Tag: NES

Random Video Game Duck: Pinkie Plays Time Lord (NES)

Hear Ye Hear Ye, Princess Pinkie has returned with a gaming post!

Salutations, Loyal Subjects and Sweet Island Guests. One of the hardest things of a content creator is content selection! Now as I grow more discontent about reviewing, I decided to spice them up a bit!  I wanted to do Reviews on Random content!  Even video games!  I love Retro Games and the way I used to play games in the past is go to your local video store and rent some video games!  Only back then there was no internet! You randomly picked a game and played it! Zero idea on whether it was good or not! To relive that experience I found a randomiser that spits out a random classic console game! Today we played Time Lord on NES! But first.. my totally “original” intro lyrics.  

<Disclaimer>
For the purpose of this format an emulator has to be used as many games on this list will be to obscure to obtain physically
<End of Disclaimer>

Song intro

♫She’s Gonna Take You back to the past!♫
To play some random games really fast!
No walkthroughs! And No reviews! This is gonna be a blind playthrough!
Some games are good but most are bad!
She will play things she wished she never had!

She is the most random gamer, without much luck!
She’s the Random Nintendo Duck!
She’s the Random Arcade and Sega Duck!
♫She’s the Random Video Game Duck!♫

All credits to the James Rolph and the AVGN, this is just a spoof!

Time to play Time Lord

Time Lord Screenshots for NES - MobyGames

Time Lord is a platformer game on NES! The game was released in America in 1990 and fairly limitedly in Europe in 1991.  It was developed by Rare LTD and Published by MB Company. MB standing for Milton Bradley! Which is like the most 90’s sitcom character name ever by the way! The game is classified as a Platformer, but feels more like an early beat’em up, like River City Ransom. After playing through the entire game it is a bit of a mixed bag of reviews, with most people really liking it and some very much hating it! Once again I find myself a bit in between! Though I severely vere to the dislike side of things! One should note that I do this from the stance of a blind playthrough! I will admit that replaying this game now would make it a much more digestible experience but the first experience is …odd to say the least.  No walkthroughs, No Nintendo Power! How manageable is the game?!

HonestGamers - Time Lord (NES)

The goal seems rather simple! Each stage holds five time orbs! Collect them all and you beat the level! Travel through time to delete the influence of evil aliens on the space time continuum. And yes that is also the entire story of this game! You are told this and while I have no idea WHY the aliens have put 5 time orbs for you to function as a tutorial they did!  However the tutorial is in no way similar to the actual game experience!  So in stage one we gather five time crystals in our current time to hop back in time for the first time! And that is when the Dodo Doodoo starts to show up for me!  The controls are fairly tight though instinctively it feels as if I am jumping with the wrong button and punching with the wrong button! That might be a fault on my end though! The game looks okay.. but kind of bland for a game that game out fairly late in the NES life span.

The Good, The Bad and the Clam!

Time Lord Screenshots for NES - MobyGames

If you read my blog and actually remember what I say, some of you might know that Turtles in Time is one of my favourite SNES titles out there and this game is VERY  similar to that one!  Just less advanced. You beat up enemies, travel through time and each stage has a boss!  The time zones you visit are varying , you play through the future, medieval times, the wild west, the age of pirates, world war 2 and the future again! Every stage but one.. has a fitting boss (but more on the odd one out later)  for example in the medieval times you fight a Dragon.. which feels like something aliens could put there to mess up time!  Or in the Wild west you face a gunslinger with better weapons! Pretty good stuff!  The stages look distinct and all have their own music. Controls feel okay, but could be a bit sharper. Having Select switch weapons is a great thing I wished to have seen in more games! The game is highly functional which given that I am going to play random games for the foreseeable future already is a big bonus! So I would not go as far as say that this game sucks donkey sausage or I’d rather eat a skunk’s rotten defecation exit than to play this game, but going as far as saying that this is a good game?! I ‘d rather not go that far either.

time lord nes Cheaper Than Retail Price> Buy Clothing, Accessories and lifestyle products for women & men -

This game has 4 major flaws that really and I mean REALLY spoil the broth for me!  Let’s begin with the biggest gripe!  Like most NES games this one can be finished a a manner of minutes.  As long as you know what to do that is! The game only has six stages which is fair. which will take you about 20 ish minutes to beat! Which is a good thing.. because if you play the game for 24 minutes and 34 seconds and still have not reached the ending.. you will hit a game over! No further edits, you have to play the game from the very beginning! Which isn’t THAT big of an issue since the whole game can be finished in about 20 minutes…on paper. Now there is a problem in the main time zones! As this game requires you to SEARCH out the HIDDEN location of the time Orbs.  Some of these orbs locations are REALLY cryptic as well.. such as having to pick up 20 mushrooms in the medieval level..or ringing the ship bell three times in the pirate level. So playing this game without hitting a game over blindly is practically impossible! And that already design wise is a chips load of fudge!

Listing of Nintendo NES games starting with the letter t - Page 5 - The Video Games Museum

This goes hand in hand with the second issue of the game!  Many of the orbs in this game.. need to be picked up IN ORDER! Which doesn’t seem to bad but 3 out of the 6 stages make you do some serious backtracking! The worst offender of this is the World War II level who places an Orb right at the start of the game but you can only collect it last. So not only do you need to familiarise yourself with the location of the orbs, you also need to find the easiest way to get from A to B as you basically are forced to speed run this game.  Some of the orbs found in the game require trick jumps to pull off and I haven’t been able to consistently do that even if I know how the controls work!  Other orbs require you to make leaps of fate down a pit.. but since the game is in 2.5d  you can still miss an item because you are to much in the foreground or background Climbing back up takes you about a 30 seconds to a minute, so if you mess up a few times to get the perspective run, you will inevitably hit a game over. 

time lord nes OFF 66% - Online Shopping Site for Fashion & Lifestyle.

The third issue is that the game is rather stingy with lives! Enemies keep constantly respawning  based on where you are in the level, so the backtracking will drain a fair bit of health! Especially in the later stages, where you need weapon upgrades to take down enemies without punching them a million times, your first run to get the items, which means you will get hit, then you have to backtrack to find all orbs which means you will take damage. If you arrive at the final boss with less then at least 2, 5 lives left  I dont think there is a way to beat it! It’s damage is nearly unavoidable, which is only amplified that by the time you arrive there you will have just a few minutes left to beat it. So you will play sloppy! Other bosses can take away huge chunks of life as well.. but they can’t hit you at all if  you find their golden spot and move in depth a bit while you can hit them no matter what plane you are on , they can only hit you if you are dead center.. if they hit you though you lose like half a life bar. The World War 2 boss i particularly hard and pretty much you will never make it through a stage in one go!  

Time Lord (NES) Final Battle + Ending - YouTube
This is how the final boss looks!

The fourth and final issue is that the final boss does NOT feel like a final boss! It feels like a scrub thing you encounter in castlevania! It’s three alien skulls on brains that spit birds at you! I knew aliens were my enemy  but these don’t look like big bad guys! This looks like the guys R2D2 and C3PO take care off while Luke  slashes at the real thing! I got really frustrated that a Mid Boss was kicking my ass.. until I finally got past it.. and realised I had beaten the game! It is not the worst boss though! The worst boss is in the pirate stage!  You may wonder .. How do you fudge up a Pirate Captain?! Well it’s not a pirate captain.. not even a pirate! The villain in the pirate themed level… is a clam! And like a clam it doesn’t really do anything! You just throw daggers at it until it dies! Why would a CLAM be the thing aliens use to disturb time! I mean it’s a big one.. but why not give blackbear a lightsaber or something.. that would seem more effective jeez!

Chocolat and Clam covered Steak

On my last run, the one I knew I was gonna beat the game on, I had a fair bit of fun! The game isn’t bad, it’s design is just fundamentally wrong! To beat the game you basically are expected to run into 6-ish game overs at least. It isn’t all that difficult to navigate through these stages but the clock pursuing you punishes you for inexperience. You are literally unable to complete the game from inexperience! You can play flawless and not get hit YET still you will be forced into a game over.. because .. who in their right minds would try to pick mushrooms until a red orb appears in a beat em up game. Who  would ring a bell three times to make an orb appear.. especially when an earlier bell shows up that just drops coins!  Which only increases your score..but cost you time to get so why would you?! The core gameplay is fun.. but it is not rewarding to play as a gamer and goes against my gaming instincts of fairness.

Time Lord - NES - Nerd Bacon Reviews

I want to lose a game because I suck at the game! I want to get better! Just simply learning the map doesn’t count at getting better at the game!  If I hit a Game Over because I hit the bell on the pirate ship too many times, I don’t feel accomplished if I skip it the next time around and DO find an orb in the next bell. I feel robbed! I don’t mind getting a bad ending for taking things slow.. take Metroid for example! That has a time limit as well but I can still be quite content if I beat it in a slow run.. here I just die! I played about 12 to 15 times, some of which was caused by pure frustration but one of them happened by time out in the final stage! I was just too slow in killing the World War 2 boss to get to that monster with as many lives as possible! As I believed he was a mid boss! That was very annoying!

This game is like grocery store steak and store bought chocolate mousse and take away clams.  As separate elements they are super passable and enjoyable!  We don’t always need fine dining and store bought can still be fine!  The steak is seasoned pretty well, the clams while not the freshest and some taste a bit funky are still clams! It’s hard to fudge those up and the chocolate mouse is a great desert that most people would not say no to! The problem is this game just throws it all together. There is no way to enjoy your steak without tasting the clams and the chocolate mouse as well.. and it just doesn’t combine! 

Houshou Marine (1,000,000 subscribers) : Hololive

I wanted a pirate boss! I love pirates! Marine is probably the VTuber I would make my wife!  So the fact that I could have fought her in this game but I got a clam instead annoys me!  I know I am into clams as well but NO! This is not a good stage boss!  Who ever thought that was a good idea!  This is clearly made by people who understood games and marketing.. yet the thing this game fails to understand is the gamer!  That is why I would consider this game a failure! Speaking of which.. since this guy is supposed to be a Time Lord, where is his phone booth?!

Next installment of Random Video Game Duck.. we will launch a Sega Master System game? Will it be good? Will it be bad? I do not know! All I know is that it will be drawn at random! Any NES game you’d like to see me play?! Or do you hope I land on a particular Master System title?! Let me know! Oh dear.. the song is hear! I gotta go! Stay random!

♫♩ She’s the Random ………..Video Game ………Duck! ♩♫

A video game movie… about video games?! The Wizard Review

In an attempt to watch video game movies , except for the in universe ones, (as in they exist besides the games as part of the same universe)  I wondered. What counts as a video game movie. BloodRayne was up next but I could not stomach Uwe Boll right now. So instead I looked for something more innocent, a road trip movie about a boy and his autistic brother, wanting to travel to California.. for unknown reasons. That is right I watched 1989’s  The Wizard.

But Pinkie! The Wizard That’s Not A Video Game?!

How Astute of you.. my dear Island guests.. or me pretending to be an Island guest! That paragraph title is Correct! The Wizard is not a video game movie in the classical sense as we do not follow the story of a video game… not that any video game movie does that ..but I mean … non of the characters in this movie is a video game character.  Instead this is a movie about video games. A boy playing video games to be exact. One could call it a 90 minute Nintendo commercial. It has received.. a fairly poor reception. Having a Metacritic Score of only 2.3 and a critic approval rating of 32% on Rotten tomatoes. With an Audience Score of 60% and a 6,1 on IMDB.. this however promises to be one of the better watches I get in all 43 video game movies I counted.  It scores less than Postal on Rotten Tomatoes though.. which is absolutely wrong. I enjoyed this movie… .okay enjoy might be a big word.. but I certainly did not hate it.

The movie was made in 1989 and directed by Todd Holland. It stars Luke Edwards as the autistic  young Jimmy Woods, who later gets the nickname the wizard. He is in an institution for his heavy form of autism. His family has broken up after his sister died a few years ago and now the boy constantly tries to run away from home to go to California. One day after his father played by Beau Bridges, kinda distances himself from the boy his brother Corey played by a young Fred Savage breaks him out angry at his father for ignoring Jimmy’s wishes. Together they travel to California but they discover.. they need money. A young girl named Hayley joins up with them and convinces them to let Jimmy play Nintendo games ..in arcades.. for money! They can use the money to travel.. when they discover that in California there is a big video game competition with a big cash price.

Divorced mother and now involved with the owner of the institution Christine hires a professional Child returner/kidnapper. This angers Father Sam who sees the error of his ways of neglect and travels along with his eldest son, played by Christian Slater in order to find his two boys!  While they travel Nick.. the Slater Characters, brings along an NES and father and son bond over playing video games like Mario 2 and Zelda 2.  While also playing a very hillbilly esque cat and mouse game with the Childnapper guy. Who finds Jimmy first.. and can he make it to California, will he win the elusive tournament or will it go to the almighty gamer Lucas.. who wields THE POWER GLOVE? All these questions as well as why Jimmy wants to travel to California will be solved in a hundred minute movie. 

Nintendoes

First of all it should be noticed that the movie has a fairly competent cast which already is a good sign. Secondly a big name to Nintendo is connected to this film. I don’t mean in the way like “yeah go ahead and make a movie about us” either. This movie was the World Wide reveal for Super Mario Bros 3 of all things. One of my all time favourites if not THE favourite Mario game.  So there was some confidence in this movie.  We also see the movies antagonist Lucas use The Power Glove, a peripheral/weird controller I talked about in the past. It’s so bad.. and hey.. that line is in the movie!  We also take a peek inside Nintendo Power magazine in america.. or the Nintendo Hotline for tips and tricks! I am not sure if it’s one and the same back here in the Netherlands it was so I assume it was a similar type of deal.  We get this type of movie we don’t really see anymore. Three kids on the road..united by friendship. It takes inspiration from movies like Stand By Me which came out three years before.  For those who don’t know that movie.. well  remember that first screen in Pokémon when you click on the tv? “Four Boys walking on a railroad.. time to get rolling myself?’ Well that’s the movie they got that from! As a result the movie has this solid “frame” to build itself onto. Which benefits it.. it does feel fairly focused..which is hard to do for kids travelling across America. 

It is also not afraid to do it’s own thing where Stand By me is very set in the wilderness this trip of the Wood Boys and Hayley is much more suburban, which comes with a different set of challenges. Challenges this movie handles fairly well. They have to deal with people wanting their money back after a lost bet, they have to deal with robbers, using their tiny statues to get what they want easily, they have to deal with stuff like.. wanting to gamble for money..but not being allowed to play in a Casino so.. having to arrange a mule. It shows Universal Studios theme park.which is funny because that later became a video game on Nintendo,, and has a few interesting choices. The kids in this movie for the most part act like kids.  For example how Hayley lies about how awesome her life is .. only to later reveal her father left her because her mom had a gambling addiction. The skills she have stem from having a gambling mother and a trucker father not from some form of greater intellect. Jimmy being so autistic he easily sees patterns in video games is a bit iffy.. but hey he’s kind of like Nintendo Rainman that’s kinda enjoyable. 

The kids deliver a fair performance and the whole being unable to communicate with your little brother thing and that sometimes they have to guess what Jimmy is feeling makes the kids part of the journey very fun to watch. It is funny so see classic NES games like  Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon and the first Turtle game  be played on camera.  While there are plenty of movies of games.. movies about gaming are fairly rare.. the only other ones that come to mind are Ready Player One, Gamer and Pixels.  All the others are exaggerations though.. this one has no superpowers, no virtual treasure, no aliens.. no this is just a story about a boy who is talented at video games. It’s “romanticised” enough to be entertaining bu in the end all this movie is about is how video games can strengthen your bonds and a trip that started because a family was unable to communicate. In it’s own way it is kinda cute! For a lost 100 minutes it isn’t even that bad. …. However…………

Ninetendon’t

Unfortunately this movie is plagued by a myriad of flaws as well. The most glaring one is that the movie is not written by a gamer. “Wow Jimmy you got 50.000 points in Double Dragon” sounds a bit cringe.A beat them up is not about points it is about survival.Later they even do points in Mario and Ninja Gaiden.. and while it is true that Championships do mention points there is a clear dissonance here. You can tell the team here doesn’t understand video games.  A lot of the writers and the actors don’t understand video games. Why does Cristian Slater have to hold a controller that awkwardly and instantly tab buttons when playing Mario 2.  The gameplay doesn’t match his hands.. how hard is it t to actually make him play or at least learn him how a video game works.. even if you then use a pro all he has to do is understand the controllers and you make him do the actions he sees on screen.. then you put that shot a second or so earlier in your timeline and voila. But no people feel rather like incompetent games..even the amazing Lucas seems to make way too many button clicks for a game he is playing. It does seem like he knows how to use a Power Glove though! So maybe he is just that BAD.

That brings me to a second element of this movie that isn’t great. It has aged incredibly poorly. It has been written with a fairly “hip” language for 1989.. but we do not talk or dress like that anymore. While that can be a hilarious time capsule effect this time it affects everything. Where for example Sentai are a timeless concept so a time setting just gives it body.. like an aging wine..only not persé as good.. more like a distinguished flavor kind of thing. Yet in this movie, it’s the lingo people speak in, the games that are being played, the way that tournaments are being held, the way plot devices work and in fact the whole complete type of storytelling. Gaming isn’t as strange anymore so 90% of those who watch this these days will be able to tell you  gaming is not about score.. that is the gaming of a generation before. The way they say Mario works.. “You gotta score points Jimmy score points”  doesn’t work and the fact that they know.. how an item works in an unreleased game is odd at best. Finding a Warp doesn’t give you more points! Back then.. you could pull that stuff “Mew Under the truck”  was a thing. The lingo sometimes makes characters hard to understand. Bad was good back then.  The whole running away story would not work these days.  As a result the focus on the movie becomes.. how different were those days which takes you out of the movie.

While that point gives the movie a positive point as well, a new angle to watch it from doesn’t fully work with how the adults in this movie work. Which in my opinion is the greatest weakness. For some weird reason, they always end up in exactly the right places in exactly the right towns. One would assume that the kids may find themselves unable to travel in a straight line, because they are dependent on hitchhiking. They might travel to the west but have to settle for moving a bit more up north?! Yet both the kidnapper guy and the father and son keep up ending up in the right towns. Where then they are able to run in each other’s cars and attack each other with shovels without consequences. Weirdly enough it’s the Adult scenes and not the kid scenes that show we have to deal with a movie aimed at children. The adults go to a car repair shop and hook up their Nintendo to their tv.. while waiting for their car to be repaired. The Kidnapper ask a towing guy.. “do you want to make a quick 50 bucks.. tow my friends car away”.. which is fine.. some tow goes would that. I can accept that.. but then they bring it to a scrapyard that immediately begins to disassemble it?  Jumping the shark a bit there. Beau Bridges not wanting to stop playing Zelda II is a funny joke.. because we as kids did not want to stop playing games.. but he is trying to rescue his son from a sure to be traumatic experience…you are just turning him into an asshole by making him want to get another item in Zelda first.

Nintendo’s Entertainment System

Comedy in this movie is great.. but some jokes really do not land. Haley getting the Kidnapper guy in trouble by repeatedly yelling “He Touched My Boob” every time he almost captured Jimmy is good for a chuckle.. She is creative and cunning in this and it both works for the plot and would actually be helpful to draw attention…so when he hears truckers tell him “so you touched a young girl’s breasts you pervert” and we see him sigh we can chuckle. It’s lowbrow and will make a kid chuckle as well. Even the awkward kiss between Corey and Hayley which is a stereotypical childish joke works and it’s great.All comedy from Beau Bridges and Christian Slater however ….DOESN’T work.  They are needed in the movie but they should have been made more caring. It’s nice to see father and son bond on a journey and it would not even be that bad to make them bond over something Jimmy enjoys like video games..  yet almost all their scenes feel disconnected because Nintendo just had to make the old man enjoy games as well… at the cost of his sons!   The whole Power glove scene in fact is quite redundant as well.. we already know he cant use it at the tournament.. so it is just a tad too commercial. This scene is better now that it has aged because of how BAD it is yet somewhere along the way it feels as if this movie is having an Agenda.  

This movie can be compared to something like Ice Age. The story of the human baby being taken ot a certain location is the main plot. Jimmy has to be delivered by two caretakers to a certain location. Along the way is a lot of child friendly humor but also a heartfelt journey with people becoming friends for life and really bonding. Then there is Scrat. You know that rat thing that wants an acorn and just ends up getting hurt? Imagine taking those scenes out of ice age and replacing them with Ola Ice Cream product placement. We see Ice age baby humans looking for him.. but when a Scrat scene would show up they get distracted by Ola Ice cream. In the end you will be a bit upset that the baby finds his way back. The ending of the movie makes up for this a bit tying the desire of the boy together with a deep trauma and making him hug his father for the first time in forever. His father needed to be there at that moment.. things needed to be broken for things to heal yet to me he will now always be the jackass who thought getting through Death Mountain in Zelda 2 is more important than finding his kid. Up to a  point where I almost found that the movie failed because it wanted to promote gaming for adults.. cause Nintendo makes such addicting games you forget your family?!…

I was gonna visit my mom.. but then I saw this scene in the movie! Now I don’t know who she is! I just wanna play Contra.

I do think that the critics are too hard.. but The Wizard is a series of odd choices which leads to a conceptually strong enough movie. How good this movie actually is  depends on how forgiving you are as a movie go-oer. Let’s compare this movie to Star Wars Episode 1. It is a very different story than what we are used to from Video Game/Star Wars movies. Yet that can be good or bad. It is catered at a slightly younger audience and while it certainly had some great revelations.. it makes some very stupid choices as well. If you are the type that thinks.. JarJar ruined that entire movie.. than this  will also be a movie that you are going to hate. If you take everything face value that one broken element breaks the entire movie.  If you are more like me though you can see that other element as just an element. “They tried to make a comical character, it did not work out, let’s take that at a loss but judge the movie on the merits it has. If you are like that you can have an enjoyable time with this.. if you at least have an affinity with old timey games.  Then there is the type like my friend Bean thats like.. “It’s meant for kids writing doesn’t need to make sense’  Then I think a little bit less of you.. movies should always be for everyone no matter who your main audience is.. but heck as long as you have an affinity for old games and love to dig around in time capsules this movie will be your jam.

It’s a movie with just one very broken element and to come to a correct judgement I  will compare the show to a car you want to buy. The engine .. in this case , the story is fine, the steering wheel is fine, the movie goes where it needs to go and addresses relevant story points and it feels paced fairly neatly..though it tends to drag at some points. It isn’t very user friendly.. the car makers didn’t know much about driving so your direction indicator has some super colourful flashy symbols and kinda makes a lot of noise and your car horn is a jaunty tune making the car a bit more tacky. However your brakes.. are completely broken.  The handbrake works fine but you only apply that when you have come to a stop already.  Sure you can throw out a land anchor or just install new brakes.. but you would not pay full price for this car. Nor would you say it’s a star on the road. You wouldn’t even call it very good.  If you get a hell of a discount it can be fine if you really want to drive this particular car.  If you have other options this one will just be okay.. and if you are a nag.. this car is clearly sub par.
I had a fun drive.. and when it comes to video game movies.. being forced to use a land anchor is the least of my worries! But you have been warned!

So my quest to watch all Video Game movies goes on! Next week I probably should watch BloodRayne, now I just have to find the courage to put it on! What is your favourite Video Game Movie? Which movie should I watch next?! Let me know! Have you played NES?! Are you some sort of video game Rainman I can bank on by making you go to tournaments?! Very important questions being asked here! Speaking of making bank! I also have a Kofi. If you want to help out please click the cute picture! However I also really appreciate likes and comments all the same! So let’s have fun interactions together! Have an amazing day and I hope you’ll visit Paradise again!

Shouting, Punching and Breaking Legs: Weird NES Controllers

Hello Island Guests, if I would be a Pokemon I would be a fossil Pokemon. So I guess I’d be a Fairy Rock type. Why? Because I constantly keep being stuck in the past. My first console was an NES, a very simple game console that got released on the Dutch markets  in the fall season of 1987. A year after I was born.

Five years later or so I had one! A very simple system with a D-pad  and four buttons (Start and select count). I love this controller, so many memories! Yet even back then Nintendo always was trying to discover new ways to play.. so worked better than others.

The Konami Laser Scope

By now it should be no secret that I hate children, they are loud, obnoxious they tend to hurt me, they think they know it all , they are helpless and unpredictable. I would describe kindergarten as like a trashcan for dead baby jokes that have gone to waste. Now of course this is a exaggeration of how I actually feel I am very anxious around children. Mostly their loudness can freak me out.. or if they play their games at full volume on their phones.  Back in my days children would have to play games in the living room though, so the noise would be very difficult if you were reading a magazine or on the phone.. which back then had cords on them that were connected to the wall. So a kid gaming was even more of a plague.

Luckily Konami came up with their Solution. The Konami Laser Scope! A huge headset children could put on.. shielding you from the bloops and bleeps of space fighting games and classics like Top Gun. It was advertised this way so it seemed great. Little did parents know! This game does a good job at muting out the game soundtrack and those sound effects. It is a fairly sound proof headphone. The problem.. this controller has no A and B button, you play this controller by yelling “Fire”…. Or anything else for  that matter. So instead of the Duckhunt theme and sound effects you hear your child yell Fire Fire Fire all the time!  Unadopt!

Design wise it seems like a sort of combination of an eye exam device, a saiyan scouter with some rad but cheap danger looking stickers added to it so kids would feel cool when wearing it. The truth? Yes with things you look completely cool!  If cool was spelled D-O-R-K that is. Yet the Laser Scope wasn’t just a controller. You can remove the head visor thing and fold back the microphone thingy and wear it as a actual headphone for your walkman! Now that .. in comparison makes the full controller look really cool!

The Power Pad

In 1988 the whole marketing department of Nintendo collectively forgot all worlds in human existence except for one word. Power! .. They could add words before it like Horse and Nintendo and sometimes even words behind Power.. like this one time they tried something with a piece of clothing for your hands?! What was that all about?! One of the Power Guys suddenly said “Body Power” and everyone clapped. So it was time to develop a controller around Body Power…how do we do that?! Well simple!  We make a sheet  with 12 balls depicted on it.. because twister is kinda popular as well.. and then make kids run and jump as a controller.  A very early DDR pad if you will… just weird.

Nintendo always wanted us to stay fit.. like nearly every generation of their consoles had some fitness equipment. There is the Balance Board for Wii and Wii U, that Ring for Nintendo Switch, A fitness Bike for SNES, the Gamecube had a handle.. so you could take it out to run outside and the NES had this thing. Twelve numbered orbs on a grey mat.  Player one usually takes  the blue numbers, player two plays on red. Which baffles me because , well  number 1 and 2 are blue, 3 and 4 are red. Then 5 and 6 are blue again and 7 and 8 are red.  I mean it makes sense on the mats design, you count the numbers and all.. but  since this thing is meant for multiplayer mostly… WHY would you do it like this?!

The game works best on button mashing games like those Olympic or running games. Player 1 runs on 5 and 6 while Player 2 runs with 7 and 8. By jumping you somehow actually jump. Fun.. but you just did a 100 meter hurdle jump thing. On an 8 bit console, it isn’t exactly thrilling. It supported a few other games but it came with the game World Class Track Meet. Why would I want to run?! I mean nowadays I get it with the whole fitness idea, but back then we played video games because we did NOT want to play outside and run. But this is coming from me, I lived in a small town where there was plenty of space and safety to do it better than a power pad could. Maybe it’s different for city folk.

Other games that came for the pad are kind kind of weird. There is for example Eggsplode and Short Order, a twin packed game that allows you to break bombs and prevent chicken murder or play simon says with hamburger parts to fatten up animals. They are solid mini games but not really something to justify getting a mat like this out, relocating your NES and sliding away the coffee table.   Technically this mat is about as big as six children standing in double file so that is a rather hefty chunk of living room. Just setting this thing up takes you longer as how long these games are actually fun so all in all.. it gets you moving.. but it is a bit odd. 

The U-Force

Now things begin to really get odd. The U-Force I would describe as weird predecessor of  the kinects. Yet.. it looks more like a monolith in a plastic case. Like those screens look like how evil computers looked like back in the 80’s. It isn’t immediately obvious how you use this. I’d say it is part Kinect, Part theremin part ??? with mostly the latter being true. The U -force has several settings depending on what game you play.  New games would tell you what U-Force setting they need in the manual older games should be able to find in the setting which can be very different between each game.

Some games require it to be a fully flat surface and you play games like a theremin, another game could require a mirror like set up, while a third game requires that same mirror like set up but requires a flight stick peripheral. The weirdest thing.. this peripheral is just a piece of plastic with buttons that is not connected  to the system in any way yet it fairly flawlessly mimics your actions and button presses. In Punch Out I think you can actually punch towards the screen and for some driving games you like swipe left and right to steer left and right and tilt your hand  to accelerate or decelerate. It is an odd contraption which works differently each time.. but what’s weirder..  It really really works. 

Playing Mario on U-Force is kinda fun it doesn’t work as clean as an actual controller but I do feel like I could beat a stage or two, unlike with my next two entries. Punch out allows me to beat Glass Joe at least, and Top Gun.. well I never really liked that game but I should really give it a try sometime. It is a gimmick and it doesn’t make things easier or better, it just is another way to play.  In that way it is like the theremin again. I would not call it like an actual controller, it’s a neat thingamajig that can be fun but quite puzzling why it was made in the first place.

The Roll’n Rocker

Now this is a controller which was distributed by LJN.This company has gained notoriety because of the AVGN, claiming there is no pot of gold but a pot of shit and the end of this rainbow.  When it comes to this controller though, that might be underselling it. This thing is broken and non functional at all. What is it? It’s basically a D-Pad you can stand on and by shifting your weight you use the directional controls. It works about just  as well as using an actual D-Pad after your hand got hit by a rainstorm of bricks. Even then depending on how much of your hand is crushed, you still have a better chance with your mangled hand as with this controller. 

The design is super retro. It’s how Back to the Future would imagine us using controllers in the future. It is a grey piece of plastic filled with stubs to make it less slippery with bright blue center with three  side bits  with Roll’n Rocker written in a tubular or gnarly font. Because of the three blue prongs you already lose your direction a bit making this finicky controller even harder to use. Since this totally Rad desgined thing does not have any buttons it has a socket where you can plug in an NES controller..so you can still use the A and B button. So much like R.O.B.  This controller still requires the original controller but unlike ROB which was a gadget to use your controller,  this IS a controller still.. so already it is so dysfunctional that you still need the thing you try to replace it with.

Now this could be fun for games like Skate or Die ,  Back to the Future or  Menace Beach. Games that are  have you skateboarding for a bit part of their gameplay. Now what these games all have in common is that they are bad games that all at least have featured in a AVGN episode.. as a testament that other people think this as well. So when you add a non functional controller  things get even worse.  Back to the Future should work for several reasons.. It doesn’t need buttons, it utilizes  controls in all directions an it is part of the LJN line-up. If you distribute a controller you best make sure it works with the games you put out as well. Why would you stand up on wobbly thing to play these games in the first place anyway it made me nauseous when I tried it out at first and anxious.. definitely a miss and a head-scratcher.

This one did not have any advert or commercial so I had to make due

The Power Glove

Another Power Item.. where The Power Pad required Body Power the Power Glove feeds on your sanity. Very few controllers are as dysfunctional as this item. Yet the marketing of this controller was SO freaking cool. It was used in a movie called the Wizard, which was basically a big NES commercial and showed us the first footage of Super Mario 3 we ever saw. Back then bad was a word we used for good! The main character’s rival used the power glove and said it was so bad! We thought he meant it was cool… but no this time bad actually meant bad. Yet just looking at the commercials we all wanted the Power.

The controller needed to be programmed for each game, except for the two games which were made for the Power Glove.  Super Glove Ball and Bad Street Brawler. While both games can be played with regular controllers they have extra moves and options when playing on the power glove. One of these games.. actually works with the power glove. Bad Street Brawler… not so much.  The latter is a great game to play though. It has your beat up self launching midgets and  Gorillas as the punk rocking guy Duke Davis. Super Glove Ball is like tennis with a hand.. and it actually works with a power glove. You wave your hand and the hand actually moves to where you want it. It’s kinda fun.

When it comes to how easy it is to actual game.. this catchphrase is right!

Mario however doesn’t work, Castlevania.. works okay..but when you need to move up or down a stairs.. it doesn’t work anymore.. so  at least the first three enemies are fun. Rad Racer more or less works but it teaches you super unsafe driving methods and at irregular intervals does teach you what will happen if you drive like that..Bam!  The Power Gloves does offer a unique gaming experience though, it will make you question your sanity?! I am such a bad gamer that I can not do this or is this thing really this broken?!  Do you want to feel hopeless like a baby chicken tossed in the tub?! Then the Power Glove is something you should definitely try out. The Power Glove arrived at the end of 1989 and it would take Nintendo 17 more years to make this concept functional.. that is how broken this is?! Why 17 years you say? That is when the Wii came out!

A BIT of Nostalgia: Ducktales

Look at the past, my darling Island Guests!
Game are and Strange and Vast, Filled with wonders and tests.
Face each old game with eyes clear and true!
Today will be awesome..as I play Ducktales Woooohoo.

Pinkie is going to piss some people of with these opinions

Incredible respect for those who were able to sing that opening rather than reading it! We are kindred spirits. Today I re-review what is possibly a contender for my most favorite game ever. Along with Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger this game means so much to me. So I will already tell you it might receive a high score!  I wanted to see if my treasured gem still could stand the face of time. It sure did.  While it’s length is very short in this day and age, that applied to many other games. What it still gives is an amazing unique mechanical platform experience.  A game that heavily inspired Crankey’s Moveset in the later Donkey Kong games and of course the noble Shovel Knight. This without a shadow of doubt in my mind is the single best licensed game ever made. Beating Turtles in Time, Epic Mickey , Kingdom Hearts and even GoldenEye.

The reason it’s better than those last two, DuckTales hasn’t aged as poorly. It’s controls are still butter smooth in its simplicity, the enemy attack patterns still work and challenge you, the hunt for the best ending is not that hard because the game lasts about an hour  or so if you  are a bit thorough but well versed in it. Maybe a bit less even. Despite of it being easy there is a sense of joy in hunting these treasures and playing these stages which all are quite diverse. We have a jungle theme level, a horror themed level, an underground one, a snow and ice themed one and of course the moon. Home to my most beautiful memory and my favorite song ever..probably. Every stage has just a bit of a different feeling and some secrets to unlock. Mind you.. there is not much secrets.. but is just a great joy to boot this game up a few times and just play through these great stages. GoldenEye’s controls now deeply disappointed and Kingdom Hearts gameplay really shows its age when it comes to collecting and progress.

She is totally being genuine though she really loves this game!

The graphics are vibrant for NES all sprites are very recognisable for what they should be. Even the tribal guys I can still very distinctly tie to when they encountered similar character in the series.  Yet for some weird reason Dewey wears green look Louis.. why?!  It’s a quirk I always wandered about and one the excellent remakes fixes, yet now that I played the original I can say I vastly prefer it over the remake. The speed of which you can run through this game is what makes it so timeless. The Remake added some extra exploratory requirements to all stages, that are much more in your face.  You need to do so.. in the original .. you COULD do that if you want. If you want the good ending it is probably wise. You can also make things very hard for yourself and try to get the bad ending (which is extremely hard to do.. without hacking nigh impossible) It’s that type of game that isn’t very challenging but you make your own challenge for.. We can do that to old games but Ducktales lends itself even better for such things than Mario because of its  unique jumping system (at the time).

This whole game is build around the pogo jump! A bouncy but deadly way of attacking using a cane. I guess if Dr Jekyll tried this out he might have not had such a sucky NES game.  The pogo stick is unique to Ducktales even though it later got mimicked.. this was the main gimmick of the game and boy was it used well. In a way Mario stole from ducktales when they came  up with the spin jump as it basically does everything the pogo jump does. It allows you to bounce of spiky objects or in mario’s case spike enemies. It can break blocks and it destroyed enemies.  When Mario steals from you when it comes to platforming you know you are on the right track. The life system is also nicely done in Ducktales. Lives are finite and a single game over makes you start all over but you can spend  money for extra lives as well as find extra lives and health upgrades across the stages. This means that you always have to balance exploring and clearing with each other. Getting sidetracked may drain your life..but you might gain life as well. Even if there is not you can buy lifes using your overworld score make sure you reach the end.. but without having the best ending.  Balanced!

Seriously if this game was an anime girl she would waifu it!

Ducktales is not hard to beat, not even on the harder difficulties , it’s fairly forgiving and any mistakes you make are your fault, there is little cheap enemies here or impossible to dodge attacks.  You just need to learn…or remember by heart because you played this game so much. Yet Ducktales would have been made for younger kids most likely so it makes sense they get a game of this difficulty. When I was a kid it had the perfect difficulty for me and now.. now I just need to expand my challenges from time to time.  Back in the 80’s and early 90’s this was a common practice in gaming.  “I challenge you to beat Mario 1-1 without collecting a  single coin’  ‘Beat Glass Joe without taking a single hit’  we used to egg each other on for extra challenges. In fact Nintendo even made a few retro collection games around this concept.

Ducktales is very cleverly designed in a way that this game can be used in such a way. We have a money score we can use for high-scores, there is a timer we can race with, there is several routes and additional tricky obstacles and several methods of traversing obstacles that making challenge each other or yourself  is super fun. While maybe not especially designed around it back than that was possible. Nowadays games hold your hand to much or offer you so much freedom that a choice of playstyle is irrelevant.  Playing a  game alternatively now doesn’t work because either a game tells you to finish this boss with X or there are 20.994 ways to defeat a boss and your chosen options is just.. one.

While the Ducktales game could use some more iconic bosses the whole world building still feels like a part of it’s world.  Of course we have the boss from the African Mines which directly links to the show and the Magica Despell fight in Transilvania , a moon rat and and an amazone statue feel a bit meh. Why not Glomgold or Mother Beagle? Yet I do feel the statue and the moon rat really make sense at the same time.. like they are supposed to be there.   Where most video game enemies can feel forced in, I never had that much with Ducktales.. except for some Beagle Boys underneath the surface of the moon. Effort went into building this world and back then.. Capcom basically was the only one to really do that.. at least in such a diverse setting. It is simple but it works and thus it becomes timeless.

Yep she is gonna talk about THAT again! Crazy Fangirl Alert

Of course Ducktales biggest charm is it’s presentation. All the characters  except for Dewey look like their series counterpart. You can tell everything apart. Purple was a colour that could not be implemented in the game so Magica Despell and Miss Beakley have some weird moments, but they are in there, you know who they are without reading a manual and they do what you expect.

Everything does what you expect..well maybe not Turbo because he doesn’t crash but can actually fly! Still despite of it’s limited graphics I never had trouble imagining how it would look like, plenty of iconic characters are hidden throughout the game. There is just a lot of love for the series and gaming in general in this little cartridge and it shows…. and  is audible
Yes time to gush about the moon theme as well. One of the most iconic video game music pieces of all time. Yet also the opening theme using the actual series theme was great, the sound when you climb up a vine or rope, the theme in the amazon.. the sound your pogos-tick makes. It’s all fantastic. 

I seriously spend about two minutes in the amazon just climbing up and down on the first rope just to hear those sounds again..searched for the hidden  room in Transylvania so I had to do a lot of mini pogo bounces. It all is just perfect for a platformer. This is what my childhood sounds like.  Wiggu Wiggu Wiggu and the Moon Theme. This music still leads a life to this day..making its way into official new products, becoming cannon in ducktales lore. Capcom where the masters of video game soundtracks and this one is amazing once again.

2:50 for some good Wiggu Wiggu Wiggu Action

I could stretch this post out and pretend like I care about the minor flaws like how it was not needed to press down to activate the pogo, or how the mine carts have a bit of a sticky control scheme making them needlessly tricky.  I could tell you about a scene where Scrooge actually tosses his cousins off a cliff with a minecart he is riding and telling you they could have done that differently. No.. that all doesn’t matter. Nowadays we think a 10/10 game should have no flaws and we should remorselessly point out everything that is wrong with it. That is not right. A 10/10 game to me is a game that is so fun to play that despite its flaws you will boot it up again. Each time you play, regardless if it crashes regardless if controls can glitch a bit or some elements seem wrong, you smile. 

Ducktales is a game I love so sooo much that whatever flaws are in there.. don’t matter to me. It has no impact on my experience with the game. Each time I beat this game and I think I have beaten it (across both version) well over 30 times now (if not closer to 50) and each I keep on smiling. Each playthrough as fun as it was my first. Ducktales was the first game I loved.. so in a way this is my Number 1 Dime.. this is what made me a gamer and when I play it today I still feel.. this is why I am a gamer.  No matter if listen to the soundtrack, play a single stage or complete the game, when I play Ducktales I feel like the richest person/duck in the world.

A BIT of Nostalgia: Super Mario Bros. 2

Now that I have cast the TALDIG aside and no longer try to teach people bad history trough mediocre video games, instead I will play some retro games I REALLY want to play. We start with one of the few main line mario games that I never finished. Today I take a look at Super Mario Bros. 2

Doki Doki We Know This

Now I assume most people know this but we need to go over this so you know what I am actually reviewing.  I played and completed the western Super Mario Bros 2.  The game that Japan knows as Super Mario U.S.A. Should there be someone out here reading who doesn’t know.  When Nintendo released their Super Mario 2, people thought it would be to difficult for your standard Western audience.. and having played it myself.. I can agree to a point. This would have polarised the american and european players. In order to still release a new Mario a game called Doki Doki Panic was given a bit of a Mario overhaul.  The original game had you pick from a quartet of arabian/middle eastern looking characters, which explains why you see so much desert levels and fly on a carpet so much.

It is also why this game does not feel like a Mario game. The mechanics in this game have never really been used after that anymore. You could attack by throwing vegetables  or throwing enemies after jumping onto them and picking them up. So one can make an argument that this is NOT a Mario game. However this game gave us so much of the super mario culture we know today. Shy-Guys, Pokey’s  and even Bob-ombs would not have existed without this game. Well .. at least not as Mario enemies and some of it’s most iconic music would also be missing. Most importantly.. without it most likely we would not have the Super Mario Brother Super Show.

It’s a me… kinda!

So for the first time I played the game and moved past the third world.Which was  where I left before. This game can be fairly difficult and cryptic at times. At least for younger gamers. Where Chibi-Pinkie  believed in being an absolute murder hobo when it comes to enemies Super Mario Bros. 2  requires you to use certain enemies as platforms or ride projectiles. There even are some minor puzzle elements on how to use bombs to blow up certain obstacles, factoring in distance you have to cross. It’s nothing special but it’s very different. Much like how Zelda 2 veered very much from its original as well. While Mario Bros and all subsequent games are pure sang platformers, this one is more of a puzzle platformer. One that is fairly stingy with its resources.

As a result this game is fairly, but never overly, challenging. The problem some puzzles are trial and error and on rare occasions this can softlock you into losing a life. This would not be that much of an issue if lifes were made more available. Super Mario 3 did that very well. Handing you 1-up mushrooms in the more trial and error like stages. This is a bit more relentless. I recommend playing the GBA version as it has a save function. I think the Super Mario All Stars one has one to,  but that is definitely welcome. You have two continues but given that most 1-ups are hidden behind RNG that still is harsh. There is nothing fun, nor was there ever about hitting a game over simply because you did not have enough lives to “learn” the game, being forced to start over. Luckily trough emulation.. and mini consoles we now have acces to save states which can help you deal with this gripe.. or you just play the superior ports.


Now don’t get me wrong this IS still a fun game to play but over time it has gotten some vastly superior versions.  Since the NES version is just a sprite swap in most senses of the word, it feels more “floaty” than other Mario games, Controls do not feel as tight. The Luigi Jump and Peach abilities do contribute to that.. and of course since she is pink I cleared the entire game with Peach. I have no trouble landing on a single block in any mario game, yet in this one I could rarely pull it off. As if there is a landing delay, which feels very un-mario. That being said the stages are mostly very well designed around this control scheme so it never killed the joy for me. Just in the core you can sense you are playing Doki Doki Panic.

It’s a Me REALLY!

Everything actually Mario, everything rebranded everything first party however feels great. The game oozes personality and much more than Mario Bros. feels part of the mario world. By now Mario had more personality he dons his actual red and blue colours rather than that brown jumpsuit. Peach, Luigi and Toad are actual characters here. I love the music and tossing an Ostrich is legitimately quite funny. I loved whenever I could do that and just waste my time respawning them and trying to kill as much things with a single ostrich thing as I can. I am even considering playing the GBA version to hunt for the red coins .. because I heard it could unlock Yoshi which seems like a fun addition. Also I really want to do a toad only run!

The reason for that would be the games ending, this game is infamous for being only in Mario’s dream.So I would really love for him to have a dream about Toad Pickup up ostriches going around beating up  pink transgender dinosaurs and beating the evil king to save a group of magical bees or something. This game introduced Birdo one of the first Transgender video game characters ever and we beat her up a lot during this game.

The game has seven worlds each with three levels. The first two levels of a world almost always face you off against Birdo in the end.  Even in some final levels she can sometimes be there as a mid boss.. or as a  means to use her eggs as platforms towards a new part of the stage. Still I wonder what would cause Mario to dream about a mushroom kid beating up the transgender Birdo and take down an evil toad (as in frog ..not mushroom.. confusingly enough)  to save some magical bees. But hey its my head canon now which is awesome so thank you Mario 2.
<Disclaimer.. I do not approve of violence against Transgender in any shape way or form, nor do I ship Toad X Mario.. I just really enjoy the fever dream fantasy. scenario.. thank you>

My least favorite Mario

While this is in fact my least favorite mainline Mario that is rather a testament to how incredible the series is rather than a strike against this game. The first half of this game is truely amazing and just a joy to play.  A bit like Mario Sunshine the second half can get a bit “stale” where the difficulty picks up to something that feels more tedious than challenging.  Each door for example is a checkpoints, some later levels just challenge you by having doors further apart  or let you collect an item on the far left which you then have to bring back to the far right. Instead of jumping to the next platform we have to use mushrooms to build our own way.  Which could be nice but across game over and continues and regular loss of life stacking the thing over and over again can feel more like labour than a challenge.

Again like Mario Sunshine (which is my second least favorite Mario by the way) that however gives  this game it’s uniqueness. I was much more inspired to try hard in this game than for example in Mario 1 or 3 where repeating stages feels less cumbersome. Where in Mario 1 I could turn of the game and say.. i’ll try again later this was the game I was really determined to beat. I wanted to conquer it and see all the worlds. Mario 2 is much more diverse compared to its predecessor at well, though there is some looping stuff after the fourth world. Out of the seven worlds only world six I sorta disliked while in Mario 3 there are two worlds I sorta dislike. So all in all this had a strong line up of levels and ‘puzzels’. It’s not bad yet overshadowed by greatness.

Strange Roots

This game is often called the black sheep in the Mario Line up and I do not think that is completely true. It’s more that annoying sheep that doesn’t really stay with the heard.. the one that always wanders aff and is the most mischievous doing some pretty weird things for a sheep. Yet for that very own reason you do always remember that sheep and tell your wife in bed about what that sheep did today. It’s a loveable odd piece of gaming memorabilia that has just so many good stories. For example the Koopa Shells in this game used to be Black-Faces you can toss as a power up. Controversy around those arose which may have led to the idea to make that particular game Mario. It already needed new sprites for the Western world anyway?! Could that be what made it ideal choice to be the new Mario? The other game was too .. controversial anyway.

Where would Mario be now without the Shy Guys and Pokeys, what if those masks  never inspired the sun in Super Mario 3. Without this game Pink would have never been able to hover with her dress and Luigi would not jump higher and floatier than Mario. Which proves just how powerful games can be. Mario Mario would not be the man he is today without this game.Luigi Mario might never have differentiate from his brother without this game and the mushroom kingdom these days is hard to imagine without bob-ombs or shy guys. I still hope that Wart makes his return to the realm one day as well because honestly he fits in quite nicely… not the bees though.. not the bees. We later got better bees , mostly in Super Mario Galaxy.

Like I mentioned this game heavily inspired the super mario cartoon which I hold fond memories of because of how campy it was..just a guilty pleasure and in a way this game is very much like that show. We all can tell it doesn’t feel exactly like Mario.. but still it is such a part of it’s history that we just can’t help but love it. I mean mario’s canonical voice comes from a mini game collection featuring go fish so why not embrace this part to the fullest as well. Yes it’s the least good part  of the series, but people treat it like that is a bad thing… yet there is always a worst part.

If there would be one Mario game.. that would also be the worst game. It doesn’t say anything. Well maybe one thing? If you actually enjoy this Mario, there is so much more out there for you to enjoy. I had a great time with this game. Frustrating sure.. I said some very unpink words.. but so did I when I played Shovel Knight or The Messenger (great games btw). This is not the game you play because you want to play a Mario game… this is a game you play because you love Mario and that is A-okay!


Top 5: Weird Nintendo Peripherals

Hello again island guests, as you might now I can be a bit of a weirdo. I am into weird things like making Luffy and Naruto play Mario Party against each other instead of them having fight a Death Battle.  I prefer old games over new ones (except for maybe animal crossing) and I am very charmed by clunkiness. So what do we get if we combine those all together? Older video game stuff that is totally weird and doesn’t work all that well? Exactly! Luckily there is Nintendo who offer me the weirdest gaming peripherals out there.

Weird Peripheral Number 5: The Inflatable Kart
(WII)

It’s a strange world where someone can make a inflatable Kart that functions as an odd on for a controller and having it barely make the top of weirdest Nintendo gadgets. In fact technically it really is not, but I chosen to exclude items I actually deem as alternate controllers, otherwise the kart wouldn’t even scratch the top 10.  Anyway … since most of you are at least old enough to have played the Switch, I think most of you know that Mario Kart Wii came with a plastic steering wheel. This is about the same thing… but with an inflatable Kart Attached to the steering wheel. 

Now Pinkie lives in a 23 square meter apartment so when it comes to add-ons for or your gaming experience she is a little bit selective , yet even in a game-room of a wealthy person I can’t imagine this working out.  It’s inflatable so prone to get leaky unless you deflate it each time after use! It’s a big kart as well so that is a lot of air you need to put in to inflate it so you are going to need something to provide enough air as well. After that you get a kid sized kart , and I can tell you that sitting in a kart like that is majorly uncomfy. I haven’t sat in this one but in a similar sized one and it killed my long dutch legs!  So without a pump this can causes intense leg cramps, respiratory issues, seasickness (yes I can get seasick from laying down on softly inflate air mattress) and you kind of look stupid sitting in a plastic kart. The Wii wheel  was bad enough.. but all this thing does is make you look sad. 

Weird Peripheral Number 4: R.O.B.
(NES)

SONY DSC

Gyromite and Stack-Up where two NES CO-Op games. Mostly the first one had some mechanics that could make for a fun puzzle game, with one player controlling gateways and the other the character. By working together you guide this little professor guy across the stages. It’s not a bad game… however it wasn’t intended to be played with a friend. Or at least not with a living one. This game was meant to be played next to R.O.B. your robot friend who could read the screen of Gyromite and Stack up and who would help you play the games.  So yes .. this is an actual robot that plays video games with you.. an actual Robot friend made for NES… that’s kinda weird right?! I mean it’s super cool but still weird. “Honey what should we hook up to our NES today?’ How about our robot friend?!

Nowadays R.O.B. I mostly know to be a fighter in smash but back in the NES era he was a true friend! Playing games with you.. however R.O.B.’s gaming skills leave a bit to be desired. First of all setting up R.O.B.  already takes about as long as beating your average NES game (once you know how to do it) so you spend 20 to 30 minutes setting up all the parts, positioning him to a screen, using the C batteries (I think it was four of them)  setting up the gyroids or the stackable blocks and then you also have to activate him. Now ROB is a 90’s robot so he is incredibly slow. Imagine Super Mario Bros world 1-1 with a question mark block this time being a gate ROB needs to open for you .

Now.. Rob doesn’t press buttons he picks up a gyro from a docking station and puts it on a scale this scale will then push A or B on Robs controller, this determines which gate is opened, the Red ones or the blue ones. .. now to switch Rob doesn’t pick up the gyroid from the controller and puts it on the other spot … no.. Rob picks it up , puts in back in the docking station, then makes another capture of the screen sees what is required of him and he moves the gyro from the docking station to the new position. So there is roughly a minute .. if everything goes well between each Mario Question block.. this is the pace that Rob holds.  And it doesn’t always go well.

ROB has butterfingers he constantly drops the gyro.. and if he does you need to make sure the gyro spins again. In Stack up where he builds coloured towers to mimic the screen he is even worse. Yet who cares you have a robot friend to play with. Now I bet GeekGirlJoy could build us another robot that does do its job better than ROB but until then either you have a gaming friend or a fairly low Tier Smash fighter.. either way if you are truly into a fluid gaming experience ROB probably should be avoided. Still a robot gaming friend.. is a pretty zaney idea for a peripheral.

Weird Peripheral Number 3: LifeCycle Exertainment (SNES) 

Nintendo always wanted that we stayed fit. The NES had a mat for running, the gamecube has a very popular DDR mat, the Wii had that Yoga balance board thing to work out with and on the Switch we now have a ring! However… there is one device that easily trumps these devices and makes them seem like child’s play. There is an exercise bike add on, for the SNES or Super Nintendo. That’s right a full fledged fully functional exercise bike. It’s extremely rare to find one these days.. as not a lot of them were sold… but back when it was made the company had full trust in this. They even released two models. One for gyms which had build in monitors and the SNES integrated into the cabinet or a home user model in which you connect the bike to an add on for your SNES that you connect via a phone cable.

It was very weird back then.. but what was actually weirder is that it actually works. The bike supports two games, of which only 1 is a bike game.. the other is a Speed Racer port.. from the same system but adapted to work with the controller. While the Bike itself actually works quite well and even can detect angles in the mode-7 graphics and increase or decrease pedal resistance based on it… the controller part really fumbles. The D-pad is horrible and since the bike’s steering wheel is fixed you need to press left and right to steer in these games…which basically is barely functional. So by playing these things on easier difficulty settings you can skip steering completely and just focus on having enough power to pedal trough. However this means earning less unlock points..and thus forcing you to exercise more.. so now it’s tiring and it’s not fun?!  Sounds like actual fitness to me, and if so this thing is completely overpriced.

Weird Peripheral Number 2: Sewing Machine 
(Gameboy) 

So this one is where things really start to get weird,  this is a sewing machine you can use by hooking it up to your gameboy, and unfortunately this isn’t even the weirdest gameboy invention ever. It’s just the weirdest you can actually play.  There is a cartridge that helps you set up sewing patterns I think which actually sounds incredibly helpful for people like me! I’d love to make cosplays but I barely even know what a sewing pattern even is. I am just not sure how helpful this tool actually is.  Aside from a few cosplayers I haven’t met a lot of people who own a sewing machine and a gameboy. The two demographics don’t overlap that much, so unless this was created for a niche of a niche specifically this one seems like a really weird idea to try out.

The Singer Izek is purchasable, which put it above it’s competition the Pedistate. The pedistate was a medical tool that never got released. It was a tool for hospitals that doctors and nurses could hook up to a gameboy, put onto a kid and …..sedate children… as they play their favorite handheld video games.  Feeling it was less traumatic for kids to be sedated this way they even build it in colours to match the original purple of the game boy colour. Honestly I would have loved to knock myself out with my gameboy! Sleeping doesn’t come easy to me so that tool would have been very useful, though I doubt I would be allowed to use it unsupervised.  Maybe the idea of sewing stuff together with my gameboy is enough to put me a sleep as well. 

Weird Peripheral Number 1: Babies  (Nintendo Wii) 

The fact that I had to write this title in plural instead of singular form amazes me. There are to my knowledge..at east two baby add ons for Nintendo wii. Both come with their own game and their own baby. Baby and me takes a realistic approach and offers you a classic baby doll. To start playing you insert the wiimote…into to baby …………and start playing the game. The game pursues this realistic like style. Unfortunately with the graphic capabilities of the Wii that doesn’t always pan out.  Aside from the fact that the baby wears pink the actual baby toy you get is kinda scary looking This baby has some serious as to it. She dons a weird headband that no other baby would.  You use the nun-chuck.. which … comes out the baby to do stuff powder it’s bum and change it’s diaper all while it’s soulless eyes stare up and scream in agony for allowing it to continue it’s miserable existence. The on screen baby is even scarier. I’d honestly rather snog with Cthulhu than bear that kid’s gaze. The baby sells pretty cheaply on eBay with models going for under 10 euro so at least it’s not hard to get.

I get this was made for little girls…but you technically can do this with regular dolls as well.  These are just baby dolls  but instead of taking care of the one in your hands you take care of the one on screen…that just doesn’t really make sense to me.. nor does seeing a baby as a gaming peripheral shout good parenting to me. The second baby possibly is even weirder. It was made for a game in the cooking Mama series named Babysitting mama  in this game you control a daycare center and insert your wiimote into a plush anime like baby. By doing well in the minigames Mama can collect more babies to play with. Taking care of these babies earns coins and unlockables. Minigames include making the baby move on a seesaw or burping it. These babies all are insanely expressive  and can get super grouchy or super happy which is scary! There even is a minigame where you have to change it’s diaper which involves removing the diaper from the plush baby a putting it on again to change it of virtual baby. This version is a lot more fun to play though and requires the use of the nun chuck a lot less often. Which makes this the de facto game to go to if you want to you an actual baby as a gaming tool, all you need is to remove it’s  diaper.. take a wiimote … and you can imagine the rest…. it will even fix some sensitivity problems this game has for the force of an adult playing this.

Be Loved or Bee Love?! Pinkie chooses the latter! Bee Love Award!

In the penultimate post of tag week I got nominated for an award I never had heard about. It is called the Bee Love award and I love the name. However this tag can be done by simply posting the logo and doing some nominations. It’s not even a specified number!. Post the logo.. thank the one who nominated you  and then nominate people and you are done!I can’t do a lot with that! So I decided to add something to it! Since this post is called Bee Love and not Bee Loved.. I guess it’s about love for bees?! A top 5 bees it is.. video game bees to be exact.

Thanking Craft Lover

Selina, thank you again for the nomination and sorry it took me that long! I needed a fun idea to give this post some content it took me a while to come up with something!  I talked about Selina’s crafting blog a fair bit in my sunshine blogger award so feel free to check that one out and of course Selina’s very own blog! If you want to get ideas for crafts everyone can make.. or be inspired for delicious smoothies Craft Lover is the place to be!

Number 5: The Good Bee
(A Link to the Past-SNES)

Now I bet all of you would have expected me to pick a lot of special bees. Like Maya the Bee from one of her video games? Or like Bee video game bosses. While not untrue in case of the latter sometimes a bee is just a bee.  Bee Mario is also not on here.. because.. he isn’t really a bee! The good bee however is! And he sparkles! Not only was a link to the past one of the first games where i could catch a creature in a small container and allow it to fight for me… .I LOVE CATCHING CREATURES IN A SMALL CONTAINER AND MAKING IT BATTLE FOR ME SO MUUUCH!..

It was also sparkly. While the good bee doesn’t have to much of an impact on the main game, when playing a randomiser encountering this little bug is always exciting because we get another free item! Having a buddy to battle with you isnt half bad either! Except when you release it when trying to sell it.. and it goes off to attack that stupid weathervane! That’s a BAD Bee! …Which also is a thing.

Number 4: Not even in the manual Bee
(Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde-NES)


Now this game is absolutely horrible, for those who have never seen the Angry Video Game Nerd, this game is the unholy grail. It might not be the worst game in existence…but it’s pretty close. I host bad video game nights for my friends every now and again and whenever some rolls to play Jekyll and Hyde.. it’s always fun….for the ones not playing. For the majority of the game you try to play as Jekyll.. mostly because if Mr Hyde goes further than him you die. Jekyll has a walking speed that is slower than that boat Guts and his party got on in the Berserk manga. He has to take a quick stroll to the church but he mozies around so slowly that the One Piece Manga can start AND finish by the time he has walked down the street. Horrible!  All you can do is prod your cain at people…who all try to kill you for some reason. It doesn’t do anything! Hitboxes are completely unfair and don’t even get me started about the bombs.

Amidst a slew of named enemies in the game, the appearance of the bee is not even alluded to in the manual. The cat and the dog are in there.. but the poor bee gets the short end of the stick.. and that can be taken quite literally. You see the Bee is the ONLY Enemy that Jekyll can kill. It has this dubious honor of being the only fair enemy in the game. Mr Hyde has a few but if you have to much fun with those.. you die! So the bee is the only fun thing in this game and that makes it a great bee for this list.

Number 3: King Bee
(Conker’s Bad Fur Day Nintendo 65 and Xbox)

Bees are usually video game enemies, regular bees as the two above or these super cutesie adorable heroes that everyone loves. Pinobee was one of these platform heroes that cutified the bees. Charmy Bee from the Sonic Squad was another of those.. but to me bees aren’t cute. They are quite scary beings that haunt me and while not as mean as wasps nor as scary.. their video depictions oftenly being more wasplike give me the heebie jeebies. So there are no nice bees on this list. King Bee from Bad Fur day definitely is the nicest of the lot. 

King Bee is a washed up hungover looking bee, who had a rough night and the next day he just wants to pollinate something with big boobs! Not even kidding.. that is what you as an equally hungover squirrel have to help the man with. However the big breasted sunflower is kind of shy and covers her chest. So you have to gather plenty of small bees to tickle her armpits so she throws them up in laughter. When you tickle her enough her boobs show and the king is finally energised enough to do his job… that is a whole lote of bee and a whole lot of love! Perfect for on this list.

Number 2: Capital B
(Yooka Laylee series) 

Now it is finally time for a major character on this list. Somehow I like me bees lower profile. But this video game villain is  quite a good bee. He looks scary and the idea they made to make him into a corporate gold loving maniac worked like a charm. In both Yooka Laylee and the sequel the impossible lair this villain plays a major role, without really popping out. Unlike Bowser or Dr Eggman he feels much more like a behind the scenes guy. While Bowser later got his Koopa kids to control, the way how Capital rules his company and twarts the heroes kind of feels spot on.  We don’t find him 5 times before the final encounter. 


His looks are crazy and remind me of the Joker. The world seems to be catered around him in both games..which makes sense for such a megalomaniac. He is one of those classical style villains done right.. we miss these types of villains these days. Even Bowser and Eggman are deeper now and not always evil for evil sake.  This guy is just a meanie bo beanie for the sake of money and being evil! He wants to rewrite reality and enslave all bees into a hivemind. Not only is he Capital B.. he is a Major D and a Giant A hole as well!

Number 1:  Zinger
(Donkey Kong Country series)


The bee I most remember from video games is definitely the Zinger from Donkey Kong Country though.  Man did those things look scary when I was a kid. Being terrified of wasps this hybrid design between bee and wasp made them look as deadly creatures.. and so they where.  The easiest one to kill can only be killed by a barrel or by the animal companions. Some other bees are completely and utterly indestructible. Hitboxes of certain death! Many vine swinging stages had these set up as hazards and many many times did they cost me a precious life.

What made them stand out the most to me was their sound effect. This weird melodial buzz that audibly changes when they change height was very unsettling to me. Not completely buzz like but close enough to unsettle you. Each buzz lasting indefinitely until it reaches it peak height or death to repeat the cycle gave it also some sort of timerish feeling like a ticking bomb.  These creatures actually gave me nightmares and yet when they got replaced by the buzzers, the buzz saw green bees in Donkey Kong Country 3.. I missed them! Zingers became iconic to me, more so than Goomba’s , whatever sonic has or Kremlin’s from the same game. While later that faded down a bit.. I tried to make drawings of these monsters way before I realised I could not draw!  When you say bees in video games.. I say Zinger.

Nominations

Now let me repeat the tag rules again.

Thank the one who nominated you and provide a link to their blog.
Share the Award Logo
Nominated some people.

So really .. there are no real rules except for being decent. So I talked about bees! With this post I dare you to write about something you normally would never write about. It can still be within the realm of your blog.. but why would you talk about bee monsters in anime.. or a documentary about pollination. Of course it doesn’t have to BEE about the flying insects but just show us something new! Let’s have fun with this one!

My nominees are:

Lyn from: The Otaku Author
Who I nominated because I think he hasn’t done this tag before.

Megan from: A Geeky Gal
The person who might have the title for most blog awards ever…so if a new one catches my eye .. she gets nominated.

Naja from : Blerdy Otome
Because I really want to know if there is an Otome/dating game with bees for some reason! Also her blog starts with a Bee .. so I feel it is destiny.. also I wanted to write her name correctly for once!

Kat from: K at the Movies.
Because I really wanted to give K a B.

Joe from: Average Joe Reviews
Because I feel a Bee is a good grade for an Average Joe!

A BIT of History (Episode 0) : What is Pinkie doing now?

One of the hardest things to do as a blogger is come up with a nice topic to blog about. At least to me. I do not like doing episodic reviews as I want this blog to be all about positivity. Love (in the non lewd way) is the theme of my blog. In an attempt to structure my writing a bit I am trying to make “columns” or series in my categories to give me some focus on what to do. For example I love Pinkie is looking for a Waifu (new installment coming as soon as i finish Aoi Hana)  as it fits the theme of love very well. The temtem journals fit what I love well so that one works as well. While I love catchable creature games there is another category of games I love. Retro Games! I love traveling to the past to relive memories…..hmmmm that gives me an idea.

Back in time …...BUT TWICE!

Since the dawn of time man has dreamed of going back in time! When we play retro games we travel back in time. Maybe to the zero’s maybe to the nineties heck we might even go back to the eighties. I prefer not to go much further than that though. Atari had a LOT of LEWD games  and since I am going to ask you on suggestions on what to play.. I prefer to exclude those as much as I possibly can! One of the most infamous ones fits the secondary theme for example. Because going back to the past has been done before! James Rolfe better known as the Angry Video Game Nerd, is one of my biggest inspirations to do my thingies online! He is the one that is gonna take you back to the past. To play some shitty games that suck ass. I am gonna take you back to the past. Then I take you back to the past. Woooo Timeception!

(I kind of wanted to edit unicorn parts to my brain but I stopped myself)

How do we do this you might ask? Well it’s very simple! I will play and review retro games set in different times.  For example I’ll start with some prehistoric themed games on the SNES then I will most likely take you back to ancient greece on the NES and than back to the SNES to duke it out with some ancient romans. While not everything is set in (the) stone (age)  yet…HA FUNNY JOKE, it seems like a nice way to play the type of games that I love in a structured way offering me a steady amount of content for you guys! Plus I am actually talking about things I love so yay that’s what this blog is all about!

(I am not good at pixel art so if anyone wants to make a 16 bit pinkie! )

Pinkie who?

Now I know what you are thinking! You can’t just do that much timeception. Going back while taking us back to the past! That is waaaay to dangerous! But do not worry my friends I have invented something fictional that is totally gonna help me out! It’s a time machine that helps me turn myself into two dimensions..or the third if I ever need to..but in a rather low  polygon count. As long as I don’t go over 64 bits in during these travels I shall be fine and this machine helps me do it. I call it the Time and Limited Dimensions in Games device… or TALDIG for short. and I made it look like a crane game! Why? Well no one plays with an empty crane game plus in 2d games those usually where non interactable background objects so it will be safe! It’s not like I’ll find a police box or phone booth anymore… this one is just a bit harder to board. Luckily there is plenty of room for all my Plushies on the inside

(Totally Orginal THINGY Don’t steal!)

A brave time time explore like needs a weapon as well. Since I am Timely Bored of going through the hoops  that is capturing retro footage in the classic way. So yes I will be able to use the powers of my Sonic Savestate if needed. However that does not mean these games are not otherwise available to me, so make no assumptions my friends! It just allows us to play some fun hacks as well! Of course I will also try to play as fair as possible. However to make sure I can progress enough for a review I will occasionally use my trustworthy device.  Now a lot of these games have multiplayer modes. Unfortunately my companion drew the short straw when testing the less successful prototype of the TALDIG (I cheated) and kind of got lost in time and games. So if you ever encounter a pink arcade cabinet with a purple girl in yelling for help… let me know! Or if you want or be a companion check my about or contact page!… Displacement in time, loss of dimension and death in a game at own risk. Until this situation has been resolved I shall not test multiplayer modes and describe everything from a single player stance.

Looking Forward to go backward when going backward.

So how will our travel schedule look like? Well you have a say in it but the first three destinations in our journey HAVE been decided already. We will start in a time where there where no land creatures yet just to be propelled into the dinosaur age. We shall do this with E.V.O. The Search for Eden on SNES. After we evolved our fish into a strong dinosaur we shall move onto the dawn of man! Flintstones the treasure of Sierra Madrock was a game I loved to rent over and over again as a kid! With hard work I managed to get to the last world just to have to return it right before finishing. Can I complete it this time around? Using my trustworthy sonic tool .. odds are YES! Who knows! Then we move on to a game I have been literally clubbed on the head for! Joe and Mac! Also on SNES. After that one has been done I am still undecided though we may play Turtles in time which does have a prehistoric level or we may leave the SNES behind for a while as we move on to ages where people began to melt stuff.

(I did not evolve gils fast enough)

Altered Beast on Sega Genesis has ancient greek themes and so does Battle for Olympus on NES. I also plan to revisit some of the Asterix games I used to play as a kid. For those who don’t know who Asterix the Gaul is, he is a punchy sort of nordic looking  guy that is the titular character of a popular french comic here. Or at least he used to be. Not sure how well he fairs nowadays. Super Ghost and Ghouls can represent the medieval age but I of course will be playing Knights of the Round as well. However time does not have to be a fully linear path, we can bounce around a bit.  Every game that has a year in it, like street fighter 2010 and even….. Ho…. ugh… Hong …. I can’t …. .. but I must! Even Hong Kong 97 would be a suggestable stop. That being said..sport games are excluded from the suggestions because of this namesake. Unless it’s stuff Like the Spirit of Speed 1937 (which is a history based racing game)  or any future based ones. Yet stuff like Hong Kong 97 or Egypt 1157 AV are still far away into the future.

(Me transforming into beast mode)

Rules of Time Time Travel

Now I usually do not get a lot of suggestions  and I feel like i might be older than a lot of you, I honestly do not know your ages guys. I estimate my average reader to be like 24 maybe? So to encourage interaction and suggestions, save for the three set in stone. Those being E.V.O , Flintstones Treasure of Sierra Madrock and Joe and Mac, anyone making a suggestion in the comments while have their channel shouted out in the post you suggested. Regardless if I would have come up with it myself. So yay! Free promotion! That’s some love right there! Of course I can not complete every single suggestion, the more recent your request the lower the chance that I will be able to play it (unless it’s for pc for obvious reasons)

(Yes this is an actual …sort of.. game)

I will always write something nice about the games so if you feel like challenging me by suggestion a badly rated one, you are very welcome. Games about time travel are always valid regardless their setting, however I plan to do Chrono Trigger as the end of the series or least of a season if I start doing those. Games set in multiple time periods like Turtles in Time or Day Dreamin Davey are always fine and you can suggest them whenever we are in time. Please do not make me play Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure though! I will play it if suggested but I might not have much nice things to say about  that one. Games years are allowed unless they are sports games nor will I for example review the Anno series in one go! Separate entries are still allowed. A game has to be at least 10 years old for you to suggest. Otherwise I am not taking you back to the past twice. Games set in the future are still perfectly okay.. I am perfectly content with taking you back to the past to take you back to the future.

(I just told him I liked Ceasar Salad!! Waaaah!)

So that is a lot of rules but you can forget them and just shout a game, I mean I invented the TALDIG , I am a mastermind , I can weave your game in my story somehow but it would be fun if we follow the rules just a bit at least. Now since I stopped doing my greetings cards at the end of each both I will leave you with some closing words. You just read a post in the present about a future where I take you back to the past to play games that take you back to the past. However in the future of that future I may take you back to the past to play a game that takes you to the future or the present even. Of course by the time that you are reading that post, that present may already be the past!

(The Soundtrack of Adventures.. I do not kwow who this Dr is…but he stole my tune!)

Riding 8 bit Space Mountain Pinkie Plays: Adventures in the Magic Kingdom

My dear island guests, I am gonna take you back to the past! To play some shitty game that suckd (Feeb)as. When I first came up with Pinkie, I wanted to make Pinkie’s Playroom. A youtube channel that would combine Angry Video Game Nerd, Kizuna Ai and Tamagotchi in a very Moe way. Pinkie would hatch from her egg in an empty room with just a NES and a single bad game to play. Trough likes, an unknown force releases more games and later toys and decoration in her room. She would start with bad goes and occasionally get a good one. Today I’d like to talk to you about that game in the first episode. Adventures in the Magic Kingdom for NES  however my blog is not about hating things! So I just had to play it again and see if there was something to love!

Frowny Stormy Cloud

Adventures in the Magic Kingdom is a Disney Game that launched in europe in december 1992. It was one of the first NES games I got and my most glitchy cartridge. While the US got this “gem” of a game, a whopping 2,5 years earlier than us , there was no internet to tell us how much this game would suck. Nor was there much objective game magazines out there. At least not that I was aware off. Let alone that I would read as a  six year old girl. I was not prepared for the unfair and poorly designed game what awaited me. The game places you in the role of a young boy that you can name yourself visiting Disney’s magical kingdom. Goofy has lost the seven silver keys to Cinderella’s castle and now the parade can start. It’s up to you to find the six silver keys in the rides scattered across the disney theme park.It seemed like such a nice idea but the AVGN would probably call this game, a shit load of fuck.  Of course Pinkie would not be as profane as the iconic internet character of James Rolfe. She would swear with very clean curse words… stuff like “Unicorn Sprinkles!” Buuuu! (just a sound) or Frowny Stormy Cloud and trust me there is a lot to frown about in this game..but that is not what this story is about this story is about love.

(I’d rather not but having Mickey owe me a favor could make Disney buy my blog!)

For a kid who had never been to disneyland herself it was a dream to play this game. Which only got better after I visited. I could first discover these rides. Then finally seem them for real myself.  After I went to the park, I could finally recognise these and I could see.. the lay out….sorta .. kinda… fitted. Of course Euro Disney was a bit different so it might have been that. I could still ride Thunder Mountain, race in Autopia, survive the haunted mansion, escape the pirates of the caribbean, travel the galaxy in space mountain.. and take part in a trivia treasure hunt. It’s everything a little kid could want. However all these games are bogged down with artificial difficulty, patterns you need to study, RNG you need to overcome and a very high difficulty wall to overcome. It isn’t really fit for it’s targeted demographic, so back than I never beat it.. but now as an adult I surely must be able to beat these. Isn’t it amazing that you grow into a game like into all the rides of Disney? Wait.. I died how many times! … I have to STOP during a race to wait for an random element to appear? Even if I finish the Thunder Mountain  minigame have to stop at a specific station to get the key?! Fuuuuuudge-muffins! Bag of not so tasty Chips! Crab …Cakes! Frowny Stormy Cloud. FROWNY STORMY CLOUD!

(I spend way to much time making this image))

Learning About Disney

Okay Okay, that wasn’t very nice of me to say when I was a kid I had fun with this game it’s all that counts right? Okay half the game … okay  I liked two out of six mini games. I could beat four of them! The first one I ever learned to beat was the quiz. It was fun to learn about Disney stuff and test my knowledge and since..young Pinkie could do it surely I should be able to do it as well. The first question that I was asked “Which is the smart and the most responsible dwarf’ Such a cute question, I remember these. Next question “what was the first Mickey Cartoon” … hmm well I know this but I think little me would have not known that. Nani! Donald Duck’s Middle name is Fauntleroy?! I never knew that! Cool!.

“ Flowers and Trees was the first academy award winning cartoon?! “That’s not stuff a kid would know. Let me tell you that these questions are impossible, the only way  a kid could get all these (again in the time before the internet) was through trial and error.  Of course these questions are randomised and you can actual game over trough wrong answers…. Well at least it’s more fun than doing homework hey?! I mean we can learn what year cinderella originally came out in! I never knew Snow White made Gooseberry Pie for the dwarfs. I figured it would have been an apple pie, or a strawberry pie! What even is a gooseberry anyway? I do know Yennefer smells like them!

(Would this still honk or make a different sound?)

Finally I managed to study enough to clear this trial I did in my past.  Time to move onto space mountain, the second trial young Pinkie managed to clear. This one is a quick time event. It says to press the button prompt on the screen. Surely I can do that! There it says A… Oh… it meant I was on planet A…the button prompts are below. Well that is one hitpoint down. This one is fairly doable, until you get to the halfway point. This one is about memorising again. About learning to recognise small cues instead of the actual button prompts because those arrive way to late. Still all in all this is actually a fun minigame and look I can actually buy hit points from the menu!….But I can’t get any stars in this stage… this one is meant to play last. Darn.. I lost a life.. wait.. Game over?!  Of course that means new questions to memorise! At least I am getting real Disney smart.

Where are the disney characters though? With the quiz I just talk to random humans. Why not make it disney characters. Wait they aren’t on any of the rides either.. we just get some still images. During one event we race against Petey.. but of course he is just another car sprite…. hmmmm. that kinda… “No Pinkie .. this blog is about love! Tell us what you love about this game!” Well the music is pretty catchy! I love the space mountain theme. I love how it makes me appreciate the actual characters so much more and want to visit the actual theme park. By now I could really impress them with my big Disney Brain. I now know Mickey’s Birthday is 18 november 1928. Disregarding the year our birthdays are just a day apart. I really love knowing that.

Training your brain

The two stages I never beat as a kid where the platforming stages, my sister could at least beat Thunder Mountain so we did get close to beating this. Yet I was pretty good at platformers. I beat all the robot masters in mega man 2, I completed Super Mario Bros 3. Yet I never could finish Adventures in the Magic Kingdom? Let me investigate this. I actually had fun finding out where I struggled with this as a kid. Though it did not take me long to find out. These stages are very challenging. Both the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean are challenging platformers with unique mechanics. In Pirates you got to rescue some girls and in The Haunted Mansion you have to defeat a ghost with limited candles as ammunition. Pirates has you dodging projectiles and is composed of mostly evasive jumping, where the Haunted Mansion mostly relies on precision jumps and well timed actions. I got to give them credit they still feel very different from each other.

However once again they do seem to be way too difficult for their core audience. My younger self should have been it’s core audience, yet the three hit point system is way to unforgiving. While these two stages ACTUALLY hold stars that allow you to buy extra hit points, so much cheap deaths are thrown at you that you are mostly training your brain again. While this was common  for games of that time, these stages kind of linger on. A game over resets all progress which makes this a very long stretch to remember. Perhaps if you somehow could SAVE a moment in Retro games ..to pick up after we could beat them.

Now it does seem like this post will end with me being very negative about the game, but somewhere in my end struggle something happened. I actually began to find the magic,  I actually had some sort of fun. I found back the fun young Pinkie had. Old Pinkie has become spoiled. She played better, young Pinkie.. kinda did but never in the same genre. Never could young Pinkie experience some  a hub world game that lead to several kinds of games. Never could she walk in a theme park like in this game. When old Pinkie reached the zenith of her annoyance .. she realised there was nothing like this anymore. Nowadays games are meant to be beatable by everyone, enjoyable to anyone and we have so many tools around herself to make gaming never be the same again. People tell us how we should play games on Youtube, if we die in a game there are no consequences and we have so many ways and tools to make a game great and extensive. 

Back in my old days we had no such options.  We had artificially difficulty , a game wasn’t just about how well we can hold a controller it was about remembering patterns and actually being punished harshly for it. We weren’t massive game addicts in that time because these game could frustrate us so much we had to take breaks and since our progress was wiped anyway. Adventures in the magic Kingdom is a game you can beat in 18 minutes… like most games of that time. Yet we needed strategy guides, intense training , memorising everything, every pattern and learn it by heart. I can dream final fantasy VI and VII by heart even if it took 100 hours to finish, I caught every single pokémon in Galar in two or three weeks.. and yet this below mediocre Disney themed game. Yet this 18 minute game took me 29 years to beat. I did not put that many hours in .. but it was never meant for that.. It was meant to frustrate you and push you to get a little better each time until you eventually beat it. Yes it’s incredibly unfair, there is way to much RNG and pattern memorisation, the looks and theming is lackluster and it certainly did not cater to it’s audience..but it was good enough for Tiny Pinkie. This dumpster fire of a game pleased me, because I just wanted to play games and this was another I enjoyed. Everyone has a game like this, their Bubsy, their Bebe’s kids, their Skate or Die. That one stinker you really enjoyed because it was still a game.

(The game looked nice back then, but so did Eward Furlong…things change)

Nowadays we boycott our favorite developer, because the new game is slightly shorter than the game before it. Now we make angry tweets on how “Generic Shooter 5 has only 190 guns, while Generic SHooter 4 had 250, therefore Generic Shooter 5 is not worth full price.. and what’s worse they will make those other guns accessible in a free update that comes with dlc! For shame! A game as terrible as Adventures in The Magical Kingdom makes me appreciate how far we have come, how great games have become and how enjoyment isn’t always strictly in the quality of a game but what you as a fan make of it yourself. I remember my sister and me playing the quiz over and over..roleplaying we were on big tv quizzes, making up stories about the Haunted Mansion level being a game show where you had to survive giving each life a personality of its own. It was great. Games like these make me appreciate games that much more and showed me what it truly meant to love gaming. And for that it genuinely is a magical game that I will cherish forever.

(Thou can clickest this image)

A tale of tiny Pinkie (The Geeky Childhood Tag)

It’s a new year my dear Island guests. It’s also a year I am starting of rather busy with plenty of people wanting to meet to convey their new year’s wishes. You know the thing, lot’s of coffee and tea events, means also a lot of resupplying, lots of extra house cleaning, additional traveling and all that. So while I am being a busy bee, let’s catch up on some blogger tags I missed either during my hiatus or still have got to do.  We start of with a tag I was mentioned in today! But this one seemed like a good place to start of the new year. A look at my first steps into geekdom. The Geeky Childhood Tag. I was tagged by Lyn, the Otaku Author, who has my thanks. Check out his blog and cool reviews. And of course you can watch HIS answers by clicking on the cocktail below!

The Rules of the Tag

Normally we begin these things by stating the rules, which involve tagging the one who tagged you, a set number of people to tag and displaying a logo. However this time there are no rules. I have no logo to display nor do I have to tag a certain amount of bloggers. So I would like to tackle this a bit differently. I shall tag three people down below, but also nominate every other reader. Just leave a comment below that you would like to take up my invitation and I shall add you to a list to bloggers who actually like to do these tags. Plenty of you out there do not like to participate in these and I have no oversight in who likes these things and who doesn’t. Since most of these post usually have a limited amount of people I can nominate and I hate excluding people to the core, I would at the very least like to keep a list of people who like to engage with these thing. If you have done this tag already, feel free to post a link to yours in the comments, again to show me you are into the taggy thing! Taggers for taggers and all! Please help me give these little nuggets to people who actually enjoy them!

With that being said it’s time to explore my geeky childhood.

Where did your geek come from? Parents? Siblings? Destiny?

Unfortunately the story of me being geeky isn’t a particularly happy one. You see as the tiny thing I was there was already some signs of the wall of my later condition. My motor skills where sub par. I had great difficulty walking stairs, licking my lips, doing some other stuff. While I got therapy, my fine motor skills began to improve but my crude motor skills deteriorated.  I ran funny, I got dressed in the most awkward ways and I was very clumsy. Even with therapy a gap appeared that grew. I was slower, more accident prone and cramped than others so I never really fully got to appreciate playing outside. I was always the slowest to dress up with my girly friends, I was always the first to be tagged out on the schoolyard and got hurt when we would adventure. I broke toys due to sudden loss of motor control for a brief moment and stuff like that. So I never fully got to enjoy myself as much as others did.

Then mom and dad gave me an NES, a way to play where I would not get in the way of myself. For the first time I could play with my friends on the same level, I was as good as Mario 3 as they were, or better. I still liked talking to my girls of course but I didn’t really need to compete in those other things anymore. Of course by the time the SNES came out,  we became old enough that you start bullying each other so in a span of three miserable years I virtually lost all my friends. Except for those who like geeky things and gaming because I actually was kind of good in that. They introduced me to more and more geeky stuff and so I became a geek. It’s the first thing I did not suck at and the first thing that did not alienate me. My first safe space.

The First Geeky Thing You Got Into

So while gaming was the geeky thing that turned me into a geek, the first thing  I officially got into was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the eighties cartoon. Though in europe or at least in the Netherlands we used to call it Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles back than. Twix was still called Raider back in those days as well so you know it’s some early life stuff for me. The neighbour boy across the streets who came over to play a lot was really into turtles so we watched it together and I really got invested in it. The neighbour girl was his niece so she also watched it with us at times but we just connected less, I always felt like I was inferior to her so I sorta rebelled and took more from the neighbour boy than the girl. So rather than dress up like a princess I dressed up like a turtle…and crashed my tricycle when my bandana got caught up in the wheels. I really could have used a half shell right then and there. Turtle-ouwww-er!

Favourite Movie as a Kid

I was a huge disney kid when I was young and later really into power rangers. Now you might think I will say I liked the Power Rangers movie best when I was a kid but no!! That movie sucks.. Even as a kid I saw how much that CGI sucked. I stuck mostly to the disney classics. One of my favorite disney movies however was not even a disney classic. It was Ducktales the movie! It was something we recorded on tv on a video tape (jeez this post makes me feel old) I watched it so much I knew exactly how long to fast forward through the commercials. It was aired on a belgium network and at the end of the movie, when G became a real boy and the subtitles were over, a clip of a belgium singer would play. It was this belgian comedian pretending to be a typical gay guy singing about how manly he is. Times sure have changed. Check this stuff out!

Now while Ducktales the movie is a contender for favorite movie, I gotta say there was one movie that was above it. A movie that I probably should not have been watching at that age yet, but it was Gremlins and even more so Gremlins 2. I loved the mogwai Gizmo when I was a kid. I loved it sooo much. I even had a gizmo plush that at some point just disappeared from my memory. I knew I had one and I was super excited when I got it.. but I think someone might have broken it and mom just gifted me stuff to make me forget..because .. suddenly it’s not there anymore.I did not win the lottery this year so I can’t afford one of those real mogwai toys you got now. Those look so friggin good. The gremlin movies had it all for me, they were scary, they had people die, it was super colourful, very random , adorable beyond  my wildest imagination and the second one featured all sorts of superpowered monsters. Heh I really haven’t grown up a lot have I , thats still the kind of stuff I love.

(Okay so the last one is not from the movies but I dig it)

Favourite Video Game as a Kid

Once upon a time there was a licensed property title that was actually good. A game that allowed you to treasure hunt in transylvanian castles, the amazon rainforest, the himalayas, the deepest mine of africa and even the moon.That game was Ducktales for NES , the first game I ever finished and too this day one of the best video games I have ever played and something that shaped me as a gamer and  completely defined my tastes. To this day I still prefer retro style platformers, like Shovel Knight, The Messenger, Cave Story and of course the ducktales remake. The NES ducktales was what made me cry when I had to sell my old NES. I was into the SNES now and I wanted money for new toys and more games so mom and dad helped me sell it. While I had not issue letting go of Mega Man 2, Mario 3, Turtles 2, Gremlins  and Adventure in the Magical Kingdom (those were all the games I own I think) I cried to see Ducktales go.. not the NES itself, not other games.. just Ducktales. If have exclaimed my love for the moon theme before, but this game has amazing music, great flow and it’s challenging enough for a kid yet finishable It’s one of those.. game-overing resets all you progress games but I didn’t care as kid. I completed it , several times. The moment your race up to reach that number one dime before magica DeSpell and Flintwood Glomgold get there is the perfect closing of a perfect little adventure.One day I hope to get a NES with a copy of the game again…or even just a copy of the cartridge to display as a trophy. When that day happens I’ll definitely Woohoo!

 Favourite Book as a Kid

This one will be somewhat lost in translation.as this is a dutch book, that only got translated in danish, lithuanian. japanese, korean and german. It’s called “De Griezelbus” which roughly translates to “The bus of Horrors, or the bus of scares. This is a serie of six five books that tell the tale of the victims of P.Onnoval , an anagram for the writer of this series Paul van Loon.  In the books a horror book author, invites a school class to join him in his Bus of Horrors , where he will tell them stories out of his new book. Yet the class doesn’t know Onnoval is in fact really a werewolf that is just stalling them with his stories until the moon comes out so he can eat and kill them. In the second part he rises from his death as a vampire and tries again, in the third he exists as a virtual presence trying to possess someone. Each time the formula is the same, kids get trapped in a bus and here horror stories as they have to find a way to escape from the clutches of this evil man. It’s a mix of an overarching  narrative and horror short stories in alternating order. Since the short stories mostly end badly you really to worry about these kids in the main story.Like the bad endings of the shorts sort of reprogram your brain let go of that feeling that everything will work out in the end.

My favorites in the series are the second one and even more so the third one. In the second one I really cared for the students trapped in the bus for some reason and in the third one the plot really had me invested. In the third one the childeren get told the stories trough virtual reality, but each round one character gets to see the story trough the eyes of the main person. By having them experience their own deaths or something extremely traumatic in first person.. Onnoval breaks their spirits one by one with no escape. Those who experienced the trauma usually go catatonic or extremely meek, as a kid this felt as such a good evil ploy! Credits to the fourth book for having my favorite short story. In this one two girls get to camp out in a museum that has a new egypt exhibition what is build up as a night full of horrors ends up a ploy for the museum ward to poison and mummify them so that two of the mummy girls of the exhibition can go free in their stead.The short ends with the reveal that one of the girls was poisoned from the very start and as she force feeds her friend the poison both go along with the ward willingly (trough the poison) in order to be mummified and placed in the display…. darn, I was a messed up kid.

Favourite Memory as a Kid

I didn’t have to much of a happy childhood, the bullying was relentless, no one wanted to trade pokémon with me..because I was me. People threw worms at me or forced me into barbed wire.. or chased me so I would fall in a pit of trash they made. While by now I have to admire the dedication that was put into making my life miserable it did mean that I might not have AS amazing memories as little miss populair or something., There are two contenders for my favorite memory one is a bit more grand than the other. The less grand memory is simply the memory of me beating Donkey Kong Country. By far my favorite SNES game  This game was one of the hardest to beat and I worked hard to get good at it, dedicated myself and the first time I took down King K Rool i felt an emotion I rarely felt in my childhood. Pride. It might have been a silly thing to be proud about but this game mattered to me. I had no trouble in school to get good grades whatsoever so when I was best of the class with grades, I never really felt proud, I was always one of the top contenders and I never really had to work for it. Unfortunately me getting sicker later ruined that as I could not coast trough things anymore due to being absent a lot and it tripped me up.. but anyway.. Donkey Kong was one of the first times I experienced genuine pride… directed at myself, it’s nice to experience it , especially if you never had it before.

The second memory is a bit more grand, it’s a chain of events that is a mix of bad luck that lead into something positive.  It all started with a competition held by a local bakery that got his supply from a local windmill. They held a colouring competition and me being creative, created blossom out of my moms nail polish on the trees,  made the sky a sunset orange rather than a normal blue and really made it feel like a warm spring late afternoon. My creativity led me to win the first price, I remember the second price was a set of lego’s shaped like a windmill which I really wanted to have…but I won the first price. So I had to go up the windmill to fetch my price.  This scared the bejeezus out of me as the stairs there.. along with my motor skills and on and off fear of heights, this already was a terrible experience. I managed to get up there.. all cried up and flustered, just to find out they wanted to take pictures of me and ask me questions for a local newspaper. My first anxiety attack was the result… yaaay fun! Turns out I won a brand new bike… which I was way to tiny for..but of course for the picture I had to get on the bike regardless…. I fell off…. So now I had a bump on my head, a red up cry face, an anxiety attack and a bike that was to big for me.  Things weren’t looking good. I was very upset. Than my parents took me the city treated me to a “frietje met kroket” some dutch junk food that is basically french fries with a stick of breaded beef stew, deep fried. Than dad told me he would sell the bike and I could get a gameboy for the money of that bike. So I got my gameboy and got a game and finally that day turned around. The day I got my gameboy is still etched into my memories and I was one happy camper. I never got that lego windmill though.

A Character You Looked Up To as a Kid

Since being the cool kid was out of the question from a very early age, I guess I determined I would be the good thing. So as a kid I took on a sensible role model. Captain Planet. Saving nature and saving animals was something I deeply respected, as well as his other wisdoms such as to stay in school and all that standard be a kid crap. I loved shows that focussed on saving nature. Right now I have really moved away from that, it’s not like I don’t care anymore but we can take things a bit far, I matter as well, at least for me. While I listened to captain planet… and dutch santa for that matter, I risked falling into that. “All work and no play make Pinkie a.. giant douche ‘  kinda trope. While most of our cartoons were subbed they also got pulled from tv very fast. Which meant we had to watch the rest on the german station RTL. Captain Planet in german is much harder to follow for a non native german speaker. I mean I can still talk with germans, like casually but when we talk about poison gasses, types of poulton, deforestation and such.. yeah I am gonna lose track.

So soon I replaced Captain Planet as my hero with Dotty, the mouse inventor of the rescue rangers. I pretended to be her a lot, I would love to invent stuff like her so I spend all day in my room playing to be dotty inventing stuff. Among my greatest inventions for example were.. putting water in your piggy bank so if someone stole your money you could follow the water on the floor and find out who stole it, Attaching a Lego shark to a pencil.. because the lego shark made everything look cooler.. and the msot famous one.. my glow in the dark lamp. It’s a desk lamp on which I melted all sorts of glow in the dark stuff. It would charge the glow in the dark stuff when you used it as a desk light.. and if you entered your room in the dark .. it would glow and you would always be able to find the light. Of course it looked like ..basically a lamp dipped in candle wax, it would stink of molten plastic every time you turn it on, drip hot plastic on your skin if you weren’t careful  and mom threw it away after a few days, ..but Dotty at least inspired me to invent something! It was awesome… then again those might be the plastic fumes talking.

A Character That Scared You as a Kid

I never really had big troubles with  monsters in series or anything. Shredder from the Turles never scared me, nor did Stripe in Gremlins. While I found some characters exciting I never really feared”the monster under my bed”. So my parents thought I was immune for it. It was an evening like any other, I just played with a punch of cardboard turtle toys, I got from my aunt and uncle, they were amazing when a new episode of Ducktales was on tv. It was the episode that in english is called  Duckworth’s Revolt. In this episode the butler of Scrooge Mcduck gets abducted by aliens and Huey Duey and Louie follow to rescue him from the evil Vegedonians. Evil vegetables that force you to labour in their gardens for life.. or throw you in the vacuum of space. Brigadier Broccoli, Lieutenant Garlic and Sergeant Squash, there was also a whipping plant that never got a name but that one looked darn evil as well. Sergeant Squash for some reason scared the soul out of me.

That night I had nightmare after nightmare about Sergeant Squash about being forced into slavery or crushed into death. That’s right when the little ducks ask what happen if they don’t work for him he tells them he will squish and squash them. The dutch voice actor does it with so much intensity that too this day I still can hear those words that haunted me that night. Even adding it to scenes where the orginal did not use it.. as a catchphrase. You see them nearly throw the butler into space and yeah these aliens were cruel. I could hear them patrolling the hallway in our house. I screamed in terror so much that night my mom took my out of bed and forced me to rip apart all those new turtle toys as punishment. It did not help. now I felt sad and scared.. and anger to my mom.  When I woke the next time I guess my mom saw the terror in my eyes for real and I saw she regretted making me tear up those toys… “Oh shit Pinkie is really scared I messed up” It was as if I could read my mothers thoughts in that moment. I told mom I deserved my punishment to try and make her feel better as I knew I forced her hand. I did not get any sleep that night, I stayed up..pretending to be a sleep , but I was staring at the empty book that once held those cardboard toys, while behind me in the hallway I still heard them…Squish Squash..Squish Squash… Never did I get so spooked by anything ever again… and why it was this particular thing I don’t even know.

And the Nominees are:

As Told by Carly
Fred 
Inskidee

And of course everyone reading this will be able to participate! Let me know if you are interested in doing Tag Posts or not in the comments! I’ll make a list!