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Title screens for made-up Nintendo games we’d like to see
06.06.2018
12:52 pm
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After the video game crash of 1983, it was Nintendo more than any other manufacturer that showed the way forward for video games. Today there is a whole generation for whom Nintendo Entertainment System games from the late 1980s that supplied the key formative experiences, with such homegrown hits as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. Unlike its main predecessor Atari, Nintendo was highly aggressive about pursuing licensed games based on movie and TV franchises, such as Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles, Batman, The Simpsons, and Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

A while back a blog called VGJunk created some amusing title screens for licensed NES video games that never existed.

In some cases (Alien) it’s all too easy to imagine what the gameplay might be, but in many of the others, it’s a little harder to imagine. Does The Shining have a level in Dick Hallorann’s bedroom? In Ghost World, is the final boss Blues Hammer? Does They Live have a no-fighting bubble gum mode? So many questions!
 

 
More of these delightful NES games that never were, after the jump…...
 

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.06.2018
12:52 pm
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If you played the old Nintendo ‘Friday the 13th’ game, this is the best thing you’ll see all day
11.05.2015
08:49 am
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The purple and teal Jason Voorhees Nintendo game figure that was introduced at the 2013 Dan Diego Comic-Con resurrected a great deal of interest in the 1989 Friday the 13th NES video game—considered by many to be one of the worst video games of all time.
 

 
The notoriously stupid, extremely difficult game has achieved a kind of fandom for being so utterly terrible and is held in the same sort of esteem that Atari’s infamous E.T. game is among vintage game aficionados. The fact that the Friday the 13th film franchise has so many die-hard fans insures its popularity, even if 8 bit purple Jason and his mother’s floating severed head aren’t exactly terrifying. And let’s not forget about that classic bum-out end screen:
 

 
The fans at YouTube channel Maga64 have created a faux trailer for an imagined movie version of the video game (complete with old-school VHS tracking adjustment issues) and they totally nail every inexplicable aspect of the gameplay (right down to the cleaver that looks like a toothbrush). If you are a fan of the movie series or the video game, this may very well be the funniest thing you see all day.
 

 
Via: ihorror.com. H/T: Mike Bracken

Posted by Christopher Bickel
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11.05.2015
08:49 am
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Lamenting the loss of the game manual
05.18.2010
03:15 am
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This Spawnkill editorial hits the nail on the head: game manuals were often cooler than video games themselves. Like record covers, and even CD liners now, game manuals have become a dead art. For those of us who grew up in the Nintendo era, but who lacked the resources to actually get a Nintendo, game manuals borrowed from friends were the next best thing, like a way to pretend you were playing the game. I remember long hours spent in the back of school buses imagining what video games must be like from the manuals other kids showed me, which were invariably more interesting than the actual experience…

Throughout those shining years of my childhood, purchasing a new game often meant thumbing through the pages of a mammoth tome detailing impending gameplay down to the letter. If I were stuck on a long car trip with a recently-purchased title, digging into that precious parcel and retrieving the manual was the first thing on my mind.  It was a way to game vicariously through a few simple, innocent pages, and one of the first ties I established to any game I had my heart set on playing through. Unfortunately, it’s also a familiar constant that gamers new and old can kiss goodbye with the decision to downsize the distribution of manuals entirely, spearheaded by Ubisoft, and perhaps many more companies to follow.


Call me old-fashioned, but the feeling of thumbing through the crisp (sometimes colored) pages rife with back story, notes from the designers, and detailed instructions on how to play gave me a real sense of anticipation. It was genuinely difficult to wait those few short hours until the final journey home at the end of the day to eagerly devour the content on the disk (or cartridge) inside. In some cases, being treated with some delicious fiction related to the title was something to look forward to as well, especially if you needed a little extra hype to fully enjoy the adventure about to unfold.

And let’s not forget the lovely serial numbers or copy protection that would require you to find a certain line or word in the manual to be able to install the thing. Good luck if you threw it away! But even now, as illogical as it would be to require a simple word or pass phrase as DRM, it was part of the charm that came with buying a new game.

(Spawnkill: Lamenting the loss of manuals)