Jeremy Parish

Game Boy World #049: Pipe Games Double Header

Hello friends, this week's belated episode is finally here—a hefty production that explores another one of those odd Game Boy coincidences of timing (e.g. Othello/Taikyoku Renju, the Penguin games). This time we have two games about shuffling conduits ahead of some advancing object, Pipe Dreams and Blodia, arriving within a couple months of one another. H-hooray?

First draft

I'm happy to say that the first draft of all text for the Good Nintentions book is complete! I have sent it along to a volunteer copy editor, who perhaps doesn't realize exactly what he's getting into. This book turned out to be 326 full-size pages of 9-point type, which is why it's taken so many months for me to put together. It is by far the largest single project I've ever undertaken in my free time, even with half the material already created. I feel good about it, though. It's turned out re...

Born on wings of steel

Here's the 50th (!) Game Boy World script, a look at Vic Tokai's wonderful Daedalian Opus. Hopefully I'll have time to produce the videos for this and Blodia over the weekend, though who knows. It looks like I may once again be (ugh) traveling.

In other news, I'm sure everyone received a message about this directly from Patreon, but it seems the company got careless and let hackers steal its database — 14 GB of personal info. That means anyone with an account has had their information co...

September 2015 Patreon supported

Thank you so much for the support this month!

Scripts ahoy (betcha bite a... script?)

Life is settling down a little, and I've managed to find the time to put together the next Game Boy World script. This one's for two games, as once again two very coincidentally similar games debuted in fairly rapid succession. I'm hoping to get script 50 locked down tonight so I can get back to the art of producing videos....

Cover art

I don't know if anyone saw yesterday's post, since I published it at like 6 a.m. on a Sunday — not really Internet browsing prime time, I realize — but you should check it out! There's an interesting download to look at!

Here's another interesting download for you: A thumbnail of the book's cover illustration, courtesy of the deliriously talented Bill Mudron. I've put in a LOT of time on this revised volume over the past few months to make it the best it can possibly be, and Bill's awesome...

Print preview

I feel like almost every post I make here lately has been some variant of "Wow, my travel schedule sure is making it hard to work on side projects." And here we are again: Less than 48 hours after I got back from a two-week trip to LA and Japan, another trip immediately came up, and now I'm in Florida. This one wasn't expected, though. Two of my sister's close in-laws were killed in a terrible shooting incident a few days ago, and I'm helping to take care of things for her at home while she trav...

I'm back! Here's a glimpse at the future

And by future I mean past.

Yes, I'm finally back from my two-week international trip and something something arms tired. I found it surprisingly difficult to squeeze in time to get any work done while traveling, and I don't know if that's a function of age, increased responsibilities, my general situation while overseas, or some combination thereof. In any case, I'm now hard at work not only on more Game Boy World videos but also on the first alternate project, Good Nintentions. My first v...

Game Boy World #048: Dead Heat Scramble

God bless wi-fi equipped airplanes. Here's the latest episode of Game Boy World, assembled lovingly while somewhere over the Pacific.

Game Boy World #047: Ninja Boy

Right, so. New Game Boy World episode. Sorry it's taken a bit longer to get up than would be ideal, and that the video quality is a little lower than usual... traveling means using other people's wi-fi connections. Sometimes those connections are very slow and don't take well to 3 GB video uploads...

I'd like to say it was worth the wait for a glimpse of a genuine Game Boy classic, but uh — no. This game is terrible. It doesn't look that bad in action, I know, but it plays badly. So badly. 2015-09-10 22:01:23 +0000 UTC View Post

Dead Heat Scramble

Another script today, for another not-so-great game. It's the Game Boy miracle: Many releases of wildly varying quality.

Ninja Boy script

I'm about to head out of town for two weeks, so I've been banking a ton of GBW footage that I can cut together while I'm away. I'm also writing up and recording as many scripts as possible. Here's the first of the batch, for a truly wretched game called Ninja Boy. More to come soon, if all goes well!

I'm also hard at work on the next two books. I really hoped to have one out last month, but The Anatomy of River City Ransom took much longer than I expected... I may switch back over to the NES b...

Game Boy World #046: SD Lupin III

Ah, I lied last time. I said I'd have one last video up before the end of August... but I wasn't counting on YouTube to hit me with a copyright strike for including a snippet of footage from The Castle of Cagliostro. Fair use means nothing to these monsters!

Anyway, here's another dumb puzzle game. Good grief.

Thanks for your support last month! I'm out of the country for a big chunk of September, but I'll try to keep things interesting around here regardless...

August 2015 Patreon supported

Thank you so much for the support this month!

Game Boy World Episode 44: Cyraid

Hello there! It's been a busy week, but here is the latest episode of Game Boy World. Expect one more of these before the end of the month. This, I command!

SD Lupin III: The scriptening

Another Game Boy World script! I'm very sad that a game based on Lupin III wasn't better than this turned out to be!

I finally found words to describe Cyraid

Which took some doing, I've gotta say. The script is attached...

I'll be leaving town for the rest of the month soon, which of course will be quite an impediment to video production, so I'm trying to stockpile some scripts and footage before I leave town so I can take them along and work while traveling.

It's Game Boy World Episode 43, yo.

Man, yesterday was pretty much the worst day I can remember. BUT I did channel all of my waiting and anxiety and frustration into productivity by taking my mind off things through the magic of video editing. So that's something. Thus: Enjoy a video about another Taito arcade classic that gained some slight notability through the circumstances of its Game Boy conversion. It's like the less cool version of Space Invaders.

Note: Beware the brief presence of naked cartoon boobies in thi...

Game Boy World #045: Batman

Yeah, I'm going a bit out of sequence here, but only for you cool backer types. 

Kinda weird how every fifth episode in the chronology seems to be a surprisingly good release! I think episode #50 is Daedalian Opus, so we'll see how that one holds up.

Super Mario Bros. 2: The good and the bad

I sat down last night to record a few levels of Super Mario Bros. 2, and before I knew it, it was somehow two hours later and I was at the final stage. But the good news is that with this video I'm finally satisfied with the quality of my NES video capture — it's perhaps just a shade too dim, which seems to be a property of my capture device (the games look perfect on both LED and CRT televisions), but the colors are strong, neutral, and look pretty accurate. The bad news? After all of that, I...

Game Boy World #042: Serpent

Hi everyone, I had hoped to have this episode up a bit sooner, but personal matters interfered. And yet, here we are: The 42nd episode of Game Boy World, reaching back into the dim and distant year of 1976 for inspiration. Yowzers!

Scripts ahoy

Aw, I was hoping to post a Patreon update every day this month, but got too caught up in work and family stuff yesterday. Alas! In any case, here are two more GBW scripts for you to browse in advance of the videos: Serpent and Qix.

A heartwarming tale of tragedy

Wow, check out this hour-plus of Metroid Zero Mission footage I captured for use in a new Anatomy series! Rad, right? Well, almost. I captured this from a RetroN 5 since ZM is not yet available on the U.S. Virtual Console (despite being in every other region!?), and when I went to load up my save file for a second session the system hadn't saved it. So, I've learned my lesson — the RetroN 5 is hot garbage — and I'll be hunting down a GameCube and component cables so I can do proper GBA captu...

Game Boy World #041: Football x2

Wow, this one was pretty painful to put together. I'm not a big fan of sports games under the best of circumstances, and neither NFL Football nor Soccer Mania are what you'd call "the best of circumstances." Thankfully with this speed bump out of the way, subsequent episodes should be much more enjoyable to produce; I don't see anything I'm particularly dreading for quite a while. In any case, apologies that I've been so slow with the Patreon GBW updates.

I'M BATMAN

Another Game Boy World script is in the bag (attached here!). I had quite a bit to say about it. The game has problems, but it's still a step above most Game Boy action titles. 

Next on the agenda, I need to figure out what the heck Cyraid is all about. 

"I want you to tell your friends about me"

Hello! Here we have the first-ever Game Boy World 60fps capture session: SunSoft's Batman. I tried to record the entire game, but it turns out the final boss is a cheesy sumbitch with waaaay too many hit points. Still, this wasn't too shabby for my first serious attempt to get through the game.

I've also recorded footage for a few other videos this week, but those sessions were REALLY dire and are not worth sharing. Crappy Game Boy sports games do not good viewing make...

Fusion finale

http://www.anatomyofgames.com/2015/08/06/the-anatomy-of-metroid-fusion-17-and-the-omega/

This is it: The end of Metroid Fusion. I was mistaken about it having two more entries in it. I mean, I could have broken this entry up, but it feels more authentic this way. Hope you enjoyed the series, despite it being more drawn out than anticipated!

Game Boy World 041: Script

Hello, everyone, here's the latest Game Boy World video script. I struggled with this one for quite a while, because football is not my thing at all, and NFL Football is not a good football title by any measure. So I decided the easiest thing to do would be to compare and contrast it to a legit terrible game about a different sort of football. 

Hopefully I'll be able to record footage this evening! Soccer Mania will be the first opportunity for me to put my 60fps capture setup ...

Making sausage is a messy affair

Another look behind the book/video making process with this dicey video of The Goonies for Famicom. This was captured for the upcoming Anatomy of Games book for the sake of still screens — which means I didn't really fret too much about creating a smooth, watchable video. I paused frequently to orient myself and find hidden items, and I even started over altogether after some screwups (along with flailing attempts to remember the button combos to reveal secrets for each stage). Not a fun watch...

Bookmaking

I've had almost zero time for working on projects this week, but I have managed to make a little progress on the next Anatomy of Games books. The new screen caps look nice and sharp in the PDF and should print up equally nicely, I suspect. Obviously, I haven't done any work on the overall design style yet — just getting text and image placed to figure out the page count. (It's going to be probably about 110-120, I think.) PDF sample attached!