Patric and the Nintendo

This is my Tendo Collection.

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This game kind of took me be surprise! I saw this cartridge for sale in a long stack and was instantly reminded of a single screenshot I must have seen in a magazine when I was a kid. I remembered being amazed that it looked like 3D. Brought it home and it's tough! You play as a little wizard guy (not totally jacked like he is on the Tape Label) who has to run around a crazy castle with death traps and monsters everywhere, looking for 6 pieces of a magical staff because a princess got kidnapped. All of the graphics are at an angle, so the controls take a second to get used to and a few minutes to master. It's fun, though. The controls are pretty tight and nothing is totally impossible if you're quick enough. You make the little guy pick up a block and jump, drop the block and jump off of it as soon as your drop it and you feel really accomplished because the wizard makes a shrieking noise every time he falls into a spike pit. You also have potions, but I don't know what the hell they do can somebody lend me the manual.

I don't know many Tendo games that have patronizing Game Over screens, but this one tells you how much of the game you have completed, like "34 Rooms, You Saw 10.51% of the Game" and it's like YEAH RIGHT! but then you press the Start button again because it's a really good game.

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Ninjas are pretty cool! Well, I guess they're not so cool when there's like a billion of them flying around shooting shurikens everywhere and you gotta hop around in the trees and do whatever crap to dodge everything. Imagine the most bare bones game about ninjas possible and you're not far off from this, but you'd still have to make it a bit more basic than that. None of the guys even have faces on the fronts of their heads and the music is the kind of fake-Oriental TIKKY TIKKY fare that you've already imagined. I can't really fault something from almost 30 years ago for being simple, though.

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IT IS THE NINETIES

AND THERE IS TIME FOR KLAX!

For a fan of games where you organize things that fall down the screen in ways that make that stuff disappear, which is how I would describe myself, Klax is a breath of fresh air. Coloured tiles are your problem in this game and rows of three or more of the same colour clear them out. You have a little white tray that slides back and forth under the falling tiles and you can catch them in a stack, dropping them at your leisure (which is something you rarely have in this game) in a 5x5 area. Two Player mode is great, because the screen is split into 2 independent games and it makes a hilarious "AARRGH" noise every time you miss catching a tile. The music in this game is hot, too. I feel like some Tendo Tapes have a "hit" tune, and here is that song for this game :

A quick aside : these black Tengen cartridges are poorly designed! There is almost nothing for me to grip onto to pull the game out of my Tendo and absolutely nothing for me to push on to wiggle the game when I'm trying to get it to work. Get it together, guys.

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You might not guess this by looking at the game art (also, you might guess this by looking at the game art) but this is a reenactment of the Cuban Revolution. You play as Che Guevera (and, in two player mode, his good friend Fidel Castro) on his quest to depose President Batista. Apart from the storyline, though, this game is basically a less-annoying version of Ikari Warriors. Like in that game, your gun doesn't fire out from the center of your guy's body as you would expect, but a little to the right. I guess this is physically accurate but I end up missing so many shots because of this! You can also ride around in a pink tank sometimes, but it will probably blow up. When you are playing One Player, you get infinite continues, but with Two Players you have to put in a super-easy code for that.

As for the price sticker, Cash Converters was a fairly popular chain of Canadian pawn shops in the late 90s early 00s. I was going to describe them as "defunct" but a quick search shows that they operate under the more efficient name Cash Max these days. Here are three more cartridges from my collection that are scarred in this manner :

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This one is pretty good but it can be frustratingly hard! It is a Remote Control Car racing game and, as such, the steering is really tight and your opponents keep zipping around like assholes. You can pick up power-ups that make your car faster or shoot bullets or whatever, but usually you spend the race overshooting turns and crashing into walls.

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I don't think I could have played some Video Golf when I was a kid, but now I totally have the patience to understand and maybe even enjoy something like this. The reason this Tendo Tape caught my attention is because it is based on a golf course that is world famous IRL but I can't really tell you how accurate that is. I don't know enough of these kinds of games yet to give a descriptive comparison, but the Wind Meter usually means Dick and the Putting is such a pain in the butt! My handicap is like 35 or something but I promise to get better at this.

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I looked up a list of game release dates and I suppose the label is partially accurate. It is called Anticipation and It was the first board game-type Tendo Tape released. What I'm not sure about is the Party Fun For All Ages statement. I could be wrong, though. Maybe I'm just having a closed mind about this and watching your Nintendo play Connect The Dots is actually a reliable Party Starter.

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i can't never get this one to work yo

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My brother got me this game as a gift and it's really complicated to describe for what amounts to a really short game. Could you imagine a tactical ops game for Tendo? Where you control a team of guys sneaking into a building and then running around, shooting terrorists and saving hostages? Okay, here's where it gets weird : imagine that game only has one level broken up into three parts (getting your team in position, sniping through / breaking into the windows of the building and finally a pseudo-3d run through the building). Now it's your turn to be asking me a question, which would probably go like "That's it? Where's the Replay Value in this game?" Well, there are a mess of difficulty settings (something like 20 combinations?) and I guess the ending sequences get better as the game gets harder but right now I can only get the ones that say "Play this game at a harder difficulty!" The graphics are good and I really like the sound and music. When you're sneaking around into the building, you can hide your character from search lights by jumping in bushes and alcoves. When you do, the music switches to a muted version of the song playing. It's the little touches, you know?

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Hey! I'm back and I've got a stack of new games to talk about. Let's start with some Mario Golf! You're totally Mario and you play some Golf. The quality you'd expect from a first party Tendo Tape is present right off the bat. The physics are nice and there are three different courses of 18 holes to play. It has a Save Battery in it so you can pick up your game whenever you want and it also remembers your golf statistics. When you putt the ball close to the hole, it switches to a close-up animation view that I feel is really well done. It's not like a stock animation of a golf ball, either. It's what your ball is actually doing. This one is pretty good!

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I never had this controller when I was a kid. When I first picked one up in my hands, all I could think about is how much smaller it is than how I imagined it was. It fits in my hand pretty nicely and I really like using it for Some games. Why did I put the emphasis on the word Some? Because of the Left Hand Side of the Max Controller. You would think that you could just slide the thumb wheel in the direction that you want your little guy to go but you still have to Press Down after you move your thumb. Alternatively, you can use the Black Disk around the perimeter as the D-Pad (D-Ring? that sounds gross) but a lot of the time there's no point. It's kind of useless for games where you have to be completely accurate with Platform Jumps or whatever. Don't get me wrong, though. It's a Quality piece of Entertainment System Equipment and I'm glad it's in my Collection.

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Check out my cool gold cartridges. I really hope you like them because these are the last games in my collection to post for now! The first one is a classic and you should all know it. The second one is a bit more jumbled and I'd say it's way harder.

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This is my copy from when I was a kid and I'm surprised that the back-up battery still works! I might be wrong about this but I really feel like I got this in the mail for being a subscriber to the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter. This is a super-basic overhead view RPG but it definitely influenced every other game like it to come afterwards.

I remember being so cheesed as a kid because there was one item integral to beating the game that I just couldn't find anywhere. I ended up borrowing a Strategy Guide from a kid at school and it turned out that the thing I was looking for was in the castle where you start every game from. I felt like such a sucker!

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Some people call this game Breakout. Some people call it Brick Out. Sometimes, people call it Brick Breaker. Some people even call it Alleyway. I like to call it Brickles, personally. This two-piece set is a relatively recent addition to my collection. I'm glad that I got the Official Controller because I've read that the last few levels are impossible without the quick response time of the analog knob. I'll let you know if I ever get there!

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This one is alright. The graphics and sound are really really simple. That being said, it's pretty fun to run around as Mickey Mouse and shoot stars at bad guys. Just a normal video game.

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You're never gonna land that GD plane. Never ever ever. It's going to crash into the Aircraft Carrier or it's going to flying right over it and into the sea. Right In To The Danger Zone.

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This one is weird! I mean, parts of it make sense, like how you're in a Boat but then when you try to dock at a pier the game tells you that you need more shells. So you kill enough Jellyfish and collect all the Conch Shells that fall out and you trade them in for a radio to help you detect when Jaws is nearby. Then Jaws fricking comes out of nowhere attacks your boat and you gotta throw bombs at him until he eats your boat then you jump out scuba dive around and shoot harpoons at him until he eats you. That's about when you turn off Jaws for Nintendo.

I really like the song that plays when your boat is just sailing around tho