Jeremy Parish
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NES Works 141: King's Knight & The Adventures of Dino-Riki
🕑 Added 2024-09-11 12:29:20 +0000 UTCI may have fudged some release timing for this episode. It's possible that one of these games is actually a September 1989 release even though the chronology is still in August (I've seen different dates given online). But here's the thing: The longer I produce NES Works, the less compelled I feel to take a strictly chronological approach... more like mostly chronological. Distribution and release dates were super slippery back in the day, as the complications around the release of Zelda II and Super Mario Bros. 2 reminded me. Technically, yes, Mario 2 arrived at the very end of 1988... but good luck to anyone who wanted it then. It didn't really arrive in proper numbers until the end of January ’89, making its initial release so effectively scarce as to be nonexistent. Anyway, the point is, even if these games shipped a month apart, it's entirely likely that you would have seen them in stores at the same time.
Comments
Valora Inverse
I do quite appreciate "Blaster Mastered" being used as a mechanics descriptor.
Hugh Mckinney
King's Knight has always been stuck in my mind as bad because of something I witnessed while looking at games at a store as a child. Family comes in, Dad has apparently promised kid can get a Nintendo and is none too happy now that he has to follow through with it. So he grabs the base Control Deck (the one without a pack-in) and the cheapest game the store had, which turned out to be King's Knight. The kid, for some reason, was fixated on getting Airwolf. I don't remember how much King's Knight was, but it must have been less than $10 because I timidly piped up that there was a bundle that included Super Mario Bros for only a couple dollars more and that might be a better choice. I stayed pretty aware on NES stuff, and I had never even heard of King's Knight at the time. Dad won and the kid went home with King's Knight. I have periodically wondered about that kid for more than 30 years. Did he swear off video games entirely after a couple of weeks, or did he become a hardcore gamer because he got forced into playing this one deep cut (these are the only two possibilities in my imagination)? I have since played King's Knight, and it isn't nearly as bad as I assumed it to be that day, but it's no Super Mario either (better than Airwolf, though).
Violet Ptolemy
Uhh, did you mean to have a few seconds of a black screen in the intro where the contemporary media clip usually goes? (I'm a younger person, I don't know if this is a reference to something that happened in the news.)
Tirgo
The clip at the very beginning doesn't seem to have come out correctly in editing
Ryan Middleton
Honestly, I find release dates less interesting than the general availability and popularity of a game. That's more relevant in terms of its influence - especially on developers of other games. Which is something you often do a great job of exploring!
Rich McKee
King's Knight was the first game I bought with my own money. I was 11 and I saw the box cover on one of those flap things at Toys 'R Us. I was newly into RPGs (D&D, Ultima etc.) and Zelda and thought it looked like the same kind of game. I asked the guy at the store if it was like Zelda and he said, "If you like Zelda, you'll love this." This game was the first time I ever remember realizing a game could be bad. Prior to this, I had encountered games that I did not like, and games that seemed to be way too hard. But, up until King's Knight, I interpreted this as being a problem with me. I wasn't old enough to understand the game. I wasn't good enough to progress. I had no concept that any of this might be the fault of the designers and programmers. King's Knight was, in that sense, a revelation. As was the custom at the time, I was stuck playing this game for months before I got another new game to play. I never beat it. It is a wonder that I still like video games.
