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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)

After all these years following gaming through its many many forms (mainly Nintendo’s in the console area) there’s a time when you ask yourself: “Is videogaming worth all the things I do for the sake of it?” I could do other things, get other hobbies like:

-Building miniature ships inside of bottles.

-Have a pet.

-Go to night clubs and hit on random women. . .although studies say that a lot of these will be men.

You get the idea. So wonderful hobbies this world has for us. . .and most of us have decided to go into gaming. Well, I couldn’t be more satisfied.

Shigeru Miyamoto started it and incited a bunch of others who also created fascinating worlds and characters who give us that small spice of adventure, drama, and whatnot to our daily lives, giving us hope that we can do anything if we have the correct set of mind. But Mr. Miyamoto was first, and without his idea, I don’t really know what kind of human or animal would have been Mario (And yes, it is WRITTEN that the character who would rise videogames from the flames shall be called Mario!).

I only think that, with the release of Mario Galaxy this 2007, giving some hope for the Mario-solo franchise, this character is worthy of the yearly Retro Video compilation extravaganza!

First, we’ll start with the first game with Mario in it, Donkey Kong (Video by lfrage):

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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!

I can say with the utmost certainty and a smirk in my face that if you like Fighting games, you’ve played any KOF. You haven’t you say? Well, in that case you haven’t seen the sun in the last 14 years either!

The great KOF series, starting as a revival project for SNK’s “Art of Fighting” and “Fatal fury” franchise, featured a lot of familiar faces from the SNK world, Terry “Are-U-Okay” Bogard and Ryo Sakazaki (the true Ryu clone), just to mention two of them, in this new franchise that offered a better way to make big bucks: making it yearly.

But today the topic isn’t how Kyo’s looks are influencing the fashion industry in Japan or how Ash’s emo-gay looks and combos are the cancer killing the KOF franchise; this time we talk about the characters with the best story in KOF. Not the Yashiro team in the Orochi Saga, or the other Ash team fiasco in the 2003 saga, but the Psycho Soldier team (Kensou, Athena, and as of 2007, Momoko).

Released in 1986 for the Arcade, Psycho Soldier is a side-scrolling shooter, where you get tons of power ups and shields to destroy a lot of enemies invading Japan. As you may think, the shields are the famous 4-balls protecting Athena when she does her special power in the KOF series.

It is very important to note that this was the first arcade to feature a full-vocalized song by Kaori Shimizu. My, imagine all the stuff needed to do that in the 1980’s. Wicked. . .and you guessed right, the song is the Psycho Soldier Team song for the KOF game.

One last easter egg for the followers of the Soldiers’ adventures: When getting a certain power-up in Psycho Soldier, Kensou transforms into a dragon and Athena into a Phoenix (Connecting the dots, aren’t we?!)

Here, moffstarr shows us the first minutes of the game. I tell you, if you can play the game, do it, it’s lots of fun!

Very well, this Retro Video is quite special. Why, you ask? Ever seen Mario outside a Nintendo console? Well, I have, and it isn’t this game. Bonus points to the one who guesses which game I’m thinking about!

Mario Teaches Typing is the title of the game, and it’s basically that. Developed by Interplay and with license from Nintendo, it was created back in 1991 for the PC on MS-DOS, then released for PC and Mac in 1995. Mario goes through Super Mario Bros.-esque levels destroying blocks and stomping on koopas. But how? Each block and enemy have letters on them, so in order to make Mario move, just type the letter.

Swizzley shows us a little gameplay from level 1 and 3 from the game. Be careful though, you might want to lower the volume of your speakers since the audio devices for the music of this game are crap, but hey, you gotta give credit to a Mario game for MS-DOS. . .aww reminds me of the games I used to play in class.

As a curious fact, Charles Martinet didn’t do the voice of Mario for this game, it was done by Ronald B. Ruben.

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.

Portal is a really short game, groundbreaking and hilarious, but really short. However, having only recently beaten portal, in about 5 hours of playtime, this 30 minute speedrun is still pretty impressive. It is also pretty hectic so not only will you get spoiled if you see it without having beaten the game, you wont understand much. And while we’re talking about cake, how about a song? Spoiler warning again.

I just had to post it, for the people who are still alive.

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?

A sequel to Kite, one of my favorite anime movies of all time was announced a while back and even a shorter while back, about a week ago, the trailer was released. This is not news, but the trailer was tyrannously trapped inside the publisher’s website. So I took it upon myself to liberate it from its prison so you fine people could enjoy it without having to do the inhuman effort of clicking a link. So here it is, in all its glory with its crappy video quality intact. And if you haven’t seen kite, shame on you!

Oh yeah anime doesn’t get much better than high school girls kicking ass! Kite Liberator comes out somewhere in the first half of 2008.

The first time I heard about Wario, I thought it was some kind of Nintendo-esque joke. I thought “. . .clever how they only made the M upside down”. I even thought it was going to be just like any other villain of some game, like King Bob-omb from Mario 64, memorable, but just that.

Wario started on the GameBoy, following the success of Mario Land and Mario Land 2, Mario Land 3 turned out to be Wario Land. Somehow his games were either a success or Nintendo did everything possible to keep the character alive. Later he ventured into other games like Wario’s Woods, and became a stable member in the Mario Party franchise, also to mention a formidable adversary in Mario Kart and specially in the Mario Strikers series.

Blaziquen257 shows us the intro and the first level of the second game for this very unique Nintendo character, Wario Land 2, on the GameBoy.

Even if the game is fun and takes us into the depths of Wario’s character (and house), after watching this we can agree on 2 things:

Wario’s needs to hire an architect to make stronger walls to his house.

Having spare change scattered all around your house may only prove useful when you’re attacked by pirates.

And then you wonder why we get no respect.

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.

Of all the GTA mods this combination is one of the craziest ones I’ve seen so far, controlling the Lucky Star girls, shooting UZIs akimbo style, fighting armed Pikachu left and right and just when things start getting heavy in comes Doraemon riding on top of Metal Gear. The madness has just begun.

Oh yeah and some nice F-zero music at the end, to keep things interesting.

Thanks Blanc!

Reading our latest “A look Back @. . .” post, I have thought of one thing: “Damn, the Dreamcast was an awesome console” and Bam! Soul Calibur comes to mind. A 3D fighting game like no other; it was the first game able to conquer successfully the bulkiness of past 3D games like Virtua Fighter or Tekken (and its predecessor, Soul Edge) and gave us the fluidity of fast sprite games like Street Fighter Alpha 3. Adding to that a very balanced parrying movement and different attack techniques and and the infamous Ring Out scenarios and you have a nearly invincible game (graphics play a role, but even when comparing past generation games, graphics won’t beat gameplay. . .ever).

Add to this game some nice characters like Nightmare, Xianghua, Voldo, and Sophitia and you have all fan bases covered. Along the way we’ve seen Soul Calibur, then the near perfected Soul Calibur II (with Link on the Gamecube, version! How cool is that?!); advancing with some let-downs in SCIII, and preparing for the next two games of the franchise: Soul Calibur IV on “power” consoles, and SC Legends on the Wii. And even as we of the DDN community have discussed the comparative issues of these two games, it would’ve been nice to have seen SC IV on our Wii’s.

To your viewing pleasure, Alexfung23 shows us a great compilation of the game for the DC, with brief clips of its characters and fighting styles.

Great, now I want to play a Soul Calibur I don’t have because my brother lost it. ;_;