Sam's video game collection essentials

Here we have one of the last major IPs produced by Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto, who does still actively work with Nintendo to this day but had his run of developing major Nintendo franchises from the 1980s to the early 2000s.  Pikmin features an astronaut named Captain Olimar who crash lands on a strange planet while on an interstellar vacation. He’s unable to breathe in the planet’s atmosphere, but he has an air supply that will last him 30 days while he tries to gather parts of his ship to rebuild it and blast off towards home. Luckily for him, he finds helpers to aid him in this campaign. The friendly creatures he meets are the Pikmin, small sentient plant-like beings that grow in the ground and have what appear to be flower-like parts on the top of their heads, but have a humanlike body with eyes and a nose. These Pikmin can reproduce rapidly using certain objects and dead bodies of other creatures, and they have great strength in numbers. Olimar learns that he is able to ...

Pac-Man World 2 is a platformer that had previously been released as a standalone title in 2002. It’s an adequate 3D platformer that sold pretty well thanks to featuring Pac-Man, and in my opinion the coolest thing about it is that you can unlock some old arcade Pac-Man games to freely play. This game is not what this post is going to primarily be about, as I want to focus on the game that it’s bundled with.  Pac-Man Vs. is a game that Shigeru Miyamoto himself, King Nintendo, was largely responsible for. The game was initially designed as a way to show off what can be done with the GBA-to-GC link cable, and Namco (owners of Pac-Man) greenlit Nintendo on making it into a full and proper release. It’s a multiplayer game that’s light on content, so it didn’t make sense for it to be a full-on $50 game by itself on store shelves. But Nintendo found alternative ways to distribute it. The best-known was for the budget re-release of Pac-Man World 2 in 2004, as a bonus inclusion. As a kid, ...

What we have here is a nifty little three-game compilation that, puzzlingly (pun intended), only came out in Japan. One of these games is a port of Dr. Mario 64, which had strangely enough only been released in America originally. Another game on here is a full remake of Yoshi’s Cookie, a game that hasn’t made my essentials list in any form previously. The third is, in my opinion, the real star of the show, which is a remake of Panel de Pon, released outside Japan with different characters in forms such as “Tetris Attack” on SNES and “Pokémon Puzzle League” on the N64. To read more about Dr. Mario 64, you can read my previous blog post about the original version. You can also read more about the basic gameplay of Panel de Pon in my blog post about the original releases. Yoshi’s Cookie is not your usual “falling blocks” puzzle game. Instead, you start with a square-based grid with cookies of various shapes. You control two lines that go across the screen, one horizontal and one vertic...

Released two years after Deadly Alliance, Deception is a direct sequel with a story that takes place directly after the events of the previous game. And as is the case with many good video game sequels, it delivers a similar kind of experience that Deadly Alliance was going for, only refined and with much more meat on the bones.  The core combat is largely the same, but with some tweaks. There are now “combo breakers” that a player can use a limited number of times per match which disrupt the opponent’s combo in a situation where you would normally be helpless. Arenas are more interesting now, with some interactive elements and even spots where you can knock an opponent into a completely different area and then continue the fight in that location. There are more characters now, with plenty of new characters, but some fighters from Deadly Alliance are absent for better or worse. Oh, and you can actually use the joystick now instead of being stuck with the d-pad! One complaint with M...

After Mortal Kombat 4, it would be a few years before we would get another mainline entry in the series. The only games we would see for a while would be ports, spinoffs and remakes. The arcade era of Mortal Kombat was over, as arcades in general started their decline. Near the end of 2002 is when the next major entry in the series came with Deadly Alliance, with a completely new style of gameplay, and now made exclusively for home consoles. Mortal Kombat 4 had technically been in 3D, but still mostly played out on a 2D axis and played like the games that had come before it. MK:DA is now a true full-on 3D fighter, with free movement towards any direction. The basic attacks are completely different as well. Characters of course still have “special moves” which involve cool, usually-supernatural feats like shooting a ball of fire or ice. Characters now have three different fighting styles that can be switched between with the press of a button, and these are often based on real-life mart...

Everyone knew that a new Nintendo console meant that a new Mario Kart game was around the corner. What people probably didn’t see coming was that Nintendo would introduce a big new twist on the basic gameplay. As you might be able to guess from the title and the cover image, Mario Kart: Double Dash is unique because it has two characters riding the same kart instead of one. In the past, different characters had different stats which affected the way they performed on the racetrack, so this new arrangement sounds like it could make things pretty confusing. They mitigated it by making this the first Mario Kart game to have unique vehicles that characters can ride in, instead of generic go karts. Now, upon picking your characters, you can choose which vehicle they ride in, and the selection you have depends on the weight of your characters. Larger characters cannot ride in smaller vehicles, so smaller characters have a wider variety of vehicles to choose from. It’s the vehicles themselves...

Camelot had previously done a very nice job with Mario Golf on the Nintendo 64, so much so that it began a new era where we were graced with a variety of quality Mario-themed sports titles. With a new console generation and much more graphical power, a second Mario Golf game made sense. Toadstool Tour doesn’t dramatically depart from what 64 did, but that’s okay because it really didn’t have to. Like the first game, rather than just being wacky and silly with Mario elements, this game does really try to deliver a fundamentally-sound representation of the real game of golf. It has many features you’d expect and hope for in a regular golf sim, such as different clubs, wind conditions to account for, and different rules to play under such as stroke or skins. The non-realistic fantasy elements mainly come with certain specific courses and unique modes. Some of the game’s courses are comparable to ones you might find in real life, but some take place in the Mario universe and feature certai...

One thing Nintendo fans grew to count on with the launch of a brand new system was an exciting new Mario game. Technically Super Mario Bros. on the NES may not have been a launch title, as its exact launch date is disputed, but it was certainly on store shelves very early in the NES’s North American campaign. The Game Boy started out with Super Mario Land. The Super Nintendo came packaged with the terrific Super Mario World as a pack-in. The Nintendo 64 had Super Mario 64 from day one. Technically, the Virtual Boy only had Mario’s Tennis as its pack-in game, which you could argue doesn’t count. The Game Boy Color didn’t have one (only Wario Land II in which Mario does not appear), but GBC was sort of in an ambiguous space between a new system and an upgraded rendition of an old one. GameCube would be the first major Nintendo home console to not have a major Mario platformer to start off with. But I guess you could argue Luigi’s Mansion is somewhat in the spirit of the tradition. It cou...

Here’s a rather peculiar Zelda release. Previously, the GBA remake of A Link to the Past included “Four Swords” as a multiplayer-focused bonus game of sorts. The existence of such a thing is pretty normal, but it’s very interesting how they decided to make a full-on, standalone sequel for it on a console. The game uses 2D graphics, which wasn’t really the norm for console games at the time which were mostly focused on the latest cutting-edge 3D visuals. But what really makes Four Swords Adventures stand out is the way it utilizes a certain accessory, the GameCube – Game Boy Advance link cable. This little cable does what you’d probably guess, it connects a Game Boy Advance to the GameCube for special compatibility with certain games. Sometimes this is a way for GBA games and their GC counterparts to talk with each other in some way, such as with storing and trading Pokémon. In this case, Four Swords Adventures doesn’t interact with any GBA title, but instead just uses the Game Boy Adva...

The first Legend of Zelda game for the new generation was hotly anticipated. And no one saw what was coming. Instead of evolving the same graphical style used in Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, the developers decided to give Wind Waker an entirely different and distinct look. The game’s graphics use “cel shading,” something that makes video games look more “cartoon-like.” It’s a very stylish choice, and one that really helps Wind Waker stand out. The game’s opening story tells a legend of a great evil and a “hero of time” who appeared and defeated it, something that fans will recognize as the events of Ocarina of Time. Wind Waker takes place many years in the future, in which the great evil (Ganon) has returned again but this time without a hero to slay him. The world now completely different, as characters live on a series of islands amidst a vast ocean.  The protagonist, another boy named Link, lives on one of these islands, and the plot gets moving when his sister is kidnappe...