Pix-Elated!

As I exhumed the contents of several mid-move boxes last week, looking for some George Carlin CDs, I found a lost piece of my childhood: a tiny, LCD, hand-held He-Man ‘video’ game. High tech gadgetry years before Atari and a half decade before Nintendo/Sega.

Simplicity at its finest...only five buttons:

Move:

Moves He-Man in a manly pixilated stride down Castle Grayskull’s maze like corridors.

Cursor:

Rotates the giganto arrow which tells He-Man which way to move.

Hurl:

Tosses He-Man’s sword at Skeletor who has one pose, a triumphant “Skeletor up in this MoFo!!!” (I should say triumphant until he gets a sword lodged in his face).

Sound Off:

A switch which sorta tells you what is off, but not what is on.

ACL:

One of those tiny, recessed jobbers where you need a pen or pencil to press it...much like the members of Lost stuck in the hatch, I refuse to press it out of fear that something bad will happen.

The plot just as simple:

Our boy, rough and tough with his puffed out chest, and, like always, mostly naked, bolts through the downtown-Phoenix designed hallways of Castle Grayskull, looking for his sword, avoiding trapdoors that lead to jail cells, and frequently being carried off by some ‘roided up bat/pterodactyl with poor direction sense. Again, the culmination is to chuck a sword at Skeletor’s face.

Cue the 1-bit music which accompanies a victory. Of course, with all this intricately simple planning there are some other unique aspects.

He-Man can only travel NSEW, yet has a spider-sense which tells him when his sword, a spare jail key, a cell, and/or Skeletor are in an adjoining room. Upon sensing Skeletor, you then guess which room he’s in and ‘hurl’ the sword down the appropriate hallway. If it hits, then it’s party time at Man-at-Arms’ crib while Skeletor calls LifeAlert from the LCD ground. If it misses, both his sword and Skeletor magically teleport to another part of the castle.

There are three levels of difficulty, but I have yet to determine what separates them since I die pretty frequently no matter what the level. I’m also baffled by the supposed time limit the only indicators being the “da DA da DA” sound every 11-16 seconds and the fact that I left it on and lost. This then leads to the more confusing scoring. If the time limit runs out, you get a 99. But if you win the game, you get a 14.

The game is fantastic! I’ve spent a Final Fantasy amount of time on the game.

A few plot inconsistencies between the game and He-Man mythos:

1. Skeletor spends pretty much every TV episode (and comic) trying to break into Grayskull to begin with...in the game he’s hanging out like Rocky...I suppose this somewhat fits why He-Man searches for him (and ultimately impales his face).

2. Why Skeletor sits still (and how he magically teleports at a He-Man misfire) is beyond me. Why not make it harder and jog around the corridors?

3. I know the MTV Cribs “Castle Grayskull” episode doesn’t exist, but I don’t recall The Sorceress having a metaphysically implausible maze.

4. Speaking of which, where is she?

5. Moreover, He-man’s got no idea where the heck he is, yet has a key for the cells. And, much like the sword...

6. ...the key mysteriously vanishes after use.

7. Speaking of which, how did he lose his sword to begin with? Last I checked the Jaw Bridge could only be opened by that.

After playing this game about fourteen dozen times, I found myself empathizing with He-Man’s LCD world.

How often do we feel like we walk an endless maze--avoiding obstacles, looking for our strengths, facing our fears, and, randomly, getting off carried track, literally, by a crazy, misguided bat--all in an attempt to get some closure or ‘win the game?’

In the great abstract world of time, while it constantly moves forward, our ability to move in a finite space seems limitless. And not just in traveling from place to place, but what activities, hobbies, interests, career moves, job fires, social moments, and basic survival needs (eat, sleep, bathroom) do we fill our space with? These two concepts cause us to feel like our life is linear; being stuck a car stuck in car wash, getting pelted with Fruity Pebble wax and royal blue brushes.

Tweak that view for one second and learn a lesson He-Man’s travels. What if the muscle-bound man made a map? What if he sat down and plotted out where all the traps were, eliminating rooms where his sword could be, and plotting, as best he can, where the crazy bat will carry him off to in relation to where he was?

Now, what if you did the same?

If you got out a big sheet of white construction paper and started scrawling: where would you start; what is the journey like so far; what symbols would represent positive moments, negative times, and other important events in your history? There’s no right or wrong how you do it (if in the end you draw a straight line, perfect, but you still have to fill out stuff that’s happened along the way).

Eventually, I did make a map for my monochrome main man. I started thinking/feeling a sense of relief, a sense of focus. While this venture only helped my game a bit (scoring a few more sword to skull victories) the most significant idea behind my upbeat feeling was the one necessary element of map making.

The last marker I put down was a “You Are Here;” I soon realized I wasn’t too far off course in the first place.

pb