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 On 02/05/2018 at 01:10 PM by Super Step See More From This User » |
Super Mario Kart was pretty impressive for its time and always makes me think of summer, when I played it most as a kid.
Mortal Kombat was released in arcades in '92, and while I didn't play one until at least '94, I was always surprised by just how out in the open places like Cici's and skating rinks let these violent titles be. So much was gramatically incorrect about what I just typed. Oh well. You know what I said.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is one I only played at kiosks, but that kiosk play is what made me jealous of Genesis owners. I loved how fast Sonic moved compared to Mario and Genesis was always the "cool" system. Its sleek black design was definitely a lot "sexier" than the grey brick SNES. Still, my older brother (and therefore I) had all Nintendo stuff growing up with NES, SNES and Game Boy and this is the only Genesis I can really remember playing growing up. Once. At a kiosk in a mall.
My neighbors had one, but we never played on it for some reason.
Oh, and I loved the really dumb cartoon Sonic that all the YouTube Poop memes were based on. Not the "good" SatAM one. The one we kids actually watched at the time.
I played this MK on SNES as well as the arcades, and remember it most of the original triolgy.
NBA Jam was an awesome SNES title. I think it released in arcades in either '93 or '94, but I'll just mention the SNES title being possibly my favorite sports title growing up, aside from Double Dribble on NES, Ten-Yard Fight on NES and NFL Blitz in arcades.
It looks dated as hell now, but the SNES Star Fox and its polygons looked amazing in 1993. We never owned it, but I would rent from the mom & pop store near our house often and it was another title you could rent from hotels. I don't know how often we actually did that, but I remember it and F-Zero being advertised as available in some places we stayed.
I rented this fewer times than its sequel, but I still rented it a few times.
This is Myst; a game I found AMAZING visually in '93/'94 when my computer teacher mom showed it off to me. I remember hating everything else about it though, so ...
Earthworm Jim was too hard for me growing up. There, I said it. I will only ever see that trash dump level with all the tires and chains in it. I think my brother rented it a few times. The cartoon show that came out a bit later was ok from memory though.
I rented this once and it made me cry cause I had no idea where to go. I now know I ran into an enemy at some point, cause I know what the battle screens look like. But I thought I was playing a slot machine inside of some tent while cops roamed the perimeter. It confused me and I hated it. In fact, it might be responsible for my dislike of JRPGs in general.
Cary has often mentioned the game came with a strategy guide for a reason. That makes me feel a little bit better.
Killer Instinct was awesome. It looked really cool at the time and had a more gothic look than Street Fighter and I preferred the visuals to Mortal Kombat quite a bit. I forget if this one or Gold introduced ringouts, but I remembered the characters and general feel of this one in arcades and on SNES.
Honestly, Killer Instinct being on XBONE at launch was making me want one of those more than a PS4, which had basically nothing I cared about at launch. Funny to think about that now.
Another game that was graphically mind-blowing at the time, I remember loving just looking at the instruction manual to see all the cool CGI art work inside. I think it still holds up visually and gameplay-wise, despite some people that will tell you the opposite. Oh well.
I think Miyamoto was reportedly not a fan and thought it was style over substance? Well, 4-5 year old me thought it was one of the best SNES games, so he can't always be right, I guess.
EDIT: So, appreantly the Miyamoto thing was a rumor. I shoulda guessed.
Finally, THIS is the Mega Man game I grew up with. Lots of rentals of this one. I LOVED the futuristic opening with the motor bikes, the excellent visuals, the sweet soundtrack (climbing volcanoes to Flame Stag's theme is etched in my memory as one of the coolest video game experiences in my childhood) and the boss fights. My love of this game has a lot to do with presentation, but I did love the gameplay as well.
Mega Man 7 is another I rented a few times, but I think that will come up later.
Super Bowl:
Congratulations to the Philadelpia Eagles. I was happy to see them win, even though I'm not their biggest fan. No offense Tami or my roommate, but I got tired of seeing the Pats every year. I wouldn't have been upset if they'd won, but I'm still happy with this outcome.
What's funny is seeing all these memes about the NFC East teams all having Super Bowl rings that are being posted by division rivals of the Eagles as if everyone in the NFC East doesn't passionately hate each other. I'm a hypocrite and I know it, but it's still funny.
I didn't think the Halftime Show was near as bad as people on my Facebook were saying and I thought it picked up toward the end when JT went into the crowd. I get that it was mostly dancing to a backing track, but I thought the choreography and visuals were entertaining. Most of this stuff is pre-recorded and not really being done live anyway, so I was ok with them basically admitting that in the way the performance was done. Plus, it turns out there's a Prince song I actually like. I've always admitted Prince was a tremendous talent, but he was one of those artists where I go, "he's amazing, but it doesn't appeal to me at all."
I was actually in a cabin in the woods with my best friend and his girlfriend this weekend, so I only caught the latter half of the game after the puppy bowl, which is disappointingly mostly advertisements. At first, he described it as a bed & breakfast and I said no, because that's what I think of as a COUPLES' retreat. It made more sense when we got there, but there were still a couple times where it was like, "why am I here?" Espeically considering we still spent time watching TV, playing games, and on our phones. Oh well, it was a nice place, the golf cart rental was fun, and I learned not to play soccer after beer, cookies and hamburgers.
This was my favorite commercial from yesterday; I don't really know what all else played since I pretty much skipped a good chunk of the game and was doing laundry while my roommate was watching, but this is my favorite from what I saw:
Have a good day, everyone.
Huh, I was definitely on Morgan Freeman's Team Ice of the two. Was a pretty neat team up for ads though. My favorite was Danny Devito as the red M&M though. I just love Danny Devito.
I never owned a SNES or Genesis as a kid, but I still played a ton of Sonic 2 at friends and family's homes. Didn't really play the others until they got rereleased on future hardware.
The video has both of them, along with the teaser coming at the end. I preferred Dinklage's fast rap to Freeman's cover of Missy Elliot, but I liked both. Danny Devito was one I must have missed. I liked the Tide ads with the Stranger Things guy though.
I played a ton of SNES as a kid due to Blockbuster being a thing and my brother/parents allowing me to rent stuff for the system. There are actually a couple games on these Wikipedia release lists I've played but didn't play at the time, so they don't go in this blog series.
Such a great time the 90's was. Mortal Kombat in the arcades, Sonic was still cool, Playing Myst and not knowing what the heck to do and getting lost wandering around the island because I didn't know how to play it...good times.
Pretty much exactly my experience. lol I was so excited to play Myst because of how cool it looked and then immediately got frustrated upon actually playing it.
I also remember trying to win lottery prizes from Sonic Spaghetti-Os cans. Except I think they weren't spaghetti-o's they were kind of their own thing.
Oh gosh, what a couple of years! I've had a hankering to revisit the Mega Man X games recently.
Yeah, this was when most of the games I played during my childhood were coming out. I'd say '94 is when I actually started playing video games. MAYBE '93.
I remember getting a SNES and Mark and I playing a ton of NBA Jam. I also remember getting pretty obsessed with DK Country, giving myself blisters playing it so much. Still never beat it though. Gets too darn hard.
What's with the two products in one commercial thing. I've never seen that before. Also, Mark skipped the half time show (his place, his tv) in favor of some world championship of dog stunts. Ha!
PepsiCo owns both products so they'd still get a cut of all the money. My roommate also skipped half time.
DK Country definitely has its hard moments. Damn cart evels.
There was one with Mr. Clean and Tide or something. I wonder if they are the same company.
I managed the cart levels. It's the ice levels that drove me bonkers.
While I think the 80's had the best arcade games, the 90's certainly had the best console games.
Super Mario Kart is one of my top five favorite games of all time.
Never got into the Mortal Kombat games. The first movie was actually kind of good, though. Can you guess my favorite MK characters?
Only good thing about Sonic 2 is that Tails was in it.
My friend saw a demo of Star Fox in a store and called me and told me I had to get it. It was pretty mind blowing at the time.
Mega Man X is one of my favorite Mega Man games. I have it and played it to death back then. I only rented MMX2.
Earthworm Jim IS hard! It's more fun to watch than to play. I did like the cartoon.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who didn't like Earthbound. When I auditioned to review games for The Dallas Morning News, I had to review a game I liked and a game I didn't like. Since I was big into RPGs then, the review of the game I liked was Final Fantasy 6, and Earthbound was the review for the game I didn't like.
I remember Killer Instinct being everywhere but I didn't really get into it. I would have you guess my favorite KI character but I'm not sure I have one. So you can pick one out for me.
If Miyamoto really didn't like Donkey Kong Country, then he's at fault too since it's just imitating one of his most famous works: Super Mario Bros. DKC may not have been the most innovative title gameplay-wise, but it was still fun. When my brother Jeff was about a year old and could only say a few words, he saw DKC and liked it so much that soon after one of his first words was actually Donkey Kong!
I didn't watch the Super Bowl this year. I just didn't feel like supporting the NFL for various reasons. Plus I had to work. Hated missing the Puppy Bowl, too, but it was getting to be the same every year anyway.
What are the 80s arcade games, besides Pac Man? I think most everything I remember of arcades was released in the 90s.
I wouldn't rank SMK or any of its sequels quite that high on my personal list, but I can understand why you would.
I'm guessing Sonya and ... idk. I usually just guess female fighters for your favorites, and I forget who those are in MK, since even she was a last-minute add for more diversity in the first one. I saw the movie on Netflix recently and thought it wasn't necessarily a good movie, but it was GREAT fan service and at least fun to watch.
Sonic 2 is probably my favorite Sonic game. I disagree with the inclusion of Tails being its only redeeming factor, especially since I never play as him. lol
Yeah, Star Fox was mindblowing on SNES, and then Star Fox 64 is something that made me think, "we will never surpass these graphics." Funny how things change.
I'm somewhat the opposite on MMX and MMX2. I rented both often enough, but I definitely remember a lot more about 2.
Yeah, Earthworm Jim was just frustrating for little me.
Turns out, Earthbound actually released in the U.S. in '95. I didn't check the release closely enough on Wikipedia, which is already a bad source, so take these blogs with a grain of salt.
I'd say Jade would be your favorite KI character ... once again, only female one I can think of. She has a green outfit too, which I remember being a color you like? I think?
Apparently, the Miyamoto quote is that people will put up with mediocre gameplay if something looks pretty. A GameFAQs commenter said he was working on Yoshi's Island at the time and felt pressured to make it look similar to DKC? That doesn't make much sense to me. Again, grain of salt: http://www.ign.com/articles/2010/06/17/e3-2010-shigeru-miyamoto-likes-donkey-kong-country-after-all?page=3
So I guess he liked the game fine and some rumor got started cause of mistranslating. IDK. I kind of doubted it, but I'd heard it so often ... I'll update this blog.
80's arcades besides Pac-Man?!? Are you kidding me? :) Galaga, Dig Dug, Pole Position, Mappy, Marble Madness, Donkey Kong, etc.
In MK, I like Sonya, Reptile, and Jade because they wear green.
I looked up some characters in Killer Instinct. There's another character named Orchid who seems cool (and wears green), and one named Maya. And I forgot that Battletoads were secret characters in the Xbox One game!
I'm familiar with all of those save for Mappy and Marble Madness. I just never really know when something was released in arcades in 80s, 90s, 70s, etc. I should actually look into that more for this series.
And yeah, I got Orchid and Jade mixed up because they look really similar.
So Orchid is Killer Instinct and Jade is Mortal Kombat, right? I could've gotten them wrong myself.
Nintendo had some awesome arcade games in the 80s. Most of my favorite arcade games were made by Nintendo: Donkey Kong (the first video game I ever played, no less), Mario Bros, DK Junior, Popeye, and Punch-Out!! They also had arcade versions of a lot of NES games like Balloon Fight and Super Mario Bros.
See, I'm familiar with and have played all of those, but I wasn't alive in the 80s, so I forget when I'm just working off the top of my head.
Soooo third wheel you say? 
I didn't watch the game, I watched halftime so I could be angry at hologram Prince but it wasn't a hologram, JT put on a good show, and my old college band director works on the crew for SB Halftime shows. I also watched the last two minutes of the game because you knew Tom Brady was going to march the team down the field, but it didn't happen this time.
Mortal Kombat!!! On Sega it was ABACABB to get blood mode, and D, U, L, L, A, R, D to ge the mode where you can pick the level and other goodies. MK II I used to hustle freshmen for quarters at the local market. NBA Jam is the best and Killer Instinct, that was a game. Orchid's finisher was funny. This had to have been the time when 99% of the games I played were fighters.
Oh there was a code on Sonic 2 for Game Gear where on the third blink of either Sonic or Tails you hit 1 and Start you got some bonus or something.
Pretty much, yeah. It took some convincing and I still wouldn't have done it had he not paid.
I thought JT was fine but people were expecting Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, or Bruno Mars with RHCP. Since that didn't happen they all confused "pretty good, but not mindblowing" with "bad." I thought the performance was fine, but I wish they would have made it less obvious how pre-planned these are.
Yeah, my roommate was like "I don't think we (Patriots) can do it" once that Ertz TD went through and I was like, "Dude, have you watched your team?" But I guess he was right.
I never did play on Game Gear.
That was an awesome time in gaming. I played SFII for awhile, then got into Mortal Kombat. I had the censored SNES version of MKI and then I got the awesome for its time SNES version of MKII. I wasn't overly impressed with KI, though, I knew Nintendo wanted it as a sort of tech demo for the "Ultra 64." The announcer sounded like he was on a meth high. I used to hang around arcades playing MKII, KI, and Primal Rage. Still did the occasional SFII match. I also saw the first Virtua Fighter, didn't really get into that series until VF2, now it's my favorite fighting game series.
1994 was awesome in particular. I know everybody talked about Donkey Kong Country, but my favorite games of that year were Super Metroid and FInal Fantasy (VI) III. FFVI was my first Final Fantasy. I played it for 16 hours straight the first time I played it. My mother was pissed off at me for doing that. I think. My brain was pretty fried by that point. I was hearing the music when I went outside shambling around like a zombie. Fortunately we lived in the middle of nowhere so nobody was there to see me but my mom.
By far my favorite game of the time, though, was A Link to the Past. That game was absolutely incredible, and even my mom was impressed with it. Link's Awakening was pretty good, too.
You sure you're thinking of the original KI and not KI: Gold as far as N64 tech demos? I wouldn't be surprised either way, but there was an N64 game as well as the arcade and SNES titles in the series. I loved Primal Rage; guess Wikipedia did not consider that a "notable release." I should find a better source for this stuff and post any I missed at the end of this blog series.
I honestly really didn't like VF4 I think it was. The one on PS2. I'm still excited for 5's inclusion in Yakuza 0, but I always preferred Tekken and thought it was more fun.
I love Super Metroid now, but as a kid I mistook the box art having a dragon to mean it was a JRPG, and I've never been a fan of those so I passed. Man, I miss having the ability to play a video game for that long.
And I love Zelda now and really want to play Link's Awakening, but again, kid me just wasn't interested so it's left out of these blogs.
In KI's attract movies, they actually advertised it as running on the same hardware as what was then called the "Ultra 64" (a name they dropped because of fear of a potential copyright conflict with Konami, which had created a shell company called "Ultra Games" to sidestep Nintendo of America's limits on the number of games they could release every year). The game was made using Silicon Graphics workstations, and SGI was one of the main designers of the N64 hardware, but it was still a bit misleading of them. Cruis'n USA was a better representation of what the N64's graphics would actually look like. I believe they were originally planning to release it as a launch title for the Ultra 64/N64 when they wanted to release it in 1995 alongside the PS1 and Saturn, but the N64 got pushed back another year so they made a SNES version to try to tide people over and convince them to wait another year instead of buying a PS1. When the N64 did launch, they ported KI2 instead.
Huh. Didn't realize Gold was 2. I only played first KI in arcades and on SNES and Gold was a game I only ever played on N64.
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