The high demand for the Wii continues in large part because of Nintendo’s inspired decision to include Wii Sports. In this series, Geek Out New York looks at the 8-bit progenitors of Wii Sports. Are the modern Wii games really so much more fun than the sports titles we played “back in the day”? Yes, yes they are.

Today: Bowling.

Aside from Wii Sports bowling, the only bowling video games I have ever seen are the arcade consoles at bowling alleys. That never really made sense to me—the actual lanes are right there, people—but in any case, I thought it would be difficult to find NES bowling games for this piece. I was wrong. It appears that there was a strong market of NES players who wanted to experience the majesty of 10-pin bowling at home without going the Daniel Plainview route.

Such homebound pin jockeys would have been well served to pick up Championship Bowling, which is a serviceable little bowling game. Trouble is, Championship Bowling was a little cocky for its own good—how else to explain the female character flipping the double-fisted bird right on the freaking title screen?¹ You want a piece of this championship bowling action? Yeah, you know you do, mofo, so push the start button and maybe I’ll give you some sugar.

The gameplay is smooth, so Championship Bowling would receive a passing grade (with points off for bad attitude) if it weren’t for the music. Not content to let the bowling excitement stand on its own, Championship Bowling adds a soundtrack—or, more accurately, a 20-second loop of acoustic terror. Here’s a taste.

For best results, turn your cellphone up to max and make this your ringtone.

Eschewing the thuggery of Championship Bowling, Dynamite Bowl boots up with a bowling-ball bomb animation, complete with crackling fuse. The sequence isn’t just pleasing to the eye; it also works from a marketing point of view, tying together every aspect of the game’s brand. Bowling: check. Dynamite: check. Now that’s a successful logo.

Past the title screen, Dynamite Bowl is less appealing. The “pins” were drawn by somebody who had never seen a bowling pin in person, and the physics are off, too. When the ball hits the pins, instead of exploding away like you would expect in Dynamite Bowl, they just clunk over like steel milk bottles in the old “knock ’em down and win a prize” carny game.

If you overcome the clunk effect and manage to get a strike, the shot indicators flash and a red “V” fades into the black space at the center of the screen. Not only does it make no sense, the “V” apparition is unsettling. I flicked the game off at this point for fear that I would be hypno-indoctrinated into a Dynamite Bowl cult. Silly, huh? So anyway, purchase Dynamite Bowl, for the day of ascension is near, and you must infuse your wounded soul to survive the reckoning.

Those first two games were fine, but if you’re like me, you’ve often thought to yourself, “Bowling would be perfect if I could bowl on some sort of space station with a group of fem-bots and strapping men in neon wife-beaters. Oh, and if the balls were electrocuted into existence instead of placed there by a machine. Then, and only then, would bowling be perfect.” Little did I know that my prayers had been answered all the way back in 1989 by the Tokyo Shoseki Video Game Manufacturing Concern.

Perfect Bowling makes no apologies for its strange environs. Indeed, it doesn’t acknowledge them at all. It’s not called Space Bowling, and there’s no backstory explaining that, say, in the post-apocalyptic future these humans are stranded on an intergalactic freighter, where bowling serves as their only form of entertainment. The scenery in the screenshots above is presented as self-explanatory.

Among your shipmates on this crazy far-out bowling cruise, there is a telling gender gap. All the women are replicated from the same Female Character 1-A mold, yet the character designer lovingly crafted every pixel of the male physiques, presumably working from sketches he made at the beach. I don’t want to make any assumptions about the artist, but let’s just say that when Fred rolled into town with his big ol’ 16-pound balls, Tokyo Shoseki made sure the lanes were greased.²

Reach the end of the tenth frame, and your abrupt reward is this philosophical variation on the traditional “Game Over” screen:

ARTICLE IS OVER.

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1. The title screen also features, for some reason, a worried penguin. Once the penguin waddles offscreen, an excited bunny runs across in the other direction and turns into a bowling ball. (I’m not making this up.) ↑

2. Joking aside, Fred is a superb bowler. ↑