Super Gameboy for Super NES part II

The post turned out so long that I thought I had covered all the games I played, but I completely forgot about the last one! The Castlevania Adventures for Game Boy! So here it is:

The music is wonderful and gives the same mystical feeling as the other Castlevania titles. The graphics are ok for being Game Boy, and it resembles the first Castlevania game for NES a lot. You have the candle lights hanging in the air (though a bit odd that candle lights are floating in the air when you are outside in the forest among trees..) and the enemies are very Castlevania. Zombies are rising from the ground, but after first having dropped from the sky?.. maybe they are space zombies ^_^ And of course bats, but also birds, crows I think, which are extremely annoying and keep charging you from behind >.< There are also little fleamen that we are used to, however easier to kill than in other Castlevania games since they don’t jump around as much.

One thing that totally baffled me though was that HEARTS give you HEALTH?! That is true in any other game, EXCEPT for the Castlevania series. We have grown to learn that hearts are collected to be used up when attacking with your special weapon, like the holy water, throwing dagger or cross. The CROSS btw makes you invincible for a few seconds, and as far as I played I didn’t bump into any special weapons at all! Why would they change all this?! Why??

Seriously the HEARTS give you HEALTH!!!!

Well, apart from this major screw up the game is a decent title in the Castlevania franchise. It is frustrating at parts where you have to jump between pillars and at the same time avoid bats that keep charging at you but all in all the gameplay is fluent and enjoyable, especially because of the great music ^_^

Super Gameboy to Super NES!

Tonight I’ve been trying out my new Super Gameboy for Super NES (or SNES, but Super NES is what it says on the cartridge…). At first I wasn’t sure if it was working since I just got a black screen, but after jiggling the games around for a bit it worked =)

The games I’ve played for Game Boy tonight are: Mega Man III, Battletoads, Metroid II and the Castlevania Adventures. I have the Japanese Metroid II for Game Boy in original box and everything, but the other 3 are just the game cartridges. But here’s what their covers did look like:

First off was Mega Man III. I started off with facing Spark Man, the music was great and after a few trial and errors during the stage I got to the boss, and I then went on to Gemini Man.. This stage is UNBEARABLE! wtf.. there’s flying mosquito shits all over the place, you take ONE step and a new one appears and if they are not charging straight towards you then you have penguin fuckers throwing bombs at you!! You can’t even try to run past the flying fuckers or the penguins cause the penguins’ bombs will bounce around until they hit you and the mosquitos will push you into a whole in the ground in case you barely touch one >_< And everything hurts you like hell! The music on this stage isn’t even good enough to make it worth the frustration to just advance a tiny bit. After 20 minutes I gave up and went on to Snake Man…
Snake Man is my ALL TIME FAVOURITE song from Mega Man. I shit you not, it is amazing! I can just listen to it over and over and over and over again, and even on the Game Boy the song sounds great!! Here’s a sample:

The music was so uplifting that I just ran though the stage without even thinking. On the second try I beat the boss. For the fourth stage I chose Shadow Man, this too has awesome music, and it was a little bit harder than Snake Man. I made it to Shadow Man and he was definitively the easiest boss. This is as far as I made it through Mega Man III, I went on to Battletoads after this.

The intro made no sense… and then I start beating up pigs in bathing suites with axes. I made it through the first stage just beating things up, but on the second stage I got stuck. It was like a space shooter stage, just fly and shoot, but at the end you have to dodge spikes in rows flying towards you. Not to hard you might say, I thought so too at first, just aim your ship towards the opening in the spikes, but the darn things started moving faster and faster, eventually I didn’t even have time to move from one hole to the next without getting hit by the following spike! WTF! After 4 continues and several lives of tries I finally gave up =(

Next up was Metroid II.

I was amazed at how much colours were in this one, many old Game Boy games just have this sepia touch to the black and white when playing them on the TV. However, something that really bugged me was the title screen music.. I LOOOOVE the title screen music of the first Metroid for NES, however in this one it sounded like you had put somebody’s retarded little brother in front of a keyboard and pressed record >___< Listen for yourselves:

And here’s the original:

I played it for a little bit, but I think I would need some sort of world map before attempting to finish it.. >_< Also, in the game there’s hardly any music, only the beeping sound that increases in speed the more hurt you are.. extremely frustrating. You had to have over 50 in health before the sound even stopped! In the original NES Metroid I think it only beeps when you’re below 15 or something…

Well that’s it for my Super Game Boy for Super NES review, I might try out some other Game Boy games for it later, but I should first go back to the Saturn I think ^_^

NINJA BASEBALL BATMAN!!!

I have it, a Korean version anyway of both the first game and apparently a sequel, it just recently arrived from ebay <3 I’m just waiting for my new computer to arrive so that I can play it. It would have been a lot cooler to find an actual arcade machine with the game though.. well I’ll just have to keep an eye out for that on Ebay ;D

Trip to New York

In December I went to the U.S of A with my boyfriend. We first went to New York for a week and then down to Miami Beach for another week. In New York I found two game stores which had a bunch of exciting retro games! However, it was in general extremely pricey..

The first store was awesome, however a bit disorganised. I didn’t wanna take any pics inside cause there was this bald rude looking man behind the counter, but they had like EVERYTHING. It didn’t look very Retro going up the stairs, however they had mainly Atari and NES stuff ^_^ My boyfriend got bored quickly though and wanted to leave =(

The second store we found was so awesome! They had everything so tidy and neatly displayed, but everything was behind glass and even more over prized =( They had a bunch of stuff I wanted to buy, like Donkey Kong Game & Watch! But it was too expensive.. I’ll just have to Ebay it instead…

While in Miami we decided to look up some vintage arcades where they might still have some of the old classics like Pacman and stuff. My nifty friend Gaston googled a bunch of places that might have the retro arcade machines close by, one of them had appeared in the documentary “Chasing ghosts beyond the arcade” (Youtube it, it’s an interesting documentary). So we rented a car to get to the places, a big-ass-mother-f*cking-jeep. I’ve never driven a bigger car, and it was scary as hell to drive on the american highways among all the other big-ass cars  (and I HAD to drive since I was the only one with a licence).

The first place we went to had no vintage stuff at all, and not many games at all.. The guys stopped to shoot some Terminators for a while, and after that we left.

The second one was way out in nowhere, called Gameroom Superstore and was the one that I think was part of the documentary. It had been a place for restoring and selling old arcade machines. It was however closed, even though the signs were still outside, apparently for several years according to the neighbours that we asked… it was sad. The place still had their website online.. they should shut that thing down! It’s misleading >_<

People had even vandalised the text on the door to the Gameroom Superstore. “This is not a coin operation gameroom” was now “This is not in operation gay room” … So after having driven for hours back and forth we went back to Miami Beach.
It really felt like chasing ghosts.. there were no vintage arcade machines to be found anywhere. The closest thing we came to that was an old pinball machine in a bar in Miami, but it’s not the same =´(

Apart from the lack of vintage gaming experiences the trip to the US of A was a lot of fun with family and friends <3

Xmas holiday activities!

Here’s a little recap of what I was up to this Xmas..

Mom wanted me to make ginger bread cookies with her, and I got tired of making hearts and tiny people.. so I started cutting out Space Invaders! They turned out real pretty ^_^

I stayed on the theme of videogames throughout the christmas season, and on the second ginger bread baking occasion I made Pacman! Loads and loads of little Pacmen and ghosts ;D