GTV Japan

The Subspace theme from Super Mario 2 can be played in the overworld and underworld?? It's true! Let's find out how! There are a few things to notice here. First the music is actually 15 seconds long, which is longer than the time in subspace. That means part of the music will NEVER be heard and trapped in the game forever, until you do this trick. The other thing is the in Super Mario Bros. 2, when you pause the game, the bass line of the music plays while the rest is muted. But in subspace you can’t pause the game. That means there’s yet another version of the music hiding out that you may have never heard before.

March 3rd is a holiday just for girls! There's also one for boys on May 5th. Learn all about it! Hinamatsuri traces its origins to a Heian period custom called hina-nagashi (雛流し"doll floating") in which straw hina dolls are set afloat on a boat and sent down a river to the sea, supposedly taking troubles or bad spirits with them. The Shimogamo Shrine (part of the Kamo Shrine complex in Kyoto) celebrates the Nagashi-bina by floating these dolls between the Takano and Kamo Rivers to pray for the safety of children. People have stopped doing this now because of fishermen catching the dolls in their nets. They now send them out to sea, and when the spectators are gone they take the boats out of the water and bring them back to the temple and burn them. The customary drink for the festival is shirozake, a sake made from fermented rice.

Paid talking heads aside, I got the FIRST Switch in the world at 10:00am in Japan while the rest of the world was stuck for hours in the cold waiting in line! I also gave an honest review, which means Nintendo didn't pay me... It turns out that anyone who did get a review unit of the Switch (before 3/3) had to read some spiel about how cute the box is and etc., etc., I was happy to get one the honest way and give my real opinion, and predictions. Even if some of those didn't actually come true...

The star of 1-2 Switch commercials in japan is a famous actor who also voices Professor Layton.

Decades before it was "cool" I was making gaming videos! On August 9th, 1990, I did something few people had thought about doing and nobody would see, that is until now. I made a video of me playing Rescue Rangers with the family camcorder. These videos are referred to as “let’s plays” in the 2020s, but in 1990, it was just me playing around with the camcorder. So in celebration of the release of The Disney Afternoon Collection, allow me to present a “let’s play” of one of the games Chip n Dale: Rescue Rangers, recorded in my basement on August 9th, 1990 at 1:30 pm!

How can a puzzle game be turned into a comic book?

People ask, "why didn't you record the whole thing?" I had to sneak it and was told to stop recording so this was the best I could do. I did find a second copy at a library but they didn't loan it out saying that they feared someone would copy it and put it on the internet! You can't make this stuff up!!

An in-depth search for answers to the how and why of Atari’s 2600 version of Pac-Man release date being lost, and how it was rediscovered.

A look at the third season of Japanese TV show, Yuusha Yoshihiko, with a top seven episode countdown.

There are words to the music in the Japanese version of Super Air Zonk???

A retelling of the classic Zelda game in manga form.

Learn all about the Guts Pose and the man behind it!

Justin Bailey is a real person? Yeah, well, kind of...

The Super Famicom Mini is finally available for sale in Japan! Released on October 5, 2017 it is the follow up to the Famicom Classic Edition released last year. This version included 21 games from the 16-bit heyday and fixes everyone’s biggest gripe over the Famicom Mini, and that is full size detachable controllers! The SFC mini Follows the western version which was released on September 29th. Wait! Something is coming out in America first? That can't be!

Let's pay tribute to the final form of the TurboGrafx-16!

Pauline from Donkey Kong is named after a 1914 silent film? It seems so!!

Altered Beast, a popular Sega arcade game, later became an album!

JJ & Jeff is based off of a crazy TV Show in Japan! Have you ever actually seen it?

Thirty Years of the Blue Bomber! On December 17, 1987, Capcom released a game known as Rockman in Japan Soon after this game would come to the West as Megaman. You wouldn’t know it then but that one game would be the genesis for one of the best selling series of all time. 30 years later the MegaMan franchise has over a dozen spinoffs and over 100 games overall. To cover all of them would be a little too crazy/but we will take a look at how Megaman the character and the series were created and how the success of these early games laid the foundation for what Megaman has become today.

In December 2017, a well known Role Playing Game series had its 30th anniversary... no, not Final Fantasy! Well ok that one too, but there is another...