It’s called World Games.
That’s what it tells you.
What it doesn’t tell you is what world.
I don’t see anybody on Earth throwing telephone poles or surviving head trauma that severe.
Jesus.
It’s World Games, for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Freaking…Kepler-78b Games.
So World Games was released in 1985, the same year as Back To The Future, The Goonies and
First Blood: Part II.
So the bar was pretty high.
But fortunately, the athletes of World Games can jump over anything.
Cue up the high jump!
Oh, there’s no high jump in this game?
Okay, how about the long jump?
Wait, there’s no long jump, either?
Well, what the f*ck do they do in this game?
Alright, hold on just a second.
Riding bulls, vandalizing public property, throwing their friends into a lake…these
aren’t international sports games.
These are the poor decisions of a drunk guy during and immediately after a night at the
bar.
World Games is a pretty literal name for this game.
Because some of its games, are literally games.
Not games, like, “Oh, sports.”
No, they’re games, like, “Oh.
Let’s spin this log until the other guy falls in the water, and apparently gets eaten
by sharks.”
So games like Mario Party, on acid.
So minigames, basically.
Sadistic and bizarre, but minigames.
This is a collection of eight minigames from 1985.
If that sounds like it would suck, that’s because it kind of does.
Of course, even in 1985, minigames would vary in quality even within the same collection.
It’s the same story with World Games.
‘Cause some of them aren’t bad.
Actually, the diving game’s one of the good ones.
You’re diving from a rocky cliff, and you actually get to choose from a couple different
ledges before you jump.
So you basically get to pick the height.
Then you have to guide your diver straight into the water, but straightening your jump
also causes you to drift, so you have to time it just right.
And once you hit the water, you have to make sure your diver pulls up, and doesn’t slam
into the bottom.
So there’s actually some nuance to this one.
I didn’t mind the barrel jump, either.
And this one really does feel like something out of Mario Party.
You have to mash the d-pad, alternating left and right as fast as you can to build up your
speed…and then you have to jump at just the right moment to clear the logs.
Wait too long…
And like the diving game, there’s actually a bit of skill to this.
I mean, it’s easy to clear the logs, but the more you play, the better feel you get
for how to build speed and when to jump.
And you start to jump further and further…the result of, you know, learning a game’s mechanics.
When games have those.
Because some don’t, you know.
Some games think they’re above little details like…coherent gameplay, and controls that
make sense.
Not to name names or anything.
F*cking log roll.
Actually, as button-mashy and nonsensical and impossible to figure out as the log roll
is, the worst game on this cartridge is by far the weight lifting.
And it shouldn’t even be close, only it is close, because the rest of the games want
to win the suck trophy, too.
But the weights are the worst.
This is actually a timing game, that doesn’t tell you what the timing is.
So it’s, like…if Simon never said.
That’s what this is like.
The whole game is about pushing buttons it never tells you, at just the right moments
it never tells you.
And the more weight you throw on, the shorter the window you don’t know about gets.
Oh, and speaking of windows, if you can play this godawful skiing game without throwing
this cartridge out the window, congratulations.
That’s not snow.
That’s the frozen tears of the 1980s.
And cocaine, cocaine was big in the 80s.
World Games is kind of a silent game, too.
There’s very little music, what’s there also varies from game to game…and the graphics
aren’t very good, either.
Sorry to get loud there, but it’s kind of what I do.
I mean, even the diving game, which is one of the best…it looks like you’re jumping
from Poop Mountain.
I don’t want to know what the water is.
Freaking…runoff, from Poop Mountain.
And what’s that bird doing?
What, are you going to get some food?
On Poop Mountain?
The weird thing about this game is that, in the context of a minigame collection, it’s
not weird at all.
I mean, forget 1985, this is how minigame games tend to be now.
Diving is fun, tossing poles is not.
Sumo wrestling is actually kind of cool, log rolling is actually kind of f*ck this.
And when you drop these weights, you’re also dropping precious minutes from your life.
Minutes that you’ll never get back.
Minutes that could’ve been spent doing literally anything else, and invariably been less of
a waste.
And that’s World Games.
A competition to see how much of your life you can drop.
Thanks to Mary from Westbrook, Maine, for signing us up.
This is a fun competition.