#video chronicles

E3 kicks off properly today in Los Angeles, but the inevitable grind of video game hype can’t stop Retronauts Video Works from maintaining its steady schedule. In addition to the daily livestreams I’m hosting this week, I’ve also posted a slightly extended-length NES Works that explores a fairly momentous occasion in the NES’s life: The arrival of Capcom on the platform. Would that their debut…

The NES Works series continues powering through the NES 1986 library in a desperate race to Gradius, aka the one genuinely excellent third-party release from the latter half of the year. I have to say, this project has given me a new appreciation for Black Box games. I became an NES owner at the end of 1987, by which time there were enough great post-launch-era releases available that the Black…

Between Game Boy Work (World) and NES Works, I’ve tackled quite a few games developed by the mystery humans at TOSE and the heartless suits at Bandai, and they have universally been pretty bad. Likewise for games from Bandai-affiliated publishers like Banpresto and Bandai Shinsei (which transmuted into Yutaka before our very eyes!). They’re all based on licenses, and they’re all bereft of those…

The game Chubby Cherub, when it bobs to the surface of the collective conscious at all, tends to be treated as one of those NES games that makes a nice, easy target for a few softball jokes, and little more. I mean, come on: It stars a fat, naked angel eating candy and avoiding dogs. I suppose any concept can make for a great game, but it’s an early third-party release for NES, so the chances of…

Bring on the "Disney Afternoon for Game Boy Collection", Capcom

I’ve been working on a review of The Disney Afternoon Collection. It should be up sometime this week; I’d been wanting to hold off on posting until I’d had a chance to put this video together: And now that I have, I feel like a hold a slightly more informed perspective with which to judge the Collection. Well, OK, not really. This…

A little something different for Good Nintentions NES Works Gaiden this week: It’s a look at a Japanese release per usual — three Japanese releases, in fact — but these are not classic games. They run on Famicom hardware, yes, but all three have shipped within the past year. The third title in this episode shipped this month, in fact! I had to make room for it at the last minute, because the…

I have to admit, the past few episodes of Game Boy Works were not quite as painful as I had expected. I don’t like sports, sports don’t like me… and yet, tackling games about skateboarding, baseball, wrestling, and now pool all in a row somehow didn’t destroy me. It helps that there was just enough weirdness in there to keep things interesting — I mean, that Skate or Die game was downright…