Jeremy Parish Breaks Down Master Chu and Captain Comic in NES Works 178

Renowned gaming historian Jeremy Parish has released the 178th episode of his popular retro series NES Works, putting a wrap on his overview of Nintendo Entertainment System releases for 1989.

The End of an Era from Color Dreams

The final episode of the 1989 season is dedicated to two unusual unlicensed projects from publisher Color Dreams:

• Master Chu & the Drunkard Hu — an action game developed by the Taiwanese team Joy Van featuring simultaneous two-player co-op, which structurally resembled early 1986 Famicom titles.
• The Adventures of Captain Comic — a console port of the MS-DOS action-platformer that attempted to borrow basic elements of the metroidvania structure.

As Parish notes, both games arrived too late and could not fully compete with late-eighties masterpieces like DuckTales or Sega Genesis titles. Nonetheless, they remain interesting examples of bold experiments by 8-bit era developers.