the Left and certainly her political party would hate them too, “Birds of a feather” and whatnot.

Missile Command (Various, 1980-2001. Part 1 of the War Games series)

One night politics and video games attended the same party. They got very drunk and had triplets (known as “Rockman Zero 2”, “Rockman Zero 3”, and “Rockman Zero 4”. Those will be addressed when/if I decide to play them again). But politics and video games met again, in a sleazy bar near downtown Detroit, and this article and any I can think of to follow in this series were born from that second drunken tryst. (Their third tryst, which is memorialized by stains of Old Crow and bodily fluids on the Corinthian Leather of a 1980 Cordoba, gave us Mass Effect 3 and a generation of SJW games.) 

As we watch the Democrats peddle their warmongering interventionist and laissez-faire let’s-wait-for-war attitudes, ie as they play their war games on their way to the fall brawl known as the midterm elections, where voters will probably vote Democrat to bring us nookular annihilation, I’ll take a look at some literal war games. Cold War video games, anyway.

Image from WWE.com

Today, we address the Left’s push for World War III or at least a new Cold War- by looking at the Cold War thriller “Missile Command”.

Alias “Warheads” (Not to be confused with Warhead 2000)

Depending on the version you play, you have between one and three missile defense platforms. You aim their salvos with a helpful cursor. You fire your anti-missile missile at incoming enemy missiles. And smart bombs. And these Sputnik/flying mine things that fly by. And enemy bombers (that oddly look like B-52s in some releases, making me wonder just which side you’re on in this game, especially given the modern leanings of game developers). Once all of your cities are destroyed, your game is over. The same effect might also be achieved if your missile platform(s) is(are) destroyed early on in a round, because that means the rest of the missiles will come in unopposed and flatten your cities. It looks something like this (a scene from the big blockbuster of 1977 that Fox had to delay releasing until Fall, releasing some obscure flick called Star Wars to whet the audience’s summer appetite instead).

You have a finite amount of missiles too, by the way. In later rounds as the action gets faster and incoming missiles become more numerous, you’ll start running out.

To defend against Fake News, one has to be able to counter the overwhelming number of claims. While distracted by one, another comes raining down, then another. Sometimes you can take down multiple claims in one shot. But eventually you’re not fast enough and are overwhelmed. What game does that sound like to you?

Strategy for stopping the smart bombs varies game-to-game. As far as I can tell, I think in the Genesis or 5200 version, the best strategy is to direct them (via detonating your missiles in front of them) into a city that’s already destroyed, or that you don’t like. The cities represent real American cities, so send the smart bombs to the second city from the left (San Francisco) or second city from the right (Los Angeles). They’re the liberal cities that most voted for nuclear war; let ’em have it. As for the other releases, smart bombs can be destroyed.

This Time, The Game Is Real

Nike-Hercules missiles were armed with nuclear warheads and deployed across the country to defend against incoming Soviet bombers. This example is from the Tank Museum in Danville, VA. This picture was taken before I was kicked out, because SOME people just don’t like it when you repeatedly hit a nuclear warhead with a hammer! Typical nanny-state BS.

The game is grounded in reality, sort of. We had such missile platforms all over the country, but they were designed to take out squadrons of Soviet bombers  (we tried to upgrade them to take out some short to long-range missiles, but that just kind of stopped when the Soviets started focusing on massive ICBM strikes with hundreds of warheads instead of bombers). ICBMs of course are faster. A faster interception system was needed, and although we never got any such projects off the ground this game depicts what appears to be the Nike-X project (it was downgraded to Sentinel, which gave less coverage and could repel far fewer missiles, and then became Safeguard. Sentinel was both met with heavy protest, from the Left of course who found missile defense to be too belligerent. Ironic how the Soviets called it “imperialist warmongering“, just the sort of thing the Left (sources like Common Dreams,

Noo-cue-lar combat toe-to-toe with the Ruskies is a man’s job, that’s why he gets the helmet deary

Marxists.org, counterpunch.org, globalresearch.ca, londonprogressivejournal.com, houstoncommunistparty.com, monthlyreview.org, leftvoice.org, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez who is the future of the party) refers to any U.S. overseas action or military buildup as today (globalpolicy.org and monthlyreview.org had examples of this belief, globalpolicy even linking missile defense to imperialism) (the Left also thinks colonizing Mars is imperialist and an example of “male entitlement”, so congratulations Democrat, this is the allegedly pro-science pro-truth group you are supporting. By the way, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale if you believe that the Left is pro-science), the same anti-Imperialist-anti-US-warmingering Left that wants war with Russia (note that after a century of brutalizing its own people and others worldwide, the only thing that made Democrats stop loving Russia was allegedly helping Hillary lose, not that whole “Soviets killed tens of millions of people” thing, so remember that when Dems say they’re compassionate and care about others) and celebrated Obama’s hawkish–except-against-Islamic-terror-foreign-policy… and wanted Hillary The Hawk to win).

Hippie liberals, who now run the colleges and to an extent the DNC via the radical protesters they are producing, protested heavily against Safeguard being installed because they were afraid it would trigger an arms race or a pre-emptive attack or some such rot. And now these same hippies and their progeny (both ideological and biological no doubt) want to piss off Russia enough that they’d send nukes our way, right into the country they left undefended. In fact, their radical President wanted to disarm the U.S. entirely, their President who said Russia was our friend. If we are to assume that your side of the aisle is as intelligent as you claim, that means you KNOW that your decades of protesting the military and disarmament talk left America weak, your protests against missile defense left us defenseless, thus you must know that your demands for war with Russia mean the destruction of this country that you left undefended. Therefore, if you’re as smart as you claim to be, you’ve deliberately disarmed America to make it easy for Russia to destroy it. That fits with your anti–American pro–communist pro–Russian rhetoric, which was the norm until your almost-century old position on Russia changed with Hillary. So unless you admit to gross incompetence, admit that your side is not particularly intelligent, we can only assume that you want America to be destroyed. For those who think I’m being a little hyperbolic and exclusionary, keep in mind that the Left for decades has believed anyone who doesn’t vote Democrat is a racist. ANYONE.

“Peace!… n-no wait WAR! Uh… I NEED MORE TIME TO ANSWER!”

So tell me, liberal, just what the hell are we supposed to do to Russia when they “hack our elections” and make your candidate lose? If we have no nuclear weapons as you want, what do we do? We saw in the aftermath of Hawaii’s accidental missile alert that you liberals have no stomach for confrontation if you think it’ll actually hurt you. You began screaming at Trump to tone down his rhetoric against North Korea (all the while you still were very vocal against the much more heavily-armed Russians). So let’s say you decide to sanction Russia- they just have to threaten a nuclear launch and you’ll shut up and impeach your President for endangering you, unless you mean to tell me that all your rhetoric against Trump over his North Korea talk was just a bunch of garbage. No, I guess you won’t.

Speaking of that Hawaii incident, and blaming Trump for inflaming the situation, remember how Obama was ready to go to war with North Korea without even seeking negotiation? No, I guess you don’t. Definitely not your Senator who went after Trump after the false alert (then again even when combined with Kamala Harris’ vast intellect we find that both Senators have just enough brain activity to show that even people not in comas can be vegetables. Throw in Maxine Waters and you might have the same amount of activity as in tomato sauce. And no, liberal, it isn’t racist or sexist to say a minority or a woman or some combination thereof is an idiot. Plus, I think white male Adam Schiff and white female Sally Boynton Brown are similarly impaired, while white male Joe Biden is slightly above them because I’m pretty sure he just babbles to himself rather than deliberately lies, and I have a low opinion in general of the predominantly white anchorage at CNN. Or are you going to say I’m racist against whites, because last I heard from you liberal that was impossible). Actually, the Left is still ready for a war with North Korea, at least those liberals on the mainland who wouldn’t have to face an attack. 71% of liberals polled don’t want peace with North Korea if it means Trump gets credit for it.

Meanwhile, the creator of Missile Command found nuclear war to quite literally be a nightmarish scenario. Unlike the Left today, which would rather we have a nuclear war with Russia because they can’t admit to themselves that Hillary was a terrible candidate, and want a war with North Korea too if it means Trump’s reputation is hurt by it.

A Quick Aside On The Russia Warmongering

We the public don’t know that Russia leaked the DNC emails. Mueller’s charges mean nothing, and most of what was in his indictments of the Russian hackers was two years old at least, and reported in mainstream outlets as far back as June 2016, meaning that Mueller’s timing was rather suspicious given that he released the indictments around the time Trump had a major summit with Putin, apparently sitting on this info for his entire first year as Special Counsel. As for the indictments, Mueller knows damn well those Russians will never see a day in court so he doesn’t have to prove anything, doesn’t even have to be able to prove anything. Remember: Clinton associate and strategist James Carville said grand juries can indict a ham sandwich, meaning indictments flow fast and free through them.

Mueller looks like he could be John Kerry’s brother.

Mueller himself has a history of pursuing innocent men and burying evidence showing innocence (he was head of the FBI during the anthrax case when prosecutors buried exculpatory evidence, and Mueller personally led that case), so his credibility is further diminished. Mueller was also very good friends with Former FBI Director James Comey (who helped Mueller prosecute innocent people) so we have in that a certain motive of retribution against Trump on Mueller’s part, which also explains the good timing that even the liberal media admits to in regards to Mueller’s indictments.

Wikileaks denies it was the Russians; there is evidence to suggest it was an inside job. Not that it even had to be, John Podesta’s password could’ve been cracked by a ten year old. Besides, if the server hack was such a damning thing, why did you liberals destroy anything that could provide evidence for your complaint? The only reason you would is that examining the servers would prove that no hack took place. Just like the only reason you would oppose a deal that would allow Mueller to question the indicted Russians is because you are afraid Mueller would have to prove his case.

You also contend that Russians colluded with Trump to get him elected. This lumped with the email hacking constitutes your sole reasoning for wanting war with Russia. There has been an army of bureaucrats and elected (Adam Schiff) leakers in the government complimented by a nation of journalists, all with a strong hatred of Trump. Yet in the two years since Trump obtained the votes needed to be the Republican nominee, not one shred of proof has surfaced. Now how about that, the best you can do is assume debunked and implausible documents like the Steele Dossier are true or say that US Intel Plant Halper giving a story to George Papadopolous who talked about it to the Australian Ambassador/Clinton Donor was somehow collusion.

The hardest evidence you have, the only items you’ve been referring to when asked for solid evidence aside from vaguely circumstantial stuff, are the debunked Steele Dossier and the intelligence assessment that you all kept touting as confirmation from 17 agencies that Russia interfered. I’ll write it here for your convenience- it did not involve 17 agencies, and was an intelligence ASSESSMENT. That means political hack and confirmed liar John Brennan assembled a team of yes-men who came up with the THEORY that Russia interfered, that is what an assessment is, it’s what that little committee theorizes, NOT what really happened (but to a liberal I guess the difference is only semantic, because what they think and feel are the only realities they acknowledge, as I’ve established in other items). And the debunked Steele Dossier was used in drafting the Intel Community Assessment in question. Oh, and Obama of course ordered this Assessment to be done.

Let’s Look At Some Quantities

I’m getting a lot of mileage out of this chart C-Gaymer found.

Given that most of those in the Journalism industry are leftwingers, it’s safe to say that at least 22,241 reporters have motive and opportunity to research Trump and any connections to Russia. Now let’s add in every Democrat in Congress (193 Congressmen and 49 Senators), every member of those 242 Congressmen and Senators’ staff, every sympathetic contact in the private and public sector that they have, every leaker and anonymous source the liberal media uses, every Democrat in the bureaucracy, every liberal blogger, every liberal hacker, every liberal professor who might have academic means of research, private investigators these groups might employ (like Fusion GPS), every liberal in the DOJ (who tried to fabricate evidence against Trump, the Steele Dossier, which wouldn’t be needed if there was anything really there), every millionaire and celebrity in Hollywood plus billionaires like Tom Steyer and George Soros with their massive networks of personnel and followers nationwide, most of the tech industry which easily has access to all of Donald Trump’s tweets and Google searches and things like that, and it’s easy to assume that we’re talking about a group of people larger than the population of Iceland (maybe even larger than England), with more money than the GDP of Russia at their disposal, with a cyber army on par with the NSA and as capable of hacking elections as any Russian group, and the backing of multiple parts of the U.S. government from Congressional offices to departments in the DOJ to state-level offices and attorney generals. This massive ball of hatred has had two years now to work on this.

DESPITE all of this at their disposal, enough raw power to destroy whole countries, DESPITE all of the time that they’ve had to research, they can’t find ONE SHRED OF EVIDENCE that Trump colluded with Russia, nor can they provide solid evidence that Russia hacked the DNC servers, even though they have Russian oligarchs with access (as we know from when Clinton cash made its way to Russians, maybe even oligarchs close to Putin to loosen their lips and make this whole “we’ll reveal Putin’s evil plan while risking our lives for some guy we haven’t seen in 7 years” thing credible, through Steele in exchange for the debunked Steele Dossier), even though they have access to SPIES in the Kremlin as the New York Times leaked (which probably means we HAD a spy in the Kremlin, thanks to our intrepid reporters who just threw a life away even though they seemed scared to death that this very consequence would happen if someone leaked the identity of  Stefan Halper as the informant from the Trump Campaign- notice that NOT ONE of the folks like Senator Warner who said Congressmen could be charged for trying to unmask Halper or the folks in the media who said intelligence would be irreparably damaged from the ‘Halper reveal’ SAID WORD ONE about the Times’ leak that we have a spy in the Kremlin). Maybe you understand NOW why your Russian collusion claims seem so ridiculous? If your side brought that same power to bear against Russia itself or China, you could probably bring those countries to their knees both in cyber and economic zones. Instead, you focused all of it on Trump, and have come up with nothing after two years.

Alright, I think that about covers why the Russian warmongering is just another “U.S.S. Maine” (the press exploited the incidental explosion of a battleship to drive America to war with Spain, just like the press is exploiting the incidental leaking of emails to drive America to war with Russia, except this time the enemy has teeth and will ironically incinerate liberals by the millions. The only time I’d ever want to be at ground zero for a nuclear attack is at NBC, ABC, CBS, or CNN headquarters (or in Senator Hirono’s office, I’m lumping her in here because she never condemned Hillary demanding missile strikes on Syria and a no-fly zone where we’d shoot down Russian jets, nor did Hirono condemn the media and her colleagues demanding war with Russia) and see the look on the face of one of these warmongerers as Russia responds to their threats in much the manner they kept saying North Korea would respond to Trump’s heated rhetoric).

Uhhhhm… You Mentioned Different Versions?

Oh right! Well, I said this mixes politics and the game, so I became a skosh sidetracked.

Atari Ports

Naturally, we get one for the Atari 2600. One of the selling points of that console was having arcade games at home. As you can see this is a version where you get only one launcher to shoot down enemy missiles from. In later ports with 3 missile launchers, 3 buttons are used to differentiate them. The Atari 2600’s standard controller had only one button.

Yet another port where you have only one tower with which to shoot down missiles. Sure the 5200’s controller had a dial pad like a telephone, but it’d be kinda hard to use the joystick and the dial pad as would be needed to control three towers. The original arcade version used a trackball, so unless you got the trackball for your Atari 5200 you’ll be hard-pressed to emulate that experience with other ports. Not that you need it, the 5200’s joystick worked well enough. It was my favorite control setup, very responsive and swift. As you can see in the upper right, on the 5200 the incoming bombers are American B-52s.

During a marketing campaign to prove the Atari 5200’s rugged durability despite its large size, Atari executives arranged for the U.S. Air Force to land a B-52 on one.

I was surprised to learn, but to the best of my knowledge, there was not a Missile Command port for the Atari 7800. You’d think they would’ve put their hit game on that console, but you’d think wrong I guess.

Sega Ports

 

 

 

 

 

The Sega Master System version (from “Arcade Smash Hits”) sort of plays like the real thing. You get multiple launchers too. As you can see, this is not about you defending American… or Soviet… cities. It’s about a race of Tangelas protecting themselves during an interplanetary war.

The cursor on the Game Gear version (part of “Arcade Classics”) moves like a sleepy Hutt, but the incoming missiles are slow as well. Feeling like you’re trying to move a heavy bookcase by pushing it across carpet is not conducive to a good gaming experience.

The Sega Genesis port (part of “Arcade Classics”) does not particularly stand out in my mind. As you can see they took some liberties with the designs, and apparently made commercial airliners into nuclear bombers (a reversal of what was actually done), but there isn’t much more to talk about here.

With the Sega Saturn version (part of “Arcade’s Greatest Hits”, the gold version, also released for SNES and PlayStation) we get into the realm of arcade-accurate ports. Or emulations. Probably emulations.

The Dreamcast version (part of “Atari Anniversary Edition”, also released for PlayStation) takes this arcade-accurate emulation to its logical conclusion by simulating an arcade machine’s monitor. This also shrinks the amount of space your game takes up on the TV screen, and the shrinkage is very noticeable in the graphics. You can see the difference for yourself if you have this copy because you can play it in either arcade cabinet or fullscreen mode.

Nintendo

There is a Super Nintendo port, on the gold “Arcade’s Greatest Hits” cartridge. But clearly I do not have it. Same goes for the Game Boy Color version, which I did not know existed until just now.

I do have the Game Boy version. It’s lumped in the same cartridge as Asteroids, titled “Arcade Classic 1” (there were more, at least 2 more, in the “Arcade Classic” series on Game Boy). The game is obviously enhanced not just beyond the original story, but beyond the Game Boy’s capabilities. If you plug it into the Super Gameboy you get some colors and an arcade cabinet around your screen.

Controls on the Game Boy Advance version (on the “Atari Anniversary Edition” cartridge) aren’t that good, it’s like your cursor is sliding on ice. It’s otherwise a great port, and even manages to give you three missile launchers. Looks like it’s more or less an emulation, like the Saturn and Dreamcast versions.

PlayStation

The PlayStation had a remake, with a different plot than the Cold War terror and graphics altered to suit (just like the Master System and Genesis versions. The Atari 2600 release had a different story, but it was clearly just a port with no extra touches). Same with the Atari Jaguar’s Missile Command 3D. The PlayStation remake offers a 3D, first-person perspective as you man a missile-shooting aircraft. This version also offers a more familiar mode of gameplay, pictured left.

Warhead(s)

In the game it’s “Warheads”, on the CD label it’s “Warhead”. Released on the FunPack CD with clones of other games (like Pac Man, Asteroids, Tetris, and Super Breakout), we get the Missile Command clone Warhead. Yes, it’s legitimate. I think. My parents bought it in the early 90s from a store, probably a big chain store since they don’t seek out small used video game shops and there certainly weren’t many around, so it must be. The FunPack version has tiny explosions and the missiles move kind of slow, so your aim needs to be more precise than the original. This works on Windows 3.1 through Windows 98. I don’t know if it’d run on anything stronger than that, even with Windows 98 the Pac Man and Tetris clones do not function right.

What Do You Think?

Looks like such a fun game, vote Democrat and make it happen! Much as Trump undid Obama’s legacy, I suspect Democrats, if given the majority in Congress, would work to undo Trump’s. And then in 2020 we’d get President Kamala Harris or President Elizabeth Warren, who’d bring back tensions with North Korea and become such hawks against Russia that Queen Hawk Hillary would tell them to take a chill pill. Because nuclear war with Russia and North Korea is what their base wants these days. Obviously, otherwise they’d vote these warmongerers out of office or at least support the peaceful foreign policy initiatives Trump has pursued, right?

Trump killed 200 Russians with his missile strikes in Syria, that’s 200 more than the past two Presidents combined. Democrats think that killing only 200 Russians, expelling diplomats, and increasing sanctions means Trump is too soft on Russia, a treasonous collaborator and a Russian puppet. That’s the bar Democrats set- meaning their idea of cordial relations with Russia under Trump would be if we nuked only Moscow. So who will YOU vote for? Or maybe just sit this one out…

Mario Bros. (Various, 1983-2001)

You know you’ve hit it big when your 1983 arcade game appears on Miami Vice in 1986. (Season 2, Episode 21 “Trust Fund Pirates”)

The Story

As I slog my way through the quagmire known as Donkey Kong Country on the Game Boy Color, I wanted to take a break from the political articles I’ve been marking time with until the DKC review is through (that would be the last 4 to 6 articles, depending on the order these get posted). Seems fitting that I’d focus on DK’s original foe for the piece I write while trying to finish off one of his games.

We Wanted The Game’s Story, Not Yours!

Here it is, set to the theme tune from the always funny “Car 54 Where Are You?”. Sadly the humor (and humors) of the show are not involved in our 8 bit subject of today. And yes, the Atari 2600 was 8 bits. Its processor is a cheap version of what the NES would later use.

Mario Bros. has a simple story- Mario and Luigi are plumbers in New York City. They are trying to clean the pipes out, and must also collect the coins because that is how they get paid. Welcome to De Blasio’s New York.

The objective is to kill all of the monsters that come out of the pipes. You don’t have to kill the fireballs, but they give you points if you do (at least in the Super Mario Advance version, I can’t remember if I ever managed to kill a fireball in the other ones). You achieve fatalities by smashing your head onto the platform beneath the monster you wish to liquidate (literally, your goal is to knock it into the water) and then running directly into the monster whilst it is disabled.

There are 99 different “phases”. Not quite 99 different stages, because several phases take place on a stage. In almost every phase, your goal is to kill the enemies to advance as stated above. However, in phase 4, 8, 16, 24, and presumably the rest of the multiples of 8, you are given the challenge of collecting 10 coins before a timer runs out. If you do, you get an extra life.

Different Versions

Look, there isn’t much to the game. That last paragraph would’ve been the end of this piece if I didn’t pad it out with a comparison between different versions. Besides, I rarely get to see side-by-side screenshots like this detailing different releases.

Atari 5200 gives a big Mario sprite that reminds me of the one in Super Mario Bros. Platforms animate when bumped. There is still only one stage design.

The Atari 2600 version looks pretty simplistic. You only see one stage design. You can’t walk on the POW block in the middle. When you bump your head on the platform above, it does not show an animation indicating where you bumped (this is the only version I played that didn’t). You start with A LOT more fireballs here I think than in other versions.

Atari 7800 gives a very detailed stage… but it’s the only one. At least Mario handled well, his movements were tight relative to the controller commands. And no, I played it on a standard 4:3 TV, not a widescreen 16:9 one. I don’t know why they chose to stretch Mario and the platform graphics.

Nintendo’s Entries

Here is the original arcade version. I did not play it. Image from mariowiki.com

Now we get to the NES, which I assume is the closest port of the arcade version out of the ones I played. The stages actually change after a certain number of phases pass. but Mario handles very poorly, skids like he’s on ice even when he isn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Game Boy Advance, we have what appears to be a remake sort of (from the Super Mario Advance games). HD upgrade maybe? In keeping with a tradition started in a minigame in Super Mario Bros. 3, the turtles you initially get are replaced by ambulatory spiky shells. All graphics for the player and enemies are on par with the Mario games from the Super Nintendo. Backgrounds and stages have also received a visual upgrade. Mario can now duck, and can throw the POW blocks.

There’s also this variant- a minigame from Super Mario Bros. 3. On the NES version, it only appears if you challenge the other player to a duel. The winner is either the one that isn’t clobbered by an enemy or the first to kill 5 enemies. If my NES were able to read SMB3 properly, I’d have had no need to take this image from strategywiki

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The two-player only variant also appears on Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES, via the Super Mario Bros. 3 entry. This time though you need two controllers to ever be able to access it, unlike on the NES where I got everything done with just one controller. On the main menu for SMB3, a “Battle Mode” option is presented so that you can take on your friend immediately instead of waiting for an encounter in the main game.

Believe it or not, there are releases not covered here. Mario Bros. found its way onto the GBA again in the form of a port of the NES title. It also popped up on Nintendo’s Virtual Console, Apple II, Commodore 64, FM-7, NEC PC88, Amstrad CPC, Atari 8-bit home computers, an arcade compilation for the Nintendo Switch, Game Boy Advance e-Reader cards, and on the NES Classic. And maybe even somewhere else I didn’t name. A sort of sequel appeared on the Virtual Boy in the form of “Mario Clash”.

So… How Did You Do?

In case you were wondering, here are the scores from the best run-throughs I had this time around, plus how many lives each game gives you to start with:

• Atari 2600- 5 lives, Phase 6, 34400 points
• Atari 5200- 5 lives, Phase 6, 43370 points
• Atari 7800- 3 lives, Phase 12, 71990 points
• NES- 3 lives, Phase 9, 69670
• Game Boy Advance (Super Mario Advance)– 3 lives, Phase 28, 245950 points