In a lovely coincidence with today’s airing on Turner Classic Movies of a bunch of Clint Eastwood films, the Virtual Console sees the re-release of the SNES game Wild Guns, an Old West With Robots-themed third person shooting gallery game that I’d never heard of before but looks quite appealing. Somewhat like the Base levels from the original Contra, and similar to the arcade games Cabal and Blood Brothers. I can definitely dig it. It’s also 2 player simultaneous, with the two player characters being “Clint” and “Annie”- no prizes for guessing where those names came from.
And then there’s a whole mess of DSi- and WiiWare, and I’m going to talk about some of them but not all because that’s how I roll and the press release will be linked if you really care and okay hit the jump already.
So why don’t we yap about Back to the Future for the NES for a bit, hm? Now I personally never owned this game but had a friend whose grandparents spoiled the hell out of him and his 8-bit library was infuriating. I’m pretty sure he was taken to Toys R Us every Friday after school and allowed to pick any one thing, which of course meant he went straight to the electronics department and snatched up whatever game was the most popular at the time.
Yes. Like everyone else, I’m currently wrapped up in Super Mario Galaxy 2 so it might be a few days before I get my ass motivated enough to post anything substantial (and if you’re playing it too then you should be too busy to read anything!). Meantime, watch this video and pretend that this “article” took me more than 3 minutes to slap together:
Art Style: light trax is definitely the highlight this week, as the first Art Style game to come out on WiiWare in a while it seems. It’s a remake/update of Dotstream from the progenitor bit Generations series of games on the GBA, with the slight twist of the playfield moving around in 3D. Basically it’s a racing game with a couple different styles of play, and I came in dead last just now on my first try so I’m looking at the operations guide. It’s 600 points like the previous Art Style games, unlike Bit.Trip Runner which I mistakenly assumed was 600 because the previous Bit.Trip games were 600. BTR is actually 800. My bad.
Close personal friend Garret and the boys (and occasional lady) at Hardmode.org are currently engaged in a marathon TO THE DEATH of games featuring ninjas, in a bid to entertain and somehow get people to donate moneys to the National Down Syndrome Society. And entertaining it has been, as games featuring ninja seem to be pretty freaking tough for a variety of reasons. Right as I type this they’re repeatedly assaulting the final stage of Ninja Gaiden, which thankfully has infinite continues. They did a Mario marathon some months ago and it was a resounding success, so I guess these things actually work.
Anyway, if you want to see some hilarious ninja beatdowns and maybe chip in some $$$ as well, head on over to http://www.hardmode.org , and learn to really, really love certain looping chiptunes because you will be hearing them over and over.
So I’ve been playing the hell out of the Metal Gear series all week, mostly on non-Nintendo systems, and among other things it’s been giving me a hankering to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl some more now that I have a bit more context for the character/world of Solid Snake. I played through the first Metal Gear last July (the original version, not the altered NES port) for the first time, and that provides a surprising amount of relevant detail, actually. Still, Snake’s appearance in Brawl is based largely on his Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 exploits, and playing through those two games for the first time really got me in the mood. Not enough to actually fire up Brawl as of yet, but enough to look back and ramble on and post videos about one of the most delightful out-of-left-field crossovers ever.
Yep. Today is like a fucking nerd holiday, because it was thirty years ago this weekend that Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back hit cinema screens and began a career of blowing people’s minds that continues to this day. Of course there’s no arguing that Empire is the greatest Star Wars movie ever made (unless you catch me some night when I’m totally hammered and you bring up Revenge of the Sith) and the video game adaptation is up there as one of the most satisfying action platformers to ever grace the SNES. I plan on doing a full review of each of the games in the Super Star Wars series before long so I don’t want to get into too much detail, but here’s a nice clip featuring some of the outstanding graphics and sound that made the series a must own.
Ever since my Netflix disc arrived in the mail a few weeks back, I’ve been using the Wii to watch movies and t.v. shows just as much if not more than play games – and now I’ve got a problem: The amount of viewing/playing options I have ready to go on the fly has completely shred the shit out of my attention span and it’s hard to give anything more than five minutes of time before I’d rather be doing something else. So I was sort of shocked when I came across that Street Fighter flick that came out back in 1994 and actually managed to sit through the whole thing. Having not seen it since I was 14 when it pissed me off royally, this is pretty hard to admit but I actually really enjoyed it.
To make Friday nights a little more fun, I’ve decided that each week Shigeru’s List will link to a classic Nintendo commercial/video (shush, it counts as content o.k?). We kick off tonight with what is not only one of my favorite Nintendo ads of all time, but just a flat out amazing piece of cinematic work. This is where Nintendo started the whole “Who Are You?” campaign (Yeah, they’ve never really been that great with the slogans), so it isn’t for any specific game.
Once again, no Virtual Console releases this week, although that doesn’t mean no old games came out. “Wait, what?” you might have just said. What I meant is: highlights this week include one port on WiiWare and one on DSi Ware of previously released games.
2008 was an incredible year and not only because Nintendo was dominating the sales charts. That was the summer that The Dark Knight came out and a new Indiana Jones movie (Hey, don’t lie. You were freaking out before you actually saw it). Night after night was spent grilling steaks, drinking beers and listening to the just released Stephen Malkmus record (Real Emotional Trash, still his best solo effort I think) and whipping some international ass online in Mario Kart Wii.
