Back in 1988, CBS gave us Garfield: His 9 Lives, an anthology special where our favorite lasagna enthusiast got to be a caveman, a pampered Egyptian god-cat, and an honest-to-goodness astronaut fending off an interstellar war fleet. Ambitious! Mythic, even! Then in 2006, Lucky Jump Games and The Game Factory looked at that legacy, borrowed the exact same title for a Game Boy Advance platformer,…
Read transcript Let’s talk about the year 2007, when Ubisoft looked at Konami’s TMNT license, going up for grabs after three straight beat-em-ups, and said “yeah, we’ll take it,” the video game equivalent of adopting somebody else’s very large, very established pet. They tied the whole thing to Imagi’s brand new fully CGI turtle movie and then, in an act of scheduling chaos I can only respect,…
Read transcript 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…
Read transcript Let’s talk about Spider-Man 3, the movie where Sam Raimi looked at “menacing single antagonist” and said no thank you, I would like three, please, and also I would like Peter Parker to dance down the street like he’s auditioning for a jazz-hands cult. It’s a movie that tried to do everything, mostly succeeded at doing too much, and somehow still made enough money that Activision…
Read transcript 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…
Read transcript 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+…
Read transcript In 1986, King Features looked at its stable of unrelated newspaper strip heroes and decided the responsible thing to do was throw them all in a blender. Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, and the Phantom. A spaceman, a stage hypnotist, and a guy who lives in a skull-shaped cave and inherited his job from his dad got drafted into a single Saturday morning cartoon called Defenders…
Garfield has spent I don’t want to think about how long being terrified for our entertainment, and somehow this is only the second time we’ve noticed. Today we’re looking at two occasions Jim Davis’s laziest creation got shoved into a horror plot he absolutely did not sign up for: Garfield’s Nightmare on the Nintendo DS and Garfield’s Scary Scavenger Hunt, the Flash game that lived on Garfield.com…
Read transcript Superman Returns came out in 2006 and asked audiences a very sincere question: what if Superman, but sad? Brandon Routh brooded his way across the big screen, lifting improbable objects and pining for Lois Lane, and somewhere in a boardroom, someone decided this emotionally complex theatrical event needed to be a video game on four different platforms. Five if you count the Game…
Read transcript Somewhere out there is a piece of Superman history that almost nobody remembers exists. Not because it was bad. Not because it flopped. It just… vanished off the internet one day, like it got caught in a Phantom Zone projector aimed at a server farm. That’s the story of The Multipath Adventures of Superman, and we’re about to dig it back up. The whole thing started life as a CD…
Read transcript Look, at some point you have to respect the audacity of putting the entire Justice League on a Game Boy Advance cartridge. Not one hero. Not two heroes doing a buddy-cop thing. The whole league. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the works. All crammed onto a handheld that also had to share shelf space with Hamtaro games. That’s ambition. That’s vision. That might also be a cry for…
