NPR – Amarcord Hard Core

24 Ottobre 2011 | Posted in Top Story | By

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Introduction Notes

NPR is an unfortunate acronym, but it depicts quite well what has been done last week. It stands for “Nerd Party Reloaded” and this is its story.

Some months ago we gathered for a casual night meeting, just three friends, a couple of beers and a mame machine. The setting was as bad as it could be: three guys on two chair and a child-sized stall, with one monitor and one keyboard. Nonetheless we had some fun and we decided to reply.

Before we move on, a little introduction on the word “amarcord”: it’s taken from the title of an italian film and it literally means “I remember”. It has become idiomatic and stands for those moments when you recall the joys of the past, usually of one’s childhood. We were trying to recall our childhood experience with coin-op machine and the games of those years (we were avid gamers) and the word rhymes well with “hard core”. At least in my italian pronunciation.

Reloading it

We needed some time to manage another night together, but this let us the time to organize it better. So it became a nerd party, but really improved.

So this time we had:

  • food and beverages in a fair amount
  • another guy, from the depth of our amarcord-hardcore-gaming
  • one controller each (sort of)
  • a comfortable setting for all of us, comprehensive of a nice couch
  • an official jingle that looped all nigth inbetween plays (NPR jingle)
  • a pre-shared list of games with settings pre counfigured by our graceful host
  • an amarcord-hardcore logo

 

 

 

 

So here we start, choosing the games that we decided were represetative of “those times”.

This is the final list:

1: Cadillac and dinosaurs(3 players)


2: Kights of the round(3 players)



3: Final fight(2 players)


4: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles(4 players)


5: WWF Wrestlefest(4 players)


6: Captain America And The Avengers(4 players)

[Image not present. I am not lazy, simply it was not exchanged back and forth in the planning mail as the others, so i do not look for a new image for the sake of historical coherency]

The outcome:

We had quite a good time, long talks about the old days of gaming, and came up with some charts.

  • Most challenging game: TMNT
  • Least challenging game: Captain America and The Avengers
  • Killer game: WWF Wrestlefest, royal rumble mode. Played with infinite amount of credits became a real phisical challenging game playeable in the mode “the last one standing wins”.

Improvement for next NPR night:

  • Set of edible tokens to represent credits
  • Competitions! (between humans and between games)
  • A real coin-op machine. (well, this last one is just an idea right now)
Side Nerding:
The night had the space to host some more free nerding, as a proof here is a leaked video, it’s in italian and even if you understand it it’s completely without context. It’s up to you to guess it: NPR – contestualizza.

.ccv.

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