Set Side B

Jeremy Parish’s NES World Vol. 1

It’s too late to inform you of preorders, those ended yesterday, but Jeremy Parish, whose Video Works series is, along with Chrontendo and Atari Archive, among the best and most informative video game history series on Youtube, and the whole internet, is preparing to sell The NES Era Vol. I, a book that’s as complete a picture of the early 3rd generation video game world in Japan as has ever written. If you’ve been following the channel you’ve seen reviews of strange and obscure games have hardly ever been heard off outside of jolly old Nippon.

This promo compilation presents a good selection of the games covered both on his channel and his upcoming book (2 1/2 minutes):

It is true that publisher Limited Run Games has a book in the works from me about Mystery Dungeon, but I’d be posing this here regardless. It’s an important work, and if it’s as fun as the video series then it’s an essential purchase when it comes out. It’s made of candy!

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Jeremy Parish Covers SMS Shinobi

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but Youtube is largely a wasteland when it comes to game opinion, criticism and history media. Generally, if it has to do with games, you have to sift through a whole lot of crap to get to the good stuff.

The gold standards in this wretched field are Dr Sparkle’s Chrontendo and spinoff serieses, which seek to review every NES and Famicom game in a decade-plus quest, and Jeremy Parish’s NES Works and its own spinoffs. Our post’s topic today has to do with one of those spinoffs, SMS Works, which has at last come to one of the Sega Master System’s defining titles: Shinobi.

One of the best things about Jeremy’s videos is the context they bring. They try hard to mention other games that came out around the same time, and how ideas would be bandied about between the different developers, repeated and refined. His videos are the only source I know of that would realize, that could realize, that Shinobi was heavily influenced by Namco’s spies-vs-tokusatsu-creeps arcade game Rolling Thunder.

So then, at 15 minutes long, here is that video.

SMS Works: Shinobi (Youtube, 15 minutes)

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Behind the Code: Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

For some reason there’s been a lot of Youtube videos lately that fit our eclectic purview, so here’s a code-heavy dive into infamous NES disasterpiece Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

It’s 19 minutes long, and is even geekier than is usual for us, going into a disassembly of the game’s machine code in its quest to make the game marginally less awful.

As long as we’re on the topic, here’s Jeremy Parish’s NES Works episode on Dr. J & Hyde, which is also 19 minutes, and also covers the somewhat better (but not hugely so) game Amagon:

While we’re on the subject, did you know that Jekyll & Hyde has a secret ending? Both endings are shown here (4 minutes):

The “bad” ending is the normal one, and shorter, but is arguably a happier conclusion to the story. To get it, all you have to do is get to the end of Stage 6 with Jekyll. That’s all.

To get the other ending, get to Stage 6 with Jekyll, then turn into Hyde and get to the end of his version of the stage. Usually, if Hyde gets as far into his level as Jekyll has gotten into his, he’s struck by lightning and dies. But in this level he’ll be allowed to reach the end of his version of the level for some reason, where there’s a boss! Beat it, and when you return to Jekyll’s world the enemies will be gone, and he’ll be free to finish the level without harassment. However, ending events will be different….

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Jeremy Parish Covers NES Friday the 13th

Few games for the NES have been better treated by hindsight than Friday the 13th. At the time it was regarded as a terrible game with difficult play and nearly impossible to win.

But even then there were things about it that indicated that there might be a little more going on then than was first apparent. Publisher LJN was known for making terrible games, but they outsourced their work to different companies that often weren’t actually that bad, just given weird properties for video games (The Karate Kid? Jaws? T&C Surf Designs??) and approaching them with experimental gameplay. And for their part, all of LJN’s games are technically sound, and manage to hit their 60fps frame rate targets, which is much more than you can say for many other NES games, including some from big manufacturers like Capcom, like Ghosts & Goblins and 1942, both implemented by Micronics, or Strider, which as we’ve noted before is a mess.

The critical reappraisal for Friday the 13th began with TripleZeroFilms made a well-produced 76-page PDF strategy guide for it, that exalted its good qualities. There is a Metafilter thread, from user Pope Guilty, on it that may also be of interest.

It has come time, as we all knew it must, for Jeremy Parish to collide with Jason’s axe, and as befits the game’s redemption, his video is divided in half, first about its reception at the time, then later now that it’s appreciated a little better. Just don’t turn it off after the 8 minute mark, there’s still more than half of it to go!

The masked axe-slinger: Friday the 13th, NES Works 113 (Youtube, 18 minutes)

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Jeremy Parish’s Segaiden Reaches the Master System Era

I worry that he’ll never finish his many Youtube game history projects, but Jeremy Parish has hit an important milestore as Segaiden, his Sega-specific series, reaches the beginning of the Master System era! In addition to the console itself three games are covered this time, including the pack-in that’s so packed-in that it’s included on the system’s circuit board itself.

There’s no shortage of game history videos out there, but Jeremy’s work is among the best, tieing the other collection of relentlessly-complete game cataloging projects, Dr. Sparkle’s Chrontendo, Chronsega and Chronturbo. I find that neither Jeremy nor Sparkle’s projects replace the other, but instead look at their subjects from different angles. Jeremy Parish has more of a view of context, both from other games and history, while the various Chrons look directly at each game’s play.

But importantly, neither of them succumb to the many excesses of Youtube gaming culture: they aren’t hyperedited, they aren’t overloaded with sound effects and swishy graphics, neither of them feel like they’re aimed at 14-year-olds, and no video in any of their series looks like it’s trying to complete with Tiktok. Whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing–well, let me clarify your thinking for you. It’s a good thing. It’s a very good thing.

Segaiden #30: Master System, Snail Maze, and Hang On & Safari Hunt (Youtube, 19 minutes)

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NES Works Presents The Portopia Serial Murder Mystery

Portopia is the biggest missing piece, to many US enthusiasts, of the history of Japanese gaming. It led to the creation of Dragon Quest, but it had a huge influence all on its own, which can be felt in a wide variety of other Famicom titles, including some that did make it to the US. Why do The Goonies II and Dr. Chaos have those weird room-based adventure sections? It’s because of Portopia, trying to mix its kind of menu-based first-person gameplay with the pre-existing side-scrolling platforming game style popularized by Super Mario Bros. It seemed random to Western players at the time, but Japanese players would have known exactly what those games were trying to do.

We’ve mentioned Jeremy Parish and his various Works projects before, and they’re always interesting and informative, a great antidote to the strident style of many popular Youtubers, and this one is especially important to anyone seeking to understand how the Japanese game industry grew and evolved in the Famicom era.

Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken retrospective: Beefing in Kobe | NES Works Gaiden (17 minutes)

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Alternate Title for Cobra Command

Just learned today from Jeremy Parish’s NES Works, Data East’s Cobra Command had an alternate title planned in case they ran with trouble releasing under that title, possibly due to its name’s similarity to that of the bad guys from the G.I. Joe cartoon show. According to The Cutting Room Floor, that title was, well, not so great:

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Video: Jeremy Parish’s Video Works

I figured I’d post all three of the major platform compilation projects I’ve been following. The second is Jeremy Parish’s Video Works, which is a collection of a number of mostly-ongoing subprojects: NES Works (1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, “Gaiden”), Game Boy Works (1989, 1990, Color 1998, Advance 2001, and Gaiden), SEGAiden, SNES Works (1991, Extra and Gaiden), and Virtual Boy Works (which is complete). The first link up there has everything; the others are in various states of completion.

What I appreciate most about Jeremy’s many series is how they’re informative without being dry (he knows his stuff!), interesting without being pedantic, and lively and entertaining without being obnoxious, obnoxiousness being a sin that I charge against many many gaming YouTube channels. If your videos whisk cut-out elements around the screen, their passage marked by swooping sound effects, then you are not going to get a link from me if I can in any way help it, so states the doom of rodneylives, and of Set Side B too if I have something to say.

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