High five.
Welcome back to Nerds Without Pants! It’s been almost a full month since the Pantsless Ones got together to record, and after the heavy topic of episode 65 they decide to keep things light. So that means two hours of meandering talk about video games, comics, blasphemy, and indie pro wrestling, among other things. Enjoy!
Lightning strikes thrice.
A while back when I officially started collecting retro consoles and games, I swore that I’d never become one of those elitists in the gaming community who always makes a big deal about his vast, all-encompassing knowledge of video games; at least not in public. However, in my own mind, I was the master of all things retro. Well, that all came to a screeching halt in recent years thanks to Wikipedia when I discovered that, aside from owning the fifth game in the series, I knew next to nothing about the Thunder Force saga. As I learned of its existence on Sega's 16-bit console, it became painfully clear that I had barely gotten my toes wet with Technosoft’s bread and butter. How I missed it back in the day, I will never know. But after playing Thunder Force III, I soon realized that there was a whole ocean I was missing out on: the Genesis was the system for shoot-‘em-ups.
This episode is three hours of awesome sauce.
It’s a new year, and the nerds without pants are back with an epic, 3 hour extravaganza! Wait, come back, because you’re gonna want to listen to all of this. Not only do we have a great discussion about Christmas loot, Dragon Age, Game of Thrones, and Destiny, but we also have a very special interview with David Evans and Jamie Roboz, who worked on NWP indie favorite Rollers of the Realm. Enjoy!
A game that involves some serious fowl play.
Duck Hunt is an interesting relic of times past and one that I have conflicting feelings about. While it was my earliest NES memory and no doubt fun from what I can remember, it also hasn't aged quite as well as I would have hoped. But sometimes, that's just how it goes with the games we played as children. I suppose the biggest letdown is realizing that the game simply isn't as stimulating to me as it once was, mostly due to its limited nature. At its core, you're just shooting the same objects round after round until you fail to reach the required quota. Be that as it may, Duck Hunt's importance in Nintendo's history cannot be overlooked.
Rise of the machines.
The original Mega Man was the perfect NES action game: powerups, platforming, shooting, and controller-tossing difficulty merged with ‘80s story conventions: the convergence of man and machine, greed, and technology gone rogue. I can only imagine what people were thinking when they picked it up in 1987 and saw a silly middle-aged fellow stuck in an uncomfortable pose with his pistol on the box cover; I’ll bet they wouldn’t be thinking that in a few decades there would be people dressed up as Mega Man along the streets of Hollywood, making a quick buck posing with tourists. It all started with a great game that is still great today.
Time to hook up the Starpath Supercharger
It should be obvious from the title that The 100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977-1987 is a very specific book that will appeal to a very specific audience. Brett Weiss, who writes many books with a narrow, historical focus, branches out slightly and tries to give his readers a huge swallow of his opinion about the first full decade of console gaming. If you have an interest – or strong opinions – about this era of gaming, you’ll be pretty pleased reading through Weiss’s descriptions and critiques.
A considerable improvement from the first.
After NES Remix, I badly wanted a sequel. My main concerns with the first Remix were that developers EAD Tokyo and indieszero focused on Nintendo’s 1983-1986 Famicom line-up, which has not aged well. This second Remix, like all good sequels, takes what made the first game so great and improves upon the flaws. They also threw in backwards Super Mario Bros. with Luigi physics and a Nintendo World Championship mini-game if you own the first NES Remix -- how can you say no to that?
I think I now hate Ice Climber even more.
Fans of the Wario Ware series tend to like 9-Volt’s mini-games the most. Honestly, I can’t really blame them. Unlike Wario Ware, however, NES Remix and its follow-up on the WiiU eShop doesn’t come from the crazy mind of Yoshio Sakamoto; instead, it’s a tribute/mashup of Nintendo’s ‘classic’ NES titles from 1983 to 1986. I put classic in quotes because, let’s be perfectly honest here, a majority of Nintendo’s early Famicom titles have not aged well.
Duck and cover!
Not about to let Disney's Donald Duck hog all the fame and fortune, Daffy Duck starred in his own Nintendo 64 platformer as well. Unfortunately, this is another case where I'm not very familiar with the source material, having seen the show maybe a few times when I was younger and don't remember a lick of it. However, the game is plenty decent enough to stand on its own, or maybe it's just my love of platformers talking.
If there was one thing that Techno Soft did very well in the 16-bit days, it was shoot ‘em ups. It all started when they created Thunder Force in 1984. It was released on the NEC PC-8801 and several other Japanese home computers at the time, but never saw the light of day in the US. The game featured an overhead free-roaming viewpoint and the goal was to destroy the enemy’s shield generators, using your main shot for air targets and the bomb shot for ground targets in each stage. While it’s tough to gauge the game’s popularity from back then, it apparently did well enough to warrant a sequel. Thunder Force II was released four years later for the Sega Genesis in 1989, making it the very first shoot ‘em up on the system.
