N64 Controller Alternatives
We’re all familiar with the unique design of the Nintendo 64 controller and it’s much more modern usage as a shell for Chinese Famiclones. We’re also quite familiar with the fact that the N64 controller’s joystick has a tendency to become loose and work poorly, or stop working entirely. So when our favorite controller decides to give up the ghost, what choices do we have in a more reliable controller for our beloved N64?
For the past few years I’ve noticed a slew of reproduction N64 controllers that look identical to the real thing, as I haven’t had the chance to get my hands on one I can’t say much in the way of how good they are, or not. But what if you’re looking for something outside the box, something with a different shape entirely? Well Performance made quite a few N64 controllers that looked much worse than the original N64 controller design, somehow, but work quite well.
Performance was always in the market making memory cards, controllers and almost anything else you can think of for the N64, as well as almost any other video game console. Performance was perhaps most well known for providing controllers with built-in turbo features, as well as making simplistically standard replacements for worn out or broken controllers. If you were short on cash but needed something for your N64, you probably bought yourself something from Performance.
Recently I’ve come across four Performance SuperPad 64 controllers, 2 gray and 2 black. The gray ones were in good shape, other than their broken Z buttons, which I will get into later. Three of the four share the same design as you see above, but the fourth controller seemed to be designed by Picasso, with strange angles and an overall strange shape.
Outside of comfort, which there isn’t much comfort when using this controller, the controller does a great job. I assume Performance designed this controller to be even further outside the box of normalcy, while still retaining complete functionality, which they have achieved! Despite its design, the controller isn’t uncomfortable, but sometimes reaching the buttons can be a bit more of a stretch than you’re use to with the original or the Stingray design of Performance’s other controller.
All of Performance’s SuperPad 64 controllers share one common thing that really stand out in my mind, the joystick. I’ve only taken one apart because it was pulled out of place when I got it, but it was very easily put back into working order. Everything inside the joystick seems well thought out for the long haul, unlike Nintendo’s idea to use cheap plastic throughout.
My one complaint about these controllers are the Z buttons. In both of my gray controllers the Z button was broken, not the actual button but the piece inside that pushes in the carbon pad to activate it, rendering the controller useless for many games. I guess with such a robust joystick Performance had to make a misstep somewhere, and the Z button took the hit.
If you’re looking for a replacement controller for your N64, or just want one with a better joystick, I would say the Performance SuperPad 64 isn’t entirely bad. I found mine at the Goodwill Outlet for the standard $.79 a pound, so I imagine they should easily be found in thrift stores fairly cheap. Although they’re not nearly as, dare I say, comfortable as the original N64 controller, the joystick alone is a feature that is worth adding one to your collection.
Whats that?
Shopping at the Goodwill Outlet store I have to contend with a lot of resellers, who ignorantly hope to strike it rich with the vintage games I go there to find. Yesterday I happened to find something that made me realize one of the most vital tactics a hunter can use is their ability to know what you’re looking for, no matter how hard that may be sometimes. Not everything is branded, for one reason or another, and you sometimes take visual cues as to what the item is for, but yesterday I had very little to go on and I had to make a call that turned out quite good in my favor.
To some the item shown above may look like nothing at all, while others may get it right away. Perhaps most of you are like myself and are currently scratching your heads telling yourself how this looks familiar, but you just can’t place the shape, or what it has to do with vintage gaming at all. Well I will remedy any and all curiosity, below.
What only says SGRL is actually a Nintendo Game Boy Color rechargeable battery pack. Even on the power supply for the charging base there is nothing at all written about what this item does or what it is for. I did however use the voltage to spur on my hopes that it was what it turned out to be.
If you saw this item sitting alone in a thrift store would you have picked it up on a whim? This item was just one of many things I’ve picked up, hoping it was what my brain thought it was. However, this item was the most cryptic item I’ve ever had to decipher!
Sam’s Scores 13
4) NES game carry case
You may know how I love to buy the canvas travel cases for retro systems, but I’ll buy almost anything branded that allows me to store my video games and systems. Such is the case with this NES game carrying case. Back in the NES days Nintendo put their name on anything, sometimes it was utter junk and other times it was decent, in this case it was JUNK! This thing was meant to carry up to 10 NES games anywhere you needed to go. The problem was these things were merely plastic covering cardboard, not the strongest combination! The strongest part of this thing is the brass parts, which have tarnished. This is still a pretty cool retro piece to own, and it does hold 10 games quite well, even if it is slightly misshapen.
3) 1080 Snowboarding N64
In a previous edition of Sam’s Scores I discussed how I may have bricked my N64 Gameshark. After a little bit of research I learned that fixing it may be as easy as buying the game that corresponds with the key code I changed it to. Lucky for me it did the trick and fixed my Gameshark to usable condition once more! Even if it hadn’t, it was cheap enough that I wouldn’t have minded just adding it to my collection anyway.
2) Krazy Kreatures NES
Most of the unlicensed games for the NES are naturally harder to find than the official releases, such as Krazy Kreatures. When I found this I originally thought it was an old 8-track tape, it looked so strange inside it’s American Video Entertainment sleeve. Although the game isn’t very fun, this is one of only two games actually developed by A.V.E.
1) Tecmo Super Bowl
About a year ago I happened to find Tecmo Bowl for $1, but could never find Super Bowl for a price that I felt was good enough to warrant owning both of them. Until recently, when I found one at such a good price that I couldn’t turn it down!
Vintage Gaming Cleaning Kits
In the days when cartridges ruled the world it seemed as if anyone and everyone put out a cleaning kit to keep your systems in working order. Which was a big selling point made all too easy by the NES and its, more often than not, ability to put on a light show rather than play a game. If there is one thing I believe about retro gaming, it has to be the fact that if you keep your systems and games clean they will last longer and give you much better functional results.
Although I now know the true cause of these glitches, I was still taken in by the cleaning kits propaganda when I was younger. They made promises to keep the blinking NES, or just a black screen on other systems, away forever! Almost every cartridge based video game system had some form of cleaning kit, and although most of the time it worked for just a short while, the fact that it worked at all made them feel like essential hardware.
My first cleaning kit was a Doc’s Fix-a-system, which had what I still feel is a genius idea in the clip on NES cleaner. You simply took any NES game cartridge, clipped the contraption to the front of it and you proceeded to stab the living daylights out of your NES. Doing so cleared unwanted dirt and gave way to a few more minutes of uninterrupted gameplay.
I still love this idea, it still works great!
After that cleaning kit was lost or broken, I’m sure, I purchased a Player’s Edge NES cleaning kit. This one was a stand alone unit with a handle, and everything you needed fit conveniently inside the unit itself. Again you just took the unit and stabbed the living daylights out of your NES and you were good to play for a little while longer.
Years of use on this thing, does it show?
That would be the last cleaning kit I bought for nearly 14 years, until one day at a Salvation Army store I found a Player’s Edge cleaning kit for the SNES. Later, at another Salvation Army, I found an incomplete Doc’s 2000 kit, which brought back a flood of memories of the good old days. Sadly the NES clip was broken, but I decided to take what was left of it and turn it into a cleaning kit inside of an old Gyromite cartridge I had laying around. (Original article: Here)
Same system, only one fits perfectly into the NES so I can shut the lid.
It seems nowadays I go through thrift stores and find cleaning kits for almost every system, and if they’re at a reasonable price I’ll pick them up. Just this year I’ve accrued quite a few system cleaning kits, and although I may not use them I still pick them up when I can.
My current collection of boxed cleaning kits.
As an adult, I know the best way to keep my systems running is to clean both the games and the systems. But it seems a good Q-tip with rubbing alcohol thoroughly rubbed through a game keeps all my systems running well. Admittedly I have had some hiccups with my Sega Genesis, N64 and SNES, but nothing a good game cleaning hasn’t remedied, so far!
Back in the day cleaning kits were pushed in our faces, and as time went on they faded away. I still get nostalgic for cleaning kits and make room for them in my collection. Though they serve no practical purpose to me, as I’ve learned far better ways to keep my systems running, they still connect me to a time when video games were problematic, but so much fun.
Willow for the NES
Willow was a 1988 film starring Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer, written, in part, by George Lucas and directed by Ron Howard, so did it’s video game counterpart suffer the same fate as many other movie to NES titles? Well fans seemingly had luck on their side as the job went to Capcom, the company who brought us the Mega Man series, so it seemed as though everything had fallen into perfect order. But would Capcom be able to translate the story of the movie into an enjoyable game, or slaughter it instead?
In both cases the main character, Willow, must overcome many perils to protect a baby who is destined to grow up and bring peace to the lands, which are currently ruled by the evil Queen Bavmorda. Willow treks a long way meeting many dangers along his journey, yet he always surpasses them with help from acquaintances. The video game follows it’s movie counterpart closer than many other NES games did and does a really good job of leaving the main plot in tact, while taking it’s own liberties to make the game fun.
The game play is action/adventure and you may immediately find yourself comparing it to The Legend of Zelda. Starting off with simplistic analysis of the sound and animation of entering/exiting dungeons and caves, which are highly reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda. But most notably the maps are cut into sections and once you go any of four directions the screen will scroll in that direction, again, much like The Legend of Zelda.
Yet this game also has a heap of Crystalis thrown in with it’s simplistic and strictly “hunt down” weapon selection, they’re more a part of the story so there are no stores to sell you weapons nor armor. The game also uses a leveling system much like Crystalis, being that there are only 16 levels. With such few levels spread out between 0 and 99,999 exp, you’ll find yourself doing quite a bit of grinding, rather than gaining experience along the journey.
You would think that such a leveling system would be well backed by a plethora of monsters to sustain the need to gather such necessary exp to fight the handful of boss battles, and this is true, but also not. I found that sometimes monsters won’t respawn in a section when they’re suppose to, while in other sections monster will always spawn. I’ve also found sometimes there are key points that you need to walk over to cause the spawn event.
As I hinted to early all items within the game are merely collectables, which break down into: weapons, shields, magic and items, all of which are key ingredients to survival and progressing through the game. In some cases items can easily be completely passed over while trying to progress through the game. Sometimes you will even find yourself doing the normal RPG backtracking to talk to a few NPCs to unlock obtaining a certain item.
But sadly Willow is plagued with a faulty, at best, save system, using passwords instead of a battery backup, which causes you to start at the last heal point, on the exact amount of exp it took to obtain your last level, without anything equipped. This means any further progress you made on the trek or exp toward a level, regardless of whether you’ve entered the password or hit continue, have now been voided back to a certain state, yet all items will be retained. This disjointed style of game play is so inhibiting and frustrating that I literally took a year away from the game, before finishing it to a point where I felt I could justify a full review on it.
I loved Willow the movie, I love both games this one reminds me of, and I also enjoyed almost anything Capcom put out on the NES, but Willow falls short (pun NOT intended). Maybe that all boils down to Capcom’s lack of experience (pun intended!) with making RPGS, yes they made a few but Capcom isn’t well known for them. Even so, are we to believe that Capcom’s version of Willow was possibly the best movie to NES adaptation? I would say yes, because it could have been dreadfully worse!
Retro Games and Passwords, why!?
Passwords, the bane of many retro gamers. After a long week of writing things down at school the last thing you wanted was having to write down something from a video game you just rented or bought. No, video games were suppose to be a refreshing exit to your week and made looking forward to the next week a little more sweet.
Before the luxury of memory cards or even battery backups, many gamers had to sit next to a pad of paper with their choice of pen or pencil to write down codes to log their hours of hard work. But to some writing down passwords seemed more like the modern day achievement, rather than a common nuisance. Passwords were, for many great retro games, the only way to ensure your hard work was there the next time you fired up the game, but many retro gamers quickly learned that passwords simply weren’t going to work.
Passwords were comprised of a given combination of letters, numbers or even symbols given to the player after what in many other games would be the game over screen. Many game developers just tossed out a grid of all 26 letters in the alphabet, sometimes in lower case and capitals, alone side numbers; sometimes things got rather confusing. Lower case Q’s could have been confused for P’s or G’s, Zeros looked like a capital O, and more often than not gamers simply had to start the game all over!
One good thing about passwords was that they were exclusive to the programming within the game, so you didn’t have to worry about renting the exact same cartridge twice to enjoy a correctly transcribed password. But still many retro gamers will have as many fond memories of mistaken passwords as they will of actually enjoying the games they were trying to write down the password for.
Even after battery backup was commonplace, the 16-bit era still rolled out games requiring passwords. For the most part though, the 16-bit era learned from the guinea pig that was the 8-bit era. Passwords were much shorter and less confusing, for the most part, to write down, making games that required passwords more enjoyable to play.
Today I keep a notepad on my laptop containing the passwords for games, and no I don’t mean through emulation, simply because notepad’s font is light years ahead of my own handwriting. I also take the time to scrutinize each line of the password to make sure I have it written down correctly. Sure I could easily go online and seek out a password pertaining to my current status on some retro games, but it isn’t my hard work, now is it?
One particular game sticks out from my childhood that frustrated me to no end with it’s completely, and utterly, useless and pointless password system, River City Ransom. River City Ransom is without question an NES classic, but that password system left a lot, and I mean heaps, to be desired. Partly because the password system required you to start a new game, press start and then select the password option; but most because River City Ransom required a whopping 66 characters per password!
Passwords could be fun also, sometimes you could mash in a nonsensical combination and have the game start up with things you didn’t earn yourself, other times the password wasn’t acceptable or it just started fresh anyway. Many retro gamers would give passwords to their friends to show off their progress, or to help them out a little. I’ve found many slips of paper covered in passwords within retro game cases, or even hand written inside the manual.
Today they are but a distant memory, but many retro gamers still retain the memories of frustration when a good password went bad. Love them or hate them, passwords were a part of retro gaming culture. I liken the retro gaming password to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, something to be remembered so we aren’t doomed to repeat our past.
Sam’s Scores 11
Personally I feel as though Sam’s Scores has hit a crossroad. I want to continue bringing you cool finds, yet I rarely hunt anywhere other than the Goodwill outlet store. Although I do find a lot of cool stuff there, I feel a bit strange marking prices as per pound. I’ll do my best to keep the series going, but hunting anywhere other than the Goodwill Outlet store usually leaves me empty handed. Please bear with me in my continuation with the series and please let me know what you think. Enjoy!
4) N64 Gameshark
I was out at a normal Goodwill store when a glistening N64 Gameshark caught my eye. I picked it up and checked the price, it was oddly cheap so I decided to buy it. After doing some research online, promptly after walking out of the store, I learned that version 3.3 Gamesharks, which this one is, commonly brick and become unusable. I hoped that wasn’t the case and indeed, it wasn’t! The Gameshark worked flawlessly, until I bricked it myself changing the keycode. No worries, apparently this can easily be resolved by plugging in the correct game that corresponds to the keycode I changed it to. At least I hope! Either way it was cheap enough to keep even if its shot.
3) Nintendo Gameboy
I’ve been collecting for a few years now and I’ve never run across an original Gameboy that I wanted to buy. They were all trashed beyond repair and overpriced! After finding tons of stuff at the Goodwill Outlet, I decided I could hold out, in hopes of finding one there. I prevailed in doing just that, although the system was extremely dirty, missing the battery cover and the contrast adjustment is broken. I still feel that it was worth holding out to find one, because it cleaned up really nice!
2) Nintendo Gameboy
No, this isn’t an error, this is yet another Gameboy that I happened to find in a flea market. If you examine the pics closely, you’ll notice some discoloration in the screen protector for this one, as if it were super glued back into place. It was cheap enough that I figured I could use the guts and battery cover to repair my other one, if needed. This one however worked perfectly, with the exception of missing columns which is common for these original Gameboys, after time. Now I feel as though I can repair both Gameboys and have 2 for way cheaper than any of the ones I had seen before.
1) Nintendo Gameboy Pocket
Another Gameboy, but this one fits in my pocket! Yes, the Gameboy Pocket! I already own the silver one without a power LED, so when I saw this one I needed to own it as well. I’ll be honest, this and the previous Gameboy came together in a bag, so for half the price I’ve seen them bashed up in thrift stores or flea markets, I now have 2 decent Gameboys. This one works perfectly, but having a GBA SP and the Gamecube Gameboy Player, I’ll probably pick those over pulling this thing out.
