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This year, The Nerds of Color has got your back on everything E3! Be sure you’re tuned in on Twitch, YouTube, or wherever else you plan to watch the online press conferences, and keep our tab open to catch live updates.
Continue reading “E3 2021 Press Conference Live Updates!”
This week, the folks at Flight School Studios and MWM Interactive released their indie mech title, Stonefly. The adventure game is a chill yet wholly beautifully exploration of legacy, resource gathering and mech building, as players follow Annika Stonefly in her search for her father’s stolen rig. After a late-night excursion, Annika mistakenly leaves the garage door storing the mech wide open, leaving it victim to a theft that launches our main character on her journey through dangerous and captivating flora and fauna.
Continue reading “Flight School Studio’s ‘Stonefly’ is a Must-Play Indie Game”
Back in February, the folks at Nintendo dropped an official trailer for the highly anticipated release of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD for the Nintendo Switch. The high-definition remaster of the 2011 classic, originally released on the Nintendo Wii, was announced during February’s Nintendo Direct stream, to the thunderous applause of countless Zelda fans. What followed were several announcements, including Skyward Sword themed Joy-Cons (with preorders currently sold-out practically everywhere) available the same day as the game’s July 2021 release.
Continue reading “‘The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD’ will Launch with Amiibo Feature That Has Fans Concerned”
On Hard NOC Life, Dominic and Keith discuss the end of Star Wars: The Clone Wars on Disney+ and how it re-contextualizes the prequel trilogy for the better.
Continue reading “Hard NOC Life: Concluded, ‘The Clone Wars’ Have”
Did I like Pokémon: Detective Pikachu? For the most part, yes. Would I recommend this movie to everyone? I don’t know if I can.
To elaborate, growing up, I played Pokémon Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, and Silver. Then my mom wouldn’t buy me a Game Boy Advance, so I stopped counting after 251, and never played another console Pokémon game thereafter (at least until I became a grown-ass man, got a job, bought a Switch, and started playing Let’s Go Pikachu!). Then naturally the Pokémon Go phase happened, and I got obsessed again. However, as they began expanding the roster of Pokémon beyond the 251 I knew, I was completely lost about what any of the Pokémon that appeared from the Advance generation and up were, and ultimately stopped playing.
Continue reading “NOC Review: ‘Detective Pikachu’ Falls Short of Being the Very Best”
When it was first announced that the world of Pokémon was finally getting a live-action film, fans all over the world of the video game, card game, and animated series were excited at the prospect of seeing their favorites come to life. Pikachu was finally becoming a live action creature, but many wondered… how?
Whoever had to create this live-action world for all of the Pokémon would have to really work closely with Japan’s The Pokémon Company to ensure these iconic characters are detailed for the hardcore fans. Fortunately, Pokémon: Detective Pikachu looks like it just did that.
Continue reading “‘Detective Pikachu’ is on the Case in First Teaser Trailer!”
Recently Netflix has released the first “season” of Castlevania, a gory, animated version of the beloved Konami series featuring our favorite vampire killers trying to take down Dracula. I am a huge fan of Castlevania, from the platformer NES days to its Metroidvania-style games on the DS; I was curious to see how they would portray the game in a show format. There is definitely some potential if given to the right people. With only being four episodes long, how does show fare with the original material?
Long story short, some work is required but it is a good start.
Continue reading “Reviewing Netflix’s ‘Castlevania’ from a ‘Castlevania’ Junkie”
There were more than 68,000 total attendees at E3 this week, and I’m almost certain all of them have been gaming more than I have in the past five years. I’m retired. Too many consecutive days of realizing I’d played through the night until dawn had me putting the sticks down. Not to mention, I just can’t keep up with these kids. I’m washed.
Yet here I got the fortunate opportunity to cover E3 for NOC in the conference’s first year open to the public. I had to do this, for the culture, for the kid inside who never finished Mario 2, and for the same kid that reached the end of Streets of Rage and chose to kill my brother to take over the gang.
The art of “translating” a media property from one cultural context to another requires more than simple language transliteration. Translating works of art has existed from the moment people from different cultures encountered one another. But at what point does translating something for an American audience necessitate whitewashing as well? Today, we’re going to look at two animated properties available on Netflix — Yo-Kai Watch from Japan and Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir from France — to determine at which point whiteness trumps cultural context when making a kids’ show more acceptable to American audiences.
Continue reading “Translation or Whitewash? The Problem with Yo-Kai Watch in America”
The NES was my staple console for the majority of my childhood. While I did not have many games at my disposal, games like Double Dragon and Double Dragon II were titles that I played just about every day on my own and with friends. I still consider Double Dragon II to be one of my favorite NES games and it influenced my tastes in games I play today. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the series’ creation, Arc System Works recruited many of the original crew that made the original game to make a brand new sequel in the form of the 8-bit games I cherished as a child. When hearing about this news, I was excited and skeptical at the same time. The nostalgia side of me wanted it but would it be enough to maintain my interest in the current era of video games?
Continue reading “Stumbling Down Memory Lane with ‘Double Dragon IV’”
This week, a classic Nintendo video game celebrated a landmark anniversary. In September 1985, the first iteration of Super Mario Bros. was released for the Famicom system in Japan. Three decades later, the Italian plumber with the 40″ vertical and suspect accent has become a cultural phenomenon the world over.
To mark Nintendo’s crowning achievement in making all of us feel super old, the Nerds convened around the old Roundtable to share some of their Super Mario memories.
Continue reading “NOCs of the Roundtable: Super Mario Memories”
I had just finished teaching my fifth grade class in Japan when I heard the news that the President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, passed away due to bile duct cancer. The news was a slap to the face to me; I had just been talking about Splatoon to some of my students. While I am not as close to Nintendo as I was when I was a child, I cannot deny to say that Mr. Iwata’s work in the company hadn’t influenced my life.
I love video game music. Ever since I started playing them back in the NES/Famicom days, I have always appreciated the catchy tunes from various games. This never went away as games evolved; if anything, my love for them only expanded. I would say at least 50% of my iPod library contains music from video games ranging from the 80s to the present day.
Nowadays, accessing the music you wanted to hear is pretty easy; usually a search on YouTube will do it. But back in the day, you had to either go to that specific part of the game or record it yourself. Props to my dad who had the fantastic idea of using an audio recorder to record Magic Sword through the SNES by going through each song in the sound test for a couple of minutes and recording it onto a cassette for me to jam to while on the move.
But now? I can just type that on YouTube and voila!
Continue reading “Diggin’ In the Carts: A Sound Test for Your Childhood”
by Dave Lee
Pokémon is the shit on many different levels.
First of all, I don’t consider myself a true gamer in the sense that I’m looking for more of an experience and less of a challenge. Also, I don’t have time to be consumed by a game for that long of a time. I’m trying to get that run-through action similar to when you set aside those weekends to binge-watch all of Breaking Bad. Yeah, there’s post-game content, online play, and it’s definitely heads out there on a serious quest for shiny pokémon (#veryrare). But the RPG format provides that one and done feeling.
Also, the game is marketed towards a younger audience. You know what that means to me? I’m not piling on more stress on top of the stress I already face as a dude in his late 20s, still trying to find his way in the world. Just some good ol’ fashioned fun that’s easily accessible, especially for dudes who haven’t been keeping up with the new generation consoles and getting their subscriptions of Gamepro, which doesn’t even exist anymore.
I know this has been shared a million times on the internet already, so what’s one more share?
Continue reading “The Magnificent DJ Jazzy Jeff + Super Mario Bros.“
Video games have been part of my life ever since I was a little kid. Ever since I was five, I have had a console in my room or living room, waiting to be played every day. I have a lot of memories of playing the NES. While I had some games, I played the majority of them either by borrowing some from friends or renting them at the local video store. You basically had to judge what kind of game you were going to get by the cover and the back of the box. It really was a crapshoot, but that was half the fun of it. After that you would gather your friends and/or siblings to enjoy it for the weekend until you had to return it.
The majority of the games were very difficult to beat and required endless trial and error. You had to have a ton of patience if you wanted to get anywhere. However, once you cleared a level you weren’t able to or finished a game you had sunk hours in gave you the greatest feeling in the world. Or, you would run out of time and say “Screw it, I can’t do it for now,” and return the game. And then it was on to the next one. That was my childhood in a nutshell when it came to games. I miss those days. I miss those old retro games and just the feeling of trying to conquer the random titles I was given for the weekend. I wish more people could experience the feelings I had as a game-loving kid. But how?
Enter GameCenter CX.
“The Lion King. Disney. Safe bet,” I hear my mom say in the other room. And with that, my family is off to the movies.
Movies seem safe. An escape, a way to forget about everything that has just happened.
The Lion King opened in June, but it’s now October. Only one small theater near us is still playing it, but tickets are only a couple of dollars. The theater is empty except for my mother, my brother, my sister, and me. My sister has just turned six. My brother is seven. I am thirteen.
The lights dim and the film begins. Everything is fine. This feels good; it’s a nice escape. The colors are bright, the music pleasant.
And then…
If names like Donkey Kong, Mario, Power Pad, or Gameboy mean anything to you, then you may shed a tear for this news: Hiroshi Yamauchi, the Japanese businessman who took the Nintendo franchise from a trading card company to video game royalty, passed away yesterday from complications of pneumonia. Yamauchi, who was named the president of Nintendo in 1949 when he was only 22 years old, claimed that he knew nothing about video games, but he obviously knew enough to turn Nintendo into one of the most recognized — and successful — video game companies in history (you may be a Nintendo nerd if you recognize these games). For those of us who grew up watching Mario and Luigi destroy Koopa Troopas and rooted for Link to rescue Princess Zelda, it has been a sad time in the NOC offices.
To honor the man who gave us a reason to stay up past our bedtime playing video games instead of doing homework, a few of the Nerds reflected on our favorite Nintendo memories:
Continue reading “Nintendo Nostalgia: The Passing of Hiroshi Yamauchi”
