Grinding for levels in Farm Together 2 and thinking about what retro games I'll play in September.
2023 was a year that happened and I played games during it, sometimes. Let's talk about it! First we'll take a look at the games I beat and bought and then we'll move onto the Golden Hippo Awards!
Another year down! What? You don't want to talk about 2021? Can't say I blame you. How about games? First we'll take a look at the games I beat and bought and then we'll move onto the Golden Hippo Awards!
It all began on this day 40 years ago, in 1981. Nintendo- a then-obscure arcade machine manufacturer- had a problem with their latest game, Radar Scope. The machines weren’t selling as well as hoped, so the company decided to refit the unsold units with a brand new game. Young staff artist Shigeru Miyamoto was tasked with creating an arcade game that would capture the attention of the American audience. The finished product starred a stressed-out gorilla with an infinite supply of barrels who wasn't afraid to use them. It's the stubborn monkey himself, Donkey Kong.
2020. Gosh. Remember when we looked forward to it, hopefully, being a good year? We had no idea. And while there were big profile delays and disappointments in the game space, there were still a ton of fun games to play. First we'll take a look at the games I beat and bought and then we'll move onto the Golden Hippo Awards!
One of the releases today on the eShop and the PS Store was the Arcade Archives version of Kangaroo, made by Sunsoft. Kangaroo was originally published in the US by Atari, which had begun supplementing it's own output with licensed games from Japan after the success of Space Invaders and Pac-Man.
My earliest years in gaming was a magical time. Every new game I discovered pioneered a fresh mechanic I hadn’t seen before. I'll never forget the moment when my brother's best friend came over with his NES games to show off Blaster Master. I marveled as the story elements unfolded while melancholic music played in the attract mode. Pressing the start button then transitioned me to the opening shot of an armored vehicle speeding off while the triumphant music swelled to a crescendo as I journeyed into the unknown. Never had I witnessed anything like that at the time. While everything I just described is nothing spectacular these days, Blaster Master still has a few gameplay elements that still hold up quite nicely.
The arcades were my first gaming experiences, and I've alwasy had a soft spot for the arcade classics. Thanks to Atari, Namco, and the Arcade Archives series, my Nintendo Switch looks like the arcade of my fever dreams. But I've always enjoyed the look and feel of arcade cabinets. When I was a kid in Arizona, the local Ak-Chin commissary always had arcade cabinets like Dig-Dug, Donkey Kong, and Ms. Pac-Man, plus arcades were at grocery stores, movie theaters, travel plazas, and of course, shopping malls.
When the NES Classic hit store shelves it was all the rage. Comprising of 30 games, there were quite a lot of games as well as classic titles that made it. Of course with a system that has about 900 titles, not all of them made it onto the system and not all of them are winners. So I figured I'd try and highlight some notable classics and some maybe not so notable crap. And since I have just about every title...we might s well give it a whirl. Let's go!
When the Switch was first shown I was pretty underwhelmed. I knew I'd get one eventually, but from the launch lineup I just wasn't impressed. I already had Mario Kart 8, and Zelda BOTW on the Wii U, so as great as they were, they weren't exactly system sellers to me. So what made me want one? E3 is what made me want one now. Nintendo blew me away at last Junes E3 so I knew I really wanted a Switch. Even through there wasn't a huge lineup of must have games out, I knew there would be here soon enough and I knew the system would be tougher and tougher to find as the Christmas season quickly approached. My dad had agree to let me put the system on his Best Buy card for me and and I'd pay him back each month, so the trick now was to find one. Well within days I found one sitting on the shelf at a local Best Buy. Sadly it wasn't to be since my dad was back home in MA for the next week and a half. He looked for one out there for me, but no luck. Fortunately when he got back, we were tipped off by a BB worker that they would be getting some for the following Sundays sale. So in anticipation, I decided to buy a few games, and accessories to ready myself for my new Switch I was determined to get. Come Sunday morning we waited outside BB for them to open so I could rush in on my bum foot to grab one. Thankfully they not only had 6 of them, but they had them with the colored JoyCon's as well.
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!
The Classic NES Series continues with more great old-school games. If you missed yesterday, be sure to check that out. I took it upon myself to draw 21 posters to some of the best NES games. Thank you to everyone who commented on the first bunch; please comment on these as well, as I would like to hear what you have to say. Please enjoy! You can check out more of my art at Deviantart here.
I was excited when I first saw Capsized because at first glance it reminded me of the classic NES game Blaster Master, specifically how you could pop out of the cockpit of your buggy and run around the area in your white jumpsuit, armed with a pea shooter. This impression led me to expect a standard run ‘n’ gun action game common amongst indie titles. What I found was a rewarding evolution of the genre that not only stimulates the senses with its stellar graphics and ambient sounds but demands some fancy finger work, too.
This week I picked up a bunch of Doctor Fate comics on the cheap after a friend said Doctor Fate was like DC's version of Marvel's Doctor Strange - a favorite comic character of mine. I found out later that Doctor Fate preceeded Doctor Strange by about twenty years (DF started in the 40's and DS in the 60's). Anyway, I noticed DC tends to not have as many ads in their comics as Marvel, most of them being ads for other DC comics - like the way indie comics do. But they do have video game ads here and there and I got six of them out of issues 32 to 41 of Doctor Fate all released from Sept 1991 to June 1992.
I broke two controllers while playing Mega Man II as a kid. Specifically, I broke two NES controllers playing Heat Man’s level in Mega Man II. Even more specifically, I broke two NES controllers while doing the “Hell Blocks” portion of Heat Man’s level in Mega Man II. That particular stage summed up perfectly what the words Nintendo Hard really meant to me. You needed patience, quickness and the ability to predict the future. It also didn’t hurt to have a couple of extra controllers lying around the house, you know, just in case.
Unquestionably, 2010 was an impressive year for gaming, with many great titles releasing across all of the modern systems available on the market.
This week's Nintendo Download offers up a huge variety of titles across all three services.