Conquest of the Crystal Palace

Publisher: Quest
Year: 1990

What we have here is an unforgiving NES platformer with the twist that you have a pet dog that helps you by mashing into everything on the screen until it dies. OTher than that, I'm at a bit of a loss to find anything worth really talking about with respect to Conquest.

Medieval asian war-helmet? Check. Scimitar for some reason? Check. Blue? AWWWWW, CHECK.

The dog functionality is actually pretty cool-looking, but in practice, it's just sort of a shield, with the added unfortunate feature of overwhelming the NES's ability to track and render all the sprites on the screen. Like, there's this big blur of an attacking dog, and he hits some stuff, and other stuff just sort of disappears. Which is fine, I mean, maybe that's one of his other powers, in addition to mashing head-first into giant venus flytraps, he disrupts the fabric of the universe causing some enemies to vanish forever into some kind of negative zone, but mostly, I think it's just broken.

I've always liked 'Rest' to mean 'remaining'. It's a relaxing way to say, 'We couldn't afford a localizer.

There's a part where you go to the store and a Japanese woman sells you potions and shit, but I didn't really know what I was buying and anyway, I had more than enough money to buy literally everything she was selling so, you know, sort of limited the effectiveness of the scarcity notion. Also there was like a CNN of video game demon world that told news stories about things that were happening but that was just straight NES crazy so I didn't try to make any sense of it.

This just in: lion warrior dog, blob sphere flute lion.

Best Moment: I dunno. I guess when it turned out that there was a store and a tv studio in the cave?

Thing to Know: Down and B makes the dog show up, and running makes people slide off the screen and get lost.

Rating: 4/10 Who cares?

Contra

Publisher: Konami
Year: 1988

Has it been 6 years since our last entry? Sure it has. Has anyone noticed? No. No they haven't. Why start up again? Well, we still have no kids, we have significantly more money and free time, and we just euthanized our cat, Ella, so why the heck not? This review is for all the dead feline homies. Also the ones under lockdown, though many of them, frankly, have it coming.

Even with the Konami code, you eventually run out of lives.

In any event, we found our place and played Contra to kick things off. Here's the high points:

• Contra is fucking difficult, and it highlights one of the things that, when you're getting nostalgic about the olden games, you should keep in mind because it sucks: the one-hit kill. Oh, you got the S and the M and you're a fucking murder machine who's going to breeze through wave after wave of deadly enemies? Oops, there's a single dude in the water behind you with a fucking rinky-dink 22. Enjoy starting from nothing!
• It also has one other control idiosyncrasy that I kind of do like: you can only point down and at an angle while you're moving forward. Not sure why this works for me, it just does.

Life is fragile. And shirts are for jerks.

The other possibly-main-feature of Contra that it got both right and horribly wrong (for the difficulty it introduces) is the need to time your jump, the arc of that jump, and the understanding that shit may happen down below you that you need to work all of that into an anticipation of the best timing for any jump. You're motoring forward, you're in a great spot to cross some chasm, you jump and then oh shit, there's 6 co-ordinated ballet dancers coming in from the right to ruin your fucking day in a way that you only see coming after the 12th time they've surprised you with their sabot kicks. Just great, but so, so fucking annoying.

I'm not including any other screenshots of Contra because they're probably burned on the inside of your retinas. 

Rating: 7/10
Advice: Obviously, use the code. Other than that, try to minimize the number of times you yell at your wife for not moving forward quickly enough.
Best Moment: Getting the S. God, the fucking S.

TL;DR: Exactly as you remember. If you already want to play Contra, you should play Contra. If not, don't.