Memory Museum: Dizzy & DuckTales2

Memory Museum: Dizzy & Scrooge McDuck

A featured series on LadiesGamers.com: Memory Museum. Our earliest gaming memories to the backdrop of what was happening in our personal life. Plus, what was happening in the gaming world back then!

It’s the year 1994 in video gaming. In Australia, Nintendo’s subsidiary is opened, opened by Hiroshi Yamauchi, the third president of Nintendo. It effectively ends Mattel Australia’s distribution of Nintendo’s products throughout Australia. Sony releases the PlayStation home console in december of that year in Japan. Nintendo releases Rare’s Donkey Kong Country (SNES), featuring 3D pre-rendered graphics. It also introduces Diddy Kong and King K. Rool. 

In Wales, little Evriun is three years old and watches his older brothers play on their NES. 

A Family Experience

The first console we had in our house was the good ole NES, with Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt, Super Mario Bros 3, Punch-Out!!, Duck Tales 1 & 2 and Fantastic Dizzy. We also had a pinball game called High Speed (we often forget it’s name; I had to look it up 😛 ) and a racing game (that I never knew the name of). We did also have Megaman 2, but that was unintentional (more on that later).

Not sure how long we had the NES by the time I was 3 years old, but that is the age I remember first playing it. I wasn’t allowed a great deal of playtime on the console to begin with. I remember my dad playing a lot of the pinball game, while my brothers would play all of the above (mainly my oldest brother). My mum on the other hand would happily join in or sit by and watch when ever we requested her to, but didn’t have enough interest to start playing without us asking – the things mums do to keep their kids happy. 😛

The focus of a 3 year old!

Not sure which game was the first one I played, but my mum has often reminisced about seeing little 3 year old me sat on the floor of the living room, playing Super Mario Bros, with my tongue poking out and my leg kicking into the air, almost jumping along when trying to get Mario to jump over a Goomba – to reach your goal; you must be one with the Mario…and with your tongue poking out it seems. 😀

As I grew a little older I was able to join in with the games more, but majority of the time I watched my oldest brother play the games and I had a go now and then – still remember him trying to get through Punch-Out!! and me trying to suggest what to do against certain opponents,  not sure how much help I actually was though lol.

High Speed
A pinball game with no mention off it being pinball…no wonder we forget it’s name! 😮

The one game that got us all playing together however was the pinball game. It was easy enough for all of us to play, while trying to beat one another’s scores and the different tables that were available, made it all the more interesting. My dad didn’t join in with us on any video game after that, well, until Bowling on Wii Sports. 😛

The Fantastic Kirby!…I mean Dizzy!

My memories of playing Dizzy were a little jumbled for a number of years; I remembered more of the layouts of levels and item locations than the other games, and I even had fonder memories than most of them too. However…

Dizzy
Definitely not Kirby! (lol)

Strangely, after playing Kirby’s Fun Pak on the SNES when I was about 6 years old, what memories I did have of playing Dizzy, somehow got merged with Kirby. Until I had internet access, I was sure Dizzy looked like Kirby and that the graphics were better (more like Kirby’s Fun Pak’s graphics), and that there were door ways with stars above them (like in Kirby). The fact that Dizzy was on the NES and the console wouldn’t be able to handle the graphics of a SNES game, wasn’t even a factor in my mind at that time – the concept of specs and limitations of a console was non-existent to me it seems. 😛

Looking at Dizzy again now…yeah very different from Kirby lol – how I managed to get the two mixed up I shall never know :o. One thing I always remembered about Dizzy that was correct though; it had to be attached to another NES game for it to work. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time why only that game was like it, but perhaps the oddity of the  cartridge was one reason the game stuck around in my memory. 😀

Scrooge McDuck and the not-so-sunken Ship

Although we did originally have Duck Tales 1 & 2, at some point my brother lent DT1 to his friend and they lent us Megaman 2; his friend then moved away (far away) several days later without exchanging back the games – so Duck Tales 2 was the main one we ended up playing and we ended up with Megaman 2 without ever planning on keeping it.

Duck Tales 2 was the first game I remember playing alongside my oldest brother, and the first one we finished together (I was about 4 by the time we played through it properly). Most of the levels my brother actually finished (he was better than I was), but I have fond memories of us both trying the levels throughout the game and being so happy when we reached the end.

 I’m better than you bro!

I remember some time after we had completed the game, my other brother (who is also older than me)  tried to do the final boss, but couldn’t defeat him. I had managed to beat the boss, but probably because I played the level repeatedly. As the youngest of 3, finishing a level while an older sibling couldn’t (regardless of the reason), brought such a brilliant feeling of satisfaction and triumph, more so than finishing the game itself – oh the competitive nature of siblings hey? 😛

DuckTales 2
I loved DuckTales 😀

Besides the memories of playing the game with my brothers, DT2 stood out so much to me because of the cargo ship unexpectedly becoming a floating ship again. It may not seem like much, but 4 year old me hadn’t seen anything like it, a sunken ship that suddenly appeared floating and was the battle stage of the final boss; seemed so awesome! I was in awe and it was one of those aspects that was small and probably insignificant to a lot of players, but to me, it was brilliant and inspiring! 😀

End of an era

After a few years, a number of the games stopped working properly, Punch-Out!! went missing and eventually we ended up with a SNES for Christmas one year…oh the wonderful SNES, so many great memories for that too!…Anyway; we ended up giving the NES games (that worked) to my cousin and the NES itself eventually got thrown away.

Weirdly though, several years later I ended up finding one of the NES controllers and Punch-Out!! Even more bizarre to me was finding Punch-Out!! in the plastic case and cardboard box (we never kept the cases or boxes for the other games when we had them; no idea why this one was so special lol).

NES Controller + Punch-Out!!
All that remains of my NES days – besides the memories 😛

The reasons for playing video games.

I think the quality time spent with my family is what initially drew me into video games. In later years it was the creativity involved in the creation of them, the adventures in these little virtual worlds that inspired me to draw, being able to discuss experiences with friends and of course play multiplayer with them! 😀

Video games have always been a part of my life, my family don’t tend to play video games together much these days, but we do still play facebook games. 😀

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