Game 48

Editor’s Note – The GRcade forum was experiencing some hosting and management issues at the time this was written, but it was not ultimately “coming to an end” or otherwise closing down. 🙂

I started trying to space my games out a bit, letting there be a wide variety and trying to keep the number of games which were considered true Nintendo classics to a minimum, it wasn’t that I wanted to ignore them, I just wanted to space them out, but now as the end of this forum is near I have thrown this to the wind a little and tried to talk about a lot of bigger games. I have over the last few reviews almost half stopped reviewing the games and just given stories about the games written chunks of my life almost. Gaming has had a huge impact on my life and it’s not just been the games it has been the friends I have made through them, the time I have spent collecting them and all the little things.

It has been suggested before that I own to many games, buy too many games and spend too much time on aspects such as cleaning and repairing them but there are reasons for this. This might be the most personal thing I ever write on here so maybe it is fitting that it is coming so close to the end.

As a child I was a chubby kid with lots of problems and a bit of an attitude. I was both dyslexic and epileptic, so I struggled at school particularly in my first year of comprehensive. Lots of people teased me about my inability to write property, the fact that I could miss spell a word ten different ways in one day, or the fact that I would go vacant when having a small fit and just look in one direction doing nothing saying nothing for a long time. There were two types of bullying I got one was the verbal the other was other kids trying to fight me. Eventual after a few fights I got a reputation, the reputation was that I was a psycho, this was largely because no matter how many people attacked me or how many times I got knocked down I would keep getting up and I would make sure that I gave at least as much pain as I got.. This was a good and a bad thing, it meant that I was largely left alone so the bullying greatly decreased but then no one outside of my small group of friends wanted to know me or have anything to do with me.

Video games were my refuge, I could forget about everything, I could retreat in to my bedroom all of the familiar things around me that made me feel safe and play some Super Mario land. With all of the secrets the game had, the Star road and the connected levels, hidden exits to various ghost houses, there was always a friend who could do a level faster or with more coins and the game just seemed to be infinitely repayable.

I have had some rough times in my life and games have always been there to offer a moment of escape, a chance to forget about my worries. It wasn’t just when I was a kid though. When I was in my twenties I was working in a pub, it was long unsociable hours, I would get home and my partner at the time would be asleep but I would be to stressed from my job to sleep, so I would need to spend time unwinding and most of the time this would be by gaming. I would walk in the door kiss my daughter on the head and then play a few games until I wound down enough to sleep.

I did buy some retro stuff back then but for some reason I didn’t focus on it quiet the way I have now. I suppose the following could go into the ‘’Why do we Retro’’ thread but It belongs here just as much. One day I was at work, I had been trying to get promoted, I was also at university at the time and I knew that I didn’t have long left. I didn’t want to be one of those uni students who gets a degree and then just tries to use it to become a manager without having worked all of the up, without having earned it through hard work. I had managed to become a supervisor but in order to be accepted as a manager one of the things you had to do where I worked was to be able to work in the kitchen successfully.

I was up in the kitchen one night and I had cooked all night, and had managed it quiet well. I cleaned everything up and went through the whole shut down process making sure everything is turned off, I got the rubbish in bags and walked it out, throwing it in the trash. I could have just left then and there having finished my job, but decided that to be nice I would go through to the bar area and I would help them close down. I walked through and there was a sudden flash of pain. I had been hit across the side of my head with a crow bar, I could feel the pain explode through my head, my vision blurred for a second and then a buzzing noise began to come from somewhere deep inside my head. I began to gain awareness of my surroundings again and I could tell I was surrounded by 5 or 6 guys, all of them were wearing Halloween style president masks. Before I could do anything else I was hit with crow bars again and again from various directions, in the end I took about 6 hits to my head. I never passed out but things got increasingly hazy from then. Somehow I made it from where I was to the bar, I kind of felt my way and crawled along the bar to behind it, and I ended up on the ground in the corner under the coffee machine. I could feel blood dripping from my head, luckily I had been wearing a leather cap to keep my hair covered and it seemed to have at least helped a bit.  There were two girls behind the bar one was about 2 years older than me the other was maybe 5. It had become a robbery and hostage situation all in one. In the middle of this one of the robbers decided that he wanted to rape one of the girls, I got up stood in the way and pretty much suggested that it would happen over my dead body, this resulted in me receiving a punch to the mouth which cracked one of my wisdom teeth in half. It was all a blur from then on, but thankfully my intervention had been enough to stop someone getting raped, they left with the money and they were never caught.

I was off for a month and I was only getting very limited sick pay so I pulled out my old consoles and began to play on them and something about them touched me, they took me back to a simpler time, back to my childhood and in a time when I felt the most vulnerable in my life they actually made things seem a little bit safer, they added some normality to a very horrible and strange time. From that point on I began to spend more money on retro games, I began to talk more to other people online, but I also realised that I was living in an awful marriage. My partner never seemed to care about what had happened to me, she didn’t support me, my mother and father were the ones who were there for me, the ones who helped me try and piece myself back together. 8 years later I developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which for those who don’t know is basically when a traumatic situation keeps replaying in your mind, you can hear things and see things that happened before and you can feel the feelings. My partner was even less understanding.

I had to stop work and I had to have therapy. Part of my therapy involved having to talk about what had happened to me in great detail but after in order to calm yourself and try to leave in an ok mood and not leave the therapy upset you had to have a happy place. A happy place was a place you went to in your mind where you felt safe and well happy. My happy place was in my bedroom playing Super Mario World on my Snes, jumping on dinosaurs, collecting power ups and finding hidden secrets. I owe the game so much, it was there for me. During this period I didn’t leave my house much except to go to therapy. I sat and played my games, worked on my systems and tried to put my head back together. One of the only things that could get me out of the house was the idea of visiting a market or a retro store chasing the various games I had decided that I wanted the thrill of the chase was getting a game cheap. I got lots of SNES games and megadrive games and for prices which compared to now were for virtually nothing. I didn’t have a lot of friends after this everyone seemed to be too worried that they would say the wrong thing or they were just far more interested in getting drunk than in offering anyone a helping hand or a bit of their time. I had my games and my daughter, my X wife would go see her friends and leave me to struggle, she got increasingly mean to me even telling me that she wished I would die so I wasn’t in her way. My games became my friends, my games became my life. I had a few friends from ONM who I talked to and was close to and they helped a lot as well.

Super Mario land was one of my favourite of the retro games I had, I knew it wasn’t worth crazy amounts of money but it was worth a lot to me because it had been such a big piece of my childhood.

Yeah there is hardly any review here but the game is amazing the graphics were so bright, the music was perfect I would always find myself humming the tunes, but the playability oh my gosh it was simply an amazing game to play, every success felt well-earned every failure felt like it was purely your own fault you never feel like you can blame the game or like you have been cheated The game is a stand out 10 out of 10. I think I could make a very strong argument for it being the greatest Mario game ever. If you want the game then the cart on its own can be got for between the 10 to 15quid amount and I think this is more than a fair price. It was also available as a download for the Wii and Wii U I imagine these are now long gone though.

Sorry if this review went really far off tangent.