Screw Attack has a video retrospective on Battletoads & Double Dragon for the Super Nintendo. It's good for a quick nostalgia fix, and it contains 200% of the daily recommended intake of fart and tit jokes in case you haven't been meeting your quota lately (that happens in the winter).
I never played Battletoads & Double Dragon. Watching the video reminded me of the reason why: my taste in games was slightly above that of a blind burrowing animal who sleeps in its own excrement. Seriously though, I never played Battletoads & Double Dragon because Double Dragon was the first verboten series in my house. My mother took note of what I was playing long before the Mortal Kombat scare, and she didn't approve of games that let you grab women by the hair and knee them in the face. I guess.
It's not to say I grew up in an ultra-Puritan house where the only permitted video games came in telltale baby-blue cartridges, or were games about barn raising. I was allowed to play most anything, and my mom even played a bit, even if she could never get past the first boss in any given Castlevania game (but damned if she didn't try over and over). But after bringing home Double Dragon for the NES, she noted that Billy and Jimmy Lee could vent their masculine frustrations on thug women, and she deemed that uncool.
Interestingly, we owned Double Dragon on the Game Boy, and the violence-against-women issue never came up. Handheld gaming tends to be more private, I suppose, and Game Boy sprites lacked anything like gender-defining shapes or colours. Anyway, our portable copy of Double Dragon got stolen long before we brought home the NES version, so that eliminated the need for disposal.
I had friends who thought that my mother's philosophy was weird. I suppose I ought to have been angry over the fact that she didn't trust me to separate fantasy from reality. I think there's more to the situation than that, though. I'm a pretty big fan of game ratings, even though the ESRB isn't perfect by far. There is nothing wrong with telling a kid, “You know what? This is just a bit old for you. Wait a while.” I doubt I'll make my kids wait until they're seventeen to play Devil May Cry 19, but it won't kill any of us for them to learn some restraint and earn a bit of maturity.
Would kicking some chicks around in Double Dragon have infused me with a desire to go on the street and start randomly punching women in the boobs? Obviously not. I didn't appreciate being told to put Double Dragon away for good. But thinking about it now, it was good to have a parent who gave a shat about my hobby, and was reasonable about it—not just knee-jerk frightened.
Oh, and I played plenty of Double Dragon at friends' houses, of course. I was fascinated by Double Dragon II. I even told my mother about it.
“Guess what? In Double Dragon II, you don't punch women anymore.”
“Well, that's good.”
“Nah, now you whip them with morning stars.”
Related Links:
Double Dragon Double Dragon Double Dragon!!
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