It’s 1987. Your ravenous love for Nintendo’s new console leads you to rent every new game released for the system, craving the joy of each new experience. One day, a stranger walks up to you on the street and offers you a device that lets you play nearly all the NES games ever released (or ever will be released) around the world on a single magic cartridge. What do you say?

Twenty years ago, such a contraption would have seemed laughably impossible. But that same mind-blowing scenario (minus the mysterious stranger) has become a reality in 2007 with RetroZone’s PowerPak NES flash cartridge. Brian Parker, the man behind RetroZone and the PowerPak, put forth a monumental effort to bring this technically challenging dream product to market.

The PowerPak retains the familiar form factor of classic licensed NES cartridges, albeit rendered in a translucent orange plastic. Cut from top edge of each PowerPak is a notch through which a standard compact flash (CF) card may be conveniently inserted or removed. Turn on a NES with the PowerPak cart inside, and you’ll see an on-screen menu that lists all the games on the CF card. Pick one from the list, you’ll be playing the game as if you had the game’s original cartridge in the console.

With a flash “multicart” like the PowerPak, NES users no longer need to switch cartridges between games, except for the few games that the PowerPak doesn’t support (see below). Legal vagaries be damned: as an owner of over 250 NES cartridges, I find the convenience of this feature worth the price of the PowerPak alone.

[ Continue reading [ VC&G Review ] PowerPak NES Flash Cartridge » ]

Ever heard of an Internet TV show called The Game Room? If not, then don’t fret. The show, hosted by Mark Bussler and David Crosson, streamed from an obscure website called FromUSAlive.com for just under a year, between November 1999 and October 2000. Even as an active member of the classic gaming community on the Internet since 1995, I had never heard of the show until Inecom’s facetiously-subtitled Classic Game Room: The Rise and Fall of the Internet’s Greatest Video Game Review Show popped up recently. This flawed comedy compilation definitely entertains, but it’s clearly destined for the back shelf of a niche audience.

[ Continue reading VC&G Review: Classic Game Room DVD » ]

While strolling through my local World Market store last year, a familiar-looking candy tin caught my eye. Upon further inspection, I realized that it was shaped like a NES control pad. Trying to avoid another impulse purchase, I passed up the opportunity.

Fast forward to yesterday, when my wife comes home from shopping and announces that she has a present for me.

“Close your eyes, and put out your hand.”

I reluctantly comply.

“Now spin around three times.”

As I slow down, she places a cold, rattling metal box on my palm. I open my eyes. To my astonishment, I find a brand new tin of Nintendo Power mints floating in thin air — just above the floor, as I collapse.

It was particularly good gift, since I had co-incidentally been thinking about them recently because of my last “Game Boy Bubble Gum” Retro Scan. Some gifts are worth a bruise or two.

The Tin’s the Thing

For $1.49 (US), you get about 84 white, pill-shaped mints in a stylish metal package. Unfortunately, I found the mints’ flavor to be somewhat lacking: unlike Altoids, these are “curiously weak” mints with a slightly unpleasant chalky consistency. But the tin alone is probably worth the price. Therein lies all the novelty, of course, and the real reason anyone would buy this product.

The tin’s two-part design of smooth, rounded aluminum closes firmly and is well-constructed. It’s about the same size as a real NES controller, which is particularly cool. The printed control-pad effect is significantly enhanced by the slightly embossed buttons and D-pad on the lid of the tin. And after you finish all your mints, you can store your Nintendo DS games and extra styluses in it. Or dead bugs — it’s your choice.

Why the manufacturer branded these mints with “Nintendo Power” (the official magazine of all things Nintendo) is unknown to me. It would have been much cooler if they referenced the Nintendo Entertainment System (in words) somewhere on the package. Barring that, they could have at least called it the “Mintendo Entertainment System.”

Now you’re eating with power. Minty power.

Imagine if I told you that there was a legal alternative to GameTap that nearly nobody knows about, costs half as much as GameTap (yet is partly free), and beat GameTap to market by at least three years. Well, I guess that was a dumb way to start this, because you don’t have to imagine — I’m actually telling you: such a service exists, and it’s called Console Classix.

Console Classix could best be described as “the world’s first online video game rental service.” Its creators have found an ingenious way to circumvent all the usual legal hassles associated with providing classic games for legal play over the Internet and on your home computer. How did they manage this incredible feat, you ask? Well, they take advantage of a loophole in copyright law that all movie and video game rental stores use: it’s legal to lend a legally obtained (i.e. bought) copy of a movie or game to someone else, as long as you don’t transmit or distribute new copies of said movie/game to others. By extension, Console Classix dumps the ROM data from unique copies of games it physically owns on a one-to-one basis and lends out the cartridges in digital form to users of the service. When a user plays a game through the Console Classix service, that copy of the game is “checked out” and no one else can play it while the first customer is using it. However, if Console Classix owns more copies of the game, other customers may play the same game until all the copies are occupied. It’s just like a video game rental store, but in digital form.

[ Continue reading VC&G Review: Console Classix, The GameTap Alternative » ]

The popularity of “TV Games” units seems to have waned a bit recently as overexposure and, to some measure, public apathy, have set in. After at least three years on the market, the newly reborn dedicated home video game concept (pioneered by Jakks Pacific) is a product line whose novelty has finally begun to wear off. TV Games and their countless imitators are everywhere you go; you’ll see them as impulse gifts in stores like Best Buy, Toys “R” Us, or even in less likely retail outlets like Kohls or Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Literally dozens of different units of varying levels of quality line the shelves of my local Target, for instance. But their absolute retail ubiquity doesn’t mean that a few good new ones aren’t leaking through. Jakks Pacific’s line of classic game units, developed by HotGen of London, have typically retained a high standard of quality over the years. And it’s their latest Super Pac-Man TV Games unit that I’ll be discussing in this review.

[ Continue reading VC&G Review: Super Pac-Man TV Games Unit » ]