I’ve been playing Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo NES for nearly 30 years. But it’s only recently that I discovered (through GoNintendo) that the game support continue.
When you have lost all your lifes and are back at the titlescreen, hold down the A-button and press Start. You will then start at the beginning of the world you died in.
It would have been nice to known this trick back in the days. There wouldn’t have been so much frustration.
The Tetris Heat Change Mug is quite cool. While it’s just fun to have a Tetris mug, it even change when you have your hot beverage in it. Be it your favourite coffee, tee or hot chocolate.
I bought my Tetris mug at a locale shop, but you can get it online too on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk [affiliate links] among others.
This time around, the people at Retro Gamer have made the bookazine The Amiga Book:
You can get Retro Gamer – The Amiga Book at Imagineshop.co.uk.
Retro Gamer issue 137 is a good read:
You can get issue 137 and any other issue (if they’re not sold out) from Imagineshop.co.uk.
I came across The Story of the ZX Spectrum in Pixels Volume 2 on Kickstarer here the other day. Looks like a good book to support. It will have 236 pages with 100 games covered. This is the second book in the series, and luckily, you can plegde for both books if you (like me) didn’t support it the first round.
You can go to Kickstarter to support this campainge which is already founded. The Kickstarter ends on January 1, 2015.
The video under is from Volume 1.
Duck Hunt is one of the Nintendo NES classics. It’s a very funny and entertaining game. The game was released in Europe in 1987, but it was already out in Japan in 1984.
In short, you use the NES Zapper to shoot as many ducks you can to earn the most score. But there are some variants of the game.
In Game A, there is one bird, while in Game B two birds. That’s the differences. There are allways 10 birds, whom you have to hit a set number of to continue to the next round. You also have three shoots in each round. Which means that you can miss two in Game A, but only once in Game B.
When I played the game again after years, I had forgotten about Game C, the Clay Shooting. Two discs are shoot out at once, and you need to hit a set numbers of discs to continue to the next round.
For all the different variants, it gets harder as you progress. The ducks fly faster and you have to hit more of them to advance in the game.
Duck Hunt is actually based on another Nintendo game, Beam Gun: Duck Hunt. This was an electronical toy released in Japan in 1976.
I discovered a couple of things while playing Duck Hunt again. The ducks comes in three colours: black, purple and blue. But when you hit any of them and the dog show you the duck you shot, this is allways a black duck. I guess they did it this way to save space in the ROM (which was expencive and small in size at the time).
When you miss a duck, it flys away. You only get the message ‘Fly away‘ in Game A, not in Game B.
In Game A it’s possible for a second player to use the NES-controller to change the direction of the ducks.
And NO, you can’t hit the Dog (even if you want to). This is only possible in a bonusround in the arcade game Vs. Duck Hunt.
Duck Hunt is still a fun and entertaining game. You should dust it of, if you haven’t already done that!
In Retro Gamer annual, you find the best of the best from the 2014 issues of Retro Gamer.
You can get Retro Gamer annual from Imagineshop.co.uk.
I got issue 136 of Retro Gamer last week, and here is some of the things to read:
As usual, Retro Gamer can be bought at Imagineshop.co.uk.
Time goes by, and I don’t think that 1994 is that long ago. This means that the Sony Playstation (also known as PSOne has turned 20. Playstation was first released in Japan on December 3, 1994. US had to wait until September 9, 1995 and had to wait some weeks more (released in Europe on September 29, 1995).
The Playstation history is quite interessting. It started way back in 1988 in co-operation with Nintendo. Sony was supposed to make a CD-ROM attatchment to the Super Nintendo.
Play Station was announced by Sony on CES in 1991. But that joy didn’t last long, as Nintendo the day after announced a co-operation with Philips instead. As the history shows, Philips made the CD-i and released some Nintendo-licensed games (which includes a couple of Zelda-games that are rated as the worsed in the series). Sony on their side continued to develop the Play Station and later released the console as Playstation.
The PSOne games came on CD-ROMs opposed to cartrigde which was very common at the time. Playstation had a 32-bit RISC processor at 33.9 MHz, 2 MB RAM og 1 MB video RAM. The resolution was from 256 x 224 to 640 x 480. PSOne also had two memory card slots to save game progress.
In the early 90s, Nintendo and Sega dominated the videogame market. Sony was a newcomer. But the Playstation was a huge suecess with about 102.5 million consoles sold in its lifetime. This makes the Playstation the fourth most sold console ever. Only beaten by Game Boy, Nintendo DS and Playstation 2.
I tried Playstation for the first time in the winter of ’96 (if I remember right). My sister and I rented the PSOne with Rayman and WipeOut. This was very fun. Rayman was a colourfull platform game, funny and with a good difficult level. There was no memory card with the unit we rented, so we became pretty good at the game. WipeOut was at the time the game that gave you the best speedracer experience. With the console, was also a demo-CD. We played that a lot too. It contained the now famous T-Rex demo which impressed us very much.
Among the most sold Playstation titles, you find Grand Turismo, Final Fantasy, Grand Turismo 2, Resident Evil and Tekken 3.
I first got a hand of a Playstation, when the PS3 was released in 2007, and hadn’t played that much on a Playstation until then. Luckily, the PS3 is PS1-compatible. Rayman and WipeOut, is still two of my favourite games, including Rigde Racer.
What is your PS1-favourite?
Photo & source: Wikipedia
There was one new that I didn’t catch last week. At the PlayStation Experience keynote on December 6, Tim Schafer announced the Day of the Tentacle – Special Edition. The game originaly came out in 1993 on PC and Mac, and will be released sometime in 2015 on PS4, Vita, PC, Mac and Linux.
Photo: YouTube
