A new Superman movie hits theaters this week, as DC reboots its movie universe with David Corenswet replacing Henry Cavill as the Man of Steel. The comic book and game title "The Death and Return of Superman" is fitting in this sense as well, but that's not why I chose this particular game to scan magazine coverage of this week. I chose it because I couldn't find any other Superman video game reviews in my magazine collection. There were 11 Superman games released before the year 2000, my usual cutoff date for blog posts, starting with the Atari 2600 Superman from 1979. Surprisingly, I don't have much experience with any of them, though I think I did briefly take a look at Superman for the Nintendo 64 to see if it was as bad as the critics said, and it was. Sunsoft published The Death and Return of Superman in 1994 for both the Super NES and Genesis, and while the only magazine reviews I found are for the Super NES version, from what I've read, the games are very similar, but with different soundtracks. Both versions were developed by Blizzard Entertainment.
In the August 1994 issue of GamePro, writer "Lawrence of Arcadia" enjoyed the game quite a bit, awarding Superman no lower than a 4.5 out of 5 across the magazine's four ratings categories. I also scanned a four-page strategy guide from GamePro's September 1994 issue that features the game on the cover, and it's the only video game magazine I own with a Superman cover. Maybe it's just the timing of my magazine collection, mostly from the late '80s and early '90s, but Batman and Spider-Man saw a lot more time in the video game spotlight than Superman. Electronic Gaming Monthly's four "Review Crew" member (Mike Weigand isn't part of the scoring), rated the game a 6, 5, 5, and 5, so very average and much lower than competitor GamePro.
Released in late 1989 for the Sega Genesis, Golden Axe is a game I played over and over when I got it. It's rare that I try to be perfect at any game which is something I was attempting to do with Golden Axe when I was younger, though based on the scores I wrote in the manual, I never got through the game without dying a few times. Of course, I'm not as good at it anymore either, and in the video I'm using a gamepad rather than an arcade stick which is what I played with exclusively as a kid. The game itself isn't difficult but it's easy to make a mistake that will cost a life, whether it's falling off a ledge (rare) or getting cornered by multiple enemies, especially skeletons, that hack-and-slash the hero from the front and back at the same time. Also, being an arcade port, it's not a very long game and can be completed in 30 minutes or less. While Arcade is the primary mode, in the video I also play the much shorter Beginner mode and the Duel mode, where players can battle the computer in 12 rounds or challenge another player.
Axe?
When the game ends it provides a score, strength rating, and letter grade. Based on what I wrote in the manual, my best score was 390.6 playing as Gilius Thunderhead and my highest strength rating was 118.3 as Ax Battler. I'm not sure how the scores are determined, though I believe the less magic you use to eliminate enemies, the higher your score will be. Since Gilius has the weakest magic and the strongest weapon with the best reach, it makes sense that players will get their highest scores playing as him. I'd noticed magic's impact on the score when I was recording the Beginner mode play through, as the less I used Tyris Flare's magic, the better my score. That stood out when I had what I thought to be a perfect run but ended up with a much lower score than my previous game in which I thought I played worse. In that perfect run I used the magic often simply because I wanted to show as many spells as I could for the video. Unfortunately, my Genesis started having issues as I finished up the recordings, otherwise I would have gone back through Arcade mode without using magic to see just how high I could score. This game was also a Sega CD pack-in title on the Sega Classics Arcade Collection disc and I own it but I can't test out the scoring there either. As I posted in 2019, my Sega CD also isn't functioning correctly and I don't know how to repair it.
Although the Sega Genesis version is what I'm playing in the video and I've never played the Sega Master System (SMS) version, I am including all the magazine coverage I could find on the game, which wasn't a lot, and there was a little bit more of it for the SMS release. From what I could gather, the primary difference is that the SMS version only supports one player and the only playable character is Ax Battler (referred to as Tarik by GamePro). For the Genesis' Golden Axe, I scanned a review from the December 1989 issue of Game Player's and part of a page from Electronic Gaming Monthly's 1991 Buyer's Guide that has review scores of a bunch of games, including Golden Axe for both the SMS and Genesis. The SMS coverage are scans from GamePro's March 1990 issue and the June/July 1990 issue of Sega Visions.
The animated short Steamboat Willie debuted on November 18, 1928 and so this day is considered Mickey Mouse's birthday. I scanned a variety of game reviews starring Disney's famous anthropomorphic mouse from issues of GamePro, Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM), Video Games & Computer Entertainment (VG&CE), and Sega Visions. Mickey has been featured in quite a few games so I opted not to include the "Illusion" series this time around as that would have been another 19 pages. Below you'll find coverage of Mickey's Dangerous Chase, Mickey Mousecapade, The Magical Quest Starring Mickey Mouse, Mickey's Challenge, Mickey Mania, and Fantasia. Surprisingly, I only found a single review of Fantasia which comes from Sega Visions, and that magazine's reviews at that time were primarily descriptions with a little opinion at the end. Also, the EGM "Review Crew" for Mickey's Dangerous Chase is the same group of writers I attached to Magical Quest while Mickey Mania is the same as the writers for Mickey's Challenge.
Within the last hour I learned that July 1st is the birthday of one of the most iconic movie characters of all-time: archaeologist Indiana Jones. Although this is very last minute, I'd been scanning Indiana Jones game reviews when I came across them over the past few years so I already most of these ready to go for whenever I had a good reason to post them. Maybe I should have put a post together when the fifth movie released but I forgot to do that. Four of the eight reviews are based on The Last Crusade and five are from Video Games & Computer Entertainment (VG&CE). Surprisingly, I couldn't find any Indiana Jones game reviews in my issues of GamePro and only one in Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM), which is of Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures, the game in the ad to the right. One of the VG&CE pages has a couple of other handheld game reviews I'm leaving in: Star Wars (Game Boy) and Pinball Jam (Lynx). The other two are from Sega Visions, however, the Sega CD game doesn't read like a review even though it's from the "Just Review It" section.
This is a four-page article that appeared in the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly's (EGM) 19th issue published in February 1991. Although the header at the start of the article says "EGM Visits - Taito of America," most of the story is about Taito's business in Japan and its smart decisions throughout the '80s. One thing EGM appears to have wrong is the release year for Space Invaders. EGM states that it was released in 1979 and I believe it is referencing the Japanese release, but all sources, including Taito's corporate history page, have Space Invaders releasing in 1978.
This is the third Taito post on the blog with the first being the ads post (Taito of America) and the second being scans from a 1989 issue of Commodore Magazineabout Taito's arcade to Commodore 64 ports. I should point out that the Facebook links on all the ads posts are broken because of a change Facebook must have made, sorry about that. The Google Photos links work and you can find the correct Facebook links under the "Game Ad Links" tab.
During the '90s I read a lot of X-Men comic books and watched the animated series Saturday mornings on Fox. Disney is reviving the show, titled X-Men '97, on March 20th so I decided to put together some X-Men coverage leading up to its debut. I'll have at least three posts, maybe four, that cover some video games, television appearances, and toys. I scanned quite a bit of coverage from video game magazines but I'm only using some of it in this post.
The scans include a GamePro "ProView" of The Uncanny X-Men (NES), a preview and review of X-Men (Genesis), a preview and review of X:Men: Mutant Apocalypse (SNES), a preview of X-Men 2: Clone Wars (Genesis), a review of X-Men: Children of the Atom (PlayStation), and reviews of the computer games X-Men and X-Men II: The Fall of the Mutants. For Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) reviews I place the review next to the writers that appear on the first page of the column to show who wrote each one. There is also editing on the reviews that appear across multiple pages and sometimes you'll see review scores and or screenshots for other games as well.
GamePro - March 1990
EGM #44 - March 1993 EGM #46 - May 1993
EGM #65 - December 1994
EGM #65 - December 1994Next Generation #40 - April 1998
Video Games & Computer Entertainment - September 1990 & June 1991
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