Castlevania

All I do now is act like a ten year old with a big vocabulary, so for a while I'll be scattering video game posts throughout our sprawling gay document.

Okay, so what is a "castlevania," anyway? And if you plan to fight every imaginable monster in the universe, why bring a whip? Really, a whip? You seriously expect to vanquish, like, Medusa's floating head and big birds launching hunchbacks at you and the Grim Reaper with a whip?

So I get the game running and, like a Tennysonian bloom, the sickly sweet green of my childhood appears:

As far as start screens go, that's pretty good. I like the bat in particular, because it forces you to conclude (mistakenly) that such a bat must be an incarnation of Dracula, or else an ordinary bat that just happened to be around, when in fact you will be fighting a gigantic, gruesome bat motherfucker in only a few minutes:
Look at that thing! Jesus, it's twice my size. Mighty bat! Now, see the watch icon in the middle center of the screen? Who in fuck builds a timestopping watch, as complicated as that must be, but allows it run for only five seconds at a time?? Not an effective weapon against giant bats, who require at least ten seconds of purgatorial void if they are to be dispatched.

But minor grievances aside, this game still shames 99 percent of its newer, slicker, more seizure-inducing brethren. It's got a simple, satisfying story, and while God knows why some poor sucker questing to defeat an immortal slav/bat who lives in a series of shitty castles would actually stop to pick up bags of money (WTF??), in the end, none of that matters, not after spending four hours in trekking in virtual darkness, besting a surprisingly stiff final villain, and walking out into some sort of Carpathian elysium filled with pine trees that Coleridge himself would have hawked and nibbled. And you get to see the castle crumble, which is gratifying. Not that it would have stood for long anyway. It was real old.

Slothrop: Slothrop is tickled pink with Koko's wrath being directed towards gigantic feral bats, but can't help thinking, nonetheless, that this post is mostly a convenient way of avoiding the real question, which is Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and the necessity of resurrecting Dracula, gathering his bits and pieces which were splayed helter-skelter across the Hungarian and Bulgarian bitch of a meadow, all just to whip his ass again. Plus, starting with the river Styx, boatmen have always been more scary than clowns, and if Slothrop recalls correctly, there's boatmen all over this piece. Explain that, Koko. 

And for further clarification,  ours is a sprawling gay document, true, but that's only because Ass-Head came along and gayified it. Before his braying, Slothrop and Koko were just two mammals proud and secure in their aesthetic love for men. But now you can't turn the corner without anal penetration slapping you in the eye. Donkeys ain't no mammals. 

Ass-Headed Bottom: Truly this is an entertaining post. I am reminded of my youth, spent largely in the basement playing already-obsolete games on the Apple 2E. Now, if we measure our lives by computer graphics (and we can, and we must), we'll notice that those ancient dino-machines--the Commodore 64s and the Apple 2Es--corresponded to the pre-traumatic phase of our infant lives, when graphics, like real people and events, were too rudimentary to trigger self-doubt or despair. 

Think of it this way: last month's Olympics were cruel and depressing; true, Michael Phelps made America look badass, in a lummoxy way, but damn, those poor twelve-year-olds plucked from their families to contort themselves into meaningless medals for dictators were depressing. That eight-year-old girl who thought she was singing, but was in fact just looking pretty while an ugly eight-year-old girl with a better voice sang in a cameraless studio somewhere else? That was depressing. Never mind Vlad "the Impaler" Putin (speaking of vampires) sitting next to George "the... um..." Bush, watching that purgatorial opening ceremony. And surely this notion that the Olympics actually disguise all that is meanest about our natures--all that is bestial in man the political animal--is nothing new. In 1972 the Games blithely went forward even as the Israeli athletes were massacred; in 1980 the issue was the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. How can any of that be fun? The answer: play the Olympics on an Apple 2E. The hammer and sickle can be rendered harmless, and the biathlon entertaining, only on a vintage screen with sixteen or fewer colors:

And when your little Soviet finally crosses the finish line, you can listen to a tinny rendition of the enemy's national anthem without the slightest pang of conscience. And you can turn to your hapless friends (and you did, and you had to) and yell "Suck on my sickle, ya bitches, YEAH!"

Yep, those old computers could make anything, literally anything, innocent and fun. For instance, Adolf Hitler, who in the original "Castle Wolfenstein" was a goose-stepping stick-figure pacing to-and-fro giving periodic heils to his stick-Goerings and stick-Doenitzes in an unadorned square of a room. It was your job--stick-Stauffenberg--to blow him sky-high with the suitcase bomb it's taken you most of the game to acquire. Like so:

(A small bonus, playing this game once automatically earns you more foreign-policy experience than Sarah Palin). Plus you get to blow up Hitler and save the world. And while the reality of Stauffenberg's failure is so depressing I can hardly deal with it if I think of historical human beings who suffered torture and death and the indignity of being played by Tom Cruise, the computer game somehow remains free from guilt; the world only not upsetting. You get to blow up Doenitz and Goering too, remember (in real life the latter cheated the hangman by committing suicide and the former got only ten years at Nuremburg).

Do you remember that shit? When the computer wasn't connected to the internet and to presidential campaigns and failing insurance companies and Hu Jintao reveling in a missing eight-year-old's voice? When it was just you vs. Hitler? That shit was awesome.