Sam's video game collection essentials

  Our next system is one you’ve more than likely heard of if you’re above a certain age, even if you’re not a gamer. It’s Nintendo’s wildly successful portable gaming device, Game Boy. The Game Boy launched in 1989. It was not the first portable handheld game system to use interchangeable cartridges, as such a thing had been created a whole decade prior, the Microvision by Milton Bradley. But prior to Game Boy, no such system had ever achieved any real widespread popularity.  The funny thing about the Game Boy is that it wasn’t really cutting-edge technology even for the time. The Game Boy screen was in monochrome, and had no backlight, meaning the player needed an outside light source to see the screen. In the very same year, the Atari Lynx would be released, and it boasted both color AND a backlight, which are undeniably nice things to have. But the Game Boy absolutely trounced the Lynx and all other competition. Why? The answer was Nintendo ingeniously finding the right balance of c

Here is a game that is on this list not so much for the game itself, but for the meme it inspired. Zero Wing got a European release in English, but…whoever was responsible for translating the introductory cutscene did a lousy job, and I guess there were no native English speakers working on the process, because the game shipped with lousy, incorrect English dialogue. A decade later, the internet started to poke fun at it, and it became everyone’s favorite running joke. The most popular line from the intro was “All your base are belong to us”. I myself caught “all your base” fever and found the lousy English to be absolutely hilarious. I even bought a shirt with the iconic line on it, which I still have to this day. As for the game itself, it’s a shoot ‘em up, so there’s basically no dialogue in the game aside from that one introduction. That’s a shame! Zero Wing isn’t the best or most unique shoot ‘em up in the world, but it’s pretty decent. It has a tractor beam mechanic where you can

The original ToeJam & Earl was a very unique game. For this sequel, though, they decided to do something entirely different rather than build on the foundation of the first game. ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron is a 2D platformer, which as you probably realize by now was a very common thing back then. Thankfully, though, this is far from just being a cookie-cutter, run-of-the-mill platformer, so it’s not as though all the creative juices were drained. After reassembling their ship at the end of the first game, ToeJam and Earl travel back to their home planet of Funkotron. But when they arrive, they discover something most unfortunate; a whole mess of earthlings stowed away on their ship and are now running rampant! They must be stopped! And so, the objective of this game is to scour every level for earthlings until you have captured every single one, and then you can throw them onto a rocket headed to Earth and proceed to the next level to find more. How does one capture ea

Here’s a very unusual game from early in the Sega Genesis lifespan that wound up with a strong following. You play as the two characters named in the game’s title, ToeJam (the red one) and Earl (the one with shades). They’re aliens who were cruising around space for the fun of it. ToeJam is the pilot, but Earl wanted to try his hand at flying the ship on a whim during this little trip. Well…it didn’t go too well. They crash landed on the strange foreign planet Earth and their ship shattered into a bunch of pieces! Never let Earl drive. The object of the game is to explore Earth and gather all the pieces of the ship. I guess this alien ship comes apart like LEGOs or something, maybe it’s built to separate so it can still function when reassembled! This game takes place from a top-down perspective, with the player(s) free to move ToeJam and/or Earl in all four directions. As you start the game, you seem to be on an island in the middle of a vast body of water, and there’s an…elevator nea

There’s some deja vu going on here. We’ve got yet another 2D platformer, and yet another Konami game.  This one, as you can see, is based on the popular cartoon from the early ‘90s, Tiny Toon Adventures. This show from Warner Bros. was a successor of sorts to the iconic Looney Tunes, and it featured a series of young characters in school to become the next generation of Looney Tunes. It was a very good show, though I was too young to watch it when it first aired. By the time I was old enough, I was aware of it but didn’t get to see it very often, so it was one of those things I thought was cool but never really got to indulge in. But you don’t even need to know or like the cartoon to enjoy this great game. There’s not a ton I have to say about it, as it doesn’t really reinvent the wheel when it comes to 2D platforming. But it does feature large, well-designed levels that sometimes give the player multiple ways to go, perhaps learning from Sonic. I never knew about this game as a kid. W

This is Konami’s sequel to Rocket Knight Adventures, a game I discussed not long ago. I don’t have a ton to say about it, but because the basic concept is the same, a 2D platformer where you have a jetpack ability that can send you rocketing forward. That’s not to say Sparkster is just a rehash of the original though. The mechanics of the jetpack boost were changed this time. It charges up automatically, and has two levels of charge as well. The game has a “true” ending that dedicated fans can go for, which involves playing on hard mode and collecting all the various hidden swords throughout the game.  I don’t have much history with Sparkster on the Genesis, but the one time I played through it I had lots of fun. It’s my favorite game featuring the possum, unless I change my mind upon replaying them. Konami wanted to make Sparkster their mascot to rival Nintendo’s Mario or Sega’s Sonic, but for some reason he never caught on nearly enough for that. I’m not sure why, since his games wer

Back in the heyday of arcades, a genre that rose to prominence was the “beat ‘em up”. These games typically are fairly simple. They’re games where your character can move in four directions and can attack, jump and pick up stuff to use as weapons or to heal. Usually there will be a few enemies at a time that the player(s) have to deal with, and very difficult bosses at the end of the stage that are sure to eat your quarters. Beat ‘em ups are not one of my favorite genres, partially because it’s very easy for them to feel stale and repetitive unless the developer is really good at spicing up the experience with each stage. Streets of Rage 2 is somewhat unusual in that it was designed for home consoles first, and not arcades. Most of the time games came out on arcades first, and then an adaptation would be made for consoles, which often involved making compromises with graphics, sound and content since consoles usually weren’t as powerful as cutting-edge arcade technology. Streets of Rag

One area in the very popular Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was “Casino Night Zone”, and there were sections of those levels with pinball flippers that could shoot Sonic curled up into a ball as if he were a living pinball. This level was popular, so there was an obvious-but-great idea, what if they made a whole game based around that concept? And so, we got Sonic Spinball. Pinball video games were not a new concept even at the time. Oftentimes, pinball video games are more or less comparable to a real pinball machine. However, this is not just a regular pinball game with Sonic replacing the ball just to sell more copies. No, this game has actual levels with objectives that must be completed, that are much bigger than an actual pinball table, with some elements that you’d never see in an actual pinball machine. In fact, Sonic is able to stand up and move and even do his trademark spin dash when he’s on flat ground, it’s just that this doesn’t happen very often. The idea is that Sonic must collec

  Sonic & Knuckles released later in the same year as Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and it is basically what was supposed to be the second half of that game before deadlines forced the developers to split the project in two. And rather than just making two completely separate Sega Genesis cartridges and calling this one Sonic 4, the development team decided to do something pretty brilliant. First, though, I want to mention that this marks the first time Knuckles the Echidna became a playable character. The main thing that sets him apart from Sonic is the ability to glide in mid-air, which he can do in the middle of any jump, and he can also grab onto and climb walls. He can’t use certain special abilities given by shields like Sonic can, though. If you look at the Sonic & Knuckles cartridge in the photo and compare it to any Sega Genesis cartridges in my previous posts, you’ll see that it looks different. That’s because Sonic & Knuckles has a slot on the top of it to insert another

For the third entry, Sega wanted to give Sonic his biggest, grandest adventure yet. There was a problem, though, that being time constraints. Making a bigger game with much more content than Sonic 2 was going to take a lot of time. And so, Sonic 3 got split into two releases. The Sonic 3 I’m talking about here, which you see in the photo, does have enough content for one standalone game (otherwise they wouldn’t have released it), but it’s really only half of what the developers intended to be the next game. More on that in my next post! Sonic 3 was the first game in the series where you could actually save your progress, rather than use a level skip code to get to where you were when you got a game over. It was also the first game in the series to feature Knuckles the Echidna, who would go on to be one of the most recurring and iconic characters in the series. The story of this game is that, immediately after the end of Sonic 2, the defeated Dr. Robotnik’s ship crashes onto an island w

The sequel to the smash hit Sonic the Hedgehog, obviously, was highly anticipated. It was one of the first games to have a pre-announced nationwide release date in the USA, which was advertised as “Sonic 2sday”, being on a Tuesday of course.  Sonic 2 is another example of how to make a great video game sequel. It took what the first game did best, focused on those elements, and made additions to make it even better. The first stage of Sonic 1, Green Hill Zone, was masterfully designed, with opportunities for great speed and multiple paths to take that rewarded players able to avoid falling down to the lowest level. A problem with the original game is that a lot of the other levels in the game didn’t replicate this type of level structure to the same degree. Sonic 2’s levels do it much better.  Sonic 2 also added crucial new elements that came to be defining characteristics of the series. One of these was the “spin dash” move. Sonic in the original game was capable of going super fast,

At last, we get to that certain blue hedgehog!! Even if you’re a non-gamer, there’s a very good chance that you at least have a tiny bit of familiarity with Sonic the Hedgehog, as he’s one of the most iconic and recognizable video game icons that exists. This game was released nearly two years after the American launch of the Sega Genesis, and was truly the game that skyrocketed Sega to their highest points of success, giving them the ability to go toe-to-toe with Nintendo after being squashed like a bug the previous console generation in the two biggest video gaming markets at the time. This game quickly replaced Altered Beast as the “pack-in” title that gamers would be included with a newly-purchased Sega Genesis console at no additional cost. You already know about how hugely successful Nintendo’s mascot Mario is, and I’ve already written about it. After Mario took over the world, every other video game company wanted to have the next iconic mascot in the industry. No video gaming i

Unlike with movies, video game sequels tend to be better than the originals, with the developers being able to refine the foundation set by the first game and usually deliver a larger amount of content as well. Shining Force II is certainly one of those sequels. The game largely doesn’t mess with the basics of the original game. It’s still a strategy RPG with most of the same gameplay elements. It’s just that practically everything here is better and/or more abundant here. The game’s longer, you’re more free to explore the world, there’s more variety in characters, better music….Shining Force II is just a very well-made game that’s still plenty enjoyable to this day. The game can be quite challenging, too. There’s one character that’s really easy to level up, making them very powerful (shown in my photo, it takes a long time to get green in your health bar), but even abusing that character, I still sometimes had a hard time because a really strong character is only one in your army of

Here’s the first game I’m covering in Sega’s “Shining” series of role-playing games. Shining Force wasn’t actually the first one, as it was predated by “Shining in the Darkness”, which was a first-person dungeon-crawling turn-based RPG that isn’t making my list because it’s not quite good enough. The developers went in a different direction for Shining Force, making it into a tactical RPG instead. I’ve already covered a tactical RPG in this series, Fire Emblem on the NES. There’s a huge and immediately-obvious difference between Fire Emblem and Shining Force, that being how turns play out. In Fire Emblem, you move your entire squad on your turn, then the enemy team does the same. But in Shining Force, each individual unit gets their own turn. The turn order is determined by the characters’ “speed” stats, meaning that the units with the highest speed will act first. There are plenty of other differences between the two games, but this isn’t meant to be an in-depth look so you’ll have to

Gosh, I really like Konami, don’t I? Here’s another 2D “mascot” platformer, a type of game that was all the rage in the early ‘90s. In this game, you play as a possum named Sparkster. The thing that sets this game apart from other platformers is that Sparkster has a jetpack on his back. If you hold down the attack button, your jetpack charges up, and when you let go…ZOOOOM!! Sparkster shoots forward at a crazy speed, with his sword out to strike any enemy in his way.  I don’t have a ton to say about Rocket Knight Adventures, I didn’t grow up with it and don’t have any specific great memories to share. I actually wasn’t super keen on it my first time playing as I had what I felt like were cheap deaths, but upon trying again, it really grew on me. The game has good, varied level design and the jetpack provides a very welcome spice to the gameplay.  This game did start a new series, as you would expect, and Konami wanted to make Sparkster a company mascot. But although there were a couple

When Sega plotted to create a mascot to rival Nintendo’s Mario, one of the things they considered was a character who would be characterized by reaching out and grabbing things. They decided against this idea at first, instead coming up with a certain blue hedgehog that I’ll be talking about pretty soon. But they didn’t totally scrap that previous idea, and much later in the Genesis’ lifespan they worked it into Ristar, starring as the eponymous character in a brand new platformer. Ristar’s controls are pretty simple, he simply jumps and grabs. When he grabs, he reaches his arms out pretty far, and you can reach in eight different directions, allowing you to grab pretty much anything close to you. The mark of a great platformer is when the developers come up with a unique gameplay idea and then build the game around utilizing it to the fullest, rather than when they create a generic platformer and throw in some odd gameplay feature as an afterthought. Ristar is one of the great example

Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are the two big-name pioneers in the world of Japanese RPGs from the early days, but another very significant series was Sega’s Phantasy Star. The most immediately-obvious way that this series stands out from the other two is the futuristic sci-fi setting with different planets and alien races, as opposed to the medieval fantasy world of those other two.  I haven’t played a lot of Phantasy Star in my lifetime. The first game was before my time on a console I’ve never owned, and II and III on the Genesis are very flawed games. However, IV marked a huge leap in quality and has a reputation that I just couldn’t ignore, so I got around to playing it nearly a decade ago.  The big thing that sticks out in my mind about Phantasy Star IV is the incredible quality of the presentation. The game features incredible detailed artwork whenever the story plays out, and features a quality translation into English, which may seem like an odd thing to compliment, but belie