Embrace the Weirdness: In Defense of TMNT 1 on the NES

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!

Ghostbusters games have been really hit or miss over the years. Sure, fans have gotten Ghostbusters: The Video Game, which was essentially a Ghostbusters 3 long before Ghostbusters Afterlife. But we've also had The Real Ghostbusters on Game Boy, which had so little to do with the license that it was actually just a Mickey Mouse puzzle platformer that they changed the character art in.

So, I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few Ghostbusters games that fans have either taken it upon themselves to make entirely from scratch or tweaked other existing Ghostbusters games to improve them in some way.

I've been wanting to write a blog post about Game Center CX for a while now. After all, it's one of my favorite shows of all-time, and something I still look forward to whenever a new fansubbed episode is dropped. But I get overwhelmed, because the show is so big. It's been going on in Japan for 20 years now! And I'm pretty sure that I've been watching it for almost as long! If I had to guess, I believe the first fansubs started popping up around 2007 by a group called TV-Nihon.