We already know the early ’90s Super Nintendo could juggle double-jumping frogs, and an Italian plumber who moonlighted as a dinosaur jockey, so what happens when you ask it to simulate 2,000 pounds of spandex-wrapped humanity, four turnbuckles, and ten entrance themes rendered in crunchy PCM? WWF Super WrestleMania happens. This 1992 cartridge is equal parts […]
How often does an 8-bit run-and-gun let you Tokyo-drift a jeep, scoop up POWs like bonus coins, and upgrade your grenade launcher into a screen-shredding missile hurricane, all while a Sousa-meets-Saturday-morning anthem blares out of the triangle channel? (Rhetorical, of course: the answer is exactly once.) Jackal, Konami’s 1988 NES conversion of its 1986 arcade cabinet, sits in that odd
Jackal (NES) – Review – NES Hard, No Passwords, No Mercy Read Post »
We already know this hedgehog has outrun 16-bit marketing buzzwords, 4Kids voice dubs, and an entire Hollywood redesign controversy, so of course his first polygonal outing is equal parts watershed and fever dream. Sonic Adventure hands you six campaigns that collide like multiverse fan-fic, a memory-card Tamagotchi that grows when you ride city buses, and a
Is EarthBound the lovingly warped sitcom of Japanese RPGs or the avant-garde late-night radio play that Nintendo somehow smuggled onto American shelves in the summer of ’95? (Do rhetorical questions answer themselves? Only if you hit “B” fast enough.) Reviews at launch called it childish, stinky (literally, more on the scratch-and-sniff fiasco in a minute),
EarthBound (SNES) The RPG That Smells and It’s Not the Scratch-and-Sniff Read Post »
Nintendo’s 16-bit catalog is stacked with heroic verbs, jump, blast, power-up, occasionally kart, but every so often a cartridge sneaks onto the shelf that replaces those verbs with a single, desperate imperative: run. Clock Tower (Super Famicom, September 14 1995) is that cartridge. It hands you a teenage orphan, a mansion dripping with gothic dread,
Clock Tower (SNES) – Why This Japan-Only Cart Invented Stalker Horror Read Post »