Ah, the joys of that particular Birthday so many years past. I open up my last present and there in my shaking hands is Gauntlet for the NES. I love Gauntlet...heck I even tried to dress up as Questor one Halloween in my youth. It didn't quite work out like I had expected. I was asked if I was everything from Robin Hood to Peter Pan. Sigh.Back to the point of the post, after about two days of playing the NES port of Gauntlet I found myself stuck. I was facing the Dragon at the end of the game and just could not slay the wretched beast. My Grandmother being a saint of video games suggested I call the Hotline phone number listed in our Nintendo Power magazines.
So I jumped up and using her phone dialed the number with bated breath to see if these gurus of gaming could perhaps give me the one vital piece of information that would help me topple my digital foe.
Unfortunately this was not to be.
It turned out that Tengen didn't exactly produce licensed versions of Gauntlet, Pac-Man, or RBI Baseball for the NES. It seems that the company found Nintendo's license too restrictive and as the Wiki states, Nintendo didn't want their licensees to have more than five game released in a year and those titles had to be console exclusive for two years.
When I asked the Hotline attendant to help me with my Dragon problems...he became quiet for a couple of seconds and then informed me he was not allowed to give any advice on Tengen titles. I was terribly confused, he had to repeat that about three times and this guy was really terrific because even at that young age I could tell he really wanted to help me.
In plain desperation I pleaded with him to help defeat the dragon. His reply though pained was brief, "Shoot the Dragon more." He then hung up the phone. I put the phone up and then went back to the game and as if he was in control of my NES unit I was able to defeat the Dragon...just because a Nintendo Hotline attendant told me to do what I was already doing.
Come to think of it I might have been talking to Dio.
Killing The Dragon - Dio
4 comments:
You don't need a phone to talk to Dio, Vic. You just need to have some metal in your soul.
Of course, you know that now, but it's a lesson that every kid can't learn too soon.
Ah the joys of unlicensed games.
Or maybe not eh Vic?
In any case I only phone the UK Powerline once and that was for Zelda on the Gameboy. Found them to be very unusable on that front too. His advice to me was just to read the manual... Awesome advice there for something that didn't need the manual.
Wow. Read the manual? That's an even better comment than shoot the dragon more, Crit. Didn't those guys know that sometimes you are renting the title and there is no manual? :)
Sadly Vic i didn't have the manual. The hamster, or some other miscellaneous creature my brother had, chewed it when it escaped from it's cage. However I did know that the specific information was not to be held within that particular tome.
I was stuck in one of the dungeons and had to do something with one of the Pols Voices. Was a right pain in the posterior.
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