Posts Tagged ‘NES’

29 results.
Apr18
magic

Archon

by Gazunta on April 18, 2012 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Archon

Also found in the museum:

  • All the characters in the Indiana Jones Atari 2600 game
  • The thing at the end of Pitfall 2
  • Everything in the Commdore 64 version of Double Dragon
  • Q*bert
I spent a while just staring at this game while preparing this comic, and I have no idea what to make of it. It’s kind of like when they have TV shows about people programming computers and they cut to absolute gibberish on the screen and you know it must mean something but it’s just beyond you.
I suck at programming.
Anyway! There is a NES version of Archon, which graphically is the best of the 8-bit versions, but lordy the music drives me nuts.

 

 

└ Tags: , , , , , , ,
  Comment

Related Comics ¬

Apr11
robot

Robocop

by Gazunta on April 11, 2012 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Robocop

Part man, part machine, all cop that has to move his arm in awkward 45 degree increments because that’s how 8-way joysticks worked back then. What made it even worse was that when you aimed up and to the right or left Robocop would keep moving in that direction too so you’d end up walking directly into the line of enemy fire. Just another day in the life for video gaming’s greatest cyborg.

The arcade version of this is my favourite of them all, simply because they stuck to the home console design but didn’t have any of the C64 or Amiga’s technical limitations. Big beefy sprites and an awesome looking ED-209 to contend with plus lots of sampled speed which was a big deal back in the day of course.

The C64 version had horrible bugs which meant one level was a garbled mess, so much for quality assurance back then.

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
  Comment

Related Comics ¬

Mar28
gazunta

Battletoads

by Gazunta on March 28, 2012 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Battletoads

I couldn’t decide which comic to do so I did both! Yay who needs sleep?

OK I have to admit not having played Battletoads much, it always seemed to hard for me and I thought it was a weird Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rip off. But it seems kind of fun!

And for some reason I own a Battletoads toy. Why did I buy this back in the day? I mean LOOK AT THIS THING:

I had way too much disposable cash when I was a kid.

Did you know there was an Arcade version of Battletoads? And it was published by Electronic Arts? Neither did I! That was weird. Battletoads was a weird franchise. I mean what other game had a cross over with Double Dragon for no apparent reason.

Oh by the way YES I know Battletoads came out in 1991 not 1992 but there were so many versions of the game that came out between 1991 and 1993 that I think I can get away with it in 2012 :)

Update: I’ve since been notified that the toy is not a Battletoads toy and is, in fact, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toy. WHOOPS!

└ Tags: , , ,
  Comment

Related Comics ¬

Mar14
gazunta

Deja Vu

by Gazunta on March 14, 2012 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Deja Vu

Good morning. Welcome to a nightmare come true.

Of every game I’ve ever played, the opening line to Deja Vu has stuck in my head the most. It’s a really emotive line and I found myself saying it every morning when I woke up before starting another day of living in a one room apartment reviewing Army Men games.

It may sound great, but most Army Men games were terrible.

Anyway! This was probably the first time I played a game with icons and a mouse-like interface in it, not having being exposed to such wild things on the Commodore 64 previously. If I remember right I never got that far through it but loved mucking open with the idea of being able to pick up items from the game play window and drag them into the inventory, open them up, close them, move stuff around etc…it was like a game in itself, except that it wasn’t, but it beat dying three screens into this game because I missed some item somewhere.

And yeah I thought the guy had a question mark stuck to his face for the longest time…I take things way too literally sometimes.

└ Tags: , , , ,
  Comment

Related Comics ¬

Mar07
gazunta

California Games

by Gazunta on March 7, 2012 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
California Games

As a kid living in a boring town with two streets and one store, an hour’s drive away from a slightly less boring town with four streets and two stores, California seemed like an amazing place to have fun. I formed that opinion primarily from playing California Games.

Actually now that I think about it most of my geography knowledge was based on the games I played. I was kind of diappointed when I visited Sydney for the first time and didn’t see anyone having karate fights across the river from the Opera House.

California Games was a gem of a mini-game collection, barring the stupid frisbee game. That thing was pants and to this day I’ve never caught a frisbee in it ever. I really liked the BMX section, the rollerblading section (once I figured out the controls) and the skating was also pretty good even though I preferred the skate bowling duel game in Skate Or Die. Hacky Sack was pretty good too if only for as long as it takes to hit that bloody seagull.

To me though the star of the show was the surfing. It was a real skill to keep moving ahead of the wave, not to mention pulling off tricks. You had to position your board perfectly right on the re-entry or you’d fall off the board quicker than you can say “whoa dude that was a totally gnarly wipeout” or whatever lingo I picked up from watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons.

It was pretty harsh that you sometimes got eaten by a shark though, maybe that was left in for a version of the game designed for sharks to play.

California Games was converted to all sorts of formats along the way – the C64 and NES versions were the most popular around the world, of course, but I remember sinking a lot of time into the Master System version. The BMX section in particular was a lot better on that system than any other to me. I was especially interested in the Lynx version – the only one to have simultaneous multi player! – and remember thinking that the waves in the surfing section looked amazing. You could pull off tricks a lot easier in the Lynx version, too.

And I didn’t even know there was a MegaDrive version until I was doing research for this comic! That looks pretty cool, I should give that a go sometime. And the Atari 2600! man, that version must look INCREDIBLE.

You know what, now that I think about it, I really missed out on a lot not owning a Lynx.

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  Comment

Related Comics ¬

Feb29
knight

Shadowgate

by Gazunta on February 29, 2012 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Shadowgate

I really only have two memories associated with this game, and one of them is “Huh, I liked Deja Vu, but geez I’m just not getting this one at all” and that’s why the comic is about something you discover in like, the second room of the game.

The other is set in the Electronics Entertainment Expo in 1999. My editor had sent me to go cover some crappy PC racing game that nobody cared about but instead of going to that meeting me and my friend decided, hey, we’re in Los Angeles for the first time ever, let’s duck out of the show and try to find a place to actually buy some video games. So a half an hour cab ride later we found ourselves in some dirt-covered K-Mart in the middle of nowhere where I bought Super Mario Bros. DX (which was awesome) and Shadowgate (which I had never played before, but figured at the least I could review it for GameSpot and make my money back). Then we realised that we were stuck in the middle of nowhere and had no idea how to get back to the hotel, let alone the convention centre. Somehow we managed to figure out how to us an American payphone (My friend was visiting from Canada and I was a plucky Australian, you know) and ordered a cab.

After waiting half an hour with the thought that not turning up to this meeting was probably a bad move, career wise, a cab pulled up and we got in.

This would have been fine if it was actually a cab and not, you know, a guy in a van pretending to be a cab driver. After locking us in he starts driving the wrong way and ignoring us. We figure out pretty quickly that this is a situation we don’t really want to be in any more, and start demanding to be dropped off.

“DO YOU HAVE FAMILY NEARBY? ARE THEY RICH? DO THEY HAVE MONEY?” he demanded of us.

Well, we didn’t, and they sure as hell don’t because otherwise I would have been a doctor instead of a broke-ass game reviewer.

“GOD DAMN YOU! YOU WASTE MY TIME!” he spits at us before pulling over on the side of the highway and yelling at us to get out (but not before asking us if we have guns for some reason).

To this day we have no idea what God forsaken thing we narrowly avoided, but it made us not complain about the long walk back to the hotel, and I didn’t even mind getting fired for missing that meeting that much.

Oh yeah Shadowgate was good I guess.

└ Tags: ,
  Comment

Related Comics ¬

Jan11
gazunta

Arkanoid

by Gazunta on January 11, 2012 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Arkanoid

So what if it was basically an overblown Breakout, Arkanoid was the killer app that sold me on the idea of using a mouse to control a game. Sure, you could play it well enough with a joystick but if you wanted total control you really needed to play it with a mouse.

Thanks to the simplicity of the game (I mean really, it was just a bat and ball game that you could make yourself in an afternoon) there wasn’t a bad home conversion. Even the Spectrum had a great version of Arkanoid! Chances are whatever you’re reading this on has a version of Arkanoid available for it. The DS had a neat one that came with a paddle you plugged into the GBA cartridge port – I thought it was funny we came so far along with technology that we went back to playing games with a paddle.

Anyway, it was the Amiga version that was the business back in the day. It looked just like the Arcade game, as long as you don’t mind a third of the screen being devoted to a bunch of logos and junk. But you got to play it with the mouse, and it felt glorious, and it made me mad I didn’t own an Amiga yet.

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  Comment

Related Comics ¬

Jan04
gazunta

Hudson Hawk

by Gazunta on January 4, 2012 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Hudson Hawk

Now, you can say whatever you like about the movie, I only saw it once and it seemed kinda dumb and it had that horrible hell beast Sandra Bernhard in it, and isn’t it good that we live in a world without her in it now, but I will not hear anyone disparage the Hudson Hawk video game.

It was a cute, colourful bouncy platformer that was a lot better than it otherwise should have been. You played as Hudson and you had to steal stuff, and avoid traps – it was basically a stealth platformer with the occasional funny bit where you threw balls to distract guard dogs. Yeah, it wasn’t going to set the world on fire but it was a game i totally didn’t regret buying at the time, not that I ever finished the darn thing.

AND it came with a Hudson Hawk hat in the box, that was neat.

└ Tags: , , , ,
2 Comments

Related Comics ¬

Dec14
gazunta

Smash TV

by Gazunta on December 14, 2011 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Smash TV

So that’s where all the toasters came from! Why would anyone want all those toasters as a prize, anyway? Not to mention the truck load of VCRs. So much for this being a death sport of the death future.

Anyway Smash TV is one of the greatest video games of all time and if you disagree well there’s the door, pal. Eugene Jarvis worked on it and that should be enough to convince you of this fact. I absolutely adore it.

It’s also one of those rare arcade games that made the trip to home machines so well many people prefer them to the arcade original. The C64 version was a personal highlight to me – the sheer number of sprites on screen at once was an incredible sight on the humble 8-bit and kept the original’s speed and control system.

Most people will be more familiar with the Super Nintendo version, which is just about near as damn it Arcade Perfect (oh, those words meant a lot back then, it was the impossible dream) and is also cool because it was made in Australia by Beam Software! Yay Australia.

└ Tags: , , , ,
  Comment

Related Comics ¬

Nov16
gazunta

Bubble Bobble

by Gazunta on November 16, 2011 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Comics
Bubble Bobble

BUBBLE BOBBLE. There isn’t anything you’re doing that’s more important than playing some Bubble Bobble,right now.

This was an absolute gem of a game from top to bottom. The cute graphics, the fun feeling of movement, the simple but depp mechanic of blowing bubbles, trapping enemies in bubbles and then popping them to get FRUIT.

Every game should have fruit as a collectable in it.

Plus you could use the bubbles as platforms, which was a cool trick, AND you could collect letters that made up the word E X T E N D. That is cool. More video games should have that in it. AND it has secret warps and bubbles that make you go on water rides.

It was converted to all sorts of things, but it was weird how the conversions got worse as time went on. The C64 and Amiga versions were just about perfect and are still to this day the best version. A little while ago there was a DS version and it was PANTS. How does that make sense?

Go play Bubble Bobble.

 

 

└ Tags: , , , , , ,
1 Comment

Related Comics ¬

Blow The Cartridge #1 Available Now! Blow The Cartridge #1 Available Now!