STREETFIGHTER II (Capcom, 1991)

Childhood really is the time to make the most of your injuries.

Think back - back to a time when all your afflictions and ailments, however embarrassing, just served as the punchlines to fantastical lies.  I walk funny because I fell out of a fourteenth story window.  I’ve got this rash because my body’s rejected my robot arm.  You could take anything, and turn it into anything else; you could take something as unremarkable as a sprained wrist, and inflate it into whatever magnificent bollocks you liked.

It’s the two things I like most about children; their thoughtless capacity for violence (punching you in the cock, for example), and that beautiful, earnest willingness to indulge any story, however ridiculous.   In the cartoonish realm of violence and inconsequence that they occupy, kids are willing to believe almost anything.

“Why haven’t you got a finger?”

“It was bitten off.  By a shark.  A big, metal shark.”

And why not?  Who’s going to prove otherwise?

Sometimes, though, truth is beauty, and beauty truth.  Sometimes you don’t need to lie.  Children are idiots, let’s be honest, and when you factor that idiocy into their misadventures, the scripts just tend to write themselves.  Take my friend (who’s asked to remain nameless): he’s got a small, neat scar, in the middle of his forehead.  After many years of changing the subject, he finally admitted to me that his older brother had once stabbed him with a chip fork.  Hysterical, he’d then run off with it protruding from his head, like some wailing, speccy Dalek.

Just look at the ‘Don’t Try This At Home’ warnings, which are so proliferate in things like the WWE: it’s because Tombstone Piledrivers and hitting someone with a flaming plank are precisely the kind of things that kids will try at home, given the chance.  And that’s a good thing – to operate beyond fear, and consequence.  You don’t really fathom the repercussions of violence until you’re about 9 or 10, which makes those early years a beautiful, adventurous thing; I remember nearly mincing my neighbour’s hand with a lawnmower, in the most bloodthirsty ‘what if...?’ scenario ever conceived.

The same friend has another story; the tale of his wonky bottom tooth.  The story goes that he and his brother were playing Streetfighter II on their SNES.  Older Brother was doing his usual thing – playing as Eddie Honda, the Sumo Wrestler, and pinning my friend helplessly into the corner with the Hundred Hand Slap.  My mate was getting frustrated, and the argument escalated, until finally he yanked out his brother’s controller.  The coup de grace.  Game, set and match.

Except it wasn’t.  His brother considered this for a few moments, weighed up his options, and then threw my mate onto the floor, punching him fully and repeatedly in the face.  He punched and punched, until there was blood.  Only then was he vindicated.

This would have (just) pre-empted the moral dirge that encircled computer games in the mid-90s; if a paper like the Daily Mail had gotten hold of it, I can safely say that they would have held the front page for him.  He’d have been their posterboy - a prototype for the war on light entertainment.  I can see it now; my mate with a fat lip, his eyes flushed red, just to the side of some headline about whatever was supposed to be giving you cancer at that particular point.

His story, though – this humdrum, everyday tale of domestic assault - articulates a much bigger point, and brings me neatly onto the main subject: namely, Streetfighter II, and how much people cared about it.

In all honesty, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog if you hadn’t heard of Streetfighter II, if you didn’t know what it was about, or if you weren’t already aware of its seismic contribution to the history of computer gaming.  Simply, it is the Rubber Soul of fighting games; the parting of the proverbial waves, the drawing of the lines for an entire, multi-billion dollar genre.

I first encountered SFII on holiday in Orlando – I would have been about 11 or so.  I’d heard a lot about it, but never played it:  they had the game somewhere down near the lobby of our hotel, and there was a gaggle of kids swarming constantly around it*.  This was back when arcades provided a public podium for dick-swinging, when every cabinet tended to be monopolized by a single, unblinking alpha-youth, ploughing wordlessly through his competition.  As I recall, I had my SFII cherry brutally popped by one such youth: it took all of about two minutes, as he pummelled me dispassionately into the ground, barely saying a word.  My quarter was probably still rattling down into the guts of the machine as I slinked back to our room, and for the duration of our stay, that kid never shifted - morning, noon or night.  That song remained the same for every SFII machine in the world – in every video shop, cinema, airport, swimming pool, or bowling alley, there seemed to be some immoveable child-savant, demonstrating his supremacy as a gamer and – accordingly, at that age – a human being.

(* It’s probably on account of this phenomena that we should salute SFII’s contribution to global etiquette, as it played a pivotal role in teaching children the world over how to queue [presumably, therefore, it was never released in France]).

In summary: SFII is a 2D, one-on-one fighting game.  You picked from eight playable characters - each with their own moves, attributes, strengths and weaknesses - and then progressed sequentially through a series of best-of-three battles, until... well, until you ‘win’.  And that, really, is it.  Sounds a bit mundane?  That’s only because the premise has since been unapologetically cribbed by just about every other fighting game in existence.

The eight characters have all since become canonical within gaming folklore: there’s Ryu (ethereal martial arts everyman, and the de facto protagonist of the game); Ken (Ryu, in the body of Owen Wilson); Blanka (lime-green Brazilian jungle-loony); Zangief (lumbering Soviet man-bear); Chun-Li (disconcertingly sexy Chinese spy-crumpet); Dhalsim (hyper-extending Indian fire-breather); E Honda (the surface-to-air sumo wrestler); and Guile (preposterously haired Top Gun escapee).  Work your way through these, and you face off against the boss characters: Vega (infuriatingly nimble Spanish uber-ponce), Sagat (double-hard Muay Thai nutter); Balrog (a thinly veiled Mike Tyson pastiche, just before he went all rapey); and finally, the iconic Streetfighter II overlord, M Bison (continuing Capcom’s proud tradition of lumbering their scariest characters with slightly incongruous names).  The action pans out across a global span of impressive set-pieces; you swing from a dojo to a Chinese street scene, an aircraft carrier to the docks of New York, a temple to a factory.  There’s even a reclining Buddha, with one very distracting nipple on display (distracting when you’re 11, anyway).

It’s better to assess SFII not in terms of how it stacks up against today’s competitors (which is still very well, incidentally), but in terms of what it introduced to the genre.  And in this sense, where do you start?  The democratic concessions of actually picking your own character, in a game that intuitively understood and accommodated the style or preferences of whoever was playing it – that was very new.  So was the 2-player facility; de rigueur for almost any game now, but revolutionary back then, and something that extended the game far beyond its natural lifespan.  It meant that you could really hone your craft, adopting a character and mastering their every nuance, perfecting strings of devastating, sinewy combos... before being inevitably beaten by some button-mashing mong.  Sigh.

Then there were the special moves.  Tournament play.  Unlockable characters.  Bonus rounds.  It even helped to educate me as to where Thailand was (I learned more about global geography through SFII and football than I did in an entire GCSE course).

The game also ushered in the proud tradition of ‘post-fight mockery’, now another staple of the genre, with each character having their own signature taunts.  They’d celebrate their victories by crowing something (and usually, something completely abstract) at their beaten, bloody opponent.  it was always my fondest wish that Capcom would release something like Streetfighter Blue, chuck in a load of blood, digitally remove Chun-Li’s pants, and maybe beef up the insults a bit; instead of having Guile asking ”are you man enough to fight with me?”, they could have changed it to something like “aaaaahhhhhh, you’reatwatyou’reatwatyou’reatwat!  You’re a twat!”.

So insolubly did the tendrils of this game take root in young minds, that the move combinations seem to have been etched into the brains of an entire generation.  It was with great joy that I recently overheard someone at work threatening to “down, forward-down, forward, strong punch” an underperforming colleague: anybody in the room who’d ever played SFII would have understood the gravity of this threat.

SFII also ushered in one of modern gaming’s less salubrious traditions – milking a licence for all its conceivable worth.  To put it lightly, Capcom got their money’s worth out of the franchise… to the point of making New Line’s additions to the Nightmare on Elm Street series look positively vital.  Since the release of the original game in 1991, we’ve been variously treated to Streetfighter II: Champion Edition, Streetfighter II: Hyper Fighting, Streetfighter II Dash, Super Streetfighter II, Super Streetfighter II: The New Challengers, Super Streetfighter II Turbo, Super Streetfighter II: Special Champion Edition, Super Streetfighter II X: Grandmaster Challenge, Hyper Streetfighter II: The Anniversary Edition, and – how could we forget - Super Streetfighter II Turbo HD Remix.  With every single release, every nominal change in graphics, sound, speed or gameplay, Capcom have managed to massage a few more millions out of the game’s loyal patrons.  But then it’s the significance and the transcendence of that first game that’s allowed them to do it.

I struggle to think of another game franchise that’s managed to span such a disparate array of media; since it first arrived in the arcades, there’s been Streetfighter films, animated television shows, comic books, novels, booklets, playing cards, trading cards, role-playing games, albums, and even an online slot machine.  In the arcades, it’s taken over $3bn in revenue.  It’s also widely credited as the game that saved the SNES in the 16-Bit war (my little heart crumbled to ash the day I opened up C&VG, to discover that Nintendo had been granted exclusivity for the port).  It is, in the context of computer games, an absolute work or art.

For my money, fighting games have gone the way of first-person shooters, pop music and football; they all attained perfection by the mid-90s, and it’s been downhill ever since.  Just as the amphetamine ultra-realism of the COD series has overcomplicated the blueprint drawn by games like Doom and Duke Nukem’, so the fighting genre – with its bells-and-whistles shift into polygons / 3D, its bombardment of nuances and distractions – has made itself too inaccessible.  The magic of SFII was it’s pick-up-and-play immediacy, the manner in which it compensated for the incapable, and challenged the exceptional.

The idea of my friend being flung to the floor and savagely beaten becomes suddenly, weirdly reasonable when you chuck Streetfighter II into the equation; it’s the glue that binds, the thing that stops it being a senseless and unwarranted tale of violence.  Bring SFII to the table, and it’s instantly the “ahhhhhh…  I see” factor.  It’s not big, it’s not clever, but it’s understandable… and it’s exactly what I wanted to do to that prick in Orlando.  And if I ever see him again, it’s what I’m gonna do.

He’ll get some ‘down for two seconds, up and strong kick’ action.  You mark my words.

GHOSTS N' GOBLINS (Capcom, 1986)

Back in the early ‘80s, Eddie Murphy did a brilliant bit of stand-up, based around his rather blunt theory on female abstinence.

Women, he claimed, will happily withhold certain ‘favours’ from their men, in order to maintain an ongoing sense of loyalty, interest and commitment.  Said favours are bestowed only when the men have worked themselves up into such a frenzy of anticipation that they’ve lost all sense of value and perspective... at which point the cage swings shut (he had a name for this theory, which I won’t go into here – suffice to say, it’s a euphemistic variation on the Venus Flytrap).

Basically, he says, it’s like giving a starving man a cracker.  “GODDAMN!!” he shouts.  “THAT’S THE BEST DAMN CRACKER I EVER HAD IN MY LIFE!!  THAT WEREN’T NO REGULAR CRACKER, WAS IT?  WHAT WAS THAT, A SALTINE?  A RITZ?  JESUS, THAT’S THE MOST GODDAMN DELICIOUS CRACKER I EVER ATE!”

And so you give him the whole packet.  You give him forty packets.

And then, six months down the line, he reaches that moment of clarity:  “hmmm.  I just got some regular old crackers.”

Now, when it comes to Ghosts N’ Goblins – my first ever computer game - I can relate to this.  It wasn’t exactly like I was ‘starving’, but my best mate had a BBC Micro, and I must have been ferrying home some very excitable stories about Jet Set Willy and whatnot.  On top of all this, I was fortunate enough to have some very intuitive parents.

So on Christmas morning, 1988, I tore away the wrapping from my first ever computer, unsheathing the mighty Commodore 64 (albeit a temperamental, second-hand Commodore 64, a machine that was borderline French in its propensity for tantrums and shit-fits).  With that computer came two games – Ghosts N’ Goblins, and Summer Games II, which was a tie-in licence with the Seoul Olympics.  I may only have been about seven at this point, but I’d long-since cottoned on to the fact that I didn’t like P.E very much.  So I ended up popping my gaming cherry with G’N’G.

Now if there’s one thing that’s put a consistent strain on my parents’ marriage over the years, it’s my dad’s refusal to read – or even acknowledge – instructions.  Having successfully wired a plug in 1973, he’s since considered the installation / operation of anything electronic to be a combined matter of luck, instinct, and educated guesswork.  Under strict orders, he’d been dispatched to my cousin’s house on Christmas Eve to pick up the C64, test it, and find out exactly how it worked: when he did finally saunter his way over at about 8pm, he’d basically spent the whole evening quaffing liqueur chocolates, and playing with their Labrador.  “How hard can it be?” he’d have asked, cracking open another beer.

When he finally came home, he’d fallen asleep in front of Jaws.

I can still remember my mum’s lips thinning to the point of invisibility when, on Christmas Day, it wouldn’t work.  It was one of the longest days of my life; him hunched for hours in front of the TV, her glowering thunderously at him, and me, riddled with that same kind of idiot anticipation Eddie Murphy had described.  I’d been waiting for this moment ever since my first go on Jetpak at Rory’s house: as I sat there cross-legged, building a Lego castle, I’d already decided that whatever Ghost N’ Goblins had to offer, it was going to be awesome.  The trap was primed.

In the end, something – be it the Spirit of Christmas, or my mum’s smouldering voodoo ill-will – got it working.  There’s few grander moments in life than the snowstorm static of a TV screen cutting to whatever it’s supposed to be showing... and there, suddenly, it was; white words on royal blue, bordered thickly in pastel, the command cursor blinking at us like the drumming of fingers.  And so it all began – the cage swung shut.

I’ll be honest here – I was (and am) willing to believe that G’N’G was a lot better than it actually is.  In this case, I think, it’s more about what it represented than anything it actually had to offer; that first taste of the primal magic of gaming.  It was one of those gateway moments that are so easily identified in hindsight, but don’t always announce themselves at the time.  It’s hard to put into words.  I suppose it’s a bit like your first football match, or passing your driving test; you know you’ve discovered something that’s going to have an immeasurable impact on your life, stretching far off into the coming years.  And even at the age of seven, I clearly remember that thrilling realisation thwacking right into me.

It was all so utterly, completely awesome.  The loading screen, the title screen, the solemnity of the music (a rather atmospheric rendition of Chopin’s ‘Prelude No. 20’)... G’N’G lassoed together everything that used to be great about computer games.  It triggered an imaginative response, you see; it all hinged on the vibe, which it delivers in bucketloads from the outset.  Yes, history and progress can fling their glares down now upon the graphical capabilities of the C64, but to me, at that point... wow.  That whole game looked like it had been chiselled from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

And then I actually played it.

Which went something like this:

“OK, let’s see what we’ve got here, I’m this knight guy, apparently, and I can go left and right... ooh, look, I can jump up and d... Oh, I’ve died.

Righto, try again... oh, look at that, he shoots out swords or something, they’ll be useful for killing those zomb... oh, they come from behind as well, do they?  Bugger.  Start again.

Third time’s a charm... kill him, kill him... jump over this tombst... Hang on, I can go forwards, and I can jump, but I can’t jump forwards.  And – ha ha – dead again.

Right, I’m getting the hang of this now.  Kill, kill, jump, kill... oh look, a spooky bird, perched impassively atop another tombstone!  No, hang on, that’s some sort of surface-to-air mega-crow, I can’t duck it OR jump it, and... oh, for Christ’s sake.

OK, this time, I’m just going to inch my way along, nice and careful, nice and slow, over the tombstone I go... so what if it’s taken me three minutes to get past the first screen, I’m alm... you what?  They’re timing this insanity?  As if this madness wasn’t enough, they’re putting me up against a clock?!

What do you mean, ‘game over’?!”

And therein lies the problem with Ghost N’ Goblins, the inevitable yin to its yang of new dawns and excitement, and all that good stuff... it’s just unplayably difficult.  I mentioned ‘popping my gaming cherry’ earlier – this wasn’t some tender, gentile, twilight fumble with a first love.  Breaking yourself in with G’N’G was like being choke-slammed onto a pile of house bricks; like having some towering bondage queen punching you hard in the nuts, over and over again.  It’s a perfect storm of unresponsive controls, ropey collision detection, and a prohibitively steep learning curve.  It was a wholly unforgiving game... even moreso for a cack-handed 7 year-old like me.

It still didn’t quell my fascination, though.  I’m also slightly consoled by the fact that Gametrailers.com have since declared G’N’G to be the second hardest game of all time. I played it again, years later, armed with all the accumulated benefits of age and experience, thinking I could set about exorcising a few demons... a bit like Tom Hanks in Big.  It’d been bothering me for years, and so now – as a grown man – I was going to vanquish this insoluble beast of a game, flush it straight to Hell and finally move on.  No chance: it dutifully handed me my arse on a plate, once again.  Some games tend to soften with time, as your motor skills and your cognitive abilities sharpen up; G’N’G remains one of the most difficult things I’ve ever encountered, and I include within that A-Levels, falling (and staying) in love, negotiating a mortgage, and the pre-entry interview for Cambridge University.  From start to finish, the whole thing is an absurd, brutish monument to difficulty; a ridiculously hostile experience.

Games used to be like this, though – there wasn’t the commercial imperative to cater for the incapable and the stupid.  The average game of Pacman or Donkey Kong only lasts for something like three minutes; as I recall, adjustable difficulty settings didn’t even come into vogue until the days of 16-Bit.  Simply, G’N’G was what it was, and if you couldn’t cope... well, that wasn’t really Capcom’s problem.

That kind of programming comes with its own rewards, I suppose, because (certainly in the C64 days) I never came close to completing at least 70% of the games that I owned.  These were the prohibitively difficult ones like G’N’G, the games that rewarded the zealots and completionists, those truly committed souls that made skylines from the teetering columns of tapes stacked against their bedroom windows; I wasn’t one of them, so instead I had a shelf full of games just like G’N’G, all rife with the tantalizing prospects of the things I hadn’t yet seen, or conquered.  Each one its own little curiosity, flicking Vs down at me from the bookshelf.

It’s not like that anymore; nowadays, there’s not just a belief, but the actual expectation that having paid your money, you’re going to get to play a game through, from start to finish.  Implicit within that is a commitment from the player... and I think that’s partly why it feels like I’m coming to the end of my gaming life.  We’ve only got one tele in the house, and I simply don’t have the time or the inclination to muster that kind of investment, to sign up to it all at the very start, not when everything seems to be so self-consciously grand.

But I find myself wondering if it really is a practical issue, or the fact that the games just don’t seem to capture my imagination anymore.  I think, for example, of the difficulty I’ve had in getting properly into Skyward Sword; it’s been sat there since Christmas, virtually untouched.  Equally, I think back to the hours and the effort and the sheer fascination I committed to this single, curmudgeonly game, back in the day.  In a weird way, the developers’ insistence on filling in all of the gaps, on crafting a coherent and completely defensible gaming world, means that we don’t tend to get games like G’N’G anymore; games that were forged within and in spite of their limitations.  And therefore, because there’s no gaps, because everything’s so remorselessly logical, we don’t get to imagine anything.  There’s no need to paint your own picture anymore - we’ve strayed from the intangibles of gaming.  And that’s a shame, in much the same way that The Twilight Zone is always going to be a damn site creepier than the Saw films.  Like Alonso Harris says in Training Day, "it's not what you say, it's what you can prove."

Ghosts N’ Goblins... yeah, it’s fine.  It’s OK.  It probably triggered my subconscious love of ‘things n’ other things’ (Guns N’ Roses being an obvious example), but that’s about it.  At the end of the day, it was just some regular old crackers.  Representatively, though, it meant so much more than any of that; I finally owned a computer.  And I knew then that in the years to come, I would probably own other, better computers, playing – and totally losing myself within – hundreds of other computer games... just as willingly as I lost myself in those first two or three minutes of Ghosts N’ Goblins.  I remember going on the Monorail at Disney World for the first time, in 1990 - fun, exciting, and very memorable, if only for what it was taking me towards...  And that’s why G’N’G will forever be sanctified in my mind as that first point of contact.  The crossing of a threshold.

Or in Eddie Murphy’s world - the bait.

SUPERMAN (Taito, 1988)

Poor old Superman.  Computer games really haven’t been kind to him.

Having already gushed over the likes of Sonic and Zelda, I felt that in the interests of fairness, it was only right to flag up something a little less... accomplished.  Something a bit less auspicious.  Something that - in this particular case - wasn’t just bad, but memorably bad.

And that’s a distinction of sorts, I suppose.  Just like the Police Academy films, it’s that kind of notoriety that, in some ways, makes a game great.

And in other (more accurate) ways, reeeeally doesn’t.

Thinking back, it’s a toss-up between which piece of work more spectacularly failed to do its subject matter justice; Taito’s Superman, or my Year 8 Geography project on Euro Disney (400 words, no pictures, and written during two non-consecutive bouts of diarrhoea).  Superman probably just about sneaks it, as for all the ways in which it’s crap, it is at least definitively crap.

History is replete with examples of the sum falling hopelessly short of its component parts.  Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s unprovoked assault on ‘Dancing in the Streets’, for example.  Everything about that worked, on paper.  In a similar way, and whilst it really shouldn’t have been, Superman was appallingly bad.  And that’s saying something, because when you’re young, computer games – and arcade games, in particular – are all just supposed to be unilaterally awesome.

Two of my great passions growing up were computer games and stadium rock.  Thinking about it now, sideways-scrollers went the same way as glam metal, at the same time, for just about the same reasons; they were colourful, and they were brash, but for the most part they just didn’t have any bollocks.  There was no real soul there.  And so, for every Final Fight / Guns N’ Roses, there were a hundred Superman / Poisons.  The same mechanics, the same concepts, the same engine, all repeating to a terminal fade.  Superman – stupid, lazy, thoughtless Superman - was one of the main symptoms of that particular malaise:  what it did at least do, I suppose, was announce and embed some of the genre’s clichés, before they’d had actually the chance to become clichés.

Now before we get into this, just think for a moment of what the Man of Steel has to offer, from a purely developmental point of view.  Flight, super-strength, near invulnerability, super-speed, X-Ray vision, telescopic, infra-red and microscopic vision, super-hearing, super-breath... The guy can fly into space.  The guy once circumnavigated the globe so quickly, he actually reversed the passage of time.

He survived a nuclear blast.

He has flown into the sun.

“Faster than a speeding bullet!” goes the tagline.  “More powerful than a locomotive!  Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!”

Or, judging by Taito’s interpretation:

“Slower than generic street hoodlums!  Easily damaged by bins!  Struggles with fences!”

Even in the rosiest hues of nostalgia, even squinting through the myopic fog of Happier Days, Superman just sucked.   It was an abominable mish-mash of inconsistencies, hellish monotony, and some almost Dadaist non-sequiturs.  Unravelling across five stages – ‘Metropolis’, ‘San Francisco’, ‘Las Vegas’, ‘Washington DC’ and ‘Space’ – it’s less an arcade game, and more an attempt to test a) the limits of human endurance, and b) how many gallons of urine Taito could spatter upon the legacy of America’s favourite comic-book son, presumably without reproach.

The immediate and very obvious problem with Superman is that he / it could barely have been less ‘super’ if he / it had tried.  When you’re playing a game with Superman in it, ‘super’ is something of an engrained expectation.  Here, he basically looks like a bloke who’s looked after himself reasonably well, and just happens to have the ability to hover indefinitely.  Rarely has a video game superhero looked less remarkable.  The alleged ‘Ultimate’ Muffin I purchased from a Tesco Express last year delivered more authoritatively on its promise.

I mentioned sideways-scrollers earlier... Games like Final Fight worked because, when you’re dealing necessarily within a loose sense of realism, you can get away with just a ‘kick’ button, and a ‘punch’ button.  It’s all grounded in the nitty-gritty and the grime of a organic street battle.  You’re looking for a bit more from Superman, though.  Heat-emitting vision and stuff.  And even then, when he does, say, ‘kick’, it’s not some mighty mule kick, it’s not a vicious roundhouse to the chops; he looks like a Victorian beach spiv shoeing sand into the face of a rival lover.  When he punches... Christ, I’ve posted letters with more ferocity.

Oh, but hang on, what’s this – if you hold down the punch button, he unleashes some sort of prototypic, Streetfighter-style energy ball across the screen... which – with an almost admirable disregard for continuity – is just about the only thing Superman has never done.    And that’s just one of the sad, illogical shrugs that Taito flung into Superman, a game programmed with an almost visible sigh.  What next?  Spiderman summoning the Batmobile?  The Silver Surfer enlisting the help of his friend and ally, Pedro the Uncircumcised Mule?  Like John Goodman asked in The Big Lewbowski, “am I the only person who gives a fuck about the rules?!”

From the very start, Superman plays like a murder-suicide pact between Continuity and Attention to Detail.  Just pick your mistake; they come bursting immediately to the surface, like some demented game of Whack-a-Rat.  Maybe it’s the cooperative mode, where the ‘second’ player rocks up wearing red and grey, like some sort of mental Superman away kit.  Maybe it’s the Las Vegas level, and the ‘COSINO’ in the background?  Ambling through a space station, fighting off anthropomorphic pink bunnies?  Or San Francisco, where Taito rejected every single identifiable landmark at their disposal – Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, Lombard Street – instead focussing almost 70% of the level inside the city’s world-famous... sewers.  And is if that wasn’t bad enough, once you’ve descended for what seems like three vertical miles, you come face to face with... a helicopter!  Underground!  Which you literally have to punch to death!  And all this whilst you’re slaloming through meteorites, that appear to be falling from NOWHERE!

The biggest triumph, though - the geographical clusterfuck par excellence - is the Washington DC stage.  Here, Taito at least made an effort towards some sort of contextualization, as Superman progresses past a slew of famous landmarks , including the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the White House, and finally... Mount Rushmore.

That’ll be the Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.  1,400 miles away.  Why not, though?  All bets are pretty much off by this point.

Where is Lex Luthor?  Where is Bizarro, and General Zod?  Why are you instead pitched against an inexhaustible supply of Turbo-Men, from Jingle all the Way?

Ultimately, Superman does for continuity what Salvador Dali did for right angles.  And that’s the puzzling thing, because really, who’s your primary market for a game like this?  First and foremost, you’d assume, it’s Superman fans.  And it’s a fair guess that this group is going to overlap not inconsiderably with your generic comic book nerds, and comic book nerds are not exactly known for their tolerance of continuity errors.  Seriously, guys – did you really think you’d get away with it?

To be fair, this was the 1980s, back when nobody really paid attention to anything.  I can only assume that having unsuccessfully pitched Ricky Raccoon’s American Adventure in Space to some sniffed-up Taito executive, the developers slunk off, returning 50 minutes later having slapped a Superman sprite in Ricky’s place.  “Kids don’t like raccoons.  They like Superman, and helicopters,” the boss would have bellowed at them, like the editor of The Daily Planet.  That’s the only possible explanation for the tides of incongruity swamping this game, because the Man of Steel is the only thing in the midst of this irredeemable tosh that could’ve possibly merited the licence.  I’ve got images of Jerry Seigal and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, sat in the development meeting, heads in hands, one of them perhaps pinching the bridge of his nose, the other thumbing his temples.

As I recall, Superman found its home in many a cinema foyer, and I suppose in this sense achieved a fleeting moment of usefulness; a vapid bit of fluff, the video-game equivalent of talcum powder, there to soak up the minutes between buying sweets, and waiting for Ghostbusters II to start.  Only 9 year-olds – with their sugary enthusiasm, and anorexic attention spans - could have stomached this... but even then, back in the day, I remember having some pretty strong inklings as to exactly how crap Superman was.  No – not even the most determined of nostalgics could whittle something worthy out of this.  A career revisionist couldn't alchemize this into something decent.  Because at the end of the day, there’s got to be something noteworthy there.  Something of value.

I mean, at least Police Academy had tits in it.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME (Nintendo, 1998)

I was a very neurotic little boy.  Very neurotic indeed.  I used to think about things – everything - one, two, three times.  It comes from being an only child, I reckon: too much time stuck in your own head, your thoughts jostling around all over the place.  It reminds me of that scene in Spinal Tap, when the band go to see Elvis’ grave.

“Puts it into perspective, doesn’t it?”
“Too much.  There’s too much fucking perspective.”

There was lots of perspective, and lots of neurosis, back in 1999.  There were mock A-Levels, and actual A-Levels.  There was the dawning realisation that I was about to be flung from the cozy little alcove I’d dug out for myself, off towards a university, Somewhere Else.  Forest were in the midst of getting themselves relegated, again.  And perhaps most significantly of all, I'd just turned 18.

I finally left the velveteen womb of childhood on the 9^th of February, 1999.  There was a huge, clamorous party – two or three of my other friends celebrated their big days in February, too – at the Beetroot nightclub: someone even cobbled together invitations, on purple paper no less, which gave the whole event an ill-deserved veneer of exclusivity and grace (I say ill-deserved, as between them, my mates invited the bulk of the English speaking world, a lot of whom just ended up fingering each other).  All night long, as the Tamperer continued to ask what she was going to look like with a chimney on her, I just couldn't shake the impression that my presence there - as a devoutly serious and rather limp young man - was rather... well, incidental.  In fact, I was pretty certain that inviting me to my own birthday party had just been a discreet means of thinning out the deposit.

We’d hired out two floors.  Unfortunately - and unbeknownst to us - they were the first and third floors: the second was hosting the AGM for the Nottingham Gay Alliance.  I spent the whole night pulling glumly at a bottle of Reef, in the company of people I (at best) didn’t know or (at worst) didn’t particularly like, ducking out for an occasional breather to see what the gays were up to downstairs.  I remember standing outside at the end of the night, glazed in the watery electric heat of a purple neon sign and waiting for a cab, wondering just what the hell was going on.

But I digress.  Whilst that was the most memorable thing about 1999 (that, and Robbie Williams' delusions of rock stardom becoming briefly, terrifyingly real), the second most memorable thing was playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d jump into my DeLorean now, and go back to those final months, the January to May period curtaining off my childhood: I’d tell myself to put down the N64 controller, and go and kiss some girls or something.  Go and earn yourself some hangovers.  Relax, I’d say.  In twelve years' time you’ll have long wavy hair, and a house, and a beautiful fiancé.  You’ll get to wear suits all the time, and generally walk around looking shit-hot.  You’ll still over-think everything, to be fair, but only because you’re getting paid for it.  Oh, and McDonalds don't do sachets of mustard anymore, so enjoy that ride while you can.

By early 1999, with a phalanx of Big, Defining Moments tumbling over the horizon almost every week, Zelda was the only thing in my life that wasn’t poking me in the ribs, reminding me that I’d perhaps not come as far as I should have.  I got it for Christmas, and once it had gotten under my skin - after the first unconvincing fortnight of wandering around Kokiri  Forest, forward-rolling into trees and flinging shrubs at the village-folk - I was hooked.  From that point onwards, Zelda was the centrepiece of a private, self-conscious pledge; to enjoy whatever childhood I had left.

To paraphrase the Ramones, I didn’t wanna grow up: this game was my enabler.

Zelda is acknowledged in many quarters - justifiably I’d say - as The Greatest Computer Game Of All Time.  Kind of in a Beatles way; there’s been better produced, bigger selling games since, but it nonetheless has to be understood in the context of what was around at the time, and everything else that it ushered forth.  I played it recently on my mate Steve’s 3DS, and even with the 3D effect mimicing life after fourteen pints of Mild, the game’s lost absolutely none of its lustre.

It’s a simple story.  As ever, you are Link, a sort of pre-ordained heavenly wood-elf, who comes to understand – across the course of an epic, unravelling, time-travelling narrative – his place as the Chosen One, delivering from evil the land of Hyrule.  We open with troublesome dreams, and clapping thunder, and Princess Zelda managing to once again get herself kidnapped (which is pretty much a prerequisite of Nintendo's princesses).  And lo, Link the warrior is born, and much of what follows is...

Blah blah blah.  Ultimately, to reduce Zelda to a simple plot is like saying It’s a Wonderful Life is just about Christmas.  This is a game about life, and growth, and exploration.  It’s about learning, and connecting tangibly with the world and people around you.  And for a computer game released in 1998, this really was something of an achievement.

It was the first game I remember offering up a sincere, considered and workable sense of freedom.  Because once you really started making headway in Zelda - after the game had taken your hand and ruffled your hair, easing you through some remedial chopping / shrub-throwing exercises - you’d have to wander a long, long way in order to find a border, barrier, or proverbial brick wall.  What Zelda does so peerlessly is to wrap up a fairly conventional ‘saving the princess / world’ narrative in the fantastical mechanisms of a lavish, distant (and yet altogether human, and believable) world, a world engineered to reward curiosity and exploration.

The central plot of Zelda is an obligation, but never a compulsion: you'll spend most of your time wandering, exploring, returning, reassessing, and conversing.  Catching fish and chasing chickens.  There's a massive streak of casualism hewn deep into the guts of Zelda, right up to the very end: even when you've progressed to the pinnacle of swordsman, when you're striding about Hyrule as a double-hard bastard, you'll find yourself irretrievably drawn to some pointless favour for an old crone in a shack, collecting bugs in a jar or something.  With day and night cycles, the eponymous teleporting ocarina, horseback riding, the ability to move seamlessly backwards and forwards through time... movement is easy, fluid.  And because of that, the whole game’s underpinned by the expectation that you won’t just go ploughing through it; that you’ll take the time to meet people, and explore, and understand this foreign world of Hyrule.  There’s none of this eventless trudging through five minutes of looped scenery, meandering back from point B to point A just because you forgot a potion or something.

The GTA series and other non-linear games owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Zelda.  100 hidden collectables?  Seemingly inconsequential sub-games and tasks, that end up as integral to your progress seven years down the line?  Discovering new pieces of equipment, acquiring new skills, and returning to previously inaccessible locations?  Check, check, and check.   Zelda was the tipping point that clued developers up to a realization that an engaging and immersive gaming world was reward in itself; that if it’s lavish and expansive enough, if it’s believably a world, and not just a structured progression of levels or challenges, then it will hold people's attention.  And that’s how Zelda - revealing itself in these delicious little increments - devoured so many of my afternoons, and evenings, and weekends, when I really should have been out getting drunk.  Or at least revising.

With Zelda, Nintendo spun a juicy array of dimensions, environments, climates and aesthetics around what is a thematically quite a simple and linear game – what contributes to the sheer scale of the game is how distinct and how engrossing the developers managed to make each one of its component parts.  Melding seamlessly and instinctively with the control pad, and discovering in the process a practical use for the N64’s thumbstick (which was no mean feat  – most of the early N64 games demanded Olympic-standard ambidexterity), Link walks, runs, rolls and jumps through some fabulously visceral environments and climates.  There’s bustling towns, and meandering mountain ascents; cavernous shrines and temples; parched, dusty wastelands, and oppressive, simmering volcanoes; crystalline caves, and fetid dungeons.  There’s fire, ice, water, forests, deserts, and even a dab of spacey, ethereal weirdness... what’s so impressive about the universe Nintendo engineered in Zelda is that in an indescribably tangible way, each place exists in and of itself, hugely impressive and memorable in its own right, so vibrant you can virtually feel it.  They moved away from the thoughtless, superficial fluff of other adventure games: here, it’s not just that the icy bits are slippy, or that the hot bits are redder than everything else, it’s the interactive attention to detail, the evocative packaging that generates a pervasive sense of hot, cold, wet, dry etc. 

The other noteworthy thing about Zelda was its fabulous soundtrack.  Unfortunately, this passed me by almost completely, as through a processing error at the Britannia Music Club I’d come into possession of Fantastic ‘80s Volumes 2 and 3 (instead of Ozzy Osbourne’s No More Tears): rather than Koji Kondo’s touchingly evocative score, Zelda for me is now umbilically tethered to Toni Basil, the Bangles, and Transvision Vamp.  Although to be fair, nothing compounded the emotional resonance of galloping across Hyrule Field quite so effectively as Cyndi Lauper’s ‘I Drove All Night’.

Zelda was the last game I ever played through a kid’s eyes: fittingly, it was the last game I can ever claim to have completely lost myself in.  It was a game that seemed to be, from the very outset - from all of the excitable articles, and the previews, and a universally captivated press - penning its own legend.  Reinforcing its own myth, in real time.  Games magazines went mental over it.  As an N64 owner, having it was a matter of almost religious significance.  And if you weren’t an N64 owner... well, you’d bloody well go out and get one.  Many did, such were the accolades.  Zelda did for the N64 what Super Mario World had done years previously for the SNES – it gave it a sense of exclusivity.  And not like a misspelt purple ticket for a sanctioned orgy - I mean meaningful, marketable exclusivity.

I’m not doing it justice really, because to lavish Zelda with the detail and discussion it deserves – baring in mind the scale of its innovation, its sheer beauty, the mesmeric need to conquer it - would take many, many pages.  Suffice it to say, if you’ve never played it before, do so.  Immediately.  Manageably epic, sensibly vast, it stands astride the threshold of sandbox gaming, as an unparalleled example of the genre (before it all got slightly too clever for its own good).  It’s an unbelievably rewarding and compelling experience, and it’ll quickly have you hooked beyond all hope.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a cathartic, immersive and memorable distraction in the midst of some considerable turmoil.  When I wasn’t playing it, I always seemed to be edgy, and nervous, and churning, my anorexic sense of self-esteem colliding with an impending sense of growing-up, and change.  So in a bittersweet way, I’ve always cherished and celebrated Zelda as a sort of self-conscious swansong for my childhood.  It’s strange, looking back: that kind of perspective tends only to reveal itself in hindsight, but I was absolutely aware of it at the time - this End of Days, this conclusion.  Hence the special place it continues to occupy for me to this day.

I’ll close with another thing that happened in 1999: the release of American Pie.  I remember watching it at the pictures and just thinking yeah, righto.  All those cheerful, scrappy, gorgeous Yanks... growing up for me – and a few others, it turns out - was just a matter of jarring biological necessity, and those final months of mountainous self-realisation just rammed home exactly where seven prurient years of single-sex public schooling had got me: pathologically afraid of girls and hangovers.  Zelda was the standard-bearer for my own personal resolution, to enjoy what little remained of being a kid.

And there it remains today, slightly dusty, holding hands with Billy Ocean on the one side, and the diminishing simplicities of childhood on the other.  Gawd bless it.