Remember the early days of the Angry Video Game Nerd, when he was the Angry Nintendo Nerd? Well, this episode goes back to this days, with James taking a look back at some of his earlier videos. He opens parodying Lucas and how he changed the Star Wars films over the years. The comparisons are pretty blatant, as well, but it’s all for fun. Of course he isn’t actually wanting to change the videos — he just wants to “complete” the reviews he felt were a little lacking, and is doing this video as a follow up to them.
We start off with Top Gun. Having only played half the game, he decides to at least show the ending where you blow up a Space Shuttle (I believe it’s actually the Soviet Space Shuttle “Buran,” but I could spend hours discussing the nuance of this subject) before addressing the carrier landing segment, explaining just how it’s actually supposed to go. Of course, even with this he still fails at landing. Some say that plane is still out there flying to this day…
Following this he moves on to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. We open up by calling the infamous real phone number in the game. As fate would have it, the number is now a sex hotline. That’s right, an NES game with a phone number to a sexline. Welcome to the future. He next covers the fight with Judge Doom. Between the nature of the controls in the game and the raw difficulty Doom already possesses, this is a hell of a final battle, and in the original video he barely discussed it! The Nerd rectifies this, explaining the basic process on how to take out Doom and finish the game.
Our next stop is another look at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. James feels this episode was pretty good, save for the fact his review pretty much ended at level 3. He goes on for a bit about the infamous sewer jump before covering the hide-and-seek game that is finding the Technodrome and the inevitable battle with the machine.
This is, at the time this episode was made, about as far as James could actually get in the game — he’s in the Technodrome, he’s got nothing to work with, and quickly loses his last turtle. The game is most definitely over here.
After a quick disclaimer where James assures the audience he isn’t running out of games to cover, we get to the main course — Back to the Future on the NES. He gives the game the “modern” Nerd treatment here, taking a jab at anything and everything he can for the sake of it, starting off with the fact that Marty can’t stop walking!
These “always moving” levels are split up by levels where Marty is behind a counter throwing milkshakes at enemies, blocking “hearts” from Lorraine, Marty wearing a boiler suit while playing a cracked-out version of Johnny B. Goode, and finally riding the DeLorean through the thunderstorm to get back to 1985. In the end, he concludes it truly is a mess, much as he did all those years ago.
Next up is Back To The Future Part 2 and 3. James originally didn’t actually explain how the game is played, and here he rectifies that. It’s an insane mess of mini-games hidden behind randomly locked doors which contain items that you have to take to other random rooms and then solve a puzzle to possibly return the correct item to the correct room. James says he played for 2 hours and couldn’t get a single item to its proper time.
Once you complete that, well, that’s only half the game. You still have to do the same, but this time for Back to the Future Part 3. Yeah, there’s a code to skip to the second half of the game, but what’s the point? It’s all a mess made by our friends at LJN.
We move on now to the Sega Genesis and Back To The Future Part 3. This one’s a rare moment in Nerd history — he can’t get past level 1. That’s right, the first level of this game is so unforgiving James can’t even complete it — at least, at the time this episode was filmed — He’d later get past this portion and experience the rest of the game, but as it stands here this just got the best of the Nerd.
After downing some Rolling Rock to dull the pain of BttF pt. 3 on the Genesis, James sees one more Back to the Future game in his collection — Super Back to the Future Part 2 for the Super Famicom. He presumes this one must be so bad they didn’t even bother to release it to the United States, as it’s a Japan exclusive title. Still, being the Nerd he says fuck it and tosses it into his system anyway.
As it turns out, he’s wrong about this one. Super Back to the Future Part 2 is actually a good game — the kind of game that should have been made based on this amazing film series. It plays the way you’d want it to, having levels inspired by the film, telling the story but still being fun to all around play. It’s the kind of game we should have had, but of course, it was only in Japan.
The Nerd leaves us on a cliffhanger, in the end showing some art which depicts him, Marty, Michelangelo, and one mystery figure in a band. This is a nod to the Metallica EP Garage Days Re-Revisited — the scene matches the cover art, and the concept of “re-revisiting” your past as done in that album was in a sense the inspiration for this, and the following, Nerd episodes.
Final Rating: 4.5/5
At the time this episode was released the Nerd was still somewhat “new” to me. I had been a fan for about a year and a half, but even then the original episodes clearly showed a different time in his life, and in his production style. James did himself a service by covering these games again, touching on aspects he missed and showing us fans a little more of these titles from his own point of view.
The more in depth coverage of later Back to the Future games was an unexpected bonus and all in all this was a pretty fun episode, then or now. The concept of the Nerd revisiting his previous revisiting of games from his youth was something I really appreciated, as well and is in a sense something that inspired these very episode reviews. It’s funny how things come full circle.
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