Vice: Project Doom
Vice: Project Doom took the cover for its three different play perspectives, and the Nester Awards results for 1990 were announced. The Rocketeer, Adventures of Lolo 3, The Lone Ranger and Gauntlet II filled the features, with a fold-out map for The Lone Ranger. A special comic introduced the Battletoads ahead of the next issue's cover story.
If you think we're gonna lay down and croak, you've got another thing coming!
Rash
Power Profile
Celebrity profile · Volume 24
This issue featured an interview with Alex Winter — British actor (born 1965).
Bill S. Preston, Esq., with Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey due that summer and an LJN game of the first film in the works. He had thought Game Boy was some kind of secret network until someone on set handed him one. Between the two films he was writing and directing a sketch show for MTV called The Idiot Box, and the profile catches him mid-pivot from actor to filmmaker. The directing stuck: he has spent the last two decades making documentaries, among them Deep Web, Zappa and The YouTube Effect, and in 2020 he and Keanu Reeves finally made a third Bill & Ted, Face the Music.
Finally I borrowed one from somebody on the set and started playing Tetris. The next thing I knew, the sun had gone down, and I was hooked for good.
Alex Winter, Nintendo Power #24
Sweepstakes
A personalized Hudson Hawk scavenger hunt staged in or near the winner's hometown, with a Sony big-screen TV waiting at the end of it. Five second-prize winners got a movie party for themselves and ten friends, all the popcorn and candy they could eat, and first crack at Sony Imagesoft's Hudson Hawk NES game.
Comics
2 in this issue · Volume 24Howard & Nester
2-page strip · from p. 20
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.
'Get Out of Jail... Free?' drops Howard and Nester into Monopoly: Howard in top hat and tails already owns three railroads, so Nester bids a thousand dollars and his autograph for the Reading Railroad just to block the monopoly, then loses Illinois Avenue to a fourteen-dollar bid because he's spent everything. Arrested for littering money, he's sold his Get Out of Jail Free card and has to buy it back from Howard with Waterworks, Baltic, Kentucky and Indiana Avenue and the Reading Railroad — only to be released for having done his time.
Battletoads
Special · 8 pages · from p. 34
Rash, Zitz and Pimple, introduced in comic form ahead of the game's cover story.
An eight-page origin for the game that took the next issue's cover: Zitz, Pimple and Rash are game testers at Psicone, tinkering with the Games Generator that makes the company's worlds, when the Dark Queen appears and demands it be unmade so she can rule the games unchallenged. Chief designer Silas Volkmire turns out to be her creature, and when the generator is switched on it turns the three into Battletoads for good. Professor T. Bird, passing in his spaceship, picks the new team up, and they head for the Dark Queen's world.
Classified Information
The codes and secrets this issue gave away.
- Sword Master
- Unlimited continues
- Conquest of the Crystal Palace
- Bonus bonanza
- Mega Man 3
- Password power-up, Goofy gadget
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game
- Double strength code
- Captain Skyhawk
- Invincible
- Silver Surfer
- Invincible plus!
- Maniac Mansion
- Stunned Edna
- Dirty Harry
- Clyde code
Counselor's Corner
Game Counselors on callReaders wrote in to ask Nintendo Game Counselors questions about the following games: StarTropics, Ultima: Quest of the Avatar, Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, Magician and Werewolf: The Last Warrior.
Top 30
These were the top Nintendo games in May 1991, 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 | |
| 3 | ▼1 Mega Man 3 |
| 4 | |
| 5 | |
| 6 | ▲3 Tetris |
| 7 | |
| 8 | |
| 9 | |
| 10 | |
| 11 | ▲8 StarTropics |
| 12 | ▼1 Mega Man 2 |
| 13 | |
| 14 | |
| 15 | |
| 16 | |
| 17 | |
| 18 | NEW Mega Man |
| 19 | |
| 20 | ▼6 The Immortal |
| 21 | |
| 22 | |
| 23 | |
| 24 | NEW Super C |
| 25 | |
| 26 | NEW DuckTales |
| 27 | |
| 28 | |
| 29 | NEW Batman |
| 30 | NEW Shadowgate |