Hey! It's an NES game. Two, actually. See, I haven't forgotten about the NES! It still has a place in my heart. We'll be wrapping up NES 1987 in due time, if only because I really want to cover The Goonies II and Mega Man.
Anyway, back to Game Boy Color games.
2019-08-28 13:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Whoa! What's this? Monochrome!? How curious.
Yes, Game Boy Works Color isn't the only Game Boy series in town. I won't be updating GBW as frequently as other series for the time being, but it won't go entirely unloved. If nothing else, this episode reminded me that if I can keep marching onward, eventually I'll get to The Final Fantasy Legend II.
Edit: Video has been revised to fix the lower-thirds that Premiere overwrote. Again. Sigh.
2019-08-21 14:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
I feel like this is a game that I could have gone into greater depth about, but I decided to save my energy for the next Game Boy Works Color episode...
Still, some kind of cool stuff in this release. I like interesting imports with strange features.
Also, there's some Hello Kitty stuff.
Update: I have corrected a glitched caption. Thanks for the heads-up so I could fix it before it went public!
2019-08-14 14:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Man, Game Boy Color sure was front-loaded with some good stuff, huh? Here’s another Nintendo joint, with (yep) deep connections to GBC's precursor portables. It’s a remarkable treatment for some extraordinarily old and simple games—the kind of top-flight treatment we only see from M2 and Digital Eclipse these days.
2019-08-08 01:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Wow, I'm really glad I decided to follow up Virtual Boy Works with Game Boy Works Color. It turns out there's a lot of continuity between them, and this episode in particular is a striking (not to mention surprising) example of that. This is basically a sequel to Virtual Bowling. I don't know if much of anyone actually cares, but it's kind of need to see the connections unfold across these platforms so intricately! Or maybe it's just me.
I also covered a shogi game her...
2019-07-31 16:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Virtual Boy Works isn't quite over! Almost, but not quite. There's still one more episode to go after this look at the hardware itself....
2019-07-24 16:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
You can usually tell how enthusiastic I am about a game by how long its video retrospective turns out to be. That rubric holds true here; Wario Land II is genius, and I could have gone on much longer about it if I'd really wanted to. But you gotta draw the line somewhere, so you'll have to settle for a mere 20 minutes of me raving about it.
2019-07-17 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
There's some pretty cool stuff to look forward to in Game Boy Works Color.
This, however, does not fall into that category.
2019-07-10 21:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Yes, that's right: A new adventure begins here. Except it's really just more of the same, only in color.
I'm not giving up on classic Game Boy, but interleaving some color games into the mix should help liven things up! I hope!
2019-07-03 15:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
You know, I enjoyed producing the Virtual Boy Works series, but this episode was a relief and a genuine pleasure to work on. With its weird tech and short life, Virtual Boy amounted to a little archipelago of video game history, with only thin and tenuous links to the larger medium. And then on NES, you have these games, so rich in history and context. What a difference.
2019-06-26 20:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
This is it! The final officially licensed and released Virtual Boy game. As with the other three most recent games I've covered, it's crazy expensive now due to its rarity. A shame, because this is a legitimately excellent rendition of bowling. It's genuinely fun to play!
Virtual Boy Works isn't over, though. There are still three more episodes remaining. Please look forward to it... after a quick break to look at a few games that involve less staring into screens of eye-searing r...
2019-06-19 15:59:59 +0000 UTC View Post
There is, after all, life beyond Virtual Boy.
2019-06-17 02:14:50 +0000 UTC View Post
This was one of those "difficult last step" episodes. The end of Virtual Boy Works is so near! I almost have the entire series wrapped up! But... first, there's SD Gundam: Dimension War.
About the only good thing to happen with this episode was that Chris Kohler once again provided use of his copy of the game so I wasn't out $1000 or more to cover it, on top of everything else. Thanks, Chris.
Anyway, the good news is that Virtual Boy is almost done—and the final game is...
2019-06-12 16:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Folks, this game ain't good. It also ain't cheap. It's one of those unhappy cases where completist collectors have to dig deep and spend tons on something no one would realistically want to pay any amount of money for.
2019-06-05 16:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
This is a much less interesting adaptation of Space Invaders than the one on Game Boy, but the semi-3D mode is kind of neat. Too bad it's locked away, probably forever, behind its prohibitive scarcity and price!
2019-05-29 15:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
I was curious about this one going into the Virtual Boy Works project, and I have to say I'm thrilled that it did not disappoint. It's a strange game in a lot of ways, but also feels like something that plied the cutting edge at the time of its original release. Pity this didn't make it to the U.S.—it might have developed a cult following.
Which, you know. Lovecraft.
2019-05-22 17:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
You ever come across one of those old games that you're obligated to review but doesn't really support much critical discourse so you just have to wring as much material out of it as possible? No? Well, maybe that's just an occupational hazard unique to me.
Anyway, this is a game where you fish, painfully, on Virtual Boy.
2019-05-15 15:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
The Virtual Boy train keeps a-chuggin'...
This one's pretty decent, and I really wish they'd been able to follow through and make it great. Ah, what could have been.
2019-05-09 00:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Hmmm, yep, another Tetris game. But a completely different Tetris game than 3D-Tetris. Did Virtual Boy need two different takes on the same franchise? No, but at least that makes more sense than it having two different bowling games...
Repeat after me: What a weird little system!
Edit: There's a pretty huge factual error in this episode that I didn't realize until I was working on the Virtual Fishing episode concerning Locomotive Corp.â...
2019-05-01 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
I went to the trouble of tracking down the complete Famicom Athena set and bought a tape player, so I figured I might as well post the whole danged contents of the cassette. The sound quality came out pretty decently. Chiptunes from the past...
2019-04-25 16:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
I like when I do one of these combo episodes and the games lend themselves to a tidy narrative. Both Athena and Arkanoid are know for being punishingly hard, and both came in jumbo special packaging (at least in Japan). But one of these games is very, very good and one of them is very, very bad... or at least badly programmed. Can you guess which is which??
Stick around for a very special B-O-N-U-S!
2019-04-24 14:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Wow, dang. I really wanted to like this one. I didn't like it at all back in the day, but the reasons for my lukewarm sentiments had faded in memory, so I had hoped it would be one that impressed me more in hindsight. But no, as you can see here, I now have the context and vocabulary to better understand why I dislike it more than I did back in 1992. Alas!
This will be the last Super NES video until next year. I'm going to get cranking on the book!
2019-04-17 16:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey all, I decided to produce an impromptu and unscheduled Game Boy Works episode this week, because... it's almost the system's 30th anniversary. And that means Video Works has been around for five years (!) now. So it seemed fitting to pause from the current projects (Virtual Boy, Super NES, and NES) to pay tribute to the console that kicked this all off.
We'll get back to Game Boy in earnest later this year. For now, though, please enjoy this momentary diversion.
2019-04-10 14:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been a while, huh? I'm finally back in the swing of video production after a rather complicated month, and I bring with me nothing less than the very final U.S. entry in the Virtual Boy lineup. Yep! 14 whole games. That was it.
We'll hop over to the Japanese-exclusive games after this, but I do want to take a moment to remark on the fact that it's pretty wild to actually have completed a set of game releases in one of these Works projects. I should do more platforms with tiny...
2019-04-04 02:01:25 +0000 UTC View Post(I do feel kind of dead, though... I picked up some nasty bug last week at Game Developers Conference. Too many hands to shake, not enough sanitizer.)
Hi all, just wanted to post a quick update before the end of the month. I touched on this a few posts back, but my video production schedule of late has been pure chaos (as promised!). Making videos is weekend work for me, and this weekend—I'm headed to PAX East—will be the six in a row in which I've had to travel or deal wit...
2019-03-28 17:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
My assault on your senses continues with the next-to-last U.S. release for Virtual Boy. Wowzers! There's a lot to unpack with this one...
2019-03-09 13:54:50 +0000 UTC View Post
Well... my enjoyable run of creating videos about good and notable games has come to an end. Now we're onto a lengthy stretch of absolute doldrums, beginning with this notorious dud. Although it wasn't as completely wretched as I expected? Waterworld for Virtual Boy ain't great, but it's tolerably playable, which is more than I can say for Virtual League Baseball. I know, a Virtual Boy game based on Waterworld should be a perfect storm of garbage. I guess this game ...
2019-03-03 21:57:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Yeah, so I had more to say about Metroid. Can you believe it? Shocking but true.
This episode reminded me how much I enjoy talking about NES games—but no! Must... finish... Virtual Boy....
2019-02-26 18:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Let's take a break from Virtual Boy, shall we? I wanted to commemorate the upcoming 25th anniversary of Super Metroid by looking at the game it was based on, which just happened to be next in the NES Works queue. Handy.
This Metroid video breaks the oath I made to myself after Final Fantasy II to avoid multi-part video episodes. I'll try not to do this often, but folks, I just don't have it in me to crank out a single 25-minute-plus video. Please understand.&n...
2019-02-24 15:51:32 +0000 UTC View Post
I think we're halfway through Virtual Boy Works now. That's pretty wild!
2019-02-21 15:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post