Embrace the Weirdness: In Defense of TMNT 1 on the NES

I feel like, as with many games released during the NES's lifetime, there have been these waves of popular opinion, thanks largely to the internet, where a game that was liked at the time is ripped apart, then everyone talks about how awful it is, then later on everyone kind of pulls back and realizes that maybe it's not that bad. The most extreme case of this happening was probably E.T. on Atari 2600, which at the time of its release I used to enjoy playing, but gradually it became known as the 'worst game of all-time'. Now I feel that people have backed off a bit and realized that there are far worse games, and that outside circumstances meant that it merely wasn't the game that was loftily envisioned by Howard Scott Warshaw at the time. I feel like the first game based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has had a similar rollercoaster ride of sentiments, and I'm not sure where people usually fall now on whether it's good or not. I'm not sure if I can objectively say that it's one of the best TMNT games of all time, but it certainly still one of my favorites.

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A Childhood Dream Fulfilled: Usagi Yojimbo in TMNT: Shredder's Revenge

In just a little over a week, there's going to be a major DLC update for last year's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge game. In addition to a new mode, costume options and stages, a new character will be playable, Miyamoto Usagi from Usagi Yojimbo. With this addition, something that started as a playground rumor when I was just ten years old, and something I wanted to badly to be real, will finally happen.

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Pixelated Proton Packs: A Look at Fan-Created Ghostbusters Games

Ghostbusters games have been really hit or miss over the years. Sure, fans have gotten Ghostbusters: The Video Game, which was essentially a Ghostbusters 3 long before Ghostbusters Afterlife. But we've also had The Real Ghostbusters on Game Boy, which had so little to do with the license that it was actually just a Mickey Mouse puzzle platformer that they changed the character art in.

So, I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few Ghostbusters games that fans have either taken it upon themselves to make entirely from scratch or tweaked other existing Ghostbusters games to improve them in some way.

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This Celeste/Mario mashup rom hack is pretty amazing!

I'm always on the lookout for an interesting new rom hack of a Super Mario title. Some of them give you new levels with some graphical changes and it makes it feel like you found some DLC for a classic game, while others make big changes like new powerups and abilities that make it seem like this could almost pass for a sequel that just never got released. Celeste Mario's Zap & Dash! is another category, in which so much as been changed that it's not even a sequel to Mario 1, it's an entirely different game!

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A Journey into Dreamland: Little Nemo on the NES

About a month ago I was introduced to the YouTube channel of Hungry Goriya, and I honestly don't know how I hadn't heard of them before (proof that the YouTube algorithm must be awful)! They had a video called 9 NES Favorites (So far), and the way she spoke of these games made me want to really try them for myself. Not try as in fire up the emulator and play for a few minutes and put them away kind of try, but really sit down and try to learn these games. Two of them on the list I had finished already, Kid Icarus and Darkwing Duck, and I'd only played a few of the others.

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Fast Food, Faster Fun: The New McDonald's Game Boy Game

Yesterday certain parts of the internet were going crazy when the news dropped that McDonald's had made a new game as a marketing tie-in for their Grimace birthday shake. While brands making games for the internet is not new and has been going on since the days of Flash, for whatever reason it was decided that their game should be in the form of a new Game Boy Color game. It's free and completely playable on their web page here, but people quickly ripped the ROM and loaded it up on original hardware to discover that it is indeed a true Game Boy Color game.

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