Video Works by Jeremy Parish

Tecmo delivers its third game almost immediately on the heels of Solomon's Key and Mighty Bomb Jack, and it's a doozy. Rygar kicks off a couple of trends we're going to see a lot of in the coming years on NES: It radically reinvents an arcade game for the console, and it's pretty much a proto-metroidvania action title. Good stuff here that deserves to be enshrined in history.

Category:Video Games -- posted at: 5:21pm EDT

The first of Nintendo's major releases for 1987 arrives, bringing with it some new technical innovations that will play a huge part in allowing U.S. releases for the system to maintain parity with titles that ran on pricey expansion hardware in Japan—and to go even further beyond that in the years to come. Oh, and the game itself is pretty good, too. Just be sure to take care when writing down those passwords...

Direct download: Kid_Icarus_retrospective_A_stygian_Pit___NES_Works_043.mp4
Category:Video Games -- posted at: 5:20pm EDT

A new third-party challenger has appeared! Tecmo arrives on NES with two simultaneous launches, both of which more or less fall into the puzzle-platformer genre. Solomon's Key and Mighty Bomb Jack are full of arcane secrets and high difficulty levels. Just the kind of thing a growing video game boy needs in his diet.


Future console first-party SNK makes its NES debut this week, and... well, let's just say there's room for improvement. Ikari Warriors was good and fun in the arcades, and on NES, it exists and doesn't cause your console to self-destruct. So that's something.

Also, a half-look at Bandai's first Power Pad title, Athletic World.


We looked at the original Castlevania for NES; now here is its Super NES remake. Sort of. Super Castlevania IV is kind of like a remix of Castlevania 1 and 3 (which does add up to IV!), but it makes some pretty big changes to the core mechanics of controlling Simon Belmont. On the other hand, it carries over a lot of elements from the NES, too. It's an odd duck in the Castlevania series that doesn't always work but has so much loving detail invested into it that it holds up regardless of its flaws.


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