Yoshi's Cookie is a weird game. Not because it takes place in a bakery of some kind and has you matching rows and columns of cookies in order to eliminate them. Mostly it's weird because a game called "Yoshi's Cookie" barely has Yoshi in it at all.
The 80's were a weird time for a lot of reasons. Take the Noid, for instance. He's a small guy... creature... thing, who wears a red bunny suit and tries to ruin Domino's pizzas (though some people might say that Domino's ruins their own pizzas because their pet pizza place is better (pizza snobs are weird)). Eventually the Noid somehow became a creature who liked Domino's pizza, or something. I don't recall it ever being fully explained, but the gist of it was that kids seemed to like the thing, and kids also like video games, so some Noid games were created, including one called 'Yo!
A long time ago (in video game years, at least) I got a call from my mom during Summer Break. One of her coworkers was apparently getting rid of some NES games that they didn't want, and she wanted to know if I had heard of a game called 'Ice Climbers'. I was a pretty big Nintendo fan... but I hadn't. Since the Internet wasn't really a thing that I had any access to, and since a lot of those old 'black label' NES games were released and out of stores before I got my first NES, it's not super-surprising that I hadn't heard of it. I didn't think much more about it for a lot of years.
It's time for me to try out another converter. This time it's the KanexPro Composite/S-Video to 4K HDMI Converter. I also chose to use the NES Star Trek game as my test game for this one, which might have been an error. You can check out the video below, but the audio is a little low. I'd like to say that this was on purpose to protect your ears from the eardrum rending tones of the worst rendition of the Star Trek theme I've ever heard, but the truth is that PulseAudio is ridiculous to try and configure, so I (surprisingly!) didn't get it set correctly.
Ninja Gaiden, the NES Ninja Gaiden, has a rep. It's tough, it's unfair, it's wonky, and it's got great music and cutscenes. I don't remember exactly how I got my hands on a copy back during the summer of 198X, but I did, and I ended up spending a lot of time with it.
It should be pretty obvious looking around here that I like old video games (I also like new video games sometimes), so I decided to pick up a copy of Ultimate NES Remix the other day to get my old game fix. I had played the first two NES Remix games on the Wii U, so I kind of knew what to expect going in.
When you play Blaster Master, you start to notice that a lot of the powerups have letters on them that roughly correspond to what they do: pickups that increase your Power have a P on them, pickups that increase your Hover meter have an H on them, homing missiles also have an H on them, et cetera. But one of the ones that always perplexed me was the powerup for your gun in the overhead scenes. It had a little F on it for some reason.
Blaster Master is one of my favorite games for the ol' NES, and I still like to break it out on occasion. For the play session below I decided that I would set a few rules for myself: I would use the 'pause trick', but I would not use turbo on my controller. Sounded like a reasonable compromise to me.
Since yesterday's warm up went so well, I decided to pit my skill against two computer opponents. But not just any computer opponents. I used max difficulty opponents. Was this a mistake?
You bet it was!
This is it! The conclusion of Deja Vu!
The end of the game consists of a lot of standing around in the sewer throwing trash down the drain and sometimes eating a handful of flour.