Rocket Knight Adventures

Hitting a roadblock

Drew remembers how a rare case of brotherly love helped him through Konami’s rock-hard Mega Drive game

» Mega Drive » 1993 » Konami about 22 years ago, i unwrapped the best Christmas present i ever got: a Mega Drive, a portable Tv that i could’ve easily mistaken for a microwave oven and Konami’s Rocket Knight Adventures.

I’m pretty sure that my parents didn’t know what they’d given me. They probably saw the cute opossum on the box and applied the formula of: ‘cute equals probably fine for kids’. It didn’t matter. My dad set up the telly, popped the cart in and handed the controller over. I was so happy… I was crying on the inside with joy.

Rocket Knight kind of employs the Super Mario Bros. technique of subtly teaching you all you need to know about the game in its first level. Only after dispatching a few pig soldiers with Sparkster’s sword I encountered the not-so-subtle problem of an impassable wall. I was four years old, I didn’t know that all I had to do was hold a button down to set off Sparkster’s jet pack – holding a button down was a concept as alien to me then as mortgages are to me now. So came forth a stream of real tears.

Dad couldn’t figure it out, he thought you had to mash the button to fill rocket gauge. Mum was too busy preparing to feed the impending deluge of family members on our house, so she was out. So I turned to my sometimes-arch enemy at the time: my older brother. Matt religiously played FIFA, so he was versed in the arcane trick of holding a button down and letting it go. Sparkster took to the skies; I thought my brother was a magician.

Two decades later, I’d like to think I’m a lot better with games today. But still, whenever I get stuck I always remember that moment my brother basically saved Christmas Day 1995.