#nintendods — Public Fediverse posts

Yu-Gi-Oh World Championship with William Morgan (The Geek Gauntlet Podcast)

Every kid who ever begged a parent for money to hit GameStop on release day understands the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship series in their bones: it’s the same card game, sold back to you once a year, wearing a slightly fancier hat each time. Konami ran this bit from 2003 to 2006 with the discipline of a Swiss watchmaker and the restraint of absolutely nobody when it came to naming the things. Four games! Four years! Somehow four completely different amounts of the word “World Championship” crammed into each title!

And somewhere in that run, things got weird. By the last entry, Konami had apparently decided Yugi, Kaiba, and the rest of the cast had done enough work, and quietly let you duel the actual monster cards instead, like the whole show got replaced by its own trading cards in some kind of legal dispute. There’s also a tiny RPG town nobody asked for, a cartridge somehow refereeing six languages at once, and just enough real cardboard cards taped inside the box that there’s a real argument the packaging outsold the game.

Grabbing a seat at the table to help me sort genuine dueling nostalgia from pure cardboard-fueled compulsion is William Morgan, host of The Geek Gauntlet Podcast, self-billed as the fastest hour in podcasting, a claim that tracks given how fast he and the crew burn through a week’s worth of comics, movies, anime, and gaming news.

So keep an eye on your Life Points, don’t forget your face-downs, and let’s find out if the World Championship series was Konami’s finest run of Game Boy dueling, or just years of very well-packaged déjà vu.

Learn such things as:

• Why do I think this is so weird but yearly sports games aren’t?
• How far back into a game’s ruleset can you go if you weren’t there when it was current?
• Who bought the game for the game, and who bought it just for the included card?
• And so much more!

You can find William on The Geek Gauntlet Podcast.

If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in.

If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store.

Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix.

Play Comics is also part of Art Comedy Pop-Culture Network, which is a long-standing creative organization spawning from a love of Adult Swim. Be sure to check them out for all sorts of entertainment news, commentary, and just plain fun stuff.

You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube, or the Play Comics website.

If you want to hear Chris talk with Karrington Martin about the lessons we learned from children’s media and how crazy it is that we’re supposed to just forget about that now that we’re adults, then Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine is probably something you should check out.

A big thanks to Anime Field Guide and Just the Facts and More for the promos today.

Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who can play the Yu-Gi-Oh theme on the theremin.

Kuriboh Dice Companion for #NintendoDS

houdini-magazine.itch.io/kuriboh-dice...

#nds #ndsdev #retrogaming #3ds

Naruto Path of the Ninja with Merrilee O’neil (Fear Coded)

By the mid-2000s, Naruto had pulled off something most manga-to-anime properties never manage: it wasn’t just popular, it was everywhere, spinning off a small army of video games across nearly every system with a screen, like Naruto himself used Shadow Clone Jutsu on the entire games industry and nobody thought to stop him. Somewhere in that flood of Ninja Councils and Clash of Ninjas sits Naruto: Path of the Ninja, the entry that decided the best way to honor Kishimoto’s story wasn’t just punching (though there’s plenty of that too) but actually letting you live through the Land of Waves and the Chūnin Exams one turn-based battle at a time.

Path of the Ninja debuted on the Game Boy Advance in Japan back in 2004, then took a leisurely three years to reach American shelves in 2007, arriving on the Nintendo DS instead, because by the time they got around to localizing it, the GBA already felt like last decade’s news. You pick from six familiar faces, Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Shikamaru, Neji, and Rock Lee, pair them into formations for bonus combo attacks, and work through more than 90 jutsu, some of which you cast on the DS touchscreen by frantically scribbling a shape with the stylus, which is either a clever nod to hand seals or just a fun way to give yourself a cramp. The story runs all the way to the Chunin Exam invasion and a face-off with Shukaku, and if you’re wondering whether you can also fight Itachi as a secret bonus boss, the answer is: only if you own the Japanese version. The English release quietly deleted that fight but somehow forgot to scrub his name from the end credits, which is the video game equivalent of hiding a body and leaving the shovel leaning against the wall.

Making another through the Play Comics dojo is Merrilee O’Neil of Fear Coded, last seen on the show trying to keep pace with the Flash. This time she’s trading super speed for shadow clones, hand seals, and a Konoha headband, so at least the running is a little more sustainable.

So form your hand seals, grab your kunai pouch, and let’s find out if Path of the Ninja earned its headband as a worthy trip through early Naruto, or if it should’ve stayed back at the Academy with the rest of the genin.

Learn such things as:

• Isn’t the world today better, with games coming out worldwide at basically the same time?
• How can you use a console’s gimmick to really lean into the gameplay?
• Can a game stick to the established story a bit too well?
• And so much more!

You can find Merrilee being the main driver of the Fear Coded account on BlueSky @fearcodedpod.bsky.social on her podcast Fear Coded.

If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in.

If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store.

Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix.

Play Comics is also part of Art Comedy Pop-Culture Network, which is a long-standing creative organization spawning from a love of Adult Swim. Be sure to check them out for all sorts of entertainment news, commentary, and just plain fun stuff.

You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube, or the Play Comics website.

If you want to hear Chris talk with Karrington Martin about the lessons we learned from children’s media and how crazy it is that we’re supposed to just forget about that now that we’re adults, then Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine is probably something you should check out.

A big thanks to Kaiju Comicast and Anime Field Guide for the promos today.

Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who probably has a pretty sick collection of headbands.

Older consoles just where built differently. Booted up my 3ds again (after well over a year of laying around): still full battery charge.

My switch after like 5 minutes of being "off": deep-discharged and wont even show me any sign of life until I charge it for hours.

#retro #nintendo3ds #nintendods #nintentoswitch #nintendo #retrohardware #retroconsoles

Yu-Gi-Oh Nightmare Troubadour with The Gaming Anthropologist

Video game licensing runs on a very simple equation: if a popular franchise exists, and a handheld system exists, someone will eventually put a game together and slap on a release date. That’s probably the story behind Yu-Gi-Oh! Nightmare Troubadour, with Konami treating the whole affair with the enthusiasm of checking a box on an extremely profitable to-do list. It was the franchise’s first outing on the Nintendo DS, arriving with the confidence of a company that already knew the math worked.

The pitch itself barely needed a pitch meeting: take the actual Duel Monsters card game, cram in over a thousand cards, and let the DS’s two screens do what a real card table always wished it could, which is render your monsters in flashy 3D up top while the actual decision-making, deck construction, knowing what a Trap Card does, happens down on the touchscreen below. The story loosely resets you into a remixed version of a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament arc, because apparently even a game that’s essentially “trading card simulator” still needed somebody to kidnap somebody, and wireless dueling and card trading rounded things out for anyone who wanted to bankrupt a friend without leaving the couch.

Making the trip through Battle City with me is The Gaming Anthropologist, who’s been out in the field studying gaming culture the way some people study a subject that actually pays.

So build your deck, set a face-down card of your own choosing, and let’s find out whether Nightmare Troubadour actually captured what made Duel Monsters worth dueling over, or whether “the license existed and so did the hardware” was doing all the heavy lifting.

Learn such things as:

• Is Yu-Gi-Oo the Madden franchise of anime and manga based games?
• How hard is it to go play a game with a different set of rules than you’re used to?
• Are we setting a record for games where you don’t even play as any of the characters?
• And so much more!

You can find The Gaming Anthropologist @the_gaming_anthropologist on Instagram and Threads, her Patron page, and of course her website The Gaming Anthropologist.

If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in.

If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store.

Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix.

Play Comics is also part of Art Comedy Pop-Culture Network, which is a long-standing creative organization spawning from a love of Adult Swim. Be sure to check them out for all sorts of entertainment news, commentary, and just plain fun stuff.

You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube, or the Play Comics website.

If you want to hear Chris talk with Karrington Martin about the lessons we learned from children’s media and how crazy it is that we’re supposed to just forget about that now that we’re adults, then Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine is probably something you should check out.

A big thanks to D’ohmance Dawn and The Monsters that Made Us for the promos today.

Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who believes in the heart of the cards, but not the liver or the kidneys.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 Mutant Nightmare with Pierce Lydon (Spawnography)

By 2005, Konami had made three TMNT beat-em-ups based on the 2003 animated series, which is the kind of commitment usually reserved for tax filings or long-term relationships. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Mutant Nightmare landed that November on GameCube, PS2, Xbox, and Nintendo DS as the trilogy’s closer, and Konami sent it off in style by giving it the series’ first E10+ rating, as if four years of shell-based violence had finally crossed some invisible threshold of Too Much.

The game loosely adapts the show’s third season across four “Episodes,” which means the Triceratons invade Earth, Agent Bishop kidnaps Splinter for reasons that presumably made sense to somebody in a government facility somewhere, and Shredder shows back up to remind everyone that retirement isn’t really a thing that happens to ninja warlords. Along the way you can pour experience points into skill scrolls, transform into a Dino Turtle or an Ultimate Turtle depending on the mood, and, if you clear the first Episode, unlock a modified version of the 1991 arcade classic Turtles in Time, which is Konami’s way of saying “here’s the good one, in case this one doesn’t land.”

Joining me to sort the Triceratons from the Foot Ninjas is Pierce Lydon of Spawnography, the podcast where he and George Marston work through Todd McFarlane’s entire Spawn mythology one hellish arc at a time. Pierce has already survived one trip through the Play Comics gauntlet with me on Spawn in the Demon’s Hand, so they know exactly what they signed up for this time: showing up, being extremely knowledgeable, and getting talked into yet another licensed beat-em-up nobody asked for.

So grab a ninja scroll, pick a turtle, any turtle, and let’s find out whether Mutant Nightmare sent Konami’s turtle trilogy out on a high note, or whether the Triceratons should’ve just stayed home.

Learn such things as:

• When is it appropriate to make a game without the most iconic villains?
• How much can you cram into a game when you know it’s your last one?
• What magical things can you find at your public library?
• And so much more!

You can find Spawnography on BlueSky, and Instagram, and of course those Apple Podcast, YouTube, and Spotify places. Or you can find Pierce as a wonderful human on Instragram @lapsed.punk.

If you want to be a guest on the show please check out the Be a A Guest on the Show page and let me know what you’re interested in.

If you want to help support the show check out the Play Comics Patreon page or head over to the Support page if you want to go another route. You can also check out the Play Comics Merch Store.

Play Comics is part of the Gonna Geek Network, which is a wonderful collection of geeky podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows on Gonna Geek if you need more of a nerd fix.

You can find Play Comics @playcomics.bsky.social on Bluesky, @playcomicspodcast on Threads, @playcomics on YouTube, or the Play Comics website.

If you want to hear Chris talk with Karrington Martin about the lessons we learned from children’s media and how crazy it is that we’re supposed to just forget about that now that we’re adults, then Sugar, Spite, and Everything is Fine is probably something you should check out.

A big thanks to Glitterjaw Presents and Byrds Eye View Comics for the promos today.

Intro/Outro Music by Backing Track, who knows the difference between ooze, slime, and muck. But doesn’t want to tell us what the difference is.

Avui es compleixen 20 anys que arribava "Nicktoons Unite!" per "Nintendo DS" de #Nintendo 🕹🎮. #NicktoonsUnite #SpongebobSquarepants #DannyPhantom #TheFairlyOddparents #JimmyNeutron #NintendoDs #Aventura #Videojocs #Gaming #VideoGames #RetroGaming

Avui és el 20è aniversari de la publicació a casa nostra de "Super Monkey Ball Touch & Roll" per "Nintendo DS" de #Nintendo 🕹🎮. #SuperMonkeyBallTouchAndRoll #SuperMonkeyBall #NintendoDs #Plataformes #Puzle #Estratègia #Videojocs #Gaming #VideoGames

Avui és el 20è aniversari de la publicació a casa nostra de "Ultimate Spider-Man" per "Nintendo DS" de #Nintendo 🕹🎮. #UltimateSpiderMan #SpiderMan #Marvel #NintendoDs #HackAndSlashBeatEmUp #Videojocs #Gaming #VideoGames #RetroGaming #ClassicGaming

Avui és el 20è aniversari de la publicació a casa nostra de "Ultimate Spider-Man" per "Nintendo DS" de #Nintendo 🕹🎮. #UltimateSpiderMan #SpiderMan #Marvel #NintendoDs #HackAndSlashBeatEmUp #Videojocs #Gaming #VideoGames #RetroGaming #ClassicGaming

Avui és el 20è aniversari de la publicació a casa nostra de "Ultimate Spider-Man" per "Nintendo DS" de #Nintendo 🕹🎮. #UltimateSpiderMan #SpiderMan #Marvel #NintendoDs #HackAndSlashBeatEmUp #Videojocs #Gaming #VideoGames #RetroGaming #ClassicGaming