If you’re hardcore about your hobby — whatever it might be — chances are, you’ve actually dreamt about it at some point in your life. Not just daydreams, but actual, vivid, REM-sleep dreams. Continue reading “The Collector’s Dream”
I’ve played my share of Final Fantasy games — I’ve played through the first, IV, VI, VII, IX, and X (with about six hours put into VIII before I decided my character was a d-bag and I didn’t wanna be him anymore) — but, like most American gamers, I didn’t play II, III, or V. Continue reading “What are we playing? 07.16.17”
I don’t even remember where I heard about it, but way back in 2011, I backed a film project on Kickstarter called Arcade: The Last Night at Chinatown Fair. It was to be a documentary on the final days of a New York City video arcade and the gaming community it affected.
Now, I have never been to New York City, let alone NYC’s Chinatown. And I had never even heard of Chinatown Fair until the Kickstarter project came to my attention. But as a dedicated gamer, an arcade nostalgic, and a self-professed videogame historian, the very idea of the film resonated with me. Continue reading “The Lost Arcade”
Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro is one of my all-time favorite movies. Like, not even just anime movies — it’s one of my favorite films, period, up there on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones level for me. I’ve owned it since the first official English-dubbed VHS of it was released in 1992, and have since bought it twice on DVD and once on Blu-ray. I’m even thinking about picking up an old Laserdisc of it just for completion’s sake.
If you don’t know the film, or the anime/manga character Lupin the 3rd — the short version is that Lupin started off as a manga in the late 1960s by an artist named Monkey Punch; had an anime TV series in the early ’70s; his first theatrical film and a second TV series in ’78; and in 1979, the second Lupin movie, The Castle of Cagliostro — the motion picture directing debut of a guy you may have heard of named Hayao Miyazaki — was released. Lupin went on to more movies, TV shows, TV specials, OAVs, and live action movies in subsequent years and remains a popular character to this day.
With that level of success, naturally, a number of Lupin videogames have been made over the years, and of those, three of them have been specifically based on Cagliostro, with one or two more taking liberal doses of inspiration from it. This is the specific subset of games I’ll be checking out in this post! Continue reading “Videogames from Cagliostro”
Since my son bought a Nintendo Switch (yay for having a teenager with a job, I didn’t have to buy it myself!), he’s been lending me his 3DSXL — a unit which I always wanted but never picked up. So I’m catching up on some games I missed out on, and the first one is Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Released in 2014, it’s not an old game, but it certainly is 100% rooted in the spirit of A Link to the Past, as you are probably well aware. Continue reading “What are we playing? 06.22.17”
Jesus: Kyoufu no Bio-Monster is one of those games I’d always heard about in “weird Famicom games from Japan” lists — you know, just mentioned because it was called “Jesus,” and then glossed over to talk about the next game in the list, which was probably that impossible-to-finish Takeshi’s Challenge game or whatever. But I never really looked into what the game actually was, until recently. And when I did, I got pretty excited and dove in headfirst. Continue reading “Finding Jesus”
Much can be debated about Nintendo’s history and their successes and failures. Say what you will about their role in the resurrection of the American home videogame console market, whether or not they won the “console wars,” the failure of the Virtual Boy, their innovations with the Wii and DS, or whether or not they’re doing right by the Metroid franchise (they’re not), but there is one inarguable, unquestionable fact about Nintendo:
They drew some great gorillas. Continue reading “Nintendo’s Legacy of Gorillas”
Like my blog? Show me and everyone else! Retro Game SuperHyper t-shirts are now available at Teespring for only $19.99!
I’m hoping that this is only the first of a whole line of retro gamer t-shirt designs, so if this one does well, you can expect more!
Got one of these? Post a pic on Instagram and tag @retrogamesuperhyper! I’d love to see you!
Guardian Legend is one of those games that I never played much back when it was new, and only got around to checking out maybe in the late 1990s when I was buying cheap used NES games. Its anime-mecha style was certainly appealing to me, but there was a problem: I never really understood how to play it. I’ve always intended to figure it out, and I recently finally did! It’s not that it’s complex, it’s just kind of a jarring mashup of styles without a whole lot of direction. So if you’re another gamer who never quite got how this shmup/Zelda hybrid is supposed to work, maybe this will help. Continue reading “So THAT’s how Guardian Legend works”
I finally got around to watching the movie Pixels just now. Having seen and loved the short film by Patrick Jean, I was interested when I heard that it had been picked up to be turned into a major motion picture, but also wondered how far the premise of classic games coming to life and attacking Earth could really be stretched. Continue reading “Pixels: That wasn’t so bad”
Riding Hero is a first-wave Neo-Geo title that typically catches a whole lotta crap from people. But you know what? I’m gonna go to bat for it right now, because I love it and it doesn’t get talked about enough.
So, this is a topic I’ve wanted to write about since I started Retro Game SuperHyper, and now that we’ve just crossed the 6-month mark, I think it’s a good time to tackle it. If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ll know that I’ve mentioned this in a few posts. I want to talk about the process of downsizing my videogame collection.
Retro Game SuperHyper 