Sam's video game collection essentials

I’ll take a second here to talk about the Sega Game Gear. As I’ve already covered in this series, the handheld system Game Boy from Nintendo was an enormous success which made portable gaming as we know it mainstream. It’s no surprise that Nintendo’s biggest competitor at the time, Sega, would challenge it. The Game Gear launched in 1990 in Japan and Western countries the following year. It saw modest success and surpassed Game Boy’s other competitors…but it still finished a VERY distant second to the Game Boy. The console had a colored screen and backlight which set it apart from the Game Boy, but the unit itself was huge and it dried up batteries much too quickly. I owned a Game Gear for quite a while as an adult, but it just didn’t have enough games of interest for me to keep it. Anyways, the reason why I bring it up here is because there were a few Shining Force games on the Game Gear. This release, Shining Force CD, is a remake that contains two of those games greatly spruced up w

And now we have the other most famous Working Designs-localized game on the Sega CD. First, you might ask, what does that title mean?? Well, Mail is the name of the main character. Nobody seems to know what “popful” means exactly, but it’s probably something that a Japanese person with a rudimentary level of English came up with when trying to think of a word like “peppy” or “spunky”, I’m guessing. But I don’t really know! Although the box calls this game an action RPG, it isn’t really. There’s no leveling up in this game, and there’s some gameplay elements you might find in a regular RPG but not really enough to call this a part of the genre. This is more of a side-scrolling action adventure title. It originated as a game for certain Japanese PCs that I know nothing about and received a few ports on other platforms…or maybe I should say remakes, because some versions of this game are extremely different from one another. As I said before, you play as Mail, who is, despite the name, is

Here’s another iconic sports game you may have expected that I put off due to there being a Sega CD version. NHL ‘94 is still considered one of the best hockey games (even best sports games in general) of all time. Like Tecmo Super Bowl, it is known for having a dedicated fanbase that still makes fan-made updates with updated teams and rosters to this day.  I can’t say a ton about NHL ‘94, I’ve always stunk at any hockey game that’s remotely realistic so that’s kinda prevented me from spending too much time with it. I could pick the best team against the worst team and still struggle to score any goals! But I’ve always been aware of this game and its quality since I was a kid. I’ve played the previous hockey game from the same development team, NHLPA Hockey ‘93, and the jump in quality from that game to this one is staggering. They just nailed what a mid-’90s hockey game was supposed to be, ranging from controls to presentation.  NHL ‘94 is most popular as a Sega Genesis game, and that

If you’ve been following this series then you might have been surprised at the absence of NBA Jam up until now, as it didn’t appear among my SNES or Genesis games. That’s because my preferred version is this one, on the Sega CD! This is a game from the highly successful American arcade game developer Midway, who had been around a while by the time they released this game in arcades in 1993. They had developed non-traditional arcade sports games before, and in fact this wasn’t even their first such basketball game, as they had previously made Arch Rivals. But NBA Jam skyrocketed way past them to new heights of popularity. In fact, this is one of the absolutely top most successful arcade games of all time. If you spent much time at all in arcades in the ‘90s, you are almost certainly familiar with NBA Jam. I’ve explained before how “arcade-style” sports games often don’t try to go for a realistic design, and instead focus on fast-paced action that’s easy to pick up and play. NBA Jam is t

After the success of the first Lunar game, it should be no surprise that a sequel was made. Eternal Blue takes place in the same world as the first game, but 1,000 years in the future. It is actually a direct sequel, though, as there are tie-ins with the first game that obviously I’m not going to spoil in a post like this. Lunar: Eternal Blue places the player in control of Hiro, a young explorer who you first meet treasure hunting in a cave with his friend Ruby who is a baby dragon. He soon meets a mysterious and powerful young woman named Lucia who appears in a nearby tower and has mysterious incredible powers…until they are taken away by a big bad evil being known as Zophar. Lucia informs that she must meet with the Goddess Althena and is determined to travel by herself if necessary to do so. Hiro decides to follow and aid her, and the group meets a variety of friends on the journey.  It seems to me like the first Lunar game is the one that is most remembered (maybe because the Seg

Before I talk about the game itself, first I want to talk about Working Designs since this is the first published game of theirs that I’m covering. Working Designs was strictly a publisher and not a developer, meaning they did not develop any games from the ground up. They instead looked at games only released in Japan and would work out a deal with the game’s developer so that they could put in the work to make an English version for an American release. They brought over a good number of games that otherwise would have been stuck in Japan, and that was really wonderful. They also had some practices that really set them apart from any other company at the time. They really put in extra effort to make the packaging for their games really nice, often adding some additional shininess to their box art (though not in this particular copy shown above)). In the instruction manuals for their games, they would have words directly for the fans and asked to hear feedback, for example, about what

By the early ‘90s, it was clear that CDs were destined to replace cartridges as the standard for how video games were sold. Technology was improving rapidly, but when this truth became evident, it was years before things had progressed enough for CDs to properly replace cartridges as the standard. Nevertheless, companies were eager to stay ahead of the curve with technology. At first, rather than release consoles that played games stored on CDs, companies instead developed add-ons for their cartridge-playing consoles that were sold separately and could play games specifically developed for them. One competitor to Nintendo and Sega back then was the Turbografx-16 (also known as the PC Engine in Japan) developed by NEC, who collaborated with developer Hudson Soft. They were the first company to release an add-on for playing CD games, which came out in the late ‘80s. (I have in the past owned Turbografx consoles but have chosen not to keep them in my collection so I won’t be covering them

Here’s a fun action game with a top-down perspective that really stands out among its contemporaries. As the great title suggests, Zombies Ate My Neighbors is about zombies and similar horror-themed creatures invading your neighborhood, in a world that may be partially horror-themed but is also a bit silly and cartoony. As one or both of the young neighborhood heroes, your goal is to rescue the neighbors found in each level, with occasional boss encounters. This is not a simple and straightforward action game. Gameplay involves collecting a lot of resources, with a wide variety of weapons and items to find, and you really need to effectively utilize them if you want to make it far. The game gets to be quite challenging before long, with nasty enemies that don’t die easily. Fortunately you don’t need to actually defeat them all to progress. The levels feature a variety of contemporary settings which have to be navigated differently due to different elements found in each.  Zombies Ate M

You ought to know by now that I like light gun games, so this one’s a pretty obvious include for the list. This game has you playing as Mario armed with a bazooka and riding on Yoshi in order to fight Bowser and his cronies.  There’s not a ton I have to say about this game as the gameplay isn’t anything really groundbreaking. A lot of the game is just shooting whatever moves, though occasionally you may have to make Yoshi jump, choose a pathway or something like that which slightly varies it up. There are few items to find as well to help you out. The game features a series of boss fights and sometimes they involve some sort of gimmick so you can’t win by just shooting whatever moves without any thought. Notably, there’s a two-player mode where a second player uses a regular SNES controller to control Yoshi as player 1 just focuses on shooting. The main complaint I have with the game is that it starts out too slow, being a big bland and repetitive out of the gate, and that’s pretty unf