What I've been playing - October 2023 Edition

I thought it might be fun to talk a bit more about games that I'm playing as I'm playing them. After all, I think I play more games than I realize, and it seems my memory is such that if I played something a week ago, it might as well have been ten years, I'll just forget. Also, sometimes I'll look back and think that it would have been nice to talk about things as I was playing them, and see what I was thinking then. If you go back far enough in this blog, back when it was hosted on a different service, you can see that I put up a blog post on the day of the Wii launch. But I thought I would be cheeky and not talk at all about my thoughts on the Wii, or Wii Sports, or The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. No, instead I wrote up a post on Sneak King, the Burger King stealth title for Xbox 360, which launched on the very day of the Wii release. That was fun and all, but maybe I should have talked about how awesome Wii Sports was! Or heck, talked about the launch, since I was working at GameStop at the time!

Just in time for Halloween, let's look at five of my favorite episodes of The Real Ghostbusters!

Collect Call of Cathulhu

While the other episodes on this list are favorites from my childhood, this is one that I only have the vaguest recollection of as a kid, but now, as an adult and a lover of H.P. Lovecraft's writing, this is a real standout episode. The Necronomicon is being loaned to the New York Public Library from Arkham University, and is stolen by Cathulhu worshipers. It's later revealed by Egon and Ray that Cathulhu is one of several 'ancient ones' that writers like H.P. Lovecraft used as the basis for their stories. This episode is a real treat for Lovecraft fans by bringing in several elements of the Cthulhu mythos, and simply saying they were real elements that Lovecraft simply weaved into his stories. We get some great creepy character designs of the [find what they were], and a pretty great looking Cathulhu himself in the end. This is a really well-written episode that is fast paced and packed with action, intrigue and comedy.

Halloween is always my favorite time of the year. Starting in August, I'm drinking pumpkin spice coffee, I'm watching spooky movies and Halloween cartoon specials, and I'm playing lots of spooky games. Playing through the first Castlevania game, or at least playing one a Castlevania game in general, has become something of a yearly tradition now. So last year, I started thinking about making a short Halloween game for the Game Boy using the wonderful GB Studio engine.

In the 80s and 90s, Nintendo was firmly against video game rentals. Big name video rental places like West Coast Video and Blockbuster were stocking NES, and later, SNES games, and so were all the mom and pop rental places of the day. It was big business, and I don't know of any video rental place that didn't carry at least some video games, no matter how small the store. And that's saying something, because video rental places were absolutely everywhere back then, especially before Blockbuster came along and put all the independent ones out of business. According to a 1994 article from Billboard, Nintendo was finally ready to talk business with rental places, allowing them to buy direct and save some money. They were still planning on going to Congress to push for making game rental illegal, however. But in just a year, they would partner with Blockbuster to make the Blockbuster Video Game Championships. And a year later, with the Blockbuster Video Game Championships II, they would even have a custom-made Donkey Kong Country game made for the tournament (Okay, so they didn't make this JUST for the Blockbuster tournament, I believe this was reused from Nintendo's 1994 PowerFest)! And when I heard about that championship, with a game that I considered myself to be quite good at, I decided I had to enter, and I had to win!

Like I wrote about with my post on playing Little Nemo on NES, I was inspired by a video Hungry Goriya posted on YouTube about 9 NES games you should play. I've made my way through the 2nd of the 7 I plan to tackle (as two of them I'd already played through). This time I tried out The Guardian Legend, and boy was I in for a surprise. When it came to Little Nemo, I had played that through rentals a few times as a kid, and had tried it again a few times through emulation as and adult. This one though, I was playing for the first time ever. And I've got to admit, I was blown away.

This is just a short post to talk about one of my favorite let's plays that I've watched over the years. It might sound weird to have a favorite let's play video, not a favorite YouTuber or anything, but this particular let's play series that tackles Jurassic Park: Trespasser is just so well done and interesting that every couple of years I find myself watching the whole thing again! The person doing the video, Research…