EASE.GG
Satisfying nostalgia for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s
Card Breaks: 1991 Topps Desert Storm Series 1
Introduction
The year is 1991. The president is George H. W. Bush. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq has just occupied Kuwait. In response, the United States along with a coalition of 35 countries (“The Coalition for Peace”) invades Iraq.
Two Different Iraq Wars
George H. W. Bush and the Gulf War (of 1990-91) should not to be confused with George W. Bush and the Iraq War of 2003. Different presidents, different wars. I actually think confusing them could be a pretty easy thing to do, especially as time goes on. Both presidents named George Bush, both invaded Iraq, both had the help of Dick Cheney.
There are some major differences however - 1991’s Gulf War boasted a coalition of 35 countries, while 2003 had only 6. And while the 1991 Gulf War lasted a roughly a year and a half, the 2003 Iraq War lasted over 8 years, officially anyway.
As perhaps due to a difference in the popularity of the wars, three trading card makers would produce Desert Storm (Gulf War) cards, while nobody would create them for the second Iraq War in 2003. There were however, “Iraqi’s Most Wanted” playing cards made by Bicycle.
The Cards
Now I know you are totally wondering: what did Topps, the trading card company, do in response to the war?
Well, they made not one, not two, but three series of trading cards about it.
And they weren’t the only ones making cards - multiple trading card companies produced cards about the conflict.
Topps however made the biggest splash, producing three separate series. Pro Set would come out with a 250 card set. And the now-defunct Pacific would also get involved, producing an Operation Desert Shield 110 card set.
Between the three Topps series, cards were created for some of the biggest names in war - Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and in Series 3, Saddam Hussein. Not to let defense contractors down, there is also a ton of military technology (weapons, etc.) showcased in each series. In the card breaks video, we will see that a majority of the cards are technology-based - military assets, technological capabilities, etc.
Desert Storm Series 1 & Series 2
Topps Desert Storm is a classic mixture of patriotism and capitalism, something America knows how to do pretty darn well. These cards were a hot commodity back when they were released, with some stores selling out within hours. I might have been 7 years old but these were the packs I was opening. I even remember having a poster of fighter aircraft (F-14, F-16, etc) at this time. Colin Powell is said to have spent years after signing Desert Storm cards. Inevitably, they were wildly overproduced (like many things from the 90s) and today you can now find a box of them for under $10.
The Breaks
So, without further ado, let’s have some fun and break a few packs open and see what we get:
Conclusion
As I mention in the video, Series 1 and Series 3 are a bit more fun, given you can get find cards for the big names in the war: George H. W. Bush, Dick Cheney, General Powell, and even Saddam Hussein.
Cheney & Powell
These cards are also easy to find, and cheap. You may be able to score some for south of $10 a box of 36 packs. It wouldn’t be too hard to build a set for each Topps series, as well as a Pro Set and a Pacific. They are that cheap.
I’ll admit that these cards can only hold my attention for about 5 - 10 minutes. They possess almost zero collector value. However, they can be fun gifts for the right people - and there is some value to that. Bring a few packs to the next party you go to - they are a great conversation starter (for better or for worse, of course).
Games I'm Sorta Good At - Mike Tyson's Punch-Out
The Mikes
Real sick, brawl nights, I perform like Mike - anyone, Tyson,
Jordan, Jackson… action
– Notorious B.I.G. on “Victory”
If you grew up in the 80s and 90s, then you are likely extremely aware of the Holy Trinity of Mikes. That is, Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, and Mike Tyson. You probably even idolized one of them or even all three. They ruled the sports and entertainment worlds and all three had their own video games.
I used to listen to my Michael Jackson CD, wearing my Michael Jordan jersey, playing Mike Tyson's Punch-Out
While Jordan vs. Bird and Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker were okay games (Jordan vs. Bird is actually terrible), Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out is arguably the greatest sports title for the NES (it has my vote over Tecmo Super Bowl), and, generally speaking, one of the greatest video games of all-time.
When Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out was released back in 1987, Tyson was on top of the world. Not only did he hold three heavyweight titles, his game was absolutely brilliant and everybody wanted it.
As you probably know, eventually all three Mikes would have their share of troubles. By the early 90s Mike Tyson was in prison. Nintendo ended up re-releasing Punch-Out! without his name and likeness. I totally refuse to play or review that version.
The Game
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out is a “port” of the arcade Punch-Out. I put port in quotes because the two aren’t all that comparable. Much of this was orginally for technical reasons, but it actually works out for the game. The arcade is a great game in its own right, but Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out is fit to be a console game and not simply an arcade port. This is a good thing, because obviously the NES is a console.
In the game, you star as Little Mac, a tiny guy who has to jump to hit his opponents in the face. Mac’s trainer is Doc. When you start winning you get memorable cut scenes of Mac running behind Doc biking in New York City.
The game is technically excellent - but the characters like Mac, your internationally flavored opponents (sure, the stereotypes are a bit ridiculous, especially 30+ years later), and Referee Mario - help make the game memorable. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out is dripping with personality.
Difficulty
I have never beat this game. I have made it to Tyson, and always lost. Badly. Mike is very, very hard. I don’t know anyone who has beat him either. (Update: I do know a person who has done it!)
Despite the difficulty of your final opponent, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out is not a “Nintendo hard” game. Let’s remember that NES has some brutally hard games. Punch-Out starts you off very gently with the remembered-for-being-terrible Glass Joe, whose record is 1 win and 99 losses. Yes, as you progress it gets more and more difficult.
Gameplay
The gameplay is about two things: timing and pattern recognition. You need serious reflexes to master the game. Each boxer Little Mac faces has different routines they go through, which come with tells. For some boxers, knowing the trick of exactly what to do is the only way to beat them (King Hippo, for example).
As you progress in Punch-Out, you do see several of your former opponents again, though they have changed - faster with new routines. This can make you really a bit twitchy!
Graphics
The graphics are memorable. Your opponents are big and expressive. The game looked as good as anything on console ever had in 1987.
The graphics were made possible by the game using an ASIC mapper called the MMC2. MMCs (memory mapper chips among other names) allowed the system extra memory and capabilities to do things not normally possible with the console alone. The MMC2 was only used for Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. Regardless of how it was achieved technically, the game looks great.
Replay Value
I have enjoyed beating the same five or six opponents for thirty years. There’s something a little theraputic about getting into the right rhythm and knocking some of your opponents out. It can be fun to jump into the game for 15 to 45 minutes at a time depending on how good you feel that day.
Not to mention, I still need to beat Tyson which gives me a reason to still come back.
The game also has a password system which motivates you to come back and not have to start all over every time you play.
Conclusion
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out is a bonafide classic sporting a larger-than-life final boss in an 80s superstar, Mike Tyson.
Great graphics, excellent gameplay, loads of personality, and the right amount of difficulty put this game in my personal NES top ten.
If you are starting a NES game collection, this one can be pricey but it can be had for a few gallons of gas (economy joke).
Yes, I have made it to Round 2 once
I’ll leave you with something I have been saying for thirty years: Some day I will beat Mike Tyson. Some day.
Everything / Nothing
The Website About Nothing
Twenty years ago I created Malignity.com which was a website about nothing. The year was 2000 (better known as Y2K), and I was still an underclassman in high school. Now, my so-called “website about nothing” was really just a collection of stuff that appealed to me at the time. And what appealed to the 16 year old me appears to be classic video game reviews, a mugshots gallery, having opinions on the news, the script to the film Kids, and links to my friend’s sites.
My E/N site in 2000 - Malignity.com
You might be saying to yourself: “Wow, but that sounds like a personal website with a blog.” But was blogging even a defined concept twenty years ago? The quick answer is no, it wasn’t. And Malignity wasn’t really a personal site either, it even had another author. I certainly didn’t use it to promote my career because I didn’t have any career to promote. And I wasn’t selling anything - no ebook, no merch, no pop-up asking you to join my newsletter. I didn’t even use my real name.
To my recollection, to have a web log (as it was called in those days) was to have simple diary entries. Malignity.com was a bit more random and dare I say, ambitious than that, even if it was still watered-down and derivative of its genre. And what genre was this? The Everything / Nothing (E/N) website.
Everything / Nothing (E/N)
Here is a description of an Everything / Nothing (E/N) site courtesy of Sawv.org:
The website’s author covers a myriad of topics. It’s not narrowly focused. The author writes about everything or at least everything that’s important to the author. The site might contain something useful for anyone who visits. The content means everything to the publisher, but it could mean nothing to the rest of the world.”
Here’s one popular culture analogy to describe the concept: An E/N site was about nothing the way Seinfeld was a show about nothing. Any given article (or page) had a subject the way any Seinfeld episode had a plot. But as a whole, it can be seen to be about whatever.
Seinfeld was the E/N show
What made Seinfeld and great E/N sites compelling is how the personalities dealt with any given subject. How George Costanza deals with any situation is one reason to watch Seinfeld. One reason to read Something Awful was to get Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka’s take on anything (like WWF Attitude for Dreamcast, for example). You didn’t go to a site for specific content. You went for whatever content you were going to find.
Content
An alternative definition of E/N was Entertainment / News. This is a fairly apt way to categorize a lot of the content. Authors would reflect on popular culture at the speed of the 24 hour cable news cycle much in the way they do now in the age of social media. The difference today is this type of content is aggregated from millions of people (“users”), algorithmically sorted, owned by big media companies, and monetized through advertising. But more on that later.
An irony of these websites is that while you could create anything and everything, it ended up pretty formulaic. My site certainly followed some kind of “E/N format”, and this was something I even lamented back then. Twenty years later I will just chalk this up to human nature. Let’s face it, people emulate other people. The web moved fast even back in 2000, and things do not stay original for very long.
Another truth of human nature is that sex and gore get people to click on your links. The Everything / Nothing world had a “shock jock” in Jay Stile. The Stile Project was a site full of porn, gore, and fake suicide attempts. It was also the most visited E/N site, and one of the more world’s popular websites at the time. It even won a Webby award. Jay was certainly reflecting the darker sides that already existed on the web, but had also developed his own voice to go along with it. Two things then happened rapidly: he spawned copycats, and he optimized his content for making ad-click cash. You can find a forum post about someone talking to Joe Rogan (who he shared web hosting with) at a comedy show in 2002 about how Stile made $60K a month. Bizarre, but I totally believe it.
The best writers gave their site content a lot of personality but what really sets this era apart was how hand-crafted everything was from a more technical standpoint. You had custom everything. You want a custom form? You coded it yourself. Many sites had pages and features not seen anywhere else. As an effect, you would actually want to go each website by URL to interact with it and see what was new. Undoubtedly, many web development careers were spawned from. The key to unlocking the most creativity was in scripting.
Discovery
Imagine a World Wide Web before Google. Really, you can do it. I was there. Even people who spent all night browsing the internet didn’t use Google at this time. Also imagine the web without any social media. People were just leaving AOL, and no walled gardens had been yet created on the web to take its place.
In the E/N world, the primary way of discovering more of these websites was through links from the sites you were already visiting. A link and/or quick news plug from somewhere popular could net you thousands of new visitors. I would email the webmasters of more popular sites and ask for them to link my site. Some did, and some would dismiss as a beggar.
You Will Believe What Happened Next
Back in one of my posts from 2000 I answered ‘no’ to the question of whether E/N sites were dead. But I left my own site behind completely by 2002, and as far as I can tell the trend was definitely a goner by the middle of the decade.
Even during the height of the trend, many sites would just vanish without notice. Various reasons included suspended web hosting, domain registrations expiring, or even sites getting hacked and deleted. Not to mention, the creators were often teenagers. A creator obtaining their driver’s license could often be enough to kill a site off. Some of these pages I linked from my site don’t even seem to show up on Archive.
It was amateur hour, but that was part of the appeal. This was a weird blip in time. After the dot-com crash, but before the next wave of venture-backed internet (“Web 2.0”). The web at this moment was truly more decentralized, long before the usage of that word became synonymous with nauseating marketing pitches for magical Internet money. Without a doubt, the experience gained from building one of these sites helped spawn the careers of many web developers, writers, and media people. The guy who actually could write an article on Malignity got paid eventually to write articles. People have been paying to make websites for them for quite some time. I even replaced Google once.
While many sites vanished without even a trace, not every E/N site has even died off fully. Something Awful became more known for its forum. One of its forum members would go on to create a far more infamous board. Hear Ye! eventually adopted WordPress and became a full-fledged personal blog. And the Stile Project became more or less just a network of porn sites that sold in 2010.
What really lives on today is the “platforms” that proceeded these websites - stuff like Digg, Fark, LiveJournal, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, or Twitch.
To me, there are a couple things that make me sad about this. First is the massive content aggregation that takes place. The work of millions of people now is monopolized by Facebook, YouTube, or Reddit. These businesses get ad money, and you get an integer value in a database - upvotes, karma, or whatever. Second is the cookie cutter content creation tools the “users” are afforded. Casual users of the web no longer get introduced to HTML, CSS, or scripting. Think about it: you can’t even italicize words in your tweets or Facebook posts.
Epilogue
I never really intended to take such a long trip down memory lane. However, once I got traveling down this path I realized there isn’t much content out there about this little era. It appears given twenty years even a phenomenon that existed solely on the internet can almost totally disappear from the internet. I guess that is a goal I have for EASE.GG: invoke a bit more of that original spirit. To think a little more outside of the input box.
Hello Again World
This is my first published blog entry since July of 2017. After a multiple year hiatus away from publishing posts, I have returned to it with a brand new TLD - EASE.GG.
I went with a gaming extension (.GG) and long-time nickname, EASE. You will also see a retro video game font used for the headers, which is an ode to my very first website in the late 1990s which was dedicated to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Despite all the gaming references, this isn’t just a place to host exclusively gaming content.
One goal for EASE.GG is to showcase projects from a more personal standpoint. Another goal is to document anything I want - both everything and nothing. My aim here is to facilitate the practice of communicating and sharing ideas, without much restraint on subject.