Jeremy Parish
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NES Works 106: Sesame Street 1-2-3 & Star Soldier
🕑 Added 2023-08-09 12:16:49 +0000 UTCWell, we've hit that point in NES history where we'll begin seeing lots of questionable filler content for the console courtesy (?) of Western devs and publishers. In this case, Hi Tech Expressions makes its NES debut by hiring Rare to produce a port of its PC edutainment game about Sesame Street muppets counting numbers (though—not The Count?!); Rare in turn hired Zippo to do the work for them. We've seen arrangements like this before, such as with LJN commissioning Atlus to make games for them which Atlus then subcontracted out; now that Western studios have begun adopting a similar policy, the circle is complete and sustained mediocrity is assured.
Which is not to say the new 1989 season of NES Works will be all duds. On the contrary, ’89 and ’90 arguably saw the NES at the height of its commercial and creative power.
But first we have to get through games like Sesame Street and Star Soldier, which definitely are video games, but the kind of games that have more interesting backstories than gameplay.
As for the hosting segments on this... I recorded these intros and outro at the library at Marufukuro, the hotel built into Nintendo's Showa-era HQ in Kyoto. I'm not sure they turned out so well, but on the plus side, I did drag a terrible VHS camcorder to Japan, so I suppose that's something.
Comments
Matt Hargett
The NES Sesame games aren’t great, but my daughter really enjoyed Sesame Street Counting Cafe on Genesis (actually, Mega Sg and RetroBit controller) a few years ago. Alongside the Barney the Dinosaur game, and Thomas the Train Engine, they are great controller tutorials and the allure of the characters pulled her through the layered challenges learning a whole new controller at 4 years old.
Sven Mascarenhas
Going to be fun to show this one to my sister, since we had Astro-Grover for the PC and she always mentions it. I never knew that it was an NES release as well until I started poking around ROM lists in the 90s.My kids goofed around with it when they were younger, too, and liked it well enough. It's just too f'n SLOW for kids - they usually solved the problems and then it took the game too long to get to the next one.
