Super Castlevania IV
The January issue introduced a new look with more pages and a comics section: Shotaro Ishinomori's The Legend of Zelda serial and Super Mario Adventures began here. Super Castlevania IV took the cover, with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Mega Man 4, Tecmo Super Bowl and Prince of Persia inside. The Top 20 split into NES, Super NES and Game Boy columns for the first time.
OH, NO! IT'S A PIPE-O-RAMA!
Mario in the first installment of Super Mario Adventures
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers
- True Golf Classics: Waialae Country Club
Power Profile
Celebrity profile · Volume 32
This issue featured an interview with Bill Laimbeer — American basketball player and coach (born 1957).
Centre for the back-to-back champion Detroit Pistons, the most hated man in the NBA, with a Super NES game named after him that played off his reputation for the physical stuff. Interviewed on the set of its commercial, in a costume he describes as a cross between a football uniform and a suit of armour, he turns out to be a scratch golfer who had shot 22 under par in NES Golf and, at seventeen, played a Sleestak. He retired in 1993 and turned out to be a better coach than anyone expected, winning three WNBA championships with the Detroit Shock and later building the Las Vegas Aces into a contender before stepping down in 2022.
Some people say that I'm an actor on the court! Actually, I have had professional acting experience. Years ago I was in a Sid and Marty Krofft production called Land of the Lost. I wore a big lizard costume.
Bill Laimbeer, Nintendo Power #32
Sweepstakes
A seven-day trip to England for the winner and three guests to visit Rare, the Stamper brothers' studio behind Battletoads, valued at $5,000. Ten Tradewest Battletoads Power Packages went to second place, and winner Eric Hince of Chicago Ridge, Illinois got an early look at the Super NES Battletoads while it was still under construction.
Comics
2 in this issue · Volume 32The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Chapter 1 of 12 · 17 pages
Shotaro Ishinomori's retelling of the Super NES game, drawn in the same year it was released and following Link from the rainy night at the castle to the Dark World.
Chapter one, and the story the game tells in its first hour: a rainy night, a voice in Link's head, and Hyrule Castle in the storm. Warned that the wizard Agahnim controls the castle soldiers with his magic, Link fights his way in, finds Princess Zelda as the armoured guards carry her off, and gets her out through the secret way to the Sanctuary. She is taken again almost at once, and her last word is the task: find the Master Sword, it's up to you alone — which leaves only the question of where it is.
Super Mario Adventures
Chapter 1 of 12 · 8 pages
Charlie Nozawa's twelve-part comic, in which Bowser proposes to the Princess, Yoshi eats everything in reach and Luigi gets no respect. Collected in a book by Viz the following year.
Chapter one. Mario and Luigi, the Mushroom Kingdom's plumbers extraordinaire, are called to the palace to fix the pipes before Princess Toadstool's party that night; Luigi can't start a job this big on an empty stomach, and hunger has him hallucinating pasta in a sea of pipes. The pipes are being uprooted from below and pillars of petunias popping up through the garden, and the culprits arrive: Koopa Troopas and a crop of Piranha Plants, the 'vile vegetation' that devours Luigi. It ends on pipes the size of buildings, and the first 'to be continued'.
Classified Information
The codes and secrets this issue gave away.
- Snow Bros. Jr.
- Invincible snowman, Bonus bowl, Stage select
- Vice: Project Doom
- Stage select plus
- S.C.A.T.: Special Cybernetic Attack Team
- Backfire blast
- Solar Jetman
- Q code
- Super R-Type
- Stage select, Instant power-up
- Gradius III
- Bonus stages
- ActRaiser
- Hidden 1-Ups
- F-Zero
- Wait there's more!
Counselor's Corner
Game Counselors on callReaders wrote in to ask Nintendo Game Counselors questions about the following games: Super Mario World, Solstice, Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure and Gargoyle's Quest.
Top 20
These were the top Nintendo games in Jan 1992, 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 | Super NES | Game Boy |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | NEW Super Mario Land | ||
| 2 | ▲2 Battletoads | NEW F-Zero | |
| 3 | NEW SimCity | NEW Dr. Mario | |
| 4 | NEW Final Fight | NEW Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan | |
| 5 | ▲8 Dr. Mario | NEW ActRaiser | NEW Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge |
| 6 | ▲1 Mega Man 3 | NEW Super R.C. Pro-Am | |
| 7 | NEW F-1 Race | ||
| 8 | NEW Batman | NEW Super R-Type | NEW Castlevania: The Adventure |
| 9 | NEW Metroid | NEW Final Fantasy II | NEW Battletoads |
| 10 | NEW Pilotwings | ||
| 11 | NEW U.N. Squadron | NEW Final Fantasy Adventure | |
| 12 | ▼7 Crystalis | NEW Gradius III | NEW Operation C |
| 13 | ▼4 Tetris | NEW Nolan Ryan's Baseball | NEW Faceball 2000 |
| 14 | NEW Super Bases Loaded | NEW Batman | |
| 15 | NEW HAL's Hole in One Golf | NEW Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge | |
| 16 | ▼2 Tecmo Bowl | NEW Populous | |
| 17 | NEW Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters | ||
| 18 | NEW Altered Space: A 3-D Alien Adventure | ||
| 19 | NEW The Chessmaster | ||
| 20 | NEW Mega Man | NEW Drakkhen | NEW Spider-Man |