With BT broadband and TV, you can say goodbye to boredom and hello to...

Huh?

This week's RetroNots is not approved by Nintendo of America.

I still remember borrowing a copy of Gollet for NES from a friend back in junior high school.

I'd always been fascinated by the arcade game, but being a pre-teen of meager means, I could

only afford enough quarters to make it to maybe the third or fourth level, even playing with pals.

The quite not version of Gollet really embodied the quintessence of ruthless arcade design.

It was geared around draining quarters from kids, at as rapid a clip as possible, fairness be damned.

Not only were 1-4 players constantly swarmed by a seemingly impossible number of the undead, scores of ghosts and demons and quantities that 3D games wouldn't be able to match until HD consoles arrived 20 years later,

but you also had to deal with constant health drain as time tick passed.

It was a nasty form of money grubbing that wouldn't fully manifest itself again in games until the mobile free-to-play revolution 20 years later.

Candy Crush Saga's shamelessness would make Gollet creator Ed Lodge blush, but the two games share in a certain kindred spirit.

Of course, the big difference between Gollet and Candy Crush Saga is that the former was loads of fun, not simply a trigger for the brain's obsessive compulsive center.

A big part of the pleasure came from the fact that it was, in all ways, an intensely social experience, and not just in the sense of begging for extra lives on Facebook.

Gollet was one of the earliest four player arcade games, and it might have been the first ever four player cooperative game.

Even if the entire experience revolved around entropy and monsters whittling your health points down to zero with alarming efficiency, Gollet was a blast to play with friends.

As the saying goes, it's fun to play together, even if you're playing with some jackass who keeps shooting the food.

The

Gawdland represented the cutting edge of arcade games when it debuted in 1985.

By the time the NES really took off in America, however, it had begun to look a little long in the tooth next to the likes of Strider, Darius, Double Dragon, Super Contra, The Ninja Warriors, and so forth.

Still, the sheer number of moving objects on the screen and the four player simultaneous design seemed well beyond the NES's capabilities.

I was eager to play Gollet at home, finally I wouldn't have to part with a week's allowance to reach level four, but I found myself wondering how well it would translate to NES.

...