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Every Monday I look at Nintendo’s Virtual Console releases. Sometimes I sigh in disappointment, sometimes I jump for joy, and other times I hadn’t even heard of the stuff they’re putting on there. Each time, though, I ask myself, “Why isn’t Super Mario RPG on this thing yet?” It looks like I won’t have to ask myself that anymore.

The classic SNES Squaresoft/Nintendo collaboration, Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars, is on its way to the Japanese virtual console in June. The game will cost 900 Wii Points as opposed to the typical 800 for SNES titles, but the extra 100 points is something I’d gladly shell out.

There’s little doubt of this coming to the US Virtual Console. Super Mario RPG was very well-received in its original release. The game has also been given an updated rating of E (for Everyone!) as of 2006 to replace the old Kids to Adults rating. All that’s left to do is wait.

[Siliconera]

Oh i remember this game, it was a friggin’ weird experience. Why? Well, for starters, the Ren & Stimpy cartoons are weird as they are, sometimes they make you laugh, other many times they make you feel uneasy, be it the plot that makes you go “What?”, the classic and gross super-detailed zooms, or the thing as an attempt to destroy the children of the 90’s. Well, whatever the reason you decide, Nickelodeon thought it would be a good idea to promote the series on the video game universe, and surprisingly this franchise has 10 games on different consoles and handhelds. Way to go!

Although the SNES had more than one, Veediots is the one featured here on Retro Video. Why? Well, just because it’s the one I spent more time with and has a place in my heart. . .which I tend to keep locked tightly (*brrrr!!*, the memories!). It was developed by THQ in 1993 and as expected, the game consists of 3 random episodes from the series, one stage you’re Ren, the other you’re Stimpy. But fear not, even though they’re just 3 stages, they are difficult as hell! i remember I could barely beat the first level. Man, old games were so challenging it was enfuriating at times!

Here, evagames shows us the starting screen with the sampler of the second stage.

And just for the fun of it, here’s the ending. Now I feel good about never beating it, haha! (Video by Artificialraven)

Ahhh, 6th grade. .  . all the kids on town (and in the whole country!) had this moderate to dangerous addiction to Dragon Ball; not anime in general, but JUST Dragon Ball, its peak in the Z sagas. Kids would do hard to believe acts to get that one special edition poster, figure, hard to get Yokos (pogs), and in weird cases, an original DBZ SNES cartridge.

I was one of the lucky ones who had that rich friend who managed to acquire on of these last copies. Strangely enough, all the others who would get a DBZ game got the very same, DBZ Super Butouden 3. Weird coincidence.

The premise of the game is simple: The tournament takes place at the beginning of the Majin Boo Saga, with Fat Boo and Majin Vegeta as playable characters. . . and that’s it. You see, there’s not much to see in the past DBZ games, since most of us just cared if we could use Goku and make Kame-hame-ha’s like crazy. Ahh, when so little gave us so much fun.

ShiryuGL shows us a little of what this game offers: Great SNES graphics, nice music, and Big Bang Attack!

Released for the first time in 1987 by studio IREM, the R-type saga is the pioneer of difficulty in video game shooters. I mean, I’m a veteran in gaming, yet I still find it difficult to beat the first boss, oh I have been the touch of old-format games ;_;. Having the help of “Forces”, the R9 (name of the ship) can use the Forces plus power-ups appearing on screen, all this to defeat the crazy-shooting Bydo empire.

Having a huge and vivid legacy (9 games, last one appeared on 2007, from Arcade to Playstation 2)) and being on of the top 10 games in the difficulty sector list, R-type deserves a good Retro Video

Here, Gaian00 shows us the first stage of R-type 3 with a different soundtrack: The Tragic Prince, from Castlevania: Symphony of the night.

And for the fun of it, here’s a video from Lkynmbr24 showing us the 1st stage of R-type 3 for the SNES on Advanced difficulty. . .but playing in a very pacifist way…

Liked it? Yeah, me too, even though this game is hard as hell. Gotta keep practicing. . .

Lately I’ve been staying up to 3:00 a.m. just playing this game, Pang! for the SNES, and what better way to describe it! You pop huge bubbles with some kind of bolt gun, and try to keep away from them. Sounds easy, right? Well, you thought wrong!

Released in 1989 by our glorious CAPCOM for the Arcade, we have P1 (blue) and P2 (red) making either the World Tour mode destroying pang all over the globe, or the Panic mode, pop until you drop! Each level more difficult than the next, with more bubbles, even polygonal figures for you to destroy, these objects soaring the sky with their sole purpose of touching one of your pixels, leading to your death.

SeventhSun shows us the tip of the Iceberg of what Pang can become if you’re not careful. . .an addiction! BUBBLES! BUBBLES COMING FROM THE SKY!

See that? If you’re bored of the same ol’ Tetris or whatever puzzle game you’ve been playing, give Pang! a shot.

Hmm. I started to wonder why just Super Mario Bros. 3 was on Retro Video. Oh what a gargantuan mistake it would’ve been to have just that game here, taking into account that Super Mario RPG exists! Yes, that poor bastard child of what could’ve been an epic union between Nintendo and Squaresoft, before the Cartridge-to-CD issues, and before the male characters from the Final Fantasy universe started to look gayer as games went by.

A Mario game on the SNES, is there something i have to know? Well, yes there is. Aside from being the first time Mario used commands in an RPG interface, we have a nice story and even nicer music. Oh, and did i mention Bowser allies with you? Oh, that part of Shounen stories will always be loved by yours truly; there are 2 enemies, but when a bigger, stronger enemy comes in, the other 2 join forces to defeat the evil-er being. Never grows old!

Part of the magic of SMRPG is, besides the blah blah power one of friendship yiddy yadda is that you get to SUFFER the loss of one of the most famous characters: Geno. Ah, that small elf-toy with the most powerful of attacks (9999 damage is a lot in the Mario universe, y’know?). I cried in the end, and so will you!

User yamiquen shows us one of the funniest parts of the game, when you have to fight the Axem Rangers. Yeah, you guessed right, they’re Power Rangers but. . .all of them have axes. . .and they even have a Megazord! How cool is that?

Ahh. . .Konami. Always giving us excellent games; great franchises like Metal Gear, Dance Dance Revolution, Contra, and other great ones that, sadly tend to shine less than others. Axelay is a good example; a vertical/horizontal shooter for the SNES using an unorthodox weapon selection style, great graphics, and very fitting music.

Released in 1992 on the USA, the game went into what I’d like to call an underground game. A game that didn’t even appear on the lowest shelf of your local Toys’R'Us. Hell, I bet it would’ve been an more difficult feat to even see one at your even more local videogame shop (which tend to have a bunch of very underrated games [and obviously, before the Game$top plague]). I’m sorry to say that these gems of Video gaming are that: Gems; one must literally mine through mountains and mountains of old videogames, some of them good, the other lot awfully bad, but I assure you, getting a game this way, the reward seems brighter.

User TheMogX shows us a run of the bosses of the game on Hard mode. Impressive indeed.

Pretty neat, huh? This game gives me so many memories. . .Thank you, thank you, Konami.

You gotta give it to Nintendo on this one. If it weren’t for their severe fixation in introducing peripherals for the sake of innovation, we’d still be sticking with the normal D-pad, no cart wheels, no guns, no nothing.

Take this game, Lethal Enforcers, made by Konami in 1993, a FPS from the 1st generation of Arcade FPS, you know. . . 2D backgrounds with animated sprites shooting at you, instead of the now-standard 3d scenarios and characters like in Virtua Cop. Not only did Lethal Enforcers challenged the power of the SNES, but we players could experience the game like the arcade, with both guns bundled with the package (They named them the Konami Justifiers. . .).

puppykik wrings us this vintage video of a real Lethal Enforcers machine and real non-emulated gameplay. Pure awesome!

This guy really looks like a police officer from the 80’s going undercover, combine it with the music from the game and Bam! you get some sort of inbred Miami Vice.

Oops, sorry for my absence these last 2 weeks, but here I am again preparing something nice for this Monday. Retro Video Time! It came to me as a surprise that off all the Retro Videos I’ve made, Joe & Mac gets featured until now; well, there have been a lot of great games through time, but Joe & Mac is the granddaddy of Arcade Adventure games, yessir! There wasn’t a trip to the arcade where i wouldn’t play some Joe and Mac (some other places called it Caveman Ninja. . .go figure) and suddenly another kid shows up and we team up beating the crap outta raging dinosaurs.

Now, Joe & Mac had a very underrated sequel on the SNES called Joe & Mac: Lost in the Tropics, and I gotta tell you that the graphics, music, and difficulty for this game are simply awesome! The vivid parts have that classic trumpet sound, like if it were some kind of Caribbean Party, and the calm parts those tribal drums, very. . .you know, caveman-ly.

One thing I really liked about Joe and Mac is that they discarded the classic Idea of having a RED player. Remember? Mario, Knuckles, Yo-Noid (ugh!), and Ken come to mind. In this game Joe (1P) is GREEN and Mac (2P) is BLUE; besides it combines really well with the background, you now, water and grass were the ONLY things in the Caveman Ninja era.

Since it’s that underrated, few videos of it appear on the internet, so we have to manage this time with a short video by Miserere01 of the first boss of the game.

Ah, the memories. If you can get to play this game, please do so, you just gotta love that song when you get on top of a dino-sidekick.

Ah. . .The good ol’ 2d days, sprites ruled the vast infinite, Mario, Metroid, and virtually 99% of Snes and Sega games were sprites, no matter how real or 3D they. . .felt. Mortal Kombat was one of the first to go the extra mile and make it even more real, not like Pit-Fighters (Which in my opinion is a kick-ass game, too!), in which you had much lesser animation sprites, making players seem more like photo cardboards hitting each other.

Mortal Kombat was a pioneer for a lot of stuff: One of the first, if not THE first game on the SNES to receive a Mature ESRB rating because of Excessive blood and gore. I remember when I went to the arcade, Mortal Kombat machines were always crowded with older guys pulling fatalities and then laughing “Whooooa dude, look at all that bloooood. . .”, and even though we knew that all the subsequent Mortal Kombats would have recolored sprites of Scorpion and Sub-Zero, we always wanted to try that new ninja. . .

Here is a video by Devouring1 showing us the fatalities of MKII, enjoy! (try to lower the volume of your speakers, don’t want the neighbors to know you’re on a killing rampage).

Oh this is really an awesome game, in fact all Looney Tunes games of the 2D era were wicked awesome! Buster Busts Loose is the name and, as it says, buster is out to do a lot of crazy stuff. . . just because! Developed and published by Konami, it was released n Japan in 1992 and in the USA in 1993; there are six fun-filled worlds where Buster Bunny will dash, jump, somersault and be Luke Skywalker in order to finish his adventure. The genre is platformer and, being a game made from a TV animated series, you’ll find the soundtrack similar to the show’s.

Here, RavenoftheBlack impresses us with an excellent gameplay in level 4: The Football Game, where Buster acts as a quarterback and you have to make a touchdown to beat the level.

Ah, what awesome memories these are. . .when games were made challenging and sprites made almost the impossible to surprise us.

Running among some old SNES games I stumbled upon one that I had rented a lot back when VHS rentals were the shit and you could leave your window open without fear of some sinister man trying to invade and steal your privacy. Skyblazer was developed by studio Ukiyotei and released by Sony Imagesoft in 1994; with Super Mario World being a worldwide success as an Adventure-Platformer, these guys decided to give it a try, and they did it damn too well, in my opinion.

Story is nothing out of the ordinary,The Skyblazer hero (the guy you use) is searching for Ashura, the Lord of War, who had kidnapped the sorceress Ariana. Throughout the game you will be aided by an old man who’ll give you advice/passwords, and you will be able to gain spells throughout the game, with which you’ll be able to defeat Ashura.

This video by ShiryuGL shows the first “dungeon” of the game, Temple Infernus.

This game is what made the SNES such an awesome console; it had non-predictable games, even if they were of the same genre, like side-scrolling, or fighting. Skyblazer was a game in which, with just playing the first 10 minutes, you get bewitched by its awesome music, controls and graphics. A very good game.

Well, isn’t this gonna be a sweet Retro Video edition! You know what day is tomorrow, so I wanted to make it really really special. Special like covered in vanilla ice-cream, put some chocolate syrup on top and as finishing touch, a cherry.

As I said, the reason I’m posting Donkey Kong is not because it’s really Retro, or it is a Nintendo game, but because Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto, former Executive Producer for Nintendo, was the one that didn’t give up on Videogames when everyone else thought they were dead; he proposed Donkey Kong, a game where a damsel in distress is taken captive by a huge gorilla and the hero is going to get her back. . .no matter what. (*insert Oohs here*). Needless to say, this was just the dust from the tip of the iceberg that has come to be Nintendo as of now, the hero of that time being our famous Mario (although with some minor changes).

Released for the first time in 1981, the DK arcade was a total blast; it boosted the videogame industry as never before, giving hope to us gamers of today. Now, even though Mario was the hero, DK played a very important role too (and lots of drama later with the Rare issue) so here are videos from every Nintendo console generation until today, showing us how awesome DK was, is, and will always be!

Read more!

This Retro Video session is very special because I just remembered how awesome and hard this game was back in the good SNES era. It is also a rarity to find. The Turrican series started in 1990 and was made by programmer Manfred Trenz, and developed first for the Commodore 64 by rainbow arts. He also designed Turrican II some time later. Super Turrican series was developed by Factor 5 (Star Wars games on the GC, for example) and Super Turrican II by Ocean Studios.

This scroll-changing shooter can be a mixture of Super Metroid and Contra: The Alien Wars, with some sweet, SNES-exclusive Mode 7 effects (Easy to remember in games like F-Zero and Mario Kart; it looks like you’re moving but what moves is the background). You have power-ups, different weapons, and even a morph-ball thingy (thanks metroid). A lot of labyrinths are going to make you mad, specially on that water stage I couldn’t find the exit when I was 10.

The music, Oh the music, is composed by German composer Chris Hülsbeck, who has also written stuff for Star Wars Rebel Strike for the GC, among other games. His music from Apidya, Turrican and Giana Sisters was performed live by a full symphonic orchestra in 2003, 2004 and 2005 at the annual Symphonic Game Music Concert-series in Leipzig, Germany. In 2006, a piano arrangement of his music from Turrican 3 was performed at the fourth Symphonic Game Music Concert. Nice.

This video shows a person named ShiryuGL playing the 1st stage of this awesome game.

Well, of you can find this game, buy it, ask a friend for it, undust your old SNES and let the Turrican Experience(tm) begin!

Military training videos are supposed to be serious and solemn, most of all they are supposed to teach something, in this case about common office accidents . But for some reason I cant seem to take this video very seriously, I cant quite put my finger on what is it though. Perhaps its because its black and white and we’re living in a color HD video era, or perhaps its all the Super Mario sounds someone synced all over it.

A small amount of gaming slapstick comedy never hurts, ironically.

[Overtime Comedy]