The second volume of Game Boy Works comes to a conclusion (look for the book this fall!) with a look at the system's first Zelda-style game. Uhhh… kinda. Rolan's Curse offers a glancing tangent to the top-down action-RPG, but there's not a lot of substance here — just the appearance of the thing.

Taito arrives on Super NES with a splash. Well, it should be a splash... you know, because of all the fish bosses. But they're actually in outer space? Darius is weird. But that's OK, because this Darius balances its quirkiness with the silkiest, smoothest action yet seen on the console. It's the cure for the common slowdown, and all it took was... not using any of the console's unique hardware features. Oh well!

Another Game Boy follow-up to an NES game appears this week, and it's just as compromised and frustrating as you've come to expect. The Rescue of Princess Blobette consists almost entirely of recycled material from A Boy and His Blob, but it's a much smaller game — and a more limited one. And slower. And more cramped. And it sounds a lot worse. But on the plus side, uh… well, it won't melt down your Game Boy, probably. So that's something.

The Makaimura/Ghosts ’N Goblins series makes its debut on a third Nintendo console, and yeah, it's every bit as harsh as you'd expect. But is the beauty of the game's visuals and the intense satisfaction of finally reaching the next checkpoint enough to make it worth the suffering?

And here at last we reach the end of this retrospective saga with a look at how Final Fantasy's fourth installment reworked the raw materials of its 8-bit predecessor to present a new and completely holistic take on the role-playing genre.

The middle chapter of this in-depth Final Fantasy II retrospective leaps from the game's innovative play mechanics to its equally striking approach to storytelling. By using all aspects of the game to relay its narrative, Final Fantasy II changed the way RPGs (and games!) integrated plots and characters into their design.

This first of a multi-part look back at the original U.S. release of Final Fantasy IV explores the history behind the game and the significance of its innovative combat engine, the Active-Time Battle System.

A fascinating bit of Super NES technology fails to match its one-of-a-kind visual approach with equally unique gameplay. There are probably worse racers on the system, but R.P.M. Racing feels particularly disappointing given the unconventional graphical approach it takes and the impressive legacy that lay ahead for developer Silicon & Synapse. It one-of-a-kind bit of tech for Super NES, and it includes the system's first custom level creator complete with battery back-up, but it just isn't fun.

One of gaming's greatest legacies gets its kickoff here... but it's not quite a slam dunk. More like a weak fly to left field. Um. Football? Yes.

Tengen scored a hit with its home rendition of Atari Games' arcade classic Paperboy, so naturally they wasted no time following up on it. But was this sequel really necessary? Did Tengen improve on a masterpiece, or merely spin their wheels? Find out by watching this video... next time you drop by my apartment unannounced to raid my pantry for cereal.

Game Boy shipped with the ability to allow two systems to link together for multiplayer sessions. But in late 1990, Nintendo took their portable multiplayer options one step further through the Four-Player Adapter, which shipped in the U.S. as a pack-in with the game F-1 Race. This week, we look at both game and peripheral.

NOTE: After uploading this video, I discovered Pac-Man on Game Boy contains a hidden full-screen option, which would somewhat mitigate my criticisms of the game. Unfortunately, since I'm currently traveling and don't have access to video recording equipment, I can't amend the video. Expect a revised look (along with a second chance for Palamedes) once this "season" of Game Boy Works ends. Namco buries the axe with Nintendo long enough to bring its classic maze-chase arcade hit to Game Boy, and the results are… mixed. A strong game gets a slow, cramped rendition here. It's playable, yes, but this icon loses a few vital details in the process of squeezing down to fit Game Boy's limits, which means this is far from the definitive handheld take on Pac-Man… something that was true even back in the day.

Game Boy gets its second quick-iteration sequel to a previous release for the platform, and it's even less noteworthy than Boxxle II. Like the original Trump Boy, this follow-up contains three card game variants based around a pack of 52. The visuals look a little nicer and have some personality this time, and there's a four-player mode (that we'll look at in a different episode), but it's pretty just, you know, Trump Boy. Again.

An interesting spin on the puzzle platformer as only Masaya could deliver: This time, you solve puzzles by blowing up stuff. Unfortunately, the unconventional premise is let down by the clunky tech and programming. It's pretty good, but it should have been great.

Another Game Boy puzzler? Yes, but at least this one is different. Rather than involving boxes and tiles, Amida-kun riffs on the traditional Japanese lottery game, amidakuji… the same game that inspired Konami's Amidar. It's pretty basic as games go, but the underlying principle is fun, and challenging, so this one's not so bad.

Another game licensed from a Japanese media property hits Super NES, but this one isn't quite as good as U.N. Squadron. In fact, it's really quite poor: A clumsy fighting game based on Ultraman's short-lived push into the U.S. television market. It might not be all bad if not for the unspeakably boneheaded victory condition requirement, which turns this into a jarring example of a faithful video game adaptation that suffers for its accuracy to the source material…

The Super NES gets its first sports game in the form of an entry in Jaleco's Bases Loaded baseball series, which doesn't offer a whole lot that you couldn't find in Jaleco's simultaneous release for NES, Bases Loaded 3. All this 16-bit iteration really offers over its 8-bit counterpart is a questionable race not for the pennant but rather for a "perfect" game, a task best left to masochists drowning in free time.

As if to prove there's no idea so good that you can't do it several times over in mostly identical ways, here is the third Battleship-like naval combat game for Game Boy. This one is from Nintendo themselves, which means that it's less offbeat than Use's Battleship/Navy Blue or NTVIC's Power Mission, but it's a lot more polished. And it includes an entirely original secondary sub combat mode, too! Just be sure to play with a friend, because the computer cheats like crazy in this one… as usual.

Who says Game Boy racing games have to be awful? Not TOSE and Tonkin House, who evidently took the likes of Monster Truck as a challenge. Roadster is everything previous Game Boy racers weren't: Fun, a joy to control, fairly balanced, thoughtfully designed. Will wonders never cease?

It's weird that someone in Japan made a game about the all-American pastime of monster trucks and didn't bring it to the U.S., right? Well, mystery solved: The game is a terrible Excitebike clone with inscrutable mechanics, and it would have bombed terribly here in America. It certainly didn't win many fans in its own home territory…

What a relief: A genuinely great game, and a licensed one to boot!? Yes, Ghostbusters II defies the odds by ditching all connections to Activision's other Ghostbusters games and going with a portable adaptation of HAL Labs' charming-as-heck Famicom game New Ghostbusters II. Sure, it has some rough patches, but it's sweet and entertaining — a nice, breezy, personality-packed rendition of the movie.

Ah, here we go: The second set of 100 Game Boy Works episodes begins with the quintessential Game Boy experience. Yes, it's a mediocre puzzle-ish game that plays better on other platforms. Not an auspicious beginning, perhaps, but at least it's a realistic one. It appears I missed a play mechanic here (clearing rows by pressing down) due to the manuals to this game only being available in German and Japanese, so I will revisit this game in some capacity in the future to make a small note. Just a small one — the added mechanic makes it a little less difficult but doesn't fix the color ambiguity issue.

The series hits its 100th episode and to celebrate… uh, well, it's business as usual. Thankfully, this episode tackles a pretty good (if somewhat unfairly balanced) shooter by none other than Konami: Pop ’N Twinbee. This shooter originally appeared in Japan in 1990 as Twinbee Da! (pictured in the video); the European version showed up four years later and is almost impossible to find complete these days (hence the lack of European packaging photos).

A pleasant surprise this week, as one of the most charming game boxes to have appeared in some time contains… a thoroughly pleasant and enjoyable little game. Astro Rabby turns out to be a little-known Japan-only release that isn't a puzzler, isn't shoddily made, and isn't painful to play. It's a good-natured top-down platformer for flexible controls and a decent difficulty curve that steadily ramps up from breezy to brutal. Not a classic, but in a way it's better than a masterpiece: It's just a fun little diversion with no frills and no expectations attached.

Nintendo's lone first-party straggler for Super NES's 1991 post-launch period lands in the form of a game by TOSE and Tonkin House that hews so closely to Tennis for NES and Game Boy that it really does deserve the name "Super Tennis." A fast-paced if visually unexciting take on the sport, Super Tennis finally rectifies the shortcomings of its predecessors by incorporating a full array of single- and multiplayer options, as well as a complete, long-term, bracket-based tournament mode. You might say it's… smashing. Special thanks to Steve Lin of the Video Game History Foundation for providing the game and packaging for this video retrospective.

An in-depth look at one of the most unique games ever to appear on Super NES: The god-sim/RPG/platformer ActRaiser. With its incredible soundtrack, challenging action, and low-calorie simulation mode, ActRaiser manages to be far more than the sum of its decent individual components. It stands as a classic for the ages, and this retrospective attempts to explain why. Special thanks to Steve Lin of the Video Game History Foundation for providing access to the packaged copy of the game for this video.

A look at Nintendo's very own console conversion of Peter Molyneux's god-sim, Populous. Wedged in between the superlative SimCity and the excellent ActRaiser, Populous admittedly struggles a bit to hold its own among its peers. But all credit goes to developer Infinity, who did a bang-up job with the conversion and used this as the cornerstone of a brief but well-intended career transforming Western PC games into forms suitable for Japanese gamers.

Strategy and simulation powerhouse Koei makes its debut on Game Boy with… a strategic simulation game. Nobunaga's Ambition does a pretty respectable job of bringing a huge PC war simulation into a tiny, monochrome format. As the world's first proper handheld simulation game, it's pretty respectable, if not precisely something you'd want to spent a lot of time with today.

Our second Game Boy Gundam game, and can you believe it? It's also not very good. This one is bad in a boring, predictable way: It's a game adaptation of a video series designed in the mold of Dragon Quest. You'd think an obvious formula for success as a video game would present itself based on that pretext, but…

It's here: The first true Game Boy collector's grail piece (and just in time for our recent "collector's bubble" episode of Retronauts - https://retronauts.com/article/699/ep...). Fish Dude is not a good or memorable game, but it is very, very rare and expensive. Which is… something, I suppose. Anyway, to mark the occasion, I tried to make this episode a little different than usual. Please enjoy.

Another HAL creation: Hole In One Golf follows up on the company's landmark MSX take on the sport, adds in a Japanese golf legend, removes the golf legend for good measure, and allows players to explore a single course with exhaustive detail (via an isometric perspective that just might have served as the basis for Kirby's Dream Course).

A strange and obscure little U.S.-only release for Game Boy in which the protagonist of equally obscure NES game Thunder & Lightning turns monsters into peaches and eats them. Developed anonymously and tied inexplicably to a completely unrelated game, this one's a real mystery. Sadly, the gameplay turns out to be far less interesting than the enigma surrounding Mr. Chin's existence.

Finally, a great-as-heck third-party Super NES game. Capcom's U.N. Squadron marks a welcome turnaround from the bumpy unpleasantness of Final Fight, with smoother gameplay, fewer conversion compromises, and smart gameplay tweaks to improve replayability. It's a high-water mark for Super NES shooters, and a game worth hunting down all these years later.

By request of patron David Morton: A look back at Kirby's Dream Course. Yeah, it's way out of sequence, but that's the law that was laid down. A clever if unforgiving combination of Kirby and golf, Dream Course has flown under the Super NES fan radar for decades now. With its fresh re-release on the Super NES Classic Edition, now seems like the time to reevaluate the game… especially since its cruelest elements can be mitigated with liberal use of the Super NES mini's save states.

The Game Boy takes up its mantle as the true successor to the NES (sort of) with the first of several Nintendo R&D1-developed sequels to classic NES games: Balloon Kid, a greatly expanded (and great) reworking of Balloon Fight's "Balloon Trip" mode.

Jaleco's long-running Ninja Jajamaru-kun series finally makes its debut in the U.S., and... it's very unfortunate that it does so in this form. Jajamaru's first portable has some interesting moments, but it's a total mess on the technical side and features some weirdly bizarre and hostile design choices. Oh well.

Please note: This game incorporates a flickering strobe effect that appeared to create a fifth shade of grey on Game Boy. However, in this high-definition/60fps format, it could cause issues for those with sensitivity to flashing, high-contrast color.

SunSoft gives Europe an unremarkable but perfectly decent adaptation of formula one racing… roughly two months before Nintendo releases its own revolutionary take on the sport.

The creme de la creme of the chess world? Well, maybe so far as Super NES chess games go; it's easy to come out on top when you're the only one in the running. But The Chessmaster doesn't leave much of an impression. There are better chess simulations, and more satisfying chapters in this particular series, on other platforms. This is like the board game equivalent of a vintage franchise sports game: It probably sold well to a general audience at the time, but it offers very little return for anyone today to return to it.

It's Space Harrier action in an F-Zero wrapper with this forgotten shoot-em-up by Nintendo mainstays HAL. A slight game, it's nevertheless memorable for its trippy visuals… and notable for its secret true-3D mode.

Unfortunately, the visuals in this game don't really play well with YouTube's compression algorithms… so, my apologies for the rather rough look of this episode.

Capcom arrives half-heartedly on Super NES with a deeply flawed conversion of arcade smash Final Fight. Missing stages, characters, and play options, this 16-bit debut looked nice in magazines, but didn't play nearly as impressively as Nintendo's own releases.

Konami makes its Super NES debut (and so soon on this channel after their first NES game!) with the third Gradius game, and the second to make its way to the U.S.: Gradius III, a verrrrry sloooow adaptaaaation of a murderous arcade game. While it doesn't show off Nintendo's shiny new Super NES hardware to the most flattering effect, the constant, all-consuming slowdown actually does have its share of beneficial side effects....

We resume a retrospective journey through the Super NES's 1991 U.S. lineup with this wonderful adaptation of the Maxis PC classic SimCity. Developed by Nintendo and Intelligent Systems, SimCity showed off a different side of the Super NES.

Also in this episode: An explanation of the change in name from Mode Seven to Super NES Works.

A real blast(-off) from the past here, with Pack-In Video's oddball rendition of classic computer simulation Lunar Lander... or more likely Atari's arcade rendition of the concept. There has never been another adaptation of Lunar Lander quite like this before, though... especially the parts where you dodge aliens while plundering the moon's resources.

And here we arrive at last at the end of NES Works 1986. Thankfully, we've saved the best for last. Gradius turns the tables on the NES's woeful early third-party days, presenting a cutting-edge contemporary arcade shooter with a minimum of compromises. It's not arcade-perfect, but it's every bit as satisfying as the original Gradius — a promising sign for new NES publisher Konami, who jumps immediately to the front of the console race with this debut release.

Capcom brings its NES development in-house with its third NES release, Commando, and nothing will ever be the same again. A fairly straightforward shoot-em-up offers a perfect trial run for the factors that will help propel the company to the upper echelons of NES development: Rock-solid technical underpinnings and home-exclusive content.

The second (and, as it happens, final) Micronics/Capcom joint for NES falls upon the cruel arcade torture implement known as Ghosts ’N Goblins. While it's a more technically competent port than 1942, the trademark Micronics jank makes a tough game even more brutal. You'll notice this video doesn't contain any footage captured beyond the second boss, and that is because I have better things to do with my life than dash my brains repeatedly against the torture implement that is this game. Anyway! Things get better from here.

Yet another old PC game makes its way to Game Boy: First Star's Boulder Dash. It loses the custom level builder and gains a new art style, but otherwise this is a faithful (and perfectly decent) conversion of a computer gaming classic for the small screen. Again.

By Patron request, here's a "controversial game": An unlicensed and slightly smutty American game that became straight-up porn when Japanese publisher Hacker International got ahold of it. And to further tempt the fates, they sold it with packaging that made it look like a Mario game starring Princess Peach. Some men want to watch the world burn; myself, I'd settle for burning this janky excuse for an NES game.

Special thanks as well to Steve Lin and the Video Game History Foundation for lending me access to this rare game in order to create this project video!

One of the all-time great Nintendo third-party publishers makes its debut on NES here, but this release — produced by infamous low-grade development contractor Micronics — offers little to hint at the greatness we could eventually come to expect from the Capcom name.

Yet another game by TOSE and Bandai based on a Japanese manga and anime property. Oh noooo! But wait. Ninja Kid is actually... kinda good? Like, legit fun in an old-school arcade sort of way, with varied level objectives and play styles, and a pretty decent power-up system. Maybe this whole "NES third party content" thing isn't doomed to trash-tier video game hell after all....

The Game Boy gets its third baseball title, unsurprisingly making the so-called "thinking man's sport" also the most prolific "gaming boy's sport" as well. You may know this franchise better as R.B.I. Baseball, but since that particular bit of branding had become associated with unlicensed provocateurs attempting to undermine Nintendo's lock on the U.S. market, publisher Bandai unsurprisingly went with the different title.

By request, a look at another cult favorite Konami game that never made its way west. Arumana no Kiseki (The Miracle of Almana) will remind you of a lot of different Konami NES games... and of a certain movie franchise, too. It's not quite polished enough to have made its way to the U.S., but you can definitely see Konami's 8-bit prowess at work here.

Konami follows up on its popular NES conversion of EA skating sim Skate or Die with a game that has almost nothing to do with the source material aside from the use of skateboards. While not an entirely successful game, thanks largely to its memorization-heavy design, it is at least one of the more interesting original projects we've seen for the platform so far.

Don't let the weird name fool you: This is totally a Bomberman game. In fact, it's one of the first Bomberman titles to have evolved the series beyond the basic maze action design, incorporating an adventure element, an economy, and a smartly balanced customizable power-up scheme. Weird that such an important entry in the long-running franchise would be hidden away behind an unrelated name… but that's the choppy localization history of Bomberman for ya.

We wrap our look at the second wave of Nintendo's Black Box launch titles for the NES with a notable capstone: Gumshoe. Besides being one of the most inventive concepts for a shooter ever, Gumshoe also has the distinction of being the first NES game designed exclusively for the U.S. (and European) market. Too bad it's so punishingly difficult most American kids never saw the ending! Or even stage 2!

A shamelessly derivative Nintendo game? Yeah, these things do happen. But even if Balloon Fight looks suspiciously similar to a certain other game, it has a heck of a legacy... and it's totally a blast, thanks to its fluid, fast-paced action, two-player co-op, and fantastic Balloon Trip mode. It's one of the good ones.

Nintendo's very first entry into the brawler genre was in some respects a landmark work, but it doesn't hold up well at all more than 30 years later — especially in light of the fact that Nintendo released the NES version of Kung-Fu a few months prior in the U.S. Whoops!

Donkey Kong bids a surprisingly hasty adieu to the console expressly designed to showcase his exploits. Donkey Kong 3 would be the final game dedicated to the big ape util 1994. And not really the most impressive swan song.

Mario recovers from his brief descent into villainy and lays down the groundwork for the platforming concepts that would make him (and his green sibling) long-term fixture of video gaming. But the difference in timing between the game's arrival in Japan and the west created a tremendous gulf in public perception of this arcade classic...

A look into the history of a game that almost was something completely different, in a sense: Nintendo's Popeye, the held-over take on the arcade platformer that Donkey Kong was meant to be. Sort of. It's an interesting slice of Nintendo history, as we wrap the NES releases of the company's trio of Famicom launch titles.

The companion piece to Donkey Kong, this pint-sized (not really) sequel showed up on both Famicom — and NES three years later! — day-and-date with dad. The two make a tidy pair, though for various small reasons, Jr. doesn't quite live up to his vaunted papa's legacy. These minor quibbles don't keep Nintendo's second chapter in the Mario and Donkey Kong legacy from meriting some praise, though!

A legendary developer still finding its voice gives us a remarkable, but not particularly good, take on table tennis. Somehow, a ping pong game from 1990 arguably offers players even less control over the action than Pong did! But it looks pretty nice, at least.

This video is made possible through support on Patreon: www.patreon.com/gamespite

More songs about buildings and kongs. The origins of Donkey Kong, and how his NES version came about and compared to other adaptations of the game. And now we can move along to... other Donkey Kong games.

The first entry in a two-part look back at the most important game of Nintendo's early days, Donkey Kong. This half of the retrospective focuses on the design of the game and why it stood out from its arcade peers to become such a phenomenon.

Note: I realize there's an error in the script (re: Space War), but I was unable to go back and correct it — I'm currently suffering from a severe cold and have no voice. (It's a lucky break that I recorded the voiceover for this in advance.)

Yep, it's another Game Boy release based on an anime, and you know what that means: The game itself is pretty lousy and forgettable, so the episode mostly consists of me waxing rhapsodic about the property itself. Patlabor was great, and deserved a MUCH nicer interactive adaptation. But such is the world we live in.

The second racing game developed by HAL for Nintendo would be the first to reach the U.S. — and little surprise, as Mach Rider more than any other NES launch title seems deliberated crafted to appeal to the tastes and interests of American gamers!

For more on the history of the NES check out goodnintentions.com — and please considering using Patreon to help make possible these videos (www.patreon.com/gamespite) and the Retronauts podcast (www.patreon.com/retronauts)!

Nintendo's third creation for their 16-bit console took an atypical approach for the company at the time, presenting players with a highly technical flight sim that demanded consistent, precision mastery of its varied mechanics. There's not really all that much game here, as the developers strained to exceed the boundaries of their new console, but good luck seeing this brief flight school course through to the end!

Welcome to Good Nintentions 1986! Sort of! Donkey Kong Jr. Math's release date is the subject of some uncertainty, but it's hard to imagine much of anyone cares. There's not much good about this game, which in some ways feels as though it was shipped before being completed. The very definition of a quick-and-dirty attempt to fill out a release schedule with a game nobody ever asked for.

Join me on an exciting journey beyond the realm of my comfort zone for this look at a vintage war game best enjoyed by two people. Power Mission (or rather, "Power Missiøn") was a reasonably decent strategy game that would be immediately overshadowed by superior and better-promoted takes on the genre, including Nobunaga's Ambition and (in Japan) the precursor to the Advance Wars series. A perfectly acceptable genre piece lost forever to history…

By request of David Morton, a look at a game that wouldn't normally have come up in Good Nintentions: Konami's Bio-Miracle Bokutte Upa. A charming little platformer, the most fascinating thing about it may be the way it deftly combines elements from games that had come before it while also including mechanics and aesthetics of classics that would show up months or even years after its debut. Not bad! Definitely worth tracking down on Wii Virtual Console.

It's the end of the NES hardware retrospective as we know it, and I hope you feel fine. You'll probably feel better if you catch up with the first two chapters first...

A quick interstitial episode of the Good Nintentions origin story before we move along to the main event. The Advanced Video System never actually made its way to market, but it nevertheless existed as a key link between the Famicom and the NES and deserves study. Part 3 will be along sooner than you expect!

And that about wraps it up for Super Mario World. Thanks and good night, everyone. I promise I won't do another multi-parter ever, ever again. Well, campaign promise. Which is to say: Expect a multi-parter for Final Fantasy II in a few months.

(Check out parts one and two before watching this video — it'll make a lot more sense that way!)

The second part of this rather overlong examination of the Super NES's key launch title looks at the importance of the mighty Cape power-up, and how Super Mario World embodies the concept of "Nintendo-esque." Look for the final part in this retrospective next week! (I hope.)

Well, well, well, what have we here? It's a game by legendary developer Nihon Falcom! Don't get excited, though — this is a port of the very first game by Nihon Falcom, Dragon Slayer, which was six years old by this point but felt far more ancient than that. The action RPG had come a long way since Falcom staked their claim on the genre in 1984, and considering you could play the likes of its own successors Legacy of the Wizard and Ys on NES and Famicom by this point, this clunky and dated game is a hard sell. It has a certain appeal, but since it consists of a lengthy quest and lacks any option to save progress, it makes for a pretty awful Game Boy release. Oh well!

If F-Zero was Nintendo's Super NES tech showcase, Super Mario World showed how their developers could expand on existing game concepts with the new hardware. This first half of Mode Seven's Super Mario World retrospective looks at the history of the game, where it sits in Nintendo's c.v., and the enormous impact on the adventure's design of a little green dinosaur.

As the title might hint for those paying attention, what we have here is a Shanghai-style game about matching mahjong tiles. It adds a few unique elements and ideas, but ultimately feels less interesting as a game than as a historical footnote to a completely different game platform.

First-person head-to-head 3D maze combat comes to Game Boy! I'm so, so sorry. Bionic Battler means well, but it sure does flop hard. With stiff and limited controls, choppy graphics, and some very weird and out-of-place music, this is a bizarre little game best left to the dustbin of history.

The first part of a look back at the NES hardware itself begins with the origins of its Japanese version, the Family Computer — Famicom for short. This episode adapted from the text of Good Nintentions 1985, with special thanks to Steven Lin.

A wonderfully charming and immensely playable little puzzle-action game from Natsume. Yes, even on a system loaded down with games like this, there's still breathing room to appreciate exemplary renditions of the genre. Definitely one worth tracking down. (Special thanks this episode: Armen Ashekian.)

Wow! It's a really bad fighting game on Game Boy. Who'd have guessed? This Japan-only game adaptation of a Japan-only manga and anime series from the '80s offers nothing of value for anyone unfamiliar with the franchise, or in fact to anyone, so feel free not to bother hunting it down. Let it lay forgotten in history.

This game marks the entry of new publisher Yutaka into the market. And by "new" I mean "a crummy old publisher under a new name." Can you guess which one? Do you even care?

Note: I realized after this episode was posted that the reading of the title's kanji characters found in most online English-language resources, while correct, is not the actual reading the game gives. So it's "Meioutou Kessen," not "Meikoushima Kessen." My big dumb American mistake. But, arguably the same level of quality control the game itself demonstrates, so... fitting.

You've seen the NES lineup for 1985, when the console debuted in America. Now compare those sixteen games to the nine contained in this episode, which explores the equivalent launch time frame for the console's Japanese birth as the Family Computer back in 1983. How different were the early days for the console in its two biggest territories?

This is it: Super Mario Bros. Everything about Good Nintentions 1985 has been leading up to this grand, climactic moment, the generational leap that justified the NES and set it apart from everything that had come before. Also, it's a pretty rad game in its own right, let's not forget that. Alas, at a mere 23 minutes long, this video doesn't begin to do the game proper justice.

By patron request, a follow-up to last week's look at Super Mario Bros. in the form of a look at the sequel to Super Mario Bros., more or less. Yume Kōjō Doki Doki Panic is probably the best-known Famicom Disk System release of all time, and all because its relationship to Super Mario Bros. 2 rendered countless American childhoods a lie...

Special thanks to Joseph Wawzonek for the episode.

Hey kids, let's celebrate 25 Super NES by kicking off a (very infrequently updated) new video series: Mode Seven. Like Good Nintentions, it'll be a chronological survey of U.S. releases for Super NES, sequenced according to Nintendo's official launch dates.

This first episode, fittingly, dives into a game built entirely around this series' namesake: F-Zero, the futuristic racing game designed as a showcase for the Super NES Mode 7 feature. Convenient!

Travel back to a time when "radical" was an innocent expression of joy rather than a loaded tool of political rhetoric. When America's hearts belonged to a quartet of adolescent amphibians named for Renaissance masters. When you could sell a portable console with a phoned-in belt-scroller. Yes, let's travel back to summer 1990 and the last days of the Foot Clan.

A classic Mac and PC puzzler takes up residence the handheld realm and finds itself an unwelcome arrival in an overcrowded neighborhood. "We already got too many of your kind! Go back to your posh world of 16-bit color and mouse interfaces!" shouted the residents of Game Boy's portable puzzle slum, pelting this unwanted intruder with tomatoes (much to Kwirk's horror).

Hmm, a Game Boy release called "Puzznic"! Whatever genre could this game belong to?

Props to Taito for even caring about this one when they could have just asked TOSE or Nova Games to barf out some rough, rushed port, but I'm having a hard time finding it in my heart to do likewise.

Ah, now here's a combination to strike fear into the hearts of mortal man: Nova and Banpresto. But soft! Ranma 1/2 may be no staggering work of heartbreaking genius or whatever, but it's a lot better than you might expect from this dire duo. Glory be.

The good-but-not-amazing Nintendo puzzler gets a curiously compromised Game Boy version, which established a world first: Namely, the first game to debut day-and-date on both a console and a handheld system. They're essentially identical, barring some unfortunate visual changes and the lack of title screen music and intermission graphics in the Game Boy release.

I would like to say this is some brilliant, undiscovered sequel to Taito's wonderful New Zealand Story, but that would be a lie. This odd little game is instead a remake of an old computer game dusted off to launch as a tie-in with a family-oriented Japanese film by the same title. Clumsy, ugly, and simplistic, there's very little to recommend about this game. Avoid it and stick with New Zealand Story instead.

As a Patreon request, we've skipping ahead a couple of years for a quick look at one of the true technological marvels of the Game Boy library: Argonaut's X, a first-person, free-roaming, mission-based, ground and air shoot-em-up. While I'm saving a proper dissection of its game mechanics for whenever we get to Game Boy World 1992, there's more than enough history and trivia surrounding this release to make for a meaty discussion.

(Special thanks to David Morton for this episode request.)

A startlingly good conversion of the classic arcade brawler (or the NES version of it, anyway). But there's one tragic flaw keeping this otherwise excellent port from sitting within Game Boy's top rankings...

The very first third-party release for NES... mostly. Developed by Irem, based on an Irem arcade game, yet published by Nintendo in both Japan and the U.S., Kung-Fu is something of an edge case. Whatever the case, though, it sure did look awesome back in 1985, with its bold graphics and proto-fighting-game mechanics.

Mario's final outing before his first adventure in the Mushroom Kingdom has little to do with any other game he ever starred in, and yet feels very much like an evolutionary step in the character's development.

This cooperative platformer occupies a somewhat unfortunate place in history: It attempted to build on the concepts of the original Mario Bros., but it arrived just before Super Mario Bros. set a new standard for run-and-jump action. It's an amusing and quirky game, but its awkward controls leave it completely overshadowed by the masterpiece that was to come.

The second half of 1990 gets rolling with the handheld debut of world-class developer/publishing combo Tamtex and Irem. Don't expect anything on the level of Metal Storm here, though; Shisenshou was a visually painfully conversion of a softcore arcade game (minus the smut, of course). Not really getting off on the best foot, alas.

Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, this motocross game is anything but your typical racer — with its side-scrolling design and emphasis on physics and jumps, it feels almost like a rough draft for Super Mario Bros. Ah, but there's a dark and terrible secret lurking in Excitebike, hidden just off the main menu... a sign of just how much Nintendo was making up the NES launch as they went along.

Gyromite's companion release constitutes the only other game ever officially designed for R.O.B.... and, frankly, we'd all have been better off if R.O.B.'s library had begun and ended with Gyromite. Seemingly rushed to production (the game evidently hit Japanese store shelves a month after completion), Stack-Up makes poor use of R.O.B, of the NES, and of players' time and money. At least the music is catchy.

Skipping a bit out of sequence for this one, as we jump ahead in the NES chronology to perhaps the most fascinating game to arrive in the U.S. in October 1985. Gyromite may not have been influential the way Super Mario Bros. would be, but it played an essential cornerstone role in Nintendo's eventual conquest of the U.S. And, believe it or not, when you play the game the way it was designed to be experienced — with a complete R.O.B. setup — it can be surprisingly entertaining.

For more on the history of the NES, check out www.goodnintentions.com. And please consider supporting this series through Patreon to make in-depth analyses like this possible: www.patreon.com/gamespite