Sam's video game collection essentials

Here we have a terrific arcade-style game (never actually released in arcades!) released by Natsume (“Not-Sue-May”), whose work has been featured in this series already with games such as Pocky & Rocky and Shatterhand. This action-packed game takes the idea of a gallery shooter that one might play with a gun and changes it up, mainly by having players control not just where bullets go, but also a character visible on the screen rather than having action take place from first-person view. For this reason, Wild Guns is played with a controller and not a light gun. Controlling both a crosshair and a character at the same time sounds like it could be a nightmare, but they executed it so well that it’s really not a problem. If you want to move the crosshair but not the character, you have to simply hold down the fire button (as opposed to tapping it repeatedly) and your character will stand in place while you fire wherever you please. While in this state, you can quickly do an evasive d

The SNES is home to a ton of 2D platformers. But here we have one that uses a unique gameplay mechanic that makes it stand out completely from the crowd.  In this game you control a young girl named Kawase Umihara (in Japanese you often put the surname first, hence the game’s title) who must navigate a series of treacherous levels with a lot of hostile marine life that somehow is functioning out of water. Kawase does not possess superhuman jumping ability like Mario or his imitators, and jumps more like a regular human being. Instead, Kawase is armed with her apparently-magic rubber fishing line. This thing can grapple and latch onto nearly anything, and it’s what Kawase will often have to use to get around. It’s also her way of defeating enemies, as latching the fishing line onto most of them will stun them, and Kawase can real them in and put them in her backpack to “defeat” them. Now, this may remind gamers of a popular NES game called Bionic Commando where the hero uses a grappling

Here’s one of the very first games I ever played, the very obscure game Troddlers! There was a home computer released in the 1980s called the Amiga that became quite popular in Europe but didn’t really catch on in North America. There were quite a few video games released for it, the majority of which (if I’m not mistaken) were made by European developers since that’s where the Amiga was popular. Troddlers was one such game, originally developed by the Swedish company Atod for the Amiga. Some Amiga games got ported or remade on home consoles like the SNES, and Troddlers made the jump very effectively with much better audio than its original incarnation. The story of Troddlers involves a couple guys named Hokus and Pokus who work for a sorcerer named Divinius. Hokus and Pokus are quite mischievous, and one day after getting in trouble for playing pranks, Divinius orders them to clean a large storeroom that hasn’t been tidied up for hundreds of years. While down there, they notice a box

You probably know by now that I tend to have a soft spot for light gun games. And here’s another one, the wacky and fun Tin Star. And something cool about it is that it’s not only playable with a light gun. You can also use the SNES Mouse peripheral (exactly what it sounds like, a computer mouse) to control a crosshair on screen and shoot that way. And if you lack both of those, you can even play with a regular controller, though that’s suboptimal.  This game, as you may guess looking at the box and screen shot, takes place in a cartoony version of the Wild West. You play as a sheriff out to thwart the plans of outlaw gangs. There is a story and cutscenes between stages, which is a nice touch. The story does not take itself seriously even one lick, and that's a good thing, because the dialogue is all about humor, which it delivers pretty well. There’s no other SNES game with a sense of humor quite like this and often made me feel like laughing! There’s a pretty decent variety and n

And now we have another Tetris game that somehow didn’t get released outside Japan despite being super good. It’s the multiplayer-focused Tetris Battle Gaiden! The concept here is that certain colored blocks will grant a power-up when part of a cleared line. Clearing one of these blocks will give you the ability to use a first-level attack. You can use it at will, or wait until you clear more colored blocks. When you clear another one, you’ll be able to use your second-level attack. The highest level is fourth, at which point you won’t have any further incentive to clear colored blocks until you use the attack and start from square one. There are a variety of playable characters in the game, each of which have their own unique set of attacks. There’s quite a variety of moves that do all sorts of different things. They can be offensive, such as messing with the opponent’s controls, or defensive, such as eliminating some of your own blocks. It makes for some really interesting multiplaye

I realize that I have failed to give Intelligent Systems proper credit in some of my previous posts. They are a company that is separate from but closely tied to Nintendo, only developing games for their platforms, and often working with them directly on projects together or making games for their IPs. Games that were partially or fully developed by Intelligent Systems that I have already covered include Fire Emblem, Metroid and Duck Hunt, Mario Bros. (the non-Super variety) and more.  Here is the start of a blocks-based puzzle game series created by Intelligent Systems that I am very fond of. It all started with a game released for the Super Famicom in Japan called Panel de Pon, shown here. That game featured a bunch of young-looking female fairies for its cast, and the story mode involved one of them (named Lip) going on a quest to defeat her friends in puzzle combat to break a spell cast on each of them. Seeing as most SNES owners in America were probably boys who were teenagers or

  This cartridge combines two beloved NES puzzle games, and gives them a new look and sound. It’s sort of like Super Mario All-Stars, only for fewer games. There’s not a ton to say about it as I’ve already talked about the NES versions of these games. The nice thing about this Tetris compared to the one for NES is that this one actually has multiplayer! Speaking of multiplayer, there is a special mode that gives this release some unique content. Two players can go head-to-head in “Mixed Match”, where both players are given a time limit and must score the most points before the clock hits zero. The game starts in Tetris’s “B-type” mode where a certain number of lines must be cleared, then a round of Dr. Mario is played until all viruses are cleared, and then the remaining time can be spent racking up points in Tetris’s “A-type” mode. Certainly a solid option for two friends who love these classic games. Sadly I didn’t know about Tetris & Dr. Mario on SNES when I was a kid. For a lon

I’ve already talked about how Illusion of Gaia was one of my top childhood games. I also talked about how, upon getting the internet at home, I discovered that it was the second in a set of three Quintet action RPGs on the SNES, and that I eagerly sought out the first game, Soul Blazer. Well, here we are at the third, Terranigma. Many RPGs in this era were released in America and nowhere else outside Japan, but Terranigma is notable for being the opposite; it released in PAL territories (i.e., Europe and Australia) but not America. Terranigma is probably one of the most notable games that released in PAL regions but still to this day has never been released in America in any form. Pictured is the Australian release, which has a different box color than the European releases (they were black like American SNES boxes). The setting of Terranigma is a fantasy version of our planet earth. In this fantasy earth, all life on the surface has been sealed away. In addition to the surface of the

If you were a kid in the ‘80s or ‘90s, the odds are much more than likely that you have at least a basic familiarity with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as they were one of the most popular media franchises among the youth during that time, starting out as a comic book and quickly branching out into TV shows, movies, toys, and of course video games. And the series wouldn’t fall into the infamous “licensed video game trap” of churning out a bunch of mediocre-to-bad video games relying on the IP to sell, because the company who got the rights to make TMNT games was none other than Konami, who was one of the greatest developers of the era, which you already know if you’ve followed these posts for any length of time.  The Turtles dabbled in a few different action-style genres. Their first two games were an action-adventure NES game and an arcade beat ‘em up. After the success of those games, Konami made a second new-and-improved arcade beat ‘em up called Turtles in Time, which this game

This is a remake of an NES game of the same name which I already talked about. You can read about it here . Tecmo Super Bowl on NES is one of the most beloved sports games of all-time, so it’s always kind of surprised me at how little attention this SNES version seems to get by comparison. I didn’t even know it existed for a long time, and was surprised to learn that it did. This version has new graphics and audio, and really doesn’t do anything to ruin what was great about the original. So you could argue that this version is even better, if the new look and sounds are to your liking. Perhaps it’s because the NES game was first and therefore more people played it.  This version came out in 1993, two years after the 1991 NES original. The rosters are updated to be current for the game’s release. That is a pretty significant change, as the teams and players now perform differently. Perhaps most notable is that Bo Jackson was clearly the best player in the original game, but by 1993 he w

Here we have the birth of a popular JRPG series known as “Tales of”, one that I’m quite fond of and that I’ll be talking about from time to time in this series. The first game was developed by a team at a company called Telenet Japan. They secured revered arcade developer Namco (famous for Pac-Man among other things) as a publisher, and Namco wound up having some input on the final product as well. Years down the road Namco would become majority shareholder of the Tales development team and therefore the series is credited as their own even though in a way they didn’t originally come up with it. (All that corporate history is pretty complicated and I did my best to present a simplified summary for this little post) Anyways, while Tales of Phantasia is a JRPG much like Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior with the same story-driven structure and many similar mechanics, it immediately stands out from its peers in the genre in a big way: instead of turn-based battles, fights in Tales of Phanta