Show of hands, who remembers Video & Arcade Top 10? Hm?
Yeah, so there’s exactly two YouTube channels dedicated to uploading episodes of the old game show, with 15 and 9 episodes available. The second one seems to be a copy though, as it’s only got one episode that the other doesn’t. But that’s besides the point.
I’ve been watching these episodes because reliving my childhood is what I do best. It’s kind of funny the sense of wonder and excitement that I feel while watching the show. It’s like I can recall how the world used to seem so amazing, and how I’d get so excited just to watch a game show with maby a minute worth of clips from a video game I’d like to play. Now I’m a grumpy old man, and nothing is quite as wonderful as it used to be, but man oh man, is there a lot to love about V&A Top 10.
If for some reason you don’t know what V&A Top 10 is, it’s a game show that ran back in the nineties (fom ’91 to… 2006! Holy crap!) that featured a quartet of kids playing video games in hopes of winning said video games. Of course, only the first place kid would win a copy of the game (as well as some other swag, like a watch). Places two to four would get comparatively crappy consolation prizes, like the Donkey Kong shampoo and bubble bath pictured above.
The stakes had never been higher.
One of the most entertaining parts of the show is watching the kids’ faces as they pay the games. Sure, you can get that same picture-in-picture feature on youTube let’s play videos, but it’s so different on V&A. These kids are focused. They are driven. This is the most important thing they will ever do with their lives, and if they fail, they will forever be shamed. They just look so serious when they’re playing; it’s totally adorbs. And then when one of ’em loses a life? You can feel the agony.
Winners are usually decided by how many points or items each player has, but one episode in particular caught my attention. In this episode, the kids were playing Donkey Kong Country 3, and the winning condition was to have the most bananas when time runs out. What? If you’re not familiar, bananas are to Donkey Kong Country as coins are to Super Mario: collecting 100 will give you an extra life and cycle the counter. So, the savvy player would collect 99 bananas and then just sit there until time runs out and he wins. Your average kid will go for that 100th banana, though, and his life will be thoroughly ruined when his counter cycles back to zero.
I guess maybe there are other factors playing into how the winner is decided, but you’ll notice that it’s unlikely if you’re paying attention. The hosts have little to no actual knowledge of the video games they’re going on about. All their story synopses and protips are coming right off of Nintendo-branded cue cards. Hell, the hosts make huge mistakes that no gamer worth his or her salt would ever make. Like calling ROB 64 (from Star Fox 64) R-O-8-6-4, or pronouncing the “chaos” in Chaos Emerald as “kay-oh.” Aceptable pronounciation errors to the common man, but “Oh my God what a poseur” moments for gamer nerds like me.
On that same episode, a new group of kids were wrangled in to play some Kirby Super Star, and maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention, but I didn’t hear any winning conditions announced at all. Doesn’t help that A) KSS has no point system, and B) the kids were playing different games; there was at least one playing The Great Cave Offensive while the rest were on Spring Breeze or possibly Dyna Blade.
Of course I didn’t give two craps about all that back when I was a kid. No, I was content just to watch a TV show about Nintendo games. And that was probably the real intent of the show. Back in the pre-internet era, it was the only way to see any game footage outside of actually playing a video game. I know that it sold at leat a couple games to me that I wouldn’t have been overly interested in otherwise. So good on you, Video & Arcade Top 10.
I really have no idea what the whole “Top 10” bit was all about, as there was never a Top 10 anything on the show. They did do a few countdowns, but the Top 5 was for what the most popular laserdiscs (!) were at the time, and then a Top 3 of video games. And I have no idea how the games were selected either. Who would rank Turok: Dinosaur Hunter second on any list? And how in God’s name did it beat out A Link to the Past? Man, the nineties were strange times indeed.
And that about concludes everything I wanted to say about that. I was considering padding this out and calling it a full article, but then decided against it. Why? I’m lazy. That’s literally it.