Ah, Pong. Not the first video game, but the first one to really become popular. Through the mid 70’s Pong was pretty much it — the genesis of gaming in our cultural consciousness. In the wake of the success of the original arcade hit, a home version was made. Then another, and another, with tons […]
The Atari era of gaming was something special. It was a time period where things were kind of wild and companies were throwing pretty much anything out there to see what would take. Atari itself, as a company, was doing wonderfully and the VCS, later renamed the 2600, was dominating the gaming scene. This success […]
Another day, another video in the AVGN “Castlevaniathon” from 2009. In this video, James takes a look at Super Castlevania IV on the SNES followed by Castlevania on the Nintendo 64. James opens by setting the stage — it’s the early 90’s, and the NES era is drawing to a close, and a game has […]
It’s time to continue our look at the Angry Video Game Nerd “Castlevaniathon” series from 2009, and this time The Nerd takes a look at two more games in the series – Castlevania II: Simons Quest and Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. We start off looking, again, at Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. It’s funny, at the […]
It’s the week of Halloween, my favorite time of the year, and what better way to do the week here on Xadara than by covering not one, not two, not three, but a whole 4 AVGN Halloween episodes in a 4 day marathon! This is partially by coincidence, but just as much by plan — […]
If you were to ask anyone about Japanese monster movies, the firs thing that would probably come to their mind is the Godzilla franchise. As one might expect, James Rolfe is a Godzilla fan, and has been since his youth when he would on occasion see Godzilla films on TV. Later in life, he would […]
After the insanity that was the Bugs Bunny’s Crazy Castle episode, it’s only fitting we go back to a more traditional Nerd episode, and for this one we take a look at Super Pitfall for the NES! The episode begins with an incredibly brief overview on the character Pitfall Harry — the guy you’re playing […]
Ah, here we have one of the best episodes of “The Angry Video Game Nerd;” Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. The game in question is, as I can best class it, a “storytelling” game for the short lived 3DO platform, an early CD-ROM based 32-bit system, with all the quirks and nuances you would expect of […]
It took quite a few hours of downloading, image selecting, editing, uploading, and article refinement to make it happen, but it’s actually complete — every single Angry Video Game Nerd episode review here on Xadara has at least one image associated with it! I’d estimate it took about 5 hours of solid work to make […]
The Terminator franchise, at least, at the time of the early 90’s, was pretty amazing. With “The Terminator” in 1984 and “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” in 1992, the struggle for humanities survival from an apocalypse of its own creation was well established in popular consciousness and with the rise in popularity of game consoles, it […]
Last month a began a process to update all of my previous Angry Video Game Nerd episode reviews to have images from the episode being reviewed. This was something I neglected when starting the project and in retrospect wish I had done from the beginning. In any case, the last batch of episodes I did […]
Ah, the X-Men; an incredibly well loved superhero franchise originating in the 60’s which experienced somewhat of a revival of popular interest in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Growing up I was quite familiar with the franchise, at least in the state it was presented at that time, and recall quite a few games […]
The entire concept of the Nerd can be summed up in the first lines of the AVGN theme song — “He’s gonna bring you back to the past.” Well, you can only go so far with the realm of gaming and in this episode James goes back about as far as you can, to 1972 […]
The other night, after publishing my review of episode 67, I finally began the task of adding images to my previous episode reviews. I wanted to “liven up” the reviews since I had never put in episode images before — I thought it wouldn’t be necessary, and I didn’t want to waste space in the […]
Ah, Metal Gear. Quite the well loved series these days, it had a rocky start in the West, not really gaining popularity until the PlayStation and Metal Gear: Solid, in 1998. Metal Gear has quite the interesting history, having started in the MSX computer platform in Japan. The NES “port” of the original game (if […]