Inside the NES Worlds of Power Series

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Saturday August 5, 2006 @05:57AM from the shamed-and-amused-at-the-same-time dept.

If you grew up in the 80s, chances were you'd at least heard of the Nintendo Entertainment System. For those of us that read Nintendo Power, ate Nintendo cereal, and (ahem) for a brief time even wore a Nintendo hat, the NES experience was fairly powerful. As such, reading about Nintendo games is a perfectly logical step. 1up has a long piece looking at the World of Power book series, a series of novelizations of some of the most popular NES titles of the day. Castlvania, Master Blaster, and Metal Gear all received the literary treatment ... with varying degrees of success. From the article: "This trend toward whitewashing death and violence also extended the books' text. In Blaster Master, all the defeated 'underboss' characters that look like mutated animals turn out to be holographic projections placed over formless blobs. In Metal Gear, Solid Snake is described as a 'walking arsenal,' yet he only uses his various weapons to shoot locks off doors. In Ninja Gaiden, Ryu's father is shown losing a duel to the death in the game's prologue, and is said to have passed away in the book's early chapters. Yet he turns up at the very end of the book, very much alive. In Infiltrator, a double agent that is ordered to be sent away to be 'voided' has his fate described as either having his memory wiped, being exiled, or getting demoted." So, how many folks (besides me) actually read these thing?

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That's a negative on Metal Gear... by lord+sibn · 2006-08-05 08:07 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Wrong on so many levels. Being the fan of the original game that I am, I can tell you that no locks get shot off in the game, ever, at all. Solid Snake's "arsenal" (which, in my memory was varied and useful) was used to shoot up guards, guard dogs, blow up tanks, and the like. Locked doors were *always* opened via the use of various key cards (numbered 1-8). If at any time you approached a locked door without the appropriate key card as your active item, the door did not open. There was no lock to shoot off.

The later Metal Gear games? I did not like Snake's revenge, and never really played any of the Metal Gear Solid games... they might have lock-shooting action. But Metal Gear? I have to question the authority of the writer on this one, because as somebody else points out, simple game titles and publishers aren't even cited correctly.