The old Nintendo Silver Surfer game was kind of lame. But…

This is a two-part post, the first about a dopey game, the second about the unbelievably boss/cool/awesome prize you could get for playing said game.

First: the dopey game.

The Silver Surfer was riding a wave — ha! — of popularity back in 1990. A big money-making wing of the Marvel U. at the time was its cosmic doings, so much so that it almost matched the box office appeal of the McFarlane Spider-Man and those darn mutants. So of course there would be a Silver Surfer video game for the old-timey Nintendo system. And if you want Contra in space, this is the game for you. It was side- and top-scrolling game play, with levels ended with perhaps the lamest selection of comic book bosses ever assembled in a NES cartridge. It’s a pretty steep drop-off after Mephisto, as you can see by the headshots in the above ad. Firelord? Okay, maybe. But it’s hard to get worked up over the menace of the Possessor, you know? Reptyl? I run a comic book blog and consider myself a mild aficionado, but I had to do a quick Wikipedia search to remind myself who the hell that is/was.

Was Thanos vacationing in Cancun? Too busy working on his purple tan?

So the game wasn’t that great. But, my God, wait until you see what you could get by honing your skills at playing it and racking up high scores. Until tomorrow.