One of the rarest Sonic games of all time is Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car, an arcade game for kids that was released in 1991. If you weren’t in Japan that year (so…pretty much all of us), you’ve probably never played it, as it has never been released again, ever, in any format. Until now!…
All those years watching Seinfeld, and I never noticed this, sothanks to Tim Rogersfor the pic: turns out the media shelf in the background of Jerry’s apartment, which is mostly full of his old VHS tapes (like Navy Seals!), is also home to a few NES games. You can clearly see SimCity there (which is…
What is it with Nintendo and phones? There are a ton companies out there making really nice phones, but no matter the number (and how many of them, *cough*, can already play Nintendo games), folks are always dreaming up ideas for Nintendo to go and make a phone of their own. I have no idea…
Cherno Samba was, at least in Championship Manager, a superstar
And you thought you were cool because you lined up at midnight and bought a PS4 with your own money. Tyler Esposito, meanwhile, gets to say that he got a SNES on August 23, 1991. The day the console was first released in the United States, when it retailed for $199. Well, he gets to…
Shigesato Itoi (Mother), Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario, Zelda) and Tsunekazu Ishihara (Pokemon), all working on the same game? We should have known it would be too good to be true. In 1997, Nintendo announced a game called Cabbage. It sounded weird (by 1997 standards, anyway), was headed for a weird console and had a (presumably working)…
From the very first days of its home console business, Nintendo has given its box art a trademark standard, a border or frame that clearly marks the title as being for a Nintendo system. Did you know, though, that this trademark is a lot older than the NES or Famicom? In the 60’s, Nintendo was…
One of the all-time great adaptations was this animated spectacular
Let me tell you a story. It involves an arcade game, the CIA, epilepsy, suicide and one of the greatest urban legends in all of video gaming. Long before the internet existed as we know it today, and long before more contemporary hoaxes about creepy video games, came the story of Polybius. It existed in…
There was a Zelda animated series, and it was terrible. Let’s not dwell on it. But if you ever wondered what would happen if the same art style ditched the excuuuuuuuuuuuse me’s and played things a little straighter, you should know that such a thing actually exists. It’s The Legend of Zelda comic, released in…
You can keep Street Fighter, Tekken, King of Fighters and Dead or Alive. My favourite fighting game pre-dates every single one of them, starred large men in furry underpants, and rather than lasting minutes could, if you knew your moves, be over in seconds. Because you weren’t using fists. You were using giant swords. Sure,…
The Maxis that you knew, the studio that released SimCity and invented The Sims, is no more. The SimCity brand might live on, and the Maxis brand might live on elsewhere, but they’ll survive only as brands, things EA will invoke to sell things. This is a very sad thing, but let’s try and remember…
Press the Buttons (via Fast Co.) recently got their hands on something very special: a copy of Nintendo’s Style Guide, a 1993 document that sought to formalise all kinds of weird Nintendo-related mascot matters, like what exact colour Mario’s and Samus’ outfits have to be. It’s as obsessive as it is fascinating. Mario’s famous overalls,…
Picture a world-beating gamer. Take your time. Done? Whatever you pictured, you probably did not picture Mr. Awesome. Mr. Awesome, aka Roy Shildt, may be familiar to some of you from his cameo in the 2007 documentary King of Kong, in which he plays a minor, background role. Which was a shame. If you’re sitting…
It’s easy to forget now, given its enormous success, that the NES was once seen as a risky proposition. Coming on the heels of the great video game crash of 1983, into a market unsure if games were a fad that had already died out, the system didn’t just magically appear in stores across North…
Nintendo had a pretty strange relationship with Star Wars in the early years of its video game enterprise. We’ve already seen the weird shit that went down when Star Wars came to the NES, but a 1979 arcade game was even weirder. This is art for Nintendo Space Launcher, one of the company’s earlier arcade…
In the late 90s, Canadian company TranDirect Holding had an idea: what if you could connect a Super Nintendo to a phone line, and use it to do your banking on? And what if instead of using a regular SNES controller, you used a sweet custom BANKING CONTROLLER. Look at that thing! It’s like a…
Before they made video games, Nintendo made loads of other sweet stuff. One of the sweetest was this Ultraman board game, which has art that looks as awesome today as it did in 1966. As you can see in the gallery on Before Mario, the game — released using the old “Nintendo Game” logo —…
Since it’s out today on GoG, meaning a bunch of people are going to be playing it for the first time, let’s talk about X-Wing Alliance. And how it has the best ending of any Star Wars game ever made. X-Wing Alliance, the third in Lucasarts’ trilogy of space shooters, took away years of my…
People gave Lucasarts a lot of crap towards the end, mostly for being a company interested in nothing but licensed garbage. For the most part that was totally fair criticism. But there was once a time when Lucasarts wasn’t just brave, it was a little weird about it. That era was the late 90s, a…
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