So this is just a quick look back at the awards as a whole, with a list of all the posts.

Best PSP Games
Best DS Games
Best Downloadable Games
Best Multi-Platform Games
Best Wii Exclusives
Best PS3 Exclusives
Best Xbox 360 Exclusives
Biggest Surprises
Biggest Disappointments
Games of the Year

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Just to clarify something here: the 3 winners are all games that won in other categories. And we strangely didn’t have a PC games category (I will hopefully rectify that next year), so no Starcraft 2 or other big PC-only titles will be seen here. Just a little note to everyone on this.

Anyhow, let’s finish up our Games of the Year awards. Here are our winners for the best games of 2010!

Actually, before talking about our 3 winners, there’s one very special game I really want to talk about. It was a game that couldn’t really fit in any other category, and therefore can’t realistically make into a winner in the Games of the Year awards, so I decided to at least have it as an honorable mention.

Honorable Mention – Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril

This game is notable for a few things. First… well, it’s awesome. A very well made game, with great music, good graphics and visual design, fun gameplay, and a GREAT challenge (not too unfair, but still very hard). Second… It came out on the NES. In an actual cartridge! It had a great-looking clear green cartridge, as well as a really cool instruction manual (and art by Guru Larry). That’s really cool, and gives us NES collectors/gamers something that we very rarely see beyond occasional homebrew ROMs or people randomly finding prototypes. Third… well, it was all made by one guy. Congrats Sivak. Not only making one of the funnest games of the year, but making it on the NES. Just awesome. We can’t have this as a winner, but I had to mention it. Oh, and there’s a sequel coming since this one did so well, I can’t wait.

Well, enough side-tracking. Without further ado, let’s name our 3 winners! All are great games, and all have very good reason to be on the list.

Donkey Kong Country Returns

What an awesome game this is. Not only a revival of a great franchise that was thought dead, but a really good revival, one that might even be better than some of the previous games in an already great franchise. Sure, the Kremlins aren’t back in action this time (we can hope for a sequel with the Kremlins though if this one does well enough), but the Tikis’ brainwashed animal army made for fun enemies to fight. The gameplay was great, the platforming was rock solid and required a lot of precision, the mine cart levels were EPIC, and the difficulty was very fair (with the addition of Diddy’s jetpack to make jumps easier, and huge amounts of lives). Oh, and it’s great graphically as well, with tons of details in the backgrounds and foregrounds, with the ability to go into the background in certain levels. And the now-cliché silhouette levels looks good as well. And it’s also a solid collect-a-ton, where finding everything isn’t THAT complicated since the game is seperated into levels. And you have a lot of levels and extra content. Truly one of the masterpieces of 2010.

Bayonetta

The action game genre has been fairly stale after DMC4, while being a great game, just didn’t do it for the masses (getting tons of really stupid complaints that applies to the rest of the series as well (reminds me of something *coughffxiiicough*)). Basically everything after was either bad God of War clones, REALLY bad God of War clones, God of War (which isn’t really good) and just bad games trying to be different. Bayonetta came during a time of suckage in the genre, and basically kicked its ass. Now THIS is what an action game should be like: fun to play, tons of crazy enemies and weapons, actually being fairly challenging and having a really fun main character. It even gives Devil May Cry 1-3-4 a run for its money, it’s THAT good. Just superb. I definitely want to see Bayonetta kicking more ass again, she’s a character with a lot of potential.

Vanquish

This was a bit of a harder choice, what with all the great games that came out this year. Go with 3D Dot Game Heroes’ great classic-style Zelda gameplay? Or Super Mario Galaxy 2 with all its huge improvements over the first one? Or a great underdog like ZHP? Or Wintrale’s or Dave’s suggestions of Golden Sun or Yakuza 3? But the right choice felt like it should be Vanquish. Vanquish was chosen for a fairly simple reason: It’s from a genre that’s generally not really fun to play, and takes it to the next level, showing that the genre doesn’t HAVE to be boring to play. Vanquish did just that for the Third-Person Shooter genre. Rather than going for the normal formula of “let’s make the game a really boring experience where you spend most of the time in cover and not give players any challenge” or the “let’s make this into a movie” route, it went with the “let’s make the main character a badass with a suit that enables him to blast through the environments at crazy speeds, give him some of the best use of bullet-time ever in gaming, and make the whole game play a bit more like an Action game than a TPS” route, which makes for a very fun, fast-paced game. It was a hard choice, but the fact that it’s one of the only fun-to-play TPS in the generation is reason enough to make it a winner for 2010.

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Releases on the virtual console have been few and far between lately on the Wii, almost has few and far between as I’ve been posting lately. Is it because they’re running out of good games to put on it? I highly doubt so. Only Nintendo would really know what the hell is going on.

I wrote most of this review a while back, so I’ll keep the old format, but from my next post, I’ll use the same system Jo started using.

But enough rambling. This week they released a NES/Famicom gem that hadn’t seen a release in North America. It was called Hebereke in Japan and Ufouria in PAL regions. It was featured adventure-action gameplay similar to games like Metroid, but overall took from all that was good about games from the NES era while also showing hints of more recent standards in videogames, like infinite continues and the ability to pick right back up where you last left (assuming in this case you wrote down the password, which you’ll probably won’t need as you can beat the game in one sit).

So was the 20 years wait in North America worth it? You know the drill, find out after the jump.

Developer: Sunsoft
Publisher: Sunsoft
Date of Release: August 23rd 2010
Platforms: Wii’s Virtual Console (originally on Famicom/Nes)

Genre: Action-Adventure (Metroidvania)
Rated E for Everyone

Story

I really didn’t pay any attention to the story intro, so here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Bop-Louie and his friends live in a world named Ufouria , The characters stumble upon a crater, in which his friends fall in. Bop-Louie climbs in, but suddenly blanks out. He finds out that he must find all 3 of his other friends, all of which suffer from amnesia and take on Bop-Louie as a threat.

The Japanese version had a very different story apparently and some different sprites for the character, which was common back then (see Doki Doki Panic/Super Mario Bros 2 US). It also had some weird alterations. I guess birds dropping dung didn’t make sense to the Europeans, so they changed that to 16 tons weights, which makes a whole lot more sense (it doesn’t).

But anyway, as you play the game, you need to free your friends, who join you into beating mini-bosses, getting upgrades and finding keys to the final boss.

It took me around three hours to get through the whole game on my first (and only) play-through.

Presentation

The game’s graphics are pretty good for an 8-bit game. It’s comparable to some other late NES/Famicom games.  The game sometimes runs into slowdowns when there are too many sprites on screen. I wish they wouldn’t emulate that kind of things in the virtual console, but again, I guess it’s the nostalgia factor. An on/off option would be great. But anyway, this isn’t a Virtual Console review; I’m 4 years too late for that. The slowdowns can be really annoying though, since they mostly happen during boss fights and can change the flow of the fight easily, in both directions. They can make a specific boss ultra easy or make it hell just because of it.
Other than that, the game has some great 8-bit music, which is always a great point for old school games, and it was a pleasure to be introduced to old classic 8-bit tunes.

The menus are a bit weird to navigate at first, but they work well once you get around switching from one character to another pretty often. As for the graphics and music, they’re your usual NES ones. Simple graphics, catchy chiptunes.

Gameplay

I want to keep this on the short side so I’m skipping ahead to gameplay. After freeing all your friends, you have access to four different characters with different abilities each. One can swim on the water and run on ice, one can swim under water, one is your run of the mill average guy and the last one is a ghost that can jump farther than the others. They also each get an attack upgrade and a few other boosts along the game.

Most of the game is spent exploring in a Metroidvania fashion, opening access to new areas and boss fights as you go along. Most of it is fairly easy and you’ll hardly have a problem going through most of the game.

There were a few challenging sections, but nothing really hardcore if you played any Megaman games, or if you played something along the lines of Battle Kid, Ufouria will be a cakewalk for you. It’s still a fun game to go through though.

Most of the first few boss fights are quite simple and will almost hold your hands, but a few of the last ones are mild, fun, challenges, so don’t be deceived by the first few encounters.

Overall

I feel that Ufouria is still one of the must-have on the virtual console, especially if you’re in North America, as it was a good title we didn’t get a chance to pick up back in the 90s.  It won’t come with the pure nostalgia dose buying a game like Excitebike or Super Mario Bros. 3 would provide, but it’s still has a good chunk of old school charm.

The story isn’t all that great and the ending is pretty dumb, but it’s definitely not why we played games back then.

Pros and Cons

Pros
- Fun (yes)
- Metroidvania style gameplay

Cons
- On the short side (3 hours to get everything done)
- Story is stupid, especially the ending

The Save Factor

When it comes to the save factor for this game, I don’t remember how much it cost me on the virtual console (I believe it was $5), but $5 does sound like the best fit for this game.

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Didn’t think that would ever happen. Here I am, reviewing a new NES game. It came out just a few weeks ago(as of the writing of this post), and it was all made by one guy, nicknamed Sivak (click here for his youtube channel). Yeah, when I heard about the game and saw gameplay videos, I was instantly excited for it. I mean, a new NES game in an NES cartridge, and it actually looked good? I had to play it. And what a nice addition to my continually growing NES collection too, which is now over 120 games big.

After a few months of waiting, it finally came for sale, and I got it within minutes, not long before it sold out.

Read on and see if Sivak made a masterpiece, or if was just a dud.

Developer: Sivak Games
Publisher: Retrozone
Date of Release: February 23rd 2010
Platforms: Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

Genre: Side-scrolling Platformer
Players: 1
No rating, but it would be an E for Everyone if it did

The cartridge itself
This is the first time I bought something from Retrozone. You can visit their website at www.retrousb.com for this game and a few other cool products (like a really cool looking NWC cart reproduction). So before talking about the game, I’ll talk about the package I received here. And just a note here, but their shipping prices are WAY too high. 12$ of shipping to send an NES cartridge? That’s BS.

Anyways… The cartridge is a clear green color and it looks really nice. It’s shaped just like actual NES cartridges, and feels similar. The plastic used for the cartridge is not cheap flimsy plastic, though I’d say a tad bit cheaper than on actual NES cartridges. Here’s a picture of what you get when you buy the game:

The game itself is made to work on any NES that has a 72-pin connector (NTSC, PAL A, PAL B, some Asian Systems), as well as clone systems. Unless the connector in your NES is in really bad condition, the game will work 100% of the time. If it doesn’t work in one shot, just press the reset button on the NES, until the Ciclone chip isets itself to the region your NES is, and afterwards you’ll have no problem with it. If it somehow still doesn’t work after resetting the NES a few times, buy a new 72-pin connector and replace it (it’s REALLY easy). I have a new 72-pin connector on my NES, and the game has always worked perfectly. Good stuff.

This game also comes with an instruction manual, and I think it’s pretty cool. This is from the first sold print of the game though, and there are a few minor printing errors, though later batches I think have it corrected. The manual itself is pretty nice. It details the story, powerups and enemies, and it has that old-school feel to it. And it includes a notes section to write down passwords and such. Not the coolest NES manual out there, but very nice nonetheless.

Overall it’s a nice product. It looks good, it plays perfectly, it comes with a dust cover which helps, and the manual is a fun addition. The only way to make it cooler would be to have a box, but that would have made the game cost more.

Presentation
Being on the NES, the game obviously sports 8-bit graphics. While the game looks a bit repetitive, but that’s not to say that it looks bad. There’s a lot of visual variety, with each area in the game looking different enough from the rest to be recognizable. Different backgrounds, the tiles making up the walls look distinct, some have animation going on, stuff like that. There’s never too many things on screen, but at the few times where there are, there’s never any slowdown, which is really nice. The character design is incredibly simple. Timmy, the main character, is just a simple square head with a tiny green body and balls for hands. Similarly, the enemy design is also very simple: balls, lemons, round things with a big eye, it’s never too complicated, but the enemies are actually quite detailed. The bosses on the other hand look really cool. They’re a lot more detailed than the average enemy, and generally a lot bigger, with some taking half the screen.  The animation is incredibly simple, with almost everything having no more than 3 frames of animation. Some things don’t even have 2. That might seem lame to modern gamers, but it’s pretty good and fits perfectly with the gameplay. Overall the game looks really good for an NES game. Not the best on the system, but it’s definitely up there.

The graphics are nice and simple

Sound-wise, the game uses the NES’ sound chip perfectly. The music (you can hear one of the tunes on the game’s trailer) sounds really good. It’s all original music written by Sivak, and there’s not much I can complain about. Each tune, except for the save room music, is nicely composed, featuring nice melodies, cool engaging rhythms, and nice backing sounds. If it would have been an actual NES game of the old, I’d think a tune or two in there might be considered classics, or at least be relatively popular.

Other than the music, the rest of the sound effects are okay. There’s actually not that many sounds, and some are remade from older games. For example, the sound for the disappearing blocks sound just like in Mega Man, and the sound when you jump underwater is very similar to the swimming sound in NES Mario games. Otherwise, the sounds for shooting bullets, or various other attacks, are distinct and easy to the ear. And thankfully the dying sound isn’t annoying at all… This is a really good thing, since you’ll be hearing it a lot.

And finally the story. It’s just like almost any other NES storyline. “There’s an evil group planning to take over the world, only you can stop them”. Gotta love those NES stories that really don’t need any kind of detailing and that are simple and to the point. And just like any good NES storyline, most of the story is explained in the instruction manual rather than the game itself. There’s even an excuse in the story as to why Timmy dies in one hit, which I thought was pretty funny. Cool stuff I say. It pokes fun at the simple story of the old days, while using the same kind of story.

Gameplay
The game is inspired greatly by I Wanna Be The Guy, a very sadistically hard game with a ton of cheap death-traps. It also takes various ideas from the Mega Man franchise, as well as Metroid. So the gameplay will feel quite familiar to anyone who ever played an NES game.

Basics
Battle Kid is a side-scrolling platformer. Like most games of the genre, the controls are deceptively simple. A jumps, B shoots, the D-pad moves your character. Eventually you get an item that enables you to float, which is done by holding Up on the D-pad. The controls are really easy to learn, which leads to having a lot of time to learn how to actually play the game. Timmy moves surprisingly fast, both while walking and jumping, and, unless you use the floating item, he goes down very fast after reaching the height of his jump. Speaking of which, like most platformers, the time you hold the jump button determines how high you’ll jump, which is a very useful skill to learn. As for the shooting, it’s quite similar to Mega Man, where you can’t have more than 3 shots on the screen at once.

There’s a relatively large cast of enemies. Each enemy type has a different pattern. Some just walk, some shot at certain intervals, some fly, some fly and shoot, some move in a certain pattern or based on where you are on the screen, and the list goes on. What’s nice is that every enemy type always acts exactly the same. For example, that one-eyed enemy that shoots at a regular interval will always shoot at the same interval, and will always be vulnerable to attacks during the same timing, no matter where you see said enemy in the game. So when you see an enemy more than once, the way he acts will never change, which helps a lot as the game progresses.

Game flow
The game flow is very similar to that of Metroid, but a little bit more straight-forward. Instead of levels, you have one big map. You will be going through a multitude of rooms filled with traps and enemies. After a series of rooms you’ll find save points(which give you a password). After a while, you’ll fight a boss. Sometimes after going through rooms you’ll find items, which grant you new abilities, or keys to open up certain numbered blocks. Just like in Metroid, you then use those new abilities or keys to get to an area you couldn’t before. You found that item that let’s you jump a bit higher? Well you can go to that place you saw before where your jump height was just a bit too short to reach. The float power-up? Well there’s this long gap you couldn’t jump normally across some time earlier, now you can.

Finding where to go next is never hard. Most of the time you will pass in a room that you can’t go through for some reason or another, and finding the proper item will enable you to go there. If you’re really not sure, you can always go back to the first save room in the game (using a teleport room if possible), since there’s a computer there that gives you hint as to where to go next. Though I found that randomly wandering around usually led me to the next area.

Eventually you find all the power-ups (other than, maybe, the optional fourth key and the attack power-up) and kill off all the bosses. That’s when you can enter a room where you see images of all the bosses, and a gate representing each of them, which open when you kill them. That leads to the stupidly hard end of the game, and to the last 2 final bosses.

I have only one complaint in regard with the game flow here: there’s no in-game map. Yeah, you CAN draw a map yourself, that’s the old-school way, but you have an item that tells you your current coordinates in the map, so why no access to said map? That would make navigating the game a lot easier.

Difficutly
This game is hard. Very much so. Don’t be surprised if you die over 100 times just to reach the first boss.
If I had to rank it in difficulty compared to other NES games, I’d say: easier than Ghosts n’ Goblins and Battletoads. Quite a bit harder than any of the Mega Man games. And it’s a whole lot easier than I Wanna Be The Guy, which this game is based on.

The game’s difficulty is based on 3 things: control mastery, timing and memorization. Each time you enter a new room, the enemy placement and room shape is completely different, requiring to learn the best path, and the best timing to get past enemy attacks. That is… rarely an easy task. You must be quick about it too, because some rooms will kill you really quickly if you take time to think. Once a room kills you a few million times, you’ll eventually figure out the timing you need to take to get past it, and eventually you’ll be good enough to get through the room without trouble. That is unless you don’t totally master the control, or just aren’t very good at memorization. It happened to me tons of times, where I didn’t jump high enough, or jumped too high, or moved a bit too much in a direction, which lead me to my death in rooms that I thought I could do perfectly. Another big part of the difficulty here is that everything, no exception, kills you in one hit, which is why you have to do your best not to do any errors. The hit detection is perfect, so if you die it’s always your own fault. One good thing is that there’s never any cheap deaths. There’s a few newb traps, but those will only kill you once if you’re careful.

The game is thankfully not very punishing despite its high difficulty. Every few rooms you get to a save point. The save point gives you a password(you only actually get the password when you die) which you can use to get back to where you were, and when you die you return to that save point. In the easy and normal difficulty levels, you get the password system, and infinite continues. But on easy your character is pink, to show how much of a wuss you are, and you get an attack power-up.

If the normal difficulty is somehow not enough for you, there’s 3 harder difficulty levels. All of them do not use passwords, so you have to beat the game in one sitting. They also limit the number of continues you have. Hard gives you 50 continues, Very Hard gives you 20, and the Unfair difficulty gives you none. So the difficulty is sort of adjustable. None of the difficulty levels change the content of each room though, so the traps will be just as tough no matter what, other than the monsters dying faster in easy mode. And if you’re really into it, every room is made so that you can speedrun them, and finding the fastest way to go through a room is quite satisfactory. Incentive to complete the game on higher difficulties? Well they give different password for various hidden modes, like sound test and debug modes.

Overall
This is a very good game. The graphics are nice, the gameplay is spot on, the difficulty is perfect and, well, the idea of playing a new NES game on an actual NES is pretty badass. The controls are quite easy to get used to, though mastering them requires some practice. The password system is short and simple (actually not that hard to “hack” if you really want to), making it easy to start playing from your last save point.

Some people might find it too hard, but I find the game quite lenient if you play on Normal difficulty. I mean, there’s infinite continues, there’s checkpoints everywhere, and when you learn the patterns and timing to pass through each room you can basically breeze through rooms you already beat.

I highly recommend this game to anyone with an NES, or collectors. It might not be the most unique game out there, but it’s a blast to play, and reaching the next save point is always incredibly satisfactory.

Pros and Cons
Pros
- Easy to learn, hard to master
- Very hard game, but never too punishing
- Looks nice
- Good music
- It’s in an NES cartridge, that’s badass
- Will last you a pretty long time

Cons
- Price is a BIT high, especially because of the expensive shipping rates
- No in-game map is a bit annoying, forcing you to draw your own map if you feel the need to have one

The Save Factor
The game can be bought from Retrozone. It costs $30, plus the shipping which is between $9 and $12(for Canada), so around $39 total. For me I feel it was well worth it. Though I feel that the Save Factor for this one would be around $25(+shipping). If it’s put on special, get it, it’s worth every penny.

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Well, I’ve been playing with my newly received Power Glove for an hour now. So I’ll go and write my first impressions right away!

So, is it fun to use? Does it even work? Is it better than the AVGN is leading us to believe? Read on and see!

Installation
Well, first things first, installing the thing. Well, there’s 3 sensors, all linked together with wires. And they suck. They’re not made to stay on the TV properly unless you have Velcro to hold them down(or on the side). The sensor on the side is the most annoying, because it’s constantly turning to the right, so it stops sensing the glove properly. In the end I took some tape out and taped the sensors to the TV. After a few strips of tape I had the 3 sensors stuck in the right angle. Little did I know that my TV is set up too high, and I’d have to hold my hand up at around my heads height to play properly. See, there’s a “sensing zone” with the sensors where you must try to keep your hand, and it just so happens that said zone is as high as my head. To make things worse, I’m using a 40 inch HDTV with a 16:9 ratio, so I have to be a lot on the right side of the screen, and quite close to it. Not very helpful. I’m sure if I had a smaller TV with a 4:3 aspect ratio, set a bit lower, I’d have a lot less trouble with the power glove.

When you start a game up, you have to input the program code(using this instruction book from Mattel). Press the “Prog” button, then a number (from 1 to 14, depending on the type of game you’re going to play), then the “Enter” button twice. The website I previously mentioned has a short list of games, though you’re apparently supposed to figure out what program code to use depending on the type of game. The method to set up control for certain games is different, like pinball games or Joust or BAD STREET BRAWLER (BAD is right, apparently the game sucks ass), though I really don’t understand how that’s supposed to work (it’s not by using a program code, i think…).

So after that I plugged the glove in the junction box of the sensors (which connects to the NES’s controller port) and started playing some Super Glove Ball. I guess I’ll give a short impression on each game I tried. (other note here: after setting the program code, check if the A and B lights are flashing on the sensor…. if they are, press  7 and 8 on the power glove, the turbo is on and it can be pretty annoying)

Super Glove Ball
This is the game that came with the Power Glove, and one of the 2 games from the “Power Glove Gaming Series”(the other being BAD STREET BRAWLER). At first I had no idea what I had to do. The glove on the screen was moving all over the place and I could do nothing to stop it. Well later on I realized I wasn’t in the sensing zone, so I tried again after moving my bed around and surprisingly this worked really well. It measured depth and position quite well. Not perfectly, and I had to move slow to get the movement right, but it moved when I did, moved forward when I moved my hand forward, and moved back properly, which was awesome. Really cool. Sometimes it jerked around, but overall it was actually sorta fun to play. And it’s 3D!!!! Kinda . It’s fun to see primitive 3D like this, with no polygons whatsoever, but instead things being drawn with pixels in a perspective to give the illusion of 3D, and it looks pretty good. Not perfect, but then again what is? Overall it worked much better than I expected with the glove, though I did struggle at times and the game itself was pretty weird. I realized I could shoot fireballs, though I never really figured out the purpose for that. It’s not a great game, but it’s fun to see how they experimented with the idea of the power glove.

Rad Racer
Of course I had to try Rad Racer. And wow, it was hard to control. I still wasn’t exactly in the sensing zone when I was playing it, though I gradually moved in it and the game was gradually easier to play. Though it was never exactly as good as I was hoping. Maybe Lucas in “The Wizard” was just incredibly badass with the thing. It took me a while to manage to accelerate properly, and the game just randomly brakes on me, I’m really not sure how that works. From what I understand lowering the hand makes you brake, though I was always kinda high so it was hard to tell if I was going too low or something. Overall, when it worked it was awesome, but it was fairly unresponsive. Again, I blame this on my TV being too high.
By now my arm was starting to hurt a bit.

Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!
This doesn’t really work. Dodging is incredibly unresponsive, getting up is really tough if you don’t use the buttons, and it’s hard to aim a punch anywhere other than the face. Though it might just be because I wasn’t controlling it properly (the instructions say to open the fist to dodge, which I rarely did), but it was very inaccurate, no doubt about that. Oh and I lost to Glass Joe. I DID manage to knock him down once, but once I got knocked down I couldn’t get back up, it didn’t work well at all.

Contra
This one I could barely control at all. Jumping worked really bad, controlling your direction and you aim was completely non-functional, you either aimed up or down, rarely in front of you, and you changed direction at complete random, mostly when trying to shoot. I had a lot of trouble with this. Couldn’t reach the first mini-boss.

Castlevania 3
By the time I tried this, my arms was getting really tired and hurting. So I didn’t get far. Like with Contra, jumping was a big problem. Constantly moving, completely unable to stop, made it pretty tough. At least using the whip was pretty easy, but that about all I can say for this. Got to the first bat and having trouble jumping definitely didn’t help in this area full of platforms. Gave up there.

Overall
It’s a bit annoying to use. The controls aren’t precise enough, it’s hard to find the center of the sensing zone to control your direction properly, and most of all it’s tiring and it hurts the arm to use. It’s like using a wiimote on a game you where need to hold your hands in the air at all times, except with a more heavy and less comfortable contraption.

If anything, the Power Glove is a precursor to the better Wiimote. It was heavily original, and better execution could have made it the most awesome peripheral to ever exist. And it does work a lot better than I expected, with Super Glove Ball being the most effective game with the device, sensing not only position, but depth. They could’ve done REALLY cool stuff with this.

It’s a great collector’s item and I suggest it to any Nintendo enthusiast. A must-have for anyone who wants to see the evolution of game controls in action. Not the funnest or most convenient way to play a game, but it’s still pretty fun to screw around with.

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I love the powerglove. It's SO bad

Not as comfortable as I thought it would be

Finally got it. From jjgames. It cost $15, plus $2 for Super Glove Ball and $9 for shipping.A lot less than getting it on Ebay.

Initial impressions? It’s kinda tight and moving my fingers isn’t incredibly easy. Though otherwise it feels fine. I have yet to set it up though, so that’s all I can say for now.

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Well, with a new GOOD Batman game out, I thought I’d make my first “Challenges from the Past” post about another good Batman game. That’s right, Batman on the NES, made by Sunsoft.

This is an NES classic for sure, and one of the few Batman games to have been good.

I was given a few challenges for this, so let’s talk about the game first, and the challenges after!

The Game
In the time of the NES, it wasn’t rare for a licensed game to be good, or even good enough to be considered a classic nowadays. Batman is one such game.

Presentation
Graphically it looks great. Detailed sprites, smooth animations on Batman, nice looking (though a bit bland) areas. But overall it looks awesome. The enemy design is a bit on the lame side most of the time, being mostly cliche stuff, but it works fine anyways.

The music is also very good. There’s only a few tracks, but almost all of them are enjoyable to listen to.

Gameplay
It has nice graphics and music, sure, but this is where the game truly shines. The controls are simple (of course, few NES games have complicated controls really). A jumps, B attacks. You start off with a basic punch, but by pressing Start you can switch to various gadgets/projectile weapons. You get a batarang, a gun that shoots missiles and a super shuriken of triple doom. Each projectile shares the same ammo, and each takes a different amount of ammo to use. Batarang takes 1, missile gun takes 2 and super shuriken takes 3. While the basic punch works nicely, the weapons can get you out of a tight spot, or completely prevent said tight spots from happening.

The other fun element is the jumping. If you press A while touching a wall, you cling to the wall for a second and wall jump. This is pretty basic, but the game complicates it by adding really tough jumps, some that require falling towards a trap, just to wall jump JUST at the right moment to get to the next platform, making sure not to hit a trap that’s overhead. Some jumps are close to impossible, and to this day some of them most people can’t do them without getting hit.

Combat is as simple as it gets, considering it’s a side-scroller. But it’s insanely fun. As is the platforming. Add in how challenging the game is, it’s definitely a classic NES title.

Challenges from the Past
For the first time: Videos on this site! Nothing fancy though, but I managed to record straight off my NES (no emulators here!!). Instead of just reporting my progress on each challenge, I’ll show you my attempts! Sadly I can’t record from my Genesis (version 1) since it has no composite outputs(unless i find how to get my capture card to see my RF connnection), but anything NES/N64 I can do it. (eventually i’ll try to make the videos more interesting >_<)

So here’s the challenges for Batman (given to me by the Save Points team). Note: I’m still a newb at this game and keep dying for stupid reasons.

Challenge 1: This one was given to me by Dave: get through the first stage, including the first boss, with only my fist.

A tough challenge, but it’s doable. It’s most doable for the whole game is you’re crazy enough, though some bosses will give you trouble. On my non-filmed attempt I reached the boss of the second level, but couldn’t beat it. Here I just plain sucked…

Challenge 2: This one was given to me by Wintrale: get as far as possible without picking up healing items! (yes, I know, I picked up a heart in the first part of level 2, but i jumped in the electricity to compensate)

That’s really tough, as you’ll only get some life back after dying, or killing a boss. The rest of the game is played normally(AKA weapons are available), so that helps a lot. On my non-filmed attempt I reached level 3, but that’s all I could manage. Here I kept making a bunch of stupid errors.

Challenge 3: This one was given to me by Victor: No-kill run(other than bosses)!

That’s insane. Not killing anything means you HAVE to take hits by certain enemies, and there’s no way, other than finishing each level, to get life back, and you can’t replinish your ammo(making the boss battles insanely hard). It’s probably possible, but I’d be hard-pressed to find someone who can do it. I can’t pass the 2 flying guys on level 1 part 2.

Overall
To this day this is one of the more challenging NES games out there, and rightfully so. You don’t exactly feel like Batman, but who cares, it’s a fun game.

Well worth the ~5$ the game goes for now(I got it for 3$).

Thank you jjgames.com for having the game in stock and for the low price

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I don’t know if it’s an old site, or if it’s well known, or whatever, but I still wanted to talk about it a bit.

Check it out!

The website is:
http://www.jjgames.com/

They have games from the NES to the Xbox. Though I don’t consider anything beyond the N64 to be retro (and the N64 is pushing the definition of “retro”). NES, Genesis, SNES, N64, Playstation, Dreamcast, GameBoy, GameBoy color, and a few recent things like PS2, Xbox, GBA and a while ago they started getting Wiis at low prices.

Prices are seemingly pretty good. Some rarer games are more expensive, but there’s some good titles for low prices. For example, Batman for NES was 2$ on it. There’s also a few really high-priced games, like Castlevania Dracula X for 60$… But overall the prices range from reasonable to crazy inexpensive. And if you’re in the US, free shipping for orders over 25$ is awesome. And the shipping prices to Canada are actually reasonable.

As for the site itself, it’s well made enough. You can choose systems and genres and it will display all the games in alphabetical order. Also, for all of the games they mention in what condition it’s in, and if it comes in the box or with instructions or not. You can also run searches for games/accessories you might be looking for, and if it’s out of stock you can enter your email to get notified when/if they ever get it.

Speaking of stock, this site gets new stock just about every day. Except maybe the weekends, where it seemed to be a lot slower for new stock. But they get a lot of new stuff every day. And if you’re looking to get rid of your games, you can contact the owner to trade the games in. Not sure how that works, but the option is there.

Well I received my first order from there, a good bunch of games (13 to be exact) and all the items are pretty much as described. The ones that said were in “Good” condition, looked really nice. There are some minor flaws here and there, tiny scratches, but overall they look great. 2 of the games had a “Scratched art” condition. One of them looks fine, but the other’s (Jet Force Gemini) is in really bad condition. Also, 2 or 3 of them said there were stickers on them, but it’s easily removable stickers that you can remove with all-pupose cleaner and a razor blade, and they were on the back of the cartridge anyways. As for how they worked… Well, the NES games required some cleaning (despite me thinking they’d already be clean), but after some screwing around they all worked perfectly. The rest were fine. Sure, it sucks that Jet Force Gemini’s art on the cartridge is all screwed up, but it plays fine and that’s all that really matters. Also, I was surprised that I had no customs fees, despite the box being kinda large and the 100$ value.

Also, most games on the site do NOT come with boxes and instructions. Actually, I haven’t seen one NES game on there that had a box. So collectors who want COMPLETE copies of games, with box and inserts, are gonna have to look elsewhere. Otherwise, if you’re like me and just want to play the games on the original system, then it’s all fine.

Overall my shopping experience there was pretty good, and I’ll definitely use the site again. It’s well worth checking out.

*We are not affiliated with jjgames*

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