I'm Better Than 1943

I'm Better Than 1945

Well, more specifically I'm better than Strikers 1945 II. For those of you who are not familiar with the game, it was a vertically scrolling "aerial combat simulation" that was often mistaken as an official part of the Capcom 194X series. In an extremely realistic portrayal of actual aerial combat, you and possibly one other plane, if you were there with a friend, take on an entire army. How realistic is this game, you ask?

1. Bullets travel slowly through the air and are easy to dodge thanks to being giant, brightly coloured spheres. In same cases the bullets being fired are the same size as your plane, but that's because in 1945 all planes were equipped with dimensional gateways that led to secret caches filled with novelty sized ammunition. This technology has since been lost.

2. Much like in real life, when planes explode they drop power-ups. Of course, the word "drop" would not be an accurate description of what happens, because these power-ups do not succumb to your so-called "law of gravity"; they float back and forth horizontally until you either pick them up or pass them. Naturally, every plane in 1945 was equipped with a master engineer who could install these upgrades to the plane what would appear to be instantly. Sadly, hiring these engineers is no longer cost effective.

3. While pictures of planes would lead you to believe that doors open from the bottom of a plane to drop bombs to the ground, bombs are actually launched horizontally at your enemies like any other bullet. Once exploding, they leave a ball of flame that just stays in the air for a few seconds and then disappears instantly, rather than dissipating slowly like you may expect. Also, these explosions can never harm you or your allies. Sadly, President Nixon lost the technology for these bombs in a poker match and was savagely impeached.

So why am I better than this game? Like most arcade games, this game was designed to eat quarters. The movie theater I used to go to all the time had a copy of this game, and as a result it did indeed eat my quarters on a regular basis. However, like a mouse running through a maze, I gradually got better at the game. Then I got good. Then I got a little too good. One night while I was waiting for some movie to start, I put a quarter in the machine. Before I knew it, I had beaten the first level. Then the second level. Then the seventh level. Suddenly, using only one quarter, I was in the 8th and final level, ignoring the fact that the game then starts over on a harder setting when you beat it. I charged through the level with reckless abandon; it was just like watching a Rambo movie...if Rambo had been a plane on autoscroll. Then, I saw it. Slowly making its way onto the screen was the final boss, and I couldn't believe I might actually beat this game using only one quarter.

Then something happened. The screen went completely black for a few seconds, and then some words started popping up:
MEMORY CHECK.....OK
ROM CHECK..... OK
The fucking machine was rebooting. I don't have an arcade emulator, so sorry if the wording is off, but apparently one of two things happened. Either I was just too awesome and overloaded the machine with how fucking amazingly I was playing, or the quarter eating monstrosity was actually designed to refuse to accept defeat and actually shut down if someone was going to beat it with one quarter to deny them bragging rights and force them to try again. Well fuck you machine, I never gave that thing another quarter.

dr_jeebus@sydlexia.com

I'm still waiting for my quarter back.