Archive for the ‘Gameboy’ Category
Joust Review
Joust. Yes, that ostrich game you may have read about in the fiction novel Ready Player One by Earnest Cline. Well I’m going to talk about it today because the site needs more arcade love and its about time Joust had a review. Full disclosure, I did review this game across a few emulators including MAME and multiple Midway Collections on Mega Drive (Genesis), PSP, and Xbox. This review will feature some brief discussion on the cabinet itself, which I have been fortunate enough to try at retro gaming conventions.
Released in 1982 by Williams Entertainment, Joust is single screen joystick and one button flapping mash fest. You play a knight riding on the back of the magnificent ostrich. With a lance in hand, your goal is simple: take out every enemy rider on screen. Then you repeat that wave after wave until you run out of lives. The single button on the cabinet is responsible for flapping wings of your feathered beast. You have to rapidly press the button to get your bird off the ground, but once you have the momentum going it becomes quite the skill to take down the other riders. You need to be slightly above the other rider and hit them to take them down. Once they are out of action an egg will drop which you’ll need to collect before it re-hatches a new rider and you have to take them out all over again. It becomes a juggle of priorities, choosing to take out the other riders or collect the eggs. The first wave, titled “Buzzard Blitz,” is fairly easy. Just three opponents spawn to ease you into the game, but like with a lot of these Williams games don’t be disappointed if you do loose all your lives on the first wave. It can take a few attempts to come to grips with the controls and figure out your strategy. By this point – back in the arcade days – you would have sunk a decent chunk of change into the cabinet.
Podcast: Gameboy Top 10
As is per usual for us here at GH101, 40 games enter (20 from each host), and 10 leave. It’s nostalgic, it’s arbitrary, we may annoy due to the lack of Pokemon, but it’s our official Top 10 Gameboy games.
Horror Obscura 2016: Avenging Spirit
When it come to the obscure and horror games I really like to search out the titles you may have never heard of and today’s game is no different.
Avenging Spirit – I have seen this title floating around on the 3DS virtual console for quite some time and decided to recently pull the trigger on it. This is a Game Boy game released in 1991. You play a nameless character who has been gunned down by the mob and who’s girlfriend has been kidnapped. You wake to find this whole mess was your girlfriends fathers fault as the mob wanted to obtain his research on ghost energy. The father now has the balls to ask you to rescue your girlfriend before you fade away into the afterlife. Oh did I mention you’re now an adorable cuddly looking ghost? Yeah the story of Avenging Spirit sounds a lot darker than its appearance would lead you to believe.
The Countdown Horror Obscura – Day 6: Resident Evil Gaiden
Day 6: Resident Evil Gaiden
Resident Evil Gaiden is very much the misunderstood step child of the Resident Evil series. Capcom likes to put it in the corner along with its other B-list Resident Evil titles like Operation Raccoon City and Mercenaries 3D and pretend they just don’t really exist. Unfortunately like a lot of Capcoms other industry mistakes some of us can’t forget the past. I for one feel Resident Evil Gaiden is a portable title that though flawed, brings a unique take on the series formula with incredibly restricted hardware.
So stop me if you haven’t heard this one from the Resident Evil series: you play as a anti-Umbrella agent who intercepts a passenger ship on the sea and soon finds it has been overrun by monsters. Well before the series copied its own idea literally twice in Dead Aim and Revelations, Gaiden was the game that some would consider the genesis of Resident Evil’s small obsession with campaigns on a boat. The agent you play is the greatest character from the series Barry Burton. Except now you finally get to play as this beard faced hunk of manliness. I am aware he’s also recently and finally been allowed to have his own campaign in Revelations 2 but Resident Evil Gaiden was for the longest time the only way for Burton fans to get their fix of the man with the best one liners in the series history. Anyway, back to the game. Barry is basically on the ship to find Leon Kennedy but along the way he comes across a young girl who seems to be the only survivor of this horror as well as a B.O.W who has the ability to morph into human form. One of the main reasons I think Gaiden is absolutely fantastic and I wish this was an actual cannon to the Resident Evil story is because of how it ends. If you really don’t want a pinnacle part of the plot to be spoiled for you then I advise you to skip the following paragraph because I’m about to explain the ending.
Lost Treasures of Gaming: Dragon’s Lair (Gameboy Color)
This week’s Lost Treasures of Gaming featured Mike Mika (some know him as “Donkey Kong Dad”) discussing one of his larger feats: porting the arcade version of Dragon’s Lair to the Gameboy Color along with his team. The feat is difficult and the result is impressive, especially when you see a 500 MB+ title reduced to 4 MB. We check it out, compare the arcade version, and die a lot.
Check out the Lost Treasures of Gaming podcast and other content at http://www.omgnexus.com.
Link’s Awakening DX Review
Link’s Awakening was the first Zelda title to be released to the Game Boy, it was also the first Zelda title to receive an updated version in the form of Link’s Awakening DX released to the Game Boy Color. It was the first of the series I played to completion and to this day I hold quite the soft spot for this title. With it being Zelda season on Gaming History 101 I was excited to revisit this title and review it for the site. So its time to strap on those nostalgia goggles and dive back into some old school handheld Zelda.
Now & Then: Mortal Kombat 3
Switching It Up
A lot happened both in the talent pool of Mortal Kombat players and in the game design overall between the release of Mortal Kombat II and Mortal Kombat 3 (MK3). For starters there was a mass exodus of on screen talent due to royalty disputes, so almost no one from the original two games returned for the third release. In addition, Boon and his team were trying to turn Mortal Kombat into a viable fighting game with things no one had ever seen before and mechanics that could compete with the massive rush of fighters in arcades. The game was completely Americanized, with all hints of Eastern influence including symbols, locales, and the soundtrack completely absent without a trace and instead replaced by urban stages, 90s hip-hop soundtracks, and cyborgs replaced the signature ninjas. These locations were now composed of pre-rendered 3D backgrounds and the character sprites were almost totally digitized as opposed to the digitized/hand drawn hybrid of the previous games. Along with it came an overhaul of the controls, including combos and a “run” button to address rightful claims that defensive players ruled the previous title. It’s all one giant 90s metaphor but that doesn’t change the fact that MK3 (and it’s update Ultimate MK3 or UMK3) stands as the moment I felt the series went into the mainstream fighter territory. Couple this with the fact that it was on just about every console that existed at the time, still dominated arcades, and had more content than rival Street Fighter II could ever dream to do with its iterations and I see why it’s creator Ed Boon’s favorite. Mortal Kombat 3 definitely upped the ante.
Mini Podcast: The Story of Tetris
Tetris has probably one of the most sordid tales about rights management. This so-called “first game from behind the iron curtain” was one of the most popular and addicting games of the late 1980s. Even more interesting is the story about how Nintendo snuck in behind a handful of eager parties who got in at the ground floor and secured sole console rights to one of the most money-producing games of all time.
Primal Rage Retrospective and Comparison Video
Primal Rage was one of the more notable Mortal Kombat clones in arcades in 1994. The popularity of this Atari Games fighter secured multiple ports to the home consoles of the time, a true cross-gen title that was on most portable, 16-bit, and 32-bit CD consoles. GH101 looks into the history, gameplay, and home console versions of this dinosaur brawler.
Podcast: Test Your Might
This week Fred and Jam are throwing around fighters of the 90s (that aren’t Street Fighter II or Tekken, we did a show for those already). In the 1990s, the fighter genre was the most popular type of game available (like First Person Shooters today), and among those that have withstood the test of time there were plenty of others that played the field. From Mortal Kombat to Soulcalibur you had plenty of arcades (and home ports) to drink your quarters in arcades.
Gaming History 101 