Super C
Super C on the cover and Final Fantasy inside, opening a multi-part feature on the role-playing game that would get its own Strategy Guide. The second Nester Awards named the winners for 1989, and the Game Boy department grew to eight pages with Batman and Gargoyle's Quest. A Final Fantasy Treasure Quest contest began, with real prizes for answering in-game trivia.
Are you okay?”, “Yeah, sure. I enjoy having my head used as a pin cushion. You should try it.
Howard and Nester
Power Profile
Celebrity profile · Volume 12
This issue featured an interview with Willie Aames — American actor, film and television director (born 1960).
Buddy Lembeck on Charles in Charge, and before that Tommy Bradford on Eight Is Enough, which made him one of the first sitcom kids to grow into a second sitcom. He'd been playing since the NES launched in 1986, which still left him behind his five-year-old son Christopher, who rescued the Princess before Willie had cleared the first world. Top Gun was the one game he could win, with help from a strategically timed chore. After Charles in Charge he spent the nineties as Bibleman, the caped star of a Christian video series, then took a sharp turn: he trained as a cruise director and has spent much of the last decade at sea with Oceania Cruises.
When we play Top Gun, I have my secret weapon—I make Christopher clean up his room to distract him! The problem is, his room has been a lot cleaner lately.
Willie Aames, Nintendo Power #12
Sweepstakes
Three days and two nights in Hollywood to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger on the set of his next movie, plus an actual Martian police uniform from Total Recall and Acclaim's Total Recall NES game. Second prize was a framed set of the film's identity patches, and third prize was the game on its own.
Comics
Howard & Nester · Volume 12Howard & Nester
2-page strip
Howard Phillips, Nintendo of America's bow-tied Game Master, and Nester, the know-it-all kid who never took his advice. Two pages an issue from the first volume on, with a different game's world to get lost in each month.
Nester reports to Nintendo R&D with a butterfly net to hunt bugs — programming bugs, as it turns out — and steps into the NES Interface Modulator with Howard to test Super Mario Bros. 3 from the inside. Their assignment is the Warp Whistle in the first mini-fortress: break the brick for the leaf, fly up off the screen as Raccoon Mario, keep flapping right, then press up. Nester skips the raccoon stuff for a door and takes a ceiling of spikes to the head, insisting afterwards he enjoys being used as a pin cushion.
Classified Information
The codes and secrets this issue gave away.
- Super Mario Bros. 3
- 1-Up frenzy
- Batman
- Punch and clutch
- Astyanax
- Maze moves
- Baseball Stars
- Powerful women's team
- Knight Rider
- Short cut
- Mega Man 2
- Password bonanza
- Castlevania: The Adventure
- Hidden rooms
- 8 Eyes
- Triple play
- River City Ransom
- Merlin's Mystery Shop
Counselor's Corner
Game Counselors on callReaders wrote in to ask Nintendo Game Counselors questions about the following games: The Magic of Scheherazade, 8 Eyes, The Battle of Olympus, Willow, Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II and Shadowgate.
Top 30
These were the top Nintendo games in May/Jun 1990, as voted by Nintendo Power readers. Arrows show the move since the previous issue's chart; the peak is the best position the game had reached by then.
| # | NES |
|---|---|
| 1 | |
| 2 | ▲10 Tetris |
| 3 | |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | ▲21 Batman |
| 7 | NEW Shadowgate |
| 8 | |
| 9 | ▼7 Mega Man 2 |
| 10 | ▼2 Ninja Gaiden |
| 11 | |
| 12 | ▼3 DuckTales |
| 13 | NEW Double Dragon II |
| 14 | ▲11 RoboCop |
| 15 | ▼5 Tecmo Bowl |
| 16 | — Metroid |
| 17 | |
| 18 | NEW Mario Bros. |
| 19 | ▼4 Faxanadu |
| 20 | NEW Double Dragon |
| 21 | ▼10 Bionic Commando |
| 22 | ▲1 Paperboy |
| 23 | NEW Blaster Master |
| 24 | |
| 25 | NEW Popeye |
| 26 | |
| 27 | |
| 28 | |
| 29 | NEW Rad Racer |
| 30 |