NES

The Famicom can be perceived as the birthplace of kusoge. While bad games have existed since the creation of the medium, the origin of the term itself is murky but generally is believed to have been coined in reference to a Famicom game. Hoshi wo Miru Hito, translating roughly as Stargazer, was one such game that rose to the rank of kusoge no densetsu (crap game of legend). It’s easy to see why. RPGs blew up in Japan following the release of Dragon Quest in 1986, and here is a game that was quick to capitalize on that…

8BitLegit has announced that Dead Tomb, a new NES game based on an old lost game, is soon to be released for Switch, Xbox, and the actual NES. While Dead Tomb is a new NES game built from the ground up, it’s actually based on a game called Temporal Inc., which was a game for the Videoway, a very unique subscription-based content delivery system based out of Quebec, Canada. Among its features was the ability to play 8-bit games, which would be loaded into the system’s RAM, which, obviously, emptied once you were done.…

When navigating the squalid wastelands of video games, I often must turn to reputation to figure out where to stick my fingers. In the West, few games have a reputation for being awful quite like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This is entirely because of the Angry Video Game Nerd, who I respect but isn’t always the best source since he’s primarily aimed at providing entertainment through a schtick. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been singled out by him as one of the darkest spots in the NES library. I have to disagree. Oh,…

The Hammerin’ Harry/Daiku no Gen-San series continued from 1990 to the last game, Hammerin’ Hero, in 2009. However, only the first game was released in arcades. After the original Hammerin’ Harry, the series shifted entirely to home platforms. Whether or not a game in the series would be released in the West, however, was another matter. In fact, only the arcade original and the aforementioned Hammerin’ Hero would reach North America, though two other titles would at least find their way to Europe. The second Famicom/NES…

Tetris always endures. The blocks keep coming and the game itself gets reinterpreted, twisted and remade for new generations. Now, a 13-year-old boy has become the first person to ‘beat’ the NES version of Tetris, 34 years after it was first released.Yes, ‘beat’ goes in quotes because there’s no way to complete the game. Instead, he played such a flawless game that he forced a kill screen, from an overflow error. While he’s the first person to do this, but not the first time it’s been achieved: An AI program called…

Tetris is one of the most popular and enduring video games of all time, with versions on just about every console, computer and gadget. Many of these iterations have endings baked into story modes and the like, but the original endless mode was considered unbeatable by humans, until now. A 13-year-old boy has become the first person to ‘beat’ the NES version of Tetris, 34 years after it originally released back in 1989, as announced by YouTuber aGameScout.The reason we put ‘beat’ in quotes is due to the nature of the…

Blue Scuti The NES version of Tetris has been around for over 34 years, but a human has just completed it for the first time. Tetris on NES does not have a traditional ending; beating this game means reaching a “kill screen” on level 157 that causes the game to crash. The time and physical skill required to accomplish this on actual hardware seemed near-impossible for a long time, so only artificial intelligence playing the game perfectly could reach this point. According to 404 Media, a new NES controller technique…

The NES version of Tetris has been beaten by a 13-year-old child – 37 years after it was first released. It was previously believed that it was only possible to hit level 38 before the game basically became impossible to play due to speed, but in 2021 a new mechanic called ‘rolling’ was discovered which allowed players to get even further in the game. After a series of investigations by players, it was discovered that a kill screen could be hit at level 155. In December 2023, Blue Scuti and Justin ‘Fractual’ Yu – the…

Classic puzzle game Tetris has been around for over three decades, and in that time, plenty of people have reached its various endings, usually by clearing four rows of bricks at once like a digital demolitioner. That’s a challenge in and of itself, but now, someone has taken the concept of “beating Tetris” to the extreme by playing the NES game so hard it straight-up crashed, a phenomenon also known as the “kill screen.”As reported by 404 Media, 13-year-old competitive Tetris player Blue Scuti became the first human to…

I have really been looking forward to Retro-Bit’s NES reissue of 1991’s Hammerin’ Harry. However, in retrospect, this is partially due to me getting it confused with Don Doko Don, a 1989 arcade game in Taito’s single-screen format. If I knew what I was thinking about, I’d be even more excited. Hammerin’ Harry is a port of Irem’s 1990 arcade game, which was called Daiku no Gen-san: Beranme-chō Sōdōki in Japan. While Irem is perhaps best remembered for their R-Type series, their back catalog is built from an extremely…