In the mid 1980s, Nickelodeon consisted of little more than You Can’t Do That on Television re-runs from Canada and old Looney Tunes cartoons. It was a dark time for children’s television. Although You Can’t Do That on Television has been cited as not only the sole non-shitty project that Alanis Morissette took part in, but also the reason for communism’s fall, it takes more than one show to make an entire cable channel not suck. Luckily, Nickelodeon soon premiered its own game show: Double Dare! A few years later, Nintendo finally got around to cashing in, and we, the gaming public, were left with one of the worst games that Nintendo ever bothered to waste plastic making.
Much like all of the other NES games that were based on game shows, Double Dare is primarily a trivia game. Unlike its other NES genre brethren, the questions in Double Dare are only difficult for that one kid in first grade who ate paste, had nervous tics, flunked quizzes on the color blue, and bragged about how many different animal cocks he had touched. For the rest of us, this game is hardly worth any sort of effort.
On the off chance that you don’t know the answer to “Which hole does food go in?” you have the option of “daring” your opponents, who in turn have the option to send the question back to you by way of the “Double Dare.” This almost always leads to the coveted physical challenges. Actually, this is how it works on the show. In the game, the computer very rarely Double Dares, so unless you have the luxury of a save/reload feature on an emulator, you aren’t going to win this without forsaking the physical challenges and just answering all of the questions.
Don’t worry about skipping the physical challenges, since you really won’t be missing much. There are two basic types of physical challenges: those where you have to catch something, and those where you have to aim and hit something. Both of which are near-impossible to do within the 20-second time limit that every challenge has.
After two rounds of mind-numbing inanity, you should have more points than the other team, meaning you earn passage to the final round. The only way that you could possibly have lost Double Dare would be if playing this game was your very first experience with an electronic device. If this is case, then you need to shut down this browser window immediately and stay the hell away from GameCola, you Amish dirtbag. We don’t welcome your kind here. Besides, don’t you have butter that needs churning or some shit like that?
The final round of the game is the obstacle course. Here is where you make your way through as many obstacles as possible within a minute’s time, while grabbing the blue flag at the end of each one. In order to simulate the excitement of a real obstacle course, Rare decided to make you have to mash the buttons as quickly as possible in order to run. The end result is that you’ve grabbed four or five flags, and developed some mean carpal tunnel syndrome. But don’t worry, Rare was kind enough to end the game by showing you pictures of the prizes you may won if you had actually been a contestant on Double Dare, instead of the overweight slob who still plays NES that you actually are.
