New Year’s Day often begins in a confusing haze. You may not remember much of what happened the night before, nor can you explain the aftermath.

This year, for instance, I woke up to find that, during the previous night’s festivities, I had fully produced a tool-assisted speed run for Sachen’s quintessential NES platformer Jurassic Boy 2.

It’s annotated throughout. Happy 2012!

[Credit: This video was inspired by Frank Cifaldi's wonderful Mr. Gimmick annotated longplay. It may have also been inspired by Kentucky Deluxe brand whiskey.]

I woke up sweating.

It was freezing outside, but under those blankets, I felt like I was roasting alive. I had a lot on my mind, I suppose. I’d been fretting about my yearly bonus at work, and my dreams were a feverish mixture of financial failure, attempted murder, and my own death, many times over.

I kicked off the blankets and looked at the clock on my nightstand. It was two hours before the alarm was set to go off. Might as well go in to work early, I reasoned; maybe that’ll make my boss forget how much I’d been slacking off over the last few weeks. Well, months. Years, actually.

[Takeshi no Chousenjou is now fully playable in English, thanks to a fan translation released by KingMike and friends. It's the best Christmas!]

It didn’t take long for my nightmares to sync up with reality.

My bonus was only 200,000 yen, just like in my dream. I briefly considered the possibilities.

I was feeling pretty sick, but the chief was never much for sympathy.

Or ass-kissing, for that matter.

Paid vacation? Man, I wish.

Paid vacation and then quitting? That wouldn’t go over too well.

And I wasn’t prepared to re-explore that particular scenario.

Instead I took a long lunch and decided to walk around town to clear my head.

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Despite his recent discovery and encouragement of That which will bring about the End Of Days, I have a grudging respect for game music composer Tommy Tallarico. He created some great stuff with the Sega Genesis’ sound hardware, and his Video Games Live concert series does admirable work in promoting video game music as an art form.

His music credits extend as far back as 1993′s bizarre non-game Color A Dinosaur for the NES; incredibly, he’s not afraid to talk about the experience. More recently, he contributed to the PETA parody game Super Tofu Boy, which makes for a wonderfully obscure footnote in one’s career.

One particular track from his discography stands out, however. “Cybertek,” a song from the Sega CD game The Terminator, is Tallarico’s take on the rave genre. It plays in the background of the game’s Tech Noir club stage. To discuss it further would spoil the experience of a first-time listening, but it suffices to say that it’s a remarkable piece of work.

Obviously, the song deserves a tribute that could only be produced with Windows Movie Maker 2.6. After capturing a handful of screenshots and scripting a high-concept music video, I partnered with Movie Maker expert Bridgeport Cat to bring my vision to life. I think she did a bang-up job.

It was Christmas, 2006. I wanted to get a present for my girlfriend, who 1) loved cats, and 2) was totally into the Nintendo DS. Since Nintendo had yet to produce a cat version of Nintendogs, I got her the best thing available at the time: Ubisoft’s Catz.

The game itself was fine, if a little primitive in comparison to later pet-raising games for the DS. It let you use the DS stylus to pet fuzzy little kittens, and that’s really all I wanted. At the time, it seemed like the perfect Christmas gift.

Unfortunately, it also had a vocal theme song.

There’s just something about the singer’s voice, the low-quality sound sampling, and the way it crackles through the DS speakers that makes this song incredibly depressing. I gather that it’s supposed to be a song about a newborn kitten looking forward to a bright future, but the delivery makes it sound more like a baby animal dirge.

It’s the first thing that plays when the game powers up, too, so it instantly saps away all desire to brush virtual kittens. My girlfriend described it as producing a “Li’l Brudder” kind of effect — it’s just not possible to enjoy the game after you’ve listened to a song about a weak, possibly crippled kitten who isn’t yet aware of the hardship that awaits him in life.

(The title screen isn’t much help, either. Those poor kitties seem so sad! And just look at their misshapen little triangle heads! Why?)

To my surprise, I found out recently that the song wasn’t an original recording produced specifically for Catz. “Meow Meow Lullaby Remix,” as it’s called, was originally written for the charity album “For The Kids Too!” It’s performed by Nada Surf, who you might know for their ’90s hit “Popular.” What a strange discovery that was, by the way. It’s like finding out Butthole Surfers did a track for Mario Teaches Typing, or that Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was the theme song for a Korean Sega Master System game or something.

The full version of “Meow Meow Lullaby” is here (warning: do not under any circumstances watch the meme-filled video itself), and if you want to hear Nada Surf drop the f-bomb while performing it live, that’s also an option.

Several years back, a few of my friends from Kentucky came down to visit. With them, they brought — among other things — some beer, an Atari Jaguar, and a giant plush crab. It was a weird weekend. At one point we ended up playing SoulCalibur with Dreamcast fishing controllers.

Another highlight to that weekend was what you see above. The Super GB Booster was an unlicensed pass-through cartridge that allowed you to play Game Boy carts on the Nintendo 64. A similar device was also released for the original PlayStation.

Despite being an aggressively unofficial piece of hardware, it worked pretty well. Games ran full-screen with minimal hiccups. If but for one small problem, it would otherwise be an acceptable alternative to the Super Game Boy and the GameCube’s Game Boy Player.

The problem? The Super GB Booster did not output audio.

Well…that’s not entirely accurate.

To clarify, it didn’t output Game Boy sound effects and music. It did play an endless loop of something else, in an attempt to hide the lack of actual sound emulation.

The result has an interesting effect on any game you plug in to it. Below is a simulation of the Super GB Booster experience.

[photo credit: Retro Gaming Life]

Last week at GameSetWatch, I wrote about a new Spanish fan translation for Namco’s light gun shooter Time Crisis. Along with translated text, it features rerecorded dialog that required the efforts of seven different voice actors. It’s remarkably well-done, especially when considering that dubbing is rarely attempted in amateur game translations.

Below is a previous experiment in fan dubbing. “Vocals of Phantasia” was a translation patch released for Namco’s Super Nintendo RPG Tales of Phantasia several years back. The intro’s pretty funny (is she singing words?), but skip to 2:07 for the best part. Trust me, you need to hear this.

Isn’t it great? Every line is spoken in a muffled hush that’s less sotto voce and more “I’ll wake up my parents if I make too much noise.” I find a new thing to laugh at every time I watch this, from the sleepy “Though I am close to death I have never been more alive,” to the classic “Wait god of thunder hmm.”

Nintendo of America tried to outclass Vocals of Phantasia with its own dub, released for the Game Boy Advance in 2006. Amazingly, it succeeded. It succeeded in the best possible way.

In 1988, Midway released NARC, a side-scrolling arcade shooter in which players waged a literal war on drugs. And prostitution. And dumpsters.

While it’s admirable that someone finally had the guts to craft a revenge fantasy against the armies of jean-jacketed PCP addicts and perverted clowns that once terrorized the streets of America, Midway’s fascination with extreme violence undercut the anti-drug message a bit. Though arresting drug dealers is presented as an option, NARC makes it explicitly clear that the preferred solution is to explode them with rockets and let their severed limbs rain from the skies like confetti in a Fourth of July gore parade.

NARC is also a very loud game that wasn’t afraid to show off its digitized voice samples. When a NARC cabinet is turned up to maximum volume (as is its default setting), an otherwise unassuming video arcade is transformed into a dissonant carnival of UUUGHs and BLAAAAGHs and YOU’RE BUSTEDs. And whenever a player’s credit ends and a new high score is earned, everyone within 200 feet of the machine is treated to this:

Also worth mentioning is the background music that plays during NARC’s second level. It’s not a vocal track…or at least, it wasn’t, until it was covered and released as a B-side by the goddamned Pixies.

Lyrics are here, if you’re having trouble deciphering them.

I guess if man is five, then the devil is six, and if the devil is six then AW NAW NAW NAW THE NARCS MAN

Last night, I dreamed that I was at a flea market, browsing for sweet deals. As often happens in these dreams, I encountered an out-of-the-way stall that held all sorts of video game treasures. Prototypes. Unreleased games. Rare Japanese titles. Everything was so cheap that I could have easily bought the entire lot…if the dealer accepted debit cards. As it happened, I only had two dollars in my wallet.

I knew that if I ran to an ATM to get more cash, another collector would sweep in and buy up everything. I could only afford one game: a sun-bleached NES cartridge with a peeling label that read “Teletubbies and More!” I had never heard of the game, so I figured that it must be valuable.

I bought the game, and ran from the table. I tripped on something and fell…but since this was a dream, I didn’t immediately hit the ground. Instead, I tumbled into an endless void. Clutching the Teletubbies cartridge, I fell for several minutes, waiting to hit bottom.

I was still holding my breath when I woke up. My heart raced. I sat up, thankful but secretly a little disappointed that it was only a dream. It was only 6 AM, so I decided to go back to sleep.

When my head hit the pillow, I felt something underneath.

My god.

This is where I stop lying: Teletubbies and More! is a real NES game. I bought it off the Internet years ago from a seller who offered no explanation regarding its origins, and who closed his eBay account shortly afterward.

Opening it up, I found that the cart’s plastic innards were crudely shaved to make room for a glop-topped 60-pin Famicom game board and a Nintendo-produced Famicom-to-NES adapter, like the ones found in early NES releases like Pinball and Gyromite.

While the game board was likely mass-produced (more on this in a minute), the cartridge was obviously hand-assembled. The label is cheap printer paper, and given that the manufacturer would need to sacrifice actual NES cartridge shells and official Famicom-to-NES adapters for each unit, I’d bet that not very many of these were made. It might even be the only one of its kind.

I recently had it dumped. You can download the ROM here. It’s not yet emulated, but the mapper (#237) has been documented, if you want to add it to your own emulator or open-source project. Please let me know if you do!

But what about the game itself? I wish I could show it off in screenshots, but since it’s not emulated, I had to resort to taking photos of the game playing on original NES hardware. Apologies for the crappy quality, but…well, best I could do.

Okay. So it turns out that “Teletubbies and More!” is actually “Y2K 420-in-1,” a pirate multicart of unknown origin. The characters on the splash screen hint at something a little more sinister than your average pirated game, though. Top row: Pikachu, Po, Buzz Lightyear. Bottom row: Woody, Doraemon, and Raphael.

This is the game selection screen, listing the typical multicart lineup of Mapper 0 titles, save for a few unfamiliar names.

“Aladdin III” is, as expected, a clone of Magic Carpet from Caltron 6-in-1. It’s a common sight in multicarts and in the occasional standalone cartridge. Pity the poor sucker who buys an Aladdin Famicom cart expecting to find a pirate clone of the Genesis Aladdin game and instead ends up with this.

Next up is “Pokemon,” which could be anything. Pirates have shoehorned Pokemon characters into a number of NES games over the years — like Little Nemo and Felix the Cat, for instance.

In this case, it’s a hacked version of Hudson’s first NES game, Nuts & Milk. In this new version, Muddy Pikachu must escape the grasp of a sickly Gray Pikachu while collecting…uh, bananas, and things. Beyond the simple character sprite switch, no attempt has been made to make this resemble a real Pokemon game.

Game #4 is “Toy Story II,” which surely must be more interesting. A pirated NES adaptation of the Genesis and Super NES Toy Story game is known to exist, so maybe that’s what this is?

No. It’s Bomberman, with Woody from Toy Story. Keeping the theme of the movie, Woody wanders a series of underground mazes and plants bombs to blow up his friends.

Next is…oh my god, seriously? That’s what it’s called? “Ding Dong”?

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You probably don’t know what it’s like to own both a Sega CD and a 32X. Here’s a brief walkthrough.

It begins at Christmas, 1994. Your dad spends all of your mom’s savings on a 32X and a copy of Star Wars Arcade, and neither of them will be able to afford more games until next Christmas. All you have to play for the next several months are Star Wars, a copy of Doom you’d later get for your birthday, and whatever Sega CD and Genesis games you already had in your meager collection.

Odds are that Wonder Dog has lost its charm by this point, and the solutions to the three cases in Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective remain exactly the same. But you’re loyal to the lot you’ve been given. You read EGM for the latest 32X news (there is none). You gaze longingly at the Sega CD 32X games available at the mall’s Electronics Boutique (there are five). And then next week, after those games mysteriously drop in price to $10 each, you buy every single one of them with your allowance money.

You buy those games, and then you play the hell out of them.

Okay, so maybe you wouldn’t. But I played the hell out of them.

I beat Fahrenheit. I got a perfect run in Night Trap. I even figured out how to finish Corpse Killer during a time of my life I’d rather forget. And I didn’t just complete but had mastered Slam City with Scottie Pippen, a timing-based, barely-interactive one-on-one basketball game presented entirely in full-motion video.

Actually, I was so good at Slam City that I saw a secret ending in which the game’s actors yelled at me because I out-basketballed Scottie Pippen so hard that I made him look bad. Swear to god, this is true. Slam City’s best ending is a guilt trip.

Unfortunately, my Slam City mastery has long since been overwritten by more important knowledge (like the names of obscure iPhone developers, and the lyrics to Infogrames’ corporate theme song), and I can’t even beat the easiest stage anymore. It’s a shame.

Anyway, that’s my Slam City story. Aside from ruining my life, Slam City is also notable for launching Scottie Pippen’s rap career, which began and ended with the game’s opening theme, “Respect.”

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