Welcome to the first issue of our new weekly Nintendo Voice Chat column. Start by tackling the questions submitted by users in the question block segment. Listeners of the show are undoubtedly familiar with the fact that we encounter… time constraints… where we cannot give your question the amount of time it deserves. What better way than to pick one of your favorite user questions of the week and answer it here?
Super Ninfriendo Tracy Vincent asked: Do you think you would have enjoyed it more or less if you played it when it was first released?”
Kat Bailey
It wasn’t always easy to get your hands on an NES game in Nintendo’s 8-bit heyday. Castlevania was one of his many popular games of the era that apparently never hit store shelves. It wasn’t even the gas station that rented Battletoads and Batman over and over again (Beetlejuice was there too, but not Konami’s equally creepy and much better platformer). One of the few hints I’ve seen that Castlevania exists was through his dog-eared copy of the ultimate unauthorized Nintendo game strategy that barely even contained screenshots. Still, Castlevania was bound to be one of the best NES games in my circle of friends, and Simon’s Quest was particularly popular. Castlevania continued to bounce around the back of his head until he left for college ten years later, where he found a copy of Symphony of the Night in a random record store. I grabbed it for $25 (stealed!) and decided to see if Castlevania really lived up to the playground hype.
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Short answer: Obviously it was. Of course, what I didn’t know was that Symphony of the Night was a radical reinvention of the Castlevania series that subsequently split fans between those who preferred “Metroidvania.” Years later, I sat in a hotel room in Japan with Jeremy Parrish (ironically one of the guys who popularized the term “Metroidvania”) and found him playing the original Famicom disc system in his game. I watched you blow your version and pointed out all the unique details. Made it special as he went. Did you like the original Castlevania if you played it as a kid? Almost certainly. It’s done quite well on the NES, with its soundtrack being a particular highlight. I may have perfected it, but this is a feat I have yet to accomplish as an adult. Maybe one day Konami will make a comeback.
rev valentine
Growing up, I only owned and played on Nintendo devices like the Gamecube, Gameboy Advance, and Nintendo DS. However, during his senior year of college, he finally bought a second-hand old PlayStation 2 on Amazon. That’s how we finally got exposed to many classic RPGs like Kingdom Hearts, Chrono (which then came to Switch). Cross, and most importantly the Final Fantasy series. It’s been over a decade since Final Fantasy 7 came out, and it’s been over a decade since I played it for the first time, and to be honest, I didn’t really like it. By 2012, it was horribly outdated – the movement was jerky and not nice to look at most of the time.I didn’t understand why people were raving about it!
I eventually got into other Final Fantasy games, played Final Fantasy X the same year, loved it so much, and got Final Fantasy 6 a few years later. loved That’s it. However, FF7 never landed. Having said that, after hearing the story, big twist Of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, I used to play it all the way back last year and I think I get it now. Before people touted FF7 as one of the greatest games of all time, and thousands of others If I had played FF7 first before I realized how games could make characters move infinitely better in 3D environments, I think I would have failed. In love like everyone else. I’m glad the remake exists, not just as a challenge to the very idea of a remake, but as a gateway to help us understand what made the original so special in the first place.
Seth Macy
It might sound crazy, but I never seriously played Metroid until I was an adult. This is kind of weird because I distinctly remember playing at J.C. Penney’s demo kiosks in the 1980s. It also means that it was I knew the password for “JUSTIN BAILEY” and knew that Metroid was a girl! (Note: I was aware of the main character’s spoiler ending, but didn’t find out that her name was actually Samus until much later).
I don’t know why I didn’t play it during the Nintendo Entertainment System’s heyday. It’s probably an earlier game that you may have parted with when choosing a game to rent for the weekend, and to the best of my recollection, none of my friends close enough to lend me the game have one for themselves. Didn’t own a copy. I actually played Super Metroid and Metroid Prime 1 and 2 before playing the original, and I must say I’m glad I waited. It’s still a solid game and still holds up today. It’s not the perfect user experience for modern games of the genre, but it’s a good guide and he’s pretty easy to progress with a few hours of free time a day.
When I finally got it to play, I was so excited to discover that it still held up. I have played it several times since then. Full disclosure, I haven’t gotten the best ending yet. As for whether I enjoyed it more or less as a kid, I can say that the setting and art style definitely appealed to me as a kid But the game itself probably wasn’t.
Like I said before, it’s easy to get over now, but it would have been harder back then. Not just because of my crappy kid’s reflexes, but because accessing help in the game wasn’t as easy as it is today. The concept of impassable areas that can only be traversed with later upgrades didn’t click with me, making me feel frustrated with the game series and never experienced the glory of Super Metroid and the first Metroid Prime.
Pier Schneider
I’m a 70’s kid, so I literally grew up with video games. From Fairchild Channel F’s Block Magic to the Atari 2600 and home computers like the Commodore 64 and Atari 800, I devoured, not literally, thousands of games in the ’70s and his ’80s. But my big blind spot happened in my late teens, when everyone was going crazy over the return of console games, the NES.
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The Legend of Zelda is my favorite video game franchise. But somehow I missed both the original game and when Zelda II first came out. My first step with Nintendo was definitely arcades. Donkey Kong in particular delighted me and pissed me off at the same time. The whole thing passed me by first. I think I was still playing Winter Games and Eidolon when the Zelda craze started.
It wasn’t until a few years later when I got my hands on the Japanese version of The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past for the Super Nintendo that I discovered the wonders of Link’s adventures. my mind was blown. I was on hiatus from gaming for a few years, but I couldn’t believe how the game looked and sounded at home…then they pulled me back. I’ve played games like this before, but none had better visuals and tighter controls than this one. What I fell in love with immediately was the (seemingly) free and open world exploration combined with the use of tools and weapons.
I ended up going back and playing many of the NES games that preceded my favorite SNES. In hindsight, if I had been playing The Legend of Zelda when it first came out, I would have spent far too much time exploring that world finding a way to get my hands on a NES or NES Disc System. No doubt. You already understand the language of the game, know many uses for its items, and even know the repeated enemy attack patterns, so even if you go back years later, it won’t be the same. I have no regrets. A few years of not playing games allowed me to focus on applying to college, understanding my life, and actually getting to where I am today.
