IREM
Hammerin' Harry

Time passes, places change, bars change, but video games always attract.

It's 1990. Italy misses a good chance to win the World Cup at home. Salvatore Schillaci, from Sicily with fury and with the precious help of some magic from the best Roberto Baggio and Gianluca Vialli, takes us to the semi-final against Argentina. Caniggia, with a header and the help of a blunder by Zenga, sends us home gracefully with the "consolation" of third place. As far as I'm concerned, the Soviet Union misses a good opportunity to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the world. The Berlin Wall has been torn down for a while, and I remember the images on the news with the backdrop of "Yesterday" as Germans reconciled between pickaxes, chisels, and sparkling wine. Gorbachev takes us a step away from world peace, and Yeltsin thinks of ruining everything with a coup. Son of a bitch. Nobel Prize to Gorbachev and the end of communism with the red flag lowered from the Kremlin.

Irem, a largely forgotten video game production company, creates a fun little game featuring a humorous Japanese character. While our placid friend enjoys the comforts of his little house, he is attacked by a group of burly builders who demolish it to turn it into a construction site. Rightly, our friend gets mad as a hatter, grabs his trusty wooden hammer, and thus begins the hunt for the most improbable enemies a video game could propose.

Every start, announced with an eventually irritating "Let's get busy!", you face carpenters, builders, engineers, site managers, tilers, acrobatic bomb techs, electricians, plumbers, yakuza (where would we put mafia in construction works, huh?). All ready to throw the most disparate makeshift weapons at you. From bags of lime to drill bits, from bowls of spaghetti from "Sasa's pasta" to pneumatic hammers, from manhole covers to car tires, from port crane hooks to forklifts. Not to mention the "monsters": drills, excavators, trailers, channels, rubble, wheelbarrows, hollow bricks...

The chances to enhance your powers were the sushi snacks wrapped in a napkin, a helmet that allowed you to be hit a second time, blue underpants good for jumping higher, a chili pepper useful for rapidly spinning the hammer with the aid of hot spirits, and the "Pow," that is the giant hammer which simplified demolition operations. Also to be remembered was the electric shock caused by hitting the ground with the hammer, resulting in a destabilizing effect.

A really original game, funny and extremely difficult considering how easily you could be eliminated by hazards. Being barely touched was enough to bring down a resounding "Ouch!" on your head, which announced the next life to be employed.

Those were still good times. It's a pity they got spoiled so soon. Amarcord!