Kurt Pankau Dot Com

🎖️Running with the devil... Contra was the original run-and-gun shooter on the platform that made home video game systems ubiquitous. Originally an arcade game, the 1988 NES port is almost certainly the most famous entry in the entire franchise and one of the most popular third-party titles on the system. It was known for its punishing difficulty. It was also one of the first Nintendo games to employ 2-player simultaneous co-op, which sounds like it should make the game easier, but in practice meant you and your schoolmate would mess up each others' flow and cause each other to die. When you ran out of lives, you could steal one from the other player's reserve. Fortunately, there was widely known "secret" code that gave you an extra twenty-seven lives, and this code no doubt preserved countless friendships. How I Remember It... I had a friend named Bryan, and he and I would play it together a lot. He owned a copy first, and playing his is what got me to beg my paren

Thanks for reading, those of you who have done so. This was a weird project to put together. Ideally, a list of things to blog about should consists of fifty or one hundred items because those fill out a year pretty nicely, but my movie list kept landing in the 60s or 70s. I tried to come up with some guidelines that might narrow things down... and mostly failed. I came up with the "Double Feature" conceit and that helped, but those posts got pretty cumbersome, so I found myself doing a lot of culling around June. Things got dropped for any number of reasons. Some just can't be found for a rewatch. Some were dropped because they were breaking up double-feature groupings. There was at least one that I didn't remember until we were past its release date in the sequence. So here are a handful of movies that I wanted to write about but didn't. Purple People Eater - based loosely on the song by Sheb Wooley, and I have to imagine it's Mac and Me  levels of bad. It s