DVD Review: Classic Game Room: "The Rise And Fall Of The Internet's Greatest Video Game Review Show"



Before there was YouTube, there was Classic Game Room.

Nowadays, the Internet is clogged with off-beat, low-budget videos the pontificate on every topic known to man. But in the latter part of the 20th century, video on the Internet was a rarer animal. Classic Game Room: The Rise and Fall of the Internet's Greatest Video Game Review Show, is a tongue-in-cheek documentary that revisits this not so long ago era, chronicling the story of one early web video series that met its unfortunate end when the dot com bubble burst.

Early on in the documentary, narrator Mark Bussler describes The Game Room, the videogame review show he co-hosted with film school buddy David Crosson, as "two nerds making fools of ourselves online." And it's an apt description. The two 23-year-olds are more concerned with creating parodies and poking fun at the gameplay, graphics, and even concepts behind the games rather than giving them a GamePro-style analysis. One needs only to look at their review of X-Men: The Videogame, in which Bussler and Crosson become their alter-egos, "The Lush" and "Pottymouth" and team up to attack the evil Magneto. Crosson curses like a sailor until his enemy submits. Bussler's superpower? The ability to throw empty beer bottles at people. At least until he runs out of bottles.

The doc takes us through some of the duo's most notable shows. A review of Duck Hunt becomes a look at Nintendo's "unreleased version," called "People Hunt." A review of "Alien" for Atari turns into a Real World parody. While some of their reviews can skew towards the blue end of the comedy spectrum-- a review of the Sega Dreamcast game, "Seaman," leads to the predictable bodily fluid double entendres-- Bussler and Crosson's odd sense of humor makes them endearing characters. You're watching two kids having fun.

Additional commentary by Bussler (Crosson is mysteriously absent) does its best to put the show in context and describe what happened behind the scenes. Interspersed throughout, and overused, is some strange, seemingly random stock footage (including an unfortunately-timed video of a bridge collapsing).

While a classic video game novice will learn very little about the games these two review, video game aficionados will certainly be able to identify with Bussler and Crosson's misadventures in videogaming.

In October 2000, unable to secure advertisers (Nintendo dropped out after a not-so-positive review of Perfect Dark), the show, along with the Internet site that featured it went under. Bussler went on to become a documentary filmmaker, and one of his first projects was Classic Game Room. Sure, the film makes The Game Room out to be a bigger part of Internet history than it was, but that simply reflects the love its creators had for their creation. Today's YouTubers take note.

"Had we kept going, I think we would have been more popular than Seinfeld," Bussler deadpans in the epilogue.

After a beat, though, he admits, "No, we wouldn't."

Video Of The Day: Tecmo Super Bowl

Bo Jackson was a tremendous athlete... but even he never accomplished this feat in real life:

Tecmo Bowl-Bo Jackson


The above is why I have a special place in my heart reserved for Tecmo Super Bowl.

All Aboard The Matzah Bus


Note: Not Used To Cook Children

School Bus Serves Up Flat, Unleavened Bread

Gotta applaud this guy on his creativity. It's hard to find an oven capable of baking tons of matzah that also serves as a form of public transportation. When the matzah is ready, do the red lights flash? That would be sooo cool.

Luckily, the police did not visit the house next door, where a minivan has been converted into a latke* fryer.

In other news, I got a Nintendo Wii. My roommate and I were terribly bored on Saturday, and stopped into a GameStop to see if there was any interesting game we could buy for our Gamecube. There wasn't. I decided, hey, lets get the Wii! I asked the lady behind the counter if they had them in.

"Oh no," she laughed. "We won't have those until April, maybe even May."

I was devastated. But just then, out of nowhere, a creepy guy vaguely resembling a mix of Rob Corddry and Rainn Wilson sidled up next to me.

"Tomorrow. 10 am. Circuit City in Union Square. Arrive promptly at a quarter till. That's all I'm at liberty to say."

I turned to ask him how he knew this information, but he was already gone. Like he had never been there at all...

So the next day I woke up early, despite the fact that it was a Sunday, and my typical Sunday wake up time is 1 pm. I went over to Circuit City. There were about 15 people when I got there, waiting for the store to open. One guy was there with his kid. "I got the XBox 360 and the PS3 for me. I'm getting the Nintendo Wii for him," he said. One woman, there with her husband, was really excited about the Wii, even though she said she never played video games. More than a few people made jokes to the effect of "Oh, they're out of Wii's already, you other guys should just go home." I was one of those jokers.

Finally, the store opened, we were led in, five at a time. And I got my Wii. All the way home I clutched it tightly to my chest, fearing that every person I passed might snatch it away from me.

When I got home, I set it up immediately. For such a seemingly sophisticated device, it was pretty quick and easy to get started.

First, I created my Wii character, called a Mii. I think it's possible to download your Mii and post it on web pages such as this, but until I figure it out, you'll have to make do with my bad drawing...



My roommate and I played for hours straight. We just couldn't stop. After every Wii sports game, they give you the option "Play Again?" And it was irresistable. Wii Bowling was especially addictive. What was amazing about it, to me, was that I bowled exactly how I bowl in real life. Horribly.


Your Mii's Hands Are Detatched Floating Orbs.. Just Like In Real Life!!

What also amazed me was how active you can get. When I first heard about people accidently throwing their Wii controllers through their TV sets, or injuring themselves and others, I thought they had to be complete spazoids. But playing Wii Tennis, I totally understood how that stuff can happen. My roommate and I were both sweating as we volleyed back and forth. The controllers get slippery. Thank God for that wrist strap.



And then there was Wii Baseball, where in order to throw a faster pitch, you need to "throw" the controller faster. I may need Tommy John surgery in a few weeks if I keep this up.

I thought Wii sounded cool before. Now that I've actually experienced it, I'm convinced this is the future of gaming. I can't wait to get home and try Wii Boxing and Wii Golf.

To tie this whole entry together... It's all about human creativity, my friends. The same kind of imagination that can turn a bus into an oven can also create something as magical as the Nintendo Wii. All this has inspired me to start my own creative project. You heard it here first people... I'm turning my parents' Toyota Avalon into a Panini press.

Patent pending.

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* the goyim** call them "potato pancakes"

** "goyim" meaning anyone who read this "**" to find out what "goyim" means

Welcome MSNers!

I just received word that my story is receiving top billing at the MSN site.



If you liked that, check out Wednesday's blog entry for my personal videogame playing history.

And please, newbies. Spend some time here on Adam's Life. Check out some totally cool things to do with your cell phone. Or read an emotional, heartfelt appeal for environmental stewardship by guest blogger Jose. Or just type in a word in the search box at the top of the page to see if i wrote anything clever/brilliant about it. Chances are, I haven't. But you might get lucky and be mildly entertained before returning to the blogs people actually read.

The Classics Never Die



I've got a new article on MSN. It's about videogames. Check it out!

I got my first videogame system for Chanukah 1985... or maybe 1986.. or quite possibly some other Chanukah in the mid 80s. Anyways, regardless of the date, that first system was original Nintendo, complete with two controllers, a light gun, and the game Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt. I was a little kid. Like pre-multiplication tables little.

I remember that for the longest time, My mom and i (she was obsessed with the game too) thought that when Mario collected a "flower," he would simply change outfits. When my mom accidentally hit the B button and a fireball came out, we were shocked.

My older cousin, Jeff, became like a god to me when he beat the game before my eyes, running through levels and ducking into warp zones I never knew existed. A few years later, I called him late one night on the phone to ask him how to beat the final boss in Super Mario Bros. 2, Wart. "Catch the vegetables and throw them in his mouth," Jeff said. Of course! He's a genius!! I thought. He was my first role model. And while beating videogames may not be a skill admired in the adult world, it was something I strove to accomplish.

The Mario games were always my faves. I never was a Sonic guy or Mega Man kid. Somehow, I just identified with a plumber's quest to save a princess from an evil dinosaur. I think it's because, at the time, I wore Osh Kosh B'Gosh overalls very similar to Mario's.

Over the years, different games stole my heart. I got new systems with wildly better graphics. I'll never tire of blowing up my friends in Goldeneye 007, red-shelling the face off someone in Mario Kart, or connecting on that deep pass in Madden.

But in college, my Junior year, it wasn't my Nintendo 64 that I brought with me. It was that original Nintendo, still in working order. I thought that its inferior graphics and simple gameplay would be less of a distraction to my studies.

Boy I was wrong.

Turned out, my old Nintendo was a bigger hit than the Playstation owned by the kids down the hall. Duck Hunt was a great way to meet girls. Many had played it as a kid, and even ones that hadn't soon became addicted to brutally gunning down those innocent pixelated ducks. I'd watch these sweet, nice girls turn into duckicidal lunatics before my eyes. I'm sure I could have written a paper for Sociology class about the effect of weapon use on the feminine psyche, but instead I just developed the pick up line, "Hey Baby, Wanna come to my dorm room and shoot some ducks?"


Duck Hunt Drives The Chicks Wild

My Senior Year, my roommate and I discovered Tecmo Super Bowl, the greatest sports game ever made for the Nintendo. The game only cosmetically resembled the game of American Football. But we'd play for hours straight, zig zagging down the field to avoid the awkwardly slow computer defenders. Because my Nintendo was old, some games wouldn't work unless I used Galoob's Game Genie, a device designed to cheat at videogames. We never used the published cheat codes, but sometimes entered random codes just to see if they would do anything. One code ended the game after the opening kickoff. Another code caused the halftime show to go berserk. "What's this next one going to do?" my roomate asked, "Give us four Dan Marinos?" Weirdly, that's almost exactly what it did. Every player on the Dolphins was suddenly Marino. Of course, we never wrote those codes down.


Note: No Real NFL Team Has Pink End Zones

Often, it was the weird quirks that kept us coming back to these games. In Super Mario Bros, we could dance at the top of a vine by pressing "up." We could bankrupt the computer players in Monopoly by trading them a mortgaged monopoly for all their money and all their properties. In Major League Baseball, we could go into the audience with a player and walk around. And the baseball, sometimes, would inexplicably levitate slowly towards the sky. In Wheel Of Fortune, Junior Edition, every puzzle was ridiculously easy-- things like "Mickey Mouse" and "Fourth Of July"... except one answer-- "Diacritical Mark," which even my roommate and I, two college students at a prestigious university, had to look up. And of course, in Contra, we enjoyed causing the other player grief by moving too fast and causing the screen to scroll, which erased the ground beneath the other player and caused him to fall to his doom. And I'm clearly not the only one who feels these things add to the fun factor. This guy's got a whole page full of cool glitches.

These are weird things that don't exist in so-called superior games today, but it made us love those old games even more. Sometimes, screwups are beloved. Like Silly Putty for example. Someone's mistake making rubber gave us one of mankind's greatest materials.

Maybe that's why I and so many others still enjoy playing these old games. They're like us. Flawed. Screwy. Terrifically ugly. But they, like us, are fun and full of heart. Except the Nintendo version of "Where's Waldo." Who came up with that one? Lame...


Not As Fun As It Looks

I'd love to hear about your favorite classic videogames, and the glitches you came to enjoy. Leave a comment below.

P.S. I am apparently a character in the classic game Streets Of Rage:




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