Here at the tail end of 1987, the western licensees have begun to arrive on NES in full force. The material you see here will become far more common once we move along into NES Works 1988. After two years of doing a pretty good job of winnowing out the low-grade kusoge from Japan, Ninten...
2020-03-11 14:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
This episode did not go the way I expected. I figured Kid Niki would be the main course, with Gotcha! as the brief side dish. But the more I read up on Gotcha! and dug into its history, the more interesting it was. Not the game, mind you... just the history and culture ...
2020-03-04 14:59:59 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm afraid we've a bit of ho-hum content to work our way through before we get to The Good Stuff™. This week's episode isn't especially inspiring—it's essentially a low-grade repeat of the Zanac/Lunar Pool episode from last month, but instead of being cool Compile games, it'...
2020-02-26 15:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, the good games couldn't last forever. Here's one that aims high and falls low. Low into the... DARK WORLD.
2020-02-19 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
It's always a pleasure to cover a personal favorite, though I did try not to drone on about it. I worried it might be unseemly after giving Punch-Out!! relatively short shrift.
2020-02-12 15:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, one thing is for sure with this episode: I'm in no danger of setting blindfolded perfect play speed records for this game. But hey, I'm about providing retrospective insight and context, not blistering finger skills. And thank goodness for that.
2020-02-05 15:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's episode is a request by Joseph Wawzonek, and it's the best kind of patron request: One on a topic I love dearly. This episode not only gave me an excuse to carry a tricked-out telephoto-capable Game Boy Camera around Japan, as well as an opportunity to really dig around the Camera's s...
2020-01-29 15:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's episode features a personal lamentation as I recount my harrowing brush with tragedy, precipitated by this physically taxing game. Also, I once again reveal my mancrush on Akitoshi Kawazu. I suppose I'm no longer objective about this subject since I've worked on one of his games. What...
2020-01-22 15:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
I've decided to up the frequency of N64 Works from "once every few years" to "a few times every year." Nah, just kidding. Once I power through NES Works 1987, I'll get serious about finishing up N64's 1996 run. It's not like there are that many games! And by and large most of them were pretty goo...
2020-01-15 13:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
A fine palette cleanser after last week's soggy beginning to the year, don't you think? Neither Zanac nor Lunar Pool are the most beautiful-looking games on NES, but they both play magnificently. And isn't that really what it's all about, in the end? I vote "yes."
2020-01-08 14:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Sometimes you gotta slog through the bad to get to the good. Next episode... is very good. This episode... well, the games aren't bad, but I sure don't want to revisit them. Sorry for the bummer of a beginning to 2020!
Description: SunSoft returns to NES with their first internally de...
2020-01-01 15:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Double Dribble is a good Christmas gift! Ring King less so. Especially for me. I'm gonna have to clean up so many YouTube comments about that stupid interstitial animation....
This is the final video update for 2019, so thank you for your support this year! I'm going to rework the tiers and...
2019-12-26 03:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
I know I said I was going to stop publishing retrospectives out of sequence, and now here's a 1991 NES game. I didn't lie, though! This is actually a 1992 Famicom game, newly localized and converted to NES in the year 2020. I am nothing if not technically honest.
But for real, I lo...
2019-12-18 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Yeah, this one's WAY out of place, but (1) it's a patron request and (2) it's going up Christmas day and (3) it's a patron request for Christmas. The hat trick!
(Also, I have a lot of nostalgia for this game, and it's nice to have an excuse to fudge the chronology and cover something cool e...
2019-12-11 15:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Huh, somehow the post I had scheduled for today... disappeared? Anyway, here is the unintentionally belated video for this week. It's a little out of chronological sequence, but it seemed like it needed to be done, given recent coverage.
2019-12-04 21:30:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey! We're all caught up again to the usual two-week lead time on these videos. Thanks for bearing with me while I got things back on track.
This week we see, by far, the most valuable game I will ever include on Video Works. I was very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to work w...
2019-11-27 15:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
The Game Boy Advance was the last platform, to my knowledge, on which we saw a significant number of intriguing first-party titles fail to reach the U.S.; on DS and everything after, the Japan-only stuff tended to fall more on the side of things specifically designed for the Japanese audience exc...
2019-11-25 14:52:17 +0000 UTC View Post
I didn't quite manage to catch up with my video backlog over the weekend, but I did make some progress. This video is four days late instead of seven. I've also written all video scripts for public releases through the end of the year, which is nothing to sneeze at. So, a decent...
2019-11-18 03:25:48 +0000 UTC View Post(By a week or so.)
Alas, it has finally happened—five consecutive weekends of cross-country travel have disrupted my weekend productivity for this, my favorite weekend project. I do enjoy having a two-week lead here on the public release of videos, though, so I'll be aiming to catch up ov...
2019-11-13 13:41:26 +0000 UTC View Post
I feel like NES Works is truly settling into its own here. After a string of amazing, groundbreaking, world-class creations, now we're on to the mundane mediocrity. Games that were okayish, not great, and mostly existed to fill out toy store shelves. Thanks, Acclaim. You excelled at creating the ...
2019-11-06 14:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
I apologize for this hyperbole-free retrospective on a much-hated game. I've accidentally gone and put together an even-handed piece that offers ample criticism but also extensive context. Whoops! I'm probably going to be kicked out of YouTube Gaming for this offense. Please enjoy this, my final ...
2019-10-30 13:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
A quick side dalliance in one of my long-simmering projects before we dive back into the NES in earnest. At some point in the relatively near future, this series will converge with NES Works... won't that be something?
2019-10-23 14:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
If you're wondering why I jumped the gun a bit and launched Game Boy Works Advance now, here's the answer. I hit a pair of Castlevania games last year for Halloween, and by cracky, I feel like that should become a tradition. Not sure how I'm going to make it happen, but we'll figure it out...
... 2019-10-16 14:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
I added a few new pieces of capture hardware to my recording setup over the summer: A Mega SD for convenient Sega CD capture, a Wide Boy 64 GBC for Game Boy Color, and an Intelligent System GBA capture kit for Game Boy Advance. Here's the first results of the lattermost addition.
Like Game ...
2019-10-09 13:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Stinger is an unusual entry in a long-running Konami series that has barely had any traction in the U.S. And... that's about all I have to say about it that wasn't covered in the video.
Anyway, next week will be something completely different.
2019-10-02 13:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Sometimes, in the course of creating a chronological survey of old video games, one must inevitably Fudge It. This is one such case: I know at least one of these games shipped in 1987 in the U.S., but despite putting quite a bit of effort into pinning down the particulars, precisely when and how ...
2019-09-25 13:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
My overall plans for Video Works are somewhat up in the air at the moment—I'm torn between doubling down on NES, focusing on Game Boy Color, or tackling a different platform and throwing in some NES/GBC stuff in there for balance. I would like to give you a definitive plan for the future, but t...
2019-09-18 14:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been a long, long time since the last N64 Works episode, but since my head has been in the "mid-to-late ’90s" space with Virtual Boy Work and Game Boy Works Color, I wanted to throw the occasional N64 title into the mix from time to time as well. With the system's 23rd anniversary just aro...
2019-09-11 14:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
I tackled this one slightly out of the actual chronological order of Game Boy Color releases. But sometimes you've gotta fudge it a bit, and this one's slated to go public the same week the Link's Awakening remake hits Switch. I think I can be forgiven.
Besides, who's going to comp...
2019-09-04 12:59:59 +0000 UTC View Post