Halloween Horror: Retro Game Night V
Retro Game Night V didn’t have a big turnout as the previous Retro Nights, but Retro V ended up being one of the most hardcore game events thus far, for several reasons:
- It has been just over a year since MB and I hosted the first Retro Game Night.
- I designed crudely animated invites for Retro V that turned out pretty well and got great responses (at least to the invite itself)
- The place where we usually got our pizzas closed down a couple of months ago, so I had to drive almost half an hour in the opposite direction of the Retro Game Night site.
- Knick and Tina arrived dressed as Japanese fox spirits, complete with face paint and hand-crafted/fitted kimonos.
- The Storm. Epic rain and lightning storm. A tiny gas-powered generator. My car unable to start up.
- The Movie. The movie choice for Retro V was E.T. (original version), using a projector I gave to MB, an ancient beast of a machine that I had bought for $25 from a random college yard sale.
- And of course, the Games. We had our epic Warlords battle, proved that ghosting does exist, and busted out a few surprise games that consumed everyone’s attention and patience.
All told, instead of the dozen or so that usually show up, we had at most 8 people. 8 die hard Retro Game Night fans. MB and I salute you. The generator ran out of gas sometime after 2am, but luckily the power came back online around 6 or 7 that morning. And my car started up normally, as if nothing was wrong with it, and hasn’t had any start up problems since then.
The Invite
Crudely animated and packed with several game references. Can you guess all of them? I’ll give you one: the soundtrack is “Rise From Your Grave” by Brazillian heavy metal band and self-proclaimed creators of Game Metal, MegaDriver.
The Storm
There was a huge rain storm that weekend, which, in addition to being cold, wet, windy, and pitch black outside, there was no electricity in the area for most of that weekend. So the Retrocade and Retro Game Night V, for 7-plus hours, ran on a tiny gas generator which MB supplied and refilled once. If you listen closely to the .mp4 videos, you can actually hear the generator’s hum in the background. We turned off everything we could that wasn’t being used: all lights except for a couple (this included the Mac Discoball), and any monitor and game system that wasn’t in use.
To make matters worse, my friend Mike and I packed all of the gear (NES, SNES, games, cables, two monitors, etc.) into my car, I couldn’t get it to start. After several minutes of trying, we moved the gear into Mike’s Green Machine: an old, barebones, but dependable Tercel. Oh yeah, and Mike has had his driver’s license for less than a year. Small car, shitty weather, n00b driver. Pucker factor was a little high, but Mike’s a good driver, which we needed to navigate in the near zero visibility weather and avoid almost knee high water levels we drove past. Good job Mike, but don’t get cocky kid.
The Movie: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
MB chose to screen E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I hadn’t watched E.T. in years, and to see it on a big screen again was just as enjoyable as the first time I saw it. I was laughing more this time around though, especially when E.T. gets totally drunk. And I can’t get over the fact that E.T.’s wearing a flannel shirt in that scene too. (NOTE: Yeah, I gave a minor spoiler away. It’s not a spoiler if you’ve already seen it, which you should have.)
Unlike previous Retro Nights, where we showed movies and played games concurrently, everyone watched the movie first. Once the movie finished, we launched into some serious gaming.
The Games: Lolo2, the Sinistar Warlord of Us All
First game up: Warlords. A tradition at any respectable Retro Game Night, we had another epic Warlords session that went down to the wire. This time though, I have VIDEO PROOF that “ghosting” exists. As described in the Wikipedia,
…When when a player is defeated (computer or human), a “ghost” of his platform still exists on the field and will alter the trajectory of a direct shot off another player’s platform.
This has been debated a bit over the past couple of Retro Nights, and now I have proven that Warlords “ghosting” is not snopes-fodder. Because of our power predicament, the Atari 5200 wasn’t used, so no Joust or Mario Brothers. Actually, except for Warlords and Duck Hunt, we focused playing a couple of “new” selections. For Retro Night V, MB set up a Sega Master System and played Space Harrier, complete with 3D glasses. After wearing the glasses for a couple of minutes, the game really looked like it was in 3D. Too bad my video screen captures are so dark.
Another game we set up was Sinistar on the SNES, via a “Video Game Classics” compilation cartridge. Sinistar was a classic arcade game, known best for its fanstatic digitized audio, with such trash talking gems as “run coward” and “beware i live.” Sinistar got massive playing time by everyone present, and in return Sinistar administered the beatdowns.
The highlight of the night, however, was when everyone huddled around the NES to play Lolo2. Cute characters, perky game music, and complicated (at least for me) puzzles that kept us playing it for hours. Lolo2 straddled the line between obsessively fun and excrutiatingly frustrating. Damn you, Lolo.
Click on one of the video highlights below:
- Retro 5 Invite.
- Warlords Sesh.
- Sinistar, eating n00bs for breakfast.
- Embarassing footage of me playing Sinistar.
- A sample of the magic that is Lolo2
- VIDEO PROOF of ghosting in Warlords.
