Adventure in Retrogaming

     This weekend I was at a resort for my grandparents' 50th anniversary, when I discovered that the place had an arcade. My cousin informed me that there was an arcade in the resort and my Mom gave me four dollars to spend. My Mom never gives me money for an arcade, so this was a special event. When my cousin and I walked into the game room, we saw a pinball machine, Atari Tetris, an out of order, yet ultra cool sit-down RoadBlasters and, finally, Super Hang-on. RoadBlasters was one of the first arcade games I ever played. My Dad works at Georgia Tech and I spent a lot of quarters in their game room even though I couldn't get by Rally 6. I quickly narrowed my choices: I don't like pinball, I have Tengen Tetris, and my childhood toys was busted, so that left Super Hang-On, a 1987 16-bit motorcycle racing game made by Sega (evil! evil! :) I put in a quarter and chose the beginner's race course. The first race did not go well at all. I reved the throttle forward instead of backwards, so I could never get above 90 KPH. I needed to race at a full 280 KPH so I lost. My subsequent races were better, by the end of the four bucks I had gotten to the end of the fourth out of six levels.

     I came back the next day to play Super Hang-On again, this time with more financial aid;  I received ten dollars from babysitting some young cousins. Over two days I memorized where all the diffucult turns were, and what I had to do upon their arrival. I was determined that I would beat the first rally of the game. Unfortunately, the 5th level thre a fatal wrench in my plan. It was not that the course was more diffucult than the others, the amount of rival racers on the road skyrocketed; no matter how far I raced, there were always three other bikers on a small road. Hitting them lost time, and I couldn't dodge them all. I concentrated all my focused energy to the race, but I never beat the 5th race; I just came to the last trees dotting the time-extending checkpoint. Nine dollars and fifty cents were gone from my pocket, but I still had a smile on my face. The money meant nothing to me, since I had agreed to babysit for nothing. I had played my first motorcycle racing game, but I never beat it...

Or did I? After all, I have the ROM :)