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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Since the fans loved it so much, myself included, this game goes back to the NES style of Mega Man games again. Cover art and all. Yeah, I really love that cover art… The game features nostalgic graphics, nostalgic music and nostalgic gameplay.

Does it hold of as well as Mega Man 9, or should have Capcom stopped milking the cow already?

Read on and see!
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Date of Release: March 1st 2010 (Wii), March 11st 2010 (PS3), March 31st 2010 (360), Wii version reviewed
Platforms: Wii, PS3, Xbox 360

Genre: Side-scrolling Platformer
Players: 1
Rated E for Everyone

Presentation
Well, the graphics are just like the NES games, and MM9. It looks great. The sprites and areas are nicely detailed, while always retaining the 8-bit NES style. Each area is unique, containing different visual styles and level elements for each. There’s really not much to say here. If you like the NES look, you’ll love this.

The sound is good. Again, most of the sound effects are taken from the NES games, though the weapons mostly have new sounds. All of those retain the NES-like sounds. The most important though, in any Mega Man game (in regards to presentation at least), is the music. The menu music and such is okay, but not stellar.
As for the level music, let’s go at them quickly one by one. Blade Man is okay, but lacks anything really good and the composition is rather flat. Solar Man’s music is really cool. It starts out rather bland, but it picks up the pace and becomes fast and exciting, with something of a double pedal sound in the backing, making it one of the more interesting tunes in here. Pump Man’s music is kinda slow and doesn’t really “climax”, and overall it’s okay but short and not too exciting. Commando Man’s music sounds pretty cool. I find it a bit slow paced, but I think it fits to mood nicely. The music in Chill Man’s level sounds appropriately winter-ish, but it kinda lacks character, and doesn’t feature many instruments, making it more bland than it could be. Sheep Man’s music has that “electronic” sound to it, being an electric-themed stage, and it sounds pretty good, with a nice tone and melody. Strike Man has some music that’s high on energy and quite fun to listen to, quite fitting with the level’s sports-theme. Nitro Man has another nice fast-paced tune with a good melody, and I quite like this one. The final levels, after beating the Robot Masters, also have a few nice tunes. Overall, the music quality isn’t bad, but there’s nothing really memorable.

Finally, a quick passing note on the story. The story here involves multiple robots, including Roll, catching Roboenza, a virus that only affects robots and almost renders them useless, and, after a couple weeks, turns them violent. Doctor Wily turns up at Dr Light’s lab, after his flying machine has been destroyed by berzerk robots, saying he had almost found a cure, but had his medicine-making machine stolen from him, so Mega Man goes to find it, with Proto Man tagging along since he thinks Mega Man might need his help. The story is superficial, as with all Mega Man games, but it’s still has that old-school fun factor to it.

Gameplay
Well, the game retains the same gameplay as the NES classics, has the same jumping and shooting mechanics. The shop is back from 9 so you can farm screws to fill up on lives and E-tanks when you want. And this game adds real-time weapon change, with the A and B buttons on the WiiMote, and I think L and R on the Classic Controller/Ps3 and 360 controllers.

Bosses/levels
Each level features some unique elements. Of course Sheep Man’s level has the trademark disappearing blocks, and Chill Man has slippery grounds, but each has some really interesting ideas that make them all rather unique. Most of them will have elements that will completely change the platforming, like speeding trucks in Nitro Man’s level, or that tether thing in Blade Man’s level, for example. Some of the levels also have mini-bosses, and I’ll say that the ones here are actually quite interesting, and overall I find them really fun to fight. The giant goal in Strike Man’s level is really quite interesting, though a bit easy if you have the right weapon. Each boss is also completely different, and I’ll say there’s some really cool fights here. Trying to find each boss’ weakness without reading about it before is quite fun, if not a little bit easy. Trying to figure out Blade Man is REALLY tough but totally satisfying since his pattern is so fast and random and adaptive of your behavior. Finding the best ways to avoid Solar Man’s attacks is hard but quite fun. Easily killing Sheep Man is fun too, and avoiding several of Nitro Man’s attacks requires precision jumps. A few of the fights aren’t as great, but overall I think they did a good job with the bosses.

Weapons
After killing a boss, you get his weapon, of course. The weapons here are not too bad. There’s a few good ones.
The Water Shield is one of the more interesting shields in the series.
The Thunder Wool basically creates a little wall of electricity in front of you(after around 2 seconds), shielding you from certain attacks and dealing good damage (though it’s hard to aim properly).
The Triple Blade you get from Blade Man can hit up to 3 times at once if you’re close enough to your target, and doesn’t use that much weapon energy compared to the other weapons.
The Commando Bomb can be remote controlled to go where you want (though your character moves as you move the missile, so be careful).
The Cutting Wheel moves across the floor and on the walls which is cool, and it stays attached to Mega Man’s (or Proto Man’s) arm until you release the button, so it can act as a shield, and it can be used to climb walls too.
The Rebound Striker can be shot either in front of you or diagonally, and it bounces off walls a few times too, making it quite useful in the right situations.
The Solar Blaze isn’t really great though, basically shooting a fireball then splitting in 2 fire waves on each side, which does no more damage than the buster.
The Chill Spikes are… not too great, unless you use it on an enemy that might walk on the spikes those produce (you can’t shoot again until something touches the spikes).

My big problem is that most of the weapons use a LOT of weapon energy. The Thunder Wool can only be shot a few times before being empty, as does the Rebound Ball, and the other weapons get empty relatively fast as well. The only weapon that can be used a bit more is the Triple Blades, which is a good thing since they’re really good.

Difficulty
The game is hard. It’s not cheap hard like most modern “hard” games, it’s “Nintendo hard”. Your first time through most levels will probably kick your ass, but you’ll eventually learn how to pass the tougher sections with trial and error. There’s a few areas that are more annoying than hard, but they’re relatively rare. The mini-bosses are also pretty tough, especially in Strike Man’s level, but learning the patterns will eventually get you through them without getting hit. The boss battles range from really easy (sheep man) to really hard (Blade Man), and most bosses will require more than one try to finally get their pattern and beat them easily…. or learning their weakness (which you should do on your own rather than looking it up online). Overall it’s quite a hard game, but I’d say not exactly as hard as Mega Man 9, since I got to the end a lot faster than 9.

The game features an easy mode. This changes quite a few things: some enemies are removed or replaced, some enemies don’t have the same attacks, some pitfalls/spikes are covered by flying platforms, some “puzzles” are changed completely like the disappearing block part in Sheep Man’s level, and the game is a LOT more generous on lives, E-tanks and screws. The levels also all have, 2-3 times each, an item appearing that fully heals all your life bar, sometimes right before boss battles. The bosses are also a bit easier, mostly featuring easier to avoid attacks. While this mode is almost useless for veteran Mega Man players (though it’s required to play to unlock all the challenges), newer gamers who are used to having their hand held through a game will definitely have a much easier  and probably more pleasant time with the game if they start out on easy mode.

Extra stuff
Here, you can play as Proto Man without having to pay extra, unlike in MM9. Here, he plays just like in MM9. He can slide, charge his weapon, he holds up his shield when jumping (unless he’s shooting) which stops almost any projectile that touches it. On the downside, he can only have 2 shots on the screen at once instead of Mega Man’s 3 shots, and he takes more damage. And here he has access to the shop unlike MM9, though it doesn’t have the same inventory as in Mega Man’s, and stuff costs more. Overall he’s pretty fun to play as.

Here, the game features 2 types of challenges. Just like in MM9, the “Challenge 2″ section is basically achievements. There’s a lot fewer than in MM9, but all the “important” ones are there. The “Challenge 1″ section is actually a relatively big amount of challenge rooms. Most of them require getting to the end of the room without dying, using pixel-perfect precision jumps, and various other things. This actually makes you get used to the game’s various jumping mechanics and puzzles in the game. There’s also boss fights and such here. It’s a really nice addition.

Like MM9, this features a Time Attack mode, where you try to finish levels as fast as possible, with all access to all weapons, with only 1 life. When you’re done, you can post your time on the leaderboards, and you can save a replay of your run. This is REALLY cool, because, if you save your replay, your recording becomes available online and people can watch it straight from the leaderboards. That way you can look at other people’s runs, to find out little tricks and such. This is a cool feature, for sure.

Overall
Mega Man 9 was the perfect revival for the 8-bit classic Mega Man. This is just Capcom milking the idea of making old style Mega Man games since it sells so well. It doesn’t feel like they put as much effort in this one than they did in Mega Man 9. But don’t get me wrong, this is still a really good entry. Damn good.

But overall it’s quite fun. The platforming is good, the boss battles are interesting and require really learning how to fight them, there’s some really challenging parts and it’s overall really fun to play. Being able to choose 2 distinct characters from the start is good, though being able to unlock Bass would be a LOT better than having to buy him.

The Easy mode makes levels almost too easy to veteran gamers, but newcomers will definitely like it more.

Overall, any Mega Man fan should check it out, and people new to the series should check it out too because of Easy Mode.

Pros and Cons
Pros
- Fun retro gameplay
- Looks great
- Sounds good
- There’s a few quite good music tracks in here
- It’s hard
- The “Easy mode” makes this a perfect for beginner Mega Man players
- Being able to watch other peoples’ Time Attacks online is really a nice feature, you can learn quite a few cool tricks
- Challenge mode is fun

Cons
- The music is nowhere near as good as in MM9
- Some parts are just annoying rather than challenging
- The weapons aren’t the the best in the series, though there’s some really cool ones
- Bass is downloadable rather than unlockable, which is really stupid

The Save Factor
Despite not being as good an entry as Mega Man 9, it’s still a solid game and is well worth the 1000 Wii Points it costs. So $10 is the Save Factor here!

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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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Well, I could just say “O_O” and be done with it for this mini-review, but that wouldn’t do the film justice. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect but I did hear lots of great reviews on this, so I went in there knowing it would probably be okay. But I was wrong… it was GREAT.

So let’s go just a little bit more in detail and talk about one of the weirdest people in the world of cinema!

Read on! (Yeah, I know this movie is 15 years old, but I just saw it for the first time and I thought I should share my thoughts with everyone)

Who was Ed Wood and why should I care?
Ah, Edward D Wood Jr. He was kinda like the Uwe Boll of his time, except less of a douchebag, and funnier… And his movies were so bad they were funny, while Uwe Boll… just sucks.
His most renown film is “Plan 9 from Outer Space”, which is considered one the worst films ever. He was a director/writer/producer/actor that never shot retakes, wrote completely weird scripts that made no sense and had total disregard to the negative criticism and didn’t care if there were errors in his movies, like actors making the sets wobble by hitting them, or bad special effects(Octopus fight!)… stuff like that. He was also well known for having famous Dracula actor Bela Lugosi in his movies. His career eventually(well, not very long after Plan 9 pretty much) degenerated into making lame softcore porn-horror films, like Orgy of the Dead.

Needless to say, he was a weirdo, and no good at his job at all, but at the same time he had a love for what he did, and movies in general. And this is what this movie is all about. And I’m sure he was a big influence in the industry as well, still having a fanbase up to this day. There’s even talk of a remake of Plan 9 from Outer Space (though it just looks like a random zombie flick according to the trailer)…. OH by the way he was a transvestite.

“I thought you were a fag.”
“No, I’m just a transvestite!”

What about the movie?
The movie is directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp. We’re off to a good start. Also, the movie was filmed fully in black and white.

The movie details part of the life of Ed Wood. It shows how he met Bela Lugosi (marvelously played by Martin Landau), how his first movie, “Glen or Glenda”, came into being, the various complications of “Bride of the Monster” (previously named “Bride of the Atom” but changed to have more appeal), the death of Bela Lugosi, and finally the big thing: The production of “Plan 9 from Outer Space”.

The events are told partly factually, though some things are changed, some things are exaggerated, and some things a. The characters are marvelous. Not only do they look exactly like their real world counterparts Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, Lisa Marie as Vampira and Jeffrey Jones as Criswell are particularly convincing. Johnny Depp as Ed Wood looks a bit different from pictures I’ve seen, though he looks exactly the same when he wears women’s clothing. And all of them act more or less accordingly to their real life counterparts. The casting was fantastic to say the least, and there isn’t one character that really feels out of place.
Some events were skipped, some of his productions weren’t shown in the movie, like Jail Bait (before Bride of the Monster). Some other minor elements were changed, like the scene where the final filming of Lugosi is done. But I think the movie goes through most of the important parts of his career.

It was a bit unreal to hear Bela Lugosi swearing all the time, and I don’t know if he was like that when he was alive, but I think it adds realism to the character. We see the end of his life and his last filmed moments, his addiction to morphine and his detox period. He was definitely well portrayed and Martin Landau’s performance couldn’t have been better.

But the one who steals the show is definitely Johnny Depp as Ed Wood. Every time he’s on the screen, it’s marvelous. The way he moves, the expressions on his face at all times, how he looks in women’s clothing, and his overall acting…. it was perfect. When he said something you really believed it, and HE really believed it as well. The way he said “Cut! This was perfect” no matter how bad the scene he was filming was awesome. I’ll say that this is easily my favorite Johnny Depp performance.

I haven’t actually seen any of Ed Wood’s movies, but I saw multiple scenes of most of the more popular ones, and most of the scenes I saw before were shown here, but remade with the new actors, and all of them were perfectly redone. They couldn’t have honored Ed Wood’s pictures any better than they did here.

Overall
This movie is incredible. The acting, the portrayal of everyone in Ed Wood’s life up to Plan 9, the actors looking almost exactly like their real-life counterparts, the story, the comedy, the drama, the very few romantic moments… Everything was perfect. And there’s never a dull moment. I’m having trouble finding anything really bad about the movie. Some might complain that some events were changed or completely omitted, but I find that the parts that were removed weren’t incredibly important either. Oh, and the ending was a bit lame. There was no closure really. They showed a bit of the Plan 9 world premiere, and then showed everyone going out of the theater, and then… just showed every character, with a small text saying what happened to them later on in their lives. I was just expecting more of an ending.

For anyone interested in film-making, this is a must watch. Otherwise, I think it’s still worth checking out.

Ed Wood: He might have been the worst director of all time, but he was passionate about his work, and this is what this movie really wanted to show: That he was, despite his flaws, a fascinating person.

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Huh…. Surprising. This is actually the first time I buy something on the Wii Shop Channel. And it’s also not a disappointing buy at all.

Contra is a great series. Namely renown for 4 things: awesome run n’ gun gameplay, awesome weapons, high difficulty and of course the famous Konami Code. Starting in the arcade and later being ported to the NES, it was a huge game in the industry and one of the more popular series of the time.

So… is Contra Rebirth a proper rebirth, or does it fail to live up to the name?

Read on to see if it did!

Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Date of Release: 2009/09/07
Platform: Wii (WiiWare)

Genre: Shooter
Players: 1-2 player Co-op

Looks and sounds
The graphics look quite good. They’re just like in Contra 3, which looked great. The sprites are quite detailed, may it be the enemies or the main characters. The animations are bit on the primitive side, but they’re pretty much the same sorts of animation as in all previous Contra games. The environments looks quite good too.

The sound design isn’t too bad either. I find that the remixed songs from the previous games are a bit on the lame side, but it’s still fun to hear those old tunes. The sound effects are classic though, so I can excuse the meh covers of the music. They should’ve gotten that guy to make the music : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5JlGQ5orL8.

Gameplay
You mean you haven’t played a Contra game yet? You did? Well why are you reading this? It’s just as awesome as the first 3 Contra games, with pretty much no change in the basic gameplay. Nothing more to say.

For people who never played Contra before (WHY!?!?!?!?), here’s a small explanation. This plays in a side-scrolling fashion. You’re alone, or with a friend, against a huge army aliens, and evil humans. All you have to defend yourself is your gun with infinite ammo, and your skills at jumping and avoiding enemy bullets. As you advance through levels, you find power ups, which make your gun more or less awesome. You fight waves and waves of enemies. Just a note here: Spreader PWNZ ALL.

The controls are simple (using the default Sideways Wiimote setting). 2 jumps, 1 shoots, d-pad moves. Holding down 1 stops your movement, but you lets you aim in any of the 8 directions without moving, which is massively useful. If you want to run and shoot, you have to tap the button. The one stupid element here is changing weapons. You have to shake the wii remote to change weapon. I found that out at total random, and it’s pretty tough to change weapons fast when you’re in a tight situation…

You can hold 2 weapons at once, which is nice, and you can switch between both when you want. When you die, you lose the weapon you currently have selected (it goes back to the basic peashooter, which is frankly not bad at all), and keep the other in backup.  The weapon selection is a bit weak, but it keeps it to the standards. You have the normal peashooter of awesomeness, the Spreader of ass kickage, the Homing missiles of pwnage, and the sucky laser of horribleness. The laser isn’t bad, and most of the time is a better choice than the peashooter since it has more damage output, but it pales in comparison to the spreader and the homing missiles. There might be few weapons, but they have the essentials, no one used the rest anyways.

The difficulty is actually quite inviting. If you’re a new gamer who wants to get in the game, easy mode is a nice intro, and finishing it unlocks a character. It’s also the only mode NOT to include the final boss. Normal mode is pretty much for the veteran who hasn’t played Contra in a while and wants to get in the groove again(and finishing the game unlocks another  character). Hard will be quite easy until level 3, and gets really tough from there on. Hard mode’s level 3 is a huge step up in difficulty. Enemies that didn’t attack on normal attack now, enemies are added, patterns are tougher… It’s pretty insane. One good thing is that there’s infinite continues, so if you just want to finish the game, it’s not THAT hard. Getting a game over makes you restart at the last check point instead of the beginning of the level which is huge help. After finishing Hard mode, you unlock Nightmare mode… Well, in Co-op, Dave and I couldn’t even make it to the first checkpoint. Yeah, it’s crazy, there’s tons of enemies and bullets everywhere, and some enemies even shoot bullets while dying. Damn. If you want a challenge, you got it here.

Overall, the gameplay is great. Classic Contra gameplay is always awesome.

Overall
It’s Contra. So of course it’s fun. The gameplay is fast and furious. So much so that it’s frequently hard to see WTF killed you.

The difficulty is definitely up there. The normal and hard difficulties are not extremely hard (though hard will be pretty challenging in the third area), but once you unlock Nightmare dificulty, your ass will get kicked so hard your grandchildren will feel the pain. This is not a game for the modern gamer who needs his hand held at all times. This game will kick you in the face and laugh at you while doing so. And at higher difficulties it does everything it can to kill you.

I do have some complaints, mainly the length… Finishing it twice in an hour isn’t a stretch at all. When you actually get GOOD at it, I doubt it takes much more than 15 minutes. The story is also pretty stupid, but Contra always was a bit ridiculous story-wise.

Overall, this is a great game that lives up to the Contra name.

Pros/Cons
Pros
- Fucking hard
- Great gameplay
- Co-op is awesome
- Old music reused

Cons
- Normal mode might be a bit too easy, and the difficulty curve between Hard and Nightmare mode is infinitely steep
- Short, a few more levels would’ve been nice
- No konami code(at least not from what i’ve seen)

The Save Factor
With a starting price of $10, the Save Factor for Contra Rebirth is:

$15 (a great buy, though paying a bit extra for one of the classic games in the series might be a slightly better investment)

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But the search wasn’t ENTIRELY fruitless, as I did manage to find something of interest that combines 2 things I love: old-school video game music and Power Metal. What I found was Power Metal band Powerglove.

Read on for a bit more info and a few songs to preview them!

First off, here’s their myspace. You can already hear a few songs on there:
http://www.myspace.com/vgmetal
And on their site you have links to their store to buy CDs(which are not too expensive actually) and other stuff, and a link to iTunes if you want to buy their songs on there.

I’m probably late on learning about them, since they’ve had their myspace account for 4 years already. But better late than never!

So, what they basically do is take old video game tunes, replace the main instruments with badass guitar, and add some double-pedal to the mix. And I’m quite happy that they DIDN’T add lyrics, that would’ve ruined it all.  But they take a lot of liberties with most of the songs and add their own riffs. Some parts don’t really sound exactly like the “source material”, but you still get a similar feel to the old songs anyways, and you can still see similarities. So it’s not exactly covers but re-imaginings.

I do have a minor complaint. Despite most of their songs sounding really great, their costumes look like crap… It’s probably intentional, but damn they look stupid when they’re performing live with those exaggerated armors and all…

So, here are a few of my favorites!

Vanquish the horrible night (various Castlevania songs)

So Sexy Robotnik (obviously classic Sonic music)

Red wings over Baron (just because I really like FF4)

Metal Kombat for the Mortal Man (even though I don’t like mortal kombat, some of the music is pretty good)

And to add to all that, they’re currently recording a new album… Nice. It’s gonna have Johnny Quest, Under The Sea from The Little Mermaid (I can’t WAIT to hear that !!!!!!), Inspector Gadget, some Winnie the Pooh song, This Is Halloween (from Nightmare Before Christmas), the Flintstones, X-men and Pokemon (the theme song from the anime). Not really video game oriented this time, but still a fun little list of songs there. Actually, they also have another new album in the works, other than this one, which will be fully video game based (the only track they mentionned for this one is Snake Man from Megaman 3, which may or may not make it on there depending on how they like the sound when it’s done). So 2 new albums soon? Hell yeah!

So yeah… this was a pretty short post, but I wanted to talk about them since I really like their music. If you know any other bands of the sort don’t hesitate to tell me, I love discovering new music(as long as it doesn’t suck, of course).

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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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