Jeremy Parish

Metroidvania Works 21: Wonder Boy III / Neutopia / Golden Axe Warrior

I kind of feel back for Neutopia and Golden Axe Warrior. Here I went and stuck two perfectly decent games together in the same episode as a genuine masterpiece, making them look paltry and derivative by comparison. Well, I suppose they really are paltry and derivative—not bad, just a bit predictable—but Wonder Boy III was simply incredible and would honestly make just about any game covered so far on Metroidvania Works look a bit flimsy by comparison. S...

July bonus #2: Epoch 10 - Super Soccer & Wheelie Racer

Good day to you!! A very good day, in fact. Today, July 15th 2023, marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of both the Nintendo Famicom and the Sega SG-1000/SC-3000. But I've already covered both of those lineups in exhaustive detail, so instead... here's another look at the Epoch Super Cassette Vision.

I mean, OK, not really a seasonal celebration here. But it has its place. Understanding the Super Cassette Vision helps you to better appreciate just how good Sega and Nintendo were at ...

Metroidvania Works 20: Ys III & River City Ransom

Whew, I just landed in Japan after 16+ hours of traveling, and I'm too tired to even make jokes about flapping here with my arms. I also have run out of witticisms about this video! I'm afraid I'll have to let it speak for itself. Anyway, I'm off to punch my way through throngs of violent teenagers as I pick my way through the Tokyo suburbs.

Metroidvania Works #19: Strider & Willow

Our journey through the ur-metroidvania's formative decade continues apace with two from Capcom in the form of Strider (not to be mistaken for the cool arcade game) and Willow (not to be mistaken for the cool arcade game). Yes, these adventures continue Capcom's persistent insistence upon reworking arcade releases for NES, whether due to Nintendo's insistence that games for their console be unique from those on other platforms or simply because Capcom realized that there was...

July Bonus #1: Dragon Quest Fantasia VHS rip

Man, the combination of Japanese proxy bidding services and a favorable dollar/yen exchange rate is one of the few truly positive things we have going in the benighted modern world. It means I can browse around an auction site and spot something unusual and say to myself, "This is only going to cost me like $15 total, I can afford to take a chance on it and see what it is." And then it ends up being a totally wonderful VHS tape that combines a beautifully corny live-action pantomime interpret...

Metroidvania Works 18: Clash at Demonhead & X•Z•R

A personal favorite arrives this week in Clash at Demonhead. Truth be told, this was one of a handful of games that prompted me to launch this series to begin with. Of course, I ended up not going into the depth I originally intended in this video, because somewhere between launching Metroidvania Works (née Metroidvania Chronicles), I ended up embarking on NES Works (née Good Nintentions). So I need to save something for my January 1990 coverage in order to justify going absolutely...

June Bonus #3: Namco Gal's Island VHS Rip

I, uh, ended up grabbing a LOT of official video game-related VHS tapes from recent auctions. A lot. Some of these have already been posted on YouTube, including this one, but I've ripped them quite cleanly and upscaled them via Framemeister, so these new versions look pretty great (in my opinion). Anyway, I have so many tapes that I need to publish them more than once per month or else it'll take years to get them all posted.

So, this month's second video is Namco Gal's Island...

Metroidvania Works 17: Blaster Master & Bionic Commando

Ah, we've reached the deepest depths of the part where the Metroidvania Works timeline-in-progress overlaps with material previously covered on NES Works. Thank goodness these are both stellar games that are always fun to talk about and see in action, eh? 

Blaster Master would probably be the pinnacle of pre-metroidvania evolution if not for its over-reliance on the top-down sequences. Heck, just move the bosses into the main spaces and let players fight them in the tank a...

Metroidvania Works #16: Battle of Olympus / Guardian Legend / Exile

Metroidvania Works continues apace. This week, a rare triple-trouble entry. It admittedly would have been more fun to have paired up the third game in this set—Exile for British microcomputers—with its upcoming counterpart—Exile/XZR for Japanese microcomputers—but alas, it was not to be. No matter, because the real innovation here happens on NES with the excellent The Battle of Olympus and the even more excellent The Guardian Legend, both l...

June exclusive #2 - NES Works Gaiden Epoch 09: Lupin III & Nebula

Solid bonus episode this month. Since we've already seen a Lupin III game (way back in the early days of Game Boy Works), I don't need to go into detail on the background of this property as it makes its debut on Super Cassette Vision. Instead, I can focus in on the fact that, wow, there are two pretty solid titles for Super Cassette Vision here.

Lupin III is a simple but challenging scrolling runner game that feels charmingly authentic to the source material—a lot m...

Metroidvania Works #15: Rambo & The Magic of Scheherazade

Whoa, a video that isn't about Sega Master System? In the Year of Our Lord 2023? Will wonders never cease....

Yes, fulfilling the mandate to take a Sega break and explore the opportunity to publish a book charting the Metroidvania Works narrative, I've returned to the well of nonlinear action-RPG-adventure games from 35+ years ago. The next few videos will concern some fairly familiar material, although as we see here the staggered releases between Famicom and NES versions of t...

June bonus #1: Fantasy Zone VHS longplay video

Another month, another upscaled video rip of a vintage Japanese video tape showcasing a classic arcade game. This time, it's Sega's Fantasy Zone. Like last month's Out Run video, this is not a pure longplay but rather a heavily edited performance (it skips shops and other screen transitions) that overdubs the soundtrack sans game effects. I love that this was a thing that you could buy with actual human money in actual stores. Eat your heart out, GDQ.

You'll be happy (...

Segaiden 53: Great Baseball [JP] / Satellite 7 / Woody Pop / BMX Trial: Alex Kidd

Good news, friends: No age-gate this week. Although my old-man reflexes do make such a hash of my video footage of these alarmingly difficult games that it might be considered an act of violence worthy of censorship.

With this episode, I've now covered all Master System and Mark III releases through the end of 1987 (or at least the Mark III that wouldn't show up later on Master System; Phantasy Star hit in Dec. 1987, but it arrived in the U.S. 11 months later, so that's where I...

Segaiden #052: Sukeban Deka II & Mahjong Sengoku Jidai

Apologies that this week's episode can't actually be viewed here on Patreon. One of the games here descends from a franchise comprised entirely of porn, and even though I placed little icons to obscure the pixel-art lady nipples so that no one would succumb to Satan's call to commit onanism, YouTube still confirmed that this material is too spicy for prime time TV. I'm sure the sociopolitical commentary that accompanied the historical retrospective probably played into that as well; ...

Bonus append: A less vaporwave-looking OutRun VHS rip

My boss was kind enough to give me a disused late-model VHS deck he had on hand to attempt another tape rip of the OutRun cassette. Sadly it doesn't support S-video, so this is strictly composite quality, but the color is much more accurate on this video, with much less bleed. I need to trim some dead air from the beginning, but this looks pretty rad from where I stand.

Ripping these old tapes is pretty fun, so you can look forward to seeing these monthly until I run out of tapes/money....

May bonus #2: OutRun VHS longplay rip

A little extra somethin' this month. Recently, some Sega arcade longplay VHS tapes on Yahoo! Auctions caught my eye, and after doing a quick search through YouTube and the Internet Archive, I couldn't find any high-quality rips of the material. So I said, "What the heck, I can do that." And so here we are. I'm not fully satisfied with the quality of this footage because my video deck is kinda crap, so I'll probably re-rip this tape before sharing it with the public. 

But for now, I...

Segaiden #51: Great Soccer, Great Basketball, and Fantasy Zone II

You know what I really appreciate about the Sega Master System? Every time something dreadful appears to exist as the Opposite of Fun, you can count on some sort of leavening content to balance it out. In this case, Great Soccer and Great Basketball arrive, fully determined to set back progress in their respective genre of sports by a few years, only to find themselves stymied by the excellence of Fantasy Zone II.

Of course, the downside of Sega Master System ...

May exclusive: NES Works Gaiden Epoch #08

This month's patron exclusive episode brings us Sept. 1984's Super Cassette Vision releases, a pair of highly derivative titles... which, you know, is about what you'd expect from Epoch. Originality: Highly overrated! Or not. I wouldn't call either of these games all-timers, to be honest. Maybe a little originality is what the doctor ordered? We'll see some of that next time, with a couple of really solid releases for Super Cassette Vision. For now, though, please enjoy a couple of little-kno...

Road map for the back half of 2023

The poll I posted last weekend was only supposed to be open for a few days, so... let's consider it closed. The results have been consistent all along, though: It's pretty much an even split between "more Sega" and "take a Sega break plz." Edging toward "take a break," but as a few people have observed, the actual breakdown is something like: 

49% More Sega
25% More NES Works
9% More Game Boy Works
12% More Super NES Works
5% Weird wildcards

So, I'm going to try t...

Segaiden #050: Zillion & Sega Challenge/Team Sega

We hit the big 5-0 this week with a breakout title for the Master System: Zillion, a proper, 1987-style exploratory action-platform-combat game that hints at—yes—the metroidvania genre to come in the years ahead. This is not, however, the Metroid equivalent that people like to paint it as; it instead takes its inspiration from Atari. Well, Epyx, before Atari devoured and destroyed them.

Also this week, I realized it's time to start engaging with Sega's own internal...

Poll: Now what?

Well, I've just about reached the end of Sega Master System's 1987 lineup. The question is, how should I proceed from here? The beginning of 1988 seems like a natural break in the Master System's history, with Tonka taking charge of U.S. distribution, the launch of the Sega Challenge (aka Team Sega) newsletter, etc. So: Do I go ahead and carry on with Master System through the end of 1988 now in order to bring the chronology in line with the NES Works timeline? Or should I c...

Segaiden #049: Kung Fu Kid & Great Golf [UPDATED]

Yet another strong Master System release this week—but not the lead title. Kung Fu Kid is fine, if a bit uneven and needlessly tedious upon replay. And I really like turning lobsters into missiles. It doesn't make any sense, but I like it. But no. That's not the banger this time around.

Nope, this week's standout release is Great Golf, a devastatingly good take on the genre. As neat as the Mark III Great Golf was, with its mini-golf isometric viewpoint, this...

Segaiden #048: Out Run

Another big one this week, both in terms of impact and in terms of length. I even talk about the Master System game a little. But really, the topic of Out Run is far larger than can be contained in a discussion about an 8-bit conversion, so this episode ranges further afield. It also touches on a peripheral that shares an intimate relationship with this version of the game. 

As for the hosting segments, many thanks go to Jared Petty, who patiently filmed my flubs and misre...

Segaiden #47: Sega 3-D Glasses & Missile Defense 3-D

First of all, let me apologize if this episode seems a little disjointed. Its production bordered on "nightmarish." I wrote it while laboring under a bit of COVID brain fog; I recorded it with defective equipment that caused certain portions of the voiceover to drop out (which I realized only after I went out of town for the weekend and attempted to put the video together with no recording gear at hand); I forgot to transfer product photography from my camera's SD card, which I discovered aft...

April bonus: NES Works Gaiden Epoch #07

Exciting (?) news, everyone! Another episode of NES Works Gaiden Epoch has arrived as your (timed) exclusive bonus for the month. I suspect this will be the least interesting episode of this entire series, because it tackles three extremely standard takes on three more or less mandatory entries for Japanese consoles: Golf, Mahjong, and Baseball. Stick a "Super" in front of each of those words and you have the titles of Epoch's trio. The Super Cassette Vision library had far weirder offerings,...

Segaiden #46: Gangster Town & Great Volleyball

Well! This is more like it. 

Gangster Town may stack its odds unfairly against a single player, but maybe that's OK—it seems like the kind of game you'd want to share with a friend (in cooperative mode, you see?). Rather than being some bog-standard arcade interpretation that simply puts the Master System on equal light gun footing with Nintendo's NES, Gangster Town plays like nothing else before it. I mean, the first proper stage consists of a car chase. That's...

Segaiden #045: Enduro Racer & state of the union

Brace yourself, because we're about to experience a rare sight: A legitimately disappointing Master System conversion of an arcade hit. Why, such a thing hasn't been seen since the hoary days of My Hero! And yet, Enduro Racer disappoints... doubly so, in fact, if you play the hacked-up American ROM. 

And this seems like a good opportunity to take a step back and give the nascent console race in the freshly reanimated zombified American console market a look. Compa...

Segaiden #044: Great Football - Sports Pad Football - Rocky

Hello friends, I may be offline during my normal Wednesday video post time, so I'm uploading a bit early this week. I know Patreon has a "schedule" feature, but historically Patreon has done a pretty spotty job of informing patrons that a post has gone live when I use that option. So I'd rather publish a smidge early, if it's all OK with you.

Anyway, this week's three-game video is really more like a two-game video. It's all quite bizarre. Every time I think I have Sega figured out, the...

Segaiden #043: Ghostbusters & Wonder Boy

Sorry this week's post went up a little later than usual—I'm on the opposite coast of the U.S., working my way through Game Developers Conference obligations in an unfamiliar time zone. But there's always time for Segaiden, especially when it concerns a pair of games that put in such a strong showing.

Segaiden #042: Shooting Gallery & Quartet

Another pair of pleasant surprises today with Shooting Gallery, a game that reads like a weak Duck Hunt knockoff but has far more (1) history behind it and (2) substance than that; and Quartet, a game that defrauds players with its very title and should have been an absolute abomination but ends up having a more interesting and considered approach to game design than its arcade counterpart. Sega, you wily scamps, you. Always so unpredictable.