It’s Time for the holiday 2013 episodes of the Angry Video Game Nerd – a two part set of episodes based on the classic holiday idea of a “wish list.” Yes, in this pair of episodes the Nerd goes over quite a few games that many fans have been wishing he would talk about but, for one reason or another, he hasn’t yet covered.
This begins with a look at many of the catalogs from our childhoods – namely the Sears catalog, among others. It spends a bit of time pulling the “hey look at how much all this old stuff cost back then” card. It’s pretty much a late 80’s / early 90’s time capsule. He also touches on some of the idiosyncrasies of them – guns being right on the next page following video games, poor descriptions, odd photos of toys, it’s pretty wild.
We move quickly enough to a few comments on various games, like Skate or Die, Bad Dudes, and Karate Champ before we get to the meat of this episode; addressing game requests from fans, starting off with the “bad” Sonic games.
This is where the episode takes a positive note, acknowledging the quality of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games on the Sega Genesis. It’s refreshing to see someone so strongly associated with Nintendo speak so strongly about the series.
Of course, there are bad games out there, and little time is spent getting to them – Sonic Blast and Sonic Labyrinth on the Game Gear, Sonic R on the Sega Saturn, Sonic Shuffle on the Dreamcast and finally Shadow the Hedgehog on the GameCube – a Nintendo system, which at the time felt incredibly odd to see. This creates a chance for commentary on the modern state of gaming – read, post 2000 or so, when cutscenes became extremely common in all types of games, as well as him expressing frustration on the nature of the 3D Sonic games.
We end covering one of the worst of the worst, Where’s Waldo on the NES. If you know the books, you know the idea here, but the execution is absolutely terrible. The review speaks for itself, and we end with a bit of a parody of the crazy walking sequence in said game.
Final Rating: 4.0/5
Another solid one. It’s pretty straightforward, almost downright “classic” Nerd in many regards, given how short commentary on each game is, but it still has something new to add to the mix with its covering of the catalogs and touching on more recent games and systems, something only done previously, if I recall correctly, in the Godzilla and Pong episodes.