While this is the 27th issue of Nintendo Power, it was the third of the first three articles I have ever posted to this section, though I've updated it and expanded it to better match what I have already written. I don't think I ever had a physical copy of this magazine, but it is August 1991, Volume 27, still list price $3.50 US, Canada $4.50 as it's been since 1988 and still from that era of Nintendo Power when the cover was either drawn or sometimes photographed with models or clay. The cover feature is Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge (not "Mega Man in Dr. Wily's Revenge"), Mega Man's first outing on the Game Boy (and by extension, all handhelds). It's the first Game Boy game to make cover.

Starting off, we have Player's Pulse, then goes straight into the first big feature, Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom (here called "Ninja Gaiden Episode III") with 12 pages covering all seven areas with some small, drawn maps...a bit of a throwback to earlier days of the magazine.

Nester's Adventures features Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, with a rare (for Nester's Adventures) "last issue's cover"...but the game was STILL delayed. Nester's mom here looks very different from her last appearance. Lost weight for sure.

In Classified Information, there's a page for The Hunt for Red October (for the NES), warp locations in Battletoads, Ikari III: The Rescue, The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants, and Mega Man 3 before getting to a strategy section that covers both Dragon Warrior II and Dragon Warrior III...though apparently it wouldn't be until April when Dragon Warrior III hit shelves. A large part of the problem was, pieceing things together from things told after the fact that sales of Dragon Warrior weren't great and most copies were done through Nintendo Power as a subscription bonus. Somehow we got Dragon Warrior IV for the NES but the series would skip the United States for a few installments until 2000 with Dragon Warrior VII...and even then, for PlayStation. Later we'll find that the poor sales of the Dragon Warrior series did kill the Earth Bound release late in development. Moving on, there's a section on Darkman, a poster for Star Wars, and finally...a special feature on Game Boy games, of which Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Adventure got just six pages and had to co-star with Final Fantasy Legend II (eight pages...FFLII was actually the second game of the SaGa series), two pages of Days of Thunder (based on the film), Game Boy Classified (with Mysterium, Ninja Boy, and Go! Go! Tank), and Game Boy's Now Playing chart: Bill & Ted's Excellent Game Boy Adventure, Bill Elliot's NASCAR Fast Track, the Data East port of Crystal Quest, Days of Thunder, Fastest Lap, Final Fantasy Legend II, the Game Boy version of Klax (published by Mindscape...the NES version was a Tengen title and thus unlicensed), Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge (again, called "Mega Man in Dr. Wily's Revenge"), Mr. Do!, and The Punisher. Over in the Game Boy Top 10, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan and The Final Fantasy Legend switch places again, no movement in four through six (see Volume 26. Operation C moves to #7 (from #8) with Castlevania: The Adventure moving to #8 from #9. The new Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge takes #9 and Batman is #10, meaning Gargoyle's Quest and NBA Challenge are off the top 10.

There's a "Custom Game Boy" contest which you can see an image of below and a "Super NES Preview" with pages on Super Mario World, ActRaiser, and Gradius III...those will get more coverage in future issues, I'm guessing.

The main Player's Poll Contest is afterward. By this time, it's the formula they kept for the next 16 years or so...some huge prize based on a game, second prize is just the game, third prize is 50 t-shirts. They didn't all follow this formula, but this month, the grand prize was "the" (possibly just "a") phone booth from the Bill & Ted movies installed in your room with a years' worth of phone bills paid for you (actually just a $1200 gift certificate for use with the phone company--likely GTE or a "Baby Bell" company). Cracked.com ran a brief article about the kid who had won the phone booth and was pictured in the magazine later that year, Kenneth Grayson, and covered a 2011 Reddit AMA where him or someone claiming to be him said that he had to buy a phone for it (though was reimbursed) and eventually put the booth in storage. Also of note is that there's a new Nintendo Power jersey, likely because some of the features didn't exist anymore and Nester not only looked different but was beginning to fade out of the spotlight.

Next up is Now Playing. Because Nintendo Power had gone monthly, there's half as many games to put on here, and with the exception of Ninja Gaiden III, few are worth getting excited over (unless you really, really liked Dragon Quest). There's Captain Planet, Darkman, Dragon Warrior II, Dragon Warrior III (which wasn't actually available yet), Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom, Sesame Street A-B-C & 1-2-3 (combining the previously released Sesame Street A-B-C and Sesame Street 1-2-3), Super Jeopardy, Triumph, and Where's Waldo?. There's also Rainbow Islands and Romance of the Three Kingdoms II (they appeared last month, but I guess their releases were delayed). The magazine gives it a sub-2.0 score (which they rarely did), and it WAS a bad game. Given that THQ was in many ways of Brøderbund Software's NES division when they purchased New Ventures from them, it represents how just how massive the step-down really was. What's more eye-raising is that Where's Waldo? was developed by Bethesda Softworks (Fallout 4, THAT Bethesda).

Top 30 changes up things. For a long time going back to when the magazine's volume was in the single digits (first five or six), magenta was "new to the top 30", light blue was "jumped up several places on the poll", and green was "favorites that have maintained their popularity". Now, green is "appeared between two and nine times" with blue more than ten times in the top 30. The blue is bestowed to Super Mario Bros. 3, Final Fantasy, Tetris, Crystalis, Super Mario Bros. 2, Mega Man II, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Legend of Zelda, and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. DuckTales and Dragon Warrior could've made it but they had dropped off in the past. However, there's been no games coming or going to the top 10 since Volume 25. Super Mario Bros. 3 is still #1, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game is still #2, Mega Man 3 is back to #3 to put Final Fantasy in #4, Dragon Warrior II went from #7 to #5, Tetris went from #8 to #6, Crystalis from #9 to #7, StarTropics fell to #9 from #6, with Dr. Mario still at #10. It looks like I was wrong about my prediction with Maniac Mansion as it jumped to #16...meanwhile, Super Mario Bros. 2 is at #11, The Legend of Zelda is at #20 (ouch!), and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is at #25.

Home Alone-era Macaulay Culkin makes Celebrity Profile, and while there's CES and Super NES stuff (for example, Zelda III, as it was known at the time), there's also Konami's Nightshade (an obscure adventure title that was original, but highly flawed), the real title of interest is Bio Force Ape. This was cancelled, and while a prototype was eventually found and dumped in 2010, but not before a hoax involving a German-accented butter monster made the rounds (sadly, the original thread from 2005 is now dead). Pak Watch now features the "Super NES Planner" with around 20 games, and the NES Planner finally puts down Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? correctly. (I didn't see "McKids" reappear last month...guess I'll have to wait for that one).

The magazine wraps up not with Gail Tilden, but from Dan Owsen's first Nintendo Power appearance.

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