 Alright, let's try something a little different here. Let's flip through Volume 25 of Nintendo Power from June 1991, featuring Battletoads for NES on the cover. Real quick, I want to thank Kevin for coming up with the awesome idea for the title of this series, Drunk with Nintendo Power, and a big thank you to Andrew for the help with how to film this stuff. Please forgive how aggressively amateurish this production is, I'm not the greatest when it comes to filming stuff, obviously. But hopefully this will still be a worthwhile video. So yeah, Battletoads is on the cover, but that's not why I picked this issue first to review, I'll get to that in a little bit. First let's just go over the regular features that are in every Nintendo Power episode, like the reader mail. This issue in particular features a dude that owns 16 cats that watch him play Nintendo. Okay then. You have to skip ahead a bit to get to the next regular feature, which is the pullout poster. This month's Super Spy Hunter, which later gets featured in the Now Playing section here, giving it a 3.6 rating out of 5. Also now playing is an RPG I've never heard of called Feria, which Nintendo Power diplomatically describes as generic as hell, saying that if you're a role-playing fan it's worth checking out. Next we have my favorite section from when I was a kid, classified information, which details all sorts of codes and tricks for an assortment of games. Here we have a couple for Powerblade, one unlocks a sound test, the other tells of the fastest way to get to a power suit, and a powered up Nova. There's a really cool section here that describes how to design your own passwords for Mega Man 3 so you can customize them to a certain extent to include what robot weapons you want to start the game with, or how many energy tanks you want to start with. There's also stuff on Chase HQ, Abadox, and even a classic section with Mario 3 DuckTales and Double Dragon that shows off older codes like how to find the warp whistles in case you missed it in a previous issue. This month's contest is winning your own golf cart and two sets of golf clubs to promote the game NES Open, wonder if that thing still runs today. Here's the NES achievers section which has readers send in their best scores or if they simply finish the game. This is a good gauge of what games are popular at the time. Mega Man 3, yes. The Immortal, not so much. There's the Counselor's Corner which provides answers to some cryptic nonsense in certain NES games like Robocop 2, Dragon Warrior 2, and Bart vs the Space Mutants. Answered by these dudes, in particular this guy who scored 84 points with one team in NES play action football, why would you want to play that game for that long? We have the top 30 games list which features Ninja Turtles 2, the arcade game at the number one spot. It's always interesting to see which games make this list, stuff like Legend of Zelda and Mario 2 are still hanging on, while even stuff that developed a cult following like Ultima the Quest of the Avatar finds a place here. There's a celebrity profile with Joe Izuzu, the guy from the Izuzu commercials who also appeared in just about every 80's sitcom you can think of and he talks about playing video games. It's about as exciting as it sounds. The Pac-Watch Future Games preview features Bill and Ted, Over Horizon, The Little Mermaid, Legends of the Diamond, High Speed, Rockin' Cats, and Pirates. And over in the rumors section here it says to expect a Railroad Tycoon game for the upcoming SNES as well as a Hudson Hawk game. Huh, neither ended up happening. Anyway the main feature in this issue is a 36 page feature on Battletoads featuring full maps of every stage including a goofy comic that expands on the story. The Turbo Tunnel map is something else. It's cool to see how long that level really is and it tells you where to jump and when to move so it allows you to memorize the sequence without having to play it and die over and over again so that's pretty cool. This issue also features NES Open Tournament Golf, Daydream and Davey which you may remember from an Angry Video Game Nerd episode, and a big Game Boy feature which talks about games like Hunt for Red October, Fortified Zone, and Super RC Proan. The NES Open Tournament feature is really nice because it details all the yardage each club can get and there's maps of every hole while Fortified Zone is something I never heard of that looks like a pretty good game or at least a decent top-down action style game akin to something like Commando. Alright, let's finally get to the real reason I chose this issue to look at. It's the first look at the Super Nintendo prior to its US release. It gives you the specific hardware specs and brags about the audio chip providing CD quality sound? Yeah, I don't know about that. They talk a little bit about the design change from the Super Famicom to the SNES with designer Lance Barr saying that there aren't really any expectations of what a home console should look like, just that it shouldn't look like a toy. Eh, this looks a lot more like a toy than this does in my opinion. But yeah, take a look at some of the SNES design prototypes here and that's pretty cool. One reason they chose the design they did was to prevent people from putting drinks on the surface of the console saying that drink spills were one of the most common repair issues that people had to deal with for the NES. That's also why the ventilator grill is on the back of the SNES instead of the top. They also designed the bottom so it can be stacked with potential peripherals like a CD-ROM attachment that never ended up happening. We also get the SNES's resolution of 512 by 448 pixels, the use of 32,768 colors, transparent color layering, scaling, and sprite work. It doesn't really give any extra insight on each of these things. It just explains very dryly which each of them actually are, why they're important, and why they're better than the NES. This feature does make sure, however, to point out the importance of sound in a video game, saying that video game sound has lagged behind the graphics from the start, which is a fairly good point. It kinda goes overboard here, though, talking about how they're going to be able to use real voices for cutscenes. Yeah, not exactly. Still, it's clear that they were placing a big priority on sound from day one. As far as the SNES controller goes, one complaint about the Super Famicom controller was that the four face buttons all felt the same to your thumb. So to remedy this, they gave the Y and X button an indentation so those buttons felt different just by touch alone, and which modern consoles still did this with their controllers. Finally, we've got screenshots of upcoming games like Actraiser, Pilotwings, and Final Fight. So yeah, that's about it. Thanks for taking the time to watch through this little experiment of mine, and I hope you have a good rest of your day.