Most people I know of, except for a few i-net buddies, have never heard of the NES game, Puss N Boots. It's a below-average sidescrolling platformer, obviously aimed at the younger crowd, except that the bosses in the Statue of Liberty are almost impossible to beat. This game was also made by relatively unknown game developer, Toei. So, this leaves me to wonder...why on earth was there a Captain N episode based on it? It was the one where Captain N and Link have to help a cat named Pero find a time machine to get home. Pero is the name of the hero cat in this game. In fact, I knew people who had seen that episode of Captain N, but had no clue that Pero and all those cat characters were actually from a game! The Puss N Boots game was actually based on a very obscure anime, which was in turn, based loosely on the Jules Verne novel, "Around the World in 80 Days", and Pero's name was "Perrault" in the Japanese version, named for the "Puss in Boots" author Charles Perrault. But in the American version, all references to the Jules Verne novel were removed.

Maniac Mansion is truly one of the greatest games ever created. As you may or may not know, the NES version was heavily censored. A lot of stuff that was in the original PC version was either changed or taken out altogether. But with as much censoring that there was done to this game, you just knew a few things had to slip! The first, and most talked-about, is the exploding hamster. This was supposed to have been taken out of later versions of the game, but I have yet to hear of a Maniac Mansion cart that it doesn't work on. If you are using Razor or Syd, you can have one of them put the hamster in the microwave and turn it on. The hamster will explode. You can then give the Exploded Hamster to Weird Ed, and he will go berserk, and kill your character. How did this get past the Censors? Either they didn't think to try it, or they tried it, but used the wrong character. The second dupe dealt with a pennant on the wall in Weird Ed's room. It said SCUMM on it, which is an acronym for some kind of system that Lucasarts used to make the text for the game. Nintendo didn't want the word "SCUMM" in an NES game, so they asked for the pennant to be removed. It was and it wasn't. It was just colored to look exactly like the wall tile. If you point the cursor to where it should be, it still shows up, and you can read it. It says, "SCUMM U. RAH!" Since it blends in with the wall, the censors didn't see it and thought it had been removed. You can read more about Maniac Mansion vs. the Nintendo Censors in this article (external link).