Schloss Ritter

Wow, for some reason a notification for this popped up my email, when I don't think that's ever happened before. Makes me wonder if Philly tweaked some setting heh. Anyway, hi, speaking of old friends, sorry I've been away from here for a while, if you even remember me, heh.

Haven't yet read through this all (read the start and the end and skimmed the middle), but I can sympathize, as I've gone through the end of a few communities myself over the years, sometimes with no advance warning. I'm glad you were able to know this was coming in advance and prepare a form of closure for yourself.

On an amusing (to me) note, it can't be a coincidence that the last update was version 1.87, given this exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/187_(slang)

Dammit, Areala.

I'm guessing you weren't really a fan of Dragon Warrior, but I kinda see what you mean about them using up so many pages when there was a special insert issue on the way. Maybe it was a case of one hand not knowing what the other was doing. At any rate, NP's extensive coverage of the game was a huge part of the console RPG genre taking root in the US and not being shoved aside by players as too outside the box to understand.

I liked The Guardian Legend as well but found it pretty hard. I couldn't beat it until I got a Game Genie.

Mario 3 must have debuted just based on the number of Pro points (from people at NP playing it early?), while it didn't have any Player or Dealer points yet as it was not yet in stores?

"(CES was the precursor to E3)" - not exactly. CES is still around as a separate show for general consumer electronics. Basically, E3 was launched when the gaming industry was taking up more and more floor space at CES, soon about overwhelming the rest of the show. When the ISDA (now ESA) was rebuffed and ignored in some requests to the CES organizers, they decided to split off into their own show.

I'm actually surprised at how many games featured in this issue that I've played and have even beaten some (sometimes through Game Genie), though Faxanadu has somehow gone untried. By the way, ever heard the song "Xanadu"? I just realized Faxanadu may be pronounced similarly.

Gah, you make me want to dig out these issues and read them cover to cover again, but that would put me even further behind from the scanning I need to do, heh.

ELIZA was an early lesson for me in how not sophisticated AI was at the time. I was intrigued by the premise, but the results were pretty predictable after a short time.

This "stagger" system as you describe it reminds me of something similar in Dawn of Mana. At first, using your whip-vine in DoM to panic foes seems like a nice innovative change to straight up hack and slash; however, you soon find out you need to use it to smack objects and foes around and increase their panic meter in order to gain any kind of substantial stat increases. What is initially a fun diversion soon turns into a tedious exercise in having to panic almost every single foe before you can take them out, with a low enough cap on your abilities that you never really get too powerful. Add to this the chapter system that practically resets all your stats at the start of each of eight chapters, and the tedium begins anew each time.

Other than that, Dawn of Mana has a great setting, story, and lots of nostalgic callbacks to early entries in the series. If it wasn't for the "innovative" panic system they tried to implement to differentiate this Action RPG from the upstart Kingdom Hears series, Dawn of Mana might not have spelled the practical death of the Mana series.

Okay, it seems maybe I should have made this a blog entry of my own rather than a reply to yours, as I went on for much longer than I planned, heh.

I remember before this game, I thought all the Game Boy was capable of was black and white games on the same level of depth as NES games. Then this game blew me away with not only meeting but in some ways surpassing the greatness of the SNES Zelda title. And then it was later re-released in color, leaving no doubt that it was full of awesome.

I think a textual Let's [...] of a printed source is highly appropriate. Before I read the rest of the article, let me get down one personal impression I have with NP. There are very few monthly mags that have ever covered games as in depth as Nintendo Power. Heck, they sometimes even fully mapped out the featured games in order to draw in the interest of readers. Not being able to afford many of these game while growing up, I took some measure of enjoyment in tracing along the mapped out routes on the page and having a limited experience of the actual game. Now, most mags I have seen give one page to most games, even the good ones, while even those given multiple pages don't get as detailed of articles as NP did. I didn't even start my NP subscription until their third year but soon found myself ordering the first dozen that I missed as back issues instead of spending the money on a new game.

Nice blog here, and I will be sure to check out the rest of the NP ones.

You say, 'It wasn't very long ago that comic books weren't considered "art,"' but he probably still doesn't agree that any of those are art either. Hence, I'll take that statement one step further into Ebert's realm of understanding: it wasn't very long ago [less than a century] that movies weren't considered "art" but in fact were thought of as a passing fad... something similar to how video games were seen in their first couple decades.

As soon as I saw the name "Jacob's Well" I knew it sounded familiar. Though I never got to run or play this adventure, after all these years there must have been something about it that kept it in my memory. Thanks for the reminder.