Rose Tinted is a regular feature of my Cblog, in which I re-examine games that we have fond memories of and see if they still hold up. If you have suggestions for titles to be featured in the future or ideas on how I can improve the column, please let me know.





On the occasion of my fifth birthday, my parents gave me my first video game console, a Colecovision. My father bought the system, as he would eventually buy all the games I owned for it, from a man who would park a retired school bus on the side of a highway and sell his wares out of it. It was either a simpler time or the dude was lifting product from delivery trucks.

Knowing how excited I would likely be (and probably because dad had wanted to play it for himself a bit), the parental units had already hooked the Coleco up to the television in their bedroom and I spent the entire day glued to the screen. The three games I had were Donkey Kong (which shipped with the Colecovision and was biggest selling point upon its release), River Raid (a top-down shooter) and Popeye.





Popeye was my favorite game of the bunch, and would continue to be my favorite Coleco game for several years to come. Produced by the video games division at board game giant Parker Bros., you play as the titular spinach-lover as he woos and rescues the twiggish Olive Oyl. The game takes place across three stages and the objective is to collect icons dropped by Olive before they can hit the ground.

Bluto chases you around during all of this, throwing beer bottles that Popeye can punch or attacking from floors directly above and below with punches. For a big guy, Bluto can move pretty fast sometimes and it was easy to get cornered. Touching Bluto is instant death, but there are a few paths in every level that only Popeye can traverse for quick escapes.





And what would Popeye be without spinach (hint: A perfectly normal, racist, drunk sailor)? A can of spinach is placed in each level that Popeye can punch to become temporarily invincible, stopping the movement of the assorted detritus that Olive is dropping for easier collection and allowing him to send Bluto bouncing around the screen.

I don't remember the game being as hard as I found it to be while playing the remake that Miyamoto produced a few years later for the NES. Some of that may be down a basic feature in practically every Colecovision title where you could select one of five difficulty settings, an attempt to mirror the difficulty levels found on arcade machines. It's fun, though, for such a basic game. I can barely make it past the first set of three levels any longer, but I feel oddly compelled to keep going back to try again.





Even being the very first game I ever owned, and a licensed one at that, Popeye continues to be entertaining from the perspective of being an arcade-action title. It isn't stunning and certainly not as exciting as my memories from twenty years ago would have me believe, but it has solid gameplay with simple concepts and a good level of challenge.


MOAR RETROSE TINTED