By: John C. Mayberry (an old fart)
Alright, is it me or do the oldies not get as much love as they deserve anymore? It’s just…a slap to the face of us older gamers. “But, Donkey Kong is so ancient. You do the same thing over and over, and Call of Duty is so advanced after it’s, like, 100th game of the same stuff…”, and a whole slew of malarkey from the mouths of youth is what I hear now. As a halfway self-respecting old fart, I shall not stand for this! Like, how do the little whippersnappers of now appreciate the advanced goodness they have today with little to no knowledge of generations past?
Lucky for you kids (your’re so welcome, btw), I’m an old fart with a somewhat decent game collection. So I bring this to you, the luckiest kids in the world, a segment I like to call Retro Replay, where I play through some old randomness in my collection and give you guys a history lesson of the games we grew up with, that didn’t have autosave features, screen captures, outputs of HDMI-JKLMNOP, or whatever, because age boys and girls, doesn’t always mean a game’s quality is obsolete.
So to kick off this rag, I played thru The Punisher: The Ultimate Payback on GameBoy. Yeah, I know. I was surprised he had a title on GameBoy too. Like Frankie’s NES game, I found this interesting because it wasn’t just an early example of the rail shooter, but an early video game crossover with none other than Spidey himself! That’s right, Spider-Man, who’s featured on the game’s cover in an action-packed sequence, appears in ONE WHOLE LEVEL. Just one, which not only changes from the jungle setting one you see on the cover to, get this…a strip mall! Complete with random shoppers who bravely, and without breaking stride, continue with their shopping like there isn’t a firefight between Frank and some drug dealers happening around them. But let’s not forget about the random fisherman in the dock level who are also oblivious to their violent surroundings!
“And now to find out who’s downloading music illegally…”
And where’s Frankie in all this? Not visible, that’s where he is! What you get is a moving target, with occasional screenshots of our guy who unfortunately looks like a skinny pre-teen wearing a crappy Halloween costume. Just move over the enemy you want gone, push a button to fire the little pea-shooter ammo you have (it’s GameBoy, don’t expect much) and gone. And for someone who’s a highly decorated ex-Marine, he takes a lot of damage. Not to Frankie’s fault though, since there almost always seems to be more enemies on the screen than seems fair. Especially since the target moves across the screen slower than they appear. He only has two arms, why couldn’t the developers be fair to our boy Frankie here? It made me sad they hated on one of my favorite characters that way…
“Look out, here comes the Spider-Maaaaa…aaaand screw you Frankie. Your’re on your own from here, buddy!”
Anyway, there are some good points to this game, for one thing it’s short, so thank the limits of the technology of the time for that one. Five stages long, so if you somehow become an expert on slightly broken controls with an unfair enemy advantage, you’re good. Aside from also being great for killing time in a waiting room somewhere, it also…well…nope, that’s pretty much it. So kids, that’s it for the first installment of Retro Replay, so if you’ve got any thoughts, comments, or even any old GameBoy titles you think I should check out sometime, just drop them below and let’s keep this going. So many insolent youths to educate in their video game history, and so little time to do it in…
