|
|
CREATIVE CRITTERS
|
 Something that Australian Nintendo fans in the 90's missed out on, along with access half the sodding library, kids rapping about Zelda and games that were actually affordable, was the chance to read Nintendo Power. This didn't bother me at the time, but I'm beginning to think that my complete inability to wax nostalgic about playing Ninendo games is due to not having a magazine that made me feel like part of a culture, and hence I just felt like a pudgy shut-in who was incapable of communicating with other human beings, rather than an exclusive member of a secret cult and potential starfighter pilot. Things really haven't improved since then, but let's not go into that now.
Instead of Nintendo Power, Australia had Nintendo Magazine System, usually abbreviated to NMS. Neither of these titles were, it's fair to say, especially exciting sounding. While "Nintendo Power" is evocative of kids with baseball caps and sunglasses clenching their fists and yelling 'Gnarly!', "Nintendo Magazine System" sounds like an oddly-shaped piece of grey plastic designed to let you change cartridges without getting up, just to underline the fact you're a complete waste of flesh and everybody would be better off if you just shrivelled up and died.
Anyway. One of the things I regret doing most (keeping in mind I regret almost everything I've done in my life) was throwing out my entire collection of NMS issues when I was 15, as the sheer mediocrity of the thing could have provided years worth of entertainment for all concerned, especially their fawning review of Rise of the Robots which was four pages long despite only containing two paragraphs of text. And, while EGM printed a diverse selection of fan art, NMS only ever printed pictures of Mario killing Sonic, which became incredibly repetitious, not only because of the subject matter, but because readers only seemed capable of tracing extant pictures, and there's only so many times you can see the box art of Super Mario World with a crudely superimposed chainsaw before it starts to get dull.
Ah, yes, fan art. NMS' "Creative Critters" competition survived my po-faced 15 year old cull, because I'd cut the pages out and filed them away in a binder of artwork I thought was 'Awesome', as reference material for - God help us - an RPG I was designing at the time, called, yes, Dark Legacy. It even had the same logo. Thankfully, I didn't come across RPG Maker until the tail-end of my adolesence, and only inflicted an awful, bug-ridden "comedy" game upon the community instead of an Evangelion / Final Fantsy VII / Xenogears / Shadowrun / Vandal Hearts / Final Fantasy VIII / Suikoden / Armored Core / Warcraft 2 / X-Files / Dungeons & Dragons / The Mask of Zorro ripoff. The list would have been longer if it weren't for The Mask of Zorro, which was such an ill-fitting idea that it made me realise I was literally including everything I thought was cool at the time, and it was probably a good idea to stop. Sadly, I threw most of that material out too, when I turned 17 and decided to try being a goth instead, which was also a spectacularly stupid idea, although a slightly better fit for somebody capable of turning the words "Nintendo Magazine System" into the embodiment of death.
This was the winning entry, apparently drawn by a young Rob Liefeld. It's by far the best looking picture in the competition, which is clearly why it won, except... It's also an incredibly dull design. "Muscular shirtless man who looks a bit cross" simply doesn't live up to the other entires, as we'll soon see.
Yes, this is more like it. Meet Syphco Man, a skinless, rotting corpse with half his left leg missing and some kind of tribal warrior mask. And, um, his name on his underpants, just in case he loses them. "Syphco" was probably meant to be "Psycho", which makes him sound like a character from Exciting Hour, alongside The Pirania, Coco Savege and Insane Worrier.
Look, we know better now, but this was 1994, and using Ren & Stimpy to get an automatic laugh was all we had before the Internet spoiled us with pirates, ninjas, badgers and surprised owls. Wait, I take that back; Ren & Stimpy were far superior, since they were actually funny to start with, even if 10 year olds who read NMS couldn't quite grasp why.
Another winner, Talon. Also a fairly dull design, and only worth including because the anatomy is so weird that, from when I first saw it until a few days ago - that's over half my life - I thought he had a giant pumpkin-like growth coming out of his stomach. I still would, if my friend hadn't pointed out that it was his leg. Yes, I see it now.
Yes, again. I can't quite work out what's actually going on here; either Ren has gotten incredibly muscular, Ren is inside some kind of suit, Ren's head is attached to a some kind of Frankenstein's Monster, or... What the hell are those things coming out of his shoulders? Wings? Where does his body start and the background end? Why is he fantasising about stabbing Stimpy? Look, I've given this more time it deserves already. Let's move on.
Remember what I said about NMS' fan art earlier? Yeah. Just imagine Sonic's head on Mario's sword, every month, forever. No, wait, that isn't entirely true; I bought a copy of NMS several years after I gave up reading it, and all the drawings were of a nurse in various states of undress, usually based on a poorly-traced picture of the one from Animaniacs. As this was during the height of the "N64 is for kids, Playstation is for adults" debate, I'm assuming it was a cack-handed attempt at being "mature", somewhat undermined by the presence of Donald Duck on the front cover.
"Heh heh heh! A distant relation of mine, perhaps?" probably deserves an explanation. While EGM had Sushi-X and Nintendo Power had Nester, NMS had... Skull. Skull started off as a regular member of the editorial team, depicted as a cartoon of a stereotypically "cool" guy from 1994 - long hair, black t-shirt, disaffected expression etc. - and his job was answering reader Q&A, which he did in way which was vaguely rude, but not rude enough to be deemed unsuitable for children (although see the above entry). This meant that people began addressing regular letters to Q&A, just so Skull would answer them, rather than the dull guy who answered the normal mail.
I'm not entirely sure what happened next, but by the time this issue was printed, Skull had actually become a skeleton. Not just a man who represented himself as a skeleton in the magazine; a man who spoke about himself as if he were genuinely a skeleton. A skeleton who worked on a Nintendo magazine and answered questions about the projected release date of Chrono Trigger. God, we thought we had it good.
Christ. Ignoring the striking similarity to images that people got killed for printing last year, this also requires an explanation.
Along with Skull, NMS had another character called Mister Prassard; a stereotypical Indian man who'd write letters to the magazine about how he ran a convenience store and liked eating poppadoms. No, really. It all seemed hysterically funny at the time, I swear.
The appeal of Mister Prassard was that nobody knew whether he was one of the editorial staff, or whether somebody was actually going to the trouble of writing letters about poppadoms and mailing them to a Nintendo magazine every single month. He developed into a cult figure, and people began sending in their own Mister Prassard stories and artwork, something which, in tandem with all the people sending letters to Skull, meant the mailbag section was entirely useless as a place to talk about Nintendo products. Rather than try and fix things, the staff just created another mailbag, and that got taken over by people impersonating Yoshi.
The Afro King, then, is meant to be Mister Prassard, if he were a fighting game character who thew burning poppadoms like fireballs. Now imagine being 10 and trying to explain that to a friend who didn't read the magazine. After he found Mister Prassard so hysterical, I told him that it was really me, which he completely bought despite massive evidence to the contrary. He continued believing in this until I threw out all my magazines five years later, when he asked "But don't you want to save all those Mister Prassard letters you sent in?". I also told the same guy a made-up story about a hidden level in Super Mario World, which, for all I know, he's still looking for.
Were this drawn today, I'd immediately assume it was some kind of fetish, but it was 1994, when people were either less perverted, or less likely to admit they were perverted in a public forum; I'm not sure which.
And is the dragon meant to be Yoshi? Because it's not.
Yes, let's end on a high note with this buffed-up version of Evil Spock, whose name is Large Sarge. Despite being a more interesting design than Cross Shirtless Man, it didn't win. However, while the losers went home empty-handed, the winners got a copy of Mortal Kombat 2. Poetic justice at its finest.
Stay tuned for more updates are coming your way! Till then keep reading those comics!
|
|
|
