Jeremy Parish

NES Works Gaiden #038: The Tower of Druaga

Although I've been trying to pack three games into each episode of NES Works Gaiden in order to reach the end of 1985 (and therefore the end of the NES Works Gaiden focus on Famicom chronology leading up to the NES launch), some games ya just gotta hand it to with a standalone episode. Games such as The Tower of Druaga. Although I've touched on some of the information in this episode before, the NES Works Gaiden spirit remains true: This episode places it in a more cogent temporal co...

NES Works Gaiden #37: Zippy Race / Super Arabian / Front Line

I've made amends for last week's chronological goof here by returning to Irem's actual first Famicom game. I'm not sure it does any favors for their reputation, though. Zippy Race on Famicom might actually not be as good as the SG-1000 version, despite the fact that the Famicom could generate much nicer-looking graphics and supported the smooth scrolling so essential to a proper racing game. Not unlike TOSE's work with Chack'n Pop, they seem to have tuned the A.I. and contro...

March bonus: The bones of Segaiden Vol. I

I have no idea how we've already reached the end of March. I had hoped to begin posting patron-exclusive videos this month, but that plan hit a bizarre snag. See, I plan to kick off my exclusive videos with Cassette Vision coverage, but making that happen requires more than just modding a console. The Cassette Vision's architecture is pretty weird, and the system offloads a lot of processing onto the cartridges—each one contains a major portion of the system's innards. And that means my ent...

NES Works Gaiden #036: Robot Block / Geimos / 10-Yard Fight

How come I only make terrible production goofs when I'm traveling and don't have the means to fix things? I tell you what. You can see what I'm referring to in the YouTube description for this episode, but, well, please look forward to a correction next week.

Anyway, lots of interesting stuff here, even if I got some of it out of order. Sigh.

NES Works Gaiden #35: Road Fighter / Warpman / Door Door

A pleasant episode this week: All the games here are good, fun, and possibly even noteworthy. I regret to say that it shall not always be so.

NES Works Gaiden: Star Force / Elevator Action / Field Combat

Yes, this week's episode once again goes back over a couple of games that have already appeared here—in this case, Elevator Action and Star Force have shown up on both NES Works and Segaiden. I promise I have new things to say about them! Plus, you'll want to stick around for the all-new, all-different Field Combat, which to my mind is one of the earliest attempts by Japanese developers to take existing genres and combine them in a simple, streamlined way... somet...

NES Works Gaiden #33: Wrecking Crew / Hyper Olympic / Spartan-X

You already know these games under their American titles: Track & Field, Kung-Fu, and, uh, Wrecking Crew. I have to admit I went into this episode with deep concern that I was about to put together a repetitive restatement of previously published information of no real value to anyone—and yet, here we are, with an episode that (I think?) actually stands completely apart from these games' respective NES Works videos and helps to recontextualize them in an inter...

Game Boy Works 127

Good morning! Or afternoon! Or evening! I don't know when you're reading this. But I do know that I have another Game Boy Works episode for you. This one kinda kicked my butt—Gremlins 2 is really hard, it turns out. Really hard. Unreasonably so. So, you know, perfect for kids.

The baseball simulator is pretty weird, at least. I like weird when it comes to Game Boy, so that all works out.

February Bonus: NES Works 1987

Well, it's done. Or at least, almost done—it's still missing two scans, and we're going to give it one final copy edit pass before publication. (I'll send out a notification once this file is replaced with the final version.) Despite those little quibbles, I'm excited to share this monstrosity with you and let you enjoy the enormous volume that has completely occupied my free time for the past four or five months. NES Works 1987 dwarfs every other project I've produced over the pas...

Game Boy Works 126: Godzilla & Nekojara Monogatari

I know a few people out there have been very excited for this one. Well, maybe like one or two. But they're very vocal.

Anyway, yeah: It's Game Boy Works, and this is Godzilla. It's also Nekojara Monogatari, a game that has never been localized into English... but should be. I have largely strayed from the Game Boy path over the past few years, because the mediocrity of the platform was grinding me down. If they were always this good, we'd nearly be to 1992 by now!

SG-1000: Farewell, my friend

I've had a really great time discovering and researching the SG-1000 library, and I hope you have too. If not, well, thanks for bearing with me. And if so, you'll probably enjoy this episode, which replaces the original introductory warm-up piece and also includes a full rundown of the system's library... this time, in actual release order, and with the proper color palettes. I wish I had known how to capture SG-1000 color accurately back when I began this effort, but alas. This overview will...

It's so beautiful...

Just look at this cover mock-up. Gosh. I can't wait.

Segaiden #28: Loretta No Shouzou & The Black Onyx

Well, folks, we did it. We did the SG-1000. We've seen all there is to see.

This episode brings us to the end of the SG-1000's life, way in the distant future of March 1987, with the system's last two releases. They are very impressive works in terms of scope, and also games that aren't a whole lot of fun to play in the modern era. Even so, we've come a long way from where we began a year ago with the likes of Borderline and Mahjong.

Thanks for taking th...

NES Works Gaiden #32: Adventure Island IV

Sometimes, things just fall into place in a way that seems entirely too coincidental for its own good. But, you know, I'll take it. Take this episode, for example. A while back it became clear that I was going to be getting to both Wonder Boy for SG-1000 and Adventure Island for NES at roughly the same time, so I figured it would be sensible to tackle them consecutively. But then! Then They Call Me Sleeper requested Adventure Island IV/Boukenjima IV... and ...

Happy New Year, and happy NES year (specifically, 1987)

Chúc mừng năm mới, as we say 'round these here parts. Well, not really "we." My relationship with the Vietnamese language is less a matter of pronunciation than of tone-deaf mutilation. But everyone else is kind about it, at least. Here's hoping the year ahead is equally kind to all of you.

As the new (lunar) year begins, I'm closing in on wrapping up NES Works 1987. At this point, I mostly just need to place all the background screen images I've capture...

NES Works #87: Hudson's Adventure Island & Milon's Secret Castle

Last week, we looked at Wonder Boy. This week, we take a step away from SG-1000 to... also look at Wonder Boy? Except it's not Wonder Boy. But yeah, it totally is.

Hudson's Adventure Island is also Hudson's NES debut, more than four years after first appearing on Famicom. By this point in history, Hudson already had its own console to manage over in Japan, the PC Engine. And yet here they are on the competition's hardware, strengthening Nintendo's lin...

Segaiden #27: Graphic Tablet / Wonder Boy / Champion Billiards

Some pretty wild stuff this week as the SG-1000 library nears its finale. Video games had changed a lot over the three years since the console's debut, and while this particular hardware really didn't stand a chance against the likes of The Legend of Zelda and After Burner, god bless ’em, Sega's home dev team did their damnedest. These games, especially Wonder Boy, are basically the equivalent of ambitious, latter-day, end-of-life hardware stunts like Nin...

January bonus: NES Works 1987 preview

Folks, I'm very, very happy to announce that NES Works Vol. III is now content-complete. It's not ready to send to press yet; there are three rounds of copy edits to be done first, and it's still missing a fair few images. But I fully expect to have this book ready to share and submit to press by the end of February. All, uh... f-four-hundred and thirty-two pages of it?! 

Yes, that's right; this is by far the single largest book I've put together to date. That is ...

Segaiden #26: Ninja Princess / Super Tank / Champion Kendou

We have the full assortment of traditional Japanese martial combat weaponry this episode: Shuriken, kunai, bokken, and uh... high-yield short-range missiles? Sure, why not. 

After last week's episode, this batch will definitely bring a little disappointment into your life. But that would probably be true as a follow-up to just about any episode; this is far from the strongest trio of SG-1000 games, and makes for a disappointing step backward after the excellent showing the...

Segaiden #25: C-So! / The Castle / Gulkave

We begin the new year with a new year for the SG-1000, which enters 1986 with sound and fury and, most importantly, some danged impressive games. C-So! I could live without, but The Castle and Gulkave are impressive. With only three episodes left in this corner of Segaiden, it's nice to see that Sega's original platform does not intend to go quiet into that good night.

The Castle is a beefy adventure, a game so enormous Sega had to bust out the cartri...

NES Works Gaiden #31: Chack'N Pop / Dig Dug / Flappy

This week's episode will seem very familiar to long-time viewers. And, I guess, new viewers alike. These games have all appeared on video games other platforms throughout the years, one as recently as last month (Chack'N Pop) and one way back in about 2015 or so (Flappy). Of course, because of my out-of-order approach to videos, all of those other renditions are either contemporary releases (as we now know Chack'N Pop shipped in the same month on both SG-1000 and Famicom! 2021-12-29 13:10:58 +0000 UTC View Post

December bonus: Book in progress update

Hello all, and (hopefully) happy holidays! This month's bonus bit is up, and it comes with Some Complications. I was very proud of the latest revision of From the Beginning, which now includes photos of almost every item to be covered in the book—there are just a tiny handful I need to reshoot, and just two games I am still hunting down. My intent was to post this and proudly say that the...

Segaiden #24: The Mark III, feat. Hang On and Teddy Boy Blues

I always like to post a meaningful or otherwise better-than-average episode around the holidays, and I'm thrilled to say this year's lineup bears that out. Last week's episode was one for the books, and I'm even happier about this one—not least of all because jumping from SG-1000 hardware to Master System (well, Mark III) was a profound relief. I don't think the Master System gets a lot of respect in the U.S., and I can safely say that's because we didn't have SG-1000 releases up through it...

Segaiden #23: Hang On II & Bomb Jack

Update: I have relinked the broken video source material and it SEEMS to have rendered correctly, but I'm at work and don't have time to watch a full video. Hopefully this episode is as intended now!

NOTE: There's a deeply bizarre error in this upload; from what I can tell, Premiere decided to replace a bunch of Hang On II game footage with an early version of this video while rendering it out. I need to go through and surgically replace t...