One of the most frightening games released on the Nintendo Entertainment System!

Hold onto your hat or put it safely in some sort of storage container because Chiller is here to scare you out of your skin – and everyone knows that hats are for skin-having organisms.

Like most NES titles, Chiller takes place in a graveyard. What makes it different, however, is the crippling despair players will feel as they realize that standing in a graveyard with a gun is hopeless, especially when their good Christian parents did not let them have the NES Zapper accessory.

Just like in real life, players can decide to do nothing until they lose or shoot until they lose, making Chiller ripe with metaphor. This allows Chiller to teach middle-class children about a futility only experienced by their poorest classmates.

Valuable lessons all around.

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From 1981 to 1986 the charts were dominated by a club unlike any other.

At the center of the club of culture was Boy George. George was a typical twenty-something male in the early 80s. He played kickball, braided his hair, wore heavy makeup and possessed all of the androgynous traits which made him indistinguishable from a woman.

It was this ability to pretend to be a woman that landed him a role in the music industry, though not as you’d suspect. He got his start filling in for the lead singer of the band Bow Wow Wow, a band which would release a single hit (“I Want Candy”) and then disappear into obscurity before being resurrected as a 12 year old rapper in Lil’ Bow Wow.

Once George got his feet wet filling in for women he decided to go in neck deep. Rather than fill in for a female vocalist, he formed his own band, Culture Club, and began filling the role of a woman in other facets of life – if you catch my drift.

In the beginning Culture Club met all of the criteria which defined ‘being a band’, though they found little in the way of success. Their first single “White Boy” was a sales flop, but a critical home-run. It took a look at the difficult issues facing inner-city African Americans from the perspective of a gender-confused Englishman.

It wasn’t until the third single “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” that Culture Club hit their commercial stride. The song and its smooth reggae rhythm took the musical influence of Jamaica and mated it with the gritty urban vocals of a mature Boy George.

The band’s next 57 singles were all failures, unable to even register on a chart titled “Top 500 Songs By Culture Club.” And then as quickly as they’d become homeless, they hit pay dirt once again.

The concept of the song was timeless – a color changing lizard. The lizard’s name was Karma, and the Karma Chameleon became synonymous with the lizard loving culture of the 1980s.

Boy George made it clear that he was the biggest lizard lover out there. His make up, his vocal style, his very personality – he was as big a lover of lizards as one could be without having it tattooed on their forehead.

“Karma Chameleon” went on to go quadruple platinum-titanium alloy in the British Commonwealth, and double reaganite in America. The band could retire and live lives of luxury now.

Unfortunately, they didn’t. Culture Club continued producing what some would describe as an abstract mix of music and random noises akin to a boom box falling out a window onto a glass truck full of frightened chickens.

For their fifth album, Culture Club had waned so far from traditional music that they began to ‘record’ the album by shooting heroin all day long, everyday. After 15 years of ‘recording’ they emerged from a dimly lit studio apartment to announce their new single.

In one of the most bizarre twists in music making history, the single Culture Club produced through 15 years of heroin addiction and reclusion was a note-for-note copy of Ashlee Simpson’s “Pieces of Me”.

George has, as of writing, just been released from prison. He ran afoul of the law when he attempted to make an unsuspecting male colleague into a lizard lover.

Boy George proves once again why he is the most successful ex-Bow Wow Wow member.

It’s titles like this that let us know the Nintendo Entertainment System was definitely a console that played cartridge-based things.

Toward the end of the 1980s when video games became too difficult by requiring players to “play” them, Namco decided to move in a different direction. That direction being the one opened up by The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout, which decided to use the NES cartridge system as a means of playing video.

Chibi Maruko-Chan: Uki Uki Shopping didn’t just try to fill the oversized shoes of Bugs Bunny, however. It also added an element of game-play that involved players pressing ‘A’ on occasion in order to initiate a random-function that decided how far players could move in what appears to be a board game of some sort.

While this style of game-play was fresh and exciting, so was Chibi Maruko-Chan’s music, which featured the best soundtrack ever produced through playing a sitar with a bag of cats.

This is a good game for fans of pressing a single button and doing nothing else, which provided excellent training for those who would eventually become fans of the Metal Gear Solid series.

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If the 1980s is known for anything, it’s its expressive, eloquent, and almost poetic style of informal – or “slang” – speaking.

One of the more popular sayings involved “getting the 4-1-1”. But despite its wide use, its origins were among the most obscure of 1980s-era slang.

Popular culture and “common sense” suggest that being a recipient of “the 4-1-1” was somehow related to the telephone culture of the period. By dialing 4-1-1 on a telephone, an individual could receive directory assistance for the area from which they were calling. This would allow users to find “information”, and this supposedly became synonymous with getting the 4-1-1.

In actuality, 4-1-1 referred to the codification of a message intercepted by the United States government that was being sent from the Ethiopian government and its citizens to “the world” during its 1984 famine. The gist of the message was that they were experiencing a famine and they were in need of international assistance in order to prevent thousands of deaths from starvation.

Confused by the meaning of these words, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to try to smash its Enigma-esque code. In order to make sense of it all, this series of nonsense words was broken down into letters and numbers, back and forth several times over.

Eventually, this message was distilled to its essence: 411. These numbers referred to the location of letters of the alphabet: D-A-A. When unwrapped from its easily understood, coded package, this stood for Department of Agricultural Affairs, a made up department that most African governments probably had, if indeed they had governments at all and not just a series of huts along the coastline.

Misused by the general public, 4-1-1 was akin to the saying “Here’s a quarter. Call someone who cares” (that is, the non-existent Department of Agricultural Affairs).

Following this deconstructive analysis, it becomes evident that one of the most prevalent pieces of slang – 4-1-1 – was underwritten by racism and white supremacy, some of Europe’s finest exports next to chocolate and genocide.

Now that you’ve got the 4-1-1, hopefully you’ve also gotten the 4-1-1.

In 1988 the US Justice Department outlawed the twisted and un-American “Three Wheeler.” Primarily built by Japanese manufacturers, the vehicle often tipped while turning; turning its back on American industry, that is.

In banning three wheelers, the US Justice Department referred to the glut of child deaths during the heyday of the three wheeled death trap. These high powered kamikaze enablers had a tendency to roll over on top of their 5 year-old drivers, causing parents to put their Miller High-Lifes down and tell them to lift the bike off themselves.

The treacherous Japanese, as always, had a trick up their collective sleeves. While three wheelers were banned, 5 wheelers were not. They released something called a “trailer” which attached to the rear of the three wheeler, allowing riders to bypass the laws of the glorious American republic.

This trailer not only added two extra wheels, but allowed the rider to carry a payload behind his vehicle. The trailers often came filled with pamphlets on breaking American unions, and the superior quality of all Japanese made products.  It was a slap in the face to the US Justice Department, and the US Attorney General, Judge Wapner, countered by banning all vehicles with 5 wheels.

Much like in 1941, the Americans had underestimated the lethal combination of ingenuity and treacherousness of the Japanese. In 1989 they debuted the One Wheeler. Composed of an outboard motor, a wheel, and a broomstick, it allowed children to propel toward any obstacle (oncoming traffic, in the graphic to the left). It was met with both outrage, and incredible sales success. Finally motorized unicycles were banned, but not before 10 million were sold, resulting in over 9 million deaths, and one case of badly scraped knees.

And end came in Judge Wapner’s personal courtroom, where he negotiated a deal with the Japanese. If the Japanese agreed to produce only 4 wheeled all terrain vehicles, the US would surrender Hawaii to Japan.

Ending what is now known as “The Cold War”, both sides left the courtroom happy.

Only Degrassi had the proper amount of Wheels.

The hottest thing to come out of Japan since warm underwear dispensers.

Chiki Chiki Machine Mou Race is based on the hit Japanese cartoon Astro Boy, which is about a man with a large hat who likes to race cars with his pet dog Chiki Chiki.

Chiki Chiki is based on episode 13 of season 2 of Astro Boy, in which Chiki Chiki gets lost in Yellowstone National Park and has to walk to the right while collecting gems and bones and defending himself with his bite against snails, bees, potted plants, and – the most dangerous of all – un-potted plants.

Featuring responsive controls and both colourful and adequate graphics, Chiki Chiki easily fills the shoes meticulously crafted by Astro Boy and his ragtag crew of misfits.

Definitely not your daddy’s Chiki Chiki.

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