 SNESDRUNK! When I first made this channel project thing called SNESDRUNK, I wanted the focus to be on how certain games have held up over time. But every once in a while, I do like to talk about the original context in which these games were made and released. And nothing encapsulates that better than the experience of renting a game. Whether you went to Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Mr. Movies, Video Update, or even Crappy Video Vision in South Saint Paul next to Highway 52, the process was usually the same. You looked to see if your favorites were available for rent, and they usually weren't. But then you take a look at some of the more polished titles, maybe some other game you've heard about in a magazine or something, games from developers like Capcom, Konami, or Squaresoft, or even first-party titles from Nintendo themselves. My personal favorite was renting an RPG like Breath of Fire or Earthbound or whatever, and seeing someone else's save files, and seeing what ridiculous names people came up with for the characters. Sure, let's name Kronos Spork. Why not? I don't know about you, but I always treated these save files with a certain amount of respect. It was always fun to dive into them to see further into the game than you might not normally have time for. But I'd never save over them, unless there were no other save slots to use. But even then, I always felt bad for saving over someone else's game. But yeah, sadly, games of that quality were almost always checked out too. And once you saw that those were all gone, that's when you have to roll the dice on a game that you've never played before. Sometimes you'd strike gold. Hell, I can remember renting Top Gear on a whim, and to this day, it's one of my absolute favorite games ever. But I can also remember renting crap like Bill Ambeer's Combat Basketball. Screw that game. And that brings me to the main point of this video. You know how certain arcade games back in the day had these absurd difficulty spikes that would pop up out of nowhere? Those were derisively called quarter munchers, and there was a similar phenomenon in the home console industry when it came to renting games. A good way to describe these would be rigged rentals. Big thanks to Andrew for this idea and for coining that term. Some of you may know him as either Critical Android or as Stas Drunk. Check out his content any way you can. But anyway, one of the best examples of a rigged rental was Lion King. Here's a cute and colorful, happy bouncy game where you start out playing as Simba, hopping on enemies, climbing trees. Seems simple enough. But dear god, this game is hard. It's seriously one of the hardest games of the 16-bit era. It's completely ridiculous. All I gotta do is mention this stupid section here with the hippo tails. You gotta be pixel perfect to get past this part. This game is filled to the brim with difficulty spikes that will have you shaking your head. I mean, the entire second level is just insane. I mean, how are you supposed to know what you can jump on or hang on to? The fact that you hit a roadblock so early on in this game is confusing and frustrating. So why is this game like this? Were the developers just sadistic? Well, maybe, but the entire idea behind making this game so difficult is so people wouldn't be able to beat the game in one rental. If you're able to crank through Lion King willy-nilly in just a couple of days, then you'd have no reason to pay full price to buy it. It's really that simple. And it explains a lot of game design choices back then. You can also see this in how a game is localized. Game rentals were practically non-existent in Japan, so rigged rentals really weren't a thing there. But in the US, Nintendo fought tooth and nail in the court system to make rentals illegal. They failed, so they had to resort to other tactics to get people to buy games instead of rent them. Of course, many of you that grew up renting NES games already know this, just look at Castlevania III, but it continued with the Super Nintendo in slightly more subtle ways. Take Super Valus IV for instance. In the Japanese version of this game, most enemies early on take one hit to destroy and your health meter replenishes at the beginning of the next level after beating a boss. In the North American version, certain enemies take two or three hits to destroy and your health meter does not replenish after a boss fight. It's the exact same game in every other aspect, but those two changes were made for one reason, to make it more difficult to beat the game on one rental. One of the most famous examples of this isn't a Super Nintendo game but a Sega Genesis title, Contra Hardcore. The North American version is just brutally difficult. It's your typical Contra action with enemy projectiles flying all over the place, crazy stuff happening left and right, and one hit kills you and you only get five continues. It's a hell of a challenge. But if you play the Japanese version of the game, you get a health meter, it takes three hits to kill you instead of one, and you get unlimited continues. Playing the North American version as is though, especially back when this game was first released, ugh, that is the definition of a rigged rental. Another way a game could be a rigged rental is if the game itself didn't explain all its mechanics, making the player rely on the instruction manual. What sucked about this is that not every rental store gave you any kind of game instructions. I can remember Mr. Movies in West St. Paul providing a Xeroxed copy of the manual with each rental, and later on Hollywood Video would just print their own version of the game instructions on the back of the plastic rental case. Sometimes though, you just got a game without any clue how to play it. Take Spawn, for instance. This is actually capable of being a pretty fun game, but it's one of those titles where every special move you can do is some overly complicated nonsense. I mean, look at this. To do a burning fist attack, you hold the R button, then hit right, then left on the D-pad, and then press X. To teleport, you hold R again, then roll the D-pad counterclockwise all the way around, starting with up, and then press Y. It's stupidly convoluted and not intuitive in the slightest, so if you're playing Spawn without the manual, there's no way you're gonna figure out any of the special moves unless you're just button mashing and you get really lucky. So as a result, the game is gonna suck. Thankfully, now we have sites like Game Facts to help us out with stuff like this, but back then, you were pretty much screwed and missing out on an essential part of the game, and that's what makes it the definition of a rigged rental. Well, that's all for now. Did you have any bad experiences from renting a game way back when? Any game that sticks out to you as a rigged rental? Let me know in the comments. And I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.