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Review – Maniac Mansion
Whenever I explore a new facet of video games, I have a tendency to go in hard. If there’s some revered series or sub-genre that I’ve yet to touch, I’ll dive right in from the beginning and blow through as many titles as possible before my endurance is expended. So of course I had a point-and-click adventure phase, what (formerly)…
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Review – Rad Racer
If you asked me to name ten games that helped define the NES, there’s a chance that I’d drop Rad Racer into that list, but probably not for the reason you’d expect. Sure, it sold somewhere around 2 million units and established itself as the preeminent racing game on the console at the time of its 1987 release. It came…
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Review – Spelunker (NES)
Despite my, erm, established familiarity with terrible games, I’ve yet to touch on the subject of “kusoge,”(koo-soh-geh) a Japanese term that literally translates to “crap game.” Kusoge has been an institution in Japan for far longer than it has over here. While the masochistic interest in bad games seems to have sprung up with The Angry Video Game Nerd’s appearance…
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Review – Karate Kid (NES)
I’ve never seen Karate Kid, nor its sequel. I get a lot of references from the movies, but that’s about it. Don’t look at me like that, I’m just not a movie person. Maybe I’ll get around to it one day. So why am I playing Karate Kid on the NES? Same reason I play any game that’s on my…
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Review – Monster in My Pocket
For those of you who are not well versed in the pop culture of the early 90’s, Monster in My Pocket was a short lived attempt at a multi-media franchise. It never really caught on, which is a shame. Someone obviously had high hopes for the full Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle treatment, with multiple series of toys, comic books, and…
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Review – Final Fantasy
I never expected to ever finish the original Final Fantasy. I first encountered it during the early days of my retro fixation, and within an hour or so realized that I did not have the patience to put up with a JRPG of such vintage. For a long time, I had a difficult relationship with JRPGs in general. I often…