You’ll Pop Your Eye Out!

December 1983

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi #3

Fun fact: Did you know that the original Donkey Kong was actually supposed to be a Popeye game? Yep! But Nintendo couldn’t get the rights to the characters in time, so they ended up changing Popeye, Brutus, and Olive Oyl to Mario (or “Jumpman”), Donkey Kong, and Pauline (or “Lady”)!

 

And another fun fact: In Japan there was actually a sequel to this game… that was made to help teach kids English. I don’t know about you, but when I think about proper use of the English language, Popeye isn’t exactly in my list of good examples!

Solar Faux?

December 1983

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi #3

Solar Fox! I’ve never played the game myself, but I’ve heard it’s a really good one. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about this ad – it just makes me cringe!

For those of you who don’t know, I’m an editor, so spelling, grammar, and punctuation are what I do. I half wonder if anyone proofread this before it went to print. This ad has missing punctuation, incorrect punctuation, ambiguous letters, and possibly even missing words! I’m sure that most people wouldn’t really notice, and for those that would, they probably wouldn’t really care, but it’s my job to care about this, and I can’t just turn it off when I’m not on the clock!

CBS Electronics, I give you credit for doing an ad in the style of a comic, but next time you do (which I’m sure will be any day now!), please have me check it over before it goes to publication!

Battling Death, 8 Bits at a Time

December 1983

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi #3

It’s almost Christmas, and this ad combines two longtime favorite gifts: Star Wars and video games! This was actually one of the first licensed Star Wars video games (from what I’m finding, it seems to be the second, but I’m not 100% sure about that), and in it you pilot the Millennium Falcon in a mission the destroy the Death Star – pretty exciting stuff!

If you want to give it a try, the Atari 2600 version is emulated here. I got 550 on my first try – I’m sure I could do better if I tried again, but don’t have the time at the moment.

Anyway, happy holidays, everyone!

Toy Shops: The Final Frontier?

December 1983

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi #3

Just like our last installment from TSR, at first glance I thought this was for a video game… but apparently Star Frontiers is a role playing game instead.

While I give them points for style for using a comic-like presentation, the ad doesn’t actually tell you anything about the game other than that its topic is space – personally, this wouldn’t have stirred up enough interest to look into it any further. But I guess they really only needed it to stir up enough interest for people to send for the catalog, so it must have generated at least enough interest for that in some people.

 

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Oh Yeaahh! It’s Kool-Aid Man!

December 1983

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi #3

I love it when advertising crosses mediums and takes on a life of its own, and here’s a fantastic example of that: the Kool-Aid Man Video Game! Kool-Aid Man, the character designed to advertise packets of flavored drink mix to kids, now has his very own video game! So, in a way, this ad is kind of meta – Kool-Aid Man started as an advertisement, and now this is an ad for Kool-Aid Man! Awesome!

This was available for both the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. From what I understand, the Intellivision version was vastly superior (as was the case with most games available on both platforms at the time), but you can try out the Atari version here! It took me a bit to figure it out, but it turns out that you need to get the guys who are using straws to drink the water, while avoiding the other guys (and also avoiding the ceiling and floor). Once I figured out what I was doing, I got 6,300 – how about you?

 

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The Science of Gross

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

Since last week we had “GROSS!” Madballs, I thought this would be an appropriate followup: Grossology. This is software (based on a book) that tries to teach kids about biology by presenting it as something gross – and therefore fun. So if you want to learn about snot, pee, pimples, scabs, or other sorts of bodily substances and/or functions, this is the place!

Just in doing a quick search on this, I found out that there’s an official website for Grossology that’s still active… and while it says that it was last updated in 2010, it looks more like it was last updated closer 2001! This is a seriously vintage website, and great for a walk down memory lane to the good (?) ol’ days of dialup. It’s also great for showing to the kids/grandkids so you can tell them, “Back in my day, this was what our internet looked like! It took five minutes to load, and we were grateful for it!” (and feel free to add “you young whippersnappers!” for extra effect).

 

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Ain’t No Party Like a Deadpool Party!

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

I wasn’t really into the whole card fad in the ’90s (either trading cards or card games), so a couple things surprised me about this ad: 1) The section for Image is actually advertising a game; 2) There was a subset of X-Men cards called “Deadpool Party”!

Upon doing a little research, it appears that Image, Marvel, and DC all had versions of the OverPower card game, which was kind of similar to Magic.

And as far as the Deadpool Party – that just sounds cool! While they would be very cool to have, a quick check of eBay shows that they’re going for about $10 each, so I think I’ll pass. However, on an amusing note, when I Googled “Deadpool party cards” I got a bunch of results for children’s party invitations featuring Deadpool – really, people?! Even I, a hardcore fan of Deadpool, think it’s wildly inappropriate for little Gavin to have a Deadpool-themed seventh birthday party! Though now that I think about it, I am generally a fan of things that are wildly inappropriate, so maybe it would be entertaining!

 

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CBA IRL – Lethal Enforcers II

I’ve got a bunch of CBA IRL things I’ve been meaning to post, so I’m going to try to get caught up with some of these.

Here we’ve got my copy of Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters for Sega CD, along with the Justifier… and the pink Justifier! You see, on the Lethal Enforcers games, if you wanted two players, you couldn’t just plug in two of the regular Justifiers (the blue ones), you needed one blue Justifier (which plugged into the game system) and one pink Justifier (which plugged into the blue Justifier). Because of this odd setup, the pink ones are kind of hard to find.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the pink Justifier back in the day – I actually received it as a Christmas gift about ten years ago. I’m still pretty happy to have it, though!

 

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Defeat Thanos With Your Game Controller!

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

I guess back in the day I was still too busy with my Mortal Kombat 3 to realize that this game was around, because I certainly don’t remember it! Apparently this was a predecessor to all the Marvel vs Capcom games.

Something that’s pretty cool (and pretty timely) about this game is that it loosely follows the Infinity Gauntlet story line – all the characters are fighting to get the Infinity Stones, and eventually defeat Thanos. One thing that sounds pretty cool about this game is that once characters obtain an Infinity Stone, they also get a special move/power related to that stone.

So I guess this means there’s no need to wait for the next Avengers movie – just play this game to see how it all turns out!

 

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Quaking in Their X-Boots!

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

It took me a minute to figure out exactly what this was – I didn’t really do any PC gaming, so while I’ve heard of Quake, I’m not really that familiar with it. This seems to be a package that lets you re-theme your Quake game to X-Men.

So it seems that in this game, you go around, taking out evil clones of X-Men… but don’t actually have contact with the real X-Men themselves? Seems like kind of a cheat to me.

 

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