Palette Swapping

The Nintendo Entertainment System was, for its time, very powerful. This was a relative term, however, and the console has some limitations that, by modern standards, are absolutely suffocating. It’s little wonder, then, the variety of creative solutions employed to work around these limits and create the games that made the Nintendo the console that restored hope to the electronic games market.

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1986 in closing

The year 1986 saw some of the worst man-made disasters in world history: the Challenger disaster, the Chernobyl meltdown, the Sumburgh crash, the release of a new Slayer album, Hands Across America and the sudden emergence of awful one-on-one fighting games for the Nintendo.

The world would recover, however, and go on to make 1987 the best year that ever happened!

Damsels in Distress

Although Mario and Luigi are naught but lowly plumbers by trade, they have well proved themselves renaissance men, having dabbled in such vocations as pest control, demolitions, and sports refereeing, to say nothing of their racing careers, ghost hunting expeditions, biohazard cleanup services and their disastrous forays into the hospitality industry and private education.

When it comes down to it, though, their most successful gigs have been in relation to the rescue of damsels in distress (DID for those of you in the biz). Today, I’d like to identify and examine the damsels of distress within the Mario franchise.

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1985 in closing

Well, to be honest, the Nintendo’s release titles do not, for the most part, stand the test of time. Hell, to be honest, we only played some of them because they were the only video games available for the system, and we sure as hell couldn’t go back to the ATARI 2600 after seeing graphics that consisted of multiple pixels in different colors.

The Nintendo Entertainment System was probably the most important achievement of 1985! Forget Reagan meeting Gorbachev and all that other Cold-war-era BS! The Nintendo was where it’s at!

Going onward from here, we have a lot more games to cover each year, and I intend to give full reviews only to those that deserve it. For most of them (those rated less than 4 and not awful or significant enough to warrant further exposition), I’ll just give a couple sentences and a screencap. For some of them, it’s far, far more than they deserve.