Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park, aka Athletic Land (Colecovision/MSX Reviews) Plus Bonus Reviews of the Unreleased Atari 2600 Version and Athletic World – The Indie Sequel for Game Boy!

January 26, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick Leave a comment

Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park
aka Athletic Land
Wait! Don’t Go! I swear this isn’t a joke review!
Platform: Colecovision and MSX
Released in 1984
Developed by Konami
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

(Colecovision) Can you tell how deliberate I was in picking this picture first? By the way, Cabbage Patch Kids was the first toy that caused Black Friday riots. Not stampedes, but actual f*cking riots! The dolls were the biggest hit Coleco had EVER had in their entire company’s history. Far more profitable than Colecovision (it’s not even close), but they’re also proof positive that Arnold Greenberg was one of the worst CEOs in the history of gaming or toys. He was awesome at “step one” and not so awesome at any step that followed. Every single hit product Coleco had once he took over in 1975 he eventually turned into a loss leader. Colecovision gave birth to the Adam Computer, the business Greenberg REALLY wanted to be in and pushed hard for even though they had no infrastructure for home computer development or manufacturing (it’s not remotely close to the same infrastructure a game console utilizes). Then he ignored engineers who told him it wasn’t ready or any good and pushed it into production. Today the Coleco Adam is largely considered the one of the worst computers ever. Cabbage Patch Kids went from BILLIONS in sales to record-setting inventory crush in a three year span when he ignored established toy trends. Coleco was the #1 toy maker in the world in 1984 and bankrupt by 1988. The guy who greenlit all those hit products also didn’t have a clue about managing them. But hey Arnie, thanks for Colecovision. I do loves me some Colecovision.

You’d probably figure Cabbage Patch Kids would be a game for young children. An “edutainment” game along the lines of Reader Rabbit, right? Nope. Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park is basically the Colecovision’s version of Pitfall!, the David Crane classic (yes, I’m aware Colecovision does have a real port of Pitfall! too) mixed with a little bit of the reality competition Ninja Warrior with challenges like skipping across pillars and trampolines. It’s also one of those games people like me discover and are always shocked to find out it’s “really good!” that, upon revisit, I’ve dropped down to “it’s fine.” It’s still a remarkable achievement given how early this was in the genre though and an underrated showcase for what would soon be gaming’s #1 genre.

(Colecovision) That is one smug looking main character. If this game had been more popular, the fish would have gone down as one of the most notorious gaming antagonists. Trust me on this. I’ll also note that the last jump is one of the most deceptively difficult challenges in gaming. Any attempt at jumping off when the platform is anywhere but the lowest it gets or maybe one tick above the lowest will result in a death. Now a modern game would probably do a better job of conveying that and maybe have a line or maybe the platform itself lights green for jump and red for don’t jump. But for a platformer made early in the genre’s learning curve, this is impressive.

In the game, you scroll one screen at a time to the right and jump over and across different things. Make no mistake about it, this is a shameless Pitfall! rip-off, in style and substance. And, like Pitfall!, Cabbage Patch Kids’ problem is the genre has come so very far from the trail that it helped blaze. As an early platformer, there’s only a handful of challenges here that are mixed and matched, but they’re not always optimized for maximum gameplay. Actually, “a handful” isn’t entirely accurate, because when I actually counted-up the amount of things Cabbage has that can kill you, I was kind of stunned. By my tally, there are ten possible primary hazards (eleven if you count the timer) and seven supplementary hazards that can be mixed-and-matched with them. In the above screenshot, in addition to the moving platforms, I had to avoid the dreaded fish. In a screen with the trampolines, I might be hopping across mini-ponds that have the fish while also avoiding spiders that fall from above.

(Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park for MSX) This is a “sock it to you” level: water to jump over with fish jumping out of the water, spiders raining down on you, and a camp fire right at the end that you have to jump over (a tight squeeze between it and the final pond) that also spits fireballs at you.

So they actually squeezed more millage out of the obstacles than I realized and props to them for that. But, once you have the timing down, Cabbage Patch Kids is really just requires patience. With the fish, the fire, the ropes, the spiders, and the moving platforms, it’s just a matter of waiting for an opening. Within an hour of starting, the only obstacle that consistently got me killed was the fire, and only when it’s positioned like it is in the above screenshot, where there’s barely any room to jump over it. Because it fires projectiles, the timing of when it’s even safe to stand on the space between it and the water is tricky. Maybe that’s where the Cabbage Patch Kids license actually factors in and this is baby’s first platformer. Probably not since some of the screens are pretty hardcore in the amount of stuff they throw at you. They also missed several chances for risk-reward temptations. Plus there’s the occasional head-scratching empty screen. Those really weirded me out, because the empty screens happen even deep into the game. Here is one on the 68th screen of the game.

(Cabbage Patch Kids for MSX) There was literally no challenge on this screen. Just walk right and don’t stop to smell the flowers since the timer is still running. Or maybe the challenge is sensory deprivation, and the object is to not be lost in isolation of your own internal madness. Probably not since I didn’t die on it once.

Sometimes my readers get angry or confused by my constant usage of “it’s fine.” Which is strange because “it’s fine” always means, at the very least, “I had more fun than not” which is an automatic YES! because that’s my criteria at its most basic. And Cabbage Patch Kids is fine, truly! I’m giving it a YES! and everything. But yeah, I mostly use “it’s fine” for games that I or others have overrated. In the case of Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park, it’s a solid platformer that was ambitious for its era and does a good job with the limits it had, but the fun isn’t endless and it’s certainly not an all-time great. Even if it’s not making gameplay mistakes, it’s just too limited and too easy to clock. My only real gameplay annoyance was how rigid the trampolines are to use. You want to hold RIGHT and press the jump button when your feet are about to make contact.

(Cabbage Patch Kids for MSX) This apple is the only bonus points item in the game and it only appears in trampoline levels. It only scores 200 points, which is nothing when you consider you get 2,000 points just for finishing a group of ten stages. Hell, sometimes I genuinely think the apple is impossible to get if it’s in the wrong position on screens with spiders/coconuts. I’m kind of fine with that too because it feels like it’s there to tempt players. What the game could have used to give it some extra score-chasing mileage is more risk-reward chances. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if every screen had a fruit. Having only one feels like it was there because an executive said “add some items to collect! Kids love that sh*t!”

At first I thought Konami realized they burned a pretty damn decent action game on Cabbage Patch Kids of all things because they re-released this for the MSX under the name “Athletic Land.” Except it appears to be the other way around. Athletic Land was either already out or already nearing the end of development (release dates for MSX being fickle) and Coleco had a good working relationship with Konami, plus the MSX and Colecovision are very, very compatible. To put it in perspective, the MSX emulator I use is also my Colecovision emulator. Either way, Konami just quickly flipped Athletic Land to Cabbage Patch Kids, and it’s a good thing they did because that gives this a fighting chance at a modern re-release if Konami ever decides to put out another MSX collection. Three volumes of ten MSX games were released for the original PlayStation exclusively in Japan from 1997 to 1998 (that were combined and released as one big set for the Sega Saturn) and Volume 2 has Athletic Land. Great sign that this is a modern re-release candidate. The problem is that Athletic Land is visually just a minor upgrade of the Colecovision Cabbage Patch Kids game while the MSX Cabbage Patch Kids has some pizzazz and is the only game that lets you custom-create your character. In the three screens below, Coleco Cabbage Patch Kids is on the left, the MSX version is in the center, and Athletic Kids is on the right.

Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park for Colecovision

Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park for MSX

Athletic World for MSX

Note that all three of those screenshots were taken on level 36. Now, I’m not sure if it’s just the placebo effect, but I think Athletic World might be slightly, slightly harder than the other two in terms of timing, but if it actually is, it’s negligible. Overall, for such an early platformer, Athletic Land/Cabbage Patch Kids aged remarkably well. Plus it controls a little better than the original Atari 2600 Pitfall!, though it’s very picky about what jumps land and which ones don’t. I jumped a little too early once hopping onto the first log on a screen and died from the jump somehow. It probably counts as walking into the log, which is fatal. I only did it once and never again because I learned my lesson. So while it’s not age-proof, Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park/Athletic Land is fun enough for thirty minutes, making it an ideal addition to a compilation. Not an all-time classic, but for sure one of the all-time hidden gems. I kind of feel sorry that the game is tied to Cabbage Patch Kids. I imagine a lot of kids who were too cool to play a game based on dolls never bothered to give it a try. Their loss.
Verdict: YES! YES! and YES!

BONUS REVIEWS

Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park
Platform: Atari 2600
Unreleased Completed Prototype
Designed by Ed Temple
Developed by Coleco
NEVER BEEN (officially) RELEASED

My first GAME OVER came on the 4th screen of the game. Yeah.

Oh the Atari fans are going to hate this review. Apparently Cabbage Patch Kids is considered one of the best unreleased prototypes, but I’m not there. It IS impressive, don’t get me wrong, but the jumping physics are very strange. Like, some of the weirdest I’ve ever played. You don’t actually have to press a direction when you jump. You’ll move forward automatically, but the actual trajectory of the jumps are these high, shallow arches. It’s so weird. You kind of have to just play it to appreciate it. The game is certainly tailored around it, though. All the platforms or waterholes are spaced correctly to accommodate the actual length you travel, and you can change direct mid-jump too. That’s the only way you can do a straight up-and-down jump.

Cabbage Patch Kids (Atari 2600)

While all the obstacles are here, the trampolines are much harder to use, and there’s less of them (thank god). The character looks like someone wearing bunny ears, the sound effects and music are a dental drill to the eardrums and the bees look more like the disembodied torsos of women. Plus, collision is a little bit on the picky side, but on the other hand, you can get away with some things you can’t get away with in the other versions. Like at one point during the log platforms, I jumped directly from the second-to-last log to the ground and didn’t die. Also, you don’t die from jumping off too high a point on the moving platforms. But what really killed Cabbage Patch Kids 2600 for me was that the angles of the gaps are much easier because of the automatic movement. Once I stopped trying to move on my own and realized the game did the hard part for me, I went from losing all my lives on the fourth screen to barely needing to do any work at all, and I just stopped having fun. It’s a good effort, truly, but I didn’t like this at all. Sorry, Atari fans, but Alligator People is still the superior 3rd party unreleased Atari prototype.
Verdict: NO!

Athletic World
Indie Remake of Athletic Land/Cabbage Patch Kids
Platform: Game Boy – Super Game Boy Enhanced
Released April 12, 2023
Developed by MHZ Games
Download the ROM – Pay What You Want
Link to Store for Physical Copy

Leave it to an indie developer to make the greatest game in this series!

What a damn impressive effort Athletic World is. The name is a bit confusing since Athletic World is also the name of an unrelated NES game that was designed for use with the Power Pad. But, make no mistake, THIS Athletic World is exactly what an early-era Game Boy port/sequel of Cabbage Patch Kids/Athletic Land would have been, and it’s an outstanding game that would make the original designers proud (at least I hope so). It adds new obstacles, and the timing of the moving obstacles is much, much more fine-tuned to create an optimized challenge. So, I want to get the message out there, to anyone who aspires to make a modern tribute to a classic game, download this ROM, get a pen and paper, and start taking some notes.

Athletic World kept surprising me. After over 80 stages and having gone a while before any new obstacles were introduced, I was organizing my thoughts and shaking my head at how well made this was and BOOM, another new obstacle: a snake. Huh.

First off, the authenticity of an early-era Game Boy title is astonishing. Every aspect of this feels exactly like a launch-window game for that platform, but in a good way. Athletic World has charming sprite work, sound effects, and a good chiptune. The designer didn’t take advantage of having more resources available to them than a designer at the time might have had. I’m not some kind of purist and often point out that there’s nothing inherently noble or sacred about the limits developers had because, make no mistake, studios of that time frame would have crawled on shards of glass to have higher storage capacity. But because Athletic World is such a simple game, I think it actually lends charm to the experience. Other than including Super Game Boy features, Athletic World has a small file size and feels the part, but it works because it’s the gameplay that’s optimized, not the appearance.

This is one of the new obstacles and it looks so simple. It’s just a tiny little stick on a rope that swivels (right before I hit publish Angela said “I think it’s supposed to be a tire swing.” Maybe?). If you can actually hop on it, I never figured out how (and not for a lack of trying, I assure you). It’s really hard to clock by itself. It’s rarely by itself, too.

All the obstacles of the original games are back, but the jumping physics aren’t. Jumping is much shorter and stiffer in this one. The bouncing balls and other obstacles can’t be survived just by jumping straight up and down. You have to be moving forward or backward, and the obstacles take advantage of this. The biggest change isn’t the new obstacles, but how fine-tuned all the obstacles can be. I said about the Coleco/MSX games that once you have the timing down, it’s just a matter of waiting for an opening. While the same theory applies here, that window is much shorter. The genre might be platforming, but the action feels more like a Frogger-style cross-the-road game at times and you’ll likely find yourself wiggling back and forth waiting for things to line-up in a way that you can make your short jumps.

Weirdly (perhaps sadly) the blank screens return, only instead of being absolutely nothing, your cat (or a dog if you play as the boy) is waiting for you. Sometimes it leaves a bonus fruit for you, and sometimes it takes a sh*t and if you step on it you lose 700 points. I’m not joking. Cute clapback to the original, I guess, but I wish these would have been dumped altogether. Heh, dumped. It’s funny because you’re jumping over sh*t.

The new obstacles are mostly winners. One of them sees you clinging to the side poles that you slowly start to lose your grip on. I never died on that screen or even came close and had to deliberately wait and see how long it takes to lose your grip, so perhaps that should have been reworked. The swinging stick I already showed off is the hardest new challenge, and there’s also disappearing platforms and a new style of dive-bombing bird. This game also has a climax too! After 99 screens, you have to follow your pet and rush as fast as you can through ten screens (just don’t try to copy the pet, since they can jump on things that kill you. Learned that the hard way). You can’t wait for an opening because you’re being chased by bees, but this is where the fine-tuned design shines brightest. And after you finish this and get the game’s ending, guess what? There’s a second quest that’s much harder. Hot damn, this developer went all-out. My biggest complaint is that, once you reach second quest, there’s no option to skip straight to it if you turn the game off. If the developer reads this and there’s a cheat code, you need to alert GameFAQs.

It’s actually well done. Again, he did a great job of fine-tuning.

So, this really is everything you’d want a sequel/remake to Athletic Land if the franchise had lasted past the MSX. It even has the Konami code in it! While I was playing Athletic World, I kept thinking “I really hope the developer is proud of this game.” I mean, I sincerely hope that about every indie game I play, even the ones I don’t like, but Athletic World succeeds on so many levels and is probably doomed to remain obscure. Why wouldn’t it? A fan-made Game Boy tribute to a game already deeply under the radar? Christ, I’d be stunned if this sold 100 copies (my friend Saud ordered one of the physical carts right before I published this, so make it 101). Yet, its existence fills me with joy. Athletic World is, no joke, one of the best Game Boy titles I’ve reviewed yet. It makes very few mistakes, pays proper tribute to an older game, and it does all that while perfectly mimicking a specific style of game on a black and white platform. Most importantly, Athletic World remembers that there’s no better way to show your love for a game than making a better version of it. CELEBRATE THAT! How can anyone who loves gaming not feel a little warm inside that something like this could exist? Athletic World is everything good about indie gaming tributes with none of the bullsh*t, and I love it.
Verdict: YES!
And seriously, give it a try and if you enjoy it, kick the dev a few bucks, or hell, order a physical copy!

Punch-Out!!: The Definitive Review – 7 Full Reviews for Punch-Out!! and Its Sequels, Spin-Offs, and Rip-Offs

January 9, 2026 by Indie Gamer Chick 6 Comments

I couldn’t get the Commodore 64 game Frank Bruno’s Boxing working. In case you didn’t know, it’s an unauthorized rip-off of Super Punch-Out!! that predates Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! by a couple years.

Punch-Out!! is a legitimate contender for my favorite Nintendo franchise. Actually, the only bad one really is the original coin-op. That would be more impressive if there were more games in the series, but I’ll get to that in a moment. I wanted to start my 2026 at IGC with something big. I was going to JUST review Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, which is one of my favorite video games ever, but I figured “why not do all the pre-Wii Punch-Out!! games?” And if you want my thoughts on the Game & Watch, be sure to read Game & Watch: The Definitive Review, though I should note the Punch-Out!! Game & Watch, sometimes called simply “Boxing” is nothing like Punch-Out!! at all. In fact, the formula used in that game evolved into Urban Champion.

Probably a good idea to cancel an 8-bit/16-bit boxing Definitive Review. Boxing games usually aren’t very good. I’ve tried a couple times to review Rocky for the Sega Master System. I’m a HUGE fan of the movie, the first sequel, the fourth sequel, and I even liked Rocky Balboa and the Creed films. Rocky III and Rocky V suck. The Sega Master System game is for sure the Rocky V of video boxing. It’s bad. It doesn’t belong in this review, and honestly, I don’t think I can possibly get an interesting review out of it. It’s such a nothing game.

I originally intended to include other games in this, but my family vetoed Teleroboxer for the Virtual Boy due to flashiness and eye strain, and my friend Dave talked me out of doing other boxing games. Some of them were literally impossible for me to recreate with my emulator because the coin-ops had unique inputs (Sega did a few that tried to mimic the feel of throwing punches). Others, like the Master System game Rocky or James “Buster” Douglas Knockout Boxing for the Genesis, I really don’t think deserve to be compared to Punch-Out!! because it’s apples and oranges. Those are actual boxing games, and Punch-Out!! is much, much more than just boxing. But I wanted at least one “bonus” review so I found a very good ROM hack of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! to close this feature. So there’s seven total reviews in Punch-Out!!: The Definitive Review. I hope everyone enjoys! Here are the games reviewed:

Punch-Out!! (Arcade)
Super Punch-Out!! (Arcade)
Arm Wrestling (Arcade)
Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (NES)
Power Punch II (NES)
Super Punch-Out!! (SNES)
Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!! (NES ROM Hack)

HAS PUNCH-OUT!! RETIRED ON ITS STOOL?

Even non-gamers get references to Punch-Out!! in pop culture. It’s astonishing to me that Nintendo isn’t doing anything with this franchise.

So why isn’t Nintendo doing anything with Punch-Out!! Around this time last year, reports came out that it was due to the roster being filled with ethnic stereotypes. Next Level games later denied reports about this and instead said the format has been taken to its limits and there’s nothing “unique” to do. Either way, I really don’t want to get into politics or political correctness. Anyone who has read me over the last fourteen years can probably guess that I find these things exhausting at this point. BUT, I figure this would be a good place to point out that Nintendo obviously can’t think the situation is THAT bad because Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! are both available on Nintendo Switch Online. If the franchise has been vanished the cornfield, it seems weird to still have the old games with the same characters widely available, doesn’t it? Plus Hamster Co. sells the arcade Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! as part of the Arcade Archives series. Hell, I even suspect that the Wii Punch-Out!! will be re-released before the 2020s are up, possibly with some small modifications. But those are legacy games and the Wii is now old enough to be “retro.” The Wii Punch-Out!! game is over a year older than Angela, for God’s sake.

I kind of hate that there’s so much focus on negative stereotypes because it takes away from Punch-Out!! having one of THE great African-American characters in gaming. In a franchise defined by boxers who, let’s say, don’t exactly follow the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, Mr. Sandman has no time for such tomfoolery. He’s one of three characters who appeared in all four formats (Arcade, NES, SNES, and Wii) and the only Punch-Out!! character who doesn’t cheat or have any aspect of his style, appearance or personality that is illegal under the rules of the sport. Mr. Sandman is just a bad mother f*cker. I was so happy he became the last boss of the Wii game. I liked that it came down to a boxer who wins by boxing. I think he should have been the final pre-dream fight of the NES game because Sandman’s fight is much harder than Super Macho Man’s. Well, except his triple uppercut is probably easier to dodge than Macho’s spinning punch, but one move shouldn’t decide who goes last. I think Sandman has harder timing than Macho for most punches. I know I needed more attempts to beat him than Macho the first time.

So is Punch-Out!! well and truly dead as a franchise? Assuming Nintendo is skittish about the stereotype situation, just ditch basing the characters around nationalities and create new characters that aren’t fated to age badly. Or, instead of new characters, use old ones, but old ones from different games. One of the most popular franchises in gaming of the 21st century is Smash Bros. That could provide the template for Nintendo to revive Punch-Out!! Everyone loved the battle against Donkey Kong at the end of the Wii game, right? There you go! Imagine how many copies a Punch-Out!! where you box Link, Mario, or Samus Aran would sell. Captain Falcon could FALCON PUNCH Little Mac on Little Mac’s home turf. Kirby could eat him. 36 MILLION copies were sold of Smash Bros. Ultimate. Even if this hypothetical Punch-Out!! sold one third of that, it would be considered a smash hit and almost certainly bring back a lot of old school gamers to Nintendo. I can’t think of any franchise as universally beloved, critically acclaimed, and best-selling that is completely shut-out of modern gaming like Punch-Out!! is. What the hell are you doing, Nintendo? Three console games and it still feels like you’ve barely scratched the surface of what Punch-Out!! COULD be. Knuckle-up already and bring it back! ON WITH THE REVIEWS!

GAME REVIEWS

For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account, at least for the games themselves. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!

YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.

NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

Punch-Out!!
Platform: Arcade
Released February 17, 1984
Designed by Genyo Takeda
Developed by Nintendo
Sold Separately via Arcade Archives

Glass Joe will EVENTUALLY throw his hat in the ring as a contender for the greatest opening stage in video game history. Here, he’s just an early sign of how unresponsive this whole game is.

I reviewed the coin-op Punch-Out!! a little over seven years ago. I didn’t like it then, and while I’m willing to admit I was wrong about Vs. Super Mario Bros. (and I used to have a snobbery streak a mile wide) I was spot-on about the coin-op Punch-Out!! Everything that a person could love about the three console games seems to be here, only it doesn’t really work. If you expect the counter-punching format from the home games, boy are you in for a disappointment. Not that it’s missing entirely. You move left and right to dodge attacks, but the actual act of throwing leather is frustratingly unresponsive. It just takes FOREVER to get the hang of because “counter-punching” in this game literally means counter-punching. You throw a punch, they block and counter-punch, then you might be able to counter-punch and get some stunned punches on your opponents.

You can see in this picture that Bald Bull’s eyes are yellow. No, the hard drinking didn’t finally get to him. This is “telegraphing” but consider those quotes to be of the sarcastic variety. The boxers will just sit still and run out the clock unless you throw a punch, and then you will be the one to trigger them “telegraphing” their punch, which they’re already doing because they’re winding back. What the f*ck do you think he’s doing in this picture? Stretching? Squeezing out a turd? I hate this game.

But whether I played Punch-Out!! on Arcade Archives or MAME, it didn’t matter. The controls are incredibly unresponsive. Many button presses go unanswered, and it reduces Punch-Out!!’s good intentions into a mindless button masher where you’re happy when you land a string of punches. I have problems with the offensive game, but even the defensive one is problematic. Sometimes something as simple as raising or lowering your guard can have a delay in it, and every time I changed my defensive stance, it felt like I was punished on the offensive side of the equation by being unable to throw any punch for a second or two. Maybe they were trying to make it feel more “scientific” or “boxing-like” but it really just came across as responsive. When I don’t like popular games, I get accused of “playing it wrong” but in the case of the coin-op Punch-Out!!, I was constantly questioning it.

Pizza Pasta probably comes the closest to feeling like one of the NES or SNES fights. He does the same “lethal dry hump” move that Aran Ryan uses in the SNES game, and after he finishes he throws a big uppercut. If you dodge it, you can unload on him and he remains stunned EVEN IF you throw the special punches.

Eventually I did at least get good enough to beat all six fighters without cheating, though only about 10% of it felt like the home games that I fell in love with. And it’s not simply the gameplay I dislike. For a boxing game, there’s no sensation of violence at all. The NES game had punches that gave off a violent, impactful vibe and the uppercut in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is so satisfying. Getting punched in the NES game feels devastating too, as it should. The NES game does 8-bit violence just about as good as the console is capable of. None of that is present in the coin-op original. Even when you charge up the KO meter and throw uppercuts and right hooks, it has no OOMPH to it. Neither does getting punched. It feels like people fighting with oversized novelty gloves. Feathery play-fighting, and that’s being generous. Finally, I thought half the roster of fighters were forgettable and generic. Piston Hurricane (who would be much better in the SNES game), Kid Quick, and Pizza Pasta have pretty dull designs and Kid Quick’s fight is just very bland. It’s almost hard to believe they stripped this game down and still managed to turn it into a timeless, cherished NES classic. Punch-Out!! does have jaw-dropping graphics for 1984 and I’m sure it was attractive to arcade goers, but it’s just very fun, you know?
Verdict: NO!

Super Punch-Out!!
Platform: Arcade
Released September, 1984
Designed by Genyo Takeda
Developed by Nintendo
Sold Separately via Arcade Archives

I expected more of the same, but instead, this is inching closer to what the console games would be.

Super Punch-Out!! is a no-doubt-about-it improvement over the original in basically every way. The previous game was apparently developed as a result of Nintendo having a surplus of monitors, so who knows how much their heart was really into it. With Super Punch-Out!!, it sort of feels like the development team realized that they were onto something and leaned heavier into the more fun aspects. The counter-punching relies more on left-right dodging instead of using your gloves. The big, slicing uppercuts and hooks that the console games would make famous are thrown more frequently here, and finding an extended sequence of wide open “stunned” punches is basically the main object now. The controls are still often unresponsive-feeling but even that’s not as bad. Super Punch-Out!! is immediately, noticeably better.

And actually, the offensive game is now based around the stunned punches.

And it also feels much closer to the console franchise in terms of personality. Annoyingly, the already sparse roster has been cut from six opponents to five, but these five are big in personality and they, you know, cheat. Well, Dragon Chan does (and technically in boxing you can’t ever face away from your opponent, so Super Macho Man’s spinning punch is very illegal). This required an additional dodging move, the duck. Weirdly, I only remember needing it for three out of the five boxers: Bear Hugger, Dragon Chan, and Super Macho Man. Also, Great Tiger doesn’t do his famous “teleporting” move and really just feels like a faster version of Piston Hurricane, complete with the “Hurricane Punches” move from the original game. You can actually feel that they’re starting to experiment and get a sense for what Punch-Out!! SHOULD be, but as an authorized enhancement kit for the original coin-op, they were limited by the problems the original game had.

Just think: by decade’s end Nintendo would be making a deal directly with the U.S.S.R. for the rights to Tetris. I wonder if they knew about “Vodka Drunkenski” at that point. If not, maybe the Steins could have poached their deal by bringing a copy of Super Punch-Out!! with them.

If the first game was a prototype for better things to come, Super Punch-Out!! is the game that confirms Nintendo recognized that and had ideas for how to get there. Punch-Out!! should be about everything but boxing. If it feels like you’re obeying the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, well, it’s kind of boring, isn’t it? Here’s where it gets really weird: I couldn’t wait to be done with the first coin-op. The second game added something to the upper screen: K.O. Time, IE how long you need to knock a boxer out. This added SO MUCH replay value. I was still frustrated by the controls, but nowhere near to the degree I was the first time around. When I knocked out the unfortunately named Vodka Drunkenski in 44 seconds and change, I literally let out a cheer. The time trials also clued me in that I wasn’t fighting Dragon Chan right, as even on my fifth fight against him I failed to put up a good time.

I heard a lot of chatter about Super Macho Man being tougher than Mr. Sandman, but honestly I thought Super Punch-Out was exponentially easier than the original, including the final fight. It doesn’t really FEEL harder until the title defenses. More responsive controls do that every time, you know?

There is a downside to the time keeping: the rematches after you beat Super Macho Man don’t record times, so if you want to treat Super Punch-Out!! like a time trial game, you have to not continue when you get knocked out during the title defenses. Speaking of which, the second wave of fighters I found to be much harder in this game. Hell, I lost the Bear Hugger fight a couple times, and I never actually made it to the second Macho fight. I decided to not reload for rematches because I wanted to challenge my fastest times. That’s what put Super Punch-Out!! over the top for me. While all the problems with the lack of authentic-feeling, painful violence returned from the original, Nintendo got close enough to the Punch-Out!! that *I* fell in love with to win me over.
Verdict: YES!

Arm Wrestling
Platform: Arcade
Released May, 1985
Designed by Genyo Takeda
Developed by Nintendo
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

This was the very last ORIGINAL Nintendo coin-op. Also, “Stud Horse?” Seriously, is Texas Mac bragging about how well he’s hung? It kinda sounds like it.

Arm Wrestling is one of the few Nintendo coin-ops that Hamster hasn’t brought to Arcade Archives, though I have no clue what the story on that is. I mean, Arcade Archives released Sky Skipper (which I reviewed on my 30th birthday), a game that never got a wide release and which only one unit is known to still exist. A game that rare, and rare specifically because of bad route testing, gets modern love but Arm Wrestling doesn’t? That seemed ominous to me, and then there’s the fact that Arm Wrestling has been shut out historically by Nintendo on the same level as StarTropics and Zoda’s Revenge. No references in any other game. Not even a wink in the Smash Bros. series or a microgame in WarioWare. So, I was a bit nervous, but truth be told, I think I like Arm Wrestling more than Sky Skipper. Maybe. As I type this paragraph, I’m not actually finished with my play session. I’ve only beaten all five fighters once, but Arm Wrestling is positively exhausting, like one of those button mashing Track & Field games. I doubt any game wearing a Nintendo label has been this physically taxing, at least not without some kind of Power Pad or Balance Board.

There’s an excellent guide to the surprisingly complicated rules of Arm Wrestling at GameFAQs. If you give this game a shot, you’ll want to at least read through the basics because Arm Wrestling is NOT intuitive. At all. Even that guide I’m not entirely sure is right. It says that I should press two buttons when the bubble has a “!!” in it but that didn’t do sh*t for me. The only thing that worked for me was pressing RIGHT and I still rarely got 100% of the bubbles.

I can honestly say I’ve never played anything like Arm Wrestling before. Well, that’s not entirely true. This is considered part of the Punch-Out!! franchise for a reason and shares DNA in that both are about counterattacks. But instead of throwing leather, you want to mostly tap the joystick LEFT to try and muscle your opponent’s arm down. Eventually they’ll make a move that’s telegraphed by a facial expression or some other telltale sign, at which point you want to counterattack by quickly pressing RIGHT instead. Doing this will stun them like a Punch-Out!! sequence, at which point little bubbles will appear above the fighter that require you to hit the POW button. A “!” bubble requires a single press while “!!” might require two presses or it might require pressing RIGHT. I honestly never figured it out, but I know that just pressing buttons always seemed to fail. A money symbol does no damage to your opponent but scores points. If a skull appears, you have to wait it out. A “?” is a 50/50 chance for points or a skull. Did you get all that?

Two of the five fighters (Mask X and Alice & Ape III) require you to perform a pull. Mask X’s pull is done by pressing UP. Alice’s “pull” move is basically an instakill and has to be stopped by pressing RIGHT. It’s sort of like the Bald Bull’s Bull Charge, only if you didn’t get up if he hit it.

As noted in the above picture, there’s more to it than just jerking left and right on the controller. Two of the fighters require special finishing techniques to beat, and a few have Punch-Out!! like moves you have to dodge, including the final fighter spitting fire at you. Okay, so Arm Wrestling is unintuitive and physically exhausting to play, but I…….. kinda liked it. It’s also an innovator in a few ways. You know the Mario Kart “hit the gas at the right moment to get a boost” thing? Arm Wrestling did it first! Every match has a starting pistol. If you hit LEFT before the pistol, you get a foul. Two fouls is a game over, but if your timing is true and you hit LEFT on the exact right frame, you can score super quick KOs on opponents. The time trial system from Super Punch-Out returns, and honestly I think it’s more potently addictive here. Plus, unlike Super Punch-Out!!, the second wave of fighters ALSO has time trials that are exclusive to the rematches.

An hour ago, I lost this fight over a dozen times. Now I’m beating it in under 12 seconds, and it’s exhilarating.

And those rematches are no slouches. I literally could not beat the first fighter, Texas Mac, in the first rematch. His fighting style is totally different. When I was just about to wrap-up this review, I went back for one kick at the can, and not only did I defeat Texas Mac II using the Mario Kart trick, but I won the fight IN FOUR SECONDS! I literally screamed.

This was the last fight I won.

Arm Wrestling isn’t perfect. I never got the hang of defending against the skulls. I never got the hang of the timing of the bubbles at all, really. In the rare instances where there was a mix of “!” and “!!” bubbles, I was always surprised when I actually got all five correct. I’m also suspect Hamster took a pass on this because it’ll be bad for analog sticks. I’m guessing even the most durable arcade units took a LOT of abuse from players, which probably explains why Arm Wrestling is a rarity. Still, it didn’t deserve to be historically blanked like it has been. It’s loaded with personality and has some of the most unique gameplay Nintendo has come up with. Yet, it can’t even get a microgame in the WarioWare franchise. I won’t suggest that Nintendo is sitting on a goldmine, but as a unique novelty game, Arm Wrestling deserves better.
Verdict: YES!

You’ll note that I didn’t mention the, ahem, infamous sound effects. For over fourteen years now my readers have given me endless sh*t because I often play games muted. Well, have a listen to what I muted this time. HAH HAH! WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?🖕🤪🖕

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
aka Punch-Out!!
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released October, 1987*
Directed by Genyo Takeda
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

*A version of Punch-Out!! without Mike Tyson/Mr. Dream was released September 18, 1987 for the Famicom in Japan. Sort of. Only 10,000 units were made but only as prizes for special events or drawings. In this version, Super Macho Man is the final fight. Mike Tyson actually IS in the game code and requires a Game Genie to unlock, and he replaces Glass Joe. Heh, imagine if that’s how it really worked. Talk about tough love training.

I’ve played Punch-Out!! and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! to death. “I need something to make it fresh for me” I thought, so I tried the PlayChoice 10 version (the first time I’ve ever played PlayChoice 10, I think), only the colors on it are, ahem, loud. So I stopped and swapped back to the NES because, no joke, my eyes started to ache.

You know what blows my mind the most about Punch-Out!!? I’ve always known that there’s really only six body types, with King Hippo being the sole one-off and the other ten fighters each being the twin of another (all the Punch-Out!! games but the Wii one do this), but I’ll be damned if it isn’t easy to forget because they did such a good job of hiding it. Like, Glass Joe and Don Flamenco don’t feel alike at all. Neither does Piston Honda and Mike Tyson. It wasn’t until I paid really, really close attention during this review that I started to “feel” the similarities besides the shape of the sprite. Before paying close attention, the only pairing that felt too similar was Mr. Sandman and Ball Bull, who both spin their hands before throwing a punch and look hilarious when you slug them in the gut. There’s also no hiding that their hooks look identical, though oddly I found the uppercut spite to feel unique, even if it really isn’t. For this review, I actually looked for shared moves for the first time and they weren’t hard to spot. Like Von Kaiser and Great Tiger both have an easy-to-exploit weakness when they duck. Glass Joe and Don Flamenco both have the same hilarious knockdown animation where they change directions a few times. Soda and Macho’s big, cutting uppercuts look and feel identical. Yet, my mind is blown because, if you’re not LOOKING for them, it really never does feel completely like a palette swap. There’s eleven fighters, period.

Super Machoiski

Soda Popman. Just seeing if you’re paying attention.

If there’s such a thing as the competition for the best job of “stripping down” a coin-op, the NES Punch-Out!! has to be the outright winner, right? Given the limitations of Famicom, especially when this started development, the “vibe” of the coin-op with huge characters and an emphasis on counterattacking was not only retained by actually optimized in a way the coin-ops never were. In terms of graphics, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! probably had the biggest character sprites seen in a game console up to this point, and they don’t feel like a “cheat” like the gigantic bosses of Contra. These aren’t bits in the background being with an invisible hit box that creates the illusion of size. If the sprites were ugly, it wouldn’t matter. But they’re strikingly memorable and create a real sense of threat. One thing that neither coin-op successfully conveys is a sense of being hopelessly outsized and outmatched. In the NES game, the opponents feel HUGE and you feel so very, very small, and on behalf of small stature people everywhere, thank you Nintendo for that. The violence is also vastly improved. Punches feel authentic and savage, thanks in no small part to some of the best damage sprites 8-bit gaming ever saw.

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (Japan, USA) (Rev A)-260108-042310

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (Japan, USA) (Rev A)-260108-044159

From spit flying out to Bald Bull and Soda Popinski’s “slot-machine eyes” to just looks of painful surprise, punches feel impactful and important. Since it’s a boxing-themed game called PUNCH-Out!!, getting the violence right is a pretty important thing. And then there’s the match design, where dodging left and right allows a chain of stun-locked punches and it’s SO SATISFYING. In addition to sussing out patterns, you can preemptively stop an attack with a well-timed punch. Doing so often earns a star and allows an uppercut. Again, the coin-op had some weak-ass vibes to its power shots. In Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the sound design and the graphic of Little Mac building up momentum before throwing the punch AND that excellent revving-up sound effect make it one of the all-time satisfying video game attacks. There’s multiple “all-time” accolades for Punch-Out!! Heck, the game starts with one of the all-time great opening stages in Glass Joe. Nobody thinks of him as a “stage” but he’s the perfect introduction to the gameplay. I’d put him right up there with level World 1 Level 1 in Super Mario Bros.

If I have to make one complaint about Punch-Out!!, and I sorta should since it’s my job, I guess I wish it made more logical sense when the opponents are able to dodge the uppercut. For the last five or six opponents, sometimes it feels like they all whiff. I’m fine with missing if I don’t have them stun-locked, but if you’re going to allow the opponents to dodge the big uppercut, stop giving out stars. It feels like punishing players for good gameplay. (shrug)

So what else could I possibly complain about? Well, I guess I wish there were a lot more fighters. There’s a hidden second quest that requires not only a password but a special way of inputting that password, but all it does is take you to a very slight remix of the World Circuit that includes the King Hippo and Great Tiger fights from the Major Circuit. If this changed up the fights themselves, it’d be awesome. It doesn’t. As far as I can tell, the only difference is losing a fight is a game over with no option for a rematch. I guess I could also complain about the logic of “winning by decision.” It’s based on a points system that makes no sense and is the final element that shatters the illusion that Punch-Out!! is a sports game. You could pummel someone into a coma and never get punched once, but if you don’t reach a scoring benchmark, they’re awarded the victory. Some of the points required are so high that I can’t imagine a person can reach them without winning by TKO (or even KO) before the bell rings at the end of the third round, and none of the title fights (or Mr. Sandman) allow victory by decision. I’d say “I wish they got rid of them entirely” but the first time I beat Mike Tyson (well, Mr. Dream, same diff) it was by decision and made me feel like a world beater.

I don’t have a problem with Mr. Dream. I really don’t. I get it. My complaint is “THIS IS THE BEST THEY COULD COME UP WITH?” He’s SO generic looking.

Okay, let’s talk about the rampaging elephant in the room. No, Nintendo is never going to re-up with Mike Tyson. One thing you have to remember is that the deal that landed them Tyson was lousy for him and would never happen again. At the time they made the deal, Iron Mike hadn’t even won his first World Heavyweight Championship yet. As the story goes, Minoru Arakawa was having a drink after hours at the 1986 Winter CES and on the bar’s TV was a match between Tyson and a guy named David Jaco (it HAD to be that match, because it’s the only one that lines up with the CES story). Tyson was just starting to become nationally known and the boxing fan Arakawa, like everyone else who witnessed Tyson, couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Tyson’s body was atypical for a heavyweight. He could be described as “compact strength” in that his muscular build was packed into less space than you would expect. He also had unimaginable speed for the weight class combined with his absurd punching power. He was a completely new style of heavyweight boxer. I wasn’t around for the meteoric rise of Tyson, but my father and AJ were, and they both shake their heads with disbelief when they talk about what it was like to witness it. “When he burst onto the scene, it really felt like he was changing what a heavyweight boxer would look like. But it’s been forty years and there still hasn’t been another combination of a squat frame, speed, and power. There will NEVER be another Mike Tyson. Heavyweights might do some of the things he did, but none of them do EVERYTHING he did.” Minoru Arakawa must have agreed with my father.

My timing is not what it used to be, but it’s a LOT easier to beat Tyson with today’s emulators than the one I used on my Wii back in the day. I fought Tyson eight times for this feature and won twice. I think that means I get a match with Evander Holyfield next to decide who is the greatest Tyson slayer of our time. I promise I won’t bite.

Predicting that Tyson would eventually claim a version of the world heavyweight championship wasn’t exactly as bold or risky as some people make it out to be. During Tyson’s rise in the mid-80’s, the heavyweight division was relatively weak following the retirement of Muhammad Ali and the biggest champion of the transitional era, Larry Holmes, was not a popular national figure (“most underrated boxer of all time” says my father). The welterweight division was where most of the fandom was at with guys like Sugar Ray Leonard. But Arakawa predicted, as did everyone else who saw him, that Tyson had a clear path to the heavyweight championship and his presence, charisma, and domination would revitalize interest in the entire sport. What’s beyond belief is that Tyson’s people agreed to the deal Nintendo offered. The price? $50,000 for three years exclusivity. Not $50,000 a year. $50K, up front, no royalties. Within a year, you wouldn’t even be able to buy a meeting to pitch to Tyson’s people for that price. It was a horrible contract for Tyson even by the standards of the era, and any “yeah but Nintendo was taking a risk” talk is mostly bullsh*t. If there’s such a thing as inevitable in sports, it was Mike Tyson: World Champion in the winter of 1986, and his handlers should have told him $50K with no royalty was a crap deal.

You have to give them credit for a VERY lifelike Mike Tyson sprite. No need to use your imagination with this one. It looks just like him. It’s worth noting that the Jaco match that Arakawa witnessed was only Tyson’s 16th match. Just like today, there were multiple governing bodies that each promoted a world champion along with two unofficial world champions, the Lineal Champion and the Ring Magazine Champion, both of which are taken very seriously. HBO had organized a unification series for the alphabet belts. It wouldn’t be until a dozen matches after Arakawa’s CES story, on Tyson’s 28th match and now under Nintendo contract, where he would be able to claim a world championship, the WBC version. His 29th match would see him also win the WBA title, and his 31st would let him claim the IBF title to be the “Undisputed” Heavyweight Champion of the World. Except it was totally disputed because Michael Spinks had never been beaten in the ring and held The Ring Magazine and Lineal Championship. It wouldn’t be until his 35th match when he beat Michael Spinks in 91 seconds to become the no-doubt-about-it Undisputed Champion. By the way, if you watch the match, Spinks looks like his life is flashing before his eyes before the match even starts. Mind you, Spinks had never lost a match in his professional career and he looked positively terrified. I’ve watched boxing my entire life, with some of my earliest memories being of sitting on my father’s lap while he explained the sport to me, and I’ve NEVER seen a guy with the accolades of Spinks look like he’s about to call the whole thing off like that. My father is right: Mike Tyson will never happen again. We’ll get a second coming of Michael Jordan before we get a second coming of Mike Tyson.

What I can’t believe is that there’re people who refuse to play Punch-Out!! without Mike Tyson, like he alone made the game worth playing and not the outstanding mechanics, authentic violence, revolutionary graphics, or the over the top roster of characters. I wonder if a lot of these stubborn people even beat Mike Tyson? It’s not the most interesting fight in the game. I think the Mr. Sandman fight really is the highlight. If they insist that it was Tyson’s game, I have news for them: he wasn’t even in the original Japanese release. In fact, there is no “Dream Fight” in that version. The game ends with Super Macho Man. It was one of five versions of Punch-Out!! I played for this feature, and there’s subtle differences in that original “Gold Edition” release.

“Gold Edition”

US releases.

Gameplay differences though? I mean besides having no Dream Fight? Nope, there’s none. It’s the same game. And that speaks the highest volume to how good Punch-Out!! on the NES is. I just played through it FIVE TIMES in a single day and I never got bored. Even though I know how to win every fight, I can still play it and have a good time. It might have aged better than any game released for a home console in the 1980s. This gameplay is age proof. I’m fairly certain stuff like Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. 3 will still be fun in a hundred years, but I can’t actually guarantee it. I can with Punch-Out!! Even non-boxing fans love it, and that makes sense. It’s not a boxing game. It just has a boxing theme. What genre does it belong to? Who knows? Who cares! It’s Punch-Out!! I don’t ever render verdicts based on historical importance, but since Punch-Out!! is cruising to an easy YES!, I want to point out that Punch-Out!! represents an underrated leap forward in game technology thanks to the MMC2 chip that allowed for the bigger sprites. It looks like a carton probably more than any game that isn’t on laser disc up to that point. That’s one of many reasons why it’s timeless, and not because of Mike Tyson. And by the way, I think this aged better than the SNES game. Stay tuned for that.
Verdict: YES!

By the way, Tyson publicly stated his wish to return to Punch-Out!! years ago. If it didn’t happen immediately after that, it ain’t ever happening.

Power Punch II
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released June, 1992
Developed by Beam Software
Published by American Softworks
Sold Separately on Steam
Available on Evercade Piko Interactive Collection Vol 1.

Beam Software doesn’t have a reputation for quality games. But, let it be said they at least gave us an excellent Itchy & Scratchy Game Boy title (which I reviewed in Simpsons Games: The Definitive Review Volume Three). It’s like all the unplayable crap they made before that built up to that one game. And it really is fantastic. Go play it. Don’t play this.

Please note that nothing I say in this review is directed at Piko. I’m fine with re-releasing old games. It’s God’s work, even if $8.99 is a ridiculous price tag for THIS. I’m also not blaming the programmers for it, either. They didn’t do the marketing for this. They made a sh*t game, but that happens all the time.

I’ve mellowed out a lot over the years, but every once in a while I’ll play a game that makes my blood boil. What can I say? I hate cynical games, and Power Punch II is maybe the most cynical NES game. If Where’s Waldo or Action 52 doesn’t have that title, it’s Power Punch II, which is clearly trying to imply a direct connection to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! In fact, the original version of the game was even going to have Mike Tyson in it before all his legal problems started and he was removed from the game. There is ZERO question that the intent of all parties was to deliberately trick consumers into believing this was a sequel to one of the best selling and most beloved video games of the 1980s and that a similar quality should be expected. That really pisses me off. Unlike stuff like Where’s Waldo, I actually think in the pre-internet days that average consumers and not just unknowing parents could be fooled by this one. The Tyson name combined with the screenshots of a game that looks kinda like Punch-Out!! probably would have worked. Where they lost any plausible deniability of their intent to deceive consumers came when they had to remove Tyson, they changed the name from “Mike Tyson’s Intergalactic Power Punch” to the much closer to Punch-Out!! sounding name “Power Punch II.” You’ll note there is no Power Punch #1, but does Mom and Dad know that the original game is called “Punch-Out!!” and not “Power Punch?” What a disgusting thing to do.

Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch (USA) (Beta) [b]-260109-001242

Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch (USA) (Beta) [b]-260109-001258

If the game behind all this was any good, maybe it wouldn’t be so infuriating of a business practice. But coming from Beam Software, Power Punch II is of course a horrible game. This might look like a knock-off of Punch-Out!! in screenshots, but the gameplay never comes even a little close. There is no fine-tuning effort at all in this game, and no sense of OOMPH to the punches. There seems to be a very vague attempt to recreate the counterattack system, only with looser movement parameters. The first opponent you can just throw hands with, with no sense of finesse and no dodging/countering to speak of. The second opponent turns Power Punch II from just bad to outright boring and bad. The f*cking thing keeps backing away from you and the only way to actually win is to wiggle back and forth and hit it one jab at a time since it counterattacks every punch you throw when it’s up close. And it was all downhill from here.

Anyone who praises the character models……. seriously? You think THAT looks good? It looks like Mac & Me is going through a midlife crisis.

It’s rare I do one of these reviews and decide to quit before I finish the game, but I had no interest in seeing Power Punch II through to the end. Absolutely no effort was made towards creating a quality game. It’s the gaming equivalent of a “mockbuster” made by The Asylum, only video games in the 1990s were expensive and it’s not inconceivable a kid who was a big Punch-Out!! fan got stuck with this for their allowance money or as a present over a better game because they thought they were getting the actual sequel to Punch-Out!! I have no problem with studios making terrible games. It happens every day. I have a big problem when you try to tie that game to a legacy you didn’t build and don’t deserve, and Power Punch II goes out of its way to do that, literally. They did it with the celebrity endorsement that fell through. They did it by attaching a sequel number to the end of the name. They did everything possible to make people believe this was the next game in the Punch-Out!! franchise except make a quality game. Disgusting, guys. Shame on you!
Verdict: NO!

Super Punch-Out!!
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Released October 24, 1994
Directed by Makoto Wada and Yasuyuki Oyagi
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

I didn’t attempt the “pause” trick, and most certainly not because I couldn’t get it to work. Cough.

Reviewing games that I spent a lot of time with in my formative years is always tough, but Super Punch-Out!! is REALLY tough because I got so hooked on it once upon a time that my experience playing it in 2026 bears no resemblance at all to the first time I played it. The fighters that once seemed so intimidating and insurmountable landed a combined total of two punches on me over sixteen fights. And hell, it’s actually possible to beat all sixteen fighters in under fourteen seconds each. Some of them can be beaten in under six seconds, and most can be in under ten seconds. It’s actually not even that hard to learn how to come close. It’s simple pattern recognition with a touch of RNG luck (and a trick using the pause button). Super Punch-Out!! is the easiest game in the franchise to figure out the timing for. By far, actually.

Once upon a time, I could NOT beat this guy. He was by far the fighter that took me the longest to beat. Today I beat him in 21 seconds and change. By the way, I think Super Punch-Out!! ending on two identical, generic muscle guys is a weak ass finale. Nick Bruiser is one of the all-time letdowns of a final boss, and really I think both Bruiser Bros. are too generic. I think a better ending would have been shifting them to the 2nd and 3rd fights of the special circuit and making the game end on Hoy Quarlow. What an amazing, unexpected twist it would have been to reach the final fight and have it be a 78 year old man with a walking stick and a record of like 999 – 0 or something along those lines. It would have made him one of the all-time great finales in gaming. He’s the toughest fighter in the game. He should be treated as such.

I’ve said something to this effect before, but besides other games in the franchise, the video game Super Punch-Out!! shares the most DNA with is actually Shadow of the Colossus. Both games are, more or less, boss rushes based around taking down much bigger, stronger, more capable opponents. Even the opponent count is exactly the same, and both games are damned by losing a significant chunk of the replay value once you know how to win, leaving only time trials as the main reason to come back. Well, except Shadow of the Colossus offers a gigantic world to explore for sightseeing. For Super Punch-Out!!, once Time Trials run out of steam, you have to find your own fun.

Okay, let’s do that. For this review, after beating Super Punch-Out!! with a 16-0 record and needing barely 30 seconds to beat most opponents (I did need 55 to beat Rick Bruiser), I replayed it all the way through, only I didn’t use a single power punch and I didn’t use any interrupting counterpunch. I only dodge-countered and threw random punches. If I accidentally did an interrupt, I rewound it and allowed the punch to land as punishment.

By the way, at sixteen fighters, this is the biggest game in the franchise, except it’s really not. The Wii game’s thirteen rematches aren’t just remixes, but whole new fights. Even the Glass Joe rematch is legitimately difficult, at least the first time. It’s something the older games like this could have REALLY used, and then after them, there’s one last big surprise that made the Wii game probably the best in the series. If only they would re-release it.

As I noted at the end of the NES game, I think it aged better than the SNES game. Even when I didn’t throw uppercuts or hooks, the speed of the enemy punches is much slower and the challenge just isn’t there. I’ll still struggle with some attacks in the NES Punch-Out!!, from Soda and Sandman’s uppercuts to Super Macho Man’s spinning punch. Similar attacks in Super Punch-Out!! are much, much easier to dodge, and there’s more defense options. Ducking is a cinch and moving your defensive stance up and down is intuitive. Because of the slower speed, I never had stress timing dodges too much. The first time you play Super Punch-Out!!, you’ll certainly struggle with some of the fights. A few decades ago, I got my clock cleaned even in early fights and needed multiple attempts to beat every one of the back eight fighters. If I didn’t lose over twenty times to guys Mad Clown, Narcis Prince, and Rick Bruiser, I’d be shocked.

After losing to Mad Clown about a billion times (give or take), I kind of cheated. When he’d throw the balls, I’d pause the game to see where the gap was. Tell me I’m not the only one who did that!

Really, once you know each guy’s attack patterns, there’s not a whole left for Super Punch-Out!! to offer except the time attack. Without throwing a single power punch, I was still able to beat most fighters (but not all) without getting punched once. Did I still have fun? Sure, but not as much as I thought I was going to have. Not even close, and I think what fun I did have is more of a credit to the formula itself. The Punch-Out!! formula is cathartic, you can’t completely zone-out while playing it, and being a tiny person defeating gigantic bullies is boilerplate wish fulfillment. The Punch-Out!! formula itself is the bulletproof thing, at least once it transitioned to a console franchise. The content of a Punch-Out!! game is practically incidental. It’s why I can tolerate generic characters like the Bruiser Bros. or Gabby Jay, but for the record, I think Super Punch-Out!! probably has the weakest roster of the console trilogy. I think EVERYONE would have preferred Glass Joe to Gabby Jay, I think Mad Clown should have been dumped in favor of King Hippo, and as noted in the caption above, I think the Bruiser Bros. are lame as f*ck and Hoy Quarlow should have been the final boss.

To Super Punch-Out!!’s credit, even the weaker character designs usually include one memorable aspect. Heike Kagero is near the bottom of the barrel in terms of character design, but that hair whip move is unforgettable. Still, I can’t help but wonder if this fight was meant to be Great Tiger at some point with the “Mirage Dance.”

Don’t get me wrong. Super Punch-Out!! does a lot right. I marveled over how convincing the palette swaps were in the NES game, but somehow I never noticed that the SNES game does the same thing for all but two characters as well. I mean, of course I realized Bear Hugger and Mad Clown used the same body, and the Bruiser Bros. needed no explanation, but I swear to God it wasn’t until I played today that I realized everyone else but Narcis Prince and Hoy Quarlow share a body with someone else. The pairings are Gabby Jay & Bob Charlie, Piston Hurricane & Aran Ryan, Bald Bull & Mr. Sandman (and they did in the original coin-op as well, duh), Dragon Chan & Heike Kagero, and Masked Muscle & Super Macho Man. I’ve played this for years and I never realized that and now I feel stupid. But, to my credit, none of the fights feel like palette swaps. The Dragon Chan and Heike Kagero fights couldn’t be more different. This has to be right up there with the ninjas in Mortal Kombat in the palette swap hall of fame.

Playing this now, I literally can’t believe I ever struggled with some of these fights. Like Narcis Prince? Even without throwing uppercuts, once I knew how to beat him, he was so easy. I didn’t use an uppercut or an interrupt and still beat him in under a minute with just normal punches. Still, I love his “OWWHOW!” cry when you knock him down. It’s so satisfying to hear.

If not for the fact that I can specifically remember how much I enjoyed Super Punch-Out!! the first time I played it, this would be one of the weakest YES! verdicts I’ve ever given. Again, I had fun but I’m pretty sure this will be the last time I ever play Super Punch-Out!! The magic is, simply put, gone. And I mean gone gone. In order to jog my memory on what my original experience was like, I had to avoid using the fun punches. So Super Punch-Out!! doesn’t hold up like the NES or Wii games. I don’t necessarily think it’s impossible to get bored with this. I played the NES game five times for this feature. I was ready to be done with Super Punch-Out!! halfway through my second run today. It’s too easy. It’s too slow. It’s too clockable. I just played all sixteen fights and didn’t throw a single power punch. My record? 16 – 0 again. Was it worth doing? Not really, actually.

OOF, that was close. This was the only exciting thing that happened playing Super Punch-Out!! today. You know, part of me wonders if this would have held up better if it used the NES’ star system. The meter makes building up an uppercut too easy, and you get unlimited uppercuts until you get hit. Maybe that’s too much of an advantage to the player. Also, I think there’s too many opportunities for interrupts. Even when I was deliberately trying to avoid doing it, I interrupted eleven total punches over the course of sixteen fights just by trying to throw random punches. Most of those came in the World and Special Circuits where the punches come in faster, meaning there’s more opportunities to interrupt-stun.

I did get punched more than twice, and in fact, I got knocked down three times. Bald Bull, Super Macho Man, and Rick Bruiser each got me once with a one-shot knockdown, but otherwise, not one single fight even reached the second minute EXCEPT Nick Bruiser, who I beat with about thirteen seconds left before running out of time. In over fourteen years of writing game reviews, this was without a doubt one of the hardest I’ve ever had to do because I have to go off memories from over a decade-and-a-half ago and remember that, yes, I had the time of my life playing Super Punch-Out!! once. Now, if you’ve somehow never played it, ignore this review, get off your butt, and play it. Super Punch-Out!! is, simply put, fantastic, at least when you play it the first time. Unlike other Punch-Out!!s, there ain’t going to be a whole lot left once you know the game, and it’s not that hard to memorize. By the way, that’s fine. Not every game has to hold up to the scrutiny of endless replayability, and frankly, not every game NEEDS to be replayed at all once you finish it. Give me one unbelievable day with a game over a lifetime with a middling game. Super Punch-Out!! IS one of the all-time greats and it aged well, and once you know what to do, it’s not exciting anymore.
Verdict: YES!

Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!!
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
Released April 20, 2010 (Updated March 25, 2016)
Developed by Master Phred
Link to Patch at RomHacking.Net
I use THIS TOOL to apply patches.

Yep, that’s Rick Bruiser! You fight him twice before fighting Nick Bruiser. The first Rick fight is one of the easier ones in the game. The second one? Not so much.

You knew I HAD to do a ROM hack in this feature. Actually, given the popularity of Punch-Out!!, I was genuinely, no bullsh*t stunned that there aren’t a lot more. I mean, people have worked actual magic on Super Mario Bros. 3 to turn it into virtually whole new games, but there’s been tons of Mario games over the years. Since Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, there’s been only two sequels. Apparently, the lack of ROM hacks isn’t due to a lack of interest. I’m not versed in this stuff but from what I’ve gathered, Super Mario Bros. 3 specifically lends itself to this form of game development as a ROM hacking building block in a way Punch-Out!! doesn’t. Re-Spritings Punch-Out!! is relatively easy, but using it as a template for new-feeling gameplay isn’t. So the fact that Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!! even exists is kind of astonishing. Don’t think of it as a NEW version of Punch-Out!! but rather a remixed version that changes the speed and tinkers with some of the punches. But boy, does it tinker with them in a way that works.

I’m guessing there’s a lot of inside baseball in this game. I don’t know the story on the developer or the original characters in this. I sincerely thought the manager was supposed to be Dante from Clerks and Ken Barryhil was supposed to be the Angry Video Game Nerd. YOU SEE IT TOO, DON’T YOU?

First off, you feel the “turbo” part of WAIT give me a second…………

Okay, NOW it looks like the Angry Video Game Nerd. Where was I?

You feel the “turbo” part of “Cool Punch Out 2.” The speed is dialed up, which I was worried would make the game feel unresponsive. It doesn’t at all and works WONDERFULLY. That uptick in the speed of gameplay by itself would have probably made this worth a look as a curio, but then Master Phred messed around with the punches in a way that works. Take a remix of Glass Joe/Don Flamenco based around Disco Kid from the Wii sequel. Disco throws off-speed punches that pack a lot of power behind them, but the timing is unlike anything in the NES Punch-Out!! The Bruiser Bros. from the SNES game are here and their punches are especially hard to dodge, some of which barely have any warning at all. I’d be impressed if someone could plow through all fifteen fights on their first try based just on their Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! experience and knowledge. I don’t think it’s even possible. This plays on your expectations, and it does a pretty good job of doing so.

The remixed version of Super Macho Man, who now looks like something out of Futurama, still throws the spinning punch. But the pattern leading to that is new, and the timing is different.

Mind you, nobody is throwing a NEW punch. Everything in Cool Punch Out 2 is done using the already existing assets within the game. The designer couldn’t make the new version of Glass Joe throw Piston Honda’s rapid-fire punches. He couldn’t make Soda Popinski do Bald Bull’s bull charge. He also couldn’t seem to change the rules of the game, which means the Bald Bull fight where you have to score an uppercut STILL needs to be won by an uppercut even though it’s now Rick Bruiser, and this game’s King Hippo stand-in can’t get up when he’s knocked down, nor could he have a different fighting style or even a weakness. For that reason, it’s inevitable that some of the fighters feel like very little has changed.

King Hippo is replaced by Doc Louis. The fight was changed as much as I imagine the developer could humanly do. The “Hippo Dance” that King Hippo rarely does is now done frequently, but you still punch him in the mouth and then the stomach. It’s worth noting the amount of damage done is reduced significantly, which prolongs the fight. I needed two rounds to win. Also, like every fight, the timing is different enough to feel fresh.

So it’s Punch-Out!! with where the punches are tweaked ever so slightly. But, like From Below (a Tetris game staged during a giant squid attack) already proved, small changes can yield BIG gameplay results. It’s a lot of fun, but certainly not perfect. I don’t think the game scales very well. I kept waiting for something shocking to happen in the first Rick Bruiser fight, but it was so easy it could have been a minor circuit fight. Stars are more plentiful in this game. Too plentiful, probably. Not only are there more opportunities for them, but you can now bank seven stars instead of three AND you start every fight with two. To counter this, a lot of the fights are now based around limited stamina. I’ve never turned pink so many times playing Punch-Out!! as I did in this game.

The Tyson fight has been remixed, with the first round having a particularly difficult pattern. Instead of trying to one-shot you in the first minute-and-a-half like in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the new final boss actually has a brutal jab combination for the first minute-and-thirty AND THEN he throws the big KO shots. Okay, so the design was pretty disappointing, but the fight feels very fresh. I was really impressed with this whole effort.

If you set your expectations correctly, I think any Punch-Out!! fan will enjoy what Master Phred has accomplished here. I remember being excited when I found the code for “Another World Circuit” in Punch-Out!! and then being disappointed that all the fights were identical to the ones I’d already done, with only two Major Circuit fighters added to the existing World Circuit lineup. Frankly, when I found out about that code, I was hoping for something like this. So, while I was disappointed by the drought in Punch-Out!! ROM Hacks out there, the one that’s a full remix IS absolutely worth a look. It’s not going to change your life or anything like that, but it’s the “second quest” that fans of the original game have probably wanted for a long time. It turns out, even with all the limitations of ROM hacking that comes with Punch-Out!!, you can get a lot of mileage out of something as simple as playing on the expectations of the timing of a punch.
Verdict: YES!

“Blarrh, I’m a vampire!” You see it too, right?

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews Tagged with Arcade Arm Wrestling Game, Arm Wrestling Arcade, Arm Wrestling Nintendo, Arm Wrestling Nintendo Review, Mike Tyson NES, Mike Tyson Punch Out, Mike Tyson's Punch Out Review, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, Nintendo, Nintendo Arcade Review, Nintendo Arm Wrestling Arcade Review, Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 Review, PlayChoice 10 Punch Out, Power Punch II Review, Punch Out Arcade Review, Punch Out Coin-Op, Punch Out Gold Edition, Punch Out NES Review, Punch-Out!!, Punch-Out!! arcade, Super Punch Out, Super Punch Out Arcade Review

Luigi’s Mansion (Nintendo GameCube on Switch 2 Review)

December 27, 2025 by Indie Gamer Chick 3 Comments

Luigi’s Mansion
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Released September 14, 2001 (JP) November 18, 2001 (US)
Directed by Hideki Konno
Published by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2

I ain’t going to win any friends with this review.

My first day one Nintendo console was the GameCube. I was SO excited, even though 2001 had already broken my heart twice with new game machines (and the early demise of Dreamcast). The Game Boy Advance’s screen was like playing video games with three pairs of sunglasses on and the Xbox’s controller was NOT made for the hands of an already-small-for-her-age 12 year old girl. But that’s okay because that GameCube controller felt custom built for me and there’s no way Nintendo would ever bungle a launch lineup. All I can say is THANK GOD for Super Monkey Ball and Star Wars: Rogue Leader. And then Super Smash Bros. Melee came out a few weeks after launch and THAT dominated my next couple months of playtime and was everything I wanted from a new game on a new machine and more. So my GameCube worked out just fine in the end, and so did the Xbox and GBA (just not THAT GBA). Eventually, I did finish all those 2001 day one launch games. All except one. I never got around to finishing Luigi’s Mansion until I did this review. I’m not even sure I beat the second boss.

This is either the first boss fight or how fans of Luigi’s Mansion will react to this review.

I remember Electronic Gaming Monthly had an Xbox versus GameCube issue and someone actually gave Luigi’s Mansion a 5.5, which was jaw-dropping for a Nintendo-published game. Literally shocking. But it only took me about an hour of playing Luigi’s Mansion to get where they were coming from and, actually, I thought a 5.5 was generous. As a 12 year old, I thought Luigi’s Mansion was a boring all around experience, and now as a 36 year old, I feel the same way. It feels like a ten second long proof of concept hardware trailer that was stretched into a full length game. Because that’s exactly what this is. They took the 10 seconds of Luigi in a haunted mansion footage from Spaceworld 2000’s GameCube tech demo (the same one that got people hyped for Zelda before the cel-shading) and turned it into a full-length game. It’s kind of stunning that Nintendo didn’t throw every resource they had at making sure a Mario game was ready for launch. Apparently Hiroshi Yamauchi’s last request before stepping down as president of Nintendo was “make a Mario game for our new game machine!” Presumably he also asked “why don’t you have one already? Are you f*cking stupid? Don’t you remember how Virtual Boy did with no (real) Mario game to send it off?”

I thought “Game Boy Horror” was trying to play a launch day Game Boy Advance.

But hey, I liked the idea of Luigi in a haunted house as a kid. I was as hyped for that Spaceworld footage as anyone else. I wasn’t expecting a Mario game, and good thing for that because there’s no running or jumping in Luigi’s Mansion and the primary method of combat is basically tug-of-war. So much tug-a-war. First, you have to stun-lock the ghost by pointing a flashlight at it, and when its heart dings, you have to suck it up with a vacuum by holding the opposite direction the ghost pulls. And, well, that’s basically the whole game. Just do that over and over and over and over and over again. If you don’t like the combat, you’re going to be bored with Luigi’s Mansion. If you like it, you won’t be. It’s really that simple. I thought it was boring as a kid and I still think it’s boring now.

God, the Nintendo fans are going to have aneurysms with this opinion, but, yeah, I think the character designers are really forgettable and generic. I just didn’t like anything about this at all. And before you burn down my house, remember that I’m not a Nintendo hater. Read some of my other Nintendo reviews. Try Mario Wonder, the Switch remake of Mario RPG, Yoshi’s Island (from the same director as this), and hell, just go to my retro review index. I even gave the lazy as all f*ck Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition a YES! because I had more fun with it than not. So I think Luigi’s Mansion has no redeeming qualities. So what? It’s okay to not like one Nintendo game, you know?

There’s just not enough twists on the ghost catching formula. The idea is supposed to be that the “portrait ghosts” take extra steps to expose their weak spot. Like the guy in the above chair? He’s not visible if you face him. You have to turn around and wait for him to yawn, and when he does, THEN you can stun lock him and suck him up the same way you do basic enemies. All the portrait ghosts have 100hp and could take multiple stun-locks and suckages to capture. And again, the actual combat is exactly the same as it is for the basic enemies. It just gets so old, so quickly, and that’s before you factor in things like poison mushrooms. They spawn spontaneously during boss fights (and are also hidden in some fixtures in the rooms) and shrink you in size. I don’t care so much about the health ping. It’s easy enough to get health back. But you can’t operate your vacuum while shrank. It’s not hard to avoid damage once shrank, but it takes too long to grow back. It’s one of many, many aspects of Luigi’s Mansion that feels like it only exists to pad out the run time.

Safe bet that the team behind this were gigantic fans of the Haunted Mansion rides at Disney theme parks. Many of the gags are straight from the ride, including this candle bit. There’s also the whole mansion setting and portrait theme, a fortune teller with a crystal ball, dancing ghosts, a graveyard, a music room, suits of armor, and ghosts seen through shadows. Really, all that’s missing are the busts and the stretching room. This isn’t a knock on Nintendo, BTW. So, in a way this is kinda the third game I’ve reviewed based on that ride, including Adventures in the Magic Kingdom for the NES and the Super Famicom exclusive Mickey no Tokyo Disneyland Daibouken. So does this mean in another twenty years we can look forward to Waluigi’s Pirate Adventure? Because that would slap. And if you’re a Nintendo fan who has never rode the Haunted Mansion and are rolling your eyes at me right now, Disney+ actually has the full Haunted Mansion ride point of view. Watch it and tell me I’m wrong. Yes, the Tokyo version of the ride is basically identical. Hell, even the music is kind of similar to Luigi’s Mansion at times.

Every ghost portrait ghost is caught by the vacuum and the sucking mechanic. No exceptions, not even the bosses, whether it makes sense or not. At one point, you meet a fortune teller and the object is to retrieve five of Mario’s personal items and bring them to her. When this is done, she asks you to use your suck her up. “All right! At least with this one I won’t have to watch the number 100 tick off yet again.” Wrong. She still resists the vacuum and still has 100hp. Why? She literally instructs you to capture her. She’s going willingly. Shouldn’t the gag be that she has 1 hit point, or none? It makes no sense.

Maybe this is how ghosts do foreplay.

And that’s what my general problem with Luigi’s Mansion is. Anything potentially clever is kind of ruined by reverting back to the same, tired mechanic that’s used on all enemies great and small. Plus, on the Switch 2, I’m not entirely sure it worked as it’s supposed to. I was constantly getting the dings for stun-locking ghosts and then immediately cuing up the vacuum, only the ghosts vanished in the transition to the vacuum. Maybe that happened when I was 12 too and I forgot, but once I switched off a GameCube controller (a $70 accessory, mind you) and moved to the Joycons, it didn’t happen as much. Oh, it still happened. It happened a lot. This isn’t the “pulling back to suck them in” part but just initiating the combat itself. For whatever reason, the flashlight felt less effective than I remember it being.

I do have one nice thing to say: for such a darkly-lit game, it’s not as flashy as you would think.

And what I said about the flashlight above really only applied to the generic basic enemies. I don’t remember it ever being a problem for any of the “portrait ghosts” that are the main objective of the game. In general, I assume the combat is supposed to feel very frantic and wacky but I thought it was underwhelming and repetitive to the point of exhaustion. Eventually the basic enemies can be dealt with by using the different elements you can suck up into the vacuum which are water, fire, and ice. Some enemies require one of those three things, when it was optional, I preferred using the elements because it worked every time, unlike the vacuum. The problem with that is there’s no PUNCH to using those elements. No feeling of doing damage. You just watch a number count down and then the ghost dies when it reaches zero. They don’t even really react to it. They just kind of stop and fade out with no satisfying death animation.

I’ve jokingly called this “Luigi’s Tech Demo” for years but that’s really what it is. It’s meant to show off how cool the GameCube is. And this IS a massive upgrade over the jaggy Nintendo 64. I actually was surprised by how low resolution this looked. I hadn’t played a GameCube game in a long time. This certainly didn’t hold up as much as Wind Waker did. I mean, it’s not a deal breaker or anything. It looks fine.

And then there’s the Boos. One of the main objectives of the game is to unleash a cluster of fifty boos into the mansion, then find them and suck them up. They don’t put up fights as much as the other ghosts (some of the Boos don’t attack at all), but they can have as much as 300hp. That sounds like busy work by itself, and that’s before you get to what they CAN do: run away, leaving the room entirely. I was using save states to reload them, but eventually I gave up on that and started chasing them into hallways and other rooms. A ghost that has 300hp might require you to follow it back and forth into a room over a dozen times. It just creates more busy work, and again, it’s the same thing you’re already doing with basic enemies and portrait ghosts.

I think the vacuum could have been satisfying if they significantly dialed back the HP on the ghosts. If there was a quick, snappy pace to it, hell, for all I know this could have been one of the best games ever made. But the way they did it just makes it feel like a grindy slog, especially since the ghosts just reset if you don’t catch them in a single pass. The only positive thing I can say is “at least they don’t require you to repeat every single activation step.” Faint praise.

If the mansion offered anything but the combat, like a genuine sense of exploration or getting lost or hidden things, I’d have liked it more. But it doesn’t. The “puzzles” in Luigi’s Mansion are really rudimentary stuff, and there’s really no room puzzles at all in the “you’re locked, how do you get out?” sense. Everything is based around the ghosts. But haunted mansions are almost never JUST about the ghosts. There’s two “hidden” rooms. One of them you fall into from the roof and the other you enter by scanning a mouse hole with the Game Boy Horror, which is like the game’s radar.

Besides the “speedy ghosts” I did get everything in the game, including all 50 Boos. Initially I finished the game with 49 out of 50. There was a hidden room I missed and my OCD got to me while writing this review. Worth the effort? Not really, but at least I’ll have this to figure out how much the sequels improved the game. Which I assume they must have because it can’t get much more boring than this.

But activating the ghost battles isn’t exactly something that requires you to have a seat on your thinking couch. Move a curtain with the vacuum. Move an airplane on the ceiling with a vacuum. Spray a sleeping ghost with water. Spray a bathing ghost with ice. Spray a frozen ghost with fire. Even late in the game, there’s a ghost that you just have to wait for it to basically say “boo.” Activate all the musical instruments or clocks in a room by pressing the A button next to them. The engine is just too limited to do anything more complicated or clever. If you can’t manipulate it with the vacuum or with a single press of the A button, the game can’t handle it. That’s probably just as well. The most complicated enemies require you to clog the vacuum with a ball that you then can launch back at them, it’s pretty haphazard. The controls in general are. Even then, I wish each ghost had a unique capture method instead of vacuum.

Like, these guys WOULD be fun battles since they fight back and feel boss-like (but they ain’t bosses). Except the method of capture is the same for them as it is everyone else. It gets old.

I guess I pictured in my mind a Clue-like mansion (or maybe the Winchester House, which I totally recommend visiting at least once) with lots of hidden rooms, secret passages, booby traps, and puzzles. Instead, it’s the facade of a haunted house, with all the expecting trappings but barely any of the interactivity I would hope for. A lot of the rooms look interesting and have lots of furniture and fixtures, but you don’t really do anything with them but shake them (sometimes it looks like he’s dry-humping them. At least I hope it’s dry). If they have money or health refills in them, it flies out inelegantly. Maybe a drawer or door opens or a chandelier sways, but that’s basically the extent of what you can do with the setting. At one point, I had to walk on a treadmill to get a key and the moment stood out so much I couldn’t believe it because so much of it just sits there doing nothing.

Another weird thing, at least for me, is how the Boos are the central focus of the game, yet they don’t look like the portrait ghosts at all. The portrait ghosts are the only eventful parts of the game, so when you think about it, shouldn’t the portrait ghosts be Boos playing dress-up instead of being humanoid ghosts? Especially since the last boss is also just an ordinary looking Boo with a crown on his head. Maybe his expression is a little more sinister, but he’s just a Boo, right?

So, I thought Luigi’s Mansion was a mostly empty game with boring combat and a plodding pace. I literally didn’t like anything about it. Even the bosses were snoozies. The first one, a giant baby, was probably the most memorable. The second one I honestly thought looked just like the basic enemies, and the third one IS just a giant Boo that you have to lure into the spikes of unicorn statues. Then the last boss is also a Boo but he’s the last boss because he has a crown on his head. Well Boos are like 94% head anyway and it’s not like he’s going to wear the crown on one of his flippers, but at least he also operates a robotic Bowser so that the game can feel climatic.

That’s the second boss. Brought to you by AT&T because they phoned that sh*t in.

I was wrong though about Luigi’s Mansion being cynical. Hey, I can admit when I’m wrong. No, I think the problem is the game was rushed out because they didn’t have a Mario game or anything remotely Mario-like for the GameCube launch. Luigi’s Mansion is a very simple game. Simple combat. Simple puzzles. Nothing too complex. Nothing ambitious at all, really. Maybe the least ambitious Nintendo launch game ever made (well, besides Mario’s Tennis on Virtual Boy). One of the biggest general complaints about Luigi’s Mansion is that it’s too short. That’s kind of bonkers because it’s one of the most artificially padded games from Nintendo I’ve played. If not for the poison mushrooms or tedious life bars, this might have only taken a couple hours to finish.

Honest to God, this guy felt more boss-like than two out of the four big bosses. He also had one of the more involved “puzzles.” You had to suck up the foot he was eating, then capture the waiters who would bring him more food, and THEN dodge his attacks when he had a tantrum, and THEN he was ready to be captured. Hell, I thought he WAS that floor’s boss. It felt like an event.

I don’t happen to think the layout of the mansion was optimized in the way, say, a Zelda dungeon is. But even if I ignore that, the game does so many things that grind the tempo to a halt. After you beat the giant Boo boss, it takes you back to the lab to turn the portrait ghosts into paintings. The next thing that happens? You have to manually walk back to the spot where you just fought the giant Boo on the third floor, at which point lightning strikes the mansion and knocks the power out. This is done as an excuse to restore basic enemies to the floors you’ve already cleared (basic enemies stop appearing in any room with the power restored), at least temporarily. You can go to the basement and restore the power. Why couldn’t the lightning strike have been a cut scene after you beat the Boo? Or why couldn’t the circuit breaker to the house be somewhere else? I guess the reason I found Luigi’s Mansion to be so boring is because nothing about it feels optimized. If you enjoyed it, hey, it’s okay. I like plenty of things that people find to be boring. I watch competitive ballroom dancing and everything.
Verdict: NO!

They went to all the effort of programming these upside-down gravity swap panels that you can step on and then they totally underutilized them. I think like two rooms in the entire game use this. To me, this is the prime exhibit in “they had a lot more plans that had to stay on the drawing board.” And really, I think this is the only time that you use this to reach something. You have to drop down on a table to reach a chest. Wait, isn’t Luigi the better jumper of the two? You mean to tell me he can’t reach up and open a chest on a table? Yeah yeah, I know, because then it wouldn’t be a game. But this upside down mechanic could have made for some interesting maze-like design. There’s none of that type of thing in Luigi’s Mansion. Rooms are just boxes that you wander around in. There’s no sense of a labyrinth of mystery. It’s just a shell. I expect more from Nintendo by 2001. This came out after Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, etc. And even 2D games had evolved past this by this point. (shrug)

Filed under Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with GameCube reviews, Luigi, Luigi's Mansion, Luigi's Mansion 1, Luigi's Mansion 1 review, Luigi's Mansion review, Luigi's Mansion Switch Online, Nintendo, nintendo-switch, Switch Online Expansion Pack Reviews

Donkey Kong Bananza (Nintendo Switch 2 Review)

September 25, 2025 by Indie Gamer Chick 1 Comment

Donkey Kong Bananza
Platform: Nintendo Switch 2
Released July 17, 2025
Directed by Wataru Tanaka and Kazuya Takahashi
Developed by Nintendo
$69.99 (normally $79.99) chopped down a mountain with the edge of my hand in the making of this review.

This is more like a whiny blog post than a normal review but I just put about two weeks into Donkey Kong Bananza and I’m not happy with the last third or so of the game. I spent two-thirds of Donkey Kong Bananza thinking it would go down as one of my favorite games ever, and it’s certainly not. Given how many total hours of euphoria Bananza gave me, I have to give it a YES! For a platformer, I don’t think a horrible final five or so hours should be capable of flipping the verdict of an amazing twenty-to-thirty hours of a rough but highly-entertaining experience. With that said, I’m really unhappy with the last several levels of Bananza, and there’s no way to explain it without spoiling it, so be warned.

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW!
I’m awarding Bananza a YES! verdict.
That’s because there’s far more good than bad in this game.
But I also HATED the last third of Bananza, and I explain why.
And there will be spoilers!

I can’t remember being so frustrated with a game I loved before. Not even Wind Waker.

The above screenshot was a really bad sign of how things would end for Donkey Kong Bananza. In one of the worst boss designs I can remember, you have to manually travel between several past worlds just to smack main baddie “Void Kong” a few times in each world. And when I say “manually” I mean you have to chase Void Kong, smacking him and then chase him more because he runs away and his primary attack is to put crap between you and him. After you chase him and smack him enough times, a cut scene happens and he warps to a prior stage. You then have to go to the warp gong, hit it, then go to the next level the Void Kong is in. Repeat doing this until it tells you that you don’t have to anymore.

Imagine this in ANY OTHER game. Imagine you’re fighting the 5th boss in Legend of Zelda, only after getting a couple smacks on him, he teleports to the middle of the 4th dungeon, where you have to make your way to him and smack him a couple times, then he teleports to the 3rd dungeon, THEN BACK to the 5th dungeon. I don’t give a flying f*ck if you can just walk out of the dungeon and blow the warp whistle to cut down on the travel. It’s still a horrible, HORRIBLE idea, and yet it’s here and a major part of this game. I literally cannot believe anyone gave Bananza a perfect score unless you somehow teleported this game to 2001 and showed it to someone who was disappointed with GameCube’s launch lineup.

It’s a complete slog and a bore that grinds the game to a screeching halt. You have to chase him through the Junction Layer (“Layers” are levels), then chase him through the Hilltop Layer, then chase him through the Lagoon Layer, and then BACK to the Junction Layer. It’s not fun AT ALL. It’s not exciting AT ALL. It’s not satisfying to make progress AT ALL. I don’t remember a single boss fight that was transformed into unbearable busywork quite like this. It’s such an overindulgent idea that it should have been rejected out of hand when it was pitched. Yet, here it is, in the final game. Up to this point, I was head over heels for Donkey Kong Bananza. It’s the sequel to Super Mario Odyssey I’ve been waiting almost eight years for, and that’s not hyperbole. The game did recover after this sequence, but it would eventually crater for good, a solid five or so hours before the actual ending.

This should have been the best level in the game, but some REALLY broken gameplay mechanics put the screws to that. You know, this burger reminds me of something but at this time I can’t recall what.

Mario Odyssey leapfrogged the first WarioWare to become my all-time favorite video game. Okay, the fact that Odyssey and WarioWare are my two favorite games probably speaks volumes about my attention span but I don’t care. I couldn’t put Odyssey down and, as long as it didn’t involve a jump rope, I never got bored with it. I even beat it a second time last year. I found every Moon, in every stage, and all the post game stuff, TWICE. I would have totally bought Odyssey DLC if it had been offered. I was good to go for weeks or even months after I finished it, both times. And there are no words to describe how overjoyed I was that Bananza’s hunt for bananas and fossils is exactly like the moons and purple coins in Odyssey. Like, 90% like it. The fossils are based around the Terraria-like digging, but the SEARCH for them is identical. It’s a direct Super Mario Odyssey sequel in everything but the name. EVEN WITH THE NEW GAMEPLAY MECHANICS, it’s Super Mario Odyssey 2, or like amazing DLC for Odyssey that grants you a new character in Donkey Kong. The logic of the level design is the same. The amount of moons/bananas is basically the same, and the variety of ways to find them has a very similar vibe. Some are just laying around, others are bought, and some you have to go hell and back to get. Again, it’s a direct sequel with a new character. Period.

My strategy was basically to beat the stages, then systematically knock-out the bananas and fossils that I missed. As you can see, there’s a LOT of stuff all over. This is just one part of a bigger map, mind you. The main levels have multiple “layers” that each have their own challenges.

And I was in love. This felt like it justified my Switch 2 purchase by itself. No joke. I got so much value out of Bananza that I have to give it a YES! because the amount of quality gaming hours I experienced far exceeded the bad parts. And that’s why I was so frustrated by the last few levels of Bananza. The last “real” level that’s Odyssey-like is basically broken, and after that, the game just f*cking refuses to end. The fun is barely visible in the rear view mirror by that point. The last couple levels, especially, are boring settings and broken mechanics.The difficulty spikes dramatically while also slowing down because the game leans extra-heavily into knocking you off the stage. When that happens it takes away a balloon (balloons are so common that you dig them up even after you reach the max 99, which is crap) and returns you to the start of the sequence you were on. It’s a very slow mechanic because you have to fall all the way to the bottom of whatever pit you’re on, so it’s like if you were playing Castlevania and the legendary knock-back of that game took five to ten seconds to recover and start moving again. Maybe even longer.

This is near the start of the second-to-last level. There’s two levels in a row that are fake-out last levels before you get the proper final part of the game. You can punch through that concrete with the Gorilla Bananza but it’s slow. Everything about the last three or so hours of Bananza is slow.

I’m fine with the recovery time punishment when it’s my fault. If I’m walking around, trashing a level and I screw up and fall off the side of a wall or tunnel through a mountain into oblivion, fine. A long recovery time is a good incentive to not do that again. But I object to the enemy design deliberately going for the knock-back, because now you’re in the action part of the game and not the exploration part. Okay, it’s technically accurate that allowing an enemy to hit me is also my fault, but apples and oranges, because having such a long recovery time in the thick of battle is boring. It’s like the development team forgot that we’re playing video games specifically to not be bored, but the game’s sudden obsession over the final four levels with going for the over-the-ledge knockouts is beyond the pale. And suddenly all the mechanical foibles I had been overlooking for a couple weeks weren’t nothingburgers anymore.

This part specifically, which is the home stretch for the second or third fake-out final boss fight, placing you on this moving platform where you really can’t stop moving AND puts enemies that knock you out quite high up. Not only do you have to wait to fall all the way but it sends you all the way back to the start of this segment.

As much as I enjoyed DKB, it was never a perfect game. It has one of the worst cameras Nintendo has done since the GameCube era, back when 3D games were brand new and game makers were still figuring that stuff out. I assume it’s based on the “almost every solid surface can be destroyed” element. The camera is NOT suitable for it, as it’s often hard to find a good angle to do what you want to do. But then there’s other janky things. Many of the power-ups have multiple actions mapped to a single button. Tap the button to do one thing, hold it for the other, and it’s badly programmed, as regardless of what you INTEND to do, tap or hold, the game will do the opposite. It never gets better, either, and so even against the final-final-final-final-final boss (yes, all those finals make sense), I would need multiple attempts to perform the action I intended to do because the game doesn’t (can’t?) wait to see if I was holding or tapping the button. Which seems like it defeats the point of making it like that to begin with.

The elephant’s ability to slurp things up, especially when you level up those abilities, is so overpowered that it probably should have been saved for post game content. I mean, I LOVED it, but it also basically marked the end of “elegant” exploration in Bananza.

Whether you’re powered-up or not, the act of aiming a pile of terrain you’re holding, which pulls the game into a third-person view with a crosshair, fails constantly. Sometimes it will just plain not work the first attempt, or second, or third. Maybe it’ll throw the piece away, which means you have to scoop-up more. Since you probably NEED this mechanic to work when you’re trying to use it, especially if it’s during combat, it’s a pretty damning thing to happen as often as it does. The animal power-ups fail just as often. The elephant has two powers, the first of which is the ability to vacuum up the terrain. It’s ridiculously overpowered and will probably force you to reset the terrain on stages multiple times because you can render areas impassable, and I loved it. Except you do the vacuum by holding the button down, and often, instead of doing that, it will instead create a boulder out of the stuff stored in its trunk, which is done by tapping the button. And again, sometimes it’ll flip. Plus, you can combine those problems with the failure to register that you want to aim and throw the boulders you make, because that happens too. This game is a Russian nesting doll of mechanical failures.

When you actually get to the third-person crosshairs, it’s pretty accurate. Also, is it just me or does that spot of terrain look like the Prince from Katamari?

By far the most unreliable power-ups were the snake’s double jump and the gorilla’s charge punch. The snake is one of those “always hopping” mechanics that Nintendo keeps going back to, like in Mario Wonder, and it’s NEVER fun and they will NEVER get the message on that and stop including it. It’s so unimaginative to begin with, but unlike Mario Wonder, it’s not really optional for large stretches of Bananza. You even have to fight a boss as the snake. The snake can also cause slow motion by holding a button down, but once again, sometimes it just doesn’t work the first couple attempts, and I often needed multiple attempts to do a simple double jump up a straight wall. What’s crazy is that, when you’re able to free-climb on a surface, it’s like a Spider-Man game that controls perfectly. It’s only when it does anything but the basic Donkey Kong moves that the game becomes janky.

I lost count of how many times I tried to ride up a wind current as the ostrich and fell right off it because it’s not intuitive to jump first to use a flying button. It really doesn’t help that the move the button does when you’re not mid-air is useless. I never found a use for rolling as the ostrich. It’s a waste of a button.

All these issues make Donkey Kong Bananza probably the worst controlling 3D platformer Nintendo has done in several generations. By far the worst of any game I actually overall enjoyed. The Gorilla Bananza power-up, which is like a beefy version of Donkey Kong, has a charge punch. Just hold the B-button down and he’ll blink and then you can throw a punch for more damage. Except half the time, it doesn’t do it. It does something else. I don’t even know what, but not the charge punch. Even late in the game, when I was trying to charge-up the punch, I’d have to press and hold it again maybe two or three times before it worked. It really felt like maxing-out the upgrades for it didn’t help or maybe even made it more prone to failure. I know video game fans don’t like to wait for anything, but Bananza would have been so much better with another year or so of polish. There are dozens of moments, if not hundreds, where the game feels like a rough prototype. And the controls aren’t even as rough as some of the mechanics. Take the muck, for example. See this?

That ooze stuff is supposed to be like slug slime. That hole only opened up after two or three hits that seemingly did nothing.

It’s called “muck” and the final proper, Mario Odyssey-like level is themed around a theme park that got covered in it. It’s kind of like Mario Sunshine, except instead of having an easy-to-refill hose to wash it off, you have to pick up piles of salt and throw it at the muck, which will clear a tiny amount of it. You have to do this one pile at a time. That would be bad enough if it worked, but it doesn’t. Even no-questions-asked direct hits don’t always work. I don’t know if it’s because there’s a microscopic piece of debris in the way. I think that’s what has to be happening. Maybe they shouldn’t have been as stingy as they are with how much muck a handful of salt can clear. For muck without an enemy in it, one pile doesn’t do a lot. On its face value, it slows the game to a crawl IF it worked 100% as intended, and would have been a bad idea on its own. But it’s like the Nintendo Switch 2 can’t handle the idea of this pile of salt you pick up disintegrating into thousands of particles that evaporate the muck. If ANYTHING is in front of it, the whole pile you threw is lost. This was especially problematic with fossils that were embedded in it. Even trying to throw around the fossil and carve it out would just leave the damn thing suspended in air. I can’t believe they included this whole mechanic in the game. (shrug) It doesn’t work! I don’t know how else to say it! It doesn’t f*cking work, at least good enough to be used as much as it is.

That’s assuming the salt even gets picked up. There were a few times where I was standing over it and somehow picked up dirt instead.

Enemies and bosses can be the same way, too. Larger ones are covered in layers of one of the materials that you can dig through (usually whichever material dominates the level layout) and if you throw something at them, it’s never consistent from one throw to the next how much shield you’ll peel off. Sometimes a direct hit goes right through them and removes their shield, and other times it might just make a tiny little dent in it. There were a lot of instances where their shields would be incredibly misshapen from all the crap I’d thrown at them, but they were still alive and attacking because the direct hits weren’t registering the full damage to the “suit” the skeleton underneath it was wearing. It’s a very janky, inconsistent game that, frankly, often makes the Switch 2 feel less powerful. Like, in 2025, it kind of feels like this texture-based gameplay should be further along than this.

This mini-game in the Canyon Layer where you have to kill 10 Squeeloids is the ideal way to grind the maximum two hundred or so bananas that you can purchase for 100 coins + 300 gold. I didn’t know there was a cap and spent a long time grinding on it, since you can just hit “restart” after everything is dead (any coins you don’t collect will be automatically given to you after the last one dies). Also, notice there’s two records in this screenshot? This is also the ideal room to get the records really fast. I went from missing 100 or so to having everything in about thirty minutes. It’s “Canyon Layer Banana #11: Exploding Pork Platoon.” It’s super easy, too. Sometimes you can clear the whole screen in a single punch that causes a very satisfying chain reaction Later in the game, you get a costume that increases coin drops by over 40%. You can get 25 or more coins per round, which takes under fifteen seconds to finish.

And then there’s the finale. After chasing around Void Kong and his minions the entire game, and Void Kong is NEVER a satisfactory boss to battle with, at least compared to the massive bosses that buffer him, something weird happens. The game has a proper, satisfying enough ending, and even made me laugh. Donkey Kong gets trapped in the purple crap, and it’s pretty funny looking. My brain played the sad version “Frosty the Snowman” and I was in tears, howling with laughter.

But then Pauline sings him free, and that’s a good, proper ending to the game. It’s how the game started. First Pauline was covered in the purple crap during the tutorial stage, then DK was, and now they know their power and their wish can come true. Void Kong is defeated, peace and returns to the layers, and we reached the Infinity Banana, which grants wishes to whoever gets to it. It’s the Triforce of bananas, apparently. Those last couple hours were pretty bad, but overall, Donkey Kong Bananza was a really fun game.

But then this happens.

Excuse me, what?

What the f*ck? Yeah, the “Root” exists but the thing you think was the root was King K. Rool’s tummy. This wasn’t set up at all leading up to this. What follows is another level that sucks and is nothing like the Mario Odyssey-like adventure I had loved for the first couple dozen hours of gameplay. Also, now the big enemies that once had skeletons inside them are housing the Kremlings inside of them instead.

And then you eventually find King K. Rool and the Banana of Destiny and you fight. Well, the best thing I can say about the King K. Rool battle is that it’s a much better fight than I expected. I think the last boss in Donkey Kong Country is a BORING boss fight (frankly none of the bosses in Donkey Kong Country 1 are fun) but this time, he’s a proper big boss, unlike the lame Void Kong battles. It’s one of those “knock the thing they shoot back at them” fights. And hey, I got one last reminder that the Gorilla Bananza’s charge punch, which is the only thing that will knock his cannonballs back at him, just f*cking refuses to activate half the time, so that was nice. One final reminder that this is the least polished major Nintendo game in decades.

But then you win that battle, get the Root, and the game IS over. Pauline wished to return to the surface. Donkey Kong wished for bananas. Awesome. The game is finally over! It sucks that they added one terrible level to an already sloggy ending sequence, but it’s finally done. You have the Banana Root or whatever and you make your wish, the Banana Root blows its load and launches you and her up to the surface. Roll the credits. I mean, surely they’re not going to do the fake end credits thing like in Donkey Kong Country and then have the game continue even further.

Oh no.

My God. Okay, so after an extended cut scene that is clearly the ending, somehow King K. Rool shoots up this banana geyser you’ve been riding to the surface and ANOTHER final battle happens. Each of these final battles has been little more than a reminder of how haphazard DKB’s gameplay is. In this battle, you have to pick up chunks of the geyser and throw them at King K. Rool. You hold down the “grab a chunk” button” to bring up cross hairs to aim, assuming it works. It often doesn’t, like every other mechanic in the game. Sometimes I just couldn’t get the aiming crosshairs to work. Also, this is a battle that goes for the “make you fall off the edge and use a balloon” knock-outs. Awesome.

Thankfully, after five or six hits, King K. Rool is defeated FOR GOOD THIS TIME and…… wait, after all that, HE gets the Banana Root and it instantly gives him his wish to take over New Donk City? MOTHER F*CKER are you kidding me? How come MY wishes don’t work as fast as his? I think this root is evil!

And there’s even a new title screen!

I wanted to cry. And it’s YET ANOTHER terrible stage. It’s short at least, but actually, it’s also the worst part of the entire game because it’s got fast-rising, instakill lava. No time to enjoy the level design. Run for it, or you will die and have to start over from the last barrel you reached. Also there’s thorns and life-sucking hot rocks everywhere and enemies are still going for that one-shot knockout. It’s just the worst. And then, after all that, it’s essentially the same “knock the cannonballs back at King K. Rool” battle as before, only he uses the Banana Root to make him look like this:

Goddammit, Mom! What did I tell you about giving your likeness to Nintendo?!

Right before I finished this boss, I had to pause the game to ask “what the hell am I doing?” Seriously! I hadn’t had even a tiny amount of fun with Donkey Kong Bananza in several hours at this point. Everything I’d loved about the level design and themes and exploration had long since ended, yet the game just refused to stop. I was happy fighting the main villains, but then suddenly Nintendo lost their nerve to not get drunk on nostalgia and switched out the new cast for the old cast. It’s Avengers: Doomsday a year ahead of schedule! So, back to the same old boss Donkey Kong has been fighting for decades, and they didn’t even give him good levels. One of the DLC packs is apparently based on Donkey Kong Country. Why wasn’t THAT the final level? If you’re going to bring back King K. Rool, put him in the Donkey Kong Country level! F*cking lame. At least this time, it was the real ending. You beat King K. Rool, Pauline says she’ll learn to keep the beat without DK beating his chest, and he returns back to his world. Yes! The credits! It’s finally over!

“Three months later…”

Nope. I’m good.

This was one of the most negative reviews I’ve done, but I promise that I had a ton of fun with this.

Okay, so I’m disappointed that Donkey Kong Bananza had a terrible end game. I figured it would be like Mario Odyssey where I’d be joyously knocking out the much harder post-game content, but nah, I’m okay with never playing this again. Hell, I didn’t even pick up the post-game banana. That was my middle finger to a game that forgot that it’s supposed to be fun. All my interest in the post-game content or the DLC was reduced to zilch by one terrible level after another to close out what had been an overall rough but amazing game. Again, by raw ratio of good-to-bad, Donkey Kong Bananza is an automatic YES! Maybe if DKB had been a heavily story-based game, like an RPG, bungling the finale like this could ruin the overall game. But it’s a platformer, and most of the levels were huge, heavy in content, and pretty damn fun. Even the ice level had some damn clever stuff in it.

I liked the whole “singing to undo the purple stuff” mechanics. If anything, I think it’s a little under utilized. There’s no boss that you beat by singing. You might activate a battle with Pauline’s tune, but her singing is set up to be magical. Why not have some enemies that you strip their shield by singing at them. Not that this game needs more actions mapped to one button.

There’s a million reviews out there that talk about the positive aspects of Donkey Kong Bananza, so I’ll sum up my experience by noting that, by my count, there’s eighteen levels in the standard game, assuming New Donk City counts as a level. After being pretty dang bored with opening tutorial stage (Ingot Isle), which has a bland mine setting and doesn’t feature the geocaching-like search for bananas and fossils that I would become addicted to, the next eleven levels, starting with “Lagoon Layer” and ending with “Racing Layer” were the Mario Odyssey sequel I’d waited nearly a decade for. Not all of those are full-sized levels, but it doesn’t matter. For all the camera sloppiness, clunky controls, and mechanical failures, I’d LOVED Donkey Kong Bananza and was making an effort to get every single banana and every single fossil, because it was bliss and possibly my favorite game of the last five years. Other than that sprawling Void Kong fight, it’s a damn fun, damn charming game for that eleven level stretch.

Okay, the racing Diddy and Dixie Kong thing was lame as f*ck. I didn’t like how it controlled at all. BUT, I also won the first and only race I needed to get the banana and open up the next stage. Unlike the ending, the racing segment didn’t overstay its welcome. I’m guessing the post-game content hid a ton of bananas

The game didn’t really start to get bad until after the racing level, the “Radiance Layer” which became the point where I was ready for the game to start wrapping-up. The snake mechanic was introduced and was horrible. There’s large segments where you have to pick up blocks made of light that quickly fade away. It just wasn’t a very fun level at all, at least until the home stretch. Then the “Groove Layer” takes away your ability to transform and the digging/exploration is largely removed. It’s a HORRIBLY boring level, and that was pretty much the end of Donkey Kong Bananza as a good game. The next level, the Feast Layer, is the salt-on-muck level that, frankly, I think is terrible. It’s tragic, too, because Feast Layer’s level design was outstanding. It could have been the best level in the game if the salt/muck mechanics worked, but they don’t. That wouldn’t matter if the level design didn’t rely so heavily on eliminating that muck, but it’s literally the main hook of the stage, and it’s so bad that I can’t believe this was released in this state. There’s nothing worse than picking up a clump of salt, aiming carefully, hitting the muck you were aiming for DEAD ON and having f*cking nothing happen. Thus the potential best stage in the game is rendered not even fun at all.

This is so clever. You have to destroy a block in one place to teleport it to another. Several levels later, out of nowhere, Bananza includes THREE mini-games where you have to create a pathway for falling ice cubes using this “hit a block in one place and it goes to another place” gameplay, and I loved it.

The two full-sized levels that followed were boring, and the New Donk City finale with the rising lava was even worse. In a game based around exploration and discovery, they close things out with a fast-moving instakill sprint. A completely nonsensical idea barely less silly than ending Legend of Zelda with a game of football. But, none of the bad stuff undoes everything that came before it. I paid $70 for this. Did I get $70 worth of entertainment? Easily. And I’m not even mad that the game didn’t end sooner. I’m not arrogant enough to think that most fans won’t disagree with me. They’ll probably LOVE the entire King K. Rool sequence, and I’m happy for them. Hell, I envy them, because my Donkey Kong Bananza experience went from being certain I still had weeks worth of post-game content I’d be eating up to deleting Bananza from my Switch 2 while my sister played “Grounds for Divorce” by Elbow.
Verdict: YES!

Froooosty the snowman……………. what’s wrong with me? It doesn’t even look like Frosty!

Filed under Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch Reviews Tagged with Bananza Review, DKB, DKB Review, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Bananza, Donkey Kong Bananza Review, Gaming, Nintendo, Video Games

Baseball (NES Review) Arcade Archives: Vs. Baseball (Switch Review)

August 30, 2025 by Indie Gamer Chick 6 Comments

Baseball
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom
Released December 7, 1983
Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

Arcade Archives: Vs. Baseball
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Original Platform: Arcade
Released June 19, 2020
Arcade Release: April, 1984
Originally Developed by Nintendo
Re-Release Published by Hamster
$7.99 struck out in the making of this review.

No infield fly rule. That’s just peachy.

“Seriously, Cathy?” Yep, seriously. Hey, I’m sporty! And by that I mean I watch sports. Play? Hah. I actually had to stop and think if I’ve even run once in the entire 21st century. Running? That sh*t looks positively exhausting! I used to golf. You know, the sport where you’re allowed to bypass the overwhelming majority of the “moving around” part of the game and instead drive a motorized carriage right up to the ball. Or, if you’re especially lazy, pay someone to drive the cart for you (thumbs up). Really, I’m only doing Nintendo’s 1983 baseball game because it was designed by Big Shiggy Style and it’s probably his worst game ever. I mean, it has to be, right? I’ve heard people say Baseball was good for its time. Was it, though? I wouldn’t be born for another five-and-a-half years after it came out so I’m just guessing over here, but I can’t imagine people in 1983 would be fine with how this plays. This is pretty frick’n horrendous.

Exclusively on the coin-op, the defense changes camera angles. The NES/Famicom version doesn’t do this. BTW, this is the only game I won of Vs. Baseball. Every time I scored a run, the next batter the CPU got immediately hit a dinger on the first playable pitch I gave. Okay, not every time but it felt like it.

The one thing that kinda, sorta feels okay..ish? The batting. It’s fine, really! I’m guessing the majority of video baseball games from the golden age focused on batting, and I could see how maybe in 1983, this felt like a close approximation of America’s pastime. You can scoot around the batter’s box and there’s a nice crack when you make contact. It feels appropriately impactful. So, that’s nice. Nothing else is even in the ballpark, though. Like base running? The AI runners are woefully stupid and heavily unresponsive. See these two screenshots where I got what should be an extra bases hit? Well, for whatever reason, even after the ball hit the ground, the runners tagged back to the bases during a live ball then sat there and stared like dumb sh*ts while the fielder limped to the ball, ignoring my “RUN MOTHER F*CKERS!” command that I was giving the entire time. What should have scored the runner on second base ended up instead being a double play for the other team. If players pulled that sh*t in real life, any manger would have rushed the field and murdered them with a bat. No jury would convict them.

Another example of the brain dead base running: if there’s a man on first and second and the batter hits a ball that IMMEDIATELY touches the ground in front of home plate, the runners will tag-up before running. This is a force-out situation, so why the goddamn f*ck is the first instinct of the runners to tag-up before they start to run to the next base? It’s not humanly possible to react fast enough to give the command not to do this. This is basic, BASIC baseball stuff that has to work every single time, and it doesn’t. I don’t even know why they bothered with running controls because, half the time, the runners don’t listen. They certainly don’t when it comes to sending them to specific bases. They seemed more likely to listen when I gave the “all runners advance” sign. Even then, OBVIOUS ROUTINE doubles and even triples were ignored by the base runners, or even worse: they’d literally run the other way, back to the base they were on and tag up first. Mother f*cker, it’s a base hit! RUN! Little kids playing tee-ball aren’t this inept at the sport! By the way, the CPU opponent’s runners DO NOT have this base running problem. They know when it’s safe to run. That proves it can be done, even in 1983.

There’s no cap on the amount of times the CPU can attempt to pick-off a guy on base, even if you’re not doing anything. I literally pressed no buttons, but it’s baseball and guys step off the base. You would think the arcade game would have a peppier speed, but actually, I think Vs. Baseball tries to pick off runners even more. How many times in a row? I counted nine consecutive attempts four separate times. That’s nine times where not a single button was pressed but the CPU did something besides throw the next pitch. You know Hamster, maybe you shouldn’t have included the five minute caravan mode. It’s not really suitable for it.

What’s with the points you see on the Vs. Baseball screenshots? It’s how the game decides when a player needs to pay to continue. You don’t get a full game per quarter, but instead of having you pay every three innings (which would make sense) every single action in the game (except an attempt at a pick-off) eats up points, on both offense and defense. Are you playing defense and throwing a ball to a base to prevent advancement? That’ll cost you points. On offense and swinging the bat? That takes points too. Foul balls? Yep, both offensively and defensively. So does running the bases, while you get 30 points back for scoring a runner. Then again, you lose a lot more than 30 points when the other team hits a bomb out of the park. I gave up a two-run homer and it deducted 90 points.

There’s no license but the uniforms actually match the colors of six MLB teams (NES) or six Japanese baseball teams (Famicom), including the Chunichi Dragons, who I recognize from Mr. Baseball, a genuinely underrated sports film. If you can find it, check it out. The funny thing is, I don’t LOVE baseball (it’s fine) but I love baseball movies. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve told people that the ending of A League of Their Own makes zero sense. The climatic game, I mean. There’s two outs, two on, and up to the plate steps Dotty Henson, the best hitter in the league. Yeah, she gets walked. 100% of the time, especially since the Peaches’ second best hitter, Marla Hooch, got married and didn’t play in the post season. They needed to create a situation where Dotty’s sister Kit, the plucky pitcher who got traded from the Peaches, almost gave up the game to her sister. But having Dotty blast an empty-bases homer would have been better than what they actually did, because what they wrote, simply put, would NEVER HAPPEN! Dotty would never ever ever get pitched to in that situation. They would have juiced the bases to create a force-out situation at every corner. I might have wrote this review just to have an excuse to talk about that on my blog.

If you were playing this on a real cabinet, it would take about a dollar to finish, and after a certain benchmark, the points go away and it lets you finish the game. To put it in perspective how STUPID this system is, right before going to press I played one last game using Arcade Archives’ Hi-Score mode (default settings, no pausing allowed, cheating impossible). On the literal first pitch I was given, I hit an inside-the-park home run. I might have scored a run, but I still had less points (238) than I started with (250) when the first batter stepped up to the plate. Dumb.

Note: In this clip of the inside-the-park homer, you can also see the lengthy pauses at each base. I’m LITERALLY giving the go sign the entire time. The runner should never have stopped! I was waving them forward right from the start!

While the base running and unresponsiveness is enough to assure a NO! by itself, the defense would have earned it too. All the fielding is done automatically. All you have to do is throw the ball. That’s fine with me, actually. I did the same thing when I played Ken Griffey Slugfest on my N64 as a kid. But, because the field is built to scale, the fielders run like they have each foot caught in a bear trap. Okay, I get it. They’re trying to simulate their approximate location if it were a full-sized baseball diamond. I’d be fine with that if the defense was reliable. It’s not. The defense’s judgement in general is pretty bad, so even something as routine as a pop fly could be dropped. The foul line is especially dangerous, as players often have to move up and and down to line up with the ball. This is where the slow speed of the fielding really screws you. However, unlike base running, this one works both ways. The CPU drops fly balls all the time too, and when it happens, it’s almost like they lose track of where the ball is in the sky. At least the pitching is fine. There’s four pitches, all controlled with the d-pad, though I couldn’t get screwballs across the plate. I’d prefer a little more room to mess with the ball, but eh, the base running is what kills Baseball. The runners are constantly tagging-up when they don’t need to, and there is literally no basis for this in baseball. I’ve never seen any game at any level that looks like this. They could have done better, even in 1983.

For whatever reason, I hit a LOT more home runs in Vs. Baseball than I did standard NES/Famicom Baseball.

Okay, so this review MIGHT seem silly to have done. But $7.99 is not an insignificant amount of money. You can buy a LOT of games for under $8 on the eShop these days. If Hamster had bundled it with Tennis, Soccer, and maybe even Golf, that would be one thing. $8 for THIS? And one of the special modes doesn’t REALLY work because the CPU might guzzle most of the five minutes trying to catch a runner stealing. You can’t stop the runners from getting leads, so there’s really no way to prevent getting caught in an agonizing cycle of pick off attempts. Both it and hi-score mode are certainly luck-based. It’s kind of nauseating. I know that the real goal with Baseball was simply to look and play better than any home video baseball did in 1983. Okay, MAYBE mission accomplished there. For that reason, some would say it’s unfair to call this Miyamoto’s worst game. It’s not an invalid argument. And for what it’s worth, I’m not calling this Nintendo’s worst game. The batting works fine. That raises it just out of the WOAT discussion all by itself. I’d rather play THIS than Ice Climber.

In Vs. Baseball, getting beaned is labeled “DEAD.” Jeez, how hard was that ball thrown? Only one person has ever been killed by getting hit by a pitch in major league history. His name was Ray Chapman. I can’t believe I know that guy’s name off the top of my head but I can’t tell you any of my nieces or nephew’s middle names.

The only reason I think Baseball is fair game in the “worst Nintendo game” discussion is because Nintendo keeps re-releasing it, which is a constant reminder that this is a BAD game of video baseball. Slow. Unresponsive. The behavior from the CPU fielding or base running doesn’t resemble what you expect from people who are in baseball uniforms. That’s what kills it for me. I might have joked about it earlier, but all my longtime readers know I legitimately love sports. The reason is simple: I love seeing athletes compete at the highest level. For whatever reason, it captures my imagination. That’s why, for me to really enjoy video sports, I need the fundamentals perfect. The GAME doesn’t have to be perfect, but the basics do. There’s no fantasy without that. No immersion. With Nintendo’s famous Baseball? I can’t suspend my disbelief, unless I’m pretending this is a celebrity softball game played with a three drink minimum. Hell, even then I think the players ought to be able to tell the difference between a line drive base hit and a pop fly.
Verdict: NO! and NO!

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with Arcade Archives Baseball, Arcade Archives Reviews, Arcade Archives Vs. Baseball Nintendo, Arcade Archives: Vs. Baseball, Baseball, Baseball NES, Famicom Baseball, Miyamoto Baseball, NES Baseball review, Nintendo, Nintendo Baseball, Nintendo Baseball review, Nintendo Vs. System, sports, Video Games

The Legend of Zelda (NES Review)

August 8, 2025 by Indie Gamer Chick 11 Comments

The Legend of Zelda
aka Zelda no Densetsu: The Hyrule Fantasy (Japan)
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom Disk System
First Released February 21, 1986
Directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Zelda Wiki

There should be a law that any game where you swing a sword must have a multi-headed dragon. Actually I’m fine with that law being for any video game. Madden would be at least 3% better if a multi-headed dragon interrupted field goal attempts, with the percentage going up depending on the number of heads, naturally.

For this review, I played Legend of Zelda between sessions of Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on my Switch 2, and two things stuck out to me. The first is that I couldn’t forget that the gap between Zelda 1 and Wind Waker is five years shorter than the gap between Wind Waker and right now, today. That’s insane! Like, where did my youth go? Wind Waker released when I was 13 and it was one of those benchmark games of my childhood. I was a HUGE Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask fan and I couldn’t wait for Wind Waker. I didn’t give a squirt if they changed the graphics style because *I* thought it looked really cool and was confident I would love the game, and I did. But the 2D Zeldas seemed different enough that they might as well have been a separate series to me. At the age of 13, the first Zelda game was so old and primitive that it might as well have happened in the stone age. Like so many Nintendo milestones, I didn’t play it until years later when it was on a GBA cart. You can imagine my surprise that I really enjoyed it a lot. Zelda 1 is right up there with Super Mario 2 and Castlevania as far as NES games I’ve played the most times.

From the time I launched IGC in 2011 and continuing to the present day, the average age of my readers is around ten years older than me. It’s actually closer to seven-to-eight years older now, but amazingly, even though I’m now 36 years old, they’re still older than me. Well, this summer I’ve done a ton of games from the childhoods of my readers, with only WarioWare being a pivotal game of my own youth, and I don’t think anyone would call that a major milestone game. So, one of my next reviews will be for Wind Waker, which I first played at the age of 13, because MY childhood matters too, dammit! By the way, I used to make fun of people who used their shiny new $500 game consoles to play retro games and now I’m one of them. Remember kids, you will grow up to be that which you mock now, so try to mock lovingly. You’ll feel like less of a horse’s ass in the future.

The second thing that stood out was how, of all the NES games that serve as launching points for franchises, the first game in the Legend of Zelda series is easily the title that aged the best. Playing it now, in 2025, I admit I was a little surprised by how much of the core Zelda formula has remained unchanged from this first game. The overworld format with distinct areas like lakes, deserts, graveyards, coastlines, forests, mountains, rivers, etc? It all started here. Really, the only major area not debuting is any form of a town. The dungeon format is in the same boat. The map, compass, enemy pacing, and goal of finding the key items and slaying a boss to collect the macguffin? It all started here too. A lot of the enemies that would be Zelda staples are introduced here, as well. Mummies? Here. The centaurs that are major characters in Breath of the Wild? They debuted all the way back here. So did Octoroks, Moblins, Zoras, Tektites, Wizzrobes, and Darknuts. Some have evolved more than others, so maybe the roster isn’t as close to modern counterparts as, say, a Mario game, but they all feel kin to their modern counterparts. For a series as complex as Zelda, that’s pretty remarkable.

Actually, the weakest enemy to battle with in all of the original Zelda is easily Ganon himself. The gimmick with him is he becomes invisible and teleports around the room, and the only way to beat him is to just mash the attack at NOTHING and hope he eventually teleports his intestines into your sword, then after the fourth hit (assuming you have the magic sword), you have to finish him off with a silver arrow. That part is fine, especially since the silver arrow is hidden within the final dungeon itself. But the fight up until the killing blow? What were they thinking? Who the hell wants a final boss that’s beaten by stabbing blindly at air? Ganon, as generically evil as he is, is still one of my favorite gaming villains and he would eventually go on to become a great final boss (Ganon > Ganondorf IMO, the human version of him is TOO generic), but his debut is one of the very worst boss battles Nintendo ever did. Actually, I think it might be at the bottom. A terrible idea executed horribly.

I played both the first and second quests of Zelda 1 for this review, and in the case of the second quest, I had never played it past a few minutes. It really was like a brand new experience, and it was refreshing given what happened in the first game. In the first quest, I had doubled my hearts from three to six and acquired every item you could get out of the overworld or purchase in shops (except the Magic Sword and two heart containers) before I ever played the first dungeon. You can’t exactly tackle the levels in ANY order because one requires the raft to reach and others require the ladder to win (assuming you’re not using glitches), but there’s still a lack of tightness of design. Really, the modern Zelda format as seen in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom feels closer to this original game than the Zeldas of my childhood, in that both lean into a sense of overwhelming vastness.

LOOK AT THAT ARTWORK! I want an anime that looks like that! Now, I grew up in the tail-end of the instruction book era, BUT I STILL READ THEM! Instruction books have since gone the way of corded controllers and game rentals. Mention instruction books to my nieces and nephew and they’ll sort of cock their heads to the side and say “in….truck…..shun…… books? What’s a book?” Kids these days, I swear to God. But I checked and if you bought this game for the NES back in the day, the book would give you pointers to get to the first level and then a map of where the second level was, but THAT WAS IT. While researching this feature, I also found out that Nintendo published a pocket-sized guide to Zelda called “Tips & Tactics” that also says “instruction book” on it. I’m not sure if this was sold separately, bundled with the game, or originally sold separately but then bundled with later pressings. If you had Tips & Tactics, let me know in the comments! I want to hear if you remember how you got it! I’ve mostly heard from readers that they got their Zelda maps from Nintendo Power or the precursor to Nintendo Power, the Nintendo Fun Club Newsletter. So, I went through those. The third issue of the newsletter has a complete overworld map and maps for the first four levels. The fourth issue has a guide to the bosses. NOTHING offered a complete walkthrough, though the first issue of Nintendo Power did include complete maps for the second quest’s first six levels and the overworld. If you truly got stuck, you had to call a 900 number to have someone walk you through it. “What’s a 900 number?” Kids these days.

On the other hand, nobody can bitch about Zelda 1 getting off to a slow start. My Wind Waker review will probably contain a lot of complaining about how damn long it takes for the game to feel like you’ve actually finished the tutorial section and are now playing the game properly. Seriously, it could take hours. Zelda 1 just kind of drops you off into the world with no real direction on what to do or where to go. In the above caption, you can see the lengths gamers had to go to in order to find help with Zelda. If you didn’t have access to those things, well, you’re on your own. I only played the first quest as well as I did because this was like the fourth or fifth time I beat the game. The first time? Oh, it’s overwhelming. But, that loose structure also opens up the possibility to make a mockery of the developer’s intent.

In the Famicom Disk original build of Zelda, you can use this heart container, combined with the whistle, to max out your health early. By blowing the whistling and summoning the whirlwind while standing next to this heart, you’ll collect it, but when you return, it’ll be back. I SHOULD have played the FDS build but instead I played the US game, where the only glitch I activated was the famous Level 1 door glitch.

This especially extends to the dungeons. You can purchase keys for locked doors within the dungeons in the overworld’s shops. That’s weird enough on its own since the dungeons provide more than enough keys that nobody should have to search too far to find one, which was a mechanic MY era’s Zeldas leaned heavily into. In playing Wind Waker, I realized the small keys play a larger role in maintaining the game’s tempo than I initially realized. When you get a key in that game, or any of the future Zelda games, it’s a MOMENT. That is not the case in Zelda 1 at all. The original game might have incentivized exploration, but it didn’t put a premium on maximizing the real estate. You actually don’t need to fully explore the overworld OR the dungeons. When I did the second quest, I realized there were large parts of the game, especially in the upper left-hand corner of the overworld’s map, that I had never been to in any of my previous play sessions.

Amazing how many icons of the franchise are in Zelda 1 and FEEL like prototypes for the ones I played as a kid. Gohma, who is the first boss in both Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker, debuted in Zelda 1 and is probably the scariest villain. A gigantic one-eyed crab that spits fireballs? Jeez, that’s nightmare fuel.

The keys show off this haphazard use of space the most. By the second level of the first quest, there are so many alternative routes within dungeons that you can completely circumvent MOST of the locked doors. As a result, I had collected so many keys that went unused that I decided to not grab the magic key in Level 8. I had eighteen keys going into Death Mountain and was curious if I could still beat Death Mountain, and if so, how many would I have when I rescued Zelda? Would I need to use ten keys? Five? Would I finish with a dozen keys? Because surely Death Mountain won’t drop keys when a magical unlock-all key is one of level eight’s items. Well, to my surprise Death Mountain also drops normal keys, and like any other level, it had pathways I didn’t need to take. I ended up finishing +1 over what I had when I entered the level and beat Zelda with nineteen total unused keys (having bought none in stores). It’s safe to say that what evolved in Zelda wasn’t so much the sublime combat or the format as it was the tightness of design.

Zelda is probably wondering who the f*ck is this locksmith that rescued her. I assume the keys in the shop thing was some kind of holdover from an earlier build that was put into the game as a means to prevent a soft-lock if a player (1) used every key as soon as they found it and (2) picked the wrong sequence of locked doors. Perhaps at some point, it was possible to pick the wrong door to unlock and end up with no option but the shop. But given the layouts of the final game, with the sheer amount of destructible walls, I can’t imagine it’s possible to do that now. Even if you somehow found yourself stuck or missing a key, it’d be quicker and cheaper to grind Moblins until one drops a bomb pick-up than it would be to spend $100 on a key.

Don’t get me wrong: most of Zelda’s play mechanics hold up to the test of time. It might have the best offensive mechanics in the entire NES library. The sword is VERY satisfying and the concept that it shoots a laser out when you have full health is both bonkers and inspired. Unlike the majority of classic gaming tropes where you say to yourself “someone WOULD have come up with something like this eventually” I don’t think the laser-shooting sword is the type of idea that was inevitable, you know? And honestly, I still think the NES version of it is the best one in the franchise. It’s kind of weak in future games, but here, it feels powerful and cathartic, with perfect sound design and that little explosion it makes at the end being the chef’s kiss.

In the second quest, these things that you can grease with one arrow show up long before you get the bow. In the Famicom Disk version, you can blow into the microphone to kill them. In Zelda’s second quest, you have to just hack at them with a sword for a few hours until they croak. HAVE FUN!

To go with the excellent sword, the enemies are generally well made. Probably the best roster of enemies of any early NES game, if not the best overall roster on the entire platform. Given the limitations and the overall experimental nature of the game, the cast is HUGE, but the enemies do feel distinct. Okay, so the mummies are kind of just the skeletons with more hit points (well, at least until the second quest) and the bosses are a little too cinchy. Actually, with the exception of the multi-headed dragon, I found the Wizzrobes and Darknuts to be worse to deal with than ANY boss. Like, they certainly overuse the dinosaurs and the four-headed Manhandla. Uh, this thing:

Overused or not, one-shotting it with a bomb is one of those “stand up and cheer!” moments.

But they utilize the enemies in a way that gives both the dungeons and especially the overworld personality. Zoras always show up in the water to give those areas a sense of menace. The moblins rule the forests, while the centaurs control the mountains, and the spider-like Tektites only appear where it’s rocky. Forty years later and Hyrule STILL feels like a real, living world because of where they put the enemies. It’s just so smart. The Legend of Zelda’s offensive game gives you everything you would want in combat with no real downside besides not getting the best out of the roster of enemies (see the below caption). Nearly forty years later and the combat STILL isn’t boring. What else can you say at that point?

I don’t think they maximized the potential of the roster at all. There’s a lot of repeat bosses, some of which are just baffling. The dragon that’s at the end of the first level also shows up as the boss of the seventh level, but without being buffed-up. By that point, he might die in two shots. Why not replace him with one of these things, called Patras, that are only found in Death Mountain? I get that they wanted that level to feel climatic by having some dangerous creatures, but the Patra feels like a boss. Hell, there’s even two types of them, one of which has the orbiting eyeballs curve differently. There’s also fast moving, dangerous worms called Lanmolas that feel like bosses that are exclusive to Death Mountain. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that they intended for these creatures to show up earlier and then lost their nerve because they didn’t want the game to be too hard.

However, Zelda’s defensive game isn’t as strong. It feels arbitrary when the magic shield works or not. Like, it’ll shield you from the blasts of the Zoras in the water but not from identical looking blasts from bosses. So frustrating, especially since hearing that PING of a shot successfully deflected is just delightful. Also, the difficulty scaling is pretty bad in general. Level seven could have easily been level three for how much of a cinch it is. I assume they placed it near the end on the assumption players would be hard up for the cash to buy the enemy bait since it’s the only time you NEED it in the first quest. Meanwhile, levels five and six feel like they could be bumped up a slot or two.

“Hey bats, if you have a moment I’d like to have a word with you about our lord and savior Jesus Christ.” “Ugh, someone hit me with a boomerang, already.“

They also ran out of ideas for useful items to fill out the stages. The magic wand and book are just about the most useless items in any Zelda game. One of those “sh*t, we gotta put SOMETHING here for the players to find!” And there were other options. Hide the letter to the lady in a level! Hide the arrows! Hide the ability to carry bombs in a level! Hide the power bracelet in a level! That one really befuddles me. It’s found in some arbitrary spot on the map under one of the statues that comes to life in both quests. It’s so subdued for such an important item. Except, it’s not really important. All the power bracelet does is make it so you can shove rocks that reveal warp zones, at least in the first quest. They could have changed it so you need the bracelet to shove anything in the overworld, making it essential towards getting the magic sword out of the graveyard. My point is, they had better options and the wand sucks. But Legend of Zelda doesn’t suck. It’s one of the best 8 bit games ever, to this day.

The second quest doesn’t f*ck around. Yes, you permanently lose a heart container if you choose the first option.

Even with the rough pacing, sloppy difficulty scaling, and somewhat underwhelming boss roster, it goes without saying that Zelda is a masterpiece that leaves the test of time laying dead with a sword through its heart. There’s nothing I can say that you’ve not already heard before, and the world certainly wasn’t aching to hear what Cathy Vice thinks of the first Zelda game. Finding something unique to talk about was tricky. And then I beat the game, saw that Link was now holding up a sword, and I remembered that Zelda had a second quest that rearranged a lot of the locations and order of the items and upped the difficulty. This is so underplayed that the famous wiki Zelda Dungeon doesn’t even have a walkthrough for it. Until I started this review, I genuinely don’t remember hearing anyone really talk about the meat of the second quest in features or casual conversation. Even the GOAT of NES coverage, Jeremy Parish, pretty much glosses over it. So let’s talk about it!

Famously, you can also enter “ZELDA” as your name and skip right to the second quest. If you’ve never done it, trust me, it’s worth a look.

The second quest of Zelda is a completely different beast. Of the nine dungeons, only the first one remains in the same location. The other eight? They’re somewhere out in the world. Good luck! Some are where dungeons were already previously located, though in different orders. Level four in the first quest is still a dungeon, only now it’s level five. Other levels are in such arbitrary locations that I would never have found them without a guide. Level eight especially is insanely well hidden. The starting sword, white sword, a couple of the heart containers (including the ladder one and the raft one), the bracelet, and some of the burnable bushes are the same. But, the item order is totally different. The bow? You don’t get it until the fifth level. The whistle you normally got in the fifth level? It’s now in the second level, and there’s a LOT more hidden stuff to uncover with it in the overworld, in places you wouldn’t normally think to look. You don’t even get the ladder until the sixth level, and it’s impossible to grind-up heart containers and get the white sword before you start gathering the Triforce pieces.

Even the letter from the old lady that you need to buy medicine isn’t found until VERY late in the game. It was literally the last thing I found before entering the new Death Mountain. In the first quest, it’s in the above door, but it ain’t there anymore. Instead, this is just a shop now. I did manage to grind up enough money to get the Blue Ring before playing the first stage. The shop that sells it I found by accident, as it had previously been a location of a high-yielding coin drop.

And then there’s the dungeons, which have an entirely different vibe to them. They’re MUCH more maze-like this time and some are pretty hard to find their way through. That’s not just because a lot of them put tougher enemies much earlier than you previously encountered them, either. It’s how you find your way through them. Instead of just having a ton of bombable walls (dear auto-correct: bombable is a word, dagnabit), you might have to just walk THROUGH the walls, like this:

Legend of Zelda, The (USA) (Rev A)-250805-134320

Legend of Zelda, The (USA) (Rev A)-250805-134323

The design logic dives really hard into the invisible doors. In fact, a key item is hidden in one of the levels BEHIND the Triforce piece. The second quest’s progression is based more around confusing players after the first quest and having no real rules or flow to the progress, though it mostly works. Mostly, but the level design itself can be problematic. The layouts of the first five stages spell out the word E-A-L-D-Z. I have no clue why the letters are not in the correct order. I assume they were at some point in development and it was changed due to the difficulty, but either way, the third level, the “L” is probably the single worst dungeon in the entire history of the franchise. Hell, it doesn’t even climax with a boss battle. You know those things that throw boomerangs? The big finale to the third stage is a room full of them.

The locked door? It’s the Triforce room. Yes, really! The room on the right directly across from the Triforce room on the map contains the blue boomerang, and you have to use the enemy bait to get it. So these things are the bosses. They’re not even the tougher blue versions! I thought this was supposed to be the harder second quest?! She said after already dying once.

Okay, so when the second quest is bad, it’s REALLY bad, but it never gets worse than that third stage. Other levels have several clever twists to them. The skeletons? Their swords shoot lasers now, just like Link’s does when you have full health. Full sized bosses appear more frequently in dungeons (in fairness, that happened in the first quest too, but not to this degree). There’s red herring keys laying around that there’s hypothetically no way to get since you won’t have the ladder yet. I mean, unless you return to the dungeon at some later point in the game to collect them. It feels like the second quest’s main objective is to trick players and take away any sense of predictability. Some of the staircases might send you to a room that doesn’t have a return staircase, and it becomes easy to get lost or go around in circles.

The “staircase drops you off in a room without a return staircase” gag that I found hugely annoying is paid off in a big way during the game’s climax. It’s actually the key to solving Death Mountain in the second quest.

While some aspects of the second quest can be taken out of order (for example, I beat level four before level three), it’s a lot harder to cheese by getting the sword upgrades or other key items before the game wants you to have them. It wasn’t long into the second quest that I started to wonder if some of the locations and dungeons were actually the original concepts for the main quest that were moved to the bonus after-game content because they were too hard. Like the mechanic with the bubbles in the caption below? That just feels like something that was meant to be in the game all along. It’s too elaborate to have been an afterthought. The same with the walking through the walls bit. While the Z-E-L-D-A shaped dungeons probably weren’t part of the main design, I think most of the gameplay mechanics from the second quest likely were. Maybe. The story behind the second quest is kind of one of those “spilled mold into bacteria and it killed” moments.

Like (like) I’m pretty sure I can’t reach this key yet. I think they did these things to send players on wild goose chases.

Because of how the memory on the NES worked, all the Zelda maps had to be made to fit like a jigsaw puzzle on a grid, and the second quest only exists because Takashi Tezuka only used up half the available space for the nine dungeons of the first quest. Okay, fine. It was a happy accident. But I’m still willing to bet that they used the opportunity to dump gameplay ideas that were deemed “too hard” and deleted from the original build back into the game. These are just too elaborate, too thoughtful, and dare I say it, too elegant to have been throwaway bonuses that only happened because someone only used up half the memory they were supposed to.

The biggest change to the monsters is with the bubbles. In the first quest, if you touch a bubble, you temporarily lose your sword. In the second quest, bubbles come in three colors: the normal ones that shift between red and blue that temporarily take away the sword are still around. But now, there’s also ones that are always red and ones that are always blue. The always-blue ones are harmless and have no negative effect on Link besides causing him to recoil as if he’s taking damage. The always-red bubbles are by far the most dangerous and annoying things in the entire game. If you touch one, you lose your sword permanently until you do any one of the following things: (1) touch a blue bubble (2) visit a fairy fountain, and yes, the effect will linger even if you leave a dungeon (3) use a potion or (4) get a Triforce piece. This isn’t a rare thing, either. Many rooms will have multiple red bubbles and a single blue bubble, while others might have quite a journey between rooms that have red bubbles and rooms that have the blue bubbles you need to regain your sword. There’s a couple REALLY annoying rooms full of red bubbles where you have to hug the wall and there’s no room to dodge in any direction. Since the bubbles have no preset attack pattern and can change direction without any warning, they’re very, very dangerous.

And it’s not a throwaway bonus. In the second quest, there’s an undeniable method to the madness that should make it a stronger experience for veterans of the franchise. I’m SO happy I finally played it. Again, nobody needs me of all people to recommend playing one of the most famous games ever made. BUT, I suspect a lot of my readers have never tried Legend of Zelda’s second quest. It’s not just more of the same. There’s hints of that, but what the second quest really has going for it is that sense that the gameplay is what Zelda 1 would have been like all along if they didn’t have to consider how new this whole idea was. Because there had never been a game like Legend of Zelda (well, except Tower of Druaga, the NES version of which I reviewed for Namco Museum Archives Volume 1), I’m guessing they had to significantly tone back aspects of it. The speed of the darknuts. The red/blue bubbles. The skeletons shooting swords. I suspect that somewhere between the first and second quests is the definitive version Big Shiggy Style and Tezuka WOULD have made if they weren’t breaking new ground. And I think you’ll get that vibe too if you give it a try.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with First Legend of Zelda, First Zelda, Gaming, Nintendo, nintendo-switch, The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda 1, The Legend of Zelda NES, The Legend of Zelda NES Review, Video Games, Zelda, Zelda 1 review, Zelda Nintendo, Zelda no Densetsu: The Hyrule Fantasy

Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II (NES Review)

August 3, 2025 by Indie Gamer Chick 3 Comments

Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released March, 1994
Directed by Genyo Takeda and Makoto Wada
Developed by Nintendo
NO MODERN RELEASE

It took me this long, roughly two minutes into starting a new game, to realize I was not going to be having any fun. While this isn’t REALLY a random encounter into a mini-dungeon, it’s structured to make you think it is. It’s the first of many terrible ideas in this terrible, terrible game.

Oh my God. Okay, so the first StarTropics isn’t exactly a masterpiece. After all, I called it “the absolute stupidest good game ever made” so it’s not like I was expecting to be blown away by a sequel. I didn’t even want the clunky mechanics to be fixed. I got used to them, and there’s basically no game like the first StarTropics. I didn’t mind awkwardly hopping across tiles or having too stiff of movement and rigid turning. At least it played completely uniquely. I would have settled for a glorified expansion pack with more levels, bosses, and less busy work. Well, they did try to fix the mechanics, and the end result is Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II is the embodiment of the “broke, or made better?” joke from the Simpsons. This might be the worst Nintendo-developed game ever made. At the very least, I have to believe it’s their worst sequel, and I do mean EVER. I hope so, at least. I mean, how could they have ever done worse than this?

This got me all excited thinking Zoda’s Revenge would take a break and let me ride the Haunted Mansion, but nope.

I bought StarTropics II for Virtual Console ten years ago and I never finished it. I’m not even sure I beat the Egypt stage, which is only the second level. I had no desire to go on, because everything I enjoyed about the first game is gone here. Just gone-gone, and other aspects that I didn’t enjoy so much have been made worse. The satisfying yo-yo combat? Gone, replaced with generic throwing weapons that have no speed or range. As if that’s not bad enough, the enemies seem to have had their sponginess bumped-up. Maybe it just feels like it because the combat is so much slower. Whatever the reason, the combat is NEVER fun in StarTropics II. It’s a slog. Really boring boss fights too, as none of them have the personality of the original game’s bosses.

F*cking end me.

The tile-based jumping is also gone. In this game, you can just walk across the tiles. They tried to give the level design a greater sense of exploration, including more levels with multiple floors, like in Zelda games. Except it just didn’t work for me because the themes, enemies, and mechanics aren’t as fun. Like, people who are playing a sequel presumably liked the first game, right? So why is the tile triggering mechanic from the first game no longer here? Were people complaining about that? Because if people are complaining about a primary gameplay mechanic, maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do a sequel at all. In Zoda’s Revenge, when a block is a switch, it blinks when you walk on it, letting you know that you have to hop on it. If it’s supposed to help open a door or a chest, it’ll make a question mark ball appear instead of leaving a footprint on the tile and causing a button to rise up somewhere else. It’s such a massive downgrade that it almost feels like the first game’s way of doing the tiles and switches is the updated sequel-like way of handling it.

The developers did attempt to change-up the combat by giving you a psychic lightning ball. A couple enemies, including the ones pictured above, can be harmed only by it. But, while you can fire it faster, until you get the final upgrade late in the game, it’s limited in range just like the throwing weapons. Also, the wide variety of exotic special items from the first game are gone here, and the one that makes a return appearance has its range also limited. God forbid anyone have any fun with this game.

The exotic tropical setting? That’s gone too, at least until the final level which is just the exact same cave that made up the first level from the original game. Literally the same map and everything. The rest of the game has a time travel theme where you meet such famous historic figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Cleopatra, Sherlock Holmes, and King Arthur. Wait, what? And, like so many time travel-themed games, it doesn’t really matter because the action segments do such a poor job of making you believe you’re in a different time period, especially when so many enemies keep showing up in each era. You’re looking for magical Tetris blocks, and, SPOILER, when you beat the game, the alien kids you rescued in the first game are reunited with their father, then peace-out and leave for their home planet without saying goodbye to the villagers who have taken care of them for the last year. Little pointy-eared twerps. Not that I cared or anything but, jeez, what a downer of an ending.

NOTE: MICA AND THE UNGRATEFUL ALIEN TWERPS DIED ON THE WAY BACK TO THEIR HOME PLANET!

But what really sucks about StarTropics II is they completely wrecked the already janky movement physics. They tried to smooth out the stiffness, but all they did was make it easier to walk into enemies. Since ranged weapons don’t show up until the very end, this is a big problem. You can move while you jump now as well, but that REALLY crashes the gameplay. If not for the ability to rewind, I would have certainly eaten a game over from botching even the most basic jumps over pits. Or, if not that, accidentally jumping into pits while fighting enemies and bosses.

The differences in elevation actually create this really unintuitive optical illusion for jumping. It’s hard to explain but it feels like they didn’t properly express how high you are and what that means for the rest of the room.

You see, height matters a lot in StarTropics II for both platforming and enemy attack patterns. Some rooms have elevated platforms, and many enemies and even at least one boss battle require you to jump to damage them. That would be fine with the old StarTropics I physics, where you can’t jump forward unless you’re jumping to a tile or across a pit. In StarTropics II, you can move while you jump anywhere, but you can’t aim at them without also moving. That’s kind of a problem when you surround the player with instakill pits or water, and I died a ton from trying to aim at enemies with my short-range weapons and accidentally falling to my death. In exchange for all that, you can move diagonally now. Oooh, diagonal.

A whopping three boss fights take place on these automatic movement arrows. These specific ones move really fast, and your attack sprite just barely reaches the center of the screen where the boss is. The end result is one of the very worst boss fights in any Nintendo-developed game.

To make matters even worse, with the new movement style comes a much heavier emphasis on platforming. I’m not the biggest fan of top-down platforming in general, and that’s assuming the game controls well. StarTropics II, you know, doesn’t. Since jumping and collision detection is so hard to judge in Zoda’s Revenge, leaning into obstacles based around jumping with moving platforms or disappearing platforms was a recipe for disaster. Oh, and sometimes the ledges will have an invisible wall to stop you from simply walking off the side and to your death, but sometimes it doesn’t. The original StarTropics had some timing-based stuff like hopping over knives sticking out of the ground or cannonballs, but it feels like they tailored the challenge to the limitations of the physics. With Zoda’s Revenge, I get the impression they eventually just sort of shrugged and said “meh, good enough” even though it wasn’t.

It really feels like I cleared it but whatever.

As a result of all the changes, Zoda’s Revenge doesn’t really feel like a sequel so much as a really bad rip-off of StarTropics made by a completely different team. That’s sad, because it’s from the same director and artists. It’s COMPLETELY lacking in charm, and even the busy work is worse than ever. I’m pretty sure the reason I quit the first time was because a gigantic blind maze happens in the middle of the Egypt level. You have to climb these towers to get a peak of the layout, but the actual navigating has to be done without seeing the walls. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad if they don’t overdo it. But then it keeps going and refuses to stop. The one improvement over the original: you no longer have to talk to everyone to open up the actual levels. I guess they were as bored with that as I was.

Also that monkey is later revealed to be Merlin the wizard. I wish I was joking.

So the enemies are dull, the boss fights are charmless, the movement parameters are all screwed up, there’s too many basic square-shaped rooms with no frills in them, the level structure is bad, and the time travel theme is a total bust. It can’t get any worse, right? I mean, it’s not like right before the big final climax, there’s a full-roster boss rush, RIGHT? Of course there is.

At least now you have a ranged weapon for them. The last one isn’t a previous boss but rather Zoda’s head lice. Oh, but it’s evil head lice that unlocks the final battle.

For all of its many, many problems, at least StarTropics felt like it came from a place of inspiration. Zoda’s Revenge doesn’t. Zoda’s Revenge was the final NES-exclusive game developed by Nintendo. Now I’ve played several post-SNES releases for the NES that were so good that I’ve suggested the NES had a secret golden age that nobody talks about. This includes a decent Flintstones game and an even better sequel, a genuinely underrated Jetsons game, a Wacky Races platformer that should make for an excellent children’s game, a DuckTales sequel that I feel easily tops the original and might be the most underrated NES game ever, the long awaited NES port of Bonk’s Adventure, and the third and best Adventure Island game. Other companies weren’t phoning-in the NES’ swan song, so it’s just such a heartbreaker that the series finale of the NES that was made by Nintendo themselves (I’m not counting Wario Woods since that was also on the SNES) sucks so very, very much.

The last form of Zoda, who now looks more like Zorak from Space Ghost, also looks like he’s taking a wiz in the middle of our battle to the death.

It feels like someone at Nintendo said “there’s still millions of NES owners in America who would buy new software for it instead of SNES games. Who wants to make the last original NES game?” and everyone said “NOT IT!” until Genyo Takeda was the only one left. This was HIS last directed game, by the way. He’s the genius behind Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! and he also made the original StarTropics. The first StarTropics was created to appeal to American gamers and never got a global release until Virtual Console came around. Hell, it’s still never gotten ANY Japanese release to this very day, even via Switch Online. Because the Macguffins are Tetris blocks and the final cinematic involves the chief of C-Island assembling them via playing Tetris, I’m guessing they can’t re-release this on Switch Online. That’s fine, by the way, because this is NOT a sequel to StarTropics. It’s barely a shadow of it. It’s fitting that the ending of Zoda’s Revenge is such a downer. It’s art imitating life. Or, wait, is it the other way around?
Verdict: NO!

Kind of looks like Moth Man.

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with games, Gaming, Nintendo, review, Star Tropics, Star Tropics 2, StarTropics 2, StarTropics II, StarTropics Sequel, Video Games, Zoda's Revenge, Zoda's Revenge review, Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II, Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II NES Review, Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II Review

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (Game Boy Review)

August 1, 2025 by Indie Gamer Chick 6 Comments

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
Platform: Game Boy
First Released January 21, 1994
Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa
Developed by Nintendo
NO MODERN RELEASE*
Listing on Mario Wiki

*I made a mistake when I first published this and said Wario Land is on Switch Online. It is not.

Wario Land - Super Mario Land 3 (World)-250801-075521

Wario Land - Super Mario Land 3 DX (World)-250731-090645

From here out, if there’s an option to do color versions of classic Game Boy titles (meaning more than just four Super Game Boy-like colors), I’m taking it. If home developers are going to go to all the trouble of colorizing these games, at least one person with a semi-big review platform should acknowledge them. All the color screenshots in this feature are from Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Color Edition by korxo, who did a very good job given the limitations.
Link to the Patch

The fire attack and the dash attacks don’t show up all too well in screenshots. Thankfully, I barely used the dragon hat.

Okay, I’m pretty sure this is the last game that’s officially part of the Super Mario franchise’s 8 bit and 16 bit era that I haven’t reviewed. Like Yoshi’s Island, it’s only technically part of the Super Mario franchise thanks to a subtitle and really exists to act as the starting point for its own spinoff franchise. As of this writing, there’s been eight Wario Land games (assuming you count Wario World for GameCube and Wario: Master of Disguise for Nintendo DS as “Wario Land” games, and I do), and it all started here with a game that built to the strengths of the Game Boy. It’s certainly not Mario-like. Wario Land is actually more of the spiritual successor to the legacy of Doki Doki Panic and later Super Mario Bros. 2. It’s a much, much slower action game with a focus on exploration. There’s no B-running and no fast reaction times required. Even when you’re being stalked by a killer Thwomp, the tempo is kept pretty low and the focus is on creating tension, not panic.

Actually, it does the “chase” gimmick twice, with the second time turning the Thwomp into a boat at the end.

Which isn’t to say there’s no action in Wario Land. Wario’s tackle is satisfying enough, and it’s always fun to pick up a downed enemy and throw them off their perch and to their death, hopefully involving lava. If it worked perfectly, the combat would be S-tier for 8-bits, but that’s not the case. Wario is one of the first 2D retro games I’ve reviewed where the physics are wonky to the point of being genuinely unpredictable, mostly thanks to the level layouts. If you attempt to pick up an enemy with any structure nearby, whatever you’re carrying will be knocked out of your hand, and the enemy might instead shuffle around like they’re square dancing upside-down around your sprite. There’s a roughness to Wario Land that’s obvious right from the start and sticks around until the bitter end.

This is not a traditional hop ‘n squash game. I took more damage fighting the most basic enemies than I did in all other Mario games in this marathon combined. I don’t know if a single goomba so much as nibbled at the tip of my boots in the Mario games, but these little things called Pirate Gooms got me several times. Usually because they recovered right as I was reaching them. I may or may not have lost lives to them as well. (cough) Hey, it wasn’t MY fault. It was the physics. I swear.

Thankfully, the combat takes a deep back seat to stellar level design, but even that has this undeniable roughness to it. Wario Land has one of the strangest progression structures I’ve encountered, as some early levels have multiple exits and branching paths, one of which leads to an entirely different game world that’s otherwise inaccessible. Hell, the very first level in the game takes place on a beach, and the level’s format changes after you beat the first game world and the tide comes in. It’s a great idea that had me so pumped-up to see what other wacky changes would happen to the game world.

Wario Land - Super Mario Land 3 DX (World)-250801-045606

Wario Land - Super Mario Land 3 DX (World)-250731-094057

Wario Land - Super Mario Land 3 DX (World)-250731-102656

And then, after the 23rd of 40 stages, the “multiple exits” concept is abandoned completely, never to return. In total, only five stages have hidden exits. Imagine if Super Mario World didn’t have any key holes after the halfway point. Well, Wario Land actually does that, and it’s so goddamn weird for it. The idea of changing world maps is also largely abandoned, as I’m pretty sure there’s only one instance of it with any consequence after the secret exits stop. A lot of games give off the impression of having more ambitious plans that were left on the drawing board, but with Wario Land, I really think that might be what happened. The only way I can make sense of the structure is that they ran out of time and had to delete multiple exits and possibly stages when the time came to code the game, only many earlier ones had to be left in because they stuck a game world off in the corner, where nothing else on the map can logically reach it, and there was nowhere else to hide the treasures within.

Unlike Mario World, the keys that unlock the fifteen hidden treasures are often placed away from the skull doors that hold them. Sometimes, they’re on the total opposite end of the level, and carrying the keys from Point A to Point B is a pain in the ass. In a good way, I mean. Thankfully, the keys don’t vanish if you scroll them off screen, and you can also use them to kill enemies.

The good news is that hidden doors aren’t the main thing you’re searching for in Wario Land. What you’re really trying to do is accumulate money to buy a bigger house than Mario lives in after Wario’s attempt to claim squatter’s rights in Super Mario Land 2 didn’t work out. The plan is to steal back a gold statue of Princess Peach that was stolen by Captain Syrup, the ruler of Brown Sugar Pirates (why is it always food-based names? Does Nintendo not feed their developers? It would explain a lot!). Surprisingly for a Nintendo game, Wario doesn’t intend to fetch the statue in order to court Peach. Oh no. Wario might be a greedy Mario doppelgänger, but he’s a greedy Mario doppelgänger who follows the golden rule: don’t stick your d*ck in crazy, and when the ruler of a country commissions a golden statue of themselves, it’s a safe bet they’re f*cking nuts. Go ahead and cringe, but Wario played Super Princess Peach. He knows what’s up. So he plans on ransoming the statue to raise funds to buy a castle. It’s the most petty reason to go on a harrowing adventure, and it ends with Mario stealing the statue anyway.

Well, to Mario’s credit, Wario did keep dropping buckets on his head.

As luck would have it, the final boss is a genie and, once Wario has won the fight, he gets to make a wish. He probably should have made it “I hope that my action-adventure franchise doesn’t completely evaporate by the 2010s” but I’m getting ahead of myself. Because the absolute monarchy of the Mushroom Kingdom is so capitalist that even a genie needs to get a bag, to make Wario’s wish come true, you need to accumulate as much money as possible. The hidden treasures are given value in coins after you beat the genie, and I’m fairly certain that if you find all fifteen of them (and complete all forty courses as well), you will max out the coin bank and get the best ending, which is Wario getting his own planet.

Update: WRONG, you will need about 10K in coins plus the fifteen treasures plus have an all-clear for the forty courses to get Planet Wario.

Mario would later top this by getting his own galaxy. Always a bridesmaid, huh Wario?

Finding the treasures IS hugely satisfying because the game doesn’t tell you where they are. While the five stages with hidden exits are marked on the overworld map, there’s no indicators for which levels have treasures (something Virtual Boy Wario Land did). The only thing you can really use to help is the fact that the fifteen treasures have spots sequentially on the scoreboard. So if you’re missing the “G” treasure, it’s going to be found in one of the levels between where you found treasures “F” and “H.” I love this, and the only thing I wish for is that, once you found the treasures, the game told you what stages you found them in. I also wish Nintendo would build a much bigger game based around this idea. I found MOST of the treasures on my first playthrough, but the act of getting them was rarely a layup. In fact, the second-to-last one I could not find for the life of me.

When you do find the treasures, it’s a moment. It never feels anything short of great.

As a proof of concept first attempt at a new franchise, Wario Land holds up shockingly well. I don’t think it will be for everyone. The slow movement will be a major turnoff for a lot of players, as will be the clunky mechanics. It also has some exceptionally weak bosses. At one point during a boss fight, I was dodging attacks and hunkering down for a typical “three hits and your dead” type of battle. But after a few passes, nothing was happening, so I charged at the boss and it worked. When he was stunned, I picked him up and threw him in the lava and the fight was over. Curiosity got the better of me so I rewound the fight and this time, I charged as soon as I could. It worked.

Even with satisfying combat, I wouldn’t recommend playing Wario Land specifically for it. It’s just not polished enough for that. From an action perspective, it’s for sure the roughest 2D combat I can remember Nintendo doing, including Kid Icarus. But as a true treasure hunt game, I was constantly surprised by how much fun I was having. Wario Land has NO bad levels among the forty total courses, which is nothing short of remarkable given the limitations of the Game Boy. And, as I said, even the basic enemies can pose a threat, so you can’t sleepwalk through it like you can the Virtual Boy sequel that was the only Wario Land I really ever played through all the way. Okay, so the difficulty is largely thanks to the janky physics and stiff jumping, but it’s charming even when it feels like it doesn’t work the way the developers intended.

The later levels that take on maze-like characteristics are so strong that I wouldn’t have minded if EVERY level had been that way. They basically did have that mentality for the sequels.

I’m sure a lot of people will say Virtual Boy Wario Land is the superior game, but I’m not going there. Both games are vastly underrated, but once you stack the eagle helmet and dragon helmet in VB Wario Land, it’s all over but the shouting. The game becomes too damn easy, and that broke my immersion a lot more than the eye-melting red and black visuals did. While there’s a few pits that I feel are too touchy and the collision is never as good as you want it to be, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 never allows you to go on cruise control. It’s an imperfect build of the perfect 8-bit mix of platforming, action, and exploration. But even the imperfection feels like it fits Wario like a glove. What other character could get away with a game that feels this unfinished? I assume since it was 1994, they thought the Game Boy was near the end of its life cycle and they had to rush it out. Hah.
Verdict: YES!

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with Gaming, Mario, Nintendo, nintendo-switch, Switch Online Game Boy Reviews, Video Games, Wario, Wario Land 1, Wario Land 1 Review, Wario Land Game Boy Review, Wario Land Review, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Game Boy, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Game Boy Review, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Review, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Switch Online, Wario Reviews

Donkey Kong Country (SNES Review)

July 31, 2025 by Indie Gamer Chick 5 Comments

Donkey Kong Country
aka Super Donkey Kong (Japan)
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 18, 1994
Directed by Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper
Developed by Rare Ltd.
Published by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Mario Wiki

Well, um, the rain still looks like rain! Or oatmeal. It kind of looks like oatmeal. But RAINING oatmeal.

I swear to God that I didn’t deliberately review this back-to-back with Super Mario Land 2 because both games were more focused on looking pretty than being mind-blowing from a gameplay perspective. Actually, I thought Donkey Kong Country had a much better chance of scoring a YES! than Super Mario Land 2 because it would still have the horsepower to pull off clever level design. And sometimes it does! Like, take a look at this:

Oof, that does not look beautiful. I bet it did in 1994, and that’s literally the only time it had to. No matter what anyone thinks, even Nintendo games (or games Nintendo paid to have made, as is the case with DKC) are ONLY made to appeal to gamers at the time of release, and if they happen to be valuable as catalog titles later, that’s just a bonus. I know people want to believe the mighty Nintendo plays 4D chess and has this big roadmap of when catalog titles will be worth money again, but they don’t. Nobody does. That’s why gaming licensing planks are so very, very one-sided and sh*tty.

You have to hit those STOP/GO barrels to freeze the red-eyed enemies, which turn into stones. You never know how much time you get for each barrel, and they staged the level in a way where the last few only give you a split second. It’s quite exciting, and the enemies are creepy enough. I just wish there were more stages that made me sit-up like that, but that wasn’t the point of Donkey Kong Country. It was made only to be 1994’s big smash hit, and if it’s worth some scratch in the 2020s, hey, lucky us. So when people say “Donkey Kong Country doesn’t hold up” it’s okay to say “well duh!” It accomplished exactly what it set out to do in 1994: curb stomp the 3DO into oblivion while keeping Nintendo fans on the hook while they got the platform that would come to be known as Nintendo 64 ready. “Holding up to the test of time” was not on the agenda.

You can’t say that they overplayed level gimmicks. Despite the fact that the STOP/GO barrels had legs as a gimmick, they only show up in that one level. These parrots only show up once too, though they’ll be featured characters in the sequel.

So in a sense, it’s kind of remarkable that any aspect of DKC holds up at all. I think my frustration with Donkey Kong Country is that it doesn’t feel like it squeezed all the potential out of the gameplay concepts it has. Maybe they were saving-up for the inevitable sequel, but I dunno. I’m a big fan of leaving it all on the court, and Rare sure as hell didn’t do that. It’s actually one of the most conservative games I’ve reviewed lately. As a franchise builder, few first steps are rarely this enticing and leave you wanting more in a bad way. Maybe any more bold ideas were canned for being too difficult when they were trying to make a game to appeal to everyone, including very young gamers, whom I’m guessing will like DKC in 2025 more than I did. I hate to guess on these things, but Donkey Kong Country seems like a great starting title for introducing young children to platforming. From what I can remember about the sequels’ difficulty, I’m guessing I won’t be able to say that about them.

Then again, there’s moments that feel like the bottom of the barrel is being scrapped. No pun intended, but this evil barrel is my least favorite boss trope: fighting the same regular enemies you’ve been killing en masse this whole time.

Even the Stampers recognized the game was too easy, but I think that could have been fixed by adding a difficulty toggle. A hard mode wouldn’t have been too hard. Just remove a lot of the DK barrels from stages. I took plenty of damage playing DKC, but I never had to wait more than a few seconds to undo that, so there was no tension. Still, the addition of Diddy Kong was probably the smartest move. What Donkey Kong Country really does right is removing hit points in favor of having two different characters, and whoever you’re playing as is lost when you get hit, at least until you find the next DK barrel two seconds later. Being able to swap between two characters who have different skills was also inspired. Diddy Kong can cartwheel through enemies and seems to have more hangtime when you cartwheel off a ledge before he has to jump. Plus he carries barrels in front of him, which makes it easier to uncover hidden doors. Meanwhile, with Donkey Kong you can do such tactics as tagging Diddy so you can use him instead. Again, a great idea that would be utilized better in the sequels. Are you noticing a theme here?

The only time I used Donkey Kong was when I was afraid of losing Diddy. It became clear really quickly why he’s not playable in the first two sequels.

Unlike Super Mario Land 2 which, besides having a lot of pointless bonus levels, really did nothing wrong besides having too basic of level design, Donkey Kong Country did PLENTY to leave me terminally annoyed. The methodology of 100%ing the game (or 101%ing because ain’t that quirky?) is strange. Every level has K-O-N-G tokens to find, some of which are so well hidden that I couldn’t find them. Sounds great, except they don’t contribute to the final completion percentage. Instead, acing the game only requires finding every bonus room. Probably not the best way to do it since there’s too many of them and they completely bust the game’s flow. My favorite levels were usually the ones that back-loaded the bonus rooms near the end of the stages. Those tended to have above-average level design. Hell, I normally hate swimming stages, but at least none of those have bonus rooms, so they were some of the better levels.

I found myself carrying barrels and walking up against walls because I was more focused on getting 100% than I was just enjoying the boilerplate, paint-by-numbers level design.

What wrecks the game’s tempo even worse than the bonus rooms are the animal tokens. No matter what you’re doing or where you are in a stage, once you collect the third and final token of any set, you drop what you’re doing and enter that specific animal’s bonus stage. It would make so much more sense to instead bank the reward until after you beat the level. That’s a time honored gaming tradition, right? But no, it’s an interruption, and not always (or ever) a welcome one. The levels take a while to finish, and it gets worse, because sometimes after the round is finished, it takes you quite far back in the level you were playing. Maybe even to the start of the stage.

Okay, so the animal bonus rounds are fun. Well, until you have 99 lives. Then they become annoying.

I did end up 101%ing Donkey Kong Country, but the irony is, I probably would have enjoyed my time with the game a lot more if I hadn’t bothered. I mean, not enough to give Donkey Kong Country a YES!, but it would have been a lot closer. I found myself deliberately avoiding animal tokens and losing the bonus rounds as soon as they started just to make them go faster. When just the act of finding the rooms is all you need, why bother? DKC is a game where lives are so plentiful that you’ll almost certainly not game over even if you struggle with some later stages. That’s a big if, by the way. The only stage I died more than twice on was the second mine cart stage, which shows up pretty late in the game. And it’s not that I never enjoyed the exploration aspect. Actually, I was happy that, if you miss a bonus room and have to replay the level, you don’t have to finish it to get credit for the stuff you missed. As soon as you locate the bonus rooms you missed, you can pause the game and press select and return to the map with full credit.

If the game had required all the letters, I would still be playing DKC, but it didn’t, and instead I’m trying to finish up this review as fast as I can.

There are a handful of gimmicky levels to keep the experience somewhat fresh, like the above screenshot. That treadmill runs on fuel barrels that you have to collect, and it kept my attention for the full length of the stage. The mine cart stages are some of the stronger auto-scrolling types of levels I’ve experienced, and a stage where you slide up and down ropes automatically actually provided a solid, enjoyable challenge. I’d say around a third of Donkey Kong Country holds up and remains clever today. But two-thirds of the game is too basic to hold up to the test of time. You never quite shake the proof-of-concept feeling when playing it, and that makes sense because the gameplay isn’t what they had to get working. Nintendo paid for a game that looked high tech enough to buy them time for the Nintendo 64. Donkey Kong Country for the third best-selling SNES game, so they got it. But being more bold and experimental with the level design? That came later, with the sequels.

Donkey Kong Country’s bosses are all dull, but King K. Rool takes the cake. His arena is much bigger than the screen, and his attack pattern is basically adding one pass across the full length of the arena after every hit. So when he drops cannonballs across the screen, instead of an exciting pattern like dodging them for several seconds, the cannonballs drop one at a time across the length of the screen. It’s the most unimaginative way of handling any boss, let alone a final one.

As a prototype for better games to come, Donkey Kong Country is a good start. It’s never BAD from a level design point of view and the barrels that you fire out of are fun enough, though not quite barrels of fun. The controls are pretty good, and it’s easy to get a feel for how long you can roll or cartwheel off a platform and float in the air before you have to jump. But the level themes are basic and dull and there’s not a big enough cast of enemies. The bosses are REALLY bad, too, and since they take even longer to fight than enemies in Mario games, they come across as punishment for finishing a world instead of a reward.

The barrels are certainly a great idea and probably the one aspect of Donkey Kong Country that I feel they didn’t hold back on. They got every molecule of gameplay out of them without being boring. I really think they’re why this ended up such a potent franchise.

The test of time is cruel, and no games have a tougher time facing that test than games based around cutting edge graphics first and gameplay second. Since the graphics were the main selling point, I figure I should mention I thought the game was pretty damn ugly. The character models are fine, I guess, but the architecture is really rough, with backgrounds often looking like Sega CD levels of splotchy. The funny thing is, after Donkey Kong Country became the last big mega hit for the SNES, Nintendo would have given anything to have Yoshi’s Island look like this game, and the only reason it didn’t happen is because it was too far in development to change the entire art direction. That’s kind of hilarious, because Yoshi’s Island still looks good in 2025 including all its cutting edge special effects. Donkey Kong Country, well, doesn’t. These days, DKC is just another middle of the road SNES platformer that looked better in 1994 than other middle of the road platformers, but it did leave a franchise with much better games in its wake, so it has that going for it. Take that, Plok.
Verdict: NO! But I want to talk about one last thing.

Donkey Kong Country: Competition Cartridge

My best score for Competition Cartridge. I couldn’t find what the highest scores were but there’s people who have scores in the 3,000s. Most of my runs also ended around the same spot, too.

There’s a version of Donkey Kong Country that acts as a spiritual successor to the 1990 Nintendo World Championships cartridge (which I reviewed in Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review’s bonus section). It’s really well made, too and actually the one aspect of Donkey Kong Country that unambiguously holds up. The timer stops during all transitions. There’s no overworld map, so finishing one stage takes you automatically to the next. They even redid what’s inside the bonus rooms to make the scoring for entering those rooms more logical, and the scoring system is, you know, fine. I actually had a lot more fun playing this than I did in anything in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. It’s fast-paced and genuinely exciting. So, why isn’t THIS on Switch Online? Unless Blockbuster Video’s IP holders also hold the publishing rights (don’t rule this out) I can’t think of any good reason. If you get a chance it’s worth checking out, though it’s probably not worth the $5,000 it fetches on Ebay.
Verdict for Donkey Kong Country: Competition Edition: YES!

The math checks out.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong Country 1 review, Donkey Kong Country 1994 Review, Donkey Kong Country Competition Edition, Donkey Kong Country Competition Edition Review, Donkey Kong Country Review, Donkey Kong Country SNES review, Donkey Kong Country Switch Online Review, Gaming, Nintendo, nintendo-switch, Video Games

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (Game Boy Review)

July 30, 2025 by Indie Gamer Chick 5 Comments

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
Platform: Game Boy
First Released October 21, 1992
Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Mario Wiki
Color screenshots are from Super Mario Land 2 DX by toruzz
Link to the Patch

I really don’t think it’s Mario or Zelda or Kirby or Samus Aran that prove Nintendo is the Death Star of video games. It’s Wario. You know, the throwaway final boss in a Super Mario Bros. spin-off that went on to star in twenty games where his name appears in the title, and that’s not even considering that he’s one of the most popular characters in Mario Kart. Hell, Wario can even lay claim to being the star of a killer app for an entire video game platform. Okay, so it’s Virtual Boy, but it still counts. Meanwhile, Wart is like “f*cking seriously?”

I can’t imagine how mind-blowing seeing Super Mario Land 2 must have been in 1992. Mario as a Game Boy franchise went from looking like this:

To looking like this:

Cool. Nintendo set out to give players the Super Mario World experience on the Game Boy. A task that was basically impossible, but they really did give it the old college try. I suppose that’s why Mario Land 2 is maybe the weirdest game in the entire “Super Mario” franchise. Most of the rogues gallery are one-off enemies that don’t really feel like Mario baddies. This even includes things like pigs with cannons for snouts, a Kid Dracula-like vampire that shoots bats at Mario, and Jason Voorhees-like evil hockey masks complete with a f*cking knife sticking out of them. Seriously, what?

Super Mario Land 2 - 6 Golden Coins (USA, Europe) (patched)-250730-004651

Super Mario Land 2 - 6 Golden Coins (USA, Europe) (patched)-250730-011138

Super Mario Land 2 - 6 Golden Coins (USA, Europe) (patched)-250730-012412

6 Golden Coins feels like it has just enough Mario staples like the mushrooms and fire flowers, Goombas and Koopa Troopas, or the right kind of destructible blocks to pass as a Mario game and not some kind of weird ROM hack. I assume this was done because turning a popular colorized 16-bit game into an 8-bit black and white game was too tall an order. If they copied too many enemies, then all they would be making is a much, much lesser version of the game everyone really liked. Which is sort of what they ended up with anyway, but I do kind of understand why they created such a large roster of new enemies and locations. Probably the best thing I can say about Mario Land 2 is it still feels pretty fresh. Instead of the typical hill stages, fire stages, ice stages, etc, you go into outer space, a graveyard, or a giant mechanical statue that Mario built to honor himself, I guess.

For seemingly no reason, here’s a stage where the ground is shaped like LEGO. It doesn’t do anything different. It’s just a floor, but, look, it’s shaped like LEGO (or Nintendo’s LEGO knock-off)!

So, uh, this is the one that gets me assassinated but I didn’t really like Mario Land 2 at all. I didn’t hate it or anything. It controls fine and has decent jumping physics, but I was just really bored playing it. I imagine a child in 1992 would be more than satisfied with this brisk, easy-going Mario game that looks great but had its potential held back by the Game Boy’s hardware limitations. While the enemy sprites might look original, they couldn’t really do anything creative with their placement or have too many on screen at once. Hell, the hockey masks are just normal Goombas that look different when you get right down to it. Granted, most enemies in Super Mario games are cannon fodder, but these ones are especially easy to deal with. Some of the indestructible underwater ones had a tight squeeze to avoid, but otherwise, there’s just not enough threats in Mario Land 2. The bosses are all pretty weak too.

Tatanga, the final boss from Mario Land 1, was the second boss I faced and the first enemy that damaged me at all. About three seconds after he got me with one of his projectiles, I nailed all three hits against him in a row because they didn’t give him hardly any invincibility frames. He basically reverse-stomped himself into my feet.

If the level design was amazing, that wouldn’t be a problem. But despite the original backdrops, I found myself listless playing the stages. Even the ones structured like mazes are too basic for their own good, and the act of exploring isn’t very rewarding because so many of the unlockable bonus stages feel samey. Only one of them provides any reward besides just an extra stage for the sake of an extra stage, and that’s a shortcut in the Macro Zone that skips two of the levels and takes you straight to the zone’s final stage. Okay, so it was cute that the moon got pissed off at me for getting the Space Zone’s bonus level, but the novelty wore off when I had to actually play the stage and it was just more of the same. I don’t mind the level count, but the bonus levels need a reason to exist. Hell, there’s even a random level in the map, the “Scenic Course” that just sort of is there for no reason besides “why not?” It does nothing. It unlocks nothing. It’s pointless. I think Nintendo was capable of better than that by 1992.

Hey, don’t look at me like that! You’re the one that only has two levels.

So, yeah, I’m not a fan of Super Mario Land 2. The rabbit ears aren’t a very fun power-up (they’re basically the racoon tail without the soaring through the sky part), the game is far too easy, and things like how carrying a turtle shell is done by balancing it on your head because they couldn’t squeeze in an animation of Mario carrying the shell thanks to the hardware limits made me cringe instead of smirk. Really, the only purpose Mario Land 2 serves today is being a reminder that ALL games are a product of their time. Most of Nintendo’s catalog holds up remarkably well to the test of time. It’s their most astonishing achievement. But the Game Boy wasn’t ever really meant to do that. It was designed to provide a lower cost portable experience that was good enough for the standards of over three decades ago.

You know, having the Three Little Pigs would have been a cute idea if I hadn’t already fought a completely different species of pig that shoots cannonballs at me. Do YOU guys shoot cannonballs? No? Then how come that thing wasn’t the boss and you are?

I actually tried to do this review back in January, when I reviewed Super Mario Land, but I got bored pretty quickly and shut it off. I gave the original game a YES! because, rough as it is, it’s a unique Mario experience unlike any other Super Mario game before or since, something you can’t really say about Mario Land 2. The two games have a lot in common. Like 6 Golden Coins, Mario Land 1 has unique-to-it locations, enemies, and themes. I guess I just like the idea of Mario exploring Ancient Egypt, Easter Island, and a world based on Chinese folklore more than lock blocks or a graveyard. But it’s not just that. Mario Land 1 feels like a one-off Mario gameplay experience. Mario Land 2’s gameplay is just the best approximation of Mario World they could muster within the limits of the Game Boy. An impressive engineering feat? Sure.

The level design just never rises above being okay. I’m happy I waited until after playing every other 80s and 90s Super Mario game to do 6 Golden Coins, because it really aged the worst out of any other game in the series. It just offers so very little that holds up. All that it really has left is a lot of personality, but hell, every Mario game has that, don’t you think?

Fated to age well? Nope, and that’s okay, because it worked for the kids of 1992. I’m happy for them. It’s just not 1992 anymore, and from the moment I booted up Mario Land 2, I couldn’t wait to be done with it. God, I really hope they don’t remake this one. Oh, Nintendo will eventually, but when it happens, I hope it’s a full reimagining with new level design and power-ups that keeps the basic frame work. The idea of Mario Land 2 is fine, but it’s a product of its time, and that product is about thirty years past its expiration date. Thanks for giving us Wario, though. I do like Wario.
Verdict: NO!

Filed under Retro Reviews Tagged with Gaming, Mario, Mario Land 2 Game Boy Review, Mario Land 2 Review, Nintendo, nintendo-switch, Super Mario Land 2 Review, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins DX, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins Game Boy Review, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins Review, Super Mario reviews, Switch Online Reviews, Video Games

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Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Parkaka Athletic LandWait! Don’t Go! I swear this isn’t a joke review!Platform: Colecovision and MSXReleased in 1984Developed by KonamiNEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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Athletic WorldIndie Remake of Athletic Land/Cabbage Patch KidsPlatform: Game Boy – Super Game Boy EnhancedReleased April 12, 2023Developed by MHZ GamesDownload the ROM – Pay What You WantLink to Store for Physical Copy

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HAS PUNCH-OUT!! RETIRED ON ITS STOOL?

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Punch-Out!! Platform: Arcade Released February 17, 1984 Designed by Genyo Takeda Developed by Nintendo Sold Separately via Arcade Archives

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Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!! Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Unauthorized ROM Hack of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! Released April 20, 2010 (Updated March 25, 2016) Developed by Master Phred Link to Patch at RomHacking.Net I use THIS TOOL to apply patches.

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Luigi’s Mansion Platform: Nintendo GameCube Released September 14, 2001 (JP) November 18, 2001 (US) Directed by Hideki Konno Published by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2

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Donkey Kong BananzaPlatform: Nintendo Switch 2Released July 17, 2025Directed by Wataru Tanaka and Kazuya TakahashiDeveloped by Nintendo$69.99 (normally $79.99) chopped down a mountain with the edge of my hand in the making of this review.

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW!I’m awarding Bananza a YES! verdict.That’s because there’s far more good than bad in this game.But I also HATED the last third of Bananza, and I explain why.And there will be spoilers!

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Baseball Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom Released December 7, 1983 Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

Arcade Archives: Vs. Baseball Platform: Nintendo Switch Original Platform: Arcade Released June 19, 2020 Arcade Release: April, 1984 Originally Developed by Nintendo Re-Release Published by Hamster $7.99 struck out in the making of this review.

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Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics IIPlatform: Nintendo Entertainment SystemReleased March, 1994Directed by Genyo Takeda and Makoto WadaDeveloped by NintendoNO MODERN RELEASE

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Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Platform: Game Boy First Released January 21, 1994 Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa Developed by Nintendo NO MODERN RELEASE* Listing on Mario Wiki

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Donkey Kong Countryaka Super Donkey Kong (Japan)Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment SystemFirst Released November 18, 1994Directed by Tim Stamper and Chris StamperDeveloped by Rare Ltd.Published by NintendoAvailable with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)Listing at Mario Wiki

Donkey Kong Country: Competition Cartridge

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Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park
aka Athletic Land
Wait! Don’t Go! I swear this isn’t a joke review!
Platform: Colecovision and MSX
Released in 1984
Developed by Konami
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park
Platform: Atari 2600
Unreleased Completed Prototype
Designed by Ed Temple
Developed by Coleco
NEVER BEEN (officially) RELEASED

Athletic World
Indie Remake of Athletic Land/Cabbage Patch Kids
Platform: Game Boy – Super Game Boy Enhanced
Released April 12, 2023
Developed by MHZ Games
Download the ROM – Pay What You Want
Link to Store for Physical Copy

Punch-Out!!
Platform: Arcade
Released February 17, 1984
Designed by Genyo Takeda
Developed by Nintendo
Sold Separately via Arcade Archives

Super Punch-Out!!
Platform: Arcade
Released September, 1984
Designed by Genyo Takeda
Developed by Nintendo
Sold Separately via Arcade Archives

Arm Wrestling
Platform: Arcade
Released May, 1985
Designed by Genyo Takeda
Developed by Nintendo
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
aka Punch-Out!!
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released October, 1987*
Directed by Genyo Takeda
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

Power Punch II
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released June, 1992
Developed by Beam Software
Published by American Softworks
Sold Separately on Steam
Available on Evercade Piko Interactive Collection Vol 1.

Super Punch-Out!!
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Released October 24, 1994
Directed by Makoto Wada and Yasuyuki Oyagi
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

Phred’s Cool Punch Out 2 – Turbo!!
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Unauthorized ROM Hack of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
Released April 20, 2010 (Updated March 25, 2016)
Developed by Master Phred
Link to Patch at RomHacking.Net
I use THIS TOOL to apply patches.

Luigi’s Mansion
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Released September 14, 2001 (JP) November 18, 2001 (US)
Directed by Hideki Konno
Published by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack EXCLUSIVELY on Switch 2

Donkey Kong Bananza
Platform: Nintendo Switch 2
Released July 17, 2025
Directed by Wataru Tanaka and Kazuya Takahashi
Developed by Nintendo
$69.99 (normally $79.99) chopped down a mountain with the edge of my hand in the making of this review.

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW!
I’m awarding Bananza a YES! verdict.
That’s because there’s far more good than bad in this game.
But I also HATED the last third of Bananza, and I explain why.
And there will be spoilers!

Baseball
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom
Released December 7, 1983
Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

Arcade Archives: Vs. Baseball
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Original Platform: Arcade
Released June 19, 2020
Arcade Release: April, 1984
Originally Developed by Nintendo
Re-Release Published by Hamster
$7.99 struck out in the making of this review.

Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released March, 1994
Directed by Genyo Takeda and Makoto Wada
Developed by Nintendo
NO MODERN RELEASE

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
Platform: Game Boy
First Released January 21, 1994
Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa
Developed by Nintendo
NO MODERN RELEASE*
Listing on Mario Wiki

Donkey Kong Country
aka Super Donkey Kong (Japan)
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 18, 1994
Directed by Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper
Developed by Rare Ltd.
Published by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Mario Wiki