Bullet-Proof Software
Nintendo
Spectrum Holobyte
Tengen
Bullet-Proof Software
Nintendo
Spectrum Holobyte
Tengen
As mentioned in the first Tetris-related post this week on Sunday, here is the brief GamePro article about Bullet-Proof Software (BPS). BPS is the publisher founded by Henk Rogers, the man who helped bring Tetris to everyone outside of the Soviet Union. The article is from GamePro's December 1990 issue and there are only a few paragraphs about the company itself. It also includes coverage of the Game Boy versions of Pipe Dream, which is a port of Lucasfilm Games' computer game, and Hatris.
A Tetris movie is going to be shown on Wednesday at the SXSW Film Festival and debut on Apple TV+ at the end of the month. It's actually more about Henk Rogers than Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov. Rogers, who founded Japan-based Bullet-Proof Software in 1983, traveled to the Soviet Union in 1988 and helped bring Tetris to the world. However, this post is primarily about Mr. Pajitnov. It features an interview with Alexey Pajitnov from Video Games & Computer Entertainment (VG&CE) magazine, along with the magazine's reviews of Tengen's NES Tetris, and the computer versions of its follow-ups, Welltris and Faces. In the past I've played the original Tetris (Commodore 64) and Tetris Effect (PlayStation 4) on the blog's YouTube channel, and I also own the Game Boy version and have tried a variety of Tetris releases but I never did play Pajitnov's other puzzle games. I'll add a couple similar posts during the week, one with a brief article about Bullet-Proof Software from GamePro and I'll put all the Tetris and related game ads I have into one post. The Tetris review is from the July 1989 issue, Welltris is March 1990, and the interview and Faces review are from November 1990.
This is a rather late post that sort of ties into the Super Bowl that airs in a few hours. I couldn't come up with anything else and I didn't have time to play a football video game for the YouTube channel so I scanned a couple magazine articles from White's Guide to Collecting Figures about Kenner's Starting Lineup toys. I'm not sure if I'd call Starting Lineup toys action figures since they aren't very poseable; they are simply mini plastic statues with moveable arms and heads. They launched in 1988 and I collected them for a while, maybe even a decade, though I did open them for a couple years. As the second article below mentions, they were a hot collectible back then, selling for double or more than the MSRP on the secondary market initially, but I don't think they do today. I've not looked too deeply into the current market so perhaps there are still some standout pieces, however, I believe most sell in the $5-10 range which is what they would have been priced at 30 years ago. Trading cards were included with the toys and at least one year they came with coins too. Previously I mentioned the figures and have a photo of a few baseball athletes in the Starting Lineup Talking Baseball post.
The first article is about the 1996 football series that focuses on the players appearing for the first time in "action figure" form. Some of those first-timers didn't succeed in the NFL, some had decent careers, and Isaac Bruce was the most successful of the bunch.
That was my weak tie-in to the Super Bowl. Unfortunately, there aren't any Chiefs or Eagles mentioned and it's not the most interesting of articles so I also scanned "Starting Lineup's Greatest Moments" in the same issue where the magazine details the top ten most significant happenings for the toy line up to that point. Joe Montana in his Kansas City Chiefs uniform does make an appearance. That was a convention piece which I don't have as I never attended conventions. The 9th entry is about the collector's club that I did join for a few years. I also remember the Grant Fuhr figure being a big deal but cannot recall if I have one or not.
Personally, I've only completed Phantasy Star II which I did a couple times in the early '90s. On the Master System I never had Phantasy Star because it released around the same time as Miracle Warriors, another Sega RPG that I got instead. While I also own Phantasy Star III on the Genesis, I never completed it and the fourth game released during my college days when I wasn't spending much time or money on video games. There were a couple of Game Gear Phantasy Star games too but those only released in Japan and one was not a RPG like the others: Phantasy Star Gaiden and Phantasy Star Adventure. After Phantasy Star IV Sega moved away from the single-player only format to Phantasy Star Online during the Dreamcast era.
Some of the reviews had to be edited to fit on one image. Video Games & Computer Entertainment's reviews can sometimes be split between multiple pages and with Electronic Gaming Monthly I like to line up the "Review Crew" next to the review (otherwise it only appears at the start of the magazine's review section). I'm also adding a video on the YouTube channel this week that looks at the Phantasy Star II package and the opening as well as the ending of the game.
Phantasy Star II