Post for: #nintendo ^{(33 Posts)}

Retro Puzzle Maker is an amazing little free game engine. It's a web-based tool that allows you to make Sokoban style games that output as playable NES ROM files. The engine is code-free and any beginner can use it, and while means that while you can't change much in terms of the type of game you're making, there are some variations to the level goals you can select and a robust level editor to make the game feel like a creation that you yourself have made.

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!

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.

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.