Volume 53 (October 1993) opens with Player's Pulse where a 41-year old man shows off his Mario t-shirt and birthday cake. While such a thing is not too uncommon today, it was probably less common in 1993 (letter in question), but at least he has a wife and son, so it's not quite as bad as it could be. Other notes in Player's Pulse include discontinuing the promotion they've been running for a few months (if you had a certain combination of Power Cards, you could win a Game Pak), as well as confirming what I already figured, that for every main feature it was a candidate for that month's cover. Gail Tilden explains that the "contestants" this month besides Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (which "won"), there was also Mortal Kombat, Cool Spot, and Plok, deciding on the highest evaluation score and marketability. If you look at the table of contents, however, there were other SNES features...it means Super Bomberman, Pac-Attack, and Wing Commander: The Secret Missions were not finalists. (By the way, I tried to use my own copy as a scan for this cover...hope it's not too skewed...)

Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back gets ten pages with maps, with Mortal Kombat getting eight pages. This is the notoriously censored version of Mortal Kombat, which recolored the blood as clear ("sweat") and replaced the Fatalities with "Finishing Moves". (It's fairly meaningless today, but at the time this just handed the Genesis a win).

Next up is Super Bomberman, like Mario Paint, came bundled with the Hudson Multi-tap, which allowed up to four controllers to be hooked up to the Super NES. "That means you can play Super Bomberman (and future games like Square's Secret of Mana) with more than two players simultaneously", the magazine reads. That was indeed a real feature and in the finished game, but I don't think most people used that.

Tradewest's Plok gets a few pages. It does mention the sound of the game, which had some better-than-average tracks for the SNES (Beach level and Boss level for a few examples). On the reverse side of Plok's coverage is a poster for Secret of Mana, which would be the next big JRPG for the SNES, especially seeing how Final Fantasy II is almost two years old at this point.

I may be overthinking Nester's Adventures (Rock 'N Roll Racing) this month, but is this an auto parts store or a Kmart? Kmart would certainly explain the shopping carts and the "blue light special" reference (I think auto part stores DO have shopping carts for convenience, but they're rarely used), but if it's a Kmart, then why is the auto parts department have a sign on it? And why are their carts filled ONLY with auto parts?

Cool Spot and Pac-Attack follow before we get to Classified Information. The games here include Street Fighter II Turbo, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, Brawl Brothers, Yoshi's Cookie, Tuff E Nuff, and a full page for Super Mario Kart. While there are no NES games this month (I believe for the first time—it wouldn't be permanent, but not the last time). There are three Game Boy titles that were covered this month, though: Battletoads in Ragnarok's World, Adventure Island II, and Bubble Bobble Part 2. A special section for passwords follows to get to further stages is also here, the games here include Alien³, Super Black Bass, Out of This World, Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, King Arthur's World, Super Widget, The Lost Vikings, Yoshi's Cookie, B.O.B., Krusty's Fun House (Game Boy), Zen: Intergalactic Ninja, and Star Trek: The Next Generation (Game Boy).

The Star Fox comic continues to kick the ball along by having Andross getting squished last month be ANOTHER fake out as Andross gets cloned...and after the Game Boy games (a Game Boy port of Mortal Kombat, as loose as that may be), Sports Illustrated Championship Football & Baseball (in a single Pak, not two titles), Jurassic Park, WWF King of the Ring, and the Game Boy port of Lemmings, comes Counselor's Corner. (Those last three games just got two pages each).

Counselor's Corner has two questions for Shadowrun, full strategy for the 33rd level of The Lost Vikings with a map, two questions for Fire 'n Ice for the NES, and two early-game questions for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.

There's a two page article talking about the "New-Style NES", which was identical to the New Famicom in Japan. It discusses that Lance Barr designed the original Nintendo Entertainment System, but there's no mention of the original Japanese Famicom...or the ill-fated "Nintendo Advanced Video System" design. At least because of this, the NES games this issue don't get stuck behind Top 20 this month. Battleship and The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak (the magazine puts it as "The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaurs Peak!" both here and in Now Playing, the American NES version does have the exclamation point, but not plural) were the only NES games this month. The New-Style NES article lists the latter, as well as a few other NES games coming soon, but also lists some "Classic NES Titles" as well. Despite the promise of "and hundreds more...", many of the titles, even listed in the section, had been discontinued.

With the neck and neck margins last month, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has reclaimed #1, pushing Star Fox to #2. Street Fighter II: The World Warrior holds #3 as last month, with Super Mario Kart holding #4 as it has for the last few months, but Mario Paint has slid to #7 (from #5). WWF Royal Rumble premiers as the new #5 instead. Final Fantasy II has at least reclaimed #6 (it was #13 last month, but #6 two months ago). With Mario Paint at #7, Batman Returns has fallen to #15. Shadowrun moves up to #8 from #16. Mario is Missing! premiers at #9, with Super Mario World being at #10 (from #12). Street Fighter II Turbo dropped to #11 this month (#6 last month), Super Star Wars dropped to #12 (from #8), and SimCity dropped to #14 (from #9).

The Game Boy margins are quite tight. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (#2 last month) is now #4, but still less than 100 away from #3 (Kirby's Dream Land, #4 last month) and less than 300 away from #2 (Super Mario Land, #3 last month). And of course, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins still leads, but not quite by a 2:1 margin anymore (just 12,000 points, still quite safe). Metroid II: Return of Samus has a much more definitive #5. Tetris and Dr. Mario still hold #6 and #7 respectively for the third month in a row, with Yoshi's Cookie holding #8 for a second month, Final Fantasy Adventure #9 for a third month, and The Final Fantasy Legend at #10 (from #18). FaceBall 2000 has dropped to #11 (from #10) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers still holds #20.

Super Mario Bros. 3 retakes the #1 spot from The Legend of Zelda in the charts with Kirby's Adventure floating up to #3 (from #14). Looking at the others, we have Final Fantasy (from #6 to #4, up), Mega Man 5 (from #4 to #5, down), Metroid (from #15 to #6, up) Tecmo Super Bowl (from #3 to #7, down), Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (from #11 to #8, up), and Battletoads & Double Dragon (from #5 to #9, down), and Tecmo NBA Basketball (from #9 to #10, down).

Battletoads dropped off from #10 to #16 and Yoshi's Cookie disappeared from the list. Older puzzle favorites still remain like Dr. Mario (#11) and Tetris (#15).

The Player's Poll Contest this month has the Grand Prize winner win a new arcade cabinet for Super Street Fighter II (no Game Pak) and the second prize winners getting Street Fighter II Turbo. Not one of their better contests, but not their worst.

Regarding Now Playing, it doesn't happen often but there appears to be a mismatch between is reviewed and what is scored. The Super NES games include Cliffhanger (Sony Imagesoft), Cool Spot (Virgin Games), Dream TV (Triffix), GP-1 (Atlus), Hyper V-Ball (McO'River), Lock On (Vic Tokai), Mortal Kombat (Acclaim), Pac-Attack (Namco), Plok (Tradewest), The Ren & Stimpy Show: Veediots! (T*HQ), Super Bomberman (Hudson Soft), and Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (JVC). The NES games this month include The Flintstones: The Surprise at Dinosaur Peak! (Taito), Mario is Missing! (The Software Toolworks), and Thomas the Tank Engine (T*HQ), while Game Boy has Gear Works (Sony Imagesoft), Lemmings (Sunsoft), and Mortal Kombat (Acclaim). There's also Sports Illustrated Championship Football & Baseball (Malibu Games) for the Game Boy, which isn't listed, but does have a full mini-review.

In Pak Watch, there's an announcement of Project Reality, a new 64-bit system developed by Nintendo. This is going to be the Nintendo 64 but at this point they already oversell it, promising a custom MIPS RISC microprocessor that "runs at more than 100 MHz and will be compatible with HDTV", neither of which were true (it ran at less than 100 MHz and is NOT easily compatible with HDTVs if you assume 720p as the minimum...but HDTV wasn't really a thing in the 1990s, either. Popeye 2 was announced for Game Boy, though we never got to play the original as INTV went bankrupt before releasing it (and unlike Battleship) was not picked up by another publisher.

The inside back cover shows that there will be two more Player's Guides released (in addition to the seven out there), one for Super Mario All-Stars and one for Street Fighter II Turbo, the latter being a rare example of a third-party game getting a full Player's Guide (and do you really need a guidebook to an arcade game?)

Well, that's it for Volume 53...continue to Volume 54?

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