Review - The Guardian Legend (NES)

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…

I feel like, as with many games released during the NES's lifetime, there have been these waves of popular opinion, thanks largely to the internet, where a game that was liked at the time is ripped apart, then everyone talks about how awful it is, then later on everyone kind of pulls back and realizes that maybe it's not that bad. The most extreme case of this happening was probably E.T. on Atari 2600, which at the time of its release I used to enjoy playing, but gradually it became known as the 'worst game of all-time'. Now I feel that people have backed off a bit and realized that there are far worse games, and that outside circumstances meant that it merely wasn't the game that was loftily envisioned by Howard Scott Warshaw at the time. I feel like the first game based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has had a similar rollercoaster ride of sentiments, and I'm not sure where people usually fall now on whether it's good or not. I'm not sure if I can objectively say that it's one of the best TMNT games of all time, but it certainly still one of my favorites.

In just a little over a week, there's going to be a major DLC update for last year's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge game. In addition to a new mode, costume options and stages, a new character will be playable, Miyamoto Usagi from Usagi Yojimbo. With this addition, something that started as a playground rumor when I was just ten years old, and something I wanted to badly to be real, will finally happen.

I just stumbled across this site today and thought it'd be fun to share. I've been slowly making my way through The Guardian Legend for NES. This is a game that I've heard the title of, I've seen the box art, but I had never played and had absolutely no idea what kind of game it was. It's been a fun surprise discovering this genre mashup of vertical shooter and blaster master style top down…

So after about 120 hours or so I finally finished Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It was a fantastic game and there was a lot to love about it, but it was also very intense and afterwards I felt like I needed a change of pace, something that I could sit back and relax while playing. Luckily right around that time there was a Steam sale going on (or maybe it wasn't luck, isn't there pretty much always a big Steam sale going on?) so I grabbed two wholesome games that had been on my wishlist, Smushi Come Home and Mail Time. I believe these were both featured in the Wholesome Games Direct 2023, and charming 3rd person platforming games in a lush forest sounded right up my alley after traipsing around, above, and below Hyrule for so long! And coincidentally, they both featured mushroom protagonists! Okay, one is a mushroom, the other is a small person that wears a mushroom cap, but still!