Sam's video game collection essentials

Mario had previously been spotted in sports games in the past, perhaps most notable in NES Open Tournament Golf which featured him on the front cover and as a playable character. But the release of Mario Golf in 1999 marked the start of a brand new era, one where Mario and his friends (and enemies) would routinely star in various sports games on a regular basis. This game was not actually developed by Nintendo, but by Camelot Software Planning. Previously, they had made the successful “Hot Shots Golf” (a.k.a. “Everybody’s Golf”) on the PlayStation which went on to spawn its own series (despite Camelot not being involved in the sequels). Previously, Camelot had primarily helped develop Sega’s “Shining” series of RPGs which I have talked about in the past.  Mario Golf strikes a good balance of being easy to understand and enjoy, while also providing enough depth and challenge for serious players. Performing a shot is rather straightforward. There is a meter at the bottom of the scree...

Sometimes Nintendo consoles are only graced with a single Zelda game. But after the success of Ocarina of Time, Nintendo decided that the Nintendo 64 needed a second one, to be developed in much less time, under two years. To help save time, many assets from Ocarina of Time were reused. The basic gameplay elements and physics are all the same, too. And so, at a brief glance, this game may seem like an Ocarina of Time clone. But guess what? Majora’s Mask is actually one of the most unique and creatively-designed games in the series.  The story begins not long after the events of Ocarina of Time. Link is ambushed by a Skull Kid, a type of forest-dwelling humanoid first introduced in the previous game. This Skull Kid is wearing a strange mask. This mask grants special powers, and the Skull Kid places a curse on Link, turning him into a creature called a Deku Scrub. Link then travels to the game’s central location, Clock Town in the land of Termina, and meets a mask salesman there who ...

Time for a big one. The original Zelda, as you more than likely know, was a huge deal in the late ‘80s. And Link to the Past was one of the most popular SNES games. And now that we were in the first console generation with full 3D, people were highly anticipating the first Zelda title for the platform. It would come two years into the Nintendo 64’s lifespan, just in time for the holiday season of 1998. Expectations were high, and thankfully Nintendo was up to the task. Ocarina of Time wouldn’t represent as drastic of a change as Mario 64 did for that series. On a basic level, the structure of OoT does resemble that of Link to the Past very much. This is an action-adventure game where the player traverses the world and a variety of dungeons trying to save the day, accumulating a variety of weapons and items along the way. But with everything in 3D, the mechanics of how everything worked had to be redone from scratch. Probably the most notable mechanic introduced is “Z-targeting”. When h...

It became somewhat of a pattern for mainline Kirby games late in a Nintendo console’s lifespan. Kirby’s Adventure on NES came out in 1993 well after the launch of the Super Nintendo, while that console got Kirby Super Star in 1996 around the same time as the Nintendo 64’s launch and it also got Kirby’s Dream Land 3 a year later in 1997. Kirby 64 is not quite as late by comparison, launching in 2000 over a year before Nintendo’s next console yet, but it was still in the later part of the system’s prime. Unlike other series that made the leap to 3D on the Nintendo 64 such as Mario, Kirby 64 doesn’t use 3D to fundamentally change the gameplay from previous entries. This means that gameplay is still locked to a 2D plan, with Kirby only able to move left and right. This sort of game is often called a “2.5D” platformer. So the basic gameplay is the same, with Kirby able to suck in enemies and spit them out or swallow them to potentially earn a special power-up depending on the type of enemy....

This one’s a nostalgia pick! This is the fourth and final “Ken Griffey Jr.” baseball game developed for Nintendo consoles and published by Nintendo (who at the time owned the Seattle Mariners baseball team), though actual development of the games was done by other companies.  Compared to other baseball games at the time, this one focused a little less on realism and more on delivering fast-paced action, often referred to as more “arcade style”. It has the  basic modes you’d expect from a baseball game of this era, such as the ability to play a season (with a full 162 games or something shorter) and a Home Run Derby mode. There’s also a “create-a-player” feature which lets you do exactly what its name suggests. You can name your created players and change their appearance to an extent as well as their batting stance, and then you are given a limited number of attribute points to designate their on-the-field skills. There is, not surprisingly, a cheat code that removes the limit...

Say hello to the best-selling Nintendo 64 title that did not feature Mario. This game is based on what was at the time the latest film in the popular James Bond franchise, “GoldenEye”. It’s not often that licensed video games attract a sizable audience that isn’t familiar with the source material, but this is one of the exceptions.  GoldenEye 007 is a first-person shooter, a genre that came to prominence in the early ‘90s thanks in large part to the popular game Doom which originated on PC and was ported to various consoles. The genre was much stronger on computers at first, but GoldenEye is part of what helped change that.  The game’s single-player campaign is mission-based, with players given specific objectives rather than simply trying to reach the end of a stage and/or defeat all the enemies. Sometimes brute force is required, but oftentimes the player must use stealth and tactics to complete their mission. There’s a variety of weapons and items that Bond can (and sometim...