A Quick Word About P.O.W.

I'm going to keep this brief today because I got my 3DS today, and that pretty much took up my whole day. P.O.W.: Prisoners of War is a 1989 beat'em up by SNK for NES. It's a port of an arcade game of the same title, and is the earliest SNK port that I can think of that isn't complete shit. I don't know if they did this one themselves or if Micronics just got better, but I'd put my money on the prior. The music is pretty catchy and the graphics are pretty good.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon 2003: That Fucking Sun

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon 2003 is a horrific game. Not only is a hack of the kind of bad King of Fighters 2001, but it is completely insane. It just raises to many questions. Why retitle a King of Fighters game as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Who is PhenixSoft Corporation? Why isn't there anything on www.phenixsoft.net? What is PoF? Phenix of Fighters? Why is O. Zero on fire? Is the last boss really the fucking sun? None of these questions and more will be answered in this post.

America Was A Scary Place In the 90's: Rival Turf!

Rival Turf is a by-the-books Final Fight knockoff. There is nothing remarkable about the game in any way except maybe the radical cover design. Part of me really wished the whole game were like that goofy cover, just for novelty's sake, but the name Jaleco is right there on the cart, so it's not like my hopes were that high. I mean, Jaleco has been around for a really long time, but I don't think they've ever made a game I gave a shit about.

Tenchu: Stealth Tanks With Swords

This is a sad post for me to write because it is about a game that I enjoyed a whole lot when I was younger but has not stood the test of time. I rented Tenchu: Stealth Assassins numerous times, but I didn't get around to actually owning a copy until years later when it had passed the initial Greatest Hits phase and became a bargain bin game. I fell in love with the game because, along with Metal Gear Solid, it was a game that challenged the idea of how you play an action game. Use stealth and tricks to defeat enemies, it was revolution. I didn't have to play as some “fake” ninjas like Shinobi who just run headlong into battle, I could sneak around and kill people like a “real” ninja.

Fishing? At My LAN Party?

If you were wondering when I would reach the bottom of the barrel, today is the day. In-Fisherman: Freshwater Trophies is one of many games that my father has purchased for meeting two criteria. That is, it is about fishing, and it was cheap. There is a very large stack of these sorts of games, and this just happened to be on the top. I'm sure it will come as a great shock to you to find out that this game is garbage and not even a father that just wants to fish on his computer could love it. Especially when games like Sega Bass Fishing exist.

Wonder Boy In Genesis Collection Land

Today I purchased yet another package of games as part of a Steam sale. Their Genesis classics collection costs only 10 dollars for the next week or so. You get 40 games in the collection, so that's 25 cents per game, which I'd say is quite poverty. With emulators and roms for older systems, you can get pretty much anything for free, but I don't mind paying a little bit for some classics. I've spent a few bucks on Virtual Console, mainly because I like to own things and the emulation is really good.

Super Meat Boy

I'm not going to do a big update today because I've been playing Metroid all day and I'm going to a concert tonight.  Maybe if I'm not out too late I'll do something more.  I got Super Meat Boy for $3.75 in a Steam deal of some sort.  I never would have thought that a game based around your failure would be fun, but it is.  It's a platform game that comes completely down to your abilities, which I like.  But, I like difficult things.  I'm a fanatic for the Mega Man Zero series.  I strongly recommend the game, even if you don't get it for $3.75.

Power Player 3D Station

After some sort of shipping problem and waiting an extra week or two, I finally received my Power Player 3D Station. The box is pretty bland. It's not nearly as hilarious as the one for Power Games, but at least it has some screenshots of games that in no way could ever run on a machine using bootleg Famicom hardware. If only there were some bootleg version of Dead or Alive made for this machine, I'd play that. Though it is the 3D Station, the system obviously does no 3D. The box also advertises stereo, which I would assume means stereo sound, but there is only one audio port for the composite cords, so I don't think it even has that. I guess it could do stereo sound through the RF output, but I couldn't even get that to work at all.

The Ultimate Canine Caper!

I bought Beethoven's 2^nd specifically for a Poverty Game Night party because how could a game based on a sequel to a horrible movie not be atrocious? So, I played it at the party and found out that it was, in fact, a piece of shit. The SNES cart was worth more to me in plastic and silicon. When I sat down to write this article, I thought, “Fuck, I don't want to actually play this shit again.” Instead of going on my instincts and just running away, I did the opposite of what logic dictated, and told myself that I would instead beat the game, with the help of some game genie codes of course.

Pin Bot and my childhood.

For my first post on this blog HawkeM suggested I write about this mythical game I had spoke of for years when discussing games of a time long gone by. My stories of my parents obsession with the game, in part helped him to decide to purchase this oldie for a measly $2(or as I like to think).

Dark Arms: Beast BUSTAAAAAA

Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 for the Neo Geo Pocket Color is quite an oddity of a game. It is sort of a sequel to, or probably more accurately a spin-off of, the 1989 arcade game Beast Busters. The original Beast Busters is an oddity of it's own, considering it was a relatively early arcade light gun game and it is one in which you shoot zombies that came out seven years before House of the Dead. This is just another case of SNK simply dropping the ball.

Mazin Saga: Mutant Stabber

Mazin Saga: Mutant Fighter is a 1993 beat 'em up game for the Genesis. It is based on the Mazin Saga manga, which is a spin-off of the Mazinger Z manga/anime. The short lived Almanic Corporation, formed by ex-Technos developers, made the game. The only other notable games they developed were the interesting E.V.O.: Search for Eden and that weird Kunio Kun game for SNES where you started off in prison. Considering the assumed pedigree of the people who worked on the game (maybe some of them worked on River City Ransom), Mazin Saga is a sort of lackluster beat 'em up.

Daedalian Opus: wat?

On the internet, being positive just doesn't sell. I've been too pleased with the last few games I've written about, so I today I will write about a game I could not possibly like. Daedalian Opus is a 1990 Game Boy puzzle game made by Vic Tokai. Vic Tokai is company that made games from the late eighties to mid-nineties. They weren't terribly successful, but made a few games you may have heard of, though this is not one of them. For the NES they made the somewhat well known, but bad Golgo 13, and cult hit Clash at Demonhead. Other notable games were the just plain weird Decap-Attack for Genesis, and Shinobi Legions for Saturn, which was the one with the hilarious live-action cut-scenes.

Burai Fighter: Fighting Whatever Burai Means In English

Burai Fighter is probably a pretty good game, but it's just not my type of game, so I dont' have a whole to to say about it. Like most of the games I have written about, I have spent very little money on it, so unless it is super fucking bad, I'm not really inclined to hate on it. Burai Fighter is a side-scrolling shooter, like Gradius and a million other games, released in 1990 and developed by KID. My research (wikipedia) has shown that KID also developed the Pepsiman game for Playstation and some dating sims, and they went out of business a few years ago.

Power Games Penguinstation

Today is a special day for the Poverty Game Night blog, because today is the day that my brother's eBay order arrived with a little thing called Power Games. The Power Games Super Entertainment System is one of China's many hilarious clones of Nintendo's Famicom, generally known as famiclones. This is a modern famiclone, so it has a lot of traits to be expected of a machine of such quality. It has hilarious box art, is very small, has awkward controllers, has a bunch of built in games, is insanely cheaply made to a degree that it is probably dangerous to use, and best of all it has gimmicks. The major gimmicks with Power Games is that it has “Wireless Telecontrol,” which is basically a IR controller, and the console itself looks like a penguin, giving it the lovable nickname of the Penguinstation.

Bujingai: The Gackt City

Bujingai: The Forsaken City AKA The Gackt Game is something of an oddity. It is a 3D hack and slash action platformer sort of game for the PS2 developed by Red Entertainment, the company that made the cult hit Gungrave. It came out during the post-Devil May Cry rush of action games of the mid-2000's that ended up giving gamers quite a few good games, as well as some crap. Almost all of these games had different strengths. Devil May Cry was the technical one (just try to forget about Devil May Cry 2), Ninja Gaiden was the hard one, Castlevania: Lament of Innocence was the one that had really good music, and I would say that Bujingai was the stylish one.

Cat Planet: Cat Planet. . . catplanetcatplanetcatplanetcatplanet

It doesn't get much more poverty than free. If Cat Planet is anything, it is free. . . and a planet. . . and cats. I originally discovered this game through a friend passing a me a link to this video. It is quite disturbing, as a man clearly having lost his mind, stumbles through Cat Planet and collects cats. The weirdness of the video and the simplicity of the game encouraged me to go find the game and play it.

Solar Striker

 

How environmentally conscious of 1989 Nintendo to make their strikers solar powered. Of course, I could be misinterpreting the game, and the objective could be to strike the sun. In fact, this could predate Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon 2003 as the first game in which the final boss is he sun. I wouldn't know because I never got that far.

Battle Hunter: Battling and Hunting

Battle Hunter for original Playstation is a peculiar game for a lot of reasons. The title is sort of a misnomer because you do not play a character that is hunting battles, but is actually hunting for items, and you just sort of get into battles along the way. Wikipedia defines the game as a tactical role-playing game, but that is a massive overstatement of the content of the game. It is essentially a board game with video games' ever present “role-playing elements,” which is to say, stats and items. It qualifies as poverty, because I clearly recall seeing stacks of this game in bargain bins at Big Lots years ago.

Mystery GBA Game

Okay, first on my list is a game that was probably more fun to purchase than it was to play. I'm talking, of course, about the GBA mystery game. At the local used game store (the good one), there is a bin of various Gameboy/Color/Advance games, each for a colossal $2. The contents of this bin were mostly what you'd expect. Crap, mostly licensed crap from licenses that hardly mattered when they were released. The one that really stuck out was this cartridge that had no label. It could have been anything, and the mystery was the reason I bought it.

Welcome

Poverty Game Night stems from a series of parties I've started throwing where I get together with friends to play the cheapest video games we can find. The base rule is this: never spend more than a 5 dollar average per game. This does not mean the games have to be crap, but they often are. With this blog I hope to explore some of the games that have began stacking up in my collection.