When I was young, I was friends with two brothers. One reason I liked to sleep over at their house was that they had a Nintendo Entertainment System and the older brother was particularly good at video games. I rarely played anything while visiting them; I preferred to watch. One one occasion, I watched him play through all of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles over the course of the night. On another occasion it was Zelda 2. Their mother would always tell them to let me play, and I would shyly explain that I didn’t want to.
Their mother would also sometimes corner me with other awkward questions. She’d ask me whether her sons had been cussing, for example, or she’d say, “I’ll bet [wourme] doesn’t spit in the kitchen sink at his house.”
The brothers had a pretty good game collection because they skipped lunch every day and saved their lunch money to buy more games. The only game in their collection that the older brother was unable to beat was Athena.
Years later, after I had moved across the country, I finally saved up and bought my own NES. At one point, I decided to track down a used copy of Athena, just because of the game’s legendary status in my mind. It cost next to nothing, so I included it in one of my Funcoland orders. And, no surprise, I could not make it all that far. Even when I acquired a Game Genie, I was unable to complete the game because the levels would loop endlessly or I would get stuck in some other way. The game still seemed unbeatable.
Last night, I happened to see in my RSS feed an article about a guy who made a goal to beat every NES game and did so over several years. I immediately thought, What about Athena? The article explained that for games without clear win conditions, such as Tetris, he simply played as far as was possible. But that reminded me that I still didn’t know whether Athena was in fact impossible. I found a speed run, so I guess not.
I always liked that SNK re-used one of the enemies from Athena in Crystalis, and I now appreciate the messy design and the awkward kicking and hammer mechanics. And it’s endearing now to see an enemy’s defeat represented by two separate explosions because the enemy is two blocks high.
what an odd little game. I liked how Athena was somehow worked into the KOF setting. I love when game companies show love for their forgotten children (e.g., FFXV’s interpretation of King’s Knight). I’m not sure if Athena’s universe fits right in with KOF, or if she just exists in multiple universes as a slightly different person. Or if it’s a Tezuka-esque Star System type deal where characters have “actors” that show up in multiple works.
One of my first posts in the old IC forums was in a “Quick Questions” thread. I asked whether anyone could identify an old arcade game by my memory of it. I remembered that the protagonist was a girl who sang as she walked and that she cried out and fell off the screen when you died. I was impressed when someone answered immediately.
Of course, my experience was with the English version.
(I never connected Psycho Soldier with Athena back when I actually played the two games.)
I’ve only ever really experienced this game through the internet so I never really knew that there was an official English version of this song until a week or so ago and I’ve been fairly obsessed with it.
Despite the poor quality of the recording I just find something about it particularly charming and I wish it also had a longer version performed with live instruments the same way the Japanese one was.
Playing the actual cabinet for Psycho Soldier is an amazing experience I keep with me. The sound the way it sounds cant be replicated with an emulator. I mean it could but it is entirely texture of the actual speakers and the mix between the “real music” and the beeps and boops.
I was sometimes disappointed by the volume setting choices of arcade owners. Scrolling shooters other than three-screen Darius were often very quiet or silent. Games such as Space Ace were obnoxiously loud.
The two times I encountered Psycho Soldier, once in a big arcade and once at a truck stop, it was turned up loud enough to hear that there were lyrics to the background music, but I don’t know that they were intelligible. Maybe in part because the recording was not great in the first place.
KOF is mostly a universe where alot of other SNK games meld into one. Everything is just shifted around so everyone is closer in age. Fatal Fury takes place after Art of Fighting which is why an aged Ryo shows up. KoF just puts them closer chronologically so they’re not that different age wise. Ralph and Clark are the ikari warriors with Leona being a girl they saved on a mission. Athena is supposedly a reincarnation of goddess athena or something. Everything else just kinda feathered out from there. It’d definetly a fun world seeing these character stand on their own and then realize the had much more humble beginnings in SNK’s library which helps add more context to either work.
