Episode 99 brings us to the doorstep of a major milestone, and what better way to celebrate than with a collection of “magical” games? This Halloween weekend special delivered an eclectic mix of experiences—from celebrity-endorsed basketball to Arabian adventures, sun-bleached RPGs, transforming mechs, and one particularly perplexing puzzle game with NSFW surprises.

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Magic Johnson’s Fast Break opens with promise—a celebrity endorsement, four-player support, and that iconic grin gracing the title screen. But as Jake and I quickly discovered, securing the name doesn’t necessarily mean securing the game quality. The basketball action moves at a decent clip, and Magic himself chimes in with occasional praise like “nice shot” and “great bomb,” but that’s where the charm ends.

The fundamental problem? A complete lack of ownership over your experience. “I don’t like that you can’t dunk or choose a team or even know who we are,” Jake noted during gameplay. The game simply assigns you to opposing teams with no team names displayed, no roster selection, and no ability to cooperate in multiplayer. It’s basketball reduced to its most generic form—you shoot, the possession changes, and you do it again. “The hoops don’t even swoosh,” Jake observed, highlighting the lack of satisfying feedback that makes basketball games compelling.

Even the visual presentation felt confusing. Jake wondered aloud, “Is that a waterfall or an enthusiastic audience?” referring to the crowd noise effect. The game reaches the minimum bar of a functional basketball competition, but offers little reason to engage with it beyond novelty. As I put it: “All the effort seem to be in getting Magic’s face on there and then the actual game is…” We gave it a zero, though as I admitted, “it’s not like a hard zero—it’s basketball, it’s a playable basketball game” just thoroughly unremarkable in every way that matters.

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Culture Brain continues their impressive winning streak with Magic of Scheherazade, bringing their record to 6-0 in the NES AtoZ series. This Arabian Nights-inspired adventure immediately captured our attention with its beautiful moon-drenched visuals and Legend of Zelda vibes. As I explained during our session, the game draws from the classic tale where Princess Scheherazade must tell her king cliffhanger stories each night to avoid execution—”a thousand Arabian nights” of storytelling to stay alive.

The game features robust RPG elements including character class selection (we naturally chose magician), equipment management, and a comprehensive save system. “There’s a lot to this game,” Jake observed while watching me navigate the detailed menu systems. The exploration felt genuinely engaging, with multiple weapon options (sword and rod), town interactions, and mysterious locations to discover. When I found a secret entrance using the “Opin” spell, it led to prophetic advice from a mysterious entity—Jake and I debated whether it was a cat or a fairy with a crown, which sparked a fun “Dreams are open to interpretation” moment.

The game features robust RPG elements including character class selection (we naturally chose magician), equipment management, and a comprehensive save system. “There’s a lot to this game,” Jake observed while watching me navigate the detailed menu systems. The exploration felt genuinely engaging, with multiple weapon options (sword and rod), town interactions, and mysterious locations to discover. When I found a secret entrance using the “Opin” spell, it led to prophetic advice from a mysterious entity—Jake and I debated whether it was a cat or a fairy with a crown, which sparked a fun “Dreams are open to interpretation” moment.

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Magician presented one of the most frustrating experiences of the episode—a game with clear ambition and depth that absolutely fumbles its first impression. Published by Eurocom Entertainment Software, this RPG features a comprehensive spell system, detailed quest structure, and saving capabilities, but wraps it all in sun-bleached visuals and user-hostile onboarding. “The colors feel wrong,” Jake noted immediately. “Like you left it out in the window.” I agreed: “It’s sun bleached, the whole game… that side of the book that was exposed while the rest was on the shelf.”

The opening moments epitomize everything wrong with the game’s presentation. You’re dropped into a town where every door is locked, every NPC ignores you, and every action is denied. “Welcome to running errands and being denied the game,” I quipped after the third straight rejection. The text delivery system adds insult to injury—words simultaneously type out at the bottom while transitioning from inside-out in a jarring animation. Your first “quest” involves walking two doors down to deliver a letter, earning you the profound message “You feel more experienced.”

But here’s the twist—the manual reveals an entirely different game. Flipping through its pages exposed elaborate spell systems with names like “Mondo Fungo” and “Tarantulon,” detailed character progression, flying mechanics with fire-breathing gargoyles, and genuinely thoughtful game design. Jake’s enthusiasm grew as we explored the documentation: “Look at all the spells, man!” The lore, the depth, the dad jokes hidden in monster names—it all painted a picture of a game that deserved better than its execution delivered.

In a rare move, we flipped our initial zero rating to a one based purely on the manual’s merit. “It’s almost like the manual has the video game as an accessory,” Jake joked, but there was truth there. Magician represents a fascinating artifact—ambitious RPG design hamstrung by technical limitations and presentation choices that actively repel new players. With the manual as a guide and patience to push past the brutal opening, there might be a worthwhile adventure here. But the game needed to meet players halfway, and it simply refuses.

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Magmax arrived as a pleasant surprise, offering a unique twist on the side-scrolling shooter genre that immediately grabbed our attention. Developed by Nihon Busousan (making their NES AtoZ debut with a 1-0 record), this 1987 Japanese title finally reached American shores in 1989, though by then it felt dated compared to contemporary releases. The premise centers on humanity’s fight against the alien-controlled supercomputer beast Babylon, piloting the mech Magmax as Earth’s only hope.

What makes Magmax special is its dual-perspective gameplay and innovative power-up system. You can play on the surface, shooting enemies while hovering above ground, or dive into subterranean passages where anti-gravity rules apply and your weapons behave differently. “It shoots kind of diagonal down on the surface,” I noted, demonstrating how the same weapon functions uniquely in each environment. The real hook comes when collecting power-ups—you’re literally assembling your mech piece by piece. “Oh, Magmax is assembled!” Jake exclaimed as the head, body, and legs combined into a towering robot of destruction.

The assembly system doubles as your health bar in a clever design choice. As Jake explained, “So the upgrade system kind of doubles as your life.” Take damage and you lose components, reverting to your basic form. This creates dynamic moment-to-moment gameplay where you’re constantly managing your power level while dodging suicide bullets—enemies that fire back even as they explode. The only real misstep is the music, which feels oddly cheerful for a game about piloting giant robots through apocalyptic battlefields. “The music is like kind of countered to the badass,” Jake observed. Despite that tonal mismatch, we gave it a solid one rating—it’s an interesting take with legitimate mechanical innovation that holds up as an early NES title.

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And then there was Mahjong Block, the perplexing finale to episode 99 that left us genuinely confused about its existence. Published by Super Mega (a name Jake appreciated as “just awesome”), this 1991 release presents itself as a mahjong-themed match-three puzzle game. The gameplay itself is straightforward—match three identical tiles horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, and they disappear. Jake even pulled off a three-piece chain reaction worthy of “the highlight reel,” though it didn’t actually affect my side of the competitive split-screen.

The game is functional but uninspired. Jake admitted mid-session, “I turned my brain off like 30 seconds ago.” Neither of us knew much about actual mahjong—I thought it was more like of a poker game… like dominoes even—and this video game interpretation did nothing to enlighten us. It’s a serviceable puzzle game with Japanese characters you could theoretically use to learn the language, but there’s zero excitement or depth beyond the basic mechanic.

Then we looked at the box art. “Whoa, there’s chicks on it, man,” Jake noticed. “Dragons and ladies.” Not just ladies—”ladies with less clothes” and “absolute nipples,” as we discovered with increasing bewilderment. The back of the box featured fully exposed women in what appeared to be a gambling parlor aesthetic, completely disconnected from the tame match-three game we’d just played. “What do they sell that in? Like they sell that in sex shops or what?” I wondered aloud.

The realization hit us: this was an adult game sold on the premise of its packaging rather than its gameplay. “You buy a whole game for an 8-bit nude?” Jake marveled at the business model. The game serves as an excuse, a thin veneer of legitimacy for what’s essentially softcore box art. We gave it a zero—not for the unexpected nudity (though we apologized to any children watching), but because the game itself is simply not fun. As Jake calculated with perfect comedic logic: “I would give it a one minus the number of boobies we didn’t see, and each one of them only had one exposed, so that math checks out as a zero for me.” Mahjong Block stands as one of the more perplexing enigmas in the NES library, a game that “doesn’t even seem like it was supposed to be—like Nintendo doesn’t know it exists.”

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Conclusion

Episode 99 delivered exactly what you’d expect from diving deep into the M section: a wildly varied collection of experiences ranging from disappointing (Magic Johnson’s Fast Break), to genuinely good (Magic of Scheherazade), to fascinatingly flawed (Magician), to cleverly designed (Magmax), to utterly perplexing (Mahjong Block). Culture Brain continues their perfect record, while we stumbled into unlicensed territory we never expected.

As we stand on the precipice of episode 100, the anticipation builds for our upcoming triple-digit milestone featuring Maniac Mansion, Marble Madness, and our first taste of Mario with Mario and Yoshi. The magic of episode 99 may have been hit-or-miss, but the journey continues to reveal the incredible diversity hidden in the NES library—from forgotten obscurities to beloved classics, and everything wonderfully weird in between.