Gorbachev’s Pipeline (or ゴルビーのパイプライン) for Famicom

March 13, 2012 by stopXwhispering

Yes, it’s a japanese Famicom game featuring the former President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the goal is to lay a pipeline throughout Russia. Each dot on the map represents a stage, and the difficulty rises progressively.

Gorbachev however only appears on the Title Screen.

It’s actually a quite entertaining game if you like puzzle games. It resembles Tetris a bit, except here you have pieces of two pipes in each falling block and you will have to connect a pipeline from the right wall to the left by rotating and placing the blocks correctly.

There are quite a few games that resembles this one, like for example Pipe Dream for Game Boy. However Gorby’s Pipeline has a uniqueness to it. There’s different music on the stages, I only played through the first three, but they were all different. I guess it will start looping eventually. Both the animation and music has a very USSR feeling to it, the japanese have portrayed a very cosy image of old Russia. It makes me think of ballets like the nutcracker and swan lake, snowy landscapes, and of course the old fashioned Tetris.

It was fairly hard though, if you are not used to puzzle games it will take some time to think where to put the pieces. I myself have played quite a few puzzlers and love the genre, but Tetris is always easier. (Unless you’re playing NotTetris2)

Here’s a movie I put together of the gameplay:

Abobo’s Big Adventure!

March 7, 2012 by stopXwhispering

I remembered watching this trailer quite a while back, and I was totally psyched about this Ultimate Tribute to the NES! Then i forgot about it.. and after browsing through my favorites on Youtube I found it again, and it has now been released since some time in January!

Tonight I’ve been playing through the whole game, it took me about 1 hour and 40 minutes, watching all the cutscenes and stuff (that are awesome btw!) ^_^

This game has it all, the retro 8-bit feeling and references to all the games we love <3 And it’s extremely funny! Here are just some of the things you will be able to enjoy and experience when playing Abobo’s Big Adventure!

Playing as MEGABOBO!

Earning medals for silly and funny things usually referenced to old NES games:

Working up your RAGE for amazing mind-blowingly awesome special attacks that are unique for each level!

References to Mortal Kombat, and in general pretty gory gameplay! =D

Finding hidden areas, where all the fun is at ;D

Abobo in Zelda:

Abobo in Balloon Fight!! With the Reaper from Castlevania!!!!

Encountering various famous NES characters all through the game, and with original NES music:

Awkward moments:

Or having babies with a mermaid.. or as they call it Merbobos!

Abobo in Contra, vs Krangby!!

YES! IT IS KIRBY WHO SWALLOWED KRANG TO BECOME KRANGBY!!!

Fighting Jaws, and even bigger Jaws!

Abobo vs Donkey Kong!

And much much more! I suggest you play it online or download it straight away!

What are you waiting for?? Go play it!

I always knew Kirby was evil…

Mario bros + Portal = Mari0

March 4, 2012 by stopXwhispering

Have you ever wondered what if would be like to play Super Mario bros with Mario possessing a Portal gun? Well now you don’t have to wonder anymore! A two-man studio called Stabyourself has created an open source game that has merged the two games, giving Mario a Portal gun!

“A complete from scratch recreation of Super Mario Bros. with a focus on perfectly imitating the feel the 1985 classic gave us. Then give Mario a portal gun, add puzzle game mechanics from Portal and there you go. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, play 4-player coop, with everyone having their own Portal gun!”

Here’s a teaser trailer for the game:

And if you want to play it, you can download it here for all platforms including OSX! (I love it when they do not exclude us Mac users) ^^

The creators also have some other great games on their page, like “Not Tetris 2“, which is a Tetris successor with no boundaries. Quite interesting, now I know what I will spend my afternoon playing!

Super Star Wars for SNES

February 13, 2012 by stopXwhispering

So here’s the review of Super Star Wars for SNES!

This game was not a disappointment! It narrated the original story of the first movie amazingly! You got to relive many of those memorable scenes and play as your favorite characters through levels that were really detailed and true to the story.

Like visiting Obi-Wan in the desert…

… finding Han Solo and Chewbacca at the bar…

… rescuing Princess Leia from the Deathstar…

Or encountering Darth Vader!

The game also had a great variation of gameplay, from side scrolling platformer to driving a hovercraft and even piloting an X-wing when hunting down Darth Vader and destroying the Deathstar ^_^

The bosses were classic SNES type boss fights, taking up half of the screen but having a weak spot. Not always something that happened in the movie, but always with some connection to it, very imaginative! Like Banthas!! =D

After encountering new characters you unlocked them so they were playable, you could choose between playing as Luke Skywalker, Han Solo or Chewbacca. I preferred Chewie since he had the highest jump, even though he was slightly slower. Luke was the only one with a lightsaber though, but I still preferred shooting laser ^_^

Han Solo looked real silly when he was wiggling his gun around..

Having the old Nintendo Power issue for Super Star Wars helped me and my friend out a little bit, but mainly they just described the scenarios. They did mention that there was a hidden place on stage 5 where you could get unlimited lives. This was very helpful! Since you don’t have unlimited continues. We finally beat the game in about 4 hours. I speed ran it the morning after in about 1.5 hours. It’s faster when you have figured out how to beat each boss and where you will have to jump not to fall to your death (yes, on some places you were supposed to fall down a platform but if you didn’t know to jump at the end you would fall into lava and die immediately)..We actually had more help from the latest issue of LEVEL (a Swedish gaming magazine) that had a retro review of Super Star Wars Trilogy where they had a small walkthrough for each boss in all the games. The Nintendo Power issue actually only covered the first 9 stages (!) There is 6 more stages after that!! An example of advice given from Nintendo Power for the Kalaar boss “Jumping to avoid the attacks takes precise timing“.. no shit?! That’s it! This was one of the hardest bosses and it took several lives before we got lucky and pushed him back to avoid him hurting us. Thank god we have Youtube today!

Look at Luke’s silly surprised face ^_^

All in all it was a great game, hard and challenging, but just enough to make you try again and finally beat it =)

Here’s a little video of all the cutscenes from Super Star Wars, it’s quite fun to see the famous movie scenes in 16-bit ^^ The music is really great!

I also edited together a video of all the Boss battles of Super Star Wars.

And here’s a guide on how to get 98 lives for those of you who want to play it ;D

80’s gaming day!

February 12, 2012 by stopXwhispering

Had an 80’s saturday with my friend and we spent most part of the the day playing NES, SNES and Famicom games ^_^

We started off with some Caveman Games for NES, it’s kind of like Track & Field except it’s set in the stone age and you’re cavemen playing various sports that could have been set in that age, like fire starting, dino racing, mate tossing etc..

Mate tossing was quite entertaining ^^ It was kind of hard to figure out which buttons you were supposed to press for most of the sports though since we didn’t have a manual. However most of the games we figured out.. except fire starting >_< but it was a fun competitive game, containing just as much button mashing as Track & Field but more laughs! =)

We also tried playing some Toobin, a Tengen game for NES. It’s about a guy floating down rivers on a rubber ring, collecting power ups and avoiding obstacles such as twigs, crocodiles, fishermen and other enemies that occasionally shoot at you. It’s a fun game, we played through quite a lot of levels before quitting, like a jurassic level with dinosaurs lying around in the river, the Nile where egyptians where shooting at you and an ice level with penguins and icebergs! ^_^

“Game over, Dude!” :D

My friend also made it further in Time Lord than I ever did. Time Lord is an interesting game, where you play as a futuristic guy traveling through different epochs of time, like the middle ages around 1260 with knights and dragons and then 1800’s etc..

It’s tricky to figure out how to advance. On each stage you have to collect five orbs to continue time traveling, and to find the orbs you have to trigger certain things on each level and these are not always easy to find….

We also played Sunsoft’s Batman for NES, this is a great game =) Lots of different weapons and nice graphics.

I also forced my friend to try Punch Out since she’s never played it, she knocked out Glass Joe and then gave the german Von Kaiser a good match, but then she gave up.

I also got her to try 大迷路 (Dai Meiro) for Famicom. It’s a great game! You basically try to get to the end of a labyrinth, but first you have to find all the chests containing pieces of the key, when you have the key you can go to the exit. Now the hard part is that at every third step you take you loose a heart, so you can’t make a lot of mistakes or get lost. Also there is a map you can look at by pressing select, however this drains 3 of your hearts. So you just have to memorize the paths you took! I actually made it through 5 levels of this game, and I felt really proud ^_^ There are mini games you can find in the maze that can give you objects that help you along your way, however they cost a heart if you don’t succeed. It was Jeewario on Youtube who made me aware of this game, so I thank him for making his awesome videos of recommending famicom games! (you can watch it here).

After this we tried out some Mega Man for Game Boy briefly, mainly just to hear the awesome music! ^_^

LIKE SNAKE MAN!!! =D =D =D

And finally we were at the final event of the evening, the thing we had prepared for and looked forward to. Super Star Wars Trilogy for SNES!

I will make an entire post dedicated to the Super Star Wars game, since it did take us about 4-5 hours to beat it and I also have a lot of pictures. I speed-ran it this morning and finished it in 1 hour 40 minutes so I will also upload some videos after editing.. ^^

Until then!

Super Mario Bros. Crossover 2.0

February 10, 2012 by stopXwhispering

This is the coolest thing ever!!
I first saw a youtube video called Super Mario Bros. Crossover Trailer and didn’t reflect upon it actually being a game, just thought it was a cool video somebody put together. But NO! It’s actually a game! Where you can play as several famous 8-bit characters (such as Samus Aran, Mega Man, Link, etc) in the Super Mario Bros world!