Many a year ago, I used to play a game over at Nate‘s house called Night Raid. It was a relatively simple game, but very fun. You-as-the-character sit in a little turret, and try to kill all the paratroopers before they land on the ground and overrun your turret. That’s it.
What makes it so entertaining is the little touches of humor, and the gleeful carnage you can inflict. You can shoot out a paratrooper’s parachute, sending his flailing body to splat upon the ground, or you can pop the paratrooper himself, turning him into so much pixelated chunky salsa. Or you can simply destroy the warplanes that drop off the paratroopers. Debris from these planes can also kill soldiers on the ground. The humor comes from the Intermissions between each round. A plane will fly over head with a banner trailing, advising you to order from Apogee Games; or, if a lone paratrooper remains alive on the ground, a UFO will come and beam him up.
Okay, so that’s not really that funny. But. What is funny, what is goddamn hilarious, is the pizza delivery intermission. A pizza van navigates this war-torn land to deliver a pizza to our intrepid turret guy (Turreteer?). This delivery fellow must be really dedicated to doing his job, risking death and dismemberment to deliver a fucking pizza. Or he’s retarded. Which may in fact be true, for when he comes up to the turret door and says, “Pizza,” he sounds kind of like Corky from television’s “Life Goes On.” This sound effect alone use to send Nate and I’s thirteen-year-old counterparts into fits of adolescent giggling. *Sniff*. Ah, the memories.
Incidentally, you can download the shareware version of the game here. Let me know what you think, or if anyone else remembers the game.
JAB
