FACT! #21

Perhaps the most well known candy bar in America, if not, the world. The standard Hershey Milk Chocolate bar was first developed in 1900 and was released that year along with a almond and peanut variety. The bar received its namesake from Milton Hershey (b. 1857 - d. 1945) and the exact process to manufacture the bar is still not completely understood. The bar originally retailed for 5 cents each and helped the Hershey Foods Corporation (now known as The Hershey Company nowadays) rise to the highest echelons of the food industry.

FACT! #20

Many people are aware of the influence that Disney had on anime after World War II. But most people don't know that Carl Barks (b. 1901 - d. 2000), the man that came to be associated most closely with Donald Duck and crew, was the animator who most influenced a young Osamu Tezuka (b. 1928 - d. 1989) who is known as the "Father of Anime."

Tezuka used many influences from Carl Barks' animation style, such as the large eyes and similar body structure. As seen above, he was a huge fan of Carl Barks and actually sent him holiday letters on a regular basis. Without Barks, anime wouldn't look like it does today.

VVAC's VG Review - Dragon Warrior I Part I

So I've been wanting to talk a bit about the video games I grew up playing. Many of them are considered classics, others are considered crap. Whether they were popular or not doesn't matter much to me as I happened to enjoy them. The game that we're tackling today is, as you probably could guess from the title and the screen shot above, is Dragon Warrior.

This new series on this blog will take place in multiple parts. The majority of the games I played were RPGs and often took many, many hours to get through. As such, I felt the need to cut the much lengthier articles down to make them easier to produce for myself. Lazy, I know.

First released in 1986 in Japan on Sony's MSX personal computer and Nintendo's Famicom system under the name "Dragon Quest," the game proved fairly popular and in 1989, the game was released in America on the NES as Dragon Warrior.

The game helped standardized the RPG genre and is considered by many to be a forefather of the console RPG. Before the release of this game, the vast majority of RPGs were simply text-based adventures with little to no graphics usually based heavily on the pen and paper games such as Dungeons and Dragons.

In this game, you're the descendent of the legendary Erdrick the Great. There really isn't much of a backstory in this particular game and the first real adventure in it is to save the princess of Tantegal castle. As I'll most likely explain the story as I go along, I won't go into too much detail.

When I was a child (physically), I thought that the dragon's head was a bird. I have no idea why.

I do want to mention that I did this on an emulator. Yes, I own the original game itself (many times over, I do believe), but I suck with cameras and wanted to take screenshots. I do not commend using emulators as their legality always seems to be in question, though what I have read time and time again is that it's fine as long as you own the original cartridge.

You start off the game in King Lorik's throne room. He tasks you with the unenviable task of searching for his daughter, Princess Gwaelin. After giving you a little talk about the journey, you're free to go off and explore and kill and all the other awesome stuff an 8-bit avatar can do.

I was hoping to show that I was going to be taking the chests right in front of the king. When else are you going to be able to do that? Well, other than in a boatload of other games ever. 

Once you're free to start moving, you'll quickly find that you're locked inside the throne room. Though they simply put the key in a chest, Enix could've easily made this opening way more epic by using some Saw style tactics. Put the key inside of the hero's right ear and make it so the only way to get it out is to insult one of the guards until they go Mike Tyson and bite the ear off.

I don't know chief, though considering that you spend all your time literally standing right there and not moving, you'll probably not find her. It's not like you're Monk or anything. Great detective work there, Columbo. (Side note, RIP Peter Falk.)

As soon as you leave Tantegal Castle, you're transported to the overworld map. As you can see, the kingdom of Tantegal decided that going all Civil War by having their capital a stone's throw from their enemy's castle was a brilliant idea.

Of course, they don't have ships so there's nothing to worry about there. Except when you realize that they've mastered construction and masonry, yet no one in the planet thought for a second that inventing a way to travel across water was a great idea. The first town, Brecconary, is to the east of the castle and that's usually the first spot you want to go.

...Or, you can run around outside and try to pick fights with things that are famous for being easy to kill, yet opt to destroy you by... How in the hell do slimes attack? Bite? They can't move THAT fast.

Perhaps one of the first things you should do is go to the weapon/armor shop in Brecconary; helpfully differentiated from the other establishments in town with a shield. The inn has an inn sign outside and I can't remember what the item shop has.

As you can see, with the amount of gold you're given, you've got a bit of working to do to get what you really want. I used to start off by getting the Bamboo Pole (really, 10 gold for that? It's a damn stalk of grass), the Clothes (shall we assume the hero's actually nude and his skin is all blue and stuff?) and the leather shield. Nowadays, I go for the Club and just work up the gold to get the Copper Sword and then get my armor from there. Needless to say, the stronger creatures and lay waste to me pretty quickly, so my pickings are slim when it comes to fighting mobs.

Though this time around, I didn't buy the club at first. Instead, I decided to get the Bamboo Pole and get thoroughly whooped by all those smiling monsters out there. When I was younger, I'd get pissed off at these creatures because I thought they were mocking me specifically. Nowadays, it's reassuring that I'm bringing a smile to something's face... Even if it's at the cost of my own life.

Oh! This is what the battle interface looks like. You get four options at top: FIGHT, SPELL, ITEM and RUN. Obviously FIGHT is just attacking with what you have. SPELL and ITEM both bring up menus for you to choose which spell/item you want to use that round and RUN is... Well, you book it or attempt to.

Inns allow you to sleep to recover your stats. The first Inn is 6 gold per night. After checking out the facilities, there's really one room that's locked and another with some dude in it. I'm assuming you sleep in the room with the grey guard in it and he watches you as you sleep. 

"Thou seems to have spent a good night." Bullshit. I spent a night on a brick floor with some creepy dude watching me. If I wanted that, I'd pass out on the road in town like normal.

"I shall see thee again." Only because you know I don't really have any other option in this area. 

The game opted to go pretty hardcore with the Middle English medieval style of speaking. It gets pretty annoying quickly. Then again, you're reading what I'm putting down... So I doubt it'd bug you much.

This is probably the room I slept in. With a creepy guard who happens to be close to death. I totally wanted to give up 1/20th of my income to sleep with a dying guy. This is the best birthday ever!

After wailing on some smiling creatures and killing them, you earn gold and experience points. After a certain amount of experience as been reached, you go up a level. This is usually heralded with a special midi file and a lengthy speech talking about how awesome it is.

Then the reality kicks in. Seriously? I'm seeing red and was hammered by some pathetic tear-drop shaped monster and all I get is +1 attack power? I mean, 6 hit points is good... But come on. I deserve more than that.

When I was a kid, I always thought that this low hill range looked like a stomach... After I found out what the stomach looked like. This is sort of a nice little area to work up when you're strong enough because at the very bottom of this range is an area where much stronger creatures lurk. With its proximity to the castle and village, it's easy to get a few high net kills then run away like a coward to sleep and come back for another.

At a certain level, you gain your first spell, HEAL. This heals your character for a decent amount. When you get this spell, it's worth checking this dude out in Tantegal Castle. He's off to the right of the entrance and heals your magic points for free. You can heal yourself for free without having to go use the inn in Brecconary. Though after a certain point, this can become far more tedious than just paying the 6 gold to sleep with Croaky McDeathmiser.

This is it for the first part of this review-like thing. There's going to be more coming up including the conclusion of the first quest, gaining the ire of some douchebag and we'll be taking bets on how long Croaky McDeathmiser lasts in the Brecconary Inn.

So thank you for reading and I hope you all are ready for the next exciting part...

...Really game? Ouch. I need to /wrist more.

FACT! #19

Originally debuting in 1919, Thimble Theater was a fairly popular comic strip of its time; being distributed by Hearst's "King's Features Syndicate." The cast contained Harold Hamgravy, his girlfriend Olive Oyl and her brother Castor Oyl.

The cast had many adventures, meeting numerous people as a result. Though the most important person that they met happened to be a young sailor. In 1929, Castor and Harold were on an adventure as Castor was attempting to concoct another get rich quick scheme (seemingly because investing in the stock market was going to soon be a bad idea) and had to recruit a sailor to travel by boat to their next destination.

With those forearms, I doubt anyone knows exactly what you are, Popeye.

 

The sailor happened to be named, as most of you probably have guessed, Popeye. Starting off as a very minor character, Popeye became a more frequent character in the strip's storyline over the years. This, in turned, help Thimble Theater grow as a whole. Eventually, Harold Hamgravy was replaced by Popeye as Olive Oyl's beau and soon ended up exiting the cast as a regular.

The rest is sort of history. The strip would eventually be renamed "Thimble Theater starring Popeye" and then simply "Popeye." The strip is still carried and drawn today, over 90 years after its initial appearance and Popeye continues to be a very popular character.

FACT! #18

 
Though many people don't know too much about the man himself, Rube Goldberg (b. 1883 - d. 1970) is famous for his comic work which included Mike and Ike (They Look Alike) and his quirky machines that are designed to turn ordinary tasks into tedious adventures. It's those machines that have made their way into our language in the form of "Rube Goldberg Devices."

Another thing that people may not know about Rube Goldberg is that the highest honor in the comic industry is named after him. The Reuben Award, given out by the National Cartoonists Society, has been around since 1946 and is still given out annually. Rube Goldberg was the president of the NCS at the time and, actually, did not win the award until 1967.

Why talk about Rube Goldberg? There are a ton of different reasons, but perhaps it's the timing. Rube Goldberg was born July 4th, 1883. So happy birthday to the United States of America and Rube Goldberg!

FACT! #17

In 1983, after achieving quite a bit of success in Japan with their Famicom, Nintendo wanted to release their system in the United States. They approached Atari, whom they previously had a negative experience with in licensing Donkey Kong. Because of this, Atari initially refused to distribute the Famicom in the US.

Any hopes they had in getting Atari to distribute the Famicom were absolutely dashed when the video market crashed in the same year. Atari felt the gaming industry was virtually done for and opted against releasing the Famicom as they viewed it as being a money pit.

Long story short, Nintendo opted to release the system themselves in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System. 60,000,000+ units sold later, the NES proved to be a wildly successful system and Atari completely missed out on their opportunity to get a piece of the pie.

FACT! #16

Originally designed in 1860 by Milton Bradley (b. 1833 - d. 1911) himself, the game of LIFE has had an interesting history and a surprisingly dark side to it. While it may seem funny nowadays to turn this childhood classic into a game about death and other horrible realities that are apart of life; you didn't originally need much of an imagination to do that.

Under the name "The Checkered Game of Life" the game looked vastly different and its tone wasn't quite as cheery. For starters, there isn't much in the way of bright colors. Oh, there's also the "RUIN" square on the far right and just to the bottom-left of that? SUICIDE. Yep! Originally you could kill yourself in the game. There's also POVERTY and DISGRACE.

Milton Bradley himself had quite a bit of hardship going on in his life when he designed the game. He was originally a lithographer who was making a decent living on selling images of Abraham Lincoln. Unfortunately, after a letter was sent to Lincoln by a young girl suggesting that he grow a beard; he took that suggestion to heart and indeed grew one rendering thousands of Bradley's images obsolete. The demand for them dropped significantly.

Factoring that in with the impending Civil War, and it's understandable that Bradley's game wasn't going to be the cheeriest ever invented. But he did well with it, the game selling over 45,000 copies in its first year. It saved him from financial ruin and helped lay the foundation for a gaming empire that's still with us today.