12/July/2016
ONM Remembered - #376
"BRONZE SEAL OF QUALITY"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 56 (May 1997)
(big ups to
oldgamemags.com for the scans!)
AAAAGH! You mean Seal wasn't just used to answer reader mail in a surly manner... but to actually serve as a seal of quality? Like, actually living up to the terrible pun? Christ. He looks horrible. Take him away. You look better behind a desk, Seal.
14/July/2016
ONM Remembered - #377
"I'll save the world, you save the money!"
from 64 Magazine volume 9 (1998)
16/July/2016
ONM Remembered - #378
"Unfortunately this is another poor cash-in on a successful cartoon."
I know absolutely nothing about The Ripping Friends. In fact, I know darn near nothing about John K.'s cartoons! I'll admit this is yet another excuse to talk about something different: when tie-in video games somehow remain the only tangible or accessible remnant of a show's existence.
For instance, Eek! The Cat was a Super Nintendo game I bought donkey's years ago, and I just thought it was a bizarre, unenjoyable game somehow graced with a great soundtrack and amusing intro. I never even knew of the cartoon 'til years later, and have never seen it in my life! To my knowledge, the show has never gotten a DVD release or seen much in the way of repeat broadcasts; unless you had a home-recording or some merch, that bloody awful game was darn near the only hard proof to show it existed until online video sharing became feasible.
In a sense, video games are no different than the likes of VHS or Laserdisc - they're storage mediums that play only on their system of choice, though some more archaic than others. All mediums are doomed to expire sooner or later, but where VHS is crummy and ancient magnetic tape that's not privy to easy lossless backups, video games have the luxury of being able to be copied flawlessly and run on emulators, and have become an almost permanent fixture of internet data.
Before the likes of YouTube, it was way easier to find relics of dead TV
shows like Family Dog and King Arthur & The Knights of Justice by
their tie-in video games than the shows themselves; sharing a two-megabyte ROM?
No sweat, any old joker with an Angelfire page can do that. Downloading a
one-minute RealPlayer video of a cartoon's intro that's been decompressed to
shit? That requires commitment from both the uploader and the downloader, pal.
Even now, video copyright laws make it tough to have this stuff archived because
the rights still exist somewhere, just not in the hands of folks keen to share
it. A lot of video media has switched to streaming, meaning we're starved of a
good physical backup of most of this stuff, though old and obscure shows have
finally found a new home thanks to DVD publishers seeking them out. But twenty
year old video games? That stuff might as well be abandonware. Golden oldies do
see re-release on modern platforms, but nobody's in a rush to rerelease the
Phantom 2040 tie-in SNES game, lemme tell ya.
As someone who's a big ol' nerd about internet history, I just find it fascinating, especially since tie-in video games of that era were always so... wacky. Where would we be if all first-hand sources of knowledge on Ren & Stimpy were lost, and all we had to go on was Nickelodeon Movie Maker? We'd be concocting weird theories about Ren Lights A Fart and its reflection on the show we never knew, and I'd be down for that.
19/July/2016
ONM Remembered - #379
"This game is for mature audiences."
21/July/2016
ONM Remembered - #380
"The game's so fast it'll make some players puke"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 122 (November 2002)
Some cool-looking splash art from a review of Extreme G3. If somebody had told me the series had butts in form-fitting jumpsuits, I might've paid attention all those years ago!
23/July/2016
ONM Remembered - #381
"Jump the jumps, sound your horn, and marry your cousin!"
26/July/2016
ONM Remembered - #382
"Now we're talkin'. Super Smash Brothers'll keep you button bashin' for ages, 'til well past your bedtime."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 88 (January 2000)
By contrast to that rad as heck preview, the review for the first Smash Bros. is rather pathetic and blase. The page design lacks sizzle and pop, there's no comic book artwork drowning out the pages, and there's no personality chart leading you towards an ideal character, for crying out loud! Of course, the fact the game was probably on shelves by now might've let them off the hook. You don't need ONM to tide you over anymore - go out there and buy it already!
28/July/2016
ONM Remembered - #383
"ZO, tell me Toby ven did you realise zat you were ZICK in der HEAD?"
30/July/2016
ONM Remembered - #384
"A whole bunch of new yellow Game Boy accessories from GAMESTER"
02/August/2016
ONM Remembered - #385
"We always knew that Forsaken was something very special."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 65 (February 1998)
(big ups to
oldgamemags.com for the scans!)
No, seriously, it continues to boggle me how much page space
Forsaken got that I have been oblivious to all these years. It even had this
side-bar development diary, in this issue showing off some neat low-poly models
of the game's vehicles. Give me more of that, please. I'm a sucker for jaggies.
And apparently the game was a NOA darling to boot? "NoA loves Forsaken. [...]
Forsaken is the best third-party game they've ever seen for the Nintendo 64"?!
Is there seriously something I'm missing?! Might I actually have to try out this
game sometime? Clearly there's a legitimate appeal to the game that mere
magazines (and
cheesecake pin-ups) cannot convey.
04/August/2016
ONM Remembered - #386
"Four the quest, four the battle, four adventure."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 119 (August 2002)
Midway's character models for Gauntlet always looked like they came from wildly different genres. Right here you've got off-model Jared Leto caricature jester, discount comic book pin-up valkyrie, mid-90s fighting game leftover warrior, and "western artist tasked with creating how-to-draw-anime book" elf.
06/August/2016
ONM Remembered - #387
"Could you overtake here?"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 132 (September 2003)
Always keen to evoke that sporty image, boxes of Kelloggs Frosties came bundled with a racing game for your home computer! And looking at it, it's hardly ground-breaking, but it looks better than most games on Steam Greenlight. It is a pity the Kelloggs license is purely aesthetic; Tony the Tiger would be a perfect fit for a Pepsiman clone.
09/August/2016
ONM Remembered - #388
"The goose pimple textured ball is made of soft rubber or leather."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 122 (November 2002)
11/August/2016
ONM Remembered - #389
"What is Donkey Kong the king of in this upcoming GBA game?"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 148 (January 2005)
Either I'm simply not a fan of puzzle pages, or asking kids to name
several ancient N64 titles or identify impossibly unhelpful screenshots sounds
more like a punishment than an activity.
13/August/2016
ONM Remembered - #390
"If you like the chunky feel of an arcade stick then this is for you."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 119 (August 2002)
A colourful collection of GameCube gadgets, including an arcade fightstick (for what fighting games?!?), a flight stick (for what flight sims!?!), and - get this - a sensor-controlled mat made exclusively for football games. At first it sounded like the perfect device for pals who are too drunk to even hold a controller properly, but it has no means of recognising the stick so it's still close to useless. I'd love to see it used in one of Mario Party 4's button-bashing minigames, though.
Also, man, the fact the GameCube was obscenely portable is never appreciated enough (no matter how many people actually do appreciate it - APPRECIATE HARDER). Of all the bizarre cottage industries to exist, the gaming-in-the-backseat-of-a-car one really got catered to during this era.
16/August/2016
ONM Remembered - #391
"Saberman is jolted out of blissful retirement (we imagine Rare provide excellent pensions)..."
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 116 (May 2002)
This era of Rare's games was a curious one. After rounding off the
N64 with excellent (or at least acclaimed at the time) games like Banjo-Tooie,
Perfect Dark and Conker's Bad Fur Day, their output for the GBA
and Xbox left something to be desired. I played a bit of Grabbed By The
Ghoulies and Saberwulf, and I came away from both with the same
question: "is that it?"
The gameplay in both is charmingly simple, but feels like they're missing
something vital; they lack the intense mechanics of Donkey Kong Country,
or the thrill of exploration from Banjo-Kazooie. It's possible they do
pick up eventually, but after an hour of gameplay in both you do fear you've
seen everything they have to offer, and they're in no rush to escalate the
challenge in inventive ways.
Also, hey, ONM had the courtesy to investigate development on Saffire, the Greek-flavoured Tomb Raider-like we last saw when the GameCube was first being hyped! It, uh, looks absolutely nothing like it did last time. Given how the development studio was also known as Saffire, it's possible they just attached that name to any untitled project they showed off; in this case, some sort of Rainbow Six-em-up. Whatever the case, it got canned, but kudos for telling us anyway.
18/August/2016
ONM Remembered - #392
"Dear Jim, please can you fix it for me to blow up Noel Edmonds' house?"
from Mean Machines SEGA Issue 8 (May 1993)
20/August/2016
ONM Remembered - #393
"Can you imagine a game called Super Martin?"
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 94 (July 2000)