The Original GameBoy: Dyl's Greatest Hits

Everyone's got a favorite console from childhood. One that just makes 'em tingle with nostalgia, and mine's the Nintendo Game Boy. Christmas 1990. Never forget. As a self-contained hand held, It was my first console that felt like it was objectively mine,  and that was very appealing in an era when I still shared a bunk-bed, room and occasionally matching outfits (ugh) with my younger brother. Much like our smartphones today, a pocket sized conduit to all the world's information (read: pornography), my Game Boy was my own portal into Nintendo's world of pixelated delights and I could carry it around with me to distract and entertain myself during childhood's more mundane and unbearable bits....like church and school.

Nothing too profound here. Just a "greatest hits" discussion of my favorite games on that beloved grey brick with the tiny green screen and the purplish buttons.

Baseball
Baseball for Game Boy was literally just a Game Boy port of the original 1983 Nintendo Entertainment System version. Like its predecessor, it was also one of the system's launch titles and was used to promote the console. The Game Boy version of Baseball featured different music and that slick Nintendo trick of working Mario into the packaging to subtly suggest that he'd be featured in the game. (Spoiler! he's not.) A weird gripe: To bunt, you tap the B button with just enough force for the player to stick his bat out, and then just hold it out over the plate. I guess the developers  didn't bother to program an actual bunt command for the batter which seems kind of lazy given that they had a whole 'nother button to work with. Whatever. I have a real affection for baseball games that weren't made with any license from the MLBPA and have to use fictional teams (there's 2 here: the bears and the eagles) and players. It's thrilling to play as BILL and charge FRANK on the mound when he beans you in the head. 

Anyway, I'm shitting on this game a lot for how much I said I liked it. It's one of the first games I got and had that lauded "pick up and play" component to it. I didn't need to spend much time figuring it out or have an older cousin beat a boss for me because I already understood baseball. Plus it had really simple visuals. 

If I'm being honest, I really don't think the "barebones" style presented in Baseball really works nowadays. There's just a wealth of better baseball games for all these consoles (Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball being my personal fav and a really solid port of the SNES version). Still, it was one of the first games I got and I played the ever-loving fuck out of it.

Metroid II: The Return of Samus

Metroid II: The Return of Samus is an important, but sadly under-praised title in the Metroid canon. It builds on the claustrophobic cave words established in Metroid for the NES and got us consumers one title closer to the greatest GD game of all time, Super Metroid on the SNES a few years later. Whether intentionally or not, Metroid 2 invoked the same slow-burn feelings of dread and terror established in films like Alien (an aesthetic from which the developers admittedly pillaged) with an extremely limited palette of visuals. This is just another prime example of where a fantastic story will always transcend gazillion dollar sound and graphics...but that's retro gaming 101. 

Some of my personal favorite memories are burning through this game late at night, using only the incandescent glow of that gaudy and ridiculous Game Boy light to see what I was doing. Playing it as an adult invokes many of the same feelings, only now I realize how bonkers it is that this game essentially takes place in one single "room" and never feels restrictive. In terms of the Metroid (or "Metroid-vania") callings cards that have made the series consistently lauded, I recommend those curious to seek a Metroid 2 ROM and have at it. It more than holds up in modernity.

Donkey Kong
I'm not too sure what I actually expected of this game when it dropped. The box art looked cool enough, and I'd already had my brain blown wide open by the quasi-3d trappings of Donkey Kong Country on SNES but...a nostalgia re-boot of the OG classic arcade (Mario vs. Donkey Kong to rescue Pauline) was NOT what I wanted to play at the time.

 Of course, after that first 4 stages of the game, Donkey Kong reveals itself to be a very robust puzzle-platformer, one that wouldn't leave my Game Boy for months afterward. I think what works here is the deceptively simple level design, the controls (Mario can backflips and pick up items a'la Super Mario Bros 2) and its "challenging enough to keep me reaching, but not completely unbeatable" dynamic. With a whole fuckload of levels and puzzles (the commercial boldly proclaimed: "The beast is back...now with 100 levels of PAIN!"), Donkey Kong's replay value is unmatched and if I truly had to choose a Desert island game, this would most likely be it!

Donkey Kong Land 2
Donkey Kong Land 2 is the Game Boy port to what many Donkey Kong fans believe to be the best DK platformer in the series. While I'd recommend those interested in the title to check out the SNES version first, you really can't go wrong with the Game Boy version in a pinch. 

DKL2 holds the distinction of being my first "odd color" Game Boy game cartridge (it was yellow instead of the traditional dark grey) and the soundtrack is fantastic. I genuinely enjoy the title music. The game features 2 playable characters, with each having different strengths and weaknesses (Dixie's helicopter hair spin being the funnest dynamic), and the game boasts plenty of levels taylor made for speed running. I still play "Krazy Koaster" after a crappy day at the office! 

WWF Superstars 2
By the time I got this, I was familiar with most of the garden variety American wrestling games. Though I really liked WWF RAW for SNES, and truthfully played the shit out of any wrestling game I could fine, I don't think the genre (ugh) of wrestling games really came into its own until the advent of Playstation and N64 programming. 

The release of this game marked a strange and transitional time for WWF and the game's inclusion of some of the "new generation" personalities and dropping much of the 80's "old guard" make it a personal favorite for me. I loved playing as the Mountie and the Undertaker, because I was already sick of Hogan by this point. Had the game come out just a few years later it would have been the Bret/Shawn show. Superstars 2 features no finishing moves here and the sprites kinda suck. The games real strong point are its title music and the 8 bit recreations of the theme songs. I love Jakes "trust me" theme (AKA his John Carpenter theme) so much that in college I'd pine for the sounds, I finally made a manual recording of each theme on cassette and used it on many mixtapes for people. 

I could go on for hours on WCW/NWO Revenge or Fire Pro Wrestling, which bolstered and supplemented my interest in this most strange of businesses in the later 90's, but WWF Superstars 2 was my first real brush with it and I played it endlessly.

Pokémon Blue
Pokémon Blue was the last "regular" Game Boy game I had before graduating to the Game Boy Color, my birthday present in 1998. Everyone feels a certain "ownership" of the youth and cultural movements that happened in their day and the first American iteration of Pokémon wasn't any different for me.

I still remember where I was and what I was doing the first time I saw that debut commercial ("in the zone" on saturday morning, with Ken Griffey Jr) Pokémon was just one of those games that everyone played and it's a game of first for me.

• It's the first game that merited me purchasing a strategy guide to beat it.
• It's the first fame I effectively played with a game link cable 
• It's the first game I ever lost a friend over (long story)
• It's the first game I ever got caught in class playing (Mrs Clark's 6th Grade English class) and that was the point where I decided I needed a Game Boy Color because its smaller frame was harder to see from a distance. 

Pokémon may very well be the game that got me directly on the internet in 1998, plumbing primitive fan secrets over how to get mew and what happens when you catch Misingno.

I'm not sure what made Pokémon speak to me. Maybe it was the simple premise, the fact that it kind of encouraged and enabled hoarding and perfectionism or just that so many other people were into it at the same time...it was hard to avoid. Regardless, it was huge. I'd get into the card game later on and even some of the subsequent games (up to and including Pokémon Gold/Silver) but by then, other adolescent pursuits had taken hold.

Honorable Mention
The OG Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was a fantastic game for the OG Game Boy that I thoroughly enjoyed, but if I'm being honest played the DX version for Game Boy Color was slightly better because of some of the extra quests and color-based dynamics. Don't worry, those games will get their own post. 

The WWF Scratch Logo and the Doodler's Mind

In November of 1997, The World Wrestling Federation changed their corporate logo to reflect the new "attitude" branding. They unveiled the new logo as part of their "try lacing my boots" campaign, reflecting the 90's obsession with "extremity," shock TV and a desperate attempt to secure a silver-bullet creative campaign to whoop their Atlanta-based rivals in the Monday Night ratings war.

Perhaps unknowingly, the company followed the oldest art-punk mantra: the best logos are those which can be reproduced with in any medium and with relative ease (i.e. a stick n' poke tattoo or spray painted beneath a freeway overpass.) Wrestling lore dictates that in one of those fabled writer's meetings between Vincent K. Mcmahon, Pat Patterson, and whichever creative cronies were on good terms with the Fed, someone hastily drew the logo on the side of a frosted beer mug with their finger. The rest is, as they say, history (or...fodder for a 10-part, marginally accurate docu-series on the WWE Network).

I shan't warble on the 90's wrestling boom or the famed Attitude Era. There's many before who've done it better. What I will say is the profound impact that scratch logo had on me as a 5th grader in suburban Kentucky. It was the first WWF logo I could accurate copy without a protractor and a knowledge of color theory and as much as I love that classic chrome logo, I just wasn't in possession of the artistic chops to make it a hand-drawn reality. Like punk, the proletariat genre that brought electrified rock n' roll to the disaffected masses of Thatcherite England and Reaganite America, so too did the Fed's new user-friendly insignia appeal to the lurid fancies of a budding adolescent hesher. "I can draw that," I thought. 

So I did. I drew that shit everywhere. On my desks and notebooks. On the bottom of my skateboard. In the dewey condensation of the family's Dodge Caravan. It was like a brand I could incorporate into myself. See "Attitude" was a concept I could get behind, even in the leafy expanses of a middle class existence, and this colorful world of pro wrestling promised a wealth of intellectual and creative fodder for my torrid mind. 

This scratch logo (and the programming behind it) promised a reckless abandonment of a stodgy, traditionalist past, rattling old-schoolers and conservative journalists to their gooey foundations. This "attitude" campaign leaped forward with the gleeful and irreverent spirit of one-upping the competition and car-crash entertainment and for all that negative press it got regarding its mysogyny and redneck ideologies...it all finally had a damn logo I could draw.

On Death and WWF Hasbros

Hello Friends,

I hope all is well. As I write this, the holidays are well upon us, the world is (still) in turmoil, I've finally deleted Facebook from my phone and hope to one day ween off completely (LOL)! The "real world" (not to be confused with The Real World) only confuses and depresses me, and I try to deal with it as little as possible. (Segue).

 2015 has been a bonkers year for wrestling fans. We've read more obituaries than we should have to, and while titillating TMZ stories on Hogan's not-so-personal demons was good for a lark, legitimate injuries and a paper-thin roster have rendered the main wrestling product pretty limp. (Segue).

That's why I'm going to talk about action figures instead. I grew up on them. Mostly of the Ninja Turtles/Ghostbusters ilk, but I had some rogue ones too. I kept them all sorted into ice cream buckets in my bedroom. I'd sneak them to school, and choose which ones got to sleep in my bed with me. There's photographic evidence of me clutching a Raphael figure on the Swiss Alps, in front of the Eiffel Tower and on the streets of Innsbruck Austria. 

I had some WWF Hasbros too though. I first encountered them at church, a kid playing with The Ultimate Warrior and The British Bulldog in the pew in front of me. I loved the chunky, cartoonish design, they seemed cut from the same cloth as the Toxic Avengers or something else left of center. Of course, it wouldn't be for another year until I'd learn these figures actually corresponded to REAL LIFE people, not just animated characters...and in a world that was still very kayfabe in terms of wrestling's legitimacy, this seems kind of mind-blowing in retrospect.  

I distinctly remember playing with a Leonardo and a Repo Man figure during my grandpa's funeral. I was 6. What seems strange to me now is how many dead people I have in plastic doppleganger, hanging out in my parents' basement. Yes, technically Darth Vader and Spawn are dead, but I'm not talking about them because their deaths didn't run in newspapers or the tabloids. Roddy Piper's (and a host of others) did. There's lots of talk about what makes this shit "real" or "fake" and truly, we smarky internet cretins get off when they intersect, but in a culture where participants bleed their own blood (no special FX here Mr. Van Damme), and become immortalized as children's play toys BEFORE they die, I ask you: what is "real" anyway?

Alright, thanks for reading. Send your spare Hasbros my way. I'm trying to get that rare Kamala. 

Gratitude Fanzine #1 + Ride the Fury #3 (Weekly Seizure - 11.24.13)

I got to live out a middle school obsession and see Monster Magnet this week. If you happen to be a fan of the Magnet, get in touch. I'm thinking about starting a usenet forum. This week I got a few zines, namely Edgegazer and Gratitude, and the ever growing stack on my desk of things to review just keeps getting less and less tamed.

1) Ride the Fury - Pro Wrestling Zine #3

I caught this one on the last go-around and liked it enough to order again. Many of you already know I'm a wrasslin' fan across the board, and I'm glad that there's some ink being dedicated to the similarities between the cultures. I'm also prone to buy things which have "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan on them.

USA! USA!

The zine also came with a homemade Ring of Honor DVD which I haven't watched yet, but is from a good era of that promotion. I'm stoked on this zine but have a few gripes. There's some really great purely wrestling zines right now (Atomic Elbow here in the states, and Calling Spots in the UK). The layout is a little too "indesign" ish, to the point where the interview with Jam of Code Orange Kids is almost unreadable due to weird spacing errors. However, it saves itself with a few gems. One being an interview with Tom Sheehan in which he tells a story about Indecision touring with Milhouse and Silent Majority and how they gave a shirt to Perry Saturn at a rest stop. I'm also a big fan of the question "If your parents said you could bring back one wrestler who passed away to come back to life to eat Thankgiving with you, who would it be?" Bummed no one said "Ravishing" Rick Rude though. That's my answer, no question.

Nope, that ain't NYC Mayhem-era Tommy Carrol. RIP Brother

Overall, it's sick, the DVD is a nice flourish and I loved issue 2. The fuzzy layouts may seem like a persnickety gripe, but my eyes suck and it was kind of a stumbling block here. Much respect to the back cover image though, a full on HBK tribute mural.

Barbershop Window

DVD's, zines, demos and anything else related to Ride the Fury records (including the above reviewed zine) at their bigcartel. 

2. Gratitude #1

I don't feel even remotely hyperbolic by calling this the best zine of 2013. As a means of disclosure, I actually contributed the Rampage centerfold, but my bias isn't any issue. Gratitude takes after the zenith-era of brilliantly written core culture zines Lockin Out #1 Fanzine and Trumbull Escapades. These zines were insular, obsessive and academic in ways few other zines were, and at times even genius. I won't sell this one that hard. You're either into the aforementioned zines and therefore 'get it' or you don't. I am going to leave this, my favorite quote in the entire zine because it absolutely articulates my position on Metallica better than anything I've ever managed to pen...and i wrote an entire 60-page senior capstone project on them in college. (Not a joke:

What's cool about Metallica is: everything. I revel in seeing them bum people out by doing things they sincerely think are great. Sometimes I don't even know if what they're doing IS great, there's just too much history there for me to make heads or tails of it. The world's finest authors couldn't make up a character like Lars Ulrich if it was their life opus - the closest we have is Pete Campbell from Mad Men. God bless them both. --Leah Geragosian (@diahleah)

Top notch content and contributors, excellent art, footnotes (!) and the best Free Spirit interview I've ever read. There's a few of them here at the Mosher's Delight bigcartel. Get on the right wagon, bunko. 

Me and the dog will show you who's hard