The banner at the top of the screen takes a significant part of the website, and it’s a bit distracting. It should be scroll with the website, and be updated a bit. It’d add alot of charm to the website.
– Andrew Rivas
Paul: Done! Or at least, sort of done. Hope you at least sort of approve!
Favorite Part of the Last Issue
Dear GameCola,
My favorite part of this issue was Low-Rent Adventures in Japan. I’ll be your laugh track, Richo!
Also, I enjoyed the new format (although it might have prevented me from finding where you guys posted pictures of your mountains of Christmas loot—did you forget that this year?)
Also, I have a DCW request to pass on from some friends—they were debating who would win, Mega Man vs. the videogame reincarnation of 50 Cent, and I said I knew one way to find out…
– Heather
Paul: Your wish is my command, Heather! Check out Digital Championship Wrestling this month to see who wins in the epic encounter of Mega Man vs. 50 Cent.
Also, sadly, Matt and I declined to write up Christmas: UNLEASHED this year, due partially to a lack of interest on our part and the part of our readers (or so we thought), and due also to not actually receiving much in the way of gaming gear this year.
I like the staff pictures. It’s a good preview to what will be on “America’s Most Wanted” in the next 20 years.
– Rick Franzen
My favorite part of the issue is how Paul’s not gonna be able to know the difference between real feedback and fake Eric feedback.
– Paul
Zack’s review of A Bard’s Tale (NES)
Yes, most NES games were shite. And to this end, the NES catalogue is the worst besmircher of retro games ever, because many great games were ported to the NES where they instantly turned into putrescence. Since folks in the USA learnt all their chops from the NES (unfortunately), they review these ports as if they’d been born on the NES. And everyone walks away saying ,’Yeah, Bard’s Tale was shit, Wizardry was shit, Karateka was shit,’ etc. etc. Which ends up being an insult to fine and important games that are only crap on the NES ports.
So I’m sayinig to you, and to retro reviewers in general – and especially on these frikkin NES games – do a little research to see if the game came from somewhere else, and don’t leave everyone with the impression that the NES game WAS the game. 90% of the time it was just the worst port of something that’s really good on its home turf. If you’ve got time to be interested in 8-bit games, to read about em or write about em, I believe you’ve got time to do that in the interests of accuracy and enlightening people.
Zack: You are right that I probably should have mentioned that A Bard’s Tale was originally a PC game that was ported to the NES, but I didn’t really want to talk about A Bard’s Tale. That’s why there’s only three or four paragraphs concerning it. Besides, as I’ve said before GameCola is a console newsletter, which means that I don’t give a fuck about PC games.
I have played the PC version of A Bard’s Tale, and I still say it sucks. Albeit, the graphics are better, and certain gameplay elements are improved, it is still a shitty game. I admit that its inherent shittiness may not be the game’s fault, since it happens to be a part of a generally shitty genre. Those 3d-maze DnD-esque RPG’s were all awful.
Though none of this really matters, since the point of that article was no longer about A Bard’s Tale, but it sort of mutated into a rant against retro-gaming, and retro-game reviewing. I really don’t care if any my readers came away from the article with an accurate or flawed view of A Bard’s Tale. I only wanted them to see that retro-gaming and a retro-game reviewing are wastes of their time, and so I stand by what I wrote.
Guest review of Halo 2 (MXB)
I happen to know some people who would slaughter you in your sleep for even considering giving Halo 2 less than a 9.5. Granted, Halo 2 is a really great game, but some people take it too far. Thank you for giving a fair review.
Cheat Codes for Life
The pure despair that exists within the eyes of those gaming champions is simply haunting.
Casey’s Top Picks for 2006
katamari for the DS is no more. Although the touch screen would have been the interesting feature to the game, it has been moved to the PSP.
Though someone here may have said something of that already.
