10.19.2008

Heavy Barrel -- circa 1987

This one I spent hours on and never beat. I found it miraculous that this was one of the few games that I had both seen in the arcades and was available for the Apple II. In the days before home-brewed porting of NES games, kids like me had to dream about what it would be like to play Super Mario Brothers at home. In Heavy Barrel, you had to collect pieces of this ultimate weapon, the Heavy Barrel, that you would need to defeat the final boss (your progress in picking up those pieces is depicted in the lower right corner of the video below). i never made it far enough to complete the Heavy Barrel, but i see from the clip (~10:11) that it was not quite as awesome as my 9-year self fantasized.

Heavy Barrel - Cabinet Image

Xevious

I spent many hours playing this game on my Apple IIC back in the day.


10.02.2008

Primo


The song ("Nas is Like") also contains scratched samples from Nas' 1994 song "It Ain't Hard to Tell". In the 14 Deadly Secrets by DJ Premier, Primo said:

This shit is crazy : the day I made this record, I was at my house in Long Island, and I found this old record that I was gonna throw away. It was a ten inch record from a Lutheran church. And it was pink with a black fish on it. And I was gonna throw it in the garbage, 'cuz it didn't look like it had anything hot on it. But somethin' told me "before you throw it away, put it on the turntable, see if you can find something on it".

And I found that sample of Nas is like, and I broke it into 3 parts, scratched it live to the drumbeat that I already had, with the little chirpin' birds and from there, nas is like was born, man...

http://www.whosampled.com/sample/view/4061/Nas-Nas%20Is%20Like_John%20V.%20Rydgren%20and%20Bob%20R.%20Way-What%20Child%20is%20This%3F/