Sunday, July 18, 2004
 
Book Review: The Official Nintendo Player's Guide (1987)

I bought this book last week at a yard sale for a quarter as the annual search for old gaming systems and small televisions reaches its crescendo immediately before the Atari Party. I also got a third Sega Genesis almost as cheaply, but that's beside the point.

Back in 1987, the Nintendo Entertainment System was under two years old, and Nintendo was still driving the PR bandwagon pretty hard, so they published this tome. Part strategy guide and part catalog, this book was designed to get you excited about your Nintendo Entertainment System and excited about spending more money on more cartridges.

Still, it offers a quick overview of the cartridges that addicted users to the NES, including Super Mario Brothers, Metroid, Kid Icarus, and There's Something about Zelda. It provides tips, maps, and pointers to help you get hooked, and once you're done with the basic cartidges, surely you're going to want to buy more.

The individual chapters on each game were written by different writers, all Japanese, and all probably marketing flacks. This led to several interesting turns of phrase that are too formally casual to be native and an excess of exclamation points, as well as declarations that anything that ran on an NES was a "realistic simulation" of anything other than the height of mid-1980s computer game console technology.

Still, it was an interesting flashback and pre-Atari Party 5: The Fellowship of the Joystick preparation. The book was also unintentionally a read-n-sniff experience; the person from whom I bought the book obviously had stored it with a Nintendo or the Sega for some time, for this book carried the scent of obsolete electronics, which was worth the quarter itself for an aging Gen Xer like me.


- posted by Brian J. @ 3:07 PM
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