Top-down ninja fun
Legend of Zelda, it’s not
‘Nintendo’ hard, yup
D’Arcy is an educator and gamer from BC, Canada. He’s been gaming his entire life and enjoys both new and retro games. His consoles of choice are Game Boy, PS3, and Switch.You can follow his gaming online @darcyska_gaming
Shayne is living by the ocean in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Shayne’s daughter broke their Cintiq pen, but he’ll be back to drawing soon.
An original metal song about Mystical Ninja starring Goemon, for the Game Boy! A very punishing game with a lot of varied gameplay concepts. Written, performed & produced by Josh Adams.
Josh Adams is a vocalist and musical performer. Check out their Youtube channel or Bandcamp and peep him on Twitter.
It’s September folks and that means a couple of things. First, we’re blowing through summer. Good riddance, I say! I am a cold-weather model human and I frankly think all of this sunshiney nonsense is for the birds. I’m looking forward to any inkling of cool fall days we may get here in Southern California. September also means a new game for us all to play! That’s of course why you’re here, not for my thick-blooded complaints about San Diego. We’re playing Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, the 1998 Game Boy entry in the long-running and fan-favorite Goemon series by Konami. I know nothing about it! It’s one of those game franchises you’ve almost certainly heard of if you play video games, but the releases in the west were fairly under the radar and relatively few and far between compared to the releases in its native Japan. The games cover a bit of genre territory so while they are often action games there have also been RPGs, board games, and numerous cameos in other series’. This one is a top-down action/adventure game from the looks of it and I’m pretty excited to give it a go and see what I’ve been missing. Maybe I’ll finally get around to the entries on SNES and Nintendo 64 that have been recommended to me countless times! Here’s what our pal Nolen has to say as the fella who chose this month’s game:
“I’ve only played the Mystical Ninja game on the N64 and know that this one is pretty different. I’ve heard this game gets some hate for being boring but it was either this or Battletoads and I don’t want to piss everyone off again.”
An update on game prices and emulation:
When we started this a few years ago (wow!) there were plenty of cheap and readily available Game Boy games on the market. Not just bad ones, but a lot of great ones, too! We decided that we would try to keep our monthly game choices to under twenty buck-a-roos to keep participation Yokoi Kids cheap for those who wanted to add to their collection as they played along with us. That said, we have always been okay with the use of emulators for those who can’t or just don’t want to own the physical cart. We need to reiterate this especially now as the COVID-19 pandemic has sent video game prices skyrocketing. Reasonably priced games are jumping ten, twenty, one hundred dollars in value across all systems. Unless we want to be playing the dregs of the Game Boy library from here on out, we’ll likely have to break our price rules more than a few times. This is particularly true of this month’s game which we think is worthy of checking out, but can fetch up to $300 bucks in an online auction! Who’s got that money?! In the future, as has always been, play the game however you are most comfortable. Emulate away. We are also paying attention to which of these pricier games are available on the 3DS. This seems to be a nice middle-of-the-road solution as you can still play the game on physical hardware and they only cost like three bucks! CHEEP!
So, in closing: The average price of the chosen games may start to go up, but please feel free to play the game any way you like. We won’t tell on you. Promise.
As always, we look forward to your contributions!
-IF
Yokoi Kids 