Murder She Wrote Recaps: S2E5: Sing a Song of Murder

Angela Lansbury pulls double duty in this episode, playing not only Jessica Fletcher, but also her cousin Emma, a heavily made-up British singer whose dulcet tones are so splendid that even the Sid Vicious-style punkers that have just walked into the theater can’t help but sing along. Emma also shows a bit of that old Fletcher moxie by surviving a few murder attempts and by blasting a street tough over the head with a flower pot.

Top 5 Wimpiest NES Heroes: #1: Swamp Thing

In the famed Alan Moore-written comics, Swamp Thing is a being of unimaginable power, an earth elemental who draws his strength directly from the planet. That's what we're assuming anyway; we never actually got around to reading the issues that explained it all.

As is sadly too often the case, the NES version of the character does not measure up to the real-life version. The game takes place entirely within a swamp. What luck, right? That's Swamp Thing's home turf! Surely he'll be at an advantage! Fighting Swamp Thing in a swamp is like fighting Aquaman at the bottom of the ocean or fighting the Blob in donut shop: they should be basically unstoppable.

Alas, it seems that Swamp Thing is easily injured by extremely normal swamp creatures like snakes and fish. And plants. Shouldn't he be in perfect harmony with these creatures and be able to use them as his minions and sidekicks? At the very least, he shouldn't be injured by plants. He's made of plants.

Swamp Thing is stymied by Plant Thing

Here's the deal: even if he's not an earth elemental, Swamp Thing is still a guy who got mutated into a giant hulking plant beast by an evil industrialist who was after his wife. Look at the ham hocks on him in that screenshot above. He's got the tools to fight. This isn't a guy who should be beaten up by nature.

But then again, if Swamp Thing doesn't want to get the crap kicked out of him, maybe he should learn how to attack at any height higher or lower than exactly six feet and at a horizontal distance greater than six inches.

You can have him.

Throwing the Controller: Electric, Poisonous Seaweed

In Throwing the Controller, we look back at the most infuriating enemies, levels and screwovers in NES history.

Few games excited the youth of 1989 as much as the NES adaptation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Upon popping the game into their consoles, gamers thrilled at being able to play as any of the four turtles, dropping into the sewers and battling Bebop and Rocksteady in order to rescue woman reporter April O'Neil.

Then came Stage 2.

April shows a solid grasp of the inverted pyramid reporting style.

Channel 4 News is going to need to make a correction for April's shoddy reporting, because those bombs were actually set up in the Hudson River, according to both Shredder's own TV report and the most unimpeachable source of all: the game's manual. Also, there are literally zero lakes in New York City. April should know this.

Looking at the situation here, you'd think that those electricity fields would be the most obvious danger to the turtles. That assumption couldn't be more wrong. The seaweed itself is either poisonous or electric. It's hard to tell which, because when you touch it you simply die, almost instantly.

TMNT may have been a dream game when it came out, but it's certainly not known for its great play control. It's very tough to make precise jumps and attacks. At first, I chalked that up to the natural difficulty that amphibious creatures like turtles would have on dry land. But they fare even worse in the river, which is supposedly their natural habitat. It's almost like they want to taste sweet seaweed death.

And don't think you can just take it slow and steady, inching through the danger. If you let that timer run out, it's game over completely.

Despite their excitement for this game, so many of my friends were so badly beaten into submission by this terrible level that they quit the game entirely.

At least the bombs weren't in a lake.

Throwing the Controller: Eggplant Wizard

In Throwing the Controller, we look back at the most infuriating enemies, levels and screwovers in NES history.

Eggplant Wizard, one of the most notorious enemies from Kid Icarus, is also one of the few NES characters to have of honor of being prominently featured on the classic Captain N: The Game Master cartoon, where he teamed up with King Hippo as Mother Brain's most-trusted flunkies.

It's easy to see why Eggplant Wizard was chosen for the show, because he's the target of burning hatred of Kid Icarus players everywhere. His eggplant throwing attack is one of the most infuriating things that can happen to you on the NES and makes him one of the best reasons to throw your controller.

That's a classy cloak, though.

The Wizard shows up in the labyrinth areas of Kid Icarus, usually just before the boss room. He throws normal-sized eggplants (his children, maybe!?) around the room with the reckless abandon of a self-loathing vegetable. If one touches you -- and, because the trajectory of the vegetaprojectiles is random, so they're tough to dodge -- Kid Icarus turns into a eggplant with human legs and can't do anything other than jump until you go all the way back to the beginning of the labyrinth to visit the eggplant-removal surgeon. Seriously.

-Ross