Review: Good Nintentions: A 30th Anniversary Tribute to the Nintendo Entertainment System

Good Nintentions: A 30th Anniversary Tribute to the Nintendo Entertainment System by Jeremy Parish

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This repackaged magazine special was quite the stroll down memory lane. This is the system where I became a gamer. But it’s also the system where I was a very little kid and when games cost something like $100 in 2021-money. So I had very few of these games and rented some of the others. The history behind the Nintendo was fairly well-known to me, having read a few video histories, but the histories behind games and their ports was new to me. The same way that early 80s and 90s anime got strangely butchered in its journey to the US (lookup how what we know as Robotech was put together), some of these games were full of very strange edits. I also knew about Nintendo’s puritanical stretch and how it affected the translation of later SNES RPGs like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, but the way it affected some of the NES-era games ventured into the bizarre.

It also ends with a great “chapter” about all the on-going ripple effects of the NES. Things like chiptunes bands, Scott Pilgrim (the comic, movie, and video game), and Shovel Knight. If you lived through the NES era, this will really bring you back and maybe explain why some of those games were so weird. (Or in my case, let me know that Mickey Mousecapades wasn’t a fever dream)

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