It's been a while since a celebrity appeared on the cover. If we don't count Michael Keaton as Batman back in Volume 48, I guess it would be Hulk Hogan back on Volume 35. Ken Griffey Jr. would not only be one of the few real-life celebrities to make cover, but also appear more than once, appearing three times. (There are only two others, Tony Hawk and Hulk Hogan, that appeared more than once on the cover).

In any case, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, the featured game of Volume 59 (April 1994), gets ten pages, including the MLB teams in the game. Next up is Star Trek: The Next Generation, an adventure game by Spectrum HoloByte. While it got a similar Sega Genesis counterpart, it was completely different title than the Game Boy title released by Absolute Entertainment in 1993 (covered back in Volume 51).

Mickey's Ultimate Challenge is by Hi-Tech Expressions, the next game covered, but this isn't a challenging platformer, it's an educational title for young children. It only gets two pages.

The next game covered is Mickey's Ultimate Challenge. This isn't a challenging platformer by Capcom—it's an educational title for young children, and only gets two pages.

X-Kaliber gets several pages, more maps are on the opposite side of the poster for Barkley Shut Up and Jam!.

After a few pages for Super Metroid (a preview feature, not a full game), there's Time Trax. The game was based on a television series that was part of the short-lived Prime Time Entertainment Network and published by Malibu Games, the label T*HQ was using at the time for Nintendo games at the time (Black Pearl Software was the Sega counterpart). "This is possibly the finest game that Malibu Games has released", bragged the magazine. If we view Malibu as synonymous with T*HQ, that wasn't a high bar to cross. T*HQ was almost exclusively licensed games to its 2013 bankruptcy.

Turn and Burn: No-Fly Zone, one of the final bunch of Absolute's titles gets four pages with two pages for "Flipper Frenzy", a mini-section on Super NES pinball games (covering both Super Pinball: Behind the Mask by American Technōs and GameTek's Pinball Dreams.

As promised last issue, Classified Information features even more Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back codes including how to get 99 lives. It gets over a page of content, huge for Classified Information standards. There's also stuff for the following Super NES games: Battletoads & Double Dragon (the SNES version), Taz-Mania, Inspector Gadget, NBA Jam, Battle Cars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, Ranma ½, and Super Mario All-Stars. The only Game Boy game (no NES games) this month is Kirby's Pinball Land.

The third part of the Super Metroid comic is next before Counselor's Corner. This time around there's two questions regarding Lufia & the Fortress of Doom, three for Secret of Mana, three for Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, two for Final Fantasy Legend III, and four pages for a Crystalis walkthrough (covering half of the game).

The special feature on Interplay (following Power Player's Challenge). It talks about several games, including ClayFighter a lot with some projects related to that, like ClayFighter: Tournament Edition (which would be a Blockbuster rental exclusive, and thus very rare today as a physical cartridge), ClayFighter II due out by the end of 1994 (it would miss that deadline by just one day), though it mentions a "female Gorilla who attacks with her purse" (though said gorilla, "Lucy", was cut from the game late in development), development of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I, and a sequel to The Lost Vikings, though the original was developed by Silicon & Synapse (by this point, they would soon rename to Chaos Studios, and considering a buy-out offer from Davidson & Associates).

As far as the later adventures of Interplay Productions went, while Chaos Studios (renamed to Blizzard Entertainment soon after) would go onto self-publish WarCraft: Orcs & Humans instead of Interplay; meanwhile, despite the success of Fallout and Fallout 2, Interplay would struggle financially. They went public in 1998 as Interplay Entertainment but a few years later and would publish a few N64 titles, but their star would fade in the early 2000s.

After Prehistorik Man (Game Boy) and Disney's The Jungle Book (by this point in time, NES games had more or less dried up completely, averaging just one title per month), is the Player's Poll Contest. Themed after U.S. Gold's World Cup USA '94, the grand prize was a trip to Los Angeles to see the finals games in the series, as well as the SNES game and a "World Cup USA '94 soccer ball and duffel bag". The second prize winners would win the same thing (sans the trip). The third prize was a Nintendo Power t-shirt (Version 4 for '94).

Top 20 this month has Street Fighter II Turbo jump back to #1 (from #4), breaking the four-month #1 streak of Mortal Kombat to #2 (it was still the top-selling SNES game that month). The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past still holds #3. Super Mario All-Stars moved back to #4 (from #7), Super Mario Kart went up to #5 (from #9), Secret of Mana improves from #8 to #6, Disney's Aladdin drops from #5 to #7, Star Fox plummets from #2 to #8, NHL Stanley Cup moves from #11 to #9, and Madden NFL '94 holds #10. Jurassic Park dropped #6 to #16 while Mario Paint still is in #15. Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball premiers at #12.

The Game Boy list has Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 drop from #9 to #13 but it's going to go up in future issues. For now, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening increased its lead against Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins while Kirby's Pinball Land moved from #10 to #3. Kirby's Dream Land is #4 (down from #3), Tetris 2 is #5 (up from #12), Mortal Kombat is #6 (up from #8), Super Mario Land is #7 (down from #4), Tetris is #8 (down from #5), Metroid II: Return of Samus at #9 (down from #6). and Faceball 2000 at #10 (up from #14). Jurassic Park is now at #11 (from #7).

The NES list is a surprise with Kirby's Adventure in #1 (from #4), Tetris 2 in #2 (from #1), Super Mario Bros. 3 in #3 (from #2), The Legend of Zelda in #4 (from #3), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project at #5, which shot up from #13. "Turtle-mania is back again!" proclaimed Nintendo Power...though in retrospect it was probably a "dead turtle bounce". The other games included Mega Man 6 at #6 (down from #5), Dr. Mario at #7 (from #9), Metroid at #8 (from #11), Tecmo Super Bowl is #9 (from #7), and Final Fantasy is #10 (from #8). Baseball Stars (#10 last month seems to have vanished, and Jurassic Park dropped from #6 to #13.

Now Playing goes over the games this month, starting with Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball (Nintendo), and continuing with Turn and Burn: No-Fly Zone (Absolute), Star Trek: The Next Generation (Spectrum HoloByte), Time Trax (Malibu), Ninja Warriors (Taito), X-Kaliber (Activision), Rocko's Modern Life: Spunky's Dangerous Day (Viacom New Media), Bill Walsh College Football (Electronic Arts), Space Ace (Absolute), Natsume Championship Wrestling (Natsume), Super Bases Loaded 2 (Jaleco), Super Chase HQ (Taito), Super Pinball: Behind the Mask (American Technōs), F-1 Pole Position (Ubi Soft), Super Troll Island (American Softworks), Fun 'N' Games (Tradewest), and Soccer Kid. The NES games just consist of The Jungle Book (Virgin Games) and Mario's Time Machine (Mindscape), while the Game Boy games just include The Blues Brothers: Jukebox Adventure (Titus), Tip Off (Ubi Soft), and Prehistorik Man (Titus). It should be noted that The Blues Brothers: Jukebox Adventure was not actually released in the U.S., though it was released in Europe.

When it comes to Pak Watch they talk about Project Reality, which still talks about pie-in-the-sky numbers, using cartridges (they claim CD-ROMs are too slow) but ones that are "at least 800 megabits" (100 megabytes). No N64 game was 800 megabits, they topped off at 512 (64MB) and only by the end of the N64's lifespan...and considering a CD-ROM held ten times that amount, the Nintendo 64 was never able to pull off video and audio the same way PlayStation did.

Other headlining games in Pak Watch this month include Final Fantasy III from Square Soft (Final Fantasy VI in Japan), Kirby's Tee Shot (renamed as Kirby's Dream Course by release), Spectre (properly crediting it as being "from the world of the Macintosh computer", yes, it DID have games), and ClayFighter: Tournament Edition (which, as I mentioned, earlier, would only be a Blockbuster exclusive).

With Final Fantasy III also on the horizon, the Super NES has a bit more life left in it than thought, though for the first time ever, NES didn't have anything listed in Pak Watch.

Next up: Volume 60 promises a new Sports Scene section, as well as full coverage on Super Metroid.

Written October 6, 2026

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