Juggle Chainsaws
March 8, 2011 10:57 AM   Subscribe

Juggle Chainsaws
Where I attempt to play every game released in the United States roughly in chronological order. Thanks a lot Nintendo of America for your wonderful record keeping on this continent!

I've been sitting on this for a while and I think it's finally time to share it with you here.

I know we've seen Chrontendo twice, and Juggle Chainsaws was featured back in September about a week before my birthday. So this isn't exactly new to MetaFilter but it is new to Projects.

My goal here is to get a general understanding of everything released for the NES. Well, technically not everything because I'm planning on overlooking the unlicensed porn games. But I don't think anyone will have a problem with that.

The goal isn't to find the worst game, although if it was M.U.S.C.L.E. and Athena would be hard to beat. Or should that be easy to beat?

It's definitely not to find the best game because if I say anything other than The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, or SMB3 I'd have way too many people telling me I'm wrong.

In a weird way, it's about finding those games that are really good but somehow slipped through the cracks of time. Mighty Bomb Jack anyone? Kid Icaris in it's own weird way? Those are the ones I'm really looking forward to playing. Anyone can say Urban Champion never should have seen the light of day or 10-Yard Fight has less realistic football than paper football. But it takes something special/weird to find good points in Donkey Kong Jr. Math or Donkey Kong 3.

In addition to game reviews I'm also planning on having some more general articles up there. Right now I have two in the planning stages.

1 - The problems with porting arcade games
2 - An analysis of cover art and how it evolved over time

Here's the part that was making me wait though, the end of the year wrap ups. I was going to wait until I finished 1987's games but I've been getting antsy and I want to share. With these end of the year wrap ups I have graphs showing the percentage of (what I've determined to be) good and bad games for the year overall and broken down by developer and publisher. Starting with the 1987 version I'll also have a cumulative graph to go with each one so we can compare that year to the NES' life to date. Beanplating is an understatement with this.

Anything you can tell me to improve it would be great too. I'm already planning on going back and beefing up some old posts. I didn't start putting screen shots in until Soccer, so some older games like Duck Hunt barely get the text past the cover art. And of course if I add screen shots I'll have to add more text to make it all work.

As for the future of this, we'll have to see what happens. I'm about 2 years away from the Game Boy and 5 from the SNES. Game Boy's a tougher call, but as of right now I'm thinking that when the SNES comes along I'll start doing those games as well.
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