Game Night!

Game Night
Last Friday I had a blast in Pennsylvania, playing video games all night with my wife's dad and brothers. An HD projector screen, a Wii, PS2, even some SNES and NES games to round things out. The bulk of the night was spent rotating players in and out of "Justice League Heroes", which we nearly beat from start to finish in one night. A couple more hours would have done it, but we were all pretty beat and had other things to do the next day.
The geek highlight of the evening, however, was my bro-in-law’s commodore 64. He had purchased the console on ebay and had a ton of games for it. I only had time to get through a few, but "Forbidden Forest" was easily my favorite.
You play an archer walking through (you guessed it) a forest, and on each stage you are attacked by various threats including giant spiders, skeletons and even a dragon! And that’s just the first three levels!!
This forerunner to Nintendo featured various level backgrounds with layered scrolling to simulate depth of field. Even Ninetendo games weren’t thinking to do that until the second half of the system’s life-span. I was impressed.
The game was also ahead of its time in terms of thematic content. When you kill bad guys, you see blood where your arrow lands. And when you die, you don’t just die. The computer plays this weird psychotic music while a monster stabs/bites/pummels you, blood spraying everywhere. This death sequence lasts at least 5 seconds. (Look at a watch.That’s a long time for such a gory sequence!) Even back then, video games were NOT just for kids!