Famidaily - Episode 0070 - Kinnikuman: Muscle Tag Match/M.U.S.C.L.E. (キン肉マン マッスルタッグマッチ)

Bandai joins the Famicom club with one of the most infamous games on the system. Surely it can't be that bad, right?
Famidaily is my attempt to catalog all of the commercially released Famicom games.

[@dpgreene]

Definitely laughed out loud at "this is the only time where a racist stereotype is an improvement".

[@esmerylan]

It's still hilarious to me this was one of the first 3rd-party NES titles in the US. Even as a kid, that made me suspect there wasn't much substance to that Nintendo "seal of quality".

[@sheets75]

Maybe the seal had some significance for detached retailers, but there were so many lousy games with it that I definitely learned early on to ignore it.

[@adzi6164]

the seal of quality mostly signified two things:
- the game is mostly family-friendly
- the game (at least generally) works and won't brick your NES (remember it was after the infamous Video Game Crash, caused partially by complete lack of quality control over games)

[@sjake8308]

@@adzi6164 I thought the only thing it signified was that Nintendo had licensed the game (and thus had got their cut).

[@toastrave7820]

my co-worker owns a weird red variant of this game in a original shell with label, includes the Japanese title card but it includes Geronimo

[@a.calder8217]

As a fan of the property (I didn't sub most of the series in English for nothing), I feel the PS2/GameCube games are genuinely good wrestling games even if you strip the license away. (They're made by AKI, the same people who made the Def Jam and the N64 WCW and WWF games, so they have experience with grapplin' games). The WonderSwan sequel to this game is decent. (For one, you have to collect three power balls to use your special technique at full strength now, since using it with just one or two balls just makes you use a weaker technique)

[@RndStranger]

I picked up the Game Cube game a few months ago but still haven't had an opportunity to pop it in. Maybe when family is around and we're looking for multiplayer games.

[@a.calder8217]

Be warned though, the dubbing (based on 4Kids' version), is quite awful. But it turns out that if you give a wrestling-themed license to a company that actually understands wrestling, you get a genuinely good wrestling game!

[@AlienChips]

Photosensitivity is misspelled :(

[@Nemo2342]

I was crazy for those little rubber figures. You could buy them in a little plastic trashcan and they were all so cool. I also had the little wrestling ring you could put them in which worked by just mashing 2 figures together until one popped free.

[@Hatchyack]

I had them too, so damn many. I remember in the late 80s and throughout a lot of the 90s, those things were so ubiquitous that you could just find them randomly in roads and bushes and whatnot.

[@thomasffrench3639]

I feel like it is important for the west, because it set the general structure and tropes for the most popular anime, although not well known enough to realize it’s importance. And I’m pretty sure it’s also pretty well known in Italy and of course France (who love Japanese stuff)

[@nate567987]

Dev info is wrong on the cards

[@BagOfMagicFood]

I'm sure Bandai helped Hudson in some way!

[@sjake8308]

Poor Hudson, being blamed for the sins of Bandai and Tose! 😆

[@JeremyLeePotocki]

Whenever I hear some nimrod Nintendo fanboy that say "well Nintendo had the seal of quality to prevent garbage games from entering the market" I always point to games like M.U.S.C.L.E to prove them wrong. It was always a marketing gimmick even to this day.

[@ivansimarroaparicio]

El cartucho verde de Kinnikuman que diferencia tiene con respecto al normal?
Tengo entendido que solo salieron 300 copias y que es muy caro.

[@Tr3vor42532]

"what the fuck is a muscle?"

[@RndStranger]

Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere.

[@nktrain64]

Got to this video in the series and this is all I can think about the whole time

[@sheets75]

I went through a MUSCLE collecting phase. It lasted until my friends and I staged a series of massacres for all of our figures. We named one guy the Pink Kisser and he would recite Ralph Kramden's line about punching Alice in the kisser, and then whenever he punched someone we'd get out the scissors and decapitate the victim. I don't think I ever played the NES game, though.

[@noaht2005]

why do some of these videos have a randomly high like:dislike ratio?

[@Xhalonick]

Why so many dislikes on this one??? Maybe a lot of people had seizures XD

[@darktetsuya]

Just when I thought I knew everything about Kinnikuman's first videogame outing... then I hear about THAT. yikes, no wonder he was changed for the US version. But yeah this one wasn't particuarly good. I do remember the little figures though.

[@stevep9177]

This game really is awful

[@sjake8308]

Yeah, this looks (and sounds) like a bad C64 game from the period! 😆