No way you can mess around in this game, even on the easiest setting they don't give you much time!

Kagoshima is a Donkey Kong kind of place.

Now here is something crazy, four unreleased games on a single advertisement page! Poor Hi Tech, you did not have enough time.

I recall a time when the number of "Megs" a game had was a big deal. 24 Megs is only 3 MB! It seems quaint with some games being well over 100 GB now a days.

I am looking through some old EGMs, and I noted that Mortal Kombat 3 made the cover in February, March, April, May, August, September and October 1995. It was like it was the only game that mattered that year! Considering the era, you have to wonder if there was a sponsorship deal.

It knocked over the giant banyan tree in front of our institute. 😢

I haven't done a Link to the Past Randomizer for a while. All dungeons, keysanity settings, as I usually do. I probably could have done it in less than 2:30 if I skipped some items at the end, but I wanted that gold sword!

Square showed an early version of Chrono Trigger at the 1994 Shoshinkai. It appears that they might have originally planned to have a four character party. Alternatively, one robot is attacking Chrono, I don't know. This is from the January 1995 issue of Nintendo Power.

In Super Castlevania IV, the rotating castle of Stage 4-3 brought the SNES to its knees. On Super ZSNES, it runs smooth as butter. Very impressive!

When I first found out about Super ZSNES, my immediate thought would be, what would Near think about this? After giving this a go, I think they would be very pleased about the direction the zsnes devs went with this.

I might be playing Super Mario World in wide-screen with enhanced graphics and uncompressed sound samples, but I still play zsnes the same way I did 22 years ago - with my Super Smart Joy SNES controller adapter. Lik Sang sent me one since I was a moderator on the zsnes forums!

I got some accessories for my new car. ;)

Mario event at Kumamoto Station!

Watching Chico-chan this morning and one of the questions was "why do people in Japan associate the colour purple with poison?" The cultural impact of Dragon Quest V was so great that the purple colour of the poison swamps caused all games to use purple to mean poison.

Clearly the devs of this game were expecting people like me to poke around. ;)

Who wants to play Asagiri Quest, an RPG set in the town of Asagiri? Asagiri is a small town in rural Kumamoto.

When you see this, what do you think it is (Japanese residents, do not give it away!)?

There is a temporary Pokemon shop in a shopping center near where I live. They have this massive Pikachu at the entrance.

I am definitely happy to celebrate 30 years of Chrono Trigger! My old cart that I have had since the 90s is not doing so well in the Japanese climate, though.

New Tekken just dropped! (Note, in this case "Tekken" means something like "wise building" rather than "iron fist".)

I bought a bunch of Yellow Magic Orchestra CDs a couple of weeks ago. It cannot be overstated how much Solid State Survivor influenced the sound of Super NES soundtracks.

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up the Final Fantasy VI soundtrack, so I now have IV-VII. One CD is not enough for IV!

The Pokemon cheering for the future of Nagasaki, Denryu! I have to admit I don't know enough about Pokemon to know the English name.

I am at the Nagasaki Lantern Festival, and someone put a Luigi hat on this camel.

Did you know there is a funk/jazz remix of the Chrono Trigger soundtrack? I picked this up today.

I was retro shopping today and saw the Final Fantasy Mystic Quest soundtrack. It is one of the best soundtracks on the SNES, but 8800 yen is a steep price. I later saw a boxed copy of the SFC game for 2500 yen, as a point of comparison.

Nintendo Power really hyped of Ultrabots, a mech first person shooter, when the SNES first came out. They even included it as a poster! It ended up being cancelled for the SNES, and the PC version came out in 1993. This is the first mention of the game, in the September 1991 issue.

The poster in the July 1991 issue of Nintendo Power shows a screenshot from Final Fantasy IV with a party lineup that is not possible in the final game.

One of my favourite pieces of Nintendo Power trivia was how Steve Wozniak was obsessed with getting the highest score for Game Boy Tetris in the high scores listings. He ended up having to start using an alias because Nintendo Power stopped publishing his scores!

Sutte Hakkun is an amazing game that has been added to Nintendo Switch Online. Make sure to check it out.