Licensed games are sort of a low-hanging fruit in terms of kusoge, and I have no shame in picking them. They have always, always been hit or miss. You either get a developer that loves the property and tries to do it justice, or you get som...

While the Famicom saw release in the middle of 1983, most of North America wouldn’t see the NES until sometime in 1986. There’s actually a good few games that came out before the NES landed that never really got localized, such ...

Combat is a central feature to many games. We’re not very good at depicting conflict resolution in an interactive way unless it involves swinging a sword or firing a gun. A debate is difficult to simulate, but ballistics are not. Rece...

We live in an age where you can easily download the entire NES library, fire up an emulator, and spend five minutes with one game before getting bored. The internet never forgets, which is fortunate since there should be nothing ephemeral a...

I’m something of an apologist for Superman on the N64. No, I’m not about to claim it was good -- it definitely wasn’t. It was an abysmal void of despair where a game should be. However, I often argue that it’s not th...

Konami’s output on the Famicom was simply amazing. While we certainly got some good games on this side of the pond, such as Castlevania and Contra, there were a plethora of great titles that stayed in their homeland. They were once a ...

While the phenomenon of appreciating bad games exists everywhere in the world, perhaps no player base is as conscious of it as those in Japan. Unlike us, they have a very concise word for describing terrible games: kusoge. That’s "kus...

One of the fears that big decision-makers had in the ‘80s and ‘90s when it came to localizing games was whether or not it would appeal to Western audiences. We hadn’t been indoctrinated with enough anime and Pocky yet, so ...

I find it difficult to travel back and play early 8-bit consoles like the Atari 2600 or Colecovision. It’s not that their primitive graphics and sound fail to capture my attention, but rather, they’re so dedicated to replicating...

Sometimes it feels like Evil Genius was a pretty recent game. Yeah, recent. 2004. I played it while I was waiting for Half-Life 2 to be released. I was in high school. High school. That was practically yesterday, right? The original studio ...

For this Famicom Friday, I think it’s time to jump straight to the Famicom Disk System. You may worry we’re moving too fast, but I’ve never felt this way before about anyone; I’m ready to take the next step in the re...

While it may have been analogous with our beloved Nintendo Entertainment System, the world of the Famicom was far different than the one we saw in the west. From the freedom explored by a Konami in its prime to the read/write frontiers of t...