Gaming Zone

Developer:

Capcom

|

Release Date:

1991 (90 in Japan and NA)

|

Systems:

NES

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Super Nintendo by playing a NES game!

Nah, not really. The SNES didn't come out where I live until 1992 so I've got nothing to celebrate yet. A NES game showing up on Super Adventures is kind of an event in itself though, because for whatever reason I haven't played one since way back in April. Of last year.

In the West this came out a few months after Super Mario Bros. 3 and a few months before the Super Nintendo, so I expect the developers likely knew what they were doing by this point (especially as it's made by Capcom!) But it's one of those games that's managed to slip by me entirely, so I've no idea what it's like or even what people think of it.

In fact I'm fairly sure I've never seen an episode of the Chip 'n Dale cartoon either, though if you showed me a picture of the characters I'd recognise it instantly. I'll even be able tell you which of them's Chip and which is Dale in a minute as the game starts off by asking me who I want to play as.

Read on �

Developer:

Sunsoft

|

Release Date:

1991

|

Systems:

NES, Genesis

---

Today on Super Adventures I'm taking a look at Batman: Return of the Joker, the sort-of sequel to Sunsoft's Batman: The Video Game, which was released for the NES two years earlier.

Batman: The Video Game was a tie-in with Tim Burton's 1989 'Batman' movie (thoughtfully given a subtitle so that people wouldn't get them confused and end up shoving the cartridge into their VCR), and this also shares the movie's shiny golden 'BATMAN' text so I'm presuming they're part of the same continuity. But ~SPOILERS~ The Joker didn't just get locked away in Arkham or go into hiding at the end of the movie, he got dropped off a giant gothic church tower to his very definite pavement-assisted demise. In fact in the end of the NES game Batman punches him off the church roof, which is kind of hardcore for a man that never kills, but the end result is much the same. So if The Joker really has returned here, then he's come back from the dead.

Incidentally this has nothing to do with the 'Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker' animated movie, as that came out about a decade later and has its own set of games. Though it's still about The Joker coming back from the dead.

The guy is like... weeds or something.
Read on �

Developer:

Nintendo

|

Release Date:

1988 (JP)

|

Systems:

NES, SNES

---

Today on Super Adventures my Mario Marathon Month continues with Super Mario Bros. 3, the final Super Mario for the NES! It's not the last game he showed up in on the console though, as he got his medical degree just before the SNES was released. Sadly his career as Dr. Mario lasted just four months and then it was all Yoshi games and edutainment after that.

I've timed this one better than most, as today is the game's 25th anniversary... in the US. It's not a particularly special date to me seeing as it came out 18 months later in Britain and a year or so earlier in Japan, but I'm being impatient considerate of my American readers. Whoa, I just did the math there: that's three years that we were left waiting for this, while Americans were already playing Super Mario World! I say 'we'... I didn't get a NES until something like 2001, so it's not like I was personally inconvenienced by any of this.

Super Mario Bros. 3 has actually appeared on Super Adventures before, about four years ago now, but I wasn't the person who played it and the guy who did absolutely hated it. Seriously, I found someone who dislikes Super Mario 3, how amazing is that? Uh, not that I'm implying that I like it, I'm not giving that away until the end, but I have definitely played it before and I have... opinions.
Read on �

Today on Super Adventures, my Mario Marathon Month continues with a tale of two Super Mario Bros. 2s.

Back on the Famicom and NES in the late 80s there was a bit of a trend for sequels to be radically different to the original. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link added RPG elements and swapped genres to become a platformer, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest evolved into more of an open world RPG with NPCs and a day/night cycle, Final Fantasy II encouraged players to beat up their own team-mates to level up skills etc. But Super Mario Bros. 2 managed to be both more of the same and a reinvention of the formula at the same time, by cheating and being two separate games:

The Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 (AKA. Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels in the West) is the next step on from Super Mario Bros. and arcade game VS. Super Mario Bros., with even more challenging levels and a badge on the box saying "For super players" to make sure that regular players realise that it's going to kick their ass.

The American Super Mario Bros. 2 (AKA. Super Mario USA in Japan) is a localisation of an entirely unrelated platformer, repurposed as a replacement Mario sequel due to the Japanese Mario 2's dated visuals and punishing difficulty level making it more likely to scare players away from the unproven NES than win the undying love that the Famicom was currently enjoying in Japan.

At least that's how I think it goes. I'll give each an hour or two and see how they play.
Read on �

Developer:

Nintendo

|

Release Date:

1985 (Japan)

|

Systems:

NES

---

It's always nice to have another 'Super' game on Super Adventures, even though Nintendo had to go and confuse me by releasing it on the Famicom/NES instead of waiting five more years to put it on the Super Nintendo. Fortunately they'd learned to match the title with the system by the time Super Mario 64 came out; they didn't end up calling it Super Mario Cube or something.

Super Mario Bros. is the second game I'll be playing for my Mario Marathon Month. It's also the something like the eighth game to ever feature Mario, the seventh in which he's playable, the fourth to have his name in the title, and the first to be developed exclusively for home consoles... I think (and that's not even counting the Game and Watch games). He's a busy guy, and it's hard to keep track of all the places he turns up.

While I'm throwing out numbers, this was something like game #64 for the two year old Famicom, but when the NES reached the US this was out at launch, and you can bet that it wasn't Gyromite and Duck Hunt that made the system such a massive success in the West, resurrecting the American console market after the 1983 video game crash. Super Mario Bros. was the best selling single platform exclusive for three decades... though that seems a bit less impressive somehow when you know that Wii Sports was the game that finally beat it.

Anyway I'm going to play it for an hour or two, show some screenshots and shout out everything that enters my mind as I go.
Read on �