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Anyone who grew up with videogames has had their world shaped by the experience of playing. This is mostly a good thing. We appreciate CoD 4, Grand Theft Auto IV or Braid trying to say something about the human condition. BUT its also a good thing those games are fun, because the message is often completely impractical. What exactly are the messages these games are conveying? War is Hell (but also awesome fun)? Urban America sucks? Don't build a nuclear bomb? No argument here, but that knowledge doesnt really integrate easily into the average gamers everyday life.
Marble Madness
The game: Sentient balls of glass roll downhill in their quest to reach the next slope. The madness comes from your lack of control: you can suggest to the marble that it might not want to fall off that precipice, but if that sumbitch is already rolling, there's little you can do to stop it.
Contra/Probotector
The games: We in the Queen's lands [ed note Toms from New Zealand.] spent the 80s watching Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and renting copies of Commando that were about three minutes long after the censors' cuts. So we were never at risk of being traumatized by the Contra titles. Until the PlayStation version, our versions of the Gryzor brothers were the less-contentious Probotector robots, for which the games were named.
Double Dragon
The game: Billy and Jimmy Lee beat up every single person standing between and I mean that literally them and Billy's girlfriend. Once everyone else in town has been brutally pummeled, each man simultaneously realizes that the only thing standing between him and the girl is the other guy. Further fisticuffs ensue!
P.O.W.: Prisoners of War / Operation Wolf / Rush'n Attack
The games: 8-bit wargames didn't need your Normandy landing and your M1 Garand. There were more pressing issues at stake. For instance, the raging conflict between America and her hazily-defined enemies, who could be most easily identified by the Chairman Mao hats perched atop their swarthy faces.
Ghosts 'n' Goblins / Ghouls 'n' Ghosts
The game: A knight in armor and underwear bravely faces off against every generic ghoul youve ever seen in a haunted house. If the legendarily difficult progression of stages in any G&G game doesn't chip away at your sanity, the revelation that recovering the princess from the adversary's clutches entails starting all over again surely will.
Chelnov: Atomic Runner
The game: Controversially inspired by the Chernobyl Incident (the game's title in Japan is Cherunoboru), Chelnov one-ups the comic-book trope of Exposure to a radioactive X gives you the power of X: surviving a meltdown grants a lucky Russian the power to run, shoot lasers, run, and run.
Battletoads
The game: Three not-turtles named after adolescent skin maladies vanquish evil stone pigs led by a sexy dominatrix, in an adventure that made perfect sense at the time. Best known for featuring a level commonly regarded as the single most difficult thing ever devised by people, until the level after it.
Asterix / Sonic the Hedgehog / Shinobi III
The games: Popular among bastard game designers throughout the ages, the fixed-scrolling level was a particular favorite among the bastards at Sega: the screen is going to keep moving, no matter what, and if you get squashed between a wall and the edge of the screen, you'll die without so much as an explanation as to how that's meant to work.
Populous / Actraiser
The games: It was inevitable that game designers would take the assume omniscient viewpoint and dispassionately direct human affairs for shits and giggles formula to its logical endpoint: Casting the player as God. But being all-powerful means never having any challenge, so then they scaled it back by adding enemies and casting the player as a passive-aggressive dick.
Mega Man
The game: A mad professor unleashes a squadron of lethal, stupidly-themed robots on a defenseless world. The obvious answer: ask a slightly-less-mad professor to send a pug-faced, theme-bereft robot to take them all down, one by one, without a single annoying sidekick of any kind. We'll see how long that lasts.
The Adventures of Bayou Billy
The game: His name's Billy, he lives in the Bayou, and he has adventures. That may seem vague, but bear in mind that Bayou Billy is one of the widest-reaching games of its time: Jumping! Driving! First-person shooting! It's basically a Wii game in an NES cartridge, but with a decent controller.
Castlevania 1-3
The games: An elderly man is mercilessly persecuted by successive generations of leather-clad, bondage-fixated upstarts who hate him and all of his kind. They break into his house and smash his things, and sometimes they burn crosses on his property. Obviously, you play as one of those upstarts.
Final Fantasy / Dragon Warrior
The games: So there was once Dungeons and Dragons, or Ren Faire daydreaming with more rules. Game designers tried to streamline D&D by giving all the dice-rolling and enemy-moving jobs to a computer, freeing humans up to focus on creativity and shared storytelling; That's nice, answered Japan, but wouldn't you rather hunt slime-blobs in a dodgy Tolkien pastiche?
Bubble Bobble / Snow Bros / Tumblepop
The games: Bubble Bobble pioneered the catch and release subgenre of platformer, pitting snot-blowing dinosaurs against cutesy reapers and whales. This firm grounding in incomprehensibility inspired the pudding-goblin heroes of Snow Bros, as well as Tumblepop's off-brand Ghostbusters.
Space Invaders
The game: No one would have believed, in the last years of the twentieth century, that an alien force could develop the technology to reach and invade Earth, then use that technology to hover uselessly while an idiot with a pea-shooter hid in a bunker and slowly shot them down one, by one, by one...
In honor of the holiday season, we're sharing some of our favorite stories from GamesRadar's past over the seasonal break. Enjoy it!
