Video gaming is nothing without its heroes or villains, but what about those “friends” the Big Evil Bad Guy has filling up warehouse districts and mushroom kingdoms all across the multiverse? Without goons and henchmen, the Ganons and Bowsers of the world wouldn’t stand a chance. Dudes like Dr. Wiley would be issuing ultimatums at sunset and getting their shit pushed in by dawn. Let’s give a little love to the ubiquitous “baddie.” We’re going to have a look at some of the more colorful guys, gals, monsters and robots who decided that under-the-table cash from a cartoon psychopath sounded better than the drive-thru or the Merchant Marine. This will likely be a multi-part series, but I’ll do five at a time. Get out your autograph books!

I was kidding, you fucking nerd. Put that shit away and pay attention.

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Special thanks today to the people on various websites who rip every sprite out of every game, thus making this an easy image hunt. Also thanks to Jakub Steiner for showing me that you can, in fact, make animated gifs in GIMP, and that it’s not that hard. My dumb ass just never knew it was there. Mind like a steel trap. Anyway…

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BLARGG/LAVA MONSTER

Super Mario World, 1990

Blargg’s responsibility of swimming through molten rock isn’t difficult in terms of complexity or stress level. He’s just the only one on the crew who’s able to survive doing it. You can tell on his face that he doesn’t give a fuck. His job’s secure. His job is easy (for him). And you know what? It’s fun. At least he can make it fun.

I’ve always appreciated the look on this character’s face. To this day, when playing through SMW, I can’t suppress a laugh when I see his ol’ razzle-dazzlin’ ass lurch upward from the lake of fire. Blargg, you make lava a not so bad place to hang out… unless you’re killing me, in which case, you can go fuck yourself.

FLEAMAN/HUNCHBACK

Castlevania series, 1986 – present

I have played the Castlevania games for more than twenty years now, and this little bastard’s weird jumping behavior still gives me apoplexy about half the time. I don’t think “hunchback” is a terribly nice thing to say about someone who can’t help being shaped like an unspeakably ugly Fibonacci swirl, so we’ll call him Fleaman (his name in later titles in the series). Fleaman is a professional, fully bonded and accredited asshole. He is a state-registered, card-carrying, world-class piece of shit. I think Fleaman bites you to hurt you, but since all most enemies in Castlevania have to do is touch you, he could just be doing that. Gently pressing the palm of his hand on your chest while you scream in agony.

The best part about his little animations is that he’s very clearly laughing at you. Simon Belmont, you may think you’re a bad motherfucker, but this freaky little dude slightly larger than a house cat will just start bouncing around when you show up, giggling at you like you just told a joke. Stow the Vampire Killer whip for these guys and just get a good 12-gauge shotgun and some buckshot.

In later installments of the series (SotN for example), Fleaman even gets some gear upgrades. Dracula issues him a pint-sized suit of plate armor and an axe twice that must weigh more than three of him. He makes it work, trust me. Fleaman will never look a gift horse in the mouth. If you’re giving him something to murder with, his arms are wide open.

Fuck these guys, but they’re also a fantastic poster-child for the concept that Castlevania monsters take their employment with Dracula very seriously. Who the fuck wouldn’t? If your boss was a legendary ancient vampire with unspeakable magical powers, the combination of leadership morale and piss-dribble terror would be pretty motivating.

THIS STUPID WITCH OR LEPER OR LIZARD PERSON OR WHATEVER

Ninja Gaiden (NES version), 1988

Projectile attacks from enemies in video games are capable of devastating fuckery, especially when one is trying to jump, dispatch more immediate threats, and generally not die. The Hammer Brothers are well-known pros, but whatever this thing from Ninja Gaiden is supposed to be, it’s got them handily outclassed in two ways:

• Placement/Position

• Adding insult to injury by knocking me backward mid-jump with what looks like a wooden toy sword so that I fall off-screen

My mind sees this thing and immediately assumes it’s female, not even because of the pink robe or because the green skin screams “Halloween witch.” I can’t find the names of any Ninja Gaiden NES enemies besides the bosses. Here’s my head-canon/theory for a 32-year-old NES game:

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Sewer Bitch was born with the green skin of a mythological hag, but sadly she had no talent for black magic, nor for the morally ambiguous soup recipes. She couldn’t even use a cauldron without burning her knees while she stirred it. Seething with dysphoric wanderlust, Sewer Bitch left the bright lights and chrome lining of hag society, taking up residence in a sewer (hence the name). To further divorce herself from her peers, she discarded the designer leopard-skin-print leotard worn by all modern hags. A soiled old white bedsheet, tinged pink from probably having been washed with someone’s color load, would serve her purposes much better.

To arm herself against the omnipresent rats, the outcast spent years of her idle hours gathering property stakes and packing twine in order to fashion some weapons. Not being terribly bright, and having seen someone play Legend of Zelda once on a rainy night through their bedroom window, Sewer Bitch handmade hundreds of crude, ungainly wooden “swords.” At first, opponents and onlookers would mock. Oh, how they would mock… but Sewer Bitch knew something they didn’t and couldn’t know. She’d alley-oop that chunk of wood upward as if granny-shooting a basketball, and the dumb bastards would inevitably walk right into it.

Eventually, the strange talents of the filthy monster-woman came to the attention of Jacquio, who hired her on the spot.

“Just stay here on this one impossibly tall pillar,” the demonic sorcerer told her. “Move back and forth a little bit, sure, but there’s not much point. Just keep dropping your shitty wooden knives into the space between this one and the one to your left. Ryu Hyabusa won’t even know what to do. He’ll just turn around and go home.”

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SMILING TRAMPOLINE (I KNOW IT’S NOT AN ENEMY, IT HELPS YOU, SHUT UP, I’M STILL PICKING IT)

Felix the Cat (NES), 1992

I really can’t help but admire, even envy this fella. He’s a little springboard Felix can jump on to get some extra height, usually so Felix can find giant bags in the sky and crawl into them. Trampy (his name for the purpose of this article) doesn’t worry too much about that. He doesn’t need to know what the cat does inside the giant floating bag. He’s happy right where he is. Joyous, even.

This sentient, sapient being’s sole function in life is to literally wait for Felix (or God forbid, someone else) to jump on him. The poor bastard exists to be stepped on. There’s no better way to phrase it.

And he’s fucking smiling.

Trampy, I hope you’re still doing well, wherever you are. I hope you’re still smiling out there, giving cheerfully of yourself without any expectations of compensation, living a life of friendly altruism in some pleasant 8-bit meadow. You always helped me when I needed you, and when Felix needed more tiny round pictures of himself so that he could finally transform his weird little car into an even weirder tank. I ain’t even tryin’ to talk shit on you, my man. Stay golden. I just wanted everyone to see you shine. You’re beautiful.

BUBBLE (YES, IT’S CALLED BUBBLE, YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE)

Legend of Zelda II: the Adventure of Link, 1987

Zelda II is a fucking abusive game. If Zelda II were a human father, he’d never wear a belt, because it’d never leave his raw-knuckled fist. Zelda II is swinging the buckle end because it’s had too much to drink again. The two types of Bubble behavior exemplify the game’s needless cruelty perfectly. Normally, Bubbles move in a fairly slow diagonal pattern in the Palace areas, bouncing from floor to ceiling. They can be a pain in the ass when the ceiling is low, but otherwise they’re manageable. Bubbles can even be killed for 50 XP, as opposed to their antecedents in the first game, who cannot.

So first of all, let’s clear this up right now: while you can kill them, choosing to do so is both time-consuming and risky. They drain life and magic, so they aren’t really to be fucked with unless your Zelda II skills are tight as a drum or you have some ready means of recovery handy that being drained of magic won’t fuck up for you. You have to get pretty close to them even with Link’s fully-charged sword, and every split fucking second a Bubble isn’t being hit, it’s moving… toward you.

That brings me to my second observation… some of the little floating skully bois move with an alacrity that would make a hummingbird pack up its shit, forfeit, and go home to cry. They travel in the same 45° bumper-path, just much faster. That’s really all the Bubble requires in order to be to be scary in Zelda II. Catching one of these in a low-ceiling walkway is more stressful than being audited by the IRS while your house is on fire and you’re trapped inside it. Best of luck. When multiple slow and fast Bubbles occupy an area, you’re in for a real Kentucky-fried shitfest. Just spread ’em and think of Hyrule, Link.

Thank you for tuning in once again, boils and ghouls.

And if you ever wonder what kind of shit I get up to when I’m not here, you know where to find me.

(there’s a hyperlink in the text, please don’t come to my house you animals)

Stay Retro!

You really can’t go wrong with some Super Mario action. It’s been clear-as-a-bell true since the poor bastard first dug in his heels and made a giant ape his hammer-bitch. The plucky plumber and his perpetually overshadowed brother Luigi have since stood as the mascots – no, the AMBASSADORS – for Nintendo across the world. When the NES hit our shores in ’85 and we first took a crack at the original Super Mario Brothers, it’s been simpatico.

I can still remember getting my grey box for Christmas in 1990. My supplemental was a starter set of three games: Castlevania III, Contra, and that glorious smiling flying asshole on the cover of Super Mario Brothers 3. I was quickly convinced that SMB3 was the hard-wire shit, and it was.

But I had no idea what was coming. The NES had a big brother, and it had one barn-burner of a Mario game. To quote the late, great Captain Lou Albano: Often imitated, but never duplicated.

Super Mario World hit Western shores (no doubt blasting “Immigrant Song” on a boombox) in the late summer of ’91. I don’t need to sit here and run my trap about this being one of the best games of all time; 20,000,000+ copies sold can’t be wrong. When viewed within its place in time, SMW understandably changed everything, because it was Mario squared. In typical Nintendo R&D fashion, work began as soon as a previous project ended. Shigeru Miyamoto (the man we have to thank for all of this) had come up with the idea of setting a Mario game in a “dinosaur land” back during SMB3’s run, and had even conceptualized Yoshi by then. Though some difficulty was anticipated when it came to tackling a new platform, the team’s trepidation was balanced by the promise of far greater capability – the limits of the NES were a thing of the past, and it was time to make some art.

Yoshi, the original martyr-complex beta-male.

The story of SMW picks up right where the 3^rd NES game left off… or I suppose a little bit afterward. The brothers decide to treat Princess Toadstool to a nice vacation in… you guessed it… fucking Dinosaur Land. Why no, Mario, I don’t expect anything horrible or tragic to happen. Not here on this landmass full of monsters. Needless to say, Her Highness vanishes, and it turns out that 12 pack will have to wait. The boys have a princess to rescue… again. After looking around a little bit, Mario and Luigi find a huge fuckoff dinosaur egg, but thankfully its tenant is friendly. Out pops a goofy, soft-serve little dinosaur named Yoshi, and the first thing he does is complain that some of his kin have also been taken. AND GUESS WHO DID IT?

Turns out, not a single goddamn one of them learned their lesson.

You guessed right.

While the basic concept of SMW is a snug fit with its predecessor,s there’s so much more going on that the comparison must end there. Koopas and Goombas make up a thin sliver of the pie chart when it comes to enemies; you’ll be harangued by dinosaurs, the coolest moles ever, Bullet Bills the size of a goddamn house, lava monsters (my favorite), and huge terrible assholes in ill-fitting football pads. THOSE GUYS. In a shining early example of clever AI and design, Chargin’ Chuck is… well, he’s inventive when it comes to assaulting you at every turn. Mario can spin jump in addition to his normal move set, which is helpful when you need to, oh say, bounce off giant saw blades or body-drill your way through some blocks. Sometimes Yoshi (or one of his color-themed cousins) will show up to give you a hand. Yoshi is pretty useful for two things: eating shit that’s about two hand spans in front of him and taking the fall like a dope when you need some extra air time on a jump. A lot of the same power ups are around, but this time instead of a raccoon suit or any of that shit you just get the sickest cape this side of James Brown’s id. Not only can you get it to behave similarly to the raccoon leaf in SMB3, you can even parachute-glide insane distances with it. Mario and Luigi Die Hard their way through forests, seas, caves, ghost houses (yes, entire houses full of ghosts) and castles to put the hot stop on all of King Koopa’s brats… all the time knowing that Big K is waiting.

SMW has a save function, which is entirely necessary because this game isn’t just some mindless platform jumper. There are some steep challenges, including but not limited to:

• saws everywhere
• entire rooms literally flooded with ghosts who mock the very life in your veins
• an ample amount of secret shit, namely some Star Road levels that get Evel-Kneivel-on-meth intense
• tons of thwomps; is he reproducing, I swear, how do they even have sex
• pissed off triceratops that are apparently named Reznor (BOW DOWN BEFORE THE ONE YOU SERVE)
• I hope you like those jet-black invincible munchy-plants because it turns out they’re like kudzu here
• entire sections of the game world without terra firma, offering you only the aimlessly drifting platforms you’ve come to dread
• the ceiling just falling, not centered on you but you know, fucking everywhere

Obviously the graphics kick the shit out of anything on the NES, with a comparatively rich color depth and other luscious details like parallaxing skies and pleasingly detailed animation. The sound stays neck in neck with the visuals; SMW’s soundtrack is one of those OSTs that I can listen to the “extended” versions of on YouTube and never get tired of. There’s a ton of character in the music, most notably (to me) the underground BGM and the “athletic” music.

Two other aspects of SMW that it should be praised for are its replay value and its overall charm. 8-bit graphics only showed us in so much detail; it turns out that those Italian boys have a lot of character, and so do their friends and foes. The appeal was (and is) universal.

I rate Super Mario World an 8/10. It’s one of the cornerstones of retro gaming, a pivotal point of acceleration for one of the world’s most recognizable and well-loved cultural icons.

Thanks for reading! Stay Retro!