A total load of Bulls: Jordan Vs. Bird: One-on-One & The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | NES Works 142

[@Encyclopedia_Brown97]

I love when Jeremy’s commentary style briefly shifts to “What if the AVGN had a Master’s degree?” style vitriol

[@goldencommon2266]

"What were they COGITATING?"

[@stevethepocket]

"Ah, this will be the perfect gift for Timmy and his Intendo Tape Machine this Christmas!" Brilliant.

[@psychodiagnostik]

Timmy just loves those TV games.

[@lordmanimani-]

This comment with a homestar profile pic is 😙👌

[@trangus]

Larry “Larry Bird” Bird 😂

[@lilwyvern4]

Revolver Ocelot

[@luisguillermojg]

6:10 Really misguided move from Sega putting Peyton Manning's name to their games when he was not only retired, but also 12 years old.

[@GetterBurai]

Yeah, I *think* he may have crossed wires with Walter Payton.

[@JeremyParish]

They had a good feeling about the kid

[@Dekar346]

I was trying to figure out if Archie Manning got a Sega game

[@rootbeer_666]

@@Dekar346that’s where my mind was going-an Archie Manning game on a Sega console when all I have is this lousy Johnny Unitas bullshit on a Tiger LCD? A travesty.

[@dreamlandnightmare]

Sega was incredibly psychic in this case, yet they did not forsee the failures of the Sega CD, 32X, Saturn, and Dreamcast.

[@Dojonpachi]

"Once you find your sweet spot, and get your timing right, it has a certain rhythm," he says, as Bird drops brick after brick. :)

[@mcgillaz3672]

I unapologetically love The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, despite how difficult it is - I also think it has great music.

[@alanschmitt9865]

The OST absolutely bangs and I’m convinced it isn’t just nostalgia

[@mcgillaz3672]

@alanschmitt9865 damn straight. Also, I'm 99% sure that the alligator boss in stage 2 gave me submechanophobia. Always freaked me out how after you beat it, the eyes and teeth disappeared and then the screen went dark.

[@alanschmitt9865]

@@mcgillaz3672 I’m absolutely certain my fear of boats started with the raft segment before the aforementioned demon gator “I can’t go on that thing, what if I jump and the boat sails out from under me???”

[@mcgillaz3672]

@@alanschmitt9865 i am right there with you. Couldn't have said it better myself!

[@sofubisamurai]

It’s fun!

[@RogerPyoko]

Your random trivia of the day: Larry Bird (voiced by Gary Chalk) appears as a character in the third season episode of Captain N the Game Master "Pursuit of the Magic Hoop". As the episode aired fall 1991 and we're still in Summer 1989, seems like someone just wanted an excuse to have a basketball episode and reached for the first NES game they could think of to let it happen as opposed to being singled out as a hot new release to advertise. No Captain N version of Michael Jordan in the episode, though you do get a parody of Steve Urkel instead to remind you it was that era of the 90s.

[@mosheg.8764]

Mark Twain did actually get less racist as time went on, promoting civil rights and protesting against imperialism and the Philippine War. he never really got better with Native Americans, though

[@JeremyParish]

Thank you Guinan

[@lilwyvern4]

@@JeremyParish Having dealt with humans for hundreds of years, she resolved "just keep them drunk, it's a lot easier."

[@ItsThatRetro]

Checking the Square Tom Sawyer RPG: "What? It's just an ordinary FamicoOH MY GOODNESS!!"

[@diamondsmasher]

Who in their right mind thought making a game out of homework was a brilliant idea? “Mom! Dad! Can you buy me the new MacBeth game?!”

[@ValkyrieTiara]

Hang on... MacBeth goes kinda hard. I'd probably play a game based on that! Though, to be fair, maybe not an NES game specifically 😂

[@BladedEdge]

Macbeth on the nes was awful, they really cut out a lot compared to the amazing Amiga/ST version.

[@fangjokerLS]

This installment of NES Works was truly a series of moving pictures. The camera eye clearly showed many vital signs without becoming a kind of witch hunt.

[@eddievhfan1984]

This comment is living in the limelight. Someone buy this dude a red Barchetta, so he can drive to YYZ.

[@billcook4768]

I read the book, but don’t remember Tom Sawyer going up against a dinosaur, gorilla or Dracula’s Castle.

[@JeremyParish]

It's in the Tom Sawyer Apocrypha, which is not recognized by most mainstream religions

[@ginormousaurus8394]

The game reminds me of Hanna-Barbera's The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Becky Thatcher traveled to exotic lands and encountered apes, pirates, mummies, ghosts, and other strange things.

[@KasumiKenshirou]

@@ginormousaurus8394 Several of those things appear in the footage of this game. I wonder if they were related.

[@arcadeapocalypsemusic]

It takes place in a dream, which it clearly shows in the cutscene

[@ginormousaurus8394]

@@arcadeapocalypsemusic The game has a "It was all a dream, or was it?" ending: Tom wakes up at school but sees feathers from Injun Joe's headdress.

[@brisulph]

While it has warts, I always appreciated adventures of Tom Sawyer. Punishing at times, but obscenely so. It just requires a bit of play and learn from mistakes that was common back in the day.

[@davidmylchreest3306]

As a Brit who owned a Commodore 64 until 1993, I can assure you there were plenty more games to come for the machine after 1988. It even got a conversion of The Simpsons Arcade. oh God. Just realised that I'm THAT kid

[@FranzKafkaRockOpera]

I gotta say, as a punchline to the thoughtful musings on Twain's handling of race, the image of a war-bonnet-clad sprite riding a diplodocus made me laugh out loud.

[@rodneylives]

The C64 has only eight hardware sprites, but they're larger than the NES's, and if you only have two large characters you can double up sprites to give your characters extra colors. One thing about the NES is that larger characters must be made out of multiple sprites. (I'm using the technical definition of a sprite here, a block of graphics data that can be independently placed on screen regardless of a background layer, not the more contemporary meaning of nearly any bit of small pixel arr.) Home computers were intended to be programmed by ordinary people, so their chips tended to be easier to use, and in the C64's case the computer's ROM did very little to help you out anyway with pre-packaged routines. The NES was a lot trickier to use effectively, because you could only really send data to the PPU at specific times each frame, and its sprites were only 8x8 or 8x16, so it had to construct its larger characters out of multiple sprites (of which it had tons more). Both these factors imposed a certain amount of overhead, but the NES made up for it by being a scrolling beast and having a higher clock speed. The C64 on the other hand technically could fill the whole screen with sprites by "multiplexing" them, moving them down the screen as it was drawn, but its slower clock speed meant you couldn't do as much else on each frame, and each had fewer colors. Thank you for attending my class on the differences between the C64 and the NES! Be sure to come by for our next session, taking place probably the next time there's a computer port to discuss. I'm sure you're all thrilled.

[@rodneylives]

Also: Tom Sawyer is so bad that, in explicating how bad it is, you didn't even have time to remark on Tom fighting mummies and skeletons, or Injun Joe riding a freaking dinosaur.

[@XanthinZarda]

@@rodneylives I think it's meant to be a lake monster like Nessie, but even still, completely out of place.

[@JeremyParish]

I give The Goonies II a pass for its winged skeletons and dinosaur lava zone, so I feel like I can't come down TOO hard on TAoTS for that stuff

[@RndStranger]

I'd honestly rather play Adventures of Tom Sawyer than Kung Fu Heroes. At least Tom Sawyer doesn't bury basic game elements behind layers of obfuscation. There's something amusing in how Japanese players thought that Americans just loved super hard games and that was why so many later-8-bit and 16-bit games got re-tuned to be nearly impossible for American releases.

[@JeremyParish]

Tom Sawyer over Kung-Fu Heroes? Not even as a joke, man.

[@jasonblalock4429]

I'd still go to bat for "Athena" being the worst game on NES. It plays at least as badly as the competition, plus it has godawful janky flickering characters because the NES just was not capable of doing the armor/weapon upgrade system properly. As plain as Tom Sawyer's graphics are, at least Tom isn't an incoherent jumble of flickering sprites.

[@ginormousaurus8394]

Kung Fu Heroes is one of those games where it's necessary to read the manual before playing. I found it was okay once I knew what to do.

[@timlom5522]

Jaws is legitimately good and I'm glad people are coming around to it.

[@nfugitt89]

"Jordan vs. Bird except for real." Love your little subtitle easter eggs when they happen

[@SynopsisGrim]

One can only imagine how a game based on The Catcher in the Rye would have turned out if SETA continued their "required reading for U.S. school students" series.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

Perfect! 👌

[@ginormousaurus8394]

I'm picturing a Kaboom! clone in which Holden Caulfield has to catch children before they fall off a cliff.

[@XanthinZarda]

Flowers for Algernon, Castle in the Attic...I can see how a lot of required reading books could have gone wrong.

[@SimonCallahan]

You know, Lord Of The Flies might have turned out to be a decent platformer.

[@luisguillermojg]

I thought that's what Duck Hunt was.

[@unoclay]

One of your best videos yet, thank you for the academic comical approach you've developed to a fine point knife

[@ItalNico]

I remember seeing Tom Sawyer in NP and thinking "well that looks lame, nope!". I don't recall any of my friends ever playing or talking about it.

[@nintendianajones64]

It's okay if you name drop Faxanadu in every episode I totally understand

[@BladedEdge]

I can't respect him as a journalist if he doesn't.

[@massivepileup]

Turrican came out in 1990, the C64 got a lot of games well into the 90s

[@todesziege]

More so in Europe than the US.

[@ellipticalsoul]

@@todesziege I had a C64 in the 90s, there was even a C64 magazine being published here in the UK in the mid 90s!

[@jrightly]

why does the pixel art Jordan asking "Any rust on that rim?" seem so sinister to me?

[@ethanlaborde]

Idk but it made me bust out laughing

[@DegeneragentX]

And we are safe from Xevious Mentions for another day.

[@2dskillz]

Jordan vs. Bird was a great compliment to Double Dribble. Covered all your b-ball needs, both fun for couch play.

[@RogerPyoko]

Overlooking Miria from the Guardian Legend when bringing up NES female protags seems like it was done to sell the joke, until you remember that Broderbund was contorting themselves in all sorts of pretzel shapes to try and downplay that kids would be playing as an icky girl in their space shooter game.

[@jasonking3182]

I think video game rental difficulty hit its peak with Lion King 5 years later.

[@aaronmoore6275]

Love your stuff, Mr. Parish.

[@DeepWeeb]

Whenever Jeremy rants about shovelware on the Famicom I'm always reminded of how videogame history tends to be skewed almost exclusive on the perspective of the US market; how Nintendo saved videogames after the 1983 crash...even though it only applied to consoles (computer games were safe) and videogames were still a blooming business in Europe and Japan, and Nintendo didn't only ever curated their library through strict guidelines for the US market (which didn't prevent a bunch of bad licensed games to still slip through the cracks!)

[@jasonblalock4429]

Yeah, I always make sure to say "1983 *North American* video game crash" when the topic comes up.

[@DeepWeeb]

@@jasonblalock4429 Jeremy even brought this up in an older video but the reality is that even if Nintendo never came stateside videogames would have eventually made their comeback one way or the other because *the demand for them by the consumers was high* The US videogame crash only ever amounted to retailers not wanting to take videogames at the fear of overstocking they can't get rid off (hence E.T. buried in the desert)

[@jasonblalock4429]

@@DeepWeeb Also, sales of the Colecovision actually went *up* during the 'crash.' If Coleco hadn't destroyed their entire consumer electronics division with the Adam, it might have kept the 2nd Gen alive.

[@jorymil]

It's certainly subject to the viewpoints of the people doing the historical research. Just means that there are other angles to research!

[@DeepWeeb]

@@jorymil It reminds me of how during the Smash Bros. Ultimate reveal of Terry Bogard it begins with a timeline of Nintendo's older consoles, and then it goes on a tangent into the Neo-Geo as if that was a whole parallel universe *because for the average Nintendo/Smash fan **_it is_*

[@slightlyevolved]

I wonder if publishers ever figured out that by making the games terrible (not just harder, but actually bad by moving around levels, etc) that they were actively killing the sales? We rented to also determine which games we would be asking for on our birthdays and christmasses. If a game was good, even if we beat it, sometimes it was good enough to still want to own it. Or, we got a few levels in, but wanted it because it was GOOD.

[@XanthinZarda]

Given that the Rental Killer trend continued though the SNES, I don't think they learned a dang thing. Here's mud in your eye, Lion King!

[@zaneseibert]

Considering the modern games industry's focus on playtime/engagement (aka wasting time) over quality, I'd say no.

[@ZaGorudan]

Oh. Yeah. Wow. Square's Tom Sawyer has one of the more offensive-looking caricatures I've seen in a hot minute. You think you're ready for it but you're really not.

[@Leahi84]

It genuinely upsets me that your channel Is so overlooked by people. People are seriously missing out. I love your videos. Honestly my favourite retro games channel hands down!

[@MrGoldenwheels]

As the first rental game I ever finished (maybe the first NES game I finished) I still pull Tom Sawyer down every few years and just power through it. 35 years and many playthroughs later, I don’t really think the first stage is any more frustrating or cheap than any of the others. I can’t agree it’s as bad Jeremy thinks…but I can hardly defend it either.

[@MarginalSC]

As a kid the concept of a game based on Tom Sawyer made by brain shout "No!"

[@inkwolf77]

12:25 "Intendo" was exactly how my grandmother pronounced Nintendo. How did you know?

[@CassiusZedaker-pr7kc]

That's also how James Rolfe pronounces it, bless his heart.

[@JeremyParish]

I, too, had a grandmother

[@robertlauncher]

Let’s not forget Mary O and Pokey Man

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

​@@JeremyParishI had two!

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

​@@robertlauncherGood times! 🎉

[@Dwedit]

We haven't reached December 1989 yet, I bet we'll see an infamous game which is quite *uncanny*.

[@efaustus9]

6:59 I was that "pesky" Atari XE owner making the best of his antiquated Atari 8-bit computer in console clothing trying to pass itself off like the "hello fellow kids" Steve buscemi meme.

[@JeremyParish]

Say what you will, but XEGS had access to an incredible library. It was super dated, but still!

[@efaustus9]

@@JeremyParish Juxtaposed against the vivid cartoony duck hunt and scrolling wondrous worlds of Mario, the XEGS box with bug hunt and missile command were comparatively quite bland. Regardless I had some good times with the system, biding my time with food fight, load runner and Archon until I got a NES of my own.

[@OldNick999-real1]

Growing up, I had an Atari 2600 when everyone else had a Nintendo Entertainment System. The kids that had a Nintendo were the posh kids. Nintendo wasn’t just a toy. It was a status symbol.

[@jessragan6714]

I didn't get an NES until 1988, and had to slum with the Atari 2600 and yard sale picks for a few years. That was fine... I needed to spend some quality time with B-17 Ballllllmer and Burgertime on the Intellivision before I was ready to play with power.

[@galloe8933]

A tire fire Sunday, slathered in unplugged refrigerator dripping syrup, sprinkled with shattered halogen tube light glass, dusted with the white powder that burst out of the lights, and finally topped with cat crap, and ferret filth. The Tom Sawyer homemade ice cream challenge bowl, eat two bites and you can legally say you beat The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. You don't even have to play it, and if anyone wants you to prove it, you can punch them in the face for even implying that you would play that game, even though you said you beat it, and have the gold trimmed award that says you beat it.

[@milkcarton6654]

`Really enjoyed the whole bit about rental laws. `I had figured for a long time the reason why so many NES games were so hard was in part because a lot were arcade adaptations, and as we know arcade games had to be hard so you'd spend a lot of money on the game, and in part, yes, to increase the games lifespan since games were so short then, but I had never considered it was really to kill the rental market. The thing is i believe at least in my case the developers shot themselves in the foot by making games that were really hard. I must have played close to 200 NES games back in the day and yet I only ever owner 13. I rented games every weekend for like three years, and the thing is, yes, it is true if i could finish a game in a weekend I'd rarely consider buying it unless the gameplay was stellar, but same if the game was incredibly difficult from the very first levels. I'd assume then that probably i wouldn't be able to finish it so why bother buying it if I wasn`t bound to ever see more than 2 or 3 stages. (of all the games I owned then there's two i could never finish, Cobra Command and Predator, now the latter might have been in good part cause the game was so bad , but still it was doubly frustrating that on top of being bad, i could never even finish it) Being able to rent games was a godsend for a 9 year old gamer and yeah it was only a few years ago I realised that renting games hadn't been a reality everywhere., I know for example that in France it WAS a possibility but it wasn't really that widespread. It seemed anyway that it wasn't as integral a part of the gaming culture in the 80s and 90s as it was in North America. That said, faced with choosing between the rental option or the piracy option... i might have chosen the latter. After all there IS just one single reason why since 2003 I have been gaming exclusively on PC.... Not to mention I got a PC in 1989 and by the time my second parents-bought pc was too old for new games in 1995 (I would not return to PC gaming until '03), I "owned" probably a 100 games. Only about a dozen of those I'd actually paid for....

[@AQuestionofCharacter]

Completely loving the new setup. Super dope.

[@JeremyParish]

I'm still straightening out my work space, but it's nice to finally have an actual desk for the first time since, uh, in my entire life.

[@gfhrtshergheghegewgewgew1730]

finally, a kusoge on nes to surpass kung-fu heroes

[@ValkyrieTiara]

Jordan vs Bird had the side effect of propagandizing my brain into believing in an alternate history where Larry Bird's longtime rival was Michael Jordan rather than Magic Johnson. I'm not old enough to really have known or cared about Larry Bird as an active player, so this game was my sole touchstone to him even existing until his cameo in Space Jam, where he was "The other guy from Jordan vs Bird". I think this is all pretty interesting when you consider the fact that I've never actually played the game lol IRT Tom Sawyer, honestly I'm not sure how the stage swap was supposed to finagle children into buying the game. Like... putting the hardest stage first doesn't make the game overall harder, it just makes you have to "get good" sooner. At best it would cause most people clear the game FASTER, being put into a grueling training gauntlet off the jump before being dropped into lighter challenges that might otherwise have tripped them up for a time if they hadn't already been hardened in the fires of hell. At worst, it would have made kids return the game to the rental shop frustrated, vowing to never play (much less purchase) such an awful title. At least its existence makes me feel better about the hours I put into Kung Fu Heroes as a kid. SOME seven-year-old out there had it way worse than me.

[@Nemo2342]

Well damn, you got me dead to rights as being the kid who was annoyingly superior about owning a 7800. But it was my choice to get that system since I figured it was easier to get my parents to spend $50 for it versus $100 for the NES, so I had to justify my poor decision somehow. And mostly I did that by being pedantic and arguing that Atari was better because they invented video games and who needed Super Mario Bros anyway when I had perfectly good Mario Bros at home.

[@GameplayandTalk]

I did the exact same thing several years later with the Jaguar. Oh, I wasn't the brightest in my younger years, that's for sure..

[@jasonblalock4429]

I actually made that same argument with my parents - but they went ahead and bought me a NES anyway, despite me being willing to compromise with a cheaper system. I think they may have been impressed that their 8-year-old was thinking tactically about purchases.

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

We 7800 early adopters need a support group.

[@BrettDelaney-i6b]

I to was a 7800 kid got it for Christmas of 87 but after I cried and whined for a year I got a nes for 1988 Christmas

[@jorymil]

My neighbors got a 7800... then got an NES anyway. Asteroids, Joust, and Pole Position II vs Mario, Zelda, and Samus was just an unfair fight.

[@premeloanthony1953]

Love the show. Jordan vs bird was fire it was all we had until double dribble

[@premeloanthony1953]

your off the hook kung fu heroes! yeah! we knew u could do it 🎉🎉🎉

[@ssalevan]

Holidays in Eden reference??!! Whaaa??! I had no idea that you were a Marillion man, Jeremy, you just blew this fella's mind.

[@JeremyParish]

Saw them at the Fillmore in 2005 for Marbles, standing at the very front of the crowd. Coulda reached out and touched Rothery’s guitar if I’d wanted to.

[@ssalevan]

@@JeremyParish Thats’s amazing man!! Gosh what a ride that time was, one of my first rock shows was seeing them at the TLA on that tour and it legit changed my life.

[@andimcc6131]

There's something kinda fascinating to me that Bird, Jordan, and Dr. J all have apparently unique balance characteristics, but that Bird plays against *both*. It makes me wonder if you could romhack some version of this game to create a Jordan vs Dr. J, and if you did, would you still have an interesting game? (That is, if Dr. J and Jordan are both tuned to be foils to Bird, would they feel too similar to give the game texture if pit against each other? Or would an interesting rock-paper-scissors dynamic emerge?)

[@phazonmasher]

I was listening while working and it buffered right as soon as you said "On rhe plus side" which I assumed was a marvelous burn.

[@stewartsmith2025]

I didn't get an NES until my friend gave me his after he got a Super Nintendo. For some reason he had a copy of Tom Sawyer. Because I was so desperate for games and had no money to buy new ones after beating the handful he had given me, I became bound and determined to beat Tom Sawyer. I played it so much I could eventually clear the game without ever getting hit.

[@tyruslawhorn]

I can't tell if this is bragging or a cry for help...

[@stewartsmith2025]

@@tyruslawhorn Why not both?

[@kevin12567]

And today I learned why Japanese games were made more difficult for their North American releases...Thank you, Jeremy. Looking forward to Faxanadu next week!

[@ClusterShart]

Countless middle-aged European men would disagree with you by saying the C64 had nothing of note after 88.

[@rottenparts]

2nd Rush reference. Nice!

[@stevethepocket]

No footage of the Amiga version in that montage of _Dr. J vs Larry Bird_ clips, though? That's the first version I became aware of (on the _Kaleidoscope_ demo disk), and given EA's relationship with the Amiga at the time, it was probably meant to be the flagship version.

[@jonothanthrace1530]

Good ol' Winkysoft. Like Micronics if Micronics had turned out to have a knack for strategy RPGs starring giant robots.

[@junethea8283]

I was one of those children who never saw past stage 3 in The Adventures of Tom Saywer. This video was the first time I saw that boss fight

[@karenelizabeth1590]

18:16 This is why I'm not ashamed to have owned a Game Genie as a kid. I couldn't afford new $50 games, so renting was the only alternative, and if they game companies were making them harder on purpose, then IMHO having a Game Genie was justified.

[@nahumgardner]

I'll never understand the bosses of that Tom Sawyer, why is there a giant purple gorilla in Mississippi. I managed to beat the game as a kid, I got it when it first came out.

[@JeremyParish]

Cultural issue-the devs had heard about the movie "Gorillas in the Mist" but someone mistranslated the title as "Gorillas in Ole Miss," and, well

[@jonothanthrace1530]

@@JeremyParish "Gorillas in Ole Miss" is the kind of joke you'd have seen on The Critic if it had aired 10 years earlier.

[@EvanCWaters]

They were looking at adaptations of Tom Sawyer in other media and somehow a VHS with an episode of Grape Ape got thrown in there, it was a whole deal

[@jessragan6714]

@@jonothanthrace1530 Nothing wrong with that! Jay Sherman is my spirit animal.

[@jonothanthrace1530]

@@jessragan6714 oh yeah, it was not at all a knock on the joke.

[@sofubisamurai]

I managed to beat Tom Sawyer as a weekend rental back in the day. I played through it again last winter and kind of enjoyed it. Maybe I’m deranged 😂

[@martiankeichan6887]

Despite how kusoge it is I can't hate Tom Sawyer. It is one of those games that you want to keep playing to see what kinda ridiculous bullshit it will throw you next. There was a time when I was even able to finish it with only 1 credit. Stockholm syndrome hit me hard in those days when I didn't have too many games to play besides what my parents bought for me. (Edit) Holy shit! Winkysoft surely redeemed themselves later with Macross Scrambled Valkyrie, Guardians, and the Super Robot Taisen series.

[@stevenglowacki8576]

I had Jordan vs. Bird as a kid solely because my dad was a huge basketball fan. I didn't particularly like it, and I didn't like basketball much either regardless of his attempts to get me to play.

[@noahmatuszewski8085]

I didn't have many NES games as a kid, but in that meager library was both Kung Fu Heros & The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Between those two, the easy favorite was Tom Sawyer!

[@dayveeman]

Ah man, you got the western changes to combat rentals said perfectly. Right down to it ruining continues in Ninja Gaiden 3.

[@thejackal007]

Looking forward to the video on Faxanadu!

[@grudlian2352]

Curious where Adventures Of Bayou Billy falls in the chronological release order. I was thinking it came out before Tom Sawyer and it was also made more difficult for the US release.

[@abraveastronaut]

I like how you just dropped Time's Arrow on us with no further elaboration.

[@daviddalrymple2284]

Imagine if Hudson Soft had licensed even more spinoff games from Falcom. We could have had "Fays" and "Fatrails".

[@JeremyParish]

Nice try, but Hudson made an Ys game and just called it... Ys IV.

[@JGreen-le8xx]

Jeremy is the Larry Bird of game reviews. Change my mind!

[@JeremyParish]

I have much better politics than he does

[@jessragan6714]

@@JeremyParish You're a much better actor, too. Larry Bird makes even Chuck Norris look like a master thespian.

[@JGreen-le8xx]

@@JeremyParish That may be. But the similarity of Bird trash talking an opponent is the same as Jeremy trash talking a videogame. And with laser precision, both dunk harder on their opponents than a witch in the river during the Salem witch hunt trials.

[@Unquestionable]

Much as I've resented the treatment of Kung Fu Heroes on this channel ,due to having so many great memories, it most definitely wasn't a good game so much as a good weekend rental when you're having a sleep over. Now I do remember being super into Tom Sawyer despite not particularly liking the game but I think that was in large part due to a mixture of gaming magazine coverage and liking the source material, it was still a semi-frequent rental for at least a year or two for me.

[@goranisacson2502]

I read Tom Sawyer way back when as a child, of my own free will even, and even though I can barely remember the book I feel like it must've ultimately been a more pleasant experience than this game, which I'd probably remember to this day had I played it... which wouldn't be a good thing. The level-swap alone is bad, but that arcing rock projectile feels REALLY awkward and unpleasant to try and play with. I never liked arc-projectiles in early games, not even the axe in castlevania- straight ahead so I can better calculate trajectory is my melody. Also, where the entities who lobbied to change the Japanese copyright law game companies, or a wider mixture of companies who all wanted to stymie renting in some way?

[@todesziege]

Tom Sawyer screams "1986" so loudly that I suspect (completely without evidence) that it was an unreleased or unfinished game they decided to pick up and push out years after its intended release. The thing that doesn't quite fit is the top-down stage, but it also doesn't quite match the art style of the rest of the game (looks newer), so it could have been a later addition if so.

[@chrismansi4855]

Great video as always, but hot darn am I sure excited for next week's!

[@SpyHunter89]

Angry Video Game Nerd in 2004: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is the worst game on the NES Jeremy Parish, 20 years later: hold my beer

[@stepheng8061]

Jeremy parish dropping the avgn style review has to be the greatest thing the internet has ever seen

[@thecunninlynguist]

I'm nowhere near a basketball fan but for some reason I had Jordan vs bird. I don't recall who got it for me. But I had fun with it

[@alk7934]

Appreciate the Star Trek references.

[@ryansc0tt0]

Tbh I spent the second half of the video imagining a Guinan NES game

[@billcook4768]

Tapper, but set in Ten Forward.

[@Daryoon]

Ninja Guinan?

[@XanthinZarda]

Adventures in the Nexus. Yes, I know, an anachronistic, movie only suggestion.

[@TheWorstThingEver]

You mention renting Tom Sawyer. That's just what I did one weekend when I was a kid. I got almost nowhere and was baffled by the game. I remember telling people it felt like an old NES game that had been designed before good games started coming out. A similar experience is Peter Pan and the Pirates on the NES, from what I remember. A low quality rental from my childhood.

[@EvanCWaters]

I feel like if this was a trick to foil rentals it probably backfired, because anyone who did rent it and get crushed at the first stage would probably not be determined enough to rent it again.

[@jiminboo]

I used to have Larry Bird’s trading card… on that particular picture, Larry Bird looked like a bird, what the heck!?

[@LagBlowz]

What baffles me is that the adventures of Tom Sawyer somehow managed to get into the Mario ova (and if I remember correctly, even Mario was stuck on that damn ship level)

[@josheldridge8546]

I guess I'll be the weirdo and say I enjoyed Tom Sawyer. If i want accuracy, I'll read the book. But it was a goofy way to kill a half hour including an overhead shmup level (and I think it coulda used more than one). I liked the soundtrack, the mechanics of ... everything ... was off, but it was consistent enough that i could get the hang of it. Stockholm Syndrome but for video games, I guess.

[@jasonblalock4429]

I *loved* Ninja Gaiden 1 & 2 (NG2 is still one of my NES faves) and I was soooo pissed at what they did to NG3. At least I finally got to play it properly a few years later in the otherwise mediocre SNES Trilogy rerelease. Also, US gamers would have their chance to copy games from rental shops. I remember in the mid 90s, a lot of shops started renting out PC CD-ROM games. Which was a stupid move on the stores' part, considering that most had no physical disc copy protection, and could be easily burned or just dumped to a hard drive. "Burn and Return" really kept my gaming costs down in high school.

[@piratapequeno]

Man, that list of basketball plays is weirdly sexual. Every single one of them could be some sort of obscure sex move.

[@MrClawt]

I never liked Mark Twain stuff as a kid, but that's because of the nightmare trauma machine Claymation 'The adventure of Mark Twain'.

[@IntoTheVerticalBlank]

Great video as always...i was one of the 7800/XEGS guys but with my Atari ST also. Milton Bradley games were pretty awful in general but Jordan Bird was pretty good. I'm pretty sure Peyton Manning retired well after the Sega machines were discontinued (unless I heard you wrong). The C64 had a lot of good European titles released after 88, but I understand what you were getting at.

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

I think that the depiction of Injun Joe is actually sortable. In an Australian animated adaptation, Injun Joe is a cultural appropriating white guy, that I always assumed dressed like he was to make others think Native Americans were bad.

[@josheldridge8546]

I mean, us conservatives deify the Boston Tea Party because they tried to blame the natives for the destruction of private property.

[@Eye-am-Metalchip]

4:08 R-Type (1988), Turrican (1990) just to name a few did gangbusters on C64

[@AccessDEANied]

dang, felt like i just saw your DQ panel in portland and we're already at another nes works episode

[@owlyus]

What band is that 20:45 into the video?

[@lhfirex]

I really should've tracked down a copy of Square's Tom Sawyer before I left Japan. Though the one I really wanted to get and could never find was Super Back to the Future, or whatever they named the BTTF2 game for Super Famicom.

[@MaidenHell1977]

Another fantastic and fascinating episode!! But man oh man I'm hyped as hell for next week!! 😍

[@VF5SS]

Winkysoft made of the hardest Super Robot Wars titles and lots of licensed stuff like the Japanese Transformers PS2 brawler so a game that actively antagonizes the player like this one tracks.

[@leegoldsmith2028]

Jordan managed to get the right to negotiate his license separately from the nbapa. I think he appeared in a basketball game based on the 1990 playoffs but nothing after that

[@patrickisme1438]

Great take on Tom Sawyer.

[@salva_75]

The Commodore 64's heyday was arguably AFTER 1988 - I can think of The Last Ninja 2 and 3, Turrican 1 and 2 and CREATURES 1 and 2 as examples of titles released after '88 (in Euoper and Australia, at least) that pushed the hardware far beyond what anyone may have expected back in 1982.

[@bueno8191]

More positive things to say about Hoops? This is like the third time that bottom-tier game has been given relative praise on this channel. I am flabbergasted!

[@PlatformJunkie]

I’ve owned the Adventures of Tom Sawyer most of my life and have always found it laughably easy especially the first level. I had no idea the Famicom version was different or that there ever was one. Interesting.

[@robertlauncher]

The Castlevania collection includes the FDS equivalent to Castlevania 3 and I have no interest in playing the US version because of the difficulty spike.

[@XanthinZarda]

The only only Adventures of Tom Sawyer I want to deal with is the minigame from Adventures in the Magic Kingdom. I know that isn't saying much, but the music is pretty nice. I can already see you rolling your eyes when looking down at the Double Dare cart, or the 8 bit micro's hangover game _The Three Stooges._