I barely remember this game, but I saw the above image at Kotaku a couple weeks back, and it blew my mind. The minimalist Master System cover is pretty cool, too, as is this.

The legendary VHS promo. In reality a far finer film than its reputation lets on.

[Update] Check out the game’s original website archived here. Thanks MisterSmith!

I was in a Korean apartment neighborhood, something like this, only more empty, spread out, reminiscent of a game world. It was wintertime, and there was snow everywhere.

I was in a little car that drove like a toy, and two police cars sped by in front of me. I immediately pursued, because somehow I knew that the car in front held the Nintendo Power video preview for the new Star Fox game. However, I would have to cut him off and stop him behind me in order to view it. So I chased and chased and chased, and finally caught up to them, pulling some tricky maneuvers in order to achieve the necessary cutting off.

At this time, I was immediately zapped into the Star Fox preview, and it looked just like Star Fox 64, but in HD and with way more stuff going on. It was pretty awesome.

This was all inspired by the old Nintendo Power promo VHS tapes. Nick brought them up in conversation a few weeks back, and I guess they’ve been in my subconscious ever since.

That is the best way I can describe it. And just like the first, I had fun with it, laughing under my breath the entire time. But it makes the original look like a masterpiece in comparison.

Mark my words, this one is going down in the books. It is a legendary mess.

The film does not even remotely resemble a theatrical cut. While watching it, I wondered whether an unfinished five month-old reel had been sent to Korea on accident. It’s that bad.

In all my life, I’ve gone to see only a small handful of films that have actually made me angry for wasting my time and money, but this, I’m glad to say, was not one of them. As bad as it was, I was certainly entertained, and I left the theater at 2AM still laughing.

Here’s why: I had spent the last 149 minutes watching a hyperactive child, drunk-on-Koolaid, play with the most amazing toys in the world, as if he’d broken into the ultimate playroom.

It’s a brazenly awful movie, and it’s remarkably proud of being so. This is something you don’t find often, and I can’t help but have a soft spot for the honesty. There’s nothing I hate more than a stupid movie that pretends to be something more than it is, but none of that is to be found here — Transformers 2 is what it is, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. This honest, ’stupid and proud’ spirit was what I liked about the first, too, but here it’s been taken to the infinite extreme. Even still, I couldn’t help but submit to the lunacy.

I’ve seen only two reactions to the film that mirror my own — here and here — and I have no idea how people could take the film seriously enough to actually be offended by it.

Amidst all the bad, there were four things that I actually did think were not terrible: Jetfire, Rainn Wilson, John Turturro, and Shia’s motormouth madman babbling. Jetfire is awesome — his design, his personality, his beard, everything. I loved him. Rainn Wilson cracked me up as the astronomy professor. I got a kick out of John Turturro’s over-the-top shenanigans, and the same goes for Shia’s dip into insanity. Oh, and the prologue was kind of cool.

If you enjoyed the first film for what it was, and if an MST3K-like experience with the insane sequel sounds like fun to you, then I would actually recommend checking it out. You might have fun like I did. But then again, you might not. So proceed with caution!

[Edit] This guy totally, completely gets it.

When I was a little kid, Mickey and the Beanstalk was without a doubt my favorite Disney animated feature. (I guess ‘animated short’ is a more fitting descriptor, but it was so epic that it always felt like a full feature to me.) I would watch it over and over on Beta at my grandparents’ house after school. Good memories. To this day, I still want to dive into a giant cube of red gelatin. Anybody know what I’m talking about?

Earlier today, I found a treasure trove of images from this classic at a totally awesome blog called Animation Backgrounds. Now I really need to go back and watch it again.

I always loved the stageplay motif of SMB3’s title screen, but I thought the idea ended there. I now see that I may have been in the dark all these years. Brilliant! And I feel stupid!

Every single episode of Interview Project has been remarkable so far. Seven and eight, the latest two, both really got to me. I compared The Wrestler to The Straight Story before, and Interview Project is infused with the very same spirit as both movies, only real. Do not miss.

Here’s a comparison. I was crazy about the retro look of the old island the minute I laid eyes on it three years ago, but I think the new one, though obviously a lot more detailed and of a higher technical quality, looks rather cheap. The layered rock in the old one instantly brought to mind Choco Mountain, and that’s an instant win. Also, the old water was way cooler.

We’ll see how it looks when it’s released a month from now. I am so excited for this game.

These are incredible. Above pic in hi-res here.

I was blown away the minute I stumbled upon this image a few days back — the full version of the illustration from the TMNT NES box. A random Google image search led me to it in the GameSetWatch archives. It’s from the cover of an Australian promo edition of Nintendo Power, which you should definitely click here to see in all its hi-res glory.

The wacky Japanese commercial for Super Mario World goes to show that there’s nothing better than clay-modeled Nintendo characters. Bowser appears toward the end.

Shaun wrote about the magic of SMW, and I wanted to share my two cents.

My household was a year or two late to the 16-bit era, and when we finally sold our NES (epic regret) and got a Super Nintendo, it was the SMW-less core system. Though we borrowed the game from friends numerous times over the ensuing years, we never ended up buying it, and my game-playing skills being what they were — very bad – the era came and went for me without even really getting to know Mario’s 16-bit adventure.

This all changed two years ago when I downloaded the game on the Virtual Console, jimmy-rigged a Hori Digital Pad, and dove into it headfirst. Before I go on, a word from Shaun:

“Going back to play Super Mario World now, it’s still a lot of fun. But the sense of discovery is completely gone for me, and I don’t know if that’s because I’ve already played through the game countless times or if it’s because I’m just too old for that kind of stuff.”

Speaking as someone who played through the game for the first time at the age of 26 — a year after finishing New Super Mario Bros, mind — I can confidently state that the lost sense of discovery experienced by Shaun is completely due to the former, not the latter.

Super Mario World absolutely consumed me for the entire month of 5-07, during which time I achieved total completion and had the time of my life. The game made me a kid again.

Now back to Shaun for a word on NSMB:

“I believe that many of our gripes with New Super Mario Bros. (and by extension, New Super Mario Bros. Wii – though many of us have not even played it) just result from the fact that we are now older and more experienced gamers. This doesn’t mean we’re necessarily better at games, though this is also likely. Having seen and played hundreds of games between Super Mario World and New Super Mario Bros., it’s understandable that we wouldn’t be as compelled by the new releases in the series.”

Again, I played SMW a year after playing through NSMB, a game that I certainly liked, but one that I felt lacked the magic of its 2D predecessors. And SMW blew me away like no Mario game had done before, not even 1~3. The sense of discovery was pure magic, as was everything else. In my own humble opinion, not even the great Yoshi’s Island can hold a candle to it. Nick and some of the 4cr guys contest me on that, but I’m right!

So as someone whose first play-through of both NSMB and SMW occurred after the age of 25, it’s my geek responsibility to state for the record that the magic of Super Mario World has nothing to do with age or previous experience — it’s totally and completely real.

NSMB could have achieved the same level of excellence as its predecessors, but it was held back what has always felt to me like a marked lack of passion. I actually popped the game in my DS this morning and played it to get reacquainted, and found it to be just the same as ever — a fun, entertaining Mario experience, but not a classic one.

Yes, I know that comparing it to SMW is unfair because they’re two totally different games and NSMB was meant to be a throwback to the NES original, etc., but that’s not what I’m talking about. When you play a game, you can feel the effort that went into it, especially in terms of visuals and gameplay. And I think we can all agree that NSMB’s visuals, while not without their own charm, are the most uninspired of any game in the series. The gameplay has its defenders and detractors, but I can’t imagine anyone claiming that it’s in the same echelon as the classics. I don’t mind the floatiness as much as most, but it’s still frustrating.

This does not mean that I don’t think NSMB is a first-rate game, because I do. I had a blast with it the whole way through — two times, in fact — and I’ve been itching to start it all over again. Despite being a throwback, it was designed to be a very different 2D Mario game than its predecessors, both in concept and feel, and I can appreciate that. But for me, the fact of the matter remains that it lacked any real magic, which is precisely the element that defined SMB~YI. Imagining what could have been, the game feels like a missed opportunity.

In spite of this, I have a very good feeling about NSMB Wii, and though I’m somewhat bummed that it keeps the appearance of its DS forerunner, things seem to look far better and more polished this time around. Maybe it’ll be the classic the original could have been.

I rediscovered this classic commercial recently, and was left dumbfounded by the giant, rampaging Monoeye (I think that’s what it is, anyway) at :07. Somehow, the frozen old Japanese man had blinded me to the ad’s real star before.

The live-action wackiness in Nintendo’s old commercials was so incredibly awesome, especially the make-believe stuff. Makes me think of the brilliant Fireball Island ad.

Wired’s Chris Kohler conducted a good interview with Miyamoto at E3, discussing both Galaxy 2 and Zelda Wii in-depth, further analyzing the former here and the latter here.

Kohler’s blog is worth reading for a number of reasons, but chiefly because he actually expresses honest, candid opinion on a frequent basis, as evidenced in the above links. There should be nothing special about this, but a great many video games ‘journalists’ have developed an obsession with trying to sound so objective that their writing becomes the equivalent of milk toast. As such, people deserve credit for at least being real.

My favorite habit is what I refer to as Morla Syndrome: Don’t say I or Me or My! Opinions are not professional! Lines like “We didn’t like this game very much” or “We found the dialogue to be dry” or “We have yellow sweat stains on our t-shirts” suggest that there is some Borg Collective behind every post, when in fact the views of only one nerd are being expressed.

On a related note, I recently spent five minutes reading a paid, high-profile ‘opinion column’ that was 90% quotes, 5% recycling of facts, 5% filler, and 0% opinion.

A post at AICN perfectly captures the magic that was the summer of 1993.

To this day, I still think of all dates in my lifetime only in relation to the years 1989 and 1993, the former because it was the year that Batman and Last Crusade were released, and the latter because of Jurassic Park. I don’t do this intentionally — it’s second nature. That’s how life-changing it was for me to see those movies in the theater as a kid.

When I have a hard time recalling some hazy event from my childhood, I ask myself when it happened in relation to 1989 and/or 1993, and then everything becomes clear.