Nintendo Wii Fanboy

With Super Famicom- and even PSP-inspired Classic Controllers hitting the market, we're not surprised to see someone exploit the sentiments of nostalgic gamers with a pad fashioned after the original Famicom controller.

Available in Japan starting this September, Datel's line of retro Classic Controllers -- all four of which you can view in the gallery below -- will retail for ¥1,659 (approx $15.54). It's nowhere near an exact replica, as you'll notice several missing and inconsistent design elements, but the controller features Home and Turbo buttons. Also, you can relive those childhood memories of throwing an NES pad at the wall after crashing into the aircraft carrier for the 20th time in Top Gun.


[Via VC Reviews]

Time to get nostalgic, proud, and teary-eyed all at the same time. On this fifteenth day of July in the year 2008, the legendary Famicom turns 25 years young. Some of us (though not all of us) weren't even born when the Famicom was released in Japan in 1983, and that day marked the beginning of Nintendo's plot of world domination. They didn't get around to the United States until 1985 with the NES, but it's the thought that counts.

A few committed folks at 1up have gone to extreme lengths marking this occasion, reminiscing about the life and times and significant games that made the little white box of fun so legendary. Is the Famicom dead? Hellz to the no -- in fact, you might say the Famicom legacy is just taking shape with new games and new ideas, all with origins dating back a quarter of a century.

As we begin today's E3 proceedings, spare a single thought for the console that changed the world for the better. Happy 25th birthday, Famicom!

Star Wars games aren't always great. In fact, sometimes they're Masters of Teras Kasi. Sometimes they're Super Bombad Racing. They suffer from the same fate as any other licensed game: the developers put the universe before the gameplay, and insert whichever popular genre of game they feel like into a Star Wars framework, knowing that enough units will sell regardless of quality.

Namco's Famicom Star Wars game is the worst, and the best. It deviates from the source material not just to fit the genre (Super Bombad Racing required the existence of karts, for example, though in this case the game just shouldn't have been made), but seemingly at random. Somebody on the team may have heard of Star Wars, maybe. Even Soul Calibur IV, which actually isn't a Star Wars game at all, makes more sense as a Star Wars game than this.

It's astounding that, despite all the eBay auctions we've followed and Nintendo oddities we've researched, there are still so many Famicom accessories out there that we've never seen, much less heard of. Thankfully, an obsessive Japanese collector has put up a page documenting these rare controllers and peripherals, like Hori RF adapters and Disk System cleaning sprays. Check out the Hyper Shot Zapper-clone pictured above -- can you believe that Bandai made a submachine gun for the Famicom? Jump past the post break for more Famicom odds and ends.

Kyle Downes' NES coffee table isn't just an awesome coffee table, oh no. Read up on the making of this beautiful piece of furniture on Kyle's blog, the appropriately named Ultra Awesome, and it's obvious that Downes' work is far more than a mere coffee table -- make the jump to see what else it can do.

James Baker collects games, but probably not in the same way that any of us collect games. Baker recently coughed up $15,000 for one of the 26 gold-colored NES carts that were originally manufactured for the Nintendo World Championships in 1990 (only twelve are still accounted for) -- in fact, we're fairly certain that his is the cart we posted about recently.

Speaking to Edge about his latest acquisition, Baker confesses that spending so much on a single videogame is "pretty crazy," but also says that he "doesn't really see it purely as a videogame."

Not only is the guy richer than us, he's also a lot braver -- when he received the cart, he popped it into his NES to give it a go! "I didn't even need to blow on the end of it to get it to work," he said, nonchalantly. You better believe that playing such a game would be the last thing on our minds. Instead, we'd be handling it very delicately, and then only after washing our hands several times over.

(Fun fact: $15,000 would cover the cost of 1.5m Wii Points, which in turn could be used to purchase the whole of the current U.S. Virtual Console line-up -- more than ten times over.)

While it's not unusual to be loved by anyone for hotels to include video game services, Japan used to do it arcade-style with coin-operated consoles (like the one shown above). 100 JPY (approximately $1 USD) would net you 10-15 minutes with a Famicom (NES), which means you'd have to lay down about $2 or $3 to for a satisfactory amount of this blogger's hotel staple, Punch-Out!!. The Super Famicom (SNES), though, was a bit more coin-hungry, and the $1 equivalent would only last five minutes -- yikes. Still, we're sure that if we visited Japan during the magical time that these boxes were hooked-up to hotel TVs, we would have let go of a few coins for some quick bouts of Mario and such.

[Via Kotaku]

Despite both of this week's North American VC releases being quality games in their own right, we found the selection disappointing. We only got two games, one of which is only a minor upgrade over an existing release. Why did Nintendo skimp on the releases? And why have they been skimping for the last three or four weeks?

The situation is actually not that much better in Japan. This week only one new game is available: Devil World, the weirdo Famicom maze game designed by Miyamoto. With the game's dancing Devil making an appearance in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it's not terribly surprising that the original Famicom game is showing up on the VC.

Is it going to join imports like Super Mario Bros. 2 and Sin and Punishment on Western consoles? It's got a lot of religious imagery -- more than Devil's Crush, which was censored -- so we're going to say no and hope we're proven wrong.

• Devil World (Famicom, 1-2 players, 500 Wii Points)

Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.

We were driven into a melancholy by the news that Australia (and probably Europe) was getting a Virtual Console version of Mega Man 2 while we have yet to see a download of the first game. Many of you correctly noted that it was stupid to wait for a VC version with the Mega Man Anniversary Collection disc available so cheaply and plentifully. But we actually have the disc and the cartridge. It's a simple matter of wanting every game we like to be available through as many conduits as possible, to get into the most hands as possible. A Virtual Console release, as well, allows a game to come back to the attention of the gaming community, sparking discussion once again. We want that for Mega Man 2 forever. Our memories of Mega Man 2 are 110 million, after all.

The existence of the Mega Man Anniversary Collection still makes any included game too easy to play on the Wii to be Virtually Overlooked material, even if, by doing so, it limits discussion. There's no real reason to wish for a game that you can just go buy for less money. That renders Mega Man 1-8 off limits (good luck playing 8 on a Nintendo system any other way!) as well as The Power Battle and The Power Fighters. But we still want to talk Mega Man, so we went scrambling for an appropriate game. Mega Man X? No, it is also available on a compilation. Rockman Battle & Chase? No, it's on the same compilation! Rockboard will have to do, then. It's got the benefit of being the weirdest Mega Man game yet, and we can keep Mega Man Soccer saved up for a bit.

Well, it had an amazing run.

Unless you're a citizen of Japan and own a Famicom system, this bit of news is likely to not affect you. However, should you fulfill those requirements, you might like to know that Nintendo of Japan has ceased to support the old piece of hardware. You're probably one who still plays the thing, we imagine, so you might want to take it easy on the old gal, as this goes into effect on the 31st of this month.

Also of note, Nintendo of Japan will be dropping support for the Super Famicom, N64, Game Boy and Game Boy Pocket, as well.

[Via Arcade Renaissance]

Never have we been as enthusiastic for the oncoming flu season than when we saw this astonishing tissue dispenser. The pain of being sick is a meager price to pay for a reason to grab a tissue from a Famicom game slot.

The best news? This little beauty doesn't fall under the "I hate Japan, why do they get all the cool stuff when we don't?" category. In fact, you can purchase it at MugenToys for only $9.99.

As if we really needed another excuse to spend money during this amazing gaming season. What about you? Are you planning to pick up this nifty tissue holder? Or are you actually, you know, careful about spending money?

[Via technabob]

Digital Press forum member Gapporin's local public library has a display case for temporary displays of collections from both the library and patrons. Being a Digital Press sort of person (i.e. someone with a lot of old game systems), he decided to exhibit some of his collection.

After getting approval from the library, he installed the display seen above, which contains, among plenty of other stuff, a Sharp Twin Famicom, a Sega Master System (with Phantasy Star and Wonder Boy III!), and a Milton-Bradley Microvision. Under each console is a fact sheet with specifications and well-known games. Expect to see a lot more of this kind of stuff in the future, as the worlds of libraries and game nerdism continue to interact!

Speaking of said interaction, it's worth mentioning that the Library of Congress has issued a grant for game preservation as part of its Preserving Creative America program. Not only that, but the University of Texas just started their own Videogame Archives Project. It's really a great time to be a retrogaming-obsessed Texan librarian.

[Via Insert Credit]

Thanks to GayGamer for today's excuse to talk about old Nintendo games. Even if we can't quite decipher all of the noisome talking in these vintage Japanese commercials for Famicom games, we love seeing the old classics advertised. Can you imagine a time in which Nintendo actively encouraged people to buy Urban Champion?

It's always nice to get a look at our old friend R.O.B., which, we hope, is next on the list of NES peripherals to be updated for the Wii. And we had forgotten that the Famicom Light Gun, Japan's Zapper, looked like-- you know-- a gun.