It was fun trying out a lot of NES games this month thanks to the NES collection on the Switch subscription service and a few available on collections on Xbox. I also had a few cartriges too for the original experience. Here's what I got to this week plus new stuff.
Oh, watched the whole first disc of Batman The Animated series and discovered this video game show called Video Power. It's from the 90s. It has a kid DJ who gives you tips on games before and after a pretty lame animated cartoon. I just skip the cartoon and see what he has to say about Shinobi or whatever game it is that episode. Commercials plug the Tiger handheld games relentlessly in the first episode. Aside from the watching, there's the playing disclosed below.
It's almost August when I will be focusing my retro gaming on the 90s. That's NES, Genesis, SNES, PS and N64 for me. I don't have a Saturn anymore, never had a TG-16 or Neo Geo, and I didn't play handheld games until the DS. However I do now have the option to play Game Boy and GBC games on my Gamecube's GameBoy Player. So I may break that out too. Here's a list of stuff I'm interested in from 1990, more or less.
Willow is a 1988 dark fantasy movie I never watched as a child. Yet the name still rings a nostalgic bell in my brain. Strangely, I didn’t consciously pay it much attention until I stumbled across the NES game sometime in the mid-2000s. But seeing the name and characters on the cover felt deeply familiar in a way I still grapple to understand. Maybe I saw the movie poster and heard its name in passing as a kid but didn’t think much of it until discovering the video game later in life. Initially released by Capcom in 1989, Willow was a calculated attempt to create a game with broader appeal since it was based on a property with characters familiar to its audience. Fortunately for Capcom, those calculations were entirely correct.
For years, there has been a heated debate among fans of the Mega Man series regarding which one is the best of the original hexalogy. After the facts have been laid out and philosophical life lessons thoroughly dissected, the debate usually boils down to Mega Man 2 vs. Mega Man 3. Which is the greater of the two? Well, no matter which side you’re on, we can all agree on the thing- the cover art for Mega Man 3 finally got it right! No more awkward stances or that pistol-for-an-arm-cannon nonsense. Of course, he didn’t look as good as on the Famicom cover, but that’s another argument.
This list’s games are chosen from IGN’s Top 100 Games of All Time, published in 2019. These fill in some gaps in my now 141 game list.
For the longest time I was kind of sad I never got the NES Classic Edition. But when Nintendo restocked them last, I was finally able to get one! So here is a blog about all the games you can play on it.
As much as I like Nintendo, they have made quite a few mistakes as a game company. Some are big, like the Virtual Boy and using cartridges on the N64. And some are not quite so big. One of those ‘not quite so big’ mistakes I feel is how they released the NES Classic Edition last year. For those who don’t know, the NES Classic Edition was a smaller console that looked like the 8-bit NES and had 30 games on it. But Nintendo didn’t make enough and it’s very hard to find. Even I don’t have one! I know Nintendo recently said they would make more and release them next summer, but we’ll just have to see about that. So when I saw where I could order the Famicom Classic Edition online for nearly retail price, I decided to import that instead. The Famicom was the Japanese version of the NES. Their Classic Edition has most of the same games as the NES one, but with a few changes here and there. So in this blog, I’m going go over the Famicom Classic console, the games on it, and at the end I’ll share some good news related to this topic!
Another year in the bag! 2016 broke new ground in the "Whaaaaa-! It's already over??" category. Somehow I managed to play some games in there, so let's take a look. First up are all the games I beat this year and then how many I bought or somehow acquired (don't worry, I don't list those specifically). Be sure to stick around for the Golden Hippo Awards after that!
Guys, I've made it no secret that I adore remixes. I mean I do a few of them for fun, but I have nothing on the talent that some of these guys possess. I mean holy shit. Check these out!
.png)
Happy GLaD, everybody! Today I want to talk about the rest of my favorite games on the NES. As I said yesterday, Super Mario Bros. was probably one of the most influential games of all time. After all, it did single-handedly resurrect the industry after Atari crashed it. Anyway, onto the best of the rest!
I don't know about you, but I love NES music! Of course, the NES did not allow for authentic sounding instrument samples, so instead we got chippy sounds, yet that kind of music can still be enjoyable. There are so many great NES themes, but I've broken it down to 8 of my favorites. I've left out some of the obvious ones that everyone knows (such as the Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda themes), but I'm sure you've heard most or all of these here. As always, feel free to comment and let us know what your favorite 8-bit themes are. So here are my 8 picks, in no particular order.
Happy 25th anniversary, Mega Man. Well, I know I’m a few months overdue on it, but I just wanted to share my love for this series. You see, original series came out in 1987, and I’m happy to say that I have been there since the second game. They have grown with me, in a sense. The Mega Man games are some of my favorites, so I decided to do a brief overview on my opinions of the games. It's been a long time since I played some of these, but I hope you get an idea on how the games differ from each other. Because there are so many of them, it can get confusing as to which ones are good, and which ones are skippable. Anyway, the first 6 titles were first released on the NES, so I won't bother to mention that again, but the others came out on different systems. Okay, here I go.
Good news today - Mega Man 3 has been released on the Nintendo e-Shop. After checking every day since I found the trailer video, it has finally came out. So far I have played through Snake Man's stage, and the game is just as good as I remember. The graphics are just as colorful and more sharp than MM 2. Also, sliding~! This game doesn't have the Mega Buster charge, but that's okay. It was more of a cumbrance in later games because you needed to charge in order to do any damage to anything. I also feel that the stages were more smartly designed than the other games. It's definitely more challenging than MM 2. Btw, this is a straight port of the NES game if you were wondering. Get it!
I was going to repost one of my older blogs from 1up today, but I have a few games that I have played in the last day that I would rather talk about instead. So I decided to start on the Game Log a Day posts I have been thinking about doing. Thanks to the other members for letting me steal their ideas lol. Rules for this are simple: I will talk about a game using a general 1/1/1 ratio. That is, I will try out something for an hour, and if it doesn't hold my interest past that, I'm done with it. Then, I am done with a game if it doesn't hold my interest for more than a day. If it captures me for at least a week, then it wins. I will be trying to kill off my backlog in this fashion. So let's get started.
I love Mega Man, and have ever since I played Mega Man 2 at a friend’s house in elementary school. Even now I’ve been known to pop the Xbox version of the Mega Man Anniversary Collection into my 360 from time to time to replay some of the better games in his 8-bit career. Needless to say, when I heard Capcom had picked up Street Fighter x Mega Man—a reportedly well-made and interesting fan project— to release to their fans for free, I was understandably excited.
First, a disclaimer; there are many, many examples of art framed in gameplay, but I can only speak to things I have personally appreciated. This is true to the nature of art itself. One can only speak to pieces that have “moved” them in some way, but that does not disqualify other works of skill, beauty, imagination, and creativity, it simply speaks to their limitations as a single human being. There are games that may deserve to be mentioned that I simply have not played, and art that I have experienced that went unappreciated because of my own personal tastes. Please keep this in mind.