158: Chill Birthday Stream of Arcade Classics
0Birthday again (turning, er, 25?), and I'm in isolation after flying and can't celebrate it. I DO celebrate it though, on Twitch, with my friends in chat, as I self-indulgently play some favorite arcade games. And give away games, because I believe it is traditional to give gifts on one's birthday.
We start with a round of that Klink N Play klassic DESTRUCTION CARNIVAL, which we first played on my first birthday stream. Someday I'll beat it. Not today. Someday.
E-SWAT: CYBER POLICE is a late 90s run-n-gun I played a fair number of times as a lad. As a cop of the future (or maybe the past, now), you have to investigate crime by shooting everyone you see! Eventually you get high-tech armor and move on from bank robbers to crime bosses to cyborg minotaur war criminals. Police brutality, chat points out. I maintain that the mad tiger and King Kong are just, her, napping. The game doesn't let you continue more than once in the last level, but for the first time I actually make it to the final boss!
POPEYE is an early 80s Nintendo game about the famous comic and cartoon character. I always liked this a lot more than Donkey Kong and am glad they didn't make a Popeye game when they originally planned. Chat gets to hear my (admittedly awful) Popeye voice. I play two credits and come soooo close to rescuing Olive Oyl on the second one.
BLOOD BROTHERS is a weird west 3rd person shooting gallery style game. Maybe it's not about werewolves, but dang if that doesn't look like one on the title screen! I only played this one a few times back in arcades. You have to restart the boss fights if you lose a credit (which I do), so some of those can be pretty tough. Bosses are your wild west standards: trains, blimps, phoenixes, dragons. Exactly what you'd see in a John Ford movie! At last we beat Big Bad John, and the ending sequence gives us about five seconds to read each paragraph. Chat, meanwhile, discusses such matters as the Bureau of Land Management, and they might even start quoting a song about Big Bad John!
Time for one more! THE SIMPSONS is one of the greatest titles from the golden age of beat-em-ups, one that I was still seeing in arcades as recently as 2020. Taking place fairly early in the TV series, the game has its share of strange foes and a Life in Hell crossover. The secret of Marge's hair, revealed! Sentient bowling balls, zombies, werebears, and kabuki baboons on local TV cannot stop the Simpsons from chasing down Smithers and rescuing Maggie! You'll NEVER guess the identity of the final boss, who put Smithers up to it.
Thank you again to everyone who raided, cheered, subbed, gifted, and just came to hang out and celebrate! If Twitch won't allow us to use the S-word, what can we call the S*mpsons? We come up with something.
RAIDS: eh_talkshow, dragongem
Watch life! www.twitch.tv/purblindgamer