28/July/2015
ONM Remembered - #303
"The boys from Scrubs hid their sadness at Kenshuui Tendo Dokuta not being a US launch game"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 148 (January 2005)
It was the launch of the Nintendo DS in America, and peeps were quite excited: finally, portable gaming becomes three-dimensional! Mario Kart DS was a rock-solid instalment at the time, and for all its dodginess, there's merit to be found in Super Mario 64 DS. After that, though? I honestly couldn't tell you what the library was like. It became so deluged in bizarre tie-ins and casual simulation games that I had trouble finding anything. I'm sure there's good stuff for it, but the lack of a DS Player of any sort is a bummer for me, personally. That screen is tiny, man. After using the PlayStation Portable it's hard to accept anything so miniscule!
I admit I scanned this partly for the photo of Cuba Gooding Jr.; I can't find the post anymore, but I believe FacilityPro of the Flying Omelette forums won a contest at this event which was reprinted in Nintendo Power, with his name in close proximity to Cuba's picture, causing some confusion at the time. And if that son of a bitch hadn't said anything, he could have scored himself a compliment for his sweet moustache. You missed out, FacilityPro!!
As for the news, sadly, no N64 Player was ever released for the GameCube; there were emulations of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask on the Zelda Collector's Edition disc, but it wouldn't be until the Wii Virtual Console that its scope broadened. The proposed animated film turned out to be Animal Crossing, though I've no idea what the card game it's referring to is.
30/July/2015
ONM Remembered - #304
"THE CHAIRMAN"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 119 (August 2002)
"THINGS MUST IMPROVE. RUN, COWARD! I HUNGER."
01/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #305
"We're not the types to poke fun at peeps who've lost their hair, but what the hell!"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 86 (November 1999)
It has its ups and downs, but crap like this is what makes the magazine worthwhile.
04/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #306
"Come and play our favourite games with us on Puzzle Island!"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 110 (November 2001)
This scan has been kicking about for three years now, and I still have
nothing to say about Denki Blocks. You move blocks around and try to
squash them together to make shapes. It's not my cup of tea. I was so starved
for material that my only note for this entry was to suggest the game is
actually something like The Enigma of Amigara Fault... in puzzle game format.
Sometimes there's no saving an entry. I got nothin'!
06/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #307
"Get ready for the world's biggest puzzle!"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 07 (September 2006)
Welp, there goes the southern States and the top of Africa. You had a good run, Morocco! (imagine the score bonus though, holy shit)
08/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #308
"The adventure to help Princess Dazzle begins..."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 113 (February 2002)
One thing I loved about the GBA was that it became a good outlet for old puzzle games to find a new home - Columns, Puyo Puyo... Hot Potato. I, uh, admit I never actually played many of these games (been meaning to get around to it!), but I always appreciated the sentiment. It's just soothing to know a stack of good ol' puzzlers are out there, ready and waiting for whenever you need them.
It's cute seeing Columns, of all things, get an anime-styled revamp to appeal to the kids... but, personally, that strips the game of half its charm. You know what I think of when I think Columns?
The incredibly depressing Mega Drive game. There's something about that game,
especially its tone, that feels like a pool of misery. It's like a game you'd
play after a relative has died. There's something about its dry atmosphere, its
dirge-like music, even the total banality of the gameplay... it should be
strange and unappealing - and it is! - but somehow that exact combination just
makes it click for me.
You think of puzzle games and you generally think of cute graphics and bouncy
music. Tetris on Game Boy literally has no visual flair beyond the title
screen, but its music carries the entire thing. Even when you lose, the high
score music has an air of hopefulness to it. It's got a touch of melancholy, but
it also suggests, you can do it! Get back in there, stack those blocks and get a
score that'll make your momma proud!
Columns, though? That game's like a goddamned funeral. Its Greek flavouring only drives home that this is a mausoleum, dedicated to things that are now a distant memory. All of the music options have an overwhelmingly sombre feel to them as if they're an extra challenge, weighing down on your morale; even their loop points seem designed to emit a sense of hopelessness! The song may try, but even it is doomed to never progress. And when you lose, your entire board is wiped clean, your high score is but a text string of text along the bottom, and the whole game resets. It's as if your game never even happened. All things must eventually return to dust.
Playing that game makes me think of funerals, and I love the shit out of it for that reason. What other puzzle game makes you think of death and the fragility of life, and not because it's catastrophically awful?
11/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #309
"DO I MAKE YOU RANDY?"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 88 (January 2000)
"An action-packed adventure."
"An action-packed adventure."
"AN ACTION-PACKED ADVENTURE."
(snarkiness aside i'd love to see an actual Austin Powers 3D adventure game just to see how embarrassing it could be. the more painful the 90s flashbacks, the better!)
13/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #310
"Make your way to the end of this level and you'll be horrendously beaten by a huge bloke with a frisbee. Makes you wonder whether it's all really worth it..."
from 64 Magazine volume 9 (1998)
Yet another review of Mortal Kombat Mythologies, and believe
it or not, a surprisingly in-depth and positive one! The game's quirks are
acknowledged, but the reviewer appears invested enough to power through it and
talk about what the game's really like, past its clunky surface level.
It's always appreciated to see folks review notoriously 'bad' games like this
and venture beyond basic player complaints and into what the game is trying to
accomplish. I mean, we all know Superman 64 has jank controls, but has
anyone dared to conceive what it set out to accomplish? Not that such thought
experiments actually makes the games any better or anything, but kudos
regardless.
15/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #311
"At the beginning of a level, race or match there is never any explanation as to how the characters got there."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 121 (October 2002)
This is a topic that's bugged me on occasion, especially in fighting games. I don't know if many fighting games frame themselves as official tournaments in their stories anymore, but I always wonder: how they do so much globe-trotting? Do they pay for the transport themselves, or do the tourney organisers arrange it? Are they escorted to the designated arena, or do they just find it themselves?
I ask because, man, the idea of stepping off a plane and being greeted by Birdie, who proceeds to lead you into the scummiest bathroom Britain has to offer for your official tournament fight just cracks me up.
18/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #312
"Loads of Toadies partying with Mazza, Lazza, and, erm, Wazza."
from N64 Magazine issue 23 (December 1998)
Some screens from the just-released Mario Party before it reached our shores. For how much I loved the game once I got my hands on it, the preview didn't do a lot for me! That said, it is a difficult game to properly convey until you see it in action, or have a few pages to dedicate to it. For the longest time I thought it was a fighting game, based solely off a screenshot of the crane mini-game. When you see it as a still, it totally looks like exaggerated grappling action. Kinda disappointed it wasn't, actually. There's something amusing about the mental image of these squat, low-poly cartoon characters doing arm-bars on each other.
20/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #313
"GB + PKT MZK = MOB MZK 4U"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 114 (March 2002)
Talk about a novelty! I have zero music talent and little to no musical interest, but I'm a terrible person for getting excited over imagining how enthusiastic other people must be about niche tools like this. This one issue of Official Nintendo Magazine is the only media I've ever seen acknowledge this game's existence, but I like to imagine out there, long ago, there was an aspiring musician who used this as their outlet before moving on to bigger things... or, who knows, maybe their music was so freakin' sweet, and the game so freakin' sweet, that this is still their tool of choice to this very day?
It's possibilities like that that make me think Pocket Music was a novel and inspiring product to release on the Game Boy Advance, and not a terrible idea because have you heard the speakers on it recently? A car full of snakes has less hiss than those things.
22/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #314
"3,265: The weight, in pounds, of pasta that filled Nintendo's world record-breaking bowl of spaghetti."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 121 (October 2002)
Another stupid feature ONM introduced after its 2002 revamp was "Nintendo By Numbers" - a column that sat alongside the news that listed numbers relating to whatever trivia they felt like sharing today, Nintendo-related or otherwise. It was a relatively harmless feature, if rather vapid, but what infuriates me is the total lack of context for some of its trivia.
For instance: why was I not informed of this titanic bowl of
spaghetti?? When did this happen? Who sanctioned this?! And did they
leave any for me???
I'll need to double-check my magazines, but it seems this event did
receive some press online, including its
announcement on Nintendo's site, even calling for Mario cosplayers to show
up. Because what better excuse do you need to bust out your pair of elastic
overalls?
Other
sources mention that the event involved people diving into the spaghetti
pool in search of hidden goodies, including boxed GameCubes, a ticket to Hawaii,
and even replicas props of Yoshi and the FLUDD.
I'll confess I'm bummed so much spaghetti was brewed up for the sole purpose of
drowning cosplayers, but dang if that doesn't sound like a lot of fun -
if not something that should be a regular event in our everyday lives. Going to
the DMV? Not until you've waded through this swamp of lasagne, you won't!
25/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #315
"He said he had a very nice meal, too."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 123 (December 2002)
This is great, this answers some of my most important long-pondered
questions.
[✓] Does Tim Weaver eat?
[✓] Where does he eat?
[_] What does he eat? ("Spanish food" doesn't count)
Two out of three ain't bad, but you could've delivered so much more, Matt.
We still don't know if the man wears socks, for crying out loud.
27/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #316
"I think Chansey is rubbish."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 92 (May 2000)
And at the top of this page...
Insult an animal, get a free game. Why they didn't make a promotional campaign out of that, I have no idea.
29/August/2015
ONM Remembered - #317
"You can have your cake and eat it with Mario Party. And you don't even have to wait for yer birthday!"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 78 (March 1999)
(big ups to OldGameMags for
the scans!)
This review had me positively thrilled. The teeny weeny preview in N64 Magazine barely made me turn my head, but this? Boy howdy! The massive twelve page coverage shows off the game in extreme depth, explaining how the game rules work from start to finish and everything in between, with heaps of colourful insets and teases of bizarre mini-games. It's strange to believe that at one point Mario Party was such a foreign concept that it needed to be sat down and explained to readers, rather than simply asking your friends, "who's in the mood to get screwed out of their Stars?"
After ten pages of discussing game mechanics, the final two-page spread gives a glimpse at the experience from both a single-player and multi-player perspective, which is actually vitally important. Party games are such wildly different beasts when you're partying with pals rather than sitting alone, rolling dice with computer opponents. I don't think there's a sadder act in my life than the time I replayed the same board a dozen times just to unlock the final mini-game in Mario Party 4... all by myself.
I refused to believe it, though, and in my copy I'd actually scrawled a "9" on top of the score percentage because I could scarcely believe a Mario game wouldn't rock my gosh-darned socks off. To the game's credit, it did rock my socks off - for a few consecutive years, even! Despite the absolutely dreadful controller-obliterating minigames, this was the go-to Mario Party for me and my pals even after I'd gotten two of the sequels.
I was actually looking forward to scanning my copy, graffiti'd score and all,
but I haven't been able to find it (i'm worried i chucked it out
years ago). It's a good thing
OldGameMags has high-quality scans of - you guessed it - old game mags,
including this one! I'm very grateful for its existence, because there's no way
I couldn't have included this in the column; it's such a vivid memory of my
Nintendo magazine browsing!
(and if anyone's concerned, i'll only be resorting to their scans
for issues i can't find in my collection - if i started browsing issues i never
owned i'd be a fossil before this column ever finished!)
Also, I can't believe it took me this long to notice they blurred out Steve giving the finger. The cheeky devil.