Super Joe, here I come (or why classic NES games make me crazy)

Damn, old video games, why are you so hard? This is what I remember from my youth, video game wise: short periods of blissful progress split up by long slogs through the same territory, the same sewers or space stations or mountain ranges, sometimes for days on end. Maybe you yourself had this experience while playing

Battletoads
Ducktales
Metal Gear
Ninja Gaiden
Back to the Future

etc. etc. etc. until your eyes liquified and bled out of your head.

And sometimes it drove me to madness! Madness! Not cursing madness, but the kind of madness where I insisted that that damned game was cheating. Where I insisted that it wasn't fair. Who did I insist to? My own pathetic self. Yes.

Until lately I thought this craziness was due to whatever hormones and half-formed brain an eight-year-old has, but now that I'm playing Bionic Commando I recall more clearly the flights of demented rage. You nimbly swing over bouncing mines, past robotic sentries, over air lifts, past guards, past dudes with remote-controlled pumpkinhead bombs, you swing on floodlamps and hack computers, only to bounce off a wall in the second half of the level, fall into the water, and realize you can't swim and the entire mission is failed. Yes, it's realistic. That huge robotic arm that sprouts out of you and is connected to a metal fire hydrant on your back probably would weigh you down. But come on: you just used the thing to deflect missiles, to scoop up prizes, to haul your ass up fifty stories at a construction site overseen by the world's most demented hillbilly driving the world's biggest and weirdest bulldozer. Couldn't that damn arm turn into a helicopter rotor blade? Into a flipper? Let's go, Good Guy Scientists.