Throwback Multimedia
Groovin’
Behind bars
Yes those are lines in my hair. Hersey Hawkins ran 3, I ran 2.
All together
Holiday Inn Brunch
Hilarious face.
White pants?!
Toughest Video Games Ever
This post was spurred by this reddit thread about the subject matter of toughest video games. I sifted through the comments and my own childhood memory and came up with this list. I haven’t seriously played video games since college so most of my analysis of this list was done when I was between the ages of 6-13. Being so young also probably made the games harder but maybe not. Bud will reminisce this list with me.
Doom (1993)
Iddqd. Do I really need to go further? Without god mode and the cheat code for the BFG9000, I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have gotten past the first few levels. This game was the first FPS shooter that gained widespread popularity. I believe Wolfenstein appeared before Doom but Doom was the pioneer for games like Quake and Unreal Tournament. The blood was horrific in 1993 and compared to today’s standards it amazing at how much we’ve been desensitized. The screenshot brings up my worst Doom fears.
ToeJam and Earl (1991)
The two player mode picture to the right is exactly how I recall ToeJam and Earl on Sega Genesis. The two player split screen was an awesome addition to this game. The purpose was to find spaceship parts but I mainly remember doing a lot of standing around and feeling lost. This doesn’t necessarily make the game hard but I don’t recall ever advancing. The game reminds me of being lost without a GPS system.
Myst (1993)
Another game that isn’t exactly hard in that it takes skill to advance, it’s just mentally exhausting hard. There are literally no enemies and I think that just frustrated me more. I would spend hours walking around the island trying to figure out anything at all. It was wandering with no purpose through a world that gave no direction. This challenge was probably made more difficult because I was 10 but I made little progress in an extraordinary amount of time.
Bayou Billy (1989)
I was given this game as a present and played it for about a week. My recollection is that Billy had a knife and the crocs in the screen shot weren’t exactly easy to take down. A driving sequence in a jeep also comes to mind as incredibly difficult. I can’t recollect advancing past the first level or two. After a while you just completely give up and never insert the cartridge into the machine again.
Marble Madness (1991)
This was a fun game. Time would wind down as you progress through mazes as a marble. Difficulty level was hard to very hard. Falling off was the norm and advancing levels not commonplace up to a certain point. Amazingly there were only 6 levels and This was a game I never beat.
Ecco The Dolphin (1992)
The main thing I about Ecco on Genesis was never getting passed the 2nd level. On the back of the case and they had a picture of a whale that I always wanted to get to. Problem was I couldn’t get past this Octopus level. In the first level Ecco was joined by two dolphins and I would just do flips with them until I got bored. We actually used this cartridge and jammed it into the Nintendo to keep the game down and help it work. Ecco was forgotten about and retrieved years later.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989)
Never came close to beating this game. The electric seaweed was agonizing and if you were ever lucky enough to make it to the rooftop, your journey would end there. Collecting pizza and disarming bombs comes to mind as challenges. Raphael’s Sai’s were really short and once you lost Donatello, game over. This game was when TMNT was huge and probably my favorite game for a period of time. Those fucking tanks on the rooftop though.
Battletoads (1991)
Battletoads was an awesome game and routinely mentioned among the hardest games ever. Rash, Zitz, and Pimple will live on forever. I can’t recollect ever beating the bike race level to the right. There were only 3 continues and this level moved fast and the walls seemed to come out of nowhere to take you down. A big hand punch brings back memories. We loved this game though even though I never saw an ending.
I want to close with an incredible depiction of Spy vs Spy
Upper Dublin – Home Sweet Home
This is now the 17th day since I arrived on my 27 day stint in UD. That opening line makes it seem like I’m in rehab in the area but I’m only home until I settle on my house in the city. Being at the house where I grew up has it’s pluses and minuses like any other place. The quiet neighborhood is quite nice and the peaceful nature makes for excellent running at any time of the day. The hour commute to the city is bothersome but not horrific for a mere 27 days (although certainly one of the worst parts). It’s a great place to live if you are looking to settle down, avoid all action, and raise a family. With that being said, I want to give a few specific examples I’ve seen.
I’m going to pull a few lines from Urban Dictionary’s definition of Upper Dublin so outsiders get a clear picture of the stereotype.
Upper Dublin –
A small suburb outside of Philadelphia that’s very estranged from the rest of civilized society. The Jews are rich as hell and get drugs and alcohol to get drunk or high everyday or on the weekends with their parents money. The Asians, all of who are Korean, are just as rich as the whites but they don’t associate with anyone else except for other Asians. All the girls here are either dumb as shit and slutty or ugly and smart as balls and have no personality. There’s lots of drugs. The po9 are always out in full force, but they have no clue. You want zannies? perkaset? weed? hash? pcp? meth? coke? You got it! Come to good ole’ Upper Dublin, home of the flying Cardinals. Ever wonder why it’s the flying cardinals? That’s right-they’re high…
Snippets from Urban Dictionary probably isn’t the most accurate so I’m going to give a few more well thought out observations.
The Good Old Days
I’m hoping that some people out there found the videos below to be pretty entertaining. I think the idea of recording your kids is such a stupid idea in the present, but an amazing one 25 years later. First I have to give my dad credit for having the foresight of transferring the tapes to DVD’s so that I had the ability to upload them to YouTube. I have to imagine I’m in the 1% of the population who has childhood tapes from the 90’s on YouTube.
What really excites me the most is that I can see how I was as a child. My mind’s interpretation of how I acted like a kid was way different than I actually was as a kid. I remember swishing 3’s, fielding ground balls, scoring goals, and basically being a boss. When my 30 year old self (I’m actually 29 but I don’t see any reason to not say I’m 30, I’ve already prepared myself mentally) looks back I can see I was just a little schmagwap. And I was one of the better athletes! Just imagine how all the other kids turned out. It’s hilarious when I’m rooting for myself to score baskets and I’m chucking up airballs. You don’t perceive yourself like that but when someone documents it and you can look back on it years later, it’s a real eye opener. It almost gives me more insight to who I’ve become as a person. How I acted then and how I was comparatively to other little kids, it’s just more info that helps me grow as a person. I have to believe most families in the 90’s didn’t own a camcorder and certainly didn’t turn them into DVD’s. Most people can’t share with everyone else what life was like back then. Who would have known Jeff was getting owned by Laura when he was 4 (by far my favorite video)!
Most people are always trying to move forward and not remembering the past. I usually try to be this way because you can never change what has already happened. However, when footage like this comes back in front of you, its hard not to be effected by it. What kind of a kid you were (from my generation) is usually not readily available. I’m sure people who have only known me in the past 10 years think what a cute kid I was and how did I possibly become an immature alcoholic with odd music taste. This will be the last I post about the old days and remembering things so enjoy it while it lasted because this will just be another memory.
Stortz Family Throwbacks
These clips are from the early 90’s and won’t have an interest to most but for people who know the family, they should provide some entertainment.
Being a Kid
I was at my parents house last night and stumbled across our old home videos that were on an 8mm tape and then re-recorded on a dvd. These tapes start from when I was 6 (1989) until I hit about 14. I sat down for an hour or so and started watching them and they are really quite remarkable. I’ll upload a few of the more classic moments to youtube and post them on the blog so stay tuned. I have this one outfit from the early 90’s that you couldn’t imagine until you see it. Also there is a footage of a classic Stortz-Schmidt 2v2 bball game that I’ll add. It seems stupid at the time to record things but when you look at tapes 20 years ago, you start to appreciate where you are and where you’ve been. The present at the time seems so normal but viewing it 20 years into the future is nothing you could have thought of.
The thing I really took from watching the tapes is how care free and innocent you are as a kid. Life is just sports, hanging out and goofing around. No responsibilities. Just living life. When I think of the last 10 years of my life I realize how much they differed from the first 20 years of my life. Night and day. I had so much potential as a youth… and now I’m a fully grown ass man. It’s actually kind of depressing. Nevertheless, life is about the moment and not getting hung up on the past. Nothing comes from the past but memories. You can learn from it but the present is where your mind is and needs to be. These types of posts remind me severely of Calvin and Hobbes.
90’s Memorabilia
There is one great thing about getting older and that’s remembering shit you did when you were little. It brings a level of happiness when you think of things that made you happy. As a kid I’d wake up at 6:30am every Saturday morning and watch cartoons all day. These were days when I had something other than alcohol to give me excitement. All that being said, I’ve chosen some shows, games, movies, and people that will most likely go down in history as forgotten about unless people like me continue to use their blogs to promote them. Without further ado, I give you a list of things you would have forgotten about if I didn’t bring them up.
Snood
I was a little surprised to see Snood as an Ipad and Gameboy Advance game which makes Snood way more relevant than I thought at first. This game sticks in my mind as a game I played throughout high school computer classes. It was extremely challenging and you’d have to make precise shots off of walls to clear levels before the level crashed down. I spent countless hours trying to master this game. I beat level 13 for a smoking girl in high school and I’m pretty sure it increased my chance to score .0001%.
Denver the Last Dinosaur
Quite possibly my favorite cartoon growing up for a period of time. This or Ducktales. For some reason I remember the one character being named Shades but the others escape me. Denver liked to skateboard which I must have thought was awesome. Wikipedia enlightened me that “episodes often focused on issues of conservation, ecology, and friendship”, but that doesn’t ring a bell. I remember jumping around to the theme song fairly often. I was going to use Camp Candy for this spot but I may have been the only viewer.
Tag Team – Whoomp There It Is
For a few weeks in 1993 Whoomp There It Is was popular. This wasn’t a particularly good song but you just had to know about it because people would be saying it all the time. I recall listening to it in my Walkman thinking I was a badass. It was also the theme song for the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies season and was featured prominently during the 1993 World Series. Between innings at one game, Tag Team performed the song on the field, with special lyrics related to the Phillies. With 4 million views I suppose more people remember this than I thought.
Land Before Time
When reading about Denver I came across this “the show ran for two seasons, as the dinosaur boom that had followed The Land Before Time waned, causing viewership to drop.” So I obviously wasn’t the only kid into dinosaurs in the late 80’s. This movie was my watch that put me under hypnosis. I specifically remember having 5 plastic cups with Littlefoot, Cera, Petri, Ducky, and Spike and every morning my mom would give me a glass with a different character. Days with Cera were the absolute worse. Ducky also carried the catch phrase Yep Yep Yep which I’m sure I said adorably cute at 7.
Clarence Weatherspoon
Baby Barkley really gets lost in the mix of 76ers history. I’d put him a notch above Sharone Wright in the remembrance category. He was the best player (or close to) for many years while the team just sucked completely. The real reason I have him in this post is because Evan used him in Scattergories for things found in a Gym and the letter was C. I believe he got vetoed (Evan is the king of questionable answers) but I believe this should pass. It’s not like Spoon is relevant but the C things in gym is too tough to veto it. (chest press, cybex, collar…)
Here were some more cartoons that brought back a lot of memories. If the show wasn’t animated, there was a great chance I didn’t watch it.
Remembering a False Reality
I had a very strange experience happen last night that brought back a variety of memories from my past. A few of us pooled some money together and bought an NES & N64 for the fun of it. The console arrived and last night was the first night that we got together to play. After a few minutes of trying to set up the system, we didn’t have the right components for the TV. This caused a minor delay as we ordered the proper part from Amazon. However, while trying to set up the Nintendo, it brought back precise memories on playing the system as a kid. The reason I’m using this idea for a post is that the way I remember the memories became clearer and clearer the more I used the machine 20 years later.
My memories in present day of playing Nintendo are all glorious occurrences. Touchdown passes to Drew Hill, swapping out Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never getting past the rooftop, finding nuke, warp whistling past world 4, and getting bull rushed by Bald Bull. The TV was 96 inches, the graphics are crystal clear and the machine always works and has no load times. If I had never attempted to set up a Nintendo for the rest of my life, I would go on living in a false reality. Last night after attempting to set up the NES and getting to a point where we were blowing into the game crossing our fingers that the Tecmo Bunny (Adam called him a little buddy) popped up on the screen, I began to actually remember my childhood past memories.
There were good Nintendo games and there were bad Nintendo games. Some you’d put in the system and have no problems. Others you’d have to adjust, blow, and use every trick in the book to get to work. The TV I played on was a 17″ POS that you had to sit 6 inches from to see what the ant like characters on the screen were doing. Some games would be so hard that you’d never play them. At 10 years old it was most likely that you didn’t have the intellectual fortitude. Bayou Billy sticks out as one of those games. A testimonial to this point is that I played the Oregon Trail (Mac not NES obviously) for the first time since my childhood and floated my wagon down the river to close the game on my very first time through. The point is though that if I had never sat there last night blowing into the game, these memories would have been distorted forever. They’d still be my memories, but they wouldn’t be truth because I’d forgotten truth.
All NES talk aside, it brings up an interesting idea on what is the truth? The way I remember something is my truth, but your truth may be something completely different because you remember it differently. If two days ago I told you about my NES remembrance, it would have been completely different than the ideas I’ve put in this post. Is it better to remember things in a positive light even if it’s not the truth or to be disappointed with reality? Sort of follows the cliche “ignorance is bliss”. I think it’s important to keep in mind that everyone has a varying viewpoint and keeping an open mind for EVERYTHING is important. Living in the present is a weird thing when you compile so much information over a lifetime. Everything you’ve been through shapes you into what you are today. I just veered off on a tangent and am going to end this post before I force feed it with more mindless drivel.
I Want What He’s Having
The idea was first brought to my attention years ago by a friend of mine. The idea is simple: kids are straight-up trippin’ balls!
I don’t have any scientific data to support this notion, but the evidence is quite obvious if you simply spend some time around children. I believe that for the vast majority of children, up until around 8 years of age, give or take, because the brain is still developing, they are not yet full human beings. Instead, they are almost-humans, perpetually wacked out of their gourds.
Logic tells me it’s likely brain chemistry and early developmental stages of becoming a full-fledged human being. I don’t know if it’s the juices in the brain still swirling around or the very fact that as children, things are still novel, so everything they do and say is, in a sense, a test. They are testing out the world and their environment, learning from it with each and every move and calculated and un-calculated decision. They are like mini scientists without any guidelines or instructions manual.
They pee on stuff. They make funny faces and sounds. They laugh at seemingly everything and nothing. They scream for no apparent reason. They run around in circles shouting nonsense, as if it’s utterly important; I wonder if their gibberish very well may be gospel if we could only interpret it.
What if they’re tripping because they are still feeling the effects of getting over living a previous life? What if it’s because as the brain develops they have yet to realize how fucked up the world is, so they are untainted by it, just out to have a good time? I obviously don’t have any of these answers but when I see kids, I see how much fun they have and I often think to myself, I wish life were still that much fun and that simple: test and re-test. Remember how great a simple toy was as a child? And how if someone handed it to you now, you’d be like “what the hell, why are you giving me this? Go away I have expense reports to review.” Whatever the reason may be, I think every one of us at one point or another would relish the opportunity to just go balls-out, that is to say, to re-live childhood, or at least the good parts of it.
The Long Lost Early 90’s
The Early 90’s was when my memory starts kicking in. I get a few memories from Pre-school but nothing major. Once I hit the later years of elementary school, I believe you start to develop a better understanding of what is happening around you. That’s why I remember the early 90’s and some of the products and events that stood out. Here is a list of some random items and topics that I will never forget.
Video Game Consoles – Neo Geo & 3DO
I would assume that most people born before me would never have known these two systems even existed. Throw in Sega CD and these were probably some of the biggest console flops that no one owned. I didn’t even have a friend, aside from the McGrath’s, who owned one of these consoles. I remember the Neo-Geo costing $650 bucks or something ridiculous. Fatal Fury and Metal Slug were the bread winners for series. I have not seen a 3DO in my life. The popular systems were the ones they made games for and that’s what people played. The progression was Atari, then NES, next was Sega Genesis and SNES, then Playstation and N64, then PS2, Xbox 360, Wii. PC picked up steam when a connection fast enough to run the games with no lag was huge to gaming. Many consoles were out there though that didn’t catch on and these are two that come to mind. Lynx is another.
Addams Family Movies
I was a huge fan of the Addams Family movies. I know the TV series ran in the 60’s but these movies were my first introduction to the family. I particularly liked Cousin ITT and Thing. I sort of remember thinking Wednesday, played by Christian Ricci, was hot. Pugsley just got on my nerves and I didn’t even realize Fester was played by Christopher Lloyd years later when I knew who Christopher Lloyd was. Addams Family Values, the sequel, I believe was when Wednesday and Pugsley went to some camp which wasn’t as good as the first one when Uncle Fester came back brainwashed from a Bermuda Triangle incident. I honestly forget but I still remember enjoying these movies tremendously as a kid. I think it was the quirkiness of the characters and the death jokes.
1992 Dream Team
The greatest basketball team ever assembled. They defeated their opponents by an average of almost 44 points a game which I would consider embarrassing the opposition. They took home gold in 92′ and stamped the USA as the most dominant basketball nation existing. Obviously the world has caught up in terms of talent since 92′ but this was a historic team and we will never see this type of annihilation again in history. The committee was not going to include Barkley because of his aggressive personality but he proved it was a wise decision by going 71% from the floor and 7 or 8 from 3 point land in the tournament. I bought a set of Dream Team player cards that I still have today. They aren’t worth anything.
Jansport & Eddie Bauer
There was a pretty funny scene in 21 Jump Street when they are discussing if you should wear one strap vs two that I remember pretty accurately being the case in grade school. What type of bag you had could also bring about some ridicule. A black Eddie Bauer, 2 strap look is what I used to rock. Remember when you’d have 5 big ass text books and it would bulge your bag out? I was like 4 ft tall carrying around 50 lbs of books on my bag, torture. I wish I had some photos of my old backpacks because I don’t think it was until 6th grade that I got a real backpack. I’d have TMNT or GI Joe. I remember taking pride in having a neat and tidy backpack. A pocket to hold #2 Ticonderoga pencils was a must. I swapped to a .07mm lead mechanical pencil in high school and college.
Roller Blades
The move from Abec 1 bearings to Abec 3 was a major change in my life. I always wanted to move onto Abec 5’s but I’m just not that much of a wild man. We even built a two foot ramp that we’d do minor tricks off of. Rollerblades were also essential to roller hockey which I believe we had a decent time playing. It’s a little bit sad to see these lose popularity but I still see some people whizzing by on Kelly Drive with them. I also remember taking some serious spills when your brake got so worn out it would be nothing.
LA Gear
I never owned a pair of LA Gear light up shoes but they were still pretty cool in terms of hype. I suppose people could see you walking around in the dark which must be their greatest advantage. I honestly can’t think of another reason why you’d want your shoes to light up. With a little research though it seems like they sold 100 million pairs throughout time. That is not a typo. They’ve also failed to regain popularity but that shouldn’t be surprising considering their spokesmen were Luke Walton and Ron Artest.
Tandy Computers
Did anyone not have a computer class in middle school? We had these types of machines, I honestly can’t remember if they were Tandy or some 486 stands out in my mind. They tried to teach us spreadsheets and how to type but all I remember is playing arkanoid and Gorilla in QBasic. I think back to those days and do believe that Mrs. DeFranco teaching me how to use the homerow is one of the greatest things I’ve ever learned. Even though I thought she was the worst teacher, she taught me the most useful skill. I also learned a decent amount about DOS which I’m sure kids today have never even heard of.