opa opa | My Nintendo Dimension

So it’s official… my NES collection is down to a mere 14 games. Of course there are the big 5 very heavy hitters left to acquire: Little Samson, Flintstones 2, Panic Restaurant, Bonk’s Adventure, and Power Blade 2. My goal is to get all the other games besides these 5, and sit on my collection for a few years. I have a strong feeling that the price of these rare retro NES games is trending downwards. I see them all the time at game shows, but only once have I seen a sale at what I consider these ridiculous prices. I did see three guys all pony up to buy a copy of Dinosaur Peak… but how does that work… who gets it when… and do any of these dudes truly have this game?!

Fantasy zone

Please don’t get upset, but I’ve never played the NES version of this Sega classic. On the Master System I thought Fantasy Zone part 1 and 2 were fantastic games! Such vibrant colours, interesting music, and surreal (clearly drug induced) graphics… I always thought it would be really cool to design a remake of this game, but with more realistic graphics as opposed to cartoonish. You know, make Opa-Opa a really bad ass killing machine! That would be awesome! And YES I actually did beat this game in front of an audience for verification purposes… exactly the kind of difficulty I look for in a shooter… or any game for that matter… hard but not impossible. That being said, have you every played the arcade version? It’s damn near impossible! The Turbo Grafx 16 version is slightly more forgiving, but also very very difficult!

Tennis

Jimmy Connor’s Tennis… is thankfully the last of the sports games I needed on the NES. I bought this game in great condition on Ebay for $55US; expensive as it is kind of rare because it came out near the end of the NES era. I would definitely say that this game is in the top 10 sports games that only “mostly suck”… which is the best honors a sports game can get (besides Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out which is awesome!). By no means am I saying this game isn’t a complete turd, but it is playable. The graphics are very basic and lame, but the music is decent. The sound FX are like Atari 2600 and there is no voice over which would have been a nice touch. The controls are pretty good, and the fact that you just have to push a button to serve is nice. Considering this game came out so late in the NES’s lifespan I think a lot more could have been done here… even for an 8-bit game.

SEGA Corner: I talked about Fantasy Zone at the beginning of this post… what more do you want?! Hail Opa-Opa!

Please follow me at #nintendojoe1985

and at #ultimate_megatron on Instagram… my G1 collection is now “complete” in that I have all the toys minus the pretenders, micromasters, and action masters… these were just abominations and were designed when Hasbro was out of ideas!

If only I got into this game collecting hobby sooner… 2008 to be exact. At some point in ’08 I could have picked up Snow Brothers on the NES for less than 50 bucks. That would be a deal considering I’ll be paying a minimum of $150 for it now:( I guess I could wait and let this video game fad fade away, but that just wouldn’t be any fun. Besides, my old man has been trying to get me to sell my Transformer collection for the last decade, yet their value has remained relatively constant for the last 20 years. I can’t wait that long to complete my nintendo collection (keep in mind I only intend to get the official Nintendo games, so I don’t have to worry about getting my hands on a copy of Nintendo World Championships… that should save me nearly $25,000:). I don’t know why the aforementioned game is so expensive as it isn’t even that good. I guess it’s super rare, but I could never justify the price tag. The most expensive game (please correct me if I am wrong) I need to get into my collection is Stadium Events… which goes for a measly sum of $4,500. I just don’t have that type of disposable income. I’ll have to fund raise for the rest of my life to get this last game! Right now my claim to fame is that I have a mint copy of Mega Man 5 which isn’t much, but it puts a smile on my face.

I thought I would review a game in this post. The game up for review is Blazeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge on the SNES. I’m not really one to beat around the bush so I’ll get right to it: This game sucks and I can’t believe I spent $28 on this piece of crap! The best part about this game is it’s cover (which was the reason I bought it). The old saying “never judge a book by it’s cover” seems really meaningful here. The only other good thing about the game was watching your ship explode into pieces whenever you were hit by enemy fire. Here are a few reasons why I would not recommend this game:

1. Lack of power-ups. What makes a shooter fun is the power-ups you collect along the way to make your ship more powerful… this game had hardly any.

blaze_arc4 2. Some obstacles will kill you while others you can fly right past… and there is no way to differentiate one from the other.

3. The boss music becomes annoying very quickly! This is a shame as in my opinion can make or break a game. This game is broken.

4. While the graphics were generally pretty good, there are times when nothing at a all is happening. No enemies or obstacles on the screen. It’s almost as if they wanted to make this game a certain length to play through, but ran out of ideas for some parts. This makes sense as the levels became rather boring very quickly.

5. Lack of an auto fire option. My thumbs aren’t used to this kind of marathon button mashing and cramped up really quickly. Perhaps I’ll revisit the game (yeah right) once I purchase a rapid fire game pad.

6.The Thunder Force ship looked way cooler and was far superior in terms of design and fire power. Heck even Opa Opa and the R-Type ship had a bigger arsenal!

So over all i was very disappointed in this game and would only recommend it as torture for prisoners doing hard time in a federal penitentiary.

In other news, I tried out the Game Boy Advance title “Mario vs. Donkey Kong”. I wasn’t expecting much, but this game is actually pretty cool. It is a fusion of a platformer with a puzzle solving game where you have to figure out how to solve each stage before finally facing off against Kong. The music was a compilation from past titles such as the original 1981 Donkey Kong, Mario_vs_Donkey_Kong mixed with Super Mario Bros., and some new stuff. Mario’s “mamma-mia” after being killed can get a tad annoying after a while, but this is easy to put up with after playing Blazeon. I can’t wait to try out this title on the Retron 5, though admittedly it might best be viewed on the 2.5″ x 2.5″ screen of the GBA.