It’s been a month, so it’s a good time for another recap of NextGen Magazine. This time, as mentioned in my last recap, I’m going to be skipping over the review section, as the reviews in NextGen over the past 4 issues have been very brief and not very informative – and have not had any names attached to them so I can’t get a vibe for individual critics taste in games.
(more…)
It’s been a while since my last recap of NextGen, mainly because these take a long time to transcribe. Also because they’re kind of long. Still, it’s time to return to this chunk of video game history, and with it take a look at some of the platforms that fell by the wayside.
(more…)
This issue has the results of the 7th annual Nintendo Power Awards.
(more…)
This week we have a bunch of movie licensed games and the launch of a major puzzle franchise that continues to this day.
(more…)
We return to our regular episodes with two streetball basketball games – one with NBA stars, one with Looney Tunes characters. If there was only some way to get them to meet…
(more…)
Moving right along with NextGen Magazine #3 for March of 1995.
(more…)
The Play It Loud era continues with a pair of Kirby titles.
(more…)
We return to our regular issues of Nintendo Power with the first issue of the Play It Loud era.
(more…)
I’m continuing with NextGen Magazine with the NextGen #2. With the second issue hitting in February of 1995, it makes keeping track of what year I’m on a lot easier.
(more…)
It has been a long time since I did Where I Read for a video game magazine, as much of the work I had been putting into my read through of Nintendo Power has been going into the Nintendo Power Retrospectives, and the second magazine I’d been covering – Electronic Gaming Monthly – has made something of a return. However, with my coverage of Nintendo Power for the show having reached 1995, I feel like I’ve lost some perspective on where the game industry was at this point, so I’ve decided to launch a read-through of another magazine, that is contemporaneous for where we are in gaming in the N.P.R.
(more…)
We wrap up the Best of the Rest with some movie licensed games and fighting games. (more…)
This time we’re covering issue #52 of Nintendo Power for September of 1993! (more…)
This time we’re covering The Best of the Rest for Nintendo Power’s 5th year. (more…)
This time we’re covering issue # 48 of Nintendo Power for May of 1993 (more…)
This time we’re covering issue # 47 of Nintendo Power for April of 1993 (more…)
This time we’re covering issue #46 of Nintendo Power for March of 1993. (more…)
This time we’re covering Issue #39 for August of 1992, featuring another major title for the SNES.
We return to Nintendo Power proper with Issue #37 for June of 1992.
This week I’m taking a look at Nintendo Fun Club News issue 2, with thoughts on Legend of Zelda, Pro Wrestling, Slalom and Volleyball.
I’m taking a break from Analog Computing this week to instead take a look at the first issue of Computer Gaming World, for November-December of 1981.
We start off with an ad from SSI, hyping their port of their Civil War Strategy game “Battle of Shiloh” and the World War II game “Battle of the Bulge: Tigers in the Snow.” It’s kind of interesting. Nowadays we’re used to strategy games which will take either larger battles or even campaigns and allow the player to control them from the strategic level all the way down to the tactical level, like with the Total War games. Whereas here, on the other hand, you’re either on the strategic level, or the tactical level. If you’re on the tactical level you’re controlling a fairly generic fight or only one battle, and if you’re on the strategic level you’re either controlling a massive battle (like the Battle of the Bulge), or you’re controlling an entire theater of operations. (more…)
It’s been almost a month since my last Where I Read, so to make up for it here’s my Where I Read for Nintendo Power issue #52 for September of 1993. This issue’s cover game is Super Mario All Stars, with Mario jumping and hitting a block. However, the inside includes guides for Final Fight 2, Rock & Roll Racing, and Enix’s RPG The 7th Saga. Let’s read on, shall we? (more…)
We have another recap of an issue in Nintendo Power, just in time for a significant, coinciding event in the modern video game industry.
The issue is Nintendo Power #51, for August of 1993. Our cover game for this issue is Street Fighter II Turbo, which introduces the ability to have same character matches in the game, as well as the ability to play as the bosses, coinciding nicely with the release of Capcom’s latest fighting game to include Street Fighter characters – Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
In the letters column for this issue we have a letter from a 47 year-old chuck driver, looking for assistance with Blaster Master, and who has also been having problems with Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy. According to the writer, he got so frustrated with the game, that he nearly ran over his Game Boy with his big-rig until another driver stopped him (I presume this was at a truck stop). The writer discovered that the other driver had been stuck in the same spot in the game he was, and he got some instructions about how to get past that part of the game. I have to admit that I never thought of big-rig drivers as hardcore portable gamers before, but now that I’ve been exposed to the concept, I’m not too surprised. I wonder if the portable game systems are still popular with long-haul truckers today, and if so, I wonder what systems are popular? (more…)
I’m continuing on with my walk of Analog Computing Magazine with issue #3 for May/June 1981. Our cover story is programming languages, and we have an ad at the beginning of this issue for Mosaic Electronics spring catalog, and their 32K RAM expansion board. Cygnus Micro systems is also advertising their new disk loader, word processor, and electronic Ledger. Also, COMPUTE! Magazine has a couple new books coming out.
First up, we learn that our editors are full-time college students, and because of their course schedule, they’re going to have to ease back on their publication schedule, as not only are they the editors of the magazine, but they’re also the entirety of the writing staff. I’d cut them some slack, except they have to be all snide and snarky and talk about how other editors don’t know all the work it takes to make a magazine, something which, bare minimum Steve Harris and Dan Hsu would take issue two.
They also have a call to fight against computer piracy, as it discourages publishers from supporting the Atari 8-bit platforms over the inferior (their words) Apple and Texas Instruments systems. We also get a call for more article submissions – pity your poor, poor writer-editors.
We get a massive letter complementing them on their Composer articles, as well as a request for more advanced programming articles. There’s also a request for contact and ordering information for a few hardware manufacturers. Another reader wants to know about this “Compuserve” thingie. There’s a request for a review of a recently released Apple emulator, and information on wargames for Atari Computers. Well, if you’re a little patient on that last front, SSI will have some stuff that should scratch that itch. Finally, the director of Kurta Corporation has a correction for their review of their tablet from last issue. Apparently the $100 does more then buy you some demo software… it will also buy you the power cables for the tablet, as well as interface cables to hook it up to your computer… so you can actually use the tablet. Congratulations, you just unsold me.
Dow Jones has some investment management software. Microsoft has announced their upcoming release of Atari BASIC at Summer CES. Plus there’s a new assembler app coming out. Floppy drive production by Atari has also been stopped briefly to incorporate some new changes to cover reading information off of disks that were written to by drives of different speeds. It probably seems odd to you that something like this would require a significant change to drive designs, but remember that around this time consumer floppy drives were fairly new.
Temple of Apshai, the latest game in the DunjonQuest series is getting a port to Atari 8-bit systems. The game’s publisher, Automated Simulations, is also putting out the Kaiju game “Crush, Crumble and Chomp” where you have to destroy as much of the city as possible before being stopped by the military. Optimized Systems Software in Cupertino also has a new variant to Basic, called Basic A+.
A program listing for an application to provide information on attached devices and whether the system recognizes something being there. Useful for troubleshooting.
This listing basically expands the range of sounds your computer can handle so it can do sounds in the base range. I don’t know how good bass sounds sound on Atari 8-bit systems though, especially since the sound range isn’t normally accessible.
This installment in the series covers the Assembler, and some of the option commands.
This is an assembler program, if you couldn’t tell from the title. They like the program, though they don’t like that you’re required to use the bundled text editor for your coding.
No relation to Word Perfect. I’ll give them props for disclosing that this is a program that’s advertised in the magazine. Unfortunately, they review commits the cardinal sin of being apologetic. The opening of the review describes it as being one of the best word processors they’d ever used, but then proceeds, in the course of using the review as a tutorial for the application, they enumerate a litany of problems with the application, to the point that they had to send the program back to the manufacturer and get a patched version back. This would be bad on its own, but the fact that the program costs $150 in 1981 dollars just makes it worse.
If you’ve played a Bioware game, you know this.
Atari has released Othello, Video Pinball, and Missile Command, and Activision has released Freeway and Kaboom. In terms of upcoming titles, we have Ice Hockey and Stampede announced by Activision, and Warlords, Asteroids, Super Breakout and Haunted House from Atari. Also, we get a heads up that 2600 carts don’t work on an Atari 8-bit system, in case you didn’t already know.
Basically, this is a suite of file-management applications. They like it, and it’s actually less expensive then Letter Perfect at $40.
If you couldn’t tell from the title, this is a typing tutor program, to help you speed through those program listings in the magazine. They like the program, though it has its problems. However, considering there’s not a lot of competition for the time, you’ll probably have to take what you can get.
We also get a little ad here for surge protectors, which is a little notable considering that now they’re practically ubiquitous.
They like this (unsurprising), though they don’t like how it handles strings.
This is a review of the Atari 8-bit version of the game. This version does have 2 less cities (and thus less missiles) than the arcade version, and you’re using a joystick instead of a trackball, so take that as you will.
Basically, this is a shooting gallery game that you control with a joystick.
This is a basic drawing application which lets you draw lines and fill closed areas with solid colors. Nowadays this isn’t much, but for a two page listing, that’s rather impressive.
Target Blockade is a multiplayer snake/Light Cycle clone, and Battle Warp is a Space War clone. These reviews also have numerical scores, though we don’t get any information on the scale.
This is a column about online services, wit ha par for the course hating on Apple users and their computers. This issue covers uploading a program listing instead of manually typing in while connected with your 2800 baud modem. This includes a couple listings to help with the uploading process, as FTP clients haven’t been invented yet.
Want to pimp your comp? Well, check out these boards that will give you a whopping 32K of memory. The boards even have gold plated connectors so they won’t oxidize causing your computer to crash and you to lose your data.
We have some corrections for earlier listings
More advice on writing better code for Basic on Atari 8-bit systems.
Just in time for the 25th Anniversary of the US launch of the Nintendo Entertainment system, my Where I Read for Nintendo Power has reached issue 50, for July of 1993. It shouldn’t be a surprise to say that this issue’s cover game is a notable one – Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for the Game Boy – the first portable outing for the series.
Our letters column for this issue has an interesting question – when they added two more face buttons on the SNES controller (in addition to the two shoulder buttons), why did they call them X & Y instead of C & D? According to the official answer, it comes from CAD, and relates to the fact that X & Y are the secondary buttons, as opposed to the main A & B buttons. I don’t know enough about CAD to say how definite that is (aside from X & Y being the axis for any two-dimensional plane), but it sounds good. If anyone who knows more about CAD wants to chip in with more information on what could be referenced here, I’d appreciate it. We also have a couple good-bad Legend of Zelda jokes, from Alex in Victorville, CA:
Q: How did Link help his team win the basketball game?
A: He used his hookshot!
Q: What did Zelda tell Link when he couldn’t unlock the door?
A: Triforce. (Get it, “try force” – I’ll get my coat)
So, just to get the age of game across here – it still has WWF in the logo instead of WWE. It’s got the Big Letter logo instead of the Scratch logo. The Undertaker has a goatee only, no moustache. Also, it bears mentioning that of the five wrestlers pictured here – Bret Hart, The Undertaker, Rodney “Yokozuna” Anoai, Curt Henning, and Scott “Razor Ramon” Hall, two are dead (Henning and Anoai), one is out of the business due to being an alcoholic (Hall), one basically can’t actively wrestle after having too many concussions (Hart), and one’s retiring Real Soon Now (The Undertaker). Hey, at least it doesn’t have Chris Benoit in it, if it did then the game wouldn’t exist anymore. 😉
The game itself has four gameplay modes – single player career, tag team career, three-man tag, and battle royal. It’s interesting to note that when wrestlers use a chair as a foreign object, they hold it upside down. Of course, like most steel chairs on WWE programming, they can only withstand a couple swings before becoming unusable for anything really. It’s also interesting to note that while the game has a tag team mode, only two real “tag teams” are represented here – Mr. Perfect and Ric Flair, and Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon, and both those are situations where one wrestler was the other’s “bodyguard”, not that they were a regular tag team and neither team ever held the Tag belts. I bring thus up because earlier games usually had one tag team in it that had held gold, usually the Road Warriors/Legion of Doom, or occasionally Demolition.
We get a list of wrestlers here, and their signature moves – which is a new touch for WWE games. However, the game doesn’t include submissions, something that WCW’s first game did include. I don’t recall if this game includes rope breaks on pin attempts though. Still, from a feature standpoint, they’re behind their competition.
This is a sort of run and slash action-platformer like Strider. We get maps of the all the stages before the last one, including boss strategies. Of note – according to wikipedia, the boss for level 2, a massive reclining undead woman, was originally just a massive reclining woman in the Japanese version, but Nintendo of America had them change it to avoid their “No Violence Against Women” policy – the same policy that lead to the stripper-riffic women from Final Fight being changed to transgender men in the US release of that game. Yeah, their priorities weren’t in the right place.
Before Will Wright gave us Spore, we got this ambitious title from Enix for the SNES. Basically, you control a creature of your own creation, and earn Evolution Points by surviving, by eating creatures and so forth. Evolution points can be spent on various genetic mutations that will help you do better later on. For example, as a fish, you can evolve a lure similar to the lure of the angler-fish, to help draw in food.
We get a run down of various edutainment games as we approach back-to-school season. Several of these games, like the Miracle Piano Teaching System, have previously been covered by the magazine, and nothing is really in-depth.
This game is a little interesting, as while the game was originally licensed when it was released on the SNES, the Genesis version was initially unlicensed (a licensed version was released later). We get maps for levels 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, and 16 (the final stage). We don’t get any boss information though, it’s entirely possible that the game doesn’t have any bosses until the end, or that the bosses are on the levels we don’t get maps for.
We also get a gallery of the covers of all of the last 50 issues of Nintendo Power. Thus far I have to say that I like the cover of issue 2, the Castlevania II cover, the most. Our Nester’s Adventures strip covers TazMania and is has no useful advice at all.
This is, as it says, an in-depth retrospective. Apparently they consider the Castlevania II cover their “worst” cover, because it gave kids nightmares. Personally, I would say any piece of cover art good enough to cause nightmares would be a sign that it’s quality. Anyway, the official history here downplays the magazine’s role as a piece of advertising, instead describing it as a way to give a lot of information about Nintendo games for fans, and not including advertising as a way to avoid any awkward conflicts of interest, never mind that this is a house organ, and thus will probably skip on saying anything too negative about their products.
At the very least, they attempt to leave the American kusoge (shitty games) out of the magazine, and to be fair, with the Quality Control picks I’ve played, while some are bad, I haven’t seen anything as bad as Deadly Towers, or the far, far worse Dragonlance: Heroes of the Lance in the magazine, at least not very often.
While the Starfox comic continues, I’m still not going to cover it because it’s still not good.
So, this guide covers enough of the overworld map to get you to the first three dungeons of the game, and maps of those dungeons. That’s unfortunately it. Most other guides usually give a glimpse and maybe a few hints of what’s to come later, but this has none of that, unfortunately.
This is a sequel to the spinoff game based on Ghouls & Ghosts/Ghosts & Goblins. We get strategies for all the bosses right off, as well as a full two-page spread of the overworld map. We don’t get maps of the dungeons, but I’m okay with that. Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded if, with Legend of Zelda, we had gotten no maps of the Dungeons, and just gotten a complete overworld maps and a few useful notes on the dungeons (for example, in this dungeon you can only defeat some enemies with jars, and you can only lift those jars after you find the Power Bracelet in this dungeon).
This is a port of the arcade light gun shooter… for the Game Boy. Yeah, no good can come of this. Mind you, I liked the arcade game, but light gun games really need to be played with a light gun – either one hard locked to the machine (T2, Operation: Wolf), or a couple on cables, possibly dual wielded.
Moving to the NES, we have a licensed game based on the Addams Family animated series. I watched this show a fair bit as a kid, and I have to say that the animated format probably worked better for the Addams Family than the live action format, at least outside of big features like the two films with Raul Julia. We get a map of the hub area and notes on the individual levels, but no full maps.
So, what do you do when you want to port one of the best fighting games of the last 5 years to the NES, when the system can’t handle it? You put out a Super Deformed version! Thus, we have Mighty Final Fight, a version of Final Fight with Chibi characters. Plus, it has a level up system, and we have Guy in the game! We get maps of the levels and notes on beating the bosses. Frankly, I like this game’s visual style, and I’m probably going to make it my Quality Control pick.
Remember Bubble Bobble? Good. Now you’re getting more of it. We get notes on a smattering of levels from the game and their World’s bosses – 3, 11, and 15 in World 1, 21, 24 and 36 in World 2, 42, 45 and 59 on World 3, and after that is the final world.
We also get a mini-merch catalog, which includes the opportunity to get every single back issue of Nintendo Power for just $50. That’s actually a pretty good deal. There’s also a Member’s Only shirt, and the Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Adventures graphic novels.
For our Top 20 this issue, Star Fox now holds the top spot on the SNES, bumping down Street Fighter II (original version) and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. On the Game Boy, Super Mario Land has once again been bumped off the top spot, and not by Metroid II. Instead, Super Mario Land 2 has claimed the top of the charts, pushing Samus and Kirby further down the charts. On the NES, Mario 3 retains the top spot, followed by the original Legend of Zelda (who has been on the Top 50 for the magazine’s full run), and Mega Man V. It bears mentioning that every NES Mega Man game is on the charts and every Metroid game released as of this issue is on the charts. We are missing Zelda 2 from the charts on that franchise, and the original Super Mario Bros and Super Mario World are absent from the charts from that franchise.
Now for the best of the rest. Ultima V: the False Prophet is getting a SNES release. Unlike the PC games you can’t carry your character over from the last game. Seika is releasing Super Turrican, JVC has the Wizardry clone Dungeon Master, There’s also a Game Boy game based on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
As my favorite wrestling commentator, Jim Ross, is fond of saying, business is about to pick up. Capcom is preparing to release Street Fighter II Turbo, with the ability to play as the bosses, as in Champion Edition, plus a speed boost. However, Midway has their own major fighting game on the way, albeit in a bowdlerized fashion – Mortal Kombat. By bowdlerized, I mean that many of the finishing moves have been toned down, though the people writing this column attempt to downplay this – and fail. Ultimately, this game, more than Sonic vs. Mario, is what truly divides the Genesis vs. SNES camps.
Konami also has a fighting game of their own, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters. This one also has its own differences between the Genesis and SNES versions. The SNES version has more characters from the animated series (like Bebop and Rocksteady), while the Genesis version includes more characters from the comics (like Casey “10 Minutes For High-Sticking” Jones). Finally, Capcom is taking Mega Man to the next level with Mega Man X for the SNES.
Finally, for my Quality Control pick. While Super Turrican in the Now Playing section caught my eye, I’m going to go with Mighty Final Fight.