Below is another rough draft sample of one of the entries of the Nintendon’t project.
Konami is a company so ingrained in the history of gaming with so many hit titles to their name that you can’t venture out into the gaming world without hearing of their endeavors. Whether it’s in regards to their Castlevania or Metal Gear franchises or their establishment of the Ultra Games “company” in the 1980’s to creatively circumvent Nintendo’s third party licensing restriction not much can be said about Konami that isn’t positive, except for whatever you can conjure about Rock Revolution.
Konami, and their extension company Bemani (a portmanteau of BeatMania, one of their most successful music-based arcade games), are responsible for some of the most successful and iconic music-based video games ever conceived. Speaking locally and generally Dance Dance Revolution is perhaps the franchise you might be most familiar with, but Konami has been responsible for so much more (mostly overseas). Unfortunately, though, not everything they produce can be a winner, what with the original incarnation of American Idol on the PlayStation 2 being nothing more than a timed button masher and also with the train wreck that is Rock Revolution, the subject of this entry in Nintendon’t.
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Nintendon't: The Book
books, crap, guitar hero, konami, Nintendon't: The Book, rock revolution
Nintendon’t is a project of mine that first came into fruition in 2008 as a little back burner topic that I plugged away at off and on for about two years. The idea was to find 20 or 25 or 50 (etc) of the worst games released and just give them hell, something that has no doubt been done before, but instead of focusing on the obvious candidates of E.T. and those wacky Legend of Zelda games for the CDi I wanted to pick X number of games that people either aren’t very familiar with or are titles that were received well that are actually quite awful. There is no real set release date for the book, it’s just something I’ve kept at for a long time (and something I’ve written and rewritten the preface for many times along with several of the list’s inclusions). Below is #25, Super Mario Bros 2 USA.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who hate Super Mario Bros 2 and those who are too caught up in believing everything Nintendo makes is a winner that they grudgingly accept that it was a “good game”. Thankfully with the advent of games like Mario Party 49 and Mario & Sonic & Other Former Franchise Rivals at the Olympics there aren’t too many people in the latter group.
I hated this game; this game cultivated an ENTIRE EMOTION in my persona. It was the first game I ever actually can remember not liking so much that it formed my initial concept of extreme dislike so it seems only appropriate to begin my list with this title.
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Nintendon't: The Book
books, crap, japan, nes, Nintendon't: The Book, super mario bros
I’m on a roll with these “10 Years After” columns, really. I’ve done Pokemon, Ace of Base, and the actual 00’s decade itself. In the aforementioned article about the decade in review I had a section about how far Nickelodeon Studios has fallen from grace and a phrase from what I wrote got me thinking; the phrase in question being “somewhere around the Nickellennium the train derailed and crashed through the side of the Fail Station”. The “Nickellennium” as it was called was part of a whole Y2K marketing thing that Nickelodeon started to ring in the new millennium, and while the previously mentioned quote was only part of a larger joke it actually reminded me of said marketing campaign. I started thinking about Nickellennium.
For those of you who are too young or just don’t remember, Nickellennium was actually a six-hour long movie (no commercial breaks either) that cataloged the thoughts, dreams, ideas, and hopes of kids from around the world as to what they thought about the future. It really was a monumental undertaking, and likely the last good thing Nickelodeon has ever produced, but I mean… seriously, putting an 11-year-old in front of the camera and asking him about the future is only going to end in him saying something he’ll regret when he’s in his 20’s. I thought about it and wondered what it would be like to revisit that production a decade later to gauge either how close or how far we are from everything that was said in the film because I’m expecting it to be hilariously skewed towards “THIS MILLENNIUM SUCKS SO FAR”, but mostly just because I’d like to make sure Frank (9, Georgia) cringes when he is reminded “in the future maybe we can talk to dolphins”.
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10 Years After
books, millennium, nickelodeon, nostalgia, spyro the dragon
