A version of Street Fighter II once again makes cover. The first time it was Guile for Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (Volume 38), then Vega for Street Fighter II Turbo (Volume 51) and now, Thunder Hawk for Super Street Fighter II. For the first time, I'll be using footnotes, something I've done for my blogs like Brazos Buildings & Businesses (a local history blog). I cannot guarantee I won't go back and add footnotes for revised updates in other issues, but in case in you come across it later, this is the first one I did.

Play It Loud is officially here as the cover declares (this is the July 1994 issue, by the way) and while the first ad (the "cafeteria meatloaf" ad) isn't an official Play It Loud ad, it is of the same spirit, along with the guy in the girls' ballet get-up a few issues ago. (It instead has the "Super Power Club" logo, and while cards were still part of the magazine they'd come to an end by the end of the year. Speaking of things coming to an end, for the first time ever there wasn't a single comic to be found in Nintendo Power. No Zelda, no Star Fox, no Metroid, no Battletoads, no Mario, no Nester.

Once again, there is no NES coverage this time, but there are lots of Super NES games and a few Game Boy games as well. We start out with Super Street Fighter II with some coverage on the new characters like Cammy and Thunder Hawk, moving onto Breath of Fire, a game developed by Square in Japan but published by Capcom stateside, followed by the special Play It Loud preview, a collection of screenshots from upcoming games (including Donkey Kong Country, the headlining game of the campaign) with some eye-gouging textures and text that goes all over the place (a page to illustrate this concept). Next is The Jungle Book, which it says was "previously available for the NES" but the official NES list they published in the early 2000s and what Wikipedia cites in turn, it was released in August 1994, around the same time of the Super NES game. I have no idea if this was accurate, but the magazine covers through the sixth level, and indicates the game has eleven levels total. Of course, if you tore out the poster for this magazine (The Itchy and Scratchy Show for the Super NES, retitled The Itchy and Scratchy Game by the time of its release), you would only have strategy for three levels.

"The Sports Scene" in this issue talks about soccer games exclusively (remember—the 1994 World Cup was going on, and it was hosted in the U.S.), featuring U.S. Gold's World Cup USA '94, but also FIFA International Soccer by Electronic Arts, Capcom's Soccer Shootout (Capcom), Championship Soccer '94 (Sony Imagesoft), Imagineer's Kick Off 3 (more on that in Now Playing), Elite Soccer (Gametek), and Pelé! (Accolade, themed after one of the soccer greats, though by the 1990s he hadn't played professional soccer for years), along with a chart comparing the soccer games available for the Super NES at the time (Mega Man Soccer is not included).

Liberty or Death, a Koei war game simulating the American Revolutionary War, is covered, and implies that you could end up in a situation where you could lose the war. There's no good footage of the ending out there (only a cam recording), but it appears that if the British do in fact win, they take a magnanimous position of agreeing to let the colonists have representation in the House of Commons rather than the "rebellion was crushed, everyone involved was hanged".

Super NES has its own version of Tetris 2 (not to be confused with an import title I covered on Exor's Dungeon, Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss). Double Dragon V¹, a title by Tradewest follows, shortly before another special article about Nintendo and Williams, which surely wasn't a coincidence (Williams purchased Tradewest by this point).

Next is an article on the the partnership with Williams. The thing was at the time, there wasn't really a Williams for many years at that point, the company had been WMS Industries and marketed under Midway and "Bally/Midway", both of which were purchased from Bally Corporation. The article promised that there would be games released for Project Reality (now under the name "Nintendo Ultra 64", the second working title for what would be Nintendo 64), under "Williams/Nintendo Inc.", which would co-owned by both companies.

This never happened. By the time the Nintendo 64 was released, WMS Industries had spun off Midway Games as its own independent company, Cruis'n USA, which was discussed in the article, was released in the arcades in a form that was not based on N64 hardware at all and the N64 port was considered a bit of a disappointment. Still, Midway was one of the bigger N64 game publishers...it would need it.

The "Days of Mana" special is written as a "Traveler's Log" from the protagonist of Secret of Mana (canonically, Randi, or "Randy" as I named him, but unusually has no default name if you play the game as released in the U.S. in 1993).

Classified Information covers a selection of Super NES games as usual: Wolfenstein 3D, Equinox, NBA Jam, Fatal Fury 2, Rock 'N Roll Racing, NBA Jam, and Super Putty. There's also the token Game Boy game (Mortal Kombat) and Jurassic Park for the NES as well. Counselor's Corner, which has more of the in-depth strategy questions, has Flashback: The Quest for Identity, Lester the Unlikely, Mega Man 6, and Final Fantasy Legend III.

After a few pages on Super Game Boy borders (actually just a long lead-in for a contest), we get the Game Boy games, including Tarzan. Interestingly, Tarzan was not in the public domain (that was still thirty years away) and it's licensed by Edgar Rice Burroughs Incorporated. About six years later, the games for the Disney film hit shelves, and that version would actually make cover (Volume 129, which as of this writing we're a long way from covering).² Jungle fever continues with a few pages on Virgin Interactive Entertainment's The Jungle Book for Game Boy. Taito's Space Invaders gets a Game Boy port. Before this, Space Invaders had never, ever received a Nintendo port before...not in America at least. The Famicom had a version but it never came over to the West. The magazine makes no mention of its even better features of the Super Game Boy, a full SNES version inside. Much like the Game Pak Data Box from just a few years ago, the Game Boy games featured in the magazine now had a recommended Super Game Boy palette, but like the Game Pak Data Box (scrapped in 1992), I don't think this stuck around long in the magazine, not by 1997-1998 anyway (before the Game Boy Color and making the SGB irrelevant).

Gametek's Jeopardy! Sports Edition is the final Game Boy game covered this issue, with the grand prize themed on Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball and to win the prize of going to every game of the 1994 World Series, three cities ("Star with games 1 and 2 in the American League City, travel to the National League City for games 3, 4 and 5, then return to the American League city for games 6 and 7, if necessary). The third prize was a t-shirt ("Version 4 for '94", as I've called it) and the second prize was the game and a life-size cardboard cutout of Ken Griffey Junior. Anyone who knows baseball knows that there was no World Series that year due to a players' strike, something so monumental that since then, has been the most recent cancellation of the World Series (not even COVID could do such a thing). Most likely the winner just took the $5,000 check (the estimated value of such a trip).

Speaking of which, sports games top the Top 20, at least in the Super NES games. NBA Jam takes a solid #1, with more than twice the points as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which dropped from #3 from #2, with Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball shooting straight to the top (or next to top, from #8 to #2). Others include Super Metroid (#4, down from #3), Mortal Kombat (#5, down from #4), Street Fighter II Turbo (#6, hold), Mega Man X (#7, up from #11), Super Mario All-Stars (#8, up from #12), Super Mario Kart (#9, up from #10), and Secret of Mana (#10, down from #7). Looking at other games, SimCity is #18 (down from #16 last month), Mario Paint is back on the list at #16, Stunt Race FX appears at #15, Star Fox dropped from #5 back to #14, and Final Fantasy II dropped from #9 to #11.

In the Game Boy list, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening had been dominating the charts for months, but with Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, Link has to be demoted to #2 by a solid margin. Kirby's Dream Land is back to #3 again as it was two months ago (last month it had fallen to #5), Tetris is back on the top five (from #7 to #4), Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (#5 from #3, beating #6 by less than 300 points), Kirby's Pinball Land (#6 hold), Metroid II: Return of Samus (#7 from #4), Super Mario Land (#8 hold), Mortal Kombat (#9 hold), and Tetris 2 (#10 hold). Donkey Kong '94 still can't crack the top 10 (#11). This time as far as classics go, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan, F-1 Race, and Golf take #18 through #20, respectively.

The NES list, deprived of major releases for some time (well, except for Tetris 2) has shuffled a bit, with The Legend of Zelda at #1 (up from #2), Mega Man 6 at #2 (up from #4), Super Mario Bros. 3 at #3 (down from #1), Tetris 2 at #4 (down from #3), Dr. Mario at #5 (up from #10), Kirby's Adventure at #6 (down from #5), Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II (#7, hold), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project (#8, down from #3), Metroid (#9, hold), and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (#10, up from #12). Final Fantasy dropped from #9 to #11.

Now Playing lists Breath of Fire (Capcom, but listed as the developer Square Soft), Capcom's Soccer Shootout (Capcom), Championship Soccer (Sony Imagesoft), The Jungle Book (Virgin Interactive Entertainment)³, Double Dragon V: The Shadow Falls (Tradewest), FIFA International Soccer (Electronic Arts), Freeway Flyboys (Seika), Kick Off 3 (Imagineer)⁴, Liberty or Death (Koei), Operation Europe: Path to Victory (Koei), Pelé! (Accolade), Super Street Fighter II (Capcom), Tetris 2 (Nintendo), and World Cup USA '94 (U.S. Gold) for the Super NES games, while Game Boy gets The Jungle Book (Virgin Interactive Entertainment), Jeopardy! Sports Edition (Gametek), Space Invaders (Taito), Stop That Roach! (Koei), and Tarzan (Gametek).

Acclaim's Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage tops Pak Watch, though some of the other titles discussed here—Stunt Race FX, Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, and Aerobiz: Supersonic, will be discussed in the near future. The "Pak Watch" update still talks about Project Reality as opposed to the name of Nintendo Ultra 64 (a correction box was in the same article, indicating this was added late in the press cycle), but it also talks about a virtual reality system also made by Nintendo (that, of course, would be the Virtual Boy).

While the next issue teases Stunt Race FX (the cover feature), this is currently where we stop, though more issues are on the way. As of this writing, we're less than 20 issues away (two years in real time) from Volume 81, which I wrote about previously. I'll be doing Volume 63 and beyond next month, or at least, that's the plan.

FOOTNOTES
1. There wasn't a "Double Dragon 4", though whether that was Super Double Dragon or Battletoads & Double Dragon is up for debate.
2. If Gametek had an exclusive license for making Tarzan video games, its bankruptcy in 1998 cleared the way for the Disney licensed titles.
3. At some point in 1994, Virgin Games became Virgin Interactive Entertainment.
4. It appears that Kick Off 3 (Kick Off 3: European Challenge) was not released in the United States.

Written October 16, 2026

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