Casino Kid

Casino Kid is all about the zany misadventures of Luke Skywalker's twin oil tycoon brother in a casino packed with various people from all walks of life, most of them completely incapable of sputtering out more than two words unless it is to somehow insult you or just tell you to go away. And really, I just described the entire game in a nutshell. The majority of it is spent walking from table to table desperately seeking anyone to play a game with you, and if you're playing Casino Kid, this probably mirrors your own tragic life way too closely for you to ever enjoy any of it. Not to say that Casino Kid is not a genre-bending title. For its day, it was the first game to ever mix the humdrum of gambling games with the hubub of the parts in RPGs where you walk around aimlessly speaking to anyone who won't call the police.

The real meat of the game is in the actual gambling you do. I imagine it works just like in Vegas except without the pressure of your hawaiian-shirt-clad relatives cheering for lucky 7's to the crooning of Tom Jones. But if you're an 8-year-old kid trying to find something to do with your NES, working on a future gambling addiction is probably somewhere just under taking out a second mortgage on your list of priorities. The only people who would possibly gather any joy from this cartridge at all are too busy passed out in their own bankrupt vomit and dreaming shattered dreams to shell out the fifty bucks to buy this damn thing. But maybe I was just too busy calling the other kids at school faggots to fully develop my sense of gambling during high stakes games of POGS. Of course, the gambling in Casino Kid is mostly just determining how insane your opponent goes whenever he sees his cards. Everyone in this game goes berzerk whenever they have a particularly good or bad hand. Old men in it routinely yell things like "WOWZA YOWZA WHAT A CRAPPY HAND!!!" Fortunately the only people who actually owned copies of this game pawned them off long ago for some extra chips, so if you really want to find a copy, check under the layers of dust at any such shop across America. Oh, and when the game tells you to store it in a cool, dry place, it's not talking about your martini, you fucking lush.

Where's Waldo

Literature is always alive. The stories are always being told, so in essence, the characters never really die. Sherlock Holmes will continue solving mysteries until the end of time. The Berenstein Bears will always be learning valuable life lessons. And Waldo will spend his eternity of Hell waving at readers from various pictures in which he is trapped in odd situations and places. If I wanted to spend 5 minutes of my life looking for a guy in a striped shirt, I'd go find a Goodwill and buy the books all for the same price of feeding a starving child in Africa for a week. I'm not giving a store 40 dollars to do that crap. Motherfuckers, I see people in striped shirts every day, and if I happen to pass by Starbucks, I see dozens of them at one time. I don't need a game that lets me haphazardly swing a cursor all over maps that resemble things I once created with an Etch-a-sketch and some dry erase markers.

The story of the game is that YOU, the player, have to help Waldo walk through various scenes with delightfully descriptive titles such as The Forest and The Castle in order to help him reach his ultimate goal of being the first Waldo in space. Having a protagonist that isn't universally loathed is always the first step to a successful game. Doing something other than looking at him until he goes somewhere else is another. The designers of this game decided having Waldo just wave at you from plain sight would be too simple, so they filled every level with as much colorful insanity as the NES would allow. The programmers of the game also thought it would be necessary to give you three levels of difficulty to test your Waldo-seeking desires. But then if you spend more than 2 minutes actively searching for someone in a video game, you have probably already been arrested for loitering and staring at people for hours on end at the bus stop.

Anticipation

Anticipation is the act of feeling or realizing beforehand. And if you anticipated the release of this game, you may qualify for several government programs granting you an orderly to change your games for you just to keep you from chewing them. The game is loosely based on a board game, and yes, you may remember these "board games" from your childhood if you were born before color television became all the rage.

In games like Monopoly, you at least got to be a piece that usually had some relevance to anything at all. Granted, a top hat bouncing all over the place attempting to corner the real estate market may not make much sense when you are sober, but I have absolutely no way to finish this sentence because every Monopoly game I ever played broke down into people throwing hotels at each other. My point is that at least you have a choice as to which irreverent piece you want to be in Monopoly. Anticipation dooms you as player 1 to spend every game as a pair of women's high heel shoes in which you bounce around guessing what a stumpy pencil will draw next. It's not even like you get to use yourself to stomp on the eyeballs of your enemies, either. At best you get the satisfaction of kicking a melting ice cream cone's ass, and at the worst you suffer defeat at the hands of a bugle.

Don't worry, kids. The latter probably won't happen. This game is so horrendously boring that even the AI seems to be paying attention to something other than itself connecting dots using a really primitive NES version of AutoCAD. So don't expect any competition, and instead ponder suicide. Playing Anticipation by yourself is a sign that you have no real friends or coloring books, and even the opponents you are supposed to be fighting are too busy giggling at you behind your back to acknowledge you are alive.

Wall Street Kid

First of all, Wall Street Kid isn't a video game. If real life were anything like an early 90's movie in which the lecherous bad guy attempts to make the children of the world suffer by sucking all of the fun out of life, this game would be his greatest weapon. In this game you play a guy who invests in the stock market. No, not a stock market agent trapped in the jungles of Vietnam. No, not even a guy using this as his theme to become a pro wrestler. You play a guy whose life consists of staring at the same nearly bare desk five days per week. By the game logic's time, about 15 minutes of your 8 hour day are spent buying and selling stocks, and the rest of the hours are spent trying to decide if you want to go lift weights or hang out with some stupid bitch that wants you to buy her thousand dollar poodles. It's not just a game about doing a nothing; it's a game that simulates being a guy doing nothing. And to think, this game was almost scrapped in favor of a game where you view the world through the eyes of a woman in a coma. Damn shame too.

To beat the game, all you have to do is go talk to market insider Connie every couple of days. She tells you exactly what stocks will be going up soon, and she also tosses in a particularly offbeat pun regarding the name of the stock. Most of them go something like, "Hey you should buy stock in Chryer because they won't be crying anytime soon!" Then, like your crazy uncle nobody over the age of 9 finds funny, she begins laughing hysterically at her own joke. If this game actually supported animation, you would probably see her lean under her desk to periodically huff a rag full of ether.

The story behind the game is that a deceased uncle you may or may not have ever met left you $500,000 under the condition that you can turn it into $1,000,000 and buy a house. The threat of a second part to this game surfaces under the mention that you may eventually have to buy a castle as well. I never played far enough to find out because my doctor informed me of a looming heart failure if I continued to bombard the precious organ with so much fun.

Shadowgate

Someone decided to make a game based on a one man assault on a castle to stop an evil warlock from summoning a dreaded creature from the depths of Hell to destroy humanity. Except this person was epileptic and decided to leave out any instances of anything moving. What is left is a command-driven game in which you wander around a castle, except wandering around in this game is more like what would happen if some relatives took pictures of the interior of it and just mailed you postcards. To aid you in your quest, you have been granted use of several commands such as take, hit, and speak. There are several more, and pretty much all of them are useless since your entire quest consists of picking up items and using them on random things in the background. Some of the uses make perfect sense like using a sword on an angry ogre. Most, however, are spawned straight from the realm of sheer insanity as you find yourself spending hours doing things only to find you were supposed to place the potato peeler you got from Death on the altar of Gargor to make the crystal ball appear. And that is why you should never use erotic dice to program the story of your breakthrough NES games.

The worst part about this game is that it's not even original. It's just a cheap rip-off of another game, The Uninvited, by the same company. Both use the exact same hand cursor. Nobody even thought it would be a good idea to at least change some of the commands. I would like to think that the scenario of escaping the creepy house in The Uninvited, coincidentally controlled by an evil warlock, would merit a few different rises to action than a mystical quest to stop, well, another, slightly more evil warlock. They may as well be the same guy, though, since they both have a habit of leaving the weapons of their undoing strewn all across the floors of their homes.

There's really not much method to the madness of the deaths either. It's pretty hard to die in Shadowgate, but it still happens. I once saw a book in a corridor, and stupid me, I assumed I could simply pick it up and read it like I have a penchant for doing in the privacy of my own, non-booby trapped home. Unfortunately I don't have the brain of an evil wizard, so imagine my surprise when I fell to my death during an attempt to increase the literacy rate. The entire game plays like this, except you occasionally get to enjoy reading all about your own simulated suicide if you USE SWORD on SELF. The worst part of the game? Even in the afterlife you are submitted to a paragraph on just how bad of a person you are for letting the world down.