Author: John Legendoffzelda The DiC produced syndicated TV show Inspector Gadget, about a rubber-limbed cyborg detective and his adventures defeating a criminal mastermind, had a video game made of it a whole seven years after the series ended. For an adaptation to come out seven years after its source material…
Author: John Legendoffzelda On the opening screen of Sunsoft’s Firepower 2000, a silvery dune buggy and a golden helicopter attack a fortress in the middle of a desert. The yellow starburst on the fortress’ outside emits a direct laser, clipping the helicopter’s landing brace. The title’s logo doesn’t just appear, it…
Author: John Legendoffzelda The time was right for The Tick to have shown his dumb grinning face when he did. Being a staple of the old Fox Kids lineup next to Animaniacs, another well-regarded piece of accessible 1990s satire, the show gave a needed contrast to the current state of…
Author: John Legendoffzelda Released in video arcades back in 1990, the satirical and gory gun-fest Smash TV only wished it could adequately contribute to the decline of western civilization. Superficially grafting the bad-future aesthetic of The Running Man onto the design of Robotron 2084, the game presented monotonous and static action supposedly made relevant by the…
Author: John Legendoffzelda The only entry in its series made for the console, the pleasantly rudimentary helicopter adventure Choplifter III came a long way to reach the Super Nintendo. The first installment was made back in 1982 for the Apple II home computer; the high-end machine of the days when…
Author: John Legendoffzelda An inescapable cultural icon throughout the twentieth century, by the time of the early 1990s, Mickey Mouse had appeared in almost everything. Walt Disney’s and Ub Iwerks’ creation lent his image to a treasury of popular media in a series of logical extensions that eventually reached the…
Author: John Legendoffzelda “Available for your home in 1995, only on Nintendo Ultra 64!” Video arcade customers in 1994 could regularly hear this message rumbling from cabinets of Nintendo and Rare’s Killer Instinct, an assured boast about the game’s longevity and a prediction of Nintendo’s future in the home console…
Author: John Legendoffzelda A regular game design company may not think there could be anything much to a video game about Goof Troop. But when Capcom was making Disney games for the Super Nintendo, they weren’t just any regular game design company. They figured that adapting a 1990s TV update…
Author: John Legendoffzelda I’m 20 years old, and I’m too young to have been around for when the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was a hot item with kids. Of course, this generational gap doesn’t keep me from adoring the SNES as an esteemed game console. But there are a…
Author: John Legendoffzelda The original, great Mega Man X could very well have remained its own game; a strong, mature companion piece to the main Mega Man games. But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, Capcom saw a potential in X that they no longer saw in the main series, and the…