Exor's Dungeon - Magazine Reviews - Nintendo Power Volume 34

One of the more consistent things Nintendo Power held to was that a Zelda game was an EVENT and would get the cover pretty much every time. The original The Legend of Zelda missed out but Zelda II: The Adventure of Link was on Volume 4. Over the years there was Link's Awakening (50), Ocarina of Time (114), Majora's Mask (137), the two Oracle games (144), Wind Waker (144), Four Swords Adventures (181), The Minish Cap (188), Twilight Princess (193) as a preview with the full name not yet revealed, Phantom Hourglass (205), Twilight Princess AGAIN (211) when it was actually ready to release, Spirit Tracks (249), Skyward Sword (258), and Ocarina of Time 3D (267), and that's not even counting other appearances like Link's cover feature in Soul Calibur II (169)...though that makes up for the fact that he didn't appear in the cover for Link's Awakening. Link's appearances are only bested by Mario who appeared no less than 30 times, and most of those were spin-off titles.

It should then be no surprise that Volume 34 (March 1992) features The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past with Link. Our issue starts out with an advertisement for the Super Scope beyond the usual subscriber stuff, probably the first ad that has showed up in Nintendo Power (there's a poll results in the back regarding the comics and potential ads). Arguably, before this, the whole magazine WAS an advertisement, but this may be the first actual advertisement. If you'd like to read along on Archive.org, the link is Archive.org here, but watch out for the scan quality.

The formula is set now. NES games serve as the openers, The Empire Strikes Back (JVC), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (LJN, the NES version...the Game Boy version was back in Volume 33), and Nightshade, a strange graphic adventure game made by Ultra and Beam Software that fell into obscurity. If you start up the game, the subtitle is "Part 1: The Claws of Sutekh", but no sequels were ever produced. Finally, the last game covered is Virgin Games' M.C. Kids which was mentioned back in Volume 25 and then never heard from again. The first paragraph outright says that the game is "similar in style and play to Super Mario Bros. 3" and an old interview with one of the game's designers alludes to Nintendo forcing them to change some maps and other stuff because of their similarity with the Mario games. I've talked about this game before and while EGM does give it more coverage, only Nintendo Power has maps (but only the first world). I may be somewhat blinded by nostalgia, but I tend to associate Nintendo and McDonald's of the past together, and quite fondly at that, likely related to road trips, where both were in full force. I do talk about McDonald's restaurants and how they used to be better at some of my other sites and other parts of this website. Nearly every single "road" page on the Houston section alone talks about some unique McDonald's restaurant that has been desecrated, demolished, or talked about fondly in some way. Anyway, I digress...

CosMc, before his name was besmirched with a chain of failed coffee shops.

Classified Information is before the Zelda comic this month. Rockin' Kats re-covers the "change the channel" code from Volume 30 as well as the cheat to recover your hearts...and also reset your lives to 6 (not 9). It fails to mention that you get more lives to 6 (though will reset if you have more) and also failing to mention that doing the code wrong (holding UP instead of down) you get half a heart and on your last life. So yeah, fun. The other games covered are Rainbow Islands (NES), Captain Planet (NES), Spud's Adventure (Game Boy), ActRaiser (Super NES), Super Tennis (Super NES), Super Mario World (Super NES), SimCity (Super NES), and The Legend of the Mystical Ninja (Super NES). As a side note, I often discover new games in reading this magazine...Amazing Tater and Spud's Adventure were both published by Atlus, and these two potato-themed games should not be confused with each other. Anyway after that we get to the Zelda comic.

Kids, dousing yourself with water
before going into a sustained-heat burning building is NOT a good idea.

The Game Boy games opens with Mega Man II for Game Boy, which is not quite a port to the Game Boy as it includes some different bosses and weapons. Konami's Tiny Toons Adventures is also up next "following the success of their NES adventure", having dropped off the charts last month, and High Stakes, a casino video game from Electro Brain. There were few gambling games on the NES as opposed to systems like computers, and I wonder if this game, where the goal is to bluff the Mafia into poverty was what helped it get approved by Nintendo's censorship boards, but the rules apparently did not include a ban on gambling. After the Super Mario Adventures comic, while the 1991 Nintendo Power Awards pre-empt the Player's Poll Contest, there's a second contest to see Trixter and a copy of the album "White Knuckle Scorin'" on cassette or CD. If you are reading this site, I am sure you are familiar with the first track of the song, which corresponds with a story included with the album...where Bowser wants to become an oil tycoon somehow, and, well, song cue.

Counselor's Corner covers Drakkhen, Dragon Warrior III, and Metroid II: Return of Samus, as well as a different sort of E3. Next is the Super NES section opening with Lemmings (Sunsoft) and covering just three random levels, Joe & Mac (Data East), with part of it being the reverse of a poster for The Addams Family, and FINALLY we get to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past with fifteen pages and lots of maps in the process.

Comparing this years Nintendo Power Awards to the the previous year, everything has separate awards for the categories, not just the Overall games (and this time, there are three systems). "Best Graphics & Sound", "Best Challenge", "Best Theme & Fun", and "Best Play Control" remain with three categories, Best Hero has been scrapped, while Best Multi-Player Simultaneous, Best Overall Villain, and Most Innovative Game are shared between systems. There are five Overall picks from each system and frankly they're not that impressive, except for Super NES and even then Final Fantasy II and Super Mario World are the only real GOTY candidates. (SimCity deserves at least one award but it's not GOTY material).

Howard barely appeared when they did the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic back in Volume 7 but instead of the Turtles, Nester's Adventures does Rampart.

George & Rob's Now Playing's NES list includes (besides the games covered) Blazebusters (Ascii), Godzilla 2 (Toho), Super Square Deal (Hector), and Wizardry II: Knight of Diamonds (Ascii). The Game Boy titles include Pop Up (Infogrames), Square Deal (Hector), Star Saver (Taito), Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (Ultra, and another completely different game from both the NES title AND the DOS title of the same name), and finally Pyramids of Ra from Matchbox. Matchbox never did publish any game for NES but one featuring their flagship die-cast cars (see Volume 9) and while Pyramids of Ra was one of them, the Game Boy version did at least make it out. There's also the Infogenius German Language Translator from GameTek, which was just listed without any scores. The SNES games not covered in this issue include Extra Innings and Smart Ball both by Sony Imagesoft. Smart Ball I had mentioned back in Volume 24, it was a localization of Game Freak's Jerry Boy and they stripped out the storyline when they localized it. Of course, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is reviewed with high reviews, with the lowest score being 4.3 in Play Control and ranking to 4.9 in Theme & Fun, average close to a 9/10 in a time when, generally, that was a rare good game, not just handed out to something halfway decent. (Already by 2005 that was endemic to video game reviewers, including Nintendo Power).

The NES charts see old favorites come back to the Top 10. It's still Super Mario Bros. 3 beating Battletoads on a 2:1 margin. Dr. Mario is up to #3 (from #6), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game is back to #4 (from #14), Tetris is up to #5 (from #12), The Legend of Zelda is down to #6 (from #3), Super Mario Bros. 2 is up to #7 (from #13), Batman is down to #8 (from #7), The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants is up to #9 after previously dropping off the charts, and Final Fantasy is now at #10 (down from #5). Looking at the ones that were replaced, Metroid fell to #18 from #8, Tiny Toons Adventures fell from #10 to beyond #20, Crystalis went from #9 to #12, and Mega Man 3 fell from #4 to #14. For Super NES, Super Mario World and F-Zero still hold #1 and #2 respectively, but Final Fantasy II went from #14 to #3, bumping Final Fight to #4, and pushing SimCity further down to #5. ActRaiser holds #6, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past goes up to #7 (from #8), Pilotwings goes to #8 from #10, U.N. Squadron drops from #7 to #9, and Super Bases Loaded goes from #5 to #10. The big loser is Drakkhen, which got pushed from #9 to #18. The Game Boy's top 5 shuffles around. Super Mario Land keeps #1, of course, but Metroid II: Return of Samus goes up to #2 (from #5), Dr. Mario goes down to #3 (from #2), Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge goes down to #4 (from #3), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan goes down to #5 (from #4, it's mistakenly put as "II" in this one). Battletoads goes up to #6 (from #11), F-1 Race goes down to #8 (from #7), Operation C goes up to #9 (from #10), and Super R.C. Pro-Am goes down to #10 (from #8). Home Alone also premiers in the Top 10 at #7. Final Fantasy Adventure is off the top 10, having been pushed to #13 (from #9), as is Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge from #6 to #12.

But that's it as to the most interesting stuff goes. The Celebrity Player Profile is Corin Nemec when he was starring in Parker Lewis Can't Lose on FOX and not when he was a "Replacement Scrappy" on Stargate SG-1 when his character (Jonas Quinn) replaced Michael Shanks' Daniel Jackson.

The Winter CES show mentions that the Nintendo will have a CD-ROM peripheral for the SNES coming January 1993. By this time, there already was drama over their partner in the venture, partly because Hiroshi Yamauchi, the preisdent of Nintendo Co. Ltd. thought that Sony was using Nintendo to eventually develop its own console and wanted to cut them loose, and that ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right now however, the Genesis was a more formidable contender.

The last page (inside the back cover) had some reader responses. 59% loved the new comics and another 23.4% liked them, with only 13.3% preferring no comics and less than 5% disliking them...but 26.3% said that there SHOULD be more ads (58.1% said "if limited to a few pages", only 15.6% saying no) and 76.8% preferring the changes made to the magazine overall, which is a little unfair as I think there were some things that were worse.

The teaser for next issue mentions The Addams Family (Super NES), Captain America and the Avengers, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (Game Boy, written as "Star Trek"), and WWF Super WrestleMania (LJN).