Sam's video game collection essentials

First developed for computers and released in the late ‘80s, SimCity was a pioneer in the “simulation” genre. These types of games weren’t as common on consoles, but Nintendo took an interest in this impressive new game and thought it might be a good fit for their upcoming console in development. And not only would it happen, but the SNES version would receive a number of changes and additions that would help it stand out among available versions. SimCity is a game that has you in charge of…well, building a city. Gameplay takes place from a birds-eye view, and you are able to play the role of urban planner and construct buildings and roads. Many factors have to be balanced in the construction of your city, and where you place everything matters a great deal. Natural disasters occasionally happen, and the aftermath has to be dealt with. There’s a very wide variety of different terrain you can build on, too, as well as different challenge “scenarios” that give you a more defined goal and

Here’s a weird game. It’s a one-on-one fighting game starring real-life basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neil! This was from early in his career when he was still on the Orlando Magic. The story of the game involves Shaq being whisked away to another dimension, where he must fight fantastical opponents and rescue a kidnapped boy. In multiplayer, the two players can select between any of the enemy characters found in the game’s story mode. Now, if you know what this game is, you probably know what I’m about to say. That being, this game is notorious for being terrible. It’s certainly one of the most maligned games from its generation. And it’s not too hard to see why, as right when you start playing, you’ll realize that the controls are far too stiff, making the game nowhere near as fun to play as far better games in the genre. However, I do have to say that I don’t think Shaq Fu is one of the absolute top worst games of its time. I think it’s better than, say, Pro Quarterback, which I

LONG POST INCOMING ABOUT A CHILDHOOD FAVORITE Secret of Evermore is a rather unusual game for its time right off the bat, because it was released by Japanese company Squaresoft…only it was developed by their North American branch which had never happened before or since, and the game didn’t even see a release in Japan at all. It’s an action RPG, a genre that at the time was dominated by Japanese games, and it has gameplay elements you’d expect in a Japanese action RPG while having the flavor of a Western title. The game is clearly inspired by “Secret of Mana”, another Squaresoft game that did originate in Japan, and it obviously borrows quite a few gameplay elements from that game. But there’s no actual connection between the two titles, and actually features cameos of characters from the Final Fantasy series instead. The story of Secret of Evermore revolves around a boy and his dog, both of which don’t have an official name and must be named by the player. The boy chases the dog into

Let me start off by saying: this game is AWFUL. It may be the very worst game that I’m covering in this entire series. Why is it on the list? If you’ve been reading up to this point, you can probably guess it’s because it’s a game that I played when I was a kid. And you’d be right. Pro Quarterback is, as one would assume, an American Football video game, and it was released early in the console’s lifespan. And oh boy, it shows, it seems like the developers hadn’t learned to program a game for the new hardware yet. The graphics not only are ugly, but the framerate is terrible, with the action looking choppier than any other SNES game you’ll ever see. The game is pretty lacking in features, too. There’s no season or playoff much, just the ability to pick a couple teams, tweak a few options, and play one game. There’s no license from the NFL or the player’s association, so no real teams or player names are used. The teams are clearly based on the real NFL teams from that time, with their

This is another game I acquired in my mid-childhood, I believe another yard sale find. The box and manual shown here were acquired as an adult, but I’m pretty sure the cartridge is my childhood copy (though I’m annoyingly not quite 100% sure). One thing that immediately endeared me to this game was the main character, and more precisely his name…Sam!! You play as Sam the caveman in a cartoony fictional prehistoric world. While other cavemen in this game talk and appear to be intelligent like normal humans, Sam doesn’t talk and seems to basically be a dog in a human body, which is kinda weird, but it works for a goofy game like this. The plot of the game is that a bunch of evil dinosaurs have stolen a bunch of food from the humans, and the village elder tasks Sam with getting it all back in time for the winter.  Prehistorik Man is a platform that has a lot of big open levels that it wants the player to explore thoroughly to be rewarded with secrets, power-ups and ultimately 100% complet

Here we have our first “PAL” SNES game to make the list. This refers to the version(s) of a game released in Europe and/or Australia, and the term “PAL” comes from the color encoding system for televisions used in those regions. Televisions in America and Japan use a different system called “NTSC”, so the equivalent terms for games in those regions are “NTSC-U/C” and “NTSC-J”. Companies often market their games at least a little bit differently for the PAL release. You’ll notice here that the box is a yellow color as opposed to the black boxes that American games typically have. SNES games in PAL regions came in all sorts of different colors rather than having one standard like in the Americas. You’ll also notice the cartridge looks different, and that’s because they decided to go for the console and cartridge design of the Japanese Super Famicom system, though they kept the American name “Super Nintendo”.  Pop’n TwinBee is yet another game from the amazing Konami. TwinBee is one of th

Pocky & Rocky 2 is another quality game, and a lot of what I said about the first game also applies here. But they certainly changed some things up in the sequel, and this post will mainly focus on differences between the two games. Pocky & Rocky 2 moves a little bit away from the pure arcade-style action of the previous game. There are things like branching paths, a little more story, friendly characters to talk to, and shops to buy upgrades, making for a game that feels a little more involved.  The game’s “partner system” is fairly unique. Pocky is the main character, and whether or not there’s a second human player, she always has a helper character, which can be Rocky or a number of other allies who each have their own abilities. The partner character, even if human controlled, definitely feels more like support for Pocky and not an equal, as they have unlimited lives, can be thrown like a projectile at enemies for a big attack (removing them from battle temporarily), and P

Japan dominated the video game industry in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But publishers generally didn’t want their games to come off as too Japanese in fear that it would come off as strange and not relatable to Western gamers. Sometimes slight changes were made to a game to remove “Japanese-ness” from it. Pocky & Rocky is a game that is extremely Japanese to its core, and there’s no way to make small simple alterations to the game to hide it. And so, it is pretty surprising that the game was released worldwide. In the following decade, it became clear that there’s quite an audience that finds Japanese stuff really cool, but the ‘90s were a much different time. The first main character of the game is a Shinto shrine girl named Pocky, who is confronted by a tanuki named Rocky who tells her that his fellow “Nopino Goblins” have gone insane, and they have to find out who is behind it. And so the two team up to fight a whole bunch of monsters until they get to the bottom of the problem. They mus

Pilotwings was one of the few launch titles for the SNES, and it was specifically designed to showcase its capabilities. Specifically, it makes extensive use of the SNES’s “Mode 7” graphical capabilities, which allow the system to rotate and scale backgrounds in a certain way that other consoles at the time could not.  This is a flight sim game that offers a few different methods of flying (or, as Buzz Lightyear would say, “falling with style”), such as a plane, jet pack and hang glider. There are a series of small challenges that test the player’s piloting skills, such as flying through a series of rings. Once the game’s challenges are complete, the player must use a helicopter to fight actual bad guys while trying to rescue some folks. I have to confess, I haven’t played much Pilotwings in my life at all. I never had it when I was a kid and was maybe only vaguely aware of it (if at all) for a long time. But it’s in the iconic lineup of launch titles for my favorite old system, and th

Here we have another falling-blocks puzzle game, something that was in nice abundance on the console. And Pikiinya nails the art of changing things up just a little bit in a way that makes it totally unique and awesome. In Pikiinya, every piece that falls consists of four blocks. A given block can either be (generally speaking) a penguin, an ice block, or a penguin frozen in an ice block. Ice blocks and penguins have to be cleared differently. Penguins will disappear if you manage to get a string of six of them connected in any sequence (just not diagonally), but frozen penguins don’t count. Ice will break when you get a full row of it, much like in Tetris. As you can imagine, breaking a row of ice will free any frozen penguins inside, which can lead to combos. The basic modes you’d expect are here, such as the single-player score attack mode, the story mode where you play against the computer, and two-player versus. There’s also a “stage clear” mode where you have to eliminate these t

I’ve been covering a lot of childhood games lately, but now here’s one I didn’t play until I was an adult. Pieces is, as you can guess from looking at the box, based on jigsaw puzzles. But it is not simply a simulation of doing jigsaw puzzles in real life, made into video game form. No, Pieces spices things up. There are two main modes of play, the “Vs.” mode and the “All play” mode. The “Vs.” mode pits you directly against the computer, or against another human player. You each are trying to put together the same puzzle on your side of the screen. The game offers a few pieces at a time, so you can’t go digging through the whole pile for corner pieces. But the really cool gameplay element to Vs. games is that, as you play, you’ll gain the ability to use special powers that will either help you or disrupt your opponent. For example, some of them show you where the pieces on your side go, while others make it so your opponent’s cursor will go super slow or in reverse. There are defensive

One would assume a game called “Pac-Man 2” would be an arcade-style maze game that involves eating all the pellets in the stage and avoiding enemies. One would be completely wrong. Perhaps this game ought to be thought of more as a spinoff than a sequel. In fact, the original title in Japan was “Hello! Pac-Man”, so the “2” was added in the international release, likely in an attempt to sell more copies. But you have here is not only unlike the original Pac-Man, it’s one of the most odd games I’ve ever seen and I haven’t played anything quite like it. This is basically what you would call a “point and click adventure game”, a type of game that was much more common on computers than consoles, so I haven’t talked about any in this series so far. A “point and click adventure game” involves navigating environments that feature all kinds of things that you can interact with using a “click”, which may involve acquiring things, pushing buttons/switches, manipulating objects to solve some sort

Here’s another childhood game of mine that I used to play against my dad. Although I think my childhood copy is at my parents’ house, not the one shown here (but I’m oddly not 100% sure at the moment!) Pac-Attack is an interesting take on the fall-blocks puzzle game formula. Like in Tetris, you want to create rows of blocks that will clear themselves when you get a perfect line. And in a certain way, it’s easier than in Tetris, but gravity actually works on the falling blocks in this game, so there won’t be gaps directly under blocks. But the catch is that, along with blocks, there are also ghosts that you’re forced to place on the stack, and a row cannot be cleared if there’s a ghost in it. But that’s where Pac-Man comes in! Every so often, you’ll get a drop that includes Pac-Man as part of it, ready to eat. Once placed, he will start moving in the direction he’s facing, and keep eating until he gets to the bottom of whichever way he goes. So you can strategically arrange the ghosts t

Today’s release is a bit unusual in the realm of SNES essentials. Developed in the mid-’90s by a British developer, the game was basically finished, but ran into troubles finding a potential publisher and never actually reached store shelves back then. Fast-forward a decade, in the mid-2000s, an American company called Super Fighter Team got started with what was at the time a very unique business of acquiring the rights to old video games and giving them official legal releases in cartridge form for old consoles, sold through their web site. Initially they were most known for translating Asian games for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and giving them official legal English releases. And then several years later in the early 2010s, they decided to pick up Nightmare Busters and finally give it the release it deserved. So while the final regular retail Super Nintendo release that hit store shelves across America was in 1998, Nightmare Busters came out via online order only at the end of 2013

Another childhood sports title here for nostalgia reasons, and I believe this might have been another one I got from Toy Liquidators in Kittery, Maine. This is also another sports game that probably isn’t especially worth playing nowadays with so many other options out there, but it is nonetheless pretty solid and enjoyable. This is, obviously, an American Football sim that’s certainly comparable to the popular Madden franchise. I didn’t own any Madden games as a kid, but this game certainly sufficed. The modes that you’d expect from a football game in this era are here such as the ability to play a full season. You can even pick from many future years to vary up the season schedule, though I don’t think the rosters change at all. But what’s especially cool in this game is the “simulation” mode, where the game places you in the middle of what is usually a historic matchup from NFL history in the middle of the game. Some text is given explaining the context of the game and what you need

Here’s another double feature, basically two versions of the same game from different regions. One of these, the American release, “NCAA Basketball”, is a childhood game of mine, a “nostalgia entry” on this list, and the cartridge shown is my childhood copy. I believe I got it pre-owned at a long-defunct store called “Toy Liquidators” in Kittery, Maine while my family was on vacation. I remember the pre-owned SNES games coming in a special custom plastic case with a typed-out blurb about the game that must have been made by someone working at the store or something, which was pretty impressive considering the store could just easily take a used cart and throw it on the shelf naked for people to buy. NCAA Basketball is, obviously, a college basketball game, featuring many prominent college teams from the era. I was sad to find out that my (future) alma mater’s team, the UMass Minutemen, were not included, so back in the day I resorted to playing as either the UConn Huskies or Boston Col