Author: John Legendoffzelda In the game Smart Ball, the player controls a nameless blue thing: a viscous blob with big eyes and a small mouth that looks like a moving drop of water. This guy has no name because the English translation removed every trace of the original story for…
Author: John Legendoffzelda A bad THQ game from the early 1990s is a soulless, turgid mess designed without any sense of individuality. It looks and sounds awful, marred by crude graphics and tuneless music. It plays like the development team wasn’t done with it yet, and licenses an outside property not to…
Author: John Legendoffzelda I believe in a sort of honor system between video game companies, at least when it comes to the compilations they make. These updated collections get created when they are important, when the amassed games matter. They aren’t just made to serve only nostalgia, but the justification…
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 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 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…
Author: John Legendoffzelda He may be “the baddest opossum to ever strap on a rocket pack”, but the title character of Konami’s Sparkster is still caught in a strange position with his sole outing on the Super Nintendo. Sparkster’s debut, the 1993 Sega Genesis game Rocket Knight Adventures,…
Author: John Legendoffzelda Finding a groove makes all the difference for wavering creators – they lock in supporters, they put themselves on a path towards further inspiration, then they’re finally able to let their spark of potential glow. And if it’s only a one-in-a-million occurrence, then it just means that…
Author: John Legendoffzelda It’s clear that Capcom’s Mega Man 7 would like to be Mega Man X. The fact that both games were made with the same game engine handily symbolizes MM7 wanting to define what Mega Man is on the Super Nintendo. The main appeal of the Mega Man…
Author: John Legendoffzelda While 1993 was a slow year for the Super Nintendo, Tradewest’s Plok! was especially overlooked. There doesn’t seem to be any good reason why at first glance; the game is a solid, functional platformer, and its look invokes the Kirby series’ balance of whimsy and…