My maternal grandfather operated under a very fixed set of eccentricities, one of which was his unwavering conviction that only one barber shop in eastern Massachusetts was able to cut his hair properly.

The shop in question was located at the North Shore Mall in Peabody. I’m not sure how my grandfather happened to come across the place, given that he lived in Woburn and worked in Wayland and Sudbury, well west and south of I-95 and Route 128′s north shore corridor. No matter how he found his Holy Grail of hairstylists, the end result was a monthly trek up the highway in the old man’s overwhelming large and overwhelmingly brown GM sedan with a chonically faulty catalytic coverter that was somehow “the pinkos’ fault”.

While my grandfather got his locks trimmed to defense contractor regulation length, my grandmother used the opportunity to do a little shopping with my brother and me in tow. This was at a time prior to the rampant Californization of shopping center design, back when malls were dark, utilitarian places and quasi-stagnant water features in the atrium were considered the height of retail venue sophistication.

As far as my grandmother was concerned, the big draw at the North Shore Mall was the J.J. Newberry department store. Newberry’s was an old school throwback, resembling a low (or “lower”) rent Woolworth’s right down to the scores of dead goldfish floating belly up in the live pets department. It was also a Sargasso Sea of discontinued toy lines, the kind of place where you could find a stray mint-in-box Major Matt Mason accessory pack sharing shelf space with a limited selection of the latest Star Wars toys and a thousand dusty Wonder Woman PrestoMagix sets (like Colorforms! Only not reusable!)

The bloom faded from Newberry’s atavistic rose for the Brothers Weiss after a shiny new Toys R Us moved in three stores down. It was kid paradise, especially when said kid had the benefit of a grandmother whose innate cheapness was often trumped by her will to overindulgence. It was there that I invested a couple weeks of allowance money for a marked-down copy of Vanguard for the Atari 2600.

The 1983 game was a home port of a SNK arcade title release two years prior. It, like Scramble and Super Cobra, was one of the great-grandpappies of the sidescrolling shooter genre in which players must navigate waves of enemies and hazardout terrain before mixing it up with an extremely cheap final boss…in this case, thegreat and terrible Gond, who dwells at the end of a massive maze of caverns.

Vanguard‘s main claims to modest fame were its use of tinny voice samples, an invincibility mechanic tied to refueling stations, four-button directional shooting, and incidental music cribbed from both the Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Flash movie soundtracks.

Due to the technical limitations of the console, the Atari 2600 version of Vanguard was forced to scale back the number of levels (or “zones” according to in-game terminology), drop all the but the final level boss, and omit the voice samples and bliptone Jerry Goldsmith score.

In exchange, players were treated to a full spectrum of chromatic pizzazz…

…perhaps meant to challenge Activision’s dominance of color gradient technology while distracting players from the inherent difficulty of duplicating the arcade version’s multidirectional shooting mechanic on a single button joystick.

The 2600 version did, however, retain the snippet of “Vultan’s Theme” that plays whenever the player manages to wrestle his or her sluggish and ungainly spacecraft over a refueling station…which is proof that the programmers at least had their priorities right.

Related posts:

  1. Growing Up 2600: Slapstick in the face
  2. Growing Up 2600: Light from a dead star
  3. Growing Up 2600: In the beginning