Castle Magus

"This is wild."

---

Charles Cornell posts videos about Mozart, Elton John, and Radiohead?

I sleep.

Charles Cornell posts a video about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Nintendo game soundtrack?

Real shit.

I agree that the game's title theme kicks ass, even though, as a kid, I was upset that it wasn't, you know, the theme, even though it does have hints of it in there. (Also, hmm.)

And the underwater theme for the dam, as fucking crazy hard as that was the first dozens of times I attempted it (and it never wasn't nerve-wracking even after I got used to it), was always one of my favorites from the game. (No, the trauma doesn't set in until the "running out of time" themes start up. Those were my drowning themes as a kid. Though... in the case of TMNT, it was less drowning and more getting blown up by bombs. And this was the height of relief when you finally found that last bomb under the dam.)

I wish he'd gotten to the second overworld theme, from the part where you're hunting for the Technodrome, as that was probably my second favorite track from the game. (Also, hmm.)

I don't think I ever legit beat this game on the original NES, but playing it years later on an emulator, with saves states and such, it turned that I'd literally made it to the final hallway right before the room with Shredder in it, I just didn't know it.

The boss themes were pretty great, too. (And speaking of Shredder, it's just too bad that he didn't get his own boss music in this first game like he did in the second one, which was, of course, based on the arcade game.)

Hell, the whole damn soundtrack was pretty great.

Yeah, it's crazy what they could do with the NES sound chip back in ye olden days.

Hmm. Interesting.

I mean, I get that Metroid II: Return of Samus (not to be confused with Metroid: Samus Returns) had an intentionally oppressive feel to it and all that, but I think the death animation for Samus was probably more a hardware limitation than a stylistic choice. In any case, playing the game didn't fill me with existential dread.

I will say that the music created most of that oppressive feel. Outside of the surface theme and the end credits theme and such, the vast majority of the soundtrack was more like ambient noise than it was music. Even the first game had more actual music, as opposed to just semi-random noise, than the second game did.

As I've mentioned before, Metroid II: Return of Samus was the first Metroid game I ever owned and finished (without a guide or walkthrough or whatever, unlike the original Metroid, which I didn't seriously try to play until several years later).

It has been over two years, but I finally got around to (re)watching the rest of Captain N: The Game Master.

( Blah blah blah )

"When you think of the NES, you think of a lot of bad games thanks to The Nerd, but I wanted to take a little time to look at some of the really good ones today that people don't talk about and are worth playing!"

---

James is right. Aside from Duck Tales 2 (which I'd heard of, but haven't played myself), I hadn't heard of any of those games before. And they do look pretty interesting, at least for old-school NES games.

(The previous post.) (The next post.)

( Jumping right in )

(The next post in this episodic "review" "series.")

To follow up on that thing from before.

Or, at least, I just finished watching the first episode anyway. While doing so, I took notes. Which I will copy/paste here (just as I figured I would end up doing, as stated in the notes themselves). This might become a thing with the rest of the episodes, too. Or it might not. We'll see, I guess.

Slightly edited copy/pasted notes starts here:

---

( Behind cut )

"It's Christmas, but a bad Intellivision Amico investment has left Pat without money to buy struffoli -- what happened?! Pat details the Amico disaster, plus a bonus holiday NES game review!"

---

This is a "Pat the NES Punk" episode (as opposed to a CUPodcast[1] episode) about the colossal scam and failure that was the Intellivision Amico. It is not a funny episode. It's pretty close to the polar opposite of funny. That's not to say that it wasn't still morbidly entertaining, in its own way. That said, it was mostly just 30 minutes (well, more like 18 minutes, because around 5 minutes in, I bumped it up to 2x speed) of Pat saying "I told you so" and ineptly clowning all over the people[2] who supported the Amico and who, more specifically, criticized Pat for criticizing the Amico. Said clowning mostly just involved showing clips of them saying dumb things about how supposedly orgasmic the Amico was going to be, which is pretty much all Pat needed to do to show how clownshoes those guys are. His inane, insipid skits "responding to"/"interacting with" them were just superfluous, in my opinion.

And... ...also a review of the Snow Bros. NES game, I guess? He managed to squeeze that into the video as well. That part of the video was okay, at least. Except for the bits where he tried to tie it back into the Amico shit.

I mean, I get it. These assholes had been gunning for Pat for the past couple of years at least, so it probably felt cathartic for him to make this video, and in that sense I can appreciate it for what it is. I'm just saying it was also a very unfunny attempt at a "funny" video.

[1] - Which is ending, aside from occasional one-off things, as was recently announced and as I only just learned today. Given that my viewing of (Youtube clips of) it had been dropping off recently (mostly due to the fact that they seemed to be more and more using the podcast as a bludgeon against people who wronged them, rather than, you know, just generally shooting the shit about video games or whatever, which was the main reason I started watching it in the first place), this doesn't bother me as much as it would have, say, two or three years ago.

[2] - The only two of which I'd ever even heard of prior to this video were Stuttering Craig (of the now defunct ScrewAttack.com [the old URL for which just redirects to Rooster Teeth/Death Battle now], which I entirely stopped paying attention to after Handsome Tom left/was kicked out of ScrewAttack back in 2008) and Tommy Tallarico himself, who I've never much liked. Of the others who were lampooned in the above embedded video, I'm not able to name a single one of them now, 20 or so minutes after watching it. Well, no, I know one of them apparently was named "Nick," like one of the two main characters in the Snow Bros. game, but that's about it.

"This is episode 206 of the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN)! In this episode of AVGN, the Nerd talks about everyone's favorite Lasagna Eating Orange Cat, Garfield. From Atari to Sega Genesis, The Nerd will dig into a big pile of Cat Crap!"

---

"I didn't know Garfield had such deep lore..."

I thought for sure when he said this, especially on the heels of talking about all the crazy and dark Lyman fan theories stuff, that the Nerd was about to bring up the infamous and very weird 1989 story, "Garfield Alone," but... then he didn't.

However, this video is so much more than just Garfield. Well, no, mostly it's Garfield, but I knew when he showed that Game Boy game near the end, things were about to get weird. I used to own the US version of that game, which was, as the video points out, decidedly not a Garfield game. (Though, to be fair, it really wasn't much of a Ghostbusters game, either. ¬_¬) I didn't have the slightest clue about all that other weird shit, though, like how the Bugs Bunny games in the US were Mickey Mouse games in Japan, and the like.

Speaking of Bugs Bunny, it was nice to have Mike back again, even if this was probably just a one-off thing. Maybe not so nice to hear him, though... Nyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh... (I'll admit, I did chuckle a bit the longer it went on.)

As a kid, I was more of a Heathcliff guy, though even with that, I preferred the bits with Riff Raff and the Catillac Cats, rather than the actual Heathcliff stuff. The Heathcliff comics stuff... not so much. Also, this.

"This is episode 202 of the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) and The Nerd is talking Contra! After years of playing nothing but crappy games, The Nerd's dreams are fulfilled through a wish on a monkey's paw, allowing him to finally play something good. Contra for NES is one of those games that everyone has nostalgia for and the AVGN is no different, so he's taking us back to the past to relive a series near and dear to his heart. While focusing on the original Nintendo Entertainment System classic and it's sequel Super C, The Nerd also checks out Contra Arcade, Operation C, Contra III: The Alien Wars, Contra: Hard Corps, Contra: Legacy of War, C The Contra Adventure, and Contra 4. -- Contra is a run-and-gun shooter game originally developed and published by Konami for arcades in 1987, before coming to homes on the NES in 1988. Also known as Gryzor and Probotector in some regions."

---

I was never really all that into Contra. I mean, sure, I definitely played it, back in the days when my sister would take us (me and her daughter, my niece, who is only a few years younger than me) to Brewer's Movie Club every once in a while, and we'd rent a game or two for her NES. (I never owned a NES myself.) Never got very far back in those days, even with the Konami code. I've since beaten it, via PC emulators and save-states and all that, but that's not really the same, I guess. Also never owned or played the sequels on other systems (outside of maybe a few minutes on an emulator as, again, I just never really got into the series).

That said, I definitely acknowledge Contra as one of the formative games on the NES for many, alongside Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda and Metroid and Castlevania and Mega Man and the like.

"What are the *worst* arcade ports to appear on 8- and 16-bit consoles?"

---

As much as I played the hell out of the NES port of the TMNT arcade game as a kid, yeah... no, it does not in any way, shape, or form hold up at all to the actual arcade game.

Aside from Mortal Kombat (which did indeed suck on SNES), I haven't really played a lot of the other ports they talk about (or the original games either, in some cases). I vaguely remember the arcade Ikari Warriors being cool, but the only experience I have of the NES version is the AVGN video about it.