Kickstarter: The Nintendo NES compendium

[Sean697]

http://kck.st/1R6Tt2m

Thought I'd bring attention to this project. Dylan Cornelious. Who years ago wrote a review for every NES game released on questicle.net , has revised and compiled his reviews with additional content into the Nintendo NES Compendium. He's actually ago of good writer. Also includes box art for every game. I believe the book is more or less ready to go. Help him and get the project funded so the I tial batch of books can be printed.mi know he's spent a lot of time putting this together and even traveled to book publishers to put the book together. Plus you can get the digital copy in May which is fairly soon after the Kickstarter ends. I know he has the book complete so there really is no risk backing this. Basically by funding this he covers the costs to go to press on it.

Also has a forward by retro games enthusiast writer Jeremy Parish. Anyway I know Pat Contri also has his book coming out. But I really think Dylan's writing will carry this book much better than that one. Plus a much less cluttered layout. Consider helping him get this book out, if even for the digital copy, or just 5.00 to help it get made.

I personally am a big fan of his current project, segadoes.com , where he reviews and plays every game released on every Sega console ever. He's already up to the start of the Genesis. And is the only good resource I know of for SG-1000 reviews. He also runs a companion podcast for the Sega does project.

Edited February 9, 2016 by Phillyman

[Sean697]

I have no idea why the kickstarter video wont embed on these board posts.

Edited February 9, 2016 by Sean697

[miketheratguy]

I looked up a couple of the guy's reviews and found them to be okay: pleasantly casual and down-to-Earth but not particularly funny or deep (and also kind of hammy at times, such as when pointlessly referencing the lyrics of that shitty Disturbed song to close his Maniac Mansion review). He describes the basic premise of the games well enough, which is good, but doesn't really go into any critical depth or provide any noteworthy background. Saying that Astyanax is "kind of like Castlevania" and describing Super Mario Bros. 3 as a satisfying game with a lot of choice is interesting I guess, but I didn't really get anything beyond that other than simple explanations of each game's premise.

A similar book was released a few years back called "The Video Games Guide", only that one included reviews of thousands of games across all kinds of systems, not just the NES. I bought it expecting it to be an incredible rush of information and nostalgia, and for the first day or so I felt like it was. SO many reviews! So many memories! Where do I even begin? But once I started browsing through the book it quickly dawned on me that reading one or two-paragraph summaries of a game's basic points wasn't especially entertaining or enlightening. I found myself disappointed with a thin and relatively pointless experience that wasn't much deeper than reading the synopsis on the back of a game box, and ultimately decided to just sell the book. I went back to reading about games on Wikipedia which, perhaps ironically, wound up being more interesting and informative anyway.

I do like the idea of having a big compendium of nothing but NES reviews and respect anyone dedicated enough to go through the time and effort to play and describe each game, but the bite-sized capsule structure of his reviews coupled with the fact that they (and other, more in-depth reviews) are freely available online would leave me conflicted about giving someone money to release them in the form of a book.

[Sean697]

I looked up a couple of the guy's reviews and found them to be okay: pleasantly casual and down-to-Earth but not particularly funny or deep (and also kind of strange at times, such as when throwing out random non-sequitur lyrics of that shitty Disturbed song to close his Maniac Mansion review).

I do like the idea of having a big compendium of nothing but NES reviews and respect anyone dedicated enough to go through the time and effort to play and describe each game, but the bite-sized summary stricture of the reviews coupled with the fact that they can all be read online for free (at least for the moment) would make me hesitate to give him money for a book version.

In reply I'll just post the link to his description on the blog.

http://questicle.net/2016/02/the-nes-compendium-is-now-on-kickstarter.html

Every single review has been revised and revised or rewritten. I think he started this project over 5 years ago or more. He's become a much better writer since then. So apparently the book is revised to reflect that. For a more recent look at his review style and writing I'd check out some of his reviews on the Segadoes website. Which I am a big fan of. But needless to say it is not just a regurgitation of the blog reviews. Plus it's nice to have a book around to check out reviews of a NES game if you have the itch. And also preserves a piece of gaming history. Even if you just get the digital copy.

[miketheratguy]

Plus it's nice to have a book around to check out reviews of a NES game if you have the itch. And also preserves a piece of gaming history. Even if you just get the digital copy.

Having gone through the experience I described above I still maintain that it's relatively unfulfilling to have a book of reviews that are just a paragraph or two long and mainly just summarize the gameplay. It's not really having a book of "reviews" so much as having a quick-reference guide, like those Leonard Maltin movie books that come out every year. You pick up it, you scroll to Gremlins, and in a few sentences you learn that it's a dark comedy about monsters and that he didn't really care for it. You think "huh, I liked it myself", and put the book back on the shelf without having really gained any great insight or been as entertained as you would have been if you'd read a longer and more dedicated discussion of the same film.

Now having said that, I don't mean to completely crap on the guy or his efforts. Being a huge gaming geek I DO appreciate the novelty of having breezy video game books to flip through when I get the itch, like when I take out my ebook reader when I've got some waiting time at the airport or as I'm getting ready for bed. And I do like the idea of having a single all-inclusive volume that has box art and a few details about each game that's available for a single console, even if the discussion doesn't go much deeper than that. I can respect the preservation aspect of it.

I guess maybe it's just that I've personally seen other, similar efforts, as well as more exhaustive ones. I myself put in countless hours of work to download every single Wikipedia page on every single video game that I've ever played, arranged them in alphabetical order, added bookmarks, and converted them into an all-inclusive pdf that can be added to at any time should I decide to update it with newer games. That document alone is several thousand pages long and goes beyond mere opinionated summary - it goes every game's background, history, publication, critical and financial response, legends, rumors, updates, revisions, etc etc etc. When you've already got something like that, a book full of little blurbs like "Maniac Mansion is a point and click game with hipsters" wouldn't really measure up.

Though it's really kind of apples and oranges, and not really fair to compare the two. They're two completely different things, put together in different ways and for different purposes. Again, I can respect the guy's efforts. I just found his reviews to be lacking. But I also appreciate that his book will apparently NOT just reprint his web content and will instead feature edited and revised reviews that will, hopefully, have a little more weight and oomph to them. I do wish him luck and I'm sure that his efforts are completely earnest but I guess, at this point, it's just difficult for me to see them as anything more than kind of a shallow experience compared to what else is out there.

[kitsunebi]

I also gave up on reading Dylan's reviews after the first two dozen or so when I discovered his site several months ago. I always came away from his reviews with a pretty good idea of whether or not he enjoyed the game, but I never got a sense for the most important part of a review - whether or not I felt that I might enjoy the game or not. To be fair, I haven't read any of his Segadoes stuff, so maybe it's done in a different style.

Actually, for NES games, I haven't found anything as satisfying as Chrontendo (though it's a video blog). Dr. Sparkle gives his impressions of the games, sure, but he also goes into the gameplay mechanics, background information and historical context of the game so that I have a much better idea of whether I would want to give the game a shot. And while I can appreciate a snarky review sometimes, the world has too many people wishing they were Seanbaby in it already, so I think it's nice that Chrontendo keeps its reviews relatively serious. As a bonus, it covers EVERY game, not just the ones released in the US.

[Phillyman]

I have no idea why the kickstarter video wont embed on these board posts.

Fixed, it was parsing it as a link before parsing it as a Kickstarter video. So I turned off all other parsing on that code, and now it works.

lets test the widget code while we are at it....

[aloram]

Thanks, Sean697, for bringing this to my attention, and thanks for everyone's input.