Tag: NES

Iron Mike’s gonna rip out your heart and feed it to the racists

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

Mike Tysons PunchOut2

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (1987)

They say sport is the great equaliser, and when it’s as accessible and universal as football, I have to agree. And give sport its dues, it helped break down a lot of race barriers. You’ll still get bananas thrown onto football pitches by knuckle-dragger fans. But as moronic as that is, how does that stack up against Muhammad Ali standing up to the white United States government and telling them he had no quarrel with them Viet Cong?

Continue reading “Iron Mike’s gonna rip out your heart and feed it to the racists” →

The NES is like heroin, and not in a good way

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

NES Logo

Nintendo Entertainment System (1987)

To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, retro, for lack of a better word, is good. Retro is right, retro works. Retro clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the gaming spirit. Retro, in all of its forms; retro for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. Retro is what sells, and everybody wants to be retro.

Continue reading “The NES is like heroin, and not in a good way” →

Top 5 NES Games

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

top5nes

Burkey’s Top 5 NES Games (2019)

The NES, the first bastion of retro goodness – its lively 8-bit chiptunes are as homely as tea by the fire and an Easy Sunday roast. The NES has almost become the retro badge of honour, or even the acid test: you may remember playing Streets of Rage or Tekken against friends, and laugh with a trace of embarrassment to others about it years later. But those games simply don’t dig deep enough into the retro enclaves. A question has to be asked to separate the retro-enthusiast wheat from the chaff: are u old skool enuf for NES?

Continue reading “Top 5 NES Games” →

The Many Jobs of Mario

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

MARIO JOBS LOGO

The Many Jobs of Mario (2019)

Now in his thirties, and still exhibiting no signs of a mid-life crisis, it’s not beyond the remit of a talented man like Mario to have had many different job titles and roles behind him. Actually, you’d have to say that some of Mario’s travails throughout his glittering life are so wild and out there, that him entering a go-kart tournament against his eternal enemy Bowser is now entirely normal. A man so travelled and so adept surely can’t escape the romantic attention of the Princess much longer, can he? All the same, given the rate he goes through jobs, you’d think Mario would be able to afford better clothes than his patchy dungarees.

Continue reading “The Many Jobs of Mario” →

There are a lot of top first date ideas, but none of them involve hiking

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

ice climber

Ice Climber (1986)

It’s enough to make any man self-conscious. After weeks of pestering and creepy-crawliness, you’ve finally secured a date with that girl and she hasn’t yet deigned to ghost you or cancel right at the last minute with no mention of a reschedule. You’ll now be relying on two things to help make the date go well – firstly, you’ll need to have good patter, otherwise that crucial ‘spark’ will not be there and you’ll be out of pocket forty nicker. Secondly, you need to make sure that you’ve got a good plan as to what you’re both going to do, because you better believe she won’t be making any suggestions. Get this wrong, and you’ll be agonising over it for a very long time once she gives you the bad news a few days later.

Continue reading “There are a lot of top first date ideas, but none of them involve hiking” →

The Russian World Cup wasn’t such a disgrace after all

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

Soccer_NES_logo

Soccer (1987)

The 2018 World Cup is long over now, and it was really a terrific tournament, despite all of my initial fears and misgivings. Firstly, it was hosted in Russia, which always quickens the old pulse and gets the fear receptors running red-hot, and secondly FIFA decided to roll out the Video Assistant Referee or VAR for a major tournament.

Both the Soviet hosting and the video doo-hickery worked out great even though football is long dead and has had its soul unceremoniously stripped. In the aftermath of this hugely successful competition, in which the limited Ireland team were probably lucky not to feature, I had football withdrawals to deal with. That all changed when I discovered the bluntly titled Soccer for NES.

Continue reading “The Russian World Cup wasn’t such a disgrace after all” →

Society’s in such grand decline because no-one’s doing action films anymore

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

Probotector_(1990)_Logo

Probotector/Contra (1990)

Most males get made to feel inadequate a lot of times in our lives. We all clamber to try and be alpha, of course, but there are those occasions where you’re comprehensively made to look absolutely feeble. Puny. It can happen to us from a young age too – while all the other young boys my age marvelled at how Arnold Schwarzenegger resembled a condom stuffed with conkers, I looked at this Austrian adonis and thought, “Christ, I’m gonna have a job looking like that when puberty hits”.

Continue reading “Society’s in such grand decline because no-one’s doing action films anymore” →

Somebody crowbarred a love story into this card collecting RPG

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

ff8-logo

Final Fantasy VIII (1999)

A year ago, when I was doing up a piece on classic gaming couples for CHUNK.ie and The R.A.G.E. for St. Valentine’s Day, I was actually struggling pretty badly. Yes, there were a whole host of tantalising will-they-won’t-theys like Link and Zelda. There were also friend-zone jobs like Mario and the Princess, and even a rare reversal with Sonic the Hedgehog and Amy Rose. And there’s even pairings that eventually turned sour, like Snake and Meryl. But proper romantic love stories? They were quite tough to shoot my arrow through.

Continue reading “Somebody crowbarred a love story into this card collecting RPG” →

You are the disappointment your parents feared

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

 

dragonslair

Dragon’s Lair (1992)

It’s a terrible truth that applies to us all: everything in life is disappointing. Everything. It’s typical cynicism from me, I know, but you’ve got to be aware, and you’ve got to be prepared. I bet you’ve been disappointed by friends and family countless times. Your exam results probably fell way short of your expectations. Or if they didn’t, you picked a heartbreaking thing to do with them, like law or medicine or lion-taming. It’ll lash rain on your wedding day. And your children will be disappointments too, even down to their gender and unashamedly ginger hair.

Continue reading “You are the disappointment your parents feared” →

Fancy collecting retro games? Try hard drugs instead

~ Burkey Gaming ~ Leave a comment

megaman2 logo

Mega Man 2 (1990)

Let me tell you something for nothing, something that may very possibly render any future “insight” I offer absolutely worthless: getting into game collecting is probably the worst thing I have ever done in my stinking little life. I’m telling you, hard drugs would be far cheaper a habit to maintain. I’d probably get much more long-term enjoyment out of a hefty supply of beak as well.

Continue reading “Fancy collecting retro games? Try hard drugs instead” →