Not all monkey style games are designed to hurt you.
Tarzan is a tape where you are a man who evolved from an ape who lives among the apes but also fights the apes and sometimes a snake or different colored apes. And also saves more apes from cages and in the end gets to a big temple with a face at the top.
And did I mention pushing the side buttons on the controler lets you do Tarzan Yell?
Just like Carol Burnett.
That is why today’s nintendo tape review is Tarzan: For ColecoVission
My Aunt Lydia introduced me to Atari and Colecovision. Then later she got a attachment for the colecovision that made it play Atari games so she could give me her regular atari. Then later the colecovision too.
She was an original gamer. She loved to play tapes all day and even developed a hump on the back of her neck from playing so much.
So when I played Tarzan for the first time in 1984 it was at her house where I always spent at least two weeks every summer. We rented video tapes and watched them all the time, big stacks of them, and played atari and Colecovision. It was wicked. All the classics. One movie we rented was name “Tazan: The Legend of The Gray Stroke” and I really dont remember much about it but i do remember it gave me Tarzan fever especially when she bought the Colecovision tape! Of it.
So in this tape, you go around the jungle killing gorillas and humans and snakes, then you avoid pits and climb trees. You also free captured apes and murder the humans who have guns. (humans always love guns) But the surprise here is guess what. Some of the apes aka gorillas have sided with the humans. So it is ok to murder them. Then at the end you get to a weird pyramid that has some kind of face on it. You climb the temple and kill more gorillas then get to the weird face at the top and press BOTH side buttons and tarzan does “The Tarzan Yell, The Power of The Gray Stroke” power and the temple crumbles to rubble and you re-start at the beginning.
There is a little monnkey who follows you and sometimes helps you I think it is Tarzans’ wife or cousin. I dont know i never cared about the story because Tarzan was too naked and I liked heroes in cool armor but the game was awesome and had WICKED music. And the story is a mystery one because no one knows why Tarzarn lives among the apes. He just likes to. Maybe he married into it.
Aunt Lydia and Uncle Ned loved to eat. I like it a lot to. But when I say they loved to eat I mean that we would go through Kentucky Fry Chicken drive thru and they would get the biggest bucket of chicken and biscuts and gravy and corn and cold slaw, like a five family dinner then give me my plate to take to the living room and eat while I watched Jaws 3-D and they would stand at the counter and eat the entire rest of the dinner.
I am not making fun of people who do that. It is just they loved to eat so much they didnt even take time to put the food on a plate. And I always wondered why they didnt want to sit down to eat like everyone else I knew.
They stood over the buckets and boxes at the kitchen counter and ate the food and didnt talk at all. They would smack their lips and breath loud thru their noses while they chewed and I would turn up the TV because i didnt like the sound. Then when they were done we would watch more movies or play more atari until bed.
My cousin Ann who was 18 back then came home with her boy friend who was a few years older and I did not like him that much because he almost always wanted to talk about a cartoon called “beanie and cecil” and he said it was the best cartoon ever. He said it was about a boy who was friends with a loch nest monster and to my mind in 1984 when i was seven that sounded AWESOME. So he finally brought over a tape of it and we watched it. And it was the lamest cartoon I ever saw. Zero special forms or attacks. Zero powers or energy swords.
It was not like he-man, or transformers, or even scooby doo which I didnt like that much in the first place because of how lame it looked. And the lock nest monster was friendly and had big eyelashes so it didnt even look like a monster at all just a buddy. Hard to be cool when you swish around your eyebrows affectionately in my opinion.
Anyway, Anns’ boyfriend was name Allan. He looked like a guy from those 70s movies where the men wore little round wire glasses and had red hair cut short straight across their forehead with long side burns and wore all black clothes. Like a chikd of the corn all grown up or a guy who works for the archdiocese in a 70s satanic possession movie.
So Allan and Ann get home from seeing Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom. I was jealous beceause I wanted to see it and wasnt allowed to because it was too violent. But in 1985 I got to because here is a secret. Aunt Lydia would let me watch anything I wanted. jaws (scary) or secret of NIMH (beatiful) or even Porkys’ (dirty) . I also felt really grown up there because She would let me drink a bartle and james every now and then and coffee too. So it was like getting to feel grown up when you’re 8. So when Temple of Doom came out on Tape that next year I got to see it and I Loved it.
But in 1984 when Allan and Ann came back from it I was just mad. I was even madder because when they were done talking about that movie Allan started talking about beaney and cecil again! He always talked about that or monty python which I thought was probably a snake from some other boring cartoon. . He was boring and I hated him. He wore these black boots that had a kind of high heel on them and one time he stood on my bare toes with them and when i said OW and told him he was standing on my foot and it hurt he looked down at me and acted like he didnt hear. He just stared at me then looked back to Aunt lydia and kept talking. And he did not move his foot either, not for like ten more seconds. No one even said anything. When you were a kid back then you were invisible even to people who loved you.
But the good news is Ann brought home Kentucky Fry Chicken for me and Aunt Lydia and Uncle Ned and they gave me extra and when i was eating it I realised it made me feel a lot better. The more of the food I ate the better I felt. Then when things made me sad a lot later on I would always remember to eat and it would help. It still helps me a lot when I feel down I just go get a bunch of food and eat it so in that way it became a good thing and supports my mental health even though I am tired and achy a lot these days and feel sick inside.
And in the end the joke was on Allan because his skin was so pale you could see red dots all over his face and neck. He always wore a suit jacket that went to his wrists so I just guessed they were all over him. And you couldn’t see any on me hardly at all.
So when I went to bed that night I fell asleep thinking about being mrs brisbey’s boyfriend from secret of NIMH and how she cheered when i used my energy sword to defeat him and she gave me hugs.
Then i had a nightmare about the scary garilla on the cover of Tarzan: Nintendo Tape.
But now i realize it was wrong to think mean stuff about Allans dots. He didnt ask for them and you should never think mean stuff about people if its not something they chose. So i apologize to him for that. I heard he died awhile back so I wanted to make sure you all knew I apoligze to him. if you are mean even if it makes you feel good at the time you can hear that the person died and then you will feel like you are the humans from Tarzarn The Video game. and that is the pits. i wish we could all be more like the friendly gorilla from the front of that tape.
so I give Tarzan :The Colecovision a 2/10.
