It also makes Ken Cosgrove dance like crazy.

When first we met intoxicants, way back in the pilot episode, it was a supporting cast member, there almost for comedic effect. Can you believe how much these guys drink and smoke? the show seemed to be saying. But just as quickly we came to realize that Mad Men was hardly making intoxicants a heroic character; like the rest of the cast, it proved to be nuanced. One minute it did rotten things like convince Roger Sterling to hit on Don’s wife Betty in their own home; the next, helped Don get his comeuppance by embarrassing Roger.

Over time, intoxicants matured. As quaaludes, it knocked Don into a stupor that allowed a pair of hitchhiking teens to rob him blind. As marijuana, it helped some characters (Peggy) become more creative and ruined the careers of others (Paul Kinsey). More recently, Sterling experimented with it in the form of LSD, and it turned him into one of those people who thinks he’s had a really interesting experience and bores everyone telling them about it.

This episode, though, intoxicants finally got to play the lead. And while it ultimately played second fiddle to Draper’s central role, that’s just par for the course on this show. And, to be honest, it made possible the most cutting insight we’ve ever seen into just what makes him tick. Under the influence of a “pep” injection administered by a “doctor” brought in by Jim Cutler — who, it turns out, is infinitely sleazier and more disgusting than Roger Sterling, so I apologize for making the comparison — Draper spends a tireless, disjointed three days working manically and generally obsessing. (The true nature of intoxicants this time around was never specified, but given the period setting I have to assume it’s some sort of proto-cocaine cocktail.)

Under the influence of intoxicants, Don’s practically a parody of himself. Not the lazy “ha ha isn’t it hilarious how these Mad Men have sex and smoke and stuff” brand of parody, but rather the accurate kind that exaggerates actual characteristics to the point of near-comedy. Don obsesses, ignores his family, sweet talks ladies, confidently proclaims he has the answers and that he can solve the problem at hand with the sheer power of his amazing creative mind. But the problem he’s aiming to solve isn’t the same as the issue at hand for everyone else. As they wonder how to appease Chevy (a corporation that’s quickly proven to have as horrible and abusive a culture as Lucky Strike was), he tries to come up with the ultimate pitch to win back his estranged paramour.

Because that’s the truth of Don Draper: A man desperately in need of validation. He wants to command the respect of his peers, but even more important is the undivided devotion of the woman he loves. And he loves his neighbor’s wife, Sylvia, because she offered him the loyalty that Megan chose to spend in pursuit of her career.

The entire episode is filmed from intoxicants’ point of view: It begins with a scene of drunk men screaming in a car hurtling down a dark road, a disjointed moment whose context isn’t explained for a few minutes. With the pep shot racing through his system, Don experiences lost time and total forgetfulness of conversations and plans. He suffers the near-lucid childhood flashbacks that always seem to accompany head injury or extreme drug consumption. And, at the end, when Don returns home at last to stage his triumphant attempt to win back his estranged lover, he comes crashing to earth with the realization that in his delirious absence his children and home were endangered as a direct result of his bender.

Only Peggy, ever level-headed, seems to speak out against intoxicants. “You have to let yourself feel [loss],” she tells her coworker Rizzo after somewhat reluctantly spurning his sexual advances. “You can’t just dampen it with drugs and sex.”

“Maybe we’re different,” Rizzo says defiantly, then proceeds to have sex with what turns out to be a newly dead man’s daughter — an overly eager young woman who Don had politely rejected (to his credit) a short while earlier. But now that he’s accepted (however begrudgingly) his break from his mistress, chances are good that Don’ll be drifting back to the world of casual dalliances, too. But I suspect his relationship with intoxicants will be downgraded back to “just booze, thanks.”

You see the same thing in Super Mario Bros. and Pokémon Red/Green/Blue as well. Unlike contemporary games, which are complex enough to contain advanced bug-checking filters or else simply fall apart when something goes wrong, Metroid bounces back when you hit it with unexpected data. It keeps on truckin’. As such, some of Metroid‘s glitches have become legitimate elements of many players’ arsenal.

A lot of Metroid‘s instability comes from the developers’ determination to push the NES hardware in never-before-seen directions. You can see the game struggling to keep up in the course of normal play; discolored scenery like this, for example, reportedly comes from the program code attempting to render scenery faster than it’s properly able to keep up with, meaning that when you dash into a new area or plummet down a shaft at full speed, the game struggles to keep up and eventually just says, “Well, good enough.”

Also unique to Metroid are a number of odd little game design oversights that the creators either didn’t catch or didn’t have time and resources to clean out before launching. For instance, one of the best-known quirks of the game is the way enemies, which normally are contained within the rooms in which they spawn, can be drawn into open doors at the same time as Samus’ transition from one room to another. Normally, this is a nuisance, since she remains vulnerable despite the player being out of control of her actions — meaning she takes unavoidable damage during what should be “down time.” But in some cases, you can do weird things.

For instance, you can lure standard enemies into boss battles. This doesn’t have any real impact on the game, but there’s a certain charming novelty in seeing a Waver or Reo flutter around while you’re blasting Ridley point-blank in the groin.

Of much greater value, however, is the ability to lure a Reo into the statue room immediately after acquiring some Missiles and the Bombs. Blast open the red door at the upper-left corner of Brinstar, pull a Reo into the room as you head left, and get it to fly down into the lower portion of the room and into the water/acid/whatever. Freeze it while it’s at the water’s surface, do a bomb jump off its back, and you can roll into Tourian long before you should be able to. This is a key tactic in a lot of speed runs of the game, although you’ll probably get pasted by Tourian’s hazards pretty quickly if you try doing this outside the confines of a tool-assisted playthrough. Still, it’s there, and that’s rad.

The bomb jump factor, of course, is another part of the game — an exploit that actually could be intentional. Because the explosion of a bomb propels Samus slightly upward and she can drop multiple bombs at any given time, you can harness this element of the game physics to allow Samus to “ride” the crest of sequential bomb explosions upward. With the proper timing, there’s actually no limit to how high she can reach provided she doesn’t hit an enemy… though it takes a steady hand to sustain a bomb jump for long.

Curiously, bomb jumps seem to be a specific feature of the NES version of the game; I’ve found ports like the 3DS Virtual Console rendition of Metroid, despite being ostensibly accurate to the original game, make bomb jumps vastly harder to pull off. I don’t think this is a deliberate action on Nintendo’s part to quash the exploit, though. More likely it’s simply a matter of the different hardware and interface timing.

As a corollary to the bomb jump, Samus can also use a related technique by exploiting the fact that bombs propel Samus regardless of her pose at the time of the explosion and the fact that she can jump from her “neutral” animation frame. Drop a bomb and immediately stand up, and when the bomb explodes it will send Samus flying upward slightly without changing her pose. This means you can jump in midair (years before the Space Jump!) and reach areas that might otherwise have been slightly out of reach.

Of course, the greatest technique of all is the wall climb skill, made famous by the Nintendo Fun Club Newsletter. An arcane combination of the behavior of blue doors — they seal back up a few seconds after being opened — along with the way the screen centers on Samus’ position and the physics of rolling into Maru-Mari form allows you to “climb” to new areas. When a door closes over Samus, she effectively becomes lodged in the scenery, though since she’s rendered immobile the only thing you can really do when trapped in a door is shoot it open again… or roll into a ball.

If you simply roll into a ball, well, you’re screwed. The bombs won’t open a door, and you can’t stand back up. But if you immediately stand after ducking, something about the animation makes it possible to rise again — and not only will Samus stand, she’ll actually be situated one block of the wall higher than before ducking. Repeat this rapidly and Samus will slowly climb the inside of the wall and off the screen. However, if you tap jump rapidly, her attempts to leap will cause the screen to slowly readjust to place her at the center. With an alternating combination of ducking/standing actions and rapid jumps, Samus can climb any vertical chamber.

This has incredible value in certain areas; I used it in my playthrough to reach the Varia long before I had the Ice Beam and High Jump. In others, it can be deadly. You need to reach another blue door in order to escape the wall, so if you climb a room with no door in the wall above your starting position, well… that’s a shame.

But it’s also possible to go into Metroid‘s equivalent of Super Mario Bros. “minus world” — areas above the actual boundaries of the current map. Here, you may be able to find shafts that shouldn’t exist, rooms that beckon for exploration, strange mishmashes of graphics and color palettes, and more. Most of the time you’ll simply reach a dead end and die, but until fans at sites like Metroid Database sorted out the particulars of Metroid‘s “secret worlds” and determined that they were just buffer overflows and misplaced data pointers, many speculated that the creators had hidden away deliberate secrets — new areas to explore, additional goodies to acquire. But, no.

It doesn’t matter, though. Metroid‘s oddities and errors have become an integral part of its legacy — unintended features embraced by fans. While sequels smoothed them out one by one, the series’ stewards have paid tribute to this part of Metroid‘s heritage in various ways… perhaps most notably with Metroid Fusion‘s dead-end “shinespark” sequence break.

And… that’s it for Metroid. I’ll be hitting the sequels, eventually, but next up: Something very different… but somewhat related.

Anyway, it’s a little late, but The Anatomy of Zelda Vol. I now has a tiny B&W paperback counterpart for those who (understandably) dig the content but don’t want to shell out $40-60 for the large format. In its miniature paperback form, it’s a mere $13. That’s a dollar more than the Castlevania book was, but that’s because the latest book is denser in text and thus about 30 pages longer than the previous volume (even though the large format books are smaller — look, it’s science, I don’t pretend to understand this stuff).

As noted before, the coupon code CROWNED15 should net you a modest discount on this.

This is no straightforward reprise, however. That early tunnel was a teaching experience, helping players come to grips with Metroid‘s unconventional design. A host of patrolling enemies imparted the value caution, while the seemingly unending upward scroll instilled patience and persistence. The wide platforms didn’t simply force players to navigate by zig-zagging horizontally within the ascent, they also provided a sort of safety net in the event of a slip-up. You might fall and lose some progress, but not much.

This shaft, on the other hand, affords no caution. It lacks enemies of any kind — after all, Mother Brain is dead, so what’s the point? — but that doesn’t make it easy? Samus is racing here to escape the Zebes underground before the space pirates’ spiteful self-destruct countdown ends, giving you roughly 90 seconds to make the climb and escape.

This is much more easily said than done, however, because the shaft contains only itty-bitty platforms. The only surfaces in the game smaller and more precious than these tiny things are those three single bubbles floating in a line deep inside Norfair — and the worst thing that could happen if you missed one of those is that you’d fall into lava and lose a bit of health. A single slip here is likely to send you plummeting all the way back down to the start. You can only afford a couple of minor slips before you’ve wasted so much time there’s no hope of reaching the end.

The escape sequences tests your understanding of Metroid‘s physics like nothing else in the game. For most of the adventure — especially since acquiring the Screw Attack — Samus’ aerial summersault is one of the most important and powerful skills in the game. But here, it’s absolutely deadly, because she’s much harder to control once she starts spinning.

To survive here, you need to fight your programming and resist the urge to spin. By leaping straight into the air, Samus will remain upright and follow a much tighter arc with her jump. This means you have much less lateral range when you leap, but the platforms here are arranged in such a way that you don’t need to move much to either side. After hours of wild, weaponized leaps, the secret to survival is to move cautiously and deliberately, employing the full range of Samus’ skills.

Once you get the rhythm down, this sequence turns out to be remarkably easy. Keep your nerve and move with care and you’ll reach the top of the shaft and escape to freedom, where you’re visually graded on your efficiency. Take too long to beat the game and Samus turns her back to you in despair; play quickly enough, however, and she reveals her shocking (in 1986) secret: A feminine pronoun. Play even more effectively and you’ll be able to control Samus in her unarmored female guise.

Play really well and she’ll strip down to a tiny two-piece bikini for some 8-bit titillation. Nintendo was pretty progressive, making Metroid‘s protagonist a woman, but… well, baby steps.

No, you can’t play as bikini Samus. No matter how much you wanted to as a 13-year-old.

Now that I think about it, Metroid kind of did the New Game + concept, huh? Once you beat the game, you can start over with every item and power-up in your inventory save Missiles and Energy Tanks. The alternate character sprite is a sort of hidden bonus to reward players who try to make better time through the game by improving their time in subsequent cycles, but the simple fact that you can start from the beginning with both a more powerful character and a clear sense of the labyrinth’s layout is enough to motivate some players.

On the whole, this trip through Metroid honestly surprised me. I think I’ve bought into the general sentiment that it’s a clumsy, dated, badly made, and nigh-unplayable mess — but really, that’s not true. Certainly Metroid has its rough spots, and you can definitely see the limits of both 1986′s technology (in the glitches and repetition of scenery) and game design (in the poorly communicated mechanics throughout the middle stretch of the adventure).

Yet on the whole, Metroid‘s powers and world are at once inventive and effective. The fact that the tools to range further into planet Zebes are integral parts of Samus’ arsenal rather than standalone keys really sets Metroid apart even now. The idea of exploration expanding organically as a function of the protagonist’s growing skills is one of the most compelling forms of game design in existence, and I think it’s safe to say that Metroid didn’t just pioneer it — it nearly perfected it in one go.

Nearly. The game does have its flaws, no doubt. But think back to the first portions of the game, the way it’s so deliberately structured to guide you to the items you need while holding you back from areas you’re unable to deal with — that’s some remarkably mature and sophisticated game design. I really feel like game design truly came into its own in the second half of the ’80s, and Metroid was one of the key titles that helped lead the way. Maybe it wasn’t amazingly revolutionary on its own, but as part of a larger movement toward more complex and sophisticated design, it deserves a place in history.

Plus, it set the framework for Super Metroid. That alone makes it worthy of admiration.

Behind the final door, the boss room awaits. And, you know, the idea of a “boss room” has become a real cliché in games. Even here in Metroid in 1986 we saw both Kraid and Ridley situated in strange, stark chambers where they did nothing but sit in wait for the hero to come blow them up. It’s kind a goofy concept if you stop to think about it; how miserable must that existence be, lurking in the dark with nothing to do until some do-gooder comes along to blow you up? You never see proactive villains in action games like this — though this very franchise made a brilliant and terrifying exception to that rule in its fourth installment — just slobs who sit and wait until the good guy finally gets through the deadly-but-not-too-deadly gauntlet leading up to them.

In Mother Brain’s case, however, this actually makes perfect sense. She’s a biological computer, and as such this is basically her server room. She’s totally immobile, powering Zebes’ systems or whatever from the safety of Tourian’s deepest sanctum, just like you’d expect a computer to do. And what she lacks in direct firepower — the Mother Brain is completely harmless unless you bump into her — she makes up for with supporting defenses.

Mother Brain’s lair is a single lengthy room divided internally into six different chambers by five Zebetites, which appear to be conduits or defensive barriers or something. Like Mother Brain, they’re biomechanical, meaning they possess regenerative capabilities. Each one takes several missile blasts to destroy, but if you don’t pour on the steady fire they quickly grow back — you can gauge your progress, not to mention the ground you’ve lost, by the condition of a Zebetite. They start thick and slowly dwindle in diameter to vanishing as they take damage, growing back to full width if you don’t destroy them quickly.

Like Mother Brain, a Zebetite also can’t attack you directly. However, taking them out is anything but a cakewalk, because each one is elevated high off the ground with only a narrow platform adjacent to give Samus a clear shot. The problem is that while you’re doing this a trio of guns is rotating and firing energy beams at you in a not-quite-random fashion. And, on top of that, Rinkas are spawning rapidly from every direction.

Despite the final boss’ lack of a direct threat, this is an extremely challenging sequence. Taking down the Zebetites burns through your stock of missiles quickly, and because Rinkas don’t drop energy pickups and Metroids only respawn when you die and continue, you’re stuck fighting with what you have on-hand. [Edit: Or maybe I'm wrong about this, but still -- tough sequence regardless.] It’s a battle of attrition, a test of how effectively you can dodge the threats surrounding you and pour missile fire into your targets. The developers do demonstrate a surprising touch of mercy here, though: Once you destroy a Zebetite, it’s gone forever. Like the minibosses, Mother Brain’s energy conduits don’t regenerate if you see a game over. In a worst-case scenario, you can fight your way through this chamber one Zebetite at a time, constantly restarting and fighting your way back, delving a little further into the room each time.

The further you get into the room, the more difficult it becomes. Around the time you hit the lava, it just gets ridiculous. Don’t computers need cold to work more efficiently? Shouldn’t Mother Brain’s server room be, like, super refrigerated? Pfft.

Really, this room can be as difficult or as easy as you like. The gun turrets follow fairly predictable patterns — some shoot at 90-degree angles, while others fire 45-degree-angle shots — and while the Rinkas materialize from all over the place and home in on Samus’ location as of the second they spawn, they obey the same strictures as they did during the Metroid gauntlet. Specifically, there will always be a fixed number of them on-screen at any given moment, so if you freeze one it’ll take that particular spawn out of play.

It’s actually not too difficult to deal with the Rinkas while destroying the Zebetites, because each column has solid footing directly below it that allows you to skip the blue platforms and jump up and down right in front of the Zebetite, firing several point-blank missiles per leap and wearing down the Zebetite in short order.

Mother Brain herself, however, is considerably more difficult. Once you shoot out the glass case surrounding the computer, you need to pump more than 30 missiles right into her face (and they have to hit dead-on or they won’t cause any damage). Unlike the Zebetites, her health doesn’t regenerate if you lay off your assault for a moment. That’s about the only saving grace, however.

The most sensible place to attack Mother Brain from is the Zebetite junction directly in front of her — the blue platform further away works as well, but it’s constantly targeted by both Rinkas and gun emplacements — yet this leaves you incredibly vulnerable. Rinkas spawn constantly above and below you, and if you’re hit there’s an awfully good chance the recoil will send you flying into the lava directly in front of the glass chamber. The wall to the right is slightly too high to reach while jumping out of liquid, and if you try to use Mother Brain’s platform as a foothold you’ll take damage from proximity to the boss and be sent flying right back into the lava. The only reliable way out is to freeze a Rinka and use it as a foothold, but that’s pretty difficult while you’re being harassed by several others at the same time. The moral of the story: Don’t let yourself be knocked into the lava.

Because there’s no time crunch here, the smartest thing to do is to take your time. Drop back and freeze the Rinkas, giving yourself a short window of breathing room. But this tactic is slightly counter-intuitive to the design of the entire room; because the five Zebetites leading to Mother Brain required a rapid volley of missiles, your brain is still in “frantic” mode when you finally reach the boss herself. You actually need to stop and recalibrate your approach here.

With smart play and the good sense not to fall in the lava, you can eventually best Mother Brain… even if you have to keep dying and retrying to do it. But once that happens, the absolute trickiest part of the game begins.

Once you step off the elevator into Tourian, another difference makes itself apparent. This zone contains neither minor enemies nor any need to explore. It’s a totally linear path to the end, and only two kinds of foes appear: The small energy toruses called Rinkas, and the creature from which the entire franchise derives its name, the Metroid.

Metroids represent a different kind of enemy than has appeared to this point — not just for this adventure, but for games as a whole. The closest contemporary analogue I can think of is Ghosts ‘N Goblins‘ Red Arimer: They’re smart, aggressive, fast, and utterly deadly. Unlike the other creatures that populate the corridors of Zebes, Metroids don’t waffle around with fixed paths or aimless meandering that makes a minimal sort of effort to drift in the direction of Samus. They lurk in wait at fixed points, and the instant Samus comes into their range (coincidentally, this range is marked exactly by the edge of the screen) they dart forward quickly to attack.

As for their attack, they don’t settle for simply bumping into Samus and knocking x number of points off her health total. Instead, they latch on like parasites and begin draining her energy. A Metroid is never sated, so it will cling to Samus until she’s dead. Up to three Metroids can appear on-screen at once, some more aggressive than others, but all intensely dangerous. The one upside to Metroids is that the the health and Missile refills they drop are worth several times as much as normal refills… though even with the Varia, enemies here hit for 15 points of health, so it can be tough to keep ahead of the power drain once Rinkas appear. Heck, the first one to materialize actually spawns as Samus is passing through a door and hits her while she’s locked in a screen transition — a free hit just to say “screw you.”

Once you descend a few rooms into Tourian, the Rinkas start to appear alongside the Metroids. They spawn infinitely from various points around the room, and the screen always has three at a time. Like Kraid’s spikes, you can freeze them to take them briefly out of play; if you destroy them, another will immediately respawn to take its place… and there’s always a chance it’ll respawn directly under Samus’ feet, meaning it’s much less dangerous to simply freeze them. That’s more easily said than done when Metroids are closing in on you, though.

What makes Metroids particularly dangerous is that they only have a single weakness: Ice. (Later games explicitly call out their vulnerability to cold, meaning any possibility of hand-waving the improbable physics of the Ice Beam’s freeze effect as zero-point gravity or stasis or something is right out… not that it matters in any way, shape, or form.) You can push a Metroid away with Missiles or the Wave Beam or the Screw Attack, but these weapons don’t actually harm the creature. Only by freezing it does it become vulnerable, and only then to five Missiles.

So, the strategy for this area becomes fairly straightforward in concept: Inch forward to lure a Metroid from hiding, freeze it, pump it full of explosives until it dies. Dodge or freeze Rinkas when necessary. Repeat. This is more easily said than done, however, given the high speed and unconstrained motion of the Metroids. They can attack from any angle, swooping in from above or below in a split second to latch onto a tasty Samus-snack. And you’re often descending vertical shafts into Tourian, meaning they’re coming up from beneath you and hovering hungrily beneath your feet, a tiny platform the only thing separating Samus from safety and a brief future of shriveling into a dusty husk of former humanity.

Metroids “pace” beneath you, drifting slightly back and forth until they get a clear shot, a behavior you can exploit to lead them up as you back away and line up a clean shot. Thankfully, when a Metroid latches onto Samus, it briefly moves down to her level to line up its mandibles or whatever, so you have a brief instant of contact in which you can freeze it before it surrounds you. If you’re too slow, however, the Ice Beam becomes useless. When a Metroid begins draining Samus’ health, she can only run back and forth while waiting for the inevitable. The only way to dislodge a Metroid is to duck into a ball and lay down some bombs, then roll over them and hope the angle of the blast knocks the creature free. This gives you only a sliver of a reprieve, however, as the Metroid will be stunned for a fraction of a second before shaking off the blast and moving back in for another nibble. This gives you just enough time to stand and freeze it.

Metroids create a harrowing sensation like nothing else in the game, especially once they start to appear several at a time. Until you know the trick of defeating them, they’re utterly baffling in their sheer deadliness and persistence. Their intensely aggressive nature combines with their unique life-sapping properties to create a wholly unique kind of foe. According to designer Yoshio Sakamoto, the name “Metroid” comes from “metro” (as in subway) and “android” — that is, the robotic-looking Samus is exploring underground tunnels like a subway. But it’s wholly fitting that the game’s creators gave these distinctive foes the name, because they’re far and away the most frightening and dangerous aspect of the adventure.

It can be a shock of cold water to go from aimless exploration in low-threat environments to a final run-up through Tourian’s brutal Metroid gauntlet, but this area forces players to use both their wits and all the combat skills they’ve picked up along the way to survive.

Once you do figure out the nature of Metroid‘s secrets, however, don’t go thinking it’s smooth sailing all the way to the end. Nintendo R&D1 remembered to put a few road bumps in along the path, including the mini bosses.

I’d be interested to read a debate over which video game introduced the first boss. Was it the Galaxian flagship? Wizardry‘s Werdna? Donkey Kong? Sinistar? I don’t know! But I do know that Metroid took a very unconventional approach to its bosses. Rather than treat them as obstacles to be overcome — impediments along the straight path to the end — Metroid‘s mini bosses instead represent one of the game’s main objectives in and of themselves.

The non-linear nature of the game meant that you didn’t simply encounter these guys on the way to the flagpole at the end of the stage. Rather, they served as load-bearing supports (as it were) for the final boss, with their deaths opening the path to the end game. To complete the game, players need to seek them out, actively, to destroy them. All the tools and weapons and items you collect en route are merely means to an end. What you’re really after is the bosses, whose deaths pave the road to the conclusion.

The first boss, according to placement relative to the game’s beginning and every piece of literature I’ve ever read about Metroid, is Kraid. Like I’ve mentioned already, though, Kraid is by far the more difficult of the two mini bosses. Well, so it goes. In terms of backward difficulty curves, Metroid has nothing on its sibling Kid Icarus.

Each of the two bosses lives in a lair on a platform surrounded by toxic fluid. The recoil from their attacks can easily knock you into the liquid, and unless you have the High Jump boots you may not be able to get out again. But the greater danger is by far is in their direct attacks. Kraid fires two different kinds of projectiles along two different paths: Large horns that fly overhead on an arc, and short spikes that fire straight ahead in a burst of three.

The primary danger comes in the form of the smaller spikes, which don’t simply fly toward Samus — they also deflect incoming fire, leaving only a small window of opportunity to pump Kraid full of missiles before the spikes regenerate and fly again. The overhead horns serve to complicate matters. It’s easy enough to jump over the spikes as they fly forward, but in doing so you’re very likely to leap into the path of the horns.

The smartest solution is to freeze the spikes with the Ice Beam, taking them out of play for a few seconds and leaving Kraid vulnerable (since his spikes won’t regrow while other spikes remain on screen). However, even this requires caution, as frozen spikes block missile fire just as effectively as “live” ones. If you make the mistake of freezing the spikes while they’re still lodged in Kraid’s abdomen, you effectively make him invulnerable to attack. So, you need to wait until the spikes are flying — and you need to freeze them precisely, as the three spikes function independently and a sloppy shot can leave some in play. Out-of-sync spikes are the worst, since they fly at staggered intervals and make your attack even more difficult to time (and make you even more likely to take a few hits, too).

It’s a complex battle, and a good one, forcing the player to make use of several different abilities at once. An excellent test of skill.

Ridley, on the other hand, is a joke. He stands in place and hops up and down, belching a trio of fireballs that bounce up and down along a sine pattern. Like Kraid’s spikes, Ridley’s fireballs deflect missile fire yet can be frozen in place. Unlike Kraid’s spikes, though, the fireballs follow a single path, and the nature of that path is fixed when you enter his chamber.

One fireball path is very tricky to deal with — the flames describe a very dense waveform and stay close to Ridley’s body. The other, however, arcs far away from Ridley himself and leaves a convenient safe spot for Samus to stand at right at Ridley’s feet. If you can get the game to use this pattern (and it resets every time you exit and reenter the room), you can stand directly in front of Ridley and pump him with missiles without taking a scratch or moving a pixel to avoid his attacks.

In any case, your reward for beating each boss is a 75-missile expansion. Theoretically, you can complete the game just by collecting these two expansions along with the mandatory first one, especially since Ridley is quite easy to beat with the Screw Attack. Each boss’ chamber also contains a hidden Energy Tank as a bonus; Samus can only carry a maximum of six expansions, but with these two accounted for there are actually eight in the game.

With these two guys dead, that strange statue room in the northwest corner of Brinstar — you know, up at the top of that long, long shaft — becomes relevant. The statues flicker with energy and, when you shoot them, they rise up to create a passage for Samus to roll through as destructible blocks appear below.

On the other side is a final elevator room — this one far cleaner and more sterile than the others in the game — that leads to the end.

Now, so many years later, so little has changed. “Man With a Plan” sees both Draper and Campbell making desperate power plays in the wake of the SCDP/CGC merger Don set into motion last episode — a conjoining that puts everyone ill at ease. The scent of layoffs lends a spirit of funereal inevitability to the air (a sensation I know all too well from years of personal professional experience), and even those with no need to fear a pink slip — such as the company principals — find themselves on uncertain ground. Draper included. Clearly, he hadn’t thought this through.

In fact, his steely-eyed pissing contest with rival-turned-coworker Ted Chaough gives a lot of credence to the notion that his flash of inspiration to marry SCDP to CGC was in fact little more than a spur-of-the-moment impulse to prove a point by winning the Chevy contract at any cost, just to show up Joan and Campbell. Now that the glow has faded and the reality has sunk in, CCG invades the SCDP offices and the shotgun nature of the wedding becomes apparent. The contrast between Draper and Chaough couldn’t be more stark as Don glides through the office with his usual diffident brilliance and lack of consideration for others, while Ted tempers his rather prosaic approach to the creative process with genuine likability and thoughtfulness.

Naturally, they quickly butt heads, which causes Don to respond with his favorite form of nastiness: Cruel intentions disguised as a friendly business drink. Roger Sterling, having fallen victim to this same two-faced vengeance long ago, probably could have warned Ted that Don’s “olive branches” come with a heavy price, such as vomiting oysters in front of Nixon’s cronies, but he was too busy getting a chuckle out of (hilariously) re-firing Burt Peterson. So Ted lets Don bully him into drinking too much, after which he promptly embarrasses himself in front of creative. (Meanwhile, Don matches him drink for drink yet seems completely unfazed, which makes you wonder just how much he had to drink to get throwing-up sick at the Roger’s mother’s funeral a short while back.)

Peggy, however, is wise to Draper’s vindictiveness and calls him out on it; whatever simpatico they once shared has long since evaporated. Ted takes his own revenge by treating Don to an absolutely terrifying private plane ride, privately getting the upper hand in the relationship, at least for a while. Sensing his role as alpha male threatened, Don asserts his authority by power-tripping in his extramarital dalliance, forcing his paramour Linda to remain in a hotel room for him, submissive and sexually available. He’s so self-involved in his sexual domination that he doesn’t bother to pay attention to the clear signals Linda broadcasts to make it clear that she was interested in an afternoon’s dalliance, not the strange protracted engagement Don wants. Ultimately, Don takes it too far and spoils everything, his demands causing his lover to rethink the entire affair and bring it to what appears to be a final end.

As the end of his fantasy affair dawns on him, too late, Don tries to bully his way through that with words, too. But Linda remains adamant, and Don’s armor shatters in a way that only ever seems to happen when he’s rejected by women. He’s ultimately reduced to pleading. “Please,” he begs, but Linda has decided her marriage is more important than her whims.

As for Campbell, his life here parallels Draper’s in the classically Campbell way. Don worries about his dominance at the company with Chaough co-calling the shots; Pete worries about his future at the company, period, mainly out of pique because he couldn’t find a seat at a meeting. Don’s distracted by his mistress waiting for him in a hotel room; Pete’s distracted by a woman in his downtown apartment as well. Except it’s his senile mother, emasculating him with her occasional lucid insights — a far cry from Don’s sexual power trip, though in the end both men are left frustrated and empty. Campbell’s always aspired to live Don’s (perceived) glamorous life, yet once again he’s more like Don than he realizes.

Meanwhile, Joan demonstrates the one example of true power in this entire episode — the subtle kind of power that runs things behind the scenes. The other partners may treat her as a highly paid secretary, but with a seemingly absent suggestion she salvages a job for a genuinely good man and ends the episode as the one person who truly got their way, with no one the wiser for it.

Don returns in silence to his perfect life with his beautiful young wife, who cheerfully discusses having a wonderful time together, maybe even going on vacation to Hawaii again. And he’s sick to his soul about it, because he’s Don Draper, and “perfect” isn’t good enough to satisfy his miserable, empty heart. As the credits roll, a television broadcast relays the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and Don sits and stares into space, surely contemplating not the murder of a young presidential contender but rather the sudden assassination of his own aspirations of power — aspirations on a far smaller and more intimate scale than Kennedy’s to be sure, but gunned down with equal finality all the same.

So, here are the books:

• GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1
• GameSpite Year One, Vol. 2
• GameSpite Year Two
• GameSpite Journal 1: Game Boy
• GameSpite Journal 2: The Greatest* Games of All Time
• GameSpite Journal 3: Encyclopedia of 8-Bit Heroes
• GameSpite Journal 4: The Mechanics of Games
• GameSpite Journal 5: The NES
• GameSpite Journal 6: The Most Underappreciated Games of All Time
• GameSpite Journal 7: Encyclopedia of 8-Bit Villains
• GameSpite Journal 8: The PlayStation
• GameSpite Journal 9: Games and Death
• GameSpite Journal 10: The Super NES
• GameSpite Journal 11: Second Chances
• GameSpite Journal 12: Sega, Vol. I
• GameSpite Journal 13: The Anatomy of Castlevania, Vol. I
• GameSpite Journal 14: The Anatomy of Zelda, Vol. I

Please note that the first few books are reproduced in black-and-white, because at the time Blurb could only print the small format books in monochrome. Do not adjust your set; this is perfectly normal. Also, the prices are listed at “$3+” because the base price is $3 but you’re welcome to pay more if you’re feeling generous.

The latest in the GameSpite Journal series has just body-checked the Blurb store with two available versions: Hardcover and paperback. As usual. Like The Anatomy of Castlevania Vol. I, this edition is the larger 10×8″ landscape format and isn’t available in black and white, so the price is a little higher than the platonic ideal for GameSpite books — though the one gracious move Blurb has made lately (they now price books per page rather than per 20-page folio) means that this issue comes in a few bucks cheaper than the Castlevania book since it’s slightly shorter.

• Paperback Edition (70pp): $37
• Hardcover Edition (70pp): $58

I’m still putting together a stripped-down, small-format, black-and-white edition for the budget-conscious, so please hold on if you’re interested in that particular book. I’ve also made the PDF version available (it’s attached to the hardcover book) if you’d like that in the short term — though please do remember that I’ll be setting up a separate PDF store sometime in the next few weeks.

The cover looks better in the flesh than in this image — you can’t see it here, but Link’s Shadow has a sort of rough-edge look meant to call back to the Ganon Wraiths in Wind Waker, and the painterly effect on the coloring looks as nice as it did on the Castlevania book. The pink looks a lot more garish on-screen. Look, I was just being true to the material.

Also, be sure to check out the inline previews on the bookstore to check out some of the great original art Philip “Loki” Armstrong provided for the book. Dude did a doodle for each and every write-up of both Zelda and Zelda II, because he’s insane. The back cover features Bill Mudron’s amazing Map of Hyrule, which you should buy at full size because it’s — what’s the word? Oh yes: Amazeballs.

Also also, the thumbnail image for the hardcover book appears to have a graphical error (it’s missing the line separating “The Anatomy of” and “Zelda”) but the actual book will be fine. What you’re seeing is just a random visual artifact caused by their store system.

And finally, the coupon code MAY15OFF should net you $15 off a purchase, though I’m not sure what the required spending threshold is for that. Poke around online for “blurb coupon code” and you’ll probably find something else that’ll work, too. Anything to offset their hideous shipping prices…. Alright, try the code CROWNED15 and see what happens.

Edit: I’ve begun selling PDFs through Gumroad, per several people’s recommendations. The most recent two books are now up for $5 apiece, and I’ll be publishing back issues for a reduced price when I have time to get those up (i.e. after work).

Anatomy of Zelda Vol. I

Anatomy of Castlevania Vol. I