Sam's video game collection essentials

The new console generation had a lot of potential for F-Zero. The previous console entry, F-Zero X, sacrificed nice graphics for a buttery-smooth framerate. A GameCube F-Zero game wouldn’t have to make such compromises. To help bring it to fruition, Nintendo teamed up with their former rival Sega who would serve as chief developer. The results were spectacular. F-Zero GX feels in some ways like a reimaging of F-Zero X, with similar gameplay concepts and the same large cast of characters returning. As a sort of reimagining, the game’s controls and the ways the vehicles move have a different feel to them. Not every mode and element from X returns here, as the X Cup and Death Race are omitted for example. But there are new modes that take their place, such as a nine-chapter story mode and a sophisticated vehicle creator where users get to create a racing machine by putting different parts together. GX takes full advantage of the GameCube’s power and delivers what were stunning graphics fo...

With the success of Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series, it’s no surprise that there would be imitators. Here’s an interesting one that only saw the light of day in Japan. DreamMix TV was developed by a little-known company called Bitstep, and published by Hudson, and they managed to get rights from video game giant Konami and toy company Takara for a rather quirky crossover roster. The game looks at first glance like a Smash Bros. ripoff, but it doesn’t quite play the same. The objective of Smash Bros. is to knock your opponent(s) off the stage, which becomes easier to do the more a character has been beaten up. But ring-outs aren’t a thing in DreamMix TV. Instead, characters have health a little more like in a regular fighting game (although it’s represented strangely, with every characters’ health represented in relation to one another in the same meter at the bottom of the screen). When you knock down a character who has no health, a large heart flies out of them, and if an opponen...

British developer Rare had catapulted Nintendo’s Donkey Kong into being an iconic franchise star in the mid-’90s with the release of Donkey Kong Country. And for nearly a decade, Rare was the one generally in charge of making Donkey Kong games, fittingly. However, in 2002, early in the new console generation, Rare was bought out by competitor Microsoft to develop games for their new Xbox. And so, Donkey Kong’s future was in doubt. For a couple years there were no major Donkey Kong titles on the GameCube.  At the end of 2003, a Donkey Kong rhythm game spinoff called “Donkey Konga” was made with a completely original “DK Bongos” controller, from the same people who made the popular Taiko Drum Master series, featuring similar gameplay. There are several releases of Donkey Konga, officially three games in total but seven in a sense since each release in one of the three major regions has a different song list. I do own some Donkey Konga games, but they aren’t making my list because I h...

Here’s an interesting little accessory that has fallen into obscurity over the years. The e-Reader is an add-on that is designed to read special bar codes on cards designed for it. An LED scanner is used to read them when you swipe a card, and the information for whatever content is to be loaded is contained on the card itself and does not simply unlock something that was arbitrarily locked away from the player.  e-Reader cards can be used to play games, or connected via cable to unlock content in other games for GBA or GameCube. Unlockable content most famously includes a variety of items in Animal Crossing, special battles and event unlocks in Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire, and brand new levels in Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3.  Actual games that come on e-Reader cards have to be rather small and simple. A few were given away promotionally, such as Air Hockey-e given out by retailers when it came out. The only full games actually sold at retail were a handful of e...

This is the first game in what would become a big franchise for Nintendo, helped out by also appealing to a lot of casual gamers. Well…technically speaking, the original game was on the Nintendo 64 in Japan in 2001, and this right here is a spruced-up port with a lot of new features that first reached Western shores in the fall of 2002. The graphics were pretty much kept the same for the GameCube version, which explains why they have the “jagged” look of a Nintendo 64 title. Animal Crossing could be described as a “virtual life simulator.” You start the game as a character with a name of your choice, who is about to move into a town which you also decide the name of. Upon arrival, you get your house on a mortgage from the owner of the town store, Tom Nook the raccoon. After these events, the game opens up to the player to do basically what they want, without any real objective other than “have fun.” The game doesn’t give you levels to beat, enemies to fight, or that usual video game st...

The first WarioWare introduced an original and very fun concept for a game, so it’s no surprise that Nintendo soon got to work on making sequels. The next two games, in fact, were developed side-by-side and released in close proximity to each other. Oddly, WarioWare: Twisted! is the second mainline WarioWare game to hit shelves…but that’s if you’re going off of Japanese release dates, because in America it’s actually the third one game that we got. Confusing! Nintendo and Intelligent Systems weren’t just going to make the exact same game with a new slate of microgames, even though they probably could have and fans would have been happy. You might notice from the photo that this game has an unusual cartridge. That’s because WarioWare: Twisted! has gyro controls! Meaning, you can control it by physically tilting the system left or right. The entire game is built around this feature, and most microgames utilize it in some way.  The game’s story is that Wario is playing his Game Boy Ad...

By the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the concept of “minigames” were becoming popular with game developers. A “minigame” is basically some small standalone bit of gameplay that is fairly simple, doesn’t last a real long time, and is distinct from everything else in the game. One of the games that popularized minigames was Nintendo’s Mario Party, a “board game video game” that featured a minigame between the four contestants at the end of every turn for the reward of coins. WarioWare takes this concept a step further and invents the concept of “microgames,” designed around a bunch of games that only last a matter of seconds! The concept was first seen on a certain bonus mode in an obscure Mario Artist title on a failed system, so WarioWare fittingly fleshed it out and brought it to a mainstream audience. Basically, in WarioWare, the idea is to clear as many microgames as possible before you mess up too many times and get a game over. Each microgame gives you a little prompt to tell you wha...

And here we have the fifth (yes, fifth) Wario Land game, on (what was at the time) new and improved hardware. Wario returns with most of the same moves and gameplay elements from previous games, though that doesn’t mean it’s an uninspired sequel by any means. It departs a little from the last two games, which were unusual because Wario couldn’t die and was only hindered (or even helped) by getting hit by enemies. Now, Wario is back to having a normal health bar like you’d expect in your everyday platformer.  But this ain’t no everyday platformer. The progression is much different, for example. The previous games had a big emphasis on gathering collectibles and encouraging players to try for 100% completion, and Wario Land 4 continues that trend. This time around, each level has four jewel pieces to collect, some which are well-hidden. Finding the jewel pieces is essential to progressing in the game, so if you play and finish the level like normal but fail to collect them, you’ll ha...

It’s the norm for a Nintendo system to launch with some kind of Mario game. Game Boy Advance wouldn’t be an exception. However, the GBA, perhaps surprisingly, would not see a single brand new traditional Mario platformer. Instead, Nintendo launched the system with Super Mario Advance, a port of an older game, and followed up with three more ports during the lifespan of the system. The original few Super Mario Bros. games on the NES and Famicom, of course, were the biggest titles to catapult Nintendo and Mario into the mainstream, so it’s not surprising that Nintendo made a habit out of porting or remaking them on a regular basis. The very next console generation, before it was common to do such a thing, they gave us Super Mario All-Stars which were full remakes with faithful gameplay but updated graphics and music. It was pretty awesome that four classic Mario titles were on one single SNES cartridge, modernized and with the ability to save your game. Super Mario Advance, nearly a deca...

Sonic the Hedgehog was, of course, one of the most successful and recognizable icons that emerged in gaming in the early ‘90s. He helped propel the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive to relevance, making incredible gains in popularity compared to where Sega had been in the previous decade. He was seen as a rival to Nintendo’s Mario, since they served similar roles as mascots for their companies, and represented different interpretations of the platformer genre. Sonic surprisingly didn’t have a big presence on the Sega Saturn, but Sonic Adventure was the best-selling title on the Sega Dreamcast which appeared to give Sega new life at the end of the decade. But of course, if you’re a gamer my age or if you’ve been reading my blog this whole time, you know that things didn’t end well for the Dreamcast. As the PlayStation 2 threatened to plunge it into irrelevance, Sega made the major decision to abandon the console-making business and immediately start making games for consoles that their now-former...

Here we have the last Nintendo-developed game released on the Game Boy Advance, one that would spawn a new series. As you’d expect from the name, this is a rhythm game. But it’s not your typical rhythm game.  Usually when you think of rhythm games, you think of games where you pick a song, then input a series of button presses along to the beat as the game prescribes. In Rhythm Tengoku, you are going to be pressing buttons along with some sort of beat, but the focus isn’t on the songs themselves, rather the quirky scenario that comes with a given stage. You never really know what you’re going to see next. Sometimes you’re a batter hitting a series of baseballs, sometimes you’re plucking chin hairs off of anthropomorphic onions, sometimes you’re a group of mice trying to get across the table without being caught by a cat. Whatever the case may be, the action tends to move at the pace of the rhythm of the background music, and you must press the right buttons to accomplish whatever t...

Pokémon was far and away the franchise most closely associated with the Game Boy after taking the world by storm in 1998. The first “generation” of Pokémon games consisted of Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue, followed later by Pokémon Yellow, which altogether sold dozens of millions of copies and teamed up with a cartoon, trading card game, and tons of merchandise to sweep the globe with “Pokémania” infecting the world’s children unlike anything ever seen before. The follow-up games, comprising the second “generation”, were Gold and Silver and later Crystal introduced 100 new species into the mix, and the games themselves saw a large number of highly noticeable improvements over the originals. Generation 2 was still incredibly popular, and while it may have sold a little less than the first generation, frankly there was nowhere to go but down. Though Crystal, which was an enhanced version of Gold and Silver, showed a notable decline by “only” six million copies, making it to date the poore...